By J. Zel Lurie
DELRAY BEACH, Florida — J Street, the pro-Israel, pro-peace lobby in Washington and JStreetPAC endorsed 71 candidates for Congress and 70 were elected. J Street PAC raised a record 1.8 million dollars to help their
candidates.
“This is an incredible victory,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founder and president of the organization.
J Street’s victory is the beginning of a revolution in Congressional action on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The next Congress will have a solid core of lawmakers who favor a two-state-for-two-peoples solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. No longer will Congress get majority support for the policy it has followed for decades: the protection of the Jewish settlers against the opposition of the president and the State Department.
JStreet endorsed 7 Senate incumbents. All were elected. JStreet endorsed 49 incumbents of the House of Representatives. All were elected. JStreet endorsed 15 Democrats who were running against Republican incumbents or for open seats. Only one was defeated.
And here is where this incredible victory gets even sweeter. Five of the defeated Republicans, in an election in which the Republican majority in the House held fast, were members of a small caucus in the house called the “one-staters.” These five Republicans took millions from casino magnate Sheldon Adelson to openly campaign for the Jewish settlers’ program of maintaining the status quo.They call it the one-state solution but they have no intention of giving up the Army’s occupation of the WestBank.
The five defeated one-staters were led by Allen West of Palm Beach Gardens, who suffered a razor-thin defeat by Patrick Murphy. He is
demanding a recount,
J Street has no illusions that the defeat of these five Republican congressmen was due to their opposition to a peaceful solution to the
conflict for Israel.
Pollster Jim Gerstein, who works for J Street, found that the American Jewish voter had different priorities. 53 percent said their top
priority in voting for or against Obama was the economy. 32 percent said it was health care, while Israel shared the remaining 15 percent with
abortion and terrorism. Gerstein’s exit poll showed that 73 percent of American Jews supported[ Obama’s handling of the Arab-Israel conflict whole 70 percent of American Jews voted for Obama,against 74 percent who voted for him in 2008.
These figures indicate a four point gain for the Republican Jewish Committee which spent millions of dollars of Adelson’s money on a blitz advertising campaign in the Jewish media. The RJC believes that the money was well spent.
But Gerstein’s exit poll has a margin of error of almost 4 percent.
More important,it does not take into account the fact that the number of absentee ballots by Jewish voters has almost quadrupled since
2008.They could not participate in the exit polls.
In Palm Beach County the flood of absentee ballots was still being counted as this column is being written, 36 hours after the polls closed.
A few of the absentee ballots came from Israel, where a pro-Romney group which they called “Vote Israel” helped Americans get their votes in.
They announced that their poll showed Americans in Israel voting 85 percent for Romney. They neglected to mention that most of the voters were recent Orthodox immigrants to West Bank settlements. They did not include veteran American immigrants like my daughter and granddaughter.
My record of being wrong in predicting every Presidential election since Harry Truman has been broken. I was convinced that Obama
would squeeze through when at my breakfast club on the Wednesday before elections a straw poll was taken of about a hundred Jewish men.
Only 15 percent raised their hands for Romney.
I asked the man sitting next to me. “Why are you voting for Obama?” He replied:”Because he is an honest man.”
That is the secret of Romney’s defeat: his pandering to the Tea Party in the primary and reversing himself to win over the independent voter in the election.
Obama was honest throughout a most difficult four years with another difficult four years to come.
*
Lurie is a freelance writer based in Delray Beach, Florida. He may be contacted at jzel.lurie@sdjewishworld.com
Thank you for this analysis of the remarkable results of this recent election. It is important to realize that despite the rhetoric to the contrary, most voters, including Jewish voters, support candidates who are willing to help bring Israel and the Palestinians closer to a resolution of the conflict. Let’s hope that the defeat of the “one-state caucus” will translate into a mandate for a two-state solution.