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.
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“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.”
Displaced Palestinians carry bags of humanitarian aid they received at a distribution center run by the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) in the central Gaza Strip on August 4, 2025. (AFP)
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.”
Israel has strongly rejected allegations of war crimes, insisting it does not target civilians and pointing to efforts to evacuate civilians from harm’s way and facilitate the entry of aid throughout the 22-month campaign. Israel also denies reports of starvation in the Strip. It has accused Hamas of impeding and hijacking aid deliveries.
International groups accuse Israel of failing to let in sufficient aid to prevent hunger and of showing disregard for civilian casualties.
While Israel and its defenders reject the idea that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, images of emaciated Palestinians that have surfaced in recent weeks, alongside stated aims by members of the Israeli government to cause Gazans to emigrate voluntarily, have spurred vast swaths of the US Jewish community to condemn the ongoing war.
Smoke and flames erupt from an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City, July 21, 2025. (Jehad Alshrafi/AP)Last week, Israeli novelist David Grossman claimed that Israel was committing a “genocide” in Gaza, saying in an interview with Italian newspaper La Repubblica that he did so only with “intense pain and a broken heart.”
Two human rights groups — B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights — became the first Israel-based nonprofits to level the charge last week, telling reporters at a press conference that the Jewish state was carrying out a “coordinated, deliberate action to destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip.”
US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right Georgia Republican who has previously advocated against funding to Israel and been accused of antisemitism, appeared to be the first Republican in Congress to accuse Israel of committing genocide in a post on X last week.
But while the claim has been getting traction in recent weeks, global leaders have shied from leveling the accusation, even as many have criticized Israel’s role in the enclave’s humanitarian crisis.
On Sunday, Trump rejected the characterization of Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza as a “genocide,” telling reporters, “I don’t think it’s that. They’re in a war.”
Trump continued: “Some horrible things happened on October 7. It was a horrible, horrible thing. One of the worst I’ve ever seen.”
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