#the Israel lobby and us foreign policy

[teanderthalrex]

Political TBR 2025

Here is a list of the books I want to read in 2025 at the moment. Yes, recs are always welcome.

Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher

Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook by Mark Bray

Late Fascism by Alberto Toscano

They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us by Peter Gelderloos

Let this Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba

The Nation on No Map by William C. Anderson

The Language of Climate Politics by Genevieve Guenther

The Will to Change by Bell Hooks

The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han

Light in Gaza by Jehad Abusalim, Jennifer Bing, et al

The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt

Justice for Some by Noura Erakat

[workersolidarity]

[ 📸 U.S. President Joe Biden, from Delaware, remains the largest recipient of Israel Lobby cash in the U.S. political system at over $4'300'000 received over his long congressional career.]

🇺🇸🇮🇱 🚨

TOP TEN LARGEST U.S. POLICYMAKER RECIPIENTS OF ISRAEL LOBBY CASH

Mint Press News has compiled a list of the top ten U.S. Politicians who receive the most money from the Israel Lobby.

Here are the largest recipients of Israel Lobby cash in the U.S. political system:

1. U.S. President Joe Biden (D-Del.), $4'346'264.

2. Robert Menéndez (D-NJ), $2'483'205.

3. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), $1'953'160.

4. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), $1'725'324.

5. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), $1'620'294.

6. Ted Cruz (R-TX), $1'299'194.

7. Ron Wyden (D-OR), $1'279'376.

8. Dick Durbin (D-IL), $1'126'020.

9. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), $1'109'370.

10. Shontel Brown (D-OH), $1'028'686

#source

@WorkerSolidarityNews

[liberty1776]

What Is the Israel Lobby and What Does it Do?

[troythecatfish]

Daily reminder that the U.S. has been supporting these kinds of genocidal wars of aggression for 100+ years. This is nothing new and not a recent phenomenon-this has been going on for a long time.

It's important during times like this that we make sure people don't fall down the trap of blaming everything on the so called "ZOG" or "Zionist Occupied Government" which basically leads to the brain dead and fucking utterly stupid neo-Nazi route of blaming everything on "da Joos”

The U.S. has had horrific foreign policy long before there was even a strong and influential Israel lobby.

The Korean War occurred before AIPAC existed, and during the early 20th century before Israel existed the U.S. brutally colonized and occupied the Philippines, invaded Russia right after the Bolshevik revolution to crush the communist movement there, and plenty of other examples of this kind of foreign policy. And of course during the 1800s in the era of Manifest Destiny you had the genocide of native Americans, the Mexican-American war, and so on.

The idea that this is all the fault of Zionists is an absolutely brain dead analysis. The problem is mainly just capitalism (as well as racism and other factors of course, especially during the 1800s) which is a system that always leads to the most insane people ruling over us, regardless of ethnicity.

Zionism just happens to be compatible with the interests of imperialists in the Middle East region.

Blaming everything purely on Zionism and "ZOG" is completely insane and shows a profound ignorance of the history of American foreign policy.

[notaplaceofhonour]

“The influence of Israeli money in American politics—!”

Qatar—the country that funds Al Jazeera and is currently hosting Hamas senior officials—spends more money lobbying the US government than Israel does.

China, Japan, and Liberia each spend roughly twice what Israel does on lobbying. Where’s the outrage about the Liberian lobby being a threat to US democracy?

Hell, the Bahamas has a greater influence on American politics than Israel. I see you freaked out about shekels; where’s this energy for the starfish pennies?

“but AIPAC!”

AIPAC isn’t the biggest pro-Israel PAC, it’s just the Jewish one, and pro-Israel PACs don’t even scratch the top ten of special interest groups.

Y’all’re just weirdly obsessed with the narrative that Jewish money drives American politics.

Source:

[korrasera]

Here's something really important to understand for the 2024 US presidential election:

Voting for Biden does not mean you are voting to support genocide.

Yes, the US is terrible and yes, thanks to US foreign policy we are complicit in the Israeli government's crimes against the Palestinian people. And that's going to continue until we change the system; the US president is going to continue US foreign policy, we can't change that in a single election.

What we can do, however, is elect a candidate who has taken steps to stop the genocide. An administration that is working to provide aid to Palestinians in Gaza, who has tried to lobby the Israeli government to end their attacks on Gaza.

And the alternative is an actual fascist who has said that he'll become a dictator as soon as he takes power. Trump currently ranks as the worst president in US history in a 2024 white paper and is an actual, provable threat to democracy in the United States. If we're terrible now, just imagine how bad things would get with a fascist in charge.

