This is the second year running I’ve participated in the Code Pink demonstrations against AIPAC—this time under the heading “OCCUPY AIPAC”. It is a complete blast, one of the most enjoyable weekends of the year. The Code Pink crowd are masters at props and street theater, their messaging is  radical but never taken too far; Medea Benjamin is full of  both charisma and common sense.  Who knows whether it matters in the long run, but it is deeply satisfying to see thousands of AIPAC delegates have to walk right by a mocked up Code Pink checkpoint, where members of the “Pink Police” with faux IDF helmets force headscarved older women to crouch on the ground while they scream out in guttural accents “No Muslims allowed—this City is for Jews Only!”

This year’s protest were highlighted by Liza Behrendt, a spirited young woman who got inside the AIPAC conference and disrupted a session on how to combat pro-Palestinian  advocacy  on campus.  She’s a Brandeis student and bundle of energy. On Monday, when we demonstrated outside the White House, the Park police had us sequestered behind a line about fifty yards in front of Pennsylvania Avenue. Liza was a settlement—that is she was wearing a big cardboard “settlement” building around her, and she kept “expanding,” waddling over the boundary line, twenty yards, thirty yards past  into the “disputed territory. ” The Park Police surrounded her, but I think they were laughing too much to arrest her.

AIPAC is of course a superpower; as Jeffrey Blankfort said at the CODE PINK meeting on Saturday, to call the Israel lobby  a lobby is really like calling a mouse a cat.  It is in fact a competing government, dictating an alternative foreign policy to American Congress—and resoundingly successful in its efforts.   If Netanyahu gets his way and brings American into another Middle Eastern war, AIPAC can take full credit.

But despite its power, I think AIPAC feels more strain than last year. Of course this isn’t a scientific sample.  But last year, as we stood in the Mount Vernon Park at dawn on early Sunday as thousands of  AIPACers filed past us, I could sense nothing but smugness and condescension.  They were powerful, we weren’t—so they thought, and surely they were right. A few commented on my Giants cap, some shook their heads or smirked at our placards and banners.

A quite different feeling this time, though we were a group of more or less the same size with more or less the same banners and temperament.  They were angry. It seemed that at least one of every forty or fifty of the men walking by would snarl, or give us the finger.  Displaying real hatred. The ground is beginning to shift and they know it. The “delegitimation of Israel” (actually Israel is delegitimizing itself) seems to be continuing apace—at least it is a prime concern in AIPAC’s precincts. Perhaps war will change all this, but my sense is more and more of a sclerotic organization, still enormously powerful but beginning to spring leaks all over, and struggling against  a world which won’t accept its writ for much longer.