JVP Picks a Side — and it's the Democratic Party
The nonprofit restructuring, resource laundering, and liberal politics behind the rebrand.
By Cody O’Rourke and Lara Kilani
On February 18, 2026, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) announced that from this point on, the moniker “JVP” will be used to describe its 501(c)(4), formerly identified as JVP Action. JVP has become one of the most prominent and well-resourced Palestine solidarity organizations in the United States, tripling its revenue to $11 million during the genocide. As Israel’s genocide in Gaza continues through its third year, the decision to redirect the weight of that brand, and the grassroots credibility built over three decades of organizing, toward a lobbying operation is not a minor administrative change. It is a political declaration.
In order to understand what JVP is committing to with this shift, one has to look at the actual record of the candidates it has endorsed — their votes, their reversals, their silences — and ask whether that record represents a genuine challenge to US support for zionist settler colonialism. What we found is that the politicians which JVP Action has championed have, with few exceptions, operated within a paradigm that undermines, rather than advances, Palestinian liberation: voting to affirm zionism’s right to exist, funding Israeli arms, opposing BDS, and walking back anti-zionist statements under Party pressure. As JVP bets its future on this electoral infrastructure, the question is not whether these candidates are better than their Republican counterparts, but whether calling this work anti-zionist is honest — and what it costs the broader movement when it isn’t. This piece examines what that restructuring actually means and why it matters.
State-sanctioned structures of “solidarity”
Fundamental to any consideration of this new arrangement is the distinction between the two legal categories: 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4). The original JVP is a 501(c)(3), meaning it is a federally-recognized public charity which is eligible to receive tax-deductible donations. Charities must be founded and operated according to purposes which exempt them from taxes — generally, this means work that serves public interests and benefits communities, including vulnerable people and animals. Importantly, charities also are limited in the extent to which their work can be political — legislative lobbying efforts, for example, cannot make up a “substantial” part of their work. Registered 501(c)(4)s, on the other hand, are social welfare organizations and can engage in unlimited lobbying in service of these efforts. While there are still some limits to the extent of their political and campaigning activities, 501(c)(4)s are generally much freer to participate in political advocacy efforts that influence policy, including issuing campaign endorsements. Donations to 501(c)(4)s are not tax-deductible.
Let’s consult the records
We’ve already written an immediate response following the release of JVP’s statement about “restructuring” here. The critique boils down to one main point: this shift is an effort to move JVP’s primary work into the realm of electoralism in support of the Democratic Party, turning more than thirty years of grassroots organizing into support for institutions animating the very genocide JVP purports to oppose. This decision is not about how to best support the liberation of Palestine or Palestinians.
Immediately, we received one recurring rebuttal: “Well, I’d rather support politicians who will prevent a genocide from happening than have to support genocide survivors.”
We think most people would agree with this common sense approach. We, too, would rather see a genocide be prevented altogether. However, this assertion assumes one thing that deserves reexamination: that the candidates supported or endorsed by JVP Action have, historically, acted in service of Palestinians and against zionist violence.
We can easily test this assumption by looking at the actual, applied positions of the candidates JVP Action endorsed in 2024. When we do, a pattern comes into focus that the organization itself seems not to notice and certainly doesn’t name. On every issue where liberal Democratic politics and anti-colonial frameworks sharply diverge — such as condemning indigenous resistance, funding the military infrastructure that facilitates the annihilation of Palestinians, backing BDS, even choosing between one and two state solutions — these candidates land, almost without exception, on the Democratic Party side of the line. What this produces is not anti-zionism in any meaningful sense, a term with which JVP self-identifies (and places beside the moniker JVP as a matter of practice); rather, it is a liberal mode of zionism dressed in the language of solidarity, one that actively undermines the resistance to colonialism which it claims to support.
Military and Iron Dome funding
The September 2021 vote on $1 billion in supplemental Iron Dome funding (H.R. 5323) works as a precise diagnostic. The bill passed 420-9. Among the JVP Action candidates serving at the time: Tlaib, Omar, Bush, and Pressley voted no. Ocasio-Cortez voted present. Bowman voted yes — the only “Squad” member to fund Iron Dome, explaining it was “important to many people in my district”. Pramila Jayapal, also endorsed by JVP Action, also voted yes.
The pattern was maintained in 2025. Ocasio-Cortez, Jayapal, and Pressley all voted against an amendment that would have cut $500 million in Iron Dome funding. Ocasio-Cortez defended the vote, arguing the amendment “does nothing to cut off offensive aid to Israel“.
