In remarks to congressional interns leaked to the press, Middle East envoy Jared Kushner is pessimistic about any peace deal. “Not a whole lot has been accomplished over the last 40 or 50 years we’ve been doing this… There may be no solution,” he says.

Yuval Steinitz, a minister in the Netanyahu government, says that David Harris, of the American Jewish Committee, serves “a little bit as the foreign minister of the Jewish state.” Thus Harris defends everything Israel does and tried to stop the Iran deal, alongside Netanyahu. But don’t call him a foreign agent!

Senator Lindsey Graham wonders if AIPAC should be a foreign agent: “They come up here in droves lobbying Congress to do things in their view good for the US Israel relationship. I know they have a lot of contacts in Israel. Should somebody like that be a foreign agent?” But no, the AIPAC model is a “good thing,” he concludes.

The investigation of Russia’s meddling in U.S. politics dominates the liberal press. Phil Weiss writes that he believes the suspicions about Donald Trump and the Russians, but what stands out to him is that conduct that is Watergate-worthy when it comes to Russia is hunky-dory when it comes to Israel. Just in the last week there have been two other expressions of Israel’s active interests in our politics that the liberal media have failed to say boo about.

The “grip” of AIPAC is so complete that writers who challenge it are smeared as “anti-Semites” and politicians who buck it “see their careers suddenly stalled,” Andrew Sullivan says in denouncing Schumer for leading the charge on the “creeping authoritarianism” of the Israel Anti-Boycott Act before Congress.

Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Grim’s report at the Intercept on new legislation in the Congress that would criminalize support for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). Yes, criminalize. The bill is such a crude example of overreach by the Israel lobby that it is sure to backfire on its supporters as Greenwald and Grim’s report ricochets around the Democratic Party

After demonstrators torched two European embassies in Damascus in 2006 in rage over Muhammad cartoons in the western press, then-President George W. Bush told Israel’s Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, “We need to cut their heads off,” she recalls at an American Jewish Committee conference. And she seems to approve of the idea.

June 8 marked the 50th anniversary of the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, killing 34 American sailors. The case remains a mystery that is the subject of a Haaretz investigation in Israel and a new book, but U.S. media won’t even address the controversy, leaving the case entirely to Letters to the Editor.

Nadia Hijab, a leading thinker on Middle East issues, says Palestinians must insist on their right to self-determination and to reparations for their losses from Israel, ahead of the issue of one or two states. She counts on highly-organized Jewish allies in this struggle. She used to ask Jews what they were doing in the movement. Now they’re so common, she never does.

America has been at war for 15 years but few Americans notice, because overall it is rural communities that have suffered the highest casualty rates, Francis Shen and Douglas Kriner argue in an important new paper. And it was those communities, in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, that gave Donald Trump his victory over Hillary Clinton, who was seen as pro-war.