Last week the RNC unanimously adopted a resolution that suggests so. The RNC is now downplaying the resolution as non-binding. Buzzfeed's take:
The resolution does … indicate the extent to which the party's grassroots will back Israel in basically any event, and would support a far more maximal Israel position than that held by any but the most hawkish Israeli parties.
Now consider who rescued Newt's candidacy with millions of dollars. That's Sheldon Adelson, a gambling business billionaire, who is a Greater Israel enthusiast, and deeply involved in Israeli politics on the far right. Wayne Barrett has a must-read on Adelson's politics:
Adelson even pulled his money out of AIPAC, the top-pro Israel lobbying group, when it appeared to support a 2007 peace initiative championed by Olmert, President Bush, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, an effort denounced by Gingrich at the time. "I don’t continue to support organizations that help friends committing suicide just because they say they want to jump," explained Adelson, who was already spearheading a coup designed to replace Olmert with Netanyahu.
Adelson has given $13 million to Newt's PACs and campaigns to date. And Newt's position on the Israel-Palestine question has shifted dramatically, as Barrett notes, in that period. Here is Newt from 2005:
The desire of some Israelis to use security as an excuse to grab more Palestinian land should be blocked by Washington even if that requires employing financial or other leverage to compel the Israeli government to behave reasonably on the issue of settlements. It is vital to our credibility in the entire Middle East that we insist on an end to Israeli expansionism.
Now, the Palestinians are an "invented people" and no pressure should be put on Israel at all, with respect to its accelerating colonization and de facto annexation of the West Bank.
I just think we should recognize what we now have: a Republican party whose policies on the Middle East are to the right of the Likud party, and whose front-runner has been financed by a man who regards the settlements as a non-issue. Just as important is Adelson's eagerness for a war against Iran:
In Connie Bruck’s extraordinary New Yorker profile of Adelson, she reported that as early as June 2007, Adelson was so ready for war with Iran that he separated the men from the boys on the basis of their willingness to strike Iran. At a conference in Prague sponsored by his own Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies, he dismissed the son of the former shah because, he told one participant, “he doesn’t want to attack Iran.” He said he liked another Iranian dissident at the conference “because he says that if we attack, the Iranian people will be ecstatic.” He attributed his own lust for an attack to his love of Israel, adding that he didn’t care what happened in Iran.
Against all this, Goldblog is exercized most of all by descriptions of Adelson as an "Israel-Firster." Marc Tracy is candid enough to note that "in Connie Bruck’s profile, Adelson is portrayed as basically a single-issue guy."
Well: he is, isn't he?
(Photo: Sheldon Adelson, chairman of Las Vegas Sands Corp., speaks during an interview in Hong Kong, China, on Monday, Nov. 30, 2009. Sands China Ltd. dropped on its first day trading after raising HK$19.4 billion ($2.5 billion) in the city's biggest initial public offering this year. By Jerome Favre/Bloomberg via Getty Images.)
The Dish 