The Shift: Establishment voices question military aid to Israel

“With Israel, It’s Time to Start Discussing the Unmentionable,” declares a Nicholas Kristof column in the New York Times last week. A longtime establishment voice in the establishment’s Paper of Record is calling for an end to U.S. military aid.

Kristof offers the standard caveats before he gets going. He doesn’t think this “should happen abruptly or in a way that jeopardizes Israeli security” of course. He assures readers “this is not about whacking Israel.” Then he lays out the facts:

The $3.8 billion in annual assistance to Israel is more than 10 times as much as the U.S. sends to the far more populous nation of Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world and one under attack by jihadis. In countries like Niger, that sum could save hundreds of thousands of lives a year, or here in the United States, it could help pay for desperately needed early childhood programs.

Aid to Israel is now almost exclusively military assistance that can be used only to buy American weaponry. In reality, it’s not so much aid to Israel as it is a backdoor subsidy to American military contractors, which is one reason some Israelis are cool to it.

Kristof goes on to quote a number of voices directly connected to The Special Relationship.

“Israel’s economy is strong enough that it does not need aid; security assistance distorts Israel’s economy and creates a false sense of dependency,” says former U.S. ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer, “Aid provides the U.S. with no leverage or influence over Israeli decisions to use force; because we sit by quietly while Israel pursues policies we oppose, we are seen as ‘enablers’ of Israel’s occupation.”

“Israel can afford it, and it would be healthier for the relationship if Israel stood on its own two feet,” says two-time ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk.

“Under the right conditions and in a galaxy far, far away, with U.S.-Israeli relations on even if not better keel, there would be advantages to both to see military aid phased out over time,” says former State Department Middle East analyst Aaron David Miller.

Where’s this all coming from? At the site Mitchell Plitnick explains how Netanyahu government is beginning to annoy Israel’s liberal supporters.

“Netanyahu has made a mockery of the United States as its patron,” he writes. “While the Biden administration has fallen over itself to keep the cash flowing to Israel; to shield Israel at the United Nations and other international fora; and to promote the truly evil myths that anti-Zionism and BDS are nothing more than forms of antisemitism, Israel has responded by making commitments to Washington it never intended to keep, often abrogating them as soon as the meetings where they were made were over. Netanyahu also misled the media about the phone call the two had last week. That didn’t sit well with Biden at all.”

“All of this has led these key figures in the liberal Zionist, Washington community to beat the drums on the most sacred of cows on Capitol Hill — U.S. aid to Israel,” he continues.”Yet even there, the calls are tempered with a sense that they don’t believe it to be possible.”

That’s all certainly true. At the Daily Beast David Rothkopf says the Israel/U.S. relationship is over as we’ve known it. “While most of the blame for this turn of events must go to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extreme right-wing coalition of Jewish nationalists, some falls on America’s leaders who, to varying degrees, for years refused to acknowledge Israel’s drift toward authoritarianism or, for that matter, its serial abuses of millions of the people who lived within the borders it controlled,” he writes.

Not the worst sentiment, but it’s worth noting what Rothkopf is about. In addition to being a mainstream columnist, past government official, and former managing director of Kissinger Associates, he’s also a registered foreign agent with UAE and is paid about $600,000 a year to carry out PR for the country’s authoritarian government. A government that established a normalization with Israel as part of the Abraham Accords.

If anything, Rothkopf and the people who Kristof interviews, fear that Netanyahu is bad for business. “Aid to Israel cannot be a blank check,” says Rothkopf. “It must be driven by U.S. interests. And currently, the Netanyahu government…is not acting in those interests.”

If you are wondering how many times Kristof’s column mentions “Palestine” or “Palestinians,” the answer is zero. He concludes with the hope that we find a “non-ideological, patient way” of exploring what’s best for the United States and Israel, but there’s not even a passing thought for the victims of this longtime alliance.

