Israel Matzav

J Street behind Ramat Shlomo crisis?

Remember the Ramat Shlomo crisis in March? Remember how we kept thinking that the blow up over the announcement of a routine approval of a housing project in Jerusalem while Vice President Biden was in Israel was over, and yet it kept coming up over and over again, each time with a greater vengeance? Lenny Ben David digs into the White House records and discovers some awfully suspicious hands that may have been behind it. You guessed it. J Street.

So what happened?

A fire that was supposedly extinguished flared up again and again.

Clearly, while Biden and Netanyahu were making up, in the White House a decision was made to apply Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s famous strategy for crisis management:

You never want a serious crisis to go to waste, and what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you didn’t think you could do before.

The 1,600 Jerusalem apartments would become the anvil on which the administration would forge a pliant Israel. The message would have to be amplified, and for the White House, the pro-Obama, purportedly pro-Israel J Street was a perfect vehicle.

According to newly released White House visitors logs, J Street’s president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, and vice president of policy and strategy, Hadar Susskind, came to the White House to meet with officials in the White House Office of Public Engagement, headed by Obama’s close friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett.

On March 11, and then again on March 12, the logs show Ben-Ami set a meeting for March 15 in the Old Executive Office Building with Danielle Borrin, who served on the vice president’s staff and in Jarrett’s office. On March 17, another meeting was set in the West Wing, the White House’s inner sanctum, for the next day with Tina Tchen, Jarrett’s principle deputy and director of the White House Office of Public Engagement.

(See below: Tchen plays a key role in the liaison between the White House and J Street and the Arab lobby.)

On March 15, the day it met with Borrin, J Street issued a statement on the “escalation of U.S.-Israel tensions” warning that Israel’s “provocative actions undermine the peace process” and weaken the American attempts “to build a broad international coalition to address the Iranian nuclear program.” Parroting Emanuel’s strategy for crisis management, the J Street memo declared:

Bold American leadership is needed now to turn this crisis into a real opportunity to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The memo, in effect, called for an imposed American solution:

We urge the United States to take this opportunity to suggest parameters to the parties for resuming negotiations — basing borders on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed land swaps, with the Palestinian state demilitarized and on territory equivalent to 100% of the area encompassed by the pre-1967 Armistice lines.

On March 16, J Street sent out an action alert to its members, warning:

Some hawkish pro-Israel activists are seizing the opportunity to attack the Obama Administration over Israel, urging the Administration to slow down and back off. The pro-Israel, pro-peace movement is stepping up strong … urging the Administration to turn this crisis into an opportunity for progress on two states.

Four days after meeting with Tchen, J Street published an advertisement in the New York Times to push for White House activism:

It’s time for the Obama administration to seize the opportunity for bold leadership — putting concrete plans for a two-state solution on the table with the sustained commitment of the United States behind them. It’s time for the Palestinians to end incitement to violence. It’s time for Israel to stop allowing extremist settlers and their sympathizers to endanger not only the friendship of the United States, but also the very future of Israel.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:23 PM