Israel and The Bay State
Rep. Betty McCollum’s (D-MN) historic Palestinian Children & Families Act still lacks a companion bill in the Senate. At a recent event local JVP Action leader Jill Charney urged Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to introduce the legislation. Here’s Charney:
I am Jewish and, like you, I am passionate about justice for all. You probably know that the U.S. government sends about $3.8 billion a year in military funding to the Israeli government. Massachusetts sends $1.3 million a year and Massachusetts taxpayers send Israel $352,000 a day. Some of these tax dollars are used to support Israeli oppression of Palestinians.
Right now there’s a bill on congress that creates the conditions for justice and freedom for all. It’s called the Palestinian Children & Families Act, H.R. 2590. It works to ensure that U.S. taxpayer funds are not used by the Israeli government to imprison Palestinian children in a military detention system, which they do at the tune of 700 kids a year. It makes sure that they money we send is not used to forcibly displace Palestinian from their homes. 1,000 families have been displaced this year. This bill is also a way to be transparent and report further annexing of Palestinian land in violation of international law.
This bill is endorsed by 140 civil organizations and many of your constituents have been asking you for years..to write a Senate companion bill to H.R. 2590. You certainly stand up for the human rights of Americans..and our friends at the border. It’s time to stand up for the Palestinian kids. Palestinian children wonder when they will be free. When will you write a companion bill to H.R. 2590?
Many in the crowd applauded when Charney finished her statement.
And here’s Warren’s response:
Thank you very much for the question. Let me make two points, if I can. I believe in the United States continuing to support Israel’s defense, but I do not believe U.S. taxpayer dollars should be used to expand settlements, to take over more land from the Palestinians..
Working through the best way to pursue that in the Senate, I will continue to do that whether it’s through independent legislation or working on the legislation that comes through and seeing where we are. There was an effort to try to put Iron Dome, for example, into the (spending package), that’s been taken out. That’s something a lot of people worked on, it was the right thing to do. So, I can tell you what I’m going to keep fighting for. I’m looking for the best and most effective way to do that and that’s what I’m going to keep doing.
You’ll notice that Warren doesn’t actually address the bill directly and certainly doesn’t commit to introducing companion legislation. JVP Action is calling on Massachusetts residents to contact the Senator and ask her to act.
McCollum’s House bill actually gained a cosponsor from Warren’s state this month: Massachusetts 8th district Rep. Steven Lynch. Lynch is a conservative Democrat and certainly no progressive on foreign policy, so it’s a pretty notable move.
Lynch was pressured by many of the activists currently attempting to push Warren. At a town hall meeting in 2019 a local JVP member named Milt asked Lynch to support the earlier version of McCollum’s bill, H.R. 2407. He contrasted Lynch’s opposition to Trump’s border policies with his lack of action on Palestine:
You said separating families does not protect U.S. security. Well, we’re not the only country in the world that separates kids from their families. That is also true in Israel at this moment and it’s our money that is paying for the Israeli military in very high amounts…and we support the Israeli military who arrest children…11 years to 18 years of age, imprison them and torture them and coerce them [while being] separated from their families. That’s our money that’s helping to support that.
Lynch indicated that he’d look at the bill. “I’m sure that’s a paraphrase of the bill, but if that’s the essence of it,” he responded. “I think you’re truthful, I have no reason to doubt your veracity. So yeah, I would gladly support that. I think that’s something we should do as a country.”
Are Massachusetts activists successfully shifting the local narrative around this issue? Pro-Israel groups sure think so.
Today the Jewish Insider (JI) ran a piece about the evolution of Rep. Ayanna Pressley. When Pressley was elected to represent the state’s 7th district in 2018 she was seen as an Israel supporter and not a lawmaker worth worrying about. She strengthened this reputation in the summer of 2019 when she was the only Squad member to vote in favor of a House resolution condemning BDS.
Pressley defended her vote with the curious claim that she was standing “in solidarity with Jewish families.” At Mondoweiss Nada Elia wrote that Pressley’s excuse “added insult to injury, as it revealed an utter disregard for the Palestinian people—families too—whose ethnic cleansing was ongoing as she voted, as well as the many Jews, individuals and families, who fully support BDS.”
