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j street
Why Are Liberal Zionists Cheering as Harris Echoes Biden on Gaza?
J Street is eager to define the limits of acceptable criticism of Israeli government policies from the Democratic Party establishment—setting aside human rights as secondary to the mantra of Israel’s “right to exist.”
Aug 27, 2024
Hours after U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris gave her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, the president of the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” organization J Street took a victory lap in an effusive email to supporters. “Wow,” Jeremy Ben-Ami wrote. “What a week! As J Streeters leave the Democratic National Convention fired up and ready to go, it’s clear we’re having a greater impact than ever.” He added that “the vice president’s remarks on Israel-Palestine were perhaps the clearest articulation of J Street’s values from a presidential nominee.”
But what are those “values” and how do they apply to what’s happening in Gaza?
Discussing Gaza, Harris’ DNC acceptance speech began with the anodyne evocation of “working on a cease-fire” of Gaza’s pounding that America is funding: “President Biden and I are working around the clock, because now is the time to get a hostage deal and a cease-fire deal done.”
Style aside, what Harris articulated about Israel-Palestine in her speech was no different than what President Joe Biden has been saying and doing since last fall while enabling the slaughter of Palestinian civilians.
Then came the “ironclad” pledge of eternal support for Israel, justified in this case by the October 7 Hamas raid: “And let me be clear. And let me be clear. I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself…”
Key to Harris’ brief discussion of Gaza in her acceptance speech was the customary refusal in American political discourse to attribute the slaughter to the U.S. or its Israeli partner. Instead, there was a reference to “what has happened”—evoking victims without victimizers—in this way: “What has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.”
After pledging unconditional support for Israel’s military, Harris expressed sorrow—as if the horrors are being inflicted by a force of nature, not a military force that the U.S. government supplies with fundamental and essential support.
Style aside, what Harris articulated about Israel-Palestine in her speech was no different than what President Joe Biden has been saying and doing since last fall while enabling the slaughter of Palestinian civilians. The vehement enthusiasm from J Street, perhaps the USA’s leading liberal Zionist organization, is illuminating.
Harris carefully omitted any mention of the only way that the U.S. government could actually put an end to the suffering in Gaza that she called “heartbreaking”—an arms embargo to stop the huge shipments from the United States that provide the Israeli military with the weapons and ammunition it’s using to continue to massacre Palestinian people of all ages.
The Harris speech was consistent with the national party’s new platform—which “J Street helped shape,” Ben-Ami proudly wrote. But full affirmation of Biden’s policies toward the Gaza carnage should not have been any cause for celebration.
“As a Palestinian American who is an elected Democrat to the Colorado State House, it has been disheartening to witness Biden facilitate and abet Israel’s brutal war on Gaza with billions of dollars in U.S. weapons,” Iman Jodeh wrote during the convention. Harris “has said that an arms embargo—which human rights organizations have been calling for—is off the table, but that she supports a cease-fire.” However, “to truly reach a cease-fire and prevent a regional conflict, the U.S. must halt the arms shipments that fuel the conflict.”
The British medical journal The Lancetestimates that well over 100,000 residents of Gaza will die because of the Israeli bombardment and siege since October 7, as hunger and disease are endemic, and housing and infrastructure have been systematically destroyed. Polio is appearing in the devastated population of more than 2 million. Israel’s assault on the enclave, populated substantially by refugees from the 1948 creation of the Israeli state, remains unchecked—and is literally made possible by the continuous arms pipeline from the United States.
For J Street’s leadership, the current U.S. policy hits the spot. “Could not be prouder of VP Harris for her remarks on Israel/Palestine—and of Democrats’ reaction,” Ben-Ami tweeted after the convention adjourned. “This is what it means in 2024 to be pro-Israel, pro-peace, and pro-democracy.”
