What a Different Pro-Israel Position Actually Requires

In the first essay in this series, I argued that one reason Israel has become so difficult to discuss in Black political circles is that “pro-Israel” is often treated as though it describes a single political position. It does not. The phrase tells us remarkably little until we know what someone believes about borders, settlements, Palestinian sovereignty, Jerusalem, refugees, Gaza, Hamas, American military assistance and the relationship between Israeli security and Palestinian political freedom.

J Street is worth examining because it answers those questions from a position that is explicitly Zionist and pro-Israel while differing substantially from important parts of the Israeli right. It supports Jewish national self-determination and Israel’s existence as a democratic national home for the Jewish people, but it also recognizes Palestinian national self-determination and argues that Israel’s future as both Jewish and democratic requires an end to permanent occupation and the creation of a viable Palestinian state.[1]

That does not establish that J Street’s proposed solution would work. A position does not become correct merely because it lies between competing ideological poles. The useful question is more demanding: what would this form of pro-Israel politics actually require, what problems is it attempting to solve, and where are its weaknesses?

Two National Projects

J Street begins with a proposition that distinguishes it from both anti-Zionism and forms of Israeli nationalism that reject meaningful Palestinian sovereignty. Jews possess a right to national self-determination in Israel, and Palestinians possess a right to national self-determination in a Palestinian state. J Street therefore envisions two national projects rather than the political disappearance of either one.[1]

That premise has consequences. Israel would continue to exist as a Jewish national home. Palestinians would acquire a sovereign political home of their own. Neither population would be expected to abandon its national identity as the price of peace.

This framework does not eliminate the most difficult disputes. It instead places limits on how they can be resolved. If both national projects are legitimate, neither side can resolve the conflict simply by absorbing all the territory and permanently subordinating the other population.

That principle becomes especially important when religious attachment to the land enters the argument.

Sacred Attachment and Political Sovereignty

There is a theological question beneath the political dispute. I have written elsewhere about what I call “divine deeds,” the recurring human tendency to transform a claim about God’s relationship to a people and a land into a permanent human title capable of settling contemporary political boundaries.

Christians should approach such arguments carefully. Scripture certainly contains divine promises concerning land, people and covenant. Yet Scripture also complicates claims of unlimited human ownership. Leviticus 25:23 declares that the land ultimately belongs to God, while Psalm 24 begins with the affirmation that “the earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it.”

Those texts do not determine modern international borders. They do suggest a distinction between sacred attachment and unlimited political possession.

The Jewish connection to the land of Israel is not a modern invention. Jewish religious, historical and cultural attachment to the land long predates political Zionism, while modern Zionism itself emerged in the nineteenth century. Theodor Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, decades before the Holocaust, as part of a political movement seeking a secure Jewish national home.[2]

Acknowledging that history does not require concluding that Jewish historical and religious attachment extinguishes Palestinian claims to political self-determination. The two propositions can coexist: Jews have a profound and legitimate historical relationship to the land, and Palestinians also possess a national history, political identity and attachment to it.

That is where I draw the distinction. Sacred attachment can establish the seriousness of a people’s claim without functioning as an unlimited modern property deed. My difficulty is therefore not with Jewish self-determination. It is with any political arrangement in which one people’s self-determination can be maintained only through the permanent denial of another people’s comparable political rights.

J Street reaches a similar political conclusion by a different route. It argues that Israel cannot indefinitely remain Jewish, democratic and in permanent control of all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Its preferred answer is territorial partition and Palestinian statehood.[1]

Borders and Settlements

J Street’s longstanding position is that the border between Israel and a future Palestinian state should be based broadly on the pre-1967 lines with mutually agreed land swaps.[3] Such a formula does not require every Israeli living beyond the Green Line to leave. It allows negotiations over incorporating some settlement areas into Israel while providing compensating territory to the Palestinian state.

