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      US agrees to buy 500m Pfizer vaccine doses to distribute to 100 countries

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      The US has reached an agreement with Pfizer to buy 500m doses of their coronavirus vaccine to distribute to nearly 100 countries around the world, as the centrepiece of Joe Biden’s initiative to help vaccinate the world against Covid-19, according to US reports.Under to the scheme, which Biden is expected to announce in the UK on Thursday, the US would pay for the vaccines at cost price. The first 200m doses would be distributed this year, and the remaining 300m in the first half of next year.According to reports, the vaccines will be donated through Covax, the global initiative to help developing countries face the pandemic, and would go to 92 lower-income countries and the African Union.The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal cited multiple unnamed sources familiar with the plan.The global vaccine initiative is part of Biden’s broader strategy of restoring America’s global influence and soft power, which he believed has been eroded by Donald Trump’s four years in office and the increasingly assertive foreign policies of China and Russia.Pfizer did not comment on the reports but its CEO, Albert Bourla, is expected to join the president for the announcement in the UK.Biden arrived in the UK on Wednesday evening and addressed US troops at the RAF Mildenhall airbase where Air Force One landed. He outlined his plans in general but did not give details of his planned vaccine diplomacy.The president intends to use the G7 summit in Cornwall, and the Nato and EU summits in Brussels over the next few days, to make a case for renewed democratic leadership in the world, as a bulwark against the encroachment of autocracies. A significant part of the discussions over the weekend will be about how to achieve a more equitable distribution of vaccines around the world.At a time when more than 40% of Americans and Britons are fully vaccinated, many of the world’s poorer countries have hardly begun to vaccinate their populations. Haiti has yet to administer a single vaccine, and is not due to receive its first shipment of 130,000 doses until next week.The G7 summit host, prime minister Boris Johnson, has called on G7 leaders to commit to vaccinating the entire world by the end of 2022.The US had already agreed on a contract to buy 300m Pfizer/BioNTech doses, so the global initiative will bring the country’s overall purchase to 800m.Before the new initiative, the Biden administration planned to share at least 80m  vaccine doses with the world by the end of the month, 19m of them going to Covax, the global scheme backed by the World Health Organization. An additional 6m shots would be channelled directly to India and other countries suffering severe outbreaks.Just over a month ago, the Biden administration announced its backing for a waiver on vaccine patents, with the aim of closing the vast “vaccine gap” between rich and poor countries – but the suggestion met resistance from European countries, who argued that patents were not the main bottleneck to production and distribution, and that waiving patents would discourage future pharmaceutical research and development.The White House coronavirus response coordinator, Jeffrey Zients, who is reported to have negotiated the deal with Pfizer over the past few weeks, has traveled to the UK with the president. In a statement on Wednesday, he said the president would use the “momentum” of the US inoculation campaign “to rally the world’s democracies around solving this crisis globally, with America leading the way to create the arsenal of vaccines that will be critical in our global fight against Covid-19”. More

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      Biden trumpets democracy abroad in Post op-ed – as threats spread at home

