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In December 2008, two weeks before Hamas abandoned the six-month lull in its rocket war against Israel, the founder and executive director of the new lobbying group J Street delivered a message via YouTube to potential supporters. Appearing in a crisply pressed pale blue button-down, Jeremy Ben-Ami offered a personalized explanation for why, eight months earlier, he had launched a self-described “pro-Israel, pro-peace” organization that hoped to change the way the United States government dealt with Israel. In an earnest, confessional style, Ben-Ami explained that in past years,
I felt that I didn’t have a voice in American politics when it came to Israel and the Middle East. . . . When I came back [from living in Israel in the late 1990’s] and I told people that I favored a Palestinian state, that I was a supporter of peace, and in recent years when I’ve said that I don’t think it makes sense for us to militarily attack Iran, I was told that I was insufficiently pro-Israel. Well, I’ll tell you, I find that unacceptable. I don’t find it Jewish. I don’t find it American to not allow people to express alternative opinions, and I certainly don’t find it to be pro-Israel. . . . I’ve decided that I had to speak out.
The group Ben-Ami founded seeks to be the vehicle for this protest. It has sought to challenge the ascendancy of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the hub of the legendary “Israel Lobby” in Washington that critics of strong American support for Israel see as a key obstacle to their goal of Middle East peace. While J Street is a tiny operation that cannot match AIPAC in terms of influence and money, in its first year of operation it has gained an inordinate amount of largely favorable press coverage.
The inauguration of a President whom J Street openly backed during the campaign has encouraged the group’s supporters to embrace the conceit that they, and not more established groups, will be more in tune with American foreign policy in the future. As such, its rise must be seen as a development whose impact may well affect the future of pro-Israel forces in this country.
Groups allied with J Street, such as Americans for Peace Now, Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, and even the well-funded Israel Policy Forum, have all previously jousted with the pro-Israel establishment. But they merely fashioned themselves as openly dovish in policy. J Street’s goals are even more ambitious. It seeks to make its advocacy mainstream by re-branding policies that had been thought to be discredited by the demise of the Oslo Accords as moderate, thus effectively labeling the Jewish mainstream as right-wing and self-destructive.
The first step in this re-branding process is the fastidious attachment of the phrase “pro-Israel” to describe almost every statement that J Street makes. Professions of deep concern for Israeli security can be found in virtually all the group’s statements, despite J Street’s rejection of the security consensus of the Israeli government on most matters. Its slogan is “The New Address for Middle East Peace and Security,” and its mission statement says:
J Street represents Americans, primarily but not exclusively Jewish, who support Israel and its desire for security as the Jewish homeland, as well as the right of the Palestinians to a sovereign state of their own—two states living side-by-side in peace and security. J Street supports diplomatic solutions over military ones, including in Iran; multilateral over unilateral approaches to conflict resolution; and dialogue over confrontation with a wide range of countries and actors when conflicts do arise.
Unlike other advocacy organizations, J Street intends to deliver its message directly into the political arena by forming a political-action committee that endorses candidates and awards money to campaigns. Other lobbies like AIPAC seek to influence policymakers quietly. J Street models itself on a Moveon.org-style of activism, cultivating notoriety and, it hopes, political power from the involvement of a cast of bloggers, journalists, and activists who frequently promote and defend J Street on popular liberal websites. Ben-Ami served as national policy director of Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, and found its “people-powered” model a perfect fit for an organization with J Street’s agenda:
The revolution afoot in 21st-century American politics enables the silent majority of American Jews to do what hasn’t been done before—namely to mobilize a broad and less organized base of moderates in a politically meaningful way. Today, for the first time, technology enables a large number of small political donors to challenge—and topple—the status quo.
The status quo that Ben-Ami and his followers seek to topple is, roughly speaking, the character of the U.S.-Israeli alliance that has prevailed since the Six Day War. Ben-Ami, assisted by a British-Israeli named Daniel Levy (who worked for the leftist Israeli politician Yossi Beilin before arriving at the New America Foundation in Washington), believes that Israeli
political decisions are largely responsible for Arab terrorism and hatred, and that the U.S. has played the role of enabler of this self-destructive state of affairs. In an interview with Salon’s Gary Kamiya during J Street’s launch, Ben-Ami explained his theory of Palestinian terrorism:
We’re not doing a very good job at creating a secure home by conducting ourselves in this manner towards another people that are a minority, and that are powerless, and treating them in a way that forces them essentially to become terrorists, and leads to us being again in danger.
