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}

Presidents find favor in the Waiver; we share the blame

Though "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem..." has become a near-ubiquitous reference point for discussions about the Israeli capital, there is another Psalm that rings poignant with an upcoming ignominious anniversary.

"Behold, your foes are in an uproar, and those who hate you have raised their head," warns Psalm 83. "They said, 'Come, let us cut them off from nationhood, so that the name of Israel will not be remembered any longer'."

May 31 should be the ninth anniversary of the opening of the United States Embassy in Jerusalem; instead, it will mark the ninth anniversary of nothingness carefully constructed, lies carefully crafted, and failures shamefully abetted.

It will mark nine years since Senators Bob Dole, Jon Kyl, and Joseph Lieberman saw insulting proof that they had overestimated Jewish support for recognition of Jerusalem's Israeli sovereignty.

The Psalm quoted above does not mention Jerusalem, but rather "nationhood," and we should never hesitate to equate the two. Because on Passover, we do not say "next year in Tel Aviv"; after the '67 war, we did not sing "Ramat Gan of gold"; we do not celebrate Yom Herzliya Pituach.

We should revere every Israeli city as hallowed ground. But Jerusalem, whether under Israeli sovereignty or not, should be treated as the beating heart among the organs of Jewish unity.

The Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, sponsored by Dole and passed overwhelmingly in both houses of Congress, states, among other provisions, that Jerusalem is the "capital of the State of Israel" and "the spiritual center of Judaism". It also declared that by mid-1999, the relocation of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv should be complete.

After the BBC last year apologized for calling Jerusalem Israel's capital, I asked Alan Dershowitz if there were some provision in international law regulating a state's designation of its capital that perhaps I didn't know about.

Dershowitz smiled at the absurdity that news outlets like the BBC required my question to be anything other than rhetorical. He told me that any nation may set its own capital, and to deny such basic rights to Israel was the uncivil union of hypocrisy and anti-Zionism.

So, if Jerusalem is Israel's capital, and the Embassy Act states that "Each sovereign nation, under international law and custom, may designate its own capital", then what's the problem? It's the escape clause, called the Presidential Waiver, which states that the president may suspend the action for six months if he believes it will "protect the national security interests of the United States."

Former President Bill Clinton and current President George Bush have both used the waiver every six months. Clinton, having promised to review the situation after Camp David, presumably put his intention to move the embassy in the same pile as his promise to commute Jonathan Pollard's sentence. Bush's hands-off approach to the peace process, often for the better, unfortunately seems to include keeping his hands off the embassy.

But to blame only Clinton and Bush would be a mistake. The Israeli government has routinely undermined efforts to move the embassy, afraid it will upset their Palestinian negotiating partners. In 1995, then-Communications Minister Shulamit Aloni told the New York Times that American congressional support for moving the embassy to Jerusalem "has a smell of provocation." Charming.

The powerhouse American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) admitted that it officially opposed such a bill, but once the bill was drafted and voted on, former AIPAC head Neal Sher said AIPAC was "boxed-in" and forced to support it. At the time of the bill's floor vote, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations did not take a position on the bill, and refused to endorse an earlier version of it. The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) took a strong stance supporting the bill, but its pleas failed to inspire even an echo.

The Times picked up on that lead and ran with it; Times columnist Thomas Friedman accused Kyl and Lieberman of "exploit[ing] the issue for Jewish votes."

Other news organizations carried that mantle. CNN, in its news story about Bush promising to move the embassy in 2000, explained snidely that "Jerusalem is claimed as its new capital by Israel". Washington Post columnist Richard "Israel itself is a mistake" Cohen wrote that moving the embassy would only "win points wherever Dole gathers campaign funds" since Jerusalem's "political status is disputed" -- though the embassy would be in undisputedly Israeli west Jerusalem.

"Tel Aviv is charmless. For the time being, though, it will have to do," Cohen declared.

One ally in the media was Times columnist William Safire. Safire had no patience for the "national security" waiver, since, as he wrote in July 1996, Clinton had presented no national security threat. Instead, Clinton's spokesman stated that the waiver was being exercised "to ensure that no steps are taken that could be interpreted as pre-empting the negotiating process."

Safire fired back that such an "excuse for delay is nowhere in the law". For that matter, Safire said, the substance of the argument was based on a false premise anyway -- that peace negotiations would be upset. He quoted Lieberman as pointing out that in any final status agreement, part of Jerusalem would be Israeli.

"Our site would be on Israeli land," Lieberman said, infusing the discussion with a refreshing dose of logic and fair play. "Let peace negotiations proceed and let the U.S. law be carried out."

Lieberman wasn't alone. A year earlier, then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich marveled at the opposition to what he thought was patently obvious.

"I think it is absurd for us to single out Israel as a country where we define what we think the capital should be," Gingrich told Israeli media in 1995.

Thus, the desire to move the embassy was bi-partisan -- even at the N.Y. Times! So what held it up? Safire pulled no punches.

"In Jerusalem's 3,000th year, Israel's new Government is eager for America's acknowledgment of its capital," Safire wrote in 1996. "Plain justice and the new realism demand it. The last obstacle is Mr. Clinton's reluctance to obey the law."

