With the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s passage of the United States-Israel Security Assistance Authorization Act of 2020 last week, the current Congress is now poised to enact with little transparency its most far-reaching bill related to Israel at the height of a national public health emergency.
Joe Biden is a throwback to a bygone era when Democrats and Republicans demonstrated equal fealty toward Israel and disregarded Palestinian rights altogether. A Biden administration would likely reflect that outmoded worldview.
A “Dear Colleague” letter was sent by more than 60 Democratic Representatives to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo earlier this week seeking to hold Israel accountable for its massive demolition of Palestinian homes last July in the Wadi al-Hummus neighborhood in East Jerusalem.
Trump’s Executive Order empowering the federal government to crack down on campus organizing for Palestinian rights under the guise of combating antisemitism was not issued on a whim but as the culmination of a deliberate strategy to stifle pro-Palestinian solidarity. On the campaign trail, Jason Greenblatt and David Friedman menacingly pledged that “the Trump administration will ask the Justice Department to investigate coordinated attempts on college campuses to intimidate students who support Israel.”
The vote last week on H.Res.326 reveals Congress to be more divided than ever in its approach to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Almost all Republicans now back Israel’s one-state apartheid rule over the Palestinian people, whereas most Democrats still give lip-service to Palestinian statehood without being willing to pressure Israel toward this end. However, Josh Ruebner writes that things are changing for the better within the Democratic caucus as a few Representatives bravely challenge the two-state paradigm and test the waters for conditioning aid to Israel.
Major presidential candidates are now supporting conditioning US aid to Israel. Josh Ruebner says it is up to us to support these candidates’ steps in the right direction while at the same time acknowledging that none of them go nearly far enough. “With continued education, determined and strategic organizing and mobilizing, we will get them there,” Ruebner writes.
Democrats are pushing to pass a watered-down and toothless version of a resolution supporting a negotiated two-state resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian issue in the coming weeks, and yet Republicans say even this contradicts the Trump Administration’s peace plan. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the resolution is designed to “score points against the President” and “cut the Administration’s peace process off at the knees, ensuring that any political proposal released by the Administration already has the black mark of a rebuke by the House of Representatives.”
US Ambassador David Friedman blatantly lied to Congress when he said he would oppose Israel’s annexation of West Bank lands and support a Palestinian state. He should be impeached for those misrepresentations, as well as for helping to block the visit to Palestine of Congress members Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.
House Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer landed today in Israel with 41 other Democratic Representatives for a week-long, all-expenses-paid junket sponsored by the the educational branch of the lobbying organization AIPAC. Dr. Craig Holman, Government Affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, who drafted the 2007 Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, designed to curb the influence of lobbyist money in congressional travel, is unequivocal that the trip “defies the spirit as well as the letter of the law.”
Yesterday, Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) addressed a Congressional briefing organized by American Muslims for Palestine on Israel’s abuse of US citizens. She shared her own family’s story of separate-and-unequal treatment by Israel, and urged the Capitol Hill audience to “push back against these kinds of racist policies.”