At the convention, the parents of a hostage held by Hamas since October 7 spoke. But no Palestinian American was allowed to say anything. In effect, the convention’s podium was a place of apartheid, mirroring the reality of Israel’s apartheid system. (In his email, Ben-Ami wistfully noted the missed opportunity: “Hosting the first ever Palestinian speaker at a national convention would have been a powerful way to underscore the shared goal of an immediate cease-fire and hostage deal, and the compassion the party feels for Palestinians and Israelis alike.”)
J Street is determined to help ensure that liberal Zionism does not question the “ironclad” U.S. commitment to Jewish nationalist control in Palestine, as discussed in articles I co-wrote that were published 10 years ago and last spring. The organization is eager to define the limits of acceptable criticism of Israeli government policies from the Democratic Party establishment—setting aside human rights considerations as secondary to the mantra of Israel’s “right to exist.” (Whether apartheid South Africa had a “right to exist” is not a topic open for discussion.)
J Street represents untenable liberal American Zionism that clings to the fantasy of a democratic and humane “Jewish state.” Washington office-holders pledge continued weapons resupply for that fantasy Jewish state—with no connection to the actual Israel that is now engaged in remorseless genocide.
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The Dead End of Liberal American Zionism
The dream of humanistic Zionism is collapsing, but—like other entrenched Jewish groups and a declining number of American Jews—J Street is desperate to keep the fantasy on life support.
May 20, 2024
In 2014, we wrote an article titled “The Blind Alley of J Street and Liberal American Zionism.” At the time, Benjamin Netanyahu was in his sixth continuous year as Israel’s prime minister, while President Obama was well into his second term. And J Street, an emerging organization of Jews aligned with the Democratic administration, had momentum as “the political home for pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans.”
From the outset, ever since its founding in 2007, J Street has implicitly offered itself as a liberal alternative to the hardline American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which was established more than four decades earlier. An avowed purpose of J Street has been to seek a humane resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while maintaining fervent allegiance to Israel as “the Jewish state.”
In the 10 years since our article, J Street—at pains to reconcile the contradictions between its “pro-Israel” bond and the increasing Israeli brutality toward Palestinians—has remained committed to the basic goal (or mirage) of a “Jewish and democratic” state. The war on Gaza since October has heightened those contradictions, thrusting into clearer view Israel’s actual creation-and-expansion story, illuminating the violent repression and expulsion of Palestinian people.
A significant number of American Jews are now willing to challenge the Zionist project while pointing out that it is inherently fated to suppress the human rights of non-Jews in Palestine. Speaking at a protest near Sen. Chuck Schumer’s home in Brooklyn last month, Naomi Kleinsaid: “We don’t need or want the false idol of Zionism. We want freedom from the project that commits genocide in our name.”
Standard claims about “democratic Israel” have fallen into notable disrepute on U.S. college campuses, with both Jewish and non-Jewish students this spring protesting against the manifest torture and slaughter of Gaza’s population. Rumblings were audible a decade ago, when the Jewish student group Hillel was roiled with a dispute over whether its national leadership could ban Hillel chapters on college campuses from hosting strong critics of Israeli policies. That dispute, we wrote at the time, “emerged from a long history of pressure on American Jews to accept Zionism and a ‘Jewish state’ as integral to Judaism.” Back then, some Jewish students—“pushing to widen the bounds of acceptable discourse”—were “challenging powerful legacies of conformity.”
This year, in mid-February, J Street issued a statement addressed to President Biden that urged him to propose recognition of a “demilitarized” Palestinian state as a solution leading to acceptance of Israel by Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region. This is a rough equivalent of fiddling with the roof of a structure built on a grievously cracked foundation: the forced exile of non-Jews from much of Palestine—what is now Israel—and the refusal of their right of return, while maintaining a right of return (including to the occupied West Bank) for whoever can claim Jewish identity.
Whether Jewish or not, many Americans have come to question the arrogant absurdity of enabling an American in Brooklyn to claim Palestine while denying any such claim by ethnically cleansed Palestinians. In concordance with other Zionist groups, J Street presupposes that Palestinians should settle for areas designated by the Israeli colonizers (who must not be called colonizers), while they reserve a “right of return” only for themselves and their coreligionists.
