The beltway consensus on military aid to Israel is finally beginning to face a legitimate political challenge. There’s obviously still a long way to go, but it’s telling that so many Democrats now feel they can safely challenge aid without facing disastrous political consequences.
Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Pramila Jayapal, Betty McCollum, and Rashida Tlaib call for conditioning US aid to Israel if the country moves forward with annexation.
Over 100 organizations are calling on Joe Biden to support conditioning U.S. aid to Israel on an end to violations of Palestinian human rights.
The Jewish Voice for Peace Health Advisory Council (JVP HAC) joins the multitude of social justice groups and community-led calls for an end to the structural and systemic racism in, and violence by police forces across the country towards Black Americans.
With the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s passage of the United States-Israel Security Assistance Authorization Act of 2020 last week, the current Congress is now poised to enact with little transparency its most far-reaching bill related to Israel at the height of a national public health emergency.
The Netanyahu-Gantz coalition government will be sworn in this week and Netanyahu has made it clear that he intends to move forward with annexation plans this summer. Almost every Democrat opposes the move, but virtually none of them want to even suggest doing anything about it.
Boston has banned ads for Palestine– and other political causes– in transportation sites, and an anonymous group responded by opening many bus station kiosks this week and replacing advertisements for commercial products with “posters explaining that the good people of Boston lose out on social programming, education, and clean energy because $11 million of this city’s taxes go towards buying guns for Israel every single year.”
Major presidential candidates are now supporting conditioning US aid to Israel. Josh Ruebner says it is up to us to support these candidates’ steps in the right direction while at the same time acknowledging that none of them go nearly far enough. “With continued education, determined and strategic organizing and mobilizing, we will get them there,” Ruebner writes.
On Thursday, by the Wall Street Journal’s Sabrina Siddiqui asked Biden whether he’d consider leveraging aid to Israel to curb settlement expansion. “Not me. Look, I have been on record from very early on opposed to settlements, and I think it’s a mistake,” Biden told the reporter, “And Netanyahu knows my position. But the idea that we would draw military assistance from Israel, on the condition that they change a specific policy, I find it to be absolutely outrageous.”
A major theme has emerged at this year’s annual J Street conference: conditioning U.S. military aid to Israel. This lines up with a wider shift that seems to be happening throughout the country. An October 25 report from the centrist Center for American Progress shows 56% of voters say they’d condition aid if the Israeli government continues to expand settlements or ends up annexing the West Bank. That number goes up to 71% when applied only to Democratic voters.