PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania — Democrats Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock must navigate an obstacle course to convert voting figures so they can join the U.S. Senate on Jan. 5 and Jewish Georgians wary of “apartheid” phrasing could help swing their elections.
Both candidates will square off against conservative Republicans in runoff elections that day. If both win, Democrats will control the Senate with 50 votes for each party with tie votes to be broken by Vice President Kamala Harris after she takes office on Jan. 20.
Warnock has the tougher task. He received 31 percent of the vote on Nov. 3 with most of the remainder split between two prominent Republicans whose combined total ran up a 636,000-vote margin above Warnock’s numbers.
The liberal Jewish community could understandably distrust Warnock because he signed a statement last year that compared Israel to “apartheid South Africa.”
Ossoff has a 91,000-vote difference to turn around in his race against incumbent Sen. David Perdue and, as a Jewish liberal, he has not endorsed “apartheid” terminology.
This election year reflects alterations in the Jewish vote, which does not usually drive elections but contributes to the outcome and can swing an election in a close race. As Jewish populations in Georgia and Arizona grow significantly, those states have been trending Democratic. The Jewish population centers in Atlanta and Phoenix have each been estimated as high as 120,000, which is half the amount of established Jewish communities in Philadelphia Boston, Washington, D.C., and Chicago.
The Jewish vote is apparently making a mark in Georgia and Arizona, where President-elect Joe Biden is leading in the vote count against President Trump in both states. In Arizona, Democrat Mark Kelly defeated incumbent Republican Sen. Martha McSally. In two years, that state’s two Republican senators were replaced by Democrats. Is it now Georgia’s turn?
Ossoff and Warnock – with the president-elect’s help, perhaps – do not seem to need advice that they must quell fears that a Democratic-controlled Senate will be an accomplice to a socialist society, violent protests, or “defunders” of police operations. Not to mention fears that Democrats will be Israel’s new enemy.
Warnock, who is African-American, repeated during an interview on MSNBC Wednesday that he has no intention of defunding police despite opponent Kelly Loeffler’s charges otherwise. He produced chuckles when he said she keeps raising the issue, and maybe that is her objective. He then added that Loeffler is attempting “to defund health care.”
President Trump won 41 percent of the Jewish vote in Florida, an unusual proportion likely in response to ongoing Israel-bashing by Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
Warnock is already striving to make certain that local Jews are convinced that he supports Israel, two years after taking a somewhat hostile stance against the Jewish state. Loeffler on Monday accused Warnock of “a long history of anti-Israel extremism,” according to The Forward.
Warnock, senior pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, delivered a sermon criticizing Israel shortly after the Trump administration opened the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem in May 2018.
“You have to look at those Palestinian sisters and brothers, who are struggling for their human dignity and they have a right to self-determination, they have a right to breathe free,” he said, as quoted by Jewish Insider. “We saw the government of Israel shoot down unarmed Palestinian sisters and brothers like birds of prey.
“And I don’t care who does it, it is wrong to shoot down God’s children like they don’t matter at all,” he continued. “And it’s no more anti-Semitic for me to say that than it is anti-White for me to say that Black lives matter. Palestinian lives matter.”
The following year, he signed the petition containing the word “apartheid” in relation to Israel.
Jewish Insider reported that Warnock provided it on Monday with an editorial expressing a more reasonable stance. “I understand the many threats that face Israel and as a U.S. senator I will work to ensure Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon,” he wrote. “I believe it (settlement expansion) is a threat to the prospect of a two-state solution, which I believe is the only path to enduring peace.”
He wrote of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, “I recognize the First Amendment right to protest is an American value we must protect. But I strongly oppose the BDS movement and its anti-Semitic underpinnings, including its supporters’ refusal to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist.”
Both Jewish Democrats and Republicans are taking opposing positions on Warnock, but many Jews there could well vote for him because they believe he supports Israel. My educated guess is that there could be a segment of Georgian Jews who have sufficient doubts about his stance on Israel to vote against him. Otherwise, they would support him. In a close race, such a batch of voters could doom Warnock’s candidacy. Even if Ossoff wins, that would leave Republicans with a 51-49 majority.
Perdue and Loeffler gave Ossoff and Warnock an unexpected break on Monday when they demanded the resignation of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who is also a Republican. “The secretary of state has failed to deliver honest and transparent elections,” the senators wrote in a statement, according to The New York Times.
Their accusation was free of any evidence.
Raffensperger called their claims “laughable,” and some conservatives are afraid that such claims may deter Republicans from turning out on Jan. 5. “Trump is gonna cost the GOP the Senate,” conservative commentator Erick Erickson of Georgia wrote on Twitter, the Times reported. “His supporters are internalizing that the election in Georgia was stolen so why bother even trying.”
Maybe Purdue and Loeffler are angry because Raffensperger did “deliver honest and transparent elections.” In 2018, Gov. Brian Kemp was secretary of state at the same time he was running for governor. Democrats criticized Kemp for what the Times said were described as “widespread voter suppression tactics.”
The incumbent Republican senators may be asking themselves about the first round of elections: Where’s a widespread voter suppression tactic when you really need one?
