The J Street Challenge - The Seductive Allure of Peace in our Time
Here's a trailer for a new movie that I know you're all going to want to watch. It's all about the 'pro-Israel, pro-peace' J Street, and the challenge they represent to the Jewish community. I have a few friends who are in this trailer.
A couple of people have asked me about the mention of the New Israel Fund in a cable that was exposed this week by Wikileaks. While I discussed the cable here, I focused mainly on 'Peace Now' being 95% foreign funded, and on the steep drop in membership of the ACRI (Israel's ACLU) reported by the New Israel Fund, both of which speak to the disappearance of the political Left in Israel. What I did not focus on, which has raised a lot of eyebrows, was this statement in the paragraph discussing the New Israel Fund.
New Israel Fund (NIF) Associate Director in Israel Hedva Radovanitz, who manages grants to 350 NGOs totaling about 18 million dollars per year, told PolOff on February 23 that the campaign against the NGOs was due to the "disappearance of the political left wing" in Israel and the lack of domestic constituency for the NGOs.... She commented that she believed that in 100 years Israel would be majority Arab and that the disappearance of a Jewish state would not be the tragedy that Israelis fear since it would become more democratic.
As you might imagine, that statement has set a few people off. This is Noah Pollack writing in Commentary:
The reasoning behind NIF’s multi-million dollar donations to Arab groups such as Adalah and Mada al-Carmel that seek the destruction of Israel as a Jewish State suddenly becomes clear: In the words of a high-ranking NIF official, the group believes Zionism itself — that is, Jewish national self-determination — is anti-democratic and should eventually yield to an Arab state where Jews will once again live as a minority. It seems the “New Israel” envisioned by NIF will not be a Jewish state. Has NIF made this clear to its American Jewish donors?
During the past decade, as the New Israel Fund and European governments have funded and fueled the delegitimization war on Israel, critics have argued the NGOs they support have no real constituency in Israel; that they represent foreign interests; that they are funded — all told, the sum is around $100 million per year — almost entirely by foreign foundations and European governments seeking to impose their agendas; that they seek to overturn the democratic choices of the Israeli people; that they foment external pressure and “lawfare” to prevent Israel from protecting herself from threats; and that the groups’ activism is motivated not by the claimed values of human rights and international law, but by varying degrees of anti-Zionism and solidarity with Arab interests and leftist anti-Israel activism.
At every turn, the NGOs have angrily denied these charges and smeared those who made them as being (take your pick) anti-peace, anti-human rights, anti-democracy, or extremist right-wingers attempting to silence dissent.
It is a remarkable moment in this battle to see the NGOs admit in private the same things they slander their critics for saying about them in public.
Even Jeffrey Goldberg, who generally supports the NIF, was uncomfortable with this one.
The NIF has responded by claiming that Radovanitz's views do not reflect theirs, and that in any event she is no longer with NIF and that she departed over 'ideological differences.' They even got Radovanitz to issue a statement making the same claim. Sorry, but that's lame. It is not credible for an organization that is so ideologically based to claim that they had not vetted the ideological views of someone who (in the words of the Wikileaks cable) "manages grants to 350 NGOs totaling about 18 million dollars per year." They may have had ideological disagreements with Radovanitz, but if that was the case, how was she ever placed in charge of all those grants and all that money? And for how long?
I try not to link to Mondoweiss. Frankly, I think they're scummy kapo Jews and I don't want to send them the traffic. But they've personally attacked my friend Noah Pollak, the Executive Director of the Emergency Committee for Israel, and frankly, enough is enough.
What bothers Mondoweiss is two tweets that Noah wrote on Thursday night when the Vittorio Arrigoni story broke. I have reproduced them below.
That's mild compared to some of the stuff I have posted on this blog about Arrigoni. Mondo refers to what Noah has written as 'disgusting venom.' Well, no it's not.
To anyone who is concerned about the future of Israel and the Jewish people, the ISM is an organization that is a Westernized Hamas or Hezbullah. They are no better. They may even be worse.
Arrigoni himself was a virulent anti-Semite. Why should any of us weep at his death? Especially when his death happened at the hands of the 'Palestinians' themselves proving that he - and by extension the ISM - were and are nothing but useful idiots.
Now, I'm getting slammed in the comments (and for the most part I have let them through) for calling Arrigoni a useful idiot. Many of those comments are coming from Italians from Arrigoni's hometown (I discovered on Saturday night that one of the commenters is actually a city councilor in his hometown), who are discovering that it's okay to call Jews 'Christ killers' again (I deleted that comment, but yes, I got one like that). But for those of you who are not totally blind, please look at the definition of 'useful idiot' and if you think I'm wrong, tell me why.
In political jargon, the term useful idiot was used to describe Soviet sympathizers in Western countries. The implication is that though the person in question naïvely thinks themselves an ally of the Soviets or other ideologies, they are actually held in contempt by them, and were being cynically used. The term is now used more broadly to describe someone who is perceived to be manipulated by a political movement, terrorist group, hostile government, or business, whether or not the group is Communist in nature.
Anyone think that Arrigoni doesn't fit the definition of a useful idiot? For that matter, does anyone think that Mondoweiss doesn't fit the definition of a useful idiot?