Here's what it boils down to:

Both candidates going to support Israel, but the Biden administration is trying to end the genocide while Trump will almost certainly encourage it.

We have a chance to push Biden and the rest of the government to change and we know that because he's already been pushed. We have no such chance with Trump.

[dostoyevsky-official]

Despite its public portrayal of itself, the ADL isn’t a civil rights group in any meaningful sense, but rather, a veiled pro-Israel lobbying organization that uses superficial language of inclusiveness and anti-racism to defend Israel from criticism from the left. The ADL has made it clear on a number of occasions that it considers the entire basis of the peaceful Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement — embraced by virtually all of Palestinian civil society — to be hate speech, specifically any claim that denies Israel’s ​“existence as a Jewish state” (e.g. its claim to ethnonational supremacy over non-Jews living in Palestine). The ADL’s website clearly states, ​“Anti-Israel activity crosses the line to anti-Semitism” with any statement that ​“Israel is denied the right to exist as a Jewish state,” and that ​“the founding goals of the BDS movement and many of the strategies used by BDS campaigns are��anti-Semitic.” The ADL smearing Black activists who oppose Israel isn’t new. In the 1960s, the ADL harshly criticized the Black-led Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panthers for their criticisms of Israel, equating these ​“negro extremists” with the KKK and American Nazi Party. The ADL also worked with the Israeli government in the 1960s, ​‘70s and ​‘80s to spy on Arab groups, as well as leftwing anti-South African apartheid activists. As Pulitzer Prize-winning author Glenn Frankel noted in Foreign Policy magazine in 2010, ​“The Anti-Defamation League participated in a blatant propaganda campaign against Nelson Mandela and the ANC in the mid 1980s and employed an alleged ​‘fact-finder’ named Roy Bullock to spy on the anti-apartheid campaign in the United States — a service he was simultaneously performing for the South African government. The ADL defended the white regime’s purported constitutional reforms while denouncing the ANC as ​‘totalitarian anti-humane, anti-democratic, anti-Israel, and anti-American.’”

[centrally-unplanned]

Genuine question, why is the Jewish American lobby worth appealing to? Jewish people are only 2.4% of the U.S population. Are they really contributing to the U.S’s pro-Israel stance?

2.4% isn't small! Most elections in the past 2 decades have been decided by margins around there. Any group in the US electorate that commits to ride-or-die on a specific issue like that with those numbers is going to be catered to. Particularly when it is an issue people are otherwise *apathetic* to. Most Americans don't really care about Israel/Palestine? They won't punish you for catering to that demo, it isn't like abortion or the economy.

But to be fair people overstate the role of Jewish Americans in this - most of that 2.4% are *not* ride-or-die. Instead, most Americans do not "care" about the topic, but when asked they are broadly supportive of the current US-Israel relationship. Even if the current conflict is testing that, it has to be contextualized behind decades of support, and things just don't move that quickly. This is true internationally, by the way? Depends on the region and the poll, but you can find plenty of polling showing that pre-war people in China, Brazil, India, all net favourable on Israel (Middle East, parts of Europe, and Japan/Korea tend to be negative), Israel was a perfectly "popular" country. This isn't shocking, the world is complex, Hamas & Iran also are awful on this, people have their own issues (India & its relationship with Islam is a bottomless bucket to dive into), etc. And ofc 10/7 was a gigantic outpouring of support for Israel - people hate terrorism, news at 11. The idea that "some people support Israel" is really too unexceptional to even really require an explanation in a certain sense, right? People disagree on a thing! (Also I think people on this issue tend to be a bit naive about how okay the average person is with civilian casualties during war. If they agree with the cause, they handwave those away. And that applies to many in the anti-Israel camp too.)

And the biggest issue here is that foreign policy tends to be the most "institutional" area of policy, where voters don't care and The System sets its own priorities. Here the US has a multi-decade long, incredibly deep military partnership with the state of Israel, and a multi-decade long commitment to a "War on Terror", and its own very fraught history with Iran, Islamic fundamentalism, etc. It values those things for its own sake on top of all the strategic stuff, and is not inclined to pivot away from that. Voter apathy is typically not enough to shake that, you would need dogged resistance, and foreign policy topics don't normally get that. I think the US is going to require "generational churn", where a cadre of defense & foreign policy leaders who didn't spend a decade+ fighting the War on Terror and all that comes into power, for things to maybe shift.

[eretzyisrael]

by Lyn Julius

The results of the British Jewish election are in: a landslide victory for the Labour party. Will it be good for the Jews?

