A Liberal Zionist Lobby Faces an Anti-Israel Moment

Last month, two days after J Street officially dropped its support for US military aid to Israel, J Street chief policy officer Ilan Goldenberg turned up on Pod Save America, a favorite stop for Democratic Party progressives. It should have been a comfortable venue for the liberal Zionist lobby group, which has endorsed most Democrats in Congress. But the conversation between Goldenberg and host Tommy Vietor was tense. When Goldenberg offered a stock J Street line about how the group supports a “23-state solution”—Palestinian statehood achieved through a regional deal—Vietor objected: Palestinians can’t have peace and self-determination until Israel makes “peace with every single neighbor?”

The prickly exchange was a warning light for J Street. Democratic politics have changed, and J Street’s liberal Zionist platitudes are no longer the conventional wisdom, at least for those to the left of the party’s center. Goldenberg felt the significance of the moment: Days later, he wrote a long blog post complaining that Vietor hadn’t recognized that J Street’s politics had evolved, too. “The policies we’re advocating today are fundamentally different from what the United States has done before,” he wrote.

It’s true that J Street’s policies have shifted: The group now says the US should phase out all military aid to Israel, though they maintain that Israel should still be able to buy notionally defensive weapons like Iron Dome. But that shift comes amid a far more radical shift in political opinion on Israel among Democratic voters at large. According to the Pew Research Center, 80% of Democrats now report a negative view of Israel, and a March NBC News poll found that 67% of Democrats say they sympathize more with the Palestinians than the Israelis, compared to 18% in 2013. That’s a huge swing, and it’s soon likely to reshape the Democratic caucus in Washington. As Jewish Currents has reported, leading candidates in Democratic primaries in a number of House races, and at least one Senate race, are now pushing for the US to stop selling any arms to Israel at all, including missile interceptors, a position previously held in Congress only by Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.

J Street has long pitched itself as a safe alternative to AIPAC for Democrats looking for a pro-Israel policy that was more suitable to their liberal base. But in the aftermath of the assault on Gaza, which experts have termed a genocide, Democratic voters have moved much faster than J Street, and it’s not clear how the group will fit into the reshaped Democratic party.

“J Street has played an important role in chipping away at a false and destructive consensus around US policy towards Israel and Palestine,” said Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy, and a former foreign policy advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders. “But I think there was so much pent-up opposition to that consensus in the country, in the party, amongst progressives especially, that now we see it shifting very, very quickly. And I think J Street is struggling a bit to find its position as this new consensus is coming into formation.”

On the Hill today, there’s a sense that J Street’s role as the arbiter for Democrats of the boundaries of acceptable discourse on Israel has evaporated. “The limit was always J Street was the furthest you went, and there wasn’t really cover to go any further,” said one Democratic Hill staffer. Now, the staffer says, “the expectation that you need their buy-in on anything that is critical of Israel is no longer there.”

For J Street, the policy change on aid to Israel it undertook in mid-April amounted to a historic reversal. Support for military aid has been a definitional stance for the group, the “first on the list of our endorsement criteria for all J Street endorsees,” according to what as of this writing remains the top entry on the FAQ page of J Street’s website. The group’s new position is vague on US sales of weapons aside from missile defense interceptors, but Goldenberg told Jewish Currents: “It’s hard to imagine many systems we would support at the moment outside of those clearly defensive systems [like Iron Dome], but we would evaluate on a case by case basis.”

That’s a dramatic change for J Street, but since early April it’s increasingly become the consensus position within the Democratic party. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced on March 31st that she opposed all US military aid to Israel, and Rep. Ro Khanna said the next day that he agreed. J Street’s shift came around two weeks later, by which point the entire political landscape had shifted, and even party centrists were changing their stances. Days after J Street’s announcement, the former Obama White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, whose father fought in the Irgun, the Zionist terrorist militia, announced that he opposed US military aid to Israel.

J Street sees itself as driving the policy change inside the Democratic Party. “We’re talking about a pretty massive shift, and we’re leading the shift, right?” Goldenberg said to me when we spoke last week. When I told him I didn’t think J Street actually was leading the shift, Goldenberg recalibrated. “I will not say we’re leading the shift, I’m saying we are a central component of the shift happening,” he said. “There’s pressure coming from other parts of the party to our left, but then we create space for a lot of people to move.”

Goldenberg says that J Street played a big role in the successful push last month around Sen. Sanders’s resolutions against the sales of thousand-pound bombs and militarized bulldozers to Israel, which drew yes votes from 36 and 40 senators, respectively—a new high-water mark that was celebrated as a significant win by anti-war activists. The bulldozer vote pulled support even from AIPAC-backed centrists like Adam Schiff. Without cover from J Street, which also endorsed Schiff, it’s hard to imagine the resolution drawing support from centrists like him and Cory Booker, who have defined themselves as pro-Israel and have been AIPAC allies throughout their careers.

Across the rest of the party, though, there are signs that J Street’s influence is slipping as the group continues to push more moderate approaches to limiting Israel’s use of US weapons. In February, J Street backed a House bill introduced by Illinois Democrat Sean Casten called the Ceasefire Compliance Act, which would restrict Israeli use of US weapons in the West Bank and Gaza. The bill was presented as a more limited alternative to the Block the Bombs Act, supported by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which would impose an outright ban on the sales of certain munitions to Israel. As Jewish Currents reported at the time, Block the Bombs supporters condemned J Street, saying their support of the Casten bill would undermine Block the Bombs’ progress. And yet more than two months later, the Block the Bombs act is cosponsored by a third of Democrats in the House, and the Ceasefire Compliance Act still has only half as many cosponsors.

The Democratic Hill staffer said that J Street’s influence among Congressional Democrats has receded quickly since October 7th. J Street, like other liberal Zionist groups, declined to back calls for a ceasefire in Gaza for months. At least four members of the group’s staff left in protest, as Jewish Currents reported at the time. “Even up until the first weeks after October 7th, it was pretty hard to get more than a handful of Democrats to say anything critical of Israel without running it by them,” the staffer said. Now, the staffer said, “I think they are struggling.”

Goldenberg maintains that J Street is holding down a nuanced, middle-of-the-road position. “I actually think there’s 80% overlap between what we are saying and the Democratic base, and 80% overlap with what we are saying and our right flank,” he says. “We’ve got to work together with all those folks. That’s politics.” That self-conception of sitting on what J Street’s president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, once called “the 50-yard line of the American Jewish community” helped crack the AIPAC veto on Capitol Hill. Now, as Democrats sour on Israel, it could limit J Street’s ability to play a role in the party.