Tikvah Scrubs False Claim Against J Street

Reporting on the J Street/Berkeley controversy, and specifically the opposition of a possibly-pro-Israel, possibly-not group called Tikvah, I noted that they claimed that J Street had hosted BDS chieftain Omar Barghouti. This was a key part of their claim that J Street was secretly pro-BDS and thus beyond the pale. The claim that J Street would have hosted Barghouti rang false to me, as they are of radically different political persuasions, so I looked into it. And unfortunately for Tikvah, it turns out there is no record of any such hosting -- indeed, googling "J Street" and "Omar Barghouti" reveals a story where Barghouti was actively spurned by J Street. I dropped them a comment asking for documentation of this claim, since as best I can tell it appeared to be made out of whole cloth (it never made it past moderation).

Well, the good news is that Tikvah changed their post and deleted that claim. The bad news is that they left no indication that the post had been modified or that a significant factual statement they had made turned out to be erroneous and was deleted.

Not to go all blogger ethics panel, but there is a pretty commonly accepted norm of behavior in the situation: You put the retracted claim in strike-out form (like this) and then post an update explaining the correction. See here for an example. That's the difference between admitting a mistake and transparently correcting it, and trying to play cover-up and pretend like nothing had been wrong in the first place. It's unbecoming (and dare I say unjewish) behavior, but given what limited experience I have with this particular group, I can't say I'm surprised that their standards of professional conduct are as lax as their support for Israel's status as a Jewish, democratic state.


UPDATE: A Berkeley J Street organizer contacted me regarding a similar piece posted up on the Hasbara Fellowship website, which also apparently originally had the false Barghouti claim and also has been scrubbed without comment. More interestingly, to me anyway, is what replaced it: a link to a "a list of additional questionable actions taken by JStreet." The piece is authored by Lenny Ben-David, and for the most part it is an incoherent mess of innuendo and hand-waving, with a fair bit of guilt-by-association-by-association thrown in (Tikvah, being in quite the glass house on this score, may not wish to throw stones). But you may recall Ben-David from an earlier anti-J Street hit piece arguing that the organization can't be trusted because it receives support from Arabs. He returns to that theme in this article, and it is as racist and counterproductive now as it was then.

To repeat: Peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors means Jews and Arabs are going to have to agree on things. If the fact that an Arab person agrees with a position is enough to per se discredit it, that's another way of saying peace is definitionally impossible (since any position an Arab agrees to -- even if 20 minutes ago it was precisely what Israel claimed to want -- is now rendered suspect). People like Ben-David and, it seems, Tikvah, are not primarily concerned with Israel's security, or its longevity, or its democracy, or the safety of the Jewish people. What seems to scare them most, and motivate them the most, is the possibility that they might have to agree with an Arab. Just like the "pro-Palestinian" protesters I saw who booed the proposal for a Palestinian state because it meant having to agree with a Zionist, Tikvah and Ben-David are fearful of an Israel at peace with its neighbors because it means having to agree with Arabs. They're manifestations of the same disease, and one that neither Israel nor Palestine can afford right now.