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    A Re-established West Bank Settlement Symbolizes Hardened Israeli Views

    Homesh, one of the four West Bank settlements dismantled by Israel when it withdrew from Gaza in 2005, has taken on new importance since Oct. 7 and the war against Hamas.For an Israeli settlement that has become such a resounding symbol of religious and right-wing politics in the West Bank, Homesh is not much to look at.Three families live in tarpaulin-covered shelters full of bunk beds for some 50 young men, who study in a yeshiva that is a shabby prefab structure surrounded by abandoned toys, building materials and garbage.They live part time here amid the ruins and rubbish of a hilltop settlement ripped down in 2005 by the Israeli army and police. It is one of four West Bank settlements dismantled when Israel pulled all of its troops and settlements out of Gaza. Israel’s intention then, pushed by Washington, was to signal that outlying settlements too hard to defend would be consolidated in any future peace deal.The decision to dismantle them is now being challenged by the more religious and right-wing ministers in the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. They are agitating to settle more land in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and even remove Palestinians from Gaza to resettle there.Homesh, perched in the hills above Nablus, has become a symbol of their resolve.Early last year, the Israeli government decided to relegalize Homesh, but the Supreme Court then required the government to dismantle it once more and ensure that Palestinians who own the land on which it sits can reach it safely.Three families live in tarpaulin-covered shelters full of bunk beds.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesWe 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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    Haley Slams Trump and Ramaswamy Over Israel Remarks

    Nikki Haley on Friday knocked two of her Republican presidential rivals, Donald J. Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy, over their recent comments on Israel, underscoring the deepening divide within the party around the “America First” anti-interventionist stance that Mr. Trump made a core part of his first campaign.Mr. Trump, Ms. Haley suggested, lacks moral clarity and has not left “the baggage and negativity” of the past behind, an apparent reference to Mr. Trump’s still-simmering animosity toward Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, over events that include his congratulating President Biden on winning the 2020 election. Mr. Ramaswamy, meanwhile, sounds more like a liberal Democrat than a Republican, Ms. Haley said.“To go and criticize the head of a country who just saw massive bloodshed — no, that’s not what we need in a president,” Ms. Haley said of Mr. Trump, the former president and current Republican front-runner, in a news conference in Concord, N.H., after filing to get on the state’s primary ballot.Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and United Nations ambassador under Mr. Trump who has been running on her foreign policy experience, said the next president of the United States needed to be someone who “knows the difference between good and evil, who knows the difference between right and wrong.”“You don’t congratulate or give any credit to murderers, period,” she said. Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, accused Ms. Haley of using Democratic talking points and said that “there has been no bigger defender and advocate for Israel than President Trump.” But Mr. Trump has drawn scorn from both sides of the political aisle for referring to Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group, as “very smart” while criticizing Israel’s prime minister and Israeli intelligence.His tone shifted on Friday, though, as he posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, that he had “always been impressed by the skill and determination of the Israeli Defense Forces.” A second post said simply: “#IStandWithIsrael #IStandWithBibi.”Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Ramaswamy campaign, dismissed Ms. Haley’s remarks on Friday — including Ms. Haley’s accusation that he sounded like a member of the group of progressives known as “the squad” — as a scripted attack from a candidate whom Ms. McLaughlin sought to portray as beholden to special interests.“Pre-canned quip brought to you by the Boeing squad,” she said in an email, invoking Ms. Haley’s tenure of less than a year on the corporate board of Boeing.Ms. Haley’s dig at Mr. Ramaswamy on Friday escalated an ongoing feud between the G.O.P. rivals that has pitted those with more traditional conservative positions, who believe the United States should play a major role abroad, against those espousing anti-interventionist views, who want Americans to focus on issues at home.Mr. Ramaswamy was sharply rebuked by his opponents over his conversation with Tucker Carlson on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, earlier this week.He called the Republican response to Hamas’s attacks on Israel another example of “selective moral outrage” and argued that politicians on both sides of the aisle had largely ignored other atrocities, citing fentanyl deaths in the United States and the accusations of genocide of ethnic Armenians by Azerbaijan.“It comes down in most cases — some people do have ideological commitments that are outdated that are earnest — but a lot of it comes down to money, the corrupting influence of super PACs on the process,” Mr. Ramaswamy said.In a statement on Friday, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, another Republican candidate in the race, condemned Mr. Ramaswamy’s remarks, saying that he was “pulling out the oldest and most offensive antisemitic tropes possible.”He added: “To say that outrage is fueled by donor money and the media is beyond offensive. It is morally wrong and it is dangerous.”Mr. Ramaswamy accused critics and even conservative media outlets of taking his words out of context. Ms. McLaughlin, his campaign spokeswoman, said in an email on Friday that he was talking about Azerbaijan, not Israel.But Sean Hannity, the Fox News commentator, was not persuaded. In a tense exchange between the two men on Thursday night, Mr. Hannity said that Mr. Ramaswamy had a history of retreating from his incendiary statements and had made wild claims without backing them up.“What are the financial corrupting influences that Nikki Haley is taking a position on?” he said. “We’ve got pictures of dead babies decapitated, burned babies’ bodies. We’ve got the equivalent of what would be, population-wise in the U.S., over 37,000 dead Americans. So, how much more evidence do you need? What are you talking about?”Mr. Trump, during his time in the White House, virtually did not challenge Israel on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.As his United Nations ambassador, Ms. Haley forcefully spoke out in support of the president’s formal recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, as well as his decision to cut American funding to Palestinian refugees. She has since made her foreign policy credentials and staunch support for Israel pillars of her campaign. Her sparring with Mr. Ramaswamy over foreign policy on the national debate stage in particular helped to boost her in the polls, propelling her to the second position behind Mr. Trump in New Hampshire.On the trail and on the Republican media circuit this week, Ms. Haley has been talking up her on-the-ground experience in the Middle East and calling for the elimination of Hamas. In town halls in New Hampshire on Thursday, she ratcheted up her criticism of Mr. Trump for his reaction to the Israel-Hamas war, saying the former president was too focused on himself.In a small room crowded with reporters at the New Hampshire State House on Friday, Ms. Haley again pitched herself as “a new generational conservative leader” who knew how to negotiate with world leaders.“I know what it takes to keep Americans safe,” she said. She later added: “You don’t just have Israel’s back when they get hit. You need to have Israel’s back when they hit back, too.” More

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    The DeSantis Foreign Policy: Hard Power, but With a High Bar

    The Florida governor has never been the internationalist that some old-guard Republicans wanted or imagined him to be. A close reading of his record reveals how he might lead the U.S. abroad.When Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida made headlines recently by undercutting U.S. support for Ukraine, Republican hawks, many of whom cling to him as their only hope to defeat former President Donald J. Trump, wondered if they had misread him as an ideological ally.Mr. DeSantis ditched his previous backing for Ukraine to align himself with the increasingly nationalistic Republican base, which he will need to win the 2024 presidential primary if he runs. But he was never the committed internationalist that some old-guard Republicans had wanted or imagined him to be.Until now, Mr. DeSantis served as a Rorschach test for Republicans. There was, conveniently, something in his record to please each of the party’s ideological factions, and he had every incentive to be all things to all Republicans for as long as he could get away with it.Hawks had claimed Mr. DeSantis as their own for his fervent support of Israel and his denunciations of China, Iran, Cuba and Venezuela. And restraint-oriented Republicans had claimed Mr. DeSantis for his 2013 decision, as a congressman, to break with Republican hawks and oppose President Barack Obama’s requests to intervene militarily in Syria.Mr. DeSantis during a visit to Jerusalem in 2019. He has been a fervent supporter of Israel. Jeffrey Schweers – Usa Today NetworkYet, despite his policy shifts and inconsistencies — this week, he said he had failed to make himself clear on Ukraine and called President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a “war criminal” — Mr. DeSantis’s worldview is not a mystery.Unusually for a governor, Mr. DeSantis, whose spokeswoman declined interview requests, has a long paper trail on foreign policy. A close reading of more than 200 of his speeches, votes, writings and television commentaries over the past decade, as well as interviews with his peers, reveal the makings of a DeSantis Doctrine.‘Just a Jacksonian’Tucked between the campaign boilerplate in Mr. DeSantis’s new book, “The Courage to Be Free,” is a short chapter describing how his service in Iraq, as an officer in the Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps, reinforced his doubts about former President George W. Bush’s “messianic impulse.”“Bush sketched out a view for American foreign policy that constituted Wilsonianism on steroids,” Mr. DeSantis writes, referring to former President Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic liberal internationalism after World War I. He recalls his reaction to a line in Mr. Bush’s second inaugural address: “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.”“I remember being stunned,” Mr. DeSantis writes. “Does the survival of American liberty depend on whether liberty succeeds in Djibouti?”Mr. DeSantis’s analysis of Mr. Bush’s attempt to use the military to “socially engineer a foreign society” is the sort of thing one hears from conservative elites who call themselves Jacksonians, after President Andrew Jackson, the 19th-century populist. Though The New York Times could find no public record of the Florida governor describing himself as a Jacksonian, the word kept coming up in interviews with people who know Mr. DeSantis.