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      As a Palestinian-American, I can’t vote for Joe Biden any more. And I am not alone | Ahmed Moor

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      America is big, diverse and polarized. Yet, when it comes to the war in Gaza, opinions here are converging. A Gallup poll in March found 55% of respondents “disapprove of Israel’s actions”, up from 45% in November. Among registered Democrats, the figure is 75%. As the number of citizens voting “uncommitted” in Democratic primaries makes plain, President Biden’s unqualified support for Israel is a problem. Beyond the human carnage – 32,000 Palestinians, including over 14,000 children, have been killed by Israel in Gaza – Biden’s Israel policy could cost him the election.“We have given Biden and his administration and the party a gift,” said Layla Elabed, organizer of the Listen to Michigan campaign, where 100,000 voters marked the “uncommitted” box in February. The vote in Michigan, a battleground state where Biden beat Trump by a little more than 154,000 votes in 2020, has triggered a cascade of protest votes in primaries across the country. At least 25 uncommitted delegates will be sent to the Democratic national convention in August.Elabed explained to me that these protest votes in swing states are meant to warn Biden that it’s time to restrict US military aid to Israel and call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. “Listen to your constituency and take action now,” she said, “or you’re going to have trouble in November.” Notably, Elabed and the campaign she leads hope that the president may correct course and earn their vote, thereby preventing a second Trump term.Prominent Democrats, Governor Gretchen Whitmer among them, have failed to engage with the substance of the argument and with the campaign’s stated goals.“It’s important not to lose sight of the fact that any vote that’s not cast for Joe Biden supports a second Trump term,” Whitmer announced ahead of the Michigan primary vote.Whitmer’s argument that critics of the president’s policy in Palestine, in effect, offer support to former president Trump seems designed to encourage voters to fall in line. Yet, as Judith Max Palmer, a Philadelphia voter and registered Democrat, said to me: “The Democrats think they can scare us into submission and people are tired of it.”The intraparty fight has taken Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan as its totem. As the only Palestinian American in Congress, she has used her sizable public platform to decry the “level of support for Netanyahu’s war crimes by the Biden administration” in commission of Israel’s “genocide in Gaza”. She also advised her constituents and others who are dismayed by the Biden policy to vote uncommitted in the primary. In doing so, she earned the opprobrium of other Democrats.Don Calloway, a Democratic strategist, railed against Tlaib.“When Jalen Rose Leadership Academy and Wayne State and Cass Tech don’t get the proper appropriations from the Democratic administration … remember it’s because your Democratic congresswoman told them to not vote for the Democratic president in the primary,” he said.Calloway’s argument, which seems to prize party discipline over individual choice, is basically at odds with the tenets of participatory democracy. Voters are not beholden to a party – rather, the candidate is charged with crafting policies that appeal to an electorate to win votes. If voters in Biden’s coalition are now advocating for a change in policy, that – as the protesters say – is what democracy looks like. The candidate, and not the voters, is to blame if he fails to win in November, a point the Democrats appear to have struggled to comprehend in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump in 2016.“The cruelty [of Israel’s campaign in Gaza] is beyond my worst imagination. It changes the calculus,” said Rabbi Alissa Wise, another Philadelphia voter and one of the founders of Rabbis for a Ceasefire. She admitted to me that she worries Donald Trump “would be even more horrific” as president, but she wants to concentrate on the value of a protest vote now: “My hope is that the uncommitted campaign could really scare [policymakers] into a conscience.”View image in fullscreenUnlike Elabed and others I interviewed for this story, I have a different perspective.I am a Palestinian American in Pennsylvania, a contested state. I plan to write in “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary on 23 April and in November, I will vote for a third-party candidate.Like many Democrats, I was underwhelmed by the prospect of another Biden term, but I was prepared to move past my concerns about the president’s age and cognitive fitness to support the broader agenda on climate, among other things. I reasoned that Biden is supported by a cadre of experts, and that his job is mostly to set priorities and enlist the best and brightest to fill in the gaps. Now I am no longer able to rationalize support for this administration; the president’s moral failure in Gaza has taken on historic proportions, like Lyndon Johnson’s in Vietnam before him.Nor am I alone. “There’s no way I can see myself supporting Biden in the next election,” Will Youmans, associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, told me. “Supporting a genocide