Dan Osborn, a 48-year-old military veteran who helped lead the 2021 strikes against food giant Kellogg’s, launched a challenge against 72-year-old Nebraska Republican Sen. Deb Fischer in October. A poll commissioned by Change Research, a liberal research firm, shows Osborn leading Fischer by a margin of 2 points. Nebraska has voted for a Republican president every year since 1964, and the survey, conducted in November, shows that respondents favor former President Donald Trump over President Joe Biden by a margin of 16.

Osborn’s slight edge in the poll — 40 percent to Fischer’s 38 percent — comes despite 59 percent of respondents saying they had never heard of him before. Fischer, meanwhile, has represented Nebraska in the Senate for a decade and sits on the influential Armed Services and Agricultural committees. In response to a question that described both Osborn’s and Fischer’s backgrounds, 50 percent of respondents said they’d vote for Osborn, while only 32 percent said they’d vote for Fischer.

“Nebraskans have had it with Washington. We’ve been starving for honest government that isn’t bought and paid for,” Osborn told The Intercept. “This poll shows that Nebraska’s independent streak is alive and well.”

Democrats have so far not fielded a candidate in the Senate race. In October, shortly after Osborn’s announcement, Nebraska Democratic Party Chair Jane Kleeb said state Democrats were considering supporting his bid. Kleeb told The Intercept that the state party would make an endorsement decision in February and that Osborn could win if “the money is there.”

He could appeal to populists and progressives, Kleeb said, with many Nebraska voters tired of one-party control in the state. “Makes politicians lazy when you have only one party in control and more beholden to corporate interests since they don’t have to answer to voters,” she wrote.

Osborn’s candidacy comes as Democrats face a challenging battle next year to retain their razor-thin Senate majority. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., has announced that he will not run for reelection, all but guaranteeing a Republican pickup in West Virginia, while Sens. Jon Tester, D-Mont., and Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, are vying to defend seats in states Trump won in 2020. 

Democrats are also defending seats in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona (where Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego seeks to beat Kyrsten Sinema, who recently changed her party affiliation from Democrat to independent, and Republican Kari Lake in a three-way race), while Republicans are playing in defense in Florida and Texas, where they have had strong showings in recent statewide elections.

Osborn has focused his campaign on labor and economic issues and the cross-partisan coalition he aims to build. “I will bring together workers, farmers, ranchers, and small business owners across Nebraska around bread-and-butter issues that appeal across party lines,” he pledged when he announced his candidacy.

His platform spans from raising pay for servicemembers and taking on agricultural consolidation to legalizing medical marijuana and pledging to “never supporting handing huge pharmaceuticals a blank check.” The independent also calls to reform railroad safety, with measures like requiring two-person crews and increasing fines for violating rail safety laws — mirroring some of the reforms that were floated after the disastrous Norfolk Southern derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, earlier this year.

Osborn’s platform appears to be popular among would-be voters in Nebraska. Pollsters asked a series of questions regarding his policy platform, after which 53 percent of respondents said they’d vote for him, compared to 30 percent for Fisher. Thirty-three percent of poll respondents were Democrats, 14 percent independent, and 53 percent Republican; 53 percent said they voted for Trump in 2020, while 35 percent said they voted for Biden.

“This poll shows that Nebraska’s independent streak is alive and well.”

Osborn has served as the president of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union Local 50G and garnered national attention two years ago when he helped lead workers in a strike against Kellogg’s that lasted more than two months and also included factories in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee.

“It’s exciting to be a part of something bigger than yourself, knowing that we’re not alone,” the 18-year Kellogg’s veteran said at the time. 

In his campaign launch video, Osborn spoke about the strike. “Two years ago, I successfully led the strike to preserve 500 middle-class jobs here in Nebraska,” he said. “It didn’t matter what party you belonged to. We came together to find solutions and move forward.”

During the strike, the company had threatened to replace all 1,400 workers. At its conclusion, workers won an agreement that included a $1.10 per hour raise, a new cost-of-living pay increase, and a pathway for lower-tier workers to “graduate” into a higher tier of pay.

As an independent, Osborn has no party structure to tap into for campaigning or fundraising. As of September 30, Fischer had $2.6 million on hand; Osborn announced raising $100,000 in two months as of November 16.

The post Shock Poll Shows Independent Nebraska Union Leader Beating Republican Senator appeared first on The Intercept.

The encomiums have flowed voluminously for Henry Kissinger, and there have been some condemnations too. But even in the latter, little attention has been paid to his efforts to prevent peace from breaking out in the Mideast — efforts which helped cause the 1973 Arab–Israeli War and set in stone the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This underappreciated aspect of Kissinger’s career adds tens of thousands of lives to his body count, which is in the millions.

Kissinger, who died at 100 on Wednesday, served in the U.S. government from 1969 to 1977, during the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations. He began as Nixon’s national security adviser. Then, in Nixon’s second term, he was appointed secretary of state, a position he held on to after Ford became president following Nixon’s resignation.

In June 1967, two years before the start of Nixon’s presidency, Israel had achieved a gigantic military victory in the Six-Day War. Israel attacked Egypt and occupied Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, and, following modest responses from Jordan and Syria, also took over the West Bank and the Golan Heights. 

In the following years, the ultimate fallout from the war — in particular, what, if any, of the new territory Israel would be able to keep — was still fluid. In 1968, the Soviets made what appeared to be quite sincere efforts to collaborate with the U.S. on a peace plan for the region.

The Soviets proposed a solution based on United Nations Security Council Resolution 242. Israel would withdraw from the territory it had conquered. However, there would not be a Palestinian state. Moreover, Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Arab–Israeli War would not return to Israel; rather, they would be resettled with compensation in Arab countries. Most importantly, the Soviets would pressure their Arab client states to accept this. 

This was significant because at this point, many Arab countries, Egypt in particular, were allies of the Soviets and relied on them for arms supplies. Hosni Mubarak, who later became Egypt’s president and/or dictator for 30 years, started out as a pilot in the Egyptian air force and received training in Moscow and Kyrgyzstan, which was a Soviet republic at the time.

When Nixon took office in 1969, William Rogers, his first secretary of state, took the Soviet stance seriously. Rogers negotiated with Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the U.S., for most of the year. This produced what American diplomat David A. Korn, then assigned to Tel Aviv, Israel, described as “a comprehensive and detailed U.S. proposal for a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict.” 

One person prevented this from going forward: Henry Kissinger. Backstage in the Nixon administration, he worked assiduously to prevent peace.

This was not due to any great personal affection felt by Kissinger for Israel and its expansionist goals. Kissinger, while Jewish, was happy to work for Nixon, perhaps the most volubly antisemitic president in U.S. history, which is saying something. (“What the Christ is the matter with the Jews?” Nixon once wondered in an Oval Office soliloquy. He then answered his own question, explaining, “I suppose it’s because most of them are psychiatrists.”)

Rather, Kissinger perceived all the world through the prism of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Any settlement at the time would require the involvement of the Soviets, and hence was unacceptable to him. At a period when it appeared in public that an agreement with the Soviets might be imminent, Kissinger told an underling — as he himself recorded in his memoir “White House Years” — that was not going to happen because “we did not want a quick success [emphasis in the original].” In the same book, Kissinger explained that the Soviet Union later agreed to principles even more favorable to Israel, so favorable that Kissinger himself didn’t understand why the Soviets acceded to them. Nevertheless, Kissinger wrote, “the principles quickly found their way into the overcrowded limbo of aborted Middle East schemes — as I had intended.”

The results were catastrophic for all involved. Anwar el-Sadat, then Egypt’s president, announced in 1971 that the country would make peace with Israel based on conditions in line with Rogers’s efforts. However, he also explicitly said that a refusal of Israel to return Sinai would mean war.

On October 6, 1973, it did. Egypt and Syria attacked occupied Sinai and the Golan Heights, respectively. Their initial success stunned Israeli officials. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was convinced Israel might be conquered. Moreover, Israel was running out of war matériel and desperately needed to be resupplied by the U.S.

Kissinger made sure America dragged its feet, both because he wanted Israel to understand who was ultimately in charge and because he did not want to anger the oil-rich Arab states. His strategy, as another top diplomat put it, was to “let Israel come out ahead, but bleed.”

You can read this in Kissinger’s own words in the records of internal deliberations now available on the State Department website. On October 9, Kissinger told his fellow high-level officials, “My assessment is a costly victory [for Israel] without a disaster is the best.”

The U.S. then did send huge amounts of weaponry to Israel, which it used to beat back Egypt and Syria. Kissinger looked upon the outcome with satisfaction. In another high-level meeting, on October 19, he celebrated that “everyone knows in the Middle East that if they want a peace they have to go through us. Three times they tried through the Soviet Union, and three times they failed.”

The cost to humans was quite high. Over 2,500 members of the Israeli military died. 10,000-20,000 were killed on the Arab side. This is in line with Kissinger’s belief — recorded in “The Final Days” by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — that soldiers are “dumb, stupid animals to be used” as pawns in foreign policy.

After the war, Kissinger returned to his strategy of obstructing any peaceful settlement. In another of his memoirs, he recorded that in 1974, just before Nixon resigned, Nixon told him to “cut off all military deliveries to Israel until it agreed to a comprehensive peace.” Kissinger quietly stalled for time, Nixon left office, and it didn’t come up with Ford as president.

There’s much more to this ugly story, all available at your local library. It can’t be said to be the worst thing that Kissinger ever did — but as you remember the extraordinary bill of indictment for him, make sure to leave a little room for it.

The post On Top of Everything Else, Henry Kissinger Prevented Peace in the Middle East appeared first on The Intercept.

Some members of Congress are coupling their calls for a ceasefire with conditions like the removal of Hamas, which is ostensibly Israel’s justification for its brutal campaign against Gaza, while others are using the word in vague statements that leave room for interpretation. 

“Calls from members of Congress that demand regime change before there is an end to Israel’s bombardment are calls to extend and prolong a situation in which Israel is killing Palestinian children every single hour,” said Beth Miller of Jewish Voice for Peace Action, an organization that has co-led massive pro-peace demonstrations across the country. 

The push for a ceasefire began about a week into Israel’s assault on Gaza, when Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., led a 13-member resolution for an “immediate deescalation and cease-fire in Israel and occupied Palestine.” (The resolution now has 18 co-sponsors.) As people across the country have inundated their representatives with demands for a ceasefire — Yasmine Taeb, political director for Muslim-led justice group MPower Change Action Fund, said an effort by her organization and the Adalah Justice Project has generated more than 429,000 letters to the House — the number has slowly climbed to 49 across both chambers of Congress.

A poll from left-leaning outfit Data for Progress in October found 66 percent of voters in favor of a ceasefire. A Reuters poll conducted nearly a month later found 68 percent of respondents in favor of one, while a YouGov poll released days later found only 20 percent of respondents opposed to a ceasefire.

On Monday, four days into the ongoing humanitarian pause, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told Israel Defense Force soldiers that when Israel re-ups the fighting, its “strength will be greater, and it will take place throughout the entire Strip. … We will use the same amount of power and more.”

The pledge comes while the World Health Organization warns that more Palestinians may die from disease than the 15,000 who have already been killed by Israel’s bombardment campaign since October 7 — and that’s if conditions remain as they are, not if they worsen.

There’s no way the conflict ends other than a permanent ceasefire, said Yousef Munayyer, a political analyst and senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC. “How much do you actually need to see before you decide to see enough?”

As most of Congress remains mum on stopping the violence — with no Republican calling for a definitive end to the hostilities and beginning of a peace process — some members are invoking the word “ceasefire” but are hedging.

On November 19, as the Gaza death toll eclipsed 11,000, California Democratic Reps. Judy Chu and Jared Huffman both called for a ceasefire. Like other members of Congress, they conditioned their demand on Hamas’s release of every hostage, but they placed a new demand as well: that Hamas be removed from power.

Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., who has faced ongoing protests from Jewish peace groups and their allies, took to Twitter on Monday to thank Joe Biden for securing a pause in the fighting. He went on to invoke a “mutual and unconditional ceasefire” dating back to May 2021 (the last war between Israel and Hamas) that he said Hamas violated on October 7. Unless a call for a ceasefire includes the removal of Hamas, Goldman wrote, the U.S. “must continue to support Israel’s just and legitimate defense of its borders and its people.”

“What it amounts to is a way for members to kind of hide in a safe spot or safer spot to not really take a position.”

This requirement mirrors Israel’s justification for the violence: to weed out Hamas. Even for those who do see that as a necessary pathway to peace, Munayyer argued, it couldn’t be accomplished without a permanent ceasefire. “How does that happen? You know, it doesn’t happen unless you have a ceasefire,” he said. “What it amounts to is a way for members to kind of hide in a safe spot or safer spot to not really take a position.”

For Munayyer, the reluctance and ambivalence around the word “ceasefire” in Congress is about politics, not policy. “We’re talking about thousands of people dying and you’re wordsmithing ‘ceasefire,’” he said. “The interests that are shaping those decisions are wildly different than the stakes that actually matter here. And it’s quite stunning.”

Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, D-N.M., for her part, expressed support for the Biden administration’s work toward the temporary ceasefire and added that she supports “such a ceasefire and additional actions to release all the hostages, address the humanitarian crisis, and protect all civilians from violence — Palestinian and Israeli,” but did not call for a total end to the war. 

Other members of Congress, meanwhile, have used the word “ceasefire” in ambiguous statements that don’t make it readily clear where they fall.

Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, tweeted that he urges “a more comprehensive ceasefire to stop the killing of innocent Palestinians and free all hostages.” He added that “we need Hamas accountability without the continued devastation and siege of Gaza, with clear red lines for Netanyahu.” His office did not respond to The Intercept’s request for clarification. 

Rep. Danny K. Davis, D-Ill., reportedly called for a ceasefire on November 12 during a radio talk show. “There needs to be a pause, if not a cessation, to let aid and medical supplies, food, get to these individuals who are maimed, shot up, bombed up,” Davis said. “There needs to be at least enough stoppage to let these kinds of items get through. I join with anybody who says let’s do that. Let’s make it happen.” He has not released any subsequent statements about the issue, and his office did not respond to a request for more information on his position.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., urged a “pause in hostilities” but refused to say what exactly that means. “I am not interested in playing semantics, call it what you want: a ceasefire or a humanitarian pause,” he said in a statement. “The fact of the matter is the violence must stop.” His office did not respond to a request for clarification on the length of time he wants the violence to stop.

Some members, meanwhile, like Reps. Troy Carter, D-La., and Sylvia Garcia, D-Texas, “pray” for a permanent ceasefire. Carter’s office did not respond to an inquiry about whether his prayers amount to a firm policy position, while Garcia’s office said that she has nothing else to add.

“One of the reasons folks are now using the word more is because they’ve been seeing all the polls from the majority of the American people, the majority of Democrats,” said a staffer for a progressive member of Congress, who requested anonymity to speak freely about the subject of ongoing congressional deliberations. Some members of Congress are only using the word “ceasefire” at all because they can equivocate the temporary pause with a full ceasefire while giving credit to Biden, the staffer said. “They have clearance to say, ‘I agree that we should extend this ceasefire,’ but it’s really like not taking any courageous stance at all.”