Just a week ago the vast majority of House members voted for a resolution declaring that Israel is not an apartheid state. Nine Democrats voted against it and one voted present. Every other Democrat backed the measure, defiant in the face of reality. It didn’t matter what all the prominent human rights groups say, what voters think, or what the international consensus is. It doesn’t matter that every week brings a new round of horrific details from the region. Detained kids, dead teenagers, houses destroyed, belongings confiscated, checkpoints jammed. Raids. Bombings. The unrelenting barrage of daily indignities that don’t even make their way into stories. Support for this brutality remains the consensus in Washington, save a few brave voices.

Last month Mondoweiss’ Tareq Hajjaj interviewed Yahiya Abu Obeid outside the rubble that used to be his home. This actually wasn’t the first time Israel had bombed his house.

“I suffered through the process of rebuilding my home after Israel bombed it in 2014,” he told Tareq. “I built it with my sons’ sweat and hard work. I put everything into it, and it took me three years to build it stone by stone. Those years have been erased in front of my eyes.”

“I waited three years after my home was destroyed in 2014 to have it rebuilt,” he continued. “For two of those years, I wasn’t able to pay my rent, so I went to my destroyed house and settled on the sand, and gathered pieces of fabric to cover our heads. No one looked after me or my family for two whole years. We spent our nights catching ants that crawled over us at night as we slept on the ground.” 

“I can’t understand this level of unfairness. Israel forces us to live a bitter life full of tiredness. It’s getting to us psychologically and mentally. I spent my finest years securing my family a home, and the Israelis repeatedly destroyed it. And every time I rebuild it over several years, they destroy it again. It’s like wiping out the last 20 years of my life.”

Despite the lofty title of Kristof’s column, threatening to hypothetically withhold some aid because you’re mad at Netanyahu is not exactly unmentionable. What’s unmentionable is sharing stories of people like Yahiya Abu Obeid, pushing for a free Palestine, and explicitly calling for the United States government stop bankrolling apartheid.

AIPAC

A flurry of interesting AIPAC stuff.

At The Intercept’s Ryan Grim has an interesting piece on Pervez Agwan, who is running against AIPAC-backed, Democratic Rep. Lizzie Fletcher in Texas’ 7th district.

Rather than simply focus on the lobbying money his opponent is receiving, Agwan is attacking the function of AIPAC directly. “To take money from a lobbying group that dictates your foreign policy, I think it’s completely unacceptable,” he told Grim. I do not think it’s OK to take money from a group that openly keeps an apartheid system and an open-air prison where people’s rights are violated.”

“This campaign isn’t about me going out there, it’s about a collective movement of people here in Houston, that are from these communities, that are from Arab American and Muslim American, and from Middle Eastern and from Palestinian communities,” he continued. “And we recognize the atrocities that are happening there that are funded by the American taxpayer dollar, but also being pushed on us by lobby groups like the ones you just mentioned,” he said, in response to a question about whether he’s nervous about spending from AIPAC or Democratic Majority for Israel. “So we’re not scared. We have to stand up because their presence in our democracy — for that matter any foreign lobby or corporate lobby’s presence in our democracy — is really diluting the power of the average American person.”

At Sludge Donald Shaw breaks down the AIPAC contributions taken in by the Democrats who signed the statement criticizing Pramila Jayapal’s recent assertion (since walked back) that Israel is a racist state,

The statement was circulated by Democrat Rep. John Gottheimer (N.J.), who has taken more than $159,000 in bundled donations from AIPAC’s PAC so far this year, according to a recent disclosure. Money-in-politics website OpenSecrets says that Gottheimer received more than $217,000 from AIPAC last cycle, making it his largest contributor. 

Several of the Democrats who signed the Gottheimer statement had also recently disclosed taking large sums of bundled donations from AIPAC PAC. Rep. Kathy Manning (D-N.C.) signed the statement after taking nearly $210,000 from AIPAC PAC since the beginning of the year. Another signer, Rep. David Trone (D-Md.), has received more than $116,000 from AIPAC PAC this year. Several more signers have received more than $20,000 from AIPAC PAC this year, including Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine), Rep. Chris Pappas (D-N.H.), and Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.).

