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      Why are Democrats blindly embracing Netanyahu? | Jo-Ann Mort

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      When Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, feels squeezed at home – and trapped by a Democratic White House – he turns to his most trusted consigliere, Ron Dermer, to fix things. Dermer, an American-born Israeli who functions like a Republican party operative, is the Bibi whisperer on Capitol Hill. His official title in the Netanyahu government is minister of strategic affairs. In practice, he is a Republican fixer.During a previous US administration, Dermer was the one who worked with the then Republican House speaker, John Boehner, to have his boss address a joint session of Congress, infuriating Barack Obama and his then vice-president, Joe Biden, by going behind their backs. That time it was to try to derail the Obama-initiated Iran nuclear agreement.This time, Dermer has schemed with the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, to invite Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress before the end of this summer session. Once Johnson accepted this idea, both Chuck Schumer, Senate majority leader, and Hakeem Jeffries, House minority leader, felt obliged to fall in line, even after Schumer gave a well-publicized speech on the Senate floor calling for new elections in Israel. Their agreeing to the Republican ploy was a mistake, but it can be rectified.The Republicans are convinced that Israel is a wedge issue, and that Jewish voters who traditionally vote Democratic will turn on the Biden-Harris ticket if the president – the most supportive president that Israel has had perhaps since Harry Truman – appear to be “anti-Israel”. So, they keep trying to weaponize Israel. But today, especially in the current Israeli political climate, there is a profound difference between being pro-Netanyahu and pro-Israel. That same difference is matched among American voters, both Jewish and non-Jewish.Amir Tibon wrote about Congress’s invitation recently in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, where he is a diplomatic correspondent. If the invite goes through, Tibon wrote: “It will be made possible thanks to the weakness and shallowness of certain Democratic politicians who have no real understanding of Israeli politics and society, and mistakenly think it is ‘pro-Israel’ to cooperate with Netanyahu – a man despised by at least half of his country.” (Tibon himself was rescued from Hamas attackers on 7 October not by the IDF or any action of the Netanyahu government, but by his father, a retired army officer who drove on his own to save the lives of his son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren.)Support for Israel is not synonymous with support for Netanyahu; to the contrary, the majority of Jewish Americans don’t vote on blind support for Israel. Dermer, especially, knows this. For years, he has been counseling Netanyahu and others who will listen that Israeli rightwing leaders should strengthen a bloc of support in the US composed of conservative and evangelical Christian voters.Dermer knows that Jewish voters continue to be among the most loyal Democratic voters. They won’t fall in line behind far-right Israeli policies. An April 2024 Pew study found that “about seven-in-10 Jewish voters (69%) associate with the Democratic party, while 29% affiliate with the Republican party. The share of Jewish voters who align with the Democrats has increased 8 percentage points since 2020.” The same poll found that Jewish Republicans are about twice as likely as Democratic-identifying Jews to say they have a favorable view of the current Israeli government (85% v 41%).Moreover, 53% of Jewish Americans ages 50 and older said Biden was striking the right balance in his handling of the war. Younger Jews, like other younger voters, are less enthusiastic about Biden’s policies – but that isn’t because they are swinging Republican.Netanyahu is a profoundly weak leader right now. Every Israeli poll since the 7 October attack against Israel and the ensuing war between Israel and Hamas has shown the Netanyahu government losing its governing majority and Netanyahu without majority support for his own leadership. And Israelis poll all the time, usually one or more polls a week.There are growing calls inside Israel for a ceasefire and an agreement with Hamas that will stop the war and bring home the remaining hostages. No current member of the governing coalition can appear in good faith before an Israeli hostage family. Nor have most of them even reached out to the hostage families. Meanwhile, Biden, the White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and numerous other Biden officials have met multiple times with hostage family members.Netanyahu himself is so weak inside his own coalition that Biden rightly chose to try to force Netanyahu’s hand on the latest Israeli proposal from Israel to Hamas, by announcing it himself – and announcing it when the Israeli government would be caught off guard during the Jewish Sabbath. Biden knew full well that the extreme rightists in the Netanyahu government would try to knock the proposal out of the running. That’s what is happening right now.Ideally, liberal or progressive members of Congress who do support Israel can find plenty of ways to show their support without being part of a staged show produced by Netanyahu, Dermer and Johnson. Those members of Congress who truly care about Israel, at the very least, must agree that before Netanyahu speaks at Congress, he has to wholeheartedly accepted the Biden-announced proposal for an agreement with Hamas, that was, after all, already endorsed by the Netanyahu government.Better yet just say no. So far, Senator Bernie Sanders has said he’ll skip the speech. That’s not surprising. But, Jan Schakowsky, the Illinois congresswoman who has significant liberal Jewish support, has also said she won’t attend. It’s anticipated that more Jewish and non-Jewish members will find other things to do that day (the date is now in flux due to the congressional calendar). That’s good. Back in 2015, 50 Democratic house members and eight senators skipped the Netanyahu speech. It would be important to raise these numbers this time.Blind embrace of a leader who is profoundly unpopular in his own country and who has repeatedly attacked the current US government and US foreign policy is a cynical use of the congressional stage. It must not be rewarded.
      Jo-Ann Mort is co-author of Our Hearts Invented a Place: Can Kibbutzim Survive in Today’s Israel? She writes frequently about Israel for US, UK and Israeli publications More

