The Magical Misery Tour? J Street's Program to Compete with Birthright Israel - by Abe Greenwald

Birthright, for the record, doesn’t ignore the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It just operates with an understanding that Israel is more than its efforts to combat terrorism. And those efforts are overwhelmingly noble. The good news is that J Street has taken only 28 kids on a single trip. Put that against Birthright’s estimated 650,000. It will take a lot of David Halbfingers to make up the difference.

Abe Greenwald..
Commentary Magazine..
11 July '19..

A host of progressive organizations use their ostensible Jewishness as cover or sanction for their campaigns against Israel. J Street, which calls itself “pro-Israel” and “pro-peace,” is perhaps the best known among them. There’s no better example of how this works than J Street’s recent launch of a program to compete with Birthright Israel, the 20-year-old organization that’s provided free trips to Israel for more than 600,000 young Jews around the world.

According to J Street, “the omission and erasure of Palestinian perspectives and narratives on these [Birthright] trips creates a political environment that allows home demolitions, settlement expansion, and other destructive policies of occupation to continue unchallenged.” Instead, the group says, “organized educational trips for young American Jews must present a robust, nuanced and honest view of the current realities on the ground in Israel and the Palestinian Territory.”

The first such J Street trip, labeled the “Let Our People Know” tour, just concluded. Here, according to a miserable piece by the New York Times’s David Halbfinger, is the “nuanced” and “honest” take that was offered to the 28 American college students involved:

In the West Bank settlement of Har Gilo, they received a harsh history lesson from a veteran opponent of the occupation. Then they toured an impoverished, water-starved Palestinian village that Israeli settlers want to demolish, and visited the city of Hebron, where repeated outbreaks of violence have turned an entire Palestinian business district into a ghost town.

Not a word, either from the “opponent of occupation” or from Halbfinger on the murderous Palestinian anti-Semitic violence that necessitates Israel’s policing of such places in to begin with. Similarly, no mention of the kleptocratic Palestinian leadership that’s consigned generations of Palestinians to certain ruin. Finally, no mention of the fact that the Palestinians have, again and again—and again—refused to make peace with Israel when it was offered.

Here’s some more nuance, J Street style:

(Continue to Full Post)