×
The Prospect's Dylan Matthews interviews J-Street's Jeremy Ben-Ami:
DM: Okay, about one of the other candidates you endorsed, Darcy Burner, in Washington. Matt Stoller had a report a couple weeks ago saying that Bruner had told him that she had gotten a phone call from some people with affiliations with AIPAC, who told her, in explicit terms, to move away from J Street -- that you guys are extreme leftists who want to leave Israel for dead. How much do things like that worry you, both in that case and in going forward with J Street?JB-A: It actually doesn't worry me at all, because, first of all, when people circulate lies and complete distortions of truth, it's not going to work. In the end, the types of things that they're saying are simply provable as wrong. If you go to our advisory council, people on our finance committee, people who signed up to support J Street in Israel, people who ran the Israel Defense Forces, the commander in chief of the Israel Defense Forces, the man who ran the occupation of the West Bank, and the former foreign minister of the state of Israel. If people are going to go around telling congressional candidates that people like that are anti-Israel or trying to undo the state and are anti-Semitic, it's just so ludicrous that I don't anticipate it would have any impact.Actually, this sort of thing is the best possible outcome for J-Street, just like it was the best possible outcome for Walt and Mearsheimer. Of late, AIPAC and others have demonstrated a tendency to deal with challenges by responding with Shock and Awe intimidation campaigns. All well and good, except that observers end up scratching their heads and wondering if it really tracks that these two distinguished international relations professors who've hired and befriended hundreds of Jewish scholars are raging anti-Semites, or whether this pro-Israel peace group endorsed by all manner of major players who've devoted their lives to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict really want to leave Israel for dead. And when the counterattack creates dissonance, folks begin to question the whole edifice, or, worse, defend the accused against the smears. All of which is to say, Ben-Ami is wrong that it's so ludicrous that it has no impact. In my experience, it's so ludicrous that it has tremendous impact: Folks who figured they agreed with AIPAC, or didn't care about this issue, suddenly find themselves wondering what the hell is going on in their names, and taking a second look at the ideas of the accused.
