Following J-Street Lead, Enemies Of Israel Now Calling Selves ‘Pro-Israel’

“We’re following the trail blazed by Jeremy Ben-Ami and his group, with an assist from the New Israel Fund,” explained Roger Gasleiter of JCPOA Associates, a Washington-area firm.

Washington, January 1 – Arab and Muslim countries long committed to the destruction of the world’s only Jewish State have taken a page out of left-leaning advocacy organization J-Street and have begun to refer to themselves as, “pro-Israel, pro-peace.”

Iran, Syria, Malaysia, Pakistan, and several other states that have no diplomatic relations with Israel and have never sought rapprochement with Israel have noted recently that explicit threats to destroy Israel play less well in powerful Western circles than the J-Street-pioneered strategy of painting oneself as in favor of Israel but redefining the Israel in question to mean the country that would exist after the current one ceases to function as a recognizably Jewish entity or a haven for Jews from persecution.

Public relations consultants working with a number of Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian Muslim states gathered in the US capital this week to compare notes on the ongoing efforts of those governments to rebrand themselves as pro-Israel in the mold of J-Street. The professionals discussed multiple options for presenting their clients’ stated desire to exterminate the Jewish State – and many or all of its Jewish inhabitants – as pro-Israel, just as J-Street’s goals point to the undermining of the Jewish character of Israel and its ability to establish and maintain security for its citizens, while the organization calls itself pro-Israel.

“We’re following the trail blazed by Jeremy Ben-Ami and his group, with an assist from the New Israel Fund,” explained Roger Gasleiter of JCPOA Associates, a Washington-area firm. “Better late than never, so for the next couple of weeks while Obama is still in office and his door is open to liberal groups à la J-Street, maybe we can get this new strategy and image going, and burnish our clients’ credentials with the American pro-peace camp, but without our clients’ having to actually change their pursuit of Israel’s destruction in any meaningful way.”

That public relations effort, noted Gasleiter, will become even more important once Obama leaves office and Donald Trump assumes the presidency. “Direct existential opposition to Israel probably won’t do,” he predicted. “Our clients have to find an angle that deflects to some degree the anticipated animus of the incoming administration, and one reliable way of doing that is to portray their desire to destroy Israel as a pro-Israel position. It took some convincing to get these governments to adopt this line, but my colleagues and I believe it holds the key to protecting decades-old policy. It’s just too bad from their perspective that it took a bunch of Jews to give them the idea.”

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