is the reddest of lines,” he explained. In November, Youmans plans to vote for down-ballot Democrats, but he will write in a protest vote for president.For Palestinians, the prospect of a second Trump administration is distressing, even if Representative Debbie Dingell’s statement that Trump, were he president, might have “nuked Gaza” seems a little overheated. Jared Kushner, who advised Trump in his last administration, openly opined about “very valuable … waterfront property” in Gaza as he described a vision of ethnic cleansing in the Strip.Yet it’s not clear that Trump’s putative policies will be worse than Biden’s current policies are. In reality, if Benjamin Netanyahu decides to invite Kushner and others to develop Jewish settlements in Gaza, there is no reason to believe Biden will stop him from doing so. The president, after all, has only mouthed his discontent with Israel’s actions. That’s even as he has actively armed the Israelis, who seem able to do whatever they please. Actions – for better or worse – speak more loudly than words do.Nor is the question of who may be worse – measured against the lesser evil – sufficient to drive voter behavior on this issue. For many, myself included, a vote for Biden is simply impermissible – the extent of the moral calamity is so great as to render a vote for Biden a vote for complicity.Our values in this country – freedom of speech, enterprise, equality before the law – are unique among countries and are worth fighting for. In the best expression of America, our values are regarded as inviolable, and they provide a roadmap for our activism. This country is bigger than Trump or Biden and while elections matter, they only gain meaning as a way of expressing our values. We cannot be the source of arms that destroy the lives of millions of people. We cannot abet a famine.The uncommitted campaign – citizens banding together to petition democratically, in good faith, for a change in government policy – is the greatest expression of what it means to live in a democracy. Tlaib, Elabed, Wise and other engaged Americans who have worked to move the president to adopt a humane policy in Palestine embody our best values. As the president of the Center City mosque in Philadelphia, Mohammed Shariff, said to me: “My vote is the purest form of expression and speech.” President Biden ignores our voices at his own peril, and ours.
      Ahmed Moor is a writer, activist, and co-editor of After Zionism: One State for Israel and Palestine (Saqi Books 2024). More

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      Bob Graham, former US senator and Florida governor who opposed Iraq war, dies at 87

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      Former US senator and two-term Florida governor Bob Graham, who gained national prominence as chairman of the Senate intelligence committee in the aftermath of the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks and as an early critic of the Iraq war, has died aged 87.Graham’s family announced the death in a statement posted on X by his daughter Gwen Graham on Tuesday.“We are deeply saddened to report the passing of a visionary leader, dedicated public servant, and even more importantly, a loving husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather,” the family’s statement said.Graham, who served three terms in the Senate, made an unsuccessful bid for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, emphasising his opposition to the Iraq invasion.But his bid was delayed by heart surgery in January 2003, and he was never able to gain enough traction with voters to catch up, bowing out that October. He didn’t seek reelection in 2004 and was replaced by Republican Mel Martinez.Graham was a man of many quirks. He perfected the “workdays” political gimmick of spending a day doing various jobs from horse stall mucker to FBI agent and kept a meticulous diary, noting almost everyone he spoke with, everything he ate, the TV shows he watched and even his golf scores.Graham said the notebooks were a working tool for him and he was reluctant to describe his emotions or personal feelings in them. “I review them for calls to be made, memos to be dictated, meetings I want to follow up on and things people promise to do,” he said.Graham was among the earliest opponents of the Iraq war, saying President George W Bush distorted intelligence data and argued it was more serious than the sexual misconduct issues that led the House to impeach President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s. It led Graham to launch his short, abortive presidential bid.