I must confess that the Republican fixation on deriding the opposition as being too weak on Israel baffles me. It has shown up a lot during this election, most recently here. Are the Republicans really that obsessed with the Jewish vote? It's more uniformly liberal than evangelicals are conservative. And the people that are really obsessed with Israel outside the Jewish community--the fundamentalist Christians--are presumably in the bag. Sure, most Americans support and like Israel, and if Obama were seriously proposing pressuring Israel into making a deal on, say, right of return or Jerusalem this might be cause for widespread concern, but he just isn't.
One must conclude that this attack is all about emphasizing Obama's "otherness", and this element of the campaign has been one of the darkest stains on John McCain's honor. One might even reasonably conclude that this was done to spread the rumor that Obama is a closet Muslim or has such sympathies. I do find it most interesting that the constituency for the most hard-core militant pro-Israel policies exist almost exclusively among Gentiles--sure, there are some neocon Jews, but you could fit them all into a medium-sized basketball arena. The fundamentalist Christians of which I am speaking make up nearly one third of the country. When the right talks about a candidate or group being weak on Israel, their audience is almost never Jews but rather their base of fundies, whose interest in Israel is mostly about eschatology. In this case, the motive for this attack is a bit different.
