Republicans = Israeli Right?

This essay by Mark Levine is over the top in a lot of places, but one claim that's becoming common enough in some quarters to be worth refuting is the implicit idea that the American occupation in Iraq is the same as the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Most among the Israeli right favor building large numbers of settlements in the Occupied Territories for the purpose of Judaizing it and ultimately annexing it to Israel through a process they don't have fully planned out yet. The American right, by contrast, takes pride in the fact that at most we want a few military bases in Iraq, and wins support by claiming to be assisting an embryonic sovereign democracy. This is a non-trivial difference which shapes both the debate and the actual formulation of long-term policies in Washington and Tel Aviv.

On a similar note, partisan Democrat Matthew Yglesias has some key comments about the relationship between the American right and social justice:

"Who's working to halt the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa? Who's trying to help refugees in Darfur? Who's trying to stop global trafficking in women? Why, that would be socially conservative religious movements. For that matter, who's charged off on a neo-Wilsonian quest to spread democracy at gunpoint. The efficacy of the religious right's preferred means of spreading liberty around the world can and should be questioned, as should the sincerity of at least some of the architects of the strategy, but there's every reason to think that many -- if not most -- of the people who vote for George W. Bush and his forward strategy of freedom are perfectly sincere in their belief that this is what's happening and that it's a good idea."

By including that here, I don't mean to claim the the National Religious Party and Likud activists don't have similar concerns - my Israeli readers could tell me for sure - but merely that demonizing everyone who voted for President Bush as an international criminal is utterly ridiculous.