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      Schumer faces backlash after calling for new Israeli elections to oust Netanyahu

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      Chuck Schumer, the US Senate leader and a top ally of Joe Biden, on Thursday broke with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his handling of the invasion of Gaza and called for Israel to hold new elections, in comments that upset its ruling party and allies on Capitol Hill.The shift by Schumer, the Democratic Senate majority leader and the highest-ranking Jewish official in the United States, came as he continued to press lawmakers to pass a military assistance package for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan, the countries Biden has named as America’s top national security priorities.In remarks from the Senate floor, Schumer said he had a longstanding relationship with Netanyahu but believed he “has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel”.Noting the prime minister’s inclusion of far-right officials in his government, Schumer said Netanyahu “has been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza, which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows. Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah”.Israel’s ruling Likud party responded to Schumer by defending the prime minister’s public support and saying Israel is “not a banana republic”.“Contrary to Schumer’s words, the Israeli public supports a total victory over Hamas, rejects any international dictates to establish a Palestinian terrorist state, and opposes the return of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza,” it said in a statement.“Senator Schumer is expected to respect Israel’s elected government and not undermine it. This is always true, and even more so in wartime.”The Republican Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, struck a similar tone. “Israel is not a colony of America whose leaders serve at the pleasure of the party in power in Washington. Only Israel’s citizens should have a say in who runs their government,” he said from the chamber’s floor, shortly after Schumer spoke.“Either we respect their decisions, or we disrespect their democracy.”Republican speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who has refused to allow a vote on the military assistance package despite its passage in the Senate, said Schumer’s remarks were “highly inappropriate” and accused him of playing “a divisive role in Israeli politics”.Schumer’s appeal comes amid rising concern among Biden’s Democratic allies over the civilian deaths in Gaza, which recently passed 30,000, according to health authorities in the Hamas-run administration. Biden threw his support behind Israel following Hamas’s 7 October terror attack, causing a domestic backlash that has seen protesters disrupt his speeches and tens of thousands of people cast protest votes in the Democratic primaries, including in swing states that will be crucial to his re-election in November.Biden says he supports the implementation of a temporary ceasefire in Gaza that would accompany the release of the remaining hostages taken by Hamas on 7 October. This month, US planes began airdrops of humanitarian aid into Gaza, and Biden says the military will construct a pier to deliver assistance by sea, as humanitarians warn the enclave could soon face a famine.Schumer has positioned himself as a strong ally of Israel’s government, visiting the country days after Hamas’s attack. But in a sign of how much his thinking has shifted, Schumer on Thursday declared: “The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after October 7. The world has changed – radically – since then, and the Israeli people are being stifled right now by a governing vision that is stuck in the past.”He listed Netanyahu, who has long opposed Palestinian statehood, as among several roadblocks to implementing the two-state solution supported by the United States, alongside rightwing Israelis, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas.“These are the four obstacles to peace, and if we fail to overcome them, then Israel and the West Bank and Gaza will be trapped in the same violent state of affairs they’ve experienced for the last 75 years,” Schumer said.He added that the US could not dictate the outcome of an election in Israel, but “there needs to be a fresh debate about the future of Israel after October 7”.Netanyahu’s cabinet is dominated by ultranationalists who share the prime minister’s opposition to Palestinian statehood and other aims that successive US administrations have seen as essential to resolving Palestinian-Israeli conflicts in the long term.The US vice-president, Kamala Harris, Schumer and other lawmakers met last week in Washington with Benny Gantz, a member of Israel’s war cabinet and a far more popular rival of Netanyahu – a visit that drew a rebuke from the Israeli prime minister.Gantz joined Netanyahu’s government in the war cabinet soon after the Hamas attacks. But Gantz is expected to leave the government once the heaviest fighting subsides, signaling that the period of national unity has ended. A return to mass demonstrations could ramp up pressure on Netanyahu’s deeply unpopular coalition to hold early elections.At the White House, the national security spokesperson, John Kirby, did not comment on Schumer’s statement, saying the Biden administration was concentrating on getting agreement on a temporary ceasefire.“We know Leader Schumer feels strongly about this and we’ll certainly let him speak to it and to his comments,” Kirby said. “We’re going to stay focused on making sure that Israel has what it needs to defend itself while doing everything that they can to avoid civilian casualties.” More

