For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm happy to welcome Isaac Luria back to the show.
He is the Director of Communication and New Media at J Street, the liberal Israel lobby in Washington, D.C.
Welcome back to the show.
Isaac, how are you?
I'm doing great.
Thanks so much for having me.
Well, happy birthday.
You're two years old, huh?
Yeah, can you believe it?
That's pretty good.
You talk really well for a two-year-old.
J Street is now celebrating its second anniversary.
Tell us all about J Street.
J Street is the pro-Israel, pro-peace political home for Americans who agree with us that two states, a two-state solution in the Middle East and strong American leadership to achieve it is the only way that Israel is going to be secure for the long term as a Jewish democratic home and the only way to adequately serve American interests in the region as well.
We've been around for two years, as you mentioned, now, building that political voice and showing the world, the American political scene here in Washington, that there is an alternative to some of the outmoded, outdated ideas out there about how best to bring peace to the region.
Now, for people who aren't that familiar, would you basically agree it's the case that most of the organized Jewish community and Israel lobby in the United States is dominated by pretty right-wing type people?
That was really the motivation for making J Street, right?
Well, the motivation for J Street is that we as pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans have not yet had the sort of political voice in Washington to represent what we believe.
And that's that peace will bring security to Israel and the region and it will be in America's interest.
There are some loud voices in the American Jewish community for whom this issue is a motivating factor in their political activism who don't agree with us and that they've been very successful at getting their views across in Washington and we are trying to show the American political leadership that there are diversity of viewpoints within our community.
I mean, the joke is that you put two Jews in a room, you get at least three opinions and that is certainly the case on Israel.
But that diversity hasn't been represented well enough in Washington.
So that's what we're about.
It's bringing that diversity that I see all the time out there, outside of D.C., outside of the D.C. bubble and making sure that members of Congress know it's out there, that if they were to take views that are more sensibly pro-peace and pro-two-state solution and in favor of the President's push for two states in the region, that they would find political support in our community for that.
Well, I guess it's kind of the same with anything.
The people who are the richest tend to be the most right-wing because they have the most to be conserved with state power, really.
So you have the masses of the American people and the masses of American Jews who have a much more J Street point of view on the issue, and the people who have run, I know you're trying to be diplomatic, some of the other lobbies and think tanks in D.C. tend to be dominated by pretty conservative folks, right?
Yeah, and that has been really a trend in the last 15 or 20 years where the APAC, the ADL, other Jewish organizations like the American Jewish Committee, etc., have built a very effective lobbying machine to lobby on behalf of what we believe are incredibly important values, that there should be a strong U.S.
-Israel relationship, that Israel is a country that we should have a long and lasting and strategic partnership with.
But in the last 20 years or so, I think that the Israeli public has grown more despondent about peace, that there have been terrorist attacks increasingly, and right-wing governments that have capitalized upon that in Israel, that that traditional, conventional lobby has become more right-wing, leaving behind the majority of American Jews that actually support more progressive positions on the issue.
And that provides us with not only, I mean, it's our impetus, it's why we do this work, is to provide that voice, but also a political opportunity for us to grow and to grow fast.
In only two years, we've grown from having nobody on our supporter list to having over 140,000 people active with our organization.
We have dozens of local groups all over the country.
We're active on dozens of campuses, where the issue of Israel is really becoming quite a battle between passionate sides, and we're trying to present that mainstream view, that advancing American interests, advancing Israel's security through a two-state solution can be achieved, and it must be achieved under President Obama's leadership.
Okay, now, I'd like to give you a chance to go over some of these numbers, because I saw a poll in Haaretz that talked about, I think, 73% of American Jews take Obama's side in his dispute with Netanyahu, which was really important, but I thought maybe you could discuss some of the poll results that show that most American Jews agree with you, rather than AIPAC, on these issues, and also in terms of, you know, maybe your analysis of that dispute between Obama and Netanyahu, and what is it exactly that American Jews are taking Obama's side against Netanyahu about?
Yes, the polling makes it absolutely clear that the argument that I've been making on the show so far, that there are, there is a majority of American Jews that will support active American leadership.
