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      Israelis want Netanyahu to resign. Why did Congress invite him to speak? | Tamar Glezerman

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      To put it bluntly – Benjamin Netanyahu is the enemy of the Israeli people, the Palestinian people, and of every person on this earth who values human life. He is also personally responsible for October 7. The fact that he spoke in Congress, with tens of thousands dead in Gaza and no hostage deal in sight, is an embarrassment to Congress and to every single representative who attended.When Netanyahu spoke to Congress, Congress should’ve walked out, not given him standing ovations. Even beyond the moral obvious, no dialogue should be had with this man for the same reason dialogue with Trump is a waste of time – all you’re ever going to get is another masterclass in gaslighting. And that is exactly what this speech was – from craven lying about the death toll in Gaza to craven lying about his attempts to free the hostages – A smorgasbord of craven lying, which congress, for some reason, could not stop applauding.But if dialogue with Netanyahu must occur – there is only one question to be asked – it’s not about the hostages – why give him another chance to pretend he cares for the people whose return he is actively preventing? It’s not about the Palestinians being killed in tens of thousands and displaced in millions – he just told you they are not. That what you see, you did not see.No, the question is biblical and it is – have you murdered and also inherited? Asked of Achav after he and Jezebel his wife murdered Navot to steal his vineyard. This question comes to say – How dare you? How dare you profiteer from a war you’re causing? How dare you shed crocodile tears for citizens you abandoned to get slaughtered, abused and kidnapped, and are now letting die, if not actively killing, in Gaza? How dare you use the blood on your hands to prolong your death grip on power?And there is so much blood on Netanyahu’s hands it is up to his neck. He is practically drowning in it. The blood of my aunt Hannah Kritzman, who was 88 years old when she was murdered in Be’eri by Hamas. The same Hamas Netanyahu funded and then ignored warnings about.The blood of tens of thousand Gazan civilians and who knows how many more under the rubble and the blood of the dead hostages who could’ve come home with a deal. Unfortunately, blood is Netanyahu’s sustenance – it keeps his career alive.I am an Israeli peace and anti occupation activist, living in New York. My family lives in Tel Aviv and I have some friends in Gaza. Since this war started, I’ve been organizing vigils and protests for ceasefire and hostage deal with a group called Israelis for Peace NYC. The first vigil was a little after I returned to NY from my aunt’s shiva – my entire belief system is based around a rejection of revenge politics, a striving for reconciliation and a dogged, relentless, choosing of hope over fear and anger. But there are exceptions – in some cases anger, like pain, serves as an indication that we are actively being hurt. Sometimes, anger is necessary, especially when dealing with a pathologically lying narcissist. Without it, we might confuse him pissing on our legs for rain.Because the sad truth is that the Israeli people have been mistreated by the Netanyahu family almost consecutively since 1996, when he was voted in less than a year after Rabin, whose murder he incited, was shot dead, and with him the two-state solution, (at least until now).At the time, I was just a kid, but I grew up in a leftist household, had already been in a bombing that killed 13 people, and learned that revenge only brings more revenge and that Palestinian self determination is not only a moral imperative, but also the only way to stop this blood cycle. So I knew what I was looking at as I watched Netanyahu replace Shimon Peres in the lead on election night in 1996 – I was looking at the starting pistol go off in the final race to the bottom. I was looking at the death rattle of hope. Since then we’ve hit rock bottom again and again, only to hear, as the Russian proverb says, knocks coming from below.Nine months after the rockiest bottom yet, Netanyahu has come to the US to pretend to speak for the Israeli people, the same people he is sacrificing in order to stay in power, and lie that continuing this horrifying war is in our interest.In reality, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been protesting Netanyahu even before the war. My 88 year old aunt was one of them. She would protest from her golf cart, the same golf cart she was later murdered on. And Israelis are still out on the streets every single night, getting arrested and beaten up for simply demanding a hostage deal and an end to this war.In reality, 72% of Israelis think Netanyahu should resign.So Netanyahu, quite literally, does not speak for us, and Congress should have never listened, let alone applauded. Shame. More

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      Harris navigates Netanyahu visit – podcast

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      Kamala Harris enjoyed a brief period of excitement as Democrats rallied behind her presidential bid ahead of November’s election. Only a few days in, however, she is being asked questions over her stance on Israel and the war in Gaza.
      With fewer than 100 days left, Joan Greve speaks to the former adviser to Barack Obama and co-host of Pod Save The World, Ben Rhodes, about the state of play for November 2024