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      Israeli PM Netanyahu ‘obstacle to peace’ in Gaza, says US Senate majority leader – video

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      The Democratic Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, has said Benjamin Netanyahu has emerged as a ‘major obstacle to peace’ in Gaza, in a further sign of growing tensions between the US and its ally Israel. Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish official in the US, accused Netanyahu of bowing to pressure from ‘extremists’ in his cabinet and appealed to Israel to ‘change course’, warning that the US would be prepared to use its leverage to shape Israeli policy if it failed to do so More

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      Biden’s ‘bear-hugging’ of Netanyahu a strategic mistake, key Democrat says

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      Joe Biden has committed a “strategic mistake” by “bear-hugging” the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, as he prosecutes war with Hamas, a leading congressional progressive Democrat and Biden campaign surrogate said.“The bear-hugging of Netanyahu has been a strategic mistake,” Ro Khanna said, accusing the Israeli leader of conducting “a callous war” in Gaza, in defiance of the United States.Speaking to One Decision, a podcast co-hosted by Sir Richard Dearlove, a former British intelligence chief, Khanna, from California, also called Netanyahu “insufferably arrogant”, for acting as if he is “somehow an equal” to Biden.But his comments about Biden’s mistakes may land with a thud at the White House.Liz Landers, a One Decision guest host, asked Khanna about a recent trip to Michigan to meet leaders of the state’s large Arab American community.“What did they tell you about the Biden administration’s policy with Israel?” Landers asked.“They were opposed,” Khanna said, adding: “I’ve been a longtime supporter of the US-Israel relationship. I’ve been in Congress eight years and my record reflects that I unequivocally condemned the brutal Hamas attack [on Israel] on 7 October, the rapes, the murders. I’ve called Hamas a terrorist organisation, which obviously they are.“They committed a terrorist act on 7 October, but the bear-hugging of Netanyahu has been a strategic mistake. Netanyahu has conducted a callous war in defiance of the United States.“I did not support a ceasefire for the first six weeks. I thought [Israel] would go and get the people responsible [for the 7 October attacks]. But they started bombing refugee camps, bombing hospitals, defying the United States and not letting aid in.”Biden, Khanna said, needed to set out “clear consequences for Netanyahu” if Israel does not change course.“He needs to say, ‘I’m for Israel, but I’m not for this extreme rightwing government.’ And that means if [Netanyahu] defies the United States, not allowing aid, or going into Rafah” – which Biden has said must not happen but Netanyahu has said will – “[then] no more weapons transfers … unconditionally.“It means not protecting [Netanyahu] from the entire international community at the United Nations, it means recognising a Palestinian state. And those are the things I think some of the Arab American community want.”Asked about a looming clash over Rafah, Khanna highlighted Netanyahu’s behaviour, refusing to heed Biden’s warning that the attack would represent a “red line”.“What I disagree with and sort of the media narrative on this [is that] Netanyahu and Biden, somehow they’re equals,” Khanna said.“They’re not. We’re the greatest superpower in the world. We’re giving Netanyahu weapons. He needs to be deferential with respect to the American president, whoever that is. And I find it insufferably arrogant for him to act as if he’s somehow an equal to the American president. And that’s just going to rub people the wrong way.“So if he defies the American secretary of defense, the American president, then we should stop the arms shipments now. We can stop the offensive arms shipments … I voted for defensive funding and we need to continue to protect Israel against an invasion from Hezbollah or Iran. But we certainly shouldn’t be giving Netanyahu the offensive weapons to go kill more people in Gaza when he’s acting in defiance to the president of the United States.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“You can act as an equal if you’re not begging for weapons at the same time.”Biden’s Israel policy has also had an effect in domestic politics, protest votes in Democratic primaries sounding a warning for the presidential election to come. Landers asked Khanna if Biden could lose his re-election fight against Donald Trump because of such protests as seen in Michigan, where about 100,000 voted “uncommitted”.Khanna said: “I think the president’s gonna win. I mean, he won Michigan [by] almost 150,000 votes.”But he said anger with Biden was spreading “probably beyond the Muslim or Arab American community. It’s more young people, voters of colour, the broader Democratic coalition.“And I think if this war continues, particularly if it’s continuing when we head to the Democratic convention in Chicago, then it creates a problem for us with the coalition that Barack Obama built, which was young people, progressives, voters of colour, that really turned out.”Khanna said there was potential for the convention, in mid-August, to generate unwelcome echoes of chaos in Chicago in 1968, the year of an election won by the Republican Richard Nixon amid protests against the Vietnam war.“I still believe the president will win, but this should be a warning sign that there are large parts of our base that are unhappy,” Khanna said.“My hope is that the president, I believe, has changed tone and changed course. He’s now using the word ‘ceasefire’. He’s saying that weapons will not be indefinitely transferred to Netanyahu. So my hope is this pressure is going to work on getting a ceasefire and release of the hostages” held by Hamas. More

