Philip Weiss presents a J Street roundup: "Key reflections about liberal Zionism's most significant annual policy conference."

Philip Weiss is an American journalist who founded and co-edits Mondoweiss.

Mondoweiss is "a news website devoted to covering American foreign policy in the Middle East, chiefly from a progressive Jewish perspective," with journalist Adam Horowitz.

Weiss describes himself as an anti-Zionist and rejects the label "post-Zionist."

End U.S. Support for Israeli Apartheid? Session 2

Dale Sprusansky:  Thanks so much. As Grant [F. Smith] mentioned, J Street wrapped up its conference this week, so we thought it was fitting to begin today’s event with a reflection on that event. For that, we are very pleased and lucky to be joined by Philip Weiss who is co-editor of Mondoweiss, a news website devoted to covering American foreign policy in the Middle East, chiefly from a progressive Jewish perspective. Phil watched most or maybe all of the J Street conference and will now take a few moments, about 15 to 20 minutes, to give us his thoughts on the event and what it means for the current status of liberal Zionism. So, Phil, we're happy to have you and the platform is all yours.

Philip Weiss:  Right. Thanks very much, Dale. And thanks to the conference for having me. It’s a wonderful conference. I enjoyed last weekend and that’s a hard act to follow, Susie Abulhawa, and Ian Williams, and Brian Baird among others, and John Dugard too, very impressive. 

So my job today, I think I'm going to talk about a split within the Israel lobby between the right-center AIPAC and the left-center, which is J Street. I am going to sort of lay out what is significant about this split within the Jewish community. That is really where I’m coming from here. I’m Jewish and I’m very interested in Jewish politics in the United States because I think they are so important in shaping foreign policy. 

Obviously I think, you know, some of that is the elephant in the room. It reminds me of the old joke about nine blind people with an elephant trying to figure out what an elephant is. I think some of that mystification and confusion exists around the Israel lobby and foreign policy. Even in our communities, you’ll have certain analysis of, “is it a military-industrial complex, imperialism that’s driving our policy in the Middle East, is it settler colonialism, is it geopolitical strategy versus China and Russia, and then what is the role of the Israel lobby?”

That [the lobby] is really my focus—it’s fairly narrow, on the tail of the elephant here. That is not the evangelical Christian lobby, which is a significant part of the Israel lobby, but the Jewish part and Jewish politics. J Street now represents that kind of left-wing of the Israel lobby. They are, as Grant pointed out, strongly supportive of American support to Israel. They want to maintain a Jewish state in the Middle East. They want a two-state solution to preserve that Jewish state and they are going to lobby Congress to do so.

I think that they have been fairly successful in establishing themselves as an access organization. That’s ultimately what a lobby is, it cares about access, it wants to get access in Washington. J Street, over the last 13 years of its existence, has had a pretty smooth and strong flight path toward greater and greater influence, to the point that it can claim that most of the Democratic majority in Congress was endorsed by J Street, and the White House, the occupants of the White House, [Joe] Biden and [Kamala] Harris, were also endorsed by J Street.

So that type of endorsement success and presumably donors, because money is at the heart of the Israel lobby, that should equate to a certain amount of access and influence on J Street’s part. I think the jury is still out on that, how much influence it has, but it is gaining influence. The question is what are its goals and will it be able to maintain those goals in the face of strong headwinds from the left, including events like this conference, which focus on apartheid?

I thought that it was kind of interesting that at the J Street conference there was even a certain nostalgia for the Trump era. They had a whole video about all these things that had happened under Trump and all the things we did to mobilize against Trump. Personally, I saw enough of that guy when he was in the White House. I don't want to see him again. It's painful to watch that kind of stuff. But it speaks to the fact that when Trump was in the White House, J Street could say, “We’re unified on the left. We're trying to get Trump out. Let's all pull together on this goal. We’re a social justice organization and we’re involved with the progressive left and in the sort of more moderate elements of the foreign policy community that we just want to get Trump out.” 

J Street was able to say, “Hey, everything you want to do in Israel, get rid of [Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu, we’re just trying to do that in the United States. We’re trying to get rid of our Netanyahu, Donald Trump.” Now that Donald Trump is gone, it sort of pulls the rug out from under their messaging, the J Street messaging, in that the left is now saying, “yeah, you got rid of Trump but there is a lot more work to be done in this country.” J Street says, “yeah, but you haven't gotten rid of your Trump in Israel. In fact, your Trump in Israel seems to be even more cemented in power than ever.” 

