Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was forced to beat a hasty retreat from the Conversion Law (rejecting Reform and Conservative conversions) after it was passed by the Ministerial Committee for Legislation on June 26. At a tense meeting with the leaders of the coalition parties on June 30, Netanyahu announced that he was putting the law on hold for six months and forming a committee to study it further. The ultra-Orthodox ministers stormed out of the meeting but later reached an agreement with the prime minister. But the affair is far from being over; Netanyahu will yet hear from them. It is safe to assume that the suspension of the Western Wall compromise, which provided non-Orthodox Jews with a separate prayer space along the southern part of the Western Wall, will be reconsidered now, too.

As a result of these two decisions, the Israeli government was inundated last week by a Jewish tsunami that no one could have anticipated. It involved everyone from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to the Jewish Federations of North America to the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations to heads of various communities and denominations. Jews around the world were up in arms. They lambasted Netanyahu and his right-wing-Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox coalition and set boundaries for it.

On June 29, the leaders of AIPAC, Washington's powerful pro-Israel lobby, arrived in Israel on an urgent flight from the United States. Its outgoing President Lillian Pinkus, its incoming President Mort Fridman, and deputy directors Richard Fishman and Cameron Brown held a series of tough meetings with various ministers and eventually with the prime minister himself. Their message was clear and succinct: Suspending the Western Wall compromise and passing the Conversion Law constitutes a bill of divorce that Israel is handing to the Jewish communities of North America. What they were effectively telling Israel was this: You're not only harming the Reform and Conservative communities, you are also damaging your alliance with diaspora Jewry as a whole and, indirectly, you are putting Israel's interests in Washington at risk. This decision can even impact the US sale of F-35 jets to Israel and other strategic issues.

AIPAC is Israel's "Iron Dome" in Washington's corridors of power, but now AIPAC's leaders made it clear to the Israelis that this protective dome is in danger. "Activists, donors and chapter heads have been calling us en masse since the beginning of the week," one AIPAC member told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. "They want to quit. They are bitter. No one will continue to work on behalf of Israel if it continues along this path and cuts itself off from the international Jewish community."