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      Hamas negotiators under pressure to produce list of hostages to be released

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      Egyptian and Qatari officials are putting pressure on Hamas negotiators in Cairo to produce a list of hostages to be released as the first step in a phased ceasefire agreement with Israel, according to officials familiar with the talks.Israel has not sent a delegation to the second day of talks in Cairo, demanding that Hamas present a list of 40 elderly, sick and female hostages who would be the first to be released as part of a truce that would initially last six weeks, beginning with the month of Ramadan, the officials say.Hamas is meanwhile demanding that large-scale humanitarian aid should be allowed into Gaza and that Palestinians displaced from their homes in the north of the coastal strip should be allowed to return.US officials have said that Israel had “more or less” accepted the six-week ceasefire deal, which White House national security spokesperson John Kirby confirmed would involve a six-week truce and begin with the release of sick, elderly and women hostages.Diplomatic sources in Washington said it was unclear what was stopping Hamas from producing a list identifying the first 40 hostages, noting that uncertainty about lists and identities had dogged the last successful hostage negotiations in November. They suggested it could reflect problems of communication between Hamas units inside and outside Gaza, that some hostages could be held by other groups including Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or that elements of Hamas were withholding the information as a way of obstructing a deal.Washington does not believe the absence of an Israeli delegation was necessarily bad news for a ceasefire hopes, as Israeli negotiators could arrive within a couple of hours if agreement was reached on a list. Egypt and Qatar have assured Joe Biden’s administration that they were putting pressure on the Hamas representatives in Cairo to come up with the identities of the hostages involved.The US is also stepping up pressure on Israel to open new land routes, as well as new sea corridors, to allow a far greater flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza to prevent a famine that UN agencies have warned is imminent. The US vice-president, Kamala Harris, said on Sunday that Israel must “significantly increase the flow of aid”. She added there were “no excuses” for the delay.Biden used similar language in a tweet on Monday, saying: “The aid flowing into Gaza is nowhere near enough – and nowhere fast enough.” Unlike Harris, however, he did not name Israel as the responsible party.At the White House, Kirby said truck deliveries into Gaza had been slowed by opposition from some members of Israel’s cabinet.“Israel bears a responsibility here to do more,” Kirby said.View image in fullscreenIsrael meanwhile stepped up its allegations against the UN relief agency for Palestinians (Unrwa), saying that Unrwa in Gaza had employed over 450 “military operatives” from Hamas and other armed groups, and that Israel had shared this intelligence with the UN.“Over 450 Unrwa employees are military operatives in terror groups in Gaza,” Israeli military spokesperson R Adm Daniel Hagari said on Monday evening. “This is no mere coincidence. This is systematic.”