While using the word “ceasefire” itself is not necessarily indicative of a lawmaker’s position, the same is true of a politician’s failure to use the word too. For instance, Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., issued a statement on November 17, before the temporary pause was announced, declaring that both Hamas and Israel must stop the violence. “The US government must use all of its influence and leverage to bring a lasting peace to a bleeding, traumatized Middle East,” he said. He did not use the word “ceasefire” but seemed to call for such an outcome. His office did not respond to repeated requests for clarification.

In the Senate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said last week that she urges “all parties to extend this agreement and work to achieve an enduring end to this fighting.” She added that things should not “return to the status quo” and that the “Israeli government should not resume bombing in Gaza, which would be a grave strategic and moral mistake.” 

Her statement was followed by Vermont Democratic Sen. Peter Welch, who said Tuesday that the ceasefire expiring “would be a grave mistake” and called for it to continue “indefinitely.” 

Welch’s counterpart from Vermont, meanwhile, independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, has called for an end to Israel’s indiscriminate bombing, unconditional aid, and settler violence in the West Bank and on Tuesday told The Intercept he may push a vote on placing conditions on U.S. military aid to Israel, but he has stopped short of calling for a total cessation of hostilities.

“You can look at this war that Israel has waged on the Palestinians in Gaza, which has set all kinds of records for brutality … and come to the conclusion that this is somehow contributing to a better outcome for Israelis and Palestinians,” said Munayyer of the Arab Center. “Or you could look at this and come to the far more reasonable conclusion that it’s not.”

“It seems like Welsh and Warren are indeed much more in line with that latter conclusion and that Sanders is not quite there yet,” Munayyer continued. “He still seems to be trying to, you know, split the difference here. And I’m not sure how that can be helpful.”

As the Israeli government plans to resume its bombing of Gaza after the temporary pause in fighting, Congress is preparing to send another $14.3 billion in military aid to Israel, per Biden’s request. “Biden and Congress need to do everything possible to pressure the Israeli government to permanently stop this genocide,” said Miller of Jewish Voice for Peace Action, “and that should include refusing to send Israel more military funds and weapons.”

The post Some Politicians Calling for a “Ceasefire” Are Not Actually Calling for a Ceasefire appeared first on The Intercept.

“I think this is a ridiculous position to put us in,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut. “Holding Israel aid and Ukraine aid hostage to solving a complicated domestic issue is really unfortunate.” 

The current negotiation has been the latest in a series of efforts by Democrats to placate Republican criticisms of Biden’s handling of the southern border, as well as an effort by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to win Ukraine funding and placate Republicans skeptical of the war.

The so-called Gang of Four negotiators includes Murphy, who chairs the appropriations subcommittee that funds immigration operations at the Department of Homeland Security; Sens. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., and Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., who have made themselves fixtures in migration policy negotiations during the current Congress; and Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., an avowed immigration hawk with close ties to Donald Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller.

Hispanic Caucus senators, historically included in bipartisan migrant policy talks, were not happy to be excluded from the negotiating room. “There are four Democratic members of the United States Senate who are Latino and it’s important that their ideas, their inclusion, their expertise to be included in this,” said Sen. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., when asked if Murphy should be negotiating migrant policy with GOP nativists on behalf of Senate Democrats. 

Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto has been a nonfactor in the negotiations, despite having little to fear electorally having just won her reelection last year in Nevada. Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., usually a vocal advocate for migrant rights, has been sidelined by criminal charges.

Murphy rejected the characterization of nativists versus migrant rights. “We’ve been engaged in serious talks and I’m not really sure they want to get ‘Yes,’” he said of Lankford and Tillis, implying that his GOP counterparts may be negotiating in bad faith. 

“I know Padilla would like to legalize 14 million people,” said Tillis. 

“No hay acuerdo,” Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., who chairs the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on immigration, countered on Tuesday when I asked if asylum rights were on the chopping block, a Tillis priority. There’s still no deal. “If we’re going to continue to entertain these negotiations there has to be consideration for legalization,” he continued. 

On Wednesday, Padilla and Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin issued a joint statement signed by nine other Senate Democrats demanding that any permanent changes to asylum rights include “a clear path to legalization for long-standing undocumented immigrants.”

Right-wing groups like Heritage Action on Tuesday came out against Ukrainian military funding, an ominous foreshadow for the House prospects of any Senate bill. “A group of senators is undermining Republican unity and effective policy solutions by negotiating with Democrats who support open border policy,” Heritage Action President Kevin Roberts wrote in a statement. “Worse, the proposal coming out of these ‘negotiations’ will likely be used as leverage to advance President Biden’s request for $106 billion in fiscally irresponsible spending, including an additional $60 billion for Ukraine that fails to meet conservative standards and $13.6 billion for fake ‘border security’ that would accelerate Biden’s open border operations.”

The right in Congress is deeply unhappy about being asked to trade a watered-down version of the party’s aspirational immigration crackdown bill for Ukraine funding. “It’s not about the border, it’s about a fig leaf for funding Ukraine,” as one Senate GOP aide told Emily Jashinsky of “Counter Points.”

A senior Democratic aide granted anonymity to discuss the bill conceded it “is going to make nobody happy.” 

At issue is whether Republicans will agree to fund the Ukrainian military in a war with Russia if Democrats agree to further gut migrant rights during Biden’s presidency while militarizing the border at taxpayers’ expense. The proposed change would sacrifice credible fear standards in asylum screening, severely narrowing the definition of who is eligible for safe haven in the U.S. Current standards require that migrants applying for asylum demonstrate to an immigration judge a “significant fear” of death, persecution, or torture if they’re returned to their country of origin. The president’s supplemental request also includes funding for 1,600 asylum officers and 1,300 Border Patrol agents to catch and expedite the processing of asylum-seekers.

GOP senators have also floated the idea of restricting the use of advance parole to limit migrant detention at the border, although Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican with influence over his party’s immigration outlook in the Senate, tells The Intercept that ending Biden’s special designation of parole for migrants from Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti, and Nicaraguans is a priority for GOP negotiators. 

This is especially true for migrant communities with no negotiator at the table as Tillis pushes to limit asylum rights and Lankford wants to limit the use of migrant parole. “It’s really about what to do with that 7,000 people that are currently released in the country,” said Tillis. 

Schumer’s office has taken the lead on writing a bill text with the tacit support of ailing Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who has made funding Ukrainian military operations a top priority. Whether House Speaker Mike Johnson has the votes or the political will to pass a border-plus-Ukraine bill remain open questions. 

House Republicans have famously failed to pass even the most basic funding measures in the current Congress. A motion to vacate rule leftover from Kevin McCarthy’s doomed speakership remains in place that allows any member of Johnson’s majority party to demand a vote to remove him within 48 hours. 

Nevertheless, allies close to Schumer insist a bill text is imminent. Migrant rights advocates for Fwd.us and the American Immigration Council tell The Intercept that despite being cut out of negotiations by the Gang of Four, the senator’s office has been adamant about making themselves available for updates on the legislation which is expected to be introduced as early as this week.

The post Bipartisan Plan to Trade Immigrant Rights for Ukraine Money Is Sinking Fast appeared first on The Intercept.

“There’s an Israel PR blitz happening this week facilitated by a handful of senators,” said a source familiar with the meetings in the upper chamber. “Practically all of the briefings on this issue these last few weeks have been members-only,” meaning congressional staff and the public are not welcome.

One briefing exclusive to members of the Senate scheduled on Monday and organized by Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., involved three senior Israel Defense Forces officers stationed at the Israeli Embassy.

“Sen. Duckworth would like to invite your boss to a last-minute meeting with Israeli Defense officials to discuss Israel’s strategy, how they are waging the war and what to expect in the day after the scenarios,” according to a memo obtained by The Intercept. (Duckworth did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The briefings are coming as Israel faces an international backlash over its assault on the Gaza Strip. Israel says it is seeking to eliminate Hamas, the Palestinian terror group that killed hundreds of Israeli civilians in its October 7 surprise attack.

The Intercept has learned of around half a dozen events coordinated with Israeli officials during recent weeks. The Intercept reviewed materials relating to four of the briefings. Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, who said he had not spoken with the Israel Defense Forces in recent days, told The Intercept, “I know there are going to be some folks from the IDF here tomorrow or the day after to brief members of Congress.” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., told The Intercept, “I have had private conversations with IDF officials but I didn’t attend any briefings.” (She declined to comment on her meetings.)

In response to the Hamas attack, Israel launched airstrikes against Gaza and undertook a ground invasion. Israel’s offensive has faced criticisms for its death toll, with more than 14,000 Palestinians dying, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, and enormous damage to Gaza, one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Over the weekend, Hamas and Israel agreed to a “pause” in fighting to allow for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza in exchange for humanitarian aid for Palestinians. The temporary truce is set to expire, but talks for an extension are ongoing.

“The IDF didn’t anticipate that there would be this much backlash to Israel.”

Calls for a ceasefire on Capitol Hill started slowly but have gained steam in recent weeks. As of Tuesday morning, a total of 43 members from both chambers of Congress had called for a ceasefire. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a progressive who had publicly sided with Israel after the October 7 attack, said on Tuesday he may put forward a bill conditioning aid to Israel, The Intercept reported.

The shifts spurred the increased pace of congressional briefings with IDF officials, some of which were hastily arranged.

“The IDF didn’t anticipate that there would be this much backlash to Israel,” said the source, who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to speak. “And, with the prospect of an even longer-term ceasefire, are putting together an all-hands-on-deck PR blitz to keep Senators at bay.”

Frequent and Secret Briefings

While members of Congress and their staff frequently hold meetings with foreign officials, including military officials, the invitations for briefings with current and former Israeli officials have come in rapid succession over recent weeks.

“It isn’t entirely unusual for senators to have member-only meetings or briefings on sensitive or classified issues,” said the source. “What is unusual is the frequency with which they’ve happened recently — especially this week — the secrecy involved, and the single-issue focus.”

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., appeared to suggest some of the briefings were secret. “My friend, I would not speak about those classified meetings,” Booker told The Intercept when asked about the IDF briefings. (None of the materials reviewed by The Intercept indicated the briefings were classified.)

Briefers in the closed-door meetings were to include several senior Israeli military officials stationed at the embassy, including Maj. Gen. Tal Kelman, former head of the strategic directorate and Iran Division; Col. Itai Shapira, a former senior Israeli Defense Intelligence officer; and Lt. Col. Yotam Shefer of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, the Israeli military unit responsible for mediating between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. (The Israeli Embassy referred questions to the IDF, which did not immediately respond.)

One briefing was scheduled to take place in-person on Capitol Hill for an hour on Monday evening.

Another briefing, scheduled for Tuesday, is slated to have the former chief of Israeli military intelligence, retired Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, brief Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M. Yadlin has issued fiery statements following the Hamas attack, saying that Hamas “will pay like the Nazis paid in Europe.” (Heinrich and Yadlin did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

Another briefing, scheduled for Tuesday morning and organized by Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., is a closed screening of 47 minutes of footage of Hamas atrocities committed on October 7.

“It isn’t a coincidence that these briefings are now happening as public opinion is shifting.”

“It’s important to bear witness in real time,” Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., who helped arrange the viewing, told reporters. “Sometime in the future, we’ll go — there’ll be a museum, there’ll be a memorial, there’ll be another Yad Vashem or Holocaust museum.”

“It isn’t a coincidence that these briefings are now happening as public opinion is shifting and the pressure to corral lawmakers,” the source said, “and the recipients of their campaign contributions.”

The post With Ceasefire Calls Growing, Israeli Military Launches Closed-Door “PR Blitz” on Capitol Hill appeared first on The Intercept.

The law is one of more than 30 introduced in recent years — at least six have been enacted — to make it easier to remove or restrict elected prosecutors who lawmakers disagree with, particularly targeting those district attorneys implementing criminal justice reforms and prosecuting police misconduct. 

The order said that the court would not review proposed rules governing a new commission with the power to discipline and remove elected prosecutors, including Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who indicted Trump. Without such a review, the agency can’t operate. 

“While we celebrate this as a victory, we remain steadfast in our commitment to fight any future attempts to undermine the will of Georgia voters and the independence of the prosecutors who they choose to represent them,” DeKalb County District Attorney Sherry Boston said in a statement on the order. 

One member of the Georgia state House who helped push the bill through, Rep. Houston Gaines, told the Associated Press that he and fellow Republicans planned to keep pushing the bill until the commission’s rules were approved and prosecutors could be removed. “As soon as the legislature can address this final issue from the court, rogue prosecutors will be held accountable,” Gaines said.

Bills to restrict the authority of prosecutors have proliferated in recent years since reform prosecutors started winning office in greater numbers. The bills tended not to pass in previous years, but in the era of Trump, the George Floyd protest movement, and perceptions about increased crime, polarized legislatures have passed the measures more swiftly. 

The Georgia law passed with support in both chambers. While many of the laws passed in recent years targeted prosecutors who took steps like implementing bail reform or declining to charge for drug possession, Willis became a target under the Georgia law after she indicted Trump in August. 

Immediately after the indictment, Georgia Republicans said they would use the law to remove Willis from office. Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed the bill into law in May, making Georgia one of at least five states to sign into law a bill to restrict or undermine prosecutors since 2017. Kemp’s office did not respond to a request for comment. 

More than a third of states have tried to pass such bills, a total of 30 pieces of legislation over the same period.

Boston, the DeKalb County district attorney, is one of four elected prosecutors in Georgia who sued in August to stop the law from going into effect. The plaintiffs emphasized the law could be used to restrict the authority of prosecutors across the political spectrum, not just reformers. 

Conservative Towaliga Judicial Circuit District Attorney Jonathan Adams also supported the complaint because of his concerns over how it could be used to restrict prosecutors who exercise various forms of discretion afforded to the office of the prosecutor, regardless of their ideological position. Adams said he had already rescinded guidelines not to prosecute certain adultery crimes still on the books in Georgia over fear that it might make him vulnerable to removal under the new law. 

“I have already received threats that members of the public plan to file superfluous, unsubstantial complaints against me under SB92,” he wrote. “This comes after I have received death threats and had my home address disseminated online.” 

While the court has authority to regulate the practice of law by district attorneys, it had “grave doubts” that it had constitutional power to take action on the draft standards and rules of the prosecutorial commission. “Because we are under no legal directive to take action, the most prudent course for us is to decline to take action without conclusively deciding any constitutional question,” the court order read. 

The commission can’t start its work without review from the court. 

“The Georgia Supreme Court recognized what we have said throughout this litigation: SB 92 is a flawed law,” said Josh Rosenthal, legal director at the Public Rights Project, which led the suit against the law. 

