It’s happened. The Israeli Embassy has called on J Street to pull in its horns, that it’s acting against the interests of the Jewish state. From the Jerusalem Post:
[J Street] invited Ambassador Michael Oren to speak at its first annual conference in late October. Despite early indications the embassy was looking to engage the group, Oren has yet to meet with executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami or agree to participate in the conference.
Instead, the embassy has "communicated to J Street its views on the peace process and on the best way to ensure Israel’s security," according to embassy spokesman Yoni Peled.
The message, Peled said, is that "while recognizing the need for a free and open debate on these issues, it is important to stress concern over certain policies that could impair Israel’s interests."
This is a signal to the American Jewish community that it must maintain the orthodox monolith of Jewish support for Israel, no matter its racist and militarist policies. The J Street conference is going to be a tremendous event, with or without Oren and the redoubtable Eli Lake. Then there’s this attack:
[F]ormer Commentary magazine editor Gabriel Schoenfeld, lambasted J Street on Thursday for not repudiating the backing of Stephen Walt, whose book The Israel Lobby and Foreign Policy Schoenfeld described as using anti-Semitic tropes.
"For a Jewish organization to make common cause with anti-Semitic voices in order to tear down others to establish its place at the table is nothing less than shameful," Schoenfeld said, pointing to a link on the J Street Web site to one of Walt’s articles mentioning J Street, on the group’s news citations page. He also referred to Walt’s recent praise for J Street in a Washington Post story.
Schoenfeld was speaking on a panel on divisions within American Jewry organized by the Hudson Institute. [to which no one on the Jewish non-Zionist left was invited].
Says Jeffrey Blankfort:
I wouldn’t put anything beyond Gabriel Schoenfeld. I remember an article he wrote for Commentary denying that what was done to the native Americans was genocide. Technically, he was right,since that word did not exist until after WW II when it was used to describe what happened to the Jews. Curious, is it not, that with the decimation of perhaps 10 million Congolese at the hands of the Beligians at the end of the 19th century, there was no such word invented to describe it… But then, who remembers the Congolese or even cares about the most suffering people in the history of the world, bar none, who have lost another five million dead in the past half dozen years?