“I think he’s kind of dead-center where Republican voters are, which is to say that he’s neither an isolationist nor a neoconservative, he’s just a Jacksonian,” said David Reaboi, a conservative national security strategist whom Mr. DeSantis has hosted at the governor’s mansion.Mr. Reaboi was referring to a 1999 essay by the academic Walter Russell Mead, “The Jacksonian Tradition and American Foreign Policy,” which is still in heavy circulation on the intellectual right. It defines a Jacksonian as having a narrow conception of the U.S. national interest: protection of its territory, its people, its hard assets and its commercial interests overseas.A Jacksonian does not dream of implanting “American values” on foreign soil. He or she believes that if the U.S. military is to be deployed, it should use as much force as necessary to achieve a quick, clearly defined “victory,” with as few American casualties as possible. A Jacksonian cares little about lopsided casualty counts — so long as they’re in America’s favor — or about international law.Unlike Mr. Trump, a fellow Jacksonian but one who operates on pure instinct and would never dream of suffering through a foreign policy treatise, Mr. DeSantis has read deeply and has formed a philosophy about America’s place in the world. But you will rarely hear Mr. DeSantis invoke abstract values to justify the use of force — as some of his potential 2024 rivals and current party leaders have done.He has not framed the Ukraine war as a battle for “freedom,” as former Vice President Mike Pence has done, or as a mission to defend the post-World War II international security framework, as Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, has done. If Mr. DeSantis is elected president, there is unlikely to be any more Biden-esque talk of “autocracies versus democracies.” In Mr. DeSantis’s framing, these are the idealistic mutterings of a “Wilsonian.”Tucked between the campaign boilerplate in Mr. DeSantis’s new book are ideas similar to those one hears from conservative elites who call themselves Jacksonians, after President Andrew Jackson, the 19th-century populist.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesMr. DeSantis’s former House colleagues could not recall him ever worrying about whether girls got an education in Afghanistan or whether democracy could be spread throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Instead, they recall him expressing a hard-nosed and narrow view of the American national interest.“After law school, Governor DeSantis didn’t take a Wall Street job or join a human rights N.G.O.,” said Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who served with Mr. DeSantis in the House and remains close to him. “He joined the military, which both reflected his worldview and probably further shaped it, as did his choice to serve six years on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.”Mr. DeSantis favors a robust U.S. military. A President DeSantis would most likely increase military spending; as a House member, he spoke approvingly of Mr. Trump’s increase of the Pentagon’s budget.In Iraq, one of Mr. DeSantis’s jobs was to provide counsel to commanders on the rules governing the battlefield. He saw his role as being a “facilitator, not an inhibitor,” he writes in his new book. He chafed at what he viewed as overly restrictive rules of engagement..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.“It is unacceptable to send someone wearing our nation’s uniform to a combat zone with one hand tied behind his back,” Mr. DeSantis writes. “War is hell, and it puts the lives of our military personnel at risk if operations get mired in bureaucracy and red tape.”Mr. DeSantis’s Jacksonianism predates the presidency of Mr. Trump.In 2013 and 2014, Mr. DeSantis broke with Republican hawks who were encouraging Mr. Obama to intervene militarily in Syria. Mr. DeSantis rejected the idea of missile strikes to respond to President Bashar al-Assad’s use of gas. And he voted against an amendment that would have authorized Mr. Obama to train and equip vetted Syrian rebels, because “mujahedeen fighters in Syria are not moderates nor are they pro-American.”Contempt for the State Department and the United NationsMr. DeSantis has often cited the writings of the late conservative intellectual Angelo Codevilla — and in particular his 2010 book, “The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It.”Mr. Codevilla, whose book came out at the height of the Tea Party movement, describes a permanent “ruling class” in Washington that looks down on the rest of the country and “makes decisions about war and peace at least as much forcibly to tinker with the innards of foreign bodies politic as to protect America.”This ruling class — a phrase Mr. DeSantis has co-opted — includes both the Republican and Democratic Party establishments. In his telling, these elites have pursued an unpatriotic agenda: They have assigned the U.S. military unwinnable and therefore demoralizing missions, and have been too generous to foreigners.Mr. DeSantis is widely seen as the strongest potential challenger to former President Donald J. Trump in the 2024 Republican presidential primary race.Scott Olson/Getty ImagesThis mental model defines how Mr. DeSantis thinks about the State Department and international institutions like the United Nations.In a floor speech on Jan. 5, 2017, Mr. DeSantis called for defunding the U.N. until the Security Council revoked a resolution condemning Israeli settlements as violations of international law.Mr. DeSantis derides the foreign policy professionals at the State Department to such an extent that it’s difficult to imagine him meeting with them, let alone listening to their advice. Mr. DeSantis has complained that the State Department is “Arabist in outlook” and “all in” with the Muslim Brotherhood.To the right of Trump on IsraelIn the early days of the Trump administration, the most pro-Israel president in living memory wasn’t pro-Israel enough for Mr. DeSantis, who was still a congressman. On Jun. 1, 2017, Mr. DeSantis issued a statement condemning Mr. Trump for delaying a decision to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem.Public records show that Mr. DeSantis took only three foreign trips as a House member and has taken one foreign trip as governor. All were to Israel.In March 2017, Mr. DeSantis flew to Israel and scouted potential sites for the U.S. Embassy to heap public pressure on Mr. Trump to keep his campaign promise. Mr. DeSantis later pushed Mr. Trump to recognize the Golan Heights as Israeli territory — another controversial move.Mr. DeSantis has promised to be the “most pro-Israel governor in America” — a stance that helps him with both Jewish and evangelical constituents in Florida.Mr. DeSantis inserting a prayer for a safe Florida hurricane season in the Western Wall in Jerusalem during a visit in 2019. Jeff Schweers – USA TODAY NETWORKHe has used his powers as governor to pressure American companies to drop their boycotts of Israel. He took on Unilever over the decision by one of its companies, Ben & Jerry’s, not to sell ice cream in the occupied territories. Mr. DeSantis added Unilever to Florida’s “scrutinized companies” list, and Unilever reversed its decision. He used the same tactic against Airbnb — successfully pressuring the company to reverse itself over eliminating listings in Israeli settlements.As president, Mr. DeSantis would not be expected to dissuade Israel from annexing further land. He has referred to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” using the biblical names for the territory used by right-wing Israelis.During his first year in office, Mr. Trump briefly gestured at considering the Palestinian point of view. He even hosted the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, at the White House. It is hard to imagine Mr. DeSantis doing the same.In early 2018, when Mr. Trump was still aiming for what he called “the ultimate deal” between the Israelis and the Palestinians, Mr. DeSantis told the Heritage Foundation that a peace deal was not “worth spending capital on.”China superhawkAs governor, Mr. DeSantis has sought to restrict Chinese investments in Florida. His actions against the Chinese Communist Party suggest that as president, his China policy would be more comprehensively aggressive than Mr. Trump’s. But he seems to care less about trade issues than Mr. Trump did, and more about security concerns.Mr. DeSantis appears less likely to chase a Chinese trade deal, as Mr. Trump did for most of his presidency, and more likely to accelerate efforts to block Chinese investments in the U.S., especially in the high-tech and security sectors. (President Biden has kept Mr. Trump’s China tariffs.)In February, the DeSantis office announced a proposal to ban TikTok and “other social media platforms with ties to China” from state government devices.Mr. DeSantis has promised legislation to stop people or companies with China ties from buying “agricultural land and lands surrounding military bases,” and he plans to ban gifts to Florida universities from people or companies connected to the Chinese Communist Party.Political calculation and inconsistenciesMr. DeSantis’s recent statement that defending Ukraine was not a vital U.S. interest came after CNN unearthed comments he made in 2015 — which were circulated by people in Mr. Trump’s orbit — urging Mr. Obama to do more to defend Ukraine against Russia. As soon as Mr. DeSantis pivoted, the Trump campaign attacked him as a flip-flopping fake.If it was a politically calculated shift by Mr. DeSantis, it would not have been the first.On Sept. 9, 2013, Mr. DeSantis told Fox News that he accepted the Obama administration’s evidence that the Syrian government had gassed its people. But this, Mr. DeSantis argued, did not justify missile strikes against Syria, which he said risked escalating the conflict.Mr. DeSantis sounded different when the president firing missiles in response to Syrian gas was Mr. Trump. In a Fox News appearance on April 15, 2018, Mr. DeSantis said, “The strikes did what they were intended to do.”Nor has Mr. DeSantis been entirely consistent in his Jacksonianism. Speaking on a foreign policy issue that is politically potent in Florida, he can sound positively Wilsonian. He told the Venezuelan people in 2017, “We hear your cries of freedom.”Mr. DeSantis encouraged Mr. Trump — who ended up pushing unsuccessfully for regime change in Venezuela — “to apply additional pressure on the Maduro regime.” More

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    Biden and Netanyahu Gear Up for a Complicated New Era

