Love of the Land: J Street Can No Longer Claim to be Pro-Israel

J Street Can No Longer Claim to be Pro-Israel

Alan M. Dershowitz
Hudson New York
21 April '10

J Street has gone over to the dark side. It claims to be "a pro-Israel, pro peace lobby." It has now become neither. Its Executive Director, Jeremy Ben-Ami, has joined the off key chorus of those who falsely claim that Israel, by refusing to make peace with the Palestinians, is placing the lives of American soldiers at risk.

This claim was first attributed to Vice President Joe Biden and to General David Petraeus. It was quickly denied by them but continued to have a life of its own in the anti-Israel media. It was picked up by Steven Walt and John Mearsheimer, Pat Buchanan and others on the hard right and hard left who share a common disdain for the Jewish state. It is the most dangerous argument ever put forward by Israel bashers. It is also totally false.

It is dangerous for two reasons. First, it seeks to reduce support for Israel among Americans who, quite understandably and correctly, care deeply about American soldiers being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Israel has always understood this and that's why it is one of the few American allies who has never asked the United States to put its troops in harm's way in defense of Israeli citizens. If Americans were to believe the falsehood that Israel were to blame for American deaths caused by Islamic extremists in Iraq and Afghanistan, support for the Jewish state would suffer considerably.

It is also dangerous because its implication is that Israel must cease to exist: the basic complaint that Muslim extremists have against Israel is not what the Jewish state does, but what it is: a secular, non-Muslim, democracy that promotes equal rights for women, gays, Christians and others. Regardless of what Israel does or doesn't do, its very existence will be anathema to Muslim extremists. So if Israel's actions were in fact a cause of American deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan--which they are not--then the only logical solution would be Israel's disappearance. This might be acceptable to the Walts, Mearsheimers and Buchanans of the world, but it is surely not acceptable to Israel or anyone who claims to be pro-Israel.

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Love of the Land: J Street Can No Longer Claim to be Pro-Israel

Love of the Land: Something's seriously wrong at York University

Something's seriously wrong at York University

David Frum
National Post
27 February '10

Next week, York University will once again open its halls and classrooms to “Israel Apartheid Week,” so-called. This year as every year, militants and activists will use the taxpayer-funded facilities of York to vilify the Jewish state. Well, that’s free speech, isn’t? Everybody gets to express his or her point of view, no matter how obnoxious, right?

No, not right. Not at York. At York, speech is free — better than free, subsidized — for anti-Israel haters. But for those who would defend Israel, York sets very different rules.

In advance of York’s annual hate-Israel week, the campus group Christians United for Israel applied to use university space to host a program of pro-Israel speakers. The university replied that this program could only proceed on certain conditions. It insisted on heavy security, including both campus and Toronto police — all of those costs to be paid by the program organizers. The organizers would also have to provide an advance list of all program attendees and advance summaries of all the speeches. No advertising for the program would be permitted — not on the York campus, not on any of the other campuses participating by remote video.

These are radically different and much harsher terms than anything required from the hate-Israel program. The hate-Israel program is not required to pay for its own security. It is free to advertise. Its speakers are not pre-screened by the university.

The pro-Israel event, scheduled for this past Monday, Feb. 22, was cancelled when the organizers declined to comply with the terms. A university spokesman told the Jewish Tribune that it insisted on the more stringent requirements on pro-Israel groups “due to the participation of individuals who they claim invite the animus of anti-Israel campus agitators.”

The logic is impressively brazen: Since the anti-Israel people might use violence, the speech of the pro-Israel people must be limited. On the other hand, since the pro-Israel people do not use violence, the speech of the anti-Israel people can proceed without restraint.

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Love of the Land: Something's seriously wrong at York University

Love of the Land: On being pro-Israel

On being pro-Israel

Fresnozionism.org
23 February '10

Somewhere in the discussion about what it means to be pro-Israel (in the context of J Street, the New Israel Fund [NIF], etc.) I heard the following:

Being pro-Israel doesn’t mean supporting Israel no matter what it does

I get it. I understand where they’re coming from.

Suppose my neighbor is arrested and charged with stealing a car. Would I support him? Would I bail him out of jail? Well, that would depend on my judgment of his character and his motives. Maybe I would and maybe I wouldn’t. I’d try to be fair; after all, he has the same rights as anyone else. This is the attitude of the ‘progressive’ Jew toward Israel.

Now suppose someone is arrested and charged as above. Only this time it’s my son. Everything changes. Would I support him no matter what he does? Of course not, but I would try much harder to understand him. I would give him the benefit of the doubt. I would listen to his story. I would give his explanations at least as much credence as those of his accusers, maybe more. This is the attitude of the Zionist Jew.

Zionists among the Jewish people gave birth to the modern state of Israel, sacrificed for it and supported it in its childhood. The Zionist feels differently about Israel than he does about, say, Japan. The best analogy is to say that he feels a family relationship.

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Love of the Land: On being pro-Israel

Love of the Land: Praise for The Case For Israel

Praise for The Case For Israel

YG
CAMERA/Snapshots
26 January '10

Yair Lapid, a popular and influential Israeli journalist, praises The Case For Israel, a documentary with Alan Dershowitz, (DocEmet with co-producers from CAMERA). In his weekend column in the Yediot Achronot magazine "Shiva Yamim," he wrote:

I finally saw this week the movie “The Case for Israel”, about the famous American lawyer, Alan Dershowitz.
“I am pro-Israel,” opens Dershowitz the movie, “I am also pro-Palestinian. I support the two state solution but...”

Dershowitz isn’t a philosopher or a filmmaker; he’s not even from the political right. We got used to the fact that defense statements on Zionism come only from the right, but Dershowitz supports us precisely because he’s a left-wing law professor from Harvard, who deals with human rights.