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      Joe Biden will use his visit to Europe this week to “rally the world’s democracies” in a reset of US foreign policy after four turbulent years under Donald Trump – all while threats to American democracy, stoked by Trump, proliferate at home.The president’s plan for the trip was set out in a column for the Washington Post on Saturday night, as Trump spoke to Republicans in North Carolina.Previewing meetings with “many of our closest democratic partners” and Vladimir Putin, Biden promised to “demonstrate the capacity of democracies to both meet the challenges and deter the threats of this new age”.Critics may point out that the president would do well to face up to attacks on democracy at home. He has put Vice-President Kamala Harris in charge of the matter but there are many fronts to the battle.In the states, Republicans have passed laws to restrict ballot access and to make it possible to overturn election results.On the stump, Trump continues to peddle his lie that Biden’s victory in November was the result of fraud. In Greenville on Saturday, the former president called his defeat “the crime of the century”.In Washington last month, Republicans in the Senate blocked a bipartisan commission to investigate the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January, by supporters Trump told to “fight like hell” in his cause.In Biden’s own party, centrist senators stand in the way of voting rights protections.In his column for the Post, Biden tied another domestic priority – infrastructure spending, currently tied up in seemingly doomed negotiations with Republicans – to a chief foreign policy aim.“Just as it does at home,” he wrote, “honing the ability of democracies to compete and protecting our people against unforeseen threats requires us to invest in infrastructure. The world’s major democracies will be offering a high-standard alternative to China for upgrading physical, digital and health infrastructure that is more resilient and supports global development.”In North Carolina, Trump said China should pay the US and the world $10tn in reparations for its handling of the coronavirus outbreak, while nations should cancel debt to Beijing.Biden touted domestic successes – progress against the coronavirus and the passage of his relief and stimulus package (without a single Republican vote) – and said: “The United States must lead the world from a position of strength.”He saluted the announcement on Saturday by G7 finance ministers of a global minimum corporate tax rate. Further distancing himself from Trump, who withdrew from the Paris climate deal, he said: “We have an opportunity to deliver ambitious progress that curbs the climate crisis and creates jobs by driving a global clean-energy transition.”In office, Trump attacked Nato. Biden saluted the “shared democratic values” of “the most successful alliance in world history. In Brussels, at the Nato summit, I will affirm the United States’ unwavering commitment to … ensuring our alliance is strong in the face of every challenge, including threats like cyberattacks on our critical infrastructure.”Amid proliferating such attacks, he said, it was important that “when I meet with Vladimir Putin in Geneva, it will be after high-level discussions with friends, partners and allies who see the world through the same lens as the United States”.Trump famously caused consternation among the US press corps in Helsinki in 2018, meeting Putin without aides and seeming cowed in his presence.Biden said the US and its allies were “standing united to address Russia’s challenges to European security … and there will be no doubt about the resolve of the United States to defend our democratic values, which we cannot separate from our interests.”Some have asked what Biden hopes to gain from meeting Putin – former Trump national security adviser John Bolton told the Guardian this week, “You meet when you have a strategy in place of how to deal with Russia and I don’t think he has one.”In the Post, Biden heralded his extension of the New Start nuclear arms treaty and responses to cyberattacks.“I will again underscore the commitment of the United States, Europe and like-minded democracies to stand up for human rights and dignity,” he wrote.“This is a defining question of our time: can democracies come together to deliver real results for our people in a rapidly changing world? Will the democratic alliances and institutions that shaped so much of the last century prove their capacity against modern-day threats and adversaries?“I believe the answer is yes. And this week in Europe, we have the chance to prove it.” More

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      Biden bans US investment in Chinese military and tech surveillance sectors

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      Joe Biden has signed an executive order that bans American entities from investing in dozens of Chinese companies with alleged ties to defense or surveillance technology sectors.In a move that his administration says will expand the scope of a legally flawed Trump-era order, the US treasury will enforce and update on a “rolling basis” the new ban list of about 59 companies.It also bars buying or selling publicly traded securities in target companies, and replaces an earlier list from the defense department, senior administration officials told reporters.The order prevents US investment from supporting the Chinese military-industrial complex, as well as military, intelligence, and security research and development programs, Biden said in the order.“In addition, I find that the use of Chinese surveillance technology outside [China] and the development or use of Chinese surveillance technology to facilitate repression or serious human rights abuse constitute unusual and extraordinary threats,” Biden said.A White House fact sheet on the order said the policy would take effect for those companies listed on 2 August.Major Chinese firms included on the previous defense department list were also placed on the updated list, including Aviation Industry Corp of China (AVIC), China Mobile Communications Group, China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC), Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology, Huawei Technologies and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC).SMIC is key to China’s national drive to boost its domestic chip sector.“We fully expect that in the months ahead … we’ll be adding additional companies to the new executive order’s restrictions,” one of the senior officials said.A second official told reporters that the inclusion of Chinese surveillance technology companies expanded the scope of the Trump administration’s initial order last year, which the White House argues was carelessly drafted, leaving it open to court challenges.The president has been reviewing a number of aspects of US policy toward China, and his administration had extended a deadline for implementation set by Donald Trump’s order while it crafted its new policy framework.The move is part of Biden’s broader series of steps to counter China, including reinforcing US alliances and pursuing large domestic investments to bolster American economic competitiveness, amid increasingly sour relations between the world’s two most powerful countries.Biden’s Indo-Pacific policy coordinator, Kurt Campbell, said last month that a period of engagement with China had come to an end and that the dominant paradigm in bilateral ties going forward would be one of competition.Senior officials said the treasury would give guidance later on what the scope of surveillance technology means, including whether companies are facilitating “repression or serious human rights abuses”.“We really want to make sure that any future prohibitions are on legally solid ground. So, our first listings really reflect that,” a second senior administration official said.Investors would have time to “unwind” investments, a third official said.The new list provided few surprises for investors looking to see if they need to unload even more Chinese stocks and bonds.But some previously identified companies, such as Commercial Aircraft Corp of China (COMAC), which is spearheading Chinese efforts to compete with Boeing and Airbus, as well as two companies that had challenged the ban in court, Gowin Semiconductor Corp and Luokung Technology Corp, were not included.In May, a judge signed an order removing the designation on Chinese mobile phone maker Xiaomi, which was among the more high-profile Chinese technology companies that the Trump administration targeted for alleged ties to China’s military. More