“We sent the information that I am sharing now, as well as further intelligence, to our international partners, including the UN,” he said.A preliminary report by the UN office of internal oversight services (OIOS) into alleged Unrwa-Hamas links delivered to the secretary-general last week, said the investigators had received no evidence from Israel since the initial allegations in January that a dozen Unrwa employees had taken part in the 7 October Hamas attack. But the OIOS said it expected to receive information from Israel shortly.Pramila Patten, the UN special envoy on sexual violence in conflict reported on Monday that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe Hamas committed rape, “sexualised torture,” and other cruel and inhumane treatment of women during the 7 October attack. In her report, Patten, who visited Israel with a nine-person team in the first half of February, added there were also “reasonable grounds to believe that such violence may be ongoing.” As the talks were under way in Cairo, a top Israeli minister, Benny Gantz, arrived in Washington for talks with Harris, the US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, to the undisguised irritation of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu invited his longstanding political rival into a coalition government after the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel, but that has done little to improve the tense relations between the two men.US officials acknowledged that Gantz’s meetings in Washington, enhancing his own status as a would-be prime minister, was likely to inflame those tensions further. Netanyahu has yet to be invited to the White House since he returned to office at the end of 2022, at the head of the most rightwing coalition in Israeli history.Gantz is said to have asked for the visit to Washington, rather than having been invited, but US officials said they welcomed an opportunity to talk to a member of the five-man Israeli war cabinet.“We’re going to discuss a number of things in terms of the priorities that, certainly, we have, which includes getting a hostage deal done, getting aid in, and then getting that six-week ceasefire,” Harris told reporters before meeting Gantz.The Biden administration is pushing for more crossing points into Gaza to be opened for humanitarian relief, especially Erez in the north. US officials say that a sea route would take at least a week to arrange, if at all, so opening Erez and other access points to the north is seen by aid organisations as an urgent priority.“The disparity in conditions in the north and south [of Gaza] is clear evidence that aid restrictions in the north are costing lives,” warned Adele Khodr, the regional director of the UN children’s relief organisation, Unicef. Unicef says 16% of children in the north are acutely malnourished, compared with 5% in the south of the strip.The White House is seeking to help resolve rifts within the Israeli coalition, suggesting Netanyahu should seek a compromise over his coalition’s bitterly contested judicial overhaul, introduced early last year. After unprecedented street protests over the measures, in which demonstrators said they feared for Israel’s democratic future, the US president went even further, telling reporters in March 2023: “I hope he walks away from it.”Netanyahu has faced significant pressure to step down for nearly a decade over his ongoing trials for corruption charges, which he denies, as well as for instigating the judicial overhaul, which has been suspended since the outbreak of war.It is widely believed in Israel that Netanyahu is slow-walking ceasefire talks, as well as talking up threats of an Israeli offensive on Rafah and Lebanon, because he believes he stands a better chance of beating the charges if he remains in office, and elections are unlikely while Israel is still at war.Earlier this year, Israel’s centrist opposition leader, Yair Lapid, met the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, in Berlin, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, in Paris.Polling suggests Netanyahu’s coalition of far-right and religious parties would incur massive losses if an election was held now, and centrist and leftwing Israeli parties are looking for ways to force an early contest. Gantz’s party is currently likely to win the most votes.Lapid said in a post on X after last week’s local elections that the successful contests showed that holding national elections during the war would pose “no problem”. More