“The quagmire in Iraq is a distraction that the Bush administration, and the Bush administration alone, has created,” Graham said in 2003.During his 18 years in Washington, Graham worked well with colleagues from both parties, particularly Florida Republican Connie Mack during their dozen years together in the Senate.As a politician, few were better. Florida voters hardly considered him the wealthy, Harvard-educated attorney that he was.Graham’s political career spanned five decades, beginning with his election to the Florida House of Representatives in 1966. He won a state Senate seat in 1970 and then was elected governor in 1978. He was re-elected in 1982. Four years later, he won the first of three terms in the US Senate when he ousted incumbent Republican Paula Hawkins.View image in fullscreenGraham remained widely popular with Florida voters, winning reelection by wide margins in 1992 and 1998 when he carried 63 of 67 counties. In that latter election, he defeated Charlie Crist, who later served as a Republican governor from 2007 to 2011. Crist said on Tuesday that he came to “love him for the good, decent man that he was”.House speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi called Graham “a patriotic American” who “brought his love for his family and for his state of Florida to the Senate, where he served with immense dignity and courage”.Daniel Robert Graham was born 9 November 1936 in Coral Gables, where his father, Ernest “Cap” Graham, had moved from South Dakota and established a large dairy operation. Young Bob milked cows, built fences and scooped manure as a teenager. One of his half-brothers, Phillip Graham, was publisher of the Washington Post and Newsweek until he took his own life in 1963, just a year after Bob Graham’s graduation from Harvard law.In 1966 he was elected to the Florida legislature, where he focused largely on education and health care issues. He got off to a shaky start and was dubbed “Governor Jello” for some early indecisiveness, but he shook that label through his handling of several serious crises.As governor he also signed numerous death warrants, founded the Save the Manatee Club with entertainer Jimmy Buffett and led efforts to establish several environmental programs. Graham was also known for his 408 “workdays”, including stints as a housewife, boxing ring announcer, flight attendant and arson investigator. They grew out of a teaching stint as a member of the Florida Senate’s education committee and then morphed into the campaign gimmick that helped him relate to the average voter.“This has been a very important part of my development as a public official, my learning at a very human level what the people of Florida expect, what they want, what their aspirations are and then trying to interpret that and make it policy that will improve their lives,” Graham said in 2004 as he completed his final job as a Christmas gift wrapper.After leaving public life in 2005, Graham spent much of his time at a public policy centre named after him at the University of Florida and pushing the legislature to require more civics classes in the state’s public schools.Graham was one of five members selected for an independent commission by President Barack Obama in June 2010 to investigate a huge BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that threatened sea life and beaches along several south-eastern Gulf states. 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      Biden’s renewed embrace of Israel threatens to deepen Democratic divide

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      “Ironclad,” said Joe Biden. “Ironclad,” said Lloyd Austin, the defense secretary. “Ironclad,” said the Senate leader Chuck Schumer, the House leader Hakeem Jeffries and the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer.In the wake of Saturday’s attack by Iran, Democrats united around a single word in expressing their commitment to Israel’s security. It was a sentiment that papered over, at least for now, cracks in the party over Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza.But Biden’s renewed embrace of Israel could deepen further a row over US support for Israel’s war in Gaza that has engulfed the Democratic party and pitted the White House against its progressive wing – a split that could sap Biden’s support in November’s crucial presidential election.These have been trying weeks for the US president. As Gaza’s death toll climbs and famine looms, criticism of Israel’s conduct of the war has been growing from the left and even the centre, with some calling for an end to US arms supplies.Tens of thousands of people registered “uncommitted” protest votes against Biden in the Democratic primary election, including in swing states such as Michigan and Wisconsin, a grim portent ahead of the presidential election against Donald Trump in November.This pressure, and the recent deaths of World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza, seemed to finally prompt a shift in Biden’s tone. Last week he branded Israel’s handling of the war a “mistake”. Even then he remained passive-aggressive, declining to impose any tangible consequences.Then, on Saturday, Iran launched hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel on Saturday night in response to a suspected Israel attack on Iran’s Syria consulate on 1 April. Biden, cutting short a weekend stay at his Delaware beach house to meet with his national security team at the White House, was back in his instinctive comfort zone. His entire political career has been shaped by the view of Israel as a vulnerable ally in a hostile neighborhood that needs unequivocal US support.In an instant, the atmospherics in Washington changed. Schumer, who surprised many last month by calling for new elections in Israel, issued a statement that said “we stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Israel” and made no mention of Gaza.The Democratic senator John Fetterman, no friend of pro-Palestinian protesters, told CNN’s State of the Union: “It really demonstrates how it’s astonishing that we are not standing firmly with Israel and there should never be any kinds of conditions on all of that. When a nation can launch hundreds of drones towards Israel, I’m not going to be talking about conditions, ever.”And on NBC’s flagship Meet the Press, John Kirby, the White House National Security Council spokesperson, gushed over “an incredible military achievement by Israel and quite frankly the United States and other partners that helped Israel defend itself against more than three hundred drones and missiles”.He added: “And I think Israel also demonstrated that it has friends, that it’s not standing alone, that it’s not isolated on the world stage.”Republicans seized on the attack to accuse Biden of weak leadership, claiming that only Trump could restore peace and stability to the world. Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee called for “aggressive retaliatory strikes on Iran”.If they succeed in shifting the terms of the debate, it will be even harder for the president to signal a break from Netanyahu. Amid the drumbeat for rallying against a common foe, Democrats who call for military aid to be conditioned will be accused of tone deaf appeasement.On Sunday, the Washington news agenda was dominated by speculation over Biden can dissuade Netanyahu from striking back – “Take the win,” he reportedly said – and prevent a wider regional war, and whether Congress might now pass military aid for both Israel and Ukraine.Gaza – where Israel’s offensive has killed at least 33,729 people, mostly women and children, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry – was no longer uppermost in the thoughts of politicians or the journalists who interview them.Progressives and protesters had come a long way in forcing Biden to question his most deeply held convictions and warn Netanyahu that enough is enough. The events of Saturday night shook the kaleidoscope yet again and may give the US president a different political and electoral calculus, an excuse to return to his default position. Yet people in Gaza are still dying, and many would-be Biden supporters are still angry about it. More

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      Trump reposts 2018 all-caps anti-Iran threat in response to Israel strike

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      Donald Trump responded to Iran’s Saturday attack on Israel by reposting a 2018 all-caps tweet in which he threatened the president of Iran and said the US would not stand for “DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH.”“To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!” read the 2018 tweet.Trump posted a screenshot on his social media platform, Truth Social, of the Florida senator Rick Scott praising the message.While US president, Trump’s foreign policy was often chaotic and upended many traditional norms of US and international diplomacy. He was frequently criticized for his closeness to authoritarian figures such as the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and for undermining traditional pillars of western power such as Nato.Trump originally tweeted the message in 2018 amid escalating tensions with Iran. It came after the then Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, warned the US that a war with Iran would be the “mother of all wars”.Trump’s message underscores how quickly he is willing to escalate tensions with foreign leaders during moments of conflict.Joe Biden had warned Iran not to attack Israel following a 1 April airstrike in which Israel killed a top Iranian military commander in Syria. Biden is reportedly urging Israel not to respond to Saturday’s attack with force and has said the US will not participate in a counterstrike against Iran.Trump also addressed Iran’s attack on Israel during a Pennsylvania rally on Saturday.“They’re under attack right now. That’s because we show great weakness,” he said during a rally in Schnecksville, in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. “The weakness that we’ve shown is unbelievable, and it would not have happened if we were in office.”As conflict has roiled Israel for months, Trump has said little publicly about how he would handle the issue if he gets a second term in the White House. Trump has previously said the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, “let us down” before the US killed a top Iranian commander in 2020. Trump has also praised Hezbollah, the Iranian-aligned group in Lebanon designated terrorists by the US, as “very smart”. More

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      Chef José Andrés says Israel engaging in ‘war against humanity itself’ in Gaza

