The detractors of J Street, the self-billed “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobbying organization, like to portray the organization’s leader, Jeremy Ben-Ami, as so far to the left of mainstream American Jewish opinion as to be out of bounds.
If they think Ben-Ami is too much of a lefty on Israel, just wait till they meet J Street’s rank and file.
At the organization’s four-day conference in Washington, D.C., which ended March 1, the crowd was emphatic in its insistence on Palestinian rights, offered only weak, scattered applause for an Obama administration official’s line about America’s strong support for Israeli security and complained that more Palestinians should have been featured on conference panels. Organizers said the conference drew 2,400 people.
One of them was Arnold Moses, an activist in his 70s from Reston, Va., who said J Street actually wasn’t reflective of his politics. “They’re too kind to the Israelis,” he said of J Street. “Obama’s too soft on Israel. The Palestinians need to get out of the jail they’re in.”
Activists from the traditional pro-Israel camp have seized upon such sentiment as evidence that J Street is not pro-Israel but pro-Palestinian. They question the organization’s funding sources, its association with certain Arab and far-left organizations and its advocacy of U.S. pressure on Israel.
But in J Street’s view, this misses the point. For Ben-Ami and J Street supporters, being pro-Palestinian is not incompatible with being pro-Israel. In their mind, standing up for Palestinian rights, criticizing Israel’s policies in the West Bank and advocating for more pressure on the Israeli government is a way of supporting Israel by helping, or forcing, Israel to become the kind of place they believe it ought to be.
“We don’t view this as a zero-sum conflict,” Ben-Ami said Feb. 28 in a Q&A session with reporters. “You can be pro-Israel and be an advocate for the rights of the Palestinian people.”
This approach explains why many audience members applauded when a questioner on one panel asked why the United States doesn’t impose economic sanctions on Israel if Israeli settlements in the West Bank are a violation of the Geneva Convention. It’s why they clapped when panelist Marwan Bishara, an Al Jazeera political analyst, wondered aloud why Dennis Ross, the Obama administration’s senior envoy on Middle East issues, was invited to the conference at all. It’s why the introduction of New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, a fierce critic of U.S. aid to Israel, drew enthusiastic whooping before he had even uttered a word.
For this crowd, the Israeli government is to blame for the lack of peace in the Middle East. Their main beef is with the traditional pro-Israel camp, not with the Palestinians.
“I would have liked to see an Israeli uprising of the people against our government,” Ron Pundak, director general of the Peres Center for Peace, said in a Feb. 27 panel discussion about the uprisings in the Arab world. The Israeli people should “get rid of this terrible government which today is governing Israel.”
Ben-Ami wasn’t entirely comfortable with every speaker at the conference. But borrowing a line long recited by the New Israel Fund, he said J Street is committed to having an open conversation, including with parties with which it disagrees.
That’s why, he said, he invited Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization classified by the Anti-Defamation League as one of the top 10 anti-Israel groups in the United States and which promotes the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement targeting Israel, even though, Ben-Ami said, he and J Street are against the BDS campaign.
If any Jewish voices were absent from the conference, it was those on the right side of the political spectrum. But even centrist voices were few and far between. The lack of diversity did not go unnoticed by some of the younger people at the conference.
“They could have used some more right-leaning speakers to balance their perspective,” said Avi Fine, a student at Carleton College in Minnesota.
“There wasn’t enough disagreeing,” said another student, Mika Gang of Toronto’s Ryerson University. “It would be cool to have more right-wing, more dissenting viewpoints.”
In the lineup at J Street, the most right-wing speakers seemed to be Ross (who represents a White House criticized by many American Jews as too left-wing on Israel) and Nachman Shai (an Israeli Knesset member from Kadima, a centrist party that leads opposition to the right-wing coalition of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu).
Even Ben-Ami found himself on the right end of the J Street spectrum, with his positions supporting sanctions against Iran and opposing the BDS movement, and his hard line against J Street associating with those who deny Israel’s right to exist.
When Ben-Ami told reporters, “This is unapologetically and unabashedly a pro-Israel organization that believes in the state for the Jewish people,” he spoke while sitting in the same chair where an hour earlier a young Jewish attendee casually was chatting with a friend about how he considers himself an anti-Zionist.
One of the few conference sessions featuring sharp disagreement was about the BDS movement. Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, compared the campaign’s tactics to those of Gandhi, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez, saying it’s “the most hopeful strategy we can engage in.”
Kenneth Bob, president of Ameinu, a labor Zionist group whose motto is “liberal values, progressive Israel,” argued that BDS seeks to displace Israel, not simply end the occupation of the West Bank. He said he sees “no common cause” with BDS leaders.
The crowd at the conference, the organization’s second since its inception three years ago, was hardly monolithic. It included men and women in kippahs and the occasional woman in a hijab; Israeli politicians and Palestinian journalists; gray-haired rabbis from California and college students from Vermont, including non-Jewish ones.
Israeli Knesset members who came were slammed in the Israeli media for their decision to participate, and Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, declined an invitation to attend (for the second straight year).
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg attended the gala dinner Feb. 28, and was honored with the organization’s Tzedek v’Shalom (justice and peace) award.
In addition, some 60 members of Congress came to the dinner. The list of those at the dinner, or who gave an RSVP indicating that they would be attending, according to a J Street spokesperson, included Reps. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland), Lynn Woolsey (D-Petaluma), Jackie Speier (D-San Mateo), Anna Eshoo (D–South Bay) and Sam Farr (D-Monterey).
Still, it was a fraction of the number that regularly show up for AIPAC’s gala dinner. And one former J Street ally in Congress, Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.), wasn’t there, having publicly severed ties with the organization in January when J Street petitioned the Obama administration not to veto a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements.
Ackerman called J Street “so open-minded about what constitutes support for Israel that its brains have fallen out,” saying in a statement, “America really does need a smart, credible, politically active organization that is as aggressively pro-peace as it is pro-Israel. Unfortunately, J Street ain’t it.”
Nevertheless, by any measure, the massing of some 2,400 people for a conference by a 3-year-old Jewish organization is a sign of notable success. Moreover, on March 2, J Street delegates had more than 200 meetings, on Capitol Hill according to a spokesperson, with senators and other members of Congress.
All of that is an indication that in the future, this “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobby may have greater influence over U.S.-Israeli issues — or, at least, the discourse within the Jewish community.
Ben Ami says AIPAC should recognize that.
“I think the time has come for them to agree to take the stage with us and with these issues,” Ben-Ami said of AIPAC. “We are a legitimate, established part of the communal conversation.”