The Shift: Under pressure from Biden, Meeks backs major arms sale to Israel

We’re continually told that U.S. lawmakers can’t possibly impact Israel’s policy in Gaza, but then how does one explain the recent case of Gregory Meeks?

The New York Representative is the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, making him one of just four lawmakers holding an effective veto over foreign military sales.

Back in April, Meeks indicated that he would hold up a shipment of F-15s and munitions to Israel until he was given “assurances” about how they would be used.

It seems pretty clear how F-15s and munitions would be used by Israel, but I digress.

The holdout seemed to symbolize a small shift within the Democratic party. Here was Meeks, a staunch supporter of Israel and the larger foreign policy of the Biden administration, pumping the brakes on a weapons sale.

“I don’t want the kinds of weapons that Israel has to be utilized to have more deaths,” he told CNN at the time. “I want to make sure that humanitarian aid gets in. I don’t want people starving to death, and I want Hamas to release the hostages. And I want a two-state solution.”

This week the Washington Post reported that Meeks ended up signing off on the deal a few weeks, bringing along Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) from the Senate’s committee.

“If ultimately approved, the transaction would be one of the largest arms sales to Israel since the war began,” explained the paper. “The weaponry, often paid over many years, is largely financed by the more than $3.3 billion in U.S. taxpayer funds Washington provides Israel every year.”

Meeks told the Post that he’s been in “close touch” with The White House, that he’s urged them to improve humanitarian and pointed out that the F-15s won’t be delivered for years. It’s unclear how their purpose would change over time, but I digress again.

Meeks seems to be downplaying and spinning what actually happened here. The Post doesn’t hold back with their language. They say that Meeks faced “intense pressure” to conform to Biden’s wishes.

Now, let’s talk about another recent story.

Whenever Axios’ Barak Ravid has a scoop about The White House, that usually means that Biden wants to (once again) express its growing frustration with the Netanyahu government, but take no steps to actually shift policy toward Israel.

This week Ravid reported that the administration had chosen to “scold” Netanyahu for releasing a video in which he claims that Biden is withholding weapons. The punishment was canceling a high-level meeting on Iran.

The Biden team was quick to note that they only paused one shipment and have let billions in arms flow freely beyond that. “We genuinely do not know what he is talking about,” Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters.

“In private, Biden’s team was angry and shocked by Netanyahu’s ingratitude,” explains Ravid.

This is yet another sequence of events that tells us a lot of about the U.S./Israel relationship. You have Netanyahu publicly complaining about a single weapons shipment being paused at the same time you have the Biden administration applying pressure to Democratic leaders for raising slight opposition.

Meanwhile, the carnage continues.

ADL and Wikipedia

This week Wikipedia’s editors announced that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) cannot be trusted to give reliable information on Israel and that they’re not a trustworthy source on the subject of antisemitism.

“ADL no longer appears to adhere to a serious, mainstream and intellectually cogent definition of antisemitism, but has instead given into the shameless politicization of the very subject that it was originally esteemed for being reliable on,” wrote one editor.

The organization put out a statement condemning the move, saying it was part of “campaign to delegitimize the ADL.”

They aren’t lying. In recent years activists have fought to expose the ADL as a group primarily motivated by its devotion to Israel. ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt frequently equates Zionism with antisemitism and consistently targets the left. After October 7th, the organization helped lead the attack on student activists and pushed the FBI to crack down on campus Palestine organizing.

The ADL did not suddenly change its stripes. It has a long history of supporting surveillance against leftists. In a 2020 piece at In These Times, Sarah Lazare and Adam Johnson broke down some of that history:

The ADL smearing Black activists who oppose Israel isn’t new. In the 1960s, the ADL harshly criticized the Black-led Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panthers for their criticisms of Israel, equating these ​“negro extremists” with the KKK and American Nazi Party. The ADL also worked with the Israeli government in the 1960s, ​‘70s and ​‘80s to spy on Arab groups, as well as leftwing anti-South African apartheid activists. As Pulitzer Prize-winning author Glenn Frankel noted in Foreign Policy magazine in 2010, ​“The Anti-Defamation League participated in a blatant propaganda campaign against Nelson Mandela and the ANC in the mid 1980s and employed an alleged ​‘fact-finder’ named Roy Bullock to spy on the anti-apartheid campaign in the United States — a service he was simultaneously performing for the South African government. The ADL defended the white regime’s purported constitutional reforms while denouncing the ANC as ​‘totalitarian anti-humane, anti-democratic, anti-Israel, and anti-American.’”

Despite all this, the mainstream media openly embraces the ADL and treats them like the civil rights organization they claim to be. Turn on supposedly liberal networks like PBS or MSNBC and you might see Greenblatt pushing an deceptive ADL study on antisemitism or lying about the amount of attendees at a pro-Israel rally.