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      The White House has pushed back on comments by World Central Kitchen founder José Andrés that Israel is engaged in “war against humanity itself” following the Israeli drone strike attack that killed seven of his aid workers on 1 April, but ruled out putting US monitors on the ground in Gaza.“There’s going to have to be some changes to the way Israeli defense forces are prosecuting these operations in Gaza to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” White House national security communications adviser John Kirby told ABC’s This Week said on Sunday.“There have to got to be changes in the deconfliction process, between aid workers on the ground and the IDF headquarters so that this kind of targeting can’t happen again,” Kirby said Sunday, but would not be drawn on claims that Israeli drone operators would have been able see the insignia three WCK vehicles carrying the workers that identified them as part of an aid convoy.In an earlier interview on This Week, Andrés had said that the IDF attack on his workers “is not anymore about the seven men and women of World Central Kitchen that perished on this unfortunate event. This is happening for way too long. It’s been six months of targeting anything that seems – moves,” Andrés said.“This doesn’t seem a war against terror,” Andrés added. “This doesn’t seem anymore a war about defending Israel. This really, at this point, seems it’s a war against humanity itself.”The IDF said Friday that there had been three strikes against the convoy, and confirmed that World Central Kitchen had coordinated their movements correctly with them in advance.It said that Israeli officials had failed to update commanders on the convoy and that they were“ convinced that they were targeting armed Hamas operatives and not WCK employees.” The strikes, the IDF added, had been “a grave mistake”.But Andrés refuted those findings, telling ABC News: “Every time something happens, we cannot just be bringing Hamas into the equation.”Asked if destroying three vehicles was following legitimate rules of engagement, Kirby said that the US knew from its own experience that “the intelligence you get, analyze and process may not always be accurate and you act on that intelligence…”But the White House adviser refused to say what consequences the US would impose if the Israel does not act on commitments to allow more humanitarian aid in and reduce violence against civilians in Gaza.“We have to judge it over time, and see if there’s a sustained and verifiable way so that confidence can be restored,” Kirby said. But against increasing calls for the US to suspend or reduce weapons transfers to Israel, Kirby echoed president Biden’s comments to Israeli prime minster Benjamin Netanyahu last week.“We’ve got to see changes in the way they are prosecuting these operations and we’re going to have to think about making changes in our own policy toward Gaza.” But, he said: “We have to remember that Israel has a right to defend itself and its important to remember they live in a tough neighborhood.”Kirby downplayed reports on Sunday that the IDF was withdrawing forces from southern Gaza, saying he would let the Israelis speak to their operations.“It’s hard to know exactly what that tells us,” he said. “This is really just about rest and refit for these troops that have been on the ground for four months – and not indicative, so far as we can tell, or some coming new operation.”“The word we’re getting is that they’re tired and need to be refit,” he added.But Kirby rejected calls for there to be US personnel on the ground in Gaza to monitor Israeli accountability to the rules of law are followed. “What we will do is make sure they have the tools and capabilities they need to defend themselves, and hold Israel accountable for the way they are conducting these operations.”Kirby said that Chef Andrés was not wrong when he said you can be a “good friend of Israel in helping them to defend themselves and at the same time holding them to an appropriate standard of accountability”.Meanwhile, one of the late aid workers’ father told Secretary of State Antony Blinken the killings by Israel in the Hamas-run territory must end, and that the United States needs to use its power and leverage over its closest Mideast ally to make that happen.John Flickinger’s 33-year-old son, Jacob Flickinger, a dual US and Canadian citizen, was among the seven humanitarian workers killed in the 1 April drone strikes.“If the United States threatened to suspend aid to Israel, maybe my son would be alive today,” John Flickinger told the Associated Press in describing his 30-minute conversation Saturday with Blinken. More

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      Netanyahu has been spoiling for a fight with the US. He may not survive this one | Alon Pinkas

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      How do you gaslight an entire nation about a war and then try to do the same to a superpower that is your ally? And how do you turn a just war into global isolation and widespread condemnation? Just ask Benjamin Netanyahu. He has the patent.Netanyahu has been deliberately and intently seeking a confrontation with the US ever since late October. The UN security council resolution 2728, demanding an “immediate ceasefire”, is just the latest pretext for this premeditated showdown. This may sound counterintuitive and imprudent to you, given that the two countries are close allies, given Israel’s heavy reliance on US military aid and its diplomatic umbrella, and particularly given President Biden’s sweeping and unwavering support for Israel since the 7 October catastrophe.But Netanyahu has two reasons to instigate such a confrontation. The first is pure gaslighting on a grand scale. He concocted a narrative that supposedly explains the war’s context and consequently absolves him from the responsibility and accountability he persistently refuses to assume. It also distracts from his stated policy of imploring Qatar to funnel more funds to Gaza to strengthen Hamas, all