This week Rep. Hakeem Jeffries was unanimously elected to lead the House Democrats, taking over for the departing Nancy Pelosi. This move has upset the Democratic party’s left flank but there’s at least one group happy to see Jeffries rise: staunch supporters of Israel.

The battle between J Street and AIPAC to influence the Democratic Party is also opening space for Palestine solidarity to enter the mainstream.

Rep. Henry Cuellar has declared victory in Texas’s 28th congressional district despite the fact that the runoff was too close to call on Wednesday morning. AIPAC spent nearly $2 million on the anti-choice, NRA-backed Democrat in Texas’s 28th district. It looks like it narrowly paid off.

Mainstream Democrats were shocked by the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, but their calls for an investigation were vague, even suggesting that Israel could investigate itself– a recipe for “whitewashing,” says a human rights group. No mainstream leader approached the position of progressive Congresspeople, that the U.S. must investigate Israel, or the view of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, that Israeli “apartheid” is the context of the killing.

“The United States has no better friend in the world than Israel,” President Obama once said. But rank-and-file Democrats don’t agree. They put Israel at 9th on a list of America’s most important allies, way behind Canada, the U.K., Germany, Japan, and China among others.

This week dozens of House members have met with Israeli leaders and tweeted praise for the country as police continued to clash with Palestinian protestors in occupied East Jerusalem, where multiple families face displacement.

Nancy Pelosi leads a Disneyland tour of Israel with congressional Democrats, embraces the rightwing prime minister, and gets a tour of apartheid Jerusalem from an Israeli not from the Palestinians who are being thrown out of their homes there. But of course they all call for a two-state solution when anyone visiting the land sees that there’s just one state. The Dems are carrying on a lie as big as Trump’s big lie — there will never be a two state solution and everyone knows it, but the Democrats have to keep the Israel lobby happy.

Pelosi’s delegation hit Israel just two weeks after Amnesty International released its report on Israeli apartheid, where the human rights organization called for an end to the “system of oppression and domination.”

House Speaker Pelosi is leading a delegation of Democratic Congress members to Israel this week, including progressives Barbara Lee and Ro Khanna. The US Campaign for Palestinian Rights calls on the politicians to cancel the “apartheid delegation” amid “Israel’s escalating ethnic cleansing” of Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem.

Openly demanding that the U.S. abandon talks with Iran, Israeli PM Naftali Bennett has just violated his deal with Biden that differences are to be worked out behind closed doors. He does so because the “special relationship” between the countries gives him power: the Israel lobby works inside the U.S. to make sure there is no daylight between the White House and Israel and to immunize apartheid. But the American people want distance.