The Jewish vote will have reflected the national trend of a swing to Labour, but many Jews remain seriously concerned over resurgent antisemitism. They remain skeptical about new prime minister Sir Keir Starmer’s reassurances that Jeremy Corbyn’s far left antisemitism has been expunged from the party. And, they ask, will a Labour government take a robust enough stand against antisemitism?

A global tsunami of antisemitism without precedent smashed into the Diaspora in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attacks; the link between antisemitism and anti-Zionism has never been clearer.  Hostility to Israel has translated into intimidation and  brutality against ordinary Jews and their property in London and Paris, Los Angeles and Montreal.

While the pro-Israel Conservatives did not always put their money where their mouth was – and the last foreign secretary, Lord Cameron, shocked many with his moral equivalence over Israel’s war on Hamas — the Conservatives’ fall from power means that UK’s 300,000 Jews have lost the most pro-Israel government they could have hoped for. Labour’s policy on the Middle East is ambivalent at best. The Greens are unabashedly pro-Palestinian and the Liberal party are equivocal, if not anti-Israel.  The Reform party have their fair share of antisemitic conspiracy nutjobs. Although ‘Gaza George’ Galloway has lost his seat, Jewish hearts will also sink at the news that four independent MPs were elected on a pro-Gaza ticket.

‘A pro-Gaza ticket’  is doublespeak for the demand for Israel to surrender unconditionally to Hamas, to be pilloried in the international courts for alleged ‘war crimes’ and to suffer political and economic boycotts and strangulation. The pro-Gaza lobby do not want a ‘two-state solution,’ they want Israel gone.

How has it come to this – that whole swathes of public opinion believe that the Jews are to blame for October 7, that Israel’s war against Hamas is unjust and and that Palestinian terror groups – in reality proxies for Iranian aggression and imperialism – are the aggrieved party? The role of the media in misleading public opinion by omitting essential context and amplifying blood libels cannot be underestimated.

The lie, peddled over decades by Western pundits and academics wracked by post-colonial guilt,  that Israelis are ‘white settler colonialists,’ is probably the most egregious. Tens of thousands of young people have been swayed by this inversion of the truth. Not only are Jews an indigenous people of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)  with a right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, but they predate Islam and the Arab conquest in the wider Middle East by 1,000 years or more.  Even Jews from Europe and the US were traditionally treated as outsiders. They have incontrovertible  cultural, linguistic and genetic links with the Middle East. Crucially, over half the Jewish population of Israel are refugees from Arab countries or their descendants. Ninety-nine percent have been driven from the Middle East and North Africa by mob violence and state-sanctioned persecution –  in greater numbers than Palestinian refugees from Israel.

How many politicians taking their seats in the new Parliament will have heard of  the 850,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries? How many will be aware of the abuse of their human rights? Apart from a handful of MPs representing ‘Jewish’ constituencies –  none.

In order to challenge ignorance and entrenched misconceptions, we need to launch a massive, pro-active, education campaign about Jewish refugees from Arab countries. The largest act of ethnic cleansing in the Israel-Arab conflict took place not against Palestinians, but Jews. Hamas just wants to finish the job by eradicating our last redoubt in Israel.

We urgently need to reframe the terms of the debate.

[fursasaida]

[same article as this post, different excerpt]

Emma Saltzberg: When Israeli state actors were trying to influence the American Jewish conversation, what did that look like? What kind of activism were they targeting?

Geoffrey Levin: One of the main figures in the book is Don Peretz, a pacifist-leaning American Jew who volunteered to help displaced Palestinian Arabs in Israel in 1949, wrote the first dissertation on Palestinian refugees, and later became a major scholar on the subject. In 1956, the AJC hired Peretz to be their first Middle East consultant, and he wrote pamphlets for them about Arab refugees that did not rule out return as part of a possible solution. Later that year, Israeli diplomats pushed the AJC to fire him. The AJC compromised by allowing Peretz’s writings for them to be looked over—or censored—by the Israelis. Eventually, the AJC did push Peretz out. Israeli diplomats also successfully lobbied the London-based Jewish Chronicle, as well as several mainstream American Jewish publications, to disaffiliate with their longtime writer William Zukerman because he repeatedly wrote about the Palestinian refugee problem and was upset about refugees not being able to return.

A lot of these figures they went after, including Zukerman and Peretz, were not radical anti-Zionists. But Israeli diplomats were actually more concerned about these people who were operating within the American Jewish mainstream, because during its early years Israel relied heavily on American Jewish financial and political support. And they were afraid that the American government might pressure Israel to accept a limited refugee return, which they opposed because they wanted to maintain a larger Jewish demographic majority and to avoid having to return land to its previous Arab owners. So they didn’t want the American Jewish community wavering on its opposition to that. As far as Israel was concerned, it was best if American Jews just didn’t talk about Palestinian refugees at all—unless they were repeating Israeli talking points.

