J Street - Relationship With Israel

Relationship With Israel

On October 22, 2009, Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni sent a letter congratulating J Street on its inaugural event. She said she would not be able to attend but that Kadima would be "well-represented" by Meir Sheetrit, Shlomo Molla, and Haim Ramon.

The Israeli Embassy stated that Ambassador Michael Oren would not attend J Street's first national conference because J Street supports positions that may "impair" Israel's interest. Oren has continued his criticism since the conference, telling Conservative rabbis meeting in Philadelphia that J Street "is a unique problem in that it not only opposes one policy of one Israeli government, it opposes all policies of all Israeli governments. It’s significantly out of the mainstream." In April 2010, Oren had a meeting with J Street Executive Director Jeremy Ben-Ami to discuss the issues.

Hannah Rosenthal, head of the Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism in the Obama Administration, criticized Oren, saying his comments were "most unfortunate". After several American Jewish groups criticized Rosenthal, the U.S. State Department said that "Rosenthal has the complete support of the department."

In February 2010 the Israeli Foreign Ministry refused to meet with visiting U.S. congressmembers being escorted by J Street on a visit to Israel unless members of Congress attended the meeting without their J Street escorts. Addressing the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Deputy Foreign Minister Ayalon said "The thing that troubles me is that they don't present themselves as to what they really are. They should not call themselves pro-Israeli."

In Haaretz, columnist Bradley Burston wrote that the Foreign Ministry's refusal to meet with the U.S. congressmembers was "a gratuitous move breathtaking in its haughtiness, its ignorance of and disrespect for the United States and the American Jewish community". He said that the Foreign Ministry considered J Street "guilty of the crime of explicitly calling itself pro-Israel, while not agreeing wholeheartedly with everything the government of Israel says and does."

Haviv Rettig Gur, writing in The Jerusalem Post, said that "J Street won a small victory" in the incident. "If American legislators with pro-Israel records say J Street is kosher," Gur wrote, "that creates a new political reality with which the Israeli Right must contend."

The Foreign Ministry said J Street's assertions that Ayalon refused to meet with members of the U.S. Congress and that he later apologized were untrue, and that they were a fund-raising publicity stunt and a "premeditated public relations circus". Barukh Binah, Foreign Ministry deputy director-general and head of its North America Division said that Ayalon did not prevent any meetings between the J Street group and Israeli high officials and that Ayalon was never on the delegation's schedule. J Street said its information was based on news reports in Yedioth Ahronoth and Maariv.

Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic described Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's repeated refusal to meet with representatives of J Street as a "farce" and added: "He should argue with J Street, yell at J Street, grapple with J Street, but most of all meet with J Street. Those Israelis, and those American Jews, who believe that J Street, and the spirit it represents, are fleeting phenemona have absolutely no idea what is happening in the Jewish world.