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      Kamala Harris must break with Biden on Israel and Palestine | Lily Greenberg Call

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      On a late summer day in 2019, I packed up my life into an old Nissan Altima and drove across the country from San Francisco to Waterloo, Iowa, to work to elect then senator Kamala Harris as president. After four years of a Trump presidency that stripped away the rights of the most marginalized in this country, I was driven by her vision that “justice is on the ballot” and that every individual should have their fundamental rights guaranteed and have the opportunity to thrive.I would eventually join the Biden administration as a political appointee at the US Department of the Interior, eager to apply the values that so inspired me from the Harris campaign. Those very same values drove me to become the first Jewish American political appointee to resign from the Biden administration in May in protest of the president’s unconditional support for Israel’s assault on Gaza. Now, Harris is poised to be the Democratic nominee to take on Donald Trump in November.I resigned because of Joe Biden’s disastrous policy on Gaza, providing the financial and diplomatic support for the Israeli military to massacre, starve and forcibly expel countless Palestinians in Gaza. As a staffer in the administration, I heard reports that Harris and her staff pushed the US president to adopt a policy on Gaza that was both more humane and in alignment with international law, but were rebuffed. I saw the Harris I moved to Iowa for in her speech in Selma, becoming the first senior administration official calling for a ceasefire, even as I was disappointed that it was only for six weeks. This was reportedly an effort by Biden’s team to water down her speech. It is shameful that Biden refused to listen to Harris – or the majority of Americans for that matter. Now that Biden has stepped aside, she has the opportunity to chart her own path on Israel and Palestine.For months, the majority of Democrats and Americans, including American Jews, have supported a lasting ceasefire and hostage deal between Israel and Hamas. Harris must make clear that she supports using the US government’s leverage to end the bloodshed and reunite families. One clear way that she can do so is by supporting an arms embargo on offensive weapons for the Israeli military – a policy floated by Biden before he ultimately backtracked and greenlit Israel’s devastating ground invasion of Rafah.Once Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza ends, a President Harris could begin a new era in which the US government uses commonsense diplomatic and financial pressure to bring about a long-term political solution that would end Israel’s system of apartheid over Palestinians and guarantee equality, justice and safety for Palestinians and Israelis alike.By setting herself apart from Biden’s failed policy, Harris has the opportunity to rebuild a coalition to defeat Trump that would include progressives, young people and Arab Americans among others.More than 700,000 Democrats voted uncommitted during the primary in protest of Biden’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza. They are a crucial part of the coalition needed for Democrats to win swing states like Michigan, Georgia and Minnesota. The policies these voters are demanding are broadly popular among Democrats and Americans writ large. Even a majority of my own community, American Jews, support conditioning arms shipments to Israel.Harris must initiate a new era in American policy towards Israel, not just because it is the right thing to do, but because it is both the popular and the politically savvy popular thing to do. What better way to draw attention to the authoritarianism of Trump than for Harris to resoundly reject all authoritarianism abroad?Harris has at times fallen short of her promise to deliver justice. As a prosecutor, she put nonviolent drug users behind bars and she prosecuted parents for their children’s absence from school. She has also maintained close ties with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), the rightwing lobby primarily funded by Republican donors that has endorsed election-deniers and anti-abortion extremists. If Harris is serious about “putting justice on the ballot”, she must commit to ending mass incarceration and overzealous prosecution in this country and reject Aipac’s rightwing agenda as president. If she does both, she has the opportunity to turn out record numbers of voters to enable her to defeat Trump in November.On 20 January, I am hopeful we will inaugurate the first female president, one who was successful because she stopped playing to the allegedly movable center, and instead embraced the Democratic party’s full coalition, including progressives, young voters and Arab Americans. To win this fight, Harris must take a clear stance against unconditional support for the Israeli military. She must strive to serve the American people and listen to the majority of Americans who are pleading for an end to the status quo of violence and pave a path forward to genuine equality, justice and freedom for Palestinians and Israelis.

