I just returned from two days at J Street's first national conference held in Washington, DC. This 18-month-old, well-funded organization and lobby, which describes itself as "pro-Israel and pro-peace," drew 1,500 attendees from a variety of progressive organizations, and included 250 students who participated in J Street's special campus conference for a day and a half before the formal proceedings began.

Day 1

The ideological confusion of the conference was obvious from the moment I registered in the downstairs hall of the Grand Hyatt Hotel. Registrants received a canvas bag full of brochures from organizations that spanned just left of center to the radical, anti-Israel left. Among brochures for the Jewish Peace Lobby and Americans for Peace Now was a book of articles from Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture, entitled Israelology. The book begins with an interview of UC Berkeley professor Judith Butler describing her break from Zionism, followed by an article by anti-Zionist UC Irvine professor Mark Levine. Butler is also a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, an active anti-Israel Jewish group that has led the call for boycotting Israel, sponsored events that demonize Israel, and used its members' identities as Jews to deflect any accusation that the anti-Israel movement also has deep strains of anti-Semitism.

Though Israelology was in the canvas bag, J Street had been at pains to separate itself from more radical anti-Israel activists who were interested in attending and speaking at the conference, banishing from the official program a session led by veteran screedmonger Richard Silverstein and calling his event "self-organized" (but including a flyer for it in the canvas bag) and disinviting poet Josh Healey, who compared Guantanamo to Auschwitz. But when I went to take my seat at a table in the ballroom, I saw a small flyer at each place on the table that read: "Help Break the Illegal Siege of Gaza. Join the Gaza Freedom March, Dec. 31, 2009." Radical anti-Israel groups have been organizing boat and overland trips to break Israel's "siege," which is in place to prevent smuggling of explosives and to pressure Hamas to moderate. The activists deliver goods and money to Hamas. Medea Benjamin, whose group Code Pink has co-sponsored these trips, said in a newly posted YouTube video that she was attending the conference because she thought she would find recruits for the December "free Gaza" trip. She reported she had found some willing recruits but that other attendees had disagreed and argued with her. When I showed the flyer to two of the evening's speakers, they shrugged. "You can't control who comes," one of them said.

J Street evidently is groping for an identity, and the conference would show where it fit on the ideological spectrum.

The evening opened with a welcome from J Street's board president, followed with speeches by Executive Director Jeremy Ben-Ami, the newly appointed New Israel Fund Director Daniel Sokatch, a short video, brief comments by a few leading J Street supporters, including an energetic young woman active in J Street's campus division, and then a kind of group-therapy, get-to-know-people-at-your-table interlude.  The questions to be discussed at each table were posted on the video screen. Ben-Ami concluded the evening with an energetic oration.

 If heartfelt protestations of Zionist credentials, love for Israel and Jewish values, and of the urgent, immediate need for a Palestinian state and regional cooperation could effect change, then the conference would have had everyone awaken this week to find that peace had broken out in the Middle East. There was lots of passionate idealism, lots of spirituality, and even more passionate wishing away-or ignoring-inconvenient realities like Palestinian terrorism and extremism and the threats from Iran and its proxies.

J Street didn't offer any new vision of peace that would justify Ben-Ami's excited introduction that "We are here to change the course of events in the Middle East." When he rose to the podium for his opening address, amid enthusiastic applause, he laid out the six pillars of J Street: We are pro-Israel; we are for a Palestinian state; we want the U.S. to take the lead in imposing peace; the mainstream Jewish organizations are "right wing," not pro-peace, and do not represent the "silent majority" of American Jews; we need a new Jewish pro-Israel voice in Washington and the country; and you who share these views are not alone! We have brought you together and will form a new, powerful movement.

 Ben-Ami's call for a secure Israel with defined borders, a Palestinian state, and the Arab world's acceptance of the Jewish state was not new. I felt like I had been transported in a time warp back to the early days of the Oslo Accords when Israel and the PLO seemed to agree to a similar vision.