The underlying principle is more important than the exact cartography. Settlements would not unilaterally determine the final border. The border would emerge from negotiation, and the West Bank would not simply be absorbed permanently into Israel.

That is also why J Street opposes continuing settlement expansion and annexation. Its stated position is that such policies progressively undermine the territorial basis for Palestinian statehood and, in its view, jeopardize Israel’s ability to remain both Jewish and democratic.[1]

Supporters of settlements offer different arguments. Some emphasize Jewish historical and religious connections to Judea and Samaria; others stress strategic depth and security. Critics focus on the fragmentation of Palestinian territory, the difficulty of creating a viable contiguous Palestinian state, and the increasingly complicated political and legal arrangements produced by long-term control of the West Bank.

The importance of J Street’s position is not that it settles those competing claims. It demonstrates that opposition to settlement expansion need not rest upon denying Jewish history in the West Bank or Israel’s legitimacy. It can arise from a different judgment about what territorial arrangement best protects both Israeli self-determination and Palestinian sovereignty.

Jerusalem

Jerusalem exposes the limits of slogans more quickly than almost any other issue. Israelis and Palestinians both claim it as a capital, while Jews, Christians and Muslims attach profound religious significance to places concentrated within a very small geographical area.

J Street has historically supported Israeli sovereignty over predominantly Jewish parts of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and Palestinian sovereignty over predominantly Palestinian parts of East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state, with negotiated arrangements protecting access to the Old City and holy sites.[3]

That formula is simple to state and enormously difficult to implement. Neighborhoods are not uniformly separated. Religious sites carry historical, archaeological and national meanings far beyond their physical size. Questions of municipal administration, policing, residency, movement and sovereignty intersect within a few miles.

The value of the proposal is therefore not that it makes Jerusalem uncomplicated. It rejects the assumption that complexity can be resolved simply by giving permanent unilateral authority to one side. J Street instead treats Jerusalem as a final-status question requiring negotiated sovereignty and guaranteed access.

Refugees and the Limits of Maximal Claims

The Palestinian refugee question reaches directly into the founding narratives of both peoples. UNRWA reports that approximately 750,000 Palestinians became refugees in connection with the 1948 conflict and today recognizes millions of their descendants as eligible for its services.[4]

For Palestinians, the refugee issue is bound to dispossession, family history and national memory. For many Israeli Jews, however, an unrestricted return of millions of Palestinian descendants to sovereign Israel rather than to a Palestinian state would raise an entirely different question: whether Israel could remain a Jewish national home.

J Street’s traditional framework attempts to reconcile those claims through a combination of resettlement principally in a Palestinian state, compensation, third-country options and a limited or symbolic form of family reunification in Israel.[3]

That arrangement would leave some people dissatisfied on both sides. Palestinians who understand return as an individual right that cannot be bargained away may regard it as insufficient. Israelis who deny responsibility for the refugee problem may object to compensation or return of any kind.

That is not incidental to the proposal. It demonstrates the central problem of negotiated settlement: the maximal version of each national narrative cannot be implemented simultaneously. A two-state framework therefore requires compromises not merely over territory but over the meanings attached to history itself.

The Security Objection

The most formidable Israeli objection to Palestinian statehood is not theological but practical: security.

Israel completed its unilateral disengagement from Gaza in September 2005, removing its settlers and permanent military presence inside the territory while retaining important forms of control over Gaza’s access and perimeter. Hamas then won the Palestinian legislative elections in January 2006 and seized control of Gaza from Fatah in 2007 after violent conflict between the factions. Palestinian armed groups fired rockets toward Israel before and after the disengagement, and Hamas subsequently developed a much larger military capacity. The trajectory culminated, though not in any simple causal sense, in the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack.[5]

For Israelis who once believed territorial withdrawal could reduce conflict, the Gaza experience created a powerful security argument against assuming that withdrawal from territory will necessarily produce peace. Any serious proposal for Palestinian sovereignty has to engage that experience rather than dismiss it.

