Biden and the Six
It was October 2021 when Benny Gantz announced that Israel was designating six Palestinian human rights groups as terrorist organizations. The Israeli government provided no public evidence to support these claims and subsequent investigations into their alleged proof found nothing to back the assertions up either.
It’s no great surprise why Israel would want to quash the work of civil society organizations that document the country’s human rights violations and Israel was appropriately condemned across the international community for its attempt at suppression. Israel officials rushed to The White House shortly after Gantz’s announcement to provide the administration with “evidence” and run damage control for their decision.
Since then poor Ned Price has had to dutifully field questions about the situation at State Department briefings and pretend that the Biden team is still examining the information that Israel provided to them. This seemed a ridiculous last fall, but now it’s devolved into a complete farce. During a heated exchange with the AP’s Matt Lee last month Price finally admitted that the administration had “not seen anything that has caused us to change our position.”
In other words, the United States government disagrees with Israel on this issue and doesn’t think the groups should be classified as terrorists. Ah, so why not just say that publicly? Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown. You can’t expect the administration to criticize Israel on this issue publicly, say the country was wrong, or vigorously defend the targeted organizations.
Lee asked the only logical followup to the admission: “So you don’t believe the Israelis’ information?” Price immediately pivoted back to the usual blather. “Intelligence information is always information that is the subject of analysis and different parties can read information differently,” he said. “They can perceive of threats differently. Our own analysis heretofore of the information that was provided last year has not caused us to change our approach to these organizations.”
You’ll notice Price uses the word “heretofore.” The implication is that they will continue to study the alleged evidence despite not agreeing with Israel on the issue. This press conference happened shortly after all six organizations were raided by Israeli forces. They all had documents stolen, property damaged, and their office doors were welded shut. Could Price condemn this travesty? Of course not. The raids simply meant that Biden now has even more information to pretend it’s studying. “I think the fact is that our Israeli partners..took an action..to designate these organizations as so-called ‘terrorist organizations’” Price explained. “What we’ve seen publicly, what they’ve conveyed privately in recent hours, is that there’s an appropriate basis for the actions that they have taken. It will be a matter of urgency for us to review the basis for that information.”
The raids were “a matter of urgency” for Biden but a month later the administration has conveyed no public information about them and who really expected it them to with this kind of track record on Israel? “Urgency” in this case is a little like “accountability” in the case of Shireen Abu Akleh. The more the administration repeats the words, the less they seem to mean.
Last week an Israeli envoy was back in DC with more alleged evidence on the six groups. A year later! An Israeli official admitted to Axios‘ Barak Ravid that the designations had hurt the country’s standing in the United States, particularly within the Democratic party as multiple lawmakers have condemned the move. So it seems like Israel is now scrambling to do some more damage control. The delegation met with the State Department, CIA and the office of the Director of National Intelligence. A State Department spokesman told Ravid that the administration was “currently evaluating” the new information. You don’t say.
“Despite claiming to center human rights in U.S. foreign policy, the Biden administration has repeatedly failed to take action and stand up for Palestinian civil society and human rights organizations increasingly under attack by the Israeli government,” Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCIP) senior policy and advocacy adviser Brad Parker told me yesterday. DCIP is one of the six group’s being targeted by Israel.
“We have no reason to believe this meeting between Israeli and U.S. officials will result in a different outcome,” he continued. “The Biden administration has made it clear that the Israeli apartheid regime has their unwavering support even if it means criminalizing and closing down prominent Palestinian human rights institutions despite international backlash.”
(More) J Street and Zionism
Earlier this month someone wrote a few messages in chalk on the ground at University of Wisconsin Madison’s campus. Headlines from the local media described the graffiti as antisemitic. Vice Chancellor Lori Reesor and Deputy Vice Chancellor and Chief Diversity Officer LaVar Charleston put out a statement apologizing to the school’s Jewish students. “These labels are antisemitic: they attribute broad actions or beliefs to Jewish student groups,” it read. “To those Jewish students and others affected, we are sorry for the impact this had on your first day of class at UW. We truly strive to create a campus where every student feels they belong, and this kind of messaging harms that goal and aspiration.”
The messages included sentiments like “Zionism is Racism” and “Zionism is Genocide. Some graffiti also declared that Zionist organizations on campus “have blood on their hands.” They were written in chalk.
