In The News

| More

06/25/2010

J Street Resolutions Stir Up World Zionist Congress

This article written by Cnaan Liphshiz first appeared in Haaretz on June 25, 2010

The dovish Jewish-American lobby J Street this week celebrated what seemed like a major achievement in promoting its agenda at the 36th World Zionist Congress. Leaders at the congress were split over the lobby's success in putting forth a resolution in favor of a two-state solution and continuing the freeze on construction in Jewish West Bank settlements - despite not being a full-fledged member of the World Zionist Organization.

Last Friday, J Street official Isaac Luria announced that the lobby got the congress - an assembly of over 200 major bodies belonging to the WZO - to endorse the resolution for the first time. The congress convenes regularly to vote on policy and allocation of funds and positions. Some Reform and Labor delegates are also members of J Street, which calls itself a pro-Israel body and supports greater U.S. pressure on Israel in peace talks..

"Our participation has helped focus the congress' conversation over the future of the Zionist project and the necessity of the immediate achievement of a two-state solution," J Street official Hadar Susskind - who attended the congress as a Reform delegate - wrote on the J Street blog about the congress. Susskind added that J Street had a "delegation of staffers and lay leaders" to join the congress, where Susskind became chair of its settlement committee as a representative of the Reform movement.

The resolution called upon the Israeli government to "stabilize the relationship with the American government; to act in the spirit of the Bar Ilan Speech in which Prime Minister Netanyahu called for two states for two peoples and to support the Prime Minister in his decision to freeze construction in the Territories."

U.K.-born Martin Stern, a senior member of the WZO's finance committee and a former audit committee member, said that J Street had "hijacked" the organization because it was "behaving like a member despite not being one." He added this "destroyed the democracy within WZO" - an executive Israel-based body for which the congress acts as an international assembly.

But Avraham Duvdevani - the newly elected chairman of WZO and a delegate to the congress for the religious-Zionist Mizrachi movement - said the resolution was "within the bounds of legitimate political discourse in Israel." He also defended the right of J Street supporters to make their voices heard in the WZO and its congress, which has a center-left majority bloc.

"These are people who are deeply involved. They live in the Diaspora, but Israel is their life," he said. "I don't agree with them, but if they feel they need to make a statement, then that's fine." He added many official congress delegates "of various organizations" double as members of other groups, which don't always belong to the World Zionist Congress.

Kenneth Bob, a J Street board member who represented Ameinu, the Labor Zionist entity in the U.S., said he believed J Street would officially join the WZO in the near future. "J Street was only founded two years ago, and this is the first World Zionist Congress since its formation," he said. Bob, a resident of New York, belongs to the joint Reform-Labor-Meretz faction at the Congress, and was elected to the Zionist Executive at the Congress.

MK Danny Danon, who represents World Likud within the congress, said that the "resolutions which J Street helped pass go above and beyond the congress' jurisdiction" and that the congress "should not be trying to dictate government policy." He said he "regretted" that some representatives of the Reform movement were "doubling" as representatives of J Street. On that subject Stern said that "the Reform movement is lending itself to J Street's cause, and it's generating a lot of anger."

Rabbi Daniel Freelander, who led the Reform movement's delegation to the congress, said the two resolutions reflected the position of the Reform movement for the past 12 years, and that this position "happens to be in alignment with J Street's position and the majority of Diaspora Jewry."