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Cramming in for the blogger panel

By Eric Fingerhut · October 27, 2009

During lunch on Monday, about 50 attendees at the J Street conference moved into a smaller room for a panel discussion among bloggers who sound off on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Some had to sit on the floor and stand against the wall in order to cram in for the session, with a dozen bloggers running the gamut from two-state solution supporters to anti-Zionists.

The bloggers and J Street officials insisted that it was not part of the official program, but J Street executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami did drop by for a few minutes to listen.

It was run by liberal bloggers Richard Silverstein, who authors Tikkun Olam, and Jerry Haber, the creator of The Magnes Zionist.

Some of those on the panel voiced disappointment with Ben-Ami's interview last week with The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, in which the J Street leader said he hoped to get attacked from the left and compared John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's book "The Israel Lobby'" to the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

The most vocal about his disappointment, and the most obnoxious about it, was Max Blumenthal, who was last seen videotaping drunk American college students in Jerusalem acting like drunk American college students -- and passing them off as representative of Israel. (It turns out that Israel is a much freer place for videographers than the bloggers' planel).

Blumenthal mocked Goldberg as a "serious man" and said that if Ben-Ami couldn't stand up to Goldberg, "how can we trust you to stand up against the settlers or Netanyahu and Lieberman?"

He then said Elie Wiesel, who appeared at Pastor John Hagee's Night to Honor Israel on Sunday evening, had spent the weekend speaking to an "anti-Semitic group," and that the last time Wiesel had "trusted someone so much it was Bernard Madoff."

Others were more civil. Sydney Levy, who writes the Muzzlewatch blog for Jewish Voice for Peace, said he wasn't that bothered by Ben-Ami's statement that he was hoping to be attacked by JVP.

"We are not interested in attacking J Street or not attacking J Streeet," he said. When they do good things, he said, "we will say so."

The panel included Laila El-Haddad, who blogs as Gaza Mom and identified herself as a "one-stater." She said that many Palestinians felt similarly and a one-state solution "needs to be added to the discussion."

But also participating, via the Internet, was Palestinian-American Ray Hanania, who said the Goldstone report "shouldn't be used as a battering ram" by Palestinians against Israel but should be a "battering ram against injustice."

The most amusing portion of the 90 minutes -- and one illustration of how these issues are now fought out on the Internet -- came when blogger Dan Sieradski asked a questioner to repeat his query. Why? Because Sieradski had been distracted by -- and combating -- someone on Twitter trying to pose as him (with a one letter difference in his screen name) and tweeting negative messages about the J Street conference.

The most passionate part of the discussion, though, might have been when Haber talked about why he blogs about the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

"It's to vent and express our pain," he said, adding that "you might as well ask why I breathe."

Blogging "allows people who care to retain their sanity," he said. "You do it because you have to do it."