J Street avoids talking sense in order to preserve its politics - opinion

The sight of hundreds of thousands of Hamas supporters marching in Washington, cheering genocidal violence and calling for the destruction of Israel, was disturbing.

But for J Street, it was nothing less than a nightmare. J Street is the controversial Washington, DC-based Jewish pressure group that was created in 2007 specifically, and almost exclusively, to lobby for an independent Palestinian state. 

It has been maintained by J Street, as a central theme of its lobbying and propaganda, that Israeli Jews do not have a right to live wherever they choose and must be transferred out of their homes and neighborhoods in almost all areas of Judea and Samaria. Remember this is where Israeli citizens have lived for over well over 50 years, since the Six Day War.

For years, J Street – and the like-minded groups that preceded it (Breira, New Jewish Agenda, Americans for Peace Now) – have been advising Palestinian Arab spokesmen to tone down their rhetoric. Not necessarily to give up their beliefs, mind you; just to be more careful about what they say in public.

The Jewish Left understands that it’s impossible to convince the Israeli public to accept a Palestinian state so long as the Arabs openly threaten to “throw the Jews into the sea.”

That’s why the phrase “two-state solution” was invented. The Jewish Left’s theory was that if Palestinian Arab spokesmen would just say that they want only a piece of Israel – just a state next door – then it might be possible to win over at least some Israelis and Diaspora friends of Israel.

The coaching worked. Little by little, English-speaking PLO officials, and their cheerleaders in the US, began mouthing the requisite lines. That’s what made it possible for the State Department and the media to paint Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas as the moderates, and portray Israel as the obstacle to peace. And that’s what made it possible to get the Israeli public to go along with the Oslo Accords.

Hamas and its supporters have wrecked J Street's delicate party line

BUT NOW Hamas and its supporters have upset the apple cart.

Instead of massacring “settlers” – whom J Street can easily demonize with the help of its media friends – Hamas decided to massacre Jewish peace activists at a dance festival, disabled children in their wheelchairs, and babies in their cribs.

Instead of marching to the White House with carefully choreographed signs calling for a two-state solution, Hamas mobs in Washington waved signs honestly and openly calling for the annihilation of the Jewish state.

Instead of keeping up the pretense that they will live in peace with the Jews, Hamas chose to rape Jewish women and decapitate Jewish infants, and their American supporters chose to cheer them on.

In other words, the most prominent forces on the Palestinian Arab scene, and the most prominent supporters of the Palestinian cause, have gone completely off script. They’re doing and saying what they really think, and throwing J Street’s friendly advice out the window.

If the elected leaders of Gaza had just hidden their true feelings for a few more years, Palestinian statehood advocates might have achieved their goal. Instead, J Street’s dream of creating Palestine has turned into J Street’s nightmare of not being able to convince anybody that establishing a Palestinian state would be a safe risk for Israel to take.

In the strained rhetoric of J Street’s press releases about the pogrom, one can see J Street leaders desperately trying to shield the Palestinian cause, even as they go through the motions of condemning Hamas. 

On October 7, 9, and 11, J Street issued press releases expressing horror at Hamas’s actions – yet they did not once refer to Hamas as Palestinian. Reminding the public that this is a Palestinian-Arab war against the Jews undermines the cause of Palestinian statehood.

By October 13, J Street’s press releases pivoted their focus to the welfare of the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza, and that is where J Street’s attention has remained fixed. If this were 1943, would their main concern be the welfare of the German masses, rather than the Nazis’ victims? Perhaps. Or perhaps they would have said they were equally concerned about both sides.

J Street has issued 13 more press releases since October 13, almost all of them about Gaza. Some have pressed Israel to pause its actions against Hamas. Others have warned against cracking down too strongly on campus antisemitism.

During those same weeks, there have been major revelations about the October 7 pogromists sexually assaulting, torturing, and beheading their victims. Not one J Street press release has ever specifically mentioned these atrocities. 

Instead, they speak about the attack in generalities, never acknowledging the details. Why? Probably for the same reason J Street won’t call Hamas “Palestinian” – telling the full truth undermines their goal of creating a Palestinian state along Israel’s old nine-miles-wide borders.

Every marcher in Washington who chanted that all of Israel, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, is “occupied Palestine”; every sign that applauded the rapists and murderers from Gaza; every protester who candidly told a reporter that their goal is not two states, but one state of “Palestine” – was a slap in J Street’s face and a reminder of the true essence of the Arab war against Israel.

The writer is a commentator on Jewish affairs whose writings appear regularly in the American and Israeli press.