NATO now

Earlier this month, one could almost hear the wind faintly whispering a disapproving refrain from the ghost of Clarence K. Streit: "I told you so." He would have been looking at us, and pointing to Georgia.

In 1938, Streit published "Union Now," his call for a union of democracies, which would act as one nation under the principles of federalism. The point, he wrote in "Union Now," was this: "The best way to prevent war is to make attack hopeless."

A simple alliance wasn't up to the task, he warned, because the nationalist desire to avoid commitments and confrontations would also prevent allied nations from coming to each other's aid in time to stop a war. An alliance could help a nation win a war that has already begun, he wrote. "But it cannot promise, as Union can, to prevent the war -- and that is the main thing."

Georgia is an ally of the powerful West, and as Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's nation was invaded by the Russian army, the West powerfully wagged its collective finger at Vladimir Putin.

While Streit's proposal for a federal union of democracies is unrealistic, especially when one takes a gander at the European Union, there is one example of a league of democracies that could prevent war against its member nations that has come once again to the forefront of the foreign policy debate: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO.

Earlier this year, President George W. Bush's continued and consistent pursuit of multilateralism took the form of pushing for NATO membership (or at least provisional membership, known as a membership action plan -- MAP) of Georgia, making the argument that we should stand by our allies, especially those that take the Soviet-sized risks that Georgia took to join our side.

Our European friends found Bush's sense of loyalty charming, but chose instead to continue the always game-changing policy of paying lip service to these democratic ideals and morals they're always hearing so much about.

So, Georgia (along with Ukraine) was denied even a MAP, and as Streit predicted, the alliance would come stomping in -- well after war was declared and much of the damage done.

I asked Karla Beth Jones, the Europe director for the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), based in Washington, D.C., if this has presented a defining moment for NATO.

She said it has, and she pointed to the Cold War as an example, echoing Streit's thesis.

"I think NATO's greatest value is as a deterrent organization," Jones told me. "Basically, we managed to win the Cold War without ever going to war, because NATO acted as a deterrence. And I believe Russia may not have provoked the Georgian attack if we had offered a MAP to both Georgia and Ukraine at Bucharest. And that's why this is a defining moment for NATO, and for other coalitions."

Her point, essentially, is this: NATO works. Fredo Arias-King, the founder of Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, told me that if there's one reason why Putin's aggression was a mistake, it's NATO.

"The sight of [German Chancellor] Angela Merkel by Saakashvili pledging to support Georgia's NATO bid is telling," Arias-King said.

He continued, "Probably Putin thought that he could conquer Tbilisi and carry out to the fullest the invasion, since then it would have made geostrategic sense. Regime change and installation of a quisling that would have forfeited Georgia's NATO aspirations, good government, and, most importantly, that Baku-Tbilisi-Çeyhan pipeline, which prevents Russia from monopolizing all the hydrocarbons from the area, was his semi-rational goal. However, this did not happen."

Arias-King said it reminded him of the failed August 1991 coup in Russia by the State Emergency Committee (GKChP). Invading a country without regime change, he said, was worse for Russia than if it had never intervened.

The conflict, Arias-King said, was "good for NATO."

"Several NATO countries had been echoing Moscow's argument that the alliance is out of date, anachronistic, and unnecessary in today's world," Arias-King explained. "But Russia's Soviet-like 19th-century tactics against a small neighbor have revived images of 1945, 1948, 1953, 1956, 1968, 1979, and 1980. It will be harder for Moscow's apologists inside NATO -- mainly Germany and France -- to make that case now."

Arias-King believes Moscow will fill any power vacuum in its neighborhood, and that Russia's actions hastened a standoff between Russia and the West that favors the West.

Why, I then asked Jones, would Russia lose such a standoff? Mainly economic factors, she said -- especially if Russia is expelled from the G8.

"Russia will have lost its standing in the world community," Jones said. "And it actually was building it back up again. People who weren't watching what Putin was doing internally were seeing Russia in a more positive light. But I think Russia is going to disintegrate internally and, just when it needs international help, it's not going to have it, because it will be an international pariah."

What's NATO's role in that scenario?

"NATO can protect Russia's near-abroad states until Russia disintegrates," Jones believes.

In other words, while the Bear starves, NATO will keep it from going fishing in Georgia and Ukraine.