J Street consequently does not describe Palestinian statehood as unilateral Israeli withdrawal followed by hope. Its proposals link Palestinian sovereignty to security arrangements, the disarmament of Hamas, alternative Palestinian security institutions, international participation and continuing mechanisms intended to protect Israel.[6]

No security architecture can guarantee that a future Palestinian state would never threaten Israel. States rarely receive such guarantees from history. The competing political problem, however, is equally real. If Palestinian sovereignty can be postponed indefinitely whenever absolute Israeli security cannot be guaranteed, then millions of Palestinians can also be left indefinitely without a sovereign political future.

A serious framework must therefore confront two risks simultaneously: the risk to Israelis if Palestinian sovereignty produces new security threats, and the political and moral consequences of permanent Palestinian statelessness. Treating either one as the only legitimate concern avoids rather than resolves the problem.

Hamas and the Future of Gaza

J Street’s current Gaza policy is explicit that Hamas should not remain Gaza’s armed governing authority. Its 2026 regional roadmap calls for Hamas’s disarmament, alternative Palestinian security and governance arrangements, Gaza reconstruction, Israeli withdrawal and eventual Palestinian self-government.[6] In July 2026, J Street welcomed the announcement of a phased disarmament roadmap while acknowledging that implementation remained uncertain and contested.[7]

This separates the question of Palestinian statehood from the question of Hamas rule. Supporting Palestinian national self-determination need not entail accepting Hamas as the institution that governs it.

The difficult part begins after that distinction is made. Any alternative Palestinian institution would need enough domestic legitimacy to govern, enough administrative capacity to deliver services, enough security capability to prevent rival armed organizations from exercising independent force, and sufficient international credibility to attract reconstruction assistance. It would also have to function while meeting Israeli security requirements without appearing to Palestinians merely as an instrument for enforcing Israeli preferences.

Those requirements lead directly to the Palestinian Authority.

The Palestinian Authority Problem

The Palestinian Authority presents one of the weakest links in many versions of the two-state argument. Freedom House’s 2025 assessment noted that the PA continued to operate under an expired presidential mandate, lacked a functioning elected legislature and faced longstanding problems of corruption, transparency and political legitimacy. Palestinian presidential elections have not been held since 2005, while legislative elections have not occurred since 2006.[8]

J Street’s answer is Palestinian institutional reform. Its recent policy proposals call for anti-corruption measures, stronger fiscal accountability, renewed elections, security-sector professionalization and governance reforms capable of producing more representative Palestinian leadership.[9]

Those recommendations are necessary on paper and difficult in practice. Governments do not become legitimate because foreign diplomats declare them “reformed.” Legitimacy has to be experienced by the governed. Institutions must function. Corruption must diminish. Security services must command public confidence. Elections must offer meaningful political choices, and citizens have to believe political participation can change their circumstances.

State-building requires far more than international recognition, a flag and formally defined borders. A Palestinian state unable to govern itself effectively would create serious problems both for Palestinians and for Israeli security. Any two-state proposal that treats Palestinian institutional capacity as a secondary matter is therefore incomplete.

American Security Assistance

American military assistance once appeared to place J Street fairly neatly between advocates of unconditional support and advocates of a broad arms embargo. Its more recent position is more complicated and should be described accurately.

In early 2026, J Street continued to support U.S. security assistance to Israel while calling for oversight and the enforcement of U.S. laws governing arms transfers. By April and June, however, the organization had gone further, calling for a responsible phaseout of direct American financial subsidies for Israeli arms purchases while maintaining a broader U.S.-Israel security partnership involving missile defense, intelligence, defense technology and other areas of mutual interest.[10]

J Street simultaneously argues that future arms sales and security cooperation should be governed by the same U.S. legal standards applied to other partners and that particular arms transfers may be restricted when the recipient does not comply with those standards or when the weapons would be used for policies Washington opposes.[10]

This is materially different from either abandoning Israel’s security or treating the provision of American military support as automatically exempt from congressional or legal scrutiny. It reflects a broader attempt to separate support for Israel’s security from support for every Israeli government policy.

