The spiritual leaders of two large southern Conservative Jewish congregations have abruptly abandoned their separate plans to visit the West Bank and make a special stopover at the grave of Yasir Arafat along with other points of Palestinian interest.
The turnabout followed a hue and cry over a visit critics said would have amounted to an act of homage to a calculating and cold-blooded murderer of Jews while providing a measure of legitimacy to the Palestinian narrative.
For their part, the two rabbis claimed the trip was envisioned as an important educational experience. One of them said,
I wholeheartedly believed I was helping to provide a rare opportunity for seasoned Israel travelers to learn about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a broader, deeper way…. I hoped participants would gain new insights and hear from peacemakers working on the ground to make a difference. I thought, perhaps naively…. that this…tour would offer a different kind of experience for Zionist, Israel-loving Jews who want to explore the many intricacies of this terrible conflict.
The other was described by one of his friends as having “sought to develop an itinerary, with Israeli partners, exploring a wide range of perspectives.”
Both were said to have been totally unprepared for the level of opposition that erupted.
There is an important lesson to be learned from this episode. We should never despair in pursuing what we believe is right. The two rabbis are powerful personalities in their communities. As religious leaders they usually command special deference, especially when it comes to Israel. Yet, as it turned out, they were forced to do a total about-face when confronted with unambiguous, principled, and common sense opposition.
And there is another dimension to what transpired here. The conflict calls to mind the now familiar differences between AIPAC and J Street that have emerged over the past few years. For AIPAC, support for Israel is fundamentally one-dimensional – that is, support for the policies of the elected government of Israel, with little or no public displays of independence.
On the other hand, J Street asserts the right to lecture to Israel on what it believes to be in Israel’s best interests. Thus, contrary to AIPAC – and the Israeli government – J Street publicly opposes retention by Israel of land seized in the Six-Day War, maintaining that there is legitimacy to Palestinian claims and that Israel’s settlement policies makes it a pariah in the Middle East and internationally. (At the very least, the two rabbis mentioned above would not summarily dismiss Palestinian land claims.)
A perfect illustration of the J Street mindset can be glimpsed in something then-candidate Barack Obama said during the 2008 presidential campaign when he asserted that the elected Likud government of Israel should not be the final arbiter of what’s in Israel’s best interests, even in terms of its own security:
I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt a [sic] unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you’re anti-Israel, and that can’t be the measure of our friendship with Israel. If we cannot have an honest dialogue about how we achieve those goals, then we’re not going to make progress….
Indeed, Mr. Obama’s comments were a straightforward presentation of the line J Street has been pushing since its founding. And while the president may have advocated the J Street approach, the right kind of pushback, as we have seen, can bring results. To put it another way: If you see something, say something.