Pardon my surprise, but this NATO stuff all sounds so... functional.

I was wondering why I seemed reflexively dubious of the efficacy of international coalitions, when the Jerusalem Post helped me out. "UNIFIL commander: Israel violating 1701" was the headline, with a story detailing how the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, via its commander Maj.-Gen. Claudio Graziano, was claiming that Israel had been unlawfully flying over southern Lebanon in violation of the resolution that ended the Second Lebanon War two years ago.

What Graziano was doing is called protecting your own interests. The U.N., as we have previously reported, has been assisting the terrorist organization Hezbollah in the latter's quest to embed its fighters and smuggle its weapons into south Lebanon. Israeli flyovers run the risk of exposing the fact that UNIFIL troops are merely Shiite militants in blue helmets.

I particularly liked this line from the Post story: "In contrast, [Graziano] said that the U.N. enjoyed excellent cooperation with Hezbollah and with the local Lebanese people."

I'll bet. In any event, Graziano tipped his hand eventually. "He conceded," the Post reported, "that his soldiers were not trying to prevent weapons smuggling from Syria as demanded by the U.N. [Security Council] because the Lebanese government had not requested such action." The Lebanese government, by the way, includes Hezbollah.

So, if the United Nations is a model for how not to behave unless you're on the payroll of the world's most dangerous and ruthless terrorist organization, is NATO the polar opposite?

"I believe it's the optimal model," Jones told me. "I believe that NATO is the most functional of all the multilateral organizations. And I would welcome more multilateral organizations like NATO."

I asked Jones how likely it is that Georgia and Ukraine will now be admitted to NATO, Ukraine being scheduled for such a vote in December.

"I am cautiously optimistic," she said.

Arias-King, whose journal predicted Putin's invasion of Georgia, agrees.

"At the December summit, there is a bigger chance that they will be offered either a MAP or some new invention that falls just short of a MAP," Arias-King said. "However, that process will take a while. But it's a better chance now than was the case before the invasion of Georgia."

Perhaps it's helpful to look at this through the prism so eloquently described by historian and political science professor David C. Hendrickson. In the winter 1997 issue of The National Interest, Hendrickson criticized the limited scope of the debate on interventionism. It is not, he said, a choice between isolationism and universalism; instead, the idea behind the federal union inhabits a middle ground.

"It enables us to distinguish between the construction of a security community in Europe -- part of the civic union to which we belong -- and the commitment to a universalistic doctrine of collective security that would oblige us to intervene anywhere and everywhere," Hendrickson wrote. "It lights up a path equidistant from the isolationist and the imperial temptations, rejecting the simple-minded notion that we must choose between these equally disagreeable alternatives."

But aren't we so different from the ethnic South Ossetians with which we claim to sympathize? So what, Hendrickson says.

"If we recall that one of the purposes associated with federative systems is not to submerge everything in a bland homogeneity but rather to affirm both individuality and commonality -- to come together in order to stay apart -- the civilizational differences that separate a Turkey or Japan from the West should not constitute insuperable obstacles to effective cooperation," he wrote.

Hendrickson's point about belonging to a "civic union" with the democratic European states is just as true and possibly more significant today than when he wrote those words 11 years ago. With our membership to that civic union comes civic responsibilities, and we owe Georgia and Ukraine their reward for turning their backs on totalitarian communism and joining our league of democracies.

In fact, just ask the Georgian people. Journalist Michael Totten, working on a piece for City Journal, interviewed a woman in Tbilisi named Lia, who said that her husband had recently arrived to join them in a school classroom -- their new temporary home, along with six other families. As her husband passed the Russian soldiers outside the city and headed toward Georgian territory, the Russians asked him, "Are you going to the American side?"

Totten's Georgian translator credited the U.S. with the fact that the Georgian capital was kept out of Russian hands. "The night they came close to Tbilisi," she told Totten, "Bush and McCain made their strongest speeches yet. The Russians seemed to back down. Bush and McCain have been very good for us."

As for the Bear, Arias-King says it's good for Russia to know her limits. Is it good for Russians, I asked him, or just good for Russia?

He clarified that it sends a much-needed (and hopefully heeded) signal to Putin and his buddies.

