During the past year, there has been much insistent rhetoric from the Democratic Party that support for Israel is "bipartisan."  To question such dogma puts one in the realm of the climate catastrophe denier – that is, a person who is such an extremist that facts matter more than theory.

I decided to test the bipartisanship hypothesis (BH) using statistical techniques.  Assuming that the BH is true, one should find the proportions of Democrats and Republicans in Congress supporting various pro-Israel measures to be roughly equal between the two parties.  The results of congressional votes are tallied at www.congress.gov.  Other tallies are available through news accounts.

Let us examine 12 bar graphs.  Most of these graphs depict congressional votes on legislation or resolutions during 2015.  Two graphs depict sponsorship of legislation or resolutions.  One depicts attendance at the congressional address by Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu earlier in 2015.

In each bar graph, the left bar indicates a position favorable to Israel, and the right bar indicates a position unfavorable to Israel.  These two bars are divided into a Republican portion in blue and a Democrat portion in green.  A cursory examination reveals that in 9 of the graphs, the anti-Israel bar on the right is composed exclusively of Democrats.

This is not a fluke.  These votes accurately represent support in the American public for Israelis (in blue) versus Palestinian Arabs (in green) along the political spectrum.  The following graphic is based on a poll by the Pew Research Center from March, 2015.

Advanced statistical software is capable of analyzing the vote counts in the 12 bar graphs above.  If the bipartisanship hypothesis is true, we can calculate the probability of observing data like that shown above.  It turns out that:

• In each of the 12 events depicted above, the odds of a Republican supporting Israel are between 5 and 12,459 times the odds of a Democrat supporting Israel.
• It would be more likely that a fair coin will come up tails 2,010 times in a row than it would be to see the observed data, if the BH were true.
• The odds against seeing the observed data, if BH were true, would be about 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1.

Given the evidence, it breaks the bonds of credulity to believe that support of Israel is really bipartisan.  Recall Debbie Wasserman-Schultz's denial to a reporter that Israel was booed three times during the 2012 Democrat National Convention, shortly after the incident was broadcast on national television.  Credulity-straining appears to come naturally to leftists.

Indeed, there is an a priori argument to explain why the Democratic Party is the natural home for American anti-Semitism.  But that lengthy argument is a subject for another day.

Surak is a patriot and a scholar.