In looking at the bogus arguments against the Executive Order on including Jews as a protected minority for Title VI purposes, I stumbled onto the J-Street U arguments used against the nearly identical Anti-Semitism Awareness Act of 2018.
J-Street U wrote a letter to Congress opposing that act, which was originally pushed during the Obama administration. Most of their arguments are the specious ones we have already debunked, but they added one that tells us a lot more about the leftists who oppose fighting antisemitism than the act itself:
In addition to focusing narrowly and exclusively on anti-Semitism that is related to Israel and to Zionism, the bill alarmingly fails to take into account the pressing issue of anti-Semitic hatred in our country stemming from the white supremacist far-right, which has risen precipitously since the 2016 election. ...It would be a grave mistake for Congress to ignore this virulent strain of anti-Semitism that has lead to a rise in hate crimes and violence across the country.
J-Street U claimed that the Antisemitism Awareness Act didn't deal with right-wing antisemitism - and this is a laughable lie. It refers to the IHRA definition which includes all kinds of antisemitism, right and left. Its definition (without the examples) leaves no doubt:
Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.
By falsely and absurdly claiming that right-wing bigotry is not included, J-Street U - and by extension, all of the Leftist arguments against the EO - shows that their concern isn't for free speech or worries about chilling debate on campus. They simply want to shut down the very idea that there is any kind of antisemitism other than the neo-Nazi kind (and there are plenty of other flavors of antisemitism besides Right and Left) and therefore they want to be able to demonize the Jewish state in exactly the same way the far-Right demonizes Jews. Any argument is meant only for the real goal of defending most types of antisemitism on campus.
That's messed up.
What is especially sick about this antisemitism denial is that it tramples on the rights of thousands of Jews on campus, today, who are being disenfranchised and attacked because they don't subscribe to the religious philosophy of the Left, where victims are to be worshipped and white-passing people like Jews are the devil-oppressors.
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You know the expression "where there's smoke, there's fire"?
Not when someone has a gigantic smoke machine. And that is exactly what J-Street builds.
From a J-Street mailing:
Let’s make sure US aid is being used for Israel’s defense, and not the demolition of Palestinian homes
Join us in backing a new effort in Congress to ensure that US military assistance is being used in compliance with current US law, for Israel’s defense and not in connection with the displacement of Palestinians.
....[W]e’re strongly backing a new congressional letter, initiated by Reps. Ro Khanna, Anna Eshoo and Steve Cohen, pushing for greater accountability in ensuring that US aid to Israel is only being used for legitimate defense purposes -- and that equipment purchased with our tax-payer dollars is not being used to displace Palestinians.
Over a dozen members have already joined the Khanna-Eshoo-Cohen letter, expressing concern over the dramatic rise in demolitions this year.
The members ask -- pursuant to the Arms Export Control Act -- for the administration to report back to Congress on whether US-supplied equipment has been used for such demolitions and whether such use constitutes a breach of any existing restrictions.
Does J-Street have any evidence that Israel is somehow bypassing the existing controls and spending US money on other things? If you read the many reports from the Congressional Research Service about aid to Israel, there doesn't seem to be any. US aid is earmarked for specific, targeted programs from the F-35 fighter to anti-rocket defense systems.
In other words, the US government is clearly not giving Israel bulldozers., nor is it handing Israel any checks it can spend on bulldozers.
If there is zero evidence of misuse of funds, and an existing audit mechanism to ensure that there is no misuse of funds, why ask for an investigation into misuse of funds?
There is no fire, and there is no smoke, except from J-Street's massive smoke machine meant to obscure rather than reveal the truth.
And speaking of transparency - this new congressional letter J-Street refers to is not public. They are asking us to tell out members of Congress to sign a letter we are not privy to see ourselves!
You know who did see the letter? Al Monitor! For some reason, Arab news outlets have more visibility into a Congressional letter than US citizens.
And J-Street - supposedly agitating for more transparency in aid to Israel - is cool with telling people to support a letter sight unseen, except for Arab media.
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My home town of Fresno, California has a tiny Jewish community. The metropolitan area of about a million people, in almost the geographical center of the state, has only about 1000 Jewish families. There are three congregations: a Reform temple with several hundred members, a much smaller Conservative shul, and a Chabad house.
I haven’t been to the US since moving back to Israel more than five years ago. But I keep in touch. So recently I noticed an announcement on the Facebook page of the Reform congregation for a talk by a Rabbi John Rosove on the subject “The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, an American Zionist Perspective.” I thought that was interesting, since I, too, am a Zionist and (you can tell by my accent) will always be an American.
Rabbi Rosove went to Berkeley (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and Hebrew Union College, and is Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Israel in Hollywood. Investigating further, I found that the talk would be about “… the destructive impact of the Israeli occupation on Palestinians, Israelis and the future of Israel’s democracy.” And I noted that Rabbi Rosove is a national co-chair of the J Street Rabbinic Cabinet, and is associated with several “Reform Zionism” groups.