    The two leaders have forged a relationship over four decades that vacillates between warmth and combat.When President Biden took office last year, he held the advantage in a tumultuous, four-decade relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu, the longtime Israeli prime minister.Mr. Biden had vanquished former President Donald J. Trump, who was a close ally of Mr. Netanyahu, and the new American president made clear that one of his first foreign policy initiatives would be to restart the Iran nuclear deal that the Israeli prime minister hated, and consistently sought to undermine.Meanwhile, in Israel, Mr. Netanyahu faced charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. Within months, he would be ousted from office after more than a dozen years as the leader of the Jewish state.Now, the tables have turned.Mr. Biden’s hopes for a nuclear deal with Iran have all but collapsed, and Iran has begun supplying missiles and drones to Russia for use in Ukraine. Polls suggest the president faces a stinging rebuke in midterm elections next week that may end his domestic legislative agenda. Mr. Trump remains a potent force in American politics, likely to run again in 2024.And on Thursday, Mr. Netanyahu secured his own return to power with a new, far-right coalition that will once again make him prime minister — an endorsement of the aggressive, in-your-face style that has been at the heart of his clashes with Mr. Biden and other American presidents over the years.The two leaders will find themselves in the position of sparring anew over issues that have long strained their relationship.It is the most complicated of relationships, vacillating between warmth and combat, sometimes on the same day. But Dennis Ross, the former Mideast negotiator who used to accompany Mr. Biden, when he was vice president, on trips to see Mr. Netanyahu, noted in an interview on Thursday that the relationship was better than the one between Mr. Netanyahu and President Barack Obama.“Bibi’s view of Biden is different than Bibi’s view of Obama,” Mr. Ross said, using the common nickname for Mr. Netanyahu. “Bibi was convinced that Obama was trying to undercut him, and Obama was convinced that Bibi was working with the Republicans to undercut him.”“He viewed Biden as someone who he would disagree with, but that Biden’s heart and emotions were all with Israel,” said Dennis Ross, who oversaw Mideast diplomacy at the National Security Council in Mr. Obama’s presidency.Disagreements remain. The president favors a Palestinian state to resolve the decades-long clash with Israel. Mr. Netanyahu does not. The Israeli prime minister called the 2015 Iran nuclear deal a disaster for Israel and the region. Mr. Biden said it was the best way to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons. And the two men have been at odds for years over the construction of Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory.The State of the WarGrain Deal: Russia rejoined an agreement allowing the shipment of Ukrainian grain through the Black Sea, one of the few areas of cooperation amid the war, easing uncertainty over the fate of a deal seen as crucial to preventing famine in other parts of the world.Nuclear Rhetoric: As President Vladimir V. Putin makes public threats and Russian generals hold private discussions, U.S. officials say they do not believe that Moscow has decided to detonate a tactical nuclear device in Ukraine, but concerns are rising.Turning the Tables: With powerful Western weapons and deadly homemade drones, Ukraine now has an artillery advantage in the Kherson region. The work of reconnaissance teams penetrating enemy lines has also proven key in breaking Russia’s hold in the territory.Sea Drone Attack: The apparent use of remote-controlled boats to attack the Russian naval fleet off the Crimean port city of Sevastopol suggests an expansion in Ukraine’s battlefield capabilities after months of military aid from Western nations.But in the 16 months since Mr. Netanyahu was ousted and then returned to power, the world has changed. Iranian leaders, preoccupied by protests at home, seem uninterested in returning to the nuclear deal from which Mr. Trump — to the delight of Mr. Netanyahu — withdrew in 2018.Meanwhile, Iran is supporting President Vladimir V. Putin’s war in Ukraine, selling drones and missiles to Russia for use on the battlefield. And the frequent source of tension, the future of a Palestinian state, is barely on the agenda these days, in part because of divisions within the Palestinian leadership.During Mr. Trump’s four years in office, Mr. Netanyahu faced little pressure from the United States to bend to the will of an American president. Mr. Trump never challenged Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign of sabotage and assassination in Iran, or his refusal to pursue a two-state solution with the Palestinians. The relationship between the two leaders did not seem to fray until Mr. Netanyahu congratulated Mr. Biden for his victory in 2020, leading the former president to accuse his Israeli counterpart of disloyalty.President Donald J. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu supported each other on key policies, but Mr. Trump eventually accused the Israeli leader of disloyalty.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Netanyahu had held off calling to congratulate Mr. Biden for several hours, worried about angering Mr. Trump, the candidate he openly preferred. But the delay did little good in the end. Mr. Biden returned the favor, taking weeks to hold a first phone call with Mr. Netanyahu. And, partly because of Covid-19 lockdowns, the two men did not meet in person before Mr. Netanyahu lost office.As vice president, Mr. Biden often found himself at odds with Mr. Netanyahu or his government.More than a decade ago, according to former officials, it was Mr. Biden who complained during a Situation Room meeting that Israel, under Mr. Netanyahu’s leadership, had been too hasty in updating secret computer code to sabotage Iran’s Natanz nuclear enrichment plant. The malware spread around the world, its revelation leading to the unraveling of the story of a covert program, code-named Olympic Games, run by both countries.At other times, Mr. Biden voiced concerns that Israel’s assassination of nuclear scientists was undercutting the effort to reach a diplomatic deal to limit its production of nuclear material.The disagreements over policy between Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu sometimes seemed to stoke personal animosities.On a visit to Israel in March 2010, Mr. Netanyahu’s government announced the construction of new settlement projects in East Jerusalem, territory that would have been up for negotiation over the boundaries of a Palestinian state. Mr. Biden, who had just hours earlier gushed effusively about the security relationship between the two nations, was surprised by the announcement — and angry.That night, Mr. Biden delayed his arrival at a dinner with Mr. Netanyahu and his wife for more than 90 minutes, a diplomatic rebuke intended to make his displeasure clear. (Mr. Netanyahu maintained he was not involved in the decision on settlements or the timing of the announcement during Mr. Biden’s visit.)After Mr. Netanyahu was ousted by his party in 2021, he lashed out at the Biden administration in his final speech, comparing the hesitance to confront Iran’s nuclear program to the failure by a past American president to more quickly confront Hitler during World War II.“In 1944, at the height of the Holocaust, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt refused to bomb the railway leading to the extermination camps, and refused to bomb the gas chambers, which could have saved millions of our people,” Mr. Netanyahu said.The relationship between Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Biden goes back decades, to when Mr. Biden was a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Mr. Netanyahu was the deputy Israeli ambassador in Washington.Mr. Biden has often spoken fondly of Mr. Netanyahu since then, despite their political differences, and once described giving him a photograph with a warm caption: “Bibi, I don’t agree with a damn thing you say, but I love you.”“Biden has this instinctive attachment to Israel,” Mr. Ross said. The belief that Israelis feel “existentially threatened” by their adversaries, Mr. Ross said, led Mr. Biden to be more inclined to understand Mr. Netanyahu’s point of view.After Mr. Netanyahu became prime minister in 1996 and then lost the position three years later, Mr. Biden was the only American politician to write him a letter after his election defeat, Mr. Ross said. During moments of heightened friction between Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Obama, it fell to Mr. Biden to play peacemaker.But there have been sharp moments when the differences came into open view.In 2015, Mr. Biden declined to attend an address that Mr. Netanyahu delivered in Congress after the Israeli leader accepted an invitation from the House speaker, John A. Boehner, a Republican, without notifying the White House. The speech was devoted to opposing the Iran nuclear deal, and Mr. Biden’s absence exacerbated the dispute between Mr. Netanyahu and the Obama administration about the wisdom of the deal.That deal did freeze Iran’s activity for several years, until it was unwound by Mr. Trump, and the Iranians resumed nuclear fuel production.As president, Mr. Biden used his early political capital to seek a return to the deal that Mr. Trump trashed. He pushed forward at a time when Mr. Netanyahu was politically weak. But even during those moments, Mr. Biden vowed to stand with Israel, whoever its leaders might be.That was on display during Mr. Biden’s visit to Israel in mid-July, when he met with the government of Yair Lapid.Mr. Biden was clearly relaxed and enjoyed the trip, especially in comparison to his next stop, in Saudi Arabia. He went to see Mr. Netanyahu, in what was described as a warm but brief meeting. Later, Mr. Netanyahu said he had told Mr. Biden that the United States needed to threaten Iran with more than economic sanctions or a defensive military partnership between Middle Eastern states.“We need one thing,” he said. “A credible offensive military option is needed.”Mr. Netanyahu will undoubtedly press that point as prime minister, now that negotiations on re-entering the nuclear deal are stalled. With Iran producing more and more uranium enriched at near bomb-grade levels, he will surely call for more sanctions and more threats of military action. And with little prospect of a diplomatic solution, Mr. Biden may have less room to push back.Mr. Biden, for his part, will likely press Israel to declare itself on the side of containing Russia, a step Israel has refused to take, saying it needs to work with Moscow in Syria.Each of these problems has a different shape than when Mr. Biden came to office. History suggests that the inevitable tensions with Mr. Netanyahu, born of different national interests, are nonetheless bound to emerge quickly. More

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    Deadly Israeli Raid Targets New Palestinian Militia

