AIPAC-Lite: J Street to be the New US Jewish Lobby

[Hei Hu Quan]

The spotlight must be getting too hot on AIPAC, so they move into the background and up steps a kinder, gentler Zionist Apartheid pressure-group.

Link: US Jewish Lobby Gains New Voice

Story:
US Jewish Lobby Gains New Voice

By Max Deveson
BBC News, Washington

Are liberal Jewish voices in America being drowned out by powerful conservative lobbyists? A group of prominent left-leaning Jewish-Americans thinks so.

They have launched a new lobbying organisation, called J Street, which they hope will redress this perceived imbalance.

"The term 'pro-Israel' has been hijacked by those who hold views that a majority of Americans, Jews and non-Jews alike, oppose," says executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton.

He says J Street will campaign for a two-state solution to the conflict in the Middle East.

Its political fundraising sister group - J Street PAC, for political action committee - will raise money and donate to sympathetic politicians.

Furious debate

The group is billing itself as a counterweight to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), the most prominent Jewish lobbying organisation in the US.

J Street says Aipac does not reflect the liberal views of a large number of its existing donors, let alone the mainstream of Jewish-American opinion.

The role of the pro-Israeli lobby - and of Aipac itself - in American politics has been the subject of furious debate in recent years.

   
The most pro-Israel thing any American politician or policy maker can do is help to bring about a two-state solution and a comprehensive peace agreement between Israel and her neighbours

Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street

In 2006, academics Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago caused a storm when they published an article arguing that groups like Aipac had pushed US foreign policy in a pro-Israeli direction often against America's national interests.

Critics of the two academics countered that the pro-Israeli lobby should be allowed to make its case to government just like any other interest group, and that characterisations of Jewish lobbyists as "well-funded" and "powerful" were liable to play into the hands of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists.

The team behind J Street do not necessarily buy into the Walt-Mearsheimer analysis, but they do believe that America's current policy tilts too strongly towards Israeli right-wingers, and is in the long-term interests neither of Israel nor the US.

"The most pro-Israel thing any American politician or policy maker can do is help to bring about a two-state solution and a comprehensive peace agreement between Israel and her neighbours," says Mr Ben-Ami.

No threat

Although Aipac have not publicly commented on J Street's launch, they are - perhaps unsurprisingly - not thought to be particularly supportive of the new group's aims.

Nor are they concerned that they will lose their pre-eminent position within the Jewish-American community.

"I believe that Aipac has very broad support and will continue to enjoy it," Malcolm Hoenlein of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, of which Aipac is a member, told the Washington Post newspaper.

Financially, J Street is certainly unlikely to pose a threat to Aipac.

Its first-year budget of $1.5m (