in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority and render any political negotiations impossible.According to this narrative, 7 October was simply a debacle that could have been averted had the Israel Defense Forces and Shabak intelligence not failed. The bigger problem now, according to Netanyahu, is the possibility of a Palestinian state that the world, especially the US, has been trying to impose on Israel since the attack. According to this narrative, only a heroic Netanyahu can stand up to the US, defy an American president and prevent this travesty.Now of course it is impossible that a new Palestinian state could be “imposed” from outside. But this framing allows Netanyahu to placate his rightwing extremist coalition and partners, who have long opposed any form of Palestinian statehood. And it lets him make conflict with the US a focal point, rather than his own failures. It’s not about the Louis XIV wannabe prime minister. It never is.The second reason is more current and practical: the confrontation is about setting up Biden as the scapegoat for Netanyahu’s failure to achieve “total victory” or “the eradication of Hamas”, two fortune cookie-type slogans that he spews regularly.The security council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire, adopted by 14 members with the US abstaining, puts Israel on a double collision course: with the UN security council but more critically, with the US. Netanyahu’s sanctimonious tantrums about how “surprised” he was and how the US abstention is a departure from policy that would prevent victory is mendacious. He was warned repeatedly by the Biden administration that this would be an inevitable outcome if he persisted with his endless recalcitrance, defiance and effective refusal to engage with the US, ostensibly Israel’s staunch ally and protector.When you ignore US requests, dismiss the president’s well-intentioned advice, inundate the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, with duplicitous spin, casually deride US plans and ideas for a reconfigured region, show crude intransigence by refusing to present a credible and coherent vision for postwar Gaza, hold a video call with Republican senators (a group that Netanyahu feels he is a life member of) and actively pursue an open confrontation with the administration, there’s a price to pay. Most recently, Blinken’s state department has warned Israel that it is increasingly isolated and is in danger of inflicting “generational damage” to its reputation and image.Had Israel seriously engaged with the US on any of the above issues, without necessarily agreeing to everything, it would have prevented this rift. The US has one long-running fundamental contention with Israel: the lack of a coherent political objective for the war, with which military means must be aligned. The US inquired time after time about Israel’s goals and got nothing but “topple Hamas”, which is a worthy goal, but does not address the “day after”.In respect of the security council, Israel will conveniently explain to itself that the resolution is not a big deal, that there is no imminent threat of sanctions and anyway, the UN was always and remains anti-Israeli. Perhaps. But that’s not the point. The resolution puts Israel in a very unpleasant and precarious place to be for a country, let alone a democracy and a US ally. The more critical and consequential arena is US-Israel relations. Their deterioration under Netanyahu has been well documented over the past year, but the security council resolution represents a new low.Since around January time, the US has negatively revised its assessment of Israel under Netanyahu. He does not behave as an ally, he has accrued a debilitating credibility deficit over the years on a multitude of issues, and he has intentionally failed to come up with a plan for postwar Gaza – to the point where he is now seriously suspected in Washington of prolonging the war for his own political survival antics. The current showdown over the security council resolution widens the rift to the point that it is impossible to see how the trajectory will change as long as Netanyahu is in power.At the moment, the US has three points of disagreement with Israel regarding the details of the prosecution of the war: the notion that Israel is impeding humanitarian aid; the number of civilian non-combatant deaths; and a possible military invasion of Rafah, on the southern tip of Gaza. These differences could have been resolved had Netanyahu and Biden had a working, honest and good-faith relationship. They do not. In fact, Netanyahu has a track record of confrontations and frequent spats with US administrations, from George HW Bush through to Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and now Biden. His – unsuccessful, it must be added – meddling in US politics is also a familiar trait of his since the 1990s.The current state of relations is close to an inflection point, and could go in one of two directions: either Netanyahu is ousted or leaves or loses an election, or the US will be convinced that the bilateral ecosystem has faltered and warrants a major reassessment of relations. Under Netanyahu, Israel has reached the point at which its very value as an ally is being questioned. It took the US some time, but it finally seems to realise a simple fact: Israel may be an ally, but Netanyahu most certainly is not.
