Senators Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley just returned from a Middle East fact-finding trip. They say Israel is enacting ethnic cleansing in Gaza, and the U.S. is complicit.
Congress passed a $1.2 trillion spending bill continuing a ban on funding UNRWA until at least 2025. President Biden will sign the bill immediately.
Two recent presidential orders show the Biden administration is feeling the heat from months of protests against his support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The Biden administration says it will release a new report on the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh after making some “technical” changes to its contents. Sen. Chris Van Hollen says any alteration “would violate the integrity of this process.”
After doing all he can to avoid confronting Netanyahu, Joe Biden called on him to halt judicial overhaul and said he’s not invited to Washington. Biden knows major Jewish groups have his back.
In a surprising but welcome development, the United States’ Department of Justice has initiated an investigation into Israel’s killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. Almost immediately, Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz declared that Israel would refuse to assist with the investigation.
Although it is unlikely the U.S. investigation will lead to meaningful accountability, Israel’s refusal to cooperate should raise questions about the US/Israeli relationship.
Two new legislative efforts to force the Biden administration to investigate the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh were announced this week.
Mainstream Democrats were shocked by the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, but their calls for an investigation were vague, even suggesting that Israel could investigate itself– a recipe for “whitewashing,” says a human rights group. No mainstream leader approached the position of progressive Congresspeople, that the U.S. must investigate Israel, or the view of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, that Israeli “apartheid” is the context of the killing.
When Biden blamed Hamas for the Gaza war in May, he was ignoring Democratic voters who by more than 4 to 1 blamed Israel for the violence. “That tells you the story right there. Democrats were not understanding why Biden’s not at least criticizing both sides,” political scientist Shibley Telhami tells Americans for Peace Now.
“Given the spread of the coronavirus in the West Bank and Gaza, the extreme vulnerability of the health system in Gaza, and the continued withholding of U.S. aid to the Palestinian people, we are concerned that the Administration is failing to take every reasonable step to help combat this public health emergency in the Palestinian Territories,” reads the letter. It was lead by Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), but was also signed by Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Tom Udall (D-NM), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Tom Carper (D-DE), and Sherrod Brown (D-OH).