A marca Aipac tornou-se tóxica. Poderá o seu rival “pró-Israel e pró-paz”, J Street, avançar?

“This victory belongs to J Street,” Biss declared.

The reference was to the “pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy” advocacy organization, the longtime underdog rival to Capitol Hill powerhouse Aipac. While both groups support a majority Jewish homeland in the state of Israel and favor American security assistance, J Street also backs the creation of a Palestinian state and opposes Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Biss, facing intense competition from progressive, anti-Zionist journalist Kat Abughazaleh and avowedly pro-Israel state senator Laura Fine, had embraced J Street-style centrism and emerged triumphant.

In some respects, this would appear to be the moment J Street was built for. Senior leaders say its staff has grown by 50% in the last five years, and both its budget and the number of individual donors – many disillusioned former Aipac supporters – have doubled. J Street raised $1.3m in June, its biggest monthly haul ever, according to its vice-president of political and digital strategy, Tali deGroot, and it expects to spend at least $13m in this election cycle, up from $9m in 2022.

That’s a far cry from the hundreds of millions Aipac will pump into this year’s races. But while Aipac, which was founded in 1954, often disguises political donations via innocuous sounding front groups – a strategy that tends to backfire when exposed and worse, can play into antisemitic caricatures of a shadowy cabal secretly manipulating US politics – J Street is “ridiculously committed to transparency”, deGroot said. She added that the group only raises money for candidates who publicly affiliate with it. Meanwhile, since 7 October 2023, a growing list of elected officials, including senators Amy Klobuchar, Chris Coons and Jack Reed, has sought J Street’s endorsement, some no doubt hoping to distance themselves from Aipac while maintaining a connection to the American Jewish community.

Nonetheless, the limits of J Street’s approach were amply demonstrated not long after Biss’s triumph, when a parade of J Street endorsees – Sharif Street of Pennsylvania, Tom Malinowski and Sue Altman of New Jersey, Antonio Reynoso and Dan Goldman of New York, and Diana DeGette of Colorado – were defeated by progressive challengers with more pro-Palestinian positions. (DeGette and Goldman also received help from Aipac-aligned donors.) And in the Michigan senate primary, the group’s favored candidate, Mallory McMorrow, dropped out in July after failing to gain traction with voters. It should be said that while J Street didn’t endorse Goldman opponent Brad Lander, who identifies as a liberal Zionist, it did give its official seal of “approval” to his candidacy – an example of a nuanced approach that arguably dampens its effectiveness.

J Street’s penchant for playing to the middle was again on vivid display earlier this month, when nearly half of the House Democratic caucus – including numerous J Street endorsees – voted to cut off aid to Israel. The group, which had opposed the amendment brought by Republican Thomas Massie, issued a press release that called it an “overly broad and poorly drafted political stunt”, while simultaneously hailing it for “sending a strong message … that it is time for a fundamentally different American approach to the US-Israel relationship and the region”.

While this delicate dance may be resonating with establishment Democrats and liberal donors, the Democratic electorate as a whole is rapidly moving left when it comes to Israel and is increasingly sensitive to signs of waffling. At the same time, the two-state solution the group has long championed seems increasingly remote, with nearly four in five Jewish Israelis now opposing Palestinian statehood. Given this picture, the question arises: is J Street’s brand of liberal Zionism still viable at all?

J Street was founded nearly two decades ago by Jeremy Ben-Ami, a former domestic policy adviser to Bill Clinton, who had become convinced that one of the chief obstacles to peace in the Middle East was the influence of Aipac and other hardline pro-Israel lobby groups. He had watched how the organization used campaign donations, congressional junkets and other tools of persuasion to cajole and discipline lawmakers into lining up behind Israeli government policies, however misguided and counter to US interests they might sometimes be.

Aipac was widely assumed to represent the views of the Jewish mainstream, but Ben-Ami, a seasoned political insider, knew how to read a poll: the vast majority of American Jews were, and still are, liberal Democrats who generally favored a more balanced approach to the issue.

J Street’s primary goals were twofold: to ensure that the views of this constituency were better represented in the corridors of power, and to offer political cover to lawmakers – and a newly elected Barack Obama – who might occasionally take a position contrary to Israel’s preferences.

Ben-Ami may have thought his personal background would lend him some credibility on the Israeli right: his family fled Russia for Palestine in the late 19th century, and his father, Yitshaq, an acolyte of Revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir “Ze’ev” Jabotinsky, was a key figure in the Irgun, a far-right paramilitary group (though he appears not to have taken part in the terror attacks committed by the organization, such as the King David Hotel bombing).

But the American Jewish establishment responded to his initiative with indignation. He and his colleagues were denounced as enemies of Israel, kapos, self-hating Jews and dupes. When the group sought membership in the mainstream Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, a coalition of dozens of Jewish groups, the bid was decisively rejected.

But the destruction of Gaza following the