Tuesday, August 06, 2019
Elder of Ziyon
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J Street doesn't love Israel. Neither does Jeremy.
It is important to understand the difference between the ends and the means.
J Street's tag line is, "the political home of pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans". In other words, J Street is intended to be a political magnet for a certain category of Americans: those who are "pro Israel pro peace". (The whole "pro Israel pro peace" thing is nonsense anyway. Nobody who supports Israel opposes peace; what they oppose is buying short-term peace by agreeing to commit suicide. The term "pro Israel pro peace" implies that pro-Israel Jews who don't support J Street are war-mongers, which is a blood libel of sorts. But let's skip that for now.)
For J Street, the highest priority is most definitely NOT a safe, strong Israel; strong, flourishing Jewish communities; or safe, flourishing Jews. None of J Street's words or activities encourage or support any of these goals.
For J Street, the highest priority is to support "progressive" Democratic Party candidates in the US. The MEANS by which they achieve this end involve appealing to "progressive" American Jews by referencing their hot-button issue of Israel in ways that J Street thinks will harness their support for "progressive" Democrats.
Unfortunately, J Street views Israel's politics as an extension of US politics. It views events in Israel exclusively through the lens of "progressive" American politics, forgetting that Israel is a distinct country with distinct dangers, a distinct culture, a distinct history, a distinct political system and a distinct future.
On Israel, J Street is the political home of people who are mentally trapped in the early 1990s, people who view the Ashkenazi Israeli left – which has been eviscerated by its own naïve failure to predict or address the murderous backstabbing of Arafat and his successors – as a kind of extension of the Democratic Party in the US. These are people who don't see any differences between the situation of African Americans in US culture and Ethiopian Jews in Israeli culture. They are people who don't see why Israelis should be allowed to have needs that are different from their own.
J Street and its supporters do not understand Israelis, their culture or their concerns. They do not bother to try to understand these things, because what Israelis want, what Israelis have learned through personal experience, and what Israelis find dubious or ridiculous are simply not important to J Street and its supporters. It's all very patronizing.
J Street has treated successive Israeli governments and politicians like political opponents rather than legitimate friends and allies of world Jewry and of the United States. J Street views all non-leftist Israeli parties – and thus much of the Israeli mainstream – as "far-right" extensions of the US's Republican Party. J Street is not interested in listening to the majority of Israelis because it is not interested in listening to its political opponents. It views them as foils that it can attack in order to rally the troops at home to its real cause, which is the election of "progressive" candidates.
J Street has become so trapped by this mindset that it aligns itself with people who oppose Israel's right to exist and harbor deeply antisemitic sentiments; it continues to oppose efforts to fight BDS effectively, or to prevent other attacks on Israel and on Jews around the world.
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