How Long Before Democrats <br>Lose the Jewish Vote <br>To a Pro-Israel GOP?

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How long can it last that the Republicans are the party that’s more supportive of Israel but the Democrats are the ones that get the Jewish vote? Could it be that President Obama is upending the old alliance?

It’s for a reason that I pose those as questions. The landscape is littered with newsmen who’ve erroneously predicted that we’re at the end of the era when the Jewish vote goes automatically to the Democrats.

Yet it’s hard to deny that there’s “a real crisis going on,” as Senator McCain put it on the Cable News Network over the weekend. What will happen if Prime Minister Netanyahu shows up to address a joint meeting of Congress and the Democrats boycott?

“I don’t know” is the answer Nancy Pelosi gave over the weekend to the question of whether most House Democrats would attend Mr. Netanyahu’s speech. The ex-speaker went on to sneer that if the Israeli premier wants to get his message through, he could go on TV.

Mrs. Pelosi has also been carping about alleged violations of protocol by the current Speaker, John Boehner, in failing to consult with the White House — or her, the House minority leader — in arranging for Bibi’s speech.

That strikes me as malarkey. As I wrote in this space last week, Congress has the standing to invite Mr. Netanyahu (or any other foreign leader) under half a dozen or more independent powers granted to Congress and enumerated in the Constitution.

All this pettifogging might mean something were it taking place in a vacuum. But the Democrats are changing. When they nominated Mr. Obama for a second term, they tried to abandon the pro-Jerusalem plank that had long been in their platform.

When party leaders discovered this, they tried to bring Jerusalem back, only to be blocked by a voice vote. Delegates actually booed from the floor. It was only by ignoring the chorus of nays on the third attempt that the chairman declared the measure passed.

Democrats like to point out that, even after that debacle, Mr. Obama won the Jewish vote by a large margin. This Jewish voting pattern is such an anomaly that the neoconservative sage Norman Podhoretz wrote a book called “Why Are Jews Liberals?”

He concluded that secularism has replaced the truths of religion with what he called the “Torah of liberalism.” He could find no signs that this would change soon, but expressed the hope that there would eventually be an end of delusions.

Mr. Podhoretz’s book came out in 2009. In 2012, the share of the Jewish vote that went for the GOP soared to 30%, up by more than a third from 2008. If it keeps moving in that direction at that clip, the old alignment could soon be history.

Certainly it’s hard to think of a moment quite like that to which Mr. Obama has brought us. It’s not, after all, just the Jewish Republicans that he is alienating. He has actually accused members of his own party of kowtowing to political donors.

This happened the other day, when the president vented about the distrust in Congress of his negotiations with Iran. According to The New York Times, Senator Menendez, a Democrat of New Jersey, stood up and told the president to his face that he took personal offense.

No wonder. Mr. Menendez is the real deal, an old-style pro-Israel Democrat. He’s just lost his position as chairman of Foreign Relations because the voters reacted against Obama-ism and tossed the Democrats out of the majority in the Senate.

This is a point to mark about the current flap. Mr. Obama wants everyone to think this is a fight between himself and Netanyahu. The more important fight is between Congress — Republicans and the Democratic Party’s pro-Israel camp — and a renegade president.

He wants to negotiate with the Iranian mullahs without so much as a howdy-doo to the Congress. He resents Senate oversight, even when it’s led by a fellow Democrat. He wants Congress to trust him and the mullahs and not even listen to Mr. Netanyahu.

The left is trying to palm off the idea that Mr. Netanyahu is destroying the bipartisan basis of America’s support for the Jewish state. It turns out to be Mr. Obama that’s doing the deed. We’ll know whether he’s succeeding by watching who shows up for Mr. Netanyahu’s speech.

This column first appeared in the New York Post.


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