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Love of the Land: Praise for The Case For Israel

Love of the Land: David Solway’s Hear, O Israel!: A Feast for the Conservative Mind

David Solway’s Hear, O Israel!: A Feast for the Conservative Mind

Barbara Kay
pajamasmedia.com
19 December 09

The new book by PJM's Solway asks why Jews are so prone to turn on themselves and make common cause with their enemies.

Hear, O Israel!
By David Solway
Canadian Values Press (Mantua Books)
181 pages; $25

On September 10, 2001, Canadian David Solway was merely an acclaimed poet, educator, and literary critic, warming himself (and his unexamined 1960s-era left-wing views) on a tranquil Greek island.

On September 11, 2001, he became a prophet. Watching the collapse of the twin towers on a television in his local café, Solway experienced a worldview-shattering epiphany that drew him into a singular fellowship of Western liberal intellectuals — Christopher Hitchens, Alain Finkelkraut, Michael Novak, and Nick Cohen, among them — who had been shocked by 9/11 into a fearful awareness of Islamist triumphalism’s threat to the West. As if making up for lost time, these ideological converts have brought a special urgency to their newly embraced roles as political Cassandras, perhaps none more apocalyptically than Solway.

Since then, Solway has put his formidable intellect to the service of myth-busting. In 2007, he published The Big Lie: On Terror, Anti-Semitism, and Identity, an indictment of the left’s collusion with Islamo-fascism in demonizing America and delegitimizing Israel.

In a way, Hear, O Israel!, partially adapted from published articles, is a recapitulation and updating of perils that have proliferated since the publication of The Big Lie. But this time Solway dwells at greater length and depth on what the Talmud calls sin’at achim, or brotherly hatred, a dynamic throughout Jewish civilization, currently embodied in the intensifying standoff between fellow-traveling anti-Zionists and Israel’s defenders.

Hear, O Israel!’s chapter titles give a good sense of what preoccupies him: “We Are All Israeli,” “The Darkness of Anti-Semitism,” “A House Divided,” and “The Question” (in a nutshell: why are Jews — not all, but a disconcerting number — so prone to turn on themselves and make common cause with those who would delight in their extermination?).

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Love of the Land: David Solway’s Hear, O Israel!: A Feast for the Conservative Mind

Love of the Land: 'Pro-Israel, Pro-peace'

'Pro-Israel, Pro-peace'

Ben Smith
Politico
28 October 09

Matthew Yglesias, who is deeply sympathetic to the liberal Jewish group J Street's aims, has an interesting point on the gap between its leadership's stated policy positions and those of many attendees at its conference:

I was debating with Jon Chait at a J Street panel this morning on the subject of “what does it mean to be pro-Israel?” As expected, we disagreed on a number of points, most of which I was right on and he was wrong on. But one thing he said in his opening remarks that I really disagreed with was that there was an ambiguity running through the J Street constituency as to whether the group was or should be pro-Israel at all.

That just struck me as kind of nuts. My J Street button said “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace.” It’s not a subtle aspect of the messaging. But when we moved to the Q&A time it became clear that a number of people in the audience really were quite uncomfortable self-defining as “pro-Israel” in any sense and that others are uncomfortable with the basic Zionist concept of a Jewish national state. I was, of course, aware that those views existed but it had seemed to me that it was clear that that wasn’t what J Street is there to advocate for. Apparently, though, it wasn’t clear to everyone.

Yglesias continues that the anti-Zionist notion of a peaceable one-state solution, but that people who think "that the area west of the Jordan River would be a great place to try implementing [post-nationalist values] in the short-term are being a bit crazy."

Love of the Land: 'Pro-Israel, Pro-peace'

Love of the Land: “Pro-Israel” No More

“Pro-Israel” No More

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
27 October 09

There has been a debate as to whether J Street is “pro-Israel.” Well, one branch of J Street now says it isn’t or at least doesn’t want to say it is anymore. Because that’s a bad thing, and people might take offense. This report explains:

J Street’s university arm has dropped the “pro-Israel” part of the left-wing US lobby’s “pro-Israel, pro-peace” slogan to avoid alienating students. That decision was part of the message conveyed to young activists who attended a special weekend program for students ahead of J Street’s first annual conference, which began on Sunday. … We don’t want to isolate people because they don’t feel quite so comfortable with ‘pro-Israel,’ so we say ‘pro-peace,’” said American University junior Lauren Barr of the “J Street U” slogan, “but behind that is ‘pro-Israel.’”

Way behind. It seems that a basic component of supporting Israel is not being ashamed or embarrassed to support Israel. And J Street’s head, Jeremy Ben-Ami, in perfect live-and-let-live-who-are-we-to-tell-kids-what-to-think mode offers this mind-numbing explanation:

Ben-Ami described himself as “concerned but realistic” about the students’ choice to leave out the pro-Israel piece of J Street’s slogan. He added, “Some in the community might not want to hear that this is where a lot of young people have come to, but we have to deal with people where they’re at and address their concerns.” …

It is our goal to change traditional conversations when it comes to Israel and to broaden the notion that there is only one way to express love and concern for it,” Ben-Ami said to applause. “We are here to redefine and expand the very concept of being pro-Israel. No longer should this ‘pro-’ require an ‘anti-.’”

Pro-Israel, anti-Israel. Whatever. It’s enough to give moral equivalency a bad name.

But clarity is good and it’s nice to know J Street doesn’t mind dropping “pro-Israel” from its self-designation. If only it had told all those congressmen and senators it had lured into hosting an event for a “pro-Israel” group.

Love of the Land: “Pro-Israel” No More