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Nita Lowey

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Columbia undergraduates voted by 61 to 27 percent to divest from companies profiting from Israeli apartheid, and school president Lee Bollinger dismissed the vote as no guide for investment. Bollinger’s statement reminds Rashid Khalidi of what Trump said during the first debate, when he refused to say that he would respect the result of a democratic vote on November 3, thereby confirming his contempt for the democratic process.

Jamaal Bowman at his campaign launch event (Photo: Twitter/@JamaalBowmanNY)

Jamaal Bowman’s apparent victory over Eliot Engel is not a setback for the Israel lobby–it is a monumental collapse. Not only does it present an opportunity to better align Democratic policy-making toward Israel and the Palestinian people with the growing pro-Palestinian sentiments of the party’s base, but it also punctures the Israel lobby’s carefully cultivated mythology of invincibility.

Lindsey Graham, Chris Coons, and Maggie Hassan meet with Benjamin Netanyahu as part of a a bipartisan delegation of senators to Israel in February 2018. (Photo: Israel Government Press Office)

On Wednesday, six members of Congress introduced a bipartisan bill to create a $50 million annual fund to “facilitate and finance joint economic ventures and people-to-people exchanges between Palestinians, Israelis, and Americans.” While the bill could be seen by well-intentioned members of Congress as a last-ditch attempt to revive the moribund prospects for a two-state resolution, Josh Ruebner says it should more accurately be seen as consistent with the Trump administration’s “deal of the century,” which appears in all likelihood to preclude the possibility of Palestinian statehood.