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      Trump allies herald Biden investigation of Covid origins in China

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      Allies of Donald Trump took the unusual step of speaking out on Sunday in support of Joe Biden, regarding efforts to pinpoint the source of Covid-19 and find out if China knows more about the origins of the pandemic than it is letting on.Biden said on Thursday he was expanding an investigation into the outbreak, following a departure from previous thinking by at least one US intelligence agency now leaning towards the theory that the virus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan.Michael McCaul, a Republican congressman from Texas, and Matthew Pottinger, Trump’s former deputy national security adviser who persuaded him to start using the controversial term “Wuhan virus”, both welcomed the development.“It’s absolutely essential to find out what the origin of this thing is, it’s essential for us to head off the next pandemic, it’s essential for us to better understand the variants of the current pandemic that are emerging,” Pottinger told NBC’s Meet the Press.“Both of these hypotheses that President Biden spoke of are valid, it could have emerged from a laboratory, it could have emerged from nature. Neither is supported by concrete evidence but there’s a growing amount of circumstantial evidence supporting the idea that this may have leaked from a laboratory.”The Wuhan lab theory was dismissed by many scientists and the official position of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Trump’s advisers was that the weight of evidence supported natural origins. The World Health Organization said in February it was “extremely unlikely” Covid-19 began in a laboratory.But the theory has gained traction. On Thursday, the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence said: “The US intelligence community does not know exactly where, when or how the Covid-19 virus was transmitted initially but has coalesced around two likely scenarios: either it emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals or it was a laboratory accident.“While two elements of the IC lean toward the former scenario and one leans more toward the latter – each with low or moderate confidence – the majority of elements within the IC do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other.“The IC continues to examine all available evidence, consider different perspectives, and aggressively collect and analyze new information to identify the virus’s origins.”On Sunday, a WHO-affiliated health expert speaking to the BBC said the lab theory was “not off the table” and called on the US to share any intelligence.Pottinger said he believed researchers in China had more to say. “If this thing came out of a lab, there are people in China who probably know that,” he said. “China has incredible and ethical scientists, many of whom in the early stages of the pandemic suspected that this was a lab leak. [A researcher at] the Wuhan Institute of Virology said her first thought was, ‘Was this a leak from my lab?’“These people have been systematically silenced by their government. Now that the world knows how important this is, that might also provide moral courage to many of these ethical scientists for whom I think this is weighing on their consciences. I think that we’re going to see more information come out as a result of this inquiry.”The Wall Street Journal reported last week that three members of staff at a laboratory in Wuhan became sick with Covid-like symptoms before the first Covid patient was recorded in December 2019.McCaul, a former chair of the House homeland security committee, told CNN’s State of the Union he believed Biden’s 90-day intelligence review would likely be inconclusive because Chinese authorities “have destroyed everything in the lab”. But he said he welcomed the new investigation.“It more likely than not emerged out of the lab, most likely accidentally,” said McCaul, who has long argued that China and the WHO are culpable. More

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      Biden Invests His Capital in Israel

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      Though the stale expression “political capital” has become a handy item in every pundit’s vocabulary, there was a time when the financial metaphor would have seemed jarring and paradoxical in the context of democracy. Its popularity today reflects a disturbing trend in the reasoning that governs democratic decision-making. The traditional focus on ensuring the general welfare and responding to the will of the people has been replaced by a process of cold calculation we associate with the world of finance and investment. Politics is no longer about governing. It is exclusively about winning elections, accumulating capital and living off the spoils of victory.

