Last week, activists confronted House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-MA) over the issue of Gaza during an event in the Representative’s district.
The pro-Israel congress member acknowledged the protesters’ concerns in her response and echoed their contention that what’s happening in Gaza is a genocide.
“We each have to continue to have an open heart about how … how we take action to in time to make a difference, whether that is stopping the starvation and genocide and destruction of Gaza, or whether that means we are working together to stop the redistricting that is going on, taking away the vote from people,” Clark said.
Video of those remarks was obtained by Axios, and, after the story was reported, some hailed it as a watershed moment.
It wasn’t just that Clark was the 14th member of Congress to use the term, or that a record number of Democrats have recently expressed support for a weapons ban on Israel. It wasn’t simply that she’s the #2 Democrat in the House and could easily become the most important if Hakeem Jeffries ends up being primaried.
No, Clark’s admission felt like such a major moment because her biggest donor is AIPAC. Clark’s use of the g-word came shortly after Democratic Reps. Maxine Dexter and Valerie Foushee both said they would back a weapons ban, despite being backed by AIPAC during their primaries.
Such shifts represent an obvious challenge for Israel Lobby groups to navigate, but AIPAC doesn’t have to worry about Clark.
Days after her comments, Clark assured the Jewish News Syndicate that she didn’t actually think a genocide was occurring in Gaza.
“Last week, while attending an event in my district, I repeated the word ‘genocide’ in response to a question,” she explained. “I want to be clear that I am not accusing Israel of genocide. … We all need to work with urgency to bring the remaining hostages home, surge aid to Palestinians and oppose their involuntary relocation, remove Hamas from power and end the war.”
AIPAC tells Jewish Insider that they’re satisfied with the clarification and will continue to support Clark.
“We appreciate that the congresswoman clarified her remarks, as Israel is fighting a just and moral war against a barbaric terrorist enemy,” said a spokesperson. “Our endorsement is unchanged and based upon her long standing support for the U.S.-Israel relationship.”
Polls show that most Democratic lawmakers are completely out of step with their voter base on the issue of Israel. Clark represents one of the most liberal areas in one of the most liberal states. It’s hard to believe that her constituents want her to engage in genocide in denial.
“A wide range of views of Israel remains among Democratic and Democratic-leaning independent voters, but there is much less diversity when it comes to the genocide in Gaza,” wrote Mitchell Plitnick at the site last week. “The left and center of the United States electorate are clearly against this and want it to stop. Even enough of the right opposes it sufficiently for Trump to at least make a show of trying to stop it.”
“Opposing genocide is about as fundamental as can be on the value scale,” he continued. “People are seeing that supporting Israel’s genocide is, for most Democrats, a question of politics, and, at that, a question of pleasing elite political donors and lobbyists.”
One imagines that Clark will face even more questions and protests over her support for Israel going forward.
Trump halts Gaza medical evacuations
Last week, the Trump administration announced that it was halting all visas for people from Gaza, including medical visas which have helped some injured children receive medical care.
“All visitor visas for individuals from Gaza are being stopped while we conduct a full and thorough review of the process and procedures used to issue a small number of temporary medical-humanitarian visas in recent days,” said the State Department in a statement.
At the site, Bilal Irfan and Alyssa Seliga say the decision means that more Palestinian kids will die.
“To understand how few make it here, you have to understand the pathway. First, a physician in Gaza refers a child for care that no longer exists at home. The case goes to a Ministry of Health committee, then to the World Health Organization (WHO) for medical triage,” they write. “Only after a receiving hospital issues a formal acceptance, often after weeks of back-and-forth with surgeons, translated records, and imaging, does the family usually even begin the paper chase: passports, exit permissions from the Israeli military’s Coordinator for Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), Jordanian clearances when the bridge route is used, U.S. visa appointments, and finally a WHO-escorted convoy. Each step is a separate queue with its own failures and reversals; a single ‘not yet’ in any queue can kill the case.”
“The numbers give us a picture of why this corridor matters. According to WHO and OCHA, as of mid-August more than 14,800 people in Gaza need urgent medical evacuation outside the Strip. Since October 2023, about 7,560 patients, including roughly 5,248 children, have been medically evacuated abroad, with most of those transfers occurring before Israel’s closure of Rafah last year made departures far rarer and slower – in fact, a 92% decrease was recorded in successful evacuations thereafter,” the piece continues. “On August 13, the WHO managed to move 38 patients, 32 of them children, to care options in Belgium, Italy, and Türkiye. Such operations are far smaller than the need. Pausing the U.S. share of that global effort may look like a minor adjustment from Washington, yet for an injured child in Gaza, it reads as a door slammed shut – and possibly a death sentence.”
