J Street, the Moderate Antidote to AIPAC, Weathers Another Cheap Attack from the Jewish Right Wing

I recently heard a Jewish congressman explain how the U.S. Congress deals with Israel. Few non-Jewish legislators pay much attention to Israel, he said. When an issue relating to Israel comes up, they turn to their Jewish colleagues for advice. Until recent years, Jewish lawmakers merely parroted the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) line. Now they’re likely to say, "Well, AIPAC says this, but J Street says that. You decide."

This shift in the political climate has the Jewish right -- people who support Israel’s policies, right or wrong -- running scared. The more they see their power slipping away, the fiercer they lash out. They’ve saved their strongest attacks for J Street because it’s the most prominent “pro-Israel, pro-peace” group in the U.S.

From its inception two and a half years ago, J Street was well aware it was bucking a powerful climate of intimidation created by fear-mongers on the right -- those who were determined to prevent any deviation from their supposedly “pro-Israel” script. Since the Six Day War of 1967, the slightest suggestion of a legitimate difference of opinion has provoked torrents of verbal fire and brimstone poured down on the offender’s head. (I’ve seen letters to the editor calling me an “anti-semite” and a “self-hating Jew” more times than I care to remember.)

For most of the years since ‘67, fear of the right-wing attack machine evoked a deafening silence from uncounted numbers of American Jews of good conscience. They knew that Israel’s policies violated norms of Jewish ethics as well as international law and common sense. Yet they knew the consequences of speaking out.

I’ve heard rabbis tell me they believed Israel was in the wrong, but they couldn’t say so publicly lest they tear their congregations apart (and, they didn’t need to add, risk their livelihoods). The McCarthyite regime did its job all too well.

In the past few years, though, that tragic lock-down by the thought police has begun to ease significantly; some would say dramatically. Opinions that were once strictly taboo in the Jewish public arena can now be heard in open discussion, even in some synagogues. Old Jewish peace groups have expanded and new ones have sprung up. None have grown as fast as J Street, which now claims over 160,000 supporters and 34 local groups across the country, with half a dozen or more new ones in the works.

Now, with the Obama administration pushing Israel ever-so-gently to make compromises, the right-wingers are more desperate than ever to push back by quashing free debate. “Rather than argue the merits of continuing settlement expansion, entrenching occupation on the West Bank, or a ‘one-state future’ [all of which J Street opposes], we can understand why right-wing pro-Israel media and activists would prefer to stay in the gutter … trying to shift the conversation,” J Street explains.

It would be more accurate to say that the conservatives are mounting their attack from the gutter because J Street and other groups are trying to shift the conversation, with considerable success. It’s not just a matter of opening up debate on specific policy issues. More importantly, J Street says, it’s challenging the right’s power to define the terms of the discourse. It aims to "redefine and expand the very concept of being pro-Israel. No longer will this pro- require an anti-." Now being pro-Israel will mean “respect for ‘the other,’ a tolerance for dissent.” That approach shatters the very foundation of the old-fashioned way of being “pro-Israel,” with its narrow-minded focus on searching for and destroying some enemy.