Last week, it seemed as though the Gorka saga was drawing to a close, with multiple anonymously sourced news reports saying that he would be transferred to another federal agency. But Gorka is still in the White House, and a report on Friday in The Daily Beast indicated that his job may have been saved by the intervention of White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, to whom Gorka reports.

Gorka’s appearance at the conference is part of a concerted effort to defend his image in the Jewish and pro-Israel communities, an effort that is being aided by several sympathetic voices outside the White House. It illuminates the extent to which Gorka has become a flashpoint for bitter intramural battles over who can accuse others, and be accused of, anti-Semitism. Pro-Gorka op-eds have popped up in the Jewish press as well as the conservative media, and Gorka is also speaking to the Christians United for Israel conference this summer. Rabbi Heshie Billet, who presides over a large Orthodox congregation on Long Island, this weekend wrote an essay for Algemeiner entitled : “End The Gorka Calumny.”

Zionist Organization of America president Morton Klein, a prominent figure on the hard right of the pro-Israel community—and the “Mort” referred to by Gorka in his speech—has taken a leading role in these efforts.

“I met with him several times, once for almost an hour,” Klein said of Gorka. “I called him, he did not call me. It was in response to the material that was being written about him.”

Klein said he had spoken with two mutual friends: David Goldman, a columnist for PJ Media, and Jeff Ballabon, a Republican activist and lawyer.

“They told me how they know him and that this is a disgrace, he’s a man who’s on the side of Israel and the Jews,” Klein said.

Both Ballabon and Goldman have written op-eds in defense of Gorka.

"I saw this happening and I started writing about it,” Ballabon said. “I started writing about it because this is not the first time this has come up, this came up during the Bush years when the left would argue you should beware of people who like Israel because they're terrible scary evangelical Christians."

"I've gotten to know him very well,” he said of Gorka.

Gorka, he said, is "collateral damage, an innocent bystander caught in what looks like an internecine Jewish war between the progressive Jewish left and more stable rational people.”

Ballabon said he had not been asked to defend Gorka by anyone in the White House, but that people in the White House had been “appreciative” of his efforts.

But Ballabon’s co-author on one of the op-eds, activist and lawyer Bruce Abramson, indicated there had been slightly more outreach than that.

“I think we had initially been contacted by some people who knew the president, [had] been working with the president, who were concerned about the allegations coming out. They said it was all slander, so we started looking into it,” Abramson said.