There’s a lot to unpack this week.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog showed up in Washington to meet with Biden and address Congress. The big story here is that a number of progressive Democrats chose to boycott the speech. Congress members who skipped the event on political grounds included Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Nydia Velazquez and Sen. Bernie Sanders.
“It is no great secret that I strongly oppose the policies of Israel’s right-wing, anti-Palestinian government,” said Sanders in a statement. “We provide them with $3.8 billion in aid. We have a right to demand they respect human rights.”
The Herzog speech occurred less than 24 hours after the House overwhelmingly voted in favor of a GOP-initiated resolution saying Israel is “not a racist or apartheid state.” This measure was developed as a rebuke to comments made by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA). Palestine activists disrupted a panel that the congresswoman was on at a Netroots conference, and Jayapal told them that Israel was a racist state. She walked that back a short time later, saying she was simply referring to Israel’s current right-wing government. This obviously did not appease any of the people attacking her.
Those protestors who showed up to the Netroots panel were calling on Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) to support H.R. 3103, Rep. Betty McCollum’s (D-MN) aimed at prohibiting U.S. military aid from aiding Israel’s human rights abuses. For some reason J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami took to Twitter to criticize the activists. He said that Jayapal misspoke because she defending her colleague Schakowsky from a “malicious attack – to which she is regularly subjected – for not supporting legislation that only around 20 of her colleagues co-sponsor.” Ben-Ami adds that Schakowsky has “been disproportionately targeted” because she’s Jewish. Here it’s important to note that Schakowsky was the only member of the panel who has yet to cosponsor the bill.
It’s unclear why the number of co-sponsors on McCollum’s bill should matter in this situation (it’s actually 28 so far) and J Street has actually endorsed the legislation, but I digress. Ben-Ami’s assertion that Schakowsky is being targeted over her religion was picked up by the JTA’s Ron Kampeas who tweeted, “The argument that Jayapal stumbled badly into an IHRA defined version of antisemitism because she was defending a Jewish Democrat from progressives who are not attacking non-Jewish Democrats for the same position- is not a defense Dems and their allies can be happy to make.”
Kampeas is the Washington Bureau chief for a website that focuses on U.S./Israel policy, but apparently somehow doesn’t know that dozens of lawmakers have been pressured to support this bill (and its previous incarnations), most of them non-Jewish. Our archive is full of posts about activists pressuring lawmakers on the issue. Ro Khanna. Barbara Lee. Elizabeth Warren. Steven Lynch. The list goes on and on. Some of these politicians have since signed onto the bill, proving that these tactics can yield results.
It’s not like Schakowsky was suddenly targeted out of nowhere. Adalah Justice Project’s Sandra Tamari notes, “The disruption was planned in response to Adalah Justice Project’s panel at the conference within a caucus of conference attendees of Black, African, Arab, Asian, Middle Eastern, Muslim, Sikh and South Asian heritage. It was a beautiful display of solidarity to lift up a long running local campaign led by the Chicago organizers of the US Palestinian Community Network (USPCN) who have been organizing to compel Rep. Jan Schakowsky to sign onto HR 3103.”
“We are grateful to Chicago area organizers who have been courageously lobbying Rep. Schakowsky to take the bare minimum step of stopping US funds from being used to torture Palestinian children and commit war crimes,” she told me in an email. “And we are grateful for the hundreds of Netroots attendees who walked out of the panel in support of Palestinian rights. Solidarity always wins.”
Schakowsky (who claims she has “vocally supported justice for Palestinians” over her entire career) voted for the “Israel is not an apartheid state” resolution, attended the Herzog speech, and still hasn’t signed onto the McCollum bill.
“The U.S. Palestinian Community Network has been working tirelessly since 2021 to pressure U.S. Representative Jan Schakowsky to sign onto #HR3103 (previously HR2590), The Palestinian Children and Families Act, and we are proud to have played a part in the disruption of her keynote speech at Netroots Nation 2023,” US Palestinian Community Network’s Lara Haddadin told me. “Rep. Schakowsky’s yes vote on the GOP’s Israel Resolution shows that, unlike what she says, she is not an ally to Palestinians, but rather another politician that turns a blind eye to Israel’s apartheid. Any ally to Palestine knows that politicians who are progressive except on Palestine have blood on their hands, and we will continue to target politicians like U.S. Rep. Schakowsky who normalize the settler colonial, apartheid state that is Israel.”