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      Kamala Harris on Trump: ‘No previous US president has bowed down to a Russian dictator before’

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      Kamala Harris on Saturday criticized Donald Trump’s cajoling of Russia to attack Nato allies of the US who don’t pay their dues, saying the American people would never accept a president who bowed to a dictator.The vice-president’s comments, in a wide-ranging interview on MSNBC’s The Weekend, represent some of the strongest criticism to date of Trump’s apparent allegiance to Russian president Vladimir Putin.The Joe Biden White House has previously called the remarks by the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination – made last week at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania – “appalling and unhinged”.“The idea that the former president of the US would say that he – quote – encourages a brutal dictator to invade our allies, and that the United States of America would simply stand by and watch,” Harris said. “No previous US president, regardless of their party, has bowed down to a Russian dictator before.“We are seeing an example of something I just believe that the American people would never support, which is a US president, current or former, bowing down with those kinds of words, and apparently an intention of conduct, to a Russian dictator.”Harris, who was interviewed in Germany, where she is attending the Munich Security Conference, also attacked House Republicans who are stalling the Biden administration’s $95bn foreign military aid package.The bill includes money for Ukraine’s defense against the Russian invasion. But it has been disconnected from US border security measures that Republicans insisted they wanted – then voted down.“We need to do our part [to support Ukraine], and we have been very clear that Congress must act,” she said.“I think all members of Congress, and all elected leaders, would understand this is a moment where America has the ability to demonstrate through action where we stand on issues like this, which is, do we stand with our friends in the face of extreme brutality or not?”She said she was confident the $95bn Ukraine and Israel package, which passed the Senate on Monday on a 66-33 vote, would also win bipartisan support in the Republican-controlled House. So far, however, Republican speaker Mike Johnson has refused to allow a vote, and the chamber is in recess.“One point that gives me some level of optimism is we are clear in the knowledge that there is bipartisan support, both in the Senate, which we’ve seen a demonstration of, and the House,” she said.“So let’s put this to a vote in the House, and I’m certain that it will pass. We are working to that end, and we’re not giving up.”Harris was also questioned about Biden’s increasingly tougher approach to Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with the president warning this week against an escalation of the military onslaught in Rafah without a safety plan for up to 1.5 million trapped Palestinian civilians.“We have been clear that we defend Israel’s right to defend itself. However, how it does so matters,” she said.“Far too many Palestinians, innocent Palestinian civilians, have been killed. Israel [needs to take] concrete steps to protect innocent Palestinians.”But she refused to say whether the US would restrict or halt weapons supplies to Israel if Netanyahu ignored Biden’s urging and pressed ahead with operations in Rafah without civilian safety rails.“We have not made any decision to do that at this point, but I will tell you that I am very concerned that there are as many as 1.5 million people in Rafah who for the most part are people who have been displaced because they fled their homes, thinking they would be in a place of safety,” she said.“I’m very concerned about where they would go and what they would do.” More

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      Biden inches away from Netanyahu as Israeli PM fails to heed US on Gaza

