Twelve hundred college students sat—and, frequently enough, jumped and applauded—in a cavernous convention space in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, rallying to get the Democratic National Committee to include the word “occupation” in the party’s national platform. One young woman from Tufts University rose to tell the crowd about her experiences on a tour of Israel and the occupied territories, “Let Our People Know,” which offers an alternative to Intourist-style organized trips to Israel that it says reinforce “the erasure of Palestinians.”

The students comprised J Street U, the “college and university organizing arm” of J Street—a “pro-Israel, pro-peace” advocacy organization, established a little over a decade ago, whose annual conference this week brought an estimated 4,000 attendees together to discuss (and debate) progressive U.S. policies toward Israel. The gathering’s theme for 2019 was “Rise to the Moment.” In the outer exhibition hall, T’ruah, a coalition of pro-human rights rabbis, staffed a table that sold shirts reading “Resisting tyrants since the Pharaoh” ($20 cash, $22 with card). The following day, in a ballroom one floor up, the chief Palestinian negotiator, Dr. Saeb Erekat, spoke at length on the importance of the two-state solution, and Senator Bernie Sanders—the most prominent of three remaining Democratic presidential contenders with a Jewish heritage—got thunderous applause when he said, “I am very proud to be Jewish, and look forward to being the first Jewish president in the history of this country.”

J Street has experienced something of a flourishing during the reign of President Donald Trump, whose ambassador to Israel, bankruptcy lawyer David Friedman, in 2016 called J Street members “far worse than kapos—Jews who turned in their fellow Jews in the Nazi death camps.” The group’s supporters, Friedman had written, were “just smug advocates of Israel’s destruction delivered from the comfort of their secure American sofas—it’s hard to imagine anyone worse.” (After he was confirmed, Friedman eventually agreed to meet with J Street leaders, who put out a statement saying that “it is vital to keep an open line of communication between Jewish American and Israeli leaders with different political backgrounds.”)

“It used to be that there was simply one venue and one conversation” for U.S.-Israeli politics, Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, told me ahead of the conference. That venue was AIPAC, the hawkish American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which describes itself as “America’s pro-Israel lobby” and has advocated unquestioning support for Israel for decades. “That monolith has been broken,” Ben-Ami said; AIPAC has “found themselves essentially standing and cheering for the autocrats.” Trump’s open affection for the increasingly belligerent, media-bashing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “opened up a tremendous amount of room” for other voices on Israel and in the Jewish community, Ben-Ami said.

Those other voices exist on a wide spectrum. Further to the left—where some people once saw J Street—there are groups that don’t believe in Zionism or the concept of a nation-state for a people, Ben-Ami said. J Street does believe that Israel should be a national homeland. But it also believes that Israeli security depends on supporting the rights of Palestinians. “That balance is actually a sensible U.S. policy, and it’s the right thing for both peoples,” he said.