      The New Police State

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      Living metaphors play on comparison between two disparate orders of reality. Dead metaphors fester in their own world as meaningless rhetorical artifacts. Attempting to analyze US President Joe Biden’s strategy of refusing to comment on Israel’s disproportionately violent campaign of “self-defense,” New York Times journalists Annie Karni and David E. Sanger propose this explanation: “Mr. Biden’s tactic was to avoid public condemnation of Israel’s bombing of Gaza — or even a public call for a cease-fire — in order to build up capital with Mr. Netanyahu and then exert pressure in private when the time came.” In this case, the metaphor is so definitively dead the authors don’t bother with the epithet “political” and simply call it “capital.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Political capital:

      According to the New York Times, the advantage one hopes to obtain from offering a gift to someone known to be selfish, greedy and disrespectful

      Contextual Note

      US media have made a major effort in recent days to make sense of the strategic logic behind Biden’s behavior at the height of the crisis that some now believe has been resolved by a ceasefire. Of course, nothing at all has been resolved, even if the fireworks have come to a provisional halt. The media, as usual, focus on identifying winners and losers. They present a scorecard and retrospectively imagine the strategy that governed the play of the actors. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      Western media continue to view what is clearly a deep, complex and enduring historical crisis not for what it is, but as a game being played by leaders on both sides seeking to reinforce their image and consolidate political capital with their base. In this reading, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s aim was to cling to power after losing an election. The adversary, Hamas, reacted with the sole motivation of reaffirming its position as the most resolute defender of the Palestinian cause, all for the sake of obtaining electoral advantage both in Gaza and the West Bank. The analysis contains a grain of truth but appeared more as a random factor in a much bigger geopolitical drama than as the basis of a serious account of the events.

      What journalists call political capital today was once expressed by the notion of “goodwill,” a term borrowed from business vocabulary that includes the idea of customer satisfaction, trust and loyalty. Like so much else in the English language, goodwill itself has been transformed by the trend to financialize our thinking about everything under the sun.

      The authoritative Shorter Oxford Dictionary (SOD) gives this primary definition of goodwill: “Virtuous, pious, upright position or intention.” Investopedia begins with this definition: “Goodwill is an intangible asset that is associated with the purchase of one company by another.” The SOD does include another definition of goodwill in use as early as 1571: “the possession of a ready-formed connexion of customers” used to evaluate “the saleable value of a business.” Investopedia sees goodwill as an asset before citing its virtuous status in the eyes of customers. The SOD puts virtue first, customers second and “saleable value” (= asset) last. Goodwill began its history as a virtue and ended up as a proprietary asset.

      Historical Note

      Political capital has definitely replaced political goodwill as an operational concept in modern political thinking. Kenya may be the last English-speaking country to continue to use the metaphor of political goodwill in preference to capital. In an editorial dated May 15, 2020, the Times of San Diego referred to goodwill as something real but now associated with the historical past. “It was not so long ago that we experienced a time of goodwill in our national political life, with Jimmy Carter promising never to lie… Now all that has changed,” adding, “we have lost what had been an open window to the fresh air that characterized the late 1970s.”

      There are two related semantic principles underlying this historical shift that reveal a lot about how society itself has changed, precisely in the decade that followed Carter’s presidency. The first concerns the shift in social culture itself from an ability to focus on collective interest that has been replaced by a narcissistic obsession with individual competitive advantage. The second concerns the trend toward the financialization of all human activities and attributes.

      The 1980s witnessed the triumph of the transformative Thatcher-Reagan ideological coalition. The ideas associated with government “of the people, by the people and for the people” found themselves suddenly radically subordinated to theoretical principles purportedly derived from the logic of free market capitalism. The idea of goodwill has always had a collective connotation. It was never about an asset or property, but a state of mind shared by the public. In 2007, Robert Kuttner in The New York Times complained that George W. Bush’s warmongering “squandered the global goodwill that has long been the necessary complement to America’s military might.” Goodwill was an asset shared by the nation and its people.