Herzog’s speech was seemingly designed to appease liberal Zionists. A mention of Tel Aviv’s Pride Parade, a shoutout to Nancy Pelosi. Israel has issues like every other country but it’s a vital democracy and possesses an unbreakable bond with the United States, etc etc. Consistent standing ovations took place on both sides of the chamber. As Gabby Deutch notes at Jewish Insider, many of the 58 Democratic lawmakers who skipped Netanyahu’s 2015 speech attended Herzog’s, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Brian Schatz (D-HI) and Tim Kaine (D-VA).
“I am not oblivious to criticism among friends, including some expressed by respected members of this House,” Herzog told Congress. “I respect criticism, especially from friends, although one does not always have to accept it.”
Laughter filled the chamber, but I’m not sure what the joke was.
New poll
I have noted it in this newsletter dozens of times, but the Democratic Party is out of step with its constituency when it comes to Israel. The vast majority of House Democrats back a resolution proclaiming that Israel is not an apartheid state, but 44% of Democratic voters say it is.
Yasmeen Serhan has a piece in Time (the most mainstream of mainstream publications!) rounding up similar data.
“While these Democrats may be in the minority among their congressional peers, their positions are more mainstream than the D.C. establishment might suggest. Polls this year have shown that the gap between the American public and those elected to represent them is widening when it comes to U.S. policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, particularly among Democrats,” she writes. “This year, for the first time, an annual Gallup survey found that Democrats’ sympathies lie more with Palestinians than Israelis by a margin of 49% to 38%. The survey found that sympathy toward Palestinians among U.S. adults is at a new high of 31%, while the proportion not favoring either side is at a new low of 15%. That’s a remarkable shift from only a decade ago, when sympathy toward Palestinians stood at just 12%. During that same period, sympathy toward Israelis has declined from 64% to 54%.”
There’s important new polling from Shibley Telhami at the Brookings Institute that we have to throw into the mix when citing these developments. Respondents were asked, “If a two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians were not possible, meaning the West Bank and Gaza had to be under Israeli control indefinitely, which of the following would be closer to your view?”
Almost 75% of Americans, including 80% of Democrats and 64% of Republicans, say they would choose a democratic Israel that isn’t Jewish, over a Jewish Israel without full citizenship and equality for non-Jews living under its authority.
There’s other intriguing data here: 62% of Americans say they don’t know whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism, while 21% said they did not think it was and 15% said they did. Excluding the respondents who don’t know, 56% say attitudes against Zionism are not antisemitic. That includes 64% of Democrats.
Excluding those unfamiliar with Zionism, 49% of respondents said they have neither a positive nor a negative view of it, including 50% of Republicans and 44% of Democrats. Overall, respondents saw Zionism (30%) more negatively than positively (21%). Just 20% of Democrats and 32% of Republicans said they had a positive view of Zionism.
So, the majority of Americans aren’t concerned with Israel remaining a Jewish state if the two-state solution is dead. The majority of those who know what anti-Zionism is don’t believe it’s antisemitic, and Zionism isn’t nearly as popular as pro-Israel groups make it out to be.
The biggest takeaway with all of this is that most Americans don’t know enough about this issue to have an opinion, but whenever there’s a week like this one, I have to believe more and more people become aware.
Odds & Ends
???? Rep. Ro Khanna: “I had the opportunity to speak with President Isaac Herzog today. His speech affirmed the historic economic, cultural & security bond between the US & Israel. We spoke about Heschel who believed that no religion has a monopoly on the truth as informing for pluralistic democracy.”
???? U.S. and Israel agree on conditions that could see Israelis join visa waiver program. Barak Ravid in Axios:
The MOU will start a four-to-six-week review period during which Israel will implement a pilot program aimed at ensuring most Iranian, Palestinian and other Arab Americans are given equal treatment when traveling to or through Israel, according to Israeli officials.
After the review period, the U.S. will decide whether Israel is eligible to enter the waiver program, the sources said.
As part of the pilot program, Israel will allow Palestinian Americans from the West Bank, Iranian Americans and other Arab Americans to enter the country for 90 days without any background checks, according to Israeli officials and Israeli Foreign Ministry documents obtained by Axios.
