J-Street & Peter Beinart: You Lose – Give Up!

Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Yitzhak Shamir.

Despite the American President being the most hostile towards Israel in many years, active opposition from inside the American Jewish community, and other distractions, donations by U.S. Jews to Israeli nonprofits have doubled during the past 12 years, according to a first-of-its-kind study conducted by professors at Brandeis University. Zionist organizations were the largest beneficiary of these donations according to the study, which is slated to be completed in late April.

In another positive trend, while J Street and Peter Beinart make a lot of noise amongst American Jews in their attacks against Israel, AJC polling shows that pro-Israel attachment hasn’t changed in a decade. When asked how close they feel to Israel, between 65% and 75% of American Jews respond “very close” or “fairly close” (2011: 68%, 2010: 74%, 2009: 69%, 2008: 67%, 2007: 70%, 2006: 76%, 2005: 77%, 2004: 75%, 2003: 74%, 2002: 73%, 2001: 72%). The fact remains that Jews of course support Israel – its the Jewish homeland, and whether you believe the Torah mandates this ownership, or it is just a result of politics and war, nevertheless, it belongs to the Jewish people – it is the Jewish homeland.

Noise-making rabble-rousers on the extreme left are nothing new – yet thankfully, in Israel (and in the American Jewish community) they are rightfully viewed as far-left extremists. The fact remains that the Likud Party is the ruling party of Israel – and the far left (where J Street & Beinart would sit) have minimal representation in the Israeli Knesset.

“Ecclesiastes, of course, was right: indeed, nothing is new under the sun,”  Yitzhak Shamir wrote in his autobiography. The left makes noise, but as Shamir wrote, these are men who make “.. peace paramount, like a golden calf, to be worshiped at the expense of the values and aspirations that made Israel unique and placed it at the heart of world Jewry.” “Peace’ secured in this way, under duress,” he writes, “would only bring greater demands in its wake until everything the Arabs wanted would, at last, be theirs, even Jerusalem.”

Thankfully, followers of Ze’ev Jabotinsky rule the State of Israel, and one can only pray that J Street and Beinart give up before they cause the Jewish community even more harm.

Ronn Torossian is the CEO of 5WPR, a leading PR agency and author of “For Immediate Release”, a PR book which may be purchased here.