Z Street: A Pro-Jewish Pride Organization in the Spirit of the Bergson Boys

by Jerry Gordon (April 2011)


Z Street
 was founded in 2009 by a veteran Philadelphia Jewish activist and former Zionist Organization of America (ZoA) official, Lori Lowenthal Marcus. Marcus is a Brandeis University, Bryn Mawer College and Harvard Law school graduate and legal educator, who also practiced as a First Amendment Rights lawyer and knew something about Constitutional rights of free speech.

Zeev Jabotinsky and led by Peter Bergson, in reality Hillel Kook, who came to the United States during WWII to raise a Jewish Army to fight fascism, only to remain and awaken American Jewish pride and convince the US Congress, the Jewish Agency and  FDR’s White House, over the objections of mainstream Jewish groups, to fight for the rescue of the remnant of the six million European Jewish men, women and children murdered in unspeakable ways in the Shoah – the Holocaust. These Palestinian Jewish Zionists were known as the Bergson Boys. The story of their remarkable exploits has been chronicled in books like  David S. Wyman and Rafael Medoff’s “A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America and The Holocaust” and both PBS and Simon Wiesenthal Center Moriah Film production, “Against The Tide.”

Yitshaq Ben-Ami, an Irgunist. That irony is not lost on Marcus and her international membership and 13 member board of Z Street, of which I am one. Z Street is committed to activism in the spirit of the Bergson Boys.

Lenny Ben David recently appeared at an Israeli Knesset  Committee investigation and gave good account of his abilities to reveal the real agenda of J Street.

With that background we held this interview with Lori Lowenthal Marcus, President of Z Street.

Nahman Shai spoke. He was one of the five members of the Knesset who came to this conference and spoke. Nahman Shai at one point responded to a question about the blockade of Gaza and his response was, when Gilad Shalit is released we can talk about easing all restrictions.  He paused when he said those words and I am positive that he expected applause. No applause, nothing. No one responded. There was no one in that room that saw that as a positive goal that Israel should be working for at least in terms of their response. There were 2,000 people in that room and the release of Gilad Shalit was not even on their radar screen. They couldn’t even applaud when they heard that. What did they applaud?  Always in terms of the occupation, the status quo is unsustainable. They had Roger Cohen of the New York Times insulting Ambassador Dennis Ross and his boss, President Barack Obama for not creating a Palestinian state immediately and allowing this to go on has been the case in so many different Administrations. Cohen said that Ross had been involved in politics and in Middle East negotiations and yet what a failure because there is still no Palestinian State. We had Marwan Beshara from Al-Jazeera. He was also arguing for creating the Palestinian State immediately. Ron Pundak, who is the director of the Shimon Peres Center for Peace, called for a revolution by the Israeli people against the Israeli government because there is no Palestinian State. It is the constant and only J Street refrain. 

Kadima member of the Knesset who called the hearing, Otniel Schneller.  He is someone who lives in a settlement who thinks that the settlements should be completely dismantled as long as you can come to peace. It was a really odd hearing. I think that there are a lot of politics that we’re not privy to regarding their thinking. There was a schism in the Kadima party about whether people attend the J Street Conference or not. I think this was an effort to embarrass the members of Kadima who went to the J Street Conference. My understanding is that a much better job could have been done had there been extensive preparation. Thank goodness Lenny Ben-David was there and able to present pretty thoroughly information about the lack of transparency and truthfulness of J Street’s public statements. I don’t know what the result will be. Frankly, I think it gave J Street an opportunity to look like a victim and that’s never a good thing for people who don’t like J Street. I wish that if there was going to be an investigation it had broader support and was more methodical. The truth is the more people in the Netanyahu government who recognize that J Street’s real positions; they will not be won over. J Street complained that Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon did not meet with them when they came to Israel.  Most organizations would wait until they’ve been around for a decade or so before they would expect to meet with the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs. At least there were some people in the Israeli government who are looking carefully and closely at what J Street does versus what they say.

Mordechai Kedar, Professor of Arabic Studies at Bar Ilan University, who is going to talk about what the lives of the Arabs in the region are like and what it is that will most suit their needs. Would it be a single unified state? Would that work with the tribal clan system that they have now? Is that what is going to be most conducive to their way of life?  We have Khaled Abu Toameh who is an Arab Israeli Journalist who was a reporter for the Palestinian Authority Press for years until he realized, “wait a minute, I’m really not getting to write the truth but instead I’m being told what to write.”  Abu Toameh now writes for Western media outlets and has great access to much information and freedom to write what he wants. He has chosen to live within Israel and sends his children  to school there. We have Nonie Darwish was Egyptian-born, grew up in Egypt and then in Gaza. She will discuss what system will offer the greatest freedoms and where she believes people she knows and loves want to live and under what kind of regime. We have Benny Morris the Israeli historian who was very much on the left. He was one of the new revisionist historians, a leading star in that group. He had a change of heart and saw that actually Israel is a very positive force in the entire region. He will talk about the history of the two state process and where his thinking has  now evolved. We have George Gilder, the economist, who will be talking about the economic growth in the Middle East,  what has driven it and  how the Arabs in the region have benefitted and how the Israelis have benefitted as a result of the cross-fertilization. We have Fred Gottheil, another economist who will also be talking along economic lines and explaining how people’s lives will be best off under alternative economic and political structures. We have Harold Rhode who was a Foreign Affairs specialist in the Office of Net Assessment, in the Office of the Secretary of  Defense in the Pentagon for 25 years. He is fluent in Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, Hebrew and English and is a student of the Middle East. He will be addressing the uprisings in the Arab world and what kind of impact that will have on the stability of the Arab Palestinian leadership and on Israel and how best to protect the lives of the people who live in that region under various political and economic frameworks. We will be looking at these issues from a number of different perspectives. We hope the conference will offer an opportunity to examine how people  in the region could prosper and live under alternatives to the immediate creation of the Palestinian state which could worsen their lives. We hope this first conference will provide information to evaluate what could be more productive and enduring solutions. This is the Z Street mission to educate people about the truth. Let’s step away from what sounds nice, what looks right on the pages of the New York Times and let’s talk about what the reality is and deal with that information.

David Yerushalmi, Esq. and the Thomas Moore Law Center?

Purim we participated in the reading of the Megillat Esther in front of the Iranian U.N. Mission in New York. We were there with our groggers (noisemakers) drowning out the name of Haman every time it was said in the Megillah sending a message to Ahmadinejad who is the modern day Haman. We continue working with other organizations land we continue writing articles. We are moving forward on a lot of different fronts. You know, through this conversation Jerry, I realize so much of what Z Street is about is pride. It’s about time we had a pro-Jewish, pro-Israel pride organization.

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