Norman Solomon

Why “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace” Advocates Cling to Genocide Denial

By Norman Solomon

Israel’s renewed assault on Gaza comes several months after both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch issued reports concluding without equivocation that Israel was engaged in genocide. But very few members of Congress dare to acknowledge that reality, while their silence and denials scream out complicity.

In a New York Times interview last weekend, the Senate’s Democratic leader Chuck Schumer put deep moral evasion on display. Among the “slogans” that are used when criticizing Israel, he said, “The one that bothers me the most is genocide. Genocide is described as a country or some group tries to wipe out a whole race of people, a whole nationality of people. So, if Israel was not provoked and just invaded Gaza and shot at random Palestinians, Gazans, that would be genocide. That’s not what happened.”

Schumer is wrong. The international Genocide Convention defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” -- with such actions as killing, “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” and “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

Such actions by Israel have been accompanied by clear evidence of genocidal intent -- underscored by hundreds of statements by Israeli leaders and policy shapers. Scarcely three months into the Israeli war on Gaza, scholars Raz Segal and Penny Green pointed out, a database compiled by the Law for Palestine human rights organization “meticulously documents and collates 500 statements that embody the Israeli state’s intention to commit genocide and incitement to genocide since October 7, 2023.”

Those statements “by people with command authority -- state leaders, war cabinet ministers and senior army officers -- and by other politicians, army officers, journalists and public figures reveal the widespread commitment in Israel to the genocidal destruction of Gaza.”

Since March 2, the United Nations reports, “Israeli authorities have halted the entry of all lifesaving supplies, including food, medicine, fuel and cooking gas, for 2.1 million people.” Now, Israel’s horrendous crusade to destroy Palestinian people in Gaza -- using starvation as a weapon of war and inflicting massive bombardment on civilians -- has resumed after a two-month ceasefire.

On Tuesday, children were among the more than 400 people killed by Israeli airstrikes, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proclaimed that “this is only the beginning.”

It’s almost impossible to find a Republican in Congress willing to criticize the pivotal U.S. backing for Israel’s methodical killing of civilians. It’s much easier to find GOP lawmakers who sound bloodthirsty.

A growing number of congressional Democrats -- still way too few -- have expressed opposition. In mid-November, 17 Senate Democrats and two independents voted against offensive arms sales to Israel. But in reality, precious few Democratic legislators really pushed to impede such weapons shipments until after last November’s election. Deference to President Biden was the norm as he actively enabled the genocide to continue.

This week, renewal of Israel’s systematic massacres of Palestinian civilians has hardly sparked a congressional outcry. Silence or platitudes have been the usual.

For “pro-Israel, pro-peace” J Street, the largest and most influential liberal Zionist organization in the United States, evasions have remained along with expressions of anguish. On Tuesday the group’s founder and president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, issued a statement decrying “the decision by Netanyahu to reignite this horrific war” and calling for use of “all possible leverage to pressure each side to restore the ceasefire.” But, as always, J Street did not call for the U.S. government to stop providing the weapons that make the horrific war possible.

That’s where genocide denial comes in. For J Street, as for members of Congress who’ve kept voting to enable the carnage with the massive U.S.-to-Israel weapons pipeline, support for that pipeline requires pretending that genocide isn’t really happening.

While writing an article for The Nation (“Has J Street Gone Along With Genocide?”), I combed through 132 news releases from J Street between early October 2023 and the start of the now-broken ceasefire in late January of this year. I found that on the subject of whether Israel was committing genocide, J Street “aligned itself completely with the position of the U.S. and Israeli governments.”

J Street still maintains the position that it took last May, when the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to halt its military offensive in Rafah. “J Street continues to reject the allegation of genocide in this case,” a news release said.

It would be untenable to publicly acknowledge the reality of Israeli genocide while continuing to support shipping more weaponry for the genocide. That’s why those who claim to be “pro-peace” while supporting more weapons for war must deny the reality of genocide in Gaza.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," includes an afterword about the Gaza war.

Has J Street Gone Along With Genocide?

By Norman Solomon / The Nation

Since its founding in 2008, the advocacy group J Street has had a consistent motto: “pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy.” In practice, this has meant resolute backing for a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine, and consistent criticism of the extremist policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Along the way, J Street has remained closely allied with the Democratic Party, raising almost $15 million for Democratic candidates during the last election cycle and taking credit as the “largest Jewish organizational fundraiser for Kamala Harris.”

But J Street’s importance goes far beyond the group’s fundraising prowess. Its status as an unabashedly liberal Zionist group—in contrast with the ever-more-hawkish AIPAC—has allowed it to play a unique political role on Capitol Hill. Whether accused of being insufficiently or excessively loyal to Israel, Democratic lawmakers can use their alignment with J Street as a handy shield. Notably, during President Obama’s second term, J Street helped push the Iran nuclear deal through Congress despite intense opposition from AIPAC and other hawks. The White House official in charge of gaining approval for the agreement, Ben Rhodes, later recalled that “J Street was one of the most effective organizations that supported the Iran deal because they had a large grassroots network and growing clout on the Hill.”

