J Street, the Jewish group that bills itself as a pacifist, liberal, pro-Palestinian, pro-Israel alternative to AIPAC, has self-destructed in the last week as Israeli forces clash with Hamas militants in Gaza. Jamie Kirchick profiled the group in the New Republic in May, when J Street first emerged to claim that it represented the vast majority of American Jews who, unlike the thugs and terrorists at AIPAC, oppose the terrorism perpetrated by the Jewish state against the good and decent Muslims of Palestine.
One probably could have predicted that this farce would only last until an open conflict broke out in Israel. Now that Israel is at war, American Jews seem to be rallying to its defense -- even those whose impulses are dovish. Yet J Street continues to rail against Israel and those who would support its action in Gaza. The response came from Eric Yoffie, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, who is described by Ami Eden at JTA as "arguably the Jewish community's most important dove." Yoffie responded in the Forward to a statement that J Street posted equating Israel and Hamas and finding both equally guilty. He wrote:
"These words are deeply distressing because they are morally deficient, profoundly out of touch with Jewish sentiment and also appallingly naïve.
J Street responded in kind:
The views we hold may not be those of Rabbi Yoffie, and that's fine. We accept and welcome an open and honest debate about the merits of our pro-Israel positions.
But to call our views "morally deficient", "naïve" and "out of touch" with Jewish sentiment is to misread the emerging dynamics of centrist, pro-Israel Jews.
The only problem is that J Street doesn't welcome an open and honest debate. The group is dedicated to purging from mainstream discourse "radicals" like Joe Lieberman, who seemed to be a weekly target for the group's petitions and statements in its first few months of operation. It is also at war with AIPAC. What J Street does not protest is the terrorism of Israel's enemies, or the bellicose statements of Iran, or the anti-Israel sentiment of the far left. Eden runs down the creepy statements the group has put out over the last few weeks and concludes:
For those keeping score, according to J Street officials, if you support Israel's current court of action, you are: 1) not a real friend of Israel, 2) do not support sanity and moderation, 3) don't discern nuances, 4) don't feel compassion for dead and wounded Palestinians, and 5) might be a latent racist.
Hey, it's a free country, but if you're going to go around expressing views like those, you lose the right to cry foul when someone turns around and accuses you of saying something that is "morally deficient, profoundly out of touch with Jewish sentiment and also appallingly naïve."
Right-wing Jews may have taken a few potshots over the last few months at J Street's ridiculous claim to represent American Jewry, but now that the group's "moral deficiency" has made them a target for the Jewish left as well, the jig would seem to be up. But that doesn't mean that George Soros won't give the group some obscene amount of money to keep its small staff employed for the next decade, which may well have been the point all along.
