Jamie Weinstein

This week J-Street, the self-proclaimed “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobby, will host its first ever policy conference in Washington, D.C. The lobby, which is just over a year old, was essentially founded to be a more “progressive” version of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, one of the most effective lobbies in Washington.

A body of lies.

But J-Street’s foundation is built on a body of lies. Indeed, one can decipher at least three fallacies upon which J-Street emerged. Let’s examine them.

Fallacy #1: AIPAC is a right-wing organization

“What we’re responding to is that for too long there’s been an alliance between the neo-cons, the radical right of the Christian Zionist movement and the far-right portions of the Jewish community that has really locked up what it means to be pro-Israel,” J-Street Executive Director Jeremy Ben-Ami has written. While Ben-Ami sometimes makes a point of suggesting that his organization is not meant to be the “anti-AIPAC,” it is quite obvious that this is exactly what J-Street is trying to be. J-Street and its supporters clearly see AIPAC as the epicenter of this supposedly right-wing pro-Israel alliance.

But the notion is silly. During the 1990s, AIPAC supported the Oslo Accords. In 2005, AIPAC backed disengagement from Gaza, which led to protests from the right outside its 2005 Policy Conference. These are not stances that scream radically right-wing.

The fact of the matter is liberal and conservative American supporters of Israel have found a home in AIPAC and that is why AIPAC is so successful. For further evidence that AIPAC is hardly a right-wing front, just take a glance at AIPAC’s Board of Directors (past and present). There’s Nancy Pelosi’s good friend Amy Friedken (who not too long ago served as AIPAC President), mega Democratic donor and Slim Fast founder S. Daniel Abraham, and former DNC Chairman Steve Grossman (also a former AIPAC President), just to name a few.

Now, there are also Republicans on AIPAC’s board as well. But you get the point. AIPAC is neither radically left-wing nor radically right-wing. AIPAC is a mainstream, bi-partisan organization. That is why they have been so effective. It is hardly some radically right-wing creature that J-Street imagines it to be.

Fallacy #2: J-Street Represents Mainstream Jewish Opinion

Despite J-Street’s repeated insistence that they represent mainstream American Jewish opinion, the record doesn’t seem to support that claim. Look no further than Rabbi Eric Yoffie’s rebuke of them during the Israel-Gaza war last December. Yoffie is the president of the Union for Reform Judaism and has been described as the America’s leading liberal Rabbi. One would imagine he fits exactly the demographic J-Street would cater to, right? Well, this is what America’s leading liberal Rabbi thought of J-Street’s response to the Gaza War.

The statements they issued, according to Rabbi Yoffie, were “morally deficient, profoundly out of touch with Jewish sentiment and also appallingly naïve.” And, I remind you, this is a liberal Rabbi speaking—one that J-Street respects and has invited to be a marquis speaker at their policy conference! J-Street is even too out there for him–at least their stance on the Gaza war was.

What Yoffie was responding to was a J-Street blog post which stated that “While there is nothing ‘right’ in raining rockets on Israeli families or dispatching suicide bombers, there is nothing ‘right’ in punishing a million and a half already-suffering Gazans for the actions of the extremists among them.” In essence, J-Street was arguing that Israeli actions fighting back against Hamas terrorists were the moral equivalent of Hamas’ actions targeting civilians. This is hardly mainstream thought among American Jews.

So goes J-Street’s stance on the Gaza War, so goes their stance on much else.

Fallacy #3: There is a dire need for a more “evenhanded” approach in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and it is necessary for the American President to engage the conflict continuously at a high level.

Underpinning everything J-Street stands for is the idea that if only previous American presidents, especially George W. Bush, were engaged in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process from the very beginning of their terms, and were more “evenhanded,” everything would somehow be so different in the Middle East. This idea is also shared by wide swaths of the liberal foreign policy establishment and was recently clearly expressed by former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk in a long article on J-Street in the New York Times Magazine. Indyk, who is not affiliated with J-Street, explained J-Street’s emergence by commentating, “In the Bush years, when Israel enjoyed a blank check, increasing numbers of people in the Jewish and pro-Israel community began to wonder, if this was the best president Israel ever had, how come Israel’s circumstances seemed to be deteriorating so rapidly?”

This is an idea that J-Street built itself upon—that a more engaged, more evenhanded American president is better suited to creating peace in the Middle East. But you can’t create peace where you don’t have a leadership who earnestly seeks peace and is willing to take the compromises necessary to achieve peace. Bush did seek to negotiate some type of peace settlement during his first years in office and he became the first President to openly call for the creation of a Palestinian state while in office. But Bush quickly came to the determination that Yasser Arafat was not willing to make peace and therefore came to the conclusion (correctly in my estimation) that you can not magically create peace in the Middle East where the are not two sides who earnestly seek peace.

Not too long after Arafat’s death, Hamas took control of Gaza. How do you create peace with a terrorist organization that not only calls for the destruction of Israel, but the killing of Jews generally? American presidents are powerful, but they aren’t God.

So J-Street has many problems ranging from their tendency to be a “pro-Israel” lobby more interested in criticizing supporters of Israel in America than the countries that threaten Israel to their association with some disturbing figures. But nothing is more problematic for J-Street’s long-term viability than the fact that it was built on a foundation of fallacies.

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