      Lily Greenberg Call was a special assistant to the chief of staff at the US Department of the Interior More

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      In Dearborn, home of largest Arab American community, despair and apathy dominate

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      Abu Bilal sits quietly on a stool in Oriental Fashion, a clothing store he owns on Dearborn’s Warren Avenue, listening to the radio. It’s hard to ascertain whether his tone when talking about the war in Gaza is one of near-complete defeatism or seething anger.“Ninety people were killed today; hundreds were injured,” he says, referencing an Israeli airstrike that killed dozens of Palestinian civilians in Khan Younis on Saturday.“No one is talking about it; no one cares. I have one question: where is the humanity?”On a scorching Saturday afternoon in Dearborn, Michigan, the feeling of despairing resignation over the war and the role America’s political leaders are playing in enabling the suffering in the besieged territory is near-omnipresent – and so is a sense of apathy over the coming presidential election.Down Maple Street, a man getting a haircut at the Al-Rehab Barber Shop says in Arabic that regardless of who the president is or will be following November’s election, it’s not going to make any difference to him. The barber says that he didn’t vote in the 2020 presidential election and doesn’t plan to vote in November. Both refused to offer their names, saying they prefer not to be identified for their political views.As the death toll continues to mount in Gaza with little sign of a political solution forthcoming, the mood in America’s largest Arab American community in recent months and weeks has decidedly changed. While flags and protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza, which has now killed more than 38,000 people, drew fervent energy and anger to Dearborn’s streets when the city became a protest hub around the state’s presidential primary, the sense today seems one of resignation and anger at America’s political leadership.For Joe Biden, who won the key battleground state of Michigan in 2020 by just 154,000 votes, that could be deeply damaging come November.When the US president defeated Donald Trump en route to the White House in 2020, turnout in Dearborn was around 10% higher than the previous election four years earlier. Biden also won 10% more votes than the Democratic party’s previous presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, suggesting voters in Dearborn four years ago were energized.Today, that positivity is nowhere to be found. During the Democratic party’s primary in February, 6,432 Dearborn voters chose “uncommitted” in protest of Biden’s support for Israel’s war, out of a total of 100,000 Michiganders who did the same. A Pew Research Center survey from May found that both Biden and Trump were the least-liked pair of presidential candidates in at least three decades. Trump currently holds a narrow lead in the state according to polls.There is little sign that support among Arab Americans has rebounded since the peak of the uncommitted movement’s strength earlier this year. According to a poll conducted by the Arab American Institute in May, Biden has the support of less than 20% of Arab Americans – down from nearly 60% in 2020. The poll estimates he could lose 91,000 votes in Michigan alone.When members of Biden’s election campaign team visited Dearborn in January, they were met on one occasion by an empty room after Dearborn’s mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, and two other Arab American state representatives declined to meet with the team, rejecting a campaign meeting to discuss elections rather than a substantive discussion about the war.“If you’re planning on sending campaign officials to convince the Arab American community on why they should vote for your candidate, don’t do it on the same day you announce selling fighter jets to the tyrants murdering our family members,” Hammoud wrote on X at the time.On Friday, Biden held a campaign rally at a school a few miles north of Dearborn, but for the most part his campaign’s overtures to Arab Americans across the country have been rejected.“The whole community was aware [that the administration had sent campaign officials to meet with the community], and I think it says a lot, that he sees us as no more than votes and that it’s been normalized for our people back home to be killed,” says Jenin Yaseen, an artist whose family is from a village outside Nablus in the occupied West Bank.She says didn’t vote in 2020 and doesn’t plan to do so this year. “I don’t think that we see that there’s a distinguishment between Trump and Biden,” she says. She added that her position would not change should Biden step aside and Kamala Harris take his place at the top of the Democratic ticket. “Kamala Harris’ stance around Palestine is pretty much the same. She’s just as guilty as Joe Biden is.”She says anger among Dearborn’s Arab American communities has simmered for years.“Dearborn is made up of people from Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere that have been directly impacted by American imperialism,” she says. “There’s also this big sense of guilt being here.”But a victory for Trump could be devastating for Arab Americans with family in the Middle East.Under the previous Trump administration, raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcements (Ice) officers and deportation orders drove fear into the heart of the community. While Biden is on track to match the Trump administration’s number of deportation orders by focusing on border regions rather than the interior US, the president in February signed an order protecting around 6,000 Palestinians from deportation for 18 months.The proprietor at Nabil Hair Salon on Warren Avenue says he’d like to offer his views but was afraid it could affect him and his business.“We’re not looking for any attention,” he says, asking not to be identified by name. “We don’t know what could happen if we talk politics.” More

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      Yes, Joe Biden’s mind is a problem. So is his cold heart towards Palestinians | Ahmed Moor

