Bipartisan Backing

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

One encouraging thing about the American reaction to the crisis in the Middle East has been the extraordinary bipartisan nature of the support for Israel. In a political climate in which Democrats reflexively criticize President Bush about nearly everything, one subject on which there is, thankfully, a broad and deep American consensus is that Israel has a right to defend itself. The tone was set by Mr. Bush, who, standing beside President Putin of Russia, gave his now-famous reply: “The best way to stop the violence is for Hezbollah to lay down its arms, and to stop attacking.”

Yesterday on “Meet The Press,” Newt Gingrich, the Republican former speaker of the House, appeared with Senator Biden, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. “I think Senator Biden and I are basically in agreement on this. It is explicitly wrong to bring pressure on the victim. I mean, Israel did everything it could to withdraw from south Lebanon, and the result was terrorist missiles,” Mr. Gingrich said.

After Mr. Bush blamed Iran and Syria and Hezbollah for the violence and said Israel had every right to defend itself, Senator Schumer, the Democrat from New York who heads the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, issued a statement saying, “I fully support President Bush’s reaction.” Said Mr. Schumer, “Israel is correct to respond with strength. It is the only thing that militant groups like Hamas and Hezbollah understand…. Israel has done what any nation would do: respond with full force and protect the security of its citizens.”

How many other issues are there on which the conservative Republican senator from Virginia, George Allen, agrees with the liberal Democratic congressman from New York, Jerrold Nadler? Senator Allen was on television yesterday, emphatically making the point that Israel has the right to defend itself, the same point Mr. Nadler said in a statement saying, “Like any other country, Israel has the right and the obligation to defend her citizens from attack no matter what the circumstance.”

It’s sad that there are some extremists, like the editorial writers at the New York Times, who are not only outside this American consensus but determined to take politics past the water’s edge. The Times, in a particularly feckless editorial last week, called Israel’s self-defense actions “perverse.” No doubt there are those who will attribute the bipartisan political consensus to the “stranglehold” that the pro-Israel lobby supposedly has on Congress, as described by the academic dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Stephen Walt. We’d attribute it, instead, to the wisdom of the American people and to their understanding of both the Islamic extremist enemy and the values that we share with our small, embattled ally in the Middle East.


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