Last week, I wrote about a panel at the inaugural convention of the self-described "pro-Israel, pro-peace" organization J Street, in which former Bush NSC staffer Hillary Mann Leverett said the following:

The self-declared mission of J Street, the dovish "pro-Israel, pro-Peace" lobby that just concluded its first national conference this week, includes redefining the meaning of the term "pro-Israel." For too long, the organization's founders and supporters argue, right-wing elements in the Jewish community have abused the term to hijack the debate and tarnish mainstream, sensible advocates of a two-state solution.

When I argued at the J Street Conference that J Street couldn't simultaneously appeal to people with Walt/Mearsheimer-esque views on Israel and a significant chunk of the American Jewish population, one of the names I cited as an example of the former was Phillip "The U.S. Without Israel is Like A Fish Without A Bicycle" Weiss, who writes for the Nation.

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Yesterday I appeared on a panel at J Street, where I debated Matthew Yglesias on what it means to be pro-Israel, as well as J Street's role in this debate. My main argument was that the Jewish community needs a group like J Street to keep the most extreme elements from defining "pro-Israel" too restrictively, to provide a counterweight against the natural inclination of any ethnic community toward tribalism, and to provide political space for the territorial compromises needed to create a two-state solution.

The famous blogger Matthew Yglesias was mentioned twice in the last few days on TNR online, once by Jon Chait on the Plank, another time by me on the Spine. Both were occasioned by Yglesias' involvement with J Street.  

J Street is having an identity crisis right in front of the cameras. For a year and a half it's been trumpeting that it's both "pro-Israel" and "pro-peace." Actually, that's how I would characterize myself. I am for a two-state solution and always have been. I was for a "Jewish state" and an "Arab state" ever since I was a kid. That's ultimately what nearly every Israeli prime minister has been for, too.

This week I've been attending the first national conference of J Street, the "pro-Israel, pro-Peace" group which I first wrote about last year. I'm working on a longer piece about the organization's identity crisis that should appear sometime soon, but there have been two events thus far worthy of special note.

First was the speech delivered by Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism and one of the most prominent liberal Jews in the country. Yoffie, who had initially welcomed J Street's emergence, dramatically broke with the organization over its morally equivocating position on the Gaza War last December. J Street claimed that “While there is nothing ‘right’ in raining rockets on Israeli families or dispatching suicide bombers, there is nothing ‘right’ in punishing a million and a half already-suffering Gazans for the actions of the extremists among them.” These words, the self-proclaimed "dove"  replied, were "morally deficient, profoundly out of touch with Jewish sentiment and also appallingly naïve."

So it is perhaps unsurprising that Yoffie was booed at this week's conference for condemning the United Nations investigation into alleged war crimes, known as the "Goldstone Report," as "fatally flawed." Furthermore, he said that "you cannot be a moral agent if you serve an immoral master, and Richard Goldstone should be ashamed of himself for working under the auspices of the U.N. Human Rights Council." This sort of passionate language in defense of Israel and critical of its defamers, unremarkable at mainstream pro-Israel and Jewish conclaves, has been almost entirely absent at this week's J Street conference. Indeed, the greatest applause lines at all of the panels I've attended are those that criticize Israel and lament the fate of the Palestinians. (Allison Hoffman of Tablet has more about the conference attendees's negative reaction to Yoffie).

Now, everybody who reads me knows that I am not a big supporter of administration policy on the Middle East. But, then, I am not a big supporter of its foreign policy almost anywhere. No, let me correct that. Not "almost anywhere." But "anywhere."

That said, I don't believe that President Obama is trying to weaken the United States or its allies. What we do disagree about (but it's I who am here doing the disagreeing) is what strengthens America and what debilitates it. 

Actually, the Obama crowd seems to be reconnoitering a bit after the string of rebuffs it has experienced from those who it has been trying to court. In any case, it has surely registered on them that Israel is amenable to a quite generous compromise ... but it is the Palestinians, riven though they may be, who are insisting on "loser take all." Strange world, theirs, no? And just in case you need a reminder: This is not the first time that the Palestinians have rioted on Al Haram al-Sharif (in their vocabulary) and the Temple Mount (in the West's) to preclude negotiations. It's an old tactic, alas. 

I'd bet also that the White House laments the fact that, when it summoned Jewish leaders for a meeting with the president months ago, it sent an invitation to J Street and omitted the Zionist Organization of America, which, for all its troublesomeness, is an institution with many real members and real ongoing work in Israel. Moreover, it is an historically significant body, Louis Dembitz Brandeis having been its president for many years. I can imagine some smart-assed staffer coming up with the idea. "Let's leave out the ZOA and invite J Street instead." 