“We are grateful that as a result of this decision, district attorneys throughout Georgia are not subject to removal for deciding how to best promote safety and justice,” he said. “The Georgia Supreme Court’s decision leaves the PAQC” — Prosecuting Attorneys Qualifications Commission — “without authority to act on any complaint. Without approved rules, the Commission cannot lawfully investigate or discipline prosecutors across the state. This is an important victory for communities’ ability to choose their vision for safety and justice and a district attorney that will reflect those views.”

The post Georgia Supreme Court Blocks GOP Attack on Trump Prosecutor — For Now appeared first on The Intercept.

Sanders spoke to The Intercept minutes before a Senate Democratic caucus luncheon, where the question of placing conditions on $14 billion in aid to Israel is on the agenda. “Yes,” he replied gruffly when asked if there was a chance he would push for a floor vote. 

Sanders’s comment comes as the death toll in Gaza is around 15,000 — with some estimating it to have exceeded 20,000 — and amid a temporary pause in the fighting between Israel and Hamas. The Vermont senator has thus far refrained from calling for a permanent ceasefire, a key demand of activist groups that has broad support among the American public and has gained traction among members of Congress. He has instead only gone as far as calling for humanitarian pauses in fighting. 

The Department of Defense has already sent a variety of heavy weapons and ammunition to Israel to support its continuing war in Gaza, according to a leaked list obtained by Bloomberg. Congress is now seeking to approve another $14 billion, requested by President Joe Biden, to provide advanced weapons systems, support for artillery and ammunition production, and more projectiles for Israel’s Iron Dome system. 

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., has also called for restrictions on weapons transfers to Israel. 

“We regularly condition our aid to allies based upon compliance with US law and international law,” Murphy said on Sunday. “I think it’s very consistent with the ways in which we have dispensed aid, especially during wartime, to allies, for us to talk about making sure that the aid we give Ukraine or the aid we give Israel is used in accordance with human rights laws.”

One way the U.S. could place conditions on the aid is through what is known as the Leahy law, named after Sanders’s longtime colleague and former senator from Vermont Patrick Leahy. The Leahy law prohibits U.S. aid to foreign military units that commit human rights violations. 

While the idea faces opposition within the Democratic caucus, and the U.S. has never before placed conditions on its billions of dollars in military aid to Israel, Biden seems to be considering the proposition. He told reporters the day after Thanksgiving — at the start of the temporary truce — that conditioning aid is a “worthwhile thought,” adding that “I don’t think, if I started off with that, we’d [have] ever gotten to where we are today.”

When pressed on whether he might use his position on the Senate Budget Committee to push for reining in the Israeli military’s onslaught, Sanders said, “there are ways we can approach it and that is what we are exploring right now.” 

The post Bernie Sanders May Push Vote on Conditioning Aid to Israel in Coming Weeks appeared first on The Intercept.

In May 2021, the Israeli government began pushing ahead with evictions of Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem. It was one more creeping step forward in an occupation and annexation process that had been under way for decades, but what was new this time was the reaction of Hamas, the government in Gaza. If Israel didn’t back off its plan to evict the families and the Palestinian Authority wouldn’t stand up for the homeowners in Sheikh Jarrah, Hamas announced, they would do it themselves.

The Israeli government did not back off, as was to be expected, and Hamas responded by launching rocket attacks into Israel, attacks that were intercepted by the U.S.-built Iron Dome air-defense system or that otherwise crashed to the earth. Israel launched an assault on Gaza, and what became known as the Gaza War of 2021 broke out.

In Gaza wars past, the Washington ritual had always been repeated. Israel had “a right to defend itself,” each statement began, even if the support for that right was occasionally caveated with a hope that Israel might decide to respect human rights and, perhaps, if it saw fit, limit civilian casualties.

This war was different. In the United States, the tenor of the coverage was far less sympathetic than it had been, with images of Israeli police attacking protesters in East Jerusalem and reports of widespread casualties from the Israeli strikes. Mark Pocan, the Madison, Wisconsin, congressman who’d previously co-chaired the Congressional Progressive Caucus, reserved an hour of time on the House floor on May 13, and Democrats paraded through to denounce the assault.

It was like nothing the U.S. Congress had ever seen. Ilhan Omar, standing in the well of the House, bluntly but not inaccurately called Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu an “ethno-nationalist.” Rashida Tlaib added, “I am a reminder to colleagues that Palestinians do indeed exist.”

Omar recalled her own experience as an 8-year-old huddled under a bed in Somalia, hoping the incoming bombs wouldn’t hit her home next. “It is trauma I will live with for the rest of my life, so I understand on a deeply human level the pain and the anguish families are feeling in Palestine and Israel at the moment,” she said.

Ayanna Pressley, the elder of the Squad and the least inclined to challenge the status quo on Israel-Palestine, spoke directly to the political guardrails put up around members of the House of Representatives—and then ran right through those guardrails. “Many say that ‘conditioning aid’ is not a phrase I should utter here,” she said, “but let me be clear. No matter the context, American government dollars always come with conditions. The question at hand is should our taxpayer dollars create conditions for justice, healing, and repair, or should those dollars create conditions for oppression and apartheid?”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hit hard, too. “Do Palestinians have a right to survive? Do we believe that?” she asked, reminding the House that Israel had barred Omar and Tlaib from traveling to the country. “We have to have the courage to name our contributions,” she said, referring to the U.S. role in perpetuating and funding the fighting.

The clerk of the House addressed Cori Bush: “For what purpose does the gentlelady from Missouri rise?”

“St. Louis and I today rise in solidarity with the Palestinian people,” Bush responded.

What made the moment dramatically different, however, was that the Squad wasn’t isolated, but instead was part of a sizable group pushing back. Rep. Betty McCollum of Minnesota rose to slam the assault on Gaza, as did Reps. Andre Carson of Indiana, Chuy Garcia of Illinois, and Joaquin Castro of Texas.

As chair of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, McCollum had influence over U.S. foreign military aid. “The unrestricted, unconditioned $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military aid . . . gives a green light to Israel’s occupation of Palestine because there is no accountability and there is no oversight by Congress,” McCollum said. “This must change. Not one dollar of U.S. aid to Israel should go toward a military detention of Palestinian children, the annexation of Palestinian lands, or the destruction of Palestinian homes.”

Castro thanked Tlaib for her presence, agreeing with her statement, “My mere existence has disrupted the status quo.” He seemed to address Israeli leaders directly when he said that “creeping de facto annexation is unjust.” “The forced eviction of families in Jerusalem is wrong,” Castro said from the floor, offering what would have been an uncontroversial assertion most anywhere else, but that was a foreign one to the House floor.

Marie Newman, who had been beaten by the combined force of No Labels and AIPAC donors in 2018, had come back and won in 2020, and she joined her colleagues on the floor. In January 2021, she spoke out publicly against Israel’s unequal distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine, demanding that the country vaccinate people in the Palestinian territories it was occupying and allow the vaccine to get to Gaza through the blockade. She organized a letter sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken demanding that he act. “They ended up negotiating that the vaccine would go through. And so, as a freshman, that was kind of a big coup,” she said. “Never before on any matter that engaged on Palestine, on any letter, resolution, legislation, did you get 23 or 25 members of Congress to sign up something, it just didn’t happen. So, we felt like, Oh, gosh, this is so good. Then that’s when the DMFI [Democratic Majority for Israel] first was like, ‘Oh, shit, she’s a pain. She’s a problem.’”

“That’s when I started getting donors that had given to me in 2018, and even some of them in 2020, saying, ‘This is going to really hurt you, Marie, just so you understand.’”

Newman was warned that being outspoken on the issue would come with a cost. “A couple of folks in my delegation, and then a couple of folks in Congress that were Democrats—more conservative than I am, said, you know, you need to be careful, because it’s really going to ruffle some feathers,” she told me. Speaking against the Gaza War on the floor brought out more opposition. “That’s when I started getting donors that had given to me in 2018, and even some of them in 2020, saying, ‘This is going to really hurt you, Marie, just so you understand.’ And it did; they were correct.”

The hour of speeches critical of Israel’s bombing of Gaza was a sloshing together of watery metaphors—a high-water mark and also a watershed moment, one that unleashed a flood of money that would erode the foundation on which the Squad had built its power to date.

After the success of the first Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, Democratic politicians began to recognize that voters were in a progressive mood. This early recognition had saved Ed Markey’s Senate seat and produced the environment in which progressive Democrats—and groups like the Sunrise Movement—had so much influence over legislation. If Sanders had led a self-described political revolution, the Gaza speeches galvanized the counterrevolution and brought tens of millions of dollars off the sidelines and into Democratic primaries, with the express purpose of blunting the progressive wave. “We’re seeing much more vocal detractors of the U.S.-Israel relationship, who are having an impact on the discussion,” Howard Kohr, head of AIPAC, told the Washington Post in a rare interview. “And we need to respond.”

Throughout the 2020 cycle, AIPAC had been content to let DMFI run the big-money operation in Democratic primaries. To encourage support for it, AIPAC donors were even allowed to count money given to DMFI as credit toward their AIPAC contributions, which then won them higher-tier perks at conferences and other events. But the unprecedented display of progressive Democratic support for Palestinians amid the Gaza War, as seen on the House floor, was triggering. AIPAC would go on to spend well over $30 million against progressive candidates in the coming cycle, potentially upping that to $100 million in the 2024 race. Their first target was Nina Turner.

The problem, Kohr said, was “the rise of a very vocal minority on the far left of the Democratic Party that is anti-Israel and seeks to weaken and diminish the relationship. Our view is that support for the U.S.-Israel relationship is both good policy and good politics. We wanted to defend our friends and to send a message to detractors that there’s a group of individuals that will oppose them.”

A Controversial Vote

In September 2021, Congress prepared to cut Israel a fresh check. It was considering its latest bill to both avoid a government shutdown and raise the debt ceiling—a legislative maneuver needed to avert both default on the debt and a global financial crisis—and Pelosi decided at the last minute to add a billion dollars in new money to the bill to replenish Israel’s Iron Dome, which had been depleted by the Gaza War. The round number had a symbolic, slapped-together feel and was well out of whack with what the United States had previously provided, representing 60 percent of the total funding given to the Iron Dome over the entire last decade. Sen. Pat Leahy, who chaired the Appropriations Committee, which doles out the money, told reporters the request wasn’t remotely an urgent one. “The Israelis haven’t even taken the money that we’ve already appropriated,” he said. Democrats, though, were making a billion dollar point, whether the money was needed or not.

But so was the Squad. Jayapal, backed up by the now six members of the Squad and by Minnesota’s Betty McCollum and Illinois’s Marie Newman, threatened to take the bill down if the money were included. Pelosi relented and pulled the bill from the floor on a Tuesday. The Washington insider outlet Axios described the stunning development for its readers: “Why it matters: There has never been a situation where military aid for Israel was held up because of objections from members of Congress.”

Mark Mellman’s client Yair Lapid, not yet prime minister, was serving at the time as Israel’s foreign minister. According to a readout later provided by the Israeli government, Lapid called Steny Hoyer to demand to know what had happened. Hoyer assured him that it was a “technical” glitch and that the House would get Israel its money quickly.

Making good on his promise, Hoyer moved to schedule a new vote, suspending the House rules so the bill could hit the floor on Thursday of that week. Omar spoke with him the night before and pleaded for a delay, arguing that a spending increase that large needed to at least be discussed and that there were other ways to move the legislation. Why use this moment, Omar asked him, to force a fiery debate on the House floor? Doing it this way would put a target on the backs of the opponents, she said—with part of her aware that this was the precise purpose of hurrying with the vote. “Israel wants a stand-alone vote to show the overwhelming support for Iron Dome,” Hoyer told Omar.

Bowman and Ocasio-Cortez both lobbied Hoyer for a delay or for a different legislative vehicle, but both were told the same thing. The vote was going ahead. In a floor speech, Rep. Ted Deutch charged Tlaib with anti-semitism for accurately referring to Israel’s government as engaged in apartheid. Pelosi made an unexpected appearance to claim that the proposed money was part of a deal President Obama had cut with Israel to fund Iron Dome. Voting against the funding, speaker after speaker said, would be tantamount to killing innocent Israeli civilians. “All of this framing starts to cross a new line—that we are now removing and defunding existing defense, when the bill is actually just shoveling on more,” Ocasio-Cortez texted from the Capitol, trying to lay out her frame of mind. “Meanwhile the vitriol started to really heat up—AIPAC has escalated to very explicit, racist targeting of us that very much translates to safety issues. This is creating a tinderbox of incitement, with the cherry on top being that Haaretz’s caricature of me holding and shooting a Hamas rocket into Jerusalem with Rashida and Ilhan cheering on.” Back at home in New York, she said, rabbis from City Island who were typically progressive and on her side were sending out mass emails warning that her vote would put people’s lives at risk. She had even been banned from attending High Holidays in her district.

Ocasio-Cortez walked onto the House floor and voted against the Iron Dome funding. She and Bowman, in the neighboring district, had gotten a barrage of calls and emails to their offices urging them to support the funding, but almost nothing at all from constituents telling them to vote it down. “Those on the ‘yes’ side were very clear, and very loud, and very consistent with why they believed the vote needed to be ‘yes,’” Bowman told me. “And that’s why I’m saying there needs to be much organizing on the left around this issue and others.” But back in the cloakroom, Ocasio-Cortez was shaken. For the first time in her life, she had been trailed that week by her own private security detail, the Capitol Police having refused to offer protection, even as the FBI was investigating four credible threats on her life, one of them a still-active kidnapping plot.

The other three members of the original Squad—Pressley, Omar, and Tlaib—had all cast “no” votes. The two newest additions, though, were split, with Cori Bush voting “no,” but Bowman voting to approve the funding. In the cloakroom, AOC began to tear up while telling Omar and Tlaib that she felt she had to go out there and change her vote.

“Alex, it’s fine,” Omar said, embracing her. “Just don’t go out there and cry.” Omar was a big believer in the mantra that you couldn’t let them see they’d hurt you.

Tlaib cut in. “Ilhan, stop telling people not to cry!” They all laughed, knowing Rashida’s penchant for letting her emotions flow freely down her cheeks.

It may have been good advice from Omar, but Ocasio-Cortez didn’t put it into practice. On the floor, she saw Pelosi, who knew AOC was angry at being forced to vote on the funding. Pelosi approached her, telling her she hadn’t wanted this stand-alone vote, that it was Hoyer, who controlled the floor schedule, who had forced it. “Vote your heart,” she told Ocasio-Cortez.

AOC broke down, this time on the floor, with tears flowing in full view of the press and her colleagues, some of whom gave a shoulder of compassion, others giving awkward back pats as they slid past. She switched her vote to “present.”

Speculation about the tactical designs behind the vote quickly shot through the press. Did this nod toward the pro-Israel camp mean AOC was angling for a New York State Senate bid? Was she worried that redistricting would bring heavily Jewish New York suburbs into her territory? Or was all of it just becoming too much?

