On Compromise and Humiliation
Five weeks into the Gaza war, U.S. liberal Zionist organizations have yet to openly criticize the conduct of the Israeli war effort. Instead, this past Tuesday, they chose to join the Jewish establishment’s pro-Israel rally in Washington, even as the death toll in Gaza surpassed 11,000 and the collapse of the strip’s hospitals dominated headlines around the world.
The humiliation of the liberal Zionist leadership at that rally underlines the need for a change of policy. Liberal Zionist groups have pursued a strategy of appeasement of the Jewish establishment. To keep their place in the communal tent, they have not directly criticized Israel’s actions during wartime. This month, their silence has allowed establishment groups like the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the Anti-Defamation League to manufacture an American Jewish consensus that places no upper limit on the violence it will condone in Gaza.
While the leftist Jewish groups If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace have launched street protests in support of a ceasefire, liberal Zionist groups like J Street, T’ruah, and Americans for Peace Now have limited themselves to broad demands that Israel “act responsibly.” In a letter about the war published on Thursday, J Street’s CEO wrote that “the level of violence used must be minimized to that which is necessary to achieve the war’s objectives,” without saying whether he thought the killing of one out of every two hundred Gazans met that standard.
The outcome of the Tuesday pro-Israel march was predictable to anyone besides, apparently, the liberal Zionist leaders who fell for it. The Jewish establishment groups that organized the event pulled a bait-and-switch, securing participation of the liberal Zionist groups with the promise of a unifying rally with no divisive speakers, and then handing the microphone to the far-right Christian Zionist televangelist John Hagee. They got to bill their rally as representing the breadth of legitimate Jewish opinion, while projecting an image of an American Jewish community that uniformly backs the Netanyahu government’s reckless assault, cheers Hagee, and boos CNN commentator Van Jones for saying that he prays for “no more bombs falling down on the people of Gaza.”
Today, as Congress considers sending $14 billion in military aid to Israel, and the Biden administration seems to reconsider its handling of Prime Minister Netanyahu, a display of broad-based dissent by American Jews could save lives. Instead, the liberal Zionist organizations have allowed themselves to be manipulated by a hardline Jewish establishment into the role of a controlled opposition.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Many of these liberal Zionist groups have competent and principled leaders, who have spent years fighting hard on difficult issues, particularly the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. If they can abandon their failed strategy of implicitly condoning any level of Israeli military violence in Gaza, they still have a chance to push the American Jewish consensus away from its unconditional support for the Israeli attack.
It may be the case, as Jewish establishment leaders claim, that the leftist groups If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace don’t represent a large constituency among American Jews. The liberal Zionist idea, however, still does: In Reform synagogues, suburban Jewish Community Centers, and on the streets of the Upper West Side and its analogues across the country, the vision of a tolerant, democratic Israel remains the default ideological position, even as it grows harder to square with the reality on the ground. J Street, Americans for Peace Now, T’ruah, and the New Israel Fund speak for that vision. It is incumbent on them to show to their constituents the extraordinary danger that Israel’s disregard for Palestinian lives in Gaza poses not only for Gazan civilians, but for the hostages, for Israelis, for American Jews, and for any hope of a democratic and peaceful future in Israel and Palestine.
This is not a fringe position. A poll published Wednesday found that 59% of Biden voters believe that Israel’s response to Hamas has been “too much.” American Jews are increasingly out of step with global and domestic opinion, and with the values they themselves espoused on October 6th.
The liberal Zionist organizations' policy of silence is a strategic choice, an act of self-censorship undertaken in exchange for limited acceptance by the establishment. The early history of J Street is instructive. In 2008, a year after it was founded, J Street called for a ceasefire days into that winter's Gaza war, saying that there is “there is nothing ‘right’ in punishing a million and a half already-suffering Gazans for the actions of the extremists among them.” It would be the last time the group would take such a forthrightly anti-war stance. Jewish establishment leaders were furious; the head of the Reform movement at the time called the J Street statement “morally deficient.” J Street got the message. They wanted influence, and saw a smoother path to power through Jewish establishment groups like the Presidents’ Conference, Hillel, and the Jewish Federations of North America, than around them. So when the Netanyahu government began a brief aerial assault on Gaza in 2012, J Street’s response was to say it “stands with Israel.” They took the same line during the longer and bloodier 2014 Gaza war, which led some former staffers to split off and create If Not Now as an anti-war alternative.
Perhaps J Street didn’t mind the spinoff of If Not Now. Perhaps they thought it would be useful to have an anti-war activist group agitating from outside the communal tent, making J Street itself look more palatable by contrast to the centrists, conservatives, and wealthy philanthropists whose political preferences drive the policies of the Jewish establishment.
Fifteen years later, that strategy looks naive. It has left American Jews with a “pro-peace” movement that turns to jelly when it could have the most impact. Since October 7, J Street has backed a Congressional resolution supporting Israel’s “right to self defense” that made no mention of Palestinian civilians in harm’s way. They have called for “humanitarian pauses,” but no ceasefire. They support, with some caveats, the $14 billion supplemental aid package the Biden administration has requested for Israel, despite the unfathomable destruction Israel has wreaked so far with U.S. weapons in Gaza.
The rest of the liberal Zionist groups have followed J Street’s lead. It's done them no good. The establishment has so little respect for the liberal Zionists that no one told Americans for Peace Now ahead of time that Hagee would speak at Tuesday’s rally, despite Americans for Peace now being a member of the Presidents’ Conference, which organized the event. Americans for Peace Now arranged for a “peace bloc” of liberal Zionists to join the march, and encouraged its members to attend, only for its president to find out that morning that Hagee would be speaking.
There have been signs of the beginnings of a shift among the liberal Zionists over the last couple of days. On Thursday, the Americans for Peace Now president published an essay in which he came closer than any other liberal Zionist leader has so far to backing a ceasefire, writing: “Call it a cease-fire or a humanitarian pause, what matters is that the hostages must be released and the bombing and rockets must stop.” The CEO of T’ruah shared the essay on Twitter.
They should be encouraged to go further. J Street and T’ruah and Americans for Peace Now don’t need to join hands with Jewish Voice for Peace or If Not Now. They don’t need to support BDS, or give up on Zionism, or abandon their commitment to two states. What they do need to do is give up on the inside game. They need to stop appeasing a Jewish establishment that treats them as props. They need to forthrightly condemn Israel’s callous disregard for Palestinian civilian lives, and they need to remind their substantial constituency that, despite the unthinkable horror of the October 7 Hamas attack, war has limits, and Israel has gone too far.