Different but doable. In Europe, Israel needs a bottom-up approach to diplomacy - by Evelyn Gordon

The problem with traditional diplomacy is that it generally focuses on high-level officials, both elected politicians and civil servants. These are people with zero incentive to rock the boat on Israel’s behalf because they would rather spend their political capital on issues that most of their countrymen (and they themselves) actually care about, which rarely include Israel and the Palestinians. And in Europe, not rocking the boat means adhering to the anti-Israel consensus that has long dominated the E.U. Thus while this kind of diplomacy remains essential for numerous issues, it often isn’t effective at generating change.

Evelyn Gordon..
JNS.org..
11 December '19..

For years, I considered Europe a lost cause from Israel’s perspective and decried the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s Euro-centric focus, arguing that it should instead devote more effort to places like Africa, Asia and South America, which seemed to offer better prospects for flipping countries into the pro-Israel camp. But the past few years have proven that Europe isn’t hopeless—if Israel changes its traditional modus operandi.

This has been evident, first of all, in the alliances that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has formed with several countries in eastern and southern Europe, resulting in these countries repeatedly blocking anti-Israel decisions at the European Union level. Previously, Israeli diplomacy had focused overwhelmingly on Western Europe. Netanyahu’s key insight was that conservative, nationalist governments seeking to preserve their own nation-states would have more instinctive sympathy for a Jewish state than the liberal universalists who dominate in Western Europe, and whose goal is to replace nation-states with an ever-closer European union.

But as several recent events show, even Western Europe isn’t a lost cause. The difference is that there, conventional high-level diplomacy won’t work. Rather, the key to change is the fact that most Europeans, like most people everywhere, don’t really care that much about Israel, the Palestinians or their unending conflict. Consequently, small groups of committed activists can exert a disproportionate influence on policy.

(Continue to Full Column)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Election Campaigns, Israel and Trump - by Jonathan Tobin

...What people say when campaigning — especially when trying to seduce Jewish and other pro-Israel voters — often has little to do with what they’ll do once in office. We can go back decades to analyze presidential candidates and discover more than a few who ran as ardent friends of Israel and then turned out to be a horse of a very different color....But given the stakes involved for Israel in preserving the alliance with the Jewish state, its friends have no choice but to think hard about a candidate’s bona fides on the issue.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
03 March '16..

With each primary victory, the debate about Donald Trump’s fitness for the presidency grows more heated. After beguiling or outraging the nation (depending on your point of view) for months, the discussion about the unexpected and often perplexing Trump phenomenon has not entirely abated, but his supporters and detractors are now finally getting down to the business of arguing about the specifics of his stands on the issues. One such argument concerns whether not only whether Trump can be considered a friend of Israel but also whether he can be judged as stronger on the issue than Hillary Clinton.

Let’s start any such discussion by recognizing that the quadrennial attempt to handicap how any presidential candidate will work with and treat Israel is a purely speculative enterprise. What people say when campaigning — especially when trying to seduce Jewish and other pro-Israel voters — often has little to do with what they’ll do once in office. We can go back decades to analyze presidential candidates and discover more than a few who ran as ardent friends of Israel and then turned out to be a horse of a very different color.

His Jewish supporters assumed Jimmy Carter would be a garden variety pro-Israel Democrat and discovered he was nothing of the kind once in the White House. Jewish Republicans had the same experience with the first President Bush. Jewish Democrats vouched for President Obama on Israel but have spent the last seven years spinning elaborate excuses for his Middle East policy. On the other hand, there are always pleasant surprises too. George W. Bush was assumed by man in the pro-Israel community to be a carbon copy of his father but turned to be such a strong friend of the Jewish state that his successor made the effort to reverse that stance and create more daylight between the U.S. and Israel it a cornerstone of his foreign policy.

But given the stakes involved for Israel in preserving the alliance with the Jewish state, its friends have no choice but to think hard about a candidate’s bona fides on the issue.

Yet what is truly interesting about Trump is that his supporters are doing the opposite of what most of those whose candidates’ stand on Israel has been called into question. When it came to a candidate like Barack Obama, his backers told us to ignore his background and associations and to focus only the policy statements that his team was churning out on the Middle East. In that way, Obama’s clear animus for Israeli leaders and their policy choices as well as his desire to make friends with the Arab and Muslim world and to initiate a new détente with Iran were buried underneath boilerplate pro-Israel campaign rhetoric churned out by staffers.