Whether it’s Netanyahu or the right, Israel is an overwhelmingly right-wing country. The latest elections just go to show that; close to 80 out of 120 members of the Knesset, two-thirds of the Knesset, is right-wing Jewish [parties]. There had been four elections in Israel [in the past two years]. You haven't changed that at all, J Street, that country is right-wing. 

Increasingly, elements of the progressive left in the United States and the think tank foreign policy community, that "blob" in Washington, increasingly they are getting impatient I think with—well, certainly the left is really impatient with Israel. Elements of the foreign policy establishment is as well.  Zaha Hassan will talk to you later about a really important paper from Carnegie about this, where the foreign policy establishment is saying, “We don't care about a two-state solution, we don't care about a Jewish state even, we just want rights for Palestinians.”  

So I think that J Street is under pressure from the left and it's under pressure from the right. I want to describe those two pressures and where they end up and what I think will develop from that. So I’m talking about a sort of fracture within the Jewish community and within the Israel lobby itself. 

The pressure from the left is, as I’ve just described, is from progressives in this country who are expecting a lot more of our country in social justice issues and of course in Israel and Palestine where there’s apartheid.  This is a community that largely supports BDS (Boycotts, Divestment, Sanctions), active non-violent measures to pressure Israel to change, that supports the International Criminal Court investigation—that potential prosecution of Israel and Palestine that began in February. And that supports these findings of apartheid issued by B’Tselem that Grant mentioned. 

These are all things that the left emphasizes that J Street can’t talk about. It can’t talk about the International Criminal Court. It can't talk about apartheid. The only references to apartheid during the whole conference were from Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, and also Breaking the Silence, an Israeli organization. But J Street itself just talked about deepening occupation and creeping annexation. That’s its way of describing the apartheid process. It can’t go there. It has to sort of cut the left-wing discussion out, it’s too threatening to a core value of J Street, which is support for a Jewish state. 

The BDS campaign, the International Criminal Court prosecution, and the apartheid discourse—all of these elements potentially threaten, or I think do threaten, the existence of a Jewish state, because there is a clear understanding that Israel’s character as a Jewish state is preventing it from granting anything like equal status to Palestinians. In fact, it’s a horrifying situation as was made clear two nights ago by this mob marching through Jerusalem saying “death to Arabs.”  A Jewish mob of Jewish supremacists, an openly Jewish supremacist organization walking and marching into East Jerusalem attacking Palestinian houses calling for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. That faction is now in the Israeli Knesset. It had previously been banned from the Knesset and now it’s part of the Israeli Knesset, in this Religious Zionist Party, which won six seats in the March election. So J Street faces this pressure from the left to say something about this, and it’s not able to really say something about that. It talks about just deepening occupation.   

Now, at its conference, and I don’t know if Grant can cue this video, J Street did have a number of videos of extremely disturbing events on the West Bank. One of them is this video you’re about to see from Jaloud, near Nablus, where you see these settlers coming down and throwing rocks at this Palestinian farmer. I mean, it’s just a horrifying video. I have to turn away. I have seen this a couple of times, it’s so upsetting. The thing that is most upsetting about this is that nothing is happening. Nothing is happening to stop this. Israel has complete impunity on this behavior. 

J Street, to its credit, aired this video and others at its conference. Michael Sfard, a wonderful human rights attorney, aired these videos. When the left sees this and when I think dispassionate foreign policy observers see this video, what they see is apartheid. This is plainly apartheid. In as much as the soldiers are on the settlers’ side, this is an occupied territory. And yet J Street is unable to contend with this.

On the other side, J Street arose in opposition to the center-right Israel lobby. J Street does represent a very important break inside the Jewish community. And I think this is something that I don’t want to diminish. The Jewish politics of this is very important. The Jewish foreign policy community and the lobby supported the Iraq war in 2003 and faced a lot of political heat for that subsequently. J Street has arisen against that strain in the foreign policy establishment that has the United States acting on behalf of Israel. J Street has taken some strong stands against that sort of trend, notably in its support for the Iran deal, which has been fantastic. 

