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 conference in Washington this week, which organizers say drew 2,400 people, 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. For Arnold Moses, an activist in his 70s who came to the conference from Reston, Va., J Street just 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 Monday in a question-and-answer 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 panel discussion Sunday about the implications of the uprisings in the Arab world. “We don't have today an Israeli partner or leadership,” Pundak said to applause. 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 -- another Jewish organization that has come under heavy criticism for its support of Palestinian groups and the Israeli organizations that help them -- Ben-Ami 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, Sanctions movement targeting Israel, even though, Ben-Ami says, he and J Street are against the BDS campaign. “The conversation within the Jewish community will be best served if you have different points of view,” he said. If any Jewish voices were absent from the conference, it was those on the right side of the political spectrum. Even centrist voices were few and far between. Their absence became glaring as panelists at session after session agreed with and applauded one another. 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. “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, whose centrist party leads the opposition to the right-wing coalition of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Judging from the panelists and the crowd’s reaction to their remarks, even Ben-Ami would find himself on the right end of the J Street spectrum, with his positions supporting sanctions against Iran and opposing the BDS movement, and his red 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 J Street attendee was casually chatting with a friend about how he considers himself an anti-Zionist. For his part, Ben-Ami claims to be the pole at the center of J Street's “big tent.” One of the few conference sessions featuring sharp disagreement was about the BDS movement. Rebecca Vilkomerson, the 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, the 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 about three years ago, was hardly monolithic. It included men and women in kipot and the odd woman in a hijab; Israeli politicians and Palestinian journalists; gray-haired rabbis from California and college students from Vermont, including non-Jewish ones. The conference's location at the same site as the annual spring policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee -- the Washington Convention Center -- begged comparisons between the two. J Street sees itself as the left-wing alternative to AIPAC, while AIPAC insists it is centrist, not right wing, and has been waging a behind-the-scenes battle to malign and sideline J Street ever since its creation. The battle in the Jewish community over whether or not J Street is kosher extends to the halls of Congress and the Knesset. The Israeli Knesset members who came to the conference were slammed in the Israeli media for their decision to participate, and Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, declined to attend. Though some 60 Congress members came to the organization's gala dinner Tuesday night, it was a fraction of the number that regularly show up for AIPAC's gala dinner. One former J Street ally in Congress, Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.), 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. He 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 2,400 people for a conference by a 3-year-old Jewish organization is a sign of notable success and 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.” The video is entitled ‘The Mystery of J Street’ and it deals with the question of how J Street can say that it is a pro-Israel group when it continuously criticizes Israel. The proof of J Street being anti-Israel, says the video, is in the fact that the organization attacks Israel for defending itself against terrorists, that it backs candidates who do not support Israel, and that it lies about accepting donations from George Soros. The video then presents the facts: J Street has endorsed and is actively raising money for the ‘Gaza 54’ (a group of Congress members who wrote a letter calling for Washington to pressure Israel to end the Gaza blockade, while Hamas terrorists were firing rockets from Gaza and hitting innocent Israeli civilians). It also notes that J Street was caught lying and that it has indeed received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Soros. Another fact presented by the video is that J Street co-founder Daniel Levy has called Israel’s creation “an act that was wrong.” All these facts mean that J Street is no friend of Israel and that it does not reflect Jewish values, concludes the video. The administration’s chief Middle East adviser Dennis Ross went to the J Street confab. It was an odd assignment, given that J Street, in concert with the pro-Iranian-regime NIAC had conspired to try to prevent his appointment. The applause greeting him was slight, almost imperceptible. When Ross did get around to Israel the bulk of his comments were about the U.S.-Israel military relationship. He declared that the administration’s “fundamental principle is an unshakable commitment to Israel’s security.” Applause was tepid. (Not what this crowd paid to hear.) He asserted, “There has never been a time when the security relationship has been stronger. And that’s a fact.” Again, only very brief applause. At the tail end of the speech, he finally got to the peace process, saying the “status quo was unsustainable.” That got the crowd mildly excited, for now he might be getting around to their main goal — hammering Israel. But alas, he declared, “There is no substitute for a negotiated peace.” Dead silence. (You can see the thought bubbles: “Where does this guy think he is — AIPAC?) In his wind-up, he got around to Iran. He noted the “irony” of the regime taking credit for events in Egypt. (He muffed the line and instead said “taking credit for Iran.”) And on Iran’s nuclear program, he gave the Obama-approved squishy line, saying we are determined to try to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons. With near-comic timing, the J Street host the immediately asked Ross whether it wasn’t time for an American “initiative” (i.e. an imposed peace deal) to resolve the Palestinian conflict. As a trained diplomat, Ross resisted the urge to respond, “Weren’t you listening?” Instead, he said the administration is “working in a different direction” (as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton laid out in a speech in November), namely talking separately with the parties. He cautioned that the “preoccupation” of the region is the relationship between the “rulers and the ruled.” The host tried again, asking if it wasn’t time to publicly make a proposal. Once more, Ross explained what the administration was doing (private, quiet talks). He was asked about the Palestinians’ unilateral attempts to obtain recognition. Ross said firmly, “Unilateral moves are not going to produce an agreement.” He said the U.N. was “not the forum” for these discussions. Dead silence. Last year, the administration sent National Security Adviser James Jones to J Street. This year the representative was a step lower in the White House hierarchy. Moreover, he gave the crowd no fodder for its Israel-bashing and zero indication he shared its agenda. I suppose next year the administration could send an intern (continuing the downward spiral of respect). But it’s an election year, so the Obama team might wise up and send no one, for fear that the administration’s decision to speak before a group infamous for its dishonest finances and enthralled with public bashing of Israel might undermine its own “pro-Israel” credentials. But, then again, J Street — if it is still around — might not want to have someone who is going to undermine, rather than parrot, its talking points.
Ross in some clever ways communicated to J Street that its agenda and strategy are out of touch with reality. J Street perpetrates the myth that Israel, and specifically Israel’s settlements, are the center of most if not all woes in the region. He, however, didn’t mention “Israel” for the vast majority of his address and never referred to “settlements.” Instead, he explained that the main issue in the Middle East is the toppling of autocratic regimes. He told the group that from “Algeria to Yemen” pressure is coming from the people of the Middle East. Using a term the left likes to apply to Israel’s possession of the West Bank, Ross said that the old autocratic regimes are “unsustainable.”
Granted, his address was exceedingly dull and delivered in a monotone, but one couldn’t ignore the utter silence — indifference, perhaps — when the topics of freedom, revolutionary change, and Muslim despots were discussed. And when he stressed the need for Muslim states to focus on internal reform without blaming Israel, the crowd, again, seemed not to notice or care that he was ridiculing J Street’s own obsession with Israel and its settlements. (He, of course, tried some historical revisionism, explaining how the administration had been pressing Egypt for reforms from the beginning.)
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