J Street offers weak tea with its proposal for “a conflict-ending agreement in which Israel also ultimately recognizes Palestinian statehood.” Under such a scenario, Palestinians as a group would dedicate themselves to cooperation, non-resistance, and—in effect, given the one-sided requirement of “demilitarization”—acceptance of Zionist rights to control Palestine.
J Street’s idea of a fix is that the U.S. government will initiate a plan for “specific steps Palestinians must take to revitalize and reinvent their government with new leadership committed to addressing corruption, demilitarization, renouncing terror and violence, and reaffirming recognition of Israel.” The plan includes “specific steps Israel must take to ease occupation and improve daily life on the West Bank, crack down on settler violence and address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.” And President Biden would offer “American recognition of Palestinian statehood, reaffirmation of the Arab Peace Initiative and security guarantees for all parties, commitments to supporting international law”—and finally, “a UN Security Council Resolution affirming global and unanimous support for the vision, the process and the parameters for negotiation leading to a final status agreement and admission of Palestine as a full member state in the United Nations.”
The J Street “comprehensive diplomatic initiative” proposal is remarkable for what it does not do. The proposal’s failure to acknowledge Israel’s taking of East Jerusalem and West Bank lands for Jewish settlement (even increasing since its war on Gaza began) dodges realities of a Palestine that is riven with settlements of Israeli citizens—a strategy since 1967 to fragment Palestinian populations into de facto Israeli versions of Bantustans.
The number of Israelis who’ve settled in East Jerusalem and occupied West Bank has increased 35%—to 700,000—since our article 10 years ago, making it that much harder to realistically imagine a “two-state solution.” There is nothing in J Street’s new “bold” vision that conceives of Israeli ceding land it has taken for “Judaizing” increasing portions of Palestine.
Liberal American Zionists and U.S. administrations have sometimes objected to the latest illegal and immoral “facts on the ground” imposed by Israel, only to later accept them as immutable facts that could not possibly be rolled back. And so, as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights recently reported, a “drastic acceleration in settlement building is exacerbating long-standing patterns of oppression, violence and discrimination against Palestinians.”
The UN human rights official, Volker Türk, reported that “the policies of the current Israeli Government appear aligned, to an unprecedented extent, with the goals of the Israeli settler movement to expand long-term control over the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and to steadily integrate this occupied territory into the State of Israel.”
Meanwhile, J Street’s proposal for a “demilitarized” Palestinian state matches Netanyahu’s plan for Israel to retain “security control” of all of Palestine to the Jordan River.
Israeli scholar David Shulman, in the midst of this latest crisis, writes: “The wave of anti-Israel feeling that is engulfing large numbers of people in the Western world has emerged not merely from the Gaza war, with its unbearable civilian casualties and now mass starvation. What that wave reflects, more profoundly, is the justified disgust with the ongoing occupation, its seemingly eternal and ever more brutal continuation, and the policies of massive theft and apartheid that are its very essence.”
The crux of our commentary 10 years ago holds even more terribly true today, after another decade of systemic, often-lethal cruelty toward Palestinian people: J Street continues its attempt to create a humane lobby group for Israel, without questioning the manifestly unjust—and thus perpetually unstable—settlement and expulsion project that created Israel in the first place and has sustained it ever since. In essence, while presenting itself as a caring alternative to Netanyahu-brand extremism, liberal Zionism’s yearning for “peace” assumes perpetuation of basic Israeli transgressions and gains over the last 75 years, while calling for acceptance and submission from a defeated and colonized people.
Ten years ago, we wrote of American Jews’ acquiescence to Jewish nationalism: “During the 1950s and later decades, the solution for avoiding an ugly rift was a kind of preventive surgery. Universalist, prophetic Judaism became a phantom limb of American Jewry, after an amputation in service of the ideology of an ethnic state in the Middle East. Pressures for conformity became overwhelming among American Jews, whose success had been predicated on the American ideal of equal rights regardless of ethnic group origin.”
