I’m a J street supporter, and I’m glad you are trying to keep them honest from the left flank. However, I don’t think this latest post — "J Street seems to avoid the term Palestinian"— is on target. In the J Street statement about Palin, I read "the lives of those actually living the conflict" to refer to Israelis, not Palestinians.
More generally, while J Street’s consensus statements are sometimes too cautious for my personal taste, I understand the value of that consensus, and I have still been positively impressed at the organization’s willingness to use the word "Palestinian" and even the word "Palestine". (As many of us have seen, some people who are comfortable using the word "Palestinian" are not comfortable with the word "Palestine" — as if actually recognizing that there is or should be a legitimate state called "Palestine" goes a step beyond recognizing that there are people with a legitimate national identity that can be called "Palestinian".) You can see this comfort level on the "Issues" section of J Street’s website, where they refer to "Israel-Palestine: The two-state solution" and also have many references to "Palestinians". Perhaps the best statement comes from Victor Kovner, one of the organization’s key funders and community leaders, in his address at J Street’s banquet where he received J Street’s first recognition award. I find these lines of Victor’s particularly inspiring:
But our nation’s commitment is to the State of Israel. And, ladies and gentlemen, to restate the obvious, the ‘settlements’ are not within the State of Israel. The so-called settlers may be citizens of Israel, may pay taxes in Israel, may vote in Israel – and they certainly do vote – but they do not reside in Israel. They live in another land. And the name of that land is Palestine.
This is the clearest possible recognition by one of the most important politically active American Jews, speaking at J Street’s most visible place and time, that there should be — and indeed already is — a land of Palestine whose national identity is legitimate and fully on par with the land of Israel in the vision of a two-state solution.
