Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the US, explains in his recent book that Barack Obama repeatedly abandoned Israel, and sought to “put daylight” between the two countries. The Iran nuclear deal was an extension of this policy.

Hillary Clinton was all-in on the Obama policy of insulting minimizing, ignoring and castigating Bibi Netanyahu. For example, in 2010, when Joe Biden visited Israel and Israel announced a new housing initiative, Clinton attacked Bibi and raked him over the coals in an extraordinarily aggressive, angry, and rude phone call.

In 2012, she told the Saban forum that there was more Israel needed to do to demonstrate that it “understood the pain” of the Arabs. She also never wavered in her support when Obama banned flights to Ben Gurion airport during the last war, held up arms shipments, and characterized some Israeli actions in Gaza as “totally indefensible.”

In her current campaign, Clinton relies heavily on her progressive credentials, insisting that her Methodist faith informs her views to “do good.” Yet several branches of that faith, including the United Methodist Church, supports BDS. While Hillary Clinton has opposed BDS, she has never spoken out against this perfidious movement within her own faith community.

Furthermore, a major source of the anti-Israel worldwide sentiment is the progressive bias towards the perceived disenfranchised “wretched of the earth” — which, in the progressive imagination, most definitely includes “Palestinians” front and center. As if this wasn’t enough, there’s the disgusting case of Sid Blumenthal, Clinton’s friend and confidante, whose son, Max, compares Israel to Nazis and who champions Noam Chomsky.

Let’s contrast this with Donald.

Also a product of the 1960’s, Donald went to New York Military Academy and Fordham University, then Wharton. Not exactly hotbeds of far-left progressives. Instead of screeching at Bibi and  chatting with Israel-bashers, he has been strong in his defense of Israel. At the Algemeiner dinner last year, he said “we love Israel 1000%!” He was Grand Marshal of the Israel Day parade several years ago, and has castigated Obama and Kerry for “selling out” Israel. He has a close personal relationship with Bibi, and taped a 2013 video endorsing his candidacy.

Harvard Professor Ruth Wisse points out that the absurd progressive notion of multiculturalism is a major driver of  anti-Israel animus. Hillary lives, breathes and eats multiculturalism; Donald eschews it.

Politics makes strange bedfellows; Israel’s ties in the 1970’s and 1980’s with apartheid South Africa, supported by Yitzhak Rabin, is an example. Some disagree with Israel’s decision to support the apartheid regime. I do not. Israel realized that survival trumps principles on occasion, and this was such an occasion.

What are Donald’s faults, and are they sui generis for a presidential candidate? He’s vulgar? In 1828, Andrew Jackson, a rough-hewn populist like Donald, called John Quincy Adams a “pimp”; Adams called Jackson a murderer and adulterer, and his wife a bigamist. Donald’s a racist? Recall that Ronald Reagan opposed  racial school busing and affirmative action.

So we’ve been to this movie before, and it turned out all right.

Israel’s supporters are rightly concerned over Donald Trump’s comments that he will be “neutral” on the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

Sean Hannity, when recently questioned about Trump’s support for Israel, said he wouldn’t let a few words, spoken in the heat of a bitter primary contest, get in the way of his support of Trump who he thinks is so right on so many existential issues.

Voltaire famously quipped that the perfect is the enemy of the good. Is Trump perfect? No. But he’s light years ahead of the Obama/Clinton anti colonial bias against Israel.  And Trump later walked back his comments:

Israel, our great friend and the one true Democracy in the Middle East, has been snubbed and criticized by an Administration that lacks moral clarity. Just a few days ago, Vice President Biden again criticized Israel – a force for justice and peace – for acting as an impediment to peace in the region.

President Obama has not been a friend to Israel. He has treated Iran with tender love and care, and made it a great power in the Middle East — all at the expense of Israel, our other allies in the region and, critically, the United States.

Forty years ago Milton Himmelfarb famously said that Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans. Is it time to change this?

Dr. Phillip Jacobs is a businessman and pro-Israel activist who was smitten with the incredible drama of the Jewish people reborn in the state of Israel after he and his wife lived as volunteers in Kibbutz Gan Shmuel following the Six Day War.

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