The conventional wisdom about the Biden Administration’s recent announcement that it will be halting all offensive weapons shipments to Israel is that the White House is aggressively courting the Michigan Muslim vote without which it can’t win in November. But that can’t be the case.
As Caroline Glick explained in her recent piece, the math is just not there. First of all, the “uncommitted” campaign spearheaded by Democrat congresswoman Rashida Tlaib was supposed to demonstrate the emerging intensity of the Arab American power. Tlaib urged Michiganders to deny Joe Biden the primary vote in protest of his support of Israel. But, as Glick pointed out,
The “uncommitted” ballots comprised a mere 13.2% of the ballots. While the media, Tlaib and her cronies presented 13.2% as a major accomplishment, it was a failure. Around 10% of Michigan Democrats habitually vote “uncommitted” in presidential primaries. Ahead of the 2012 elections, 11% of Michigan Democrats voted “uncommitted” against then-President Barack Obama.
Glick quotes the political commentator Richard Baehr who contends that
. . . four swing states—Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona—may well be decided by their large Jewish communities.Baehr explains that the Jewish vote in all four states is larger than the margins of victory in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential races.
Although American Jews have been a loyal Democrat constituency and historically prioritized issues other than Israel, the rise of antizionism worldwide and especially the wave of unrest on American college campuses, awakened a sense of insecurity that might just prompt them, as Glick said, to start voting as Jews—and against Biden.
The risks the Biden Administration is taking by denying Israel vital ammunition supplies far outweigh the rewards. To understand their true aims, recall the Obama campaign slogan of the 2008 vintage—Change We Can Believe In.
As Joe Biden’s public appearances become increasingly infrequent and painful to watch, his intellectual deterioration is now impossible to deny. Who is running the country is naturally a matter of speculation. Tablet writer David Samuels and Obama biographer David Garrow reported the DC gossip that Barack Obama is the one pulling the strings. As far as I know, nobody has proposed an alternative theory.
One of Barack Obama’s most memorable quotes is “elections have consequences“—not because the phrase is particularly elegant, but because it perfectly describes his modus operandi. It’s a common conviction among the American left wingers that once voted into office, progressives should push their agenda without regard for the consequences they may incur from the mainstream electorate.
Shortly after assuming office in 2009, Obama pushed an unpopular healthcare reform. In the 2010 midterms that followed the passage of Obamacare, the GOP netted six Senate and 63 House seats, the largest shift since 1948. Democrats were wiped out on state and local levels; the party was drained of political talent, the consequences of which are reverberating today as strong candidates to replace Biden are nonexistent.
Yet to Obama it was an acceptable price to pay for massively and irreversibly expanding the federal government’s role in the healthcare infrastructure, making Americans exponentially more dependent on Washington and shifting the cultural and political climate in the nation. Today, economic libertarianism is all but dead.
A bold realignment in the Middle East was on Obama’s second term agenda. In his recent essay, Tablet columnist Lee Smith explained how Obama pulled away from the American traditional Jewish and Arab allies, ushered in the Muslim Brotherhood and attempted to make a nuclear deal with Iran. Donald Trump later reversed course, reestablished the American-led alliances and brokered the Abraham Accords.
Lee traced how inexplicably “Obama and then Biden sought to undo the U.S. order of the Middle East, an arrangement that has kept a volatile and strategically vital region relatively stable”:
Is it ego alone that requires Obama and his party must be proven right, and that Trump’s successes must be transformed into failures at America’s expense—and at the additional price of destroying the prospects of a relatively hopeful future for Middle Easterners?The key fact is this: The regional order that Trump restored has long been part of the formula that ensures continued U.S. domestic peace and prosperity. To put it another way, the moves made by Obama and now Biden are not primarily about destabilizing the Middle East. Rather, they are designed to destabilize the United States.
Lee’s is an America-centered explanation. But the son of African elites and a post-colonialist anthropologist who spent most of his childhood abroad and in Hawaii, the 44th President of the United States is very attuned to the Global South. In his youth, Obama cozied up to domestic terrorists like Bill Ayers and to antisemitic theorists of third world liberationism like Columbia’s Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi.
Though his physical and mental decline is undeniable, Biden was likely attuned in his lucid years to Obama’s antizionist ideas. Menachem Begin’s famous “I am not a Jew with trembling knees” comment was directed at the then U.S. Senator, which makes me suspect this was the reason he stood out of the sea of other Democrat white men Obama considered for the Vice Presidential nomination.
Obama’s way was never to pander to the voters in the middle, but to push an agenda of change and then either hope that the middle would acquiesce, erode, or cobble together an intersectional coalition of marginal interest groups supporting each other. He failed to realign the U.S. with the Islamic Republic; the failure cemented in the ayatollahs’s massive areal attack on Israel last month, but antizionist sentiments appear to prevail over any kind of practical considerations of alliance-building. Which helps to explain why the Biden Administration obligingly acquiesced to pressure from Tlaib and so doggedly insists on helping Hamas survive.
Reshaping domestic politics is more important to this administration than forging international partnerships or winning elections. A recent Harvard-Harris poll revealed that 4 in 5 Americans support Israel over Hamas, with every age group choosing the Jewish state by a landslide. But the Biden Administration caved in to Tlaib and quite transparently chose the Jewish Senator Chuck Schumer to lead a turn away from the middle eastern ally among Democrat politicians. The party stalwarts like Nancy Pelosi fell in place. The Democrat Party is now at best split on Israel and at worst is the antizionist party.
Israel is not a bread and butter issue for most Americans; it’s consistently ranked lowest priority for voters. The Biden Administration might be counting on the electorate to fall in line within a political and cultural landscape redefined as antizionist. The Left can then use this new antizionist stronghold to launch a movement against Jewish achievement at home and sovereignty abroad. And with that the United States will be changed forever to better fit into the world Obama dreamt up.
[Featured Image: Obama and Biden announcing Iran Nuke Deal, 2015]
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