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      Attention has rightly been focused on Biden’s cognitive lapses – the incomplete sentences, the trailing thoughts, the obvious gaps in coherence. The spectacle, which has been obvious to anyone who isn’t a Democratic party surrogate or a diehard party member, has been astonishing to witness. The images of Giorgia Meloni seemingly redirecting Biden at the meeting of the G7, or his frozen visage as Jill Biden sought to drum up enthusiasm for his candidacy, or Barack Obama guiding him off a stage, or his rigid dancing during a Juneteenth celebration have caused many to ask about Joe Biden’s physical fitness and ability to hold the highest office in the land.Yet, in calling for Biden to step back from running a second time, some Democrats have described the president as “decent” and “a good man”. The opposite is true.Biden has enabled a ghastly genocide, the starvation of children in Palestine, and his legacy is defined by it. Unfortunately, his record before Palestine also puts the lie to the “decency” myth. His enthusiasm for the Iraq war and the savage destruction of Lebanon in 1982 illustrate his poor judgment and ethical lapses on foreign policy. His opposition to federally mandated desegregation busing, his lazy plagiarism, and his sexist treatment of Anita Hill, a Black woman who was allegedly sexually harassed by the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, do not comprise a record of decency either.Donald Trump is a dangerous man. In his first term he employed cartoonishly bad people. Steve Bannon, a criminal and an Islamophobe; Jared Kushner, whose primary achievement appears to have been transmuting an inscrutable role in the White House into a $2bn investment from the Saudis in 2021 and John Bolton, who lied about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to propel this country into war, all “served” him as president. This time around, we should reasonably expect more of the same. Or maybe worse.Democrats are right to fret – and, to use the illustrative if childish metaphor favored by the Biden campaign – to wet their beds at the prospect of another meeting between Trump and Biden. The president’s decline is alarming many Democrats. Trump, by contrast, presents as someone who is a little more alert, but is self-indulgent and undisciplined. He comes across as a peevish, unimaginably rich man, who has been so wealthy for so long, whose money has insulated him from the consequences of his actions for so long, whose primary company is sycophantic, that he chooses to rant incoherently. If there is something wrong with his brain, it may be attributable to the long-term effects of money on cognition.Another Trump-Biden debate is scheduled for 10 September, and, if he remains the Democratic candidate, there is no reason to believe that Biden will fare any better. While cognitive decline is highly mediated by personal characteristics, it does not get better with time; age is age. Today, Biden is unable to meet the challenge posed by Trump – not cognitively, and not ethically.The argument for replacing Biden was strong as soon as his first “bear hug” embrace” of the “insufferably arrogant” war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu caused him to lose voters in Michigan, an indispensable swing state. And it has grown stronger in the wake of the disastrous July debate. It seems reasonable to believe the polls: Americans will not vote for someone who cannot plausibly hold a regular job to the office of the presidency.Before the debate, it seemed likely that enough Americans would not vote for someone who actively abetted a genocide, who openly regarded Palestinian lives with contempt, and who cast an entire generation of college students and young people as antisemites and miscreants, to produce a Trump presidency. But politics is dynamic – and presaged does not mean prescribed.Biden’s poor performance during the debate with Trump may act as an unexpected opportunity for Democrats. Because far from being “a good man” – as Nicholas Kristof, who has spent time documenting aspects of the Israeli genocide, has nonetheless called Biden – Biden’s ethical failures have always been an albatross. He was poised to lose the election even before the debate – an argument that his supporters were able to successfully withstand, primarily by browbeating the realists in the party. But now, with his mental decline so evident, those who seek a different candidate can argue forcefully that he is unfit.The Democrats do not have to lose this election to Donald Trump. The country, and the world, does not have to contend with another four years of incoherence and ineptitude. As the French election – which saw the Palestine-supporting New Popular Front win a shock victory – shows: the best way to beat the far-right is a strong and principled left.This race is salvageable. To win, the Democrats must jettison one bad, ailing man. And find someone decent to take his place.

      Ahmed Moor is a writer, activist and co-editor of After Zionism: One State for Israel and Palestine More

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      Why did Delta Air Lines tweet that the Palestinian flag is ‘terrifying’? | Arwa Mahdawi

