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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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      US should ‘reset relationship of unconditional support’ for Israel, progressives say

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      Leading progressive and Jewish members of Congress have criticized the US’s “unconditional support” for Israel after Benjamin Netanyahu declared bluntly that he was opposed to a Palestinian state after the war in Gaza and directly rejected American policy.The Israeli prime minister declared on Thursday that Israel would forever maintain control over all land west of the River Jordan, making an independent Palestinian state there impossible. “This is a necessary condition, and it conflicts with the idea of [Palestinian] sovereignty,” Netanyahu said. “What to do? I tell this truth to our American friends, and I also stopped the attempt to impose a reality on us that would harm Israel’s security.”Pramila Jayapal, the US representative who heads the influential Congressional Progressive caucus, on Friday issued one of the sharper responses to Netanyahu, saying in a video that the Israeli prime minister’s stance “should cause us to reset our relationship of unconditional support to [his] government”.“These are policies that are diametrically opposed to the US’s stated goals,” Jayapal said about Netanyahu’s calls for the permanent expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.Meanwhile, 15 Jewish members of the House released a statement Friday saying they “strongly disagree with the prime minister” of the predominantly Jewish nation.“A two-state solution is the path forward,” said the statement, whose signatories included Jerry Nadler, Jamie Raskin, Adam Schiff and Elissa Slotkin. They were joined by 11 fellow House Democrats: Jake Auchincloss, Rebecca Balint, Suzanne Bonamici, Steve Cohen, Daniel Goldman, Seth Magaziner, Mike Levin, Dean Phillips, Jan Schakowsky, Kim Schrier and Bradley Sherman.In a separate statement, the Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid predicted that “continuing to unconditionally fund Israel’s war in Gaza” would cost him enough votes to doom Joe Biden’s campaign to be re-elected as president.“He will break a fundamental trust with many Democrats,” said Shahid, a former spokesperson for the progressive political action committee Justice Democrats. Shahid also warned that “lecturing about the greater evil” represented by the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump, would do “little” to repair it.Trump is facing more than 90 pending criminal charges for attempting to forcibly overturn his defeat to Biden in the 2020 election, illegally retaining government secrets after he left the Oval Office, and hush-money payments to an adult film actor who has alleged an extramarital sexual encounter with him. He has also been grappling with civil litigation over his business practices and a rape accusation which a judge has determined to be substantially true.“I pray, for all our sakes, that Biden corrects course – because our country cannot afford to pay the bill for disregarding Palestinian lives should it come due in November,” Shahid said.A spokesperson for Biden’s national security council, John Kirby, said the president and Netanyahu discussed “post-conflict Gaza” on Friday by telephone, as the foreign policy reporter Laura Rozen wrote on the social media platform X.Biden made clear that “an independent Palestinian state” was important for long-term security, Kirby remarked, as reported by Rozen.“The president still believes in the promise and the possibility of a two state solution,” Kirby said, in part, according to Rozen. “And the United States stands firmly committed to eventually seeing that outcome.”Despite occasionally endorsing the concept, Netanyahu has worked to obstruct the establishment of a Palestinian state throughout his political career.His statements on Thursday were his most pointed attack on the US’s preferred foreign policy approach in Gaza, however.It came after Biden’s administration had spent enormous domestic political capital – and billions of dollars in aid – to support Israel’s military in its strikes there.Israel, which receives $3.8bn annually in security assistance from the US, mounted the offensive in Gaza in response to the 7 October attack by Hamas that killed about 1,200. Israeli military operations in Gaza have since killed more than 24,000 people.Netanyahu’s comments on Thursday came two days after US senators defeated a measure from the progressive Bernie Sanders that would have made military aid to Israel conditional on whether the Israeli government is violating human rights and international accords with its offensive in Gaza.Biden’s White House opposed Sanders’s proposal and has asked Congress to approve an additional $14bn for Israel. More

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      Bernie Sanders demands answers on Israel’s ‘indiscriminate’ Gaza bombing

