‘American support is not a blank check’: An interview with J Street Israel’s Executive Director Nadav Tamir

On Nov. 20, 19 Democratic senators voted in favor of three resolutions to block weapons shipments to Israel. The resolutions, which failed, were introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders and opposed by all Senate Republicans and most Democrats. The Biden administration, which has sent billions in military aid to Israel, also came out against the measures.

But, in an act of what might be called “tough love,” the resolutions to withhold weapons were supported by J Street, which bills itself as “the political home and voice for pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy Americans.”

Nadav Tamir, J Street Israel’s executive director, said there’s a difference between supporting Israel’s defense and its offense in the current war. While J Street always supports the shipment of defensive weapons to Israel, it urged senators to vote for the resolutions to halt the provision of some offensive weapons to “send a message to Congress.”

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“We believe the Netanyahu government continuing this war without a plan for the day after, without any attempt to release the hostages, with the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza — I believe the administration and Congress should show a signal to Netanyahu that the American support is not a blank check,” Tamir said, speaking on Zoom from his home outside Tel Aviv. “Soldiers are being killed, hostages are still there. So the U.S. has to tell Israel the aid is for Israel’s security. What you are doing now is not Israel’s security and definitely not in America’s interest.”

Tamir, a former Israeli consul general to New England and adviser to former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, will be at the Jewish Community Center in Squirrel Hill on Thursday, Dec. 5, at 7 p.m. to discuss “The Future of Israel and the Middle East.”

Tamir, who worked in Peres’ office during the days of the Oslo Accords, said his role with J Street, “is the exact right place for me as someone who knows American politics, who understands diplomacy, the peace process, keeping Israel a democracy.”

He began working with the Israeli Foreign Ministry in 1993. His first position abroad was in Washington, D.C., where he “learned a lot about American politics and American exceptionalism and diplomacy,” he said, and was “very impressed by the mainstream Jewish organizations, their clout, their impact.”

But his perceptions later changed while in the U.S. as a Wexner Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government in 2004, when he got to know the Boston community and came to realize “the organizations that I was very impressed with are very disconnected from so many Jews who felt that they didn’t leave any space for anyone who had criticism, and that they demanded the only way to love and support Israel is to agree with the Israeli government — which was easy in the early days of the state but became harder and harder with the right-wing governments and lack of peace process.”

Mainstream Jewish organizations, he said, “made it impossible for American administrations to really try to work hard on achieving a two-state solution because any politician who spoke about the Palestinian state or Palestinian rights was suicidal — they would go after him or her.”

Tamir describes himself as a Zionist who believes that “a Palestinian state is absolutely necessary.”

“And if we won’t end occupation,” he added, “the occupation will end us.”

Tamir’s criticism of the Israeli government landed him in hot water in 2009, while he was serving as consul general in Boston.

The Obama administration had just come into power “and I was very frustrated by the way the Netanyahu government dealt with the Obama administration,” Tamir said. “So I wrote a long memo criticizing that policy, which was supposed to be internal but it got leaked to the press, and that created a lot of issues in the Israeli media and in the Boston media. In the Boston media, it was more like ‘the consul general spoke truth to power,’ but the government in Israel saw it very differently.”

Tamir was, in fact, called back to Israel where he was reprimanded for the memo and he apologized, according to multiple media reports. He went back to Boston and completed his term of office.

J Street was founded just two years earlier, and was beginning to gain steam.

“I thought, ‘Wow, this is exactly what we need: a political home for American Jews who care about Israel, who care about peace and care about democracy,’” Tamir said.

While he “was skeptical that this organization could become a player,” he kept in touch with J Street leaders, and eventually was offered the position of executive director of J Street Israel.

“I feel very happy that I could work in a place that really serves my values,” he said, “even though it is very hard times for anyone who believes in those values, both in the U.S. and in Israel these days.”

While a two-state solution is disfavored by a majority of both Jewish Israelis and Palestinians, Tamir thinks it is the only path to peace. In an October Gallup poll, only 17% of Jewish Israelis supported the creation of an independent Palestinian state, and only 28% of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem supported it.

Tamir thinks the poll results are misleading.

“I believe the majority of Israelis are confused,” he said. “When you explain that [a two-state solution] is part of a regional choreography of an alliance of Israel with the entire Arab Sunni countries, led by the U.S., and that is the best way to get security and to actually confront Iran and its proxies, Israelis are absolutely responding to that. So it depends on how you ask the question and what’s the framing.”

Palestinian leaders have rejected multiple proposals for a two-state solution through the years including the Oslo Accords and the Trump administration’s “Deal of the Century.”

Those plans were rejected, Tamir said, because they did not offer the Palestinians “a real solution that respected their basic needs.”

Also, he added, there were many mistakes made along the way. In Oslo, for example, the assumption that an agreement could be made with the Palestinians “without a regional component was naïve.”

“The Palestinians on their own cannot make the decision about Jerusalem, about refugees — they cannot provide the security,” he said. “But now that the regional situation is so much more ripe and our entire neighbors would like to actually normalize relations with Israel if it includes a Palestinian state, that’s a different ball game.”

The Palestinian component of a normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia is critical, he said, and might be “one of the things that Biden and Trump could agree on.”

“What maybe Trump has that Biden did not have is the willingness and the ability to pressure Netanyahu,” Tamir explained. “And that’s why I can see a situation where Trump could be more effective in implementing the Biden Doctrine than Biden was, because Biden was not able to treat Netanyahu as a superpower needs to treat an ally.”

Intervention by the international community is imperative if there is to be peace, Tamir stressed. And while the Palestinian rallying cry of “From the river to the sea” is loud, he said it does not represent the views of most Palestinians.

“There are extremists on both sides: Hamas on the Palestinian side, and even some members of our government who believe ‘From the river to the sea’ for their own side,” he said. “Both are wrong. Both are not representing the majority of Israelis and Palestinians. But for Israelis and Palestinians to believe again in the two-state solution, you need an action from the international community, and especially from the U.S., because Israelis are now in big trauma and big fear from the other, and blind to the suffering of the other side — both Israelis who don’t understand the suffering in Gaza and Palestinians who don’t believe the stories of Oct. 7. So we really need help from our friends in the West and this is why I feel J Street is needed more than ever in order to work with American politicians in Congress and in the administration to bring leadership that will allow that.” PJC

Toby Tabachnick can be reached at ttabachnick@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.