Here is a bit of Ben-Ami Zionism:
Western political leaders have acquired a concern for ''Arab-Palestinian homelessness'', which is selfishly economic rather than humanitarian. At the same time they ignore that three quarters of the original Palestine Mandate area is now under Palestinian-Arab rule. The sooner disaspora Jews and the Hebrew nation recognize these new realities, the stronger they will be.The Hebrew renaissance offers a painful choice to Jews. They can live in the diaspora, often facing isolation, persecution and ambivalent identities, or they can return to their ancient land and face perils, but with a chance for honorable self-fulfillment and an end to wandering...
No, that wasn’t the Zionism of Jeremy Ben-Ami who dwells at that fictitious “J Street" address.
The Zionism in that section belongs to his father, Yitzhaq Rosen Ben-Ami, “Mike” of the Peter Bergson group, an Irgun commander. You can find it on page 544 of his book, Years of Wrath, Days of Glory. And as the reviewer at Foreign Affairs noted at the time, in 1982,
Some of the most interesting parts, as one might expect, have to do with the rivalry and bad blood between the Irgun and the Zionist establishment.
The Zionism of his son, Jeremy, as much as it is, seems to be expressed in a very odd and anti-Zionist formulation. As detailed by Daniel Mael, at the now on-going three-day 2014 J StreetU Student Town Hall conclave, “Real Conversations, Real Action” at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD,
Jeremy Ben-Ami declared before 300 students that Diaspora Jewry can simply bring its values and override Israeli democracy. J Street, he suggested, will bring its progressive values to Israel and they won’t check them at the door. That message of his sounded to me like ‘we’ll pay you a visit but won’t stay to clean up’.
A tweeter recorded another “Zionist” gem:
I am sorry to disappoint those excited by that quip but Jews returning to Zion did not do so to assist in the establishment of an Arab state in its own homeland, an entity that would seek to deny Jews our history, attempt to eradicate our physical presence on this land, which aligned itself with Naziism as early as 1933 and until this day, engages in the worst humanitarian practices possible, to Jews and also its own "people".
Politics being what they were, our strength being what is was, and with the results of the Holocaust aided by the Mufti of Mandate Palestine''s Arab community, we could not prevent during the Mandate days a foreign entity from receiving recognition (and we were forced to agree to a surrender of major sections of that homeland in Transjordan - to a Saudi Arabia refugee family). However, to actively encourage “Palestine” --- which is a concept that is but the reverse negative of Israel and Zionism, a movement which is anti-Semitic, murderous and destructive, to Jews and to its own members, especially to children, --- is maniacal madness.
Despite claims to the contrary, J Street is following in the footsteps of the weakeners of Zion to whom Jeremy referred not only due to its corrosive effect or its perverted political positioning on the far-out left but because it does not have Israel at heart. It is pro-American in the worse sense as it exists primarily to maintain Jewish existence in that country. His groups is solely to act as an Obama satellite.
If Ben-Ami, as reported, did suggest that "60 to 70 years ago, major Jewish organizations were against the formation of the State of Israel", a silly remark because the American Jewish Council was not "major" and already in 1942 all major Jewish American organizations were behind the Biltmore Conference Declaration, all he is doing is drawing attention to his own anti-Israel philosophy today.
I met Jeremyy briefly last month at the Knesset as he was leaving. I told him that despite the very fundamental differences between us, I wanted him to know I had great respect for his father (I did work for him in helping to research his memoirs).
I only hope that his respect for his father will yet return him to Zionism, the grand Zionism of the Jabotinsky camp. Stranger things have happened.
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