“The United States has no better friend in the world than Israel,” President Obama once said. But rank-and-file Democrats don’t agree. They put Israel at 9th on a list of America’s most important allies, way behind Canada, the U.K., Germany, Japan, and China among others.

The Biden administration’s opposition to Israeli settlements really is a joke. After second husband Doug Emhoff tweeted a photo of the vice president serving wine from an illegal Israeli settlement at her seder Friday night, the VP’s spokesperson tweeted: “The wine served at the Seder was in no way intended to be an expression of policy.”

Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton acknowledges the contradiction between democracy and a Jewish state: “If you actually had a true one state where Palestinians and Israelis had equal rights– a democracy, right?– then demographically the Palestinians are probably going to take over the Israelis in relatively short order, they would outvote them, and that means you would really lose the concept of a Jewish state. For everybody who advocates for a Jewish state and the right for the Jewish people to have a Jewish state in the world, it’s hard to see how that works under a truly democratic single state as one would be necessarily constructed here. And that’s something that people don’t like to talk about frankly.”

American Jews overwhelmingly support the renewal of the Iran deal, and very few American Jews consider Israel a political priority, according to a new survey of American Jewish voters.

GEICO immediately caves to pressure from pro-Israel groups, drops Linda Sarsour from diversity event

In February a Rochester, NY, radio station aired a wonderful panel, of pro-Palestinian activists, one of whom deplored children being “taken from their parents” in nighttime raids. Pro-Israel groups attacked the station for the allegedly antisemitic charge that Israeli soldiers “rip children from their parents’ arms.” Well, they do rip children from their parents arms. And the silence of local progressive activists in the face of the antisemitism claim is dismaying.

In an impressive appearance before a Pittsburgh pro-Israel group, Summer Lee, a progressive running for Congress, refused to back down on Palestinian rights. She supported conditioning aid to Israel over home demolitions and child detention. She did not rule out the idea that Israel is an apartheid state. She attacked the claim that Israel had a right to defend itself by storming the al-Aqsa mosque last year. And while she did not endorse the BDS campaign, she likened it to the Black Lives Matter protests in the U.S. as a vital effort to change government’s conduct.

In case you missed it, Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic lately issued a report that finds Israel’s treatment of Palestinians on the West Bank amounts to the crime of apartheid. The study came out on February 28 in the wake of five longer, wider-ranging, apartheid reports published since 2020 – and just before the UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine published yet another apartheid report on March 21. Despite its quiet rollout, the study’s high quality and association with Harvard likely mean it will play a significant role in establishing Israel’s apartheid, and represents a victory for Palestinian human rights.

In a highwater mark of mainstream opposition to the unending Israeli occupation, 50 members of Congress have signed a letter to Secretary of State Blinken urging him to try to stop Israel’s demolition of 38 Palestinian houses in al-Walaja, a village in the occupied West Bank, because the demolitions will undermine “Palestinian dignity” and “long-term Israeli security.” The demolitions are also an issue in a Michigan congressional race between two Democrats, with Rep. Andy Levin calling them “unjust.”

The rightwing Israel lobby is enraged by the new report by the Special Rapporteur to the U.N. accusing Israel of “apartheid”– a “landmark moment of recognition of the lived reality of millions of Palestinians,” says Amnesty International. But J Street has had nothing to say about the report. It surely hopes it will go away, because these reports foster demands among progressives to actually do something about human rights violations beyond acknowledging their existence.