ES: What about the CIA and Arab state actors? How were they trying to influence American discourse on Israel/Palestine?

GL: Surprisingly, one of the main reasons American Jews were thinking about Palestinian refugees in the mid-1950s is because this CIA-funded anti-Zionist organization called the American Friends of the Middle East (AFME) was raising awareness about the Palestinian cause. This was part of the Eisenhower administration’s effort to create more political space to push Israel to make concessions to Egypt to help them court Arab nationalist Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser as an anti-Communist ally. In the US, AFME ran propaganda campaigns against Zionism. Many of its members were white American Protestants, though AFME also sponsored the creation of the Organization of Arab Students. So the first national American Arab student organization was funded with CIA money, though the students didn’t know that; they were just advocating for their cause.

There were also Arab state actors who were advocating for Palestinians in the US; I focus on the work of Fayez Sayegh, who was running the Arab League office in the US for a short period in the mid-1950s. At that moment, there was a hope amongst some in the American foreign policy establishment and some more conservative Arabs—often Christian like Sayegh—that America and the Arabs would align to counter Soviet influence in the Middle East. But by the ’60s, and especially by the ’70s, that dream was falling apart as Cold War alliances solidified. And so you had Arab states and the Palestinians moving in an anti-US direction, turning toward Third World alliances and alignment with global anti-colonial struggles. In fact, In the early ’70s, that Arab student group that was first funded by the CIA ended up being monitored by the FBI.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Sanjana Karanth at HuffPost:

The U.S. government’s unconditional financial and diplomatic support of Israel is harming America’s global standing, national security and domestic interests, according to a new report by a policy group focused on U.S. policy toward the Middle East. A New Policy’s report, first obtained Wednesday by HuffPost, describes more than a dozen reasons why the country’s unconditional support for Israel, particularly its actions toward Palestinians in Gaza over the last 15 months, is not in America’s national interest, contrary to bipartisan political messaging. “Whether we’re talking about American taxpayer money or whether we’re talking about American freedoms, there’s this assumption across much of the political establishment, again on a bipartisan basis, that unqualified support for Israel is the right thing. And the answer is, not for America it’s not,” said Josh Paul, who with Tariq Habash co-founded the lobby group A New Policy after they resigned from the Biden administration in protest of its Gaza policy. “Why we’re putting out this paper is in order to help Americans engage in that conversation and understand how the policy approaches and the political approaches that have been taken have been so harmful,” Paul said.

The report’s release comes just one day after Israel and Hamas agreed on a long-awaited ceasefire that involves pausing the violence in Gaza and exchanging captives. Though the deal has brought a sense of relief to those desperate to see the fighting end, some are more cautious about whether Israel will hold up its end of the agreement ― and for Palestinian Americans like Habash, frustration that the Biden administration could have helped achieve such a plan months ago. [...] As the U.S. prepares again for an incoming Trump administration, both Paul and Habash stressed that the arguments in their report against unconditional support for Israel transcend political parties and individual short-term leaders. Instead, they said, the U.S. requires a much bigger upheaval of its foreign policy that over the past year has led to the country’s isolation at the United Nations, projected weakness for letting Israel cross red lines without accountability and loss of international credibility for acting in defiance of the democratic values it preaches. “I think now what you have enabled is the world to believe that they have to move forward without the United States ― and I think that is extremely dangerous for America on a global stage, when people feel like America should not be the first ally they think about,” Habash said.

The U.S. sends billions of dollars to a foreign country’s military, a military that has never been held accountable for harming an American. But at home, Americans who feel as if their government has failed them in its Mideast policy can face punishment for criticizing Israel.

A report from New Policy, as obtained by HuffPost, reveals that the US’s unconditional support for Israel is bad for America, especially after Israel Apartheid State’s instigation of the Gaza Genocide.

[crowandtalbot]

Put this on tiktok but it's likely going to get removed:

AIPAC is behind most of the pro-Irsael to the point of cutting $14 billion from our IRS budget to help fund their military type craziness. Most US politicians are in their pocket and they are also the ones pushing legislation to make criticizing the Israel government illegal in the US and deporting all Palestinians in the US and just a shit ton of other anti-Arabic foreign policy.

