RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Wednesday, the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations rejected J Street’s bid for membership. Of the 42 out of 50 members present at the vote, 17 were in favor, 22 opposed and three abstained.

Needing 34 supporting votes to gain entry “into the tent,” J Street would have lost even if the eight groups absent, together with those who had refrained from casting a ballot, had backed its entry.

It was, in other words, a resounding defeat.

Since its inception in 2008, J Street’s goal has been to compete with, undermine and eventually replace the American Israel Public Affairs Committee as the most influential Jewish lobby on Capitol Hill. And though initially this seemed to be too tall an order for the fledgling organization that called itself “pro-Israel and pro-peace” — a euphemism for pro-Palestinian and pro-Arab world — J Street began to gain momentum.

It certainly received media coverage for every one of its events, no matter how poorly attended; and its director, Jeremy Ben-Ami, became prominent on the lecture and panel circuit. This provided him the opportunity to attack Israel in the guise of defending it against the policies of its government, while accusing J Street’s critics of stifling healthy and robust debate.

Liberals are always suckers for such blackmail. Ben-Ami knows this and has tried, often successfully, to use it to his advantage.

But there is one crack in his armor and calculations: His operation is funded by radical left-wing billionaire George Soros.

Soros is considered by Israel supporters, even large numbers of left-leaning ones, to be an extremist in his hostility towards the Jewish state. Indeed, he has been a key financer of the delegitimization campaign whose tentacles extend far and wide.

Still, while J Street openly supports policies that Israel views as harmful to its interests — such as the Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state — Ben-Ami repeatedly professes his great love for the country.

This is what distinguishes him from and his counterparts at AIPAC. AIPAC sees its job as strengthening ties between the governments of the United States and Israel. J Street’s mission is to lobby Washington to exert negative pressure on Jerusalem. In a nutshell, its raison d’etre is to show that “anti-Israel is the new pro-Israel.”

The irony is delicious.

Whether American Jews call themselves “pro-Israel” or not, an overwhelming majority is loyal to the Democratic Party. In 2008, Barack Obama won a whopping 78 percent of the Jewish vote. In 2012, after four years of Obama’s appalling treatment of Israel in particular and his disastrous Middle East policies in general, the Jewish vote decreased to 70%. (This phenomenon was the inspiration for the quip that if Obama bombed Tel Aviv, he would be able to get “only” 65% of the Jews to vote for him.)

It is for this reason that J Street’s failure to garner enough votes from the Conference of Presidents is now causing an uproar among liberal Jews. The Union of Reform Judaism and the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly, for example, are up in arms and threatening to leave the umbrella organization. The American media, too, are having a field day.

According to Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin, J Street’s loss was its gain. It was, he writes, “…the best possible outcome for the left-wing organization that came into existence not to fit in and cooperate with existing Jewish groups and coalitions but to blow them up. The negative vote enables J Street and its various left-wing sympathizers to play the victim and boosts their agenda to first delegitimize groups like the Conference and AIPAC and then to replace them.”

Indeed.

Herein lies the only silver lining in this otherwise dark cloud. In spite of the knee-jerk liberalism of the organized American-Jewish community, the Conference of Presidents voted to exclude J Street from its ranks.

This is the best evidence that Ben-Ami and his buddies are on the fringe. It also indicates that they underestimated the ability of Jewish liberals to recognize an assault on the birthright and justice of the Jewish state when they see one.

Ruthie Blum is the author of “To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the ‘Arab Spring.'”