Israeli ambassador calls J Street a ‘cancer within Jewish community’
Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, called the liberal pro-Israel lobby “duplicitous” over its opposition to U.S. military aid to Israel
Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S., Yechiel Leiter, listens during a meeting with President Donald Trump and Lebanon’s Ambassador to the U.S. at the White House in Washington, D.C. on April 23, 2026. Photo by Brendan Smialowski/AFP
(JTA) — Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, took aim at the leading liberal pro-Israel lobby J Street on Monday, calling the group “duplicitous” and a “cancer within the Jewish community.”
Speaking at the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism meeting at Museum of the Bible in Washington, Leiter decried J Street’s recent opposition to continued U.S. military subsidies to Israel, a position that has been echoed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in recent months.
“How can you be pro-Israel and advocate for an arms embargo on a state that’s fighting a seven-front war against Iranian proxies?” Leiter said.
Leiter, a Netanyahu appointee and former settler leader, also criticized the group’s self-description as “pro-Israel, pro-peace and pro-democracy,” telling those gathered in Washington D.C. that “if they said that they were pro-Palestinian, I wouldn’t have a problem meeting with them.”
“But when you come and say in such a two-faced manner, ‘We’re pro-Israel, we’re pro democracy,’ there’s a democratically elected government in Israel,” Leiter continued. “You don’t like Netanyahu, make aliyah, vote in the next election and express yourself. Don’t say you’re ‘pro-democracy’ and decry and defy the position of the democratic government of Israel.”
Leiter’s criticism of the pro-Israel lobby comes as the group has increasingly departed from the positions of other mainstream pro-Israel groups. Last year, J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami said that he had been “persuaded” by arguments that Israel had committed a genocide in Gaza.
Ben-Ami shot back at Leiter’s remarks in a post on X Monday, writing that the Israeli ambassador should be “engaging seriously with us” instead of “calling us names.”
J Street is a longtime target of the Israeli government. In early 2023, Diaspora minister Amichai Chikli called the group a “hostile organization that harms the interests of the state of Israel” after it criticized him online.
Ben-Ami wrote Monday that the group represents a “large and growing segment of the American Jewish community that supports and cares deeply about Israel but opposes policies we believe are making it less secure and more isolated.”
“Serving effectively as Israel’s ambassador to the US requires engaging with those disagreements, not attacking the patriotism or integrity of fellow Jews,” Ben-Ami added.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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