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      What to Know About the Latest Gaza Cease-Fire Proposal

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      President Biden raised hopes last week when he endorsed a plan that he said could lead to a “cessation of hostilities permanently.” He said Israel had put forward the plan, but neither Israel nor Hamas has said definitively that they would accept or reject the proposal, and they appear to still be locked in disagreement over fundamental issues.Here’s a look at what is known about the cease-fire deal, which key points still must be negotiated, and the hurdles still ahead:What’s in the plan?Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire in November that lasted for a week. But the proposal now on the table — as laid out by Mr. Biden, a senior U.S. administration official and Israeli officials — is more ambitious. Major issues remain unresolved, including whether Hamas would remain in control of the Gaza Strip.The proposal would unfold in three phases.In phase one, among other things, Israel would withdraw from population centers in Gaza during a six-week cease-fire, and dozens of women and elderly hostages held in Gaza by Hamas and its allies would be exchanged for hundreds of Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons.During that time, talks over a permanent cease-fire would continue, and if successful, the deal would enter phase two, with the full withdrawal of Israel’s military from the enclave. All hostages and more Palestinian prisoners would be freed. Under phase three, Hamas would return the bodies of hostages who had died, and a three- to five-year reconstruction period, backed by the United States, European countries and international institutions, would begin.Near a rally on Wednesday in Tel Aviv for hostages who were kidnapped during the Oct. 7 attack.Marko Djurica/ReutersWhat are Israel’s concerns?One of the key gaps between Hamas and Israel over the plan is the length of the cease-fire and the future role of Hamas. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said on Monday that he was open to a six-week cease-fire, according to a person who attended a closed-door meeting he held with Israeli lawmakers. But publicly he has said that Israel will fight until Hamas’s governing and military capabilities are destroyed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Columbia Law Review Website Is Taken Offline Over Article Criticizing Israel

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      The board of directors of the student-run publication said that the article, by a Palestinian human rights lawyer, had not been subject to sufficient review.The website of the Columbia Law Review, one of the United States’ most prestigious student-edited law journals, was taken offline Monday by its board of directors after its editors published an article that argues Palestinians are living under a “brutally sophisticated structure of oppression” by Israel that amounts to a crime against humanity.As of Tuesday evening, visitors to the website of the 123-year-old journal saw only a blank page with the message “Website is under maintenance.”The decision to suspend access to the website is the latest example of how American universities have sought to regulate expression that is highly critical of Israel amid concerns that it veers into antisemitism. That, in turn, has spurred complaints about censorship and academic freedom when it comes to Palestinian scholarship.In a statement, the board of directors, which consists of faculty members and alumni, said it had decided to suspend the website on Monday after learning two days earlier that not all of the students on the Law Review had read the essay before publication.The board said that it had asked the editors to hold the article until June 7, to give others time to read it but that they had published it on Monday instead. The board then decided to take the website down temporarily “to provide time for the Law Review to determine how to proceed.”In a letter Tuesday to the editorial staff that was provided to The New York Times, the board charged that the article had been handled with unusual secrecy, calling that “unacceptable.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Benjamin Netanyahu set to address joint session of US Congress for fourth time