Levy has articulated a similar view. Writing in the Guardian, Richard Silverstein, an American writer and blogger whose work focuses on condemning Israel, recounted a dinner in Seattle at which Levy
emphasised that while Israelis realised that they were primarily responsible for resolving the conflict, they also needed a good swift kick in the rear from an energised American Jewish community and U.S. president. An Israeli prime minister like Ehud Olmert might welcome pressure coming from America to adopt a more forthcoming approach to the idea of compromise. He could then turn around to the Liebermans (Avigdor, not Joe) on his right and say: “If you want to buck our American friends, be my guest. But where will you turn once you do and they’ve abandoned you?” Levy believes that this narrative will resonate in Israeli political circles.
In order to transform relations between the U.S. and Israel, J Street intends to provide political cover for an American campaign to pressure the Israeli government into making more concessions for the sake of what it believes will be peace. In his op-eds and speeches, Ben-Ami frequently cites his family’s history in Israel as evidence of the depth of his commitment to the Jewish state, but he nonetheless considers the sovereign nation incapable of making healthy decisions for itself. As he told a Newsweek interviewer,
[I]t’s time [for the United States] to act like the big brother or the parent and to say “enough is enough and we’re going to take the car keys if you don’t stop driving drunk.” We’re not talking about simply business as usual. There’s got to be some sort of intervention here where the U.S. says to Israel the time has come to finally do something. . . . And within Israel, the Israeli prime minister may have a tough time because of their domestic politics fulfilling their commitments. It’s going to be a lot easier if they say to their coalition partners and to the rest of the government, “I have to do this because the president of the United States is telling me to do it.”
And what J Street hopes the President of the United States will tell Israel to do is immediately commence peace talks with Syria and Hamas, and support the inclusion of Hamas in a Palestinian unity government. The group also advocates for Israel’s adoption of—that is, for the U.S. government to force Israel to adopt—the Arab Peace Initiative. Originally proposed by Saudi Arabia at the 2002 Arab League summit, the Initiative would require Israel to evacuate the West Bank, give the Golan Heights to Syria, and admit unspecified thousands of Palestinians currently living in Arab countries into Israel. In exchange, Israel would receive diplomatic recognition from the current Arab holdouts. Ben-Ami is so taken with the plan that he declared Israel would be committing “national suicide” if it did not accept it.
As for the Iranian nuclear program, something that most of Israel’s political parties from right to left see as a source of existential national peril, the group’s spokesmen are primarily concerned with making a case against the use of force to stop Iran even in the event that diplomatic efforts fail. Though acknowledging that a nuclear Iran is a real threat, Ben-Ami has made it clear that he believes the larger danger comes from the bellicose threats emanating from pro-Israel groups.
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Jeremy ben-ami’s creation is best understood not as a source of foreign-policy coherence, but as an example of the new liberal politics in America. Over the past decade, a narrative was adopted among liberals to explain their political defeats. This narrative holds that liberals were repeatedly bested by conservatives because of their unwillingness to employ the same kind of hardball tactics that conservatives used against them. It started with the inability to protect Bill Clinton from impeachment—this is when Moveon.org was founded—and escalated in the years that followed. Liberals believed George W. Bush stole the 2000 presidential election, that the neoconservatives lied America into war in Iraq, that conservatives bulldozed critics of their war on terror tactics by questioning the patriotism of dissenters, and that the Right ensured Bush’s re-election by making charges they believed to be scurrilous about John Kerry’s Vietnam-era military experience as a captain of a swift boat. The “swiftboating” of Kerry proved to be the watershed moment that convinced the Left that the conservative way of political warfare was not just dishonest and insulting, but actually depended for its success on the refusal of liberals to fight back.