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      There’s been a huge increase in scary airline incidents recently. Last week, there was yet another one when passengers on a Delta flight from Boston to West Palm Beach experienced extreme turbulence. No, this wasn’t a Boeing-related safety glitch; it was far more serious than that. A flight attendant was wearing a tiny Palestine flag pin on his uniform.Terrifying, right? Just unbelievable that, nine months into Israel’s relentless bombardment of Gaza, someone might feel the urge to publicly express solidarity with a group of people who are being bombed into oblivion. Absolutely mind-boggling that someone might feel moved by the fact that, according to United Nations rights experts, Israel has carried out a “targeted starvation campaign” in Gaza and babies are dying of malnutrition. Really chilling that an American felt upset by their taxpayer money being used to fund an assault which is killing civilians at a scale and pace many experts have called “unprecedented”.Luckily there was a brave passenger on the plane to call this foolishness out. Someone snapped a photo of the flight attendant and posted it on social media. Various anti-Palestinian accounts quickly mobilized to uncover the man’s identity and pressure Delta to get him fired. A Twitter account called iliketeslas then found another picture of a Delta employee wearing a Palestine flag and tweeted: “imagine getting into a @Delta flight and seeing workers with Hamas badges in the air. What do you do?”Well, personally, the first thing I’d do is explain to the person complaining that the Palestinian flag is not a “Hamas badge”. But I’m not the person manning Delta’s official Twitter/X account. Instead, that person replied from Delta’s official X account: “I hear you and I’d be terrified as well, personally. Our employees reflect our culture and we do not take it lightly when our policy is not being followed.”Let me just spell that out. Someone on Delta’s communication team thinks the Palestinian flag is terrifying and had no problem tweeting that out from the company’s official @Delta account.And this, by the way, isn’t the first time that Delta has been in the news for cracking down on pro-Palestinian messages. This week the non-profit news organization Truthout published a piece alleging that an anti-Zionist Jewish American man called Louie Siegel was told to remove a pro-ceasefire T-shirt during a recent Delta Air Lines flight from São Paulo to Chicago. The T-shirt said “Not in Our Name” on the front side and “Jews Say Ceasefire Now” on the back. Real extremist stuff, eh? Siegel had to cover it up to stay on the plane and was warned he would be put on a no-fly list if he didn’t comply.Delta’s tweet about the terrifying Palestinian flag, by the way, was quickly deleted. But a proper apology from the airline hasn’t been forthcoming. “Delta removed a mistakenly posted comment on X Tuesday because it was not in line with our values and our mission to connect the world,” a Delta spokesperson told me via email on Thursday. “The team member responsible for the post has been counseled and no longer supports Delta’s social channels. We apologize for this error.”Delta’s spokesperson also clarified that neither flight attendant was fired for wearing the pins and said they’d been offered support. They added: “However, as of [Thursday], Delta is shifting its pin allowance policy effective July 15. Beginning then, only US flags will be permitted to be worn on uniforms. Previously, pins representing countries/nationalities of the world had been permitted.”While it’s encouraging that Delta’s flight attendants haven’t been terminated for the crime of wearing a Palestinian flag pin, minimizing this incident as an “error” is insulting. Writing an important email that says “I hope you like tit!” instead of “I hope you like it!” (which is something I have unfortunately done) is what you call an error. Using an official corporate social media account to call the Palestinian flag terrifying, on the other hand, is a hell of a lot more than that.Rather, it’s yet another example of just how widespread and normalized anti-Palestinian bigotry has become in the US. Indeed, racism towards Palestinians is so acceptable that when Donald Trump used “Palestinian” as a slur against Joe Biden in the recent debate, there was barely any outrage. Biden certainly didn’t call Trump out on his racism.Gaza is hell on earth at the moment. Perhaps there will be a ceasefire at one point, but Gaza will never be the same. According to a recent piece by the Israeli paper Haaretz, “The IDF has taken control of 26% of the Gaza Strip … [and] the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Gazans to the southern part of the Strip is becoming permanent. This, an IDF soldier told Haaretz, is ‘an effort at prolonged occupation’.”Meanwhile Israel is loudly and proudly annexing the occupied West Bank, recently approving the largest seizure of land in more than three decades, according to a report by an Israeli anti-settlement watchdog.We are witnessing ethnic cleansing and mass murder in real time and yet speaking out about these horrors – doing something as little as wearing a Palestinian pin in public – puts you at risk of being smeared, harassed and fired from your job. It’s become difficult to even speak about the death toll in Gaza now. The House recently passed an amendment preventing the state department from citing the Gaza health ministry’s death toll statistics for the war. That is the only official entity tracking death data in Gaza; banning these figures effectively halts any conversation about the death toll.“They want to erase the Palestinians who are living,” said Representative Rashida Tlaib in response to the amendment, “and now they are trying to erase the Palestinians who are dead.” As Tlaib says, there is a widespread effort to “dehumanize Palestinians and erase Palestinians from existence”. It’s this that should terrify you. Not a tiny Palestinian flag.

