Jeremy Ben-Ami, executive director of J Street, in Washington, on Thursday, May 21, 2009. (AP)

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For years, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, has been the big player in Israel lobbying in Washington. Still is, dwarfing all others in its field.

But there’s a new player in town. It’s called J Street. It’s much smaller. More liberal. And it’s trying to open up the American debate on the Middle East and represent, it says, more American Jews’ actual views. To be “pro-Israel,” it says, and “pro-peace.”

Small as J Street is, it may matter right now. This hour, On Point: The new Israel lobby. A conversation with J Street founder Jeremy Ben-Ami.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Seattle is Jeremy Ben-Ami, founder and executive director of J Street, a year-old, Washington-based lobbying organization that describes itself as “the political arm of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement.” He served as President Bill Clinton’s deputy domestic policy adviser and as policy director on Howard Dean’s presidential campaign.

From New York, we’re joined by Marty Peretz, editor in chief of The New Republic. His blog at TNR.com is The Spine.

More links:

James Traub, in a piece titled “The New Israel Lobby,” wrote about Jeremy Ben-Ami and J Street in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.

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Middle East politics is stone-cold serious. Israel’s soldiers and spies and Palestinian militants compete so ruthlessly, it’s more than a little incongruous that Mideast history took a hairpin turn in 1997 with a crazy tale of Israeli assassins saving the life of the man they tried to kill.

You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Fast forward about a decade, and the intended victim is a savvy Hamas mastermind, and the same Israeli prime minister who tried to take him out is back in power.

This hour On Point: The story of the mission to kill Hamas leader Khalid Mishal.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jacki Lyden, guest host

Tom Ashbrook is on vacation.

Guest:

Paul McGeough joins us from Sydney, Australia.  Chief foreign correspondent and former executive editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, he has twice been named Australian Journalist of the Year and in 2002 was awarded the SAIS-Novartis Prize for excellence in international journalism by Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. His new book is “Kill Khalid: The Failed Mossad Assassination of Khalid Mishal and the Rise of Hamas.”

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, left, and his Israeli counterpart Ehud Barak hold a joint press conference at a Jerusalem hotel on Monday. (AP)

Iran, nuclear weapons, and the Middle East. Is it never going to happen? Or is the US ready to accept, and put up what Hillary Clinton calls a “defense umbrella”?

Guests:

Graham Allison, professor of government and director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy school of government. Author of “Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe.”

Barry Posen, professor of political science at MIT and director of the MIT Security Studies program. Author of “Inadvertent Escalation: Conventional War and Nuclear Risks” and “The Sources of Military Doctrine.”

Ephraim Sneh, former member of the Israeli Knesset. Served briefly under Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as Deputy Minister of Defense. Also has served as Minister of Health and Minister of Transportation. Left the Labor Party in May 2008 to create a the Yirael Hazaka (Strong Israel) party.

President Barack Obama speaks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on Monday, May 18, 2009. (AP)

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Nobody expected a shouting match in the Oval Office. But there is wide speculation that the agendas of Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu may ultimately put the U.S. and Israel on a path to tough tensions.

Tensions over Iran, and whether to talk or attack. Tensions over a “two-state solution,” and whether to push forward.

Observers joke, grimly, of a “yes, we can” Obama versus a “no, we won’t” Netanyahu — and don’t joke at all about a potentially very real U.S.-Israeli test of wills.

This hour, On Point: Obama, Netanyahu, and the way forward in the Middle East.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Washington are:

Gerald Seib, executive Washington editor of The Wall Street Journal, where he writes the Capital Journal column. He’s co-author with John Harwood of “Pennsylvania Avenue: Profiles in Backroom Power.”

Aaron David Miller, public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. From 1978 to 2003 he advised six U.S. secretaries of state on Mideast policy and Arab-Israeli negotiations. His latest book is “The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace.”

Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. His most recent book is “Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands.”

Dr. Ezzeldeen Abu al-Aish rests his head on his son Abdullah, 6, in a car near his house in Jebaliya, in the northern Gaza strip, Jan. 21, 2009. Three of his daughters and a niece were killed by an Israeli shell which struck his house, and he returned to Gaza to collect his remaining children. (AP)

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Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish was, and is, that remarkable Palestinian welcome on both sides of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

A resident of Gaza, fluent in Hebrew, deeply devoted to peace. An obstetrician who treated both Palestinians and Israelis — who was welcomed by Israeli medical colleagues, one of whom called him a “magical, secret bridge between Israelis and Palestinians.”

On January 16, in the Israeli invasion of Gaza, an Israeli tank shell hit his home — and killed three of his daughters. Three. And still he calls for peace.

This hour, On Point: A conversation with Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish.

You can join the conversation. Do you remember the news report back then? Of Dr. Abul Aish and his family’s tragedy? Could you keep reaching out for peace?

Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish joins us in our studio.  He is a Palestinian physician, an obstetrician, living in Gaza and has worked closely with Israeli doctors for years treating patients and doing research at Soroka University Hospital in Beersheba in southern Israel. He lost three daughters and a niece when his home was shelled during the Gaza conflict in January.

Joining us from Tel Aviv is Gadi Taub, a writer, essayist and historian. He writes a regular op-ed column for Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s largest daily, and teaches at the Department of Communications and the School for Public Policy at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is author of “Allenby,” “A Dispirited Rebellion: Essays on Contemporary Israeli Culture” and the forthcoming “The Settlers & the Struggle for the Meaning of Zionism.”

Dr. Abuelaish’s reaction to his daughter’s deaths was heard on Israeli TV:

Egyptian activists are confronted by police during a protest in Cairo against the Israeli attacks in Gaza, on Dec. 31, 2008. (AP)

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Israel announced today it will pause its attack on Gaza three hours a day for humanitarian relief. The other 21 hours a day, the Israeli action goes on. The pounding. From the air. On the ground.

The whole world is watching — the Arab world, closest of all. Arab television is wall-to-wall images of Gaza death and destruction: women, children, hospitals, morgues soaked in blood, Hamas counterattacks framed as defiance, the United States and Israel linked as one. Arab leaders portrayed as ineffectual.

Where does this go? This hour, On Point: Israel’s neighborhood, the Arab world, watching Gaza.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Roula Khalaf, Middle East editor of The Financial Times.

Labib Kamhawi, Jordanian political analyst.

Tamara Wittes, director of the Middle East Democracy and Development Project at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings Institution.

Smoke rises following an Israeli missile strike in the northern Gaza Strip, Dec. 30, 2008. (AP)

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Nightmare scenes in Gaza, where for five days F-16s and Apache helicopter gunships have rained fire on one of the poorest, most crowded enclaves on Earth.

And nightmares across southern Israel, where rockets out of Gaza have now reached as far as an empty kindergarten classroom in Beersheba. Four Israelis dead since Israel’s assault on Gaza began. Nearly four hundred Palestinians dead. Many more injured.

After grinding seasons of embargo and tunneling and Hamas defiance, Israel’s defense minister now speaks of “war to the bitter end.”

This hour, On Point: Bloody showdown over Gaza.

You can join the conversation. Did Hamas make this inevitable, with its rocket fire and its fury? Did Israel make this inevitable, with its chokehold and its demands? Will this turn Palestinians away from Hamas, or more deeply against Israel? What should the U.S. have done? What should it be doing now? Tell us what you think.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Margaret Coker, Middle East correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.

Aaron David Miller, public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He advised six U.S. secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli negotiations, from 1978 to 2003, and is the author of “The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace.”

Shai Feldman, chair of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies and professor of politics at Brandeis University.

Issam Nassar, professor of history at Illinois State University.

Iran's Shahab-3 missile being launched from an undisclosed location on Wednesday July 9, 2008. (AP Photo/Sepah News)

It’s summertime and we want the livin’ to be easy, but it’s a tangle out there – on the economy and, potentially, on yet another warfront: war with Iran.

In recent weeks, the signals are hot – and all over the place. Israeli war games. Iranian missile tests. Blistering rhetoric and calls for cool.

U.S. and Israeli generals shuttling back and for the between Washington and Tel Aviv. Reporting that US special forces are already inside Iran.

That war could come before Bush leaves office. And today that a top US envoy will talk with Iran.

This hour On Point: red lines and real plans – we’re weighing the talk of war with Iran.

- Tom Ashbrook

* * *

Guests:

Jonathan Karl, senior national security correspondent for ABC News.

Emily Landau, senior research associate at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, where she is also director of the Arms Control and Regional Security Project.

James Dobbins, director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at RAND, he was the Clinton administration’s special envoy for Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo and the George W. Bush administration’s representative to the Afghan opposition in the wake of September 11, 2001.

Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, and author of “Treacherous Allianice: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the U.S.”

By the Hebrew calendar, today marks the 60th anniversary of the creation of Israel in 1948. And Israel has been celebrating, with picnics and parties and warplanes on display.

Of course, Arabs call the events of 1948 the “naqba” — or catastrophe.

But it’s Israel’s birthday. We’ll observe today with one of the hottest writers of a new generation of Israeli writers, Etgar Keret.

And with an American-Jewish resident of the U.S. and Jerusalem, Bernard Avishai, who says it’s time for the Jewish state to become what he calls the “Hebrew Republic.”

This hour, On Point: Israel turns sixty.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Bernard Avishai, consulting editor at the Harvard Business Review, former professor at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center in Israel, and author of the new book “The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace at Last”

Etgar Keret, author of the story collection “The Girl on the Fridge” and director of the award-winning film “Jellyfish.”

Through nearly 20 years of wild ups and downs, Aaron David Miller was in the middle of American efforts to broker Arab-Israeli peace in the Middle East. He saw the good, the bad, and the ugly of our efforts, and theirs.

Now he’s out of the bubble, and talking. Very frankly. About how Americans have lost sight of their country’s own interests in the gale of lobbying over the Mideast. About the need for tough love with everyone, including Israel, if peace — and U.S. security — are ever to be found.

This hour, On Point: Aaron David Miller on America as broker in the Mideast.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Aaron David Miller, former advisor to U.S. secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli negotiations between 1978 and 2003, his new book is “The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace.”

The last time Israelis and Palestinians sat down at an American conference table to talk peace — seven long and bloody years ago — the Middle East was a different place.

Today, as the old adversaries meet in Annapolis, Maryland — along with the U.S. and dozens of other countries, including most of the Arab world — the backdrop is sobering: Iraq mired in civil war, Iran on the rise, Hamas ruling Gaza, and Sunnis and Shiites staring across a dangerous divide. In other words, the stakes at Annapolis could hardly be bigger.

This hour, On Point: Israelis, Palestinians, and the new Middle East.

-Jane Clayson

Guests:

Dennis Ross, former Middle East envoy for presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of “Statecraft: And How to Restore America’s Standing in the World.”

Fawaz Gerges, professor of International Affairs and Middle Eastern Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and author of “Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy.”