We did some polling, have done now at least two polls, maybe three, I'm trying to remember, three, and those polls showed that, you know, in the context of the President's efforts so far to rein in both Palestinian and Israeli unilateral actions and get people back to the table and talking, that American Jews stood by the President.
And, you know, if you don't trust an advocacy organization's polls, and I think you should, we hold our polls to the highest standards, but if you don't, check out the AJC poll, American Jewish Community did a poll.
By any means, by any stretch of the imagination, they are not a left-wing organization on Israel, and they found similar numbers of at least majorities, and sometimes up into the 60s and 70s, that people support the President's approach.
So the polling is clear, the data is there for our argument.
And on to the substance of the issue, you know, I think that what happened when the Vice President went to Israel, while on a trip to reaffirm the U.S.
-Israel relationship, on a trip to hopefully develop a joint strategy on Iran to combat their nuclear program, and to launch peace talks, it really was a slap in the face to the Vice President.
But I think that for us, for J Street, and for pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans, it was a wake-up call.
We need a new approach, we need more active American leadership to make sure this doesn't happen.
We have tried for, the American administration has tried for now 10 months to try to get people, to the Israelis and Palestinians and others, to actually sit down and talk, and they haven't been successful.
And why?
Because the Israelis and Palestinians, and our approach I think is sometimes understood in the context of this, let's just sit down and talk about it.
Maybe we can find ways to compromise.
And the truth is that's not going to happen if the Israelis and Palestinians are talking directly to each other.
They're going to need a strong American role, bridging, you know, forcing compromises, suggesting proposals that can help bridge gaps.
And that's what we need more of now, not less.
And that's the decision that the American administration is considering now.
They floated in a trial balloon in a couple of newspaper articles that they're thinking about an American plan.
I think that that is exactly the right consideration for them to be making now.
Obviously J Street would have to see that plan to figure out whether or not we'd support it.
But that's the kind of deep American engagement that we're going to need in order to bring about a lasting two-state solution.
All right, now there's so many different things I want to ask you about, but I guess it's time to go ahead and skip right to this, which is one of our in-house writers at Antiwar.com, Alan Bach, wrote an article recently about Camp David Envy and how Jimmy Carter made peace, made this deal between the Israelis and the Egyptians.
And every president since then has wanted to achieve something great like that.
But the fact of the matter is that it's not really up to us.
It's up to the people involved.
And if they're not ready, they're not ready.
And it's really just a mistake and kind of a waste of time for America to try to force this, that, or the other thing, because really we're not going to say no more aid for you unless you do what we say or whatever.
So Netanyahu can continue to buck all he wants and is never going to be any worse off for it.
Really, the consequences for it aren't going to be any worse than the ones he's aiming for anyway.
So maybe Obama's just barking up the wrong tree here.
It's just not the right time and place.
And I guess I'll build into that also the question of why should America take any side, either side, be friends with anyone over there more than allies in a strategic partnership, I think was the term you used.
Why not just be neighbors and friends in a no alliances sort of way?
Because there are a lot of people in America who don't really care about Israel either way.
Why should they have to be involved in this?
Well, to answer the first question about Camp David and the lessons of Jimmy Carter's achievement of a peace deal, I think that the writer on your website missed a key point, that that deal happened because of the Carter administration's deep engagement.
Yes, there were courageous leaders ready to respond in a positive way to that leadership, but if Carter hadn't pushed, there would not be peace between Egypt and Israel, or it would have happened in a very different way.
And the way things were going in the region at that time, late 70s, I could imagine another war between Egypt and Israel breaking out.
So I think that in order to use that lesson and to bring it to today, what does that show?
It shows that an American administration, given our global responsibilities and our global influence, can force the issue for both the Palestinians and the Israelis to start talking about how they're going to achieve two states and to provide an opportunity for a leader, for an Abbas, for Netanyahu, to think about putting aside the domestic political consequences, which for Sadat at the time were very serious.
Putting aside those consequences, they have the ability to make a courageous step and take a step forward.
That's the choice that both leaders face now.
