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This is huge: (via The Washington Post)

Some of the country’s most prominent Jewish liberals are forming a political action committee and lobbying group aimed at dislodging what they consider the excessive hold of neoconservatives and evangelical Christians on U.S. policy toward Israel.

The group is planning to channel political contributions to favored candidates in perhaps a half-dozen campaigns this fall, the first time an organization focused on Israel has tried to play such a direct role in the political process, according to its organizers. Organizers said they hope those efforts, coupled with a separate lobbying group that will focus on promoting an Arab-Israeli peace settlement, will fill a void left by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, and other Jewish groups that they contend have tilted to the right in recent years.

The lobbying group will be known as J Street and the political action group as JStreetPAC. The executive director for both will be Jeremy Ben-Ami, a former domestic policy adviser in the Clinton White House.

“The definition of what it means to be pro-Israel has come to diverge from pursuing a peace settlement,” said Alan Solomont, a prominent Democratic Party fundraiser involved in the initiative. In recent years, he said, “We have heard the voices of neocons, and right-of-center Jewish leaders and Christian evangelicals, and the mainstream views of the American Jewish community have not been heard.”

Read the whole article. Wherever you stand on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, or on the influence of AIPAC for that matter, most would still agree that there is a strong need for a more moderate Israel lobby. AIPAC has consistently adopted positions that dovetail with the hard-line Israeli Likud party, embracing policies that often undercut the possibilities for a negotiated settlement. In 1995, for example, when Israel’s Labor Party prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was busy negotiating with the Palestinians, AIPAC pushed for a bill in Congress that would have authorized moving the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem – an effective assassination attempt against Rabin’s peace efforts.

Moreover, it is useful to remember that AIPAC’s hard-line views – extremely hawkish on foreign policy, pro-settlement construction on Palestinian land, pro-annexation of Jerusalem, hostile to negotiation – are not only unfavorable to Israel’s long-term interests, they also aren’t even supported by most mainstream American Jews. As Daniel Levy, Israel’s lead negotiator during the Geneva Initiative has written, “polls repeatedly show that American Jews, unsurprisingly, are liberal on Israel-Palestine, just as they are across a range of issues. Paradoxically then, it could be argued that there is too little Jewish influence in Washington. If more American Jews took a keener interest in what was being advocated in their names on Israel-related matters, then things might look very different, and far more hopeful.”

It’s about time, then, that a mainstream Israel lobby finally stepped up to bat.