Sweet Revenge: Israel Project "Right-Wing"

The Israel Project was left-of-center when it suited their purposes to be pro-government, when Calev Ben-David headed it. But Ha-Ha-Haaretz knows better.

Here is how they are described today:-

the right-wing Israel Project group

And why?

A pro-Israel lobby group in the U.S. has launched a project intent on shifting the focus of the Obama administration away from West Bank settlements, claiming they are not an obstacle to peace and that their evacuation would amount to "ethnic cleansing."

A manual called Global Language Dictionary, circulated among supporters of the right-wing Israel Project group, seeks to develop a strategy to downplay the centrality of settlement freeze in the American efforts to press on with the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians...the manual urges its readers to disseminate the message that "the idea that anywhere that you have Palestinians there can't be any Jews, that some areas have to be Jew-free, is a racist idea. We cannot see why it is that peace requires that any Palestinian area would require a kind of ethnic cleansing to remove all Jews. We don't accept it."

Admitting that the settlements are the "toughest issue" in pro-Israel advocacy, and that the hostility towards Israel's settlement policy "is clearly evident," the document advises the activists to stick to the security benefits of the settlements at the expense of the theological argument.

We needed them for that? I've been writing that for dozens of years and have been published, as recently as in the LATimes at the end of June, the outlines that Frank Luntz presents.

And this is a rehashed story.

Didn't Make It Into the JPost Magazine

My letter, that is.

In the discussion touching on the say of Jews from abroad initiated by Calev Ben-David ("Did I forget thee, O Jerusalem?", Dec. 6), Ben-David's opinion is that Ehud Olmert "is correct. The simple truth is that Diaspora Jews don't and won't have much actual say" in deciding "the future fate of Jerusalem, and so much else here". I find that an odd conclusion in that Ben-David recently left a prestigious position harnessing Diaspora Jewry to struggle on Israel's behalf in the field of Hasbara at the Israel Project.

Can it be that Mr. Ben-David thinks it proper to involve Diaspora Jews to fight Israel's media wars and to struggle for public opinion, or as the TIP site states: "to educat[e] the press and the public about Israel", but the relationship ends there and that it is one-way only? Is it not possible that some of the college students fostering TIP programs could be in danger on certain campuses but that there is no liability, moral or otherwise, that the state of Israel is obligated to these activists?

These activists, perhaps convinced by then Mayor of Jerusalem Olmert's words that the city is united were out there getting Israe's message to the public but now, must stay out of the campaign because current Prime Minister Olmert's words have been reversed? I find that nonsensical, illogical and a dangerous suggestion by Ben-David. The ramifications of his message is that when he was in charge of a joint Diaspora Jewry-Israel effort, the situation was acceptable but when a different set of conditions arises, Diaspora Jewry is told we don't want your help, your invovlement nor, perhaps, your money. That is unethical, to say the least.