Well, they did invite J Street, and now they are stuck with the damage. The J Streeters went around identifying themselves as Obama's people in the crowd. I suppose that was good for them. But it was not good for Obama. The fact is that, by this past weekend, when J-Street launched its D.C. fest, it was already seen in the public mind as a bunch of nut cases and very much anti-Israel in the very substantive sense. It was callous about Iran's nuclear threat to Israel, was against sanctions, supported negotiations with Hamas, which even the E.U. disdained. Moreover, it refuses to recognize that one obstacle to a two-state solution is that neither the Palestinians nor the other Arabs can even contemplate security guarantees to Israel. 

Mr. President: You courted a friend. Now you have him. Woe is you.

Anyway, here are some links to the J Street saga… 

Politico (Ben Smith): Frontiers of Pro-Israel 

Ha’aretz: Poet booted from J Street meet for comparing Guantanamo to Auschwitz 

The Jerusalem Post: Ambassador Michael Oren declines J Street conference invite 

The Washington Times: Upstart Israel lobby draws controversy 

The Washington Post: Israel conference to open amid controversy 

The Guardian (Isi Leibler): J Street's 'pro-Israel' stance is phoney

And, from Lenny Ben-David over at Pajamas Media, an important set of questions for J Street executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami...

Now, everybody who reads me knows that I am not a big supporter of administration policy on the Middle East. But, then, I am not a big supporter of its foreign policy almost anywhere. No, let me correct that. Not "almost anywhere." But "anywhere."

That said, I don't believe that President Obama is trying to weaken the United States or its allies. What we do disagree about (but it's I who am here doing the disagreeing) is what strengthens America and what debilitates it. 

Actually, the Obama crowd seems to be reconnoitering a bit after the string of rebuffs it has experienced from those who it has been trying to court. In any case, it has surely registered on them that Israel is amenable to a quite generous compromise ... but it is the Palestinians, riven though they may be, who are insisting on "loser take all." Strange world, theirs, no? And just in case you need a reminder: This is not the first time that the Palestinians have rioted on Al Haram al-Sharif (in their vocabulary) and the Temple Mount (in the West's) to preclude negotiations. It's an old tactic, alas. 

I'd bet also that the White House laments the fact that, when it summoned Jewish leaders for a meeting with the president months ago, it sent an invitation to J Street and omitted the Zionist Organization of America, which, for all its troublesomeness, is an institution with many real members and real ongoing work in Israel. Moreover, it is an historically significant body, Louis Dembitz Brandeis having been its president for many years. I can imagine some smart-assed staffer coming up with the idea. "Let's leave out the ZOA and invite J Street instead." 

Well, they did invite J Street, and now they are stuck with the damage. The J Streeters went around identifying themselves as Obama's people in the crowd. I suppose that was good for them. But it was not good for Obama. The fact is that, by this past weekend, when J-Street launched its D.C. fest, it was already seen in the public mind as a bunch of nut cases and very much anti-Israel in the very substantive sense. It was callous about Iran's nuclear threat to Israel, was against sanctions, supported negotiations with Hamas, which even the E.U. disdained. Moreover, it refuses to recognize that one obstacle to a two-state solution is that neither the Palestinians nor the other Arabs can even contemplate security guarantees to Israel. 

Mr. President: You courted a friend. Now you have him. Woe is you.

Anyway, here are some links to the J Street saga… 

Politico (Ben Smith): Frontiers of Pro-Israel 

Ha’aretz: Poet booted from J Street meet for comparing Guantanamo to Auschwitz 

The Jerusalem Post: Ambassador Michael Oren declines J Street conference invite 

The Washington Times: Upstart Israel lobby draws controversy 

The Washington Post: Israel conference to open amid controversy 

The Guardian (Isi Leibler): J Street's 'pro-Israel' stance is phoney

And, from Lenny Ben-David over at Pajamas Media, an important set of questions for J Street executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami...

Ours is an age when the moral authority of accusers is at its height. Also the moral authority of accusations. There was a time when accusations had to be proven. That requirement has long since passed. After all, why would anyone bear false witness? So everybody is a witness, especially those with phantasmagoric tales to tell, especially those who yearn to testify against liberal societies which have established and proven processes to alert their own demos about evil. There are many of these foul witnesses: some ideologues, some ideological liars, some resentful, some haters. Like haters of Jews, of which in the arrested world of Islam there are more and more. As there are more and more among philo-Islamists, a cultural sickness in the West not yet fully gauged.

1. The Fall of Human Rights Watch

Robert L. Bernstein is of the best of American liberalism, of the best of American intellectual liberalism. He was chairman for a full quarter century of Random House, a distinguished New York publishing house. He was also the founder of Human Rights Watch. That was roughly 30 years ago, and he was the working chairman for two decades. Subsequently, he was the organization's chairman emeritus, watching--I would guess--with horror as the institution he established lost track of the defining distinctions between democratic societies and tyrannies.

Human Rights Watch was a light for those actually or spiritually imprisoned in the many real-life gulags spread throughout the world. But human rights are violated in both closed and open societies, and HRW didn't ignore the abuses of milder despotisms or, for that matter, of vaguely progressive commonwealths. There are such.