This is not my kind of Zionism – it demands a suicidal “two-state solution,” and wrongly analogizes our conflict with the Palestinians to the American civil rights struggle, two things that couldn’t be more different.
Let’s assume that Rabbi Rosove is one of these. His talk is being held at Clovis Community College, next door to Fresno, and is free. But who paid Rosove’s expenses? The announcement for the talk indicates that it is sponsored by GV Wire, a local progressive news website. GV Wire is a very slick production, with a professional staff including Bill McEwen, a former Fresno Bee columnist and editorial page editor.
The “GV” in GV Wire stands for Granville Homes, one of the biggest real estate developers and homebuilders in the Fresno area. And Granville Homes is owned by the Assemi family, who came to California from Iran just before the revolution. Among the founders of the Islamic Cultural Center of Fresno, the Assemis are among the biggest philanthropists in the Central Valley of California. Granville has done some projects in the downtown area which have improved parts of town that many people thought were lost forever. They donate large amounts to numerous causes and organizations, especially “progressive” ones.
The publisher of GV Wire is Darius Assemi, Granville’s President and CEO. He is deeply involved in local politics, and is probably one of the most powerful people in the area. And of course, he’s no friend of Israel. He’s described Israel’s shooting terrorists climbing its border fence as a “massacre.”
So why would he bring a self-described “Zionist” speaker to the area (even if he’s as much a Zionist as I am Queen of England)?
The explanation is the reaction to Assemi’s previous speaker, Alison Weir, who appeared on September 18 (her presentation can be viewed here). Weir is viciously anti-Israel and antisemitic, to the point that even pro-BDS groups like Jewish Voice for Peace have disavowed her. Her position is that the Israel/Jewish lobby dominates the US government, causing it to act against American interests in order to help Israel oppress, exploit, and murder Palestinians, which it does in the most sadistic way possible. She asserts that US media, controlled by Jewish interests, is biased in favor of Israel, and that any criticism of Israel is derailed by accusations of antisemitism. She is a low-key, persuasive speaker, and if you don’t recognize the lies, lack of context, and distortions, she will convince you.
Weir was originally invited by the college, which canceled the event following complaints by the ADL and other Jewish organizations.
But Assemi thought that she should be heard, so he had GV Wire sponsor the event and rent the hall, absolving the college of responsibility. ADL and the others protested again, but rather than cancel the event, Assemi decided to also invite “a speaker who will explain the deadly realities in this region from the Jewish perspective.” Balance. That would be Rabbi Rosove.
So now we will get a “Jewish perspective” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a Jew who says he is a Zionist, but represents an organization that is actually anti-Zionist, and is even supported financially by Israel’s enemies. And a Jewish house of worship is advertising it.
Welcome to the highest level of useful idiocy!
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Clarify that US assistance to Israel is to be used solely for the country's defense and that the United States will not foot the bill for annexation or pay for... a one state outcome. An important conversation has been started in this campaign about American policy regarding the uses for which American assistance to Israel can be put. Already in this presidential campaign we are hearing real conversations, real proposals, from several leading candidates, around ensuring that our assistance isn't being put to uses that actually deepen Israel's security challenges, whether it's annexation or settlement expansion. Current law is actually explicit as to the purposes that US security assistance can and can't be put by recipient countries including Israel. Our aid is not intended to be a blank check. Congress and the next administration at a minimum should take the necessary steps to gain visibility into how our assistance is being used, how our dollars are being spent, and to ensure that all existing laws regarding those uses are being followed.
Ben Ami is right about one thing: existing US laws allow for only certain uses of foreign aid.
But what he is demanding - and what some candidates are happily parroting from him - already exists. There are already audits as to how American money is being spent.
The US looks closely at how its aid is used, and when it finds a violation, it calls it out. The last time this happened for Israel was in 2006 when, as a recent Congressional Research Service report says,
After Israel’s 2006 war in Lebanon, the State Department issued a preliminary report to Congress concluding that Israel may have violated the terms of agreements with the United States that restrict Israel’s use of U.S.-supplied cluster munitions to certain military targets in non-civilian areas.
No violations have been found since then.
In 2016 - during the Obama administration - some members of Congress formally asked for an investigation into whether Israel used American funds to allegedly extrajudically kill some specific Palestinians. The State Department investigated and found that no American money was involved in the incidents.
Similarly, the CRS report says that there is some aid to Israel that is specifically meant to be used within the Green Line - for immigrant absorption and for some binational foundations, such as the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation, and this is audited as well.
99.8% of US aid to Israel is earmarked for specific military purposes - the vast majority for missile defense systems, F-35s and anti-tunnel defense systems. None of that money can be repurposed. The remaining 0.2% goes to immigrant absorption and homeland security - research into technologies for first responders and early warning systems that can be used in the US.
