People sit beside the shrouded corpses of relatives killed in Israeli bombing on Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, at the morgue of the al-Najjar hospital on Dec. 3. Israel carried out deadly bombardments in Gaza as international calls mounted for greater protection of civilians and the renewal of an expired truce with Palestinian militant group Hamas. Photo by Said Khatib / AFP via Getty Images

By Beth Harpaz December 7, 2023

The progressive U.S. Jewish organization J Street on Thursday said it was on the verge of announcing opposition to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, citing the toll on Palestinian civilians and the Israeli government’s refusal to lay groundwork for a long-term solution to the Palestinian conflict. 

“If we do not see evidence soon that the government of Israel is, in fact, making meaningful changes to its conduct of the war and its attitudes regarding post-war arrangements, then J Street will no longer be able to provide our organizational support for the current military campaign,” the organization said in a statement.

J Street said Israel’s refusal to heed U.S. “guardrails” by curbing its military campaign is “untenable” if it expects to continue to receive U.S. economic, military and diplomatic support. 

“This is a moment of truth for the U.S.-Israel relationship,” the group said. “White House admonitions on these critical matters are not idle suggestions to be considered and ignored or dismissed out of hand. U.S. security assistance is not an entitlement program to be provided in the form of a blank check.”

J Street describes itself as a pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy organization with a longstanding commitment to finding a “negotiated resolution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, in which Hamas murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped 240, J Street supported Israel’s right and “moral obligation” to respond militarily. 

But Israel’s resumption of “large-scale bombing” in Gaza after a temporary cease-fire during which Hamas released 105 hostages in exchange for 240 Palestinians being let out of Israeli jails, has stretched J Street’s support to its limit, the organization said. 

Officials in Gaza say Israel has now killed more than 17,000 people, most of them civilians and many of them children. J Street called the scale of suffering “unfathomable” and “morally unacceptable.”

The group said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current strategy “generates more terrorists than it eliminates, alienates nearly the entire international community and doesn’t actually advance the goals of the war.”

“We urge that Israel listen to U.S. officials and recalibrate its military approach to be more strategic, targeted and limited,” the group said, including through negotiations for freeing the remaining hostages and a working toward transitioning to governance by a multinational authority in Gaza. 

J Street said it understood the “long-term Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolution demands removal of Hamas,” which Israel has said is its rationale for waging its war on Gaza, but insisted that Israel must also embrace a “vision for the ‘day after’ the fighting that leads toward Palestinian freedom and independence.”

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