The campaign and israel: take 3029

Last week Gallup released a poll showing that American Jews support Sen. Obama by a margin of 74 to 22. But if you look at the breakdown at the end, the October results were recorded over a shorter period of time and, more importantly, were the result of a somewhat smaller sample with a larger margin of error.

It’s clear that Sen. Obama will win the American Jewish vote, but it’s not clear that he will win it by 3 – 1 as writers have been claiming.

Martin Peretz weighs in:

But first I’ll write about the Palestinians, with a little digression to the hysterical Jews and cynical Republicans who are trying to convince these very Palestinians that Barack Obama is their greatest ally. After all, he once was caught in a photograph with Edward Said. But these savvy Arabs are having none of this. They simply don’t believe it.

Well it wasn’t that Sen. Obama was once photographed with Edward Said. It was that he was close friends with Rashid Khalidi. And that he attended a dinner in Khalidi’s honor where anti-Israel speeches were given, which didn’t seem to upset Sen. Obama. The feeling is that his closeness to Khalidi suggests an agreement with him.

And as far as the Palestinians not believing that a President Obama would be more sympathetic to their cause than a President McCain, there’s some evidence to the contrary.

23 year old [Palestinian] Ibrahim Abu Jayyab sits by the computer in the Nusairat refugee camp [in the Gaza Strip] trying to call American citizens, in order to convince them to vote for the Democratic candidate for president, Barack Obama…
Most of the Palestinians feel hatred towards USA, whose administrations have always stood by Israel…

Abu Jayyab’s idea is to make telephone calls to American citizens through Internet sites that allow making free calls… in order to use them [to make phone calls] for the campaign supporting Obama. Abu Jayyab says: We dial random numbers and try to call people without knowing their identity or their affiliation…

(h/t Daled Amos)

Peretz concludes:

Except for black Americans, American Jews will back Barack Obama by the highest percentage in the country. So much for Jewish conservatism. So much for Jewish distrust of African Americans. Put that nonsense in the trash.

These are straw men. The question is how supportive of Israel Sen. Obama is likely to be. If Jews would question Sen. Obama’s support of Israel, it wouldn’t be because of conservative values or because of mistrust of African Americans. It would be on policy grounds.

Still if American Jews are somewhat comforted by Sen. Obama’s campaign regarding Israel, Israelis apparently are not:

These are the types of threats that color Israelis’ worldviews and influence the type of American president they want: someone who will take a hard line when confronting any existential threat to the Jewish state.

“They look at [Sen. John] McCain and they see a tough president willing to help them do what is necessary. The look at Obama and they see a liberal with big ideas. But when the time comes when Israel has to do something tough and not so beautiful, they don’t know whether he’ll say ‘do what you have to do,’ ” says Shmuel Rosner, an Israeli expert on US politics.

That perception has placed Senator McCain 12 points ahead of Obama in a recent poll conducted by the TNS Teleseker polling agency. The survey, commissioned by the Rabin Center for Israel Studies, found that 52.5 percent of those polled thought McCain would do a better job of protecting Israel.

I wonder what would happen if the identification of the voter was pro-Israel instead of Jewish. After all Shmuel Rosner recently wrote that Israel was not a major concern for most American Jews. If that’s the case, then the Jewish support of Sen. Obama is largely independent of his stands on Israel.

Michael Oren has looked more closely at the statements of the two candidates. It’s a comprehensive look at the statements of each, not at their advisers.(it’s a must read.) Here’s one point of divergence (h/t PB):

These disparities are rife with ramifications for Israel. Long time advocates of preemption, Israelis may be disappointed by an Obama administration that abandons the tactic and recoils from further preventative action against terrorists. They will have to grapple with the fallout of an American evacuation from Iraq, which is almost certain to be perceived in the region as an Islamist triumph. Still, Israel could benefit from a United States that is less inclined to pursue polices unilaterally and more in line with international opinion.

The situation might be reversed under McCain. The U.S. would continue to press its anti-terror campaign in the Middle East and stay the course in Iraq but remain to a large extent isolated globally. The Israeli ideal of an America that is engaged militarily in the Middle East and in sync with the international community may well prove elusive.

I don’t know how important being in “sync with the international community” is to Israel. Certainly American support during Operation Defensive Shield was essential but it also went against the international consensus. In the end Oren concludes that Israel needs the candidate who is the better leader in charge because events will often dictate American actions more than previously stated policies.

After reading Oren, I’m more convinced that McCain is the better choice regarding Israel. I don’t know that Oren would agree with that conclusion.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.