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      Benjamin Netanyahu is set to become the first foreign leader to address a joint session of the US Congress four times, despite deep differences with the Biden administration.The Israeli prime minister’s office said in a statement that a date for his address to Congress had yet to be set, but that it would not take place on 13 June as had been reported, due to a Jewish holiday.The formal invitation came from congressional leaders of both parties within hours of Joe Biden’s disclosure of the terms of a new peace proposal for Gaza endorsed by Israel. Over the weekend, however, Netanyahu played down the significance of any Israeli concessions in the new plan, and insisted that any proposal for a lasting ceasefire without the destruction of Hamas as a military and governing force would be a “non-starter”.He also has suggested that Israel was under obligation only to carry out the first of the peace plan’s three phases, which may increase Hamas’s reservations of a deal. The White House says it is waiting for an official response from Hamas on the proposal.Netanyahu had earlier defied Biden by adamantly opposing any steps towards the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, and by pressing ahead with an offensive on the southernmost Gazan city of Rafah, despite repeated appeals not to from the Biden administration.Before this month’s scheduled appearance, Netanyahu was the only foreign leader apart from Winston Churchill to be accorded the honour of an address to a joint sitting of Congress three times. With his fourth address, he will outdo even Churchill in the record books.The invitation to Congress is a reminder than while Biden is seeking to influence Israeli politics to forge a peace agreement for Gaza and a broader long-term settlement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Netanyahu also has the means to sway US politics – and possibly hurt Biden’s re-election chances if he were to accuse the president of being insufficiently supportive.Netanyahu used an address to Congress in 2015 to speak out against the efforts of then President Barack Obama to reach an agreement with Tehran on Iran’s nuclear programme. The Israeli prime minister was highly critical of Biden last month when the president stopped a delivery of heavy bombs to Israel forces. More

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      Intense Security at Peaceful Parade for Israel in Manhattan

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      The annual parade focused this year on the hostages in Gaza. Thousands marched, and with many streets blocked off, there were few protesters.Thousands of supporters of Israel marched along Fifth Avenue on Sunday during a heavily policed Israel Day parade that took on a more somber tone this year as the war in Gaza enters its eighth month.The normally jubilant event, which has been held annually since 1964, had fewer spectators in Midtown Manhattan than usual because of intense security. The parade — expected to draw 40,000 participants, all of whom needed credentials to march — has been previously called “Celebrate Israel.” This year, it was renamed “Israel Day on 5th” and focused on remembering the hostages seized by Hamas on Oct. 7.The event was mostly peaceful and drew very few protesters. Police barricades, chain-link fences and checkpoints limited access to the route.New York has had roughly 3,000 demonstrations related to the Israel-Hamas war since October, according to Mayor Eric Adams, most of them pro-Palestinian, and hundreds of protesters have been arrested. No Palestinian flags were in evidence along the parade route on Sunday.Still, moments of tension erupted between participants and politicians. At the start of the parade, the arrival of elected officials, including Gov. Kathy Hochul; Letitia James, the attorney general of New York; and Senator Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, drew jeers from the crowd.As Mr. Schumer began to speak, at least one person shouted “you betrayed us,” a reference to Mr. Schumer’s sharp criticism of the Israeli government in a Senate speech in March.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      After Biden’s Push for Truce, Netanyahu Calls Israel’s War Plans Unchanged

