The president of the Conference of Presidents must be 100% pro-Israel
The president of the Conference of Presidents must be 100% pro-Israel

Caroline Glick has written a provocative and most timely article about the impending presidency of Dianne Lob as President of the Conference of Presidents of the 53 major Jewish organizations in the United States. She is alarmed and concerned about this development.  In her article, she tries to understand how this poor choice could take place. 

Normally, Glick cuts right through the darkness and reveals the inner dynamics of that which she writes about.  But in this article, for the first time, we find her perturbed and even overwhelmed by the mischegoss. She is struggling to put all these developments in perspective. She is disgusted, befuddled.  She is at the same time trying to create a framework about what to think. 

On Tuesday, if Lob is elected President, the Conference of Presidents will have made what I can only call "an Esau decision."  Esau was hungry and wanted to get to the food.  If she is voted for, the Conference will have shown itself as "hungry" to get this election over with. 

This writer would have preferred that someone of Ms. Glick's stature be even more condemnatory than she is in this article.  She says, "At the rate the radical left is taking over major Jewish organizations, we can assume that within five years there will be a steep rise in the number of American Jewish groups that advocate on behalf of BDS." 

This is where the Esau theme comes in.  It is tantamount to selling your birthright for a mess of potage. In this case the potage is to satisfy the hunger to continue to have the ear of the leadership of the Democratic Party. It will be more difficult to access Democratic Senators, Congressmen, and backroom wheeler-dealers if you don't make some room for the BDS'ers.

Just look at the positions of all the Presidential contenders for the Democratic nomination.  Where is the rabid, intrepid supporter of the State of Israel?  So they are thinking that to maintain influence and access, they will have to modify.  Having meetings, hors d'oeuvres, lunches, and dinners with the power minds of the Dems can be very heady, very satisfying, just like Esau found eating a good meal to be very satisfying.

Further, she describes the majority of Dems (and ipso facto the leadership derived from that base) as a "silent, exhausted and uninvolved Jewish majority."  However, the Jewish majority is not silent and not exhausted.  And it is too often involved with the wrong issues, at the wrong time, and in the wrong way. Sorry to say, it strikes me that she is sentimentalizing the mass of Jews who never go to synagogue and who think tikkun olam (if they even heard the term) not Torah is the key to Jewish identity. 

Sadly this same group believes that the Psalms, Wisdom books, and the Prophets are, at best, "interesting" but largely irrelevant for understanding our society (let alone Almighty God).  Instead, they prefer to identify with a limited social worker mindset and thus insist on being identified with those persons whom they perceive as the underdog.  In this way, the Jewish citizens that cling to the Democratic Party are manipulated by the leadership of that party who are striving to implement a neo-Marxist, techno-bureaucratic rule and value system in our country and throughout the world.   Often unaware, they are energetically (neither silent or exhausted) involved in implementing an organizational model -- dare I say "Orwellian model" -- upon society, a model that will be controlled and directed by a despotic elite that eternally depreciates the importance of the individual, of liberty, and of Almighty God. 

The election of Dianne Lob would not be based on a solid vision of the hope Zion is for the Jewish people and for the entire world. 
She says, "Since J Street was established in 2007 to compete with AIPAC and began lobbying Democratic lawmakers to diminish their support for Israel, AIPAC has been steeped in existential crisis."  But is this true?  There has been some accommodation to J Street, but as she says J Street only received 17 votes. So where is the "crisis?" 

Obviously the AIPAC strategy is to listen to all, be respectful to all, but not change its priorities. They are not “steeped in crisis,” but are ignoring the crisis which is greater than they realize. Even though J Street only garnered 17 votes when they applied for membership in the Conference, J Street still must count that as a victory and be encouraged that there even was a vote being taken; whereas ten years ago, their membership would never even have come to a vote. Furthermore, despite that earlier J Street setback, here they are with this lady from HIAS likely to become President who appears to be supportive of BDS.  Thus, even if the BDS policies do not become implemented, again, progress will have been made against the best interests of Israel. It's a progress that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.  

So, no, there is no "identity crisis." Rather we see that the Conference of Presidents has an excess of pride in its ability to maintain core Jewish values and the validity of time-honored American policies towards Israel while at the same time “being flexible” towards BDS or those Jews willing work with CAIR or Linda Sarsour.  They believe they can maintain the status quo ante but at the same time appear flexible and open to all Jewish constituencies. Their pride is actually misplaced. 

The opposition represented by a BDS mindset which perceives the Palestinian Arabs as the underdogs (and thus automatically deserving of Jewish support) sees its even being considered for membership or Lob’s selection not as a sop or a bone, but as real progress. The enemy of Zionism is at the gates, and with a prideful "big tent" philosophy by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, might it not be that they are underestimating the opposition? 

Lastly, I would like to comment on Mrs. Glick's sentence "The second reason HIAS’s efforts to bring Muslims to America is significant is because in its work in this arena HIAS has collaborated with Islamic groups associated with Islamic terrorist organizations."  Here, she rightly sees that working with such groups is nothing short of “nuts” for the Jewish American community. 

Yet, it may be that she underestimates the power of guilt in the Jewish psyche that is still at large in the USA.  The Jewish desire, born of years of helpless victimhood, is to ensure they are not seen as being against anyone because of their belief system or nationality. “Acceptance” of others as an adjustment to centuries of rejection by others itself has sometimes contributed to adjustment issues and misunderstandings. 

Considering Ms. Lob for this high office may itself be an expression of or attempt to appease this guilt for being against Muslims or even terrorists:  We must protect ourselves from terrorists of course.  But in some ultimate personal sense, we are not and should not be against them because they, like us, are fellow humans. 

Admitting HIAS to a leadership role may very well be an attempt to appease that guilt. It's a way of saying that we do not want to reject the Muslims or even terrorists out of hand. It is an attempt to communicate magnanimity and forgiveness, even where that magnanimity and forgiveness is not reciprocated.

The election of Dianne Lob would not be based on a solid vision of the hope Zion is for the Jewish people and for the entire world.  Rather, it would be based on an “Esau vision” of one’s birthright, and upon a deep-seated guilt that comes to the fore to distract our moral compass. 

It is not reflective of a crisis of identity but a failure to fulfill the goals and meaning of our identity.  And recognition of anyone not avid for the promotion of Israel and Jewish identity, who instead holds to what they perceive as a more humanitarian philosophy is simply not right for the job.