This demand by J-Street to further investigate that which is already being carefully vetted is a straw man to imply that Israel has been misusing US aid. As such, it is a slander. It is also a slander against the US government by saying that the existing extensive audit mechanism is not adequate, and that Israel can somehow pull the wool over the eyes of the US.
If that is true, then aid to other countries really need to be looked at more closely as well. But J-Street doesn't care about whether US aid to Jordan or Egypt is audited and money secretly going to terrorists. They only accuse Israel of using American money to break the law.
This is reprehensible. But then again, this is J-Street.
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Yesterday at the J-Street conference Bermie Sanders said that as president he would tell Israel, “If you want military aid, you’re going to have to fundamentally change your relationship with the people of Gaza. In fact, I think it is fair to think that some of that $3.8 billion should go to humanitarian aid to Gaza.”
Others have already noted how crazy what he said was:
Just when you thought Bernie Sanders couldn’t get any more radical, he outdid himself. He wants to take money we give to Israel to defend itself from terrorists, and give it to Gaza, which is run by terrorists?? Unreal. Why isn’t every other Dem pres candidate saying he’s wrong?
But Sanders doesn't even have his facts about Gaza right.
Gaza is a hellhole, no doubt about it. But Israel has been working to help the innocent people of Gaza, a fact that the media largely ignores.
Israel decided this year to allow day laborers into Israel from Gaza. Nearly 4000 Gazans now have entry permits into Israel, and another thousand are approved.
The number of Gazans entering Israel every month is now nearly double what it was in 2018.
The number of Gazans entering Israel is more than double the number that enter Egypt.
Sanders claimed that many of the items denied by Israel into Gaza were items that could not be used for military purposes. This hasn't been true for many years. If Gazans can order the items and find a seller, they can get it.
Israel allows and promotes infrastructure projects in Gaza. The amount of waste Gaza spills into the sea is now half what it was in January. The desalination plant is up and running.
Surprisingly, Gaza now imports about twice as much fuel from Egypt as from Israel, almost certainly because the PA cannot tax the fuel from Egypt so Hamas can get it for cheaper.
(Most of these statistics come from the UN.)
Israel has worked closely with Qatar to bring in aid to Gaza. The relationship started when Egypt refused to allow Qatar to ship construction materials into Gaza through its border. It was Israel that agreed with an Arab country that is friendly with Hamas in order to help ordinary Gazans.
The shortages of medicine and power in Gaza are usually more the fault of the Palestinian Authority which has been trying to use economic warfare against Hamas, collectively punishing all Gazans. When was the last time you heard the word "collective punishment" used against Palestinians that was not blaming Israel?
Israel has done other things but reserves the right to modify them (like how far Gaza fishermen can go into the Mediterranean) when there are rockets or other attacks from Gaza. Lately, things have been quieter and as a result things are getting slowly better for Gazans.
In many ways, Israel is helping Gazans more than any Arab country (including the PA) outside of Qatar. (Iran, meanwhile, payrolls Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists, a small fact that wouldn't be mentioned at J-Street either.)
So what would Bernie propose, specifically, that Israel do more than it already is? Gaza's problems are a result of Hamas and Palestinian Authority infighting, Hamas prioritizing terror over governance, and Arabs at large sick and tired of supporting the Palestinian issue.
It isn't the blockade. It's not as if Gaza is exporting goods to Egypt. Nothing is stopping that - except Egypt doesn't want to buy. Would Bernie force Israel to buy Gaza goods it doesn't want?
Living in Gaza is awful. Israel is doing a great deal that the media (and of course J-Street panelists and speakers) do not report on, because demonizing Israel is the order of the day.
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On Sunday, the J-Street conference hosted a panel session entitled "Scorched Earth: The Trump Legacy on Israel/Palestine."
The participants were:
Debra Shushan, Director of Policy and Government Relations, Americans for Peace Now (Moderator)
Khaled Elgindy, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution
Ilan Goldenberg, Senior Fellow and Director of the Middle East Security Program, Center
for a New American Security
Dr. Dahlia Scheindlin, Political Analyst, Public Opinion Expert
Daniel Seidemann, Founder and Director, Terrestrial Jerusalem
Shushan gave a monologue at the beginning. She reviewed most of Donald Trump's moves, all of which she considered to be awful, and she wanted her panelists to describe how all of them can be rolled back in a future Democratic administration.
She called the move of the US Embassy to Jerusalem "the hostile takeover of the consulate in Jerusalem by [David] Friedman's embassy."
She also encouraged the audience to boo Friedman, the US ambassador to Israel. It is axiomatic at J-Street that certain government officials must be treated with utmost disrespect, something Democrats complained bitterly about - rightly - when Obama was president.