Pressley faced widespread backlash for the vote and the JI article details some of the local pressure aimed at the congresswoman. “We reached out, just expressing some disappointment [about the anti-BDS vote], and she actually responded [by] asking for a meeting,” IfNotNow volunteer Kayla Neumeyer told the website. “The communities that I’m in were also pretty disappointed in the vote. We saw it actually as not necessarily being aligned with her positions on the ability to boycott and free speech.”
Last week Pressley was one of just 8 Democrats to vote against extra Iron Dome funding. Mark Pocan, Betty McCollum, and Jamaal Bowman all voted yes. AOC voted present.
Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston’s Jeremy Burton told JI that this was a “severe disappointment” and lamented that pro-Israel groups organizations had lost Pressley.
“It is self-evident to anybody observing her statements and votes that Councilwoman Pressley, congressional candidate Pressley and Congresswoman Pressley in her first six months in office are not the same person, in their perspective and approach to the U.S.-Israel relationship, as Congresswoman Pressley is in the fall of 2021,” said Burton.
“Since getting elected, she has chosen to narrow her perspective on who she’s in relationship with and elevate one particular perspective on what it means to stand up for victims of violence that doesn’t allow for a relationship with the Jewish community to inform who she’s giving voice to,” he added.
“We have to have some self-respect in how we approach public officials who don’t show us a lot of respect.”
In May I spoke with Massachusetts activists who were challenging Senator Ed Markey over his support for Israel. “It has been incredible to see so much momentum building for the Palestinian liberation movement, and I’ve heard from many longtime organizers that they can’t imagine having this much support even 2 or 3 years ago,” Calla Walsh, a student who helped work to reelect Markey told me. “I certainly have not been paying attention to this issue for long enough, largely because I have always been told that it’s ‘too complicated’ for me to understand the history or take a position. I think that notion has been dispelled because many folks, especially young people like me, are realizing that no matter how complex the history of Palestine is, there is only one right side to take on an issue of apartheid and human rights abuses.”
Iron Dome Vote Moves to Senate
Contrary to popular belief, Congress is capable of being decisive and acting quickly, it just depends what the legislation is. An extra billion for Israel is the kind of thing that can easily be rushed without reflection or debate.
Last week a small group of progressive House members were able to strip additional Iron Dome funding from the spending bill. That victory had a shelf life of hours, as a group of Democrats swiftly established a separate vote for the funding. That passed and now it’s headed to the Senate.
Ted Cruz said he wanted it moved quickly “through whatever procedural vehicle is effective.” On Wednesday Senate Democratic leadership hotlined the bill, looking to pass it with unanimous consent. Who says bipartisanship is dead?
Politico reports that the legislation passed the Democratic side of the aisle without a hitch, but that it was blocked by Rand Paul on the GOP side. Don’t expect anything great from Paul on this front, his justification makes as much sense as you might imagine. He’s somehow tying the request to a call halt aid to Afghanistan.
McConnell is blaming the holdup on the fact the funding was removed from spending bill. “It is seriously disappointing that the Democratic side would not let us include funding for Israel’s Iron Dome in the base text,” he said this morning. “It honestly baffles me that defensive aid to our ally Israel has become a thorny subject for the political left.”
Yeah, all eight of them.
Puma Day of Action
In 2018 Puma signed a four-year deal to sponsor the Israel Football Association (IFA), a league that features teams based in illegal West Bank settlements. FIFA has rules to stop teams from playing on occupied land. For instance, they took action when the Russian Football Union tried to play games Crimea in 2014. However, it’s Palestine so there’s a different set of unwritten rules.
September 18 was the #BoycottPuma Global Day of Action. The hashtag trended on social media and protests were held in 50 cities across six continents. More than 64,000 people signed a petition calling on Puma to sever its relationship with the apartheid state.
“Call on PUMA to join Ben & Jerry’s and stop supporting the Israeli apartheid regime’s oppression of Palestinian people,” it reads. “After Israeli forces murdered 256 Palestinians, including 66 children, earlier this Spring, PUMA’s celebrity endorsers sent messages in support of Palestine on social media. Yet, PUMA still supports the illegal occupation with its hundreds of thousands of dollars of endorsement deals within the Occupied Palestinian Territory that grossly violate human rights.
