The beltway consensus on military aid to Israel is finally beginning to face a legitimate political challenge. There’s obviously still a long way to go, but it’s telling that so many Democrats now feel they can safely challenge aid without facing disastrous political consequences.

The only variety of Zionism still on offer is the ethno-nationalist creed of Benjamin Netanyahu and the many politicians in Israel who sit to his right in the Knesset. And with annexation, we are about to begin the final phase of the Palestinian people’s long and tortured dispossession.

The Israel lobby is splitting into two branches. Last week Hadar Suskind of Americans for Peace Now called on the AJC to dissolve over its failure to oppose annexation. Now David Harris of AJC lashed at the liberal Zionists. He railed against “leftwing” “ideologues” in organized Jewish community who play to donors by taking “muscular macho” stands against Israel.

Now is the time for serious accountability measures, not just for the sake of defending Palestinian rights under international law, but crucially to safeguard the very credibility of and respect for international law itself.

As annexation is put into gear, Palestinians feel that occupation is becoming an eternal fate. Emad Moussa reviews an Israeli film seeking to explain the occupation, Foxtrot, and finds it is all about Israeli trauma: “The only scene of Palestinian death in the film is reconfigured as a metaphor for Israel’s internal and transgenerational trauma, repression, and guilt.”

From lock down inside of Hebron Badia Dwaik writes, “While we do not know when Netanyahu will resume his annexation bid, our crisis is not over.”

Anyone who thinks that stopping the next Israeli annexation of additional parts of the West Bank would bring peace closer would be well-advised to peel away the veneer of democratic façade, one that covers an Israeli plan with only one goal in mind—completing the campaign of ethnically cleansing Palestinians—on both sides of the Green Line—that started with the creation of the State of Israel.