The annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is the Super Bowl of Israel lobbying. This year, some 14,000 delegates braved a snowstorm to watch speeches in a stadium-sized auditorium at the Washington Convention Center. For those far away from the dais, the speakers’ image was projected on huge screens that rung the walls of the auditorium. Attendees who wanted to mark their schedules for next year’s conference were offered a $200 discount if they signed up by March 8.

But not all was hunky dory at the convention center. The conference came in the wake of two major setbacks for the lobbying group. Last September, AIPAC backed President Obama’s attempt to win authorization for an attack against Syria in response to Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons. If Russia hadn’t interceded and arranged a deal with Assad to remove the weapons, the President and the AIPAC would have lost the vote in Congress. Then this winter, in the face of opposition from the President, AIPAC couldn’t get the Senate to pass an Iran sanctions bill.

As the conference opened, the question was whether the organization would alter its strategy. Would it stick with the sanctions bill? How would it respond to the prospect of an agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians, which in the past it had nominally supported, but given short shrift? Would it attempt to win back Jewish Democrats, some of whom had cast their lot with the rival J Street (which is ardently backing a two-state solution), and Democratic politicians, some of whom failed to follow AIPAC’s lead on either Syria or Iran? The convention provided tentative answers to these questions: AIPAC is sticking with its approach on Iran; it is beginning to warm, but only a little, to the negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians; and it is going to try to change its political makeup, though that may be difficult without changing its policies more dramatically.

Iran

Last month, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that Iran had begun complying with the interim agreement it had signed last November with the P5+1 nations (the five Security Council permanent members plus Germany.) And Iran and the P5+1 also agreed to a framework for talks leading up to a comprehensive nuclear accord. But at the convention, AIPAC continued to insist that the framework was entirely inadequate and that the final agreement must include provisions on nuclear enrichment, missiles, and Iran’s foreign policy that the negotiators have all but ruled out.

In the opening plenary on Sunday, AIPAC Executive Director Howard Kohr devoted his entire 27-minute presentation to the threat from Iran. Echoing the demands of AIPAC’s sanctions bill, Kohr insisted that an agreement specify that Iran’s nuclear facilities be entirely dismantled. “On that there can be no compromise,” he said. AIPAC recruited Republican Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen to lead two workshops for attendees on the Iranian threat. Ros-Lehtinen dismissed the negotiations. Charging that “the administration continues to bury its head in the sand,” she warned that Iran “could develop a bomb in a matter of weeks.” (The usual estimates are that building a bomb would take several months to more than a year.) AIPAC might be quietly changing its tune on Iran, but there was no audible sign of it during the policy conference.