Also a reminder that Netanyahu (Israeli Prime Minister, currently under investigation by the International Criminal Court for war crimes from before and after the continued siege of Gaza started) and his extremist administration are pushing for "Greater Israel" which would involve conquering Jordan, Lebanon, parts of Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. The proposed map looks like this:

There are many ways American imperialism and Evangelical Zionism would benefit from this map. It gives an American ally control of natural gas reserves off the coast of Gaza, it gives access to build the Ben Gurion Canal and the ability to construct an oil pipeline from Saudi Arabia into Europe and dominate the energy sector. It also allows America to funnel its Jewish population out of America without expressly deporting them. There is literally so much wrong with this.

But Americans can protest AIPAC directly and attempt to sever the connection between this lobbying group and our politicians. First by checking if our reps have already accepted AIPAC money (I recommend using opensecrets.org but googling usually works just as well), contacting them, and telling them that if they continue to accept AIPAC and AIPAC affiliate donations you will volunteer for thier opposition in the coming election. Then try to find a candidate running who doesn't accept AIPAC money and volunteer or donate for their campaign. Also, you don't have to be a politician's constituent to contact them. This means you can spam-fax their office or mail them physical form letters demanding action against Israel's genocide. These physical documents must be handled by actual staff and preserved so this is very disruptive for them.

AIPAC also has a website with a contact form and phone number you can call.

I would recommend filling the name and address fields with junk information (nothing too obvious for them to filter out) and then type whatever you would like to say in the actual message part.

And it wasn't hard for me to find a mailing address for them either.

However it is unlikely this is the only office they have, or that office even has many workers in it. Also if I can successfully convince people to pester them like we did to all those republican rallies in 2020, they can ask Google to remove that info and then remove their contact info from their website.

If we can disrupt AIPAC we can do a lot more good, not just for Palestine, but for Israel and other American backed genocides like in Congo and Sudan.

Please re-blog this, don't just like and move on.

[ashadowofburnedoutstardust]

Do you think the real reason that Russia is so pissed is because Israel are the ones that blew up that pipeline of theirs at the behest of the United States, and they framed the Ukrainians for it?

I mean if we're going to see a mirror image here then that means that someone is probably going to blow up that pipeline that supplies the USA with supplies right? I mean I know Biden already killed the damn thing, but why bother to leave the infrastructure in place

I'm guessing there's definitely at least one group angry enough to blow up that pipeline in revenge, and it's not who you think it might be......

Especially when it's such a tasty target to ensure martial law, which lets face it is what the Israel lobby is wanting in order to maintain their control before they attempt to impeach Trump

Can you imagine just how badly things are going to get cut off from the US because of this tariff pause? The only reason the tariff pause exists is to give Mexico and Canada as well as every other country in the world the ability to find alternate markets, the tariffs will still go ahead as the rest of the world is no longer interested in funding the Israel lobby

See now most of those companies that fund the Israel lobby are the ones that actively chose to comply with the removal of DEI policies, and of Americans actively choose to target one company at a time instead of all of them allowing them to continue then their lives will only continue to get worse and worse until they are able to bankrupt these companies and therefore the Israel lobby

So I highly recommend not fucking around and picking one brand at a time because you simply do not have the time for a campaign any longer, keep the list with you and double check all of your labels and ensure that you are either buying foreign or not from any company that is not DEI compliant

In the next what was it 30 days, well 28 now, that pipeline goes boom boom, they start rolling out troops in order to maintain a literal dictatorship, which could also require foreign countries to have US military bases within their territories evacuated so that they are unable to attack them in their own country, I mean heck these soldiers might even just straight up get arrested by the country that they're residing in solely as a security measure

Nobody in the world wants to risk their product going into the United States because it's just such an unstable economy so they lose at least 90% of their foreign suppliers

There's literally SFA in terms of food production in the US besides corn and potatoes, I mean it's like you are going to be living in a post Stalin communist USSR, which is highly ironic in the circumstances

I mean let's face it the US military doesn't have enough personnel to be able to take on the entire world and they currently don't have any public allies

Now in order for the rest of the world to maintain their own status quo, because let's face it they have to look after their own best interests they will of course seek to start supplying somewhere else in other markets

The US however is going to have to rely on foreign donations to top up on a lot of products, which would mean the supervision of the UN in order to distribute any form of aid, and if that's not allowed then unfortunately does us companies may have to buy that age from the UN in order to distribute it within its supermarkets

The current US government has no friends, and the thing is even if the republican party get replaced with the democrats you still don't have any friends because they have as well being complicit in a genocide, so even swapping parties without swapping out the candidates that were compliant with Israel's actions, the United States economy will not be recovering, especially with international trade dropping their currency

Either you all get in line with the rest of the world's values or you will suffer the consequences

I don't mean to sound harsh when I say that but I have to be absolutely straight with you about this because there is no sugar coating it

[grandhotelabyss]

sorry to sound like im trying to "gotcha" you, but even the "organic cultural" shift seemed to be co-opted by the Trump force - for example I remember clicking on some babylon bee sketch with the premise of "haha the literal devil thinks the democrats are too extreme xdd" - and in it it put killing babys, pedophilia and other stuff on the same level as... supporting Palestine, not like even Hamas, but just Palestine - even if one is pro-israel I think saying that supporting another side which has a lot or civilians being as bad as all the other stuff that organically gets disliked by "rightwingers" seemed like proof that the "pendelum swing back* was as astro turfed to succed as the initial rise of sjws (not using "woke" on porpuse, because that already was a rebranding term by "normiecons")

As social justice got pushed by twisting and exagerating many often wacky beliefs held by a large group to derail occupy wallstreet, so now social conservatism, or "putting the woke away" seems to get some limelight again, but only in a form that can be instrumentalised "remember xbox live lobbys? Now go blow up a sandn***er in real life, you dont wanna be some troon soyjack right?"

But to extend a hand, I'll even admit, that no matter how much the regime supports it or not, it still is better than all the "DEI" stuff lol

I share your concern. As someone who has maintained for nine years now that there is a rational kernel to MAGA the center and left fail to address at their peril, I would add this: the hardline Zionist coloration notwithstanding, if the next Trump administration does not maintain a realist foreign policy and succumbs instead to warmongering neoconservative messianism, it will have made anything else it ever had to say ethically irrelevant. So far, there are reasons to fear; there are reasons to hope.

[sophia-zofia]

Despite its public portrayal of itself, the ADL isn’t a civil rights group in any meaningful sense, but rather, a veiled pro-Israel lobbying organization that uses superficial language of inclusiveness and anti-racism to defend Israel from criticism from the left. The ADL already assists large social media platforms in determining what is and isn’t hate speech, and by teaming up with the #StopHateForProfit effort, the group will likely have even more say in determining what content is worthy of publication. The problem is that the ADL has made it clear on a number of occasions that it considers the entire basis of the peaceful Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement — embraced by virtually all of Palestinian civil society — to be hate speech, specifically any claim that denies Israel’s ​“existence as a Jewish state” (e.g. its claim to ethnonational supremacy over non-Jews living in Palestine). The ADL’s website clearly states, ​“Anti-Israel activity crosses the line to anti-Semitism” with any statement that ​“Israel is denied the right to exist as a Jewish state,” and that ​“the founding goals of the BDS movement and many of the strategies used by BDS campaigns are anti-Semitic.”

Put another way, if Palestinians don’t co-sign their own ethnic cleansing by agreeing with the radical premise that the land of their birth, or where their families are from, is axiomatically meant for Jews, they are, according to the ADL, engaging in racist speech. So too will non-Palestinian allies of Palestine be painted as racists: Recently, the ADL’s deputy national director took to the New York Times to accuse Peter Beinart, who was once among the most prominent liberal Zionist writers in the United States, of anti-Semitism for announcing that he now supports one state based on equal rights.

The use of anti-hate-speech laws and regulations to snuff out calls for equal rights in Palestine is not theoretical — it’s common practice already in France, which has used such laws to effectively make the BDS movement illegal. While these are laws, not social media rules of conduct, the principle is the same: Any speech that calls into question Israel’s right to exist as a ethno-supremacist state is de facto anti-Semitic.

In 2017, the ADL accused the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a grassroots Black Lives Matter organization founded in 2014, of anti-Semitism, a form of hate speech, because M4BL’s platform read, in part, ​“The U.S. justifies and advances the global war on terror via its alliance with Israel and is complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people.” It follows that if the M4BL were to post this statement on social media, it’s likely the ADL would view it as hate speech and demand Facebook take it down. If the ADL views the foundational documents of the M4BL as including hate speech, how can the ADL possibly assert itself as a moral authority in this moment? Has the ADL’s position changed since 2017, or does the ADL still to this day consider the M4BL’s platform anti-Semitic?

The ADL smearing Black activists who oppose Israel isn’t new. In the 1960s, the ADL harshly criticized the Black-led Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panthers for their criticisms of Israel, equating these ​“negro extremists” with the KKK and American Nazi Party. The ADL also worked with the Israeli government in the 1960s, ​‘70s and ​‘80s to spy on Arab groups, as well as leftwing anti-South African apartheid activists. As Pulitzer Prize-winning author Glenn Frankel noted in Foreign Policy magazine in 2010, ​“The Anti-Defamation League participated in a blatant propaganda campaign against Nelson Mandela and the ANC in the mid 1980s and employed an alleged ​‘fact-finder’ named Roy Bullock to spy on the anti-apartheid campaign in the United States — a service he was simultaneously performing for the South African government. The ADL defended the white regime’s purported constitutional reforms while denouncing the ANC as ​‘totalitarian anti-humane, anti-democratic, anti-Israel, and anti-American.’”

