J Street: Tough Love Without the Love

Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S., Yechiel Leiter, recently was called “un-diplomatic” for daring to criticize J Street – an organization that keeps dishing out criticism against Israel – but cannot take it. Leiter wondered how J Street calls itself “pro-Israel, pro-peace and pro-democracy” while endorsing “an arms embargo on a state that’s fighting a seven-front war against Iranian proxies.”

Others have detailed J Street’s support for candidates hostile to Israel and its complaints whenever Israel is compelled to defend itself.  But the J Street contradiction runs deeper. How is it “pro-Israel” when it’s so busy whacking Israel, it forgets to celebrate it? And how can J Streeters claim to be “pro-peace and pro-democracy,” as their Bash-Israel-Firsting keeps delighting Palestinian “From the River to the Sea” exterminationists and their fellow Jew-haters worldwide?

When tomorrow’s historians analyze today’s reinforcing, ever-escalating, anti-Zionist and Jew-hating manias, J Street will have two starring roles. It has enabled obsessive anti-Israel progressives to spew their venom with some Jews’ cover. Its kosher certification for Israel-haters keeps erasing red lines, giving Zionophobes a Star-of-David-embossed fig leaf.

J Street helped Bernie-Sanderize the Democratic Party. More and more Democrats demonize AIPAC, support candidates bearing SS tattoos and boast that their political rite of passage was Zio-hunting or running encampments.

Mainstreaming anti-Israel fanatics, left and right, rousing antizionist lynch mobs, spurs Jew-bashing. Today’s feverish atmosphere risks making much anti-Israel zealotry antisemitic in effect, even when not in intent.

J Street has also helped orchestrate America’s mass souring on Israel. Treating Israel only as a problem … is the problem. Since its 2007 founding, J Street suffered from the occupation preoccupation, soft-pedaling Palestinian terrorism and naively endorsing the two-state solution without acknowledging Oslo’s failure, how the Gaza disengagement spawned Hamasistan and many Palestinians’ desire for a no-Jewish-State solution.

Now, the well is being poisoned on a broader scale. Worshipping in the church of The New York Times and academia, J Street is teaching generations of American Jews – and Americans – that to engage with Israel is to wallop it. When every Israel-oriented conversation involves fault-finding, making the leap to regretting Israel’s very existence becomes that much easier.

In that spirit, J Street’s website romanticizes the five-time Palestinian murderer Marwan Barghouti. It supports California State Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) who accuses Israel of “genocide” and Daniel Bliss, who condemns Israel’s “atrocities” and “cruelty.” From day one, it blasted the Iran war – which most Israelis supported.

Bibi-bashing constantly, J Street champions sanctioning Israeli officials and embargoing weapons sales – to punish Israel. Even while agreeing with a J Street position or two – I found the torrent overwhelming. It sentences Israel to reputational death by a thousand doubts.

To counter these nattering nabobs of negativism – stealing a phrase from 1970 – Zionists should sing Roberta Flack’s 1972 hit: “Where is the Love?”

The J Street case is a red flag, warning American Jews, left and right, to avoid an overly-politicized and partisan Zionism of the Hunched Back and the Furrowed Brow. Too many right-wingers only see Israel through a defensive defense lens. Constantly defending Israel against its many enemies imprisons Israel in the never-ending conflict narrative.

Even worse – and more damaging –  too many Progressives join the Delegitimization Derby. They spiral naturally from “I dislike this Israeli policy or politician” to “therefore Israel doesn’t have the right to exist.” Now, even those stopping short of that conclusion, having spit so much in the Zionist soup, help the haters deeming Israel radioactive.

J Street and other cynical perfectionists are so busy mudslinging they can’t see anything positive. They don’t rejoice on Israel’s Independence Day – and certainly not on Jerusalem Day. That overlooks how much Israel needed to win in 1967, while forgetting to hail Israel for liberating the Jewish quarter – and half of Jerusalem from Jordanian snipers patrolling the Old City Walls.

Obsessively rejecting what Israel felt forced to do to protect itself after Oct. 7, 2023, feeds the Zio-witch-hunt. It obscures the miracles that saved Israel, and keep it thriving, as Israelis improve the world culturally, medically, technologically, ideologically – and militarily. And those fixated on caricaturing Israel as all Bibi, Ben-Gvir and Settlers, oh my, romanticize Palestinians as forever-suffering, Christ-like victims. Beyond condescendingly robbing Palestinians of agency or responsibility, that narrative ignores the estimated 9,000 terrorist attacks those oh-so-innocent Palestinians launched since Oct. 7.

That’s neither “pro-Peace” nor “pro-democracy.”

Ignoring the Middle East’s complexity drains the empathy of J Streeters and their contemptuous comrades. By contrast, simply by putting Israel’s actions in context, Israel’s INSS – Institute for National Security Studies – could help these remote-control, Ivy League moralists mourn Israel’s losses – and trauma. Since Oct. 7, 2,044 Israelis have been killed – including 157 up north, with over 38,000 wounded. Israelis have scrambled to shelter 78,000 times, dodging over 40,000 rockets, in 3,500 different target zones.

In this combustible environment, J Street’s leaders cannot keep feeding the anti-Israel – and thus anti-Jewish – feeding frenzy, then claim innocence simply by calling themselves “pro-Israel.” Although the “pro-Israel, pro-genuine-peace and pro-democracy” community should be a big, welcoming tent, communities require some boundaries. American Jews should distinguish between J Street’s instinctive sourpuss opposition to Israel’s need to defend itself, and patriotic liberal Zionists’ critique of some Israel’s politicians, while supporting Israel’s existential fight to survive.

It’s “tough love” at best — a bitter version of tough love without any expression of love whatsoever.

Slinging criticism without responsibility and spewing all complaints all the time is barn-burning, not bridge-building. The anti-communist dissident Václav Havel warned in 1978 that “Truth must be integrated with love; morality is not whole without it.” In 1910, Theodore Roosevelt valued “the man who is actually in the arena,” exquisitely balancing between “high achievement” and failure “while daring greatly,” unlike armchair critics, “those cold and timid souls … who neither know victory nor defeat.”

While most Israelis have been “in the arena,” taking responsibility for life-and-death choices our enemies imposed on us, J Street has helped raise generations of “cold and timid” Jews and non-Jews. With their inexcusable empathy deficits – and lack of love – they risk fomenting chaos, with callow assumptions that Israel can survive by fighting with both hands tied behind its back, to please The New York Times’ editorial board.

Gil Troy is an American presidential historian and a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem. Last year he published “To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream” and “The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism and Jew-hatred,” available on the JPPI website. Next month, he will publish “The Essential Guide to the U.S-Israel Partnership, the 250th Edition.”