Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) told Mondoweiss that, while he doesn’t support criminalizing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), he doesn’t believe that “BDS will help achieve either a two state solution or the recognition of rights for Palestinians.”
Khanna is currently one of the one hundred seventy-four Democrats cosponsoring House Resolution 246 (H.Res.246), a bipartisan piece of legislation that affirms the U.S. government’s commitment to a two-state solution while condemning BDS as a movement that “promotes principles of collective guilt, mass punishment, and group isolation…”
Mondoweiss reached out to Khanna’s office inquiring why the congressman supports the resolution and he responded with the following statement:
“I oppose criminalizing the BDS-movement and have stayed off bills that do so or impose any penalty. The First Amendment is a key foundation of our country that we must protect. Nothing in the Schneider resolution that I cosponsored infringes on any American’s First Amendment right to protest the U.S. or any foreign country, and I advocated with other progressives to have that clarifying language included. I have supported numerous pieces of legislation that prevented any U.S. funds from being used towards the unlawful detention of Palestinian children and have stood up for the human rights of Palestinian children—but like Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and other progressive leaders, I do not believe BDS will help achieve either a two state solution or the recognition of rights for Palestinians. We should continue to work to find constructive ways to achieve peace and a resolution to the conflict.”
Like Khanna, a number of the resolution’s supporters have also pointed to its First Amendment protections but its critics believe that the political capital generated by the bill’s passage will be used to pass much more aggressive anti-BDS measures in the future. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) has tweeted that the bill is “unconstitutional” and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) has introduced her own resolution to affirm Americans’ right to boycott foreign countries.
Khanna’s statement references H.R. 4391, the Promoting Human Rights by Ending Israeli Military Detention of Palestinian Children Act. That bill was introduced by Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) in 2017 and would have required the Secretary of State to certify annually that U.S. funds weren’t used by Israel to detain children. That bill ended up dying in a previous congressional session after obtaining 31 cosponsors, but McCollum reintroduced a similar piece of legislation this April: H.R. 2407. This version would amend the Foreign Assistance Act to block funding for the military detention of children in any country, including Israel. “Israel’s system of military juvenile detention is state-sponsored child abuse designed to intimidate and terrorize Palestinian children and their families,” McCollum has said of the legislation, “It must be condemned, but it is equally outrageous that U.S. tax dollars in the form of military aid to Israel are permitted to sustain what is clearly a gross human rights violation against children.” Khanna isn’t signed on as a cosponsor for H.R. 2407, but his office told Mondoweiss that he’s currently evaluating the bill as it’s changed since the last time it was introduced.
Since being elected to Congress in 2017, Khanna has distinguished himself as a progressive leader on foreign policy issues. Most notably he has become the legislative face of the campaign to end U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen. Earlier this year, the House approved a bill introduced by Khanna that would have cut off U.S. involvement from the conflict, but it was vetoed by President Trump.
H.Res.246 was just marked up by the House Foreign Affairs Committee and it’s expected that the House of Representatives will vote on the measure this week.
So what? The U.S. government routinely “promotes principles of collective guilt, mass punishment, and group isolation” (see Iran, North Korea, Iraq, Afganistan, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, Libya, etc.). Shame on Khanna and the U.S. government for “applying a double standard” to and “singling out” Israel.
“We should continue to work to find constructive ways to achieve peace and a resolution to the conflict.”
Greenstein writes
“Labour’s Pathetic Analysis of ‘Zionism’ Throws the Palestinians Under the Bus”
which is about the Labour Anti-semitism saga, but seems to cover Khannas’ meaningless phrases,
“What is most depressing about Labour’s new Web Page on Anti-Semitism is not that it gets most things wrong, which it does, nor that it indulges in what Salo Baron called the ‘lachrymose version of Jewish history’, but its clumsy, childish anti-intellectualism.
By lachrymose I mean the tale of never ending woe, the Zionist fable that Jews were always persecuted, poor dears, non-stop for 2,000 years. They weren’t. For many of those years they ruled over others and occasionally suffered terribly for it but the Jewish experience in the Jewish diaspora was a mixed and rich one.
It is also true that Jewish communities prospered in particular in Islamic countries where the oldest Jewish communities were to be found, such as in Iraq, until Israel and Zionism destabilised those countries. That was why, in Iraq and Morocco Zionist agents planted bombs in Jewish places to simulate anti-Semitism.
In its childish simplicity coupled with a poverty of thought, Labour’s statement completely fails to place anti-Semitism in any form of context. It is a childish monologue of good people and bad people. It is the kind of history that would be rejected in a GCSE essay”
https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2019/07/corbyns-latest-anti-semitism-proposals.html
…condemning BDS as a movement that “promotes principles of collective guilt, mass punishment, and group isolation…”
Isn’t that what the Zionist occupying entity has done to Palestinian civilians every single day since 1948?
Very disappointing. And frankly, a load of horse manure. Even if he disagreed with BDS as a tactic for some reason ( I can’t think of a good one) he didn’t have to support this bill condemning it. Whether he wants to admit or not, he has just lined up with the enemies of Palestinian human rights.
Why doesn’t he propose a bill condemning the blockade of Gaza, an actual example of murderous collective punishment?
Israel appeaser