"The Russian people, as usual, are passive objects in this game of his," he said. "They suffer the consequences of the faux grandeur emanating from their elites."

Let's make sure the Georgian people don't suffer anymore from Putin's adventures. They belong in NATO, now.

Seth Mandel is the managing editor of The Jewish State, where this column first appeared.

They are Jews and they are Israelis, period

The Israeli deputy consul general could not, for all his humble sagacity, see the future.

Yet Benjamin Krasna’s heart was heavy. It was June 28, 2006 — two weeks before Israel and the Iranian terror proxy Hezbollah would fight a bitter, monthlong war in which Hezbollah would succeed in causing the deaths of hundreds of Lebanese civilians in addition to the Israeli casualties of the war. But as he spoke that night to the Jewish Federation of Ocean County, there was still some hope that 18-year-old Itamar resident Eliyahu Asheri was alive. Asheri had been kidnapped by Palestinians earlier that week, and his body would be found only hours after Krasna’s speech.

When asked about Asheri, Krasna said he wanted to make one thing clear: “He is an Israeli,” Krasna said. We don’t, he continued, perform the crass act of pretending to better understand Asheri’s kidnapping in light of the fact that Itamar is a Jewish village near Shechem — a “settlement.”

Krasna was clearly irritated by the media’s portrayal of Asheri as a “settler” — as if that made his kidnapping OK.

Two years later, on July 3, 2008, a Palestinian terrorist would drive a bulldozer over Jewish pedestrians and motorists in Jerusalem, killing three and wounding more than 60. Haaretz, the Israeli daily, via its columnist Bradley Burston, was in utter disbelief at the savagery of “the man behind the wheel of a bulldozer, who has taken it upon himself to kill Jews. Not Israeli security force personnel, not occupation troops, not the Shin Bet. Jews. Women and children and the elderly and the infirm. Jews who may be in favor of an independent Palestinian state. Jews who have nothing against Arabs. Jews who may work to end the occupation. Jews.”

The ideologues behind Haaretz, who have admitted to covering up corruption and last year told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that Israel has to be “raped” into making concessions for peace, were aghast. Where, they wanted to know, have all the good terrorists gone? You know, the ones with the decency to target settlers and occupiers and soldiers. Why target Jews unaffiliated with Israel’s settlements?

On July 7, almost 100 Israel Defense Forces reservists from the Rabbinate Corps were called up to active duty for the purpose of exhuming bodies of foreign fighters that are to be returned to Hezbollah as part of a prisoner swap. Hezbollah will receive hundreds of prisoners and bodies, as well as Samir Kuntar, who is currently serving consecutive life sentences in Israel for his murder of Einat Haran. Einat was 4 years old when Kuntar smashed her head repeatedly against a rock with the butt of his rifle until he crushed her skull, next to the lifeless body of the girl’s father, Danny Haran, who Kuntar had executed moments before in order that Einat’s last sight would be the murder of her father.

It is doubtful that there is any air on this planet more wasted than that which circles Kuntar’s lungs, giving life to someone who exists only for death.

Yet he will be free, and he will kill again. And in return, Israel will receive the bodies of two of the IDF’s fallen heroes, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, whose kidnapping by Kuntar’s masters touched off the war.

Goldwasser and Regev were taken from within Israel’s borders. But to the purveyors of self-hating collaboration such as Haaretz, are they still tools of the “occupation”? Upon their return, as the worldwide Jewish community cries for its sons of Israel, mourns for its two faithful servants of God and country, sees the tragic end of a story that compelled it to say Tehillim every day for two years, feels the weight of failed hope and fights the onset of hope’s loss: what will we think?

To those of us who watched Goldwasser’s wife and mother plead for his return last year in New York, standing across the street from that nest of corruption, that cathedral of depravity known as the United Nations building, we will think simply that we have lost two of our own. There are no categories; there is no caveat — regardless of on which part of biblical Israel they stood when they were taken from us.

After all, international law unequivocally sides with us on this one. Ex iniuria non oritur ius. An illegal act cannot produce a legal result, roughly translated. That’s the principle of international law that removes any recognition of Jordanian sovereignty over the West Bank. An illegal act (Jordan’s occupation of the West Bank from 1948-67) cannot produce a legal result (accepted claim of sovereignty over that land by Jordan and the Jordanians now living there as a result, known as West Bank Palestinians).