Her “present” vote was the epitome of Ocasio-Cortez’s effort to be the consensus builder and the radical all at once. Voting her heart, she felt, would have permanently undermined her ability to serve as a peacemaker on the issue. “While I wanted to vote NO[,] the dynamics back home were devolving so fast that I felt voting P[resent] was the only way I could maintain some degree of peace at home—enough to bring folks together to the table[,] because all this whipped things up to an all out war,” she said.

Omar and Tlaib held firm, though, and the threats of violence ratcheted up. “For Muslim members of Congress, it’s a level no one understands,” Omar messaged me when speaking about the death threats the next day. “The anti-American rhetoric is a violent beast and our vote yesterday makes it 10x worse.”

Marie Newman also faced serious pressure after she had announced her opposition. Ahead of the vote, she said she got a call from a member of party leadership, and from other from rank-and-file members, urging her to reconsider. Pressure had been applied in the run-up to the vote, too. “I was like, well, it is what it is. It’s done. And I feel good about it,” she said. The resistance was fiercest on the floor during the vote. “I got bullied on the House floor. Two of AIPAC’s members—congressional members—came over and literally yelled at me,” she said, demanding to know why she had voted the funding down. “First of all, my husband is an engineer, and from an engineering standpoint, there’s no way that battery system costs a billion dollars,” she told them. But also, she said, her district was opposed to it and would rather the billion dollars be spent here, in the United States.

The next day, Ocasio-Cortez sent a long note of apology to her constituents. “The reckless decision by House leadership to rush this controversial vote within a matter of hours and without true consideration created a tinderbox of vitriol, disingenuous framing, [and] deeply racist accusations and depictions,” she wrote. “To those I have disappointed—I am deeply sorry. To those who believe this reasoning is insufficient or cowardice—I understand.”

Then Came the Money

Amid the 2021 war in Gaza, Nina Turner was setting on a 30-point lead in a special election when DMFI and an allied organization, called Mainstream Democrats, decided to make an example of her. 

Mainstream Democrats PAC, backed by LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman, and DMFI were effectively the same organization, operating out of the same office and employing the same consultants, though Mainstream Democrats claimed a broader mission. Strategic and targeting decisions for both were made by pollster Mark Mellman, according to Dmitri Mehlhorn, a Silicon Valley executive who serves as the political adviser to LinkedIn’s Hoffman. DMFI also funneled at least $500,000 to Mainstream Democrats PAC. Together, Mehlhorn and Mellman controlled the kind of money that could reshape any race they targeted.

“Our money is going to the Mainstream Democrats coalition, which we trust to identify the candidates who are most likely to convey to Americans broadly an image of Democrats that is then electable,” Mehlhorn told me, saying he relied on the consultants linked to DMFI to make those choices. “I trust them. I think Brian Goldsmith, Mark Mellman—they tend to know that stuff.”

The super PACs came in with a deluge of money and swamped Turner, electing Shontel Brown instead. On election night, she thanked supporters of Israel for her victory. 

Mehlhorn, Hoffman’s right-hand man, was explicit about his purpose. “Nina Turner’s district is a classic case study, where the vast majority of voters in that district are Marcia Fudge voters. They’re pretty happy with the Democratic Party. And Nina Turner’s record on the Democratic Party is [that] she’s a strong critic,” he told me. “And so, this group put in money to make sure that voters knew what she felt about the Democratic Party. And from my perspective, that just makes it easier for me to try to do things like give Tim Ryan a chance of winning [a U.S. Senate seat] in a state like Ohio—not a big chance, but at least a chance. And he’s not having to deal with the latest bomb thrown by Nina. So anyway, that’s the theory behind our support for Mainstream Democrats.”

Mellman, in an interview with HuffPost, acknowledged that his goals extended beyond the politics of Israel and Palestine. “The anti-Biden folks and the anti-Israel folks look to [Turner] as a leader,” Mellman said. “So she really is a threat to both of our goals.” His remark was itself a case study in the strength of Washington narratives to withstand reality. The party’s right flank, led by Manchin, Gottheimer, and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, was actively undermining Biden’s agenda, while Turner’s allies in Congress were the ones fighting for it.

In response to DMFI’s spending in 2020, the group J Street, a rival of AIPAC that takes a more progressive line on Palestinian rights, launched its own super PAC to compete. Its leaders guessed DMFI would spend somewhere between five and ten million dollars. If the advocacy group could cobble together $2 million, said J Street’s Logan Bayroff, that would at least be something of a fight, given that AIPAC and DMFI had to overcome the fact that what they were advocating for—unchecked, limitless support for the Israeli government, regardless of its abuses—was unpopular in Democratic primaries.

But then AIPAC itself finally stepped into the super PAC game in April 2022, funding what it called the United Democracy Project. It would go on to spend $30 million, with its first broadside being launched against Turner in her rematch against Brown.

The constellation of super PACs and dark-money groups around No Labels, the political vehicle for Josh Gottheimer and Joe Manchin, kicked into gear, targeting progressives in primaries around the country. And then came the crypto. Hoffman’s super PAC spent heavily, while crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, his Ponzi scheme having yet to collapse, chipped in a million dollars against Turner. SBF, as he became known, seeded his Protect Our Future PAC with nearly $30 million and began spending huge sums.

 “We’re always gonna expect the right to have more money, given that they’re operating off of the basis of big donors. But that’s a little bit more of a fair fight,” he said of the disparity between J Street and DMFI. “But now you add to what DMFI is doing, 30 million [dollars] from AIPAC—that’s just in a whole other realm,” he said. “It’s been a radical transformation in the politics of Israel-Palestine and the politics of Democratic primaries.”

Going into 2022, Turner was joined by the biggest number of boldly progressive candidates running viable campaigns in open seats since the Sanders wing had become a national force. There was Gregorio Casar in Austin, Delia Ramirez in Chicago, Maxwell Alejandro Frost in Orlando, Becca Balint in Vermont, Summer Lee in Pittsburgh, Nida Allam and Erica Smith in North Carolina, Donna Edwards in Maryland, Andrea Salinas in Oregon, and John Fetterman and Mandela Barnes running for Senate in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — both, coincidentally, their respective state’s lieutenant governor. Also in Oregon, Jamie McLeod-Skinner was challenging incumbent Kurt Schrader, one of the most conservative Democrats left in Congress, who had made it his personal mission to block the Build Back Better Act and to stop Medicare from negotiating drug prices.

Redistricting had also produced two progressive-on-centrist primaries between sitting Democratic members of Congress, as Marie Newman and Andy Levin were both crammed in against centrist incumbents. On January 31, kick-starting the primary season, Jewish Insider published a list of fifteen DMFI House endorsements, nearly all of them squaring off against progressive challengers.

“In Michigan and Illinois, Reps. Haley Stevens (D-MI) and Sean Casten (D-IL) are, with support from DMFI, waging respective battles against progressive Reps. Andy Levin (D-MI) and Marie Newman (D-IL), who have frequently clashed with the pro-Israel establishment over their criticism of the Jewish state,” the Jewish Insider piece read.

In January, DMFI released its first list of fifteen endorsements, the start of the year’s battle to shape what the next Democratic class would look like. The constellation of progressive groups that played in Democratic primaries scrambled to respond. Their loose coalition consisted of J Street, Justice Democrats, Sunrise Movement, Indivisible, the Working Families Party, the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC, and Way to Win.

Because Justice Democrats had been unable to form a collaborative relationship with the Squad, it hadn’t been able to raise the kind of small dollars that AOC or the Sanders campaign could. This meant it was increasingly relying on the small number of left-wing wealthy people who wanted to be involved in electoral politics and were okay angering the Democratic establishment. This left the organization without many donors, but with enough to stay relevant.

Collectively, the groups would be lucky to cobble together $10 million, up against well more than $50 million in outside spending, and that’s before counting the money that corporate-friendly candidates could raise themselves. Remarkably, the Squad and Bernie Sanders were conspicuously absent from this organized effort to expand their progressive numbers.

In the summer of 2020, facing down their most intense opposition from within their party, the four members had created a PAC called the Squad Victory Fund. But in the 2022 cycle, it raised just $1.9 million, and a close look at the finances show that it spent nearly a million dollars to raise that money—renting email lists to hit with fund-raising requests, advertising on Facebook, and so on. The remaining million was doled out mostly to the members of the Squad.

Had the Squad worked collaboratively with the coalition of organizations—lending their name, attending fund-raising events, and the like—several million dollars could have been raised. If Sanders had turned on his fire hose, the resources available to the left would have been considerable. As it was, the left had to find a way to even the playing field, and, to a handful of progressive operatives, Sam Bankman-Fried seemed like the only path left.

After SBF was arrested, he texted with a reporter at Vox, saying his effective altruism evangelism and woke politics was all a cover. “It’s what reputations are made of, to some extent. I feel bad for those who got fucked by it,” he said in a series of direct messages the reporter published, “by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shib[b]oleths and so everyone likes us.”

John Fetterman was locked in what threatened to be a tight primary race with Rep. Conor Lamb for a Senate nomination, and Lamb’s campaign was openly pleading for super PAC support to put him over the top. Early in the year, Jewish Insider reported, Mellman had reached out to Fetterman with questions about his position on Israel. “He’s never come out and said that he’s not a supporter of Israel, but the perception is that he aligns with the Squad more than anything else,” Democratic activist Brett Goldman told the news outlet.

Mellman said the Fetterman campaign responded to his inquiry and “came with an interest in learning about the issues.” Following the meeting, the campaign reached out again. “Then they sent us a position paper, which we thought was very strong,” Mellman said. But it wasn’t quite strong enough. Jewish Insider reported that DMFI emailed back some comments on the paper, which “Fetterman was receptive to addressing in a second draft.”

In April, Fetterman agreed to do an interview with Jewish Insider. “I want to go out of my way to make sure that it’s absolutely clear that the views that I hold in no way go along the lines of some of the more fringe or extreme wings of our party,” he said. “I would also respectfully say that I’m not really a progressive in that sense.” Fetterman, unprompted, stressed that there should be zero conditions on military aid to Israel, that BDS was wrong, and so on. “Let me just say this, even if I’m asked or not, I was dismayed by the Iron Dome vote,” he added. DMFI and AIPAC stayed out of his race.

During the Gaza War in 2021, Summer Lee had once posted support for the Palestinian plight. “It was really one tweet that kind of caught the attention of folks,” she said. “Here, this is it, we got you. And it was really a tweet talking about Black Lives Matter and talking about how, as an oppressed person, I view and perceive the topic. Because the reality is—and that’s with a lot of Black and brown progressives—we view even topics that don’t seem connected, we still view them through the injustice that we face as Black folks here and the politics that we see and experience here, and are able to make connections to that.”

Lee had written on Twitter: “When I hear American pols use the refrain ‘Israel has the right to defend itself’ in response to undeniable atrocities on a marginalized population, I can’t help but think of how the West has always justified indiscriminate and disproportionate force and power on weakened and marginalized people. The US has never shown leadership in safeguarding human rights of folks it’s othered. But as we fight against injustice here in the movement for Black lives, we must stand against injustice everywhere. Inhumanities against the Palestinian people cannot be tolerated or justified.” That was the extent of her public commentary on the question.

But the comment was shocking to some in Pittsburgh. Charles Saul, a member of the board of trustees of the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, was later quoted by the paper saying he was concerned about Lee because “she’s endorsed by some people I believe are antisemites [sic], like Rashida Tlaib.” He went on: “Another thing that worried me was her equating the suffering of the Gazans and Palestinians to the suffering of African Americans. That’s one of these intersectional things. If that’s her take on the Middle East, that’s very dangerous.”

In January 2022, AIPAC transferred $8.5 million of dark money to the new super PAC it had set up the previous April, United Democracy Project. Private equity mogul and Republican donor Paul Singer kicked in a million dollars, as did Republican Bernard Marcus, the former CEO of Home Depot. Dozens of other big donors, many of them also Republicans, along with more than a dozen uber-wealthy Democrats, kicked in big checks to give UDP its $30 million war chest.

On May 11, Israel Defense Forces sparked global outrage, first, by killing Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and then, again, days later at her funeral procession, by attacking her mourners and pallbearers and nearly toppling her casket.

Primary Elections

That Tuesday in May was a day that DMFI, AIPAC, and Mainstream Democrats had been hoping would be a death blow to the nascent insurgency that had been gaining traction in the primaries. In April, AIPAC had begun its furious barrage of spending, tag-teaming with DMFI, Mainstream Democrats, and Sam Bankman-Fried to make sure Nina Turner’s second run against Shontel Brown never got off the ground. Turner was smothered. Reid Hoffman’s PAC had spent millions to prop up conservative Democratic representative Kurt Schrader, who was facing a credible challenge from Jamie McLeod-Skinner in Oregon.

Nida Allam, a Durham County commissioner and the first Muslim woman elected in the state, ran for office after three of her Muslim friends were murdered in a gruesome Chapel Hill hate crime that drew national attention. AIPAC would spend millions to stop her rise. Elsewhere in the state, it spent $2 million against progressive Erica Smith in another open primary. United Democracy Project, for its part, began hammering away at Summer Lee, whose Pennsylvania primary was held the same day as North Carolina’s.

Justice Democrats, the Working Families Party, Indivisible, the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC, and the Sunrise Movement worked in coalition with J Street on a number of races in which DMFI and AIPAC played. Where the progressive organizations could muster enough money, the candidates had a shot. “If you look at the races we lost, we were outspent by the bad guys six, eight, ten to one. If you look at Summer’s race, it was more like two to one,” said Joe Dinkin, campaign director for the Working Families Party.

AIPAC and DMFI did manage to win their rematch against Marie Newman, who had beaten the incumbent Democrat Dan Lipinski in 2020. That win had been critical, as Lipinski would certainly have been a “no” vote on Biden’s Build Back Better and the Inflation Reduction Act. In 2022, Newman was redistricted out of her seat, with much of her former area being sent to a new district, the one Ramirez claimed. Illinois Democrats carved up the Palestinian-American stronghold and split it into five separate districts, diluting its strength. This forced Newman into an incumbent-on-incumbent contest with a centrist. AIPAC and DMFI also knocked off the synagogue president Andy Levin.

Nida Allam lost a close race, and Erica Smith, who also faced more than $2 million in AIPAC money, was beaten soundly. And in Texas the following week, Jessica Cisneros was facing Rep. Henry Cuellar in a runoff she would lose by just a few hundred votes. But McLeod-Skinner knocked off Schrader, and progressive Andrea Salinas overcame an ungodly $11 million in Bankman-Fried money through Protect Our Future PAC to win another Oregon primary.

The marquee race, however, was in Pittsburgh, where AIPAC and DMFI combined to put in more than $3 million for an ad blitz against Summer Lee in the race’s closing weeks. In late March, Lee held a 25-point lead before the opposition money came in—and that amount of money can go a long way in the Pittsburgh TV market. As AIPAC’s ads attacked Lee relentlessly as not a “real Democrat,” she watched her polling numbers plummet.