“While the Israel Football Association teams host its games in Israeli-only stadiums in illegal settlements, mere kilometers away, Sa’id Yousef Odeh, 16-year-old Palestinian First Division budding football star, was shot dead by Israeli occupation forces in May. He played on Balata, one of 235 Palestinian teams that are calling on PUMA to drop its sponsorship of the Israel Football Association. This is just one of many of stories from occupied Palestine under Israeli apartheid that illustrates PUMA’s complicity in human rights abuses.”
Odds & Ends
?? Rep. Ro Khanna’s (D-CA) amendment ending U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen passed the House 219-207. 11 Republicans voted for it and 11 Democrats voted against it. The same amendment passed a couple years ago, but was ultimately stripped out of the final version of the National Defense Authorization Act.
? I wrote about the Orange County School of the Arts, where the administration recently shut down a student meeting on Palestine after complaints from the local ADL.
? JVP Action’s Beth Miller came on the Mondoweiss podcast to talk about the Iron Dome vote.
?? At The Intercept Murtaza Hussain has a piece about Israeli officials pressuring the University of North Carolina to stop graduate student Kylie Broderick from teaching. She made the mistake of promoting the BDS movement on her personal Twitter account.
“I think that a representative of a foreign government attempting to police an academic class is, in the first place, ridiculous, and an obvious overreaction to what is essentially an issue that started on Twitter,” Broderick told The Intercept. “I also think it is strange that the Israeli consulate general was granted an audience. If this was a class on Hungary or Australia, would the university have permitted the attempted interference of a foreign government? The fact that this meeting happened at all is clearly a threat to academic freedom.”
Hussain notes that the school also faced pressure from North Carolina Rep. Kathy Manning, one of the Democrats who helped forced a separate vote on extra Iron Dome funding last week.
?? Democratic Party Israel controversies generated by the right are always amusing. The Biden administration has pretty much given Israel everything it wants but people are up in arms because VP Kamala Harris nodded while a student at George Mason University expressed frustration about the United States sending the country so much money and so many weapons.
Islamophobic conspiracy theorist Douglas Murray went on Fox to drum up anger over the nodding: “Now we see the vice president just nodding along as a very, very ignorant American student libels an ally. People I speak to around the world, including in recent days in Israel, are concerned about this.” Amazing.
The student remarks were actually very good:
I see that over the summer there have been protests and demonstrations in astronomical numbers standing with Palestine, but then just a few days ago there were funds allocated to continue backing Israel, which hurts my heart because it’s ethnic genocide and displacement of people, the same that happened in America, and I’m sure you’re aware of this.
I bring this up because Americans are struggling over lack of healthcare, lack of affordable housing. All this money ends up funding Israel and backing Saudi Arabia. I think the people have spoken very often on what they do need and I feel there’s a lack of listening. I just feel I have to bring this up because it affects my life and the lives of people I really care about. It’s just something I had to bring up.
Harris’ responded with a barrage of hollow platitudes. She defended everyone’s right to make their voice heard but didn’t address Israel at all. “The point that you are making about policy that relates to Middle East policy, foreign policy, we still have healthy debates in our country about what is the right path, and nobody’s voice should be suppressed on that,” she told the student.
?? Quincy Institute fellow Mark Kukis calls for a moratorium on drone strikes in Responsible Statecraft:
The innocent deaths in Kabul in August came months after the Biden administration began rethinking drone killings. In March, the White House imposed limits on drone strikes and began considering new rules for their use. But events on the ground in Somalia and Afghanistan prompted the administration to unleash fresh drone assaults nonetheless, with predictable results for civilian casualties. Even a White House seemingly wary of drones and eager to end wars winds up killing civilians, just like the past administrations whose drone programs have drawn credible allegations of human rights violations.
?? On Democracy Now! Former Guantánamo Bay detainee Mansoor Adayfi talked about the hunger strikes he took part in during his 14 years at the prison.
? The National Political Committee of DSA put out a statement condemning the Iron Dome vote. Here’s some of it:
DSA unapologetically stands in solidarity with the Palestinian people in their ongoing struggle for liberation. Our platform proudly states continued support for and involvement with the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and efforts to eliminate U.S. military aid to Israel, while resisting the “normalization” of relationships between the Israeli government and other governments. When our elected members show the conviction of these principles, and when we demonstrate the power to defend them against the most cynical attacks from the Israel lobby, we grow the seriousness of our organization as a vehicle for the liberation of all oppressed people.
? 27% of Americans said that 9/11 changed the United States for the worse in 2002. That number is now 46%.
?? This week a group of masked Israeli settlers attacked a Palestinian village. They injured 12 people, wounded a toddler, killed grazing sheep, and dumped tear gas into people’s homes and cars. Virtually no lawmakers are talking about protection for these families, much less any sort of Iron Dome.
?? The Charity & Security Network has new report on the lawfare groups working to suppress nonprofits that promote Palestinian rights.
?? Ohio Republican State Rep. Josh Mandel tweeted, “The Palestinians are a people from a fictional land who hate everything we stand for as Christians, Jews, and Americans.” Imagine the backlash if Mandel had tweeted about pretty much any other group of people.
Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) condemned the tweet, saying that the “bigoted attack on the Palestinian people is shameful, morally repugnant, and factually wrong.” Quick reminder that DMFI’s board includes a woman who called for Gaza to be burned.
?? The New York Times ran an awful op-ed from former Democratic Rep. Robert Wexler on Iron Dome. Wexler thinks things are getting better for everyone and anyone who objects to unceasing military aid is simply making things worse. Imagine typing the following sentence and not collapsing into a ball of shame: “While the Israel Defense Forces have continued to carry out raids against Hamas that have killed civilians, they have limited their nighttime incursions in the West Bank.”
Wexler repeats the trope about Iron Dome saving Palestinian lives too. “Iron Dome funding was never the intended target. The system is defensive; it protects countless numbers of innocent Israelis from Hamas rocket attacks and saves numerous innocent Palestinians by avoiding even more punishing Israeli military responses to those attacks.”
These kind of assertions always read like implicit threats. If the United States doesn’t fork over another billion in taxpayer money, Israel will simply be forced to murder more Palestinians.
In addition to being depraved, this take is also very inaccurate. In a recent newsletter I mentioned Khaled Elgindy piece in MEI on the subject:
The claim that Iron Dome also saves Palestinian lives seems to be grounded in the widely held belief that fewer Israelis killed would ultimately lead Israel to kill fewer Palestinians. But this is not at all the case. In fact, the 2014 war simultaneously saw the highest proportion of Palestinian civilians killed (75%, or 1,694 Palestinians) and the lowest proportion of Israeli civilians killed (8%, or 6 Israelis) of any Hamas-Israel conflict of the last 12 years.
By contrast, a strong case can be made that by minimizing Israeli casualties and economic disruption, Iron Dome essentially provides Israel a “cushion” that enables it to keep on bombing until its leaders are satisfied they’ve achieved their military objectives — the highly subjective and ever-elusive aim of “restoring its deterrent.” Simply put, the less cost Israel pays, whether in human, material, or political terms, the less incentive it has to hold back militarily or to “sue for peace” via diplomacy. This may also explain the more protracted and deadly nature of the 2014 Gaza war, which lasted 48 days and claimed the lives of 2,251 Palestinians and 73 Israelis, in comparison to the most recent conflagration in May 2021, which lasted 12 days and took the lives of 260 Palestinians and 10 Israelis. While Iron Dome featured prominently in both conflicts, the regional and U.S. domestic political environments proved to be far less hospitable to a prolonged war in 2021 than in 2014.
?? Americans for Justice in Palestine Action (AJP Action) held its virtual Palestine Advocacy Days this week. One of the sessions was a roundtable discussion on “Ending US Complicity in Israel Apartheid. The speakers were Palestinian diplomat and scholar Hanan Ashrawi, Human Rights Watch’s Omar Shakir, the Harvard Divinity School’s Taurean Webb, and IfNotNow’s Eva Borgwardt. You can watch the session on YouTube.
?? Dr. Steven W. Thrasher on Twitter: “A catastrophic failure of US journalism and politics is that something like Biden’s 10-year, $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill is not called a $350 billion annual bill…but the Pentagon’s budget, which will exceed $7.5 trillion over a decade, is called a $750 billion annual bill.”
Stay safe out there,
Michael
