I suspected J Street wasn’t pro-Israel in any meaningful sense of the term, and the conference seemed to confirm my suspicions, but never did I imagine that J Street would drop the pretense on the final day of their conference:
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…. Barr, secretary of the J Street U student board that decided the slogan’s terminology, explained that on campus, “people feel alienated when the conversation revolves around a connection to Israel only, because people feel connected to Palestine, people feel connected to social justice, people feel connected to the Middle East.” She noted that the individual student chapters would be free to add “pro-Israel,” “pro-Israel, pro-Palestine,” or other wording that they felt would be effective on this issue, since “it’s up to the individuals on campus to know their audience.” Yonatan Shechter, a junior at Hampshire College, said the ultra-liberal Massachusetts campus is inhospitable to terms like “Zionist” and that when his former organization, the Union of Progressive Zionists (which has been absorbed into J Street U), dropped that last word of its name, “people were so relieved.”
The J Street conference is featuring anti-Zionist and anti-Israel speakers, the Israeli ambassador refused to attend the event because the group itself has taken positions that the embassy warns may “impair Israel’s interests,” and its college affiliate has just used the conference as a platform to announce that it no longer considers itself “pro-Israel.” Critics of the organization had already seen more than enough evidence to be convinced that this was the case, but for the group’s defenders — how can they now claim J Street is pro-Israel even as J Street itself drops the charade? J Street is a left-wing group that supports social justice in occupied Palestine and a bunch of other dopey progressive ideas about the Middle East. It is not, as the kids themselves concede, pro-Israel.