I don’t know that we would have had an Iran deal in 2015, I don't know that the momentum would exist now to restore the Iran deal were it not for a portion of the liberal Zionist community, J Street and Americans for Peace Now, saying, “yes, get back into the Iran deal.” So J Street, out of principle, has taken on the right-wing Jewish pro-Israel lobby on very important issues like the Iran deal. 

Even this week, J Street marked its independence by supporting Betty McCollum’s historic legislation—the Minnesota congresswoman in St. Paul, I used to live in her district—that would prohibit U.S. aid going to house demolitions and detaining Palestinian children. This is a historic moment in advancing pro-Palestinian legislation and J Street signed on it. It’s a wonderful thing that they signed on. Lots of civil society organizations across the United States signed on, on the left and the center. It’s great that they all signed on. 

But within Jewish politics, J Street signed on to this bill that AIPAC, the right-wing lobby, hates. But it has only gotten 15 sponsors in the House. AIPAC meanwhile has gotten 330 congresspeople to say, “never limit U.S. aid to Israel, we must keep the aid flowing.” So in this respect, I think J Street has taken a very important stance and should be celebrated for it. It’s threatening its own access game by doing so. It alienates itself from the center-Israel lobby. Ultimately, J Street is in an access game. It’s trying to get access to foreign policy leaders. It’s doing so through the old chemistry of joining up with other powerful Jewish organizations and using donor money. Just what Brian Baird talked about last week. And it has split the lobby on this question of unfettered military aid to Israel. It said, no, there have to be some limits.

At the same time though, the left discussion is outpacing J Street. So it’s balanced between trying to stay an access organization and trying to stay in good odor with the centrist Israel lobby and with the Jewish community. By doing so, it says explicitly, “we don't want anything to do with the Phil Weiss’ of the Jewish community.” Jeremy Ben-Ami, the head of J Street, said this directly to me: “You’re an anti-Zionist, we don't want you in our community.” Okay. They get to define their community how they like.  

But the left I think is turning increasingly towards anti-Zionism. That’s because that video you just saw is a manifestation ultimately of Zionism. The great thing about this conference is that you’re going to hear this type of analysis from me, parochial me inside the leftwing Jewish community. You’ll hear it from foreign policy realists. You’ll hear it from an anti-settler colonial leftwing internationalist understanding. So this is a very broad understanding that Zionism is the problem and that the ideology of Jewish nationalism is what produced that video you just saw, that Jewish nationalism has not worked out. It has just created more and more ethnic cleansing and what I think will be more and more apartheid findings. 

That is ultimately the pressure on J Street. I think that it will ultimately, I don’t know how soon, but these things—as we've seen with the racial injustice demonstrations in the United States and other political movements from the left for same sex marriage in the United States—these things happen very swiftly when they happen. J Street is aware of that and is trying to position itself carefully. But I think ultimately the thought I would conclude with is that J Street is more vulnerable to the left than it is to the right because the left is developing and the left-center and the non-Jewish progressive movement is developing a strong impatience with Zionism and a clear understanding that Zionism is the problem.

So thank you, Dale. If there are any questions, I’m happy to take them. I hope I didn't go over my time limit. I really don't want to wear out my welcome here.

Questions and Answers 

Dale Sprusansky:  Thank you so much, that was great. It kind of really helped me digest what I watched earlier this week. I want to go back to something you said about the jury still being out on how influential they really are. Like you said, you watched this conference and there is a range of views. Basically, as long as you’re not “the Squad” on the left, or [Rep.] Ted Deutch on the right (the liberal right), you’re allowed to speak at the conference, and that results in a range of views. 

You mentioned that the McCollum bill, while endorsed by J Street, only has 15 co-sponsors. And a lot of J Street [conference] speakers in Congress actually signed a recent AIPAC letter against conditioning aid to Israel. So how do you see J Street's ability these days to actually kind of move ideas and policy in Congress?

Philip Weiss:  Well, I mean just the big picture I’d point out is that 10 years ago to their credit—I mean not credit on principle but just in terms of power politics which, Dale, you're questioning. To their credit, they were an outsider organization 10, 12 years ago. Many in the Jewish community used hideous, you know, Nazi—you’re like helping the Nazis—they castigated and ostracized J Street. I’m not even talking about me, the anti-Zionist Jewish community has been ostracized clearly. 

But J Street at that time had trouble getting arrested in Washington, and now [Rep.] Nancy Pelosi and [Sen.] Chuck Schumer are speaking at their conference. So they have managed to get inside. Now part of that is Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi know that the left is where all the action is now in the Democratic Party. The base is very progressive and wants a lot of social justice reforms. So they think J Street is one place they can get that.

Nonetheless, it is as you say, a balancing act and it’s full of controversy. It’s like other politics. Any political conference that has 4,000 people or however many, they’re going to have a lot of contradictions. But I think ultimately the central contradiction is going to be between—and hopefully this will play out in the Congress.  I think Zaha Hassan will address this, the degree to which the Democratic base is ahead, is way out in front of our politics. 

So you have people at J Street saying again and again, “we're for a Jewish state.” The left is not talking about that. And I think that, yes, the Democratic Party is reflecting, is even to the right of J Street, but—wow, I rambled.  I don't know if that answers your question. I think that it’s very fluid and there are a lot of contradictions.

Dale Sprusansky: Great. Maybe now we can go to Julia. I see some questions pouring in here out of the corner of my eye.

Julia Pitner: Yeah, there are quite a few.

Julia Pitner: One of the questions is regarding the J Street conference and Peter Beinart’s appearance there. So how does he relate to J Street now? He’s moved a bit left of them. How was he received when he was there?

Philip Weiss: It’s a great question. This is again part of J Street's balancing act. Peter Beinart is this very respected Jewish intellectual who has not been ostracized from the Jewish community and who has come out in the last year for one state in Israel and Palestine. He’s accepted the reality that Israel’s never going to disgorge these occupied territories, so let’s have one democratic state. Everyone has equal rights. How hard is that to figure out?

He has not come out for BDS. He’s not come out against Zionism as such. I mean, there are certain ways that he has not satisfied the leftwing demands, pressure on him. I think he’s done wonderful work in terms of moving the Jewish community and moving the discussion generally. So, he was at J Street. The funny thing about Peter Beinart being at J Street is they didn’t ask him about—he was there to discuss anti-Semitism, a different subject. They weren’t putting him on a platform to say, “hey, Peter, why are you for one state?”

Similarly, Michael Sfard is really a human rights attorney. He described Israel as an apartheid state in the last few months. They had Michael Sfard on, but Michael talked about deepening occupation.

I felt J Street was being very careful about taking these leftwing figures who have real standing on the left, and justifiably. They spent some political capital to support human rights and human freedom, all that the left, all that any of us really in a democracy want to stand for. [J Street] took these figures who are pro-democratic and sort of had them discuss subjects a little off their area. So, I think J Street is made extremely uncomfortable by the democracy discourse. Again, that’s all we’re talking about is, “hey, can you have a democracy?”  You have 12 million people there under your control. Half of them can’t vote, another third of them are whatever, 20 percent are second-class citizens. [Israel says], “let’s have a democracy on an ethnic basis.” That’s why they’re calling it apartheid.

Julia Pitner: Another question is then does J Street at all deal with the three specific BDS demands? Do they even acknowledge those three separate demands? Or do they just vilify BDS the way that other Zionist organizations do?

Philip Weiss:  J Street vilifies BDS. We need to be very clear about that. J Street has supported legislation that went through that describes BDS as containing elements of anti-Semitism. So, essentially, BDS is anti-Semitic. Well, [they say] you have the right to support BDS. they also say the free speech thing. So, J Street has vilified BDS.

I think that if you were to ask J Street about the three specific demands, they would say that, “yes, we’re against the occupation. We would support boycott. We don’t actually have a campaign on these grounds. But we would support boycott aimed only at the occupied territories.” As if somehow the occupied territories are distinct from Israel now after 53 years with nearly 700,000 Israeli Jews living there and being part and parcel of the Israeli state.

So, [J Street would say], “We don’t mind your plank, BDS, with respect to the occupied territories. Your plank about equal rights for Palestinians inside Israel—well, Israel is a democracy, and these people vote. And yeah, we’re against the nation-state law and other things that derogate Palestinian citizenship, but we wouldn’t boycott Israel on that basis. And as to the right of return, we want a right of return to the Palestinian state under the two-state solution. All these refugees can come back to this small portion of the land that would go to a Palestinian state. We don’t want them coming back to Israel, per se.”

So, I think they’re very much against the right of return of refugees. And even their imagined right that they give refugees to return to a Palestinian state, well, it’s been 73 years or whatever since the U.N. voted to partition and create a Palestinian state. There’s never been a Palestinian state in 75 years, and there is not going to be one in another 75. I don’t know where these refugees are supposed to go.