Noah Pollak's head is screwed on as well as anyone I know. He got it right. Mondoweiss - as usual - got it wrong.
In an earlier post, I reported that Dennis Ross, President Obama's senior adviser on the Middle East, would be speaking at J Street's weekend conference this weekend. The Emergency Committee for Israel has sent a letter to Ross, which essentially says, "I don't understand why you're giving them credibility by doing this, but if you're going to do this, please stay true to your own and America's values."
You have devoted your career to helping Israel find peace with her neighbors. In high-level positions in administrations of both parties, you have been a leading presence in the peace process for over two decades. Because you possess such a detailed knowledge of the conflict and the attempts to resolve it, you are capable of distinguishing between truth and falsehood, helpful criticism and destructive activism.
It is thus with some surprise that I learned you would be speaking at this year’s J Street conference. Speaking, that is, before a group that has worked diligently over the past three years to become a voice for weakening the U.S.-Israel alliance, for pressuring Israel to accept policies that Israeli voters have rejected as dangerous, and perhaps most important, for giving Jewish support to a global campaign of delegitimization directed against Israel and Zionism.
J Street has spent much of the last two years opposing sanctions on Iran while demanding that Israel refuse to consider military self-defense; it has partnered with leaders of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement; its inability to draw distinctions between Hamas and the IDF during the Gaza War was so striking that the president of the Union for Reform Judaism called the group “morally deficient” and “appallingly naïve.” And, more recently, the group was exposed as having dissembled for years about its sources of funding (much of it foreign) and about its support for the Goldstone Report. Rep. Gary Ackerman recently ended his relationship with the group in exasperation, writing that J Street is “so open-minded about what constitutes support for Israel that its brains have fallen out.”
The conference at which you will be speaking is titled “Giving Voice to Our Values.” J Street’s values are most clearly articulated by the speakers it has selected for its conference. These include:
I had to click through three different links to get to the full article, but it was worth it. Ultimately, the Hat Tip goes to Noah Pollak via Twitter.
David Frum nails what's troubling about Palileaks. Ultimately, what matters is not whether the documents are true or not, nor who leaked them, but the reaction of the 'Palestinian people' and the 'Palestinian leadership' and what those reactions tell us about the non-existent possibility of finding peace between Israel and the 'Palestinians.'
The Palestinian leaks show the Palestinian Authority leadership trying to work their way to the answer that "everybody knows."
But the secrecy surrounding the documents -- and the reaction to the leak -- confirms the Israelis' worst fear: The Palestinian population does not, in fact, "know" what "everybody knows." And a Palestinian leadership that did "know" what "everybody knows" is now being reviled by its own population as traitors and sell-outs.
What, after all, are the big, shameful concessions contained in the documents? Where are the wounds to Palestinian national pride?
• The documents as reported demand Palestinian sovereignty over almost all of historic Jerusalem, including the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism.
• The documents demand Palestinian control of lands equal in territory to the 1967 lands. Any border adjustment to reflect Israeli settlement activity would have to be balanced by an equivalent surrender of Israeli land to the new Palestinian state.
• Even after the Palestinians get their state on the other side of the 1967 line, the documents demand some kind of recognition of a Palestinian right to "return" to the Israeli side of the line. At one point, the documents suggest that the Israelis be required to resettle 100,000 Palestinians inside Israel.
If these ideas had been accepted as the basis of a final treaty between Israel and Palestine, every Middle East expert in Washington would have agreed that the Palestinians had done very, very, very well for themselves.
And yet, it never happened. It did not happen in very large part for exactly the reason now confessed by angry Palestinians themselves: because the actual demands of the Palestinian population are so much greater than any diplomat can gain.
Nothing else matters about these leaks except what the reaction to them shows about the 'Palestinians': They are not now and may never be ready for peace. When Blake Hounshell tweeted on Sunday, "I think today may be remembered as the day the two-state solution died," he was right, but not because of what the Palileaks documents show about the 'Palestinian' negotiation positions. Rather, the 'two-state solution' may now be officially dead because it has now been shown that it cannot possibly happen.
But wait - I knew that before and so did most of you. In fact, so did anyone who has had their eyes open for the last 20 years. And so, deep down, without their admitting it outside their own homes, do the 'Palestinians.' So why does the conflict continue? Why don't the 'Palestinians' just cut the best deal they can and be done with it? Frum nails that too.
The conflict is not being ended because the outside world supports and subsidizes the conflict. Palestinians who have lived in Lebanon since 1949 are not Lebanese. Ditto Palestinians who have lived in Syria or Jordan. They receive international aid on the condition that they remain refugees forever. They command attention only to the extent that they do not relinquish their grievances. Everywhere else on the planet, the world community insists that wars must end. This one war is the war that the international community pays to continue.
And when -- at long last! -- some Palestinian leaders take the tentative steps toward peace on more realistic terms, they must do so in desperate secret. They know what would happen if the deal ever emerged into view. They'd lose their public. As has happened.
When people say that the Middle East peace process is all process, no peace, here is why: because it is only so long that the process reaches no result that the people in charge of the process on the Palestinian side can remain in charge.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
