By Max Deveson

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Are liberal Jewish voices in America being drowned out by powerful conservative lobbyists? A group of prominent left-leaning Jewish-Americans thinks so.

They have launched a new lobbying organisation, called J Street, which they hope will redress this perceived imbalance.

“The term ‘pro-Israel’ has been hijacked by those who hold views that a majority of Americans, Jews and non-Jews alike, oppose,” says executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton.

He says J Street will campaign for a two-state solution to the conflict in the Middle East.

Its political fundraising sister group – J Street PAC, for political action committee – will raise money and donate to sympathetic politicians.

Furious debate

The group is billing itself as a counterweight to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), the most prominent Jewish lobbying organisation in the US.

J Street says Aipac does not reflect the liberal views of a large number of its existing donors, let alone the mainstream of Jewish-American opinion.

The role of the pro-Israeli lobby – and of Aipac itself – in American politics has been the subject of furious debate in recent years.

In 2006, academics Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago caused a storm when they published an article arguing that groups like Aipac had pushed US foreign policy in a pro-Israeli direction often against America’s national interests.

Critics of the two academics countered that the pro-Israeli lobby should be allowed to make its case to government just like any other interest group, and that characterisations of Jewish lobbyists as “well-funded” and “powerful” were liable to play into the hands of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists.

The team behind J Street do not necessarily buy into the Walt-Mearsheimer analysis, but they do believe that America’s current policy tilts too strongly towards Israeli right-wingers, and is in the long-term interests neither of Israel nor the US.

“The most pro-Israel thing any American politician or policy maker can do is help to bring about a two-state solution and a comprehensive peace agreement between Israel and her neighbours,” says Mr Ben-Ami.

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