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The Israel Lobby’s GOP Past
posted on May 4, 2012Though “Jewish voters are a reliable Democratic bloc,” Tablet’s Lee Smith takes us back into recent history: when Republicans, not Democrats, led America’s support for Israel. In his review of Sonja Schoepf Wentling and Rafael Medoff’s new book, Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the “Jewish Vote” and Bipartisan Support for Israel, Smith finds, “Republicans’ reasons for [supporting Israel]…haven’t changed much over the last 60-plus years. Some were moved by pity or guilt over the West’s failure to prevent the Holocaust; others, perhaps a majority, embraced Zionism because of their Christian faith; and yet others … believed ‘that a Jewish state would serve a pro-American bulwark against Soviet penetration in the Middle East.’”