If you want to understand the power imbalance between the United States and Israel, the farce over Biden’s broken promise to Palestinians to reopen the former U.S. consulate in Jerusalem is a good place to start. The State Department has beseeched Israel to relent in its opposition to the reopening. But the Israeli government is adamant against it. And guess who wins?
At the Zionist Organization of America’s annual gala, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that Israel does not occupy any Palestinian land.
Israel has just approved a plan to double the roughly 25,000 settlers on the occupied Syrian Golan heights. Because Biden refused to reverse Trump’s decision on the illegally-acquired territory. And because leftwing Meretz, a government coalition party, went along too, saying the matter was “complicated.” Only Ahmad Tibi says the truth: the Golan belongs to Syria.
Mainstream media tends to focus on politicians, but the contours of what’s possible are determined outside of Washington. Despite the tragedies of 2021, the movement for Palestinian rights continued to grow in surprising and profound ways.
A new arms deal with Saudi Arabia shows that U.S. support for the regime hasn’t faltered.
Democratic congresspeople who opposed arms sales to Saudi Arabia under Trump don’t seem to have the same issues under Biden.
The NSO developments and the terrorist designations were two separate stories involving Israel, or so most people thought. However, just days ago we found out that they are very much connected.
The Israeli government is lobbying the Biden administration to get sanctions on the NSO Group removed. The push comes amid calls for a deeper investigation into how the company’s hacking technology ended up on the phones of Palestinian activists.
The Biden administration will continue to issue “strong” condemnations of Israeli settlements but do nothing to confront Israel because it does not want to make Palestine a political issue in the U.S. and it does not want to bring down Naftali Bennett’s fragile government, says Tal Shalev of Walla News speaking to an Israel lobby organization.
Israel’s declaration of six leading Palestinian human rights and civil society groups as “terrorist” organizations continues to have reverberations in Washington. Rep. Betty McCollum has introduced a resolution calling on the U.S. House of Representatives to condemn Israel’s announcement, and specifically called for the Biden administration to “publicly condemn this authoritarian and antidemocratic act of repression by the Government of Israel against prominent Palestinian civil society organizations.”