On Thursday, January 10, 2008, the left wing British site, Jews sans frontiers, sent out this post, entitled, US presidential hopefuls and where they stand on Israel.
Although yesterday Bush called for an “end of ‘occupation’ of Arab lands” in Palestine, and the development of a contiguous Palestinian state, not many Palestinian observers, given his intentional ignorance of the conflict for the past seven years, placed much confidence in his words.
According to Jews sans frontiers, Ha’aretz’s printed a ranking of candidates on the basis of how pro-Israel they are. The most pro-Israel candidates, those “best for Israel” from the perspective of this panel received a score of 10, while the “worst for Israel” received a score of 1. Needless to say, no presidential candidate received a score below 5, a moderate kind of rating.
The Israeli panel chosen to rate the candidates definitely revealed that the best scores trended toward the right wing anti-Palestinian line of thinking, whereas left wing scoring tended to be lower and while not necessarily anti-Israel, they were definitely more conciliatory with regard to the Palestinians.
The scores devised by this panel, for the past month of campaigning, for Democratic and Republican candidates still in the race, were as follows:
Guliani 8.75
Clinton 7.38
(Bloomberg 7.63, possible independent)
McCain 7.5
(Richardson 6.88, out)
Thompson 6.88
Romney 6.5
Huckabee 6.75
Brownback 6.63
Edwards 6.0
(Biden 6.0, out)
(Dodd 5.75, out)
Obama 5.25
Results showed Guliani, McCain, and Hillary Clinton rated as the most right wing hawks in their support of Israel, while Obama and Edwards appear more moderate, perhaps supportive of a two state solution and a Palestinian state. Among the Democrats, Hillary’s Middle East platform is bereft of talk about ending Israel’s 40 year occupation or a peaceful solution, and even engages in right wing proZionist propaganda, which includes falsehoods about Palestinian textbooks.
Obama scored the lowest out all the candidates still in the running.
Out of those no longer in the running, the Republican, Chuck Hagel, scored the lowest, 3.5. Hagel believed that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is central to bringing about Middle East peace. Apparently, the panel did not believe that this view is particularly pro-Israel.