In addition, Shushan sarcastically said that Israeli claims that annexation of the Golan Heights and the West Bank would be legal based on the principle that one can annex land won in a defensive war was a brand new, legally untenable position. While most modern legal scholars agree with Shushan that land cannot be legally annexed in any circumstances, it is not unanimous nor has it been uniformly applied since the UN Charter, as Eugene Kontorovich has demonstrated.
Daniel Seidemann described how he gave a tour of Jerusalem to Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt. He told them that Arabs in Jerusalem east of the Green Line "are not entitled to receive citizenship" in Israel.
He is lying and he knows he is lying. (He is an expert on Jerusalem so it is disappointing when he knowingly pushes lies.) The process has been difficult but thousands have become citizens and many more are on their way; Israel is trying to streamline the process.
Khaled Elgindy said during his main talk that Clinton and Obama tried to make peace - but for some reason never mentions that Palestinian rejectionism was what stopped the initiatives. Later on someone asked him bout whether Arafat missed the boat in rejecting the Clinton peace plan and Elgindy denied that Arafat did that, saying that both Barak and Arafat accepted the plan. He later tweeted me his proof:
I responded that Clinton had no desire to sabotage any chance for peace while he was in office by insulting Arafat but not long after he left office he made it clear that Arafat was the rejectionist and Barak was ready to give major concessions:
And this as well:
While I agree that technically both Arafat and Barak accepted the plan with reservations, Clinton showed afterwards that Barak was the only one serious about it and Arafat was playing games (which Barak elaborates on in great detail.)
The bigger point is that Jews have been accepting and proposing peace offers since before 1948 and each of them has been consistently rejected by the Palestinian Arabs. That is a key point in any discussion on peace, which J-Street claims it cares about, yet only Israel is blamed for the lack of peace. This is a major blind spot in the liberal world which then leaks into a blind spot for everyone who does not spend serious time researching the topic.
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J-Street's conference had a panel on "Fighting Anti-Semitism and its Weaponization in American Politics."
Already by equating antisemitism with its supposed "weaponization" (which exists but is not nearly as big an issue,) the panel was doomed from the start from seriously looking at the problem.
The panelists were:
Rabbi Jill Jacobs, Executive Director, T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights (Moderator)
Peter Beinart, Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York
Maya Berry, Executive Director, Arab American Institute
Haile Soifer, Executive Director, Jewish Democratic Council of America
Eric Ward, Executive Director, Western States Center
The entire discussion was naturally about antisemitism on the Right. It is a real problem, but not the way it was framed here. Haile Soifer wasted no time in attacking Donald Trump, the only president who has a Jewish daughter and grandchildren. She claimed falsely that he excused the white supremacists in Charlottesville, and she claimed that he failed to condemn antisemitism ever (although she accidentally said "condone.") She also claimed that the white nationalists who have attacked blacks and Jews in the US all were aligned with Trump, when they almost all hated him because he was too philosemitic.
I do not disagree that Trump has said things that embolden racists in the US. There is plenty to criticize him for in dividing the nation. (It is not so clear that the number of racist incidents increased under Trump, when the 2018 FBI hate crimes statistics are released we'll have a better idea. 2017 showed a marked increase but also many more agencies were added to the reporting compared to 2016, so the data sets may not be comparable.) But when you criticize him, do it accurately.
Peter Beinart said "I agree with everything [Haile] said." So, truth is certainly not something that this J-Street panel prizes.
Beinart also said, to applause, that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, but his reasoning was quite bizarre:
"The vast majority of Palestinians are anti-Zionist...The Palestinian experience with Zionism has been a very bitter, painful, traumatic experience. You do not have to be an antisemite...to be in solidarity with the Palestinian experience...Any definition of antisemitism that dehumanizes and silences Palestinians is not a response to bigotry - it is an expression of bigotry."
Would Beinart say that Jews who say that there is no room for Palestinians to have any political power in the region are not bigots? Of course not. But Palestinians who say that Jews have no right to live in the region as anything but second class citizens - which is the standard and mainstream Palestinian position - cannot be called antisemitic because that would "silence" them!
Sorry, Peter, antisemitism's definition is not dependent on whose feelings it might hurt. Arab and Muslim antisemitism is a thing, as much as you don't want to admit it. Saying that the Jews are not a people - the official PLO position! - is antisemitic. Saying that they do not have the right for self-determination in their historic homeland is antisemitic. And having a different standard for what Jews can say about Palestinians and what Palestinians can say about Jews in the area is itself an example of bigotry.
"The reality is that the definition of antisemitism that was developed for use overseas that has been adopted by some here in the United States ...that they are attempting to use that definition on our college campuses, that is not an acceptable definition of antisemitism. As a result, we're entering in this sort of grey space...[During a time of worries about white supremacist violence] we're trying to decide how much I can criticize the State of Israel before I get labeled a certain thing. I think that's crazy. "
So now we are told by a Muslim that Jews cannot define what antisemitism is because she demands the right to compare Israel to Nazis or say Israeli Jews love to kill children and poison the wells. IHRA has no problem with criticism of Israel, and Berry knows that - but she wants the right to demonize any Jew who supports Israel or to demonize the Jewish state for actions that would be considered nothing in every single Arab state.