[dragoneyes618]

As American betrayals of Israel go, the Biden administration's failure to veto UN Security Council Resolution 2728 calling for a Gaza cease-fire during Ramadan leading to a "lasting" cease-fire does not begin to compare to the Obama administration's failure to veto UNSC Resolution 2334. The latter declared all land held by Israel beyond the 1949 armistice lines to be occupied territory. Passed in the waning days of the Obama presidency, weeks prior to Donald Trump's entry into office, it was designed to hamstring the incoming administration.

As the late Yale professor and former State Department chief of staff Charles Hill wrote at the time: "The first thing Obama did when entering office was to derail all hopes for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement by declaring all settlements to be illegal. Now, the last thing he's done is to enshrine that anti-Israel position into international law in language that can be followed up with sanctions to delegitimize Israel's existence itself."

That resolution made it impossible for any Palestinian leader ever to make concessions to Israel regarding Jerusalem or on so-called "settlement blocs," for to do so would be ceding "stolen Palestinian lands." And Obama knew full well that Israel would never agree to return the Kotel or transfer over 750,000 citizens, including 300,000 in new neighborhoods of Jerusalem, or to go back to its pre-1967 "Auschwitz borders." (Then–vice president Joe Biden personally lobbied Ukrainian president Petro Proroshenko not to withdraw Ukrainian sponsorship of the resolution, after Egypt did so at Trump's request.)

I predicted at the time that UNSC Resolution 2334 would legitimize the BDS movement and its repercussions would be felt on every college campus. How true that has proven. In addition, it vindicated the strategy outlined by Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas, as outlined in a 2009 meeting with the Washington Post editorial board: Eschew direct negotiations with Israel and rely exclusively on American pressure on Israel.

The March 25 "Ramadan cease-fire" resolution, and the American failure to veto it, was not as malevolent. But it was plenty bad enough, and similarly vindicated Hamas's longtime strategy. David Brooks, in a lengthy essay in the New York Times, quotes MIT professor Barry Posen, who describes Hamas's strategy as "human ammunition." In other words, "maximize the number of Palestinians who die, and in that way build international pressure until Israel is forced to end the war before Hamas is wiped out." Hamas's survival depends on "making this war as bloody as possible for civilians."

And UNSC Resolution 2728 shows that strategy is working. Hamas, naturally, "welcomed" the resolution, though it immediately rejected the resolution's demand for "the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages." It was free to have its cake and eat it too, because unlike previous cease-fire resolutions drafted by the United States, and vetoed by Russia and China, this one did not make the cease-fire contingent on the release of hostages. It also did not condemn Hamas's October 7 invasion and massacre of Israeli civilians, as had the US-drafted resolutions.

Russia and China got their way, and pressure on Hamas to release the hostages was reduced in two ways: First, by giving Israel pause before launching a major operation in Rafah, where the remaining Hamas battalions are hunkered down; second, by delinking the hostage release from the cease-fire.

Typical of American foreign policy over the past three and a half years — e.g., the hasty and ill-planned withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the continued transfer of tens of billions of dollars to Iran, even as that regime masterminds attacks on America and American allies — the message of the US abstention was one of confusion and weakness.

Spokesman John Kirby insisted that the abstention on the resolution did not represent a shift in the American position. But if that was the case, it is only because, as Matthew Continetti wrote, "to change a policy, you must first have a policy. And it is increasingly clear that the Biden administration has no coherent Israel policy, nor a coherent policy for the Greater Middle East." Rather it is buffeted between its recognition that no peace can be had as long as Hamas remains in power and its desire not to lose Palestinian-American voters in Dearborn, Michigan.

After surveying all possible alternatives to a large-scale Israeli action in Rafah, the Times' Brooks concludes, "I'm left with the tragic conclusion that there is no magical alternative military strategy." He quotes Raphael S. Cohen of the Rand Corporation, writing in Foreign Policy, "If the international community wants Israel to change strategies in Gaza, then it should offer a viable alternative strategy to Israel's announced goal of destroying Hamas in the Strip. And right now, that alternative strategy simply does not exist."

Moreover, there can be no serious discussion of any postwar political solutions for Gaza or the larger Palestinian-Israel conflict, "as long as Hamas is still governing Gaza or commanding a coherent military force," argue Robert Satloff and Dennis Ross in American Purpose. If Hamas survives the war intact, the global community will have little incentive to invest in rebuilding Gaza, as "Hamas would rebuild its military to continues its efforts to exterminate the Jewish state," says Brooks.

