Jeremy Ben-Ami did not want Donald Trump to win the election.
J Street, the liberal Israel lobby Ben-Ami leads, accused Trump of antisemitism and undermining democracy. It raised millions for Kamala Harris. It said a Trump White House “endangers advancing a resolution between Israelis and Palestinians,” adding, “he is not a friend of Jewish-Americans supporting peace.”
Then, just before Trump took office, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire and hostage release. It was the very deal that, for months, J Street had wanted Joe Biden to accomplish. By many accounts, it was Trump who helped push it over the finish line.
Now Ben-Ami and other liberal Zionists are asking a somewhat uncomfortable question: Is the president they opposed in fact their best hope? Could he achieve a treaty with Saudi Arabia? Real progress toward a Palestinian state?
Could Donald Trump make all their dreams come true?
“He is president of the United States, and he’s expressed an interest in getting done the ultimate deal,” Ben-Ami said. “We are supportive of anybody who’s going to try to advance that kind of agenda.”
Trump isn't liberal
Of course the case against Trump being a liberal Zionist is extremely obvious: He isn’t liberal. Both his past and future ambassadors to Israel, David Friedman and Mike Huckabee, support the settlements. His Israeli-Palestinian peace plan did not include an independent Palestinian state. In his first term, he embraced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s priorities.
Some liberal Zionist leaders see all of that, and are girding for a Trump administration that will give Israel the green light to expand settlements and annex the West Bank.
And yet. Trump is the one who said the ceasefire deal “better hold.” Trump promised an end to “all wars” in his inaugural address. Trump has cultivated a reputation as a dealmaker. Trump brokered normalization agreements between Israel and four Arab countries.
Now, Trump wants an Israel-Saudi Arabia treaty. And it seems like that will only come at the price of concrete movement toward a Palestinian state, the longtime aspiration of J Street and its ideological partners.
“If at the end of four years what comes out of this is the beginning of the reconstruction of Gaza, and normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia that has a real Palestinian component, those are things liberal Zionists have wanted for years,” said Michael Koplow, the chief policy officer of the Israel Policy Forum. “He certainly could end up advancing liberal Zionist goals more than any president in recent memory.”
But Koplow is skeptical that the ceasefire deal, which requires further rounds of talks, will succeed. And he said it’s also possible that Trump greenlights the annexation of the West Bank, a longtime right-wing dream. At this stage, he said, there’s no way to know.
“He could end up doing things that liberal Zionists love and he may end up doing things liberal Zionists hate,” said Koplow, whose group favors a Palestinian state alongside Israel. “I don’t think there’s a president that had such different paths ahead of him, where either one is plausible.”
Right-wing pro-Israel fans of Trump certainly haven’t given up on him. While the ceasefire deal has unsettled many of them, they’ve noted that it could easily fall apart. The second stage of the agreement, which would see the Israeli army fully withdraw from Gaza, has yet to be negotiated. And Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partner Bezalel Smotrich opposes it, which might mean that Netanyahu’s political survival hinges on the deal failing.
If the ceasefire does fall apart, Trump’s supporters expect Israel to return to fighting — with the full support of the Trump administration. Trump himself said, shortly after his inauguration, that he was “not confident” about the ceasefire’s chances. “That’s not our war, it’s their war,” he added.
David Friedman, Trump’s former ambassador to Israel, took that as a good sign. “I think Israel has received assurances that it can go back into Gaza and re-fight the war and rid the area of Hamas, however long it takes,” he said on a recent Tikvah Fund webinar, adding that “Trump will be OK with that.”
Friedman later theorized that Trump could even support the mass emigration of Palestinians from Gaza,which Smotrich has advocated. “I think Trump could do it,” he said.
Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff sounds committed to safeguarding the ceasefire. But even if the truce does hold, an Israel-Saudi Arabia deal is still a tall order. Netanyahu has pursued a Saudi accord for years, going so far as to once promise direct flights between Tel Aviv and the Muslim holy city of Mecca.
But Saudi officials are demanding progress toward a Palestinian state as part of the deal — and over the past decade, Netanyahu has also been increasingly clear that that’s a price he won’t pay. Barely a month ago, Netanyahu’s office sent out the following official statement: “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has acted, and is acting, against the establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger the security of Israel.”
