by Andrew Bernard
“The worst thing about J Street is it’s duplicitous,” Yechiel Leiter, the Israeli envoy in Washington, said at a National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism event at Museum of the Bible on Monday.
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Yechiel Leiter, the Israeli ambassador in Washington, referred to J Street as a “cancer within the Jewish community” on Monday.
Speaking at a National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism meeting at Museum of the Bible in Washington, Leiter said that “the worst thing about J Street is it’s duplicitous.”
“How can you be pro-Israel and advocate for an arms embargo on a state that’s fighting a seven-front war against Iranian proxies?” the ambassador said.
J Street, a liberal Jewish organization that bills itself as “the political home for pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy Americans,” recently reversed course on its support for U.S. security funding for Israel by calling for an end to U.S. aid to Israel, including programs like Iron Dome.
Leiter said that the group’s motto couldn’t be squared with its opposition to the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or its support for members of Congress, who have voted to block arms sales to the Jewish state.
“If they said that they were pro-Palestinian, I wouldn’t have a problem meeting with them,” Leiter said. “I meet with pro-Palestinian groups.”
“But when you come and say in such a two-faced manner, ‘We’re pro-Israel, we’re pro democracy,’ there’s a democratically elected government in Israel,” he said. “You don’t like Netanyahu, make aliyah, vote in the next election and express yourself. Don’t say you’re ‘pro-democracy’ and decry and defy the position of the democratic government of Israel.”
Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, told JNS that the Israeli ambassador should engage with the group instead of “calling us names.”
“J Street represents a large and growing segment of the American Jewish community that supports and cares deeply about Israel but opposes policies we believe are making it less secure and more isolated,” Ben-Ami said. “Serving effectively as Israel’s ambassador to the United States requires engaging with those disagreements, not attacking the patriotism or integrity of fellow Jews.”
In his speech at the antisemitism task force event, Leiter accused groups like J Street of hiding behind their Jewish identity and made allusions to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and his sponsoring of bills to block arms sales to Israel without directly naming the Democratic Socialist from Vermont.
“Don’t be fooled by the fact that they appear to be Jewish,” Leiter said.
“One senator told me that the sponsor is a Jew. The sponsor is not a Jew,” he said. “The sponsor is a Communist, who may have Jewish pedigree. That doesn’t make him a Jew.”
“I like to play tennis once or twice over the summer. That doesn’t make me a tennis player,” Leiter said. “It’s amazing that we have some of these people, who remember their Jewish pedigree only when they’re bashing the State of Israel.”
Nearly every Democratic senator voted for a resolution that Sanders introduced in April to block sales of bulldozers to Israel, while 36 voted to block sales of bombs.
Leiter pointed to the trend among many Democrats and some Republicans in rejecting money from the pro-Israel group AIPAC and said that supporters of Israel should make a similar effort towards J Street.
“You’ve got to create an atmosphere where there’s going to be competition among candidates who say, ‘I don’t have anything to do with J Street,’ and have competition among candidates who say, ‘I’m proudly affiliated with AIPAC,’” the Israeli envoy said.
Andrew Bernard is the Washington correspondent for JNS.org.
Source: https://www.jns.org/news/u-s-news/j-street-a-cancer-within-jewish-community-israeli-ambassador-says
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