The number of Democrats who will skip the speech doubled in the last few days, to 57, though Robert Menendez says he will walk Benjamin Netanyahu down the aisle

Why is the New York Times running a front page story slurring John Kerry as a Don Quixote bent on getting an agreement with Iran? And why is Michael Gordon– who gave us the Iraq war on a silver platter of lies — allowed to write such a hatchet job?

Freezing rain and dangerously icy sidewalks on Sunday afternoon didn’t deter protesters gathered outside the Washington Convention Center, where a sit-in was staged to block one of the entrances to the annual AIPAC conference underway inside.

On the eve of his departure to Washington DC to address Congress about the possible nuclear deal being brokered between the U.S. and Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made one last stop to occupied East Jerusalem.

Israeli PM Netanyahu said he means no disrespect to the White House and Israel support is bipartisan, but in fact he and Obama have squared off in the battle of their lives, with Republicans and AIPAC on Netanyahu’s side and Democrats and liberal Zionist groups on Obama’s

+972’s Mairav Zonszein reports: “Settlers built a Star of David made out of rocks on private Palestinian lands in the village of Shweika in the South Hebron Hills on Saturday. The settlers, who live in the illegal outpost Eshtamoa near the village, built the Star of David in order to obstruct Palestinian residents’ sheep from grazing.”

Plumes of teargas wafted up the terraced hillside of the West Bank village of Bil’in on Friday when over 1,000 demonstrators marked ten years of weekly protests against Israel’s separation wall and occupation, outside of Ramallah. Israelis drove in from Tel Aviv, and international activists and Palestinians from nearby towns flocked to march from the center of Bil’in, to the hamlet’s agricultural grounds. As with every Friday, clashes ensued once protesters reached the outskirts of town where olive orchards and patch vegetable farms buffer Israel’s concrete barrier and one of the most populated settlements, Modi’in Illit.

In a hysterical ad in the New York Times, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach uses his friend Samantha Power, the UN ambassador, against Obama national security adviser Susan Rice, when he accuses Rice of condoning genocide against Jews

The scandal over the Netanyahu speech to Congress is in the end a story about the Jewish condition in the United States. Netanyahu’s speech has exposed the power of the Israel lobby, and it will never be the same. The American establishment is too diverse, and we are all tired of the lobby’s 40-year-run in power.