      Kuttner correctly noted that Bush’s Middle East adventures both broke the solidarity of goodwill and squandered its value as a collective asset. In 2004, Chris Sullentrop, writing for Slate, noticed how, at the same time goodwill was disappearing from the media’s vocabulary, Bush himself relentlessly insisted on the idea of political capital. “Now the most common usage of ‘political capital,’” according to Sullentrop, “means the power that popularity confers on a politician, or something like that. ‘Political capital’ is shaping up to be the first buzzword of the second Bush administration.”

      Sullentrop cites multiple examples in Bush’s discourse. In 2001, the president, newly elected (by the Supreme Court), explained: “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style.” Really? Is spending one’s public reputation — to say nothing of blood and treasure in the Middle East — a feature of presidential style? When Time magazine asked Bush, “What did you learn about being president from watching your father?” he answered, “I learned how to earn political capital and how to spend it.” There are many other examples. If for Americans “time is money,” for post-Reagan Americans, goodwill (earned or unearned) is also money.

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      In 2008, Barack Obama insisted that he was on a mission to restore America’s goodwill. But after eight years of Bush, the very idea of goodwill had lost all its ancient connotations of being “virtuous” and “upright.” It was now reduced to the simplistic idea of marketing the nation’s image to the rest of the world. By continuing most of Bush’s policies, from maintaining his tax breaks for the rich to prosecuting Bush’s wars and even expanding them to new regions, Obama’s efforts at creating goodwill could only remain superficial and cosmetic. That bothered no one in Washington, since the reigning ideology, formerly focused on seeking politically coherent solutions to complex problems, had converted to an ideology based on the newly adored laws of branding and marketing.

      Some saw Donald Trump’s triumph in 2016, built around his guiding principle, “America First,” as a shift away from even the need to spread goodwill. In reality, his hyper-narcissistic ideology was an extension of the same trend that had replaced the notion of virtuous action by that of accumulated assets.

      And what about Joe Biden’s plan to order to “build up capital with Mr. Netanyahu and then exert pressure in private when the time came”? It sounds like a joke. Playing the accomplice to someone else’s criminal actions cannot produce political capital. Al Jazeera quotes Nader Hashemi, a Middle East expert at the University of Denver: “[T]he more Israel is coddled, supported, sustained, the more belligerent and intransigent Israel becomes to making any concessions.” Bibi Netanyahu is not done with managing America’s foreign policy.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Cracks open in Democratic support for Israel as old guard is challenged