Are they going to take this opportunity, provided with an American administration that is absolutely committed to the basics of Israeli security and Palestinian human rights, and are they going to seize that opportunity to achieve the two-state solution?
Both of them, I think, in their hearts, have to know that that's where things are going.
If Israel is going to be secure, if the Palestinians are going to avoid decades more likely violent conflict with Israel, that they're going to need to achieve two states.
So that's my lesson from what happened with Carter, and I think that that should be the lesson of the last 20 years, too.
That this old, we're going to talk about talking, that we're going to do confidence-building measures, that we're going to slowly develop momentum towards peace, that provides way too much opportunity for the kinds of people on either side that are going to try and undermine that deal.
You've got to do it fast.
You have to do it with strong, courageous leadership.
And I know that some people out there are not feeling too confident in the administration's approach in what could be achievable.
But I don't think we have a choice.
The stakes are way too high for Israel.
They're way too high for an ongoing conflict for the Palestinians.
They're way too high for American interest in the region.
We're fighting two wars in the region, and even General Petraeus himself, the man in charge of the U.S. command in the Middle East, is saying that yes, an ongoing conflict makes it more difficult for us to achieve our interests there.
So we don't have a choice.
That's the sensible solution, and we're going to have to press forward.
Now let me ask you about just how committed you think Obama is.
I mean, on one hand, he has made this kind of one of the defining features of his presidency from his first year in power rather than, you know, putting it off and doing a little kind of half-assed Annapolis like Bush did.
Or even, you know, Clinton kind of seemed to put off everything until toward the end of his term, his second term as well.
So it seems like, you know, he knows the risks of taking on an issue like this, and yet it seems like, at least from my perspective, it seems like all he's ever demanded are like the least sort of half measures.
You know, like when he says, you know, I sternly warn you to curb the rate of growth of the expansion of the settlements in the West Bank.
I mean, it sounds like the Republicans are saving money, you know?
Curb the rate of growth of spending.
It seems like almost nothing.
It seems like there's this giant fight, this giant expenditure of political capital.
But he's not saying, hey, out of East Jerusalem.
He's not saying, hey, listen, tear down the walls and get your settlements out of the West Bank.
There's going to be a state there one day.
He's not doing anything even remotely, making demands even remotely along those lines, is he?
I would temper your criticism a bit.
I think that the administration did exactly the right thing.
I am drawn to hyperbole.
Well, it is talk radio, right?
So the administration did exactly the right thing by engaging early, by laying out a vision for a new way of interacting with not just Israel but the Muslim world as well, putting behind us the eight years of really ineffective policy, not just, you know, sort of the Bush-style diplomacy, which frustrates me on the face of it, but the fact is it's not effective.
It doesn't advance our interests.
It makes Israel less secure.
It makes our allies less secure in the region, makes it more difficult to achieve our goal.
So I would put out there that the administration did the right thing at the beginning, and what they're running into is the challenge of this problem.
It's a huge problem.
Many presidents have faced it, and some have not been able to solve it.
But I think that the context now that Obama finds him in and the ability he's setting up for him to have more time to work before having to consider re-election, before having to consider a second term, that he's going to have more time to do some things, and that the last six, eight months have been exactly the sort of thing that needed to play out in order for the administration to throw up its hands for the old approach, the confidence-building measures, the trying to get people to talk about talking, and to try something bolder.
That's going to happen, I hope, in the next few months, that a bolder approach is going to be needed.
This American plan idea is a good start.
I think it's those sorts of American ideas that are going to make this work, and he's going to have to do that.
Now let's be clear, though, that the political difficulties of doing that based on the current setup of some of the conventional pro-Israel organizations that exist all over the country, he's going to have to find a way to work with them or to disagree with them on what is best for American interests and what's best for Israel's security, and that's what Jay Street's about.
It's about providing that political support, making it clear that this is not only an intractable policy problem, but it is a political problem largely, we think, based here in the United States.
If the American president's hands are not tied behind his back, if he's allowed to lead, he can achieve for what Israel and the Palestinians are desperate for, which is a two-state solution, and it will help American interests in the meantime.
