Republican presidents have been pushing Israel toward the peace table — sometimes not so gently — almost since the Jewish state was born more than six decades ago.
But in the recent round of debates, the crop of candidates vying for the GOP nomination has been chiding President Barack Obama for forcing Israel’s hand — and the audiences are cheering.
“You don’t allow an inch of space to exist between you and your friends and allies,” former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said to thunderous applause at a Sept. 22 debate in Orlando, Fla.
Frontrunners Romney and Texas Gov. Rick Perry disagree on many issues — Social Security as a federal program, the utility of health care mandates, immigrant rights — but they trip over each other in assailing the Obama administration on Israel.
Romney coined the phrase “threw Israel under the bus” in May when Obama called for peace talks based on the 1967 lines, albeit with land swaps.
Not to be outdone, Perry traveled to New York for the September opening of the United Nations General Assembly and accused Obama of “appeasement,” adding that he himself backed Israel because he was a Christian.
Whereas previous Republican administrations have opposed Israeli settlement building, with various degrees of vehemence, and have remained cool to Israeli claims of sovereignty over eastern Jerusalem, Perry departed from these positions at his New York news conference.
Standing beside right-wing Jewish activists, Perry expressed support for Israeli settlement building and said he favored Jerusalem “being united under Israeli rule.”
Current and former GOP operatives and veterans of Republican administrations have identified a number of factors they say explain why the Republican Party, which until a decade ago tolerated a faction that kept Israel at a friendly distance, now hews to a BFF (best friends forever) policy.
The chief reason they cite is the growth of the evangelical movement as a cornerstone of the party. Other factors include changed attitudes toward the Middle East in the wake of 9/11, the significance of the Jewish vote in certain swing states and the emergence of a Jewish Republican donor base in a community that for decades has given mostly to Democrats.
“Israel is not just for Jews anymore,” said Noam Neusner, a former domestic policy adviser to President George W. Bush and now a communications consultant to Christians United For Israel. “There are 5 million American Jews and 50 million evangelicals, some of whom are Hispanic, African American, Korean. Every Sunday morning they are reading scripture and reading it seriously.
“What the candidates all understand implicitly is that you demonstrate a sense of America’s unique role in the world and moral force by supporting Israel.”
Matthew Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said that while evangelicals had a role, the changes wrought by 9/11 should not be underestimated. Republican presidents including Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush operated in a Cold War arena in which cultivating allies among Israel’s rivals and enemies may have made sense — but that is no longer the case, he said.
“Given how things have developed — the global war on terror, the rise of militant Islam — that [strategy] doesn’t make any sense anymore,” he said.
Marshall Breger, an adviser to Reagan who now teaches law at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., said that while Jews still tend to give to Democrats, there is a growing base of Republican Jewish givers.
“Even in 2008, when a very high number of Jews voted for Obama, the financial support Jews gave to the [Republican] party was significant,” he said. “And it’s still seen as relatively untapped.”
Dov Zakheim, a former senior Pentagon official in both Bush administrations, said a Republican president likely would have to make decisions that displeased Israel. But Neusner doubts that a Republican president would pressure Israel overmuch.
“In a future Republican White House, the president chooses who his advisers are going to be, and it includes people who he is comfortable with,” he said. “It may include realists, but increasingly it looks like it’s not going to.”