(I have yet to see a critic of the IHRA definition say which specific examples given there of anti-Zionist antisemitism they do not agree with. Because they know that double standards for Israel is in fact antisemitism.)
She also said, "I think one of the biggest mistakes J-Street makes is the position its taken on BDS. [Applause!] Because if you equate the entire movement with antisemitism then the logical conclusion is Rashida [Tlaib] is an antisemite. And that is a problem we should all be very concerned about."
This is after she noted that Jews never considered the previous Muslim members of Congress to be antisemitic, and it is only because Tlaib and Ilhan Omar support BDS that they are considered as such.
This is a mirror of Beinart's argument that if a definition of antisemitism ends up calling someone you like an antisemite, it must be wrong. That is not how definitions work.
(Also, J-Street does not say that BDS is antisemitic.)
Perhaps the most offensive part of the session was a question from a J-Street board member, Victor Kovner, that was itself antisemitic:
"I'd like to ask an easy question about whether white nationalism is rising within the Jewish community....Is it true, that because of policies about Israel, that white nationalism is rising among particularly the ultra-observant community? Is that true? And is it also rising in the Israeli settler movement?"
In other words, are religious Jews the disgusting racists I think they are?
Of course no one called Kovner out for his fairly clear bigotry. Beinart tackled the question but watered it down for public consumption, saying that some Zionists naturally will ally with like-minded political groups, as if Jews are willing to accept right-wing Tree of Life-level Jew-hatred for Israel. But the question revealed much more about how the (mostly elderly) leftist J-Street attendees really think.
In short, it was an antisemitic question that was tolerated at a panel supposedly about antisemitism.
Kovner, a major J-Street fundraiser, described J-Street's goal in a 2008 New York Times article this way: "Candidates would also be able to use the group’s endorsements as a shield against accusations that they were anti-Israel."
Does this sound like someone who loves either Israel or Jews?
This panel was a disgrace for a supposedly Jewish, pro-Israel organization that pretends to care about antisemitism.
(h/t Daled Amos)
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J-Street likes to pretend that it is pro-Israel and that the people on the Right who claim to be pro-Israel are really anti-Israel by considering parts of the West Bank to be part of Israel in any final status agreement.
But as this excerpt from the J-Street Conference indicates, Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times thinks that any Democratic candidates who are "too" pro-Israel are also "far-Right."
"What I think is interesting is that this is going to be...the first presidential primary where some candidates will pay a price for being too pro-Israel, and that was never a thing before. That could potentially change politics if there is a price to be paid too far-Right as well as being too far-Left."
Even subconsciously, she associates being pro-Israel with the political right and being anti-Israel with the political Left, at an unabashedly anti-Right conference that claims to be "pro-Israel."
And yes, she actually implied that some Democratic candidates were so pro-Israel as to be considered "far Right."
(I have no idea what candidate she has in mind who could remotely be considered "too" pro-Israel to the extent that it would hurt him or her. I certainly haven't seen anyone in the Democratic presidential field who remotely qualifies as such.)
She did preface this by saying that most of the candidates were still sticking to the old "pro-Israel" playbook of supporting our only democratic ally in the Middle East, which (in my impression of what she means) sounded like everyone knows this is just something they have to say even if they don't believe it. I was honestly expecting her to finish that statement with "blah, blah, blah."
The entire video is filled with smug, "we know better than Israel" comments. Similarly, tossing around idiotic statements like the US and Israel are turning "fascist" is regarded as accepted wisdom. J-Streeters position themselves as messianic figures who are the only ones who see the truth and everyone else is simply too dense to recognize their brilliance.
The smugness inspired me to tweet this morning, "Telling Arabs how to act morally is condescending and colonialist. Telling Israelis how to act morally without bothering to ask their side of the story is woke."
The J-Street Conference also includes PLO speakers. Jeremy Ben Ami defended that, and I responded:
I read the PLO positions in the original Arabic. I know very well how they really think. If you think that what they say to a @jstreetdotorg conference is remotely accurate compared to how they speak in Arabic, you are a complete fool. And you are willing to push their lies.
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J-Street released a really unprofessional survey on Democratic voters' attitudes towards Israel and the Palestinians.
The questions are so biased as to be laughable.