This defensive/offensive distinction requires a lot of heavy lifting from liberal zionist conceptions of the reality in Palestine, and its implications are borne out in other proposed legislation which JVP Action has endorsed. The bill H.R. 3565, co-sponsored by JVP, other US-based Palestine aligned NGOs, and politicians including Ocasio-Cortez, Jayapal, Pressley, Ramirez, and others, is titled “To provide for a limitation on the transfer of defense articles and defense services to Israel”. This legislative effort targets specific munition categories: bunker busters, JDAMs, artillery, and white phosphorus. It leaves untouched the F-35s and Apaches that deliver them, the $3.8 billion in annual military financing that purchases them, and the Presidential Drawdown Authority that moves them outside normal legal channels entirely.
When you strip away the rhetoric shaping the bill’s presentation, it actually doesn’t activate “conditions” that stymie material support for genocide. Instead, it’s a bill that adds liberal process to the orchastration of genocide, providing the possibility to override the so-called limit on the transfer of these weapons simply by way of written assurances from Israel. There is no verification mechanism and no penalty for non-compliance in the text of the bill. This is the architecture of the Block the Bombs framework: condition the most visibly brutal weapons while explicitly preserving Israel’s “ability to defend itself” — using the very weapons whose transfer it seeks to limit — so long as the Israeli government can provide adequate written reassurances. It is a humanitarian optics intervention, not a structural challenge to US-Israeli military integration.
This is not an anti-zionist position. In fact, it is almost indistinguishable from J Street’s framework of strategic indigenous subjugation and erasure, which accepts the legitimacy of the Israeli state and its military apparatus while objecting to specific applications of force. The distinction between so-called “offensive” and “defensive” weapons does not come from Palestinian liberation movements. It comes from liberal arms-control discourse that takes the US-Israel military relationship as given, and assumes that Israeli action against Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Iranians, or anyone else, can be read as “defensive”. Endorsing candidates who hold this line while claiming an anti-zionist mandate is not a strategic compromise. Instead, it represents a contradiction that actively reinforces the architecture these candidates claim to oppose.
In contrast, in November 2025, Tlaib introduced H.Res. 876 recognizing the ongoing genocide in Gaza and calling for a complete arms embargo. Though this bill has been endorsed by a number of JVP Action’s candidates, it has not been the primary focus of any organizing campaign. Some of this can be attributed to the differences between resolutions and acts in US Congressional legislation, but the reality is that JVP Action and the larger US-based Palestine solidarity NGO network has coalesced around the Block the Bombs Act framework, which is the undeniably weaker framework in terms of its demands and potential material impact. If there was a political will among these formations to write a bill with the same demands as Tlaib’s resolution, it could have been done — it can still be done.
In other words, the $3.8 billion annual military aid package, which is the core financial architecture of US investment in Israeli settler colonialism, goes unchallenged by any active legislative campaign by JVP, or its candidates. To put it more plainly: disrupting one of the most critical mechanisms sustaining the Israeli state’s capacity for violence against Palestinians is not on the table. When the majority of an organization’s endorsed candidates, as well as the organization’s prioritized legislative campaign operate within these constraints, it cannot be considered an anti-zionist organization. Instead, we have liberal marketing that shrinks the boundaries of permissible dissent within the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, the $3.8 billion in military infrastructure flows uninterrupted.
Walkbacks and accommodations
Jayapal’s reversal on “racist state” is an instructive example. At Netroots Nation in July 2023, she told pro-Palestinian protesters: “We have been fighting to make it clear that Israel is a racist state.” The next day, after 43 House Democrats condemned her for this statement, she walked it back: “I do not believe the idea of Israel as a nation is racist” (a central element of any anti-zionist critique). She then voted for a Republican resolution affirming Israel is “not a racist state”, directly contradicting JVP’s own published analysis. The speed of the reversal reveals something about the structural forces at work. Jayapal did not change her mind about the nature of the Israeli state in 24 hours. She responded to the disciplinary mechanisms of the Democratic Party caucus, which enforce a floor of acceptability that is solidly zionist. This is the political formation in support of which JVP is restructuring, diverting resources from a 501(c)(3) to a 501(c)(4) for this purpose.