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Columnist Bruce ticker is based in Philadelphia. He may be contacted via bruce.ticker@sdjewishworld.com
The Reverend Warnock has very little chance of winning the US senate race, as it is far more likely the two Republican candidates will come together–under threat of their careers and who knows what else, as Loeffler is already under investigation. So my response is more about facts and conclusions regarding Rev. Warnock’s views concerning Israel. Yeah, he sees apartheid in Israel when he looks at the West Bank occupation, and the way Gaza is locked in with the Israelis enforcing sanctions and a blockade. Does that make him anti-Semitic? Certainly not. Does that make him anti-Israel? Not really. Here is Gideon Levy, a prominent Jewish-Israeli columnist for the major Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, writing in a column on October 11, 2012 (2012!): “Anyone who tries to draw a comparison between the occupation regime in the territories to the South African apartheid regime – and their number is rising constantly – is instantly labeled anti-Israel and anti-Semitic. But the facts justify the comparison. No, Israel is not an apartheid state, but the occupation in the territories is apartheid.” Since 2012, Israel has taken more and more control of the West Bank, taken water from Palestinian villages (and then Palestinians have to buy the water at prices Israelis control), and have sent more and more bulldozers which come in to demolish Palestinian homes, after Palestinians have ended up in a Kafkaesque maze of futilely trying to get a permit to make improvements to their homes. Since 2012, there has been a clearly growing chorus in Israel to annex the West Bank outright, culminating in Netanyahu’s announcement earlier this year. Even a South African-born, but now Israeli, Jewish writer, Benjamin Pogrund, who for nearly two decades vehemently argued against comparing Israel to an apartheid state, such as South Africa, said, in an interview with The Times of Israel, published June 5, 2020, “I have argued, uphill and down dale, and lectured about it in a dozen countries and books and articles, that this is not apartheid. There is discrimination against the Arab minority and there’s an occupation in the West Bank — but it’s not apartheid…Come July 1, if we (Israel) annex the Jordan Valley and the settlement areas, we are apartheid. Full stop. There’s no question about it.” If all it takes is an oral or a written declaration of annexation, that means one should wonder if, practically speaking, Israel is already behaving as an apartheid state. I know this is hard for older Jews to hear this, but we really need to hear the cries of Palestinians in a way that doesn’t just create the reaction, “What about Hamas?” When I look at how Warnock has since made clear his stance against BDS, and voicing clear supports for a two-state solution (something even AIPAC at least until recently supported), which is not at all inconsistent with his previous remarks, it is ridiculous for any Jewish person in Georgia, who is not a right-wing
conservative, to not support Rev. Warnock. I think it is too bad the headline here made Warnock sound anti-Israel, when Bruce’s article provides a far more subtle and reasonable position regarding Israel. I think, too, it is even more important to acknowledge the gorilla in the room, which is the majority of Jewish-Israeli voters are ready to vote for apartheid in the name of security. And if security is that important, then wear the apartheid label, too. After all, security is what white people in South Africa were after, too.
I disagree, Mitch. Any candidate who applies the term “apartheid” to describe Israel or Israel’s limited control over the West Bank either doesn’t understand what the word means or is purposely using term to de-legitimize Israel as a Jewish nation-state. The label is a libel; it is false and it is pernicious. One can criticize any aspect of Israeli policy regarding the State of Israel or the partial control Israel has over the territories that are governed by the PA or by the terror organization Hamas without employing gratuitous lies. Apartheid in South Africa was a systematic and openly racist policy of repression, segregation and domination imposed by a white minority over a black majority. That bears no resemblance to Israel, where Arab Israeli citizens have the same civil and political rights as their Jewish compatriots. The limited Israeli control over the West Bank is related only to security interests in order to protect against terror attacks against Israeli Jewish and Arab citizens. It does result in procedures such as checkpoints, security barriers and reduced access to enter Israel, but it is not done to persecute the Palestinians. (In fact, the term “apartheid” is much closer to views expressed by some PA officials who say they would exclude Jews from living in their land if and when the Palestinians conclude a peace deal with Israel.) The bottom line is that anyone should be skeptical (at the least) of a candidate who expresses support for Israel, while at the same time uses the term “apartheid” to describe Israeli actions. That kind of “support” Israel doesn’t need.
You may want to get a 3 months subscription to Ha’aretz, Jack. Note the quote from Gideon Levy, who is a long-time writer at Ha’aretz. You can go tell him he doesn’t understand his own nation or is delegitmizing his own nation. And the South African and now Israeli fellow who sounded like you until this year.
Why would anyone vote democrat in the Georgian run offs in January? Vote Republican and help contain the Anti Israel, Anti Semitic left including AOC and her 3 friends and others who cannot be guaranteed to support Israel or the Jewish community in an hour of need. The riots after police shootings have been more like pogroms than anything else. Defunding police won’t help you either.
These things are easy to see from down under and other places outside the USA. Jewish Voters in Georgia should think very hard before voting for any democrat candidate.
How dare you compare the protests after police shootings to pogroms? You obviously have no understanding of what pogroms were. Also, your confusion of criticism of Israeli conduct with anti-Semitism is noted. I am not sure how you got here from “down under” (New Zealand), but what perhaps you have not seen here is how Trump and too many enabling Republicans have had a hard time separating themselves from the KKK in the South and people who literally wave Nazi flags. As I have said to people for over 20 years, Presbyterians who oppose Israeli policies against Palestinians are more likely to hide American Jews from anti-Semites, while Israel-flag-waving Christian evangelicals in the South particularly may love Israel, but are not very much enamored with Jews, who they see as “lib-ruls.” So, don’t go assuming AOC and Tlaib or Omar would not be saving American Jews from the likes of the real live Nazis and Klan members operating at the edges of the Republican Party these days. Finally, the proper term for the political party you disparage is “Democratic” not “Democrat” Party.