Long story short, the dream of humanistic Zionism is collapsing, but—like other entrenched Jewish groups and a declining number of American Jews—J Street is desperate to keep the fantasy on life support. The nostrum of a two-state solution for the small tormented land of Palestine is more and more flimsy, but organizations like J Street and a large majority of elected Democrats refuse to concede that it has been made nonsensical by Israel’s ever-expanding settlements and escalating Jewish nationalism comfortable with inflicting genocide on Palestinian people.
We were touched, reading through successive J Street statements after the surprise and devastating Oct. 7 raid on “Gaza Envelope” Israeli settlements, causing 1,200 deaths and 240 kidnapped. Their first responses were expressions of solidarity with stunned Israelis, beginning with “J Street Stands with Israelis Facing Hamas Terror Onslaught.” Anguish was evident as J Street statements changed their tone, when Israel escalated assaults on Palestinian civilians. Alarmed at the Israeli military’s blockading and devastating Gaza, and also intensifying paramilitary settler raids on Palestinian communities in the West Bank, J Street pleaded repeatedly that the U.S. restrain Israel—to rescue J Street's dream image of a humane and well-meaning Jewish state.
Unfortunately, these words that we wrote in 2014 have remained accurate, with steadily horrific consequences: “Every conceptual lane of J Street equates being ‘pro-Israel’ with maintaining the doctrine of a state where Jews are more equal than others. Looking to the past, that approach requires treating the historic Zionist conquest as somewhere between necessary and immaculate. Looking at the present and the future, that approach sees forthright opposition to the preeminence of Jewish rights as extreme or otherwise beyond the pale. And not ‘pro-Israel.’”
J Street’s current self-definition begins: “J Street organizes pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy Americans to promote U.S. policies that embody our deeply held Jewish and democratic values and that help secure the State of Israel as a democratic homeland for the Jewish people.”
In an unpublished autobiography, former Zionist Baltimore Rabbi Morris S. Lazaron wrote of political Zionism’s “nationalist philosophy expressed in this country under the guise of promoting ‘Jewishness,’ ‘Jewish unity,’ ‘Jewish education.’” And he summed up: “Finally I came to the conclusion that the Zionists were using Jewish need only to exploit their political goals. Every sacred feeling of the Jew, every instinct of humanity, every deep-rooted anxiety for family, every cherished memory became an instrument to be used for the promotion of the Zionist cause.”
Jews are going to have to make a painful reappraisal of the project that imposes a “Jewish” state in Palestine. Understanding our willful blindness and self-deception that facilitate the abuse of the non-Jews of Palestine will mean giving up the evasive palliative of pseudo-humanistic posturing from groups like J Street. The essential fight against antisemitism cannot mean ongoing degradation and suppression of another people. After 75-plus years of violently taking, while piously talking of a desire for peace, the disconnect between that ostensible peace-seeking and the assertion of Zionist control of the land will need to be resolved.
No matter how much it might be paved with good intentions, J Street serves as a well-trafficked avenue for liberal American Zionism that continues to support the subjugation of Palestinian people, with steady patterns of deadly violence. J Street has rigorously lobbied for the U.S. aid that provides Israel with the weaponry to inflict mass casualties.
“Since we launched J Street 15 years ago, we’ve supported every dollar of every U.S. security package to Israel,” J Street’s longtime president Jeremy Ben-Ami wrote in a May 9 email to supporters. As usual in lockstep with the Democratic White House, Ben-Ami went on to reassure supporters: “The decision to hold back certain weapons shipments is one the President doesn’t take lightly. And neither do we.”
