In a new Jerusalem Post column, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz declares that the progressive pro-Israel group J Street, by highlighting statements by Israeli defense officials regarding the potential consequences of a strike on Iran, “is now making it more likely that Israel and/or the United States will have no choice but to take military action against Iran’s nuclear weapons program”:

In its most recent mass emailing, Jeremy Ben- Ami, J Street’s leader, urges his followers to undercut the Obama policy by demanding that the president stop threatening military action against Iran and that “the drums of war” must be silenced.

Without distinguishing between an Israeli and an American military attack, J Street mendaciously claims that “top Israeli security experts and former officials warned about the inefficacy and disastrous consequences of a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities” and that “many in the American and Israeli intelligence and security establishments believe that a strike on Iran would fail to end Iran’s nuclear program and may even accelerate it….”

While this may be true of a unilateral Israeli strike, it is totally untrue of an American or joint attack, which many of these experts acknowledge would wreck havoc on the Iranian nuclear weapons program. Many of these same experts have explicitly called for the United States to maintain its military option as a last resort.

While it’s true that most experts agree that the United States should maintain its military option as a last resort — this is J Street’s position too, by the way, despite Dershowitz’s contention — Dershowitz is quite wrong about what U.S. officials have actually said about the possible consequences of an American attack. In April 2010, Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen suggested that a U.S. strike on Iran could be just as destabilizing to the region as an Iranian nuclear weapon. “Iran getting a nuclear weapon would be incredibly destabilizing. Attacking them would also create the same kind of outcome,” Mullen said. “In an area that’s so unstable right now, we just don’t need more of that.”

In November 2011, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said that a U.S. strike might delay Iran’s nuclear work by only up to three years, and warned of “unintended consequences.” A military option should be kept available, he said, but might not result in “really deterring Iran from what they want to do.”

In January, Bush administration CIA director Michael Hayden recalled, “When we talked about this in the government, the consensus was that [the U.S. attacking Iran] would guarantee that which we are trying to prevent — an Iran that will spare nothing to build a nuclear weapon and that would build it in secret.”

In June, Michèle Flournoy, former U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, said the U.S. security community estimates that “any military strike in its most wildly successful incarnation” would only result in a one- to three-year setback for Iran’s nuclear weapon program. “It would put time back on the clock, but it wouldn’t solve the problem in any meaningful way,” she said.

In March, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia, “If you think the war in Iraq was hard, an attack on Iran would, in my opinion, be a catastrophe.”

Dershowitz’s attempt to portray J Street’s efforts to tamp down the war talk as somehow out of step with President Obama’s policy also fails. Addressing the Iran issue in a press conference in March, the president pushed back hard against just the sort of belligerent punditry that Dershowitz now endorses. “Already, there is too much loose talk of war,” President Obama said. “Over the last few weeks such talk has only benefited the Iranian government by driving up the price of oil, which they depend on to fund their nuclear program… For the sake of Israel’s security, America’s security and the peace and security of the world, now is not the time for bluster.”

The “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace” group J Street today released two ads highlighting rhetoric from two far-right Republicans in Congress — Reps. Joe Walsh (R-IL) and Allen West (R-FL) — that the group says “isn’t pro-Israel.”

Walsh introduced a resolution late last year supporting a proposal that Israel annex Jewish settlements in the West Bank. “There is no such thing as a two-state solution, and no such thing as land for peace,” Walsh said. West, who co-sponsored the resolution, has offered his fair share of far right rhetoric on Israel too, saying last year that a two-state solution would mean an end to Israel.

The J Street ads single out the Congressmen’s claims, urging constituents to tell them “the two-state solution preserves Israel’s democracy and its security. Opposing it isn’t pro-Israel. It’s playing with fire.” Here’s the text of the ad on Walsh:

The Middle East is a tinder box, more than any place on Earth words matter and Congressman Joe Walsh is playing with fire. Walsh wants Israel to take permanent control over Palestinian territory. He called the two-state solution insane even though Israel’s last three prime ministers supported it. Walsh even says the U.S. shouldn’t broker peace. Tell Joe Walsh, the two-state solution preserves Israel’s democracy and its security. Opposing it isn’t pro-Israel. It’s playing with fire.

Watch it:

Reporting on the video’s this morning, the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent wonders:

Is it possible to make Republicans pay a political price by hitting them from the left for being too confrontational on Israel’s behalf, and too hostile towards Palestinians, when it comes to Mideast peace issues? The left-leaning group J-Street is launching a new experiment to find out.

J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami said in an interview with the New York Times back in May that “the assumption has always been that to run for office, you have to run to the right on this issue with a relatively hawkish view on Israel and the Middle East — the ‘Israel right or wrong’ position,” adding, “We’re changing that calculus. We are beginning to organize a very, very large network of people in the middle.”

Last week, a well-connected neoconservative pundit and board member of a high-profile right-wing pressure group wrote, after the prisoner swap deal that freed an Israeli soldier, that Israel should now take Palestinian militants — and their “devils’ spawn” children — and “throw them… into the sea, to float there, food for sharks, stargazers, and whatever other oceanic carnivores God has put there for the purpose.”

