The J Street conference and Israel

In February 2020, US Sen. Bernie Sanders – then one of the leading Democratic presidential candidates – tweeted that he would not be attending the upcoming AIPAC conference because “I remain concerned about the platform AIPAC provides for leaders who express bigotry.”

Though Sanders never specified which leaders he was referring to, odds were that Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu – whom he labeled in a presidential debate a “reactionary racist” – was one of them.

Another leading Democratic contender at the time, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, also decided not to attend the conference, though she did not couch her absence in such moralistic terms.

That two leading presidential candidates decided to skip a conference that for long was viewed as a must for any presidential candidate created waves. But it shouldn’t have: the two candidates were pandering during the primary season to their progressive base, which saw then – and continues to see today – AIPAC as the ultimate bogeyman.

Sanders’s reasons for not attending came to mind this week as he was one of a bevy of Democrats who addressed the left-wing J Street’s annual conference, held virtually this year.

One of the headline speakers there was Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, a man who has over the years made comments about Jews that even Sanders must recognize were at least as “bigoted” as Netanyahu’s infamous comment on Election Day 2015 about Arabs going to the polls “in droves.”

For instance, in 2018 Abbas said that the Holocaust was the result not of antisemitism but of the behavior of Jews. Two years earlier, soon after Sanders’s snub of AIPAC, Abbas said, “Certain rabbis in Israel have said very clearly to their government that our water should be poisoned in order to have Palestinians killed.”

And In 2015, he opined: “Al-Aqsa [Mosque] is ours, and they [the Jews] have no right to defile it with their filthy feet.” And on and on.

Despite those comments, Sanders had no qualms about taking part in a conference that gave Abbas a platform.

And what did Abbas do with this platform, speaking to a Jewish audience? Did he use it to make an impassioned appeal to peace with Israel, as Netanyahu or any Israeli prime minister would have likely done had he been invited to address a dovish Palestinian lobbying group in Washington?

No, Abbas called on J Street to lobby on the Palestinians behalf in Washington to rescind the 1987 US determination that the Palestinian Liberation Organization is a terrorist group, to pave the way for closer US-Palestinian ties. And he hinted ever so broadly that he may alter the PA’s “pay for slay” policy toward terrorists sitting in Israeli jails. Hinted, but made no promises.

THREE THINGS were striking about this week’s J Street conference.

The first was its complete lack of diversity. No Republicans or anyone on the Israeli political scene to the Right of Labor leader Merav Michaeli addressed the virtual attendees.

J Street’s meeting was the converted talking to the converted about issues all the converted agree upon: the two-state solution is the answer, and Israel’s policies – especially the settlements – are the problem. And, by the way, the Iran nuclear deal is good.

Secondly, the confab showcased the degree to which this organization’s fortunes are completely dependent on who sits in the White House.

After four years in the shadows with no influence on policy while Donald Trump was president, J Street has now reemerged into the daylight, and with this conference was projecting itself as a lobbying group with access and influence – a no-brainer since there is a Democratic president and administration.

While AIPAC impacts policy and works with both sides of the aisle and both Republican and Democratic administrations, J Street – as the Trump years showed – is not a significant player when the Republicans are in power. And when there is a Democratic administration, more than impacting policy, J Street acts as a tool to legitimize administration policies that the democratically elected government of Israel deems harmful.

The Obama administration honed this use of J Street into an art. How could one criticize president Barack

Obama on the Iran deal or for publicly quarreling with Israel over the Palestinian issue and settlements, when those policies were supported and trumpeted by the Jewish “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobby in Washington?

And the third telling aspect of the virtual confab was the degree to which few people seemed to be paying attention in Israel.

Even though the conference featured some big hitters – Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, along with Sanders, Warren and a number of other senators and representatives – it was hardly covered in the Hebrew-language media in Israel.

Had AIPAC not canceled its annual policy conference this year, it is safe to assume that – as usual – the goingson at the conference, even a virtual one, would have generated more of a buzz in the Hebrew media.

The J Street conference did not. And that shows two things. First, while the organization likes to think of itself as having an impact on American policy, in Israel few are paying attention – or seem to care – what the group thinks or has to say.

And the second thing this lack of attention reveals is a certain Israeli shortsightedness. Agree or disagree with J Street, it is an organization that does reflect the mainstream view of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party on Israel – not the mainstream of the Democratic Party, but the mainstream progressive view.

And if what is being discussed at this conference is restricting aid to Israel, something both Sanders and Warren came out in favor of, it is incumbent on Israel to take note. Not because this is the view of US President Joe Biden or the mainstream of the party, but because it could – if left unchallenged – gain traction and become the view of the party.

J Street, with its predictable talking points and focus on a two-state solution, should not be dismissed as a one-trick pony with little impact. The organization both shapes progressive thinking and policy on Israel and provides a peephole into this thinking and strategy. And while the progressive wing has not yet taken over the Democratic Party, Israel should be monitoring and paying close attention to what is going on inside that camp, in the eventuality that someday it will.