 But J Street's analysis of why peace efforts have failed and what should be done now resembles the staples of the anti-Israel narrative. They claimed that the real obstacles to peace are Israel, which is not living up to progressive and Jewish values and has refused to end the "occupation" and establish a Palestinian state, and "mainstream Jewish organizations" (especially AIPAC), that, in their view, have not allowed the U.S. to pressure Israel into making concessions that they seemed to believe would bring peace to the region. J Street speakers implied that lofty ideals and a magic U.S. wand (or club) would be enough to create a Palestinian state and Israel's acceptance in the region. In short, they blamed Israel and the pro-Israel lobby. J Street is trying to repackage these views to make them palatable to mainstream Jews and the American public.

 One strategy J Street used for this repackaging was airbrushing away inconvenient realities. It was disconcerting that the 16 years since Oslo, with all the obstacles and bloodshed that prevented realizing its hopes, were either misrepresented or regarded as irrelevant. No speakers seriously addressed the long and painful history of Arab and Palestinian rejectionism, terrorism, anti-Semitism, and the widening circle of radical Islamic fundamentalism led especially by Iran, whose oft-stated goal is to wipe the "cancer" that is Israel off the map. No one referred to the facts on the ground in the Middle East as the conference opened. In Jerusalem, Palestinians were attacking Jews for allegedly trying to take over Al Aqsa Mosque; in Gaza, the radical Hamas was imposing Islamist rule and unyielding extremism against Israel; in the West Bank, Mahmoud Abbas' fractured leadership was failing to quell radicalism, and he announced he will never recognize Israel as the Jewish state. No one referred to the problem posed by the fact that today Gaza and the West Bank are separate entities at war with one another. No one questioned whether this new Palestinian state, half of which is ruled by extremist Hamas, would live up to the human rights ideals the attendees so fervently espoused. No one questioned whether the tragic aftermath of Israel's withdrawal from Gaza would be repeated if Israel withdraws from the West Bank, where Hamas is spreading and the Fatah government is unpopular and weak. No one questioned the impact of Israeli concessions on the fanatical rulers of Iran. A young Israeli lawyer, who has been active in Israel's peace movement for years, told me she was disappointed by the conference's failure to grapple with these stubborn issues.

 Laying the blame exclusively on Israel has been the mantra of anti-Israel groups that don't see terrorism-or find a way to explain or excuse it-and so see no justification for Israel's counterterrorism measures. Instead, they often blame the counterterrorism measures for causing the terrorism. Laying the blame on the "Israel Lobby" has also been a staple of anti-Israel groups. J Street speakers unfortunately echoed many of these views.

In essence, on this opening night, J Street declared war on mainstream, pro-Israel Jewish organizations. Unlike Walt and Mearsheimer, J Streeters do not oppose Jews and others organizing an "Israel Lobby" that tries to impact government policy and elections. They just want to create a new Israel Lobby that promotes a different agenda. But they did echo Walt and Mearsheimer in their descriptions of the current pro-Israel groups. Speaker after speaker painted the vibrant, diverse, mainstream American Jewish organizations with one brush stroke as "right wing" and anti-peace. Many groups hostile to Israel have consistently tried to hijack the term "peace" and accuse anyone who doesn't support their policies as "pro-war" or "anti-peace." In this case, J Street could only do so by rewriting history. They ignored the fact that during the Oslo years, this community it now vilifies supported the emergence of some kind of two-state solution, and that it was dissenting, cautionary voices that were marginalized at the time. Nor did J Street even acknowledge the mainstream Jewish community's support for Israel's many offers and concessions for peace, such as the generous Camp David offer in 2000.

 Another central strategy was to redefine what it means to be "pro-Israel." In tones worthy of Walt and Mearsheimer, speaker after speaker claimed that the American Jewish community has been forced to believe that "pro-Israel" means one must "support Israel right or wrong." Though no one ever specified who was forcing this ironclad groupthink or exactly what it entailed, they seemed to be referring to looking at Israel's actions from Israel's perspective, particularly "JUSTIFYING" its counterterrorism measures, such as the security fence, checkpoints, restriction on goods entering Gaza, and its wars against Hezbollah and Hamas. The message was that you can still be pro-Israel even if you oppose Israel's counterterrorism policies, minimize terrorism and the Iranian threat, criticize Israel's failings, and fault it for not being what Ben-Ami described as "the embodiment of our [social justice] values and Jewish ideals." In short, you didn't have to be sympathetic to Israel and its strategic threats to be pro-Israel.