    At least six Palestinians were killed in a night of violence in the West Bank, raising tensions further ahead of elections in Israel next week.JERUSALEM — Israeli forces carried out a major raid against a Palestinian militia in the occupied West Bank city of Nablus on Tuesday, killing a leader of the group and four other men, according to members of the militia and Palestinian officials.The predawn raid targeted the Nablus-based militia known as the Lions’ Den, which emerged this year and does not answer to any of the established Palestinian factions. Many Palestinians have championed the group’s fighters as popular heroes, in part because Israel’s occupation of the territory has dragged on for more than a half-century and become increasingly entrenched.Israel has blamed the Lions’ Den for a rise in shootings that it says are aimed at its troops and Jewish settlements in the West Bank, including one that killed a soldier this month. It said that it had killed the group’s leader, Wadie al-Houh, in an exchange of gunfire, adding that he was the main target of the raid and was responsible for producing bombs and obtaining weapons for the group.This year has already been the deadliest in the West Bank since 2015 for Palestinians in the conflict with Israel. And the raid, along with the threat of revenge attacks, raised tensions further in an already volatile atmosphere ahead of Israel’s general election, which is set to take place next week.The Israeli army has kept Nablus under a tight siege for about two weeks, severely restricting movement in and out of the city in an effort to contain attacks. Palestinians have decried the closure as a collective punishment.On Tuesday, the Israeli military said that its troops and special forces had raided a “hide-out apartment” in the Old City of Nablus that the Lions’ Den used as a headquarters and explosives manufacturing site. The troops blew up the explosives lab, the military added.It said that its troops hit multiple armed men and fired back at gunmen who were shooting at them, while dozens of Palestinians burned tires and hurled rocks at the forces.Palestinian militants firing into the air during the funeral of those killed in the predawn Israeli raid in Nablus on Tuesday.Majdi Mohammed/Associated PressThe Lions’ Den confirmed that Mr. al-Houh was killed and that he was a leader of the group.The militia has won the admiration of many young Palestinians by posting videos on social media of its attacks on Israelis in real time. These young Palestinians are as frustrated with the Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited authority over parts of the West Bank, as they are with Israel.Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, denounced the Israeli raid as a war crime, while Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that dominates the Gaza Strip, warned that Israel’s “crimes would plunge Palestine into escalation.”The dead were carried in a funeral procession in Nablus, wrapped in flags with the Lions’ Den insignia. Along with the five who were killed in the Nablus raid, the Palestinian Health Ministry said at least 20 Palestinians were injured.Another Lions’ Den operative was killed in Nablus on Sunday when a motorcycle exploded as he passed by. The group blamed Israel for what it described as an assassination and swore to avenge it.Israel did not claim responsibility. But if it was behind the killing, Israeli experts said, it would be the first time that Israel has carried out a targeted killing in the West Bank in more than 20 years.In addition to blaming the Lions’ Den for a rise in shootings at troops and in West Bank settlements, the Israeli authorities say that in the past few weeks, the group also sent an operative to carry out an attack in Tel Aviv, which was thwarted by the police, and that it planted an explosive device in a gas station near a West Bank settlement.Separately on Tuesday, Palestinian officials said that a sixth Palestinian was killed overnight in the West Bank town of Nabi Saleh near the city of Ramallah. The Israeli military said its soldiers spotted a man hurling an explosive device at them near Nabi Saleh and responded with live fire.No casualties were reported on the Israeli side in either episode.Much of the violence between Israelis and Palestinians this year has focused on the northern West Bank cities of Nablus and Jenin. Unrest has spread to Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed after the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 in a move that most countries have not recognized.And there has been a noted rise in violence against Palestinians and their property by extremist Jewish settlers, who frequently set out to confront Palestinians and their supporters during the fall olive harvest.Right-wing opponents of Israel’s centrist prime minister, Yair Lapid, have criticized his government during the election campaign for not acting more aggressively against Palestinian militants. But Mr. Lapid vowed on Tuesday to keep pursuing Palestinians who attack Israelis.“We will reach every place,” he said. “Israel will never be deterred against operating for its own security.”Gabby Sobelman More

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    What Rashida Tlaib Represents

    Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Last May, following protests in East Jerusalem over planned evictions of Palestinians, Hamas started firing rockets toward Tel Aviv, and Israeli airstrikes pounded residential buildings in the Gaza Strip. Shortly after, a group of nine Democratic lawmakers, all longstanding Israel supporters, took to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives to reaffirm the country’s right to defend itself. “We have a duty as Americans to stand by the side of Israel in the face of attacks from terrorists,” Elaine Luria, a representative from Virginia, said, “who again, have the same goal in mind: to kill Jews.”Later that evening, about a dozen other Democrats spoke as well — to question the justice of funneling almost $4 billion a year to a country that was in the midst of bombing civilians. “Do Palestinians have a right to survive?” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Democrat, said. “Do we believe that? And, if so, we have a responsibility to that as well.”The speeches were a rare occasion when Palestinian rights have been addressed at such length on the House floor. They were introduced by Representative Mark Pocan of Wisconsin. But the driving message of the session came from Rashida Tlaib, the 45-year-old second-term congresswoman from Detroit, who, according to several people familiar with the discussions, played a significant role in making the speeches happen. “How many Palestinians have to die for their lives to matter?” Tlaib said in her own remarks, fighting back tears.Tlaib is the only Palestinian American now serving in the House of Representatives, and the first with family currently living in the West Bank, whose three million inhabitants’ lives are intimately shaped by American support for Israel. As the May fighting intensified, colleagues approached Tlaib to ask if her family was safe. “It’s a voice that hasn’t been heard before,” Betty McCollum, a Democratic representative from Minnesota, told me.Tlaib has been criticized, sometimes viciously, by Republicans and pro-Israel Democrats for calling Israel an “apartheid regime,” and for her support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which aims to end military occupation by exerting economic pressure on Israel. She has been called anti-Semitic for her criticism of Israeli policies, and has become a favored quarry of Fox News. Tony Paris, a close friend and former colleague of Tlaib’s, told me that in conversations with some of his relatives, conservative Democrats, he has “tiptoed around the Rashida thing.”But Tlaib’s arrival on the national stage has also coincided with an opening, albeit a small one, within the Democratic Party to challenge the United States’ Israel policy. The Palestinian cause has become a significant part of the politics of the American left at the same time that the left has gained a legible footing on the national stage. Tlaib, a democratic socialist who is if anything more outspoken on domestic issues than she is on the Palestinian cause, has found herself at the center of this turn. She appeared in a traditional Palestinian dress made by her mother during her swearing in, sometimes wears a kaffiyeh (symbolically tied to the Palestinian resistance) on the House floor and speaks often about her grandmother in the West Bank. Rebecca Abou-Chedid, a lawyer and longtime Arab American activist, told me that the simple fact of Tlaib’s presence on the Hill means that “we are now actual people to them.”Yet Tlaib is wary of adopting the role of the only Palestinian voice in the room. “I feel like no one wants to see me as anyone but Palestinian,” she told me. “I’m a mother, I’m a woman, I have gone through a lot being the daughter of two immigrants in the United States. I’m also the big sister of 13 younger siblings. I’m also a neighbor in a predominantly Black city.”Tlaib’s pitch is that the roads to a fairer Israel policy and to fix the problems that plague her district — poverty, water access, pollution — are not so different. She didn’t run for Congress with a strategic plan to shift the Israeli-Palestinian debate, or even a coherent vision to do so. Sometimes she even seemed to equivocate. “We need to be not choosing a side,” she told The Washington Post during her 2018 campaign. But over her three years in Washington, Tlaib’s argument has sharpened: If the United States cares about democratic values, then upholding Palestinian rights is inherently American.I first met Tlaib last summer at a cafe in the Midtown neighborhood of Detroit, a gentrifying area of dive bars and boutiques. Two days of thunderstorms had left 850,000 people without power, and several restaurants were still closed. Tlaib was in a white summer dress and sneakers (“My mother hates when I wear them”); a congressional pin hung around her neck. I had ambitiously ordered a cinnamon roll, and as we sat down, Tlaib, who had gotten a coffee, eyed it and brought me a fork and napkins. “I’m such a mom,” she said. Shortly after they arrived in Washington, Ilhan Omar, a Democratic representative from Minnesota, gave bracelets to fellow members of “the Squad”: the young, left-leaning congress members of color that at the time included Tlaib, Omar, Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, all of whom were elected in 2018. Omar had Tlaib’s inscribed “Mama Bear.”Tlaib grew up caring for her seven brothers and six sisters, balancing diapers with homework. Her father, Harbi Elabed, was born in East Jerusalem, and her mother, Fatima, grew up in Beit Ur al-Fouqa, a village in the West Bank. They arrived in Detroit shortly before Tlaib was born, in 1976, as the city was reeling from years of deindustrialization and redlining and the deadly unrest of 1967. Capital had fled in search of cheap labor, as had white residents, leaving the city majority Black.Michigan’s 13th District, which Tlaib represents, cuts through most of working-class Detroit before veering abruptly west into slices of three other cities: Dearborn Heights, Romulus and Wayne. It is the second-poorest district in the country. Tlaib, who grew up relying on food assistance, came to Congress at a time when more than half its members were millionaires. She recalls voicing her frustrations about finding an affordable place in Washington to a freshman colleague, who nonchalantly mentioned that he’d bought an apartment nearby. “That’s like $800,000, isn’t it?” she said in amazement.Tlaib’s father, who died in 2017, was an assembly-line worker at the Ford Motor Company and a United Auto Workers member. They had a difficult relationship, but she credits him with introducing her to politics. When she turned 18, instead of wishing her a happy birthday, he told her to register to vote. “I think it’s because maybe he knew it’s a privilege, because he didn’t have that opportunity anywhere else,” she told me.After law school, she worked at a nonprofit serving the Arab American community, then moved to the Statehouse as a staff member. In 2008, she won an eight-way primary race to become a state representative — a surprise to her father, who was skeptical Americans would elect an Arab after 9/11. (Soon after the attacks, like many Muslims, Tlaib’s parents were interrogated for hours by F.B.I. agents about their travel and whom they knew among potential suspects on the agency’s radar, according to Tlaib.) In office, she developed a reputation for taking matters into her own