I had a funny feeling when I saw this New York Times headline:
Pro-Israel Groups Differ on Approaches Toward Iran
As soon as I saw the headline I knew that J Street would be included in the story.
Except that J Street isn’t a pro-Israel organization. The Israeli government certainly doesn’t think so. Last year, Israel’s Minister of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Yuli Edelstein bluntly said, “They’re not pro-Israel, they’re not liberally Jewish. They’re anti-Israel.” (I should mention that when I was a teenager I campaigned for Edelstein’s release from a Soviet jail and had a chance meeting with him when I was in Israel in the summer of 1988.)
Just last week, J Street erroneously claimed the IDF had killed over a dozen Palestinians civilians when in fact the IDF had actually killed terrorists affiliated with Islamic Jihad and Popular Resistance Committees. While J Street scrubbed this claim from their website they did not issue a correction.
If the New York Times considers J Street a pro-Israel organization, it leaves me to wonder who they consider to be anti-Israel.
