Far Left Center for American Progress Hosts Netanyahu, Leader of the Israeli Ethnonationalist Right
When Israeli PM Netanyahu visited the US at the invitation of then House Speaker John Boehner in March, the take-home message was that support for Israel had become a partisan issue, with strong Republican support and relatively weak, dwindling Democrat support. Indeed, the Democrats have an analogous split between the donor class and it base that we see among the Republicans, but for different reasons.
The Democratic Party establishment and donor class are strongly supportive of the Jewish state and are seeking to find new ways to increase U.S. military aid for Israel following the Iran deal. But recent polling shows that support for Israel among rank-and-file Democrats has fallen by 10 points in one year. A Gallup poll released this year found that fewer than half of Democrats, 48 percent, report sympathizing more with Israelis than with Palestinians as it relates to the Middle East conflict, while 83 percent of Republicans sympathize more with Israel. (John Hudson, Foreign Policy: “Netanyahu Visit Sparks Internal Backlash at Powerhouse D.C. Think Tank“
The White Republican base is more supportive of Israel (at least partly because of a large, terribly misguided Evangelical component) and thus more in tune with the donors on that issue. But it is famously out of step with the donors on social issues—immigration, gay marriage, abortion, etc. On the other hand, the Democrat base is far less supportive of Israel than the donors but, as a coalition of the ascendant non-White majority, it is entirely in step with them on social issues.
The common denominator is that in both parties the donors are substantially Jewish, and these wealthy Jews are pursuing a Jewish diaspora strategy of favoring Israel and leftist stances on social issues.
So in his recent trip to the US, in addition to dunning the Obama administration for a hefty increase in military aid in return for the US not bombing Iran (at least until the Republicans are back in charge), Netanyahu was invited to give a speech at the Center for American Progress, a powerful left-wing lobbying group. The result was that Netanyahu, dedicated to ethnonationalist policies of apartheid and ethnic cleansing vis-á-vis the Palestinians and expelling African migrants in Israel, spoke at CAP which is dedicated to the dispossession of White America via immigration and multiculturalism in the name of universal human rights and empathy for the oppressed. There were some tensions, but in the end, the strength of the Israel Lobby on the left in the US was reaffirmed — and CAP bigwigs burnished their credentials for high-level positions in a putative Hillary Clinton administration. Read more