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      The timing of the remarks seemed to rebuff the president’s hopes for a speedy end to the war. But some analysts said the prime minister was aiming at domestic supporters, not the White House. A day after President Biden called on Israel and Hamas to reach a truce, declaring that it was “time for this war to end,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday reiterated that Israel would not agree to a permanent cease-fire in Gaza as long as Hamas still retains governing and military power.In his statement, Mr. Netanyahu did not explicitly endorse or reject a proposed cease-fire plan that Mr. Biden had laid out in an unusually detailed address on Friday. Two Israeli officials confirmed that Mr. Biden’s proposal matched an Israeli cease-fire proposal that had been greenlit by Israel’s war cabinet. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations.But the timing of Mr. Netanyahu’s remarks, coming first thing the next morning, seemed to put the brakes on Mr. Biden’s hopes for a speedy resolution to the war, which has claimed the lives of more than 36,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.“Israel’s conditions for ending the war have not changed: the destruction of Hamas’s military and governing capabilities, the freeing of all hostages and ensuring that Gaza no longer poses a threat to Israel,” Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in the statement released on Saturday morning. Biden administration officials and some Israeli analysts said they believed that Israel still supported the proposal Mr. Biden described on Friday, and that Mr. Netanyahu’s statement on Saturday was more tailored to his domestic audience and meant to manage his far-right cabinet members, rather than to push back against the White House. Mr. Biden is eager for the war to end, with the American presidential election just five months away.But Mr. Netanyahu’s domestic political worries could prove paramount. On Saturday night, two of Mr. Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners — Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir — threatened to quit his government should he move forward with the proposal. Mr. Ben-Gvir labeled the terms of the agreement a “total defeat” and a “victory for terrorism.” If both of their parties left his coalition, it could mark the end of Mr. Netanyahu’s government.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Yael Dayan, Israeli Writer, Politician and Daughter of War Hero, Dies at 85

