For the past 10 years or more, surveys consistently find that a majority of American Jews favor ending the Israeli occupation and dismantling Jewish settlements in return for peace. But this view has never held sway in Washington, where a commitment to going to the mat for Israel, no matter how outrageous that country’s provocations, is the closest thing the United States has to a coherent policy toward the Middle East. With an insurgency exploding from Fallujah to Sadr City, Pentagon fantasies that Iraq could be the United States’ new outpost in the region have evaporated, making loyalty to Israel, as a bulwark against Arab nationalism, as central as ever. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, and dozens of powerful Christian Zionist lobby groups have put popular muscle behind this “special relationship” and policed the bounds of the debate on both sides of the aisle. The intransigent bipartisan consensus is that Washington must put Israeli security before peace and support even such extreme security measures as the separation wall and assassinations. And once Israeli/Palestinian peace talks failed in 2000, the combination of Palestinian suicide bombings, the election of uberhawk Ariel Sharon as Israeli prime minister, and Bush’s “with us or against us” war on terror intimidated the peacenik majority into silence.

This Likudnik consensus in Washington, let’s be frank, will not change easily or soon. But at the close of 2004, we are beginning to see hairline fractures. The second intifada woke tens of thousands of American Jews from their slumber. They began to ask heretical questions about whether former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak had really offered Palestinians a viable state—and whether rising Palestinian anger was legitimate in the face of an increasingly brutal occupation. And they formed dozens of local and national organizations dedicated to ending the occupation. The two-year-old Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, based in Chicago, already has 17,000 members and chapters in twenty-seven cities; Rabbi Michael Lerner’s Tikkun Community now has 51 chapters in 27 states; Jewish Voice for Peace, based in the San Francisco Bay area, saw its membership jump from 2,500 to 10,000 in the last year, and they too recently decided to go national. Engaging in demonstrations, petitions, shareholder resolutions, and letter-writing campaigns, these organizations have protested Israel’s settlement policy; insisted that Caterpillar – which sells bulldozers to Israel that are used to demolish Palestinian homes – reexamine its business relationship with Israel; and urged that the next president of the United States to get Israeli/ Palestinian negotiations back on track.

In August, the 1.5 million–strong Reform Movement added its voice, staking out a newly critical stance toward the Washington consensus. Rabbi David Saperstein, the movement’s top lobbyist, sent the Secretary of State a letter urging him to match public support for Sharon’s unilateral Gaza withdrawal plan with “vigorous” efforts to reignite negotiations. Saperstein also criticized recent pro- Sharon congressional solutions – supported by AIPAC and Christian Zionists – for failing to address “the troubling humanitarian conditions of the Palestinians” and for “fail[ing] to recognize the need for withdrawal to be directly linked to a return to the negotiating table.” As one Jewish paper noted, the letter marked “a major break from the unqualified support that almost all major Jewish organizations have voiced for the alliance between Sharon and President Bush.”

And this foment is hardly confined to the Jewish community. The International Solidarity Movement, founded in 2001, has sent thousands of activists to the West Bank and Gaza to protect Palestinian homes and olive groves. The US Campaign Against the Israeli Occupation, founded in 2002, is pushing unions and city councils to divest from Israel bonds and recruiting district leaders across the country to lobby members of Congress. SUSTAIN, founded in 2000 to stop US military aid to Israel, now has seventeen chapters across the country. A campus divestment movement has emerged at Berkeley, Michigan, Ohio, Princeton, and Harvard. And trade unionists, such as the Bay Area’s Labor Committee for Peace and Justice, and antiwar activists, such as United for Peace with Justice (which recently mobilized half a million people to march against Bush at the Republican National Convention), have all taken up the cause of ending the Israeli occupation. As these voices of dissent grow, aipac and Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin find themselves the subjects of an FBI investigation for sharing aclassified government document with Israel, and many of the administration’s other neocons find their reputations battered after their rosy prognostications for Iraq failed to pan out.

The most encouraging aspect of these new anti-occupation organizers is their steadfastness.The campus activists, students of the lengthy battle over divestment from South Africa, are hunkered down for an ongoing fight. Jewish Voice for Peace plans to spend much of the next year seeding chapters around the country, settling in for a building phase. Tikkun, which organized a 400-person lobby day in the US Capitol last spring, has decided to make it an annual event. The US Campaign Against the Israeli Occupation, which started two years ago with leaders in only five US Congressional districts, now has organizers in 145 and plans to reach every district within two years. “We have to be thoughtful and patient,” says Mitchell Plitnick, codirector of Jewish Voice for Peace. “We’re taking very small steps. But there’s going to be a louder voice, even in the next year, calling for a change in US policy. This is a suicidal policy not only for Israel but for the United States. And I do see a kind of dissent growing in this country that’s never been here before.”

Esther Kaplan is a print and radio journalist who writes for The Nation, The Village Voice , and other publications. She is the cohost of a Jewish public affairs program, Beyond the Pale, on WBAI/NewYork.