But tens of thousands of American Jews have had a very different response to the failed talks and the new Palestinian uprising. They began to ask heretical questions about whether former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, or Oslo, had really offered Palestinians a viable state, and whether the harsh occupation was to blame for rising Palestinian anger. Most American Jewish peace organizations had closed up shop during the hopeful Oslo years, so these marginalized doves started almost from scratch, launching dozens of local and national organizations dedicated to ending the occupation. "Since the intifada began, the mantra in the American Jewish community was that Israel's existence was being threatened and we had to stand by the government of Israel no matter what it did. This idea, brilliantly manipulated by the Israeli government, became sacrosanct," says Marcia Freedman, a former Knesset member who co-founded one of these new groups, the Chicago-based Brit Tzedek v'Shalom, in 2002. "There just happens to be a very right-wing government in Israel that does not support a two-state solution, so this lockstep solidarity gave that government carte blanche support." The new grassroots efforts are determined to revoke that carte blanche. Brit Tzedek already has chapters in twenty-seven cities; Michael Lerner's Berkeley-based Tikkun Community and the Oakland-based Jewish Voice for Peace, which just went national in May, have joined the few remaining older peace outfits like Americans for Peace Now (APN) and Arthur Waskow's Philadelphia-based Shalom Center to create an incipient counterforce, which exists almost entirely outside official Jewish channels.

Some of the new groups, like Brit Tzedek and Tikkun, consider themselves to be strongly pro-Israel but seek to radically redefine the term. ("So the definition of being pro-Israel is to be pro-Sharon?" asks Tikkun's Deborah Kory. "Well, maybe assassinating a guy in a wheelchair is not the best thing for Israel.") Others, like New York City's Jews Against the Occupation, define themselves as pro-Jewish and pro-Palestinian, and are open to the idea of a single, binational state. Most of the new organizations are explicitly Jewish, but American Jewish activists have also been central players in the founding of multiethnic organizations like the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), which sends international observers, about a fifth of whom are American Jews, into the occupied territories, and the Washington, DC-based US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, which advocates divestment from Israel bonds. And they are becoming increasingly visible. In March one older peace group, Rabbis for Human Rights of North America, sent an open letter to Sharon protesting Israel's house-demolition policy, which was signed by 400 rabbis, including leaders of some of the largest congregations in the country; in April Brit Tzedek organized 10,000 US Jews to sign another open letter, this one calling on Israel and the United States to fund the relocation of Jewish settlers from the occupied territories to Israel.

Over the past three years, these organizations have lobbied Congress, picketed Israeli consulates, initiated campus divestment campaigns, set up informational listservs and held hundreds of vigils and teach-ins. Though they lack support from major Jewish donors or Jewish foundations, their numbers are fast approaching AIPAC's 65,000 members (APN has some 25,000 supporters, Brit Tzedek another 17,000 and so on), and polls show that there is tremendous room for growth. When former Israeli and Palestinian officials crafted the Geneva Accord last year as a model peace agreement, an APN survey found that five times more American Jews supported the plan than opposed it. AIPAC, on the other hand, dismissed Geneva as irrelevant and used its political muscle to block a mild Congressional resolution applauding the "courage and vision" of those who fashioned it. It turns out that far from being more unified than ever in support of Israeli policies, American Jews are as polarized on Israel as Americans as a whole are polarized about George W. Bush.

The divide is not only political but existential. AIPAC, the ADL and the Conference of Presidents see Palestinian suicide bombs as part of a global attack on Jews that includes everything from the murder of Daniel Pearl to the spike in anti-Jewish attacks in France; in their view, Palestinian attacks on Israelis are fueled by hatred of Jews. The peace groups believe that Israel, with one of the world's most powerful militaries, can't claim its existence is at risk, and they see in Israel's occupation, separation wall and collective punishment a moral challenge to the Jewish soul. News and commentary circulated by the two camps, even regarding the same events, bear almost no relation to each other. In late May, as the Israeli army's Operation Rainbow crested in Gaza, ISM e-mails included an eyewitness account of Israeli soldiers shooting tear gas at children and a graphic description of tanks firing shells into a peaceful demonstration in Rafah. E-mails from the Conference of Presidents, on the other hand, told of tunnels used by Palestinians to smuggle weapons and a Jewish settler whose wife and four daughters were killed by terrorists. In the eyes of peaceniks, such as Anita Altman, a Jewish communal professional in New York City, mainstream Jewish institutions are concerned so exclusively with Israeli security that "we've lost the capacity to recognize the other and to acknowledge Palestinans' humanity." In the eyes of establishment Jewish leaders, such as Ernest Weiner, director of the American Jewish Committee's San Francisco chapter, the doves, by concerning themselves primarily with the rights of Palestinians under occupation, have become "nothing more than a mouthpiece of the Arabs." One of these camps has positioned itself as the legitimate voice of American Jews, and has the ear of both parties in Washington; the other, the anti-occupation majority, is being quashed.

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