In a dangerous precedent, the House of Representatives passed a controversial bill equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Pro-Israel lawmakers quickly followed with a bill to establish a congressional commission aimed at Palestine solidarity.
In yet another demonstration of the bankruptcy of Biden’s policy on Palestine, the State Department called a UN Security Council resolution opposing Israel’s latest settlement move as “unhelpful,” a sure sign the U.S. will veto it. And reinforcing Biden’s bankruptcy is the emergence of a new Democratic Party PAC funded by Jeffrey Yass, who has funded Trump Republicans, to bolster the rightwing settler agenda here in the U.S.
House Foreign Affairs Committee votes to stop funding Palestinian curriculum that include teaching that Israel is an apartheid state. Rep. Brad Sherman of Los Angeles explains, Israelis and Palestinians live side by side in separation, just like the Dutch and the Germans live on either side of a border, so to characterize Israeli rule as apartheid is an “extreme and ridiculous conclusion.”
Israel is seeking to “liquidate” the Palestinian issue in its crackdown on seven human rights groups and Europe knows it, Khaled Elgindy says. But will it try and stop the crackdown? This is the “last straw” and “point of no return” for Europe’s claims that it supports the two state solution.
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.
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.”
Palestinian human rights activist Fadi Quran describes his detention by Homeland Security at the Dallas airport in October at the behest of the Israeli government as a supposed terrorist– a US lieutenant told Quran his hands were tied to interrogate Quran after an ally filed the claim. While Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace says the Biden administration will spend no energy on Palestinian rights.
The growing list of those who say Israel practices “apartheid” in occupied territories and west of the Green Line is joined by Michael Benyair, a former Israeli attorney general. But US advocates maintain a taboo on that word in the U.S. discourse, enforced by Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL and Rep. Ted Deutch.
“This is state terrorism at its finest hour,” Ubai Al-Aboudi, head of one of the Palestinian human rights organizations Israel has labeled terrorist groups, tells a Washington, DC, webinar convened by leading American thinktanks to push back against the secret dossiers Israel has circulated. He and other Palestinian execs say they crossed Israel’s red line when they assisted the ICC investigation of Israeli war crimes and assisted Rep. McCollum’s bill to cut off U.S. funds for Israeli mistreatment of Palestinian children.
Biden will have little choice but to turn up the heat on Israel for human rights violations given shift in establishment opinion in DC and mass movement to address racial inequities in U.S. And human rights group B’Tselem’s recent report that Israel is an apartheid regime will soon be echoed by a global human rights organization, according to a Carnegie Endowment panel.