THIS is a little down in the weeds, but it seems the progressive Truman National Security Project has expelled Josh Block, a former spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), because he criticised the stances of left-wing groups that are trying to take a more critical line on Israel. The conflict centres on several bloggers at the Center for American Progress (CAP) and Media Matters, which are both taking a more Israel-sceptic approach, and who wrote some intemperate posts criticising the Simon Wiesenthal Center as "Israel-firsters".

I think you can get a lot of what's going on here out of the attack the Simon Wiesenthal Center leveled against CAP and Media Matters two weeks ago.

"When it comes to the charges of being 'Israel Firsters' and having 'dual loyalty,' we not only plead innocent but also counter-charge that these sponsored bloggers are guilty of dangerous political libels resonating with historic and toxic anti-Jewish prejudices," the center said in a statement issued today. "These odious charges have been around since Henry Ford in 1920 said 'wars are the Jews' harvest,' Charles Lindbergh in 1940 condemned Jews for conspiring to plunge America into World War II, and 'Jewish neocons' were charged with colluding with Israel to cause the 2003 Iraq War."

Attention, Simon Wiesenthal Center: Do you see the difference between the first two clauses of the final sentence, and the last clause? Because this is exactly the kind of move that is getting people so upset with you. Dual-loyalty charges are indeed pretty dicey. Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh were anti-semites, and their claims that Jews caused the first and second world wars were baseless anti-semitic propaganda. But the last claim offered here is completely different. There are, in fact, a lot of Jewish neocons, so the scare-quotes here are as inappropriate as those on roadside marquees across America advertising "A 'Delicious' Breakfast" and so forth. (Here's another apposite one.) Those neocons did, in fact, press for the United States to invade Iraq in 2003. The Israeli government also generally supported the American invasion of Iraq, though it was more concerned about Iran and had misgivings about a prolonged American occupation. Yes, it would be ridiculous, and anti-semitic, to cast the Iraq war as a conspiracy monocausally driven by a cabal of Jewish neocons and the Israeli government. But it's entirely accurate to count neoconservative policy analyses as among the important causes of the war, to point out that the pro-Israeli sympathies of Jewish neoconservatives played a role in these analyses, and to note the support of the Israeli government and public for the invasion. In fact any analysis of the war's causes that didn't take these into account would be deficient.

Claims that the Jews caused the world wars through their financial conspiracies and so forth are pure fantasies with no factual base, motivated by religious bigotry and paranoid worldviews. The claim that Jewish neocons "colluded" with Israel to "cause" the Iraq war is an exaggerated way of making the point that Jewish neocons, and to a much lesser extent the Israeli government, supported the Iraq war and played a substantial role in precipitating it. The words "collude" and "cause" are over the top, but I'm not sure who exactly has used them, outside of this press release. If bloggers refer to the existence of Jewish neocons, their close ties to the Israeli government, and the consequential roles they played in causing the Iraq war, it's preposterous to accuse them of retailing a modern version of old blood libels. But the Simon Wiesenthal Center doesn't seem to be able to recognise the difference. Their confusion on this point is symptomatic of the inability of many conservative Jewish institutions to distinguish between legitimate criticism of specific political factions with the Jewish community and Israel, and anti-semitism. As more and more American Jews take a sceptical and critical approach to Israel, this threatens to put groups like the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Anti-Defamation League, and AIPAC in conflict with more and more American Jews.