BDS, two-state frameworks, and the political boundaries of the permissible
On BDS — considered by many to be the bare minimum of Palestine solidarity — the record among JVP Action endorsed politicians is fractured in ways that expose the lack of any coherent policy. Tlaib and Omar openly support BDS and voted against the 2019 anti-BDS resolution (H.R. 246, passed 398-17). Bush supported BDS in her campaign platform. But Pressley voted for the anti-BDS resolution, explaining that it “affirmed to my constituents raised in the Jewish faith Israel’s right to exist”. Bowman has explicitly stated that he does not support the BDS movement. JVP Action endorsed both of these candidates and used movement resources, raised with the expectation that they would be used to further Palestinian liberation, in order to support their electoral campaigns.
Think about what that means for a moment. BDS is the primary international, nonviolent strategy endorsed by huge swathes of Palestinian society, formally and informally. Formal support is recorded through the construction of the BDS National Committee some two decades ago. While JVP claims to stand against zionism, it endorsed candidates who voted to delegitimize BDS and publicly affirmed “Israel’s right to exist” — a formulation that, within the discourse of Palestinian liberation, concedes the legitimacy of the zionist project itself. This is the foundation of their electoral work up until this moment. The decision to restructure, investing further in the electoral process and lobbying for legislation, will no doubt supercharge these processes.
On this note, it is worth pointing out that just in November 2023, as Israel’s genocidal intentions in Gaza were on full display and ramping up daily, H.R. 888 affirming Israel’s so-called “right to exist”, passed with a roll call vote that provides clear insight into where JVP Action endorsed candidates fall with regard to this question. Of the 2024 JVP Action endorsed candidates in office at the time (all of them) and present for the vote, Rashida Tlaib was the only one not to vote in favor of the resolution — she voted “present”. Cori Bush was marked “not voting”. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Pramila Jayapal, Ayanna Pressley, Jamaal Bowman, Summer Lee, Ilhan Omar, and Delia Ramirez all voted “yea” on the resolution. This is an explicit, undeniable endorsement of zionism.
The opposition of JVP Action’s candidates to BDS highlights the contradictions between JVP’s rhetoric of accountability and their Palestinian co-organizers’ priorities. JVP’s claim that accountability to Palestinian partners forms “the foundation” of their work deserves scrutiny that the organization itself has never invited. Afterall, accountability is a structural term which implies mechanisms, consequences, and the genuine possibility of being overruled. What JVP describes instead is a process of “deep listening” and “relationship-building”, language that signals deference without enforcing it. If Palestinian-led organizations were materially empowered to hold JVP accountable, the next question becomes: which of those organizations sanctioned the endorsement of candidates who voted to affirm Israel’s right to exist, who publicly opposed BDS, who walked back characterizations of Israel as a racist state within 24 hours of Democratic Party pressure? The BDS call is not a fringe position within Palestinian civil society. Rather, it is the formally adopted, consensus demand of the BDS National Committee.
For JVP to claim accountability to Palestinian partners while directing movement resources toward candidates who have actively delegitimized the most basic, milquetoast call of solidarity is a contradiction its leadership has been asked to explain publicly — and the silence of their alleged Palestinian partners on this point is itself revealing. Either those partners were consulted and agreed, which would demand its own accounting, or the accountability JVP advertises is a rhetorical architecture: language designed to confer legitimacy on decisions already made by a professional class of organizers whose primary operational constraint is not how to develop an anti-colonial praxis, but instead the contours of Democratic Party politics.
What we are willing to accept or tolerate
In a recent piece, “Palestine Solidarity in the Age of Reaction”, Steven Salaita writes: “We foreground the aftermath of liberation by what we are now willing to embrace or tolerate.” This is true of every party we engage with, both friendly and hostile. It means that if we imagine a future of liberation, we will not accept or invest in those who are willing to normalize our ongoing annihilation, or those who would use our struggle cynically, to harm others. In the case of JVP and JVP Action, it means first, understanding what we are tolerating when we allow these organizations to speak on behalf of anti-zionists and in solidarity with Palestinians. Then, it means enforcing our values by disallowing the most fundamental elements of anti-zionist thought and praxis to be cast aside — from BDS to Israel’s “right to exist”. What value is there in solidarity if it works to undermine liberation? What liberation is there in tolerating such treatment from ostensible allies?