J Street’s support for continuing huge quantities of military aid to Israel belies the organization’s humane pose. “U.S. aid to Israel must not be a blank check,” Ben-Ami wrote. “The Israeli government should be held to the same standards of all aid recipients, including requirements to uphold international law and facilitate humanitarian aid.” But those words appeared in the same email pointing out that J Street has always “supported every dollar” of U.S. military aid. Given that Israel has been flagrantly violating “international law” for decades—and had lethally blocked “humanitarian aid” in Gaza for more than six months by the time Congress approved $17 billion in new military aid in late April—J Street’s blanket support for military aid to Israel epitomizes the extreme disjunctions in the organization’s doubletalk.
“Voices on the extreme left are slamming the President for failing to do enough and enabling a genocide, even if one might think they would consider this a step in the right direction,” Ben-Ami wrote—the implication being that it’s unreasonably extreme to demand an end to U.S. policies enabling genocide.
In 2024, “pro-Israel, pro-peace” is an oxymoron, with denial stretched to a breaking point. Israel is now what it is now, not a gaslit fantasy that backers of groups like J Street want to believe. To whistle past the graveyard of a humanistic Zionist dream requires holding onto the illusion that the problem is centered around Netanyahu and his even-farther-right government allies. But a country cannot be meaningfully separated from its society.
“Israel has hardened, and the signs of it are in plain view,” foreign correspondent Megan Stack wrote last week in an extraordinary New York Times opinion piece. “Dehumanizing language and promises of annihilation from military and political leaders. Polls that found wide support for the policies that have wreaked devastation and starvation in Gaza. Selfies of Israeli soldiers preening proudly in bomb-crushed Palestinian neighborhoods. A crackdown on even mild forms of dissent among Israelis.”
The social fabric is anything but a fringe in control of the prime minister’s office and war cabinet. As Stack explained:
Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, the creeping famine, the wholesale destruction of neighborhoods—this, polling suggests, is the war the Israeli public wanted. A January survey found that 94 percent of Jewish Israelis said the force being used against Gaza was appropriate or even insufficient. In February, a poll found that most Jewish Israelis opposed food and medicine getting into Gaza. It was not Mr. Netanyahu alone but also his war cabinet members (including Benny Gantz, often invoked as the moderate alternative to Mr. Netanyahu) who unanimously rejected a Hamas deal to free Israeli hostages and, instead, began an assault on the city of Rafah, overflowing with displaced civilians.
Meanwhile, Stack added, “If U.S. officials understand the state of Israeli politics, it doesn’t show. Biden administration officials keep talking about a Palestinian state. But the land earmarked for a state has been steadily covered in illegal Israeli settlements, and Israel itself has seldom stood so unabashedly opposed to Palestinian sovereignty.”
Likewise, if J Street officials understand the state of Israeli politics, it doesn’t show. The organization’s officials also keep talking about a Palestinian state. But in reality, the “two-state solution” has become only a talking-point solution for liberal American Zionists, elected Democrats, and assorted pundits who keep trying to dodge what Israel has actually become.
Last week a founder of Human Rights Watch, Aryeh Neier, wrote: “I am now persuaded that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.” It is a horrific truth that J Street’s leaders keep evading.
In 2024, the meaning of “pro-Israel, pro-peace” is macabre: J Street refuses to call for an end to U.S. military aid to Israel while that country continues to use American weapons and ammunition for mass murder and genocide.Keep ReadingShow Less
Far-Right Israeli Ministers Lead Settler March to Illegal West Bank Outpost
"The cognitive dissonance is truly astounding. Israeli settlers march on stolen land... and yet, somehow, they are the victims in their own narrative," said one Palestine advocate.
Apr 11, 2023
In what Palestine defenders and even one mainstream U.S. Jewish group called a perilous provocation, leaders of Israel's far-right government accompanied thousands of settlers shielded by a heavy military presence on a Monday march to an illegal colony in the occupied West Bank.
Senior officials in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right Cabinet—including National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich—and numerous right-wing lawmakers joined a crowd of as many as 20,000 pro-apartheid demonstrators who marched to Evyatar in a bid to legitimize the outpost, The Times of Israelreports.