But in Trump’s case, it’s just the opposite. When it comes to Israel, his supporters are at pains to tell us to ignore the things he’s said on the campaign trail. Though Trump’s foreign policy statements are generally all over the map as he improvises positions that are, at one and the same time, extremely aggressive (his threats to kick ISIS’s ass) and neo-isolationist (pull back from war on Islamist terror while conducting trade wars), he has been consistent about his stance on the peace process. There he has repeatedly vowed that he would be “neutral” with regards to Israel and the Palestinians. He also expressed doubts about whether Israel was ready to take risks for peace.

Such a position makes Trump an outlier among Republicans. Virtually every other GOP presidential candidate and the overwhelming majority of Republicans in the House and the Senate have affirmed their support for Israel in a way that makes clear that they believe the U.S. strongly backs Israel against the repeated Palestinian refusal to make peace. If anything, Trump’s stance strongly resembles the policy position taken by the Obama administration over the last 7+years.

(Video) The Pro-Israel Harlem Shake

Im Tirtzu..
02 March '13..

The annual anti-Semitic and anti-Israel carnival called "Israel Apartheid Week" began last week around the world. Im Tirtzu's Bar Ilan University branch has an answer.



www.imti.org.il/en
www.imti.org.il/fr
www.imti.org.il
http://www.facebook.com/#!/ImTirtzuEn...

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook.

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Pro-Israel Activist at London University Physically Attacked

Daphne Anson
20 March '11

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/03/pro-israel-activist-at-london.html

I suppose it was only a matter of time, given the hate-ridden antisemitic atmosphere that prevails on some of Britain’s campuses, especially in London, and the lily-livered attitude of the university authorities.

The Jewish Chronicle reports that a pro-Israel activist was physically attacked and hospitalised during Israel Apartheid Week. He was one of a foursome from the organisation Stand With Us who went along to the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at London University to observe a “Celebrate Palestine” event there.

One man reportedly told the group that “the best thing the Jews had done was to go to the gas chambers” and then another man, described as “of Middle East appearance”, bit one of the foursome on the cheek, causing the victim to be taken to the nearby University College Hospital.

To add insult to injury, the university authorities seem to be blaming the Stand With Us group for the assault on the grounds that their presence was provocative.

Read more: http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/46817/pro-israel-protester-attacked-soas

And here's a taste of student opinion at SOAS, with George Galloway thrown in:



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Z Street's Legal Battle Continues Against the IRS

Daniel Halper
The Weekly Standard
22 November '10

As THE WEEKLY STANDARD reported in August, pro-Israel group Z Street believes it was discriminated against after "Z Street was told by an IRS agent that it might not be granted 501(c)(3) status, which would allow the group to be tax exempt, because its position toward Israel differs from the Obama administration's official policies." Today, Z Street continues its legal battle to obtain tax-exempt status from the IRS.

Here's the press release the group is about to release, outlining the latest developments:

Z STREET: IRS continues Constitutional violations concerning Israel

Z STREET, an organization devoted to pro-Israel public education, today filed in federal court its Opposition to the government’s effort to continue violating the US Constitution by discriminating against the organization because its views on Israel and the Middle East differ from those of this government. On August 25, 2010 Z STREET filed a Complaint in federal court charging the Internal Revenue Service with constitutional violations by subjecting Z STREET’s application for tax exemption to a discriminatory process.

In its response to Z STREET’s Complaint, the government did not deny that it engaged in this First Amendment violation. Instead, the government’s position is that (1) it can violate the Constitution whenever it wants and the only way to stop it is if the government agrees to be stopped, and (2) Z STREET should go to a different court to get something it should already have - tax exempt status - were it not for the constitutional violation the government has inflicted upon it.

(Read full story)

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'Are We Too Critical of Israel?'

Daniel Halper
The Weekly Standard
03 August '10

That was the question debated by Douglas Murray and his interlocutors on the BBC. It makes for great television:



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Who is Mehmet Celebi and why does he like J Street?

