Israel and its advocates claim “there are no innocents in Gaza” and depict all Palestinians as legitimate targets. For them, to be alive in Gaza is to be implicated.

Progressive leader Nina Turner was defeated in the closely-watched Ohio primary for Congress tonight by establishment candidate Shontel Brown, according to reports in the media. The victory is a big win for the pro-Israel lobby inside the Democratic Party– and a blow to the insurgent left wing in the party.

The neocons were a conspiracy in plain sight who fomented the Iraq war, says star academic Heather Cox Richardson, dismissing “tin foil hat” theorizing. Though even her questioning about the causes of the war stops short of the role of Israel in neoconservative thought.

Pompeo’s gifts to Netanyahu in occupied territory yesterday were all about getting the Israel lobby on Pompeo’s side for 2024. The one headwind Pompeo has it in his power to possibly create against Biden/Harris in 2024 is to get Biden fighting with Netanyahu over settlements and get the Democratic Party fighting over Israel.

Forty percent of Arab American voters cite race relations as most important issue in election, and 70 percent have positive view of anti-racism protests, according to an Arab American Institute survey of voters. Just 5 percent of Arab American voters say solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is their top issue– a number not dissimilar from surveys of Jewish voters.

Guccifer 2.0, the Russian account said to have hacked Democratic emails in 2016, was registered with an Israeli phone number, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reported last month, just one of many instances that Israelis appeared to help Russia interfere in U.S. election. But the new cold war is with Russia, so US media ignore the Israeli connection.

Russiagate is an excuse to ramp up a new Cold War. That’s why so many national security types love it. Antiwar types should see this as an internecine fight between different factions of warmongers, a jingoistic and xenophobic way to blame our country’s pathetic political culture on evil foreigners. McCarthyism 2.0 The more demented liberals online blame every criticism of the Democrats on Putin.

The UAE had a clear goal in signing a deal with Israel: gaining support and arms from the U.S. This reflects a long pattern of foreign leaders from Egypt to India to Russia being friendly with Israel so as to gain access to Washington. But our press ignores the trend.

Norman Finkelstein says that the International Criminal Court crossed a “Rubicon” when it announced a formal investigation of Israeli war crimes in Gaza and its ongoing settlement project, but that the ICC will likely use a technicality, that Palestine has no standing as a state, to throw out the case. The real battle will be in public opinion, and the case may help force the reckoning inside the Democratic Party.

We are actually having a debate about anti-war policy in the Democratic Party. Pete Buttigieg is soaring in fundraising in part due to strongly interventionist stances in last debate, while Sanders and Warren are getting slammed by establishment voices for alleged isolationism. And Tulsi Gabbard is smeared as a Russian asset for condemning “regime change” in Syria.