Updated: J Street snags Sarah Palin, Avigdor Lieberman for Chanukah party – NOT

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

J Street, the pro-peace process lobby and political action committee, is having a holiday party – and its guest list is nothing short of stellar.

Of course, the list is a put on, but that probably won’t stop the group’s legion of detractors from finding some deep and dark significance in the official invitation.

Distributed on Facebook, it lists luminaries from Sarah Palin to Avidgor Lieberman as members of an “honorary host committee.”  (Lieberman is the hardline Israeli foreign minister who probably won’t be getting any awards from J Street for his positions on Israeli-Palestinian peace; Palin is the target of a J Street attack for her recent claim that settlement expansion is necessary for the many Jews who will be “flocking” to Israel in the weeks and months ahead).

The list is a reference to the group’s recent Washington conference and the all-out effort by anti-J Street forces to pressure members of Congress to withdraw from the gala dinner’s honorary host committee.

An asterisk next to every name indicates they are just “invited” – a sly poke at the many Jewish groups that pad press releases about upcoming conferences and banquets with high-powered keynoters who haven’t actually accepted their invitations.

Also on the imaginary committee for the group’s Chanukah happy hour: arch J Street critics Lenny Ben-David and Michael Goldfarb, Pastor John Hagee, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Levi Johnston. You know who he is.

Sadly, I wasn’t invited, which is too bad, since I always wanted to meet Sarah Palin.

Update: Goldfarb, the Weekly Standard blogger who was a pretty relentless J Street  critic in the weeks leading up to its recent conference, has accepted the invitation. On Twitter, he wrote this: “A genuinely pro-Israel host committee that I’m honored to serve on!”

So there.