Fresnozionism.org
06 July '10

Last year, I wrote a piece called J Street’s treason exposed, in which I quoted this news story:

The [J Street PAC] finance committee’s 50 members – with a $10,000 contribution threshold – include Lebanese-American businessman Richard Abdoo, a current board member of Amideast and a former board member of the Arab American Institute, and Genevieve Lynch, who is also a member of the National Iranian American Council board. The group has also received several contributions from Nancy Dutton, an attorney who once represented the Saudi Embassy in Washington.

I, and many others, found it somewhat odd that these individuals would support a pro-Israel organization. You don’t understand, I was told. They are donating because they are for peace.

Note that the donations in question were to the J Street PAC — which, because it gives money to candidates for political office, is bound by law to report all donations in detail. The J Street parent organization is not required to do so, so we don’t know where they get their money from.

(Read full post)

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J Street Fails to Stymie Pro-Israel Effort

This one’s a victory for Israel and the pro-Israel lobby.


Daniel Halper
The Weekly Standard
21 June '10

Last week, the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC announced it was supporting letters circulating Congress – a House version and a Senate one – supporting the Jewish state’s right to defend herself and reaffirming American support of its liberal democratic ally in the Middle East. The Senate letter is led by Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and GOP Leader Mitch McConnell. In the House, Republican Ted Poe and Democrat Gary Peters, joined by Steny Hoyer and Eric Cantor and Howard Berman and Illeana Ros-Leithene, are leading the effort.

It was a pretty non-controversial, widely bipartisan, standard letter addressed to the president of the United States. It is the kind of thing that is meant to underscore support for Israel, as it is under a barrage of unfair criticism because of the flotilla incident. (The full text of the Senate version is here, and the House one is here.) Indeed, it has been received so well that, at the time of this writing, 85 senators and 307 members of the House of Representatives have signed onto the letter.

In what political reporter Ben Smith called “the most open conflict in months between the left-leaning Israel group J Street and the traditional pro-Israel powerhouse AIPAC,” J Street opposed the letter – and sent their own letter around Capitol Hill, urging members to oppose the AIPAC letter.

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DemoCast.TV: A Daniel walks boldly through lions' den - spurring pro-Palestine demonstrators to reveal their fangs - & true intent: Jihad war to conquer Israel from Jewish rule

Democast
01 June '10

A Daniel walks boldly through lions' den - spurring pro-Palestine demonstrators to reveal their fangs - & true intent: Jihad war to conquer Israel from Jewish rule



The true agenda of the self-proclaimed, Palestinian peace-proponents seeking to embarrass Israel for having to shoot its way out of an Islamist lynch-mob ship on Sunday - was revealed on Monday in Los Angeles. One courageous, Israeli-born, American high-school student stood-up for his right to publicly support Israel - and a rally of hundreds of Muslim and far-leftist, pro-Palestine demonstrators nearly turned-into the lynch-mob they sought to downplay.

Outside of the Israeli Consulate to L.A. on Memorial Day, Daniel a Jewish high-school student defiantly waved the Israeli flag through a crowd of Israel-haters - to defend what he perceives as the Israeli Marines' justified handling of the Flotilla blockade when they came under attack.

(Read full post)

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The Liberal Betrayal of Israel

Daniel Greenfield
Sultan Knish
31 May '10

Over the last two weeks, a liberal scholar and pundit named Peter Beinart got a lot of attention by arguing that liberals could no longer be pro-Israel because the country and its people had moved too far to the right. The reality however is just the opposite. In every way, from national defense to the role of religion in public life, Israel has actually watered down its principles and liberalized. But it could not and cannot keep up with the pace at which liberals have slid far to the left.

The key factor in falling liberal support for Israel is not inside the country, but outside it. As liberals have become more radicalized, what used to be the left is now simply liberal. And the delegitimization of Israel is part of a larger package of radical beliefs which extends across the spectrum into every area of domestic and foreign policy. For example the anti-Communist liberal who was not at all hard to find in 1967 when Israel fought the Six Day War, is nearly extinct today. And liberals who support the War on Terror are an endangered species. And if they can't even support America's national defense, it's not surprising that they don't support Israel's own national defense.