In last week’s newsletter I talked about a recent saga over Zionism involving the liberal, pro-Israel group J Street. I’ll quickly recap in case you missed it. Last month a college student and J Street U member wrote an opinion piece for the Americans for Peace Now website declaring support for BDS and suggesting that J Street unwavering commitment to Zionism was potentially alienating students. Phil Weiss wrote about the piece at our site. In response to Phil’s article J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami wrote a defense of Zionism and Americans for Peace Now took the op-ed down.
J Street was one of the Zionist organizations mentioned in the chalk, which has prompted the group to put out another statement defending the nationalist, political ideology. This one comes from Liz Ely and Raphy Jacobson, the J Street U Chapter Leaders at the University of Wisconsin.
“It should go without saying, but it’s possible to identify as pro-Israel and Zionist and still hold any number of wide-ranging views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” it reads. “Our J Street U chapter models a pro-Israel vision underpinned by our Jewish values and Israel’s own founding values of justice, equality and peace. This compels us to speak out against the occupation and in support of Palestinian rights and Palestinian statehood.”
There’s a lot to unpack there, but let’s zero in on one specific part. It’s obviously possible for Zionists to hold different views, but whether these can actually be “wide-ranging” is certainly not self-evident. J Street isn’t lying when it refers to itself as a liberal organization. They oppose the occupation, criticize settlement expansion, and support the Iran deal. However they’re also hopelessly devoted to the two-state solution and adamantly oppose BDS, a nonviolent Palestinian-led movement with the simple goal of getting Israel to meet its obligations under international law. When it comes to the Palestinian right of return J Street believes in allowing “a very limited, primarily symbolic number of refugees to return to Israel for the purpose of family reunification.” I love liberals when they try to think constructively, the late Alexander Cockburn used to say.
When Israel’s three-day day assault on Gaza killed 49 Palestinians (including 17 children) last month J Street put out a statement expressing concern about the situation, but made it clear that they supported the bombing. “Israel has the same right as any other country to defend itself from the threats posed by such an entity,” it explained in a statement.
Can an organization truly support Palestinian rights if it also believes all these things? That question has seemingly gained traction over the past year or so. Last fall we saw a rift develop between Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) and the DSA, in part because Bowman participated in a J Street trip to Israel and we’ve seen more criticism of the organization from campus Palestine groups.
Earlier this year I spoke with a couple Tufts University students who had launched a BDS campaign on campus and received pushback for including J Street as one of the groups to avoid joining. “One thing we can agree on is that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism,” one of them told me. “You can critique Israel and as a Jewish person you can have a strong moral and political stance against Israel. With that being said, I think the reason the discourse has shifted is that liberal Zionists, even if they’re anti-occupation and the framework they use to talk about the issue might sound more humane than anti-Palestinian or Islamophobic rhetoric, they’re still not acknowledging the fundamental cause of Palestinian resistance. It’s not just the occupation, it’s also the colonization of historic Palestine going back even before 1948.”
The ADL and Fox News
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) purports to be a civil rights organization despite opposing Palestinian rights, aligning with the police, teaming up with the right, and smearing anti-Zionists as antisemites.
In recent years a coalition of social justice organizations have called on civil rights groups to “Drop the ADL” and stop collaborating with the group. In 2020 the campaign published a primer detailing the ADL’s history on some of this stuff. “We are deeply concerned that the ADL’s credibility in some social justice movements and communities is precisely what allows it to undermine the rights of marginalized communities, shielding it from criticism and accountability while boosting its legitimacy and resources,” reads the coalition’s website. “Even when it may seem that our work is benefiting from access to some resources or participation from the ADL, given the destructive role that it too often plays in undermining struggles for justice, we believe that we cannot collaborate with the ADL without betraying our movements.”
Recently the ADL was the target of a “Fox News Digital investigation,” which is pretty much exactly what you’d expect. Fox pored over the ADL’s educational materials and found all kinds of ghastly stuff. Mentions of intersectionality, references to structural racism, acknowledgments of women’s rights, the works. So how did this alleged civil rights organization react to predictable right-wing smears? They immediately caved and promised to do better. They even managed to attack antizionists in their craven statement:
ADL is guided by a mission statement that was written when the organization was founded in 1913: our purpose is to ‘stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all.’ This mission compels us to fight antisemitism and all forms of bigotry and prejudice, from virulent anti-Zionism to vicious xenophobia. In service to our mission, we have developed anti-bias and anti-hate education programs over the past four decades. These programs are designed to educate students and help them confront hate. We are proud we have helped millions of children across America learn to challenge bias, discrimination, and hate against all people.
