The alternative Israel lobby, J Street, is in one way like Noam Chomsky: it is the new bete noir whose very utterance sends the neocons into a raging lather.
It is a particular demon to the young turks at the Commentary blog such as James Kirchick, Noah Pollak, and Abe Greenwald. They have chosen to take it on because it is the rudest reminder that they, with all their youthful cadence, are on the wrong side of history.
To understand the bizarre set of premises animating the elevation of J Street to the highest caste of neocon demonology, an indispensable guide was laid out by Jack Wertheimer, one-time provost of Jewish Theological Seminary and Commentary’s go-to-guy on what’s happening on the American Jewish scene. He did so in an incredible essay in which it was plainly articulated that a group critical of Israel had to prove itself kosher through its commitment to the "collective interests" of the "Jewish polity".
Wertheimer begins by telling the story of Breira, founded by a group of rabbis who advocated Israeli negotiations with the PLO in the 70s. The group was riven by a bitter split between a group of old-school "liberal" Reform rabbis who remained steadfast in their ideological commitment to Zionism, and more radical new left rabbis such as Everett Gendler and Arthur Waskow, who were the early pioneers of the progressive Judaism we know today.
After briefly discussing the hard-leftist New Jewish Agenda in the 80s, Wertheimer concludes by favorably contrasting the case of Breira with Americans for Peace Now,which was ultimately embraced in the 90s by the official Jewish community, represented by the Conference of Presidents. Americans for Peace Now, in contrast to its two predecessors in the essay, has totally embraced the ideologies of both Zionism and Jewish collectivism, and boasts of being a member in good standing of not only the Conference of Presidents but of AIPAC itself.
So where does J Street fall into this picture? If they once sought to "lobby the lobby", and perhaps still, to my knowledge they have made no attempt whatsoever to be formally accepted as a part of the Jewish "collective". J Street does, to be sure, constantly insist that it is "pro-Israel" (and quotes Alan Dershowitz favorably), but nonetheless they are fundamentally different from Breira in their attitude toward first principles, that is, to the ideology of Zionism.
What makes J Street different is that it has made a point of being completely agnostic on first principles, in other words, however many times they insist they are "pro-Israel", never once will they utter the word "Zionism". This has not gone unnoticed by their detractors at Commentary, who raised the question of "having no qualms about collaborating with avowed anti-Zionists", but even they have not quite yet taken the issue head on.
This may seem like a trite and trivial thing to the casual reader, but it absolutely is not. The neocons may be talking a lot about the perilous threat of socialism from Obama these days, but the fanaticism expressed in Commentary about the absolutely sacrosanct "collective" of "the Jewish people" is extraordinary, with the mark of judgement of all Jews being their devotion to this collectivism, and if they are found wanting, they are not merely banished as heretics but declared an outright enemy of the Jewish people, in other words, an anti-Semite.
But the growing fanaticism of the neocons toward J Street is not really about J Street itself, or even for that matter about its stated policy objectives. One thing that must be understood about the neocons is that Obama is their worst nightmare – that someone who just five years ago was a state senator from the South Side of Chicago with an African name is now President of the Untied States, a disciple of Saul Alinsky to boot and with a foreign policy resembling no president so much as that of Richard Nixon.
To the neocons, therefore, J Street is above all else a symbol of the reality that the solid, if not overwhelming majority of American Jews are more loyal to their worst nightmare Barack Obama than to "the Jewish people". Oh, they must be lamenting, for the good old days of such lovable foils as Noam Chomsky and Henry Kissinger!
