The New Single-Issue Israel Voters

One of the more enduring fictions about the American Jewish community is that it is largely comprised of "single-issue" voters, with that one issue being Israel. This is a myth that's been debunked more times than I can count; while certainly American Jews care about Israel, polls consistently show that Israel is not among most Jews' top voting priorities. This is one reason why GOP efforts to win over the Jewish vote by focusing entirely on Israel always founder: on every issue aside from Israel, Jews support Democrats more than Republicans (the other reason is that, on the issue of Israel ... Jews also support Democrats more than Republicans).

But over the past few years, I have started to notice the emergence of some folks who do present themselves as single-issue Israel voters. But it's not the imagined pro-Israel zealot -- it's sharp anti-Zionist leftists.

I first noticed this phenomenon in relation to Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY), who pairs a domestic policy agenda that's almost Squad-like in its leftism with strong and vocal traditional pro-Israel commitments. Now, to be clear, I don't expect progressives to approve of these positions by Torres. But there's a common enough progressive line on Torres that's not "he's really strong on a lot of issues except for Israel"; or not even "he's really strong on a lot of issues, which makes the Israel thing really aggravating." This cadre of progressives hate Ritchie Torres with a passion; they basically view him as the devil. He's detested far more than most Democrats who are well to his right on most issues but who haven't been as vocal or front-facing in their pro-Israel politics as he is. And that pro-Israel orientation, in turn, is the sole reason why these progressives hate him and seethe at the fact that they haven't been able to primary him out -- they barely make any pretensions that anything else is motivating them.

More recently, we've started to see a flurry of commentators saying, more or less, that Biden's Israel policy -- specifically, his continued support for Israel in the midst of its campaign against Hamas in Gaza notwithstanding the devastating toll it's exacted on the Palestinian civilian population -- means they will not vote for him in 2024. Now, admittedly, for some of these people it's hard to say they're single-issue Israel voters because one suspects they're single-issue every issue -- they're just looking for some heresy they can cry blasphemy over and justify the nine trillionth self-indulgent "both parties are the same" essay (I have my doubts about the twice-over Jill Stein voter, for instance). 

But there are others who really do seem to be pretty explicit that the only thing that's motivating their vote is Israel -- everything else is washed away. This piece making that argument is especially illustrative because it states flat out that Israel single-handedly renders meaningless a mountain of accomplishments and priorities that the author concedes should under normal circumstances represent essential progressive priorities:

Is sending weapons to Israel that it can use to decimate and kill a civilian population more important than Biden’s industrial policy? Is it more important than the Supreme Court, and abortion rights? Is it more important that all of the hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure investment? Is it more important than having a government that takes on corporate power concentration? Is it more important than the revival of organized labor? The person who is answering “yes” to all of those questions right now is Joe Biden himself.

Effort to pin the blame on Biden notwithstanding, the entire point of this litany is to say that for a significant cadre of voters all of these issues and accomplishments will count for squat in the face of Biden's current stance regarding Israel. While I'm dubious that the author actually has his finger on the pulse of a sufficiently large contingent of voters that it will actually make the political difference he thinks it will, he certainly is speaking for a vocal set that is not hiding their stance that Biden's Israel policy is the alpha and omega of their voting habits, and every other issue is irrelevant.

One can, of course, defend that position -- viewing America's policy on Israel (or Israel in this moment, anyway) as so essential that it outweighs every domestic policy item (and every other foreign policy item). People make their own choices on where their priorities lie. But if you thought it was a bit dodgy when it was (imagined that) Jewish voters were putting Israel above all other considerations, well, this isn't any different from that.

Journalistic Defectors

One of the more dangerous players in contemporary discourse -- or at least one of the types that makes me the most nervous, anyway -- are people who are trained as journalists, who know the forms of the genre, but now are working consciously and intentionally as advocates.

Adam Kredo -- he of Kamala Harris' pot-gate -- is one example. Before joining the Washington Free Beacon, he was a relatively well-respected "neutral" journalist working for the Washington Jewish Week. Now, nobody confuses what he does for the Beacon as dispassionate journalism (except maybe Kredo, who claimed -- apparently with a straight face -- that at the Beacon he remains a straight news reporter who is "not in the opinion biz"). Nonetheless, there's little question that Kredo is more effective as a purveyor of partisan hit pieces precisely because he knows how to write an article in a way that follows journalistic conventions. Get quotes from alternative sources, ask subjects for comments (that they're damned if they do and damned if they don't is a bonus), do much of the heavy narrative lifting not by direct accusation but in terms of presuppositions and framing -- it works in a way that more direct propaganda doesn't. I suspect the "news-ier" side of Fox News (not Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity, but the parts that present themselves as straight coverage) fits this mold too.

On the other side of the street, one can see similar characteristics at Jewish Currents. Again, many of the people writing for Currents have clear talent as journalists, and their stories track journalistic conventions. They aren't obvious agitprop. But they're great examples of how, if you know what you're doing as a journalist, you know how to push every convention to the limits of its tolerance band in a way that gets you to something pretty close to agitprop while still looking on face like a regular investigation. If every choice of framing is meant to accentuate one side's story, if every presupposition of the relevant political climate or social atmosphere reaffirms a particular point of view, if every inference or interpretation is just a little credulous to the right people and cynical to the wrong ones, the result is an article in which all the constituent elements are defensible as fair but the net result is intentionally one-sided (their piece on Ritchie Torres I think works as a decent example of what I mean).

I've sometimes said that the "evil" version of me would make a good press secretary, because I think I'd be very good at spinning effectively. This is a version of that -- if you're a journalist, you know how the narrative machine works, and knowing how it works you also know how to break the machine. And as parts of a political toolkit this is very effective; arguably even necessary, even as it is also intentionally manipulative and kind of hackish. The reason "evil" me is a Press Secretary rather than actual me is that in real life I don't have the stomach for that sort of work. Which is not the same thing as saying that either I or the people I admire are perfectly virtuous or fair-minded in how we relate to our own interlocutors. We have times our biases shine through too. But there is, I submit, a difference between unknowingly being swayed by one's personal biases, or even a temporary lapse acknowledged as a wrong, and knowingly and self-consciously trying to align one's work product with one's biases to the maximum extent possible.

In any event, I suspect the people who do this are in fact decently self-conscious about what they're doing -- they don't (contra Kredo) actually think they're not engaged in opinion; they're relatively open about their agenda. Press them, and they might say something like "all news coverage has a political agenda behind it; the difference is that we are self-conscious about it, whereas the people who think they're doing straight news are more likely to be unconsciously parroting orthodox Pablum without recognizing that's a view too." And I have some sympathy for that critique, actually. We all could stand to be more reflective on what our biases and presuppositions are. But I also think there is a difference between actually trying to understand issues on their own terms and be fair to subjects one is covering, versus just going through the motions of it because "hey, everyone has an agenda right?" Such is the curse of many liberal values (objectivity, neutrality, even-handedness, etc.): they're simultaneously impossible to achieve, and yet things are so much worse when people stop even trying to achieve them.

Demystifying the very much non-neutral "mainstream" coverage norms need not necessarily take the form of "replicating those norms, but intentionally and in service of a different political program." But in practice, it often does, and the result is I think work product that is very slick, very effective for its chosen audience, and very dangerous for the project of fair-minded discourse.