Will Biden be the last Zionist US president?

Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.

Pennsylvania’s charismatic and eloquent Governor Josh Shapiro appears to harbor no ill will for having lost out to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as the running mate of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

He’d been seen as the most likely to be tapped for the job up until the final moment. But swallowing whatever disappointment he felt, Shapiro stepped forward as a team player, delivering a rousing introduction at a raucous rally in Philadelphia last week. “Walz is a great man,” he said. And in turn, both Harris and Walz went out of their way to praise him. “Pennsylvania, I know that you know this, but my God what a treasure you have in Josh Shapiro,” Walz remarked.

Nonetheless — and rather predictably — the second-guessing over Harris’s choice began in earnest immediately after the announcement. Had Shapiro been skipped over because of his Jewish origins and/or strong backing of Israel?

Predictably, former U.S. President Donald Trump quickly sought to characterize Harris’s decision as an exercise in antisemitism. “It was because of the fact that he’s Jewish,” he openly said during a Fox TV interview.

Trump’s accusation is, of course, absurd — Harris is married to Jewish businessman Doug Emhoff. But for Trump, facts are never allowed to get in the way of a good mischievous tale.

The former president has been peddling this “antisemitic” line about Harris for weeks now, likely in an effort to stir up political divisions within a Democratic Party that’s deeply split over the war in Gaza — and to capitalize on tensions within the Jewish community over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the military campaign against Hamas, sparked by the butchery the Palestinian militants visited on southern Israel last year. Trump will throw anything that might shake up American-Jewish political affiliations, much like in 2020, when he argued Jews who vote for Democrats were “very disloyal to Israel.”

According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which a bipartisan majority in the House attempted to codify into U.S. law earlier this year: “Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations” is itself antisemitic.

Nonetheless, Trump’s tactics aren’t surprising. Statistically, seven in 10 American Jews identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, and since Franklin Roosevelt first ran for president in 1932, most have voted Democrat in presidential races. But in recent years, more American Jews than in the past have been voting Republican, and it’s a shift that’s been partly forged by the rise of perceived antisemitism on the left. While Jews only make up about 2.4 percent of the adult American population, they have a strong track record of actually turning up to vote, and in a tight race, they could play an important role in a handful of swing states.

However, while Trump’s claims can be easily disregarded as self-serving, it’s important to note that some pro-Israel and Jewish Democrats are making similar accusations and, arguably like Trump, are too casually conflating antisemitism with criticism of Israel’s military campaign.

“As Jewish Democrats, it’s tough to wrap our heads around the idea that everyone thought Shapiro was the strongest pick and he lost out,” David Greenfield, a Democratic player in New York, told POLITICO last week. “There was an unprecedented campaign against him by the far left, including many who aren’t even Democrats, to smear him because he’s an observant Jew.”

Mark Levine, another New York Democrat and Borough President of Manhattan, concurred: “The daggers came out for him, in a way that I think is incredibly unfair, and that’s explainable only by his Jewish identity.”

Indeed, in the run-up to Harris’s announcement, pro-Palestinian progressive Democrats had been lobbying her and her campaign aides to skip Shapiro, arguing that choosing him would risk deterring progressive voters in November — as well as Arab Americans in the battleground state of Michigan. This sticks in the craw of many Jewish Democrats — and Shapiro’s magnanimity has done nothing to ease their hurt feelings.

Pennsylvania’s charismatic and eloquent Governor Josh Shapiro appears to harbor no ill will for having lost out to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as the running mate of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Harris’s call for an immediate Gaza cease-fire earlier this year, her soft pushback against antisemitic tropes used by Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, and her support for the Iran nuclear deal while serving as a senator are all examples listed to show she’s weak on Israel. Zvika Klein, editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, reckons “Harris as president could be a disaster for Israel and the Jewish people.”

But while Harris is more attuned to her party’s progressive wing than Biden and keen to placate it, her position is, if anything, more reflective of a changing America— especially in terms of demographics. For example, since 1980, the number of Americans claiming Arab ancestry has nearly quadrupled. Among the fastest growing Arab diasporas in the world, the number of Arab Americans grew by 30 percent from 2010 to 2022, and currently totals around 3.5 million.

Moreover, the overall fastest growing demographic groups in the U.S. — Asian Americans and Hispanics — don’t have any ties to Europe or the Middle East, and their foreign policy anxieties tend to lie elsewhere. And all of this suggests that as time goes by, there will be domestically driven adjustments to U.S. foreign policy, which are likely to erode the Democratic Party’s reliability as an Israel ally.

This isn’t lost on the more forward-thinking Israeli politicians and strategists, who also speculate just how long Democrats — and America for that matter — will continue to be Israel’s best friend.

For all the tensions and disagreements between Netanyahu and Washington over Israel’s Gaza campaign — including its civilian death toll and the risk of sparking a full-blown regional war — Biden has lived up to his claim of being a self-described Zionist president, once again emphasizing his lifelong bond with Israel as recently as July.

Of course, Biden did threaten to withhold some arms supplies from Israel in a failed attempt to cajole Netanyahu to agree to a cease-fire or ratchet down the campaign in Gaza. And Israelis complain there’s been a go-slow with some supplies — a tactic that, according to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, previous U.S. administrations have used to emphasize their displeasure.

The real worry, though, is that future U.S. presidents might revert to the country’s default position on Israel in the years immediately following the Jewish state’s founding. Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower both refused to supply Israel with weapons, fearing Egypt would go over to the Soviet bloc if they did. So, for the first two decades of its existence, France was Israel’s main supplier, with the country digging into German war reparations to be able to buy weapons. The American arms embargo was eventually only lifted by President John F. Kennedy, in a move partly designed to help Democrats garner more Jewish-American votes.

But as America changes, electoral calculations will alter as well. “Nearly every Israeli prime minister from David Ben-Gurion on has had to defy American presidents,” a senior Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told POLITICO earlier this year. And he remained confident that come what may, Israeli governments well into the future will be able to do so as well without suffering severe consequences. But others aren’t quite so upbeat, and they worry that Biden may well be among the last U.S. presidents who self-identify as Zionist.