According to Haaretz, 22 Palestinians including residents of the nearby town of Beita were wounded when Israeli occupation forces fired on them with less-lethal weapons including rubber-tipped steel bullets during and after the march. More than 100 people including journalists also suffered from inhaling gas used by Israeli forces to disperse counter-demonstrators. At least two journalists were hospitalized as a result of their injuries.
Meanwhile, marchers brought inflatable bouncy houses and other amusements to entertain children during the demonstration.
\u201cThousands of Israeli settlers marched through the northern West Bank today towards the Palestinian village of Beita flanked by Israeli regime forces. \n\nAmong them were dozens of Israeli regime ministers & lawmakers. \n\nMeanwhile Palestinians were tear gassed & their roads closed.\u201d— Dr. Yara Hawari \u062f. \u064a\u0627\u0631\u0627 \u0647\u0648\u0627\u0631\u064a (@Dr. Yara Hawari \u062f. \u064a\u0627\u0631\u0627 \u0647\u0648\u0627\u0631\u064a) 1681137061
The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned the march as "a dangerous escalation and provocation of the Palestinian people and an extension of the incitement calls of the Israeli right and the fascist right to deepen settlement at the expense of land."
Yumna Patel, Palestine news director at Mondoweiss, said on Twitter: "The cognitive dissonance is truly astounding. Israeli settlers march on stolen land, in a settler colony that's given them the land to steal and colonize, alongside an army whose singular goal is to protect them. And yet, somehow, they are the victims in their own narrative."
The liberal U.S. Jewish group J Street also condemned the march, tweeting that "this is an incendiary and deeply dangerous act by some of the most senior ministers in the Israeli government."
"Their vision is clear: annexation, endless conflict, and chaos," the group added.
\u201cFar-right Israeli ministers join settler march for illegal Evyatar outpost\n\nIsraeli settlers marched near Nablus in the occupied West Bank to demand the re-establishment and legalisation of the evacuated illegal outpost of Evyatar (Avitar) near the Palestinian town of Beita\u201d— Middle East Monitor (@Middle East Monitor) 1681207188
However, Ben-Gvir—who is a settler—asserted that "we are here, and we are marching toward the future... I hope the entire state of Israel understands this."
Smotrich told Haaretz while marching that "God willing, we'll bring here another half-million Jews on top the half-million that are already here."
United Nations experts say the true number of Israeli settlers colonizing the West Bank and East Jerusalem is closer to 700,000.
Evyatar, an exclusively Jewish community first established in 2013, is built on stolen Palestinian land on Mount Sabih in Beita, south of Nablus. The settlement is illegal under both international and Israeli law and has been repeatedly destroyed by Israeli authorities.
Since 1967, at least 77 Beita residents have been killed by Israeli forces, many of them during protests, according to Patel.
\u201cThe Palestinians in Beit have been protesting against the Evyatar outpost since 2021. At least 7 people, including 2 children, from the town have been killed over the course of the protests. We covered Beita's fight against the outpost back in 2021 https://t.co/Nw4aLS7LzD\u201d— Yumna (@Yumna) 1681231625
The last mass eviction of Evyatar took place in June 2021. However, while the Israeli military says the outpost is "flagrantly illegal," scores of homes have been built there with soldiers' help and the government has provided the community with electricity, water, and roads.
On February 27—the day after settlers' deadly rampage through the Palestinian town of Huwara—Ben-Gvir, who leads the Jewish Power party, defiantly organized a rally in Evyatar, where he called for the assassination of "terrorists" who resist Israeli expansion.
Netanyahu's government is seeking to "legalize" Evyatar as it did for nine other settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem earlier this year.
When asked by Haaretz why Evyatar has not yet been legalized, Zvi Sukkot, an Israeli lawmaker representing the Religious Zionism party, said that "legalizing such an outpost takes time."
"We're not afraid of America," he added. The Biden administration says it opposes settlement expansion, even while lavishing Israel with billions of dollars in annual military aid and diplomatic cover.
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