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OPINION
The dead end of liberal American
Zionism
In 2024, the meaning of “pro-Israel, pro-peace” is macabre: J Street supports U.S. military
aid to Israel as it carries out a genocide. Liberal American Zionism has revealed itself to
only be a tool for the subjugation of the Palestinian people.
BY ABBA SOLOMON AND NORMAN SOLOMON - MAY 26, 2024 - 5
JEREMY BEN-AMI AT J STREET’S 2022 NATIONAL CONFERENCE, DECEMBER 2022. (PHOTO: J
STREET/FLICKR)
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 Klein said: “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, prodemocracy 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 welltrafficked 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 evenfarther-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.
BEFORE YOU GO – The mainstream media has reached a new low as it uncritically repeats government lies to justify the Israeli assault on Gaza.