Hyper-partisan J Street a road to nowhere for U.S. Jews

It was a poignant moment -- at once a fond farewell and a vow of friendship, of love, of loyalty, and of honor.

And after declaring that "Masada shall never fall again," and just before stating that when confronting terrorism, Israel -- a country of 7 million -- is "307 million strong, because the United States of America stands with you," President George W. Bush warned against "the consequences of disregarding the words of leaders who espouse hatred."

Barely had the words received their deserving ovation from the Knesset when a Web site here in the U.S. blared on its home page "That's offensive, Mr. President".

But it wasn't an anti-Bush political blog. Nor was it a news site often critical of the president.

It was the Web site of the new self-proclaimed "political arm of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement," J Street. J Street, as we profiled in a recent edition of The Jewish State, is the Israel lobby cooked up and headed by Jeremy Ben-Ami, former President Bill Clinton's deputy domestic policy adviser and the policy director for Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign.

Billed as an answer to AIPAC, J Street has tipped its hand far too early; promising to rescue U.S. Israel policy from the "neocons," and attacking Israel's most stalwart American ally, J Street confirmed fears that it is not so much pro-Israel as it is firmly entrenched in a political crusade.

This has presented a veritable beehive of problems. First, those involved with J Street have, as Alan Solomont -- a Democratic Party fundraiser who is involved with J Street -- told the Washington Post, "We have heard the voices of neocons, and right-of-center Jewish leaders and Christian evangelicals, and the mainstream views of the American Jewish community have not been heard."

Of course that's not true -- as a Gallop poll noted in March, Israel receives a favorable rating from 84 percent of self-identified Republicans and 64 percent from Democrats, so it's doubtful that those "right-of-center" are distorting the mainstream view in which Israel gets pretty high marks across the board. But that misses the point anyway; the term "neocon" is mostly used as a pejorative for the high-level Jews in Bush's cabinet, often depicted as a sinister cabal of Jewish agents pushing our country into war with Iran.

That a Jewish lobby would use a smear term aimed primarily at Jews is evidence of the partisan thinking of J Street. It's a colossal mistake.

But not as colossal a mistake as, say, donating money to individual campaigns and endorsing a candidate in a presidential election -- which, unfortunately, J Street aims to do as well, via JStreetPAC.

According to the Washington Post: "The initial efforts will be relatively modest: Ben-Ami said the group aims to try to raise at least $50,000 or more for a handful of campaigns this fall as a 'test case.' But the group intends to raise its profile in future campaign cycles, and some major liberal fundraisers have already committed to the venture, including Solomont, high-tech entrepreneur Davidi Gilo, and former New York City corporation counsel Victor Kovner, a supporter of Clinton's presidential bid."

That, the Post notes, is "something AIPAC does not do."

What does Ben-Ami think will happen if and when they throw money and influence behind one candidate (and publicly endorse that candidate) and the other candidate wins? Both political parties, and all presidential candidates, must believe that the Jewish community is interested in promoting Jewish causes, not political parties. And they must be made to believe that they would have the support of the Jewish community.

Jewish organizations looking to support Jewish causes -- including Israel -- first and foremost should never align themselves with one political party and against the other.

Another question raised by J Street is whether the lobby is more pro-peace or pro-Israel? Let's take a look at J Street's stance on the issues, available on its Web site.

Settlements: "Israel's settlements in the occupied territories have, for over forty years, been an obstacle to peace. They have drained Israel's economy, military, and democracy and eroded the country's ability to uphold the rule of law," reads the site.

I believe the appropriate agenbite for that would be gobbledygook. Overall, it's nothing but empty rhetoric copied and pasted from Arab talking points.

On Iran, J Street is even more troubling. Claiming that current policy of "saber-rattling, threats and sanctions has neither resolved the nuclear issue nor changed Iranian behavior," J Street advocates "high-level negotiations".

Here's the cringe-inducing part: "The informal Iranian negotiating proposal of 2003" should be the model. The problem is, that proposal was a hoax. Debunked quite clearly by Michael Rubin, who at the time of the supposed "offer" was Defense Department Iran country director, the document had a number of red flags that betrayed its spuriousness. Nevertheless, much of the press corps ate it up as an opportunity to smack Bush over the head for his "rejection" of the "offer."

Rubin revealed that the "offer" was the work of disgruntled Swiss diplomat Tim Guldimann, who was replaced after the ruse came to light. Guldimann developed the document with Sadeq Kharrazi, the Iranian ambassador in Paris.

In an online debate hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations in April/May 2007, Rubin said, "The 2003 Iranian offer is bogus. Washington and Tehran were already talking in Geneva, although Tehran broke the commitments it made there. That was the channel, not an unsigned English fax. Even the Swiss foreign ministry acknowledges privately that Tim Guldimann, the Swiss ambassador, was freelancing. Nor do serious proposals come with the caveat that the issuing party only agrees with 80 percent of its own paper."

Regarding that document, Rubin later sounded a warning note on National Review Online in May 2007 that J Street's founders should have kept in mind: "It is dangerous and irresponsible to create a false baseline that validates concessions never offered."

And here's J Street's official opinion of the war in Iraq (emphasis added): "The Iraq war is a prime example of the mistaken course charted by the Bush Administration in the Middle East and beyond since September 11," the Web site states. "Not only are both the United States and Israel less secure, but al-Qaeda has strengthened and expanded its reach, not only into Iraq, but into Jordan and the Egyptian Sinai as well."

I'm not sure what J Street bases that all on, but the facts strongly dispute their statements on American and Israeli security and al-Qaeda's strength. The rest is more partisan pettiness.

It all starts to make sense, however, when you take a look at the organization's financial backers, which include Moveon.org, the George Soros-funded organization behind the New York Times ad calling General David Petraeus "General Betray Us."

Moveon.org is also the Web site on which the phrase "Jew Lieberman Done" was trumpeted after the organization helped Ned Lamont defeat Senator Joe Lieberman in their 2006 Senate primary election. ("Jew Lieberman" was not done, it turned out, as Lieberman ran in the general election as an independent and won.)

Some other Moveon.org classics from its now defunct Action Forum: "Anyone who takes the time to become familiar with the history of the creation of, and the acts of the Jewish State of Israel can come to no other conclusion that it should not exist where it does in the first place"; "Israel should have never been recognized to create a state as a result of terrorist acts"; and "Islamic hostilities will go away the minute Israel is closed down and the Jews all move to the U.S. where they should have come to begin with."

J Street has not hidden its partisan nature; rather, it has proudly boasted of it. Part of this stems from a profound misunderstanding of Right and Left with regard to Israel. The Right in Israel is not the same as the Right in the U.S., though of course there are similarities. Ditto with the Left. For example, Golda Meir was considered a leftist (and indeed lived among the nascent Israel's socialist kibbutz culture) yet eschewed the Left's feminist identity politics for a more Conservative approach to modesty and merit.

Such misunderstanding, however, is actually J Street's clarion call to American activists and media. And that call was answered by New Yorker senior editor Hendrik Hertzberg. In a blog on the magazine's Web site, Hertzberg spoke of the "glad tiding" of J Street's founding, offering a case study in the outstanding ignorance that fueled the birth of the organization.

"True, there has been no shortage of lobbyists who assume that Israel's interests ought to be subsumed to those of West Bank settlers, defined by Likud-style neoconservatives, or yoked to those of lunatic American fundamentalists eager for a Levantine apocalypse featuring the mass slaughter of Jews who decline to convert to Christianity," Hertzberg wrote (again, emphasis ours). "But there has been a paucity of pro-Israel lobbyists who are also pro-peace, pro-liberal-democracy, and pro-secular, and who can deploy some political muscle besides. J Street aims to fill that gap. It isn't aiming to be the anti-AIPAC, exactly. There will be some overlap. But J Street won't be another holiday camp for neocon armchair warlords and Christianist rapture-mongers."

As of this writing, J Street's home page calls on Lieberman to withdraw his scheduled speech at an upcoming Israel Summit hosted by Christians United for Israel. On that note, Lieberman's recent keynote speech at the annual Commentary Fund dinner is instructive.

"By considering centrism to be collaboration with the enemy -- not bin Laden, but Bush -- [pacifist] activists have successfully pulled the Democratic Party farther to the left than it has been at any point in the last 20 years," Lieberman -- still a Democrat -- said, with a heavy heart, before imploring the audience to hold on dearly to knowledge that has slipped from the fingers of many Americans: "the difference between America's friends and America's enemies."

That's remarkable clarity from someone J Street's supporters might consider a neocon armchair warlord rapture-mongering Likud-style lunatic American fundamentalist.

En route to justice and peace, J Street is a dead end.


{This first appeared in the June 6, 2008 edition of The Jewish State}