hands. When plumes of black dust appeared over the Detroit River, in 2013, she and a few environmental activists drove to the river’s edge, marched past a “No Trespassing” sign and crossed old train tracks to the source: an industrial site where petroleum coke was piled in 40-foot-high black dunes. Tlaib scooped the substance into Ziploc bags and sent it off to a lab. A storage company was stockpiling the petcoke — prolonged exposure to which at high concentrations can cause lung disease — without a city permit. For weeks, Tlaib held up a bag of the residue in interviews, and the company was later ordered to remove the piles. A building in Michigan’s 13th Congressional District, which Tlaib represents — the second poorest in the country.Dave JordanoIn 2017, John Conyers, Detroit’s longtime congressman, resigned following a sexual-harassment scandal, opening up a House seat in the city for the first time in 52 years. Many residents believed the seat should go to another Black person, and the mayor and the Wayne County executive endorsed Tlaib’s primary rival, Brenda Jones, the City Council president at the time, who is Black. But Tlaib won the primary against Jones the following August, and with it, the near guarantee of winning the general election.When she and the Somalia-born Omar were elected that November, they became the first Muslim women in the House. “I guess I was naïve,” Tlaib told me, “in not understanding how bipartisan Islamophobia is in Congress.” It was the subtle things, she said: colleagues shocked to know that most American Muslims are Black, or stereotypes of Muslim women being submissive. One colleague approached Omar and touched her hijab. Besides ignorance, Tlaib said, “I think there’s a tremendous amount of fear.”Her election also made her the third Palestinian American in the House after Justin Amash, a Republican representative from Michigan, and John E. Sununu, a Republican representative from New Hampshire. Amash at times bucked his party, which he left before exiting Congress in 2021, on Israel. In 2014, he voted against funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system, which has been significantly financed by the United States since it was established in 2011. Amash, a libertarian, explained his opposition on the grounds of government spending. Tlaib’s views, by contrast, are deeply and openly personal. She grew up hearing stories of family members being forced out of their homes. At age 12, she visited the West Bank and saw for herself the walls and checkpoints.Still, foreign policy had hardly come up in her years as state representative. Shortly after her bid for Congress, Steve Tobocman, a former state representative for whom she worked early in her career, sat down with her. The two had discussed the conflict in the past, but now Tobocman, who was working on her campaign, wanted to further understand her views.Tlaib, he recalls, offered few specifics for a policy agenda, but told him about playing with children of Israeli settlers when she visited her grandmother, and recognizing the humanity of people on both sides. Ultimately, she told him, her position on the conflict would be driven by values of equality, peace and justice. She reminded Tobocman of Barbara Lee, the California Democratic congresswoman who cast the sole vote against the authorization of force in Afghanistan in 2001, quoting in her floor speech a clergy member’s warning to “not become the evil we deplore.”“I said, ‘You aspire to be like Barbara Lee,’” Tobocman told me. “And she said, ‘Absolutely.’”In the fall of 1973, shortly before Tlaib’s parents arrived in Michigan, almost 3,000 Arab American U.A.W. members marched to the U.A.W. Dearborn office and demanded that the local union liquidate about $300,000 in bonds it had purchased from the State of Israel with money collected from union dues. At another protest, workers waved signs that read: “Jewish People Yes, Zionism No.” The U.A.W. later liquidated some Israeli bonds.Only recently had the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fully entered American politics. In 1967, after a six-day war with its Arab neighbors, Israel captured the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights; swaths of Palestinian land were now under Israeli control, and so were one million additional Palestinians. To American leaders, Israel proved itself a capable ally against Soviet-backed regimes in Egypt and Syria. By 1976, Israel had become the biggest recipient of U.S. military aid.Around the same time, James Zogby, who is now president of the Arab American Institute, helped found the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, part of a nascent Palestinian rights movement that had a few allies in the Capitol. But its efforts were dwarfed by those of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), founded over a decade earlier, which helped form pro-Israel political action committees that fund-raised for both parties. Israel also successfully framed the Middle East conflict for American audiences as a battle between the West and Soviet-sponsored terrorism. In 1988, Zogby, who advised Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign that year, was a delegate at the Democratic National Convention. He tried to persuade the party’s leadership to include language about the “legitimate rights of Palestinian people” in the party platform, but failed. “Palestinian became the prefix for the word ‘terrorist’ or ‘terrorism,’” Zogby told me. “You couldn’t say one without the other.”Since then, the question of U.S. aid to Israel, in the words of Lara Friedman, the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, has remained “sacrosanct.” Barack Obama committed the United States to an additional $33 billion in military aid, even as Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, brazenly waded into American politics on the side of the Republican Party and presided over Israeli politics’ lurch to the right. Israel legitimized settlement expansion despite international condemnation and, in 2018, passed a controversial “nation-state” law that in part affirms that only Jewish people have the “right to national self-determination.”But beneath the unbroken surface of U.S. policy, the consensus has begun to slip. According to Gallup polling, Americans’ views of the conflict have changed significantly since 2013, with sympathy for the Israelis falling slightly and sympathy for the Palestinians more than doubling. The shift has overwhelmingly been on account of Democrats; while Republican opinion has changed little, Democrats have gone from sympathizing more with Israel by a margin of 30 points in 2002 to being more or less evenly split today.The beginning of this shift roughly coincides with the resumption of the active conflict in 2014, when Israel launched a major military operation in the Gaza Strip after the kidnapping and murder of several Israeli teenagers by the Hamas militant organization. Social media was flooded with testimonials and videos of Israeli airstrikes, which killed nearly 1,500 Palestinian civilians (six Israeli civilians were killed by Hamas rockets).The American Jewish community, which is broadly Democratic, has meanwhile begun to fracture in its support for Israel. According to a recent poll from the Jewish Electorate Institute, 43 percent of Jewish voters under 40 say that Israeli treatment of Palestinians is comparable to racism in the United States, versus 27 percent of those over 64. And pro-Palestinian activists have more successfully integrated their cause with the last decades’ currents of American activism, most notably marching alongside Black Lives Matter protesters in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, while halfway around the world, Palestinians tweeted tactical advice (“Don’t keep much distance from the Police, if you’re close to them they can’t tear gas”).Although most Democratic lawmakers continue to side with Israel when the conflict finds its way into Congress, a handful have begun to reflect the shifting sympathies of the party’s base. In 2017, McCollum introduced the first piece of legislation to directly support Palestinian rights, a bill that would have restricted U.S. aid from being used to detain Palestinian children in military prisons. The bill never came up for a vote, but it garnered 30 co-sponsors. “It’s a bit of new space that might be cracking open,” says Brad Parker, a senior policy adviser for Defense for Children International — Palestine. He added, “We’re trying to force it open.”In interviews, Tlaib speaks about the occupied Palestinian territories in the context of Detroit, pointing to issues of water access in both, comparing their patterns of segregation and poverty. “I don’t separate them,” Tlaib told me. Both places have “what I call ‘othering’ politics,” she said, “or feeling like government or systems are making us feel ‘less than.”’In 2013, Detroit entered the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history. It came under emergency management, which granted a governor-appointed trustee, a bankruptcy lawyer from the Jones Day law firm, authority to overhaul spending on city services. At the time, the city’s unemployment rate hovered around 15 percent, and more than a third of the population was living under the poverty line. Widespread power outages followed; people opened their faucets to find them dry. Today, a quarter of the city’s population is unemployed. In office, Tlaib has been more focused on the affairs of her district than of the Middle East, including persuading the House to pass a national moratorium on utility shut-offs when the pandemic started, as well as pushing legislation to replace lead water pipes. But from her first days in office, it was Tlaib’s positions on Israel that attracted both attention and criticism.In January 2019, on the day that Tlaib and Omar were sworn in, Senate Republicans added language to a bipartisan bill reauthorizing aid to Israel that affirmed state and local governments’ right to sever ties with companies that boycotted or divested from the country. This was a nod to the more than two dozen state legislatures that already had laws responding to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. The Democratic Socialists of America, of which Tlaib is a member, endorsed B.D.S. in 2017, and both Tlaib and Omar had voiced support for the movement. In response to the Republicans’ bill, a version of which was previously introduced in 2017, Tlaib tweeted that the sponsors “forgot what country they represent,” which critics charged was perpetuating an anti-Semitic trope accusing Jews of dual loyalty.Tlaib’s timing couldn’t have been worse: The Democrats had recently taken control of the House, and Republicans had already zeroed in on the Squad’s left-wing politics. “I don’t see much hope for changing where Tlaib and Omar are, but there is a battle in the Democratic Party,” Norm Coleman, the former Republican senator from Minnesota who now presides over the Republican Jewish Coalition, said at the time. House Democrats “will have to make choices about whether they’ll quiet those voices or whether they’ll remain quiet.”Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, admonished Democratic leadership for not “taking action” against the anti-Israel stance of Tlaib and Omar, to which Omar tweeted in reply, “It’s all about the Benjamins” — $100 bills. The ensuing maelstrom defined Tlaib’s career for the next several months. Tlaib came to the defense of Omar (who apologized the next day) even as Democratic leaders issued a statement to condemn Omar for anti-Semitic remarks. The party was already sharply divided on B.D.S.; Speaker Nancy Pelosi described it as a “dangerous” ideology “masquerading as policy.” By that summer, the House overwhelmingly passed a bipartisan resolution to oppose boycott efforts targeting Israel; Pressley broke with her Squadmates and voted in favor. The anti-Semitism charge, Lara Friedman told me, was a “sharp knife” that Republicans could throw “and watch Democrats attack each other.”According to Tlaib’s friends and staff, she hadn’t expected the level of vitriol flung at her and her colleagues. Yet, at times, even her critics seemed unsure of how to respond to Tlaib’s unique position as a Palestinian American member of Congress. Shortly after her election in 2018, Tlaib announced plans to lead a congressional delegation to the Palestinian territories, a tour that would focus on poverty and water access. The trip would coincide with the annual AIPAC-sponsored congressional visit to Israel led by Steny Hoyer, the House majority leader. After public encouragement from Donald Trump, Netanyahu announced on Twitter that Tlaib and Omar, who planned to join the trip, were barred from entering because of their support for B.D.S. The move drew criticism from Hoyer, and even AIPAC and several Republicans. Tlaib asked permission to at least visit her grandmother in the West Bank, who was 90 years old at the time, promising to not promote boycotts while there. Israel acceded to the terms, but in a sudden about-face, Tlaib decided not to go. In a statement, Tlaib said that visiting under “oppressive conditions meant to humiliate me would break my grandmother’s heart.”One aide to a Squad member, who asked for anonymity to speak freely, told me that wanting to show solidarity with Tlaib gave their boss more courage to speak on the issue. McCollum told me she receives less pushback from colleagues now than she did for her earlier efforts to recognize basic rights of Palestinians. “If I can speak out about what’s happening at home,” she said, “why can’t I point out when another democracy is not behaving in a way that I think lives up to human rights norms?”Even President Biden, who during the May 2021 conflict reiterated Israel’s right to defend itself, made a point of speaking to Tlaib about the situation when he met her on an airport tarmac during a trip to Michigan. According to Tlaib, Biden brought up the conflict first, asking how her family was doing in the West Bank. Over the course of the eight-minute conversation that followed, the president listened as Tlaib spoke about the dire situation in the West Bank. “Everything you’re doing is enabling it more,” she later said she told him. Tlaib speaking with President Biden on the airport tarmac in Detroit about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict last May.Doug Mills/The New York TimesTlaib arrived in Washington with one genuinely vanguard position on the conflict. During the 1990s the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organization, along with the United States, agreed that the best solution to the conflict was the establishment of two states: a sovereign Palestine and a sovereign Israel coexisting side by side. Though the borders have never been agreed upon, the two-state outcome remains a “core U.S. policy objective,” according to the State Department. But since then, settlements have grown steadily, while military occupation of the Palestinian territories continues. Today, nearly 700,000 Jewish settlers occupy land in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which has not only cut off some residents’ access to water and electricity but also left Palestinians with less — and more fragmented — territory for a Palestinian state in any hypothetical future negotiation. This has led Middle East experts like Zaha Hassan from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Steven Cook from the Council on Foreign Relations and commentators like Peter Beinart to publicly give up on a two-state solution as a fair or realistic outcome and turn toward what was once considered a radical prospect in the debate: a single democratic state with equal rights for Arabs and Jews.Tlaib didn’t seem to have a firm view on the best road to peace before her election. During her 2018 campaign, the liberal pro-Israel group J Street endorsed her candidacy based on a meeting and a policy paper that her team submitted, which argued that a two-state outcome, while increasingly difficult to achieve, was the best aim. Soon after, in an interview with the left-wing magazine In These Times, she reversed herself, questioning the two-state solution. After seeking clarification from Tlaib about her position, J Street pulled its endorsement. By the time Tlaib reached Washington, she was the only member of Congress to publicly back a single, fully democratic state.This position has put Tlaib out of step with most of her Democratic colleagues. Hoyer, with whom she has grown close and who calls her “my Palestinian daughter,” told me she has not swayed him on his views on Israel. Even her progressive colleagues like Omar support a two-state solution.To other congressional Democrats, talk of a secular one-state outcome, which by definition rejects the idea of Jewish nationalism, is tantamount to calling for the eradication of a Jewish state. “The whole idea of a one state solution denies either party the right to self-determination,” Ted Deutch, a Democratic congressman from Florida who chairs the House Subcommittee on the Middle East, North Africa and Global Counterterrorism and is a staunch Israel supporter, told me. If you advocate getting rid of a Jewish state, he said, “that’s when you end up on the path to anti-Semitism.”Deutch clashed directly with Tlaib on the House floor in September, when Hoyer forced a vote on a bill that would provide Israel with an additional $1 billion for its Iron Dome program. Tlaib has long seen U.S. aid as a crucial source of leverage in the fight for Palestinian rights. She argued against the resolution, declaring Israel to be an “apartheid regime.” (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, have all taken the position that Israel has committed the crime of “apartheid,” but Human Rights Watch has stopped short of calling it an “apartheid regime.”) Chuck Fleischmann, the Tennessee Republican representative who was floor manager during the debate, urged Democrats to condemn Tlaib’s words. Deutch spoke up, saying the House would always stand by Israel and suggesting that Tlaib’s position was anti-Semitic.Afterward, Tlaib told me, her colleagues “whispered, ‘Are you OK?’ The whispering needs to stop,” she said, “and they need to speak up and say, ‘That was wrong.’” Hoyer told me he didn’t consider Tlaib’s remarks anti-Semitic, but thought they were “harsher than they needed to be.”Some Palestinian rights advocates, including McCollum, didn’t join Tlaib’s nay. Only nine lawmakers voted against the measure. Ocasio-Cortez, who the previous May introduced legislation to block a $735 million weapons sale to Israel, was about to join them, but ultimately changed her vote to present, crying as she did so. She didn’t give a clear reason for the switch but later said there were pressures of “vitriol, disingenuous framing, deeply racist accusations” and “lack of substantive discussion.” Tlaib spoke with her privately after, but wouldn’t reveal details. She had conversations with several others too. “People were really sincere about the guard rails they felt were present,” Tlaib told me. “They kept saying ‘guard rails.’”The pro-Palestinian cohort in Congress remains only informally organized. The House has nearly 400 caucuses, including one for rum and another for candy, but none focused on Palestinian rights. Staff members of about a dozen current House and Senate members meet informally to discuss the latest efforts to advance Palestinian rights and their long-term objectives, according to several participants in the discussions. But no one has yet filed the paperwork to start a formal caucus. “They’re kind of looking at me, and I’m like, ‘I’m not doing it by myself!’” Tlaib told me. “You all cared before I came here.”Tlaib at a pro-Palestinian rally in Dearborn, Mich., last spring.Antranik Tavitian/Detroit Free Press, via ZUMA
    In the years since Tlaib’s election, several Democratic battles involving the left have included fights over Palestinian rights — a difference that maps onto wider fights over the future of the Democratic Party. Cori Bush, the Missouri Black Lives Matter activist elected in 2020 to Congress, and Pressley now often link the Palestinian cause to issues of police brutality and segregation at home. Jamaal Bowman, who beat the longtime (and pro-Israel) incumbent Eliot Engel for a New York congressional seat in 2020, recently came under criticism from some in the D.S.A., which endorsed him, for his vote to support Iron Dome funding and for visiting Israel on a J Street-sponsored trip. In North Carolina, Nida Allam, the Durham County commissioner who is running for Congress on a platform of environmental justice, has called for conditioning military aid to Israel on Palestinian rights; she was recently endorsed by Tlaib.In 2020, meanwhile, Zogby, who had been attending the D.N.C. for nearly four decades, finally succeeded in inserting changes to the party’s platform. Party leaders wouldn’t accept the word “occupation,” but for the first time, allowed the phrase “we oppose settlement expansion.”Sensing a shift, however small, a new pro-Israel organization called the Democratic Majority for Israel was formed in 2019 to campaign for Democratic candidates who would uphold current U.S. Israel policy. “We thought it was important,” Mark Mellman, its founding president, told me, “before things get out of hand, if you will, to be a force in the Democratic Party and maintain support for Israel.”D.M.F.I.’s political action committee has targeted primary races that often involve candidates backed by Justice Democrats, an influential left-wing PAC that recruited Ocasio-Cortez and Bowman. Last summer, D.M.F.I. PAC injected more than $2 million into the Democratic primary of a congressional special election in Ohio, and aired ads against Nina Turner, who supports placing conditions on military aid. (Turner lost.) Notably, the ads focused less on Turner’s position on Israel and more on her disagreements with party leadership. “In the super PAC business, one is about winning elections,” Mellman told me.According to D.M.F.I., 28 out of its 29 candidates won their primaries in the last cycle. Among them was Ritchie Torres, a congressman representing the South Bronx, the poorest district in the country. Some Israel advocates see Torres as the model for bringing disaffected Democrats back into the fold: a self-described progressive who maintains support for Israel. For the first time since its founding, AIPAC is starting two political action committees. Writing in The Jerusalem Post, Douglas Bloomfield, a former AIPAC lobbyist, said the group will “probably accelerate its ad campaign against” Omar and Tlaib, as well as “a few others on its enemies list.”The politics of Tlaib’s own position on the Palestinian question, however, may be improving for other reasons. Detroit’s population has fallen again, and congressional lines were recently redrawn into another jigsaw piece of a district, costing Michigan a seat. In January, Tlaib announced she would run for the new District 12, which includes only two-thirds of her old constituents, but now also includes Dearborn, a city with a large concentrated Arab American population. Tlaib’s challenger, Shanelle Jackson, has already tried to wield her identity against her, telling Jewish Insider: “She obviously is carrying the water of Palestine in all that she does.”In 2019, days after telling the Squad to “go back” to their countries, Donald Trump called Tlaib a “crazed lunatic.” Denzel McCampbell, Tlaib’s communication director, told me that whenever there is an uptick in hateful calls and threats at the office, he knows that Fox News must have mentioned her. A Republican political tracker — an operative who regularly films the activities of a politician — follows her around regularly, a practice usually reserved for campaign season.In her Washington office, Tlaib keeps a sample of the petroleum coke she collected in Detroit in a glass cabinet. A framed photo of Tlaib’s grandmother, whom she hasn’t seen in more than 10 years, looks over her desk. “You know how some people take naps?” she told me. “I quit in my head for 20 minutes, and pretend I’m not the Congressmember for the 13,” she said, referring to her district. “Not because of them, but because of this place.”Rozina Ali is a contributing writer at the magazine. She is working on a book about the history of Islamophobia in the United States. Jarod Lew is an artist and a photographer based in Detroit. His works explore community, identity and displacement and have been exhibited at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the Design Museum of London and the Philharmonie de Paris. More

