Rauch: As Tevye (from Fiddler On The Roof) sings, ”Tradition!” Because of he Torah’s teachings and the experiences suffered by the Jewish people, most Jews have tended to be ”socially concerned” for other people’s plight. As with black Americans, Jews traditionally view the Democrats as more socially conscious. Until something dramatic happens, Jews (and perhaps blacks as well) don’t take the time to check what’s really going on. They naively leave their voting decisions to ”tradition.”
What would Israel’s future have looked like had Al Gore been elected in 2000?
Brooks: In all of my travels I have not met anyone in the Jewish community who has not told me that they don’t thank G-d that we have George Bush in the White House. I think it was said best by Prime Minister Sharon during his last visit to the Oval Office when he said that in the history of the State of Israel there has never been a better friend in the White House than George W. Bush.
Weinstein: Given [Gore’s] support for Oslo and for multilateralism, the international pressure on the Sharon government would have been overwhelming. Tensions with the U.S. would have been at an all-time high; Israel’s efforts to dismantle Arafat’s terror networks in the West Bank could not have succeeded without implicit American support. The beacon of hope that is the forthcoming invasion of Iraq would not exist.
Charen: Far worse. Al Gore, as a good liberal, would have endorsed and stuck to the ”peace process” despite everything. He would have been completely a creature of the State Department, and would accordingly have distinguished between the terrorism that struck us and the ”violence” inflicted on Israel — a distinction that George Bush, to his everlasting credit, could not bring himself to recognize.
Jacoby: If anything, Israel’s position would have been even bleaker. If Gore had been elected, there would have been no break with the Clinton policy of lionizing Arafat and pressing Israel to make drastic new concessions. There would have been no June 24 speech, with its forceful call for ”regime change” among the Palestinians. The supporters of Israel who are so prominent among Bush Administration policy makers — Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Elliott Abrams — would still be in the private sector. And the avidly pro-Israel evangelical Christian community would not have had the ear — and respect — of the president. Israel’s position always seems precarious, but it would have been markedly worse if the election had gone the other way.
Rauch: I shudder to think of what things would have looked like had Gore been elected, not just for Israel, but for our country as well. I’ll stop short of saying that we’d probably all be taking Islamic religious lessons and learning to speak Arabic, but I don’t think we’d have gone to war against Al Qaeda or the Taliban. We’d probably be ”dialoguing” with them over ways to dissuade them from following up on the September 11 attacks with the destruction of Chicago’s Sears Tower and San Francisco’s TransAmerica Building.
(FrontPageMag.com)