Additionally, it is not disputed that Jordan shelled Israel before any Israeli guns were aimed at Jordan during the Six-Day War in 1967, so the West Bank was land that Israel won in a defensive conflict. International law, as scholar Julius Stone wrote, considers Israel’s actions perfectly lawful — an obvious but important edict.

International law, he wrote in International Law and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, “does not so forbid [taking land], in particular, when the force is used to stop an aggressor, for the effect of such prohibition would be to guarantee to all potential aggressors that, even if their aggression failed, all territory lost in the attempt would be automatically returned to them. Such a rule would be absurd to the point of lunacy. There is no such rule.”

Which means Haaretz, the New York Times, et al. are wrong about Asheri and his fellow Itamar residents. They’re Israelis. And so are the Jews in the oldest Jewish community in the world, Hebron. And the tumultuous modern history of Jews in and around Shechem (now home mostly to a large Palestinian settlement called Nablus) makes them no less Israeli. Same goes for the flourishing Jewish community in Ariel, which is separated from Jerusalem by random Palestinian settlements along the way but is of great value to the state and the Jewish people.

And what about Jerusalemites? They’re Israeli, too! Despite this, in January, just before President George W. Bush was to visit Israel, Condoleezza Rice admonished Israel over a planned housing complex in Jerusalem called Har Homa. “Har Homa,” Rice carped, “is a settlement the United States has opposed from the very beginning.” The very beginning of what? On July 16, 1997, the U.N. voted to criticize the housing project. The United States voted against that resolution.

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) offers the reasons why then-U.S. Ambassador Bill Richardson voted with the Israelis, instead of voting against them or even simply abstaining. First, the land is 1,850 dunams, about 460 acres, which the Israeli government acquired via eminent domain, and 1,400 of the 1,850 dunams were owned by Jews. Much of that land was owned by Jews prior to 1948. Every single dunam of the entire planned housing project is currently vacant — not a single home would have to be knocked down nor anyone displaced.

Additionally, in the Oslo Accords, Jerusalem is specifically separated from settlements: “1. ... the jurisdiction of the Council will cover West Bank and Gaza Strip territory as a single territorial unit, except for: a. issues that will be negotiated in the permanent status
negotiations: Jerusalem, settlements, ... (Interim Agreement, Article XVII).” Building in Jerusalem is not only a feature of the final status agreements (not the interim agreements or Declaration of Principles), but it is also a distinct feature from settlements.

Fortunately Rice, whose strange ruling on Har Homa contradicts Bush’s opinion on the matter, managed to defuse the situation when she couldn’t even answer questions about building in Jerusalem. For example, reporters asked her, do you consider other Jewish neighborhoods outside the Green Line, such as Gilo and Ramot, to be “settlements?”

“The important point here is that one reason that we need to have an agreement is so that we can stop having this discussion about what belongs to Israel and what doesn’t,” she responded.

In other words, she has no idea.

But the answer is that while Jerusalem has the greatest significance for Jews and the Jewish state, Jews have every right, as Israelis, to live in the West Bank, and the brave men and women of the IDF have every right to defend them. Terrorism against Jews in the West Bank is murder, and it cannot be justified or explained away any more than the Mercaz Harav massacre in Jerusalem in March. The Palestinians want Tel Aviv as much as they want Ariel or Hebron or Beersheba, and they want West Jerusalem cleared of Jews, too. That, Mr. Burston, is what Husam Taysir Dwayat, the 30-year-old driver of the bulldozer and resident of a southeast Jerusalem neighborhood, was doing.

Walid Shoebat, the former PLO terrorist turned Israeli advocate once said: “There are only two choices when it comes to terrorism. The first is to make excuses for it. The second is to say there is absolutely no excuse for it. There is no third choice.”

Settler, soldier, secular, or scholar, the second choice should always be our first response.

{This column first appeared in the July 18, 2008 issue of The Jewish State.}

Hyper-partisan J Street a road to nowhere for U.S. Jews

It was a poignant moment -- at once a fond farewell and a vow of friendship, of love, of loyalty, and of honor.

And after declaring that "Masada shall never fall again," and just before stating that when confronting terrorism, Israel -- a country of 7 million -- is "307 million strong, because the United States of America stands with you," President George W. Bush warned against "the consequences of disregarding the words of leaders who espouse hatred."

