1000 alumni of J Street U fault the parent org’s efforts to stop Israeli expansion as toothless. “Time and again, J Street has organized letters of condemnation, Jewish communal pressure, and congressional measures that fall short of creating material consequences for Israel’s actions.”

Jeremy Ben-Ami has a straightforward explanation of the Balfour Declaration: “The British in the course of fighting World War 1 were looking for the support domestically in the U.K. of the Jewish community and there was a desire to offer and to promise to that community something that they wanted.”

The biggest impediment to annexation by Israel is a threat that the country will lose the support of the Democratic Party and American Jews, J Street says. The Israel lobby group called on Joe Biden to oppose annexation more emphatically than he already has.

Palestinians are players in Israeli politics in a new way, Yael Patir of J Street says. Three-fourths of Israeli Jewish centrist voters supported a possible government that would have had Palestinian political backing, and that is “huge,” she says, seeing a silver lining in the collapse of the effort to remove Netanyahu.

Trump’s decision to assassinate a leading Iranian official in Iraq yesterday has contributed to the split inside the Israel lobby in the United States. Republican Israel supporters celebrate the killing, and see it as destroying the last hope of saving the Iran deal. Many Democratic supporters of Israel are critical of the decision.

Conservative donors have skewed the American Jewish establishment to support the occupation, said many speakers at the J Street conference. The liberal Zionist organization is mounting a power struggle inside the Jewish community. But those efforts do not include sanctions in opposition to the occupation.

“I look back [with] regret at Gaza,” Ben Rhodes confesses at J Street. While another Obama official Tommy Vietor says the Yemen war was “wrong” and a “disaster.” And NY City Councilman Brad Lander says he regrets keeping quiet about Palestinian human rights over 10 years of defending Israel. “I was pushed to find more courage,” he says.

The New York Times wants Netanyahu out because “elements of the Democratic Party have grown increasingly suspicious of Israel, if not hostile,” and replacing Netanyahu “may halt this dangerous shift.” Palestinian human rights are no account here. Though Israel’s politics have only shifted right, Israel-watchers say.

As Netanyahu goes up for reelection tomorrow in Israel, the warning that liberal Zionists have long issued– the Jewish state will no longer be a democratic state but will be inherently racist — has become impossible for even the warners to ignore. J Street called on US politicians and Jews to condemn Netanyahu’s promise to annex West Bank settlements; and Beto O’Rourke did so.

The recent declaration of anti-Zionism by Jewish Voice for Peace has the compassion necessary to reach liberal Zionists– and thus to break the consensus within the Jewish community. And because Jews are still the gatekeepers of the American discussion of Israel, the statement could ultimately move U.S. policy toward equality.