      Alon Pinkas served as Israel’s consul general in New York from 2000 to 2004. He is now a columnist for Haaretz
      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls Israeli Gaza campaign an ‘unfolding genocide’

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      Progressive US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called the Israeli military campaign in Gaza an “unfolding genocide” in a scathing speech that demanded the Joe Biden White House suspend aid to Israel’s armed forces.“As we speak, in this moment, 1.1 million innocents in Gaza are at famine’s door,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a speech on the House floor on Friday.Citing 30,000 Palestinian deaths in Gaza and noting 70% were women and children, she continued: “A famine … is being intentionally precipitated through the blocking of food and global humanitarian assistance by leaders in the Israeli government. This is a mass starvation of people, engineered and orchestrated.“This was all accomplished – much of this was accomplished – with US resources and weapons. If you want to know what an unfolding genocide looks like, open your eyes.”Ocasio-Cortez’s comments marked the first time the congresswoman, one of the most prominent members of the US’s political progressive left, referred to Israel’s assault on Gaza as a genocide. Israel mounted the campaign there in response to the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas that killed more than 1,100 and took hostages.While other American progressives – including congresswomen Cori Bush and Rashida Tlaib, who is Palestinian – have used the term “genocide”, Ocasio-Cortez had refrained from doing so until her remarks on Friday.In January, Ocasio-Cortez implied that she was waiting for the UN’s international court of justice to weigh in on the term, noting that “the fact that this word is even in play, the fact that this word is even in our discourse, I think, demonstrates the mass inhumanity that Gaza is facing”.Earlier in March, a group of protesters confronted Ocasio-Cortez at a movie theater in Brooklyn, criticizing her for “refus[ing] to call it a genocide”.Ocasio-Cortez on Friday called on Biden to suspend the transfer of US weapons to aid the Israeli government, saying “honoring our alliances does not mean facilitating mass killing”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We cannot hide from our responsibility any longer,” she said. “Blocking assistance from one’s closest allies to starve a million people is not unintentional. We have a responsibility to prove the value of democracy, enshrined in the upholding of civil society, rule of law and commitment to human and civil rights.”Ocasio-Cortez was one of 22 House Democrats who voted against the $1.2tn, six-month spending package that both the House and Senate passed on Friday. The package includes a ban on direct US funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, an agency providing key assistance to Gaza, until March 2025.Biden is expected to sign the bill, which was sent to his desk early on Saturday morning after it passed the Senate. More

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      In defying Joe Biden, Benjamin Netanyahu is exposing the limits of US power | Jonathan Freedland

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      The pictures out of Gaza get more harrowing with each passing day. After months of witnessing civilians grieving for loved ones killed by bombs, now we see children desperate to eat – victims of what the aid agencies and experts are united in calling an imminent “man-made” famine. What matters most about these images is their depiction of a continuing horror inflicted on the people of Gaza. But they also reveal something that could have lasting implications for Israelis and Palestinians, for Americans and for the entire world. What they show, indeed what they advertise, is the weakness of the president of the United States.Joe Biden and his most senior lieutenants have been urging Israel to increase the flow of food aid into Gaza for months, in ever more insistent terms. This week the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, cited the finding of a UN-backed agency that the threat of hunger now confronted “100% of the population of Gaza”,adding that this was the first time that body had issued such a warning. Earlier this month, the vice-president, Kamala Harris, told Israel it needed to do whatever it took to get humanitarian aid into Gaza: “No excuses.” The Biden administration is all but banging the table and demanding Israel act.A week ago, it seemed to have had an effect. The Israel Defense Forces announced what was billed as a “dramatic pivot”, promising that it would “flood” Gaza with food supplies. But there’s precious little sign of it. An additional crossing has been opened, the so-called 96th gate, allowing a few more trucks to go in, but nothing on the scale that is required to avert disaster – or mitigate the disaster already unfolding. For all the talk of a pivot, there is still “a series of impediments, blockages, restrictions … on lorries carrying the most basic humanitarian aid”, David Miliband of the International Rescue Committee said this week. He noted the way that Israel’s ban on “dual use” items, those things that could be used as weapons if they fell into the hands of Hamas, means that even the inclusion of a