Israel/Palestine

Jeremy Ben-Ami explains he has been ‘persuaded rationally’ by legal and scholarly arguments, stresses that though he won’t use term himself, he won’t argue against it either

By JTA and Jacob Magid
5 August 2025

Days after rejecting the claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the liberal Zionist advocacy and lobby group J Street, has said 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 US voices to lodge the accusation, which Israel denies and which US 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 recalled his parents’ experience with the Holocaust and laid out Hamas’s crimes against Israel, including the Palestinian terror group’s October 7, 2023, attack that killed 1,200 people, resulted in 251 hostages and triggered the ongoing war.

“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 during the Holocaust. But he said he had still made a shift in his own thinking.

“I cannot and will not argue any more against those using the term. I simply won’t defend the indefensible.”

“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 US 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.

J Street, which characterizes itself as pro-Israel and pro-peace and lobbies lawmakers in Washington to adopt policies that advance a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, appears to be one of the most prominent Jewish American groups to legitimize the use of the term “genocide.”

Continued @ https://www.timesofisrael.com/j-street-head-says-hes-now-convinced-israel-committing-genocide-in-gaza/