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      With a giant Stars and Stripes and two gleaming cars at his back, Joe Biden turned to focus his remarks on one member of the audience. “From my heart, I pray that your grandmom and family are well,” he told Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress. “I promise you, I’m going to do everything to see that they are, on the West Bank. You’re a fighter.”It was a characteristic peace offering by the US president, even as protesters rallied outside the Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan, and Tlaib herself challenged Biden over his unyielding support for Israel. But Tuesday’s gesture, and even a Middle East ceasefire declared on Thursday, may not be enough to heal a growing rift in the Democratic party.Biden’s first hundred days as president were striking for their rare display of Democratic unity, pleasantly surprising the left with his ambitions for government spending, racial justice and the climate crisis. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a congresswoman from New York, said his administration “definitely exceeded expectations that progressives had”.Even when a crack appeared last month over Biden’s plan to retain former president Donald Trump’s cap on the number of refugees allowed into the US, the White House backed down within hours after fierce blowback from progressives and harmony was restored.But Israel’s bombing campaign against Hamas in the heavily populated Gaza Strip, which killed 65 children over 11 days, was of a different magnitude. It exposed a generational and political divide in the party that cannot be so easily bridged.On one side are Biden, 78, the Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, 78, House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, 81, and House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, 81, all of whom grew up in a political era when reflexive support for Israel was axiomatic. Hoyer said this week: “We must not allow extremists to hijack important discussions about securing a better future for Israelis and Palestinians by promoting a false narrative.”On the other side is “the Squad”, progressive members of Congress and people of colour who include Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez (both called Israel an “apartheid state”), Ilhan Omar of Minnesota (who described Israeli airstrikes as “terrorism”) and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts (who tweeted “We can’t stand idly by when the United States government sends $3.8 billion of military aid to Israel that is used to demolish Palestinian homes, imprison Palestinian children and displace Palestinian families”).The generation gap reflects a broader trend among the US population. John Zogby, a pollster, notes considerably more sympathy for Palestinians among voters under 40 than those over 60. “Older folks are able to conjure up the original legend of David Ben-Gurion [Israel’s first prime minister] and the wars of 1967 and 1973,” he said. “Voters under 40 conjure up Benjamin Netanyahu [Israel’s current prime minister], the intifada and now several bombings in Gaza.”Youth is not the only force moving the Democratic party’s centre of gravity. On Thursday the leftwing senator Bernie Sanders, 79, introduced a resolution blocking a $735m weapons sale to Israel while his colleague Elizabeth Warren, 71, welcomed the ceasefire but urged Biden to press for a two-state agreement “that starts with taking all appropriate steps to end the occupation”.Several pro-Israel members of Congress also raised questions in recent days, a sign that, while backing for Israel’s right to self-defense remains rock solid, skepticism about its government’s treatment of the Palestinians is no longer taboo. The fact that “the Squad’s” scathing comments went unrebuked spoke volumes about how much has changed in a few short years.Logan Bayroff, a spokesperson for J Street, a liberal Jewish American lobby group, said: “There are shifts and you see it on the left side of the spectrum with vocal and unapologetic Palestinian rights advocacy from the likes of AOC [Ocasio-Cortez] and others but you also see it reflected across a large swath of the party.“What is notable is that we’re still not seeing that reflected in terms of policy or rhetoric from the Biden administration. I think this is less one half the party versus the other and it’s more Congress pushing in one direction and the administration not following as of yet.”Activists and analysts suggest that various push and pull factors are at work. Netanyahu’s ostentatious alliance with Trump, whom he praised for moving the US embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, makes him a singularly unsympathetic figure for Democrats. Netanyahu fiercely opposed Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, which Trump scrapped but Biden is seeking to revive.Bayroff added: “When you have an Israeli leader who has identified himself so closely with the ideology, rhetoric and tactics of rightwing ethnonationalism and has explicitly echoed Donald Trump and Trumpism – as well as aligning himself with other illiberal democracies and leaders like Orbán and Bolsonaro and Modi – that’s the antithesis of the pluralistic, diverse liberal democracy that most Democratic voters and an increasing number of Americans are supporting. So that is going to lead to a collision.”Meanwhile a new generation of Americans, including Jewish Americans, have grown up with a heightened consciousness of social justice movements. Sanders and others have compared the Palestinian struggle to Black Lives Matter and want to apply domestic principles to foreign policy.Bayroff added: “We’re seeing an overall push in all aspects of American politics and policy from a rising generation and a lot of voters to centre human rights, dignity and equality and equal treatment and social justice for all people. When they see a 54-year occupation and a system where Palestinians have a different set of rules and don’t get to vote for their own government and face a different legal system than their settler neighbours, that is something that people reject and want to see the US work to end.”But some Democrats who support racial justice causes are nevertheless uneasy with the comparison.Ron Klein, chair of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said: “We made it clear to our friends in Black Lives Matter and various civil rights organisations we’re on the same team. The Palestinian issues are a separate set of issues. Don’t conflate the two, they’re totally different, and that is not part of the formal Black Lives Matter movement.”Klein believes “the Squad’s” recent statements have gone too far. “I think that they’re wrong,” he continued. “They’re entitled to their opinion as elected members of Congress but they’re taking a lot of their information out of context. I’m not here to suggest that Israel always does the right things but Israel is a very strategic ally to the United States.”Still, the political and social upheaval of recent years has shaken many old certainties about crossing lines once perceived as uncrossable. Democrats who may have long harboured doubts about Israeli policy, but bit their lip because of assumed political risks, now feel at liberty to speak out.Peter Beinart, editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, tweeted: “The reason the American debate over Israel-Palestine could shift dramatically and quickly is that many Democratic politicians don’t need to be convinced that what Israel is doing is wrong. They just need to be convinced that they can say so without hurting their careers.”Biden, who has impressed many young liberals with his bold agenda, finally seems to have run into an issue where old, cautious habits die hard. However, with Democrats holding only narrow majorities in both the House and Senate, “the Squad” might be deterred from causing a serious split over a foreign policy issue when so much is at stake on the home front.Max Berger, editorial director of the liberal group More Perfect Union, said: “I think it’s very unlikely that this portends any kind of significant rupture in the Democratic coalition but it does open up a question: will the White House be as responsive to progressives on foreign policy as they have been on domestic policy? The honest answer is, we’ll see.” More