But, as with liberal Zionism itself, the flaws in J Street’s approach have become more and more apparent over the years. The group rarely used its aforementioned clout to raise critical questions about recurring Israeli assaults on Gaza. And the relentless brutality of the Israeli assault on Gaza that began in response to the October 7 Hamas attack left J Street floundering for a coherent message.

Routinely, while calling for the release of the Israeli hostages, the organization also expressed concern about the deaths and suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. But none of J Street’s 132 news releases between October 7 and the start of the ceasefire in late January 2025 called for an end to shipments of the US bombs and weapons that were killing those civilians while enforcing Israel’s policy of using starvation as a weapon of war—a glaring omission for a group that declares itself to be “pro-peace.” It was as if J Street thought that vague humanistic pleas could paper over these gaping cracks in its stance.

However, J Street felt comfortable taking a firm line on the question of whether Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. Here, it aligned itself completely with the position of the US and Israeli governments.  In mid-January 2024, when oral arguments ended at the International Court of Justice in the case brought by South Africa that charged the Israeli government with violating the Genocide Convention in Gaza, a news release declared that “J Street rejects the allegation of genocide against the State of Israel.” Four months later, on May 24, J Street responded quickly when the ICJ ordered Israel to “immediately halt its military offensive” in Rafah. “J Street continues to reject the allegation of genocide in this case,” a news release said.

That statement from J Street came ten days after the publication of an article by Aryeh Neier, a founder of Human Rights Watch, who wrote: “I am now persuaded that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.” Many other experts, including Omer Bartov, the Israeli-American professor seen as the world’s leading scholar of genocide, agreed. But this was a bridge too far for J Street. 

In a statement last December, J Street’s founder and president Jeremy Ben-Ami harked back to what he described as Israel’s “promise as a proud, just, peaceful democratic homeland not just for the Jewish people, but for all who live there.” He called for following “the path that allows Israel to remain true to its founding values of pluralism, equality, freedom and justice, and a commitment to liberal democracy.” Such messages are not only conveniently unmoored from history (Palestinians would, to say the least, likely take issue with the idea that Israel was ever conceived as a homeland for them). They are also, crucially, in sync with denial about the present-day realities of Israel, a state that grows more committed to apartheid, occupation, and ethnic cleansing with each passing year.

[Click here to read full article on The Nation website.]

How the Warfare State Paved the Way for a Trumpist Autocracy

By Norman Solomon / TomDispatch

Donald Trump’s power has thrived on the economics, politics, and culture of war. The runaway militarism of the last quarter-century was a crucial factor in making President Trump possible, even if it goes virtually unmentioned in mainstream media and political discourse. That silence is particularly notable among Democratic leaders, who have routinely joined in bipartisan messaging to boost the warfare state that fueled the rise of Trumpism.

Trump first ran for president nearly a decade and a half after the “Global War on Terror” began in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The crusade’s allure had worn off. The national mood was markedly different than in the era when President George W. Bush insisted that “our responsibility” was to “rid the world of evil.”

Working-class Americans had more modest goals for their government. Distress festered as income inequality widened and economic hardships worsened, while federal spending on war, the Pentagon budget, and the “national security” state continued to zoom upward. Even though the domestic effects of protracted warfare were proving to be enormous, multilayered, and deeply alienating, elites in Washington scarcely seemed to notice.

Donald Trump, however, did notice.

Pundits were shocked in 2015 when Trump mocked the war record of Republican Senator John McCain. The usual partisan paradigms were further upended during the 2016 presidential campaign when Trump denounced his opponent, Hillary Clinton, as “trigger happy.” He had a point. McCain, Clinton, and their cohort weren’t tired of U.S. warfare — in fact, they kept glorifying it — but many in non-affluent communities had grown sick of its stateside consequences.

Repeated deployments of Americans to war zones had taken their toll. The physical and emotional wounds of returning troops were widespread. And while politicians were fond of waxing eloquent about “the fallen,” the continual massive spending for war and preparations for more of it depleted badly needed resources at home.

Status-Quo Militarism

President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton represented the status quo that Trump ran against and defeated. Like them, he was completely insulated from the harsh boomerang effects of the warfare state. Unlike them, he sensed how to effectively exploit the discontent and anger it was causing.

Obama was not clueless. He acknowledged some downsides to endless war in a much-praised speech during his second term in office. “Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue,” he affirmed at the National Defense University. “But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.”

New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer hailed that instance of presidential oratory in a piece touting Obama’s “anguish over the difficult trade-offs that perpetual war poses to a free society.” But such concerns were fleeting at the White House, while sparking little interest from mainstream journalists. Perpetual war had become wallpaper in the media echo chamber.