As Jews in the United States navigate the unprecedented minefield known as the 2020 presidential election, one familiar debate topic has returned for its aptly scheduled visit: which candidate is good for Israel?
Every four years Jewish voters engage in this ritual exercise of trying to persuade fellow members of the Tribe that Israel’s wellbeing is dependent on their candidate of choice sitting in the Oval Office.
We can appreciate why this happens and how real it is experienced, even if polling data indicates that only a small minority of US Jews list Israel as their number one voting issue – far behind concerns that unite them with their non-Jewish neighbors, such as healthcare, the economy, and social security. Even if Israel is not the preeminent factor when it comes to filling out their ballot, make no mistake, the overwhelming majority are still bringing the Jewish state with them into the voting booth.
Most Jews have favorable views of Israel and feel a strong emotional connection to the country, but the reasoning goes beyond contemporary politics. The collective conscience and memory of the Jewish people serves an intergenerational link to our land and each other, and is one of our most powerful and distinct qualities as a people.
It is why we actually see ourselves as if we left Egypt when we gather around the Seder table on Passover, it is why we feel the deepest anguish when we recall the destruction of Jerusalem on the 9th of Av, and it is why we firmly declare in one voice, “Never again!” when we speak of the Holocaust, even though few now have a living memory of the Third Reich and many of our kin never set foot on the same continent as Auschwitz.
It is why, after 2,000 years, we never stopped dreaming of returning home, and it is why that dream ultimately became a reality. The singular connection that all Jews share, irrespective of background, belief or observancy, helped us survive two millennia of exile, and it has helped us thrive since the rebirth of our national sovereignty seven decades ago. However, the very same attribute that has served as an unquestionable asset has also manifested as a liability.
Since the destruction of our civilization at the hands of the Roman Empire, Jewish communities throughout the Diaspora faced brutal persecution at the hands of host populations. This is something that all Jews have internalized, consciously or otherwise, as a hallmark of our traumatic communal experience and the consequence of being on the wrong side of social and political power. Due to our vulnerable status in exile, we understandably sought ways to inoculate ourselves from this oppression as best we could for as long as we could.
Between the pogroms and expulsions, there were tenuous lulls when Jews were permitted some degree of normalcy through the protection of powerful gentile rulers; it is worth noting that it was the same overlords or their successors who would eventually reverse course and enable renewed persecution and oppression.
This abusive cycle conditioned Jews to associate our safety and wellbeing as being squarely dependent on the good graces of a foreign leader to act on our behalf, one who would protect us from the native mobs and offer us a semblance of security. Often the hefty price of such “normalcy” either mandated that Jews serve as a buffer class alien to both the peasantry and the nobility (e.g. money-lenders) or by forfeiting, when permitted, authentic components of our identity (e.g. the Haskala). Neither kept Jews safe for long.
On a national scale, we can observe how this inherited trauma and its consequences first applied to the Zionist movement and later on to the foreign policies of the State of Israel. Appealing to the Kaiser, the Sultan, and then the British Crown to act on our behalf in advancing Jewish return and autonomy in Palestine, Theodore Herzl, the World Zionist Congress, and the Jewish Agency attempted to position their agenda to fit into the strategic interests of these external powers.
Yet it was the same British Empire that claimed to be Zionist and endorsed the Balfour Declaration and its international application during the 1920 San Remo conference that also partitioned away 77% of what was designated a Jewish national home, restricted Jewish civil rights, did everything in their power to prevent conditions that would allow for Jewish independence, and actively prevented Europe’s Jews from reaching their own country, both during the Nazi genocide and following the liberation of the camps.
What ultimately secured our independence was not political negotiations but rather a campaign of guerrilla warfare that forced the British to end its occupation of our country.
As an infant state surrounded by hostile neighbors who sought its destruction, the Israeli doctrine of superpower patronage initially sought alliance with the Soviet Union, but ended up shifting to France and subsequently the United States as a means of securing our survival in one of the world’s most unforgiving regions. The same French Republic that would provide Israel with the Mirage fighter aircraft and help develop our nuclear program in Dimona abandoned the Jewish state during two of our most most trying times — an arms embargo leading up to the 1967 Six-Day War and refusing to assist in a desperate military airlift during the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
Concerned with how the US would react, Israel refused to fire first during the Yom Kippur War, which ended up costing 2,500 Israeli lives, and did not respond to Iraqi scud missiles raining on Tel Aviv in 1991 due to pressure from Washington. Both Democratic and Republican administrations have pushed Israel to comply with its demands surrounding regional relations and our conflict with the Palestinians, amplifying the Arab perception that Israel is nothing but a forward-operating base of Western imperialism.
As one can objectively identify the positive benefits of the US-Israel relationship and how it has enabled Israel to grow in previous decades, especially when it was perhaps needed most, so too can we accept the limitations and detriment of this dynamic in the present and within the context of Jewish history.
Every nation has its own interests, values, and goals, and therefore unique policies to help manifest them in the world. Are such differences always inherently at odds where one must compromise that which is most important to them in order to avoid conflict? Not necessarily. There is plenty of room for overlap and mutual gain in international relations, but one cannot accurately determine that, and where it can be achieved, without consciously recognizing one’s own distinct interests and the interests/agendas of others.
Such is the problem when it comes to Jewish voters, and even Israelis, evaluating the “pro-Israel” bonafides of US presidential candidates and the current structure of the US-Israel relationship as a whole. Most either never considered the impossibility of Israeli and US interests being one and the same or, alternatively, acknowledge this but fear Israel is too weak to survive without heavy American backing and therefore advocate for alignment beyond what may be naturally possible in the world of international diplomacy.
Much has changed in less than a century when it comes to the Jewish condition – Jews can now live as individuals almost anywhere in the world and the Jewish state is the most formidable power in its region. But the inherited trauma of exile and modern Israeli history continues to influence our perceptions and behaviors today, notably when the White House is at stake.
So who is good for Israel – Donald Trump or Joe Biden? I hope by now you are beginning to see how the question itself is a symptom of the inherited trauma we Jews need to heal from, and that either response cannot fundamentally answer it.
