J Street From Israel

J Street From Israel

Jeffrey Goldberg, always a valuable blog to visit, has been dealing a lot recently with the pros and cons of J Street and it's approaching big conference. The Big Question is if J Street is pro Israel, as it professes, or not, as many observers think (Goldberg isn't sure either way).

I'm confident that 99% of Israelis have never heard of J Street. This is an American issue, in spite of purportedly being about Israel. Still, one Menachem Pritzker, a reader of the Goldblog, has a comment which sums it up neatly, to my mind:

Are there any other examples of a Washington lobby that knows "better" than
the party they're lobbying for? Would it be possible, say, for a group to
lobby for raising the minimum age for buying cigarettes to 25, and doubling
tobacco taxes, and still get away with calling themselves a "pro-tobacco
lobby?" Why would they even want to?It seems ridiculous to me that a group
with positions farther to the left than Meretz could position itself as lobbying on
behalf of us. From an Israeli perspective, this whole J-Street episode has
been insulting, upsetting, and very confusing.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations