'Tectonic Shift' in 'Jewish Americans' Opinion of Obama

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Daily Caller:

‘Tectonic shift’ in Jewish Americans’ opinion of Obama
By Caroline May - The Daily Caller | Published: Tuesday, June 29th, 2010 | Updated: Tuesday, June 29th, 2010


Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leaves the White House after a meeting with President Barack Obama in Washington, Monday, Nov. 9, 2009. At right is White House Chief of Protocol Capricia Marshall. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Support for President Obama is waning among America’s Jewish population, polls indicate, a shift driven primarily by the president’s policies toward Israel.

The London Telegraph reported this weekend that Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, described the state of U.S.-Israeli relations in bleak terms, saying the two nations “are in a state of tectonic rift in which continents are drifting apart.” While Oren since has asserted that he was misquoted and that his words were less incendiary than reported, even relatively disinterested observers can see that relations between the allies are strained.

McLaughlin & Associates, a national polling company, recently released the “National Survey of Jewish Voters” which reported that while Jewish voters favored Obama 78 percent to 12 percent in the 2008 presidential exit polls, currently, “only 42 percent of voters would re-elect him, while the plurality (46 percent) would consider voting for someone else.”

Ed Koch, former New York mayor, campaigned for Obama in the 2008 presidential election but told The Daily Caller that he believes the Obama presidency represents a very serious problem for supporters of Israel.

“His campaign promises and image as a friend to Israel during the election were one thing, his actions have been very different,” Koch said. Koch does not believe he was misguided during the campaign, but rather that the president’s views had shifted, the first indication of which, Koch noted, was the Obama’s Cairo speech. “The No. 1 problem I see with Obama is that he is not willing to stand up to Islamic terrorism, he conveys weakness and his Israel policy is a subset of that failure.” Despite his frustrations, Koch was coy on whether he would support Obama in the future: “It depends on who was running.”

By contrast, Mark Pelavin, the associate director for Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, contends that Jewish opinion of the president has hardly changed and that Obama has stayed true to his campaign promises of working toward Middle East peace. “There is a lot on the table for this administration, a lot of friction and tension. Unfortunately there is no clear path forward,” Pelavin told The Daily Caller. Though this is a hard process, he continued the Jewish community is poised to embrace Obama’s Israel policies as they bring the region closer to a reasonable solution for peace.

Morton A. Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), told The Daily Caller that the ZOA was one of the few groups that warned Obama would be hostile to Israel. While his peers were unwilling to oppose Obama in the election, Klein said the tides have shifted: “I have never seen this precipitous a drop in support for a president before … Many Jews have gone from supportive to being exceedingly worried if not outright hostile to this president and his Israel policies.”