For example:
People often talk about being pro-Israel. Do you think someone can be critical of Israeli government policies and still be pro-Israel? Total Yes.........................................................................................81 No ..........................................................................................13 (Don't know/refused) ..............................................................5
I'm actually surprised at the 13%. Every thinking person, right or left, agrees that someone can be critical of Israeli policies and still pro-Israel. J-Street, of course, is critical of virtually every Israeli government policy. If they would have asked "Do you think someone can have thousands of anti-Israel tweets and not a single pro-Israel tweet, and still be pro-Israel?" then the answer would not have pleased them, because that is what J-Street is.
Similarly, J-Street worded this question not to illuminate but to pretend that their opinions are mainstream, asking whether voters would be more likely to choose "A candidate who says he or she strongly supports Israel, and the United States must stand behind all of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's policies." Who thinks that?
Here's another loaded question that proves that J-Street themselves have no idea why anyone should support Israel:
Please tell me which statement comes closest to your own point of view, even if neither is exactly right. 1.The United States should act as a fair and impartial broker in order to achieve a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians. 2. The United States should side with Israel during peace negotiations because Israel is our democratic ally and needs our support against a world that isolates them.
Is that the only reason why Americans support Israel?
Why didn't J-Street try this statement?
The United States should side with Israel because Israel shares American liberal values, giving rights to minorities, women and LGBT who are oppressed in Arab countries. Israel has offered to live in peace with its Arab neighbors multiple times yet the Palestinians have rejected every single plan. An "even handed" approach rewards Palestinian intransigence.
How would liberals answer that one? After all, only one side has liberal values and has shown a real desire for peace - but J-Street will never point that out.
The fact is that J-Street knows that most respondents don't know squat about the Middle East so it phrases questions to lead the ignorant to the conclusions they want.
While 61% of the respondents said that they followed news about Israel "very" or "somewhat" closely, only 9% said that they were very familiar with what BDS was about. If you don't know what BDS is, you aren't following the news. Meaning that the vast majority of Democratic voters do not follow the Middle East closely at all, but they think they know what they are talking about.
J-Street uses this ignorance to create a poll that provides the answers they pre-determine within the questions themselves.
Professional pollster Steve Miller called this "shitty polling and incoherent questions."
In the annals of shitty polling and incoherent questions lies this slide https://t.co/pvYnJGrsoN
Why did J-Street release this poll, taken in May, now? Because it wants to use the results to pretend that it is mainstream ahead of its conference next week. The poll is meant to do one thing only: to make J-Street look good.
Anyone who reports on the poll as if it actually reflects reality is ignorant or knowingly deceptive.
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2ss would save our democracy by avoiding undemocratic 1-state rule first and foremost. And a peace with deterrence would has worked in both cases where we made peace with Arab neighbors. There are different circumstances, but then there are more aggressive security measures.
I find it interesting that Peace Now does not choose to use "peace" as its primary reason for a two state solution, but an appeal to democracy - "first and foremost." Maybe it should change its name to Democracy Now - oh, wait, that's already taken.
Of course, Israeli leftists said that Israel's withdrawal from Gaza and from Areas A and B would not hurt security either because Israel could use deterrence - but new Gaza wars every few years indicates that deterrence is not all it is cracked up to be.
Assuming "if Israel does X, then then Arabs will do Y" is a fallacy.
The other major difference between Palestinians and Egypt/Jordan is that those two countries do not have (serious) territorial claims on all of Israel but the Palestinians do. As I recently pointed out, most Palestinians want the conflict to keep going even after a "peace" agreement that still allows Israel to exist.
I responded to Peace Now, "So your vision of democracy is worth the potential deaths of thousands of people?"
It turns out that Dennis Prager described the Peace Now/J-Street mentality perfectly in his column last week:
The problem with communists and with leftists who don’t consider themselves communists is not that none of them mean well. It’s that they lack wisdom. There are wise and foolish liberals, wise and foolish conservatives; but all leftists are fools. Every one of the Democrats running for president is a fool. This is not, however, a description of their totality as a human being. Fools may be personally kind and generous, may be loyal friends and devoted spouses, and of course, they may be well-intentioned. But in terms of making the world worse, there is little difference between a well-meaning fool and an evil human being. Tens of millions of well-intentioned Westerners supported Stalin. The Westerners who supplied Stalin the secrets to the atom bomb were not motivated by evil. They were simply fools. But few evil people did as much to hurt the world as they did.
They are fools partly because they believe good intentions are all that matter. Therefore, they never ask perhaps the most important moral question one can ask: What will happen if my policy is enacted? Leftist supporters of communism never asked.
...
On every issue in which the left differs from conservatives (and often from liberals), they are fools. They push for a Palestinian state although even Israelis on the left know this would mean a Hamas-Hezbollah state on the Israeli border. But they know they mean well.
They want peace! How can that be bad? But it can be, because they do not think through the potential downsides of what they call "peace." They pretend that their desired outcome is the only possible outcome, and if they are wrong, oh well - there are no consequences to them personally.
This is why they are fools.
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You won't find these photos on J-Street's Twitter account, but the PLO is very proud to have met with a delegation of Congressional aides who visited under the auspices of J-Street.