Beinart like other left-wing Jewish critics insist that Israel needs to go further to accommodate their support. But how much further is there to go? Israel has worked for 17 years to cut a deal with the Muslim terrorist gangs who employ a constructed identity as Palestinians to leverage international support for their killing sprees. It has withdrawn from large amounts of territory, provided weapons to their militias and even lobbied on their behalf. Will the left suddenly begin supporting Israel, if after offering East Jerusalem to them, Fatah and Hamas still refuse to make peace? We know better than that. No offer Israel could make would suffice to demonstrate its goodwill and the intransigence of the terrorist gangs.

Beinart himself suggests that only when the Palestinian terrorists are happy, and Israel is transformed into an oasis of social justice, (and presumably all conservative parties are banned and the Russian immigrants who voted in Lieberman are deported back to Russia) will his compatriots possibly get on board with supporting Israel again. Which really means that their support for Israel is conditional on the Palestinian terrorists accepting Israel. That is not the way that people who actually ever have any intention of supporting Israel talk or think. It is the way that people who trying to strengthen the terrorists' hand argue. And of course that is the real aim of the left.

(Read full article)

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J Street Can No Longer Claim to be Pro-Israel

Alan M. Dershowitz
Hudson New York
21 April '10

J Street has gone over to the dark side. It claims to be "a pro-Israel, pro peace lobby." It has now become neither. Its Executive Director, Jeremy Ben-Ami, has joined the off key chorus of those who falsely claim that Israel, by refusing to make peace with the Palestinians, is placing the lives of American soldiers at risk.

This claim was first attributed to Vice President Joe Biden and to General David Petraeus. It was quickly denied by them but continued to have a life of its own in the anti-Israel media. It was picked up by Steven Walt and John Mearsheimer, Pat Buchanan and others on the hard right and hard left who share a common disdain for the Jewish state. It is the most dangerous argument ever put forward by Israel bashers. It is also totally false.

It is dangerous for two reasons. First, it seeks to reduce support for Israel among Americans who, quite understandably and correctly, care deeply about American soldiers being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Israel has always understood this and that's why it is one of the few American allies who has never asked the United States to put its troops in harm's way in defense of Israeli citizens. If Americans were to believe the falsehood that Israel were to blame for American deaths caused by Islamic extremists in Iraq and Afghanistan, support for the Jewish state would suffer considerably.

It is also dangerous because its implication is that Israel must cease to exist: the basic complaint that Muslim extremists have against Israel is not what the Jewish state does, but what it is: a secular, non-Muslim, democracy that promotes equal rights for women, gays, Christians and others. Regardless of what Israel does or doesn't do, its very existence will be anathema to Muslim extremists. So if Israel's actions were in fact a cause of American deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan--which they are not--then the only logical solution would be Israel's disappearance. This might be acceptable to the Walts, Mearsheimers and Buchanans of the world, but it is surely not acceptable to Israel or anyone who claims to be pro-Israel.

(Read full article)

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Something's seriously wrong at York University

David Frum
National Post
27 February '10

Next week, York University will once again open its halls and classrooms to “Israel Apartheid Week,” so-called. This year as every year, militants and activists will use the taxpayer-funded facilities of York to vilify the Jewish state. Well, that’s free speech, isn’t? Everybody gets to express his or her point of view, no matter how obnoxious, right?

No, not right. Not at York. At York, speech is free — better than free, subsidized — for anti-Israel haters. But for those who would defend Israel, York sets very different rules.

In advance of York’s annual hate-Israel week, the campus group Christians United for Israel applied to use university space to host a program of pro-Israel speakers. The university replied that this program could only proceed on certain conditions. It insisted on heavy security, including both campus and Toronto police — all of those costs to be paid by the program organizers. The organizers would also have to provide an advance list of all program attendees and advance summaries of all the speeches. No advertising for the program would be permitted — not on the York campus, not on any of the other campuses participating by remote video.

These are radically different and much harsher terms than anything required from the hate-Israel program. The hate-Israel program is not required to pay for its own security. It is free to advertise. Its speakers are not pre-screened by the university.

The pro-Israel event, scheduled for this past Monday, Feb. 22, was cancelled when the organizers declined to comply with the terms. A university spokesman told the Jewish Tribune that it insisted on the more stringent requirements on pro-Israel groups “due to the participation of individuals who they claim invite the animus of anti-Israel campus agitators.”

