I’m on Jewish Voice for Peace‘s email list the way you slow down for a car accident. Not because I want to be there. Because I can’t quite believe what I’m looking at, and I need to keep looking to confirm it’s real: that people, some of them well-meaning young Jews who just don’t know better yet, are actually buying what these people are selling. This week’s pileup came with a subject line that practically vibrated: AIPAC is hiding. Read that again, they said. One of the most powerful pro-Israel lobby groups in the country is hiding.
I keep watching because somebody has to answer this stuff in an authentically Jewish voice, not the namby-pamby, watered-down Judaism-lite JVP peddles, the kind that quietly drops every foundational piece of the tradition it claims to speak for and keeps only the parts useful for a press release.
I did read it again. And then I looked at who was telling me this. Not gonna lie, the audacity is kind of iconic (olds: audacity, but as a compliment, in the worst way). Lowkey (olds: a little bit, understated) the whole email is one long vibe check that JVP itself would fail.
Here’s an organization whose own demonstrators show up to protests in keffiyehs and medical masks like it’s still 2021, lecturing me about who’s hiding. I know why AIPAC’s donor-disclosure timing annoys people, I read the reporting, The Intercept covered it, so did Al Jazeera, and none of it is illegal, no cap (olds: I am not exaggerating). It’s a lobby doing what lobbies do: representing the interests of the American citizens, Jewish and not, who fund it, playing the same legal super PAC game every other interest group in this country plays. AIPAC isn’t hiding. It’s winning, and apparently winning while Jewish is the actual crime here. JVP calls this “organized people defeat organized money.” I call it sour grapes from an org that just watched the other team win with the rules everybody plays by.
Meanwhile the people sending me this email won’t show their faces at their own rallies. Mid behavior (olds: weak, unimpressive, do better) from an organization that wants credit for “transparency.” Real beige flag energy (olds: not disqualifying on its own, but a warning sign you should be tracking).
Let’s talk about who’s actually asking for my money, and let’s be honest about what they actually want, which isn’t $20. It’s my intelligence. It’s my soul. It’s whatever’s left of my love for my people, my culture, my values, my whole way of life, after they’re done rewriting all of it. Jewish Voice for Peace was founded in 1996 by three Jewish women at Berkeley, I won’t pretend otherwise, but the organization’s real value to the movement was never about who founded it, it’s about who it lets other people point to. As a Commentary piece laid out, JVP’s membership includes plenty of non-Jewish people too, a Palestinian-American chapter co-founder, a Lutheran minister three generations deep in the ministry, and that’s the entire point. Jewish opposition to Jewish interests is the indispensable proof that those interests are illegitimate, so you find the twelve people in a community of sixteen million willing to wear the costume and you present them as representative. The email’s opening line accuses AIPAC of using cash “to flood Democratic primaries” and calling it “democracy,” which is rich coming from an organization asking me to flood the same primaries with different cash toward different ends. JVP also actively campaigned for and endorsed Zohran Mamdani. We’ll get back to that. It’s giving foreshadowing (olds: this detail matters later, pay attention).
JVP wants credit for calling out AIPAC’s dark money while asking me to fund a movement that can’t say the word terrorist about Hamas without a whole TED Talk first. Cori Bush told an interviewer in 2024 she wanted people to be “careful about labeling,” comparing Hamas to Ferguson protesters. Girl math (olds: reasoning so warped it only makes sense to the person doing it) doesn’t get more unhinged than that. She was one of two House members who voted against barring Hamas’s October 7 terrorists from entering the country. Abdul El-Sayed, JVP’s next fundraising target in Michigan, went on CNN and said the Israeli government is “just as evil” as Hamas, campaigned alongside Hasan Piker, the streamer who’s said Hamas is “1,000 times better” than Israel, and accepted an endorsement from Osama Siblani, the Dearborn activist who’s called Hamas fighters “freedom fighters” and mourned Hassan Nasrallah as a hero. This is who gets the JVP stamp of approval. Not flawed candidates with complicated positions. People who won’t condemn organizations that murder Jews for a living, and somehow that’s the “safe” choice. Certified L take, no notes (olds: a bad opinion, no further discussion required), full villain arc energy (olds: they know exactly what they’re doing and they’re doing it anyway) from a group that claims to want peace.