But then she saw the race stabilize, as outside progressive groups pumped more than a million dollars in and her own campaign responded quickly to the charge that she wasn’t loyal enough to the Democratic Party. Her backers made an issue of the fact that AIPAC had backed more than one hundred Republicans who had voted to overturn the 2020 election while pretending to care how good a Democrat Lee was.

“When we were able to counteract those narratives that [voters] were getting incessantly—the saturation point was unlike anything you’ve ever seen—when we knocked on doors, no one was ever saying, ‘Oh, hey, does Summer have this particular view on Middle Eastern policy?’ Like, that was never a conversation. It was, ‘Is Summer a Trump supporter?’” she said. “We were able to get our counter ad up, a counter ad that did nothing but show a video of me stumping for Biden, for the party. When we were able to get that out, it started to really help folks question and really cut through [the opposition messaging].”

On Election Day, Lee bested Irwin by fewer than 1,000 votes, winning 41.9 percent to 41 percent, taunting her opponents for setting money on fire. Had she not enjoyed such high popularity and name recognition in the district, AIPAC’s wipeout of her 25-point lead in six weeks would have been enough to beat her.

John Fetterman, meanwhile, was able to face his centrist opponent in an open seat for the U.S. Senate without taking on a super PAC, too, and won easily. In Austin, Casar and the progressive coalition behind him had known he was within striking distance of clearing 50 percent in the first-round election, which would avoid a May runoff—and avoid the opposition money that would come with it. They spent heavily in the final weeks, and Casar won a first-round victory, another socialist headed to Congress. Once sworn in to the House, one of his first major acts as a legislator was to support Betty McCollum’s bill to restrict funding of the Israeli military. He quickly became one of the leading progressive voices critical of U.S. adventurism abroad, likely producing regret among DMFI and AIPAC that they had allowed him to slip through.

The big-money coalition had not gotten the knockout win in the spring it had hoped for. But AIPAC itself posted impressive numbers. It spent big against nine progressive Democrats and beat seven of them, losing only to Summer Lee and an eccentric, self-funding multimillionaire in Michigan. Without their intervention, Turner, Donna Edwards (who saw AIPAC spend more than $6 million against her), Nida Allam, and, potentially, Erica Smith would have joined the progressive bloc in Congress, in districts that are now instead represented by corporate-friendly Democrats. And many of the ones who did make it through had been forced to moderate their stances on the way in. Still, the Squad of AOC, Omar, Tlaib, Pressley, Bowman, and Bush was being joined by Summer Lee, Delia Ramirez, Greg Casar, Maxwell Frost, and Becca Balint. On a good day, that was ten. But what kind of ten?

“I see people who are running for office or thinking of running for office in the future, and they feel deterred because this is a topic that they know will bury them.”

Summer Lee, reflecting on her near-death experience, was pessimistic. I asked if the amount of spending had gotten into her head and influenced the way she approached the Israel-Palestine issue. “Yes, absolutely, and not just with me. I see it with other people. I see people who are running for office or thinking of running for office in the future, and they feel deterred because this is a topic that they know will bury them,” she said. “There’s absolutely a chilling effect . . . I’ve heard it from other folks who will say, you know, we agree with this, but I’ll never support it, and I’ll never say it out loud.”

More broadly, though, it makes building a movement that much more difficult, Lee added. “It’s very hard to survive as a progressive, Black, working-class-background candidate when you are facing millions and millions of dollars, but what it also does is then, it deters other people from ever wanting to get into it,” she said. “So then it has the effect of ensuring that the Black community broadly, the other marginalized communities, are just no longer centered in our politics.”

Her narrow win, coupled with some of the losses, began to crystalize into a conventional Washington narrative that the Squad was in retreat and that voters wanted a more cautious brand of politics. “It’s a way of maintaining that status quo,” Lee told me. “But also it’s just disingenuous when we say that we’re not winning because we’re not winning on the issues. No, we’re not winning because we’re not winning on the resources.”

Israel’s Rightward March Continues

Whatever the fears of hard-line Israel hawks, the rise of the Squad did not materially slow the expansion of Israeli settlements into occupied Palestinian territory. In 2019, the Squad’s first year in office, Israel added more than 11,000 new settlement units. In 2020, the figure doubled to more than 22,000, many of them in East Jerusalem and deep into the West Bank. “As stated in numerous EU Foreign Affairs Council conclusions, settlements are illegal under international law, constitute an obstacle to peace and threaten to make a two-state solution impossible,” said an EU representative to the United Nations in a report chronicling the increase. The settlement expansion included multiple “outposts”—seizure of farmland and pasture—which puts any semblance of Palestinian independence or sustainability farther out of reach. In 2021—despite Israeli prime minister Lapid’s campaign promise not “to build anything that will prevent the possibility of a future two-state solution”—settlement expansion in East Jerusalem doubled in 2021 compared with the year before, threatening to fully slice the remaining contiguous parts of Palestinian territory into small, prisonlike enclaves.

On August 5, 2022, without the support of his cabinet, Lapid launched air strikes on the Gaza Strip, agreeing to a truce on August 7. Palestinian militants fired more than a thousand rockets, though no Israelis were killed or seriously wounded. The three-day conflict left forty-nine Palestinians dead, including seventeen children.

Israel’s initial denial of any role in the killing of reporter Abu Akleh gradually morphed under the weight of incontrovertible evidence into admission of possible complicity. Partnering with the London-based group Forensic Architecture, the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq launched the most comprehensive investigation into her death. On the morning of August 18, at least nine armored Israeli vehicles approached the group’s headquarters in Ramallah and broke their way in, ransacking it and later welding shut its doors. An attempt by the Israeli government, headed by Mellman ally Yair Lapid, to have the European Union label Al-Haq a terrorist organization was rejected by the EU, which reviewed the evidence Israel provided and found it not remotely convincing.

With the primaries over, Bankman-Fried’s PAC, AIPAC, and DMFI had mostly stopped spending to help Democrats. In September 2022, the Democratic National Committee refused to allow a vote on a resolution, pushed by DNC member Nina Turner and other progressives, to ban big outside money in Democratic primaries. Leah Greenberg, cofounder of Indivisible, said it was absurd that Democrats continued to allow outside groups to manipulate Democratic primaries even though they clearly had little interest in seeing the party itself succeed. Their goal is to shape what the party looks like; whether it’s in the minority or majority is beside the point. “For a group called Democratic Majority for Israel, they don’t seem to be putting much effort into winning a Democratic majority,” Greenberg said.

Rep. Elaine Luria, a Democrat from Virginia whose race was listed as “key” by AIPAC, had been one of the organization’s most outspoken and loyal allies since her 2018 election and had regularly teamed with Gottheimer as he made his various power plays. Her first significant act as a member of Congress had been to join him in confronting Rashida Tlaib with their white binder of damning quotes. Still, AIPAC’s United Democracy Project had declined to help her, and Luria was among the few incumbent Democrats to lose reelection in 2022.

Instead, AIPAC’s first foray into the general election had been to spend its money in a Democrat-on-Democrat race in the state of California. According to Jewish Insider, “a board member of DMFI expressed reservations over [David] Canepa’s Middle East foreign policy approach, pointing to at least one social media post viewed by local pro-Israel advocates as dismissive of Israeli security concerns.” The allegedly dismissive message, which Canepa posted on May 13, 2021, as the Gaza War raged, had read, “Peace for Palestine.”

But AIPAC saved the rest of its energy for Summer Lee. Because the Republican in the race had the same name, “Mike Doyle,” as the popular retiring incumbent Democrat—deliberately, no doubt—voters thought that a vote for Doyle was a vote for the guy they’d known for decades. After spending millions of dollars attacking Lee for not being a good enough Democrat, AIPAC spent millions in the general elections urging voters to elect the Republican. Lee won anyway.

At the end of 2022, Bibi Netanyahu, at the head of a right-wing coalition so extreme that mainstream news outlets had dubbed it fascist, was once again sworn in as prime minister, ousting Yair Lapid, the prime minister backed by DMFI’s Mark Mellman. 

Disclosure: In September 2022, The Intercept received $500,000 from Building a Stronger Future, Sam Bankman-Fried’s foundation, as part of a $4 million grant to fund our pandemic prevention and biosafety coverage. That grant has been suspended. In keeping with our general practice, The Intercept disclosed the funding in subsequent reporting on Bankman-Fried’s political activities. A nonprofit affiliated with Way to Win, called Way to Rise, has donated to The Intercept, facilitated by Amalgamated Foundation.

The post A Big-Money Operation Purged Critics of Israel From the Democratic Party appeared first on The Intercept.

The move to lift restrictions was included in the White House’s supplemental budget request, sent to the Senate on October 20. “This request would,” the proposed budget says, “allow for the transfer of all categories of defense articles.”

The request pertains to little-known weapons stockpiles in Israel that the Pentagon established for use in regional conflicts, but which Israel has been permitted to access in limited circumstances — the very limits President Joe Biden is seeking to remove.

“If enacted, the amendments would create a two-step around restrictions on U.S. weapons transfers to Israel.”

“If enacted, the amendments would create a two-step around restrictions on U.S. weapons transfers to Israel,” said John Ramming Chappell, a legal fellow with the Center for Civilians in Conflict.

Created in the 1980s to supply the U.S. in case of a regional war, the War Reserve Stockpile Allies-Israel, or WRSA-I, is the largest node in a network of what are effectively foreign U.S. weapons caches. Highly regulated for security, the stockpiles are governed by a set of strict requirements. Under circumstances laid out in these requirements, Israel has been able to draw on the stockpile, purchasing the weapons at little cost if it uses the effective subsidy of U.S. military aid.

With the WRSA-I, Biden is looking to lift virtually all the meaningful restrictions on the stockpile and the transfer of its arms to Israel, with plans to remove limitations to obsolete or surplus weapons, waive an annual spending cap on replenishing the stockpile, remove weapon-specific restrictions, and curtail congressional oversight. All of the changes in the Biden budget plan would be permanent, except for lifting the spending cap, which is limited to the 2024 fiscal year.

The changes would come in an arms-trade relationship that is already shrouded in secrecy, as The Intercept recently reported. Whereas the administration has provided pages of detailed lists of weapons provided to Ukraine, for instance, its disclosure about arms provided to Israel could fit in a single, short sentence. Last week, Bloomberg obtained a leaked list of weapons provided to Israel, revealing that they include thousands of Hellfire missiles — the same kind being used extensively by Israel in Gaza.

The effect of lifting the restrictions on transfers to Israel — such as eliminating the requirement that the weapons be part of a surplus — could harm U.S. interests by diminishing American preparedness for its own conflicts in the region, said Josh Paul, a former official who served in the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs.

Paul, who resigned over U.S. arms assistance to Israel, told The Intercept, “By dropping the requirement that such articles be declared excess, it would also increase the existing strain on U.S. military readiness in order to provide more arms to Israel.”

“Undermine Oversight and Accountability”

The U.S. government is only supposed to spend $200 million per fiscal year restocking the WRSA-I — about half the total cap for all U.S. stockpiles round the globe. The White House request, however, would waive the limit on U.S. contributions to the stockpile in Israel. That would allow the stockpile to be continuously replenished.

“The President’s emergency supplemental funding request,” Paul said, “would essentially create a free-flowing pipeline to provide any defense articles to Israel by the simple act of placing them in the WRSA-I stockpile, or other stockpiles intended for Israel.”

The U.S. currently requires that Israel grant certain concessions in exchange for certain types of arms assistance from the Pentagon, but the White House request would remove this condition as well.

Finally, the White House request would also reduce congressional oversight of U.S. arms transfers by reducing the length of advance notice made to Congress before a weapons transfers. Under current law, there must be 30 days prior notice, but the Biden budget request would allow this to be shortened in “extraordinary” circumstances.

“It will make it much harder for Congress or the public to monitor U.S. arms transfers to Israel.”

“The Biden administration’s supplemental budget request would further undermine oversight and accountability even as U.S. support enables an Israeli campaign that has killed thousands of children,” said Chappell, of Center for Civilians in Conflict.

The House has already passed legislation reflecting the White House’s request last month, and it now stands before the Senate.

“Taken as a package,” said William Hartung, an arms expert at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, “it is extraordinary, and it will make it much harder for Congress or the public to monitor U.S. arms transfers to Israel, even as the Israeli government has engaged in massive attacks on civilians, some of which constitute war crimes.”

The post Joe Biden Moves to Lift Nearly Every Restriction on Israel’s Access to U.S. Weapons Stockpile appeared first on The Intercept.

Frankel, first elected to Congress in 2012 and a CPC member since at least 2016, had been considering leaving the caucus for several weeks, according to one source. She was one of at least six caucus members who voted earlier this month to censure Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich. 

Frankel’s departure is a symptom of a larger split growing within the caucus over the congressional response to the war in Gaza. It comes despite the fact that the CPC rarely takes public positions on Israel–Palestine, given the deep divides within the caucus, and has not taken a position on the current crisis. But the tensions and animosities produced within the progressive coalition broadly are great enough that her decision to leave is not a surprise. 

Many of the 22 Democrats who voted to censure Tlaib, including Frankel, have received major contributions from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The pro-Israel lobbying group is recruiting challengers to Tlaib and other Squad members for being out of step with a hawkish, pro-Israel line that demands unconditional support. The resolution censured Tlaib for “calling for the destruction of the state of Israel” and claimed promoting “false narratives” about the October 7 Hamas attack. 

Progressive caucus leaders met earlier this month with House Democratic leadership to encourage them to keep the pro-Israel lobby from spending to oust progressive incumbents this cycle. Asked last month about news that groups including AIPAC, Democratic Majority for Israel, and Mainstream Democrats PAC were considering primarying Tlaib and Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., who led the ceasefire resolution in the House, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said, “Outside groups are gonna do what outside groups are gonna do. I think House Democrats are going to continue to support each other.”

Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, lobbied Democratic leadership to encourage the primary challenges against critics of Israel, he told a political science class at American University, according to a student in the class. Cuellar has twice faced a primary challenger backed by Justice Democrats, which helped elect the Squad. 

Frankel is the former mayor of West Palm Beach and has been an unapologetic supporter of Israel throughout her career, celebrating, for instance, former President Donald Trump’s provocative decision to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. “The President’s announcement today is consistent with current U.S. law and reaffirms what we already know: Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Jewish people and the State of Israel,” she said at the time. She fought against President Barack Obama’s signature foreign policy accomplishment, the Iran nuclear deal, which AIPAC worked hard to undermine. The hawkish posture won out, and Trump withdrew from the deal. Backers of the deal warned that tearing it up would only increase conflict and instability in the region. 

The progressive caucus is chaired by Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., who faced harsh criticism in July for calling Israel a racist state, comments that she later walked back under pressure.

Frankel and the CPC did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 

The post Florida Democrat Who Voted to Censure Rep. Rashida Tlaib Quits Progressive Caucus appeared first on The Intercept.

