By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
With its expansion into the Pacific Northwest, the seven-year-old Israel advocacy organization StandWithUs hopes to bring an additional perspective to education and advocacy issues around the Jewish State. The opening of the StandWithUs office also addresses a question that many Anti-Defamation League supporters had had after its former director, Robert Jacobs, had parted ways with the organization.
In a large ad in this newspaper, SWU, for which Jacobs will be serving as local director, announced its existence, along with its first major public event — a talk by Itamar Marcus, director of the Palestinian Media Watch, who will speak about education as a key to finally settling the Israeli-Palestinian issues and bringing peace to the Middle East.
PMW is a Jerusalem-based organization that monitors and reports on the content of Arabic-language programming in the West Bank as well as educational materials being used in the Palestinian Authority-operated schools. In their press releases and reports, PMW focuses exclusively on messages delivered through the Arabic media and textbooks that underscore their belief in the duplicitous nature of the Palestinians’ endorsement of a two-state solution.
According to the advertisement, Marcus will talk about “the message that the Palestinian leadership is sending to its people and schoolchildren [and] the implications of this indoctrination on the long term prospects for peace in the Middle East.”
In an interview with JTNews, Jacobs described StandWithUs as “an Israel education and advocacy organization” with headquarters in Los Angeles and a dozen regional chapters throughout the U.S., including the new Pacific Northwest chapter. He said that the group also maintains offices in London and Jerusalem. SWU has been around since 2000, when it was started in response to many major American media outlets’ presentations of Israel and the conflict with the Palestinians.
“They were responding to the very mixed or negative press reports about Israel at just the same time as the intifada started,” Jacobs said. “It’s grown since then. It concentrates very heavily on education and on working locally in school systems and community groups, [and] with churches and civic organizations, to try to convey more of the positive image of the good things that are happening in Israel — the culture, the technology, things of that sort. At the same time, [we] respond when inaccurate information is put out, in terms of the conflict, or Israel’s position on politics, and so forth.”
Although the group’s affiliation with the national organization is new, Jacobs said that the people involved are many familiar names and faces within Seattle’s activist Jewish community. The chair of the local chapter’s executive committee, for example, is Nevet Basker, a former ADL regional advisory committee member and former chair of the ADL’s International Committee.
“It’s basically the Israel Committee of the ADL, that separated at about the time that I left ADL,” Jacobs said of the new regional chapter of SWU. “We got back together again and started taking a look at what we could do to continue working in support of Israel.”
Jacobs estimated that about 20 pro-Israel activists have been a part of getting the new office together.
While the main thrust of the group’s activities will be in support of Israel within the larger community of the Northwest, Jacobs said he intends to use his new position to pursue one of his own long-term goals for this area: to establish and maintain a dialogue across the political divide. He hopes to encourage an open discussion between those in the Jewish community that defend Israel’s governmental actions unequivocally and those who criticize Israeli policies vis a vis the occupied territories and within Israeli society.
Jacobs said his goal is “to reach out broadly, trying to get people on the left and the right to talk to each other, to try to bring in speakers and make them available to folks who ordinarily wouldn’t meet with them. That includes bringing representatives from left-wing groups such as Brit Tzedek V’Shalom and the Israel Policy Forum to meet privately with people like PMW’s Marcus so they can speak with “more than just a talking head,” Jacobs said, “but somebody who comes in with research and material.
“I will try to get people on the political right on Israel to sit down and do exactly the same thing,” he added.
Jacobs said he hopes to arrange for people from both sides to sit down separately, “then, hopefully, somewhere down the line we’ll be able to get them to sit down with each other and to create a dialogue that is more attractive to folks in the middle.”
People not strongly partisan on the subject “often see the Israel conflict within the Jewish community as so divisive that they want to stay away from thinking about the issue at all,” he said.
Jacobs compared what he hopes to accomplish with a statement that was published as a full-page ad in the JTNews three years ago. The statement, which he worked on, brought together 37 organizations that support Israel, though with different perspectives across the political spectrum.
“Seventy or 80 percent of the issue, everybody agrees on,” Jacobs said he told organizational leaders at the time. “It’s the 20 or 30 percent that they’re so divided on. If we can get people to start talking civilly about the 20 or 30 percent and working together on the 70 or 80 percent, we’ll be much more effective as a community, over all.”