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      A long time ago, Joe Biden signed a photo for Benjamin Netanyahu. “Bibi, I love you,” he recalls writing. “I don’t agree with a damn thing you say.”This twisty, best-of-frenemies relationship has been at the heart of the crisis in Gaza for the past five months. Unfortunately for the US president, the message from Jerusalem has been: he’s just not that into you.After the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October that killed 1,200 people, Biden invoked his long commitment to the country by giving full-throated support to its government’s right to defend itself. Biden’s embrace of the Israeli prime minister was supposed to come with an understanding – spoken or unspoken – that Netanyahu would heed US advice, show restraint and alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.But as the months have gone by and the death toll has mounted, it is a case of all give and no take. Biden is fond of saying “This is not your father’s Republican party” when considering the influence of Donald Trump. Slowly but surely, he has been forced to confront that this is not your father’s Israeli government, either.“We’re not dealing with the old Benjamin Netanyahu,” said Aaron David Miller, a former state department analyst, negotiator and adviser on Middle East issues who has worked for several administrations. “The risk-averse Israeli prime minister would take one step backward, one step forward and one step to the side.“We’re dealing with a different incarnation. He’s almost desperate to keep his coalition and prioritises it above all else even at the risk of incurring suspicion, mistrust, the anger of an American president. We’re five months into this and you’ve yet to see the administration impose any cost or consequence.”Biden, 81, and Netanyahu, 74, have known each other for nearly four decades, since the days when the former served in the Senate and the latter worked at the Israeli embassy in Washington. Biden became chair of the Senate foreign relations committee and ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988.Netanyahu served as Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and became prime minister in 1996, holding the position intermittently ever since. Relations with the US have not always been smooth. Miller, now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace thinktank, said: “I remember when Bill Clinton emerged from his first meeting with Netanyahu in June 1996. He exploded. He said: ‘Who’s the fucking superpower here?’ Frustration with Benjamin Netanyahu is not new.”Tensions flared during Obama’s presidency when Biden was vice-president. A 2014 report in the Atlantic magazine characterised US-Israel relations as on the edge of a “full-blown crisis”, but Biden publicly declared that he and Netanyahu were “still buddies”, adding: “He’s been a friend for over 30 years.”However, the Israeli prime minister undercut the Obama administration by speaking before a joint meeting of Congress on Capitol Hill and denouncing a nuclear deal that the US and its allies were negotiating with Iran. Relations with Obama never recovered.When the 7 October attack happened, Biden was unequivocal as ever in declaring himself a Zionist and duly travelled to Israel to meet Netanyahu and his war cabinet in person. It was a classic diplomatic play: bear-hug Netanyahu in public while urging restraint in private. The administration claims that Israel has duly heeded its advice and taken steps to minimise civilian casualties.But the overall Palestinian death toll from the war has surpassed 28,000 people, according to the Gaza health ministry, while Netanyahu has been reluctant to pursue a long-term peace agreement (and rejected calls for Palestinian sovereignty). Anti-war protests have erupted across the US and demonstrators have interrupted Biden’s speeches to brand him “Genocide Joe” – a potential disaster in an election year.Brett Bruen, a former global engagement director for the Barack Obama White House, said: “Biden went out on a limb for him and part of that effort is that Netanyahu, even if it was not explicitly said, needed to do the minimum to keep things from getting untenable for Biden. And yet it seems as though Netanyahu’s back to his old way of operating, and that’s going to prove costly because Biden now has a pretty strong justification for taking a harder line.”Bruen, the president of the public affairs agency Global Situation Room, added: “It’s fair to say that the relationship is on the brink of breaking. With the president, you have an unstated expectation that we’ve known each other for a while and therefore can call on some of those favours from time to time and it clearly isn’t working. So you’ve not only alienated key members of the cabinet but also folks who are critical for Biden’s re-election effort.”NBC News reported this week that Biden has been “venting his frustration” over his failure to persuade Israel to alter its military tactics, complaining that Netanyahu is “giving him hell” and impossible to deal with. The president makes contemptuous references to Netanyahu such as “this guy” and “asshole”, according to unnamed sources who spoke to NBC News, and has said Netanyahu wants the war to drag on so he can remain in power.Larry Haas, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, said: “There’s no question that political matters are weighing on Biden, and the fact that these reports have come out, that Biden is saying this and that about Netanyahu in private, is not accidental. In a political sense, Biden and his people are trying to walk a fine line between supporting Israel and responding to the complaints of the Arab community and progressive Democrats.”Biden did flex some muscles by issuing an executive order targeting Israeli settlers in the West Bank who have been attacking Palestinians. He has also been increasingly critical in public. Last week he described Israel’s military assault in Gaza as “over the top” and said he is seeking a “sustained pause in the fighting” to help ailing Palestinian civilians and negotiate the release of Israeli hostages – though this is still far short of the ceasefire calls that progressives are demanding.The president told Netanyahu in a 45-minute phone call on Sunday that Israel should not go ahead with a military operation in the densely populated Gaza border town of Rafah without a “credible” plan to protect civilians. More than half of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people have fled to Rafah to escape fighting in other areas.If Netanyahu ignores him again and presses ahead, Biden could signal his displeasure by slowing or restricting weapons sales to Israel, changing course at the UN by throwing America’s weight behind a ceasefire resolution or coming out aggressively for Palestinian statehood.Any of these would make a point, but would they make a difference? Miller doubts they will happen since the US believes the key to de-escalation in Gaza is achieving an Israel-Hamas deal – which requires Netanyahu’s approval. “I do believe that without the Israel-Hamas deal, you can hang a ‘closed for the season’ sign on this administration’s handling of this crisis,” he said. “They need it.” More

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      The US could stop the horror in Rafah today. Why won’t it? | Paul Rogers

