Obama's Grassroots Ambassador In Tel Aviv
Jeremy Bird, deputy director of Organizing for America, the man who is in charge of galvanizing Obama volunteers toward the passage of a health care bill, Friday August 21, 2009.
Photograph: The Washington Post via Getty ImagesPresident Barack Obama’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is an epic of neurotic interchange, of which Netanyahu’s address to the American Congress—scheduled without consulting the Obama administration—is only the latest chapter. But the next chapter has already begun to be written.
Young Israelis eager to replace Netanyahu’s government have turned for help to an Obama stalwart, an integral player in both the 2008 and 2012 campaigns. A group known as “Victory 15”—V15, for short—has put up shop on Tel Aviv’s Lilienblum Street and joined with OneVoice, a political grassroots organization that aims to propel “mainstream Israelis and Palestinians…toward the two-state solution.” According to the reporter Roy (Chicky) Arad, writing for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the alliance’s “secret campaign weapon” is 36-year-old Jeremy Bird, who has flown in with a team of four consultants. In a photograph in Haaretz, Bird is shown in plastic-framed glasses and arms crossed, affecting a serious mug. He’s leaning against a yellow wall that boasts a poster: “Big Data,” it reads, in obtrusive capitals. At the center, in a circle that matches Bird’s pin, in Hebrew and in English: “V15.”