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.

Mainstream media are at last humanizing Palestinians with great potential political consequences. Ali Velshi of MSNBC met the Palestinian activist Hajj Suleiman in 2019 and when Israel killed him last week, Velshi honored his resistance with a searing report describing an Israeli occupation of nearly 700,000 illegal settlers encroaching on traditional villages and destroying their bread ovens.

When Rep. Alan Lowenthal (D-CA) introduced a nonbinding resolution in support of a two-state solution in 2019, Rep. Mike McCaul (R-TX) called it “a one-sided take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” and Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) was even more direct: “I stand against a two-state solution.” Mast doesn’t represent some sort of hardline minority — he was voicing what has now become the GOP consensus.

Let’s hope 2022 is the year that the grassroots break down the firewall in Washington on the death of the two-state solution. Liberal Zionists are the gatekeepers, and are preventing the discourse of apartheid and a struggle for human rights of replacing the political mantra of a secure homeland for the Jewish people.

The late Archbishop Desmond Tutu used his moral stature to call out and oppose Israeli apartheid, but the U.S. media seem embarrassed about this information. NPR completely leaves it out, while the New York Times and Washington Post and PBS News Hour bury it.

Israeli author Einat Wilf tells the Democratic Party how to give the bad news to Palestinians. “I had to wrestle with the fact that I’m not a nice person. And I accepted it,” she says. So Americans must give “not pleasant” messages to Palestinians, that they need to accept that Zionism is a legitimate “indigenous” movement for Jewish liberation in the Middle East.

Palestinian human rights activist Fadi Quran describes his detention by Homeland Security at the Dallas airport in October at the behest of the Israeli government as a supposed terrorist– a US lieutenant told Quran his hands were tied to interrogate Quran after an ally filed the claim. While Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace says the Biden administration will spend no energy on Palestinian rights.

Any realistic discussion of Iran’s nuclear program ought to include the glaring fact that Israel has 90 nukes, according to experts. But our officials and media always leave Israel’s nukes out. Because acknowledging as much would trigger US laws against giving foreign aid to a country with unauthorized weapons.

The Israeli government minister Nachman Shai says that a “crisis” is coming between the U.S. government and Israel over the Iran deal, and Israel will need American Jews to come to its side. “During many crises… many issues between Israel and the United States, American Jewry has always been there supporting Israel,” he told the Park Avenue Synagogue.