Zionism is a 150-year-old modern political movement founded on the values of a 3,000-year-old national and religious tradition that connects the Jewish people to the land of Israel. It successfully advocated the Jewish people’s rights to the land of Israel and founded a Jewish state in the homeland of the Jewish people.
Zionism also argued that just as any other nation deserved to determine its own future, the Jewish people deserved that right as well. After 2,000 years of exile and persecution, it was time that the Jewish people were given the opportunity to establish a state that they governed and which allowed them self-determination. Since its founding, the government of Israel has strongly guarded its right to self-determination.
Israel’s Declaration of Independence included the idea that the Jewish people: “Never ceased to assert their right to a life of dignity, freedom and honest toil in their national homeland.”
Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, explained that independence is dependent on self-determination: “The criterion of spiritual and moral independence is freedom of judgment and conscience. Only if we use our own judgment to determine for ourselves what is good or bad in itself, and what is good or bad for us, are we free men acting of our own accord.”
There are countless examples where the international community has pressured Israel to make policy decisions Israeli leaders knew were not in the country’s best interests.
One of these examples isn’t well known, though it acts as an exemplar of Israel ignoring international pressure. U.S. President Harry Truman tried to convince Israel not to declare its independence until Arabs accepted the idea of a Jewish state, but Israeli leaders declared independence anyway.
As a democratic country, Israel exercises self-determination through the decisions of its elected leaders. Israeli policy isn’t determined by a king or dictator, as it is in other parts of the Middle East.
Israeli leaders are elected by the people, and they determine Israel’s policies as representatives of the Israeli people. Israel’s ability to determine its own future is dependent on the purity of its elections.
Purity of elections—ensuring that elections are fair and just—is the backbone of a democracy. It isn’t just Israeli leaders who have stressed this, but American presidents as well.
Former President Joe Biden, when faced with threats to the purity of American elections from domestic and foreign actors, said, “We’ve got to shore up our election system and address the threats of election subversion, not just from abroad, which I spent time with Putin talking about, but from home. We have to ask: Are you on the side of truth or lies; fact or fiction; justice or injustice; democracy or autocracy? That’s what it’s coming down to.”
It is because America is one of the world’s oldest democracies and its leaders have recently spoken of the need to secure America’s elections, that it is so disappointing to know that America has continuously interfered with Israeli elections.
In a 2018 interview with Israel’s Channel 10, then-President Bill Clinton acknowledged he tried to intervene to help Shimon Peres win Israel’s 1996 general elections against Benjamin Netanyahu. In the weeks before the May 1996 Israeli elections, Clinton made several notable appearances alongside Peres, the incumbent prime minister. He even traveled to Israel to stand with Peres.
Clinton wasn’t the only president to interfere in Israeli elections. A 2017 congressional investigation found that the U.S. State Department, under former President Barack Obama, used hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to grant Israeli groups formed to oust Netanyahu from office in the upcoming Israeli elections.
Although one Israeli organization, OneVoice, told congressional investigators it had informed U.S. State Department officials that it planned to use the money to influence Israeli voters to vote against Netanyahu, the Obama administration granted it the money anyway.
The precedent of American administrations interfering with Israeli elections continued in the recent Biden administration. Depending on how one reads an unclear congressional report, maybe under the first Trump administration.
A congressional report released recently attributes anywhere from tens of thousands of dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars of American grant money facilitated by the U.S. government to organizations with partisan agendas in Israeli elections.
The investigation revealed that American tax dollars have been used to fund protests against Netanyahu’s judicial reform plan during the Biden-Harris administration. The House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees investigated six non-government organizations to determine if they used American taxpayer funds to interfere with Israeli policies and elections.
The committees also released information that the investigation found that the Biden-Harris administration “potentially funded groups with ties to US-designated terrorist organizations,” which included Hamas, even after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.
The U.S.-Israel alliance is one of the most important relationships between nations in the world today. This relationship is built on shared values and shared strategic goals. As the only democracy in a region ruled by dictators, terrorists, and despots, Israel’s democracy is a shining light on a hill.
This relationship is weakened when America disrespects the integrity of Israeli elections and the Israeli people by interfering in Israel’s elections.
Congress must pass a law prohibiting American administrations from interfering with foreign elections. America cannot claim to be a beacon of light and stress the importance of free and fair elections to other countries while interfering with those same elections.
