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Dam Press:
The American Politico published an article by writer Jimmy Detmer, which talked about Kamala Harris’ possible foreign policy and said that Biden might be the last US president who calls himself a Zionist.
Here is the full text of the article translated into Arabic:
Charming and articulate Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro appears to hold no hard feelings about losing to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ running mate. Speculation about Harris’s selection began immediately after the announcement. Was Shapiro overlooked because of his Jewish heritage and strong support for Israel?
As expected, former US President Donald Trump was quick to describe Harris’ decision as anti-Semitic. “It’s because Shapiro is Jewish,” he said in an interview with Fox News.
Of course, Trump’s accusation is absurd, given that Harris is married to Jewish businessman Doug Emhoff. But for Trump, facts should not get in the way of a good, damaging narrative.
The former president has been promoting this “anti-Semitic” line from Harris for weeks, possibly in an effort to incite political divisions within the Democratic Party, which is deeply divided over the Gaza war, and to exploit tensions in the Jewish community over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the military operation in Gaza. Trump will make any remarks that could sway the political position of American Jews, as happened in 2020, when he claimed that Jews who voted for the Democratic Party were “disloyal to Israel.”
Trump’s strategy is not surprising. According to statistics, seven in ten American Jews sympathize with or lean toward the Democratic Party, and most of them have voted for the Democratic Party in presidential elections since Franklin Roosevelt’s first run in 1932.
But American Jews have increasingly voted Republican in recent years, a shift driven in part by rising anti-Semitism against the left, and while Jews make up only about 2.4% of the U.S. adult population, they actually vote at a high rate, and in a close race they could play a big role in several swing states.
While it’s easy to dismiss Trump’s claims as self-serving, it’s worth noting that some pro-Israel and pro-Jewish Democrats are making similar accusations and may, like Trump, casually mix anti-Semitism with criticism of Israel’s military activities.
In fact, before Harris’ announcement, progressive, pro-Palestinian Democrats had been pressuring her and her campaign aides to avoid Shapiro, arguing that choosing him could discourage progressive, Arab-American voters in the battleground state of Michigan. This angered many Jewish Democrats.
Harris’s call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza earlier this year and her support for the Iran nuclear deal while she was a senator are two examples of her views on Israel. Zvika Klein, editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, believes that “if Harris is elected president, it could be a disaster for Israel and the Jewish people.”
Yet while Harris is more in line with the party’s progressive wing than Biden and more eager to please him, her positions, if anything, say more about how the country is changing, particularly in terms of demographics.
For example, the number of Arab Americans has nearly quadrupled since 1980. The fastest growing Arab community in the world, Arab Americans grew 30% from 2010 to 2022 and now totals about 3.5 million.
Moreover, the fastest-growing groups in the U.S. are Asian Americans and Latinos, who have no ties to Europe or the Middle East and whose foreign policy concerns tend to lie elsewhere.
All of this suggests that over time there will be some internally motivated realignment of U.S. foreign policy, and the potential to undermine the Democratic Party’s credibility as an ally of “Israel.”
This has not gone unnoticed by “progressive” Israeli politicians and strategists, who are also speculating on how long the Democrats and the United States will continue to be Israel’s best friends.
For all the tensions and disagreements between Netanyahu and Washington over Israel’s actions in Gaza, Biden has lived up to his own narrative that he is a Zionist president.
But the real concern is that a future U.S. president might revert to the country’s default position on “Israel” within a few years of the Jewish state’s creation.
Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower supplied Israel with arms, fearing that Egypt would join the Soviet bloc if it did so. Thus, for the first twenty years of Israel’s “existence,” France was its primary supplier, and so Israel used German war reparations to buy its arms.
The US arms embargo was eventually lifted under President John F. Kennedy, in part to help the Democratic Party gain more Jewish votes in the United States.
But as the United States changes, so too will the electoral calculus. “Almost every Israeli prime minister has had to challenge the president of the United States,” a senior Israeli official who spoke on condition of anonymity told Politico earlier this year. He remains confident that, whatever happens, Israeli governments will be able to do so in the future without suffering serious consequences.
But others are less optimistic, fearing Biden could be the last U.S. president to call himself a Zionist.
Screenwriter: Jimmy Detmer
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