From this reading of a decade of political defeats, liberals extracted several lessons: First, that their misfortune was a result of liberal purity, or acquiescence to dirty tricks; second, that these tricks must be countered by equivalent tactics; and most important, that liberalism and liberals themselves were not to blame for their political misfortune. Instead, the problem was how liberals talked about the issues, how they framed the debate, and what they permitted their rivals to say about them. A final derivation of this view of American politics becomes possible: Victory can be achieved—and the re-framing of the issues accomplished—if you create large, energetic factions that can be quickly mobilized over the Internet.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, the liberal rhetoric of political victimhood was at its high-water mark, and it encouraged an ethos of defiance: In the face of an onslaught of character assassination and delegitimization from conservatives, liberals told themselves, it was vital to remain unintimidated and to fight. This is where Jeremy Ben-Ami’s YouTube speech came in, which sought to rouse the Internet masses in order that liberals would no longer be silenced.
Those who join J Street, of course, may view themselves as bravely raising their voices in a political environment that is controlled by conservatives to silence, ridicule, and excommunicate heretics. If this sounds like a gross exaggeration, simply listen to how J Street officials and supporters talk about the bravery required merely to be publicly “pro-peace” in contemporary America. Here is Ben-Ami, feeling the pea of pro-Israel oppression under 40 mattresses, in the Forward:
Somehow, for American politicians or activists to express opposition to settlement expansion—or support for active American diplomacy, dialogue with Syria or engagement with Iran—has become subversive and radical, inviting vile, hateful emails and a place on public lists of Israel-haters and antisemites. For the particularly unlucky, it leads to public, personal attacks on one’s family and heritage.
Elsewhere, Ben-Ami has said that when Israel goes to war, “our side gets cowed into silence” because the discourse on Israel is controlled by “a small number of large donors essentially holding the [Jewish] community hostage.” Ezra Klein, a blogger at the liberal American Prospect who backs J Street, declared that those who “dishonor” the ideals of human rights are the “voices [that] control the conversation” about Israel. “Even more to the point,” Klein intoned, this “is no time for silence.”
In their imaginations, the dark night of authoritarian suppression may always be descending on peace activists in America, but it is apparently so unreliable in arriving that J Street officials and their supporters are able to complain about being intimidated and silenced on the pages of major American newspapers and magazines and on dozens of highly trafficked websites. (Former President Jimmy Carter and Israel Lobby authors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer have suffered exactly such oppression as their books sell briskly and their appearances in the media multiply.) Of course, views identical to J Street’s are expressed regularly in think tanks, on the op-ed pages of almost every American newspaper, by academics and policymakers, by street picketers, and by former Secretaries of State, Presidents, and ambassadors.
Yet the delusions of oppression persist. Here is Salon’s Kamiya, lauding the creation of J Street and engaging in just such an absurdity: “Nothing is more urgently needed in our political discourse than for the taboo against speaking forthrightly about Israel to be overthrown.” The website on which these words were published garners 50 million page-views per month. What Kamiya really means is that he wishes people who challenge his opinions about Israel would stop doing so.
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Operation Cast Lead, which commenced on December 27, 2008, would become J Street’s first real-world test of the popularity of its ideas. On the first day of the operation inside Gaza, J Street posted a statement on its website calling for an immediate cease fire and making the remarkably blasé claim that “only diplomacy and negotiations can end the rockets and terror.” A few days into the conflict, the group released a statement that combined abject moral equivalence, heroic self-flagellation, and anguished false introspection. “As friends of Israel, we felt immediate pressure from friends and family to pick a side,” the statement said. “Couldn’t we see who’s right and who’s wrong?” The monthly War and Peace poll conducted by Tel Aviv University found that 94 percent of Israeli Jews had no difficulty either picking a side or determining who was right and who was wrong. Public opinion was so uniformly in favor of the operation that even the ultra-dovish Meretz party—for which Daniel Levy once worked, and which typically earns only about 5 percent of the vote in Israeli elections—supported the campaign.
For J Street, the opening days of Cast Lead were not just a time to declare an inability to make moral distinctions between Hamas and Israel, or aggression and self-defense. Cast Lead also provided an opportunity to accuse the 94 percent of Israeli Jews who supported the operation of insanity:
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Footnotes
© 2010 Commentary Inc.
