Glenn Greenwald has been hammering on the odd spectacle of our political elite’s unanimous refusal to offer even the faintest criticism of Israel no matter what they do and how strongly the rest of the world condemns it. It’s a point I always make whenever I write about Israel-Palestine issues. But what explains it?

The normal explanations focus on the effectiveness of Israel lobbying organizations and the high-level of Jewish media ownership and/or media voices. But it’s really more simple. If you poll Democrats, you’ll discover that less than a third of them support Israel’s airstrikes in Gaza. Fifty-five percent of Democrats think that Israel should have pursued diplomacy before using violence. Seven percent of Democrats consider Israel to be an enemy of the United States.

Given this opinion profile, we might expect the Democratic Party to be somewhat critical of what Israel is doing. But 77 percent of American Jews voted for Barack Obama in the November elections. Jewish Americans are divided on the strikes on Gaza, as they are on the Palestinian issue in general. But the Democratic Party doesn’t want to undermine their reputation as a reliable defender of Israel. Therefore, the Democrats take the position of uncritical support for whatever Israel does.

The Republican Party’s position is equally simplistic. It might seem to defy reason that the GOP would pander to a population that makes up roughly three percent of the electorate (mostly in solidly Blue States) and which votes against them at an over three-to-one clip. But the Republicans aren’t pandering to Jewish voters (except those that live in purple Florida), they’re pandering to evangelical voters that believe Israel must remain in Jewish hands for Jesus to return and bring Armageddon.

The GOP is also using fear of terrorism and hatred of Islam to justify their advocacy for enormous military/industrial complex spending, and hating on Palestinians plays right into that strategy.

The Israelis allied themselves with America’s Christian Right way back to the 1970’s, when Menachem Begin gave Jerry Falwell the Jabotinsky Centennial Medal and gifted him an airplane. Israel understandably makes a huge effort to encourage evangelical tourism. It makes sense for Israel to have friends in both parties so that they’re aren’t subject to the vagaries of the American political cycle. But it probably never occurred to Begin that thirty years later the Republicans would be the more supportive party of the two, even as 77% of Jews maintained their Democratic tendencies.

Ironically, this strange dynamic makes it more likely that the Democrats will force tough concessions on Israel than the Republicans. But the Democrats aren’t likely to criticize Israel unless they are in a position to negotiate with them. The Democrats haven’t been in that position since Bill Clinton left office.