J Street is the new AIPAC in the Democratic Party

The Israel lobby is exposed these days as it has never been before. Or AIPAC is. AIPAC is a dirty word among Democrats because it refuses to criticize the Netanyahu government. 

California Governor Gavin Newsom and Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner are both refusing AIPAC donations. In New York City, progressive Democratic candidates are primarying two sitting congressmen, Ritchie Torres and Dan Goldman, and making the incumbent’s donations from AIPAC an issue.

And not just Democrats. In announcing her resignation from Congress, the Republican firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted that she takes no money from AIPAC– and “condemns Israeli genocide” — in contrast to Donald Trump, who has gotten over $230 million in pro-Israel money, and backs Israeli genocide to the hilt. 

The liberal Zionist organization J Street looks to be the beneficiary of this shift. J Street used to represent a left/liberal fringe of the Democratic establishment. Now it represents the center/right. 

And J Street is lobbying hard for Israel. It doesn’t want the U.S. to cut military aid to Israel. It says it wants young Jews to “fall in love with Israel” all over again. 

This is risky positioning. There is today a “civil war” inside the Democratic Party over Israel, two liberal Zionists acknowledged on a recent J Street podcast.

That civil war is happening for a simple reason. The Democratic base sympathizes with Palestinians more than they do Israelis, by a shocking 60 to 12 percent. Among the young, the numbers are even higher, while the party’s elites sympathize with Israel. 

But liberal Zionists and the party leadership still see things from the Israeli perspective.  

J Street leader Jeremy Ben-Ami described his civil war with the base on the same podcast. J Street sees Gaza from an Israeli perspective: Gaza was all about what Hamas did on October 7. But the Democratic base looks at Israeli actions over the last 27 months. Ben-Ami: 

“The base of the Democratic party thinks that what just happened in Gaza is wrong—and  whether or not October 7 is the single worst thing that has ever happened in our life time– that happens to be true for us, that is our view of October 7– for many Democratic voters and certainly for many Jewish kids of ours, what happened over the last two years is the worst thing they’ve witnessed an American ally do to another people.”

J Street actually reflects the right-wing Jewish establishment here. It wasn’t a genocide, it was a “defensive” war.

Here are some of J Street’s positions (per statements by its leadership): 

• Gaza was bad, but let’s not talk about Gaza. Gaza is past. Gaza is simply omitted from this policy memo for the American president.

• Military aid to Israel must continue. Though we’ll cut funding tied to human rights abuses by settlers in the West Bank. 

• The West Bank is the issue because the occupation of the West Bank is an impediment to a two-state solution, which is the will of the international community, and the crux of J Street’s message.  

• New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is a breath of fresh air. But his anti-Israel statements go too far. 

This rhetoric is a balancing act. The Democratic base wants to cut off military aid to Israel because Israel perpetrated a genocide: tens of thousands of children and other civilians killed, the entire Strip made uninhabitable, virtually all Gaza’s historical and cultural sites destroyed. 

Ben-Ami thinks that Democratic candidates can split the difference, and young Dems and Jews will let go of their horror. Democrats have to find language “to express empathy on equal measures for both sides.” Democrats have to back away from reflexive support for Israel – all those party platforms that said nothing about the Palestinians’ right to be free of occupation. 

But steer clear of the left! “Don’t go off the deep end” of anti-Zionism, as Ilan Goldenberg of J Street says.

I think J Street is sure to succeed in the short term– It will establish a lane for Democratic politicians to be able to get donations from the (wealthy) Israel lobby by saying, I want to cut off aid that goes to violent settlers and I feel terrible about what happened in Gaza. Schumer and Booker are on board. 

But the J Street line is too cynical for anyone who believes in human rights. 

Ben-Ami put out a column last month saying, What do we have to do to get the kids to love Israel again. Yes, you read that right. The piece says we have to talk about Israel’s “flaws” –just like the U.S. has flaws. We must “acknowledge Gaza.” Not that it was a genocide. But Israel inflicted great “suffering” — “tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians [were] killed.” 

But even if young people question the “uses of power” by the Jewish state, the key thing is that there must not be a “rupture” between young Jews and Israel. 

This is a cynical position because Ben-Ami can’t bring himself to mention apartheid. Every worthy human rights group says Israel practices apartheid– the systematic denial of rights to non-Jews. Even if you think Hamas’s actions of October 7 were terribly wrong (as I do), the mass slaughter of civilians didn’t come out of thin air, they originated in apartheid.

J Street today is trying to revive the pro-Israel stance it long maintained: The status quo is unsustainable. For years, J Street would murmur that phrase if you harshly criticized Israel. Yes, we know, The status quo is unsustainable–  was their response to the slaughter of demonstrators in Gaza or shepherds and journalists in the West Bank. 

It’s a cynical stance because J Street absolutely refuses to lift a finger to actually do anything about the status quo besides bewailing it. BDS—the simple non-violent measure that Rosa Parks advocated in Montgomery in 1955 to end Jim Crow, and anti-apartheid activists in South Africa endorsed in 1959, and that Palestinian activists called for 20 years ago to end Jewish supremacy in Israel and Palestine – J Street was always against. J Street said that BDS is antisemitic. That’s like saying, Rosa Parks is protesting simply because she hates white people. 

The moral and political failure of the liberal Zionist position was actually October 7. If a people are oppressed and you refuse to endorse nonviolent measures to alleviate their suffering…. If yet another generation of an ethnic group is condemned by its government to having no rights and no dreams … and meantime you are doing all you can to normalize the oppression by cheering on the Abraham Accords (as J Street crows) in defiance of Palestinian aspirations — what choice do you leave the oppressed but violence? 

The truth is that the liberal Zionists abetted October 7 by routinely shutting down nonviolent boycotts as “antisemitism” and showing complete indifference for the young Palestinians whose dreams were being strangled. 

But– we have to love Israel again! And another generation of politicians has to support Israel virtually unconditionally! And “Democracy is a Jewish value,” as the J Street poster says. When anyone from Mamdani to Tucker Carlson can see that’s not true in the Jewish state. 

J Street sounds more and more like AIPAC. And it won’t be able to end the civil war inside the Democratic Party.