The logic is impressively brazen: Since the anti-Israel people might use violence, the speech of the pro-Israel people must be limited. On the other hand, since the pro-Israel people do not use violence, the speech of the anti-Israel people can proceed without restraint.

(Read full story)
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On being pro-Israel

Fresnozionism.org
23 February '10

Somewhere in the discussion about what it means to be pro-Israel (in the context of J Street, the New Israel Fund [NIF], etc.) I heard the following:

Being pro-Israel doesn’t mean supporting Israel no matter what it does

I get it. I understand where they’re coming from.

Suppose my neighbor is arrested and charged with stealing a car. Would I support him? Would I bail him out of jail? Well, that would depend on my judgment of his character and his motives. Maybe I would and maybe I wouldn’t. I’d try to be fair; after all, he has the same rights as anyone else. This is the attitude of the ‘progressive’ Jew toward Israel.

Now suppose someone is arrested and charged as above. Only this time it’s my son. Everything changes. Would I support him no matter what he does? Of course not, but I would try much harder to understand him. I would give him the benefit of the doubt. I would listen to his story. I would give his explanations at least as much credence as those of his accusers, maybe more. This is the attitude of the Zionist Jew.

Zionists among the Jewish people gave birth to the modern state of Israel, sacrificed for it and supported it in its childhood. The Zionist feels differently about Israel than he does about, say, Japan. The best analogy is to say that he feels a family relationship.

(Read full post)
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Praise for The Case For Israel

YG
CAMERA/Snapshots
26 January '10

Yair Lapid, a popular and influential Israeli journalist, praises The Case For Israel, a documentary with Alan Dershowitz, (DocEmet with co-producers from CAMERA). In his weekend column in the Yediot Achronot magazine "Shiva Yamim," he wrote:

I finally saw this week the movie “The Case for Israel”, about the famous American lawyer, Alan Dershowitz.
“I am pro-Israel,” opens Dershowitz the movie, “I am also pro-Palestinian. I support the two state solution but...”

Dershowitz isn’t a philosopher or a filmmaker; he’s not even from the political right. We got used to the fact that defense statements on Zionism come only from the right, but Dershowitz supports us precisely because he’s a left-wing law professor from Harvard, who deals with human rights.

(Read full post)
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David Solway’s Hear, O Israel!: A Feast for the Conservative Mind

Barbara Kay
pajamasmedia.com
19 December 09

The new book by PJM's Solway asks why Jews are so prone to turn on themselves and make common cause with their enemies.

Hear, O Israel!
By David Solway
Canadian Values Press (Mantua Books)
181 pages; $25

On September 10, 2001, Canadian David Solway was merely an acclaimed poet, educator, and literary critic, warming himself (and his unexamined 1960s-era left-wing views) on a tranquil Greek island.

On September 11, 2001, he became a prophet. Watching the collapse of the twin towers on a television in his local café, Solway experienced a worldview-shattering epiphany that drew him into a singular fellowship of Western liberal intellectuals — Christopher Hitchens, Alain Finkelkraut, Michael Novak, and Nick Cohen, among them — who had been shocked by 9/11 into a fearful awareness of Islamist triumphalism’s threat to the West. As if making up for lost time, these ideological converts have brought a special urgency to their newly embraced roles as political Cassandras, perhaps none more apocalyptically than Solway.

Since then, Solway has put his formidable intellect to the service of myth-busting. In 2007, he published The Big Lie: On Terror, Anti-Semitism, and Identity, an indictment of the left’s collusion with Islamo-fascism in demonizing America and delegitimizing Israel.

In a way, Hear, O Israel!, partially adapted from published articles, is a recapitulation and updating of perils that have proliferated since the publication of The Big Lie. But this time Solway dwells at greater length and depth on what the Talmud calls sin’at achim, or brotherly hatred, a dynamic throughout Jewish civilization, currently embodied in the intensifying standoff between fellow-traveling anti-Zionists and Israel’s defenders.

Hear, O Israel!’s chapter titles give a good sense of what preoccupies him: “We Are All Israeli,” “The Darkness of Anti-Semitism,” “A House Divided,” and “The Question” (in a nutshell: why are Jews — not all, but a disconcerting number — so prone to turn on themselves and make common cause with those who would delight in their extermination?).