We do not teach Critical Race Theory, period.
That said, we are far from perfect and clearly there is content among our curricular materials that is misaligned with ADL’s values and strategy. We intend to address this issue immediately and openly. We are moving to launch a thorough review of our education content. We will review the findings and implement a process to update them appropriately and expeditiously. We will get this right.
“One more time, from the top: the ADL is a right-wing organization,” Emmaia Gelman, an activist and a post-doctoral lecturer at New York University in American Studies told me. “The ADL has been leading the attack on ethnic studies in public schools for two years now, using the exact same arguments as those by the anti-CRT crowd. It is fundamentally no different from the right-wingers fear-mongering about “critical race theory.” The only difference is that the ADL fronts as a civil rights organization at the same time as it attacks Black- and brown-led people and movements and smears antiracist organizing as ‘extreme.'”
“The ADL is also not an organization that protects the civil rights of LGBTQ people, despite pretending to be otherwise. Now, as Fox News attacks the ADL for teaching about gender identity and respecting people’s pronouns, the ADL replies that it will investigate itself and ‘we’ll get this right’. Seems like the ADL has tipped its hand, albeit accidentally: will it conclude that people’s pronouns should not be respected? That position would at least be more honest. It would affirm what we already know about the ADL, its reactionary character, and who its real friends and allies are.”
Someone should have simply let Fox know that the ADL attacked the SNCC and the Black Panthers in the 60s over their criticisms of Israel. With this kind of common ground established surely they could have avoided the whole investigation thing.
Odds & Ends
? According to a forthcoming book former president Donald Trump offered to give the illegally occupied West Bank to Jordan’s King Abdullah II. Peter Baker (New York Times) and Susan Glasser’s (New Yorker)”The Divider: Trump in the White House 2017-2021″ says that Trump told Abdullah he would give him a “great deal” on the area.
“I couldn’t breathe. I was bent doubled-over,” the monarch recalls. It probably goes without saying that Trump did not have the authority to give the West Bank away.
? At the site Mitchell Plitnick writes about the Israeli superhero Sabra, who is being introduced into Marvel’s cinematic universe: “The heroine is problematic not just because she is Israeli, but because she is a quintessential part of the Israeli apartheid system. She is, by day, an Israeli police officer while her super-powered persona is an agent of the Mossad, so she has two jobs that involve oppression and brutalization of Palestinians. Her outfits usually include some aspects of the Israeli flag, including blue and white coloring and a Star of David. She is not just an Israeli woman, she is a symbol of Israeli nationalism, and, therefore, of Israeli oppression of Palestinians.”
?? The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations has adopted Sen. Chris Van Hollen’s amendment requiring the State Department to produce a report on the killing of Shireen Abu Ahleh. “Over 100 days ago, American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot and killed while reporting in the West Bank. Following her death, my colleagues and I requested an independent investigation led by the United States as well as answers to basic questions around her shooting and a copy of the report produced by the U.S. Security Coordinator,” said Van Hollen in a statement. “This amendment will ensure that the Senate will receive the USSC report as we requested in July – and I’m glad that it was adopted by the Foreign Relations Committee. I will continue pressing for full accountability and transparency around the death of Shireen – anything less is unacceptable.”
?? A hawkish group called United Against Nuclear Iran is pushing a poll that seems completely made up.
?? US ambassador to Israel Tom Nides praised Israel’s treatment of Gaza this week and said last month’s deadly attacks on Gaza were “relatively calm.”
? Good catch by Lara Friedman from the House Committee on Foreign Affairs markup. Chairman Gregory Meeks tells Rep Ted Deutch (who is taking over as head of the pro-Israel American Jewish Committee in a couple weeks ) that he will continue to consult him in his new position. Deutch tells him that the phone works both ways.
Friedman also points out that all present Democrats voted AYE on an amendment attacking any use of the term “apartheid” to describe Israel.
?? Interesting piece from Andrew Bacevich comparing the performance of Russia’s military with the United States.
??????? Why didn’t Queen Elizabeth II ever visit Israel?
? RIP Jean-Luc Godard. In 2018 the pioneer of French New Wave boycotted a film celebration that was partly organized by the Israeli government. “Posing as an event for cultural exchange this effort is meant to boost Israeli reparation, tarnished by its increasingly hard-handed policies vis-a-vis the Palestinians,” read the petition Godard signed.
Stay safe out there,
Michael