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      She was hailed for her books and admired for promoting women’s rights. But her support for a two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict angered many.Yael Dayan, a celebrated Israeli writer who, after the death of her father, the war hero and statesman Moshe Dayan, entered politics and became a proponent of women’s rights, L.G.B.T.Q. issues and a two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict, died on May 18 at her home in Tel Aviv. She was 85.Her daughter, Racheli Sion-Sarid, said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.Ms. Dayan was the last surviving child of Mr. Dayan, who served as Israel’s defense minister during the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973. With his distinctive black eyepatch — he had lost his left eye in combat fighting with the British in World War II — he was the unmistakable patriarch of a family dynasty that many in Israel have compared to the Kennedys.Mr. Dayan’s wife, Ruth, was the founder of the fashion house Maskit. Their son Assi was an actor and filmmaker. Another son, Ehud, was a sculptor.Ms. Dayan shot to literary stardom at age 20 with “New Face in the Mirror” (1959), an autobiographical novel written in English about a young female soldier whose father is a military commander.“One day my father came to the camp,” she wrote. “He said he was passing and had decided to drop in. He would never have admitted that he had come to see me. His arrival was, of course, an event — an occasion for smart and often unnecessary salutes, for alert and curious eyes. Will he kiss her when he leaves?”The novelist Anzia Yezierska, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called “New Face in the Mirror” “an extraordinary record of the inner life of a rebellious adolescent in search of self-realization.” She added, “There is an honesty and a compulsive intensity in the telling of her story that haunts us, long after finishing the book.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Where is Joe Biden’s fury about decapitated Palestinian babies? | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Earlier this week, I sat down to write a piece about a campus safety officer at a public college in New York who told pro-Palestinian protesters that he supported genocide. “Yes I do, I support genocide,” the officer said, after a protester accused him of this at a graduation event at the College of Staten Island, part of the public City University of New York (Cuny) system, last Thursday. “I support killing all you guys, how about that?”It’s possible that you didn’t hear about this incident: while it was covered by a few outlets, including the Associated Press, it didn’t get a huge amount of press. It certainly wasn’t splashed all over the front page of the New York Post the way it would have been if that guard had made the same comment about Israelis. The New York Times, which has written a lot about safety on college campuses – and published a piece on anti-Israel speeches at Cuny just a couple of days before this incident – didn’t seem to deem it newsworthy. And the White House didn’t chime in with a horrified statement about anti-Palestinian bias on campuses. After all, this wasn’t a big deal, right? It was just a security guard saying he supports genocide. Which, it should be clear now, is essentially the same position as the US government.So, yes, that was what I was going to write about. But a couple of paragraphs in, I stopped writing. I’d had a quick look at Twitter/X, you see, and it was full of the horrors of the tent massacre in Rafah, where an Israeli airstrike killed at least 45 people in an area where displaced Palestinians were sheltering. That, of course, is already old news: more killing has followed the slaughter on Sunday night – and Israel has said it plans many more months of this.The images out of Gaza have been unrelentingly traumatic, but the slaughter in Rafah was just unbearably upsetting. Reports of decapitated babies. Charred children. People burned alive. All just days after the International court of justice (ICJ) ordered Israel to halt its military offensive in Rafah. All while the US government makes excuse after excuse for Israel’s flagrant breaches of international law, which Israel said was just a “tragic mistake”.After those images, I couldn’t function anymore. I certainly couldn’t sit down and try and write. The hopelessness and the horror and my rage felt too overwhelming. My complicity felt too overwhelming – the knowledge that this mass slaughter is being facilitated and funded by the US taxpayer, the knowledge that a little portion of my writing income goes towards this suffering. All while the public school around the corner from me in Philadelphia is failing because there’s never enough money for education and the library near me shuts on Sundays because there’s never enough money for public services and there are people going bankrupt in the US from medical bills because there’s never enough money to invest in public health. But there’s always money for bombs.What’s the point? I keep asking myself. What’s the point in writing when it’s now very clear that there are no red lines, that absolutely nothing is going to stop the carnage? Not the United Nations human rights council terming this a genocide, not international courts telling Israel to stop, and certainly not my little opinion pieces.The point, I have to keep reminding myself, is that all genocides begin with dehumanization, and we all have to do what we can to push back on this. This genocide was built on decades of Palestinians being demonized and dehumanized – and public consent for this assault on Gaza was manufactured with the help of dehumanizing narratives designed to ensure nobody could think of a single Palestinian as an innocent civilian or even a human being.One of the most inflammatory examples was the false rumour that 40 decapitated babies were found in the Kfar Aza kibbutz after the Hamas attack. Hamas, of course, committed atrocities on 7 October, including murdering 38 Israeli children. But the fake news about 40 beheaded babies – which the Israeli government press office has confirmed to Le Monde was not true – was potent and emotive and spread absolutely everywhere, including to and from the White House.Joe Biden repeated these unverified reports, even when his staff urged him not to. He even lied about seeing pictures of these babies. It was Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction all over again. It was the Kuwait incubator hoax all over again. It laid the basis for genocide; for politicians to look at pictures of Palestinian children, decapitated by US-manufactured missiles, and just shrug.We see this same dehumanization come into play when it comes to US campus politics. Pro-Palestinian protesters are painted as hateful and dangerous, while violence by pro-Israel voices is minimized. When a pro-Israel mob attacked pro-Palestinian protesters at UCLA, for example, the police (normally keen to crack down on protesters) allowed the attack to happen. The US press used the passive voice and characterized the violence – which was, by most accounts, extremely one-sided – as “clashes”.As for that Cuny officer who supports genocide? His words were also diminished by the mainstream media. The Hill, for example, which is centrist, chose the following headline: New York college suspends officer after perceived threats to campus protesters. Notice the use of perceived: the language minimizes the incident. There is also a clear choice not to put the words “kill you all” in the headline. And, while there is a video of the officer saying the remarks, the Hill made sure to say in the piece that it “appears” like he was making the remarks.Now compare this to a similar incident where a pro-Palestinian protester said something violent. In April the Hill published a piece with the headline: Columbia has banned student protest leader who said ‘Zionists don’t deserve to live,’ University says. In that instance, they put the inflammatory quote inside the headline. There also weren’t any qualifying words about the video; because it was a pro-Palestinian protester saying something violent, it was accepted at face value. All these little choices in reporting add up to a bigger narrative about who is violent and who isn’t. They help manufacture consent.So while it feels pointless writing this, the point is to make it clear that a lot of us don’t consent to what is being done with our taxpayer money and with the encouragement of our elected officials. The point is to make sure that this is all on record. Because decades into the future, when Israeli condos line the ethnically-cleansed beaches of Gaza and people look back on this genocide, there will be a lot of people who say they didn’t know. There will be people who will try and rewrite history to make it seem like the genocide unfolding right now was too complicated to parse. The point is to remind everyone too cowardly to speak up that your silence is complicity.
      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist More