The anti-Israel lobby excels at generating astroturfed groups featuring the same old people. It spun off a bunch of younger J Street members into If Not Now. a hate group whose members aggressively attack Jewish charities in ways that J Street doesn't want to be seen doing.
The latest anti-Israel group is named Save Israel, Stop the Occupation. The first part is misleading. The last thing the anti-Israel lobby wants is to "Save Israel". It obsessively seeks to destroy it.
Save Israel, Stop the Occupation pretends to be a new organization. It's actually headed by Jessica Montell who formerly headed the anti-Israel group B'Tselem. She's just been moved over to another target audience.
Jessica Montell started out in Human Rights Watch, another misleadingly named anti-Israel hate group which gets funding from the Saudis to bash Israel.
A delegation from Human Rights Watch was recently in Saudi Arabia. To investigate the mistreatment of women under Saudi Law? To campaign for the rights of homosexuals, subject to the death penalty in Saudi Arabia? To protest the lack of religious freedom in the Saudi Kingdom? To issue a report on Saudi political prisoners?
No, no, no, and no. The delegation arrived to raise money from wealthy Saudis by highlighting HRW’s demonization of Israel. An HRW spokesperson, Sarah Leah Whitson, highlighted HRW’s battles with “pro-Israel pressure groups in the US, the European Union and the United Nations.”
And, oh yes, HRW has been funded by George Soros.
Then Jessica Montell moved on to Development and then Executive Director at B'Tselem. Both B'Tselem and HRW get cash from the Ford Foundation.
We don't have funding information for Save Israel, Stop the Occupation yet, but it's a good bet that it will be the usual anti-Israel lobby suspects. Save Israel, Stop the Occupation's steering committee includes Jill Jacobs of the anti-Israel group T'ruah and Aaron Back of the New Israel Fund, which once again gets money from all the usual suspects.
Why has the anti-Israel lobby decided to create yet another duplicate Israel bashing group?
The obvious marketing strategy of Save Israel, Stop the Occupation is to leverage Jessica Montell's experience with B'Tselem to link up anti-Israel lefties in Israel with an American organization operating in a diaspora space. The agenda is to use anti-Israel activists who speak Hebrew as human shields to mute objections in the United States.
The anti-Israel lobby has enormous wealth, power and resources. And it can launch experiments on this. Their goal is to maintain pressure on the Jewish community from different angles.