J Street Finds No Difference In Social Media Engagement During Internet Outage

The incident recalls an episode in 2016 when a J Street post on Facebook broke the two-digit mark on Likes, prompting Director Jeremy Ben-Ami to create a special award for the dozen staffers of the organization who had used their personal accounts to create that achievement.

Washington, October 18 – A progressive lobbying organization that bills itself as “pro-Israel, pro-peace,” but has failed to resonate with the overwhelming majority of American Jews and Israel-supporters, disclosed today that while Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram went down for six hours two weeks ago, the organization registered no appreciable change in the traffic, shares, comments, or Likes of its materials on those platforms.

A spokesman for the liberal J Street outfit observed Monday that the major collapse on October 4 of several of the world’s largest social networks appears not to have had an adverse effect on its social media reach and engagement. The spokesman pointed to traffic and engagement statistics from during the outage and the close-to-identical numbers before and after the incident.

“We’re pleased that our outreach matrix is robust enough to maintain our reach even under such challenging circumstances,” stated J Street’s Assistant Director of Communications Bootstrap Stroehmann. “The task before us is to leverage that robust matrix to expand the reach beyond its current level, which unfortunately had shown disappointing growth since President Obama left office.”

Obama tapped J Street to spearhead the administration’s efforts to drum up American Jewish support, or at least to create the impression of American Jewish support, for the JCPOA agreement with Iran in 2015 that, at the time, smoothed Iran’s path to nuclear weapons, an outcome that Obama and his “echo chamber” insisted would not occur. Absent endorsement and support from Obama, however, J Street has never made a credible claim to represent American Jewry – even though a sizeable majority of American Jewry, according to polls, favor a negotiated two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, a position that J Street, ostensibly, also favors. The organization’s failure to resonate authentically with more than a narrow sliver of the American Jewish community stems in part from J Street’s pronouncements – and notable silences – finding an eerie congruence with those of Israel’s most intractable, existential foes; in part from its apparent inability or refusal, as a self-proclaimed “pro-Israel” organization, to express unequivocal support for Israel even when the latter faces indiscriminate rocket barrages; and in part from its consistent endorsement of political candidates whose positions on Israel resemble those of Muammar Qaddafi more than those of Shimon Peres, let alone the majority of Israelis.

The incident recalls an episode in 2016 when a J Street post on Facebook broke the two-digit mark on Likes, prompting Director Jeremy Ben-Ami to create a special award for the dozen staffers of the organization who had used their personal accounts to create that achievement.

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