Good thread from Zaha Hassan on all the issues here. “It is NOT a binding doc’t that guarantees Israeli compliance. “It would have to be a treaty for that. Israel’s coalition wld not be ok giving rights to Palestinians…”
???? Here’s the Time article I referenced earlier: The American Public’s Views on Israel Are Undergoing a Profound Shift. Washington Hasn’t Caught Up.
???????? Rep. Jerry (D-NY) was holding a flag of Israel on the floor during Herzog’s speech.
???? Noura Erakat in The Hill: “Herzog might be considered a moderate by the right-wing standards of Israeli politics, but that says little. He does not even oppose the West Bank settlement enterprise, considered illegal by international diplomatic consensus and now up for scrutiny as a war crime before the International Criminal Court. Congress should be discussing measures of accountability, rather than normalizing the apartheid of our time.”
????️ Peter Beinart in The Guardian: “It should be no surprise that progressives like Omar, Bowman and Ocasio-Cortez – who are fighting desperately against ethnonationalists who want to entrench white Christian supremacy in the United States – would boycott an Israeli president who has made Jewish supremacy the guiding principle of his political career. When Narendra Modi – who is turning India into a Hindu supremacist state – addressed Congress last month, they boycotted him for the same reason. Far harder to justify is the decision of their Democratic colleagues, who proclaim their commitment to equality under the law yet line up to applaud a politician who baldly opposes it.”
???? Noa Tishby says the President of Israel isn’t a politician. (???)
???? Zionist Organization of America’s Morton Klein is criticizing Netanyahu for his proposed (temporary!) settlement freeze: “Any freeze on Jewish building is unconscionable antisemitic discrimination.” Worth noting that Klein advises RFK Jr. on Israel.
???? Mitchell Plitnick on the Herzog speech at the site:
Herzog has no explanation for how it is that, this year alone at least 153 Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers (through June 24) while these allegedly bloodthirsty Palestinians have killed 23 Israelis. Every life is precious, and all civilian lives lost are tragedies, but Herzog would have us believe that Israelis never harm anyone outside of those about to kill them. It is obviously untrue. And when we talk about injuries, more Palestinians have been injured by Israelis (6,336) this year alone than Israelis have been by Palestinians since the beginning of 2008 (6,246).
Herzog dove deeper, though, claiming it was only Palestinian violence that was responsible for the derailment of the futile “peace process,” portraying Israel—whose prime minister for almost all of the past fifteen years has repeatedly vowed to destroy the very idea of a Palestinian state—as constantly striving for “peace” and good relations with the Palestinians. He repeated the falsehood that the Palestinian Authority’s welfare system for the families of Palestinian prisoners and those killed fighting Israel (some of whom have certainly attacked or even killed Israeli non-combatants) is actually a reward program for those who kill Israelis. He never, of course, mentioned that those same Palestinians are deprived of all their rights, without exception, by Israel.
???????? Jonathan Ofir on why Israel is a racist state.
✉️ More than 60 national organizations are calling on Congress to pass Justice for Shireen Act. Groups include US Campaign for Palestinian Human Rights, Amnesty International USA, Reporters Without Borders, IfNotNow, Defense of Children International – Palestine (DCIP), Oxfam America, Project, and Human Rights Watch.
“We call upon Congress to pass Representative Carson’s Justice for Shireen Act to require necessary reporting into Shireen Abu Akleh’s killing and urge Congress and the Biden administration to take immediate steps to ensure that U.S. military funding to the Israeli government does not support human rights abuses against Palestinians,” reads their open letter.
“The United States has a moral and legal obligation to ensure that its military funding is not used to support actions that violate international humanitarian or human rights law. Thank you for your consideration of this important matter,” it continues. We look forward to working with you to bring about justice for Shireen Abu Akleh.”
????️ Biden, Jayapal, and liberal Zionists rush to prop up the Israel lobby for 2024
???????? Democratic party fissures on display as Jayapal walks back Israel criticism
???????? Palestinian organizer Samir Eskanda in Jacobin: “After Israel’s Jenin Attack, It’s Time to Strengthen the BDS Campaign.”
Stay safe out there,
Michael
