Why J Street Does Not Go Far Enough

by Harrison Berger | May 13, 2026 

An illegal auction of stolen Palestinian land at an elite Upper East Side synagogue, and the swift condemnations from groups like J Street launched against New Yorkers who attempted to protest it, reveal the Zionist rot at the heart of the American Jewish elite establishment that is bastardizing and corrupting the religion from within, and why liberal Zionist groups present only an impotent challenge to it.

“The Great Israeli Real Estate Event,” held last Tuesday at Park East Synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, was organized to assist prospective buyers in the United States, Canada, and the U.K. purchase land in the occupied West Bank, with the expo’s website advertising land for sale in Gush Etzion, a cluster of West Bank settlements illegal under international law. At least one company present, Harey Zahav, displayed maps and brochures advertising properties in Kfar Eldad, Karnei Shomron, and other West Bank settlements. Karnei Shomron is the subject of a $633 million Israeli government development agreement to nearly triple its population, an effort that Israeli Construction Minister Haim Katz called “a clear policy of settlement and building the land of our forefathers,” with a separate land designation designed to prevent Arab construction in the area.

In response to those illegal land sales, New Yorkers used their First Amendment rights to congregate at Park Avenue Synagogue to protest the contentious practice, with demonstrators arguing that it is inappropriate to use a religious institution to shield what is purely a political activity.

As Jewish Voice for Peace explained in their call to action statement, such “events are attempting to cynically shield themselves from protest by holding their sales at a synagogue. No one should enable the sale of stolen land, let alone a religious institution.”

Though instantly labeled antisemitic – the label reflexively deployed against any criticism of Israeli policy regardless of the identity of the critic, and one applied with particular cynicism given that many of the demonstrators outside Park East were themselves Jewish –  those protesters were fairly targeting what has become the broader ideological capture of elite American Jewish institutions by a foreign government engaged in genocide and apartheid, and their transformation into a financial backbone for the Greater Israel Project.

Since 2023, American synagogues and Jewish federations have raised millions for ZAKA – founded by an accused serial rapist known in Jerusalem’s Orthodox community as “the Haredi Jeffrey Epstein,” exposed by Haaretz for defrauding the Israeli government, and the originating source for the beheaded babies hoax Joe Biden and Donald Trump continue to repeat – and for its rival United Hatzalah, whose director told a room of Republican Jewish donors in Las Vegas that Hamas had baked a baby alive in an oven. The Jewish National Fund, a tax-exempt American nonprofit institutionally embedded in synagogues nationwide, has for decades purchased land from which Palestinians are legally barred. Hillel International sponsors American Jewish college students on trips that include volunteering at IDF military bases. The Central Fund of Israel, JGives, and Israel Gives conduct tax-deductible fundraising for IDF units in Gaza and the West Bank through similar Jewish institutional networks that gathered at Park East last Tuesday to sell stolen land.

Israel has always depended on diaspora wealth for its survival, which is precisely why its sprawling and aggressive lobby exists. Under those conditions, what B’Tselem, Israel’s own leading human rights organization, has called “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the river to the sea” cannot be seriously challenged without directly confronting the American Jewish institutional infrastructure that bankrolls it, which is precisely what New Yorkers attempted to do last Tuesday at Park East Synagogue.

But those New Yorkers, including many Jewish ones, who showed up to protest those illegal land sales were swiftly condemned – including by J Street, the self-described “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobby that has pitched itself as the liberal alternative to AIPAC. “Two things can be true,” J Street wrote. “Protests that glorify violence, wave Hezbollah flags and chant for the destruction of Israel are wrong. Using our synagogues to promote home sales in West Bank settlements is also wrong.”

Americans are, of course, free to “glorify violence, wave Hezbollah flags, and chant for the destruction of Israel.” That is all permissible speech which anyone on American soil has the constitutionally protected right to utter, despite an intense ongoing effort by the Israel lobby to criminalize it.

But J Street’s response to those protests – condemning both the protesters and the land sales in equal measure – is indicative of the balancing act the organization has attempted to manage, one that is unstable and contradictory, with its guiding (or rather, mis-guiding) principle that Zionism can ultimately be reformed into something that is morally good, that the solution is a better Israeli government, and that the American Jewish elite institutions which have funded settlement expansion, armed soldiers to ethnically cleanse Gaza, and laundered Israel’s atrocity propaganda bears no meaningful responsibility for what Israel does.

That incoherence was highlighted by a recent memo put out by the group that ostensibly calls for an end to unconditional U.S. aid to Israel which, even while calling for an end to certain weapons transfers, insists that the United States should continue to “sell short-range air and ballistic missile defense capabilities to Israel,” including Iron Dome and David’s Sling and Arrow, interceptors and other system components, which J Street says are “purely defensive and have saved countless civilian lives by intercepting attacks from Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and others.”

If the purpose of J Street’s new position is to change Israeli behavior, it is not a serious one; the Iron Dome system is what allows Israel to wage its wars of aggression across seven fronts simultaneously without fear of costly retaliation from the populations it targets.

Just as unserious is J Street’s neutered and impotent critique of Israel’s current campaign in Lebanon as “Netanyahu’s and Smotrich’s” war.

“Netanyahu and Smotrich,” the group’s Senior Vice President Ilan Goldenberg wrote in a May 1st statement, “are carrying out their West Bank and Gaza playbook in southern Lebanon. We’re failing to stop them.”

Since March 2, Israel has killed over 2,700 people in Lebanon and displaced more than 1.2 million. Israel’s defense minister demanded for southern Lebanon to be ethnically cleansed following “the model of Gaza” and images published by local journalists demonstrate that is exactly what IDF soldiers have done, with complete U.S. backing. Haaretz reports that Israeli soldiers are engaged in extensive looting of private homes and businesses in southern Lebanon, with many soldiers justifying theft by telling themselves the property will be demolished anyway. As Haaretz puts it, the soldiers are “stakeholders in destruction and in prolonging the war.”

Yet one would believe from J Street’s statement that Benjamin Netanyahu and Bezalel Smotrich are single-handedly demolishing entire villages in southern Lebanon — and not the conscript army and Israeli civilian volunteers who are committing those crimes on a daily basis.

The conclusions that J Street cannot bring itself to reach are now being stated openly by a growing number of American Jews, particularly younger ones, who have watched their communal institutions mobilize in defense of an apartheid state and the genocide it has just committed. That the protesters outside Park East are labeled antisemitic is a measure of how completely the establishment has fused Jewish identity with Israeli state policy – a fusion that younger American Jews are increasingly rejecting. Until American Jewish institutions can separate themselves from Zionism, the antisemitism charge will only grow cheaper, and the religion it has been weaponized to protect will grow hollower.

Harrison Berger is a correspondent at The American Conservative. He has contributed to Drop Site News, The Nation, and Responsible Statecraft. Previously, he was a researcher and producer for System Update with Glenn Greenwald. His work focuses on civil liberties and U.S. foreign policy. He studied Political Science and Russian Studies at Union College (NY).

Officials and Activists Are Working to Overturn Illinois’s Anti-BDS Law. Could Their Campaign Become a National Model?

Activists and lawmakers in Illinois are pushing to repeal the state's anti-BDS law, the nation's first such law. The campaign could serve as a model for more than 30 states that have since adopted anti-BDS laws.

By Michael Arria

May 12, 2026

Source: Mondoweiss

Illinois State Representative Abdelnasser Rashid (Photo: reprashid.com)

Since 2014, U.S. lawmakers have introduced over 200 bills targeting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The vast majority of these efforts have failed to pass, but more than 30 states have adopted anti-BDS laws.

The first state-based measure to take specific action against Israel boycotts was passed in Illinois in 2015; 49-0 in the Senate and 102-0 in the House.  “This historic legislation is an important first step in the fight against boycotts of Israel and I hope other states move quickly to follow our lead,” declared then-Governor Bruce Rauner after signing it into law.

Rauner’s hope was quickly realized, as the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) adopted the Illinois law as a model for pushing anti-BDS laws in other states. According to Palestine Legal, 38 states have enacted laws or executive orders designed to designed to penalize the boycott movement.

Many of these measures have had a significant economic impact. In 2021, the Illinois board overseeing state employee pensions voted to bar funds to the company Unilever over Ben & Jerry’s’s decision to limit sales of its ice cream in Israel. A a result of the ruling, the state was forced to sell between $150–200 million in pension holdings and activating nearly $1 billion in coordinated state divestments nationwide.

Now, Illinois officials and activists are pushing the Illinois Human Rights Advocacy Protection Act, or HB 2723. The bill would repeal the state’s anti-BDS law and potentially serve as a model for legislatures across the country. The effort currently has 22 cosponsors in Illinois House and 12 in state’s Senate.

The bill’s chief sponsor is Palestinian-American Rep. Abdelnasser Rashid.

At a recent hearing on the bill, Rashid explained how the the existing law violates the First Amendment.

“This law uses the retirement security of teachers, university workers, state employees and judges to punish peaceful protest,” said Rashid. It coerces American companies—including Illinois companies—into changing their lawful behavior to satisfy a foreign government. And it does all of this with no fiduciary duty, no published rules, no formal appeal, and no audit.

“Boycotts are foundational to who we are as Americans, are an instrumental tool in achieving democratic change, and are as American as baseball and apple pie,” declared Chicago attorney Richard Goldwasser. “Penalizing the politically motivated boycott..is of a piece with the growing fascism in our country.”

HB 2723 is opposed by a number of pro-Israel groups, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). During the hearing Rebecca Weininger, the Senior Regional Director ADL Midwest, claimed that “anti-Israel sentiment was powering the rise of anti-Jewish violence.”

“This committee should not tolerate antisemitism dressed up as a foreign policy critique,” said Weininger.

Andrew Herrera, a lobbyist for the Illinois Coalition for Human Rights told Mondoweiss that he expects the bill to succeed if state leadership has the political will to consider it.

“This is the kind of bill that once it moves, it wins,” said Herrera. “Were going to cruise through both chambers.”

“This is narrative fight,” he continued. “It has become impossible to publicly support genocide, ethnic cleansing, and needless war in Iran. It’s about shifting the national conversation and and showing people that this messaging works with voters.”

Recent polling backs up Herrera’s assertion.

According to Pew Research poll from last month, 60% of U.S. adults have a negative view of Israel, up from 53% last year. The same survey found that a majority of Democrats and Republicans under the age of 50 now view the country negatively.

Rebekah Levin, a local activist and Jewish Voice for Peace member who has been organizing around the repeal for years, also cited public opinion while speaking with Mondowiess, and said it had undeniably shifted the position of lawmakers.

“When we first started doing this work in the legislature our job was to educate people who voted for it,” she explained. “Over the past 2 years with the genocide in Gaza, the war in Iran and gas prices going up so high legislators finally saw this as something they could take action on and I would guess they see what’s happening nationwide, not just within the Democratic party at this point, but within the Republican party as well.”

Levin says that, if the anti-BDS law is repealed, it could serve as a model for other activists hoping to overturn such legislation in their states.

“People in other states have reached out to us,” she said. “They want to know what we did and how we did it. “If we overturn this it would be a boost to other states. It’s a powerful message. This is why pro-Israel groups are afraid of this passing. It’s about more than just Illinois.”

These sentiments were echoed by Rep. Rashid.

“Thats what makes the stakes so high,” said Rashid. “I believe this will have a domino effect, we are already talking to states about how to run a campaign. I’m hoping these conversations begin in earnest in other states as they find ways to repeal their laws. 

“It is a challenge as it would be many in other states, but I’m hopeful we will set a positive precedent of repealing this shameful law,” he added.

Illinois’s legislative sessions runs until May 31, and proponents of the bill are hoping it gets a hearing before then.

This article was originally published by Mondoweiss; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.Email

Michael Arria

Michael Arria is a U.S. correspondent for Mondoweiss. His work has appeared in In These Times, The Appeal, and Truthout. He is the author of Medium Blue: The Politics of MSNBC.

No, It’s Not Antisemitic to Charge Israel With Genocide and It’s Dangerous to Say It Is

It posits that Israel represents all Jews and therefore criticism of Israel becomes criticism of the Jewish people and it denies the victims of Israel’s behaviors their legitimate right to speak of their pain.


Students protest in support of Palestine during the University of Michigan’s Spring Commencement ceremony on May 4, 2024 at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
(Photo by Nic Antaya/Getty Images)

James Zogby
May 12, 2026

Common Dreams

Is it antisemitic to say that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza? More generally, is it “hurtful and insensitive” for someone to acknowledge the suffering that Israel has inflicted on the Palestinian people? In recent weeks, actions by two different institutions of higher learning brought these two questions to the forefront.

On April 15, a group of faculty and student organizations at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York, hosted celebrated Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Mosab Abu Toha to speak at the campus. During his appearance, to set the stage for the poems he was to read, Abu Toha shared his experiences living in Gaza during the start of the Israeli assault. He told of the members of his and his wife’s families who had been killed in Israel’s bombing campaigns. Entire families erased, neighborhoods laid waste, memories eradicated. It was, he stated, a genocide.

Days after event, Le Moyne’s president issued a statement apologizing for the discomfort that Abu Toha’s remarks may have created for some in the college community. The letter noted that his use of the word genocide in connection with the state of Israel caused “real hurt” and was leaving “some members of our community to feel unwelcome.” The president concluded by affirming that “antisemitism, along with all forms of bigotry and hate, has no place at Le Moyne.”

Abu Toha responded to the president’s letter with an “open letter” of his own, rejecting the implication that using the word genocide to describe Israel’s actions could be termed antisemitic.

It is worth noting that the assumption underlying this assertion fits hand-in-glove with the claim of real antisemites who argue that the consequences of Israel’s bad behaviors can legitimately be visited on all Jews.

“Seriously?” he asked. “Are the crimes of the Israeli state representative of all Jewish people? I personally refuse to believe that is the case… I never used the word ‘Jewish’ during the entire event; I refuse to conflate the faith of Judaism with the actions of Israel.”

He concluded: “If anyone told you they felt ‘hurt’ because I used the word genocide, then I ask you: How should I feel? How should my wife feel after losing her father? How should my three children feel after losing their grandfather?”

And then, this past weekend, the University of Michigan held its commencement ceremonies. One of the speakers was the president of the faculty senate. He began his short but eloquent remarks by noting that while the university celebrates its athletes and their accomplishments, there are other heroes who should also be celebrated—those who challenged the stale and unjust status quo of the university by opening the doors to inclusion and understanding.

He began by mentioning a young woman who in 1858 challenged the school’s opposition to enrolling women as students. He went on to note the first Jewish faculty member and the Black Action Movement that pressed the university to expand their curriculum to honor the black experience, and closed by recognizing the “student activists… who sacrificed much to open our hearts to the injustices happening in Gaza.”

His remarks were so beautifully constructed and presented that they elicited a roar of approval from those in attendance. The video of the event appearing on the university’s website shows his colleagues and administrators applauding the speech.

Within a few days, the same university president who is seen applauding issued a letter denouncing the professor’s speech as “hurtful and insensitive” and “inappropriate.”

(To avoid “further controversy” the university removed the video of the event—in which the president is seen applauding the speech—from the website).

The question that must be asked, in addition to those noted above, is what is the logic behind this claim that the remarks of both Abu Toha and the faculty senate president were hurtful to the point of being antisemitic?

The place to begin is by asking: “What is antisemitism?” The simplest and clearest definition is that antisemitism is hatred of, stereotyping of, or discrimination against Jewish people because they are Jews. Like other forms of bigotry, it claims that there are inherent characteristics or behaviors that are shared by all Jews, simply because they are Jewish.

Given this, the only way that criticism of Israeli actions can constitute antisemitism is if the critic implies that Israel does what it does because it is Jewish and “that’s the way Jews are,” or if the person making the claim of antisemitism maintains that because Israel says it is a Jewish state that whatever it does represents all Jews and therefore criticism of Israeli policies is the same as criticism of the Jewish people.

This latter position has long been propagated by pro-Israel organizations. Until recently, this proposition was mostly rejected, but it has now come to gain acceptance. It is dangerous precisely because it posits that Israel represents all Jews and therefore criticism of Israel becomes criticism of the Jewish people. It is worth noting that the assumption underlying this assertion fits hand-in-glove with the claim of real antisemites who argue that the consequences of Israel’s bad behaviors can legitimately be visited on all Jews. Interestingly, this is the same logic that has long plagued Arab Americans who have been victims of hate crimes because it was claimed that their ethnicity or religion made them legitimate targets in response to the actions of some Arab groups in the Middle East.

The other consequence is that, as Abu Toha correctly notes, it denies the victims of Israel’s behaviors their legitimate right to speak of their pain and call out, with specificity, the agent who caused it because of the hurt that might cause those who support Israel—or in the case of the University of Michigan, to deny the right of students to empathize with and demand that Palestinian victims be heard, because acknowledging Palestinian pain might also cause hurt feelings.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


James Zogby
Dr. James J. Zogby is the author of Arab Voices (2010) and the founder and president of the Arab American Institute (AAI), a Washington, D.C.-based organization which serves as the political and policy research arm of the Arab American community. Since 1985, Dr. Zogby and AAI have led Arab American efforts to secure political empowerment in the U.S. Through voter registration, education and mobilization, AAI has moved Arab Americans into the political mainstream. Dr. Zogby has also been personally active in U.S. politics for many years; in 1984 and 1988 he served as Deputy Campaign manager and Senior Advisor to the Jesse Jackson Presidential campaign. In 1988, he led the first ever debate on Palestinian statehood at that year's Democratic convention in Atlanta, GA. In 2000, 2008, and 2016 he served as an advisor to the Gore, Obama, and Sanders presidential campaigns.
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A Future Beyond Israeli Genocide in Palestine

By Sonia Boulos, Raz Segal 

May 11, 2026

Source: Jacobin

Image by Jaber Jehad Badwan/Wikimediacommons, licensed via CC BY 4.0

In the last two and a half years, Israel has intensified its core project of realizing a “Greater Israel.” Its ongoing drive to eliminate Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba has escalated into full-scale genocidal violence in Gaza. The intensification of Israel’s colonial violence has also included a forced displacement campaign in the West Bank unprecedented since the 1967 war, a renewed assault on the political rights of Palestinians in Israel, and the transformation of Israeli prisons into a network of torture camps in which unspeakable cruelty is the order of the day.

Israel’s large‑scale attacks on Lebanon and Iran, and its use of the “Gaza doctrine” — particularly in Lebanon — have made the systematic targeting of civilians, neighborhoods, schools, and hospitals, and the infliction of mass destruction, suffering, and death, a regional reality. At the same time, the US-Israel war on Iran has caused an international economic crisis that underlines how genocidal regimes pose a threat on a global scale.

It is difficult to imagine a future in the region beyond this horrific reality without the Israeli state, supported by a large majority of its Jewish citizens, facing accountability. Accountability demands centering the experiences and knowledge of Palestinians confronting Israeli elimination, yet the Jewish supremacy and anti-Palestinian racism that fuel the genocide also drive the silencing of Palestinians and their activism to end it. The result is that mostly Jewish voices critical of Israel manage to gain attention through the cracks of this censorship and suppression, though they offer little in the way of thinking about accountability.

