In a highwater mark of mainstream opposition to the unending Israeli occupation, 50 members of Congress have signed a letter to Secretary of State Blinken urging him to try to stop Israel’s demolition of 38 Palestinian houses in al-Walaja, a village in the occupied West Bank, because the demolitions will undermine “Palestinian dignity” and “long-term Israeli security.” The demolitions are also an issue in a Michigan congressional race between two Democrats, with Rep. Andy Levin calling them “unjust.”

The rightwing Israel lobby is enraged by the new report by the Special Rapporteur to the U.N. accusing Israel of “apartheid”– a “landmark moment of recognition of the lived reality of millions of Palestinians,” says Amnesty International. But J Street has had nothing to say about the report. It surely hopes it will go away, because these reports foster demands among progressives to actually do something about human rights violations beyond acknowledging their existence.

Israel’s “untenable occupation just goes on and on” and has “parallels” to apartheid, Rep. Jared Huffman of California reports after a visit to the country. But he says he got in an argument with Rep. Brad Schneider, who said that Palestinian prime minister Mohammed Shtayyeh offended American congresspeople by using the word “apartheid” and said Huffman and others should have taken the prime minister “to task” for using the word. Huffman said almost every Palestinian he met shares Shtayyeh’s view.

When Israel slaughtered hundreds of civilians in Gaza, mainstream journalists and politicians said the situation was too “complicated” to come out against such actions. Now they are cheerleaders for Ukrainian resistance, by any means, to military invasion and missile attacks. And Benny Gantz who bragged about bombing Gaza back to the Stone Age, is a hero to the Democratic Party. Yes there is an official propaganda line in the U.S., and journalists lost their mainstream careers for doing in Palestine what journalists routinely do in the Ukraine now.

“The Zionist left is the real enemy of freedom, of fighting the occupation in Israel, much more than the right wing is,” says Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy. “They are the founding fathers for the settlement project. Who started it? Netanyahu, Begin, Sharon? No no no no no! Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin– Nobel Peace Prize winners, peacemakers– they are responsible. They also enable us Israelis to feel so good about ourselves. Because they were always the laundry of any crime. We have this prestigious, world-famous Supreme Court, this castle of liberalism and freedom, part of the Zionist left, and this Supreme Court enabled any crime of war, from the settlements to the tortures, everything went through the Supreme Court and everything was washed there, and it was accepted. If the Supreme Court says there are no torturing or the settlements are legal– so who are we to say or to think different?”

The Jewish establishment is cracking. “Our institutions have to wrestle with the reality that increasing numbers of passionate Jews do not support the State of Israel,” even as the “donor bases” are shrinking, writes Rabbi Amy Bardack, a liberal Zionist leader associated with J Street. Bardack calls on Jewish organizations not to shun anti-Zionists. But there’s a reason anti-Zionists were shunned– because the principle of “equality” beats “Jewish nationalism” any day of the week.

New York Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove says his congregants need to hear not just AIPAC and ADL and J Street opposing the Amnesty report on Israeli apartheid. But from him too, “for Zion’s sake.” “Israel is part and parcel to my Jewish identity, it’s central to my vision of the rabbinate, and as long as I’m the rabbi of Park Avenue [Synagogue], it will remain central to the mission of this synagogue.”

Liberal Zionists are not accepting the reports of the leading human rights organizations, lately including Amnesty International, saying Israel practices apartheid. J Street and Ameinu and Partners for Progressive Israel reject the term, while Americans for Peace Now says it has no comment for now. They would be excommunicated by the Jewish establishment for endorsing the finding, even as progressive Jewish groups have accepted Amnesty’s verdict.

Amnesty International’s bombshell report on Israeli apartheid has unleashed angry attacks from Israel lobbyists who say that the report endangers Jews, is “steeped in antisemitism,” and its “real agenda” is “Jew hatred.” And by the way, it dismisses 2000 years of Jewish history. While the liberal Zionist group J Street, which rejects the report, says that such accusations are inappropriate; and Americans for Peace Now says that the mainstream organizations are manufacturing outrage without having read the report, which reflects Palestinian experiences.

In his new book, “The State of Israel Vs. The Jews,” Sylvain Cypel paints a too-hopeful portrait of the anti-Netanyahu wing of American Jewish life as a virtuous broad tent united in their opposition to racism. What actually exists is a hodgepodge of intercommunal bickering, toothless fingerwagging, and hand-wringing– and this against an ever growing backdrop of Jewish only roads, deliberate bombings of civilian infrastructure and Associated Press offices, as Cypel himself meticulously documents. And in assigning importance to that Jewish argument, Cypel fails to treat Palestinians as autonomous political actors in the struggle.