Just how out of touch with reality is J Street?

What do Thomas Friedman, Rahm Emanuel, Ed Miliband and J Street have in common?

All seem convinced that they know better than Israelis what is best for Israel. They profess support for Israeli democracy yet have little patience for Israeli choices that conflict with their prescriptions. Rather than persuade Israelis, they want their governments to pressure Israel into accepting policies its citizens overwhelmingly reject.

J Street deserves particular scrutiny. Its detachment from reality was on full display in an email its president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, sent to supporters on the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre.

Ben-Ami concluded by invoking Vivian Silver:

I am reminded today of the words of J Street’s dear friend Vivian Silver, a peace activist who dedicated her life to building that shared future and was murdered on October 7: “This could be such a haven to both of our people here.” Indeed it could. That future remains possible — and we will continue to fight for it.

I had to read those words twice.

How could Ben-Ami invoke Silver’s murder as an affirmation of his worldview rather than confront what her death revealed about its assumptions? Hamas terrorists did not spare her or other Jews committed to reconciliation, because there is no possibility for a “haven” to exist where one side is determined to exterminate the other.

Has he listened to people like Irit Lahav, a peace activist from Kibbutz Nir Oz, where one in four residents were killed or kidnapped? Lahav, who drove Gazans needing medical treatment to Israeli hospitals, reportedly said, “All of the people of Gaza, all of them, hate us to a degree where they would murder babies and pillage our property with zero compunction.”

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An academic study of Kibbutz Be’eri — long associated with Israel’s peace camp — found that residents who had employed Palestinians, transported Gazans to Israeli hospitals and supported humanitarian aid felt betrayed by the very people they had sought to help.

One survivor said, “What has been shattered forever is belief in the possibility of peace.”

These are not the voices of right-wing extremists or ideological opponents of compromise. They are the voices of people who believed in precisely the future Ben-Ami continues to promise.

He and his allies filter out evidence that contradicts their conviction that peace is just one Israeli concession away. They envision a happily-ever-after in which genocidal Islamists abandon their ambitions and Palestinian leaders who have spent decades rejecting Israel’s legitimacy suddenly become reliable partners.

For J Street, the massacre was a horrific interruption on the road to peace, rather than evidence that the road itself may lead to another catastrophe. Burning Jews alive, raping women and decapitating children were not a fluke but part of a broader pathology sustained by decades of indoctrination in schools, mosques and media incitement.

J Street’s website features an article presenting Marwan Barghouti as a leader who would be “indispensable to negotiating a solution” — provided there is “a willing Israeli partner.”

Barghouti, the leader of Fatah’s terrorist Tanzim faction, is serving five consecutive life terms, plus 40 years, for murder.

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Like explorers searching for a unicorn or the Yeti, J Street and its allies keep pursuing a two-state solution that exists more convincingly in policy papers than in the Middle East’s political reality.

The two-state “solution” is anathema to Israelis who recognize it as an invitation to repeated days like Oct. 7, and to Palestinians who see it as an impediment to the erasure of Israel. A new Gallup poll found that majorities in Israel (65%) and among Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem (58%) do not support it.

J Street’s response is to insist that Israelis accept the very outcome they fear while ignoring Palestinian rejectionism. That is easier than examining Palestinian textbooks, listening to Palestinian media or confronting a political culture that has glorified martyrdom and sustained hostility toward Israel for generations.

More than 500,000 Jews live in Judea and Samaria, and 250,000 reside in eastern Jerusalem — areas that Palestinians would make Judenrein if J Street’s objective were achieved, an idea that only the enablers of antisemitism would be expected to endorse.

As I argued in an earlier column, the prerequisite for peace is not another Israeli concession but a transformation of Palestinian society. Until generations taught to regard Israel as an illegitimate intruder come to see it as a permanent neighbor, new borders will not create peace; they will create new opportunities for the slaughter of Jews.

The collapse of Oslo and the consequences of the Gaza disengagement forced Israelis to confront this reality. J Street remains committed to a narrative untouched by history.

J Street has become perhaps the most effective component of the Arab lobby, exceeding even the Qataris, thanks to its consistent attacks on Israel’s elected government, its rejection of Israel’s democratic choices when they conflict with J Street’s prescriptions, and its financial support for congressional candidates who have pledged to cut aid to Israel.

Here J Street’s “pro-Israel” rhetoric collides most sharply with its actions. It is one thing to criticize an Israeli government. It is quite another to mobilize American political and financial power to compel Israel to take security risks its own citizens believe are intolerable.

Ben-Ami’s invocation of Vivian Silver exposes the fallacy at the heart of J Street’s raison d’être. If you care about peace for Israelis, you do not promote policies that make them less secure. If you believe in democracy, you do not undermine the positions of the majority of the electorate. If you believe in a haven for Jews and Palestinians, you do not excuse, ignore or embolden the extremists who make that haven impossible.

Silver and the other peace activists murdered by Hamas deserve better than to be enlisted in a cause their killers proved false. To honor their memory, acknowledge what Oct. 7 made undeniable: Hatred of Jews cannot be appeased.

Those who lived through that horrific day learned this at unbearable cost. Those who watched from thousands of miles away have not learned it at all.

Mitchell Bard is a foreign-policy analyst and authority on US-Israel relations.