This is the case, most recently, with Israeli-American Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov’s latest book, Israel: What Went Wrong? Just out in English and slated to appear in numerous other languages, the book asks readers to think about Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza through a narrative that begins with the Holocaust and antisemitism. Bartov argues that Zionism emerged as a project of liberating Jews from persecution and destruction, but it changed with the establishment of Israel in 1948, when it turned into the state ideology, becoming increasingly exclusionary and violently ethnonationalist, ultimately culminating in genocide.

In fact, Palestinians and even Zionists understood Zionism as an exclusionary, settler colonial, and violent ethnonationalist ideology well before 1948. We know this, for instance, from the work of Palestinian scholars like sociologist Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, who shows in her book Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba how left-wing Zionists, under British colonial auspices, took an active role in the dispossession of Palestinians through the establishment of kibbutz colonies in the Jezreel Valley/Marj Ibn Amer frontier area in the 1920s and ’30s.

If Zionists on the left talked about coexistence with Palestinians even as they displaced them, Zionists on the right dispensed early on with such discourse. Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s well-known 1923  essay “The Iron Wall” set the tone with an explicit acknowledgment of Zionism as a settler-colonial movement that aims to remove indigenous Palestinian Arabs to create a Jewish state.

It is impossible to understand the 1948 Nakba without considering this eliminationist Zionist consensus that had formed in the preceding three decades and which informed Zionist settlement and actions well before the Holocaust. The 1948 Nakba furthermore marked the birth of the Israeli state as clearly exclusionary, racist, and violent; to adapt the language of Bartov’s title, the Israeli state emerged as foundationally wrong.

Bartov, who counts among erstwhile liberal Zionists, rejects this position. His argument about the Gaza genocide functions in a similar way as his argument about Zionism. He eventually found it difficult during Israel’s live streamed genocide to dismiss the charge of genocide. For him, the invasion of Rafah in May 2024 signaled Israel’s turn to genocide. This means that Israel’s campaign in its initial months — its deadliest phase — was not genocidal, according to Bartov, even as he acknowledges that Israeli political and military leaders expressed clear genocidal intent at the time. This qualification of the genocide determination reflects Bartov’s rosy view of pre-state Zionism, as it aims to conceal the historical continuity between the eliminatory logic of Zionism and the Nakba and the genocidal violence unfolding in Gaza since October 2023.

Bartov argues, accordingly, that “the focus on the functional reality of [Zionist] settlement in Palestine largely misses the ideological and emotional motivations of this [Zionist] movement, as well as the underlying self‑perception of generations of Zionist activists and supporters.” Within this narrative, the victims of Zionism — now in its genocidal phase — have erred by judging Zionism through their lived experience of its dispossession and violence; instead, they should have been sufficiently “attuned to the aspirations of Europe’s Jewish refugees.” This framing renders the Palestinian and Arab anti‑colonial struggle — beginning with the Arab Revolt of 1936, or even earlier — a hostile act of aggression against Jewish settlers in Palestine, thereby creating a false equivalence between the colonized and the colonizer.

We also know that while Jewish refugees were seeking a sanctuary, the Zionist movement funneling them to Palestine aimed for their migration to create a Jewish demographic majority that would eventually facilitate Zionist control of the country. Zionists thus turned refugees into settlers. What is more, at least some of Europe’s Jewish refugees who arrived in Palestine during or immediately after the 1948 war understood this, and that the fledgling Jewish state reproduced the kind of exclusionary violence that they had experienced in Europe. It was a very bitter liberation for them, if they perceived it as such at all.

However one understands the multiple perspectives of Jewish refugees in 1948, Bartov’s approach affirms racialized epistemic hierarchies, sidelining the perspectives, knowledge, and voices of Palestinians who have faced Israel’s colonial and eliminatory violence before and after 1948, including those who have identified Israel’s attack on Gaza as genocide from the very beginning.