While few people might put their faith in US electoralism and lobbying its politicians as the primary vehicle to further Palestinian liberation, the reality is that millions of dollars are being used for this very purpose under the guise of its utility. In fiscal year 2024, JVP’s 501(c)(3) brought in $11,003,649 — more than triple its pre-October 7 revenue — while JVP Action, its weaker 501(c)(4) counterpart, raised $1,069,275 in the same period. The disparity is telling. The money, the membership, the institutional weight — all of it sits in the 501(c)(3). And yet it is the 501(c)(4) that is now being handed the name, the brand, and the political direction. This restructuring is a declaration of where JVP intends to put its future: lobbying politicians and supporting electoral campaigns, regardless of what those politicians have actually done with their votes. Making this decision is one thing, but continuing to endorse and financially support politicians who have expressed their disregard for Palestinian self-determination — or their willingness to concede their own beliefs about Israel’s racist foundations under pressure — is not part of an anti-zionist effort. It is about resource capture, about limiting the demands of politicians and their need to take personal risks, and controlling the political advocacy shaping Palestine solidarity in the United States.
Like it or not, this affects other Palestine solidarity formations in the United States and elsewhere. By supporting legislation that significantly lowers the bar of risk, JVP Action and its partners in the Block the Bombs Act campaign make it less likely that politicians will engage with more meaningful legislative demands. But even for organizations which have co-endorsed JVP-led events, protests, campaigns, and more in the past — even those who disdain aspects of JVP’s wider vision or political trajectory, but value its occasional support — this decision implicates them as well.
Organizations across the Palestine solidarity ecosystem have co-sponsored JVP events, shared platforms, and lent their names to joint campaigns — not to JVP Action, but to JVP. That distinction, already thin on paper, has now been formally, and intentionally, collapsed. The credit those organizations generated (particularly the Palestinian ones), the relationships they built, the credibility they lent — all of it now flows to the JVP lobbying arm, retroactively conscripting their participation into a political project they potentially never (formally) endorsed.
For donors, the problem is also both past and future. Those who gave to JVP did so understanding their money was going toward Palestinian liberation. That framing and identity now belong to a 501(c)(4) whose primary function is electoral — one that carries with it a track record ranging, at best, being ineffectual to, at worst, constituting a form of counter-insurgency.
While the legal distinction between the two entities is real and shapes what each can do legally, this is more than a “structural adjustment”. In practice, this move allows JVP to operate as a single brand. The 501(c)(3) holds the assets; the 501(c)(4) holds the name; but donors, allied organizations, and the broader public do not experience them as separate entities any more than a consumer distinguishes between the subsidiary corporations behind a pair of Nike shoes and the Nike jacket hanging next to them. As they do with corporate models like Nike, they are buying the JVP brand. And as it is with multi-asset corporations, a brand provides synergy: the platform placements, the op-ed slots, the webinar invitations, the coalition letterheads they all work in unison and flow across all the JVP entities. All of these resources and social infrastructure belong and are utilized by the entire JVP ecosystem, not one entity.
It is worth naming this for what it is: a form of liberal praxis that privileges aesthetics over substance. The brand does the work that politics cannot. JVP can position itself as a radical anti-zionist organization, accountable to Palestinians, outside the mainstream… Meanwhile, its institutional infrastructure quietly serves the Democratic Party’s need to contain Palestine solidarity within manageable limits. The Block the Bombs Act made this visible in plain sight. A campaign built on the language of accountability, dressed in the aesthetics of an arms embargo, that left intact every meaningful mechanism of US military support for Israel. It looked like their candidates were applying pressure, but instead, their policy strategy functioned objectively to preserve Israel’s access to essential military infrastructure.
The creation of 501(c)(4)s by US-based Palestine-oriented NGOs is never primarily about Palestinians. It is about building institutional capacity within the Democratic Party — a party whose Palestine policy consensus remains anchored to the colonial designs of the Oslo Accords, selective invocations of international law that carry no enforcement mechanism, and a categorical refusal to accept that colonized people facing annihilation have the right to resist by any means available to them.
Tracing even a partial voting history of JVP endorsed candidates makes the specific stakes undeniable: this restructuring is about cultivating a professional class of “organizers” that function to materially contain and redirect Palestine solidarity. This is about keeping Palestine-related political advocacy manageable and useful to a party that continues to fund and enthusiastically support Palestinian dispossession.
This is neither acceptable nor tolerable. It does not meet the moment, respond to Palestinian needs, or foreground anti-zionism’s most basic principles. As Palestinians in Gaza face siege, famine, and annihilation — as those in the rest of historic Palestine face expanding settler violence and home demolitions, and as refugees in neighboring countries are targeted by bombing campaigns — steering money, energy, and movement infrastructure toward that same party is not a strategic choice. It is a nasty betrayal.