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      The US’s support for Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza is facing new scrutiny in Washington following a proposed resolution by the independent senator Bernie Sanders that could ultimately be used to curtail military assistance.It is far from clear whether Sanders has the support to pass the resolution, but its introduction in the Senate this week – by an important progressive ally of the US president, Joe Biden – highlights mounting human rights and political concerns by Democrats on Capitol Hill.Citing the killing of nearly 19,000 people and wounding of more than 50,000 in Gaza since Hamas’s brutal 7 October attack, Sanders said it was time to force a debate on the bombing that has been carried out by the rightwing government of the Israel prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the US government’s “complicity” in the war.“This is a humanitarian cataclysm, and it is being done with American bombs and money. We need to face up to that fact – and then we need to end our complicity in those actions,” Sanders said in a statement.If passed, the resolution would force the US state department to report back to Congress any violations of internationally recognized human rights caused by “indiscriminate or disproportionate” military operations in Gaza, as well as “the blanket denial of basic humanitarian needs”.The state department would also have to report back on any actions the US has taken to limit civilian risk caused by Israeli actions, a summary of arms provided to Israel since 7 October, an assessment of Israel’s compliance with international humanitarian law in Gaza, and a certification that Israeli security forces have not committed any human rights violations.“We all know Hamas’s brutal terrorist attack began this war,” Sanders said. “But the Netanyahu government’s indiscriminate bombing is immoral, it is in violation of international law, and the Congress must demand answers about the conduct of this campaign. A just cause for war does not excuse atrocities in the conduct of that war.”Any such resolution would have to clear the Senate but only require a simple majority. It would also have to pass the House and be signed by the White House.The resolution includes details about the extensive use of US arms, including massive explosive ordinance, such as Mark 84 2,000lb bombs and 155mm artillery, and includes “credible findings” by human rights monitors and press organizations about the use of US arms in specific strikes that killed a large number of civilians.If the resolution were to pass, the administration would have 30 days to produce the requested report. After it is received, Congress would under US law be able to condition, restrict, terminate or continue security assistance to Israel.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCongress has not requested such a resolution since 1976.Sanders has come under pressure from progressive Democrats to support calls for a ceasefire. Instead, the senator has previously called for a “humanitarian pause” to allow more aid into Gaza.In a letter to Biden this week, Sanders called on the US president to withdraw his support for a $10.1bn weapons package for Israel, which is contained in a proposed supplemental foreign aid package, and for the US to support a UN resolution it has previous vetoed demanding an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. More

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      Antisemites supporting Israel is weird. Jewish support of them is even weirder | Sam Wolfson