In the background, Manchin has been propping up a new third-way organization. Along with his daughter Heather Bresch, he has been soliciting funds for a new nonprofit that, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept, is being overseen by the senator’s longtime associates who became significant power players in West Virginia after receiving plum appointments during Manchin’s rise to the top of the state Democratic Party. 

Bresch, a former pharmaceutical executive, registered Americans Together in July as a 501(c)(4), a legal classification that means it is not required to publicly disclose its donors. While the senator’s daughter has said the organization will be set apart from Manchin’s political endeavors, few restrictions exist on how it can spend its money. Should Manchin run for president on the No Labels ticket, Americans Together could work to boost his candidacy or oppose other presidential campaigns through what’s known as an independent expenditure. But the nonprofit could also provide Manchin a financial cushion with few spending restrictions should he leave politics altogether.

Manchin and Bresch did not respond to requests for comment.

Craig Holman, a lobbying and ethics expert at Public Citizen, told The Intercept that dark-money nonprofits “are frequently and almost always set up by someone opening a presidential run intended to provide a means for unlimited contributions from external sources that are frequently used to indirectly benefit a presidential campaign.”

“By having a family member or former colleague set up 501(c)(4), that provides the kind of distance that makes it easy to avoid coordination restrictions,” Holman added, referring to federal election laws that prohibit campaigns from coordinating with nonprofits. “If a daughter or former staffer set it up, it is difficult to prove coordination. These dark-money groups can get away with a lot.”

An independent expenditure, however, is just one way the nonprofit could spend its money. 

“It can be used for lobbying expenditures, for instance,” Holman said. “So if Manchin ends up losing and becomes part of a lobbying firm, the funds can be used for the lobbying activities as long as he’s not a candidate. At no point does the fund have to be dissolved. He can hang on to it forever.”

Manchin and Bresch are seeking to raise $100 million for Americans Together “to change the national narrative and garner support for those willing to prioritize policy and country over party and politics,” according to a solicitation obtained by the Wall Street Journal in August. The nonprofit’s formation follows a record windfall from No Labels, which doubled its fundraising to over $20 million in 2022 and began increasing the six-figure salaries paid to its executives ahead of its planned 2024 presidential stunt.

Manchin’s name does not appear on Americans Together’s paperwork — and Bresch told the Wall Street Journal that the organization will be divorced from her father’s political prospects — but the senator himself was making fundraising pitches for the organization. West Virginia secretary of state filings, meanwhile, show that Bresch has tapped her father’s longtime allies to join her in overseeing the organization. 

Nick Casey, Manchin’s former campaign treasurer, is listed on Americans Together’s filing as treasurer, while Steve Farmer, a Republican lawyer who has known Manchin for decades, is listed as secretary. Other than Bresch, they are the only two individuals listed on the group’s filing. Casey and Farmer, both prominent lawyers in West Virginia, did not respond to requests for comment.

Casey worked for Manchin during his statewide races for secretary of state and governor in the early 2000s. He helped overtake the infrastructure of the West Virginia Democratic Party, which was purged after Manchin assumed control of the political machine, eventually taking the reins as party chair from 2004 until 2010, the year Manchin left state politics for the U.S. Senate. (Casey went on to work for Gov. Jim Justice, who fired him in 2017 after the governor switched his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican. Justice is now seeking the Senate seat that Manchin is set to vacate.)

As governor, Manchin appointed Farmer to the West Virginia University board of governors. In 2008, former WVU football coach Rich Rodriguez accused Farmer of conspiring with Manchin, other members of the board of governors, and university president Mike Garrison, himself appointed by the board, to force him into signing a contract with a clause requiring him to pay out $4 million should he leave before the expiration of his contract. All of the WVU appointees denied Rodriguez’s allegations, and Rodriguez ultimately settled a related lawsuit with the university.

Farmer also served on the WVU board of governors as Bresch was ensnared in a scandal over whether she had completed required coursework to receive an advanced business degree from the university. The scandal resulted in multiple firings and an internal review that determined Bresch’s grades had been “pulled from thin air.” Bresch, who would go on to become CEO of the EpiPen maker Mylan, emerged from the drama relatively unscathed. 

Casey and Farmer have stood by Manchin after he faced his own set of scandals, including probes the FBI and IRS launched into his inner circle and business associates in West Virginia, and as he grew in notoriety on the national political stage. 

In the face of Donald Trump’s broadsides in 2018, Farmer spoke to the Daily Beast about how Manchin should respond. “If Trump wants something positive for West Virginia, Manchin will support it regardless of what the president says about him personally,” Farmer said. “He can’t control the president’s behavior—he can only control his own.”

In 2021, as Manchin faced pressure for his intransigence on helping to pass key parts of President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda, Casey said of the senator, “You’re in the hot seat when you’re a quarterback, but it’s pretty satisfying when you make progress,” adding that Manchin was “the greatest QB who never got to start at West Virginia University — just ask him.”

There is a long history of the Manchin family working to enrich one another through their professional dealings. After assuming the role of CEO of Mylan in 2012, Bresch oversaw the price hike of EpiPens by hundreds of dollars. At the same time, Bresch’s mother and Manchin’s wife, Gayle Manchin, worked to ensure that schools were required to carry, and therefore pay for, EpiPens while she served atop the National Association of State Boards of Education.

Years later, as part of an effort to woo the senator into supporting White House legislative priorities, Biden appointed Gayle Manchin to lead the Appalachian Regional Commission, a federal agency overseeing development efforts for Appalachian states. As The Intercept first reported, the Manchins directed tens of millions of dollars to the Canaan Valley and surrounding wilderness area where the couple own a vacation condo. 

Before his political rise, Manchin founded a coal brokerage firm that has continued to supply his family with significant sums of income to this day. The company, Enersystems, is now overseen by Manchin’s son, Joe Manchin IV. 

The company makes hundreds of thousands every year overseeing waste coal transfers to the Grant Town power plant outside Fairmont, West Virginia. The plant has faced closure repeatedly only to be saved time and time again by rate hikes for consumers. 

American Bituminous Power Partners, or AmBit, the operator of the financially troubled plant, has been locked in a yearslong legal battle with Horizon Ventures, the company leasing the land upon which the Grant Town power plant sits. Last month, a judge ordered AmBit to pay a decade’s worth of back rent to Horizon Ventures, according to legal documents reviewed by The Intercept. 

Horizon could not only drive AmBit into financial ruin, but also evict it entirely if it fails to pay what the court has ordered it to fork over. The closing of Grant Town would deal a fatal blow to Enersystems, which funnels its entire coal supply to the Grant Town plant. 

Horizon is run by Stanley Sears, a longtime business owner and political player in West Virginia who has known Manchin since the start of his political career. The dispute over the plant led to a falling out between Manchin and Sears, as well as his son, Scott Sears, who served as Manchin’s right hand on the campaign trail and in the governor’s office. Scott Sears, who left the Democratic Party to support Trump, said without a serious path to the presidency, and a foreclosed seat in the Senate, it’s time for his onetime friend to exit politics. 

“Since he’s fucked and can’t recover,” Sears told The Intercept, “next best thing is to raise as much money as he can and walk away and be happy.” 

The post As Manchin Prepares Senate Exit, His Friends and Daughter Are Lining Up a No Labels Lookalike appeared first on The Intercept.

Philadelphia City Council member and Minority Leader Brian O’Neill, the last remaining Republican on the council after this month’s elections, fired an administrative assistant in his office in April 2017, less than six months after she accused a co-worker of sexual harassment, according to court documents.

The administrative assistant, Linda Trush, sued the city in 2021 and alleged that she was repeatedly sexually harassed by a co-worker and subjected to a hostile work environment before being unlawfully terminated from her job. In her suit, Trush said she was retaliated against after reporting “severe and pervasive sexual harassment” and taking medical leave for mental health treatment as a result of the alleged harassment. (Trush’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.) 

“Despite Plaintiff’s aforesaid excellent performance, her work environment was tainted by the severe and pervasive sexual harassment that she was subjected to in 2014,” the lawsuit says, “and the retaliation that followed once she complained of the same.”

The city responded to the suit in January 2022 denying Trush’s allegations of harassment. Earlier, the city stated that it was “unable to substantiate” the harassment claim. The case is still pending. “As this lawsuit is in active litigation, the City declines to comment at this time,” Ava Schwemler, director of communications for the City of Philadelphia Law Department, which is representing the city, said in a statement to The Intercept. (O’Neill did not respond to a request for comment.)

O’Neill represents northeast Philadelphia and was first elected to the City Council in 1979.

Two of the council’s seven at-large seats are reserved for nonmajority parties and had historically gone to Republicans. In 2019, Working Families Party candidate Kendra Brooks was elected to one of the slots, making history as the first candidate outside the two major parties to hold a council seat in a century. After Brooks and Nicolas O’Rourke, another WFP candidate, won at-large seats in this month’s election, O’Neill is the last remaining Republican on the council.

While the WFP campaigned on shutting out GOP council candidates, the Philadelphia Democratic Party openly opposed the party’s candidates in this cycle. The week before the election, Philadelphia Democratic City Committee Chair Bob Brady emailed city ward leaders and threatened to expel those who had signed onto a letter supporting Brooks and O’Rourke unless they recanted before the election.

City Democrats backed O’Neill’s challenger Gary Masino, leader of the Sheet Metal Workers union. Masino lost to O’Neill by 22 points.

“You Will Lose Your Job”

O’Neill’s office hired Trush in 2010. Trush said she was harassed by a co-worker on multiple occasions starting in 2014 and that the harassment continued until the co-worker was moved to a different department in 2015, according to court documents filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

Trush claimed that on different occasions, the co-worker kissed her face, put his hands down her pants, and told her to kiss his genitals. When she refused his advances and threatened to report him, according to Trush’s suit, the co-worker told her, “If you report me, trust me you will lose your job over me first. They will believe me, not you.”

Shortly after her co-worker’s transfer, Trush said she experienced a decline in mental health including depression and panic attacks that led to a post-traumatic stress breakdown in November 2016. Trush told her husband about the harassment, and he contacted O’Neill by text message and asked him to investigate and take action. Following her husband’s outreach, Trush reported the harassment to O’Neill, and, according to Trush’s complaint, O’Neill told both Trush and her husband that the co-worker was a “predator who needed to be stopped.” (The city, in its response in court, said, “Councilman O’Neill stated that if what Plaintiff’s husband told him is true, then Shain is a predator, and Councilman O’Neill stated that the allegations should be reported to the police.”)

After reporting the alleged harassment, Trush requested and took a leave of absence, which she said in her suit was for mental health treatment. (In its response, the city only admitted she took leave, not the impetus.) She left work for three months and returned in February 2017. Upon her return to work, Trush learned that the office had not begun an investigation into her report of sexual harassment and that she would be returning to work in the same office with the co-worker she had reported. Trush complained and asked that her co-worker be moved to another office. Instead, the office reassigned her to its City Hall location, an hour from her home.

Trush alleged that the new office environment was hostile too. She was told she would no longer report directly to O’Neill as she had for the last six years, but to his executive assistant. She said office management refused to move her office supplies and items to the new location and that she was not given an employee access card, meaning she had to obtain a visitor’s pass every day and use public restrooms instead of employee restrooms.

After several requests for an update on her report of harassment, Trush said she received a letter from a human resources representative who said they had completed the investigation and could not substantiate Trush’s claims.

A week later, O’Neill informed Trush she was being reassigned to a new department. Trush asked O’Neill to reconsider the change and to accommodate her ongoing mental and physical health treatment stemming from the alleged harassment. She told O’Neill she believed the reassignment was retaliation for her complaint. One month after being reassigned, Trush was given a letter stating that after “an internal staff review,” her employment was being terminated. Trush asked her new manager why she was being terminated, who replied, “You know why,” according to the lawsuit. When Trush asked the manager to explain, they replied, “Maybe you shouldn’t have made a complaint.”

The post Last Republican on Philly City Council Fired Staffer Who Reported Sexual Harassment, Says Lawsuit appeared first on The Intercept.

Who pays for these trips has, until now, remained largely a mystery. According to an unredacted tax filing for 2019 obtained by The Intercept, the financiers are a clutch of large foundations and nonprofits, some of which are family-run, that also give to a wide range of other political and cultural groups.

The trips are organized through a cutout called the American Israel Education Fund, a charitable organization founded by AIPAC, from which it borrows its offices, board members, and even part of its logo. Like other tax-exempt nonprofits, AIEF must file a Form 990 every year with the IRS, but donors are redacted from the version that is made accessible to the public.

According to the unredacted 2019 tax filing, AIEF drew millions of dollars from eight philanthropic groups, estates, and family foundations: the Koret Foundation, the Swartz Foundation, the Jewish Communal Fund, the One8 Foundation, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, the Paul E. Singer Foundation, Milton Cooper 2013 Revocable Trust, and the estate of Hedy Orden. These donors helped finance 129 AIEF-sponsored trips to Israel in 2019, totaling $2.32 million, according to the public records database LegiStorm.

The all-expenses-paid trips are crucial to how AIPAC keeps both Republican and Democratic lawmakers firmly on Israel’s side. That allegiance has been on full display as the Biden administration and most members of Congress have backed Israel amid its war against the occupied Gaza Strip, which has killed more than 12,000 Palestinians in the last five weeks. 

“The trips clearly have an impact, as personal experiences in Israel often show up in congressional narratives justifying support for pro-Israel policies,” Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel program at Arab Center Washington DC, told The Intercept. “It’s part of a broader strategy to keep U.S.–Israel ties close.”

“The trips clearly have an impact, as personal experiences in Israel often show up in congressional narratives justifying support for pro-Israel policies.”

In a statement, AIPAC spokesperson Marshall Wittmann told The Intercept, “AIPAC and AIEF are distinct entities and strictly adhere to all relevant governmental guidelines, regulations, and statutes.” (An email address for AIEF did not respond to a request for comment, and neither did any of the foundations listed as donors on the tax filing.)

In addition to pro-Israel causes, some of the AIEF donors also fund a wide spectrum of other political initiatives. The Paul E. Singer Foundation, which gave AIEF $1.25 million in 2019, has been a prolific contributor to conservative causes in the U.S. for years. Singer, a billionaire hedge fund manager, is a major donor to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, or FDD, a hawkish, pro-Israel think tank that pushes Israel’s national security perspective to U.S. policymakers.

The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, which gave $1.5 million to AIEF in 2019, portrays itself as heavily focused on progressive issues, including education, voting rights, criminal justice, and reproductive rights. The foundation also funded a number of hawkish, pro-Israel groups in the same year, including FDD; the Middle East Media Research Institute, which monitors foreign language press in the Middle East and has been criticized for bias and misleading translations; the Investigative Project on Terrorism, led by the discredited extremism expert Steve Emerson, who has been repeatedly invited to speak at AIPAC summits despite allegations of Islamophobia; and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a D.C. think tank that was itself spun off from AIPAC.

Among the donors who gave the largest amounts to AIEF are the Bay Area-based Koret Foundation ($5 million), the Jewish Communal Fund ($3.5 million), and a trust established in the name of real estate tycoon Milton Cooper ($2.475 million). The Swartz Foundation, which contributed $1.45 million, is notable for its founder Sidney Swartz, the former chair and CEO of the Timberland Company, a popular manufacturer of work boots and outerwear.

In 2022, the Paul E. Singer Foundation and Swartz Foundation also donated $1 million and $25,000, respectively, to United Democracy Project, a super PAC affiliated with AIPAC that backs challengers to progressive candidates who are critical of Israel, according to itemized tax receipts from that year.

AIPAC and AIEF’s Relationship

The millions of dollars AIEF gets from its funders goes toward AIPAC’s goal of securing bipartisan consensus on Israel. In 2019, the year for which The Intercept has unredacted tax records, AIEF sponsored trips for 64 Democrats and 65 Republicans, who left for Israel on 14 separate dates, according to LegiStorm. Each trip can cost upward of $10,000 per person, and members of Congress can also bring senior members of staff, spouses, or children.

These expenditures appear to have been made possible with some creative legal maneuvering from AIPAC. The group has used AIEF to fund congressional junkets and to bypass an anti-corruption law that bans lobbyists from taking politicians on paid trips abroad. The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act responded to a major lobbying scandal involving Jack Abramoff, a D.C. lobbyist who had for years funded lavish trips and given expensive gifts to politicians as a means of influence peddling.

After the law was enacted in 2007, AIPAC, which had sponsored congressional trips to Israel since the 1990s, campaigned to create an exception for 501(c)(3) organizations that lobbying groups could use to get around the law. Both 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) groups are tax-exempt nonprofits, but 501(c)(4) groups — including AIPAC — are considered “social welfare” organizations, which are allowed to spend more than 20 percent of their resources on lobbying the government.

Craig Holman, an expert on governmental ethics and campaign finance at the public interest advocacy organization Public Citizen, said AIPAC undermined the lobbying reform.

“AIPAC successfully inserted an exception to the rule for 501(c)(3) organizations,” Holman said. The use of AIEF has “allowed it to continue funneling money to members of Congress for travel to Israel.” Holman, who was involved in drafting and promoting the 2007 law, added, “These trips would be illegal otherwise.”

The murky relationship between AIEF and AIPAC has come under scrutiny in the past. Before AIPAC moved to use AIEF to fund the congressional junkets, the nonprofit was incorporated as a charitable organization affiliated with AIPAC in 1988, likely to solicit tax-deductible contributions, Holman said.

In 2019, the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy published research showing that, over the prior decade, AIEF and other pro-Israel nonprofits had funded hundreds of trips for members of Congress and their staff, covering over $10 million in expenses. The study’s analysis of gift travel filings found that serving members of Congress had been on nearly 600 Israel junkets; many had been multiple times, including current House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La.

“When an organization lobbies Congress for support on making public policy, one of the most effective means of achieving victory is by befriending members of Congress through gifts and travel,” Holman told The Intercept. “This is a loophole that is being heavily exploited now.”

Congressional Junkets

Once an unassailable powerbroker on Capitol Hill, AIPAC and policymakers who work to further its interests have faced increasing criticism in recent years, as some members of Congress and the American public question the U.S.’s blanket support for Israel.

In addition to AIPAC’s heavy hand in elections, legislation, and military spending, the congressional trips to Israel have also been put under the microscope.

Since 2019, AIEF has spent a total of $6.1 million on 309 trips to Israel, 144 for Republicans and 165 for Democrats.

Since 2019, AIEF has spent a total of $6.1 million on 309 trips to Israel, 144 for Republicans and 165 for Democrats, according to LegiStorm. During the trips, members of Congress have met with high-level Israeli politicians and security officials, toured historical sites, and attended information sessions tailored to Israel’s view of the region. Past trips have also included occasional meetings with members of the Palestinian Authority, which nominally governs the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

“For members of Congress, AIPAC is a very important player on the Hill,” said Munayyer, of Arab Center. “These trips are seen as routine and have only become more controversial over the past 10 years or so as AIPAC has come to be seen as a more partisan actor.”

Democrats have been increasingly divided over U.S. support for Israel, with the rift widening significantly during the Obama administration. Progressives have taken a stronger stance against unconditional aid to the country and, more recently, called for a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza.

The party’s centrist leadership, meanwhile, has toed the line. In August, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., who led a delegation of two dozen Democrats on an AIEF-sponsored trip to Israel, pushed back on the growing chorus of criticism of the U.S.–Israel relationship within his party.

“The Democratic Party in the House of Representatives will continue to stand with Israel,” Jeffries said at a press conference during the trip, “and lift up the special relationship between our two countries and in support of Israel’s right to exist as a homeland for the Jewish people, and as a Jewish democratic state, period, full stop.”

AIPAC celebrated the trip on its website, posting a host of straight-to-camera, gushing testimonials on the AIPAC YouTube channel.

As an alternative to the AIPAC junkets, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., the only Palestinian American member of Congress, had attempted to lead a delegation in 2018 to the West Bank that would center Palestinians’ experiences under Israeli occupation.

“I want us to see that segregation and how that has really harmed us being able to achieve real peace in that region. I don’t think AIPAC provides a real, fair lens into this issue. It’s one-sided,” Tlaib told The Intercept at the time. “[They] have these lavish trips to Israel, but they don’t show the side that I know is real, which is what’s happening to my grandmother and what’s happening to my family there.”

Tlaib was forced to cancel the trip after the Israeli government barred her from entering the country. Under pressure, Israel reversed course and said Tlaib could go on condition that she not express support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement while there, a condition she rejected.

Last week, Tlaib was formally censured in the House for expressing support for Palestinians and criticizing the Israeli assault of Gaza. Almost all of the 22 Democrats who voted in favor of the measure received money from AIPAC in the last election cycle.

Despite greater scrutiny of pro-Israel influence in U.S. politics in recent weeks, American politicians continue to accept paid trips to Israel. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, came under fire for going to Israel in the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attack on a trip sponsored by the UJA-Federation of New York. UJA, a local Jewish philanthropic organization, has sent over half a million dollars to groups in Israel that support its illegal settlement program in the West Bank, The Intercept reported. Hochul’s office later said it would cover the cost of a trip, citing a delay in a state ethics review.

The post Meet the Secret Donors Who Fund AIPAC’s Israel Trips for Congress appeared first on The Intercept.

Two of the organizations sent cease-and-desist letters to union shops considering resolutions calling for a ceasefire. Another group called staffers into meetings with human resources for using work channels to share links about Palestine and proposing to do fundraising for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund in lieu of an annual holiday party.

Management at several of the offices said statements on Gaza under consideration by their unions were jeopardizing funding. Pro-Israel activists launched a petition to defund the Bronx Defenders after its union issued a statement opposing Israel’s “genocidal intent in Gaza.” Public defender offices across the country are already severely underfunded. While most rely heavily on public funding, many also receive support from private institutions, including major law firms. Several firms have responded to criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza by rescinding job offers and threatening to curb recruiting efforts at law schools. 

On Thursday, ahead of the unionwide vote on a statement, the Legal Aid Society called a staff meeting. According to a partial recording of the meeting obtained by The Intercept, Chief Executive Officer Twyla Carter said the resolution’s language was antisemitic. Staff could vote how they wanted, she said, but she had an obligation to warn them about the impact on the organization’s work. 

Four law firms had already threatened to pull funding from the office over the resolution, Carter said. In discouraging union members to vote for the statement, she said, “I’m not trying to lose a dime.” 

A vote on the union resolution was halted by a court on Friday after members of the organizations, including union membership, sued. The union received the restraining order before it was over and could not tally the results.

The suppression of speech at publicly funded legal defense agencies comes as governments and workplaces around the world have disciplined and fired staffers for criticizing Israel’s nonstop bombing of Gaza. Suppression of speech about Palestine has come in the form of bans on rallies and vigils, suspensions of student groups, doxxing and death threats, and the cancellation of television interviews with Palestinian commentators. 

“Unions must act where the U.S. government will not. I proudly support Palestinian liberation and self-determination.”

The fight brewing in public defender offices escalated after recent union efforts to issue statements condemning the killing of Palestinian civilians. Since Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis last month, mostly civilians, Israel has killed more than 11,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, one out of every 200 people. 

“Unions must act where the U.S. government will not,” said Sophia Gurulé, a staff attorney in the immigration practice at the Bronx Defenders and a member of the Bronx Defenders Union – UAW Local 2325. “I proudly support Palestinian liberation and self-determination.” 

Stop the Count

The legal fight revolved around a statement from the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys – UAW Local 2325, which covers more than 25 organizations, including the Bronx Defenders, Brooklyn Defender Services, Neighborhood Defender Service, and the Legal Aid Society of New York City. Staffers across the four offices, as well as the New York County Defender Services, which is not represented by the union, have been retaliated against, reprimanded, surveilled, and encouraged to oppose the union resolution. 

The staffers spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional retaliation. In total, the five agencies provide legal and social services to more than 360,000 people each year.

The resolution expresses solidarity with Palestinians, calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, and demands an end to Israel’s occupation, decrying apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. With a “yes” vote, the union would also oppose future military aid to Israel and endorse the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel. 

At the Legal Aid all-staff meeting on Thursday, Carter, the CEO, said the resolution was antisemitic. “These statements call for the elimination of the state of Israel and the annihilation of the Jewish people,” Carter said. “You don’t have to agree, but that’s how some of our colleagues feel, and some of our supporters.”

“Accusing Israel of being an apartheid state and of genocide are all dog whistles for antisemitism,” she said. She suggested Jewish readers of the statement might see it the same way Black people would see pro-police sloganeering: “And, again, as a Black woman, my closest analogy is hearing how people talk about ‘blue lives matter’ or other things that land on me differently.”

“Accusing Israel of being an apartheid state and of genocide are all dog whistles for antisemitism.”

In a statement to The Intercept, the Legal Aid Society said it has a long-standing policy against taking positions on international political events and that it was focused on its mission to provide legal services to low-income New Yorkers. The organization said it rejected the union’s resolution, found it antisemitic, and hoped union members would vote against it: “The resolution is laden with coded antisemitic language and thinly veiled calls for the destruction of the State of Israel. At a time when our attorneys and staff should be united in support of the people we serve, the resolution does not advance the legal interests of our clients, does not comport with our mission and values, and is divisive and hurtful.”

Several hours after the meeting on Thursday, attorneys at the Legal Aid Society of Nassau County sued in New York State Supreme Court to stop the vote, saying it posed an ethical dilemma for attorneys that would make it “impossible for them to properly do their job as Public Defenders.” 

On Friday, the court granted a temporary restraining order enjoining the vote. Voting had gotten underway at 9 a.m. and only 15 minutes were left on the clock when the injunction was issued. The tally never got underway.

Cease-and-Desist Letters

On October 18, two days before the union at Bronx Defenders issued a statement opposing Israel’s occupation, ethnic cleansing, and “genocidal intent in Gaza,” management at the group sent a cease-and-desist letter warning that it would enforce trademark rights against any use of the organization’s name in the forthcoming statement. 

On Wednesday, the Bronx Defenders issued its own statement distancing itself from the union. The group said its union’s statement did not recognize the humanity of Israelis and was not consistent with the values or mission of the Bronx Defenders. 

Bronx Defenders staffers also reported to the union that human resources informed them that their draft emails were in violation of policies on internal communications. Management later apologized and said they hadn’t intended to look at staffers’ drafts. (Asked for comment, the Bronx Defenders referred The Intercept to its Wednesday statement.)

As staff at the Neighborhood Defender Services, a public defense group covering Harlem, considered putting out a union statement on Gaza in early November, they also received a cease-and-desist letter. The letter came attached to an email from managing director Alice Fontier, who said a public statement on Israel and Gaza fell outside the scope of the organization’s work. The attached letter, from an outside law firm, urged the union not to use Neighborhood Defender Services or any other trademarked nomenclature.

“We have seen the impact of a similar statement issued by Union members at the Bronx Defenders,” said the attached cease-and-desist letter. The letter noted that the petition to defund the Bronx Defenders had already gathered more than 1,500 signatures and was picked up by the New York Post, “which, unfortunately, is read widely by those in power in New York City government.” The city, the letter said, would soon be considering two major funding proposals for Neighborhood Defender Services. 

Neighborhood Defender Services’s Helmis Ortega Santana, who helped write the union’s draft statement, resigned on November 6 as union president after receiving the cease-and-desist letter. In his resignation letter, Santana said he was concerned that the statement would jeopardize the organization’s funding and its ability to serve clients, as well as ongoing contract negotiations.

Policies against international political speech in work channels weren’t previously enforced around discussion of the war in Ukraine, participation with pro-Israel groups, or international migration issues, according to public defense staffers who spoke to The Intercept. Now, these policies are being enforced for the first time in the case of speech related to Palestine, staffers said. Several of the public defense group have a record of putting out statements on major political events, including police brutality such as the murder of George Floyd, the movement to abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and former President Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban.”

In the Legal Aid staff meeting Thursday ahead of the union vote, Carter referred to an organizational policy to “not talk about sociopolitical views or anything outside of our mission and our clients.”

Correction: November 17, 2023, 11:32 p.m. ET
This article previously stated that Lisa Ohta, who is the president of the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, was a plaintiff in a suit brought against the union. Ohta was named as a defendant.

The post Public Defenders Get Restraining Order to Block Their Own Union From Voting on Gaza Statement appeared first on The Intercept.

On Tuesday, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton published an opinion piece in The Atlantic headlined “Hamas Must Go.” Why does she believe this? The subhead explains: “The terror group has proved again and again that it will sabotage any efforts to forge a lasting peace.” 

The article is the latest chapter of Clinton’s press tour following the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks, including an appearance on the daytime talk show “The View.” Both in The Atlantic and on “The View,” Clinton explained why a ceasefire in Israel’s current war on Gaza would be a terrible mistake.

Everything Clinton has said is part of a peculiar genre of self-defeating “liberal” propaganda on the topic of Israel–Palestine. Clinton is rational and informed and understands, as she writes in The Atlantic, that “the only way to ensure Israel’s future as a secure, democratic, Jewish state is by achieving two states for two peoples. … There is no other choice.”

She cannot acknowledge, however, the historical events that have led to the present situation, which clearly show that the primary obstacle to a two-state solution is not any Palestinian faction: It’s the government of Israel.

She repeatedly claims that it’s been Palestinians who have stood in the way of any kind of permanent peace. Of course, this makes her call for a two-state solution appear like the worst kind of liberal naïveté — and is therefore a huge gift to the U.S. and Israeli right. After all, if even the extremely liberal Hillary Clinton admits that Palestinians don’t want peace, why should Israel even try?

If even the extremely liberal Hillary Clinton admits that Palestinians don’t want peace, why should Israel even try?