Acknowledgement Without Accountability?

Racialized hierarchies shape not only how the causes of the genocide in Gaza are discussed, but also how pathways forward are imagined. One would expect the recognition of genocide to be followed by a clear call for justice and accountability. This includes the right of victims of colonial violence and genocide to see those who targeted their loved ones and society brought to justice: those who committed the crimes, those who ordered them, and those who incited them. Victims are also entitled to an official account of what happened. The state itself must be held accountable for these grave crimes.

One is thus left to wonder why Bartov’s book contains no clear call for legal accountability, especially in light of the recent piercing of the veil of impunity that has long shielded Israel from accountability for crimes committed against the Palestinian people.

Why does he not explicitly support accountability efforts before the International Criminal Court? Bartov does refer to the 2024 Advisory Opinion issued by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the illegality of Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza, but he does so without explaining that it calls on third states neither to recognize nor to aid or assist in maintaining this illegal situation — thereby opening a window of opportunity for the imposition of effective measures to pressure Israel to cease and remedy its violations of peremptory norms of international law. Instead, Bartov warns that if Israel does not change course, it will face isolation akin to that suffered by apartheid South Africa.

Many liberal Zionists share Bartov’s concern. The celebrated Israeli writer David Grossman, for example, told the Italian daily la Repubblica in early August 2025 that “Israel’s curse began with the occupation of the Palestinian territories after 1967” — thus erasing the 1948 Nakba — and that he remains “desperately committed” to the two-state solution; that is, a Jewish state and a Palestinian state with “no weapons.” Mainstream liberal media also seems desperately committed to Nakba denial and a Jewish state, even if cursed, which explains the space it affords to people like Bartov on opinion pages, while its reporting largely reproduces anti-Palestinian racism.

Bartov does go further than other liberal Zionists in criticizing Israel and Zionism. He now sees no future for Zionism, as it has become an ideology of genocide, although he rejects the label “anti-Zionist.” Consequently, he cannot imagine a future without a Jewish state, albeit different from the current one. For this sort of criticism and his belated recognition of the Gaza genocide, Bartov has faced intense hostility, including being labeled a Jewish “traitor” and other epithets commonly hurled at Jews who refuse to repeat the talking points of the Israeli state and major Jewish communal organizations.

Yet his visions for Palestine/Israel are largely centered on salvaging Israel as a Jewish-majority state from a feared future or “nightmare” marked by the exodus of the educated and skilled, increasing international isolation, and the prospect of sanctions. What remains unaddressed is the moral and political imperative of accountability for historical and structural injustices inflicted on Palestinians by the Zionist settler‑colonial regime since its inception.

Bartov’s “fundamental rethinking of the relationship between the seven million Jews and seven million Palestinians who live between the river and the sea” mostly entails ending the war in Gaza, rebuilding it, and replacing Hamas’s control of the Strip, with the ultimate goal of creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza that would be viable only as part of a confederation with Israel. In this scenario, based on Dahlia Scheindlin’s writing, Gaza could become “the Dubai of the Mediterranean,” and a confederation model is presented as an alternative to the failed Oslo logic of the two‑state solution.

According to this vision, Palestinian refugees forcibly displaced during the ongoing Nakba may return as Palestinian citizens to the West Bank or Gaza, whereas in Israel they may be granted only residency rights. Their “rights” inside Israel will be analogous to those afforded to Israeli Jewish colonizers living in the West Bank: they would retain their Israeli citizenship and be permitted to reside in the West Bank not as citizens, but as residents, provided they accept Palestinian sovereignty.