And then there’s Mamdani, JVP’s biggest trophy of the cycle, so let’s look at the marriage they’re so proud of. Rama Duwaji, now New York’s first lady, posted as a teenager that Tel Aviv “should not have existed in the first place.” Fine, she was fifteen, she apologized, saying “being 15 doesn’t excuse it,” I’ll give her that one, that’s just a kid being chronically online (olds: too terminally plugged into the internet to have a healthy sense of scale). What she has not apologized for is the 2017 post, as an adult, of Leila Khaled, a hijacker for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist terrorist organization the US has designated as such, captioned with her willingness to die for “the cause.” Or the “valiant freedom fighters of Palestine” post from that same year. Or liking, eighteen months before her wedding, a post describing the October 7 attack as “resistance,” plus “river to the sea” posts, plus a post calling the October 7 mass rapes a hoax. Or illustrating a book for a writer who calls Jews “supremacist ghouls” and “vampires.” This is the household JVP helped elect into Gracie Mansion, receipts and all (olds: documented proof, screenshots don’t lie), and they want me to Venmo them $20 because they’re mad about a super PAC’s paperwork strategy. The math ain’t mathing (olds: this does not add up, and not in a way that reflects well on them). She’s cooked (olds: there is no recovering from this one), and honestly so is the messaging strategy that thinks I won’t notice.
What actually gets me about this email, more than the hypocrisy, more than the cash grab, is the condescension of it. They’re not really selling me on AIPAC being sinister. They’re selling me on the idea that this time, unlike every other time, cheering “resistance” produces a different result than it has for 78 years. 1947, 1967, 2000, 2008, the 2005 Gaza withdrawal that got answered with rockets instead of roads, it ends the same way every time: rejection, war, and not one additional inch of anything anyone would recognize as a liberated Palestine. Seventy-eight years betting everything on refusal and violence instead of the table, and the returns are a pile of ash and a body count, over and over, on schedule. JVP wants me to believe I’m the naive one for not funding round seventy-nine.
I’m not offended that JVP exists. Criticize Israel all day, I’ll argue with you about settlements and Bibi and West Bank enforcement right alongside you, some of it fairly, say less (olds: agreed, no further explanation needed). I’m offended that an organization built to make gullible young progressives feel like moral geniuses for calling Hamas “resistance” thinks I’m the mark. Keep your 3x match. Keep your masks on too, apparently showing your face is only for people you’re trying to smear. Not the flex you think it is (olds: this does not impress me the way you believe it does). The email signs off with, “They won’t put their name on it. We will.” Cute line. Now take off the mask and say it to my face.
- Everyone in the Clavicular Israel Story Is a Little Bit Awful, Actually - 7/13/2026
- JVP Isn’t After My $20. It’s After Us. - 7/3/2026
- F*ck Your Bagels, Zohran - 6/22/2026
Hatem Bazian, a cofounder of Students for Justice in Palestine, outed himself as one of the administrators of JVP’s twitter account when he forgot which account he was using when tweeting at CNN’s Jake Tapper.
https://www.investigativeproject.org/9431/hatem-bazian-is-the-jewish-voice-for-peace
Lynne, I saw this and I have never cackled harder at a screenshot in my life. The man was mid-rant at Jake Tapper and just full sent “As Jews who believe in human rights and justice, we demand you do better” from his OWN personal account. Sir. Sir. That’s not a typo, that’s muscle memory.
Now, in the interest of not being the thing I make fun of AIPAC’s critics for, let’s be accurate: JVP’s own FAQ page swears up and down Bazian’s “never been employed by JVP in any capacity” and calls this whole story an “Islamophobic campaign.” Sure, Jan.
But here’s the thing that’s actually harder to explain away than one drunk-tweet-energy screenshot: JVP’s official Facebook page has posted “Excellent piece from Hatem Bazian” while sharing his writing under their own name. That’s not a slip. That’s a co-sign, on the record, from the account they definitely know how to log into. And StandWithUs put out a whole report this year calling him “largely involved” with the org, on top of flagging JVP’s funding trail running through Lebanon and Iran, with actual Hezbollah officials bragging about “investing in” groups exactly like this one.
So no, I’m not going to sit here and pretend a guy who founded SJP, chairs American Muslims for Palestine, once ran a charity the Treasury Department shut down for funneling money to Hamas, and spoke at a 2025 conference stacked with designated terrorist affiliates is just some rando who “supports” JVP the way I support (well, my parents support) my local coffee shop. He’s not a fan. He’s furniture. JVP just really, really needs you to believe the furniture doesn’t live there.
Anyway. Ratio’d by his own thumbs. Thanks for the heads up Lynne!
Glad to have flagged that incident up for you. JVP is an utterly despicable organization.