A Tale of Two Letters
This week Israeli bulldozers and soldiers arrived in the Masafer Yatta villages of the West Bank to forcibly evict Palestinians living in the area. The land is being stolen so it can be converted into a military training zone.
On Twitter, Palestinian journalist and local resident Basel Adra documented some of the disturbing scenes on video. “This is firing zone 918,” an Israeli soldier tells the Palestinian families, “You don’t live here.” One mother yells at the IDF while picking up one of her children. “Don’t you have kids? Where will I take mine now?” she asks. “Don’t destroy my home, curse you!,” yells a woman before a tent gets bulldozed. Moments later she is sitting on the ground weeping.
“The woman crying in the video, her name is Wadha,” explains Adra. “Soldiers destroyed her home in May shortly after the the occupation ruled to evict thousands of people here. Since then, she slept in a tent with her kids. Today they CAME BACK, specially to destroy her tent. No limits. No heart.”
Israel has been trying to obtain these villages for more than two decades and they were finally gifted a legal breakthrough earlier this year when the country’s high court ruled that the Palestinians were not “permanent residents” of the area. The government based its argument on the findings of an Israeli anthropologist who has repeatedly insisted that his work is being misinterpreted and there’s overwhelming evidence to prove that the families have been there for decades, but of course none of this mattered.
The Biden administration has been receiving a lot of letters about Israel lately. Almost 60 Democratic House members sent them a letter asking for an independent investigation into the killing of Palestinian-American journalist of Shireen Abu Akleh. Obviously that’s not going to happen. 12 House Dems wrote them about Israel’s new restrictive rules regarding West Bank travel, but that policy will go into effect this summer without a hitch. Biden’s team received two letters urging action in Masafer Yatta, one signed by 83 Democrats and one signed by just 15. These efforts likely won’t add up to anything either. When State Department spokesman Ned Price was asked about the issue on Tuesday he responded with the same empty refrain we’ve all grown accustomed to: “Our reaction to that is what our message has consistently been. We continue to urge all sides to avoid steps that have the potential to inflame tensions, that have the potential to set back the cause of a two-state solution.”
They won’t have an impact, but the difference between the two Masafer Yatta letters is worth noting. The first letter was promoted by the liberal Zionist group J Street and praises Biden’s commitment to a two-state solution, whatever that means nowadays. It identifies the signatories as “supporters of a strong U.S.-Israel relationship” and warns the administration that bulldozed homes could “imperil Israel’s security.” On Twitter Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), who co-led the letter, writes that the forced evictions “increase tension and undercut efforts to take concrete steps toward peace.” The land theft isn’t referenced within any wider context of Israeli behavior.
The second letter, which was led by Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) and first reported by Jewish Currents, clearly states that forced displacement and transfer is a breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention. A war crime. It asks Biden to stop the destruction, but also calls on the administration to condition military aid to the country. This is the letter that attracted just 15 signatures: Bush, Carson, DeSaulnier, Grijalva, Jayapal, Pocan, Garcia, Hank Johnson, Omar, Tlaib, Ocasio-Cortez, Newman, Pressley, Takano, and McCollum.
There’s a lot of evidence that support for Israel is dropping among Democratic voters and young people, so it makes sense that Democratic lawmakers are making more public statements in support of Palestine, but most of these positions remain far removed from the reality on the ground. Just 8 of the 15 Democrats who signed the second letter voted against an extra $1 billion in Iron Dome money last fall.
“We don’t want apartheid liberalized,” said the late, great Desmond Tutu. “We want it dismantled.”
Biden Halts Consulate Reopening
You might remember that, while on the campaign trail, Joe Biden promised to reopen the Jerusalem consulate that Trump closed. In December 2021 the administration paused these plans over Israeli backlash. The Times of Israel now reports that the pledge has now been formally broken:
The Biden administration has settled on a series of steps aimed at boosting its diplomatic ties to the Palestinians in lieu of reopening the US Consulate in Jerusalem — a move it reluctantly shelved amid Israeli opposition.