The group also still works with a number of human rights groups, who seemingly believe that it’s a reputable organization. That’s why activists have been pushing progressives to “Drop the ADL.”

In 2020 the Drop the ADL movement published a primer detailing the ADL’s history of repressing Palestinian rights, aligning itself with the police, and trampling justice movements. A coalition of groups (including American Muslims for Palestine, Palestinian Youth Movement, Adalah Justice Project, and IfNotNow) also published an open-letter calling for action.

“Even though the ADL is integrated into community work on a range of issues, it has a history and ongoing pattern of attacking social justice movements led by communities of color, queer people, immigrants, Muslims, Arabs, and other marginalized groups, while aligning itself with police, right-wing leaders, and perpetrators of state violence,” it read. “More disturbing, it has often conducted those attacks under the banner of ‘civil rights’.”

“We’re in conversation with educators and communities of color across the country and they’re naming the ADL as a primary force in attacking and undermining their ethnic studies work,” Executive Director of Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC) Lara Kiswani told me in 2022. “You also have their recent efforts to suppress Amnesty International’s very moderate report condemning Israeli human rights violations. I think the ADL can continue to talk a good game, but I would encourage people to think about what the ADL is actually doing and saying.”

It certainly seems like many people now have. The decision by Wikipedia should be hailed as a major victory and a testament to the importance of organizing.

After the decision I reached out to Professor and founding Director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism Emmaia Gelman, who has organizing against the ADL for years. Here’s what she told me:

Wikipedia’s public rebuke of the ADL is incredibly important for reclaiming journalistic standards, and beginning to take down the palace of lies that has been built to rationalize U.S. and Israeli-led genocide. Wikipedia’s refusal of the IHRA definition is just as important for the same reasons: mirroring the ADL, the IHRA definition is a right-wing political bludgeon masquerading as civil rights advocacy.

Wikipedia’s editors are doing what news outlets have flatly refused to do: consider the source. The ADL is overtly a political organization, neck deep not only in U.S. and Israel politics, but also in repressive regimes around the world. It attacks social justice movements. It advocates for policing and surveillance. It’s protested by the communities it claims to represent. No journalist could credibly mistake it for an organization representing “Jewish interests.” Yet major news outlets have been the ADL’s stenographers, just as they are for police and the IDF. 

The ADL is facing unprecedented public scrutiny, and maybe Greenblatt will be forced out. But the ADL can’t be fixed. The ADL’s right-wing politics are not just a Greenblatt problem, and they don’t stop at anti-Palestinian racism. The ADL was conceived as a white, capitalist institution to shut down Jewish immigrants’ radicalism. Its civil rights work has always stopped well short of decentering whiteness and wealth, and it has always attacked Jewish, Palestinian, Black, and queer social justice movements that actually challenge power.

We don’t need a “better version of the ADL.” Instead, we need to look at how the ADL’s work — including hate crimes policy, misdefining “terrorism” and antisemitism, rationalizing genocide — has distorted our conversations about justice. For that, look to the movements that the ADL has been trying to silence.

Odds & Ends

🗳️ What’s next for the Uncommitted campaign?

🇮🇱 The U.S. power structure is blindly dedicated to Israel

🇺🇸 Blinken’s lies about Hamas rejecting a ceasefire reveal the Biden administration’s true intentions

🚫 The Asian American Foundation’s ADL partnership is a betrayal to Asian American communities 

🇵🇸 The story of the U.S. ‘floating dock’ built from the rubble of Gaza’s homes

💰 Progressive organizations launch Reject AIPAC to counter the pro-Israel lobby

🇺🇸 Counterpunch: The United States Is the Main Obstacle to Peace in Palestine

🇮🇱 Truthout: Former Official: Biden State Department Bending US Law to Send Israel Weapons

🏫 In These Times: The Crackdown on Campus Protests is Just Beginning

🇺🇸 The Nation: The Lifelong Incoherence of Biden’s Israel Strategy

🇺🇸 Middle East Eye: Prominent US senator says Netanyahu invitation to Congress is a mistake

🇺🇸 The New Republic: Biden Just Criticized These Protests as Antisemitic. Were They?

🗳️ New York Times: Race and Israel Take Center Stage in Final Bowman-Latimer Debate

🏫 New York Times: Michigan and CUNY Mishandled Discrimination Complaints, Education Dept. Finds

🇺🇸 Electronic Intifada: US blames Hamas while Israel prolongs Gaza war

⚖️ Palestine Legal: Palestine Legal Warns Barrington High School Over Its Criticism of Palestinian Flags at Graduation

🇱🇧 Axios: U.S. officials say Netanyahu’s accusation video hurts effort to avoid war in Lebanon