Because American funds, weapons and laws are involved, these questions properly belong within American public-policy debate. Disagreement about the terms of American assistance does not itself answer the prior question of whether Israel has a right to exist or to defend its population.

From Two States to Twenty-Three

J Street’s most significant recent reframing is its “23-state solution.” The phrase does not mean creating twenty-three new countries. It describes an effort to embed an Israeli-Palestinian settlement within a broader regional agreement joining Israel, a future Palestinian state and the Arab states in political recognition, security cooperation and economic integration.[11]

The framework builds upon precedents that already exist. Israel signed a peace treaty with Egypt in 1979 and with Jordan in 1994. More recently, the Abraham Accords produced or advanced formal relations between Israel and several Arab states.[12] J Street’s argument is that regional normalization can be expanded further, but that durable regional integration ultimately requires addressing rather than bypassing Palestinian statehood.[11]

The attraction of this approach is its attempt to alter incentives. Israeli territorial compromise would be linked not simply to bilateral assurances from Palestinian leaders but to broader regional recognition, security cooperation and economic relationships. Palestinians, meanwhile, would negotiate within a framework in which Arab governments had a direct interest in making Palestinian institutions and sovereignty succeed.

The regional approach does not eliminate the bilateral questions. Borders, refugees, settlements, Jerusalem, security arrangements and governance would still have to be negotiated. It changes the scale on which those negotiations occur.

Whether that enlarged framework makes compromise more achievable remains uncertain. But it is more substantial than simply renaming the traditional two-state formula.

The Cost of the Middle

Middle positions are sometimes defended merely because they appear more reasonable than the positions on either side. That is not enough. Moderation is not evidence, and occupying the political center does not make a policy workable.

The serious case for this framework is different. It recognizes that both national movements would have to surrender important parts of their maximal aspirations.

Israel would have to relinquish claims to permanent political control over much of the West Bank and accept genuine Palestinian sovereignty. Palestinians would have to accept an Israel that remains a national home for the Jewish people rather than imagining Palestinian liberation as requiring Israel’s disappearance. Most Palestinian refugees would not physically return to homes within sovereign Israel. Some Israeli settlers might have to relocate or live under arrangements established by a final agreement. Jerusalem would require divided or shared sovereign arrangements rather than exclusive possession. Hamas could not continue as an independent armed power, while Palestinian political institutions would require substantial reform. Israel, in turn, would have to accept that security cannot become a permanent rationale for denying Palestinian sovereignty.

None of those concessions is trivial. That is precisely what makes the proposal worth examining rather than dismissing as easy centrism. Its premise is that neither national movement is disappearing and that political victory cannot realistically consist of eliminating the other one’s national project.

The Question Beneath the Policy

After working through borders, Jerusalem, settlements, refugees, security, Hamas, Palestinian governance and American assistance, the proposition beneath J Street’s position becomes clearer. Neither Israelis nor Palestinians can realize the maximal territorial and political aspirations of their national movements without severely constraining the aspirations of the other.

That proposition does not prove that two states remain achievable. It does not demonstrate that Israeli voters will accept the territorial and security risks involved, that Palestinian politics can produce institutions capable of governing a state, or that leaders on either side currently possess the authority necessary to reach and implement such an agreement.

It does identify the problem every alternative must answer. Jewish national self-determination and Palestinian national self-determination now make claims upon the same land, while Israeli security and Palestinian freedom are too often treated as though recognizing one necessarily requires diminishing the other.

For Black Americans and American Jews, those questions arrive carrying different histories. Black Americans may recognize displacement, unequal power and the absence of political control in the Palestinian experience. Jews bring memories of persecution, expulsion, statelessness, antisemitism and genocide, as well as a centuries-old attachment to the land and a modern national movement shaped in part by the conviction that Jewish security cannot depend entirely upon the protection of others.