The progressive Jewish group IfNotNow has launched a Reject AIPAC campaign, which calls on candidates to reject endorsements and financial contributions from the lobbying group.

“Our Jewish and American values demand that we speak up and take action in defense of freedom, human rights, and communal well-being,” reads an open letter to congressional candidates from the group. “We envision a thriving future for all here in the United States and in Israel-Palestine where everyone enjoys equality, justice, and freedom. AIPAC has demonstrated time and again that it is actively opposed to these basic values. We ask you to uphold these values by committing to reject AIPAC’s endorsement and contributions.”

Odds & Ends

???? Julie Hollar has a piece in FAIR about how the mainstream media covered Jayapal calling Israel a racist state without mentioning whether Israel is a racist state.

???? Nasim Ahmed in Middle East Monitor: “Democrats and Republicans employed the symbolic power of Congress in a move intended to counter the near unanimous consensus among major human rights groups about Israel’s practice of apartheid,” Ahmed argued in response to last week’s House resolution declaring Israel is “not a racist or apartheid state.”

????️ Members of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) have overwhelmingly endorsed a resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions. 71% of the members who voted backed the measure while just 29% opposed it.

“This resolution is a meaningful demonstration of solidarity by thousands of scholars standing alongside their Palestinian colleagues, whose work and lives are impacted on a daily basis by Israel’s racist, discriminatory policies and brutal military rule,” said Jessica Winegar, an anthropology professor and member of the Anthroboycott collective, a group that pushed for the measure. “As scholars with a long history of studying colonialism, anthropologists are all too familiar with the devastating harm of Israel’s oppression and theft of Palestinian land. This vote is an important step in showing that support for Palestinian rights goes hand in hand with the AAA’s values of human rights for all.”

???? Last week over 500 New Yorkers protested recent Israeli violence and called on local lawmakers to back the historic Not On Our Dime! Act.

The legislation, which was introduced by State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani and State Senator Jabari Brisport, would amend New York’s not-for-profit corporation law and establish a civil penalty for nonprofits that fund illegal Israeli settlements in Palestine.

???? Adalah Justice Project is circulating a petition calling on Christina Aguilera to call off her upcoming show in Israel. “When an artist as big as Christina cancels a scheduled performance, it can break through the news cycle in a way that can be very hard for another kind of solidarity action,” it reads. “Each artist that cancels is the beginning of thousands of new people finding out about Israeli apartheid for the first time. It can lead to hundreds eventually joining the movement for Palestinian freedom.”

✊ Amazon workers protested in front of the company’s Web Services Summit in NYC. They are calling on Amazon to end its contract with the Israeli government. From Adalah Justice Project:

For almost two years, Amazon and Google workers have been organizing to end the billion dollar Project Nimbus contract, which helps the Israeli government surveil Palestinians, expand illegal settlements, and inflict violence on Palestinians under siege and occupation. 

This year marks 75 years since the Nakba, the expulsion of over 75% of Palestinians from their land. Tech workers and community activists remain unwavering in their organizing to ensure that Big Tech stops enabling the injustice and violence that began with the Nakba and that Palestinians continue to face to this day. 

Simply put: Amazon workers don’t want their labor to power the ongoing Nakba.

???? Senator Bernie Sanders introduced an NDAA amendment that would condition U.S. military aid to Israel in an effort to deter settlement expansion.

????. RIP Sinéad O’Connor. Here she was in 2014: “Let’s just say that, on a human level, nobody with any sanity, including myself, would have anything but sympathy for the Palestinian plight. There’s not a sane person on earth who in any way sanctions what the f*ck the Israeli authorities are doing.”

Stay safe out there,

Michael