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]

For Black Americans who have largely encountered the debate as a choice between defending Israel and defending Palestinian rights, that matters because J Street rejects the binary. That does not establish that its proposed solution would work. Moderation is not evidence. The more demanding question is what this form of pro-Israel politics actually requires, what problems it attempts to solve, and where its weaknesses lie.

Two National Projects

J Street begins with a proposition that separates 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.[1]

Israel would therefore continue to exist as a Jewish national home, while 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.

That does not settle the hardest disputes, but it places a limit on how they can be resolved. If both national projects are legitimate, neither side can settle the conflict simply by absorbing all the territory and permanently subordinating the other population.

Sacred Attachment and Political Sovereignty

J Street reaches its political position through policy analysis. My own route to a similar conclusion begins with theology.

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 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, and political Zionism long predates the Holocaust. Theodor Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897 as part of a movement seeking a secure Jewish national home.[2] But acknowledging Jewish historical and religious attachment does not require concluding that it extinguishes Palestinian claims to political self-determination.

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 arguing that Israel cannot indefinitely remain Jewish, democratic and in permanent control of all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.[1]

Borders, Settlements and Jerusalem

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] That formula could incorporate some settlement areas into Israel while providing compensating territory to a Palestinian state. Its central principle is that settlements should not unilaterally determine the final border or become the mechanism by which the West Bank is permanently absorbed.

Supporters of settlements cite Jewish historical and religious connections to Judea and Samaria and concerns about strategic depth and security. Critics emphasize the fragmentation of Palestinian territory and the difficulty of creating a viable state under conditions of continuing settlement growth. J Street’s position demonstrates that opposition to settlement expansion need not depend 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 presents the same dilemma in concentrated form. 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]

No formula makes Jerusalem simple. The point is that its complexity cannot be resolved merely by granting permanent unilateral authority to one side.

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 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 raises a different question: whether Israel could remain a Jewish national home.

J Street’s traditional framework attempts to reconcile those claims through resettlement principally in a Palestinian state, compensation, third-country options and a limited or symbolic form of family reunification in Israel.[3] Neither side would receive the maximal version of its claim.

That is not incidental. It reveals the central problem of negotiated settlement: the maximal versions of the two national narratives cannot be implemented simultaneously.

Security, Hamas and Palestinian Governance

The most formidable Israeli objection to Palestinian statehood is 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 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 later 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, Gaza created a powerful argument against assuming that withdrawal will necessarily produce peace. Any serious proposal for Palestinian sovereignty has to engage that experience.

J Street consequently does not describe Palestinian statehood as unilateral Israeli withdrawal followed by hope. 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 a phased disarmament roadmap while acknowledging that implementation remained uncertain and contested.[7]

Supporting Palestinian national self-determination therefore need not mean accepting Hamas as the institution that governs it.

But removing Hamas raises the question of what replaces it. Any Palestinian government would need domestic legitimacy, administrative capacity, credible security institutions and enough international confidence to attract reconstruction and investment. That leads directly to the weakness of the Palestinian Authority.

Freedom House’s 2025 assessment noted that the PA continued 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 institutional reform: anti-corruption measures, stronger fiscal accountability, renewed elections, security-sector professionalization and more representative Palestinian leadership.[9] Those proposals are necessary on paper but difficult in practice. Governments do not become legitimate because foreign diplomats declare them reformed. Legitimacy has to be experienced by the governed.

The hard problem is therefore two-sided. No security architecture can guarantee that a future Palestinian state would never threaten Israel. But if Palestinian sovereignty can be postponed indefinitely whenever absolute Israeli security cannot be guaranteed, millions of Palestinians can also be left indefinitely without a sovereign political future.

A serious framework must confront both risks.

American Security Assistance

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

It also 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 transfers may be restricted when those standards are not met.[10]

That position is materially different from either abandoning Israel’s security or treating American military support as automatically exempt from congressional or legal scrutiny. It attempts to separate support for Israel’s security from support for every policy of an Israeli government.

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 Arab states in political recognition, security cooperation and economic integration.[11]

The framework builds upon precedents that already exist: Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan and the more recent normalization process represented by the Abraham Accords.[12] J Street’s argument is that regional normalization can be expanded, but that durable integration ultimately requires addressing rather than bypassing Palestinian statehood.[11]

The attraction of this approach is that it changes the incentive structure. Israeli territorial compromise would be connected not simply to assurances from Palestinian leaders but to broader regional recognition, security cooperation and economic relationships. Palestinians 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 disputes over borders, refugees, Jerusalem, security or governance. It changes the scale on which they are negotiated.

The Cost of the Middle

Middle positions are sometimes defended merely because they appear more reasonable than positions on either side. That is not enough. The serious case for this framework is that it recognizes that both national movements would have to surrender important parts of their maximal aspirations.

Israel would have to relinquish 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 and compromises over refugees, security and armed groups. Jerusalem would require negotiated rather than exclusive sovereignty. 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’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 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.

Black Americans and American Jews increasingly encounter this conflict through histories that carry enormous moral weight. 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 religious and cultural attachment to the land and a modern national movement built partly around the conviction that Jewish security cannot depend entirely upon the protection of others.

Those histories need not invalidate one another.

The more difficult intellectual task is learning to hold both long enough to ask what kind of political order could protect Jewish self-determination without making Palestinian statelessness permanent, and could protect Palestinian freedom without requiring Jews to surrender their own national self-determination or legitimate security concerns.

That is a more demanding question than whether Black Americans should become more pro-Israel or whether American Jews should become less Zionist. It asks whether Palestinian freedom and Jewish security must remain competing moral claims.

That is the question I want to take into the final essay in this series.

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 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.