simple pair of scissors for a clinic can result in an entire truckful of aid being turned back.To repeat, the victims of this are the 2.2 million people of Gaza, who don’t know where their next meal is coming from. But it represents a severe problem, or several, for Biden too. The most obvious is that he is in a re-election year, seeking to reassemble the coalition that brought him victory in 2020. Back then, a crucial constituency was the young, with voters under 30 favouring Biden over Donald Trump by 25 points. Now it’s a dead heat. To be sure, there are several factors to explain that shift, but one of them is younger Americans’ outrage at the plight of Gaza.The threat to re-election is illustrated most sharply in the battleground state of Michigan, home to 200,000 Arab-Americans who are similarly appalled, with many unequivocal that they will not vote for Biden, even if that risks the return of Trump – with all that implies for the US and the world. That number is more than enough to tip the state from Democrat to Republican in November. “If the election were held tomorrow, I think Biden would lose Michigan,” veteran Republican strategist Mike Murphy told me on the Unholy podcast this week. For Biden, “this is a pain point”.US support for Israel in this context would be a headache for any Democratic president, but Israel’s willingness to defy its most important ally presses especially on Biden. For one thing, the upside of his great age is supposed to be his experience in foreign affairs and especially his personal relationships with fellow world leaders. He likes to say he has known every Israeli prime minister since Golda Meir and that he’s dealt with Netanyahu for decades. Critics reply: a fat lot of good it’s done you.And that is the heart of the matter. For most of Israel’s history, it’s been taken as read that a clear objection from a US president is enough to make an Israeli prime minister change course. A shake of the head from Dwight Eisenhower brought an end to the Suez war of 1956. A phone call from Ronald Reagan ended the Israeli bombardment of west Beirut in 1982. In 1991, George HW Bush pushed a reluctant Likud prime minister to attend the Madrid peace conference, by withholding $10bn in loan guarantees.Biden has repeatedly made his displeasure known, and yet Netanyahu does not budge. It’s making the US look weak and for Biden especially, that’s deadly. “The subtext of the whole Republican campaign is that the world’s out of control and Biden’s not in command,” David Axelrod, former senior adviser to Barack Obama, told me on Unholy . “That’s basically their argument, and they use age as a surrogate for weakness.” Every time Netanyahu seems to be “punking” Biden, says Axelrod, it makes things worse.Plenty of Israeli analysts suggest that appearances are deceptive. In their view, Netanyahu is making a great show of thumbing his nose at Biden, because he is in an undeclared election campaign and defiance of Washington plays well with his base, but in reality he is much more compliant. In this reading, Team Netanyahu’s talk of a ground operation in Rafah – where nearly 1.5 million Palestinians are crammed together, most having fled Israeli bombardment – is just talk. Yes, the Israeli PM likes to threaten a Rafah invasion, to put pressure on Hamas and to have a bargaining chip with the Americans, but he is hardly acting like a man committed to doing it. Amos Harel, much-respected defence analyst for the Haaretz newspaper, notes that there are only three and a half IDF brigades currently in Gaza, compared with 28 at the height of hostilities. “Netanyahu is in a campaign, and for the time being at least, ‘Rafah’ is just a slogan,” he told me.Let’s hope that’s right, and a Rafah operation is more rhetorical than real. That does not address Israel’s foot-dragging on aid, which Netanyahu is clearly in no hurry to end, in part because his ultranationalist coalition partners believe sending food to Gaza is tantamount to aiding the Hamas enemy.That leaves Biden with two options. His preferred outcome is a breakthrough in the talks in Qatar, which would see both a release of some of the hostages taken by Hamas on 7 October and a pause in fighting, allowing aid to flow in. But Netanyahu fears such a pause, which would hasten the day of reckoning for his role in leaving Israel’s southern communities so badly exposed six months ago to Hamas – whether that reckoning is at the hands of the electorate or a commission of inquiry. He prefers to play for time, ideally until November, when Netanyahu hopes to say goodbye to Biden and welcome back Trump.The alternative for Biden is tougher. Last month, he issued a new protocol, demanding those countries that receive US arms affirm in writing that they abide by international law, including on humanitarian aid. If the US doesn’t certify that declaration, all arms sales stop immediately. In Israel’s case, the deadline for certification is Sunday.Joe Biden does not want to be the man who stopped arming Israel, not least because that would leave the country vulnerable to the mighty arsenal of Hezbollah just across the northern border with Lebanon. His administration is split on the move and he may well deem it too much. But he does need to see food flood into Gaza, right away. He has tried asking Netanyahu nicely. Now he needs to get tough.
      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist More