September 9-15, 2004

loose canon

Bush and the Jews

by Bruce Schimmel

Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch's endorsement of George Bush at the Republican National Convention gave fresh credence to an untruth that the president's strategist are praying will come true: that Jews were turning en masse to Bush.

It's in their prayers and predictions, but it hasn't happened. I hope it doesn't.

Even with Koch, an erstwhile Democratic big-time macher, urging other Jews to break ranks, the percentage of Jews supporting Bush remains about the same as during the last presidential election. Taking into account the post-convention jump, only 22 percent of Jews are planning to vote for Bush. Last election, Bush got 19 percent.

The reasons Koch gives for his support are neither surprising nor revealing. Koch said he could not "turn his back" on the man who was there for New York on 9/11, and who continues to aggressively wage war on terror. But that's not the whole story, and neither is its obvious subtext: that Bush is fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel.

There are deeper commonalities between some American Jews and the fundamentalist Christians who set the Grand Old Party's ideology.

What Bush-voting Jews and Christians have in common is terror — a terror that is growing because it is self-fulfilling. Further, they share a common belief that God will deliver them from His enemies if they are but willing to take up the cudgel on His behalf.

Most Jews are scared. With European anti-Semitism on the rise, it's not hard to understand why some have chosen to drop their anchors in the best fortified port. And while a more secular, humanist Jew might attribute sharp increases in anti-Semitism to Israel's increasingly belligerent behavior, fundamental Jews — like their Christian counterparts — see the historical antagonism in more biblical terms.

Humanists see the conflict with Islam as manageable, while fundamentalists believe war is not only inevitable, it is desirable. Making war is God's way, as foretold in scripture; and for them, quite literally, this war is but a prophetic continuation of the Crusades.

Behind Republican policy is a religious orthodoxy that calls itself Christian Zionism, which takes the Jewish repossession of Israel as its central religious tenet. Called an "Armageddon Theology" by some, Christian Zionism has the same goals as its Jewish counterparts, but doesn't share its ends.

Both want Jews in the Holy Land. But the Christian version ends with a vision of the apocalypse; while most Jews — last I checked — end their Bible with the Old Testament, and the earth still intact. For the sake of peace, humanists of all ilk would hope.