Saeb Erekat told these aides that Israel is entirely at fault for there being no peace in the region and that the PLO desires a two-state solution.
On the same PLO page header, you can see its logo, which shows exactly how interested the PLO is in a two-state solution.
I doubt any of the delegation bothered asking about that.
Similarly, today, the website of the PLO's Department of Public Diplomacy and Policy includes explicitly antisemitic content. It features this description of Jews (archived here) in a page dedicated to the major Zionists that they blame for the "Naqba" with antisemitic Quranic allusions:
انهم علو في الارض يذبحون ابناءنا ويستحيون نسائنا وما كيد يهود الا في ضلال ،الاجرام صفتهم والقتل لغتهم وهدم البيوت عرفهم وقلع الاشجار عادتهم، شخصيات يهود تجسد الاجرام والعتو ،لكن في هذه البوابة سنعرفهم عن قرب.
They acted with arrogance on earth, slaughtering our sons and leaving our women alive, and the plotting of the Jews is just delusions. Crime is their quality/attribute, killing is their language, destroying homes is their custom, uprooting trees is their habit. Jewish personalities epitomize crime and arrogance, but in this web portal we will get to know them from up close.
Is this anomalous? Of course not. Official Palestinian TV, effectively run by the PLO, has dozens of examples of explicit antisemitism - often from PLO leaders themselves - every year.
The Fatah platform of 2009 remains in force, and it says that terrorism ("armed struggle") is their right, never abandoned and allowed, they claim, under international law. It also explicitly says it wants "preserve the refugee camps as a political witness" even on its own territory, a conscious decision to keep their own people miserable as political capital against Israel.
J-Street would never mention these facts. In fact, it would do everything it could to hide it.
J-Street pretends to be even-handed in these sorts of trips. They probably had the aides visit some dovish Israeli MKs. But their website, words and actions prove that they will bend over backwards to believe every lie the Palestinian leaders say and to be critical of every word the Israeli government says. There is nothing remotely balanced about them, and the congressional aides who attended these sessions weren't learning anything but curated anti-Israel propaganda.
(h/t Ibn Boutros)
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It seems there are various former members of J Street, some who served in leadership positions, who are now involved in If Not Now -- and some of them are apparently founding members.
For example:
Max Berger
o He is identified as a co-founder of If Not Now in his 'bio' on Haaretz o A JTA article notes that before If Not Now, Max Berger worked for J Street as a new media assistant
Yonah Lieberman
o Yonah Lieberman has a twitter account that identifies him as a co-founder of If Not Now o Lieberman was very heavily involved in J Street. According to his LinkedIn page, from January 2010 on he was a member of the National Student Board, the Midwest Regional Co-Chair, and Campus Chapter Chair.
Carinne Luck
o Times of Israel identifies Carinne Luck as a co-founder of If Not Now. o Luck's website notes she was a founding staff member and Vice President for Field and Campaigns at J Street.
Simone Zimmerman
o Simone Zimmerman identifies herself as a co-founder of If Not Now on her Twitter page. o In an article for The Forward, Josh Nathan-Kazis writes that Simone Zimmerman was the national president of J Street U’s student board in the 2012-2013 school year
o Emily Mayer identifies herself as an If Not Now organizer on her Twitter page o Daniel Greenfield notes that Emily Mayer was with J Street U at Haverford
Sarah Beth Alcabes
Canary Mission lists Sarah Beth Alcabes as leading an INN disruption, in partnership with Taher Herzallah of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), and also being an activist with J Street U at the University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley) from 2012-2014.
Times of Israel mentions Elianna Fishman, who was "heavily involved with J Street U Dartmouth" and who confirms "I interned for J Street, and helped set up a chapter on campus” before graduating and joining IfNotNow -- to which the article adds
In fact, many of IfNotNow’s leaders are alumni of J Street U.
[If Not Now] remains small, attracting several dozen participants, some of whom are leaders of J Street U, the group’s student-organizing arm.
But the question remains: why have these, and other members of J Street, made the switch?
It sure appears as if J-Street is a gateway drug for Jewish students to learn to hate Israel and to be comfortable to criticize Israel "as a Jew." But it might be more than that.
According to a Haaretz article from 2014, Gaza War Pushes Some to the Left of J Street. The logic, according to Haaretz, is that over time, J Street, even back in 2014, was becoming larger and more moderate, with the result that there were the beginnings of a limited exodus that benefited smaller more radical groups. One of those groups was If Not Now, described in the article as "an ad hoc group."
Of course, what the Haaretz article claims is a sign of J Street's moderation can also be seen as the failure in the eyes of some of its members, to become increasingly radical.