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The American Public’s Incredibly Strong Support for Israel; Pew Gets Wrong the Amazing Results

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
05 December 09

According to the latest Pew poll, 51 percent of the American public say they sympathize more with the Israelis, while just 12% say they sympathize more with the Palestinians. (14 percent say neither; 19 percent have no opinion). That’s very impressive, right?

That means that two-thirds of Americans who have an opinion sympathize more with Israel.

What about all the academics who hate Israel, all the anti-Israel propaganda, the supposed sympathy for Palestinians as victims and underdogs? No apparent effect.

The poll also shows that among Democrats the number supporting Israel has remained the exact same (43 percent) over the last 16 years. So there’s been no decline due to a party or shift to the left within this camp. That’s important, too.

True, among those describing themselves as liberals, the gap is only 35 to 27 percent which is quite narrow and far different from the overall population. Here is where the hostility has made some real difference. Yet among Democrats as a whole it is a much wider 43 to 18, and for Democrats to be elected they need votes from the even more pro-Israel independents.

(Continue article)
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'Pro-Israel, Pro-peace'

Ben Smith
Politico
28 October 09

Matthew Yglesias, who is deeply sympathetic to the liberal Jewish group J Street's aims, has an interesting point on the gap between its leadership's stated policy positions and those of many attendees at its conference:

I was debating with Jon Chait at a J Street panel this morning on the subject of “what does it mean to be pro-Israel?” As expected, we disagreed on a number of points, most of which I was right on and he was wrong on. But one thing he said in his opening remarks that I really disagreed with was that there was an ambiguity running through the J Street constituency as to whether the group was or should be pro-Israel at all.

That just struck me as kind of nuts. My J Street button said “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace.” It’s not a subtle aspect of the messaging. But when we moved to the Q&A time it became clear that a number of people in the audience really were quite uncomfortable self-defining as “pro-Israel” in any sense and that others are uncomfortable with the basic Zionist concept of a Jewish national state. I was, of course, aware that those views existed but it had seemed to me that it was clear that that wasn’t what J Street is there to advocate for. Apparently, though, it wasn’t clear to everyone.

Yglesias continues that the anti-Zionist notion of a peaceable one-state solution, but that people who think "that the area west of the Jordan River would be a great place to try implementing [post-nationalist values] in the short-term are being a bit crazy."

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“Pro-Israel” No More

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
27 October 09

There has been a debate as to whether J Street is “pro-Israel.” Well, one branch of J Street now says it isn’t or at least doesn’t want to say it is anymore. Because that’s a bad thing, and people might take offense. This report explains:

J Street’s university arm has dropped the “pro-Israel” part of the left-wing US lobby’s “pro-Israel, pro-peace” slogan to avoid alienating students. That decision was part of the message conveyed to young activists who attended a special weekend program for students ahead of J Street’s first annual conference, which began on Sunday. … We don’t want to isolate people because they don’t feel quite so comfortable with ‘pro-Israel,’ so we say ‘pro-peace,’” said American University junior Lauren Barr of the “J Street U” slogan, “but behind that is ‘pro-Israel.’”

Way behind. It seems that a basic component of supporting Israel is not being ashamed or embarrassed to support Israel. And J Street’s head, Jeremy Ben-Ami, in perfect live-and-let-live-who-are-we-to-tell-kids-what-to-think mode offers this mind-numbing explanation:

Ben-Ami described himself as “concerned but realistic” about the students’ choice to leave out the pro-Israel piece of J Street’s slogan. He added, “Some in the community might not want to hear that this is where a lot of young people have come to, but we have to deal with people where they’re at and address their concerns.” …

It is our goal to change traditional conversations when it comes to Israel and to broaden the notion that there is only one way to express love and concern for it,” Ben-Ami said to applause. “We are here to redefine and expand the very concept of being pro-Israel. No longer should this ‘pro-’ require an ‘anti-.’”

Pro-Israel, anti-Israel. Whatever. It’s enough to give moral equivalency a bad name.

But clarity is good and it’s nice to know J Street doesn’t mind dropping “pro-Israel” from its self-designation. If only it had told all those congressmen and senators it had lured into hosting an event for a “pro-Israel” group.

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