Days after rejecting the claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami says he has been “persuaded” that he was wrong.
Ben-Ami’s about face makes him the latest in a growing list of prominent left-wing Jewish voices to lodge the accusation, which Israel denies and which U.S. President Donald Trump rejected on Sunday.
In a newsletter Sunday marking Tisha B’Av, a day of mourning to commemorate catastrophes throughout Jewish history, Ben-Ami, who heads the liberal Zionist advocacy and lobby group, recalled his parents’ experience with the Holocaust and laid out Hamas’ crimes against Israel, including the terror group’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack.
“Yet none of that provides any rationale for what Israel is doing now in Gaza,” wrote Ben-Ami. “Denying food and basic necessities of life to civilians. Soldiers shooting at civilians trying to get food. Destruction of the entire infrastructure of Gaza. Forcing the population into intolerably small areas. Hoping to create the conditions under which an entire population will be forcibly displaced.”
Ben-Ami said he was “unlikely to use the term myself” due to his own family’s experience. But he said he had still made a shift in his own thinking.
“Until now, I have tried to deflect and defend when challenged to call this genocide,” he wrote. “I have, however, been persuaded rationally by legal and scholarly arguments that international courts will one day find that Israel has broken the international genocide convention.”
Ben-Ami’s commentary came days after he repeatedly rejected the claim that Israel is committing a genocide in an appearance on “Pod Save the World” in a debate with the pro-Palestinian journalist Mehdi Hasan.
The stark shift in Ben-Ami’s stance underscores a sharp waning in support for Israel as claims of mass starvation in the embattled enclave have ratcheted up in recent weeks.
While Israel and its defenders reject the idea that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, images of emaciated Palestinians that have surfaced in recent weeks alongside stated aims by members of the Israeli government to voluntarily emigrate Gazan Palestinians have spurred vast swaths of the Jewish community to condemn Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.
Last week, Israeli novelist David Grossman claimed that Israel was committing a “genocide” in Gaza, saying in an interview with Italian newspaper La Repubblica that he did so only with “intense pain and a broken heart.”
Two Israeli human rights groups — B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights — became the first Israel-based NGOs to level the charge last week, telling reporters at a press conference that Israel was carrying out a “coordinated, deliberate action to destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza strip.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right Georgia Republican who has previously advocated against U.S. funding to Israel and been accused of antisemitism, appeared to be the first Republican in Congress to accuse Israel of committing genocide in a post on X last week.
But while the claim has been getting traction in recent weeks, global leaders have shied from levelling the accusation, even as many have criticized Israel’s role in the enclave’s humanitarian crisis.
On Sunday, Trump rejected the characterization of Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza as a “genocide,” telling reporters, “I don’t think it’s that. They’re in a war.”
Trump continued, ““Some horrible things happened on Oct. 7. It was a horrible, horrible thing. One of the worst I’ve ever seen.”
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
