Time to evict J Street from our communal tent

By Charles Jacobs and Elliott Hamilton

 The recent announcement of the P5+1 nuclear deal with Iran has sparked deep concern and even outrage in the Jewish community. In an almost unprecedented moment for American Jewry, the majority of prominent Jewish organizations have lined up in order to combat this deal. This historic display of Jewish unity comes because of a clear belief that Israel and the Jewish people have been placed in a life-threatening situation.

But the J Street lobby stands apart.

When the deal’s framework was reached in early April, J Street co-authored a statement with the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC) and the Arab American Institute, welcoming the agreement. Now that the details have become known and almost every major Jewish organization is trying to kill the deal, J Street is undertaking a multi-million dollar campaign to get Jews to support an arrangement that at best keeps Iran nuke-free for about a decade while it gives the mullahs $150 billion to arm Israel’s enemies. This puts J Street in direct confrontation with the more than 80 percent of the Jews of Israel, whose political parties from left to right are fiercely united against President Barack Obama’s deal.

J Street’s campaigning for the Iran deal comes as no surprise to those who have been carefully watching the organization since its inception in 2008. J Street’s ptollolicy on Iran has never been aligned with the rest of the American Jewish community.

J Street has a history of taking significant sums of money from anti-Israel sources—and lying about it. For example, J Street continuously lied about its funding from George Soros, who has blamed Israel and the Jewish people for the rise of global anti-Semitism. While J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami kept denying it, Eli Lake reported in 2010 that J Street acquired $750,000 from Soros’s family. Ben-Ami was eventually forced to apologize for lying.