Sen. Chuck Schumer’s shocking reversal on J Street - by Stephen M. Flatow

Why has Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who has called himself “a guardian of Israel,” agreed to be a featured speaker for perhaps the most effective pro-Palestinian lobbying group in Washington?

Stephen M. Flatow..
JNS.org..
24 October '19..

The decision by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to serve as one of the featured speakers at the upcoming J Street conference should trouble every supporter of Israel. It’s both a boost for the Jewish critics of Israel and a disturbing sign of trends within the Democratic Party.

It was 10 years ago this week, in October 2009, that the New York senator announced that he would not be speaking at that year’s J Street conference in Washington, D.C., following reports that he had initially accepted its invitation to speak.

J Street is probably the most effective pro-Palestinian lobbying group in Washington. There are, of course, many groups operating in the nation’s capital with the word “Palestine” in their name. The secret of J Street’s success is precisely the fact that it does not contain the word.

Still, it uses its Jewish identity to create a veneer of credibility that masks the fact that its agenda is to pressure Israel to give in to Palestinian demands. The groups that openly brandish the “Palestine” label are too obvious; J Street’s more subtle approach is a much more effective way to advance the Palestinian agenda.

No wonder Schumer didn’t want to be associated with J Street. It represented the opposite of what he said he believes. Just a few months later, when he was interviewed on the Nachum Segal radio show in New York City on April 21, 2010, he said: “You have to show Israel that it’s not going to be forced to do things it doesn’t want to do and can’t do. At the same time, you have to show the Palestinians that they are not going to get their way by just sitting back and not giving in, and not recognizing that there is a State of Israel.”

As we all know, politicians spend a lot of time trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing. It’s the nature of their job to constantly worry about where their next votes and donations will be coming from. Back in 2009, Schumer and his staff evidently sized up J Street and decided (correctly) that it was a radical group on the margins of the Jewish community.

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