"J Street," the new alternative to the Aipac lobby, says that it "represents Americans, primarily but not exclusively Jewish…." The gentile outreach is significant. As I noted a couple of months back, the Israel Policy Forum is also reaching out to gentiles, having named a gentile to its board for the first time.
The importance of this trend is that it reflects an understanding by progressive Jews that they need non-Jews to help them out on a Jewish issue, and that they must trust them. Jews used to present a united front. Now progressives understand that that method hasn’t worked out so well, they need the help/values/engagement of the wider community. Similarly, Ambassador Kurtzer calls on the next president to have a diverse negotiating team re Israel/Palestine–not just Jews.
Which gentiles will J Street get? Well, AIPAC is also reaching out to gentiles: Christian evangelists. Which says to me that J Street is going to end up with liberal Protestants, Jimmy Carter types. A lot of these gentiles will have read Walt and Mearsheimer, whose last chapter, as I recall, was "A New Israel Lobby?" This is going to be fun!
My headline is not ironic. This moment recalls assimilationist motions in Central Europe in the 1700s and 1800s when Jews, so inward-looking over the ages, began to open their minds and language and books to gentiles. The first to do so were scorned, still the trend continued. This time the outreach is aimed at sharing policymaking. And as such it reminds me of Michael Walzer’s pained admission about Jewish self-governance at the Center for Jewish History a year or so back:
"It may be that the talents honed by exile don’t fit the circumstances of statehood." Jews were trained in the circumstances of "kehal" or their own legal/religious community. "We governed only ourselves, as best we could… Sometimes [we were] semi-autonomous… responsible only for ourselves. In the state of Israel, we have accepted responsibility for other people. That is something we have never had in all the years of exile, and we have not done terribly well."
We haven’t done that well here as lobbyists either. Now that the issue is breaking out of the ghetto, maybe the U.S. will get a real debate.
Related posts:
- Prominent gentiles must get over their hangups and start criticizing Israel
- My New Year’s Parties Expose Mingling of Affluent Gentiles and Jews
- ‘Nosey in New York’ Seeks More Cases of Establishment Gentiles Who Converted to Judaism
- Ethnocentrism, Inc: Jewish leader in ‘Forward’ calls for beheading ‘J Street’’s Ben-Ami for noble Gaza stand
- ‘J Street’ finds a wedge issue, AIPAC loses influence
{ 5 comments }
What Gentiles will J Street collect? I'd say some really gullible ones. J Street is just a shell game, since the issue is still about what's best for Israel and Jews.
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"Ambassador Kurtzer calls on the next president to have a diverse negotiating team re Israel/Palestine–not just Jews."
WHOA — big double-take on that one! Here's what Kurtzer said in the linked article at the globalist CFR:
"If the next president decides to invest in an envoy, then I would hope that envoy can bring together an experienced team with diverse backgrounds. And what I mean about that is people who know a great deal about the Middle East—about the Arab world, about the Muslim world, about Israel, about the issues that are out there—so that you don’t have any kind of perception of tilt in the level of expertise and experience."
Agreed, reading between the lines, "diverse" presumably means "not just Jews" (as in the counterexample discussed in the interview, of Kissinger as a one-man show). But I knew Kurtzer wouldn't wave his hand and admit, "Nobody here but us Jews!" ;-)
The Lobby's reaching out to gentiles reminds me of South Africa's outnumbered whites trying to increase their majority by giving coloureds and Asians their own parliaments in the 1980s. The halfway measure didn't hold, because they were still refusing to recognize the interests of the black majority.
In other words, it's the Palestinians and Arabs that the Lobby needs to reach out to. THEY are the other interested party in Israel/Palestine, not American gentiles. Trying to recruit sympathetic gentiles doesn't change the Lobby's underlying zionist apartheid goals. It's the groups with both Jewish and Arab members (many of which have been mentioned in this blog) that represent a peaceful future.
From a Washingtonian perspective (i.e., George's Farewell Address), the U.S. interest would be best served by withdrawing from the region. But I have yet to EVER hear any pro-Israel advocate discuss, or even imagine, a future in which Israel finally weans itself from Uncle Sam's sugar tit.
Publicly renounce the $3 billion annual tribute — take the stinging mosquito proboscis out of our damned vein — and plenty of gentiles be yellin' "Hallelujah" and dancin' in the street.
Go Jim.
Whether it is AIPAC on the "right" and J Street on "left" in the U.S. or Benjamin Netanyahu and Shimon Peres in Israel, they all sit at the same table and cut the same deals. All are pro-Israel, none are pro-peace.
hmm, I see Phil has started selectively deleting my comments. Fascist is as fascist does.
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