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When I served as president of Bears for Israel, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s affiliate group at UC Berkeley from 2017-to 2019, I thought I was playing my part to promote peace. But in the past several years, I’ve come to see that AIPAC — alongside an alliance of hawkish U.S. politicians, Christian Zionists, and defense contractors — contributes to the cycle of violence by demanding or benefiting from unconditional support for the Israeli government no matter the cost.

I decided to study Arabic in college and worked in humanitarian aid in Greece, where I befriended Syrian-Palestinian refugees. I developed deep relationships with Palestinians through academic programming and made friendships with Palestinian-Americans at school and as a staffer working on Democratic campaigns. My relationships across differences stood in direct contrast to the echo chamber I grew up in, where I was taught that the only option for sustained Jewish safety in a post-Holocaust world was separating ourselves from non-Jews in a militaristic state of our own.

there can’t be safety for some at the expense of another and that our Jewish community must reject the idea that our freedom is synonymous with retaining power over others. We must understand that Palestinian and Jewish safety are not mutually exclusive, but are in fact intertwined.

a rare public glimpse of how Israel and its American allies harness Israel’s influential tech sector and tech diaspora to run cover for the Jewish state as it endures scrutiny over the humanitarian impact of its invasion of Gaza.

reveal the degree to which, in the tech-oriented hasbara world, the lines between government, the private sector, and the nonprofit world are blurry at best. And the tactics that these wealthy individuals, advocates, and groups use -- hounding Israel critics on social media; firing pro-Palestine employees and canceling speaking engagements; smearing Palestinian journalists; and attempting to ship military-grade equipment to the IDF -- are often heavy-handed and controversial.

The final group consists of those who are "reflexively pro-Israel, kind of ‘Israel, right or wrong.’" Members of this group "are not actually very knowledgeable," so they needed to be equipped with the right facts to make them "more effective in advocating for Israel,” Fisher said.

As Christian Zionists—Hagee is the founder of the main US Christian Zionist organization, Christians United for Israel (CUFI) and Jeffress regularly preaches the ideology on Fox news—the two men’s remarks reflect their belief that the modern state of Israel is the result of biblical prophecy. This belief centers around the idea that 4,000 years ago God promised the land to the Jews, who will rule it until Jesus’ return to Jerusalem and the rapture. Not all will benefit from this end of times scenario: While Christians will be saved and “live forever with Christ in a new heaven and earth,” those adhering to other religions who do not convert to Christianity will be sent to hell.

Israel’s occupation and oppression of Palestinians—including those who are Christian—is either ignored or perceived as required to achieve the end result. In this vein, Christian Zionists consider Israel’s expansion into the West Bank via illegal settlements a positive development and even support Israeli expansion into Jordan’s East Bank.

Jeffress, for example, once said that Judaism, Islam and Hinduism “lead people…to an eternity of separation from God in hell,” and Hagee suggested in a 1990s sermon that Hitler was part of God’s plan to get Jewish people “back to the land of Israel.” Yet when questioned about the decision to include such speakers in the ceremony’s lineup, White House Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah said, “I honestly don’t know how that came to be.”

They had imbibed some of the defining values of American Jewish political culture: a belief in open debate, a skepticism about military force, a commitment to human rights. And in their innocence, they did not realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to Israel.

For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead

Every country manifests some kind of ideological divide. But in contemporary Israel, the gulf is among the widest on earth

All this because Democrats had the audacity to write a platform that did not publicly reject the position on Jerusalem held by every American administration since the founding of the Jewish state

AIPAC has helped create a climate in which being deemed insufficiently “pro-Israel” is almost as dangerous to a politicians’ career as being deemed insufficiently “anti-communist” was in the early 1950s. But this very climate gives politicians and activists an incentive to keep raising the “pro-Israel” bar higher and higher so as to gain an advantage over their political foes. As the definition of “pro-Israel” becomes more extreme, it becomes harder and harder to reconcile with a commitment to Palestinian statehood, America’s standing in the Arab and Muslim world or even the simple realities of the foreign policy-making process. The people least fettered by those concerns—those least concerned about international opinion and Palestinian dignity—thus wield power over everyone else since they can keep establishing new “pro-Israel” litmus tests that their political foes find difficult to meet. It’s hardly news that this dynamic breeds terror inside the Democratic Party, especially around election time. What the Jerusalem platform flap reveals is the terror it can breed inside AIPAC itself.

Obama's peace initiative on Palestine suffered a stunning, perhaps fatal, blow last week. Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu rejected out of hand any freeze on the West Bank settlements which the White House had pressed as a necessary first step toward serious negotiations. The Obama plan is now stillborn, never having drawn a hopeful breath.

he will expect to bring the parties into line with only slight resort to coercion. Accordingly, his instinctive avoidance of head-on confrontations will leave him unprepared, psychologically and politically, for the requisite arm twisting with its inescapable political reaction from the Israeli lobby at home.

Obama rushed to say that the settlement matter is not so important after all, just a piece of a complex problem. Just as the "public option" was redefined as "just a sliver" of the overall package. There is no virtue in this approach. It is classic avoidance behavior.