The J Street conference kicks off here in D.C. tomorrow night. I’ve come down from New York to cover it and I’ll be joined by four more New Voices contributors by the time the whole shebang kicks off.
There’s a great piece in Tablet today in anticipation of the J Street conference about Breira, a short-lived 1970s lefty group made up largely of students, Hillel leaders and chavurah-types. (Which is a pretty similar constituency to the folks who founded the Jewish Student Press Service, which now published New Voices, a few years earlier. The article is chock-full of people who were involved with JSPS back in the day.) It was founded as an alternative to the American pro-Israel establishment of the time. The piece examines how and why Breira failed and how and why J Street has been more successful at doing a similar thing.
One of the major critiques of Breira at the time was that it wasn’t just a home for pro-Israel lefties, that it also included an openly anti-Israel contingent as well. In the article, Rabbi Michael Paley, a student at Brandeis when Breira was formed, says, Breira included “many haters of Israel.” Then he says, “I get that J Street has people that hate Israel in it, too. That’s a problem.”
This certainly isn’t the first time I’ve encountered this charge, but this time something new occurred to me. Obviously, Paley is right; all is not well in an organization devoted to a two-state solution to the region’s troubles when it has members that are fundamentally opposed to its goal of a two-state solution. However, there’s a difference between hating a state and hating a people. Not to go for the rhetorically nuclear option here, but it was surely possible to hate the Nazi state without hating the German people. For an example a little closer to our time, look at Iran: It’s easy for some these days to hate the Iranian state, but that doesn’t mean they hate the Iranian people.
So yes, there are some “Israel-haters” within J Street’s ranks, but my sense from last year’s conference is that they’re an insignificant minority. And even so, they don’t make up the national leadership of the organization and they certainly don’t set policy for J Street. They’ve simply found the only part of the American Jewish establishment that won’t kick them out on their asses if they’re found out.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the American pro-Israel establishment….
You wouldn’t have a hard time flushing out some prominent Palestine-haters. (OK so a national entity called Palestine doesn’t exist, but I mean people who hate the idea of it.) And you wouldn’t have to look far for some people who actually hate the Palestinian people. (Quite a feat for the significant portion of them that also believe there’s no such thing as a Palestinian.) We often hear from them about how Islam is a religion of violence and how backward Arabs are as a people.
But I have yet to hear anything approaching that kind of hatred for Israelis from any on the pro-Israel left, regardless of their feelings about the State of Israel.
