"The Enemy Within": J Street Summed Up By The Great I. J.

Mention  "I.J." in Australian Jewish communal circles and most people above a certain age will know exactly to whom you're referring: Isi Joseph Leibler, the clever and charismatic individual who, Colossus-like, led the community for a quarter of a century and who, by virtue originally of his groundbreaking and sustained efforts on behalf of trapped Soviet Jewry beginning in the 1960s rose to prominence (and stayed there) on the world Jewish stage.  (I've written more fully about him here.)

Admired and respected rather than universally loved (he suffers neither fools nor "trembling Israelites" gladly), he left a vacuum in the Australian Jewish leadership that has never been adequately filled when he departed for Israel in 1999.  Well-known to a wide readership as a Jerusalem Post columnist, I.J. (or "The Great Man," to give him his other epithet) masterfully sums up in his latest column all that is wrong with J Street:

".... J Street’s leadership ... manipulates history and reality with dangerous rhetoric. Founder and President, Jeremy Ben Ami, refuses to recognize Israel as a “Jewish state” referring to it as a “Jewish democratic home, in the state of Israel”. Co-founder Daniel Levy has described Israel’s creation as “an act that went wrong”. It is noteworthy in this respect that Ben Ami was also proven to be a serial liar when despite his repeated denials to the contrary, the anti-Israeli George Soros was exposed as one of his major contributors

 In contrast to AIPAC whose charter explicitly states that it supports the policies of the Israeli government holding office, J Street actively lobbies the US government to undermine policies that are enacted by Israel’s democratically elected government. It continuously fiercely disparages AIPAC and has gone to the extent of fanning anti-Semitism by warning that AIPAC’s “blind support” for Israel will give rise to hostile feelings that American Jews harbor dual national loyalties ....

 In the past, Labor leaders, including Yitzhak Rabin, considered it unconscionable for Jews living outside Israel to publicly engage in issues impacting on Israeli security from which neither they nor their children would reap the life or death consequences....

With the current unprecedented global escalation of anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism, we must divorce ourselves from the enemy within. There is plenty of room in the Jewish tent for legitimate dissent and freedom of expression. But “pro-Israel” Diaspora Jews, are morally barred from intruding and in particular from lobbying governments to pressure Israel to take actions which impinge on its national security.'

The entire article must be read, to appreciate what sparked it, and his further strictures thereon: see it here