Even before October 7, Jonathan Kessler had as his screensaver the Tom Petty lyrics, “Everything changed then changed again.”
“For years, I’ve recognized that we’re living in an age of liminality,” said Kessler, who left the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, in 2021 to start Heart of a Nation, with an aim “to empower emerging American, Israeli, and Palestinian changemakers to improve their political cultures.” He already knew, he said, that “everything’s in transition.”
Even so, Kessler said, the last few weeks, following Hamas’s attack and Israel’s subsequent military operations, have been one of the most difficult, challenging periods of his life: “We’re all trying to get our bearings.”
Many liberal-minded, pro-peace Jewish groups in the United States are now finding themselves in a period of change—or, perhaps more accurately, they thought they were in one transitory moment and now find themselves in another. Many liberal Jewish organizations spent much of the past year criticizing the policies of the current government, the most far-right in Israel’s history, and encouraging American Jews more broadly to do the same. Now they’re faced with new and vexing questions: What does it mean to support Israel and support peace when Israel is at war? What does it mean to be liberal and Jewish when the Jewish state and its staunchest defenders are cracking down on dissent?
“In many ways our world has changed,” said Hadar Susskind, president and CEO of Americans for Peace Now, which exists to try to achieve a comprehensive political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But for APN, “I don’t think there’s any sort of fundamental change.” The call to “Stand with Israel,” Susskind said, “is not policy. It’s bumper sticker politics.” Does it mean, he asks, to “stand with the government? With the people? If so, which ones?”
Susskind, for his part, thinks Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government should resign immediately, not after the war, having “failed on an almost unprecedented level.” (Susskind admitted that one might not hear the same from many other American Jewish organizations.)
Other groups felt that they too are, in a way, doing the same work they were doing before.
“What’s deeply painful about all of this is just how fundamentally right everything that J Street has been saying was,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, a self-described pro-Israel, pro-peace advocacy organization. The idea that Palestinians could simply be ignored while Israel pursues normalization with other Arab countries was a “strategic failure.” That core principle and messaging, he said, remains.
“Another key to our messaging is the word ‘and,’” he said. “Feeling deep pain for the people of Israel and the people of Gaza. The vast majority of Jewish America holds a middle ground,” Ben-Ami said. That middle ground includes “support for Israel, empathy for Palestinians.” But it does not, at present, per Ben-Ami, include a cease-fire.
“A cease-fire implies that you’re coming to terms with a world post-conflict in which your adversary’s still there in charge,” Ben-Ami said. “We don’t believe that the type of future we want to see built can ever happen with Hamas still in operational control of Gaza.” Ben-Ami added that Israel should do more to save civilian lives, including the establishment of safe zones, humanitarian corridors, and humanitarian aid.
Ben-Ami believes too that this war has to conclude with the establishment of a Palestinian state (in Ben-Ami’s vision, after Hamas is eliminated, an international trusteeship led by regional partners cultivated by Israel would step in, eventually turning leadership over to a revitalized Palestinian Authority). “This violence is horrendous, but it has to have a purpose: that this be the last round of this violence,” he said.
“There was a cease-fire in place on October 7,” said Kessler, who added, “I don’t believe that we can bring the next generations to a conversation about a better future when they are looking over their shoulders at people that will stop at nothing to crush their souls. Not just Israelis, I’m thinking of Palestinians.”
Others also stopped short of calling for a cease-fire, but for different reasons.
“Cease-fire means different things to different people,” said Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of T’ruah, a network of “more than 2,300 rabbis and cantors and their communities to bring a moral voice to protecting and advancing human rights in North America, Israel, and the occupied Palestinian territories.” It could, for example, be a humanitarian pause that’s negotiated and extended. “Israel’s priority should be getting the hostages out and not endangering them further,” she said. “That does require a humanitarian pause.”
Part of the issue, she said, is that Hamas knew Israel would respond: “Any country would respond.” But Israel has to have a strategy for its response. And the same “incompetent extremists” are running the country, “and they’re still incompetent and extremists.” And so Israel is left with a situation, she said, in which a military response is justified, and there’s no military solution to the conflict, and “almost nobody trusts the people running this war.”
“It’s very easy to jump on simple slogans,” she said. “The reality on the ground is much more complicated.”
Susskind agreed that “cease-fire now” was more slogan than substance.
“But again, what does that actually mean?” You could stop the bombing and keep the blockade, and 50,000 people in Gaza would die in the coming weeks, he said. “Cease-fire” is functioning as a slogan, he said, and so instead APN has called for cessation of hostilities, a release of hostages, and humanitarian aid. On Thursday, APN sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken asking that fuel in particular be allowed to be supplied via the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, since humanitarian assistance is essentially worthless without it.
In comparison to these liberal organizations, America’s leftist Jewish groups have a different message: They are calling for a cease-fire specifically. So too are Palestinian-led groups, like the Adalah Justice Project. To them, a cease-fire—not a pause to bring aid in, but the cessation of hostilities—is the only just thing to be done at this point.
“If Palestinians are going to be killed by Israeli bombs, it doesn’t matter how much food they have in their bellies,” said Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian American writer and analyst. “More than that, the people who are arguing for a so-called humanitarian pause, whatever in the world that means, are doing so because they believe there’s some kind of military solution to this.”
And there is no military solution, Munayyer said. How long will it take before people realize that? And how many thousands of people will be killed before they do?
“The people who oppose a cease-fire do so because they feel that Israelis have a legitimate reason to eliminate Hamas,” Munayyer said. “Even if you accept that that is the case, is this something that is achievable? Most honest assessments of that question [say] it’s probably not entirely achievable, and to the extent you might get close to achieving it, it’s going to be at tremendous cost.”
Where liberal American Jewish groups see more apparent overlap with their leftist counterparts is in the conviction that pro-Palestinian speech should not be chilled.
“The idea of trying to shut down the right of people to protest and to speak who disagree with us, firing people because of the content of their views, shutting down classes and professors—it’s a really bad idea,” said Ben-Ami. “It’s a bad way to go about fighting antisemitism.”
Jacobs expressed deep concern about antisemitism on university campuses—but added that the doxing of undergraduates by full-grown adults chills speech. “People’s most charged opinions will chase them for life,” she said. “That’s inappropriate.”
For American Jews, meanwhile, Jacobs rejected the idea that one either had to support Israel without critique or be an anti- or non-Zionist and walk away. “I really reject the idea that American Jews can walk away from Israel,” she said. It’s half the Jewish population of the world. She wants to see more engagement “in a way that is consistent with our values.”
“People involved in this work have come to understand that our work is aspirational, it requires an enormous amount of resilience, and that catastrophe not only shatters worlds, it creates opportunities,” Kessler said. Even so, for the past month, the lyric playing in his head has not been the Tom Petty one on the screensaver, but comes from Leonard Cohen: “You want it darker.”
