You’ll find it animating his very good interview with Jeffrey Goldberg. What I find most interesting is Goldberg’s self-imposed conceptual restrictions — which don’t serve journalism very well — as when he presses Ben-Ami on whether “Israel is creating conditions for the Palestinians to become terrorists.” I mean, of course it is. Read The Accidental Guerrilla. Apply common sense. It would be stunning if a 40-year occupation did not produce terrorists. I doubt that Goldberg really finds the recognition all that problematic, but his formulation suggests that he considers it some kind of besmirchment of Israel’s good name.

Ben-Ami gives a thoughtful and sophisticated answer. It’s representative of the whole exchange: Goldberg predicates his questions on the terms of the American Jewish community’s longstanding Israel debate, which holds that fidelity to the community’s sacred cows about Israel is the milemarker for determining someone’s good faith, and Ben-Ami, befitting J Street’s perspective, challenges the premises. This Goldberg comment, for instance, is telling:

The thing I’m worried about with the conference is that I think most of your supporters are well-meaning, left-of-center Jews who love Israel and are tortured by the various dilemmas, who do stay awake at night worrying about this. But there are others who are glomming on to you guys as a cover, just using you to advance another agenda entirely.

I wonder if Goldberg ever actually questions that way of thinking, because it’s a foolish method of reasoning-by-association. But at the same time, it’s not as if he’s the only one who thinks that way, and the truth is that we in the Shtetl worry so fucking much about whether we’re giving our “enemies” succor. It’s a fearful, ghettoized way of thinking that inhibits us from doing what we know is right, and brave, and in the best traditions of Judaism.

Who does Goldberg — or anyone else, for that matter — believe is actually using J Street as “a cover”? He deserves credit for criticizing Lenny Ben David, but I wonder if he’s sufficiently confronted the Ben-Davidism in his soul. I actually don’t mean to pick on Goldberg here, since he’s, again, not the only one who thinks that way. I had a guy on Twitter who goes by @ArikSharon (really!) tweet at me that his “best guess” is that J Street is a “Soros & Saudi sponsored front to sabotage US Jewish support of Israel.” How would that even work? Jews are never not going to support Israel. We love it so much we want it to stop doing fucking self-destructive and unjust things, like subjugating an entire other people to statelessness and occupation. These aren’t even criticisms of J Street anymore, they’re just Jewish tribal anxiety.

And look, beyond that: So what if some asshole somewhere uses J Street to say, “Look, even these Jews think Israel shouldn’t be sending soldiers into Gaza!” Focusing on the asshole, who has his own warped conception of tribal loyalty, is a way of avoiding the first-order issue at stake. We Jews are the most disputatious people in the world, and that’s beautiful and valuable. But we act like some gentile’s point-and-staring is the first step to the world massacring us again. We do not need to be a fearful people. J Street is daring us to be as brave as we actually are.