APN's mission is to educate and persuade the American public and its leadership to support and adopt policies that will lead to comprehensive, durable, Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab peace, based on a two-state solution, guaranteeing both peoples security, and consistent with U.S. national interests.
What Happened to IfNotNow?
This feature appears in our Spring 2021 issue. Subscribe now to receive a copy in your mailbox.
ONE FRIDAY AFTERNOON in June 2019, the anti-Israeli-occupation group IfNotNow sent its roughly 2,000 members an unusually candid email. “First and foremost: we owe you all, the leaders and members of IfNotNow, an apology,” it began. Part strategy document, part confessional, the email signed by IfNotNow’s full-time staff responded to discontent that had been brewing for months. IfNotNow had become too hierarchical, many members said, leaving local chapters unsupported while paid national staff pursued projects in which the rank-and-file had little say. The staff email committed the group to a process of teshuva, or repentance, borrowing a Jewish religious concept that requires an offending party to repair, to the degree possible, the damage they have done. But for many disgruntled IfNotNow members, it was too late to fix an organization that had veere
J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami speaking at the 2019 national conference in Washington, D.C., on October 27, 2019. (Gili Getz)
J Street finally wants the US to think beyond the two-state solution
With a one-state reality deepening in Israel-Palestine, the lobby group is shifting away from the model it has championed for years. Now it is turning to a new solution: confederation.
When J Street was founded in 2007, it aimed to be a home for America’s “pro-Israel, pro-peace” community by dedicating itself to advancing a two-state solution while also denouncing the Israeli occupation and settlement expansion. Fourteen years later, the lobby group has established itself as a major institution in Washington, influencing lawmakers on Capitol Hill and attracting powerful keynote speakers to its annual conference. Yet as Israel’s policies of occupation and annexation deepen, the goal of partitioning the land and establishing a Palestinian state is nowhere in sight.
Responding to vigorous campus support for Professor Cornel R. West â74 â who said last month Harvard declined to consider him for tenure in part due to his outspoken criticism of Israelâs treatment of Palestinians â Rabbi Jonah C. Steinberg, executive director of Harvard Hillel, criticized West for having âegged students onâ in âscapegoating and demonizingâ Jewish people.
In an email to Hillel affiliates Friday, Steinberg wrote he believes a student petition condemning Harvardâs alleged decision to not consider West for tenure is based on âan anti-Jewish conspiracy theory.â
The petition cites Westâs belief that he was denied tenure consideration due to his opposition to âthe settler colonial violence of Israelâs occupation of Palestineâ and references Zionism in a list of ideologies it says West has critiqued, alongside âwhite supremacy, racial capitalism,â and âthe military-industrial complex
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