I am confused by your confusion. I am not a member of J-Street, nor do I in any way speak for J-Street. But let me try to explain to you my confusion.

1. If J-Street strongly opposes something that has been said, why is saying that a problem? J-Street didn’t demonize, threaten, or call for the suppression of Pastor Hagee. It didn’t call the opinion he expressed “radical” or “controversial”. It simply expressed its strong opposition, calling it “extraordinarily unhelpful.” If Abe Foxman or David Harris says that he strongly opposes some of J-Street’s positions, would that confuse you? Were you confused when Eric Yoffe called J-Street’s statement on Gaza “appallingly naive”?

(By the way, Yoffe’s defense of the IDF’s conduct of the war has been rejected by Amos Oz, David Grossman, Yossi Sarid, and a bunch of Israeli intellectuals, artists, and writers, who called this week for an external investigation of IDF conduct—showing that it is Yoffe, not J-Street, is was out-of touch with the Israeli left.)

2. J-Street did not “allege” (and you should apologize to them for saying that they did) anything about Christian support for Israel. They wrote about Hagee’s support, and Hagee, while he does not call for the conversion of Jews now, believes that we are standing before Armageddon As Sarah Posner wrote in the American Prospect in 2005

“Hagee doesn’t fear a nuclear conflagration, but rather God’s wrath for standing by as Iran executes its supposed plot to destroy Israel. A nuclear confrontation between America and Iran, which he says is foretold in the Book of Jeremiah, will not lead to the end of the world, but rather to God’s renewal of the Garden of Eden. But he also reveals that he is ultimately less concerned with the fate of Israel or the Jews than with a theocratic Christian right agenda. When Jesus returns for his millennial reign, the righteous are going to rule the nations of the earth.”

Do you really thing that American Jews would be enthusiastic about somebody like Hagee influencing American or Israeli policy? Why did John McCain, hardly a left-winger, distance himself from Hagee?

And finally you write

“But even if one doesn’t want to believe that, why would you want to alienate thousands of motivated supporters of Israel? No one says you have to work with them today, but if Israel is seriously threatened in the future, wouldn’t they be valuable allies to have on your side?”

Yet according to J-Street, and according to many Israelis, those well-intended supporters are a serious threat to Israel today—by supporting policies that are destroying the viability of Israel right now. If a group of Chrisitans believed that all the Jews will convert to Christianity in the future, but that in the meantime, Jews, Christians, and Muslims, have to work to create a just and equitable solution for both Israelis and Palestinians, then I doubt J-Street would reject their support.

Israel’s survival depends, among other things, on its making peace with the Muslim world. How can Hagee’s crowd of Islamaphobes ever help them with that?

So, if I were J-Street, I would not consider these folks friends of Israel, either now, or in the future—regardless of their eschatology.

Jerry Haber