To prove the point, speaker after speaker gave their Zionist, I-love-Israel credentials, which were undoubtedly sincere. David Gilo, president of the board of J Street, opened the first plenary session describing his service in the Golani Brigade and reminding the audience that staunch Zionists had given up land for peace, from Menachem Begin's withdrawal from the Sinai to Ariel Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza. He stressed that it is hard to define who is pro-Israel. The brief video that followed included various rabbis and other prominent figures in the Jewish community who first described their Zionism and love for Israel and then their disappointment with Israel's policies.  "Israel has no right to occupy another people," declared one of the people featured. In his speech, Daniel Sokatch repeated that "No one has a monopoly on defining pro-Israel." 

Ben-Ami received thunderous applause at the end of the evening with his new definition of "pro-Israel." It means we don't "care just about our own future but about the future of Palestinian children, too." The fact that Israel and American Jews have consistently shown sympathy and concern for Palestinian children and that Israel has done more for Palestinian children than any other country in the world-including building schools and universities in the West Bank; improving Palestinian health, education, and welfare; and providing humanitarian medical care-is lost on J Street. He said that being pro-Israel means we "reject racism and prejudice when directed at our community or any other community." His comment should have caused vigorous head-scratching given that the mainstream Jewish community is widely known for its activism for human and civil rights. But his audience seemed to know what he meant. In their view, the Middle Eastern minority that faces racism and bigotry is the Palestinians oppressed by Israel, not the minority of 5.8 million Jews surrounded by over 300 million Arabs and Iranians, who for 61 years have bitterly and violently denied the Jewish nation's right to exist in their midst. And Ben-Ami redefined Zionism. It was not just about creating a thriving Jewish state but also about creating a Palestinian state.

There was only lip service given to the threats Israel faces today. Gilo admitted that radical Islamic organizations and especially Iran threaten Israel. Then he claimed that it is in Israel's and world Jewry's interests to support the establishment of a Palestinian state-but he did not explain the connection between the two points. The implication seemed to be that if a Palestinian state were created immediately, which is up to Israel, not the Palestinians, then Iran might stop its warmongering. Ben-Ami mentioned Palestinian fundamentalism, extremism, and terrorism only once, and then almost as an afterthought. "We oppose the use of terror and violence by Palestinians to achieve their political goals." J Street speakers never mentioned what policies would end this unfortunate and significant aspect of the Palestinian movement or how a two-state solution would solve it.

J Streeters certainly didn't criticize Zionism or Israel's founding, but in other respects, they seemed to echo the views of many anti-Israel groups. Speakers consistently faulted Israel for not living up to Jewish and social justice values. "Social justice must be the foundation of Israel," insisted Sokatch. He lauded those who purportedly support these efforts, such as the "soldier who speaks out," an allusion to a group also invited to the conference, Breaking the Silence, which hunts for and trains disaffected former IDF soldiers to go public about alleged IDF war crimes in order to defame the Israeli army to the international community.

Israel's failure to live up to these values, he and other speakers contended, is what is causing a hemorrhage of young Jews from supporting Israel and from mainstream pro-Israel organizations. Sokatch claimed that these organizations require young people to support Israel blindly. J Street, he promised, is the solution. Under its big tent, these young people can put their social justice values first and freely criticize Israel without fear or guilt that they are betraying Israel or their family traditions. 