A similar theme to Haaretz is taken by Nathan-Kazis in the Forward also in an article from 2014, that in contrast to the more "moderate" tone taken by J Street, some members felt J Street was not doing enough:
Former high-ranking J Street staff members were among the organizers of a July 28 protest in New York City against Israel’s invasion of Gaza. They acted under the name #ifnotnow and made no mention of their former J Street affiliations.
He writes about another protest just a few days earlier, launched by 4 activists that included high-ranking members Carinne Luck who had left J Street in 2012 and Daniel May, director of J Street U from 2010 to 2013 as well as Max Berger.
Other participants in one or both of those #ifnotnow protests included Isaac Luria, J Street’s vice president of communications and new media from 2008 until 2011 and Tamara Shapiro.
Some of that former J Street staff said they were not opposed to J Street’s long-term strategy -- but felt limited by its tactics. Others, like Luck, said they did not share J Street's "patience" with the "Jewish institutional community."
That is the narrative. Daniel Greenfield of FrontPageMag.org isn't buying it.
The official narrative is that If Not Now parted ways with J Street because the group was insufficiently opposed to the Jewish State and insufficiently supportive of Hamas. As a practical matter though this is how radical groups have always operated, with a front group that makes efforts to appear moderate while incubating radical organizations within itself that "split off" but still pursue the same agenda.
Despite claims of a split, If Not Now is just pursuing the exact same agenda as J Street U, protesting Jewish charities for supporting Israel, while claiming to be the voice of a new generation.
It's the same scam with a new brand and slightly less of a paper trail.
If Not Now is J Street...
...New organizations are constantly being created and destroyed. But they all share one agenda. The destruction of the Jewish State.
If there is indeed an element of dramatic effect at work here, then this alleged break would be no more authentic than the recent break of Jesse Steshenko, who claimed to have been "a very ardent Zionist" who as a result of his recent J Street trip to Israel became "disgusted" with Israel.
Elder of Ziyon revealed that in fact as recently as 2016 as a member of Junior States of America, a mock Congress, he introduced a resolution calling Israel an apartheid state and demanding the recognition of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza as defined by the 1949 Armistice -- effectively depriving Israel of the Western Wall and the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem.
Actually, J Street itself has a history of being less than straightforward.
Carinne Luck's involvement in If Not Now is another reason for apprehension.
Here is a 2012 video of Luck explaining J Street's job:
The main takeaway from what Luck says:
o A sizable percentage of J Street is not Jewish o J Street responds to the wishes "the Hill, the (Obama) Administration" which wants J Street to "move Jews" o The bulk of J Street resources are dedicated to this o There is an uneasiness about those in J Street leadership who are not Jewish who may present themselves as Jews
This idea of misrepresentation that Carinne Luck shares with the group -- without condemning -- is an issue that arises again with If Not Now, both in terms of questions about its connections with J Street but also in terms of its own claims to represent today's young American Jews.
We have seen there is a failure of J Street to live up to what it claims it does.
Should we be surprised that there are doubts about what If Not Now claims as well?
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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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Last week Jennifer Lopez and her fiancee Alex Rodriguez visited Israel last week and seemed to have a fantastic time.
Although she only tweeted about her visit a couple of times and he added a few more, it occurred to me that they had far more pro-Israel tweets in one week than the purportedly "pro-Israel" J-Street has had in eleven years on Twitter.
What an amazing time we are having on my first trip to Tel Aviv! The people have been wonderful and have such energy. I will definitely be back and recommend visiting this incredible country! ❤️
In contrast, I just searched through all of J-Street's tweets that mention "love" or "beautiful." Not one is aimed at Israel without qualification (there are many that claim that people who love Israel criticize it, not one that just says how much they love Israel itself or that Israel is beautiful.)
So J. Lo and AROD have shut-out J-Street and Jeremy Ben Ami in terms of who really loves Israel.
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When Katz visited Abu Dhabi and met with at least one senior UAE official, J-Street was silent.
This has been a consistent pattern with J-Street. No matter what the diplomatic achievements of Israel in the Middle East and Africa and with majority Muslim nations worldwide, J-Street cannot find a nice thing to say.
When Netanyahu sat down with foreign ministers from United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain in Warsaw, and even when he flew to Oman to meet the Sultan Qaboos bin Said al Said, J-Street had nothing to say - except a link to a Foreign Policy article complaining about how the Arab world was abandoning the Palestinians.
Benjamin Netanyahu has made more progress for peace between Israel and the Arab world than Rabin, more than Begin, more than Peres, more than any other Israeli leader. Even the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan never resulted in smiling photo-ops between Arab and Israeli leaders of the type we have seen so many of in recent months.
J-Street claims to be pro-Israel - even though it cannot say a good word about Israel in any tweets or articles.
Its claim to be pro-peace are just as specious.
But it is definitely telling the truth when it says it is pro-Palestinian.
One out of three ain't bad, is it?
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Monday, December 16, 2019
Elder of Ziyon
