What Does It Mean to Be Pro-Israel?

National Journal:

Pushing Israel From Both Sides

By Julie Kosterlitz, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008

What does it mean to be pro-Israel? With the Bush administration's 11th-hour push for renewed peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, the American Jewish community has renewed its soul-searching on this question. Two new political groups have proposed vastly different answers.
The formation of two new political groups underscores the difficulty that the traditional pro-Israel lobbies face staking out a position on the peace process.

Last fall, about two dozen Jewish organizations, including several Orthodox and Zionist groups, banded together to oppose the stated intent of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government to consider sharing control over Jerusalem with a Palestinian entity. Led by Rabbi Pesach Lerner, executive vice president of the National Council of Young Israel, an alliance of Orthodox congregations, they formed a nonprofit called the Coordinating Council on Jerusalem around the shared belief that that ancient city, as the council states, "is the capital of the Jewish people and the heritage of all Jews everywhere and ... we oppose any negotiations which involve possible concessions of Jewish sovereignty or control" over the city.

With an anticipated initial budget of just under $1 million, the CCJ has hired lobbyist and political consultant Jeff Ballabon, a former aide to then-Sen. John Danforth, R-Mo., and a liaison to Jewish organizations in President Bush's 2004 re-election campaign, to run its operations. "No one could imagine the day when an Israeli prime minister would suggest touching" Jerusalem's existing boundaries, Ballabon says. "It's time to say, 'When it comes to Jerusalem, it belongs to all Jews. Israel simply holds it as stewards for you.' "

A growing number of the CCJ's members have also soured on the broader thrust of the peace negotiations, which envision creation of a Palestinian state, that began with the Oslo accords of the 1990s and were reprised recently with the Bush administration's Annapolis peace conference, Ballabon says.  [link]

Russian Jews are represented at the Coordinating Council on Jerusalem by the Russian Jewish Community Foundation.

posted by: jrtelegraph