Support for Israel seems to be correlated with degree of religiosity, whether the religion is Christian or Jewish.
Obviously, the same would not be the case if the religion is Islam.
Here’s more:
The political arm of Reform Judaism is publicly opposing Huckabee [for the post of ambassador to Israel]. So too are the left-wing lobby J Street and the Jewish Democratic Council of America. The Jewish Council for Public Affairs, an umbrella group of Jewish community relations councils around the country, didn’t condemn the nomination outright but made clear its disdain for him with comments deprecating him as a “Christian nationalist.”
These views were summed up in an op-ed published in The Hill by Lily Greenberg Call, a veteran Democratic operative who had worked for the campaigns of former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris and resigned from a post at the Department of the Interior because she felt the Biden-Harris administration was too supportive of Israel after the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre. “Unconditionally supporting Israel actually makes Jews unsafe” and the Jewish state is “antithetical” to “Jewish values,” Call asserted.
On the other side of the issue, more mainstream, liberal Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee said that they looked forward to working with Huckabee. More ardently pro-Israel groups like the Zionist Organization of America and the Orthodox Union endorsed him enthusiastically.
The opposition to Huckabee – and to Israel itself – is from leftist people of Jewish background, who are leftists first. Leftists do not, for the most part, like religion. In fact, leftism has often been described (not by leftists, however) as a replacement for religion and a type of godless quasi-religion. The reason leftists seem to have a soft spot in their hearts for Moslems is the exception, but that is based on Moslems supposed status as oppressed peoples, not their religiosity.
The leftists I know, some of whom are Jewish but not the majority, detest religion and look down on those who practice it or believe in it as irrational troglodytes. But I’d never heard the phrase “Christian nationalism” prior to reading the linked article. Here’s how it is explained by the author:
Przybyla condemned political conservatives and Trump backers as “Christian nationalists,” because they believe that the rights of all Americans “don’t come from any earthly authority,” she said “They don’t come from Congress or the Supreme Court. They come from God.”
That is something that Huckabee believes. But that belief was shared by all of America’s Founding Fathers, not least a non-denominational Deist like Thomas Jefferson. It was, after all, the man who would eventually become the third president of the United States who wrote in the Declaration of Independence that it was “self-evident” that all Americans were “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”
It’s either abysmal ignorance on the part of Przybyla, or refusal to accept the stance of the Founders. It hardly matters which; it’s a common notion, that of the negation of what’s known as “natural rights” and their religious basis in the beliefs of the Founders. It’s something I discussed previously in this post about Allan Bloom and his book The Closing of the American Mind, written in 1987. The following is a quote from the book:
But the unity, grandeur and attendant folklore of the founding heritage was attacked from so many directions in the last half-century that it gradually disappeared from daily life and from textbooks. It all began to seem like Washington and the cherry tree—not the sort of thing to teach children seriously. What is influential in the higher intellectual circles always ends up in the schools. The leading ideas of the Declaration began to be understood as eighteenth-century myths or ideologies. Historicism, in Carl Becker’s version (The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas, 1922) both cast doubt on the truth of the natural rights teaching and optimistically promised that it would provide a substitute. Similarly Dewey’s pragmatism—the method of science as the method of democracy, individual growth without limits, especially natural limits—saw the past as radically imperfect and regarded our history as irrelevant or as a hindrance to rational analysis of our present. Then there was Marxist debunking of the Charles Beard variety, trying to demonstrate that there was no public spirit, only private concern for property, in the Founding Fathers, thus weakening our convictions of the truth or superiority of American principles and our heroes (An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, 1913). Then the Southern historians and writers avenged the victory of the antislavery Union by providing low motives for the North (incorporating European critiques of commerce and technology) and idealizing the South’s way of life. Finally, in curious harmony with the Southerners, the radicals in the civil rights movement succeeded in promoting a popular conviction that the Founding was, and the American principles are, racist…
Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it.
I repeat: that was published in 1987. In the nearly forty years since then, it has only gotten worse.
But back to the issue of support for Israel:
As a Gallup poll published last June suggested, support for Israel in the United States is primarily a function of religious faith. And declining religiosity is directly linked to growing hostility to Israel.
The survey, which tracked opinions about the Jewish state and the Palestinians over the last quarter-century, demonstrated that support for Israel was far more prevalent among those who attended religious services regularly, and it declined among those who did not attend a church or a synagogue.
The poll notes that Protestants have generally been most supportive of Israel and remain so, but the percentage of Protestants in the population has declined. Meanwhile, those with no religious identity have increased, and they are the group most likely to be sympathetic to the Palestinians – an embrace which is rather ironic, considering that fundamentalist Islam is a huge part of what motivates the Palestinians. But it’s not about logic.
More:
The percentage of Catholics in the U.S. population has remained about the same over time, but Catholics have shown a somewhat more significant increase in sympathy for the Palestinians in the past five years than is the case for Protestants.
I’m not sure what that’s about; perhaps the current Pope? Despite this increase in pro-Palestinian sentiment among Catholics, the majority are nevertheless supportive of Israel.
In general:
If younger Americans are less supportive of Israel than older ones, it is to some extent the result of their being less religious than their elders. The fact that people 29 or younger are also more likely to have been indoctrinated in the toxic neo-Marxist ideas of critical race theory, intersectionality and colonial-setter ideology that brands Israel and the Jews as “white” oppressors—and which is antithetical to traditional faith—is also part of this depressing trend.
As for Jews, the poll doesn’t tell us much for two reasons: the first is that the number of Jews was so small as to be susceptible to large margins of error, and the second is that religiosity among Jewish respondents wasn’t measured in any way. But we already know from other polls that, among Jews, the more religious the greater the support for Israel. The definition of “Jew” is, of course, different than definitions for other religious groups, because being Jewish also represents an ethnicity and does not require any religions belief at all. And yet nevertheless, according to recent polls, support among American Jews for Israel remains extremely high: