Check this out:
‘J Street’ official takes care not to mention ‘occupation’ till after the speech
Philip Weiss heard Steven Krubiner, a J Street director for its Israel program, speak at a church in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He's upset:
Krubiner's message during the talk was very different from his comments to people who came up to him after the talk. Specifically, in his talk, Krubiner did not once mention the occupation, did not mention the humiliations of the Palestinian people, said nothing about the creeping fascism inside Israeli political life. No: the talk was all about the existential threat to the Jewish state posed by the failure of the American government to pressure Israel to make a deal with the Palestinians so that a Jewish majority would be preserved in Israel.
That bothers Weiss. Because
His audience is Jews. The non-Jews in the crowd were chopped liver. He is concerned about changing Jewish opinion, and he is working on the conservative Jews in the crowd, the ones who give money to the Democratic Party and maybe give to J Street and transform the lobby. So he took care to say a couple nice things about AIPAC (!) and not to breathe a word about the occupation, and he was a little defensive about J Street's stance last winter when it opposed Obama's shameful veto of the anti-settlements resolution in the U.N. Security Council...Krubiner had trouble getting the word "settlements" out of his mouth.
This is the essence of my difference with J Street. An appeal that rests inside the Jewish community will be spavined by the fears and conservatism of that community. You can't even mention the occupation! The Jewish community will only leave the desert of collective blindness on Jim Crow in Israel and Palestine with the help of non-Jews. Keep the conversation inside our community, and we're lost.
So, the idea is that the more subversive you are, the 'better' you are?
Gee, I wonder how non-Jews would react to being dismissed as "chopped liver"?
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