New Jewish Lobby Takes Different Tack in DC

WASHINGTON -- National Security Adviser James Jones gladdened the hearts of this city's newest would-be power lobbying group by saying that "the time has come to relaunch negotiations without preconditions" to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "Nothing is more important" for the United States, he told the group J Street, than to solve the conundrum in the Middle East.

"This is the epicenter and where we should focus our efforts," Jones said as he announced that special envoy George Mitchell will leave this week for another round of talks in the region.

That was just what the new liberal Jewish lobby wanted to hear at its first conference. And while Israel's ambassador didn't show up, Jones told the group, "You can be sure this administration will be represented at all future" gatherings.


That was essentially a vow to give equal time to a group conceived as an alternative to the powerful and right-leaning American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has long held great sway with high-ranking policymakers. AIPAC has a $130 million endowment and nearly 300 staffers. J Street is tiny in comparison and only 18 months old, but its inaugural gathering attracted 1,500 people, half again as many as expected. The overflow crowd jammed meeting rooms at a downtown hotel and forced organizers to repeat a standing-room-only session after dozens were turned away.

The conference marked "the birth of a movement," said Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street's founder and executive director. "This is the coming-out party for the pro-Israel, pro-peace community, [which] stands for the proposition that there is more than one way in this country to be pro-Israel."

The group's founding formalized a longtime struggle within the Jewish community for influence over U.S. policy in the Middle East. On one side are mainstream groups like AIPAC that tilt right and have welcomed support from Christian conservatives and hard-line Republicans. On the other are what J Street calls the "silent majority" of American Jews -- Democrats who voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama last November and who support a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

J Street "fills a vacuum" in the American Israel advocacy community, said Meir Sheetrit, one of several opposition members of Israel's Knesset who attended the conference. He said AIPAC's no-questions-asked support for the current right-leaning government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has turned off younger Jews who are concerned not only about Israel but also about the rights of the Palestinians.

Laura Kaplan, 21, a Tufts University senior from Medford, Mass., said she joined J Street because AIPAC doesn't represent her views. "They support Israel no matter what," she said. "I've been to Israel and seen what's happening on the ground, and [there's] a cognitive dissonance from Jewish values that I've been taught all my life."

The conference also attracted older Jewish anti-war activists who have been uneasy with Israeli policy since the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which many view as Israel's Vietnam.

The group's anti-war bent was clear Monday when several people booed Rabbi Eric Yoffie, head of the Union for Reform Judaism, when he criticized a recent United Nations report that accused the Israeli military of war crimes during its military campaign in Gaza last winter. During a strategy session of 250 college students, leaders decided to drop the "pro-Israel" part of J Street's slogan, saying it could hurt recruiting on campuses, where sympathy for Palestinians runs high.

Ben-Ami, a veteran of the Clinton White House whose grandparents founded Tel Aviv and whose father fought in the militant Zionist Irgun, "managed to create a space where this voice can be expressed," said Ron Kampeas, a correspondent with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. A longtime observer of Jewish communal politics, Kampeas said the Obama White House sees J Street members as its "troops" to help make its case. "The Obama administration more than acknowledges the reality of AIPAC. It works with AIPAC," he said. "But it sees J Street as a way of changing the dialogue, of pushing forward on an accelerated path back to negotiations" between Israel and the Palestinians.

J Street's approach has provoked controversy. Israel's ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, rejected an invitation to speak. Oren said the group's positions -- which include calling Israel's Gaza incursion a "disproportionate" response to Hamas' rocket attacks and opposing sanctions as a first step to curb Iran's nuclear program -- would "impair Israel's interests." The embassy sent two low-level "observers" instead.

Oren's boycott is in keeping with opinion in Israel. An August poll for the Jerusalem Post showed a mere 4 percent of Israelis consider Obama's policies to be pro-Israel, and 51 percent said his administration favored the Palestinians. Many Israelis are suspicious of Obama, who during his short tenure has given a historic speech to the Muslim world in Cairo and visited Turkey but skipped a trip to Jerusalem.

Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, offered advice to Obama during a J Street panel: "You need to go to Israel. Israelis feel, with some justification, that you've spoken to everybody else except them."

Although the White House sent Jones, at least 10 members of Congress backed out amid accusations by conservative bloggers that the conference was little more than an anti-Israel bash session that included Muslim and Palestinian participants. About 150 other lawmakers were expected at a gala dinner tonight to close the conference.

"We shouldn't shy away from controversy," said Rep. Charles Boustany of Louisiana, the grandson of Lebanese immigrants and the only Republican to attend.

Rep. Bob Filner, a California Democrat, said he once lost $250,000 in campaign contributions after voting against a bill supported by AIPAC and knows colleagues who vote the lobby's hawkish way for fear it will use its clout to defeat them at the polls. "The pressure is very intense so people go the easy way, the path of least resistance," said Filner, who is Jewish. "J Street is meant to open another path" of support for Israel.

Sue Swartz, 54, a Bloomington, Ind., writer, hopes J Street also will change attitudes within the Jewish community. "We are very attached to our narrative that our side only wants peace, our side has nothing to blame for. That can't be true about anything in life," she said. "So this is a place where you can hold a morally complex perspective of both loving Israel and being willing to say the status quo is not acceptable."