To be clear, J Street is
to Zionism what Jews for Jesus are to Judaism.
Yom Ha'atzma'ut, Israeli
Independence Day, is a joyous holiday. In Israel, every year, from Eilat to
Metulla, from Tel Aviv to the Jordan Valley, everyone across every spectrum -
secular, religious; rich, poor; left, Right, Ashkenazi, Sephardi - is out
celebrating.
The reconstitution of the
Jewish state, and its growth within three generations from a third world
economic and military basket case into a prosperous and powerful country, is
among the most astounding success story in human history. Certainly it is the
greatest story of Jewish success since Joshua led a nation of former slaves in
conquering and settling the land of Israel some 3,500 years ago.
And today, three generations
after the enslavement and genocide of European Jewry and the expulsion of the
Jews from Islamic lands, the Jewish people in the Land of Israel have built
arguably the most dynamic society in the world.
For the Jews of the Diaspora,
Israel's success should be a source of enduring pride and joy.
Independence Day should be
celebrated by Jews throughout the world. But in recent years, associations of
Israel with joy have become increasingly rare.
As one Jewish student activist
put it, the celebration on his campus was nothing more than "a bunch of kids
eating cake."
And at the same time, he
explained, many students were posting statuses on their Facebook pages talking
about how the day was "bittersweet because of the Nakba."
The situation was all too
similar in campuses throughout North America. Yom Ha'atzma'ut, the celebration
of the greatest act of Jewish will in modern times, was marked with a shrug, and
small clumps of students eating felafel and humous, and cake.
No doubt, part of the problem
is the distance.
It may be that you have to
live in Israel to understand how amazing it is. But then again, thanks to
programs like Birthright, far more young American Jews have visited Israel in
recent years than had visited in previous generations. And previous generations
of American Jews felt far greater joy in Israel's accomplishments than young
American Jews feel today.
Part of the problem is
ignorance. With steadily decreasing levels of Jewish education and religious
affiliation among non-Orthodox Jews in the US, young American Jews don't know
almost anything about their Jewish identity.
They are unfamiliar with their
history. Their religious education - if they had any - generally came to a
grinding halt immediately after their bar mitzvas. And their Zionist education,
such as it may have been, was filtered through the media and then, once they
arrived in college, through the rants of their anti-Israel professors.
And part of it is that they
are intimidated.
Hate groups like Students for
Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace harangue Jewish students for
uttering even the mildest defenses of Israel.
When students are willing to
stand up to these hate groups, they are beset by J Street U members telling them
that there is nothing anti-Israel about being anti-Israel, and that being
anti-Israel really means being pro-Israel.
The ignorant Jews shrug their
shoulders and walk away because Israel is just too much trouble.
Or they stay and become
convinced that they can be pro-Israel by being anti-Israel.
A poll of Israeli Jews
published on Independence Day by Tel Aviv University found that 80 percent are
optimistic about Israel's future, and 85% are optimistic about their own
future.
Eighty percent of Israelis
wouldn't want to live anywhere but Israel.
Israelis are most concerned
about domestic issues. Forty-seven percent are most concerned about the divide
between the wealthy and the poor. Twenty-one percent are most concerned with
skyrocketing housing prices. Only 8.7% think the most urgent challenge is to
make peace with the Palestinians.
For most American Jews, these
Israeli priorities are incomprehensible. Over the past 20 years, and at an
accelerated pace over the past five years, they have been browbeaten by the
mantra that Israel is all but synonymous with the peace process, and that
without it, the Jewish state will be lost.
This mantra, which denies
Israel an existence independent of the Palestinian conflict, was created
immediately after Israel embarked on the peace process with the PLO in 1993. It
was bad enough from the outset. But it has become gravely exacerbated by the
appearance of J Street on the American Jewish scene.
Before J Street, ignorant
American Jews could defend Israel because it is pro-peace. But since J Street
arrived at the scene, the fact that Israel has always sought peace with its
neighbors is increasingly denied and replaced with lies about Israeli
culpability for the pathologies of the Palestinians and the wider Islamic
world.
J Street is an anti-Israel,
pro-Iranian and pro-Palestinian lobby run by American Jews.
Since its founding six years
ago, J Street has lobbied against US sanctions on Iran. It has lobbied for US
support for anti-Israel resolutions in the UN Security Council. It lobbied in
favor of the libelous Goldstone Report and then lied about its actions when they
were exposed.
J Street opposes US strategic
ties with Israel. It opposes efforts to defeat the campaign to delegitimize
Israel. It hosts openly anti-Semitic speakers at its conferences. It raises
money to defeat pro-Israel members of Congress.
