Israel Matzav

Was the J Street scandal inevitable?

Some interesting thoughts on the J Street scandals from Benjamin Kerstein (Hat Tip: Shmuel Rosner).

The truth is that, however disheartening the scandal may be to those on the Left, it was inevitable. In setting out to form a "counter-lobby" to AIPAC and thus to challenge the American "pro-Israel establishment" from the Left, J Street was forced from the beginning to embrace what was essentially a watered-down version of the "Israel lobby" conspiracy theory: the idea, in other words, that a hawkish cabal of Jews loyal only to Israel has prevented the U.S. government from achieving peace in the Middle East. As such, it was only a matter of time before the organization became involved, intentionally or not, with some rather dubious characters.

Moreover, since its inception the "pro-Israel and pro-peace" J Street has been trapped in a schizophrenic and self-contradictory dilemma of its own making. What does it mean to be "pro-Israel" if not, in practical terms, to support Israel's defensive military actions? And what does it mean to be "pro-peace" if not, again in practical terms, to oppose those same actions? What J Street's current travails expose is just how difficult it has become to be both passionately on the Left and passionately pro-Israel, without eventually being forced to aggrandize the former at the expense of the latter.

And that is where the true significance of the J Street scandal may lie. At the organization's inception, its executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami proudly referred to it as President Obama's "blocking back" in Congress. That is, J Street was to provide the new administration's, and thus the liberal establishment's, first line of defense, both in the political arena and inside the Jewish community, for a historic change in American policy toward the Jewish state. Its job was, and still is, to enable the administration to pressure Israel unilaterally without paying a domestic political price for it.

In this, it must be said, the organization has scored a number of successes. But as the impact of events like the Soros scandal sink in, the underlying and rather sordid hypocrisy of its efforts becomes more and more difficult to conceal. Recently, the organization's adviser and co-founder Daniel Levy asserted with uncommon bluntness that Israel's very founding was "an act that was wrong" and that "there's no reason a Palestinian should think there was justice in the creation of Israel." Such honesty, refreshing in its way, may indicate the extent to which the progressive Jewish minority that helped elect Obama and that gave J Street its raison d'être is, at least on the issue of Israel, in the process of being devoured by its own contradictions.

Kerstein's argument implies - if I'm understanding it correctly - that you can't be on the Left and support Israel. Even I don't buy that. For example, while there is much about which I disagree with Alan Dershowitz, I don't question that he supports the existence of the Jewish state. What's the difference between Dershowitz and J Street? It's a question of priorities. It's a question of how you resolve the inevitable contradictions between being dogmatically on the Left and supporting Israel. If being Left means that you're going to look at Israel's creation as 'an act that was wrong,' because being Left means looking at Israel (and the US for that matter) as "an aggressive, Western imperialist power exploiting indigenous people of color who simply wish to be free," you won't be able to reconcile being Left or Liberal with supporting Israel.

But if your conception of a liberal democracy is open enough to realize that there are situations where a democracy has to restrict the rights of some people to protect the overall body politic, if you aren't so dogmatic as to insist that you can't take actions that trample on the rights of those who attempt to use a democracy to destroy its people, then you can reconcile being Left and Liberal with supporting Israel.

J Street has tunnel vision when it comes to supporting the Left and its positions, and that's why, for J Street, it was inevitable that it would fall into the contradictions between being dogmatically Left and being pro-Israel. But there are many Liberals who don't necessarily feel the same way. That's why there is still majority support for Israel in the US Democratic party, even if that majority is nowhere near as large as it is on the Republican side.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:59 AM