One spring day, when American politics felt polarized and Israelis were still catching their breath from a punishing and controversial war in Gaza, 329 members of the US Congress sent a letter to the president calling on him to remain a “devoted friend to Israel.”

The lead signatories were members of the House leadership, one Republican and one Democrat. The list of signatures, comprising more than three-quarters of the House of Representatives, was about evenly split between the two parties.

The year was 2009, and the letter’s sponsor was the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC.

Around the same time, another letter said Israel and the Palestinians could not make peace by themselves, and that “American leadership is essential to achieving meaningful progress.”

That letter came from a new organization, J Street, founded the previous year as a liberal, dovish alternative to AIPAC. Of the 435 members of the US House, it got just 87 signatures.

Was J Street pro-Israel enough? Or pro-Israel at all? Not just Republicans but Democrats were asking the question, and for many, the answer was no.

New York senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, both Democrats from a blue state, pulled out of its first conference. The group endorsed 41 candidates in its first year — but not the Democratic House speaker or majority leader.

Meanwhile, AIPAC’s former director derided the group as the “blame Israel first” lobby, and Israel’s US ambassador at the time, Michael Oren, lamented that J Street was “a unique problem in that it not only opposes one policy of one Israeli government, it opposes all policies of all Israeli governments.” He declined an invitation to the conference.

Seventeen years later, times have and haven’t changed. To many on the right, J Street is hardly pro-Israel. If anything, it has moved much further left, and away from the views of the average Israeli, taking positions opposed by the vast majority of the country it says it supports.

But among US Democrats, the picture has flipped. AIPAC, formerly a powerhouse in the party, is now anathema, while J Street, once seen as too far to the left, is becoming the redoubt of Democrats who aren’t ready to abandon Israel. Israel’s fiercest critics, meanwhile, have no problem lumping the two Israel lobbies together — never mind how much the two disagree with each other.

Eighty percent of Democratic voters view Israel negatively. But the majority of their congresspeople — including the top three House Democrats — are now endorsed by a group that functions as the liberal Zionist flagship. In the Democratic Party, at least in Washington, J Street has become Main Street.

“We endorse the overwhelming majority of elected Democrats at the federal level,” J Street’s founder and longtime president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, told The Times of Israel in an interview this week. “They are not running away from us and viewing our support as toxic. They are coming to us and seeking our support.”

Supporting Israel, opposing the views of Israelis

For Israelis who hope to preserve bipartisan support in the US, this presents an awkward situation. J Street is now the mainstream Israel lobby among Democrats, endorsing more of them in the House and Senate than AIPAC’s PAC does.

But the group that has long described itself as “pro-Israel, pro-peace” has also consistently opposed the views of the vast majority of Israelis on both sides of the Knesset aisle.

To take a few examples: 85% of Israeli Jews (a solid majority of the country overall) supported US President Donald Trump’s 2017 recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and the US moving its embassy there. Opposition MKs praised it. But Ben-Ami called the recognition “reckless.”

More recently, the group said it was “appalled” by the start of the recent war with Iran, which, at its outset, had the backing of more than 80% of all Israelis — including a large majority of the Jewish left. And J Street has long supported the establishment of a Palestinian state at peace with Israel, something just 26% of Israelis said was realistic in 2024.

Ben-Ami noted that J Street has pivoted to stressing a regional normalization deal rather than a two-state solution, and pointed to polling suggesting Israeli support for Palestinian statehood shoots up if it comes along with full acceptance by the Arab and Muslim world.

But he also stressed that he isn’t bothered by the gulf between his group and Israelis. The polls he cares about are the ones J Street commissions, which unfailingly reflect Democratic, liberal majorities among US Jews; a recent one showed that American Jews broadly sympathize with Israel but opposed the Iran war.

“Our role is not to represent the Israeli Jewish population, our role is to represent the American Jewish population,” he said, adding later, “We don’t exist to have conversations with Israelis. Our conversation day in and day out is in the United States.”

He went on to compare his group’s support for Israel to........

© The Times of Israel