JERUSALEM — Left and progressive groups are waging a campaign to demonize Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, after his stunning return in last month’s election, according to some experts on Middle East democracy.
Amid Netanyahu’s efforts to build a complex coalition of religious, conservative and ultra-nationalist parties, one left-wing American organization, J Street, went on the offensive this week.
“The potential for specific actions that can be taken in this regard [Israeli] authorities, these are the moments when the relationship between the majority of American Jews and the state of Israel begins to really deteriorate,” Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, told The Associated Press.
December 1J Street posted an ad on its website that “the United States must act now to confront extremist Israeli officials and political moves.” J Street identifies itself on its website as a “pro-Israel” organization.
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Former Israeli Prime Minister and Likud party leader Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to supporters in a modified truck with bulletproof glass during a campaign event on October 29, 2022 in Bnei Brak, Israel.
(Amir Levy/Getty Images)
In the same Associated Press report, the president of the Union of Reform Judaism, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, said the future coalition includes some of the “most extreme voices in Israeli politics.” As the leader of the largest Jewish group in the U.S., Jacobs continued, “What the trajectory of the new Israeli government will be with these kinds of voices in such key leadership positions is a matter of deep concern.”
Caroline Glick, an American-born Israeli columnist and author, told Fox News that Digital J Street is “trying to provoke a crisis by spreading lies. J Street is not a pro-Israel organization. They support the Iranian regime.”
Glick, author of “The Israel Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East,” said that “J Street has a very warm relationship with the Biden administration, and that’s embarrassing.”
secretary of state Anthony J. Blinken on December 4 presented at the J Street National Conference.
“The continued engagement with J Street … continues to inform our thinking,” Blinken said, adding that J Street is a “great organization.”
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Benjamin Netanyahu is closing in on becoming Israel’s next prime minister. Here he greets supporters at the Likud headquarters in Jerusalem on November 2, 2022.
(AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov)
Support from J Street and the Biden administration the controversial Iran nuclear dealwhich the Israeli government strongly opposes.
Israel says the nuclear deal only places temporary limits on the Islamic Republic’s right to build nuclear weapons and funnels hundreds of billions of dollars to the treasury of Tehran.
Iran’s nuclear weapons program is a threat to the existence of the Jewish state.
During a recent speech, Blinken told J. Street said the US wants the Iranian regime to rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the formal name for the Iran nuclear deal, and rejected the previous administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign targeting theocratic Islam. state
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken speaks as his image is shown on a large screen behind him at the J Street National Conference at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC on December 4, 2022.
(AP Photo/Caroline Custer)
Netanyahu advocates that all levers of pressure, including the actual military option, be used to stop Iran’s race to build a nuclear bomb.
Blinken, in an indirect reference to some Israeli fireworks who are slated to enter Netanyahu’s cabinet, said: “We will evaluate [Israeli] the government by the policies it pursues, not by individuals.”
Traditionally, Israeli governments avoided J Street and its president because of their perceived anti-Israel policies.
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The main pro-Israel organization in the US is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) directly tweeted it “J Street is many things, but it is not pro-Israel.”
Glick said that progressives in the U.S. are fueling disinformation against Netanyahu that is “virtually identical to the campaign that progressives are waging against parents who resist educating students on school boards.” She said there was an “awakened ideology” permeating many U.S. schools that was “anti-American.”
Glick argued that the new conceptual framework for understanding the daily attacks on Israel’s legitimacy is “demonization” and is “a new fig leaf for adopting anti-Israel policies because the peace process is dead.”
(Left to right) Itamar Ben-Gvir, an Israeli far-right lawmaker and leader of the Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, and Betzalel Smotrich, an Israeli far-right lawmaker and leader of the Religious Zionist Party, at a rally with supporters in the southern Israeli city of Sderot, on October 26, 2022.
(Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP via Getty Images)
The peace process between Israel and the Palestinians over the disputed West Bank, also known as Judea and Samaria, has reached an impasse for many Israelis.
Glick criticized J Street and two elites in the Washington, D.C., foreign policy establishment who wrote a Washington Post op-ed calling for sanctions against Israel.
“They hate Israel,” Glick said. “They want to harm Israeli-American relations. And it undermines America’s core interests. Israel is the staunchest ally of the United States.”
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, told Fox News Digital: “I believe that J Street is not representing the majority of American Jews on this issue. Americans can help best expand the Abrahamic covenant to include the Palestinians means pressuring the Palestinian Authority to end corruption, to end incessant anti-Semitism, and to end the “pay to kill Jews” policy.
The Trump administration negotiated historic normalization agreements—the Abraham Accords—between Israel and four Sunni Arab countries (the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan).
A Palestinian man uses a catapult against Israeli troops during a protest against new construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
(Nedal Eshtai/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Palestinian Authority pay terrorists and terrorist families who attacked and killed the Israelites. Critics argue that Palestinian policy promotes terrorism.
Fox News Digital asked the US State Department to respond to Glick and Cooper’s criticism of J Street.
“Just like our predecessors, this administration regularly engages with American-Jewish groups as well as diaspora groups to underscore our strong commitment and partnership with Israel, which has never been stronger,” the department said.
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“Israel is America’s trusted friend and ally, not America’s 51st nation,” Cooper said. “This is a crazy democracy whose electorate in the last election voted for parties that formed a coalition that included Israeli Arab parties. Now that same electorate has voted for right-of-center parties and smaller parties that include hard-liners enraged by continued Arab terrorism and some with extremist views outside the mainstream of Israeli society.”
Shlomit Ravitzky Tour-Paz, director of the Israel Democracy Institute’s Joan and Irwin Jacobs Center for a Cooperative Society, told Fox News Digital: “Israel is both a Jewish and a democratic country, and new policies that affect core characteristics and shared values can create tensions.
U.S. Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo visits the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem with U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman on March 21, 2019.
(Hum Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
“A possible point of conflict between competing worldviews can be found in two extreme examples. The proposed changes at the Ministry of Education raise the question of the place of diversity: whether Israeli children will be given different options for how to be Jewish and whether they can accept different relationships with Jewish tradition, or whether the Orthodox view will be the only possibility. Another example touches on the path to becoming a Jew.’
One difficult question, she added, will center on whether the new right-wing government “will continue to recognize Reform and Conservative conversion as valid for confirmation of Judaism — and thus automatic Israeli citizenship — according to the Interior Ministry, though not by the rabbis.” “
Progressive critics of Netanyahu’s declared coalition partners say party leader Noam has an anti-LGBTQ agenda because he wants to ban a gay parade in Jerusalem.
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Netanyahu has flatly rejected attempts to undermine him by being pro-LGBTQ. Israeli media reported that he said “there will be no harm to pride parades or the status quo on LGBTQ rights.”
Glick accused some Israeli rights groups of being anti-gay.
“You don’t see gays being hanged on the streets of Tel Aviv, but there was a gay man just killed by Palestinians” said Glick.
Fox News Digital called and sent several press inquiries to J Street.
Associated Press contributed to this report.
