I've written before about the paradox of the pro-Israel wing of the pro-Israel community.
The marshmallow center of the pro-Israel community is the best recruiting ground for the anti-Israel left because its worldview is hypocritical and incoherent. It lobbies for arms for Israel and yet insists that peace is inevitable. It concedes that both sides have good arguments, but that Israel’s argument is slightly better. Or perhaps slightly less worse. It evades the issues to talk up Israel’s tech sector or the gay bars in Tel Aviv. It believes in boosterism, but not in Israel’s right to finally end terrorism.
This is a situation in which much of what is officially deemed the pro-Israel lobby shoots down actual pro-Israel legislation while favoring some sort of imaginary peace with the terrorists. And they are distinct from the covertly overt anti-Israel wing like J Street.
So groups like these are a very welcome development.
A Jewish political action committee is seeking to get the Republican Party platform to recognize the West Bank as an “indigenous” part of the Jewish homeland.
“The Land of Israel is the indigenous homeland of the Jewish people by right and by law and we oppose any measures to force, coerce or otherwise impose a security ‘solution’ or artificial borders on the Jewish state,” says the language proposed by Iron Dome Alliance. “We recognize an undivided Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and Judea and Samaria as integral parts of the indigenous Jewish homeland.”
The Iron Dome Alliance released the language on June 16, offering it for incorporation into both major parties’ platforms. Its chairman, Jeff Ballabon, told the Forward Wednesday that its emphasis would be on the Republican Party, in part because the party is more attuned to conservative pro-Israel positions and in part because the presumptive presidential nominee, Donald Trump, is an iconoclast.
“Someone who likes to succeed won’t agree to go down the road of something that has failed and failed again and again,” said Ballabon, a longtime Republican activist in the Orthodox Jewish community, told the newspaper. “The idea of taking a new look at this is very important.”
And Trump might be more willing to throw out the conventional expert wisdom on the failed two state solution which remains an article of faith in most quarters.
You can find the Facebook page for the Iron Dome Alliance here and its Twitter account here.