In the June 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine, Editorial Assistant Aiden Pink wrote The Anti-Zionism of J Street. J Street is an organization that boasts of being “pro-Israel and pro-peace,” and has garnered much controversy since its founding in 2008. Recently, it was overwhelmingly defeated in its effort to be included in the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

Pink analyzes J Street’s political stances and American domestic lobbying efforts, concluding:

For a non-Israeli citizen to claim the right to have a say in Israeli policy decisions, to game the American political system so as to pressure Israel into making a specific choice that the Israeli citizenry, in the form of its duly elected government, does not wish to make, is to deny Israelis the right to shape their state as they best see fit. It is arrogant and anti-democratic. It may well be a legitimate form of activism as an American citizen exercising free speech; but it must be simultaneously conceded that it negates the belief in Israel’s right to self-determination—which is the whole point of the Zionist enterprise.

Pink takes apart an op-ed by J Street’s  founder and leader, Jeremy Ben-Ami, observing:

In other words, Jewish self-determination is the essence of Zionism, except when that self-determination leads to decisions that Ben-Ami disagrees with, at which point he and his followers, with an almost neocolonial sense of paternalism, will support American politicians who will punish Israel for its perceived errors.

If there’s a lesson to be drawn from his analysis of J Street, according to Pink, it is that it would be healthier if “American Jews become less obsessed over what Israel could be, and accept it for what it is … an imperfect state, but a sovereign state nonetheless; a state that will accept help when it needs it, but has long since earned the right to make its own choices in pursuit of prosperity, peace and security.”

In a similar vein, as Rabbi Richard Block wrote in How Should Rabbis Speak About Israel? in the May 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine, “Where Israel is concerned, rabbis have a primary duty: to nurture ahavat Yisrael—love for, identification with, and attachment, loyalty and commitment to the Jewish state, its imperfections notwithstanding.”

[Photo: J Street / Flickr ]