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      Despite the pressure coming from the Biden administration, there is little sign of the Netanyahu government changing its plan to destroy Hamas – whatever the cost in death and destruction in Gaza.The immediate risk is to the city of Rafah, where Israel is launching intensive airstrikes and planning a full ground offensive. Rafah and its immediate surroundings are sheltering about 1.5 million people, many of them in flimsy tents, while food and clean water are scarce and medical support is minimal. Warning of a ground assault, the UN high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, described it as “terrifying, given the prospect that an extremely high number of civilians, again mostly children and women, will likely be killed and injured”. On Monday, at least 67 Palestinians were killed in airstrikes on Rafah, which coincided with an Israeli mission to free two hostages.Further horror in Rafah could be averted if the United States stepped in. Israel is hugely dependent on US military support and could not continue the war for long without it. This raises two core questions: why is Israel determined to continue with a military operation that has the potential to cause appalling civilian casualties? And why won’t Joe Biden pull the plug?The first is rather easier to answer. The Hamas assault on 7 October shook Israeli society to the core, as it was intended to do. After the second intifada between 2000 and 2005, Israel had really thought it was in full control of its security. But on 7 October, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), police and intelligence agencies all got it grievously wrong.The Hamas paramilitary leadership had planned the attack over many months and anticipated a massive Israeli response. This is what it got, resulting in damage to Israeli attempts to work with Gulf regimes and massive support for the Palestinian cause across the Middle East and beyond.Meanwhile, Israel has the most hawkish government in 75 years, with its unsteady coalition reliant on three fundamentalist parties. But if Hamas remains active, the far-right parties will most likely withdraw support, and Benjamin Netanyahu will not survive. The prime minister’s desire to continue in his role is enough to ensure that Israel’s assault continues.The IDF also has an interest in continuing this war. Its military failures have seen its status diminished across the Middle East, and its leadership knows this can best be regained by some kind of victory. The problem for the IDF leaders and Netanyahu is that the war is still not going to plan. The IDF death toll may still be in the low hundreds, but more than a thousand troops have been seriously wounded, many of them with life-changing injuries.Even now, Hamas is reconstituting paramilitary units in northern Gaza, which for months the IDF has claimed to be in control of. On Sunday, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) reportedly mortared Israeli military positions east of Gaza City, while the Palestinian Mujahideen Movement fired rockets towards an Israeli position south-east of the city. These attacks may be much smaller than at the start of the war, but they show that Hamas is far more flexible than expected. Even now, the IDF has still not mapped most of the Hamas tunnel network, nor has it been able to free more than three of the 100-plus hostages remaining.Meanwhile, what of the other question: the position of the Biden administration? There may be increasingly strong messages directed at Netanyahu to limit the Palestinian losses, but they have been to little avail. It’s as if the Israelis know they can ignore Biden without consequence.The Israel lobby is certainly very strong in Washington, and the Pentagon connections with Israel are deep. They were greatly strengthened when Israeli advice was sought as the Iraq war went so wrong in 2003, and even now US forces are permanently based in Israel, running a key X-band radar early warning facility. The US later helped to build Baladia, a permanent Arab “town” for military training. The flow of hardware through to Israel at present is massive, and highly profitable for the US military industrial machine.The main Israeli lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), is very effective but there are also American Jewish organisations, such as the J Street group in Washington, that are very unhappy about the direction of the war. What remains missing from an understanding of Biden’s position is the benefit Israel gains from the support of Christian Zionists in the US.Of about 100 million evangelical Christians in the US, a substantial minority do hold fast to the belief that Israel is an essential part of the Christian God’s plan for the end times. Many believe that it will be in the land of Israel that the final battle will be fought between good and evil, and that it is part of God’s plan for Israel to be a Jewish state. Evangelical Christians are more likely to vote than others and Christian Zionists are more likely to vote Republican. That alone bodes ill for an early end to the war – which makes it all the more important for US allies to speak some truth to power.This is barely starting. David Cameron says that Israel “should stop and think seriously” before taking further action in Rafah, and the EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, has hinted that the US should rethink military assistance to Israel. But much more will be needed, and quickly, if an even greater disaster is to be prevented.
      Paul Rogers is emeritus professor of peace studies at Bradford University and an honorary fellow at the Joint Service Command and Staff College More

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      From Germany to Israel, it’s ‘the will of the people’ v the rule of law. Which will win? | Paul Taylor

