Despite initially facing resistance from the Hillel of Greater Philadelphia, student members of J Street at the University of Pennsylvania were able to host an event at Penn’s Hillel featuring Breaking the Silence, a group of Israeli Defense Force army veterans who speak out against Israeli military policy.
Thursday’s event drew about 60 people and there were no protests according to Akiva Sanders, a junior and co-president of J Street UPenn.
Shapiro, who noted that many Penn Hillel students would like to live in Israel after graduation, said that it was, “important for people to understand all the different details of the situation in Israel and the situation produced by the policies of a government that we give a lot of money to and we also support.”
J Street began planning to have a speaker from Breaking the Silence come to campus in October but was soon notified that Hillel of Greater Philadelphia would not allow the event to be held in the Hillel building. In January, J Street created a petition to support the event, which was signed by 27 Penn Hillel student leaders.
Sanders said the petition made the point that, “people across the Jewish community amongst my generation really want to have a kind of conversation that is supportive of Israel, loving toward Israel, but is thoughtful and can deal with the realities of the situation.”
Jewish professionals are known to play musical chairs and switch from one organization to another. It’s mostly institutional inside baseball, but some moves are more interesting than others.
Take the switch by Alan Elsner, who until recently was a top official at The Israel Project, a centrist organization devoted to the defense of Israel’s public image. Elsner has moved to the dovish lobby J Street, a group that challenges the notion that American Jews cannot be critical of the Israeli government and its actions.
Elsner, a veteran journalist and author, has been named J Street’s vice president for communications. He told the Forward that the move, which may seem like a sharp political shift, is a “comfortable ideological fit” for him.
“I believe that the way to improve Israel’s image is through reaching a two-state solution,” he said, adding that highlighting the “nice things” about Israel while ignoring the conflict will not get pro-Israel advocates closer to that goal.
Emergency Committee for Israel board member Bill Kristol told an Upper West Side audience last night that President Obama has “moved back to the center” on Israel.
The statement, one of a number of kind words Kristol had for Obama, came just two months after ECI released a video calling the president’s Israel policy “dangerous.”
“Barack Obama promised to be an unwavering friend and defender of Israel,” the ECI said. “It is deeply unfortunate and dangerous that he has failed to keep this promise.”
Kristol, the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard and a board member of a number of right-wing advocacy groups, including the hawkish Emergency Committee for Israel, praised the president during a debate with Jeremy Ben-Ami, the executive director of the dovish pro-Israel group J Street. Forward editor Jane Eisner moderated the discussion.
Kristol’s group ECI is known for its bombastic criticism of the president. The group raised $700,000 during its 2011 fiscal year, and has spent heavily on high-profile newspaper and billboard advertisements condemning Obama’s Israel policy.
But Kristol repeatedly praised the president during the Upper West Side debate.
“I am happy to agree with Obama to a considerable degree,” Kristol said, according to Chemi Shalev in Haaretz.
Liberal Jews have taken turns over the past few weeks whacking at the Emergency Committee for Israel’s advertisement alleging anti-Semitism at the Occupy Wall Street protests. Eliot Spitzer called the ad “despicable” on Slate; Richard Cohen called it “reprehensible” in his Washington Post column; and J Street said it “slandered” Occupy Wall Street.
A new wave of condemnations arrived in reporters’ inboxes yesterday with a press release headlined “Jewish Leaders Denounce Right-Wing Smears of Occupy Wall Street.” The release, signed by 15 prominent Jewish liberals, amounted to a renewed attack on ECI:
“It’s an old, discredited tactic: find a couple of unrepresentative people in a large movement and then conflate the oddity with the cause…One particularly vile example was a television ad…paid for by something called the Emergency Committee for Israel.”
As we get closer to September 20 and the opening of the UN’s General Assembly, all the various voices of the American Jewish universe are beginning to state their opinion about whether the Palestinian push for UN recognition is a wise or foolish step. We’ve actually got an editorial, stating our own position, which will be on line shortly.
For the most part, there are few surprises. Most mainstream (read: center-right) Jewish organizations oppose the move. But I couldn’t really guess what card J Street was going to play. Well, according to a JTA report, they’ve also decided to take a stand against the Palestinian Authority and its September gamble. “We believe that everything J Street stands for and what we do needs to promote the two-state solution and not just two states,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the group’s director.
What they will not do, however, is support the efforts gaining steam to cut off funding to the Palestinian Authority as a result. Here’s Ben-Ami again: “What the Palestinians are doing is legal, even if we don’t agree with it, and we believe it is against Israel strategic interests and U.S. interests to cut funding to the Palestinians.”
This seems sensible. J Street does stand for negotiations, and so, despite their more sympathetic approach to the Palestinian side of the conflict, it would not be consistent for them to support unilateralism. The group wasn’t around in 2005, but I have a feeling that they might have also opposed the way that Ariel Sharon pulled out of Gaza without any attempt at negotiation.
On the other hand, they have the good sense to see what other American Jewish groups are apparently failing to see, that defunding the P.A. would be disastrous for everyone involved — Americans, Palestinians, and, yes, Israelis. It would probably undo Mohamed Abbas’s leadership and create further frustration and despair among the Palestinians. What would follow, we can’t know for sure, but it’s safe to assume it would not be good.
It is polling season in the Jewish world and after Gallup’s poll and the controversial Dick Morris and the just as controversial McLaughlin and Caddell surveys it is now J Street’s turn to weigh in.
The group released yesterday its own national survey of American Jews which reinforces the main findings of the Gallup poll — that Barack Obama still enjoys significant support among American Jews.
According to J Street’s poll, conducted by pollster Jim Gerstein, Obama has a 60% approval rating among Jews, a number consistent with previous polling done by the group. When faced off against potential Republican candidates Mitt Romney or Michelle Bachmann, Obama easily wins a large majority of Jewish votes.
The survey also dispelled claims that Jewish donors are turning away from Obama and the Democrats because of the president’s rocky relations with the Israeli government. A huge majority of those who made political contributions to Obama’s campaign in 2008 intend to do so again, just as a similar majority of Jews who gave money to John McCain in ’08 will contribute to the Republican candidate in this election cycle.
But not all is rosy for Obama with Jewish voters. The poll found that a majority of American Jews (56%) disapprove of Obama’s handling of the Arab–Israeli conflict. But despite this number, still a large majority of the American Jewish community, based on this poll, will vote Obama in 2012. According to Gerstein, this finding proves what Jewish Democrats have been saying all along — Israel is not a deciding factor for American Jewish voters.
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