J Street supports the BDS
movement. It defends BDS activists against their Jewish victims on US college
campuses. It hosts them at its conferences and cosponsors events with them.
J Street's purpose is twofold.
First, as an anti-Israel lobby that acts in support of the Iranian regime and
Palestinian terrorist organizations, it seeks to diminish to the point of ending
the US's alliance with Israel. To this end, as Richard Baehr noted this week in
Israel Hayom, J Street is working to wrest the Democratic Party away from Israel
and so make supporting Israel a partisan issue in American politics.
Second, as the recently
released documentary on J Street, The J Street Challenge, demonstrates, J Street
strives to make it difficult if not impossible for the American Jewish community
to support Israel in any coherent fashion.
In a speech at the New America
Foundation, J Street executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami explained that the
organization's goal is to destroy the power and influence of the American Jewish
community.
In his words, "I think we're
taking on much more than AIPAC. I think that it is the Conference of Presidents.
It's the American Jewish Committee. It's the lobbying structures of the
Federations. It's the network of JCRCs, the Jewish Community Relations
Councils."
He then employed classical
anti-Semitic imagery to explain the magnitude of the challenge and of the danger
allegedly posed by these groups.
"It's a really multi-layered,
multi-headed hydra. This monopoly, this many-headed monopoly, has been trying to
squash us."
The most effective means that
J Street has employed to date to accomplish its destructive task has been
joining the big communal tents.
In these efforts it has been
most successful on college campuses.
After decades of living with
the perception of Israel as inextricably linked to the "peace process," most
American Jews are extremely supportive of peace between Israel and the
Palestinians.
J Street exploits this popular
position to undermine Israel. Falsely presenting itself as a "pro-Israel,
pro-peace" organization, the anti-Israel lobby has entered into the big tent of
Jewish communal life at campus Hillels to both undermine support for Israel, and
render it all but impossible for Jews on campuses and in larger communities to
voice a coherent Zionist message. They accomplish this by falsely arguing that
strong pro-Israel positions undermine prospects for peace and that Israel itself
undermines peace.
To be clear, J Street is to
Zionism what Jews for Jesus are to Judaism.
Jews for Jesus call themselves
Messianic Jews.
They dress like observant Jews
and prey on the religious ignorance of young American Jews to convince them to
convert to Christianity.
In J Street's case, its
members present themselves as pro-Israel and pro-peace, or simply as pro-peace,
to exploit the ignorance of American Jews and subvert their capacity and
willingness to support Israel.
Last week, J Street's strategy
of penetrating mainstream Jewish organizations hit a brick wall. The Conference
of Presidents, one of the "heads" of the Jewish "hydra" that Ben-Ami declared J
Street seeks to destroy, rejected J Street's application for membership.
Partly due to the strong
support J Street receives from the leftist media in the US, partly due to the
rise of radicals to leadership positions in many major American Jewish
organizations, J Street's application for membership was a cause for concern.
Many activists were convinced that it would be accepted.
So the fact that J Street
failed to muster not only the two-thirds majority necessary to become a member,
it failed to win even a simple majority of the votes, is a major triumph for the
community and a cause for hope that the battle for Zionism in America has been
joined.
And it must be joined, and
won. As far as J Street is concerned, its bid to join the Conference of
Presidents was merely one battle in its war against American Zionism.
Immediately after the votes
were counted, J Street moved to Plan B. It mobilized its supporters in the
Reform and Conservative movements to bludgeon the Conference of Presidents for
daring to reject the membership application of an anti-Israel group whose leader
publicly pledged to destroy the Conference of Presidents.
J Street exists to fight. Its
goal is to destroy.
The tools it employs are
demoralization and deceit. That is why the reticence American Jews feel about
celebrating Yom Ha'atzma'ut is not merely sad. It is dangerous.
Israel is the most
extraordinary collective achievement of the Jewish people in thousands of years.
It is the embodiment of the dreams, faith, blood, sweat and tears of the Jewish
people today and throughout time in both spiritual and physical terms.
Israel is something that every
Jew should celebrate and be thankful not only on Yom Ha'atzma'ut, but every day
of the year.
Israelis know this and that is
why we are so content and optimistic.
It is J Street's purpose to
hide this truth from the American Jewish community. So it is the task of the
American Jews to build on the decision of the Conference of Presidents and
ensure through education, travel to Israel and aliya that J Street goes down in
time as the great failure it deserves to be. Doing so will ensure that next
year, instead of being reduced to the sad spectacle of "a bunch of kids eating
cake," Yom Ha'atzma'ut celebrations worldwide will be the unbridled expressions
of joy that they are in Israel.
Caroline B. Glick is the
author of The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle
East.
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