The new friends of Israel

Tuesday, 15th September 2009

Seems some opponents of the new lobbying group, J Street, are getting rattled. Politico reports on the response from the United Jewish Communities. Michael Goldfarb piles in at the Weekly Standard:

J Street is nothing more than a partisan, Democratic organization trying to provide Jewish cover to an administration that is hostile to Israel

They're not best pleased by James Traub's sympathetic profile of the new kids on the block, which included this aside on the generation gap:

Important Jewish organizations are normally reached through a series of locked doors presided over by glassed-in functionaries. The peril may be real. But it can also feel like a marketing device. “You know what these guys are afraid of?” says M. J. Rosenberg, Washington director of the Israel Policy Forum. “Their generation is disappearing. All the old Jewish people in senior-citizen homes speaking Yiddish are dying — and they’re being replaced by 60-year-old Woodstock types.”

J Street, by contrast, is wide open to the public... The average age of the dozen or so staff members is about 30. [Founder Jeremy] Ben-Ami speaks for, and to, this post-Holocaust generation. “They’re all intermarried,” he says. “They’re all doing Buddhist seders.” They are, he adds, baffled by the notion of “Israel as the place you can always count on when they come to get you.” Living in a world of blogs, they’re similarly skeptical of the premise that “we’re still on too-shaky ground” to permit public disagreement.

But as Traub observes, it won't be easy to get a conversation going:

As a lobbying group, would you rather represent the passionate few or the dispassionate many? The National Rifle Association knows the answer to that question. One administration official involved with the Middle East points out that Aipac cultivates single-issue partisans. Wielding the other 92 percent into a potent political force, he notes, will be “a major, long-term and uphill task.” He adds, “I’m not sure it can be done.”

Via Mondoweiss, the Jerusalem Post's Shmuel Rosner adds his own criticisms of Traub's piece:

J Street is "bringing highly placed Israeli peaceniks to spread their alternative message in Washington and beyond"? I have no problem with that as long as it tells people the truth about those "highly placed" peaceniks: that they travel to the US mainly because they have no influence and no constituency in Israel.