It is hard to gainsay Seth Mandel's conclusion in Commentary that the biggest loser of the US abstention was President Biden himself. That abstention confirms his image as "doormat not a doorstop," and that he can simply be waited out, as Russia and China did at the UN, in their insistence that a cease-fire not be conditional on the release of hostages or the condemnation of Hamas.

Once again, the president has shown himself no match for the Iranians, who have consistently and shrewdly opened up a seven-front war on Israel. They have a clear goal — the elimination of the "Little Satan," Israel, before moving on to the "Big Satan," the United States — and a clear step-by-step plan for achieving it. Were Israel not to eliminate Hamas now, its deterrent power against the many enemies on its borders would be shattered.

The consequences of such a failure would be felt first and foremost by Israel, just as Czechoslovakia first felt the Nazi boot, but they would reverberate across the world. As Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute writes, "The White House and its allies in Europe... face two options: engage in a region ever more dominated by Iran and its proxies, or cede Iranian dominance, replete with a lethal nuclear weapons program. The choice should be obvious." Yet it appears once again that the US and its European allies on the UN Security Council have chosen wrongly.

I WANT TO FOCUS on one other aspect of the recent resolution because it points to a much larger problem in American foreign policy. The resolution explicitly calls for a cease-fire during Ramadan. As the US ambassador to the UN explained, "This should be a season of peace. This rightly acknowledges that during the month of Ramadan, we must recommit to peace."

What beautiful solicitude to the sensitivities of Muslims, right? Well, not so fast. For one thing, the emphasis on Ramadan casts Israel as waging a religious war rather than one of straightforward self-defense. And Israel's Muslim enemies have not exactly been solicitous of Jewish religious feelings — or rather, they have been acutely aware of Jewish holidays. Egypt and Syria chose Yom Kippur to launch surprise attacks on Israel in 1973, and fifty years later, almost to the day, Hamas attacked on Simchas Torah.

Nor is Ramadan exactly a month of peace for Muslims. It commemorates, inter alia, Muhammad's defeat of Meccan tribes at the Battle of Badr; Saladin's defeat of the Crusaders at the Battle of Hattin; the Muslim conquest of Andalusia, and the defeat of the Mongols by Mamluks in the Battle of Ain Jalut. In 1982, Iran launched human wave attacks against their fellow Muslims in Iraq in the Ramadan Offensive. And in 2006, Iraqi insurgents dramatically increased attacks on occupying American forces during Ramadan, including many suicide attacks. Many of the attackers believed that death in jihad, or holy war, during Ramadan would confer special merit upon them.

This extreme deference to Muslim religious sensitivities is directly proportional to the ignorance of Islam, for which the West has been paying a heavy price in recent years. President Obama's misbegotten belief that deference to Iran would somehow turn Iran into a status quo power totally failed to take into account the Islamic Revolution's designs on spreading the rule of Islam internationally. As the name "Islamic Revolution" implied, and as Ayatollah Khomeini repeatedly stated, its sights were upon the entire world, the very opposite of a status quo power.

When German chancellor Angela Merkel opened the gates of Europe wide to Muslim refugees, it is doubtful that she had much awareness of the factors that might make their absorption into Europe a difficult project, if not impossible. For one thing, most of the refugees had spent their entire lives in majority Muslim lands and had no experience of living as a religious minority or of showing tolerance to those of other faiths, other than as submissive dhimmis. Moreover, Islam has nothing comparable to the Torah's rule of dina d'malchusa dina, which allows Jews to function as loyal citizens of their host countries.

Just last week, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) instructed employees to avoid terms like "radical Islamists" or "jihadists," as they are hurtful to Muslim-Americans. But banning words not to be mean does not make phenomena disappear. If radical Islam describes a certain congeries of belief, if Islamofascism is a phenomenon, then banning use of these terms only makes the phenomenon more dangerous. For that which we cannot discuss, we cannot take action against, either.

Martin Gilbert, the great biographer of Winston Churchill, wrote that Churchill felt his greatest failure was to alert his countrymen to the nature of Nazism in time, as that might have spurred them to action. And toward the end of his life, Gilbert saw the same thing repeating itself with respect to radical Islam. 9/11 was a brief wake-up call, but much of the West has returned to a peaceful somnolence, out of the most exquisite sensitivity. But it does so at its peril.

The "Ramadan" cease-fire is but one example of the dangers that lurk in too great, and misplaced, sensitivity.