      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

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      David Lammy faces a world in turmoil: five key concerns for foreign secretary

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      UkraineMore than two years after Russia invaded Ukraine, the conflict drags on. Ukrainian forces are depleted and they need foreign weapons. Support for Ukraine crosses most party lines in Europe, but if Donald Trump wins the US election and cuts or limits the flow of arms, Europe may struggle to fill the gap. Lammy will want to shore up public support, bolster European collaboration, and map out what resources the continent can collectively offer Ukraine if the US steps back.GazaLabour’s stance on Gaza cost it several seats, and Lammy will face scrutiny on issues including arms sales to Israel. Labour is committed to recognising Palestinian statehood “as a contribution to a renewed peace process which results in a two-state solution”, but has not given a timeline. Starmer is unlikely to want to risk alienating the Biden administration by making unilateral moves in the run-up to the election.US presidential electionView image in fullscreenOne of the UK’s main diplomatic roles has been as Washington’s ally in forums like the UN, and an interlocutor between the US and Europe. But US politics are in turmoil, with Joe Biden’s bid for a second term hanging in the balance. Lammy will have to prepare for the possibility of working with a Trump administration.EuropeStarmer say he wants to keep Brexit out of politics but his commitment to growth means forming an economic relationship with the UK’s biggest trading partner. Ties to Europe will be particularly important if Trump win. A meeting of the European Political Community, held at Blenheim Palace later this month, will be a key first step to building a shared vision for the continent.Climate changeDespite heavy criticism for watering down commitments to clean energy, Labour has laid out ambitious plans to lead global efforts on climate change, building on British diplomatic reach and technological expertise. The potential loss of progressive allies in France or the US could make a British role important globally. But as the impact of a warming world become increasingly evident, Labour may open itself up to charges of hypocrisy if domestic policies don’t measure up. More

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      US Congress faces growing calls to withdraw Netanyahu invitation: ‘a terrible mistake’

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      A group of prominent Israelis – including a former prime minister and an ex-head of Mossad, the foreign intelligence service – have added their voices to the growing domestic calls in the US for Congress to withdraw its invitation to Benjamin Netanyahu to address it next month, calling the move “a terrible mistake”.The plea, in an op-ed article in the New York Times, argues that the invitation rewards Netanyahu, Israel’s current prime minister, for “scandalous and destructive conduct”, including intelligence failures that led to last October’s deadly Hamas attack and the ensuing bloody war in Gaza which shows no sign of ending.“Congress has made a terrible mistake. Mr Netanyahu’s appearance in Washington will not represent the State of Israel and its citizens, and it will reward his scandalous and destructive conduct toward our country,” the article’s six authors argue in a blistering critique that also accuses the Israeli prime minister of failing to secure the release of scores of hostages taken in last year’s attack and still held captive.The article’s authors were Ehud Barak, a former prime minister; Tamir Pardo, an ex-director of Mossad; David Harel, the president of Israel’s academy of sciences and humanities; the novelist David Grossman; Talia Sasson, a former director in the state attorney’s office; and Aaron Ciechanover, a Nobel prize-winning chemist.Their august status and biting criticism will reinforce the opposition of many Democrats to Netanyahu’s appearance before a joint session on Capitol Hill on 24 July – a sentiment strengthened by his accusation last week that the Biden administration is hampering Israel’s war effort by deliberately withholding weapons, a charge the White House denies.The invitation was originally extended by the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, and endorsed by Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic House minority leader, and the Democratic Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, despite the latter’s earlier denunciation of Netanyahu and call for fresh Israeli elections.Several Democrats have said they will boycott Netanyahu’s congressional appearance, most notably Bernie Sanders, the leftwing senator for Vermont, who has branded the prime minister “a war criminal”.Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat in the House rules committee, has called the invitation to Netanyahu “deeply troubling” and also vowed to stay away. Other critical Democrats have included former House speaker Nancy Pelosi.In comments that will be grist to the Democrats’ mill, the six Israelis write: “Inviting Mr Netanyahu will reward his contempt for US efforts to establish a peace plan, allow more aid to the beleaguered people of Gaza and do a better job of sparing civilians.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Time and again, he has rejected President Biden’s plan to remove Hamas from power in Gaza through the establishment of a peacekeeping force.”Setting out the domestic opposition to Netanyahu among Israelis, they add in a scathing conclusion: “Giving Mr Netanyahu the stage in Washington will all but dismiss the rage and pain of his people, as expressed in the demonstrations throughout the country. American lawmakers should not let that happen. They should ask Mr Netanyahu to stay home.” More