Barely had the words received their deserving ovation from the Knesset when a Web site here in the U.S. blared on its home page "That's offensive, Mr. President".

But it wasn't an anti-Bush political blog. Nor was it a news site often critical of the president.

It was the Web site of the new self-proclaimed "political arm of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement," J Street. J Street, as we profiled in a recent edition of The Jewish State, is the Israel lobby cooked up and headed by Jeremy Ben-Ami, former President Bill Clinton's deputy domestic policy adviser and the policy director for Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign.

Billed as an answer to AIPAC, J Street has tipped its hand far too early; promising to rescue U.S. Israel policy from the "neocons," and attacking Israel's most stalwart American ally, J Street confirmed fears that it is not so much pro-Israel as it is firmly entrenched in a political crusade.

This has presented a veritable beehive of problems. First, those involved with J Street have, as Alan Solomont -- a Democratic Party fundraiser who is involved with J Street -- told the Washington Post, "We have heard the voices of neocons, and right-of-center Jewish leaders and Christian evangelicals, and the mainstream views of the American Jewish community have not been heard."

Of course that's not true -- as a Gallop poll noted in March, Israel receives a favorable rating from 84 percent of self-identified Republicans and 64 percent from Democrats, so it's doubtful that those "right-of-center" are distorting the mainstream view in which Israel gets pretty high marks across the board. But that misses the point anyway; the term "neocon" is mostly used as a pejorative for the high-level Jews in Bush's cabinet, often depicted as a sinister cabal of Jewish agents pushing our country into war with Iran.

That a Jewish lobby would use a smear term aimed primarily at Jews is evidence of the partisan thinking of J Street. It's a colossal mistake.

But not as colossal a mistake as, say, donating money to individual campaigns and endorsing a candidate in a presidential election -- which, unfortunately, J Street aims to do as well, via JStreetPAC.

According to the Washington Post: "The initial efforts will be relatively modest: Ben-Ami said the group aims to try to raise at least $50,000 or more for a handful of campaigns this fall as a 'test case.' But the group intends to raise its profile in future campaign cycles, and some major liberal fundraisers have already committed to the venture, including Solomont, high-tech entrepreneur Davidi Gilo, and former New York City corporation counsel Victor Kovner, a supporter of Clinton's presidential bid."

That, the Post notes, is "something AIPAC does not do."

What does Ben-Ami think will happen if and when they throw money and influence behind one candidate (and publicly endorse that candidate) and the other candidate wins? Both political parties, and all presidential candidates, must believe that the Jewish community is interested in promoting Jewish causes, not political parties. And they must be made to believe that they would have the support of the Jewish community.

Jewish organizations looking to support Jewish causes -- including Israel -- first and foremost should never align themselves with one political party and against the other.

Another question raised by J Street is whether the lobby is more pro-peace or pro-Israel? Let's take a look at J Street's stance on the issues, available on its Web site.

Settlements: "Israel's settlements in the occupied territories have, for over forty years, been an obstacle to peace. They have drained Israel's economy, military, and democracy and eroded the country's ability to uphold the rule of law," reads the site.

I believe the appropriate agenbite for that would be gobbledygook. Overall, it's nothing but empty rhetoric copied and pasted from Arab talking points.

On Iran, J Street is even more troubling. Claiming that current policy of "saber-rattling, threats and sanctions has neither resolved the nuclear issue nor changed Iranian behavior," J Street advocates "high-level negotiations".

Here's the cringe-inducing part: "The informal Iranian negotiating proposal of 2003" should be the model. The problem is, that proposal was a hoax. Debunked quite clearly by Michael Rubin, who at the time of the supposed "offer" was Defense Department Iran country director, the document had a number of red flags that betrayed its spuriousness. Nevertheless, much of the press corps ate it up as an opportunity to smack Bush over the head for his "rejection" of the "offer."

Rubin revealed that the "offer" was the work of disgruntled Swiss diplomat Tim Guldimann, who was replaced after the ruse came to light. Guldimann developed the document with Sadeq Kharrazi, the Iranian ambassador in Paris.