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      The will of the people expressed in free elections and the rule of law upheld by independent courts are two of the pillars of a liberal democracy, or so we were taught at school. Yet these two core principles keep colliding in increasingly polarised societies from Washington to London, Paris to Berlin and Warsaw to Jerusalem, with populist politicians demanding that “the will of the people” override the constitution, treaties or the separation of powers.It is vital for the long-term health of democracy that the judges prevail. If politicians are able to break or bend fundamental legal principles to suit the mood of the moment, the future of freedom and human rights is in danger.In the United States, the supreme court will soon rule on whether Donald Trump should be allowed to run again for president after having encouraged and condoned the storming of the Capitol by his supporters on 6 January 2021 in a violent attempt to prevent Congress certifying the election of Joe Biden as his successor. Two states, Colorado and Maine, have barred him from the ballot.The 14th amendment of the constitution, adopted right after the civil war, states that no person shall “hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath (…) to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof”.If the court applies the constitution literally, it’s hard to see how it can let Trump stand in November’s election, even though he may not be found guilty by a court over the insurrection. However, to deny the runaway favourite for the Republican nomination a chance to regain the White House would ignite a firestorm of outrage among his supporters, and perhaps a wider sense of a denial of democracy.Even some Trump-haters contend that it would be wiser for him to be defeated in an election than prevented by judges from running for office. The fact that the supreme court is dominated by conservative justices appointed by Trump and his Republican predecessors might not be enough to convince millions of Americans that they were robbed of a free vote.The same kind of issue has arisen repeatedly in the UK, where the high court ruled in 2016 that even after the Brexit referendum, the government still required the assent of parliament to give notice of Britain’s intention to leave the European Union. The Daily Mail infamously branded those judges “enemies of the people”. In 2019, the supreme court overruled Boris Johnson’s proroguing of parliament, and more recently it ruled unanimously that Rwanda was not a safe country to send people seeking asylum in Britain. Each time, populist politicians denounced what they call “rule by judges” and vowed to find ways to limit their powers.Of course, it is politically inconvenient when judges tell a government, or a parliament, that it is acting illegally or unconstitutionally, but it is an essential safeguard of our democracy that those rulings be respected and implemented faithfully.While Britain lacks a written constitution and is governed by a mixture of laws and informal conventions, its courts are bound to uphold the European Convention on Human Rights, to which the UK is a founding signatory, and the jurisprudence of the European court of human rights that derives from it.View image in fullscreenIn France, the constitutional council last week struck down substantial parts of an immigration law passed by parliament last month. Les sages (the wise persons) annulled more than a third of the measures, including provisions that would have obliged parliament to set annual immigration quotas, discriminated between French nationals and foreigners, and between working and non-working foreigners in entitlement to welfare benefits, and denied automatic citizenship to French-born children of foreign nationals.Emmanuel Macron had referred the law to the council as soon as the conservative opposition forced his minority government to accept a severe toughening of its original bill, drawing charges of hypocrisy since his party voted for the legislation knowing that parts of it were likely to be ruled unconstitutional.As expected, the council’s ruling was denounced as a “legal coup” against the will of parliament and the people by mainstream conservative Republicans and Marine Le Pen’s hard-right National Rally, who demanded that the constitution be changed to permit a referendum on immigration quotas. But amending the constitution is a lengthy process that requires both houses of parliament to adopt identical wording and then a three-fifths majority at a special congress of both houses. Don’t hold your breath.In Germany, the federal constitutional court ruled last year that the government’s attempt to divert money left over in an off-budget special fund for Covid-19 recovery for investment in the country’s green energy transition was unconstitutional. The ruling has left the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, with a massive hole in his budget that the government is struggling to fill.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe court decision has prompted the beginnings of a sensible debate on amending a constitutional debt brake enacted during the global financial crisis in 2009, which severely restricts budget deficits except in times of emergency. At least no one in Germany has branded the justices “enemies of the people” or demanded their heads on pikes.In Israel, an attempt by Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-right government to curb the independent supreme court’s right to interpret quasi-constitutional basic laws to overrule government decisions and appointments and to reject legislation passed by the single-chamber parliament caused months of civil unrest last year.Netanyahu, who is on trial on corruption charges and seeks to exert political control over judicial appointments, argued that the will of the people should prevail over an unelected judiciary. Far-right members of his government contend that Jewish religious law should trump the basic law anyway. The supreme court this month overturned a law that would have prevented it using the principle of “reasonableness” to quash government decisions.In Poland, a democratically elected nationalist government defied the EU to dismantle the independence of the judiciary by packing the constitutional court and prosecutors’ offices with loyalists and creating a politically controlled body to discipline judges for their rulings. Now a pro-European government is trying to reverse the damage wrought by its predecessors, but faces accusations of violating the rule of law itself by ignoring the packed court’s rulings.The common thread in all these different situations is that in a democracy, the will of the people is not and should not be absolute and unconstrained by law. Perdition that way lies.
      Paul Taylor is a senior fellow of the Friends of Europe thinktank

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