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    Netanyahu’s Road Through Israel’s History, in Pictures

    “Bibi, King of Israel!”That is a shout from his fervent supporters that might have given pause to King David, let alone King Solomon. But Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, has finally lost his job, unable to cobble together a final majority in the Knesset after four elections in the last two years.The government that has now replaced him is fragile, however. Little holds it together except a desire to get Mr. Netanyahu out of office, where he will no longer be immune from punishment, if convicted, over charges of corruption.But Mr. Netanyahu still appears to rule Israel’s largest party, Likud, and given Israel’s riven politics, his fall may only be a sort of sabbatical.Whatever the criticism of his actions and political cynicism, Mr. Netanyahu’s career represents an extraordinary accomplishment for a man who grew up in the shadow of a difficult and demanding father and a hero brother, killed at the age of 30 in command of one of Israel’s most storied military ventures, Operation Entebbe. The 1976 operation rescued hostages held at Entebbe Airport in Uganda.Both brothers served in the military’s elite commando unit, Sayeret Matkal. But Bibi survived to put a more lasting stamp on the young state through his political and economic policies, his toughness toward rivals. He has an instinctive sense of what drives Israelis — the search for security in one of the most unstable regions of the world, a Jewish state built on the remnants the Nazis left behind, in the midst of an Arab and Iranian sea.Mr. Netanyahu, right, during a training exercise as a member of the Israeli Army’s Sayeret Matkal commando unit.Israeli Government Press OfficeIsraeli troops patrol fields around a hijacked Sabena aircraft in Tel Aviv in 1972. Mr. Netanyahu’s commando unit, led by Ehud Barak, another future prime minister, rescued the passengers from hijackers.Associated PressMr. Netanyahu with his daughter Noa in 1980.Israeli Government Press OfficeMr. Netanyahu’s path to leadership was not an obvious one. Born in Israel, he grew up partly in the United States, where his father, a deeply conservative scholar of Judaic history, was teaching.He returned to Israel after high school, fluent in English, to make a distinguished career as a commando in Sayaret Matkal, where he rose to captain and was wounded several times.He then returned to the United States, using the more Anglicized name Ben Nitay (later changed to Benjamin Ben Nitai) to get degrees in architecture and business management. By 1978, he was already appearing on American television, where his English made him an ideal guest to discuss Israel.He found his way into diplomacy and politics in the early 1980s, when he was appointed deputy chief of mission to the Israeli Embassy in Washington. He then served as ambassador to the United Nations before returning to Israel to enter politics in earnest.He joined the Likud in 1988 and was elected to Parliament.Mr. Netanyahu, accompanied by Government Secretary Elyakim Rubinstein, on a flight from New York to Washington in 1989, when Mr. Netanyahu served as deputy foreign minister.Israeli Government Press OfficeRight-wing activists pasting campaign posters for Mr. Netanyahu over campaign posters for Prime Minister Shimon Peres in May 1996, before the election that would bring Mr. Netanyahu to power.David Silverman/ReutersBenjamin and Sara Netanyahu in Jerusalem on election day in 1996.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBy 1993, he was the leader of Likud and was a strong critic of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of the Labor party and his willingness to give up territory to reach peace with the Palestinians in the Oslo accords. After Mr. Rabin was assassinated in 1995, Mr. Netanyahu was criticized for language approaching incitement, a charge he said he found deeply wounding.But he defeated Washington’s favorite candidate, Shimon Peres, in the 1996 elections by pushing the theme of security in the midst of a badly managed conflict with Lebanon and a series of terrorist bombings by Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad. He became the youngest prime minister in Israeli history and the first to be born in the independent state.That same year, 1996, Mr. Netanyahu represented Israel for the first time in summit meetings organized by President Clinton, who was eager to build on Oslo to create a more lasting peace.Then and later, in the 1998 Wye River summit, Mr. Netanyahu proved a difficult partner. He was willing to appeal to American Jews and Israel supporters in Congress to heighten political pressure on Mr. Clinton not to press Israel to go farther than he judged wise.His relations with the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, were always tense, and the two never came to trust one another enough to reach the peace that Mr. Clinton thought was within grasp.Vice President Al Gore watching as Yasir Arafat, King Hussein of Jordan, President Clinton and Mr. Netanyahu leave the Oval Office after a Middle East summit meeting in 1996.Paul Hosefros/The New York TimesThe Israeli and Palestinian leaders failed to resolve any of their differences during the two-day summit.Doug Mills/Associated PressSurrounded by security personnel, Mr. Netanyahu, with his wife Sara and son Avner, spent a holiday at the beach in Caesarea in August 1997.Shaul Golan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhile Mr. Netanyahu did much to reform Israel’s economy, charges of corruption, both large and petty, surrounded him and hurt his popularity.After the failure of his Labor Party successor, Ehud Barak, to reach peace with the Palestinians at long meetings at Camp David and again, just before Mr. Clinton left office, Mr. Netanyahu returned to politics. But he lost out to Ariel Sharon, then went on to serve in his cabinet. After a period in opposition, Mr. Netanyahu became prime minister again in 2009 and has remained in office since.But his relations with American presidents continued to be fraught, and he and President Obama developed a deep mutual disdain.Mr. Obama pushed too hard too early to try to get Israel to stop settlement building in the occupied West Bank, while Mr. Netanyahu believed that Mr. Obama was putting Israel at an existential risk by trying to do a deal with Iran to curb its nuclear program.While Iran denied it was aiming to develop nuclear weapons, Mr. Netanyahu compared the threat of Iran to Israel and the Jews to the late 1930s in Europe, when Hitler took power.He tried to defeat the deal in every setting, from the United Nations, where he famously held up a cartoon bomb with a thick red line representing Iranian uranium enrichment, to the U.S. Congress itself, where he remained very popular, especially among Republicans.During his second tenure as prime minister, Mr. Netanyahu had an icy relationship with President Obama.Stephen Crowley/The New York TimesThe Iron Dome defense system being used to intercept incoming missiles fired from Gaza by Hamas militants in 2012.Tsafrir Abayov/Associated PressMr. Netanyahu, famous for his use of visual aids, displaying his red line for Iran’s nuclear program at the United Nations in 2012.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesMr. Netanyahu also dealt with the aftermath of Mr. Sharon’s decision to pull Israeli troops and settlers out of the Gaza Strip, a step he opposed. Mr. Sharon dumped the keys to Gaza in the street, but they were picked up by the more radical Hamas, which seized control of the Palestinian territory from the more moderate Fatah faction led by Mr. Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas.Under Mr. Netanyahu, Israel made regular raids and airstrikes to try to stop rockets from Gaza hitting southern Israel, prompting criticism about the deaths of Palestinian civilians in a place many compared to an open-air prison, largely sealed off from the world by Israel and Egypt.But Mr. Netanyahu has refrained from any comprehensive re-invasion of Gaza and has had quiet talks through Egyptian mediators with Hamas to try to keep Gaza from imploding and dragging Israel into a larger war, especially another one with the Iranian-armed Hezbollah militia in southern Lebanon.In the occupied West Bank, however, Israel continued to build a separation barrier between the Palestinians and ever-expanding settlements beyond the so-called Green Line, which delineated Israel’s boundaries under the 1949 armistice until the 1967 Arab-Israeli war..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media 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a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Mr. Netanyahu increasingly depended on political support from Israelis who supported the settlement expansion and their eventual annexation, which he threatened but never carried out.At the same time, he has been making inroads with other Sunni Arab nations despite the continuing decline in relations with the Palestinians, pushing Israel’s solidarity with them against Iran. One of his great accomplishments, working with President Trump, were the Abraham Accords, which opened normal diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.Those accords survived the most recent exchange of fire last month with Hamas in Gaza, an 11-day clash that seemed, for now, to put the Palestinian issue back on the table. But even that conflict did not save Mr. Netanyahu.An Israeli tank near the town of Sderot at the border with Gaza during the seven-week war with Hamas in 2014.