And that reluctance to obey the law has been passed down. It, too, has become bi-partisan, and a tradition in the Oval Office.

But maybe it really was a national security issue. The vehemently anti-Israel Middle East International warned of, in an editorial during the 1984 Reagan-Mondale election campaign, what amounted to thinly veiled threats of retaliation in the Arab world should the embassy be moved to Jerusalem.

"The reaction to the move in Muslim countries would be catastrophic," the editors wrote. "It is easy to imagine the attacks on American embassies, the rupture of diplomatic relations, and all the rest that would follow."

"All the rest" is a diplomatic way of putting it, but I think the message gets through.

The editors did, however, manage to stumble upon what unfortunately has been confirmed in the almost-quarter century since.

"Supporting the move to Jerusalem," the editors wrote, "is one of those easy gestures, "like being in favor of a united Ireland, or approving of motherhood and disapproving of sin, which cost the maker of them nothing."

In 1995, Senator John McCain co-sponsored the bill, and during her 2000 Senate run Hillary Clinton said she supported moving the embassy ASAP. When I asked McCain's campaign what his official position is on the issue, a spokeswoman reiterated that McCain co-sponsored and voted for the original legislation. McCain was in Jerusalem in March of this year and stated unequivocally that it is Israel's capital; would he commit to moving the embassy there? His campaign wouldn't get that specific with me.

A Clinton staffer, before setting off on the hunt for the campaign's official stance, told me she had just been to Jerusalem less than a year ago and remembered visiting the U.S. Consulate General there -- a reminder that there is at least some form of official recognition in the holy city. Senator Barack Obama has yet to respond to my query in any form.

So, is that it for moving the embassy? Will politicians no longer be cavalier about tossing out that promise?

They may not feel they need to make the promise anymore, and that's probably a good thing. But what about us? Can we so easily be absolved of our role in letting the issue fade?

Lieberman once exclaimed that, if need be, he and former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott would move the embassy to Jerusalem "ourselves, brick by brick!" Yet, when the mouthpieces of the American Jewish community picked up their shovels, it was to facilitate the issue's burial.

After a nearly 2,000-year struggle to reclaim it, Jerusalem shouldn't be taken so lightly. And on May 31, it shouldn't be forgotten.

(Originally published in the May 23, 2008 edition of The Jewish State.)

At the U.N., an ugly shade of lipstick on the caterpillar

{This column was first printed in the April 11, 2008 edition of The Jewish State}

The government is lying about who shot JFK. The government is lying about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The government is lying about Pearl Harbor. The government is lying about 9/11.

Not sure if he's covered the moon landing, but former Princeton professor Richard Falk thinks the government is lying to you about the above formative historical events. According to Falk, the government has also been lying about Yasser Arafat being a terrorist, and, as he said in April 2002, "we should at least be clear that [Ariel] Sharon is a much bigger obstacle to real peace than Arafat is or ever was."

Falk's hard work has paid off; on March 26, he was appointed "special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967" by the United Nations Human Rights Council.

This newspaper offered a less than glowing appraisal of the efforts of Falk's predecessor, John Dugard, in a recent issue. As I am not especially given to "piling on," the U.N. would have to have appointed someone so clearly possessed of anti-Israel, anti-Zionist conspiracy theories to replace Dugard in order to provoke an immediate response on these pages.

True to form, they did.

Last year, Falk set out to pad his resume with something that would put him a step ahead of the competition for the U.N. job -- the privilege of consuming American and other Western taxpayer dollars while sowing the seeds of U.N.-subsidized anti-Semitism. What he came up with was an essay he authored called "Slouching toward a Palestinian Holocaust," in which he compared the Israeli government to the Nazis.

"There is little doubt that the Nazi Holocaust was as close to unconditional evil as has been revealed throughout the entire bloody history of the human species," Falk opens the essay.

He then goes on to explain just how gruesome and barbaric the Holocaust was, to make sure the reader understands to what he is about to compare Ehud Olmert's government.

"Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not," Falk writes. "The recent developments in Gaza are especially disturbing" -- the Nazis were disturbing, but the Jews are especially disturbing -- "because they express so vividly a deliberate intention on the part of Israel and its allies to subject an entire human community to life-endangering conditions of utmost cruelty."

Falk laments how the world watched silently as the 1994 Rwandan genocide took place, as the 1995 Bosnian genocide happened, and again as the genocide unfolded in Darfur.

Though some two million people in the Darfur region of Sudan have been displaced and 450,000 have been killed since the atrocities began in 2003, "Gaza is morally far worse," Falk states.

"It is far worse because the international community is watching the ugly spectacle unfold while some of its most influential members actively encourage and assist Israel in its approach to Gaza," he writes.

And just to put it in perspective, Falk offers: "It is helpful to recall that the liberal democracies of Europe paid homage to Hitler at the 1936 Olympic Games, and then turned away tens of thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany."

Falk has left a paper trail of his journey from obscurity to subversive critic of Israel and the U.S. Unfortunately, that trail -- made up of columns contributed to various newspapers and magazines -- reveals a person who is at his best moments confused, and at his worst moments much, much worse.

For example, Falk displays an intriguing lack of knowledge about the targets of his invective in a January 2002 essay titled "Appraising the war against Afghanistan". He criticizes the administration of President George W. Bush for too broadly extending the brand of "terrorist" to include "groups" like Hamas and Hezbollah.

"These latter groups have neither ideologically nor tactically associated themselves with al-Qaeda and the visionary outlook of Osama bin Laden, and their struggles are much harder to categorize," he writes.

Yet, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that al-Qaeda and Hezbollah have worked together, especially thanks to the late Imad Mugniyeh, who trained bin Laden. Not only is Hezbollah ideologically and tactically associated with al-Qaeda, but al-Qaeda actually modeled itself after Hezbollah -- it was a clone of the organization, or close to it.

He admits that Hamas has used "gruesome terrorist tactics" against Israeli civilians, but "the context has been one in which Israel has also used even more destructive tactics against Palestinian civilian society". More destructive and gruesome than suicide bombers and the kidnapping and torture of civilians -- both embraced by Hamas? We'll never know, because Falk doesn't give any examples.

He then states that Hamas and Hezbollah should be left intact, because to destroy them would deny the Palestinians their right to self-determination, and "should such groups be destroyed the effect would be to stabilize an oppressive Israeli occupation."

This is a point on which Falk has shed some valuable light, however. In a 2006 column he wrote for the Topeka Capital-Journal, Falk calls on the U.S. and Israel to engage in dialogue with Hamas. He complains that the U.S. and Europe insist on freezing Hamas out of the discussion "unless its leaders explicitly renounce terrorism, recognize Israel, accept all prior agreements between the Palestinians and Israel, and annul that part of the Hamas charter that calls for Israel's destruction."

This is unreasonable, he declares, because such devotion to terrorism and Israel's destruction is part of the genetic makeup of Hamas-led Palestinians. Take that away, and there's nothing left of Hamas.

"The chance of Hamas meeting these political conditions all at once is essentially nil since they amount to a renunciation of struggle and almost a declaration of surrender," he writes.

In other words, it's like telling the sun not to shine.

And the sun isn't shining, apparently, in the wilderness in which Falk wanders. He gives this away in his prescription for peace, published in The Nation in April 2002. Since only the Palestinians' violence is designated as terrorism, he writes, "Israel's greater violence" gets off scot-free.

"The point here is not in any way to excuse Palestinian suicide bombers and other violence against civilians, but to suggest that when a struggle over territory and statehood is being waged it can and should be resolved at the earliest possible point by negotiation and diplomacy, and that the violence on both sides tends toward the morally and legally impermissible," Falk writes.

To the casual observer living in the United Kingdom (or Waziristan, for that matter), that comment may seem erudite and reasonable -- a given. But in fact, as we know, the conflict is not about land or statehood, since the Palestinians have repeatedly refused any offer of land or statehood that wasn't prefaced by "From the river to the sea...."

Falk also wrote that the contention that Arafat resorted to terrorism is "seriously misleading." In fact, Falk writes, Arafat was the "moderate voice," dramatically fighting to protect Israeli civilians from attempted Palestinian terrorism; anyway, it was Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount "that started the second intifada."

Wild-eyed conspiracy theorists are usually interesting -- from a distance. But Falk doesn't keep his distance from such people, rather he keeps their company.

One of those characters is David Ray Griffin, who wrote a book called "The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11". Though the book is a reinvention of the wheel, its sales riding the wave of earlier 9/11 conspiracy theorists, it was very important to Falk that this book be published. Falk helped find a publisher for it, and wrote the introduction to the book as well.

"As with Pearl Harbor there are ample reasons to receive news of massive attack with some skepticism," Falk writes in the introduction. "As with the difficulties of the Roosevelt presidency in rallying the country for war, here too, the neocon advisers shaping the foreign policy of the Bush Administration had been frustrated by their inability to mobilize the country for war. These prominent advisors had made no secret of their fervent wish for some sort of hostile attack of dramatic magnitude that would awaken the American people to their sense of the dangers of the post-cold war world, as well as of the opportunities for global domination, a vision of global empire that was openly embraced by neocon leading lights."

Falk accuses the media of ignoring the evidence, and the American public of resisting the truth. He explains that in Europe, clear-thinking people were immediately proposing "official complicity" in the attacks, but for some reason Americans just didn't get it. Of course, the "neocon leading lights" were primarily Jewish, pro-Israel advisors, so it's unclear if Zionist brainwashing was the cause of the public's ardent support for its country, its military, and its president immediately following 9/11.

It shouldn't surprise anyone, then, that Falk didn't face much competition; according to U.N. Watch, the Islamic and Arab states pressured the council leadership to list only Falk as a nominee for the post.

This is the new, "reformed" U.N. human rights body. It calls to mind what former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton said about the U.N.'s efforts to build a new rights council from the same broken pieces and using the same shoddy workmanship as the last.

"We want a butterfly," Bolton said. "We don't intend to put lipstick on a caterpillar and call it a success."