Democrats and Israel
With regard to “Pence and Pew, present and future” (Column One January 26), the roots of growing apathy toward Israel in the US Democratic Party lie in three events from the 1990s: the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Oslo Agreement in 1993, and the 1994 Republican “Contract with America.”
The first of these deprived the Left of its ideal, and when Soviet archives were opened, this demonstrated that it had completely misunderstood the nature of “socialism” while the Right had understood it correctly. The second endorsed the Left’s ideas on how to bring peace with the Palestinians, but experience there demonstrated that the Left was wrong about this, too. The significance of the Republican “contract” is that it encompassed a set of ideas that, when adopted, actually worked.
These three, taken together, undermined the Left’s self-perception of being entitled to rule because it was more moral, more intelligent and better educated than the Right, and raised the specter of its becoming politically irrelevant.
Without any new ideas that would appeal to voters, the Democrats responded by adopting a strategy of catering to identity groups that could claim grievances – blacks, Latinos, feminists, LGBTQ and, under former president Barack Obama, Muslims. This strategy works only as long as these grievances are maintained, which is why Democratic policies generally don’t solve the underlying problems: Doing so would lose them their voters.
These groups, and the party that embraced them, cannot tolerate evidence that they might have brought their grievances upon themselves, but any peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians would do exactly that: demonstrate that Palestinian suffering has been due to the bad decisions of Palestinian leaders.
The reason is simple: The best the Palestinians can achieve in any deal is exactly what they would have achieved had they settled in 1949. Support for BDS follows since only the delegitimization of Israel can prevent the emergence of evidence that the Left has been wrong about the Israel-Palestinian conflict as well.
YALE ZUSSMAN Framingham, Massachusetts