Those histories need not invalidate one another. But they can cause people who believe they are discussing the same conflict to hear very different moral claims. A Black American speaking about Palestinian statelessness may believe he is describing an injustice of unequal power. A Jewish American hearing the same argument may fear that concern for Palestinian freedom is becoming a challenge to Jewish national self-determination itself.

That takes us beyond the policy questions examined in this essay. Borders, settlements, Jerusalem, refugees, Hamas, Palestinian governance and security arrangements matter enormously, but another question remains: whether Black Americans and American Jews can confront these issues from different historical experiences without allowing disagreement over Israel and Palestine to become estrangement from one another.

That is the question of the final essay.

Notes

1. J Street, “Mission & Principles,” accessed September 30, 2026. J Street affirms Jewish and Palestinian rights to national homes, supports a negotiated resolution, and argues that Israel cannot remain simultaneously Jewish, democratic, and permanently in control of all territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
2. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Holocaust Survivors and the Establishment of the State of Israel,” accessed September 30, 2026. The museum identifies Theodor Herzl with the emergence of modern political Zionism and notes his convening of the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897.
3. J Street, framework for a negotiated Israeli-Palestinian agreement. The organization has advocated borders based on pre-1967 lines with agreed land swaps, Jewish areas of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and Palestinian areas as Palestine’s capital, protected access to holy sites, and refugee arrangements involving a Palestinian state, compensation and limited family reunification.
4. United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, “Palestine Refugees,” accessed September 30, 2026. UNRWA states that it began operations serving approximately 750,000 Palestine refugees and that approximately 5.9 million registered descendants are currently eligible for its services.
5. U.S. Department of State, “Completion of Israeli Withdrawal From Gaza,” September 12, 2005; Council on Foreign Relations, “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Timeline.” The sources document Israel’s 2005 Gaza disengagement, Hamas’s 2006 electoral victory, its 2007 seizure of Gaza and the broader chronology of rocket attacks and political conflict.
6. J Street Policy Center, “A Roadmap to the 23-State Solution,” March 2026. The roadmap calls for addressing Gaza’s humanitarian crisis, reconstruction, disarming and replacing Hamas as an armed governing force, Israeli withdrawal and Palestinian self-government.
7. J Street, “J Street Welcomes Announcement of Hamas Agreement on Roadmap to Disarmament, Calls for Full Implementation by Israel and Hamas,” July 31, 2026.
8. Freedom House, “West Bank: Freedom in the World 2025.” The report documents the absence of Palestinian presidential elections since 2005 and legislative elections since 2006, the lack of a functioning elected legislature, and concerns about corruption, transparency and political legitimacy.
9. J Street, “Why the United States Should Recognize Palestine,” and “J Street’s Policy Agenda for the Trump Administration.” The proposals call for anti-corruption reforms, renewed elections, fiscal transparency, security-sector professionalization and more representative Palestinian institutions.
10. J Street Policy Center, “Reassessing the US-Israel Security Relationship,” April 2026; J Street, “J Street’s Position on US-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation and the Future of the Security Relationship,” June 4, 2026. J Street proposes phasing out direct U.S. financial subsidies for Israeli arms purchases while retaining broader security cooperation and applying ordinary U.S. legal standards and oversight to arms transfers and defense arrangements.
11. J Street, “The 23-State Solution,” and “A Roadmap to the 23-State Solution—Regional Peace and a Palestinian State,” 2026. J Street describes the framework as Palestinian statehood embedded within a larger regional settlement involving Israel and the Arab states.
12. U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, documentation of the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, March 26, 1979; U.S. Department of State materials on the Israel-Jordan Treaty of Peace; J Street’s regional framework discusses the later normalization process represented by the Abraham Accords.