Martin Indyk is a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former United States ambassador to Israel, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs, and special assistant to President Clinton. Previously, Indyk was executive vice president of the Brookings Institution, where he had also served as director of the Foreign Policy program and the founding director of its Center for Middle East Policy. He served as President Obama’s special envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations from July 2013 to June 2014. He lives in New York.
As the founder and President of J Street, Jeremy Ben-Ami brings both deep experience in American politics and government and a passionate commitment to the state of Israel to the role. Ben-Ami’s family connection to Israel goes back 130 years to the first aliyah when his great-grandparents were among the first settlers in Petah Tikva. His grandparents were one of the founding families of Tel Aviv, and his father was an activist and leader in the Irgun, working for Israel’s independence and on the rescue of European Jews before and during World War II.
Congresswoman Katie Porter represents California’s 45th Congressional District. Before running for Congress, Rep. Porter worked as a consumer protection attorney, and she spent nearly twenty years fighting powerful interests and Wall Street banks on behalf of consumers and families. In 2012, then California Attorney General Kamala Harris appointed Rep. Porter to be California’s watchdog against the banks. The Congresswoman has also been a tenured professor at the University of California Irvine Law School. In Congress, Rep. Porter has emerged as a leader on progressive issues and as a prominent voice for working families as one of only two single mothers of young children in Congress. In 2020, she handily won re-election in a district that was previously considered a safe Republican seat for decades.
Rep. Porter supports a two-state solution, creating a safe and secure Israeli state living alongside a Palestinian state. She views the two-state solution as the clearest path to an enduring peace, offering both Israel and the Palestinian people lasting stability. In Congress, Rep. Porter expressed support early on for House Resolution 326, which reaffirmed Congress’s support for a two-state solution.