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http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/israeli-committee-debates-whether-us-jewish-group-is-pro-israel/2011/03/23/ABQKpoKB_story.html
Israeli committee debates whether U.S. Jewish group is pro-Israel
By Janine Zacharia, Wednesday, March 23, 6:22 PM
JERUSALEM — Israeli lawmakers held a highly unusual hearing
Wednesday to decide whether J Street, a Washington-based Jewish
advocacy group that bills itself as “pro-Israel, pro-peace,” ought
to be declared anti-Israel.
The group’s founder, Jeremy Ben-Ami, flew in to attend the
two-hour session, which frequently deteriorated into a verbal
brawl among members over what it means to be “pro-Israel” and who
has a right to speak on Israel’s behalf, particularly abroad. It
also revived a decades-old debate about what role, if any, Jews
living outside the country should have in Israeli policymaking.
The hearing, convened by Danny Danon, the Likud party chairman of
the Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs parliamentary
committee, came at a time when right-wing Israeli politicians have
accused human rights and advocacy groups in Israel of feeding an
international campaign to portray the country’s conduct toward the
Palestinians as villainous.
Some lawmakers have pushed for Israel’s parliament, the Knesset,
to investigate the foreign funding of such organizations. The move
against J Street, some observers here said, appeared to be an
extension of the effort to combat perceived attacks on Israel from
within its own ranks.
J Street, which was founded three years ago, says it has 170,000
members in the U.S. Jewish community, many of whom, organizers
say, want an outlet for their support of Israel without feeling
required to be in lock step with every government decision.
The new model is considered treasonous by those in Israel who
think the American Jewish community’s role should be to back the
Israeli government’s decision.
“J Street is not a Zionist organization. It cannot be pro-Israel,”
lawmaker Otniel Schneller, a member of the centrist Kadima party,
said at the hearing, asserting that the group’s love of Israel
“has strings attached.”
Rabbi Michael Melchior, a former minister in charge of relations
with Jews abroad, disagreed. “It’s not love conditioned on
anything,” he said. “It is most important to enter a dialogue with
people who care about Israel, not to boycott them.”
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has declined to meet with J
Street representatives or take part in the group’s conferences.
The most recent one, in February, drew 2,500 people.
The group — whose name is a nod to Washington’s lobbyist
headquarters, K Street — has in particular pressed President Obama
to push more aggressively for a peace deal between Israel and the
Palestinians.
Israeli lawmakers at the hearing who came out against the group
were especially critical of its opposition to Obama’s veto of a
U.N. resolution this year condemning settlements.
J Street’s position prompted Rep. Gary L. Ackerman (D-N.Y.) to
publicly dissociate himself from it. He called the group’s stance
the “befuddled choice of an organization so open-minded about what
constitutes support for Israel that its brains have fallen out.”
Ben-Ami told the committee that J Street thought the veto ran
contrary to long-standing U.S. policy on settlements and undercut
U.S. credibility. The United States has long stated its position
that Jewish settlements in the West Bank are illegitimate and an
obstacle to peace.
Questions were asked about J Street’s funders and its policy on
Iran sanctions — critics said it opposed sanctions, but Ben-Ami
said it lobbied in favor of them — and the group was accused of
giving money to congressional candidates who lawmakers said were
anti-Israel.
Ben-Ami sought to assuage the committee’s concerns and warned “of
the grave risk that Israel faces in thinking that only those who
hold certain political views can be your friends.”
“This country is too small, our people too few and the dangers too
great for us to let political differences sever the bonds between
Jews living here and abroad,” he said. “Now is not the time to
push away your friends and family, even if we criticize one policy
or another.”
Danon said he would call for a committee vote in a week or two to
have J Street labeled a pro-Palestinian rather than a pro-Israeli
group, a move Ben-Ami said in an interview could undermine the
group’s efforts in the United States.
“We’re fighting a very, very difficult battle to be able to have
the space at the table in the American Jewish community, to be
allowed into synagogues, Hillels, federations, to speak,” he said.
“And if the government of Israel, through the Knesset, has some
kind of a resolution that says, ‘No, J Street is not pro-Israel,’
the doors will be shut.”
zachar...@washpost.com
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