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesMr. Netanyahu at the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament.Lior Mizrahi/Getty ImagesMr. Netanyahu visiting the border fence between Israel and Jordan in 2016.Pool photo by Marc Israel SellemSome say that Mr. Netanyahu has sought his whole life to grow out of shadow of his brother and to make his own mark on Israeli history. There are streets all over Israel named after Yonatan Netanyahu.Only when Mr. Netanyahu’s father, hawkish and dominating, died in 2012 at the age of 102, Israelis said the prime minister could feel liberated enough to try to make peace with the Palestinians.But that has been a hope long deferred, as previous efforts at peace have proven hollow. Both the Israelis and Palestinians have pulled back from the deeply difficult compromises, both territorial and religious, that would be required for a lasting settlement of the unfinished war of 1948-49.Mr. Netanyahu, with his father, Benzion Netanyahu, visiting the grave of his brother Yoni at Mount Herzl in 2009 in Jerusalem. Yoni Netanyahu was killed during military operations in Uganda in July 1976.Amos Ben Gershom/Government Press OfficeHar Homa, a Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem, has more than 25,000 residents.Tomas Munita for The New York TimesMr. Netanyahu used one of the most prominent platforms in the world, the United States Congress, to warn against what he called a “bad deal” being negotiated with Iran to freeze its nuclear program in 2015.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Netanyahu was an early supporter of Mr. Trump and his presidency was a triumph for the Israeli leader. Having the support of an American president is crucial for Israelis and Mr. Netanyahu campaigned on his strong relationship with Mr. Trump.Mr. Trump pulled the United States out of the Iran deal and, in an obvious effort to help Mr. Netanyahu in this latest campaign, moved the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, captured from Syria in the 1967 war.But Mr. Trump’s defeat was a blow to Mr. Netanyahu. President Biden is trying to restore the Iran nuclear deal over fierce Israeli objections, intervened to press Mr. Netanyahu to bring an end to the latest Gaza clash and has repeated his support for a negotiated, two-state solution to the Palestinian issue.After President Trump’s election in 2016, Mr. Netanyahu found an ally in the White House.Stephen Crowley/The New York TimesProtesters seen through a banner showing Mr. Netanyahu in 2018.Oded Balilty/Associated PressMr. Netanyahu visiting a market in Jerusalem in 2019 during his campaign for a fifth term as prime minister.Dan Balilty for The New York TimesMr. Netanyahu remained in power so long not because Israelis think he is the nicest or cleanest man in the kingdom, but because they believed that he kept them safe and made them wealthier, and that he has succeeded in maintaining Israel’s security while reducing its isolation in the region.Mr. Netanyahu celebrating an election victory in 2020.Dan Balilty for The New York TimesMr. Netanyahu, right, with his lawyer at the Jerusalem district court in February during a hearing in his corruption trial.Pool photo by Reuven CastroIsrael’s Iron Dome missile defense system lights up the sky over Tel Aviv as it tries to intercept rockets fired from Gaza during the war last month.Corinna Kern for The New York TimesWhether or not he ever returns to power again, after Mr. Netanyahu dies, there will be many streets named after him, too.Benjamin Netanyahu shakes hands with the new prime minister, Naftali Bennett, after the Knesset approved the new coalition government on Sunday.Ronen Zvulun/Reuters More

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    Yang Walks Back Stance on Israel After Drawing Criticism

    Mr. Yang said his initial statement in support of Israel, which drew criticism from progressives, “failed to acknowledge pain on both sides.”As the Israeli-Palestinian conflict erupted this week, Andrew Yang issued a statement on Monday that in years past might have seemed politically unremarkable, perhaps even expected, from a leading candidate to be New York City’s next mayor.“I’m standing with the people of Israel who are coming under bombardment attacks, and condemn the Hamas terrorists,” Mr. Yang said. “The people of N.Y.C. will always stand with our brothers and sisters in Israel who face down terrorism and persevere.”Then came the backlash.At a campaign stop in Queens, Mr. Yang was confronted about his statement and its failure to mention the Palestinians, including children, who were killed in the airstrikes. Mr. Yang was uninvited from an event hosted by the Astoria Welfare Society to distribute food to families at the end of Ramadan.Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat who has condemned the “occupation of Palestine,” called Mr. Yang’s statement “utterly shameful,” noting that it came during Ramadan.And Mr. Yang acknowledged that volunteers with his own campaign were upset by his statement, prompting him to release a new one on Wednesday admitting that his first was “overly simplistic” and “failed to acknowledge the pain and suffering on both sides.”“I mourn for every Palestinian life taken before its time as I do for every Israeli,” he said.Mr. Yang’s clarification reflects the reality that what was once a given in New York City politics — unquestioning support for Israel — has become a much more complicated proposition for Democratic candidates.New York City has the largest Jewish population in the world outside of Israel. While the mayor has no formal foreign policy powers, the position often affords opportunities to showcase New York’s posture toward Israel.Mayor Robert F. Wagner in 1957 barred a welcome for a Saudi king he deemed anti-Jewish. Mayor Edward I. Koch zealously expressed support for Israel and had an argument at City Hall with the Austrian foreign minister in 1984 about whether the Palestine Liberation Organization served as the voice of Palestinian people.But wholehearted, uncritical support for Israel is no longer automatic among officials or candidates.In recent years, many members of a growing progressive left have criticized the Israeli government for its treatment of Palestinians and are pushing for public acknowledgment of Palestinians’ suffering.The shift mirrors the way that on a national level, some Democrats have challenged the decades-long norm of blanket support for Israel, while many liberal American Jews have become increasingly vocal about their discomfort with the policies of the Israeli government.The differing views were apparent among the mayoral contenders.Among those considered to be more centrist candidates, some maintained a stance similar to that of Mr. Yang’s initial statement. Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president and another leading candidate, said on Monday, “Israelis live under the constant threat of terrorism and war, and New York City’s bond with Israel remains unbreakable.”Asked on Wednesday if he had anything to add to his original statement, Mr. Adams said that “no act of aggression can justify the deaths of innocent children.”“Never again should religious sites be targeted — whether it be a synagogue or a mosque,” he said. Raymond J. McGuire, a former Citi executive, interrupted a news conference in Times Square on Monday to make a statement of support for Israel.“There’s clearly terrorism that has taken place in Jerusalem. Hamas just claimed credit for rocket attacks aimed at Jerusalem,” Mr. McGuire said. “We stand with our brothers and sisters from Israel.”But others offered more nuanced statements. Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive, said on Tuesday that the “world needs leaders who recognize humanity and the dignity of all lives. Whether in N.Y.C., Colombia, Brazil or Israel-Palestine, state violence is wrong. Targeting civilians is wrong. Killing children is wrong. ”Asked on the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC on Wednesday about whether Israelis or Palestinians should bear more of the blame, Kathryn Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner, said it was not appropriate for the mayor “to be doing foreign policy.” But she said she wanted to support the diverse communities in New York City that have ties to the parts of the world embroiled in conflict.“Clearly the state of Israel needs to exist,” she said. “We have strong partnerships with them. They’re like our fourth largest trading partner with the City of New York. But this escalation of violence is incredibly sad to see.”In a statement on Wednesday, Shaun Donovan, a former federal housing secretary, criticized Mr. Yang’s remarks, saying that they lacked “responsibility and empathy.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“Kids are not terrorists, and whatever our differences on this emotionally challenging issue, we should at least display a common humanity,” Mr. Donovan said, referring to the fact that children were among those killed in the conflict. Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller and only Jewish candidate in the race, said he condemned recent “horrific acts of terrorism against innocent Israelis” in Jerusalem and said he supported Israel’s right to defend itself from extremist groups.But Mr. Stringer, one of three candidates consistently characterized as progressive, also urged the Israeli government to stop “wrongful evictions of Palestinian families, and for all parties to exercise caution and restraint to prevent further suffering and loss of precious life.”“And as we near the end of Ramadan, we must recognize and mourn the Israeli and Palestinian lives that have been so tragically lost,” Mr. Stringer said.The city’s Orthodox Jewish community has long been considered a politically salient voting bloc and has been courted by both Mr. Adams and Mr. Yang, who has been endorsed by several ultra-Orthodox leaders.The endorsements came after Mr. Yang defended the yeshiva education system, which has faced criticism over the failure of some schools to provide a basic secular education: A 2019 city report found that roughly two dozen Hasidic yeshivas had fallen short of city standards in math, science and English education.In a race where voter interest has so far been low, the endorsement of influential religious leaders could be a boon to any campaign. But even in neighborhoods with large ultra-Orthodox populations, like Borough Park, Brooklyn, there were mixed feelings about Mr. Yang’s initial statement and subsequent turnaround.“If you’re talking about the Jewish community, if someone is pro-Israel, that will always be seen as a plus,” said Yoel Greenfeld, 22, as he left a synagogue on Borough Park’s main shopping street at midday. “But then for Yang to say something else a day later because of A.O.C.? Let me tell you something, people around here think A.O.C. is a complete joke.”The Astoria Welfare Society rescinded its invitation to Mr. Yang because his tweet felt like an insult to Muslims in New York City, the group’s secretary general, Mohamed Jabed Uddin, said.“It is like he is blatantly saying to Muslim New Yorkers that he does not care about us, our issues, the attacks on our houses or worship,” said Mr. Uddin. “He will only take a principled stand when it will pay off politically. That is not the type of leadership that we want for this city.”Assemblyman Ron Kim of Queens, a progressive who has endorsed Mr. Yang for mayor, said that he thought Mr. Yang’s initial statement was “inhumane,” and he said he had called Mr. Yang on Tuesday to relay his concerns. “He came off as taking a one-sided, 100 percent pro-Israel dominating position, with no nuance, and I know that that’s not what he believes and I know that those aren’t the values that guide him, especially when there are innocent people dying,” he said.Jeffery C. Mays and Michael Gold contributed reporting. More