So our job, and I hope that your listeners can join us and help us out at jaystreet.org, our job is to create that political space for him and to push him when necessary, and we'll be doing that in the coming months.
I am talking to Isaac Luria from Jay Street.
That's, again, jaystreet.org.
He's the director of communication and new media.
You keep referring to the necessity of getting something done here from the Israeli point of view.
Geez, I think if people just got their news from American TV, they might not even really understand that there are millions of Palestinians who live in occupied territory, and they have for a period of time longer than the Soviet Union occupied Eastern Europe.
You might not even know that.
There are entire discussions.
Former AIPAC spokesman Wolf Blitzer does a show on CNN, and they'll talk about Israel for 15 minutes, and you won't even hear anything about occupied territories even existing or having anything to do with the question.
But anyway, you keep saying, hey, man, from the point of view of Israel first, even, we have to come to a settlement here.
It's no different than a pro-American patriot opposing George Bush's, or for that matter, Barack Obama's, counterproductive and immoral policies in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This is not good for us.
And so even depending on how broadly you define us, if you define us as even just, I guess, Americans who care a lot about Israel or Israelis themselves, the Likud policy, the Netanyahu policy, the Bush policy is not productive.
That's no way to live in, you know, for long-term peace with your neighbors is by just threatening them and having domination of force over everyone all the time for the indefinite future.
But so I wish you'd kind of expand on this in terms of demographics and what have you.
Why is it that even if you don't even care about the Palestinians, even if you're an American who watches TV and doesn't even know there's such a thing as a Palestinian, why is it that Israel needs to do this two-state solution?
Right.
And this is exactly the argument that Jay Street advances, that as pro-Israel Americans, we are faced with a very difficult choice right now.
We can either let a status quo that is slowly killing Israel as a Jewish democratic home continue.
We can let it fester.
And in 10 years, in 20 years, Israel's very legitimacy as a Jewish and democratic home will be challenged.
And I'm afraid that all it takes is one Palestinian to stand up and say, I want one vote within the whole land of Israel.
And given the way that the population numbers are going, that the demographics of the situation, it only takes a nonviolent one vote, one person movement, and literally about five years is when the demographic tilt is going to happen, where there will be more Palestinians than there are Jews in the land of Israel, including the West Bank and Gaza.
That will mean the end of Israel.
And that's not my vision for Israel.
My vision for Israel is one in which Jews can go if they need to go, they have a place where they can be completely secure.
And that's necessary because of Jewish history.
I believe in Jewish sovereignty.
I think that that means, that necessitates finding a way to live with our neighbors that's real, that recognizes their dignity, their right to a state.
And that means a two-state solution.
Now, I'm not going to get into the fact that, you know, and I think this is another motivating factor for people on this issue, that Palestinian human rights are being violated, that they have not had access to a state, that there are checkpoints in the West Bank that make it impossible for them to go to work, that they are living under a military occupation.
I think that's true.
And I think we have to acknowledge that, that the occupation is not just killing Israel from a strategic point of view, that it is making a Jewish and democratic home more difficult to obtain in the next, and to secure for the future in the next couple of years, but it's also killing the soul of the Jewish people.
Yeah, and this is what American corporations above all have figured out.
PR is everything.
And right now the world, I think in general, the billions of people on earth, think of Israel as a bully.
You know, it's like a little Massachusetts colony in somebody else's land, and they just never stop killing Indians over there.
And people are really cynical about Israel.
Believe me, at antiwar.com, here we're mostly Jews, but we're libertarians and we have a very libertarian point of view on Israel, and that means that we're in between people who hate us for being Jews and people who hate Israel for being Jews, and I hear it from all sides all day.
Just check out our comments section, it'll make you want to puke.
But, you know, this is not, I'm trying to look at the long view here, and I'm not really in favor of the perpetuation of any state, although I'm all for human rights for any people, but if the Israelis want to have a long-term Jewish state that lasts for, what, I don't know, hundreds of years into the indefinite future, they've got to be friends.
You can't move into a new neighborhood and then just pick a fight with everybody and just have bigger guns than everybody and say, what are you going to do about it?
There's no security over the long term at all, right?