On that topic, Netanyahu appears to speak for the Israeli majority. Polls taken after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel show that only about a quarter to a third of Israelis support establishing a Palestinian state. That’s a big drop from the majority that backed Palestinian statehood as recently as 2013.
But a poll released this week shows that when the question is phrased differently, it gets overwhelming support. The Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies found that fully three-quarters of Israeli Jews support a deal that entails Saudi normalization, regional partnership to oppose Iran, and “a pathway to separation from the Palestinians.”
In a column Thursday for the Guardian, Jo-Ann Mort, a Jewish writer and communications consultant, looked to a potential Saudi deal for hope.
“It’s Trump’s proclivity for deal-making and the no-mess sentiments that I’m holding on to for some progress toward a future Palestinian state beside Israel,” she wrote. “Saudi Arabia remains the linchpin in the region as a counterweight to Iran, and the main hope for the Palestinians.”
Ben-Ami has gotten the memo. At the time of J Street’s first national conference in 2009, conditions appeared ripe for the two-state solution — the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel: President Barack Obama had just taken office promising to engage on the issue, and Netanyahu had just given a high-profile address endorsing Palestinian statehood. Liberals were optimistic, and since then, J Street has been one of the two-state solution’s loudest cheerleaders.
But no longer — at least not in those terms.
“There’s no idea or phrase more closely identified with J Street than the ‘two-state solution,’” Ben-Ami wrote in an essay earlier this month. “Sadly, years of failure to realize two states have turned to decades of frustration and despair. Now, mere mention of the phrase shuts ears rather than opening minds.”
What does he advocate instead? Something he calls “the 23-state solution” — whose first pieces sound a lot like Trump’s plan. It entails regional integration with the Arab states surrounding Israel, with the end result of a Palestinian state. Crucially, Ben-Ami said, Trump has built up enough credibility with Israelis at large as well as Netanyahu that he may be able to withstand opposition from the Israeli right.
“It’s going to take very heavy pressure on Netanyahu from the White House, and no one has more chits and credit and credibility with the Israeli public than Donald Trump.” Ben-Ami said. “And if anyone is going to stand up and say, ‘You’ve got to do this,’ It’s going to be Donald Trump.”
J Street will be there to help. “There is an inherent opposition within the world J Street moves in to anything President Trump is going to touch,” Ben-Ami said. “If he’s pursuing something we agree with, we can be an ambassador to the Democratic world or the more liberal part of the Jewish community to say, get over that sort of knee-jerk response.”
An open question
Whether any of it will be possible remains an open question — and not all proponents of a two-state solution are optimistic. Koplow said on an IPF podcast that the ceasefire deal was “set up to fail.” He also noted in an interview that a Saudi-Israel deal could require Senate approval with bipartisan support, which Democrats may be reluctant to provide under Trump.
And Shira Efron, IPF’s senior director of policy research, cautioned that Trump may have pushed for the hostage deal so he could notch an easy win — and no more.
“If he just wanted to say, ‘OK, I got a deal, I succeeded where Joe Biden didn’t, there’s no war,’ but not put in the hard work that is really needed now on the ground ensuring there’s a stage two, [then] there won’t be a stage two,” Efron said on the podcast. “It’s all on him.”
Hadar Susskind, the CEO of New Jewish Narrative, a liberal Zionist group, has no illusions that Trump will deliver on a better future for the Palestinians. In a scathing statement, he and the group condemned a range of Trump’s day-one executive orders, including one rescinding the sanctions Biden placed on extremist Israeli settlers.
“Removing the settler violence Order is giving a green light to the very worst elements of Israeli society and sending a clear message that the Trump administration supports their annexationist agenda and the violent means by which they pursue it,” Susskind wrote.
He said later in an interview, “If Trump is the one to push the Israelis and Palestinians to a two-state solution, I would gladly applaud that. Do I think it’s likely? No, I do not.”
Ben-Ami also disagrees with much of Trump’s domestic agenda, and said J Street will speak out when the president does something it opposes. But he added that if Trump advances peace in the Middle East, J Street will be there to back him.
“I would much prefer to have absolute alignment with an administration on policy and values and approach, but this is the world we live in, and in the real world, nothing is perfect,” he said.
“We worked very strongly to try to prevent Donald Trump from being elected president,” Ben-Ami added. “Now he is president, and if he can move in a direction we can support on this set of issues, we would support it.”