What do Thomas Friedman, Rahm Emanuel, Ed Miliband and J Street have in common?
All seem convinced that they know better than Israelis what is best for Israel. They profess support for Israeli democracy, yet have little patience for Israeli choices when those choices conflict with their prescriptions. Rather than persuade Israelis, they want their governments to pressure Israel into accepting policies its citizens overwhelmingly reject. They are prepared to gamble with Israeli security to advance a vision of peace that neither Israelis nor Palestinians currently embrace.
J Street deserves particular scrutiny for its efforts to undermine the U.S.-Israel relationship. Its detachment from reality was on full display in an email that its president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, sent to supporters on the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre.
Ben-Ami concluded by invoking Vivian Silver, an Israeli peace activist murdered by Hamas that day:
“I am reminded today of the words of J Street’s dear friend Vivian Silver, a peace activist who dedicated her life to building that shared future and was murdered on October 7: ‘This could be such a haven to both of our people here.’ Indeed it could. That future remains possible—and we will continue to fight for it.”
I had to read those words twice.
How could Ben-Ami invoke Silver’s murder as an affirmation of his worldview rather than confront what her death revealed about its assumptions? Silver devoted her life to building bridges with Palestinians. Yet Hamas terrorists did not spare her or other Jews committed to reconciliation, because there is no possibility for a “haven” to exist where one side is determined to exterminate the other.
Does he really believe Silver’s opinion would not have changed if she had survived?
Has he listened to people like Irit Lahav, a peace activist from Kibbutz Nir Oz, where one in four residents were killed or kidnapped? Lahav, who drove Palestinians in need of medical treatment from Gaza to hospitals in Israel, told The Times of Israel, “All of the people of Gaza, all of them, hate us to a degree where they would murder babies and pillage our property with zero compunction.”
She said, “I used to think Palestinians were good people, like you and me,” and then “hundreds of civilians, including women and children” followed the terrorists to loot and vandalize the communities.
An academic study of Kibbutz Be’eri—long associated with Israel’s peace camp and known for its close ties with residents of Gaza—found that residents who had employed Palestinians, transported Gazans to Israeli hospitals and supported humanitarian assistance felt betrayed by the very people they had sought to help.
One survivor said, “What has been shattered forever is belief in the possibility of peace,” while another admitted, “I don’t know what I believe in, but it’s not peace.” Others acknowledged that their previous belief that most Palestinians wanted peace had been naive.
These are not the voices of right-wing extremists or ideological opponents of compromise. They are the voices of people who believed in precisely the future Ben-Ami continues to promise.
J Street has become perhaps the most effective component of the Arab lobby, exceeding even the Qataris.
He and his allies are not merely tone-deaf. They filter out evidence that contradicts their conviction that peace is just one Israeli concession away. They envision a happily-ever-after in which genocidal Islamists abandon their ambitions, Palestinian leaders who have spent decades rejecting Israel’s legitimacy suddenly become reliable partners, and “moderates” foreswear destroying Israel in stages after being given independence in portions of Eretz Yisrael to which they have no historic, legal or religious claim.
For J Street, the massacre was a horrific interruption on the road to peace, rather than evidence that the road itself may lead to another catastrophe. Burning Jews alive, raping women and decapitating children were not a fluke but part of a broader pathology sustained by decades of indoctrination in schools, mosques and media incitement.
Consider another revealing example of J Street’s judgment. Its website features an article presenting Marwan Barghouti as a leader who would be “indispensable to negotiating a solution”—provided there is “a willing Israeli partner.”
Barghouti was the leader of Fatah’s terrorist Tanzim faction and is serving five consecutive life terms, plus 40 years for murder. Yet J Street promotes the notion that a man convicted of responsibility for killing Israelis could be indispensable to making peace with them.
The implication is extraordinary: Israel must demonstrate its willingness to make peace, while a convicted terrorist is portrayed as a potential peacemaker.
For J Street, the obstacle to peace is not Palestinian terrorism but Israeli reluctance to embrace its perpetrators as negotiating partners. That posture reveals the organization’s delusions.
Like explorers searching for a unicorn or the Yeti, J Street and its ideological allies keep pursuing a two-state solution that exists more convincingly in diplomatic speeches and policy papers than in the Middle East’s political reality. Decades of failed initiatives have not disabused them of these fantasies.
If the people who will endure the outcome reject the proposal, it ceases to be a peace plan and becomes little more than intellectual vanity.
The two-state “solution” is anathema to Israelis who recognize it as an invitation to repeated days like Oct. 7 and Palestinians who see it as an impediment to the erasure of the State of Israel. Gallup just released a new poll reaffirming that majorities in Israel (65%) and among Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem (58%) do not support it.
J Street’s response is to insist that Israelis must accept the very outcome they fear, while ignoring Palestinian rejectionism. It is easier to cling to the two-state mantra than to examine Palestinian textbooks, listen to Palestinian media, recognize the glorification of martyrdom or confront the political culture that has sustained hostility toward Israel for generations.
More than 500,000 Jews live in Judea and Samaria, and 350,000 reside in eastern Jerusalem—areas that Palestinians would make Judenrein if J Street’s objective were achieved, an idea that only the enablers of antisemitism would be expected to endorse.
As I argued in an earlier column, the prerequisite for peace is not another Israeli concession but a transformation of Palestinian society. Generations have been taught to regard Israel as an illegitimate intruder, not a permanent neighbor. Until that changes, new borders will not create peace; they create new opportunities for the slaughter of Jews.
J Street offers the comforting illusion that one-sided Israeli concessions can substitute for social transformation.
Instead, J Street offers the comforting illusion that one-sided Israeli concessions can substitute for social transformation. The collapse of Oslo and the consequences of the Gaza disengagement forced Israelis to confront this reality; still, J Street remains committed to a narrative untouched by history.
J Street has become perhaps the most effective component of the Arab lobby, exceeding even the Qataris, thanks to its consistent attacks on Israel’s elected government; its rejection of the country’s democratic process when citizens fail to adopt J Street’s prescriptions for undermining their security; and financial support for congressional candidates who have pledged to cut aid to Israel and weaken the historic strategic relationship. The timing could not be worse as Israel faces threats from Iran and its terrorist allies.
This is where J Street’s rhetoric about being “pro-Israel” collides most sharply with its actions. It is one thing to criticize an Israeli government. Israelis do that every day. It is quite another to mobilize American political and financial power to compel Israel to take security risks its own citizens believe are intolerable.
By playing the “As-a-Jew” card, Ben-Ami and his organization mislead the public and politicians into believing that their fringe views reflect those of the Jewish community. That is evident in the relative support for the J Street PAC, which is expected to contribute $13 million to campaigns for Israel’s detractors, compared with the much-vilified American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which has raised $233 million to support candidates committed to maintaining a strong U.S.-Israel relationship.
Ben-Ami’s invocation of Vivian Silver exposes the fallacy at the heart of J Street’s raison d’être. If you care about peace for Israelis, you do not promote policies that make them less secure. If you believe in democracy, you do not undermine the positions of the majority of the electorate. If you believe in a haven for Jews and Palestinians, you do not excuse, ignore or embolden the extremists who make that haven impossible.
Silver and the other peace activists murdered by Hamas deserve better than to be enlisted in a cause their killers proved false. To honor their memory, acknowledge what Oct. 7 made undeniable: Hatred of Jews cannot be appeased.
Those who lived through that horrific day learned this at unbearable cost. Those who watched from thousands of miles away have not learned it at all.
