Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the 76-year-old juggernaut, who has dominated his country’s politics since 1993, put down his marker June 11, regarding the end of the Third Gulf War–and when President Donald J. Trump ignored him, it was the watershed moment.
It Trump confirmed the shift, it will be a rejection of the Republican Party’s committed to Israel forged 40 years ago with the scalps of three senators and a senatorial candidate.
The story begins in 1981, when the new administration of President Ronald W. Reagan proposed to approve the sale of five Boeing 707 airframes modified into the E-3 Airborne Warning and Control System, or AWACS.
Originally priced at $5.8 billion, by the time the deal was approved by Congress, and some fuel tanker aircraft, spare parts and other facilities were thrown in, the price was roughly $12 billion. It was easily to largest foreign military equipment package purchase to that date.
To block the sale, each chamber would have to vote a resolution of disapproval.
At the time, Reagan defended the AWACS deal as necessary to bolster Saudi Arabia from Soviet or Soviet proxy aggression, but everyone understood that it was also a way to cement a positive relationship with a powerful oil producer less than 10 years after the oil shocks of the mid-1970s.
Leading the opposition was the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee, and the full-weight of the Israeli government, led by Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Begin flew to Washington to lobby Reagan and members of Congress.
In the end, Reagan, who won the White House with 44 states and had survived a March 1981 assassination attempt, was too strong, and the deal was completed.
Then, came the retribution. In the 1984 midterms, AIPAC targeted and helped defeat Sen. Charles H. Percy (R.-Ill.), then-chairman of the the Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. W. Roger Jepsen (R.-Iowa) for their support of the AWACS sale.
Both men lost despite Reagan winning both of their states on his way to a 49-state victory.
In 1986, AIPAC took down three more GOP senators and strong senatorial candidate. Losing those six seats, cost the Republicans the Senate, which meant for the last two years of his administration, Reagan had a Democratically-controlled Capitol Hill.
After losing the Senate in 1986, Republicans came to appreciate that AIPAC was responsible for those scalps, and for the next 40 years no national Republican has come close to challenging Israel or its interests.
That might all be changing now.
For the first time since the 1986 ballots were counted, Republicans are lining up against Israeli interests, and there are similar voices in the administration, including the president, who has made no secret of his anger at Netanyahu, including his use of profanity to make his point.
All of this is a polar opposite of how it all started.
The founding of the State of Israel in 1948 was a project of the Democratic Party, led by President Harry S. Truman and leaders of the American Jewish community. It was meant to be both a homeland for Jews, a lesson learned from the just-ended Second World War, and a socialist paradise.
It was not a new idea for there to be a Jewish State, but as Americans were busy reconfiguring the world and its borders, Israel was just another project on the list.
As Republicans tended to practice neo-isolationism, it was the Democratic Party that pursued a robust foreign policy throughout the Cold War, partly out of conviction and partly as a function of the party’s dominance of the White House, Capitol Hill, and all the foundations and think tanks.
For decades, the New York State Democratic Presidential Primary was an absurd exercise of Democratic presidential hopefuls.
That time has passed as well.
Now, Democrats compete with each other to blast Israel, and some of that could be that Israel is no longer the socialist state that was envisioned in 1948.
Or it could be that the Republican no-questions-asked support for the Jewish State left no room for Democrats to maneuver, so they took the field the GOP abandoned.
The Third Gulf War started in large part as an exercise to finally secure Israel, but it might end up uniting Republicans and Democrats against her.