The move effectively stops the work of HEAL Palestine, a nonprofit that has enabled nearly 70 children to receive lifesaving surgeries, prosthetics, and rehabilitative care in the United States.
People say the cruelty is the point with this regime, but there’s also a specific strain of stupidity that has come to define its barbarism.
This case is no exception.
The Trump administration seemingly made the move in direct response to a viral campaign initiated by racist, Islamophobic conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer.
Loomer posted a video of child amputees arriving at a U.S. airport, falsely insisting that they were erupting into “jihadi chants” because the kids are “Islamic invaders from an Islamic terror hot zone.”
In a follow-up post, she tagged Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “How did Palestinians get Visas under the Trump administration to get into the United States?,” she tweeted. “Is Secretary Rubio aware of this?”
She later claimed that the Gaza children were “being treated in American hospitals for free while US Veterans are homeless on the street, unable to get healthcare.
“This is why everyone hates them,” she added.
Drop Site News’s Ryan Grim replied to these ridiculous statements on Twitter.
“Trump slashed Medicaid, slashed the VA, slashed ACA exchange subsidies, and increased the military budget to over a trillion dollars but Loomer wants people to think that the reason they don’t have health care is that a Palestinian child got treated thanks to donations from people heartbroken at what Israel is doing to children,” he wrote. “This is a lie. The trillion dollars being spent to blow the arms and legs off of children is the problem. Not the children themselves.”
In a statement, HEAL Palestine said it was “distressed” by the State Department’s decision.
“Our mission gives children a renewed chance at life, whether through life-saving surgery or the ability to walk again,” it reads. “U.S. tax dollars don’t fund this treatment. Guided by human and American values, HEAL is committed to offering hope and healing to the few young lives we can reach.”
Odds & Ends
⛪ United Methodist Church divests from Israel bonds
📖 Sarah Schulman tackles the urgency, and pitfalls, of solidarity
🇺🇸 Rubio suggests he’ll target CAIR over Palestine advocacy
🗳️ Democrats torn between voters and donors on Palestine
🤝 Responsible Statecraft: Rubio takes annual human rights report to new heights of cynicism
📊 Reuters: Most Americans believe countries should recognize Palestinian state, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds
🫏 Punchbowl News: The Democrats’ Israel split is defining the Michigan Senate primary
🖊️ Counterpunch: Open Letter to Journalists on the Vast Undercount of Deaths & Serious Injuries in Gaza
🏥 Jewish Currents: Mount Sinai Hospital Fired Social Worker Over “Gaza Must Live” Postcard
💻 Drop Site News: Hundreds of Former Israeli Spies Are Working in Big Tech, Database Shows
📺 New York Post: Shari Redstone hoped Trump’s ‘60 Minutes’ suit would root out anti-Israel bias at CBS News — and she sold Paramount partly over Oct. 7
🇮🇱 Jewish Insider: Rep. Laura Gillen returns from Israel doubly committed to a strong U.S.-Israel relationship
✊ Electronic Intifada: JoAnne Lingle: Battling injustice from Hebron to Washington
Re that link** about the undercount of deaths in Gaza:
Classified intelligence from May reveals Israel believed it had killed some 8,900 militants in its attacks on Gaza, indicating a proportion of civilian slaughter with few parallels in modern warfare, a joint investigation finds….Figures obtained from the classified database — which records the deaths of militants from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) — contradict by a huge margin the public statements of Israeli army and government officials throughout the war, which have generally claimed a 1:1 or 2:1 ratio of civilian to militant casualties. Instead, the classified data backs up the findings of several studies suggesting Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has killed civilians at a rate with few parallels in modern warfare….“We are reporting a lot of Hamas operatives killed, but I think most of the people we report as dead are not really Hamas operatives,” an intelligence source who accompanied forces on the ground told +972, Local Call, and the Guardian. “People are promoted to the rank of terrorist after their death. If I had listened to the brigade, I would have come to the conclusion that we had killed 200 percent of Hamas operatives in the area.” [ the whole article is worth reading, but I can summarize it: the death count of ‘militants’ is about as accurate as the death count of the Viet Cong in 1970: complete bullshit ]
IDF database suggests 83% of Gaza dead were civilians
**
OPEN LETTER to Journalists on the Vast Undercount of Deaths & Serious Injuries in Gaza – CounterPunch.org
Katherine Clark is an amoral coward. I live in her district. I’ve written countless letters to her about Israel’s apartheid policies. She replies with formulaic answers that must have been edited by AIPAC before being mailed.
The vast majority of voters in her district oppose this Gaza War, yet she ignores them because power and money are all that matters for spineless Democrats like Clark.