What Does Being Pro-Israel Mean Anyway?

The term Pro-Israel gets thrown around a lot these days. Obama and Biden both claim to be Pro-Israel, despite Obama's closeness to everyone from Rashid Khalidi, a leading PLO figure, to Ali Abuminah, publisher of the Electronic Intifada. J-Street, a liberal front group created by their own admission in order to lobby against Pro-Israel policies, claims to be Pro-Israel. Don King has just visited Israel and claimed to be Pro-Israel.

So what does being Pro-Israel mean anyway? It does not mean supporting any particular Israeli government or merely paying lip service to the idea of Israel when elections come around. If Pro-Israel is to mean anything at all, it has to mean supporting the survival of Israel. And by definition the opposite of this, promoting the destruction of Israel and supporting its terrorist foes automatically disqualifies any individual and group from being considered Pro-Israel.

After all if you aren't for someone's survival, in what sense can you be considered "pro" them?

When challenged on this point the left trots out lines about "tough love" as if the last two administrations pressuring Israel over and over again to make deals with terrorists while funding and training the terrorists themselves somehow wasn't "tough" enough. As if graves across Israel filled with the victims of terrorists funded and backed by US and Europe wasn't tough enough. As if the thousands of men, women and children torn by shrapnel, permanently mutilated and crippled just wasn't "tough" enough. As if setting up an army of tens of thousands of terrorists in Israel's borders wasn't tough enough.

The "tough love" line puts Israel squarely into the battered wife role who needs to be slapped around by Obama, Biden and the J-Streeters and the rest of the Jewish liberal establishment for its own good. In this paradigm pressuring Israel into policies that lead directly to the murder of its citizens is an act of "love", in the same way that the brutal husband's worst beatings are also defended as acts of tough love.

But there is another better paradigm for those who are not willing to take the side of Israel against the terrorists but still want to be considered Pro-Israel. It comes from the Hippocratic Oath, "Before all else do no harm."

None of the Presidents routinely described as Friends of Israel from either party have ever followed that proscription. The day when major Jewish groups followed it too has long passed. But it is a fairly easy one to follow. Before all else do no harm. That doesn't require providing Israel with money or weapons or attending rallies for Israel or passing resolutions for Israel. It means that if you can't bring yourself to do any good, don't do any harm either.

Such a proposal is deceptively simple yet indisputably fair. "Doing no harm" may be a low standard to set but in an age when pressuring Israel is the standard means of doing business in D.C. and liberal Rabbis write letters to Bush in support of Hamas, but it is a standard that virtually all of the people and organizations who claim to be Pro-Israel but aren't could never meet.

To Liberal Jewish organizations and figures a "Do No Harm" standard is the equivalent of telling a violent alcoholic, "We can't expect you not to drink, but please do it at home where your drinking isn't a danger to the general public." To politicians it means saying, "We don't expect you to love Israel, we just expect you not to work to destroy it."

Because simply put being pro-Israel means at the very least being for Israel's survival and even apathy is closer to being Pro-Israel than the destructive actions that have brought Israel into a struggle for its own survival against an enemy backed and funded by the State Department and liberal groups.

Or to put it another way it's saying, "We don't actually expect you to be good. We're just asking you not to be too evil."