According to two US and Palestinian officials who spoke to The Times of Israel, US President Joe Biden will elevate Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israeli and Palestinian Affairs Hady Amr to the role of special envoy to the Palestinians. Amr will remain in Washington but will make regular trips to the region and work closely with the Palestinian Affairs Unit, which currently is a branch within the US Embassy to Israel and is housed in the old Jerusalem consulate building.
The unit’s diplomats used to serve independently from the embassy until former US president Donald Trump shuttered the de facto mission to the Palestinians in 2019.
An IMEU post from last November explains the historic significance of the consulate:
In June 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, territories which comprised the remaining 22 percent of historic Palestine not conquered by Israel in 1948. Shortly thereafter, Israel de facto annexed East Jerusalem.
After Israel began this military occupation, all US diplomatic buildings in Jerusalem were “under the authority of the U.S. Consul General,” according to the defunct website of the US Consulate General, which headed “an independent U.S. mission that is the official diplomatic representation of the United States in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza.”
For more than half a century, until its closing in March 2019, the US Consulate in Jerusalem functioned as a direct diplomatic conduit between the United States and Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation. The Consulate General reported directly to the Department of State and was not a subsidiary of the US Embassy to Israel.
Ned Price says Biden remains committed to reopening it, but it’s nearly impossible to believe anything the man says on the subject of Palestine these days. Even if Biden opened the consulate, it wouldn’t reverse Trump’s declaration of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital or change the location of the U.S. embassy, but the bare minimum is too much in these cases.
Odds & Ends
? General Mills announced that it will divest the 60% stake in its Israeli subsidiary. This is a big win for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), who launched a campaign targeting the company two years ago. General Mills makes some of its Pillsbury products at a factory in the Atarot Industrial Zone, an illegal Israeli settlement.
AFSC’s No Dough For the Occupation was backed by a number of human rights organizations and multiple members of the Pillsbury family. “General Mills’ divestment shows that public pressure works even on the largest of corporations,” said AFSC’s Noam Perry in a statement. “With this move, General Mills is joining many other American and European companies that have divested from Israel’s illegal occupation, including Microsoft and Unilever just in the last couple of years. We call on all companies to divest from Israel’s illegal and brutal occupation of Palestine, and from the apartheid system it is part of. We congratulate General Mills on this decision and hope this is the first step in cutting all its ties to Israeli apartheid and toward respecting universal human rights.”
?? Axios reports that The Pentagon is considering downgrading the post of the U.S. security coordinator with the Palestinian Authority.
? On the website Mitchell Plitnick writes about a new Super PAC aiming to unseat Rashida Tlaib.
? Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley on Twitter: “Housing is a human right. The destruction of these homes and displacement of these families would be devastating. We’re calling on Secretary Blinken to engage immediately. #MasaferYatta.”
? Brooklyn councilwoman Inna Vernikov is pulling $50,000 in funding earmarked for CUNY Law School because the faculty endorsed a BDS resolution. According to the New York Post, “The money had been set aside for CUNY Law to provide pro-bono services to the needy in her district.”
?? Former Florida ADL director Hava Holzhauer is trying to fill Rep. Ted Deutch’s soon-to-be-empty congressional seat. He’s leaving Congress to run the American Jewish Committee. “Israel is incredibly important to me personally,” she told the Jewish Insider. “Israel’s existence is fundamental. To me there’s no question — I am a Zionist, and I support the safety and security and continued existence of the State of Israel.”
?? A bipartisan group of almost 50 congress members introduced legislation to end unauthorized United States involvement in Yemen. Sara Sirota reports on the effort at The Intercept.
?️ JVP Action announced their latest round of endorsements: Huwaida Arraf in Michigan’s 10th, Stephanie Gallardo in Washington’s 9th, Muad Hrezi in Connecticut’s 1st, and Amy Vilela in Nevada’s 1st.
? On the new episode of our podcast Dave Reed interviews Nooran Alhamdan, a recent Georgetown graduate who protested the killing the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh at the school’s commencement ceremony. Be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Stay safe out there,
Michael