When the blog post, by Rachel Abrams (wife of top Bush adviser Elliott Abrams), got some media attention — highlighted by both liberal and conservative writers — the progressive Jewish-American group J Street demanded that the right-wing Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) cut ties with the neoconservative doyen.

ECI responded to J Street’s criticism with a statement from former John McCain campaign adviser Michael Goldfarb (who advises ECI) to the Washington Jewish Week’s Adam Kredo. Goldfarb said:

J Street chooses to deliberately and viciously slander Rachel Abrams, accusing her of directing her words at all Palestinians when she was clearly speaking about the terrorists who abducted [Israeli soldier] Gilad Shalit and those who celebrated that deed and other acts of terror. ECI supports Israeli efforts to kill or capture terrorists, including those responsible for abducting Gilad Shalit.

Despite the fact that her original post said Palestinians’ children should also befall the fate she prescribes for their parents — something the denial took no heed of — Abrams would unequivocally demonstrate shortly thereafter that she does not, indeed, limit her call for gruesome physical harm to be done only to Palestinian terrorists. Her list of those slated to become “food for sharks” also apparently includes liberal American writers with no ties to terror or a record of supporting or celebrating such acts.

After the Washington Jewish Week piece, this reporter asked Goldfarb on Twitter if he personally thought it would be alright to drop Palestinian prisoners in the sea as shark food instead of taking them to Israeli prisons. Goldfarb dodged, writing back that he’d “have to check with [Rachel Abrams] re official ECI position.” It was at this point that Abrams herself chimed in, writing in a Twitter post that she would feed this reporter “and all his friends to sharks.”

Before Abrams and ECI start issuing convoluted denials that relay implausible defenses or alternate intended meanings, it should be noted that the context of Abrams’ Tweet seems unambiguous as to the target of her comment. Take a look at a screenshot of her tweet, along with Goldfarb’s to which she was responding:

In his condemnation of the original blog post, J Street chief Jeremy Ben-Ami said Abrams’ screed was an “unhinged rant filled with incitement and hate.” The term seems to apply to her twitter feed too. If Abrams is, as her brother Commentary editor John Podhoretz posited, the “neocon id,” then perhaps that school of thought has its issues to work out as well. Looking at her tweet, one wonders what this reporter and Abrams’ mutual friends must think, for she said she’d consign them to becoming shark feed, too.

When the Israeli Knesset passed a law that would impose penalties on calls to boycott Israel proper or the illegal West Bank settlements, the outcry from much of the American Jewish community came swiftly.

The liberal American Jewish group J Street came down hard in a statement:

J Street condemns the Knesset’s passage yesterday of a law making the call for boycotts of Israel or the West Bank settlements illegal, as a clear and unabashed violation of the fundamental democratic precept of freedom of speech.

This bill is part of a disturbing anti-democratic trend that undermines its purported purpose by giving fodder to Israel’s critics and alienating many of its friends.

The statement served as the latest salvo of the ongoing tensions between the right-wing government in Israel and J Street, which has drawn the ire of the right-wing pro-Israel lobby for criticizing Israeli policies such as settlement expansion. The Israeli ambassador to the U.S. rejected an invitation from J Street to attend its first ever policy conference in 2009, and this summer Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who usually welcomes Diaspora pro-Israel groups, refused to meet with a J Street delegation.

But J Street’s condemnation of the anti-boycott law brought the war of words to a new level. Speaking to the Israeli daily Haaretz, Jonathan Peled, a spokesperson for Israel’s embassy in Washington, compared J Street to the Klu Klux Klan:

I think our approach to J Street was correct. We disagreed on many issues, but we didn’t boycott them. They are a unique example because they are a Jewish organization that calls itself ‘pro-Israeli.’ To bring some extreme example, if the Ku Klux Klan suddenly proclaim themselves pro-Israel, will it mean they are pro-Israel, or does it contradict our own understanding of what pro-Israel means? They are entitled to their views, but it doesn’t mean we want to invite them to our home.

Reached by ThinkProgress for comment, an official in the embassy’s press office passed along a non-apology “clarification” from Peled:

During my personal conversation with Ha’aretz, I was not intending to compare J Street to an extremist or offensive organization.

I regret any misunderstanding. Such a comparison would be clearly inappropriate and unacceptable.

The comments do not reflect the view of the government.

J Street seemed less than thrilled with the non-apology. Director of media relations Jessica Rosenblum gave a terse statement to ThinkProgress, saying, “We appreciate the clarification and take it at face value.”

The embassy spokesperson’s comparison of J Street to the KKK seems especially out of place because, in the same interview, Peled said that Israel welcomes all points of view. “We are interested in a big tent,” he said.

That was Peled’s dodge of a question about whether or not the government welcomed former Fox News personality Glenn Beck’s rally in Israel. Beck, who recently said Netanyahu had “evidence” to prove his conspiracy theories and addressed the Knesset, just moved his rally — which is to be attended by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) — away from the Temple Mount because it coincides with a holiday when 40,000 Muslims are expected to be worshiping in Jerusalem. Beck intimated that the Muslims might try to kill him and were looking for any excuse to start “World War III.” So it seems that there’s room for Beck in the Netanyahu government’s “big tent,” but according to Peled, J Street doesn’t appear to be welcome.