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      Perhaps the most bizarre spectacle of the past month has been watching some of the world’s most wretched antisemites lining up to give their unalloyed support to Israel. Even more jarring has been their embrace by those who are supposed to advocate for Jewish safety.These people include the radical US pastor John Hagee, who previously claimed that Adolf Hitler had been born from a lineage of “accursed, genocidally murderous half-breed Jews” and sent by God to help the Jews reach the promised land. (He apologized in 2008 for some of his remarks.) He was invited to speak last Tuesday to an audience of thousands at the March for Israel in Washington, organised by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, to help “condemn the rising trend of antisemitic violence”.Tommy Robinson, a leading member of the British far right, recently called on people to go to the Cenotaph, a war memorial in central London, to “protect” it from pro-Palestinian protesters. Last year Robinson defended Kanye West, saying it was obvious that “there are powerful Jewish people, claiming to be Zionists, who have their fingers on buttons of power in the entertainment industry, in big tech … and in governments” and that Jews “generally speaking, at least the white European Jews, have an average IQ of 110, so inevitably those Jews will rise to the top of corporations”.Despite Robinson’s history of inflammatory and conspiratorial remarks, a 2019 Guardian investigation found that many of the groups bankrolling or supporting his organisation were rightwing pro-Israel thinktanks in the US, including Middle East Forum and the Gatestone Institute.Then there’s US presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr, who earlier this year repeated the conspiracy theory that Covid-19 was “targeted” to spare Jewish and Chinese people. When he was accused of propagating antisemitism, which he denies, Kennedy chose to blast representatives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for insufficient support of Israel, saying that “criticism of Israel is a false narrative” and “Israel is a shining star on human rights in the Middle East”.Kennedy was rewarded with an op-ed in Jewish Journal, a pro-Israel publication, titled “RFK is an Ally, not an Antisemite”, which argued that despite his comments “RFK’s unwavering commitment to Israel as a Jewish state is sincere and integral to his political values”.Europe’s far-right political parties have a long history of promoting antisemitism. Yet Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, the AfD in Germany and Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party in Hungary all have given unequivocal support to Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Indeed, Netanyahu considers Orbán a close ally and often tweets support for him.In the US, there is Donald Trump, whose election was heralded by antisemites’ biggest public rally in the US in a generation, the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Yet because Trump was also demonstrably pro-Israel in his foreign policy stances, notably moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, he receives ongoing support and endorsements from many pro-Israel pressure groups. Some of them were nervous when he criticised Israel’s lack of military preparedness for the Hamas attacks, but he’s now back in the fold, adding “#IStandWithBibi”to his Truth Social posts.This month Elon Musk agreed with a post on Twitter that said Jewish people have been pushing “dialectical hatred against whites”. The owner of the account, which had fewer than 6,000 followers, went on to say he was “deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations”.“You have said the actual truth,” Musk said. This was not an unusual stance for Musk, who denies that he is antisemitic. He has flirted with white nationalism many times, and earlier this year he remarked that the Jewish billionaire George Soros “reminds me of Magneto” (the evil X-Men villain, who, like Soros, is a Holocaust survivor).As expected, Musk was admonished by the Biden administration, advertisers on X and Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, the world’s most prominent pressure group in protecting Jews from antisemitism. Musk has attacked Greenblatt and the ADL many times, threatening them with lawsuits, saying the group over-polices language on social media and calling them “ironically the biggest generators of anti-Semitism on this platform”.Netanyahu didn’t bother to admonish Musk at all – the pair are friends, and Netanyahu has called him the “Edison of our time” even after many examples of Musk giving a platform to antisemites.Musk did not remove the original post; instead he denied he was an antisemite and promised to come down hard on those who defended Palestinian rights on X, saying he would remove users who posted phrases like “decolonization” and “from the river to the sea”, which he said were “euphemisms” that “necessarily imply genocide”.Greenblatt was thrilled: “I appreciate this leadership in fighting hate.”Over and over again, alleged antisemites or those who give platforms to antisemites have had their offenses chalked off by some in the pro-Israel movement, as long as they show sufficient deference to the Israeli project.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFor decades, groups like the ADL have made it clear that one can only go so far in criticising the actions of the Israeli state before that critique can be dismissed as antisemitism – that some hand-wringing over settler violence in the West Bank is permitted, but that anything beyond that is in the danger zone of hate speech. Greenblatt said in a speech last year that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism”, a statement he only slightly qualified in a tetchy New Yorker interview.This is an idea promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), whose definition of antisemitism, adopted by many organisations, states and legal frameworks, includes examples that conflate Judaism with Zionism and suggest the state of Israel embodies the self-determination of all Jews. The IHRA definition has been used in many cases to label groups and movements like the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement as antisemitic.This straitjacket definition of who is antisemitic apparently includes some Jews themselves who are horrified by the inhumanity of Israeli violence and apartheid. Compare the ADL’s reaction to Musk with their words last month when an alliance of Jewish Americans met in New York and Washington DC to protest against the relentless and indiscriminate killing of Palestinians in Gaza.I was at the New York event and was incredibly moved by speakers who talked about the importance of Jews coming together, in spite of our collective trauma, to say that violence will not be carried out in our names. Greenblatt responded to these tender protests by saying that the protesters were “hate groups” that “don’t represent the Jewish community” – essentially, that we are not real Jews.Greenblatt’s remarks echo similar claims he made last year, that groups like Jewish Voice for Peace are “radical actors [who] indisputably and unapologetically regularly denigrate and dehumanize Jews”.The rationale behind these reactions is twisted and wrong: Israel is supposed to be a homeland for Jews from the horrors of the pogroms, the Holocaust and antisemitism. Yet we are now reaching an illogical conclusion where organisations supposed to protect Jewish rights turn a blind eye to antipathy towards Jews as long as proponents support Israel.This does not make Jews safer. It does not even make sense.
      Sam Wolfson is a writer and senior editor at the Guardian US More

