What’s Next for J Street is the title of an interview with Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street’s founder, that appears at The American Prospect. And after reading it one can safely answer the question: what’s next for J Street is the continued dissemination of false information. Says Ben-Ami:
We will have to show that more American Jews actually agree with J Street’s agenda, that our policies are actually the better policy, supported by people in Israel, and that kind of debate I’m more than happy to have.
On its website, J Street advocates for the Arab Peace Initiative, which offers Israel normal diplomatic relations with the Arab world in exchange for withdrawal from the Golan Heights, withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders, and acquiescence to the “right of return” of the millions of descendants of the Arabs who left Israel in the 1948 war. This would demographically destroy Israel as a Jewish state. I risk insulting the intelligence of contentions readers by even bothering to point out that the Arab Peace Initiative has virtually no support whatsoever among Jews in Israel and America. But there it is, on J Street’s website.
Back to Ben-Ami:
We came out and said strongly at the time of the AIPAC conference that an issue like Jerusalem should not be a political football. It’s inappropriate to try to use an issue like that, which is so sensitive and so important, which should be left to the parties to decide, and inject it into American politics to make a political point.
But J Street’s own policy paper on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict explicitly endorses the division of Jerusalem. Ben-Ami is either unaware of the contents of his own website, or is being duplicitous. He continues:
The majority of American Jews agree with the positions of J Street, and it’s a safe bet that we’re going to continue to try to convince candidates that they will actually score political points by articulating a vision more in line with J Street than in line with what has traditionally been assumed to be necessary to say.
As our own Jamie Kirchick noted in his New Republic piece on J Street, this, too, simply is not true. As Jamie wrote,
According to the same AJC survey cited by J Street supporters, nearly three-quarters of American Jews do not believe that Israel can “achieve peace with a Hamas-led, Palestinian government,” as J Street’s founder advocates. What’s more, 55 percent believe that negotiations between Olmert and Abbas “cannot lead to peace in the foreseeable future.” And a whopping 82 percent agree with the following statement: “The goal of the Arabs is not the return of occupied territories but rather the destruction of Israel.”
Finally, J Street has jumped on board the crazy train with a group of fanatics — M.J. Rosenberg, NIAC, Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan, etc. — who insist that a non-binding House resolution calling for stronger sanctions on Iran actually demands a naval blockade. J Street is so dedicated to propagating this lie that it has created an online petition to enlist the signatures of its members.
J Street will continue to be an object of ridicule so long as the group insists on trying to maintain such a laughably unconvincing disparity between its actual agenda, and what it claims about its agenda.