His views were echoed by a young J Street intern, Lauren Barr, who said many Jewish students feel alienated and silenced because the pro-Israel campus groups are intimidating and ideologically rigid. She said these disaffected students had no forum where they could raise their questions and ambivalence about Israel and that J Street is a shelter for them away from the "extremism of both sides." She did not describe "extremism" on the pro-Israel side and did not speak about the anti-Israel extremism that has destroyed rational dialogue on so many campuses. She claimed that Jewish students were torn between their support for Israel and their belief in "social justice values." No one at this conference and no J Street U chapter (the campus arm of J Street) would help them understand that the two are not in conflict, that in supporting Israel, one does support ideals of social justice. To the contrary, J Street was capitulating to the psychological/ideological campaign against Israel that has fervently worked to portray Israel on campuses as one of the world's worst violators of human rights and peace.

A disturbing aspect of all this is that many students at the event seemed genuinely confused, groping to understand Israel and its policies and to reconcile them with their value systems. They would certainly not get help at this conference, where the Palestinian terrorism and extremism that have forced Israel to take counterterrorism measures, such as checkpoints, the security barrier, and restrictions on goods entering Gaza, were virtually omitted from the backdrop of information. Instead, these counterterrorism measures were frequently portrayed as the cause, not the result, of terrorism.

And no speakers or audience members questioned whether the prevailing anti-Israel sentiment on campuses and the misinformation of anti-Israel professors contributed to the reluctance of these students to identify with Israel. The messages at the J Street conference will not reconcile them to the difficult and sometimes tragic realities Israel faces. Instead, I fear that by omitting important context, J Street will simply reinforce their concern that supporting Israel while supporting human rights is contradictory, which will only increase their disaffection.

I could not attend the student sessions on Saturday and Sunday. The student organizers had decided not to include any non-students, except for the presenters, to avoid inhibiting the students. I did find three attractive young women from Canadian and American universities who had attended the anti-Semitism and the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) sessions, but they seemed reluctant to talk. One said that the panelists at the BDS session discussed whether boycotts were a viable option, particularly if they targeted only products from the settlements, but concluded they were not. In other words, the session seriously considered boycotts as an option for exerting pressure on Israel. I was surprised that the students didn't mention any discussion about how boycotts have been a weapon used by fervent anti-Israel groups to import the 60-year-old Arab boycott of Israel into the West, sparking publicity so they could air their defamations of Israel and turn Israel into a pariah state by focusing on Israel's response to terrorism while underplaying the terrorism itself and by then equating Israel with some of the last century's worse violators of human rights. I could not get a clear sense of the discussion in the anti-Semitism panel, other than that it is possible for Jews to oppose Zionism without being anti-Semitic and that crossing the line into anti-Semitism is a gray area and difficult to define. Apparently, there was little education about what many scholars have called the "new anti-Semitism," with "Israel" replacing "Jew" in revivals of medieval anti-Semitic and Nazi imagery. I don't know if these young women accurately described the panels.

The opening night of the J Street conference ended with this black-and-white caricature of mainstream Jewish organizations. There was a concerted effort to put a major wedge between mainstream pro-Israel organizations, Israeli government priorities, and these "pro-peace, pro-Israel" activists. The prevailing mantra was blame Israel, have the U.S. force Israel to make unilateral concessions, and then Israel will approximate progressive Jewish ideals, and Hamas, Fatah, and other terrorist groups will be willing to turn their rockets into ploughshares. I hoped that Day 2 would present more details and more nuance about how J Street will bring much-needed peace to the Middle East.

Day 2

Day 2, with its small breakout sessions and the larger plenary sessions, exposed more of the troubling nature of the J Street agenda. The air of unreality continued, as did the anti-Israel messages that were always velvet-gloved in protestations of love for Israel and compassion for the Palestinians.

Serious problems were waved away in airy clouds about how dialogue, compassion, and understanding can solve most problems. In the session on how Jews, Christians and Muslims can work together for peace, the emphasis was on interfaith gatherings in the U.S., not on the urgent threats of radical Islamic fundamentalism and anti-Semitism. The panel moderator said that Islam was the most pluralistic of the three monotheistic religions. Salaam Al-Maryati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, agreed and assured the audience that anti-Semitism was foreign to Islam, which accepts Jews as a protected "people of the book." He insisted that moderate American Muslims like himself denounce terrorism but that their voices are not heard because the media only reports the statements of extremists. He claimed that no matter how much he condemns terrorism, he is told it is not enough. "I can say the sky is blue, and I will be accused of extremism," he charged. He also insisted that justice and human rights are central to Muslim theology, though he didn't explain why the human rights records of Muslim-majority countries, especially in the Middle East, are among the world's most abysmal.

