Days after rejecting the declare that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the liberal Zionist advocacy and foyer group J Road, has stated he has been “persuaded” that he was unsuitable.
Ben-Ami’s about-face makes him the newest in a rising listing of distinguished 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 all through Jewish historical past, Ben-Ami recalled his mother and father’ expertise with the Holocaust and laid out Hamas’s crimes towards Israel, together with the Palestinian terror group’s October 7, 2023, assault that killed 1,200 individuals, resulted in 251 hostages and triggered the continuing warfare.
“But none of that gives any rationale for what Israel is doing now in Gaza,” wrote Ben-Ami. “Denying meals and primary requirements of life to civilians. Troopers taking pictures at civilians attempting to get meals. Destruction of your entire infrastructure of Gaza. Forcing the inhabitants into intolerably small areas. Hoping to create the circumstances below which a whole inhabitants might be forcibly displaced.”
Ben-Ami stated he was “unlikely to make use of the time period myself” resulting from his family’s expertise in the course of the Holocaust. However he stated he had nonetheless made a shift in his personal pondering.
“I can not and won’t argue any extra towards these utilizing the time period. I merely received’t defend the indefensible.”
“Till now, I’ve tried to deflect and defend when challenged to name this genocide,” he wrote. “I’ve, nonetheless, been persuaded rationally by authorized and scholarly arguments that worldwide courts will at some point discover that Israel has damaged the worldwide genocide conference.”
Displaced Palestinians carry luggage of humanitarian assist they obtained at a distribution heart run by the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Basis (GHF) within the central Gaza Strip on August 4, 2025. (AFP)
Ben-Ami’s commentary got here days after he repeatedly rejected the declare 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 pointy waning in help for Israel as claims of mass hunger within the embattled enclave have ratcheted up in current weeks.
J Road, which characterizes itself as pro-Israel and pro-peace and lobbies lawmakers in Washington to undertake insurance policies that advance a two-state answer to the Israeli-Palestinian battle, seems to be one of the distinguished Jewish American teams to legitimize the usage of the time period “genocide.”
Israel has strongly rejected allegations of warfare crimes, insisting it doesn’t goal civilians and pointing to efforts to evacuate civilians from hurt’s manner and facilitate the entry of assist all through the 22-month marketing campaign. Israel additionally denies stories of hunger within the Strip. It has accused Hamas of impeding and hijacking assist deliveries.
Worldwide teams accuse Israel of failing to let in adequate assist to forestall starvation and of exhibiting disregard for civilian casualties.
Whereas Israel and its defenders reject the concept Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, pictures of emaciated Palestinians which have surfaced in current weeks, alongside acknowledged goals by members of the Israeli authorities to trigger Gazans to to migrate voluntarily, have spurred huge swaths of the US Jewish neighborhood to sentence the continuing warfare.
Smoke and flames erupt from an Israeli airstrike in Gaza Metropolis, July 21, 2025. (Jehad Alshrafi/AP)Final 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 solely with “intense ache and a damaged coronary heart.”
Two human rights teams — B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights — turned the primary Israel-based nonprofits to level the charge last week, telling reporters at a press convention that the Jewish state was finishing up a “coordinated, deliberate motion to destroy Palestinian society within the Gaza Strip.”
US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right Georgia Republican who has beforehand advocated towards funding to Israel and been accused of antisemitism, gave the impression to be the primary Republican in Congress to accuse Israel of committing genocide in a submit on X final week.
However whereas the declare has been getting traction in current weeks, international leaders have shied from leveling the accusation, whilst many have criticized Israel’s position within the enclave’s humanitarian disaster.
On Sunday, Trump rejected the characterization of Israel’s ongoing warfare in Gaza as a “genocide,” telling reporters, “I don’t assume it’s that. They’re in a warfare.”
Trump continued: “Some horrible issues occurred on October 7. It was a horrible, horrible factor. One of many worst I’ve ever seen.”
