The last time the outcome of a U.S. presidential election was as decisive as the vote held last week in Israel, Americans were pretty much in unanimous agreement as to what to call it. The word they used was "landslide." And that's why those American groups and denominations that wasted no time in not merely denouncing a newly re-elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but called for the U.S. government to override the will of the Israeli people should reflect on the damage they are doing to the Jewish nation.
The traditional benchmark for a landslide is 55% of the popular vote. Since the beginning of the 20th century, that percentage was matched or exceeded 10 times by American presidents. Ronald Reagan's 1984 re-election was the last such occasion.
I bring this up because it's important to place the outcome of the April 9 Knesset election in Israel in perspective.
To place Israel's electoral system alongside that of American presidential votes would appear to be comparing apples to oranges. With voters casting a single ballot for one among many lists of candidates for the Knesset, it's easy to misunderstand the outcome. Israeli elections always come across to Americans as a chaotic muddle in which no party ever gaining a majority.
But if you think Netanyahu and his Likud party won only a razor-thin plurality over Benny Gantz's Blue and White party, you don't understand what really happened. Israelis knew that when they cast a ballot for a party that pledged to support Netanyahu's bid to lead the next government – even when that party wasn't the Likud, but one of the prime minister's allies or "frenemies" – it was as good as a vote for Likud itself. The same is also true of those on the Left who voted for parties other than Blue and White, which were prepared to back Gantz's bid to be prime minister.
So, if you want to know how many Israeli voters really voted for Netanyahu, you need to total the percentage of votes garnered by all the right-wing and religious parties that pledged to join his coalition government. That total was approximately 55%, which is why, even among the prime minister's die-hard foes, few have attempted to claim the election was anything but a decisive victory for Netanyahu.
This is important because the immediate reaction from much of the organized Jewish world in the United States was to treat Netanyahu's victory as an event that called into question ties between Israel and Diaspora Jews. Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the head of the Union of Reform Judaism, stated that Netanyahu was causing "a dramatic rupture with many in the American Jewish community." Jacobs helped organize a letter signed by nine Jewish groups that demanded U.S. President Donald Trump ignore the wishes of Netanyahu and his new government, and insist on the creation of an independent Palestinian state and oppose the application of Israeli law over West Bank settlements as the prime minister has promised to do.
Of course, these nine groups, which include some entities associated with Reform and Conservative Judaism, the left-wing Israel Policy Forum and the formerly mainstream Anti-Defamation League, have every right to oppose Netanyahu's positions. But they should be honest about what they're doing. By speaking out in this fashion only a couple of days after Israelis took to the polls, they are trashing the verdict of Israeli democracy.
Given that some of the same sources were among the most vocal in expressing worries about the future of Israeli democracy, this is highly ironic. Israel's democratic system is in no danger, but these critics are angry that most Israelis don't vote the way they would like them to.
The issue on which they are prepared to discard the ties between Israel and American Jews is one that is hardly worth such a split. Netanyahu has made clear he does not intend to annex the West Bank, but rather apply Israeli law to settlements where, truth be told, Israeli law is already applied as a general practice. Such a move wouldn't prevent the implementation of a two-state solution were the Palestinians ever inclined to accept it. Jacobs and his friends know very well they have repeatedly rejected it.
The real issue here then is the anger of American Jews, who are still shocked that Israelis don't value their advice. The clear majority of Israelis, including many who voted for Blue and White out of disgust with Netanyahu's legal problems and because Gantz offered no substantive disagreements with the prime minister on security issues, have rejected the blind belief of Jacobs and his friends in withdrawal from the West Bank as an end in and of itself.
We know Jacobs and ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt oppose Netanyahu and Trump. But it's time to acknowledge that their real beef is with the Israeli people, who have repeatedly rejected their opinions by margins of landslide proportions. Most Israelis believe that endangering their security by creating a hostile sovereign power in Judea and Samaria the way late Prime Minister Ariel Sharon did with his 2005 disengagement from the Gaza Strip would be madness.
Writers like former Forward editor Jane Eisner, who are open about rejecting the political will of Israeli's people and abandoning the notion of Israel's centrality, or prominent Jewish-American commentator and Israel critic Peter Beinart, who work to subjugate Israel to the will of foreign powers who wish to force a solution to the conflict on it, are more honest than Jacobs and Greenblatt about their goals.
Regardless of their own opinions of Netanyahu or the conflict, it's likely that many Reform and Conservative Jews, as well as donors to the ADL, are uncomfortable with how these organizations express such contempt for the people of Israel and attempt to sabotage the U.S.-Israel relationship. Nor should they be. These unelected leaders of American Jewry, who have the nerve to lecture the people of Israel about Jewish values and morals, deserve to be ignored.
This article is reprinted with permission from JNS.org.