Palestinian refugees forcibly expelled from their homeland are thus granted the same package of rights inside Israel as those guaranteed to West Bank settlers inside a future Palestinian state. According to this vision, Palestinian refugees may return to Haifa, Yaffa, Safad, and Lydda as tolerated guests, not as beneficiaries of the right to self-determination in the homeland from which Israel had expelled them. While they might be allowed to reside there and vote in municipal elections, they would have no right to benefit from the land and resources that belonged to them before the Nakba for the development of their communities. Nor would they be recognized as part of the political community entrusted with determining the political, economic, and cultural future of their own homeland.

Bartov misses how relegating Palestinian refugees to a status comparable to that of West Bank settlers — active participants in a criminal settlement policy — reaffirms a colonial logic, especially when this vision says nothing about restitution or reparations.

It is telling that Bartov draws on a recent scheme formulated by Scheindlin, an Israeli Jew who grew up in the United States, even though a Palestinian alternative exists: the plan by the Palestine Land Society, under the leadership of Salman Abu Sitta. It contains detailed and viable plans for refugee return, developed in consultation with refugees and their descendants, that allow return inside the Green Line without requiring any major relocation of Israelis.

“Alleviating the fear of demographic imbalances,” as Bartov puts it, lies at the heart of the plan that he supports. In practical terms, this means that more than thirteen million Palestinians would be granted 22 percent of Mandatory Palestine to exercise their collective national aspirations and rights, while approximately two million Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship are reduced to a minority, not an indigenous group entitled to self-determination.

A similar position has been adopted by the political movement Land for All. In its program, the movement affirms that the State of Palestine would have the sovereign power to grant citizenship to Palestinian refugees. Upon receiving Palestinian citizenship, refugees would be able to travel freely to Israel “for work, tourism, and residence.” More importantly, to avoid “inundation,” an agreement would be reached on the number of Palestinian refugees eligible for residency in Israel.

Such arrangements would secure a body politic where Israeli Jews remain a majority within 78 percent of historic Palestine, controlling its natural resources. This scheme reenacts the logic of Jewish supremacy that Zionists have long invoked to justify the forced displacement and political and physical elimination of Palestinians. The language of demography is the language of dominance.

Jewish Supremacist Frameworks

It is not surprising, then, that Bartov hails Israel’s Declaration of Independence as a missed opportunity, failing to see how it officially established a regime of Jewish supremacy by excluding Palestinians from its “We the People.” It recognizes only the exclusive natural right of the Jewish people to the land, as if Mandatory Palestine were terra nullius. Palestinians who had survived the Nakba and remained in what became Israel are treated merely as “minorities,” nominally entitled not to collective national or sovereign rights but only to “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex.”

One might have expected the genocidal escalation of the Zionist settler‑colonial project to expose the catastrophic implications of this logic of supremacy, leading critics of Israel to abandon it once and for all. Instead, we are once again confronted with attempts to prioritize the security concerns of the colonizers at the expense of the colonized, now articulated through the language of demography. The security concerns of the colonized — and the imperative of providing the victims of colonial genocidal violence with the international legal guarantees of non‑repetition — are either entirely absent or, at best, relegated to the margins.

Bartov concludes his discussion of this vision with a rather odd comment on how, absent serious US pressure on Israel, Germany could serve as the main force pushing Israel in this direction. The reality is that Germany has worked mostly to push Israel in the genocide direction — by providing Israel with military support, depicting Palestinians as Nazis, and violently silencing and shutting down pro-Palestinian activism, including police violence against Palestinians and anti-Zionist Jews on the streets of German cities. The ongoing case in the ICJ that Nicaragua brought against Germany in March 2024 for complicity with Israel’s genocide in Gaza (which Bartov does mention) renders his comment particularly problematic.

Given this qualified recognition of the genocide in Gaza, marked by the absence of any call for legal accountability and a political vision capable of comprehensively addressing the ongoing harms of the Nakba, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the outrage expressed by Bartov and other liberals over what Israel has become is not, in fact, centered on Palestinians. Rather, it remains an effort to salvage Israel, within a Jewish supremacist framework, from what liberal Zionists, however they call themselves, view as a self‑destructive course.

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