No, and there is no way that an ongoing conflict plays, bodes well for Israel's future, and that is something that I wish more people in the pro-Israel community understood, that when we do not address this issue, when the pro-Israel community does not have an answer to the demographic threat, when we won't talk about it, I think that we're making a grave mistake, one that is going to affect the future of Israel, the future of the region, and is just something that we need to have a better answer for.
And currently there's this sense that if we could just convince the world that Israel is awesome, that we would be totally set.
If we could just convince the world through Hasbara, which is a Hebrew word for propaganda, basically, if we could convince the world through better Hasbara, that Israel's cause is just, that we have an economy that has these great tech companies, and that we're so much fun to visit and everything, that everything will be okay, that people will stop caring about the conflict.
And I just think it's not a PR problem.
It is a policy problem.
Well, it's the facts on the ground that negate the good PR.
It's sort of like I read an article the other day about Al-Qaeda.
This is the British, I think, trying to figure out, how do we stop young people from wanting to join Al-Qaeda?
And the answer is not withdraw from occupying lands throughout the Middle East and Central Asia.
The answer was, we need to find a way to make Al-Qaeda not cool.
And sort of, you know, completely missing the point that people are going to find something to rally around in opposition to what is going on there, whether it's bin Laden or something else.
I think that that's just a problem within the pro-Israel Hasbara community, that we need to have an answer to the policy question, to the substance.
Because every two years or every three years, there's going to be a conflagration of some kind.
And we can't live in that sort of an ongoing status quo.
And we need an answer.
And I think that the answer is that President Obama brings the parties together.
He puts difficult, painful compromises on the table, but ones that he knows are the best way for us to achieve a two-state solution.
And, you know, he tries to bring the parties together.
All right.
Now, one last topic here before I let you go, Isaac.
And that is John Hagee and Pat Robertson and the evangelical, cynical, dishonest, end times, give me all your money and support settlements in the West Bank right wing there.
Jay Street from our outset have been deeply uncomfortable with that alliance between conventional pro-Israel organizations and pro-Israel community and evangelical Christian Zionist Christians.
You know, it is entirely their right to find a way to try and support what they think is in the best interest of Israel.
I just disagree that it is.
Supporting settlements is only going to make securing Israel's future more difficult.
And that makes me deeply uncomfortable.
Not only does the American Jewish community not share many of the values of these movements, but their policies that they're advocating for Israel are deeply, deeply hurtful to Israel's future.
And I understand that they, you know, entirely have a right to their viewpoint, but they are going to oppose that viewpoint and that sort of status quo lobbying, greater Israel stuff that is only going to hurt Israel in the long run.
And it is kind of ironic, too, when you look at the polls that explain that this, I think the official designation is a super duper majority of American Jews are liberals.
And yet the Israel lobby's alliance with these evangelical Christians completely distorts their power on all these other issues, you know, like homosexual rights or, well, you go down the list of issues, domestic issues that are important to liberals.
And instead you got the Hagai right is empowered on all those other issues as well, in direct opposition to what most Jews want in America.
Right.
And what most Jews want in America is a progressive administration.
That's clear from the way that they vote and who they support.
And they also want their progressive values to be represented in the way that our community is represented in Washington when it comes to Israel.
And that's what J Street's here to do is to provide that voice.
Right on.
Well, good luck to you.
Oh, wait, one more question.
Is it becoming easier, do you think, for, say, the average congressman to maybe vote his own conscience on Israel issues and figure that he's got backup from you guys and doesn't have to turn to AIPAC come election time?
I think that we are really prying open the conversation on Capitol Hill.
We have a lot of work to do.
And it is a huge problem.
But it can happen.
And it's going to take a grassroots movement of people that are listening to this program and others and the 140,000 people with us to convince Congress that it is good politics to take a sensible pro-Israel, pro-peace position on the Middle East.
Right on.
Well, as George Bush used to like to say, it's hard work, but we're making progress.
All right, everybody, that's Isaac Luria.
He is the director of communication and new media at J Street.
Thanks a lot for your time.
Thanks, Scott.
Hey, everybody, Scott Horton here for LibertyStickers.com.
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