Headlines, Middle East & North Africa, North America

Book Plots J Street’s Coordinates on Map of U.S.-Israel Politics

Mitchell Plitnick

WASHINGTON, Aug 4 2011 (IPS) - The “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobby group J Street has drawn a lot of attention in its short lifetime. Despite decidedly moderate politics, its leader, Jeremy Ben-Ami, has repeatedly been the centre of controversy, and the group’s very existence has stirred debate in the U.S. Jewish community about the boundaries of acceptable discourse on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Ben-Ami’s book, “A New Voice for Israel”, is both a memoir and a manifesto laying out J Street’s political programme. His personal tale is gripping and revelatory. But the book leaves one wondering whether he can put together a strategy to impact U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Many readers will be surprised as Ben-Ami devotes the first part of the book to drawing a parallel between his activities with J Street and his father’s work in the Irgun. The Irgun was the armed wing of Revisionist Zionism, regarded by the British as Jewish terrorists. Revisionism was the precursor to today’s Likud, the right-wing party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Ben-Ami uses this provocative analogy for two purposes.

The first is to remove any doubt about commitment to Israel, as his family stretches back to the first wave of Zionist immigration to Palestine.

The second is to compare J Street’s efforts to sound the alarm about the threat to Israel and the Jewish Diaspora from the ongoing occupation of Palestinian lands to the Revisionists’ vain effort to rouse the U.S. and Palestinian Jewish communities to do more to rescue the Jews of Europe in the face of escalating Nazi atrocities more than 70 years ago.

“Voices of dissent…bring views and ideas…that are at times uncomfortable to consider,” Ben-Ami writes. “But they may also have a critical message to convey – a message that can save lives and change history. If the experience of the Bergson Group (the American delegation of the Revisionists) teaches us anything, it is that the appropriate way to deal with those new voices is not to reflexively shut them down but to engage them on the merits and see what value there may be in what they are trying to say.”

Ben-Ami’s father was ignored and blackballed by the Jewish establishment in Palestine and the United States, just as Ben-Ami now faces ostracism and attacks from major Jewish institutions for his efforts to rally the Jewish community behind a viable two-state solution that would provide Palestinians their right to self- determination.

He has an impressive organisation behind him. It has expanded its staff quickly and spawned a political action committee (PAC) that distributed 1.5 million dollars to Congressional candidates in 2010, more than any other single pro-Israel PAC ever, according to its website.

Still, Congress has remained remarkably impervious to Ben-Ami’s arguments. And, if the U.S. discourse on Israel has opened up to some extent, it seems this is due at least as much to Israel’s sharp turn to the right and policy excesses in recent years than to J Street’s efforts.

Ben-Ami lists the lobbying forces arrayed against him – Jewish groups led by the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, (AIPAC); neo- conservative think-tanks; Christian Zionist groups; dozens of hawkish PACs and individual contributors – that promote an “Israel right-or- wrong” policy. At the same time, he rejects the notion “that the organized Israel lobby… exercises control over American foreign policy. I think it is one influence, not the only or even necessarily the most important force.”

And while he stresses that the Israel Lobby does not represent the views of most U.S. Jews, he concedes that what he calls “the loudest eight percent” has been able to “write the rulebook” for acceptable political discourse about Israel.

It’s hard to reconcile that with his contention that the Lobby does not have decisive influence in Washington on issues of direct concern to Israel.

More to the point, this apparent contradiction leads to the main question that Ben-Ami’s book raises, and which he leaves largely unanswered: how is J Street going to change U.S. policy regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict?

Ben-Ami illustrates this very question when he describes President Barack Obama’s failure to get Israel to agree to freeze settlement construction. He says “…no one in the Obama administration seemed to have thought about what would happen if and when… Israel said no.”

Yet Ben-Ami does not answer that question. Instead, he says the U.S. should “publicly put the widely accepted parametres of a peace agreement on the table and ask the parties to respond.” But those parameters are on the table – in agreements like the Oslo Accords, the Arab Peace Initiative, and the Clinton Parameters. So what is J Street’s plan to stop Israel from saying no this time?

This issue was crystallised by Ami Eden, editor-in-chief of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “During the past year,” he wrote recently, “one could make the argument that the upstart Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) has emerged as the main challenger for the hearts and minds of Jews on the left who feel alienated from Israel and the Jewish establishment.”

Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which is often depicted as “too radical” to be allowed inside the mainstream policy discussion on Israel-Palestine, is a grassroots organisation that calls for divesting from corporations that are complicit in Israel’s occupation and suspending the three billion dollars Israel gets in annual U.S. military aid until Israel withdraws from the Palestinian territories.

JVP employs direct-action tactics and stakes out a human-rights stance that places Israelis and Palestinians on equal footing. JVP’s approach appears to hold great appeal to the same younger generation of U.S. Jews that J Street has targeted.

J Street has so far opposed the pressure tactics favoured by JVP. But Ben-Ami’s alternative of “opening up the debate” here in the United States, hoping that will change Israel’s policies looks increasingly dubious, particularly when President Barack Obama, in whom J Street had placed great hope, has shown little appetite for taking on the Lobby, despite his clear dislike for Netanyahu.

How will J Street muster a force that can counter The Lobby? Though broad, its base has been relatively apathetic about Israel. Alarm over Israel’s future as a “Jewish and democratic state” and the growing alienation of young Jews from the organised Jewish community are not sufficient motivators for that base, particularly at a time of economic turbulence and growing inequality at home. The “Israel Lobby’s” backers, on the other hand, are much more narrowly focused.

Meanwhile, a growing number of mainstream peace groups, such as Americans for Peace Now, have endorsed boycotts of settlements, which is very close to JVP’s position, and are coming to believe that Israel under Netanyahu’s coalition has gone so far astray that only tangible pressure can change its course.

J Street is precisely the organisation that many people have been hoping would arise for years: a mainstream, Jewish group seeking to make a serious political push inside the Beltway for a real resolution to this conflict.

But has it come too late? “…given the urgency of the situation, we need to [organise political backing for peace] swiftly and convincingly,” Ben-Ami writes. But if he opposes tangible pressure on Israel, it’s hard to see how he can do that.