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      in US Politics

      In a world on fire, Biden struggles to banish the curse of Trump

      by

      Is Joe jinxed? In less than three years as US president, Joe Biden has faced more than his fair share of international crises. America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan blew up in his hands like a cluster bomb. Then came Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Europe’s biggest war since 1945. Now, suddenly, the Middle East is in flames.It could just be bad luck. Or it could be Biden, who prides himself on foreign policy expertise, is not as good at running the world as he thinks. But there is another explanation. It’s called Donald Trump. If Biden’s presidency is cursed, it’s by the toxic legacy of the “very stable genius” who preceded him.It’s worth noting how the poisonous effects of Trump’s geostrategic car crashes, clumsy policy missteps and egotistic blunders continue to be felt around the world – not least because he hopes to be president again. In 2020, with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his side, Trump unveiled his “ultimate deal” for peace in Israel-Palestine.His plan was a gift to rightwing Jewish nationalists, offering Israel full control over Jerusalem and large parts of the West Bank and Jordan Valley while shattering hopes of a viable Palestinian state. It was laughably, amateurishly lopsided. Except it was no joke. It excluded and humiliated Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, convinced many that peaceful dialogue was futile and so empowered Hamas.Netanyahu had long advised Trump that the Palestinians could be safely ignored, normalisation with Arab states was a better, more lucrative bet and Iran was the bigger threat. Now he could barely contain his glee. “You have been the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House,” he cooed. Naturally, Trump lapped it up.The catastrophic consequences of Trump’s dangerous fantasising are now plain to all – but it’s Biden, his re-election prospects at risk, who is getting heat from left and right. Partly it’s his own fault. He thought the Palestinian question could be frozen. Meanwhile, Trump, typically, has turned against Netanyahu while praising Hamas’s close ally, Iranian-backed Hezbollah, as “very smart”.The 2018 decision by Trump, egged on by Israel, to unilaterally renege on the west’s UN-backed nuclear counter-proliferation accord with Iran was the biggest American foreign policy blunder since the Iraq invasion. Ensuing, additional US economic sanctions fatally weakened the moderately reformist presidency of Hassan Rouhani.Iran took Trump’s confrontational cue – and shifted sharply to the anti-western, rejectionist right. A notorious hardliner, Ebrahim Raisi, president since 2021, has pursued close alliances with Russia and China. At home, a corrupt, anti-democratic clerical oligarchy, topped by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, brutally suppresses dissent, notably advocates of women’s rights.Mahsa Yazdani is the mullahs’ latest victim. Her “crime”, for which she was jailed for 13 years, was to denounce the killing by security forces of her son, Mohammad Javad Zahedi. Such persecution is commonplace. Yet if the Barack Obama-Biden policy of engagement, backed by Britain and the EU, had been maintained by Trump, things might be very different today, inside and outside Iran.Instead, Biden faces an angry foe threatening daily to escalate the Israel-Hamas war. Iran and its militias are the reason he is deploying huge military force to the region. Iran is why US bases in the Gulf, Syria and Iraq are under fire. And thanks to Trump (and Netanyahu), Iran may be closer than ever to acquiring nuclear weapons capability.Trump’s uncritical, submissive, often suspiciously furtive attitude to Vladimir Putin has undermined Biden’s Russia policy, doing untold, lasting harm. Untold because Democrats have given up trying to cast light on at least a dozen, publicly unrecorded Trump-Putin calls and meetings over four years in the White House.It’s not necessary to believe Moscow’s spooks possess embarrassing sex tapes, or that Trump solicited Russian meddling in US elections, to wonder whether he cut private deals with Putin. Did he, for example, suggest the US would stand aside if Russia invaded Ukraine, where there had been fighting over the Donbas and Crimea since 2014? Trump has a personal beef with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. That alone is sufficient to shape his policy.Trump’s criticism of European allies and threats to quit Nato caused a damaging loss of mutual confidence that Biden still struggles to repair. For his part, manipulative Putin sticks up for the former president. He recently declared that federal lawsuits against Trump amounted to “persecution of a political rival for political reasons”. Evidently, he’d like to see his pal back in power.Did Trump’s behaviour in office, his impeachments and failed coup, encourage Putin (and China’s Xi Jinping) to view American democracy as sick, failing and demoralised. Probably. Trump’s 2020 Afghanistan “peace deal” – in truth, an abject capitulation to the Taliban – confirmed their low opinion. It led directly to the chaotic 2021 withdrawal and a shredding of US global credibility that was largely blamed on Biden.Little wonder Putin calculates that American staying power will again fade as Trump, campaigning when not in court, trashes Biden’s Ukraine policy and his House Republican followers block military aid to Kyiv. Unabashed by his Middle East fiasco, Trump vainly boasts he would conjure a Ukraine peace deal overnight – if re-elected (and not in jail).It’s an unusually challenging time in world affairs. And Biden has been unlucky domestically, too, given a post-pandemic cost of living crisis and a supreme court gone rogue. Yet his biggest political misfortune remains the noxious global legacy and continuing, uniquely destructive presence of Trump.He is more than just a rival waiting for an 80-year-old president to slip and take a tumble. Symbolically, Trump is nemesis. He is the darkness beyond the pale, he’s a monster lurking in the depths, he’s the enemy within. He’s Joe’s Jonah.
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