Israeli Ambassador
Michael Oren will not
attend J Street conference in Washington next week.
by James D. Besser Washington Correspondent
Political maneuvering in advance of next week’s first-ever national conference by J Street — the pro-Israel, pro-peace process lobby and political action committee — reached new heights this week.
With The Weekly Standard leading the charge and pro-Israel campaign donors adding financial muscle to the effort, many of the 160 lawmakers who signed on as members of a “host committee” for the event’s gala dinner are coming under intense pressure to withdraw. According to the conservative publication, 10 already have, including Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, both New York Democrats.
J Street was also forced to cancel a planned session on poetry as part of its “Culture as a Tool for Change” theme at the conference when The Weekly Standard reported that Josh
Healy, a poet scheduled to participate, had compared the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo to Auschwitz — and had written, “We’re the ones writing numbers on the wrists of babies born in the ghetto called Gaza.”
In a statement, J Street’s founder and executive director, Jeremy Ben-Ami, said, “As a matter of principle, J Street respects the dissenting voice that poetry can represent in society and politics.” But he added that since “J Street is critical of the use and abuse of Holocaust imagery and metaphors by politicians and pundits on the right, it would be inappropriate for us to feature poets at our Conference whose poetry has used such imagery in the past and might also be offensive to some conference participants.”
Also at issue is the non-response of Michael Oren, Israel’s new ambassador to the U.S., to a J Street invitation to address the conference. Ben-Ami followed up with an open letter to Oren insisting that “what J Street shares in common with you far outweighs that on which we disagree.”
This week the Israeli embassy in Washington responded with a statement saying that because of “concerns” about policies of the 18-month-old organization, it would just send an “observer” to the conference.
Several bloggers noted that one of Oren’s first public appearances as ambassador was at the national conference of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), a group founded by the controversial preacher Rev. John Hagee.
Kean University political scientist Gilbert Kahn said that the widely reported pre-conference maneuvering could work to the group’s advantage.
“J Street has already scored everything they’re going to get out of this conference just by dint of the fact there is so much news being generated,” he said. “All the anxiety that has produced suggests people comprehend that J Street is saying something — even though it’s reasonable to argue it doesn’t speak for very many Jews.”
But he warned that the conference could backfire if “excessive rhetoric ... pushes them off the map. The biggest danger is that some of the invitees are potential loose cannons who may end up marginalizing the organization as a whole.”
Apparently in an effort to tamp down that possibility, the group declined requests from Rabbi Michael Lerner’s Tikkun Community to participate. In a Tikkun editorial, the group said it was “deeply disappointed that [J Street] leaders rejected our requests to cosponsor the conference.”
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