Al-Marayti, like the Palestinian and American Christians on the panel, all found fault with Israel, never the Palestinians. Hamas terrorism was caused by Israel's closures, not the other way around. He charged that Israel has refused to allow sanitary napkins, diapers, and butter into Gaza, claiming they might be used to make explosives.  He condemned Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza, charging that it simply produces more extremism-though he neglected to explain why the radicalism and terrorism started in the first place. He claimed that suicide bombing occurred because "the powerless use human beings for bombs," ignoring all the evidence that suicide bombing was a planned, well-organized strategy supported by multi-levels of training, funding and indoctrination of radical ideology, a phenomenon that can be seen and felt globally and that has affected not only the Middle East but also Spain, London, Pakistan, Bali, and the U.S.

Maureen Shea, of the Churches for Middle East Peace, also presented the exclusively Palestinian narrative that is typical of many "social justice" Christian groups. She stressed how much Palestinians are suffering and claimed that Christians are leaving the Holy Land not because of Islamic persecution but because of Israel's occupation. She did not mention that Israel is the only country in the Middle East where the Christian population is growing instead of disappearing. Nor did anyone address Islamic persecution of Christians in the region. All problems were laid at Israel's door.

There was even a strong dose of moral equivalence. The moderator asked how interfaith dialogue could occur when there is so much pain and so many wounds on both sides: Palestinians lost their land and Jews lost their families. He equated the two losses. The real problems of radical Islam in the Middle East and of radicalized Arab/Muslim, anti-Israel communities in the U.S. were simply glossed over or blamed on Israel's actions.

There is little way the speakers at this interfaith session could be characterized as "pro-Israel," unless the definition is stretched beyond those who wish to see Israel secure and thriving to include others who may not call for its destruction or dismantling in a one-state solution but who only grudgingly and reluctantly accept its existence. They are not interested in seeing it thriving and secure. Prior to the J Street conference and in other forums, Al-Marayati's MPAC has demonized Israel's founding, signing a 1993 statement that claimed Israel was "established by force, violence and terrorism" and is "racist, chauvinistic, and militaristic." In 2002, Al-Marayati charged that Israel's operations against the Intifada's relentless suicide bombing campaign were "nothing more than war to steal lands from Palestinians, to decimate their leadership, to humiliate the Palestinian people." Similarly, speaker Greg Khalil of the Kairos Foundation has been an advisor to the Palestinian Authority and joined the Palestinian team at the International Court of Justice, where Israel was put on trial for building a security barrier to prevent suicide bombers from simply walking freely into Israeli communities. In other words, the people on this panel have a history of defaming Israel and denying its right to defend itself against terrorism.

The session about campuses was equally disappointing. The speakers, the president of Hampshire College, the Hillel Director at Harvard University, a University of Colorado professor, and two students all seemed to argue that the problems on campuses could easily be handled by dialogue and by finding a reasonable middle ground. As each speaker demonstrated how a problem was averted through diplomatic tactics or through a compromise reached by campus Muslims and Jews, some students behind me began fidgeting. Finally, during the question period, one of them, a representative of the Union of Canadian Jewish Students, politely and articulately asked what could be done at Canadian universities, where radical anti-Israel groups intimidate pro-Israel students and spew hate no matter how centrist the pro-Israel students are and no matter how much they reach out. She got no answer. As we left the room, several students said that these panelists didn't seem to understand what they were up against with the campus anti-Israel groups.

