J-Street, a leftwing Jewish American group dedicated to the long defunct two-state solution, on Sunday launched a campaign to push Democratic presidential candidates to condition aid to Israel on the Jewish State’s compliance with said solution.
“The vast majority of Democratic voters believe that the US should support Israel’s security, promote a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and oppose the Israeli government’s policies of occupation and creeping annexation,” J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami stated on the group’s website, adding, “That approach is good policy and smart politics — which is why the Democrats should firmly commit to it in their party platform.”
But according to a JTA report Monday, Ben-Ami is hell-bent on pushing DNC candidates to condition the aid package signed by Israel and the Obama administration in 2016 on Israeli compliance. Sort of a quid pro quo, but with Democrats.
“Our aid is not intended to be a blank check,” Jeremy Ben-Ami, the group’s president, said Sunday evening, at the group’s annual conference. Speaking before he introduced Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn), Ben-Ami announced J-Street intends to push her and other Democratic party to include in its platform a demand that Israel end the occupation of Judea and Samaria.
Back in 2016, candidate Hillary Clinton and the DNC leadership overpowered Bernie Sanders’ representatives on the platform drafting committee at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, James Zogby and Cornel West, who denounced Israel’s occupation of the liberated territories and said they would try to get their views incorporated into the platform — the party’s statement of its core beliefs.
Now, with the help of J Street, as well as the radical rogue group IfNotNow, what used to be the marginal voices inside the DNC are attempting to capture the center.
As a core part of the campaign, “J Street U” students will hold meetings and events on college campuses nationwide to highlight “how the ongoing occupation of the West Bank tramples on Palestinians rights, imperils the prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace and runs counter to American interests and democratic values.”
“J Street and J Street U activists will organize with College Democrat leaders, key Democratic Party stakeholders and progressive movement allies to build a broad base of support for this effort in advance of the Democratic National Convention in July 2020,” the group’s website states.
God bless Senator Klobuchar, a good friend of Israel and of AIPAC and a distinctly sane voice in a state and a party being overrun by the crazed left – she told her hosts it was “not a good idea to negotiate these things” in public, and declared she would oppose aid cuts, especially in light of President Trump’s unpredictable Middle East policy, which is why, she indicated, “I am so wedded right now to make sure we are actually continuing the aid.”