Tag

conditioning aid

Browsing
U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren speaking in Las Vegas in 2019. (Photo: Gage Skidmore)

At a town hall in Natick, Massachusetts this week Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) told a group of supporters that she supported conditioning aid to Israel, but couldn’t remember whether she voted in favor of the United States’s $38 billion military aid deal with the country.

In fact, she cosponsored a 2018 bill that aimed to enshrine the agreement.

Huwaida Arraf (Photo: Huwaida for Congress / Larry Lipton)

Polling by Huwaida Arraf, a Democratic House candidate in Michigan, shows that her position of cutting off aid to Israel is not unpopular. “Palestine is a political positive…Attitudes toward military aid to Israel undermine claims by AIPAC that strong support for Israel is ‘good politics… [S]ix in ten (60%) voters under 45 want aid to Israel reduced or ended,” a memo to donors asserts.

At 30 years old, Joe Biden told Israeli PM Golda Meir “there is no debate in the Senate about the ME [Middle East] because the Senators are ‘afraid’ to say things that Jewish voters will dislike,” according to an Israeli document. The report shows Biden twice angrily took on Israeli prime ministers over illegal settlements, when he was young. Though his surrogates have sought to deny this.

It’s a “canard,” says Halie Soifer of the Jewish Democratic Council of America. A “false story,” says former ambassador Dan Shapiro. Biden’s surrogates in the Jewish community go to great lengths to try to debunk a story that Joe Biden took on Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin over settlements in 1982. But the encounter is documented in the New York Times.

As he becomes a mainstream contender, Pete Buttigieg has shifted on the Israel Palestine issue. After saying directly that he would seek to condition aid to Israel if the country moves toward annexing the West Bank, the South Bend Mayor dodged this question entirely at the last debate, offering platitudes about the need for U.S. “leadership” in the world.