In an online debate hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations in April/May 2007, Rubin said, "The 2003 Iranian offer is bogus. Washington and Tehran were already talking in Geneva, although Tehran broke the commitments it made there. That was the channel, not an unsigned English fax. Even the Swiss foreign ministry acknowledges privately that Tim Guldimann, the Swiss ambassador, was freelancing. Nor do serious proposals come with the caveat that the issuing party only agrees with 80 percent of its own paper."

Regarding that document, Rubin later sounded a warning note on National Review Online in May 2007 that J Street's founders should have kept in mind: "It is dangerous and irresponsible to create a false baseline that validates concessions never offered."

And here's J Street's official opinion of the war in Iraq (emphasis added): "The Iraq war is a prime example of the mistaken course charted by the Bush Administration in the Middle East and beyond since September 11," the Web site states. "Not only are both the United States and Israel less secure, but al-Qaeda has strengthened and expanded its reach, not only into Iraq, but into Jordan and the Egyptian Sinai as well."

I'm not sure what J Street bases that all on, but the facts strongly dispute their statements on American and Israeli security and al-Qaeda's strength. The rest is more partisan pettiness.

It all starts to make sense, however, when you take a look at the organization's financial backers, which include Moveon.org, the George Soros-funded organization behind the New York Times ad calling General David Petraeus "General Betray Us."

Moveon.org is also the Web site on which the phrase "Jew Lieberman Done" was trumpeted after the organization helped Ned Lamont defeat Senator Joe Lieberman in their 2006 Senate primary election. ("Jew Lieberman" was not done, it turned out, as Lieberman ran in the general election as an independent and won.)

Some other Moveon.org classics from its now defunct Action Forum: "Anyone who takes the time to become familiar with the history of the creation of, and the acts of the Jewish State of Israel can come to no other conclusion that it should not exist where it does in the first place"; "Israel should have never been recognized to create a state as a result of terrorist acts"; and "Islamic hostilities will go away the minute Israel is closed down and the Jews all move to the U.S. where they should have come to begin with."

J Street has not hidden its partisan nature; rather, it has proudly boasted of it. Part of this stems from a profound misunderstanding of Right and Left with regard to Israel. The Right in Israel is not the same as the Right in the U.S., though of course there are similarities. Ditto with the Left. For example, Golda Meir was considered a leftist (and indeed lived among the nascent Israel's socialist kibbutz culture) yet eschewed the Left's feminist identity politics for a more Conservative approach to modesty and merit.

Such misunderstanding, however, is actually J Street's clarion call to American activists and media. And that call was answered by New Yorker senior editor Hendrik Hertzberg. In a blog on the magazine's Web site, Hertzberg spoke of the "glad tiding" of J Street's founding, offering a case study in the outstanding ignorance that fueled the birth of the organization.

"True, there has been no shortage of lobbyists who assume that Israel's interests ought to be subsumed to those of West Bank settlers, defined by Likud-style neoconservatives, or yoked to those of lunatic American fundamentalists eager for a Levantine apocalypse featuring the mass slaughter of Jews who decline to convert to Christianity," Hertzberg wrote (again, emphasis ours). "But there has been a paucity of pro-Israel lobbyists who are also pro-peace, pro-liberal-democracy, and pro-secular, and who can deploy some political muscle besides. J Street aims to fill that gap. It isn't aiming to be the anti-AIPAC, exactly. There will be some overlap. But J Street won't be another holiday camp for neocon armchair warlords and Christianist rapture-mongers."

As of this writing, J Street's home page calls on Lieberman to withdraw his scheduled speech at an upcoming Israel Summit hosted by Christians United for Israel. On that note, Lieberman's recent keynote speech at the annual Commentary Fund dinner is instructive.

"By considering centrism to be collaboration with the enemy -- not bin Laden, but Bush -- [pacifist] activists have successfully pulled the Democratic Party farther to the left than it has been at any point in the last 20 years," Lieberman -- still a Democrat -- said, with a heavy heart, before imploring the audience to hold on dearly to knowledge that has slipped from the fingers of many Americans: "the difference between America's friends and America's enemies."

That's remarkable clarity from someone J Street's supporters might consider a neocon armchair warlord rapture-mongering Likud-style lunatic American fundamentalist.

En route to justice and peace, J Street is a dead end.


{This first appeared in the June 6, 2008 edition of The Jewish State}