Julia Pitner: Great.  I mean it’s a tough question. Another question here is wondering what has been the effect of the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement on J Street’s perception of apartheid, or if anything, affecting J Street?

Philip Weiss:  It’s a great question. It’s a beautiful question. I mean I think it’s fantastic. Again, I think Zaha can speak to this a little bit because the Carnegie report that she’s involved with, some of the discussion addresses that very issue, that structural racism in the United States, any focus on that is just speeding and enabling a discussion of the racism that we are supporting in Israel and Palestine.

So I think it’s had a very beneficial effect. And obviously, there are elements of the Movement for Black Lives that created a lot of these protests. There’s an element of that organization that is very strongly supportive of Palestinian rights, and it has been part of the platform of the Movement for Black Lives. I think they've waffled a little on their Palestinian support. But clearly, I mean someone like Marc Lamont Hill, a great leader in that movement, has embraced Palestinian rights nobly and has lost his job at CNN over it. I think that has played a very big part in all of this.

I think that’s something that terrifies J Street. J Street is aligned with the Jewish social justice tradition, which is firmly on the side of Black Lives Matter, and on the side of scrutiny of civil rights and racism in the United States. J Street is right in the head of that parade and it’s afraid it’s about to go to Israel and Palestine, which it will.

Julia Pitner: So, how effective is J Street going to be in navigating this smaller and smaller space between the left and the right when they’re dealing with Congress or their membership?

Philip Weiss: You know, everything I predict is always wrong. So, I want to say that they won’t be successful. So, that means that they will be successful. I think that’s the correct—anyway, no, I guess, I’d say that J Street has been very nimble and effective at getting as far as they have. They want access. They want to play the power game in Washington. They’ve done pretty good. I think they have really done pretty good. They’ve sold out principles that I care about in doing so, but they’ve gotten what they wanted, more and more access.

So, while I want to believe that they’re going to be crushed between the right and the left, and the left is ultimately going to overwhelm them and they’re going to have to come out against the Jewish state, I’m afraid that they’re going to be around for a while, and that they will exercise a considerable influence. I mean the great thing is that they’re supporting the Iran deal. So, there’s a great incremental role that they play and I look forward to their playing that role.

The problem is, again, that they are going to be just as bad as Netanyahu on certain things, which is the right of Jews to have a nation in a land that was populated by non-Jews. And that’s one where at their conference, I should have emphasized this, Isaac Herzog, a left-wing leader in Israel, expresses the most right-wing ideas—and that’s Zionism. And J Street is a Zionist organization. So, this crisis in Zionism that I want to create, that people on the left want to create, I think J Street is going to be able to dance around that for as long as possible. Given that they are at the forefront of changing the Congress right now, supporting legislation only 15 congresspeople support, they are still looking pretty good on the left. I hope that answers that question.

Julia Pitner: I have one more question if we have time.

Grant F. Smith: One more.

Julia Pitner: So, this goes to kind of looking at some of the racism that’s part of that Zionist ideology and wondering, you know, at J Street did anybody discuss the inequity of the vaccine rollouts in Israel versus Palestinian territories? Because all we hear about is how great Israel is doing with that, but not really hearing or reading anything about what’s happening in the Palestinian territories or with the Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Philip Weiss: Julia, I’m sorry. I told Dale that I had sat through the entire J Street conference, which is true. All last weekend, I was sitting here doing my hard work, the many stations of the progress of J Street. I didn’t hear that one. I did not hear that as a concern. I think they’ve made good statements on that issue actually, so I don’t want to castigate them in an unfair way. But I didn’t hear any talk about that.

I did, as I say, hear a lot of references to the Jewish state and the importance of the Jews having self-determination in their own land. Just to conclude, these are statements that Netanyahu makes. You heard speakers at J Street saying, finally, historically, Jews have the sovereign right to determine our own faith in our own land. And left-wingers in Israel will say this, quote-unquote left-wingers, because that is Zionism. That’s the ultimate dilemma, I think, to repeat myself, ad nauseam.

Grant F. Smith: Excellent, excellent. So, thank you very much, Phil. If you haven’t seen this great post by Philip Weiss, “J Street’s Magical Thinking,” you really need to check that out.