The day's closing session with four U.S. members of Congress followed the same pattern as these earlier sessions, this time with strong undertones of the Walt and Mearhseimer thesis about the "Israel Lobby." After the moderator, former CNN correspondent Bob Franken, joked about the members of Congress who had been "pressured" to stay away, presumably by the Israel Lobby, he introduced three of the panelists, stressing their leftist and Jewish bona fides. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) mentioned that her rabbi was in the audience; Bob Filner (D-CA) elaborated on his anti-war, civil rights background and on his Orthodox upbringing and relatives living in Israel; Jared Polis (D-CO) apologized that he was too young to have been in the New Left but stressed that his parents had been activists and that his rabbi was also in the audience. The fourth panelist, Charles Boustany (R-LA), a former cardiac surgeon, was praised for his courage in breaking from Republican ranks as well as bucking the pressure of the Israel Lobby. He explained his presence by the fact that he is of Lebanese descent and has been deeply concerned about the lack of information in Congress about the real facts in the Middle East, which he has studied extensively. The message was always the same: the old paradigm didn't work. It isn't anti-Israel to search for another policy for Middle East peace. The J Street agenda is an important one to consider. Filner perhaps best described the importance of J Street. In the past, he explained, he couldn't vote against what AIPAC recommended because there was "no one to cover my back." He hoped that J Street would provide popular support for those who wanted to vote against the Israel Lobby.

Today's sessions also ruptured an ironclad message of the J Street slogans. Many of the people around me repeated several times that they couldn't understand how Ben-Ami could claim that they were a "silent majority." They certainly weren't majorities in their communities. In an informal session, "Navigating the Minefield of Jewish Public Opinion," rabbis and speaker after speaker told how anguished and isolated they felt, how much they had been marginalized by the Jewish community, and how unpopular their ideas were. They were fringe groups. With its generous funding, J Street had gathered these disparate groups and people together, assuaged their lingering guilt that their views might be a betrayal of Israel, and made them feel that they were not marginal and could become a political force. Whether or not they do depends a lot on how the mainstream Jewish community handles their sudden appearance.

Some of the answer could be seen in the highlight of today's sessions: the debate between Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union of Reform Judaism, and J Street founder Jeremy Ben-Ami. Yoffie had disrupted the harmony of the new movement when he condemned J Street's opposition to Israel's war in Gaza, calling their positions "morally deficient, profoundly out of touch with Jewish sentiment and also appallingly naïve." Yoffie's presence on the J Street schedule puzzled many who concluded that the rift had been healed. It had not been. Rabbi Yoffie appeared before what proved to be a largely hostile audience and spelled out his differences with J Street's positions. His presentation finally brought some sense of reality back into the program and clarified the centrist positions of the mainstream Jewish community, which had been so criticized and misrepresented by the J Street speakers. Rabbi Yoffie called for a two-state solution, again defended Israel's war against Hamas, denounced the bias and questionable claims in the Goldstone report, said that the settlements west of the security barrier should be accepted but those "ideological settlements" east of the barrier would probably have to be removed-anguishing as this would be, and called for an end to demonization of the settlers and for stronger sanctions against Iran. Booing-and sometimes applause from other quarters in the audience-interrupted a few of his comments, such as when he said that Israel is not violating international law by controlling the flow of goods into Gaza since it ensures that basic humanitarian needs are met. The moderator of the session finally asked the audience to behave more respectfully.

As part of my work with StandWithUs, I have attended many anti-Israel events and conferences. They range from enraged demonizations of Zionism and Israel to biased indictments gloved in the velvet rhetoric of human rights, idealism, peace, love for Israel, and compassion for both sides. The J Street conference fit the latter category, and the organization will have to determine how to absorb or distance itself from the radical groups that felt welcomed in its big tent. J Street is trying to garner support by capitulating to the wedge that anti-Israel activists have tried to put between social justice values and support for Israel and by misrepresenting and attacking mainstream Jewish and pro-Israel groups. Its agenda is for Diaspora American Jewry to lobby the U.S. to impose a solution on Israel, regardless of what Israel's democratically elected government decides and regardless of whether the political situation in Gaza and the West Bank at this time warrants entrusting Palestinian leaders with the responsibilities of statehood. Rabbi Yoffie's strong and reasoned presentation of the centrist Jewish position laid down the gauntlet of what may prove to be a battle between J Street and the mainstream Jewish community.