The degree to which Clinton’s Atlantic essay is riddled with historical inaccuracies is startling, especially given that she brags about her “decades of experience in the region.” The article begins in November 2012 with a tale of her knocking on the door of President Barack Obama’s hotel room early in the morning during a visit to Cambodia. “Then, like now,” Clinton writes, “the extreme Islamist terror group Hamas had sparked a crisis by indiscriminately attacking Israeli civilians.” She and Obama debated whether she should fly to the Middle East and try to broker a ceasefire in what Israel had dubbed Operation Pillar of Defense. 

This was a difficult decision, she writes, because she and Obama “knew Hamas had a history of breaking agreements and could not be trusted.” Nevertheless, they decided she should go. She succeeded in negotiating a halt to the conflict, after about 100 Palestinian and two Israeli civilians died, along with military personnel on both sides. 

Clinton says she was left uneasy. “I worried that all we’d really managed to do was put a lid on a simmering cauldron that would likely boil over again in the future,” she writes. “Unfortunately, that fear proved correct. In 2014, Hamas violated the cease-fire and started another war.”

This is close to the opposite of reality. 

Sparking a Conflict

Israel had, in collaboration with Egypt, imposed a brutal blockade on Gaza since 2007. Blockades are arguably acts of war, and one place you can find it argued is on the website of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs: “The blockade is by definition an act of war, imposed and enforced through violence. Never in history have blockade and peace existed side by side.”

This is an excerpt from a June 1967 speech by Abba Eban, then the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, right after the end of the Six-Day War. Eban was explaining why Israel had not started the war, despite the fact that it had struck Egypt first. Because Egypt had imposed a blockade on the Straits of Tiran the month before, Eban said, it was actually Egypt who was responsible for the war.

In the years leading up to Operation Pillar of Defense, Hamas leaders said over and over that they were willing, at a minimum, to accept a long-term truce with Israel. Even the U.S. Institute for Peace, a think tank funded by federal government, acknowledged that Hamas had “sent repeated signals that it may be ready to begin a process of coexisting with Israel.”

This did not interest the Israeli government. On November 14, 2012, Israel assassinated Ahmed Jabari, the head of Hamas’s military wing. 

Gershon Baskin, an Israeli peace activist, had been in communication with Jabari long before the assassination. According to Baskin, Jabari had come to believe that it was in the best interest of Palestinians for Hamas to negotiate a long-term truce. Jabari, Baskin asserted, had on several occasions acted to prevent Hamas from firing rockets at Israel. In Baskin’s telling, just before the assassination, he gave Jabari a draft proposal for such a truce to review and approve. The draft was agreed to by Baskin and Hamas’s deputy foreign minister, and Baskin also said he had previously shown it to Ehud Barak, then the Israeli minister of defense.

After Israel assassinated Jabari, Reuven Pedatzur, a military analyst for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, reported: 

Our decision makers, including the defense minister and perhaps also Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, knew about Jabari’s role in advancing a permanent cease-fire agreement. … Thus the decision to kill Jabari shows that our decision makers decided a cease-fire would be undesirable for Israel at this time, and that attacking Hamas would be preferable.

Baskin himself told the story in a column for the New York Times. “Israel has used targeted killings, ground invasions, drones, F-16s, economic siege and political boycott,” he wrote. “The only thing it has not tried and tested is reaching an agreement (through third parties) for a long-term mutual cease-fire.”

While there had been tit-for-tat attacks, Israel’s assassination is widely seen as the proximate cause of the eight-day flare-up of violence in November 2012 — the one Clinton left Cambodia to deal with.

Breaking the Ceasefires

Clinton’s claim that “Hamas violated the cease-fire and started another war” in June 2014 is also highly misleading. 

The period from November 2012 to June 2014 was generally presented in U.S. media as one of quiet in the Israel–Palestine conflict, because in this time only seven Israelis — three soldiers and four civilians, of which three were West Bank settlers — were killed by Palestinians. During the same year-and-a-half period, over 60 Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza were killed by Israelis.

Among those killed were two Palestinian teenagers who were shot by Israeli forces on May 15, 2014, during a West Bank commemoration of the Nakba, the mass dispossession and expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 at the founding of Israel. Then, in June, three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped by Palestinians from a West Bank settlement.

To this day, it’s unclear what connection, if any, Hamas had to the abduction. At the time, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed, “Hamas is responsible, and Hamas will pay.” An Israeli intelligence officer, though, anonymously said that there was no evidence for this, and “we have come to conclude that these men were acting on their own.”

Hamas proposed a 10-year ceasefire. Israel studiously ignored this proposal and went on to kill over 2,000 people in Gaza.

In response to the kidnapping, Israel launched Operation Brother’s Keeper, during which it arrested hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank — most of whom were members of Hamas — and tortured many of them. It also killed seven civilians. It was all for naught: The teenagers were found dead several weeks after they were taken.

Escalations followed — Hamas fired rockets, doing little damage — until Israel launched Operation Protective Edge, another bombing and invasion of Gaza, on July 8. 

Several days later, Hamas proposed a 10-year ceasefire, on the condition that Israel would release the Palestinian prisoners, and the blockades of Gaza in the Mediterranean Sea and along its border with Egypt would be lifted. Israel studiously ignored this proposal and went on to kill over 2,000 people in Gaza, about two-thirds of whom were civilians. Seventy-two Israelis died during the operation, nearly all of them soldiers.

Revisionism

Clinton’s appearance on “The View” last week was propagandistic in all the same ways, with an added wrinkle of nonsense regarding President Bill Clinton’s involvement in the conflict. According to Hillary Clinton, “My husband with the Israeli government at the time in 2000 offered a Palestinian state to the Palestinians at that time run by [then head of the Palestinian Authority Yasser] Arafat. … Arafat turned that down.” She added, “There would have been a Palestinian state now for 23 years if he had not walked away from it.”

In reality, it was Israel that walked away from what was possibly the best chance there will ever be for a resolution to the conflict.

Bill Clinton did propose what he called parameters for a two-state solution in December 2000. In early January 2001, with less than a month to go in his presidency, Clinton announced, “Both Prime Minister Barak and Chairman Arafat have now accepted these parameters as the basis for further efforts. Both have expressed some reservations.”

Negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians continued later that month in Taba, Egypt. But they were terminated by Barak on January 27, ahead of upcoming elections in Israel. The negotiators issued a joint statement that the two sides had “never been closer to reaching an agreement and it is thus our shared belief that the remaining gaps could be bridged with the resumption of negotiations.”

Barak, however, was defeated by Ariel Sharon, who opposed a two-state solution and did not restart the talks. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs put out a statement that the Clinton parameters “are not binding on the new government to be formed in Israel.”

Bill Clinton has since lied over and over again about what happened, contradicting his own words at the time, claiming that Arafat was the one who rejected a settlement. 

There’s much more detail to this story, of course, but together Hillary and Bill Clinton have done an extraordinary amount of damage to any hope for peace in Israel and Palestine. If they really care about the lives of Israelis and Palestinians, they should both correct their farragoes of deceit — or, at the very least, just stop talking.

The post Hillary Clinton Is Lying About the History Between Hamas and Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

Led by Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rep. Greg Casar of Texas, the letter expresses “deep concern about the ongoing human rights violations in Pakistan,” which has been in a state of political crisis since the military-engineered removal of former Prime Minister Imran Khan last year. Khan was removed from office following a no-confidence vote organized by the military and his civilian opponents. The Leahy Law, as it’s often called, bars military assistance to government entities engaged in abuse.

According to a classified Pakistani intelligence document reported in August by The Intercept, the effort to remove Khan also came partly on the back of pressure from the U.S. government, which had been antagonized by what State Department diplomats privately called Khan’s “aggressively neutral” stance on the war in Ukraine. 

“Pakistan is the fifth most populous country in the world and has been a major US military partner since the Cold War, but you wouldn’t know it from the scarce attention it gets in the halls of Congress,” said Aída Chavez, policy adviser at Just Foreign Policy and a former reporter for The Intercept. “This letter from Reps. Omar and Casar is a welcome change at a time when the Pakistani military is systematically crushing its political opposition with tacit US support. The bare minimum we should expect of Biden and the State Department is to ensure that security assistance to Pakistan is in line with the Leahy Law, and this letter makes that demand.”

The letter expresses concern over news reports that Khan, currently imprisoned and facing a secret trial, potentially faces the death penalty. Khan faces widely derided charges related to the handling of the cable implicating U.S. involvement in his ouster. The members of Congress urged the State Department to send representatives to monitor the trial of Khan and others under persecution.

“We are unable to ignore the persistent reports of human rights abuses including restrictions on freedom of expression, speech, and religion and belief, as well as enforced disappearances, military courts, and harassment and arrest of political opponents and human rights defenders,” the Democrats write. “These violations not only violate the fundamental rights of the Pakistani people but also undermine the principles of democracy, justice, and rule of law.”

Reps. Cori Bush, André Carson, Joaquin Castro, Lloyd Doggett, Summer Lee, Ted Lieu, Jim McGovern, Frank Pallone, and Dina Titus also signed on.

The crackdown on Khan and his party, highlighted by the letter to the State Department, has entailed widespread arrests, disappearances, torture, and targeted killings of his supporters and Pakistani civil society in general. Citizens of Western countries, including U.S. citizens, have been caught up in this crackdown and imprisoned on allegations of taking part in demonstrations in support of Khan’s party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf. “[W]e remain concerned about the ongoing harassment and arrests of political opponents, including members of Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf, Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement, and human rights defenders who are charged with bogus cases to trample their right to free speech. Such acts of harassment do not only impact individuals, but deeply traumatize their families. This includes the former Prime Minister Imran Khan,” the letter reads.

The letter’s signatories, particularly Omar, are often accused of expressing concern around human rights abuses only when they are committed by Israel. But her criticism of Pakistan adds to the regular alarm she raises around abuses carried by, for instance, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The Pakistani military has relied for decades on a steady stream of U.S. security and financial assistance to maintain its privileged place in the country’s ruling establishment. During both the Cold War and the U.S. war on terror, the military has sought to serve as an ally to U.S. security interests even as the two countries have clashed over issues like Pakistani support for the Afghan Taliban. The U.S. government recently helped broker a much-needed bailout from the International Monetary Fund for Pakistan’s government after coming to an agreement to purchase arms for the military for use by the Ukrainian military in its war with Russia.

The possible cessation of this crucial U.S. support could be devastating to the Pakistani military. The country is expected to have elections next year, but Khan, the country’s most popular political leader, has been imprisoned and barred from participation. The letter from Congress targets this lifeline directly, warning that if some semblance of normalcy is not returned to Pakistani politics, along with the participation of Khan himself, the military may be in danger of losing its privileged relationship with the U.S. and the largesse that come along with it.

“We further request that future security assistance be withheld until Pakistan has moved decisively toward the restoration of Constitutional order, including by holding free and fair elections in which all parties are able to participate freely,” the letter reads. “We believe that the United States can play a constructive role in supporting positive change, and it is our hope that our cooperation can contribute to a more just and equitable future for the people of Pakistan.”

Correction: November 17, 2023, 10:45 a.m.
Joaquin Castro, a House member, signed the letter — not Julián Castro, his brother.

The post House Democrats Press Biden to Block Military Aid to Pakistan Over Human Rights Abuses, Jailing of Imran Khan appeared first on The Intercept.

This was the scene where Columbia students gathered last Thursday for a “peaceful protest art installation” and demonstration organized by the campus chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine. Hundreds of students demanded that Columbia publicly call for a ceasefire in Gaza, divest its endowment from corporations complicit in Israeli apartheid, and end its academic programs in Tel Aviv.

The next day, Gerald Rosberg, chair of the Special Committee on Campus Safety, announced Columbia had suspended its chapters of JVP and SJP through the end of the semester, citing an “unauthorized event” that “included threatening rhetoric and intimidation.” The announcement quickly drew widespread criticism, including from hundreds of Jewish faculty who denounced the “vague allegations” that served as grounds for the suspensions.

But amid the backlash, StandWithUs, a self-described “non-partisan Israel education organization,” lauded Columbia’s decision. “StandWithUs sent several legal letters to universities like @Columbia, urging them to immediately hold these groups accountable for the hate, fear, and harassment they incite on campus,” the group wrote on social media. “We hope more universities will follow suit.” 

Alongside Israel advocacy groups like the Brandeis Center, the International Legal Forum, and the David Horowitz Freedom Center, StandWithUs has spent years trying to shut down criticism of Israel on college campuses, often by weaponizing civil rights law. The groups allege that, while the political speech may be protected by the First Amendment, it fosters a campus climate of antisemitism in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits federally funded programs from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin. As students have ramped up pro-Palestinian demonstrations over the past month, Israel advocacy groups have escalated a pressure campaign of their own. 

Earlier this month, StandWithUs sent an open letter to thousands of universities addressed to the general counsel and vice president of student affairs, outlining actions colleges could take to ensure compliance with Title VI. The group’s recommendations include requiring student identification cards at protests, monitoring university communication channels for “biased statements about Israel,” and investigating student groups for ties to Hamas. The group has also sent a surge of direct letters urging administrators to clamp down on specific Palestine solidarity campus events. Meanwhile, on November 9, the Brandeis Center filed two Title VI complaints with the Department of Education against the University of Pennsylvania and Wellesley College. (The Brandeis Center also joined forces with the Anti-Defamation League to call on the presidents of nearly 200 universities to investigate their SJP chapters, alleging they could have ties to Hamas that would constitute “materially supporting a foreign terrorist organization.”)

“If you can’t win the debate because the facts aren’t in your favor, it’s pretty sensible to try to stop it altogether.”

According to Dylan Saba, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal, the groups tend to target “pretty mundane examples of pro-Palestine expression … because that’s precisely what these organizations are trying to get rid of.” But as Israel’s military assault over the past month has become “increasingly indefensible for the pro-Israel forces,” it’s spurred a new wave of Title VI threats.

“That’s what’s motivating the strategy to try to raise the stakes of Palestinian expression and organizing by getting universities to try to crack down on it,” said Saba. “If you can’t win the debate because the facts aren’t in your favor, it’s pretty sensible to try to stop it altogether.”

Crackdown at Columbia

The Title VI crusade adds even more fuel to the recent punitive actions against Palestine solidarity student groups. 

Since the start of Israel’s bombing of Gaza, students at Columbia have organized numerous protests, vigils, and rallies in a show of support for civilians in Gaza. As part of a nationwide “Shut it Down for Palestine” walkout on November 9, SJP and JVP arranged an art installation and rally.

One day later, the groups were suspended for the unauthorized event and “threatening rhetoric and intimidation,” making them ineligible to hold campus events or receive school funding for the remainder of the term. 

While university policy requires students to obtain a permit 10 days before an event, violations of policy usually result in a disciplinary proceeding against individual students, not an outright suspension of an entire organization, according to Katherine Franke, a law professor at Columbia University who has been serving as a faculty advocate for the sanctioned students. 

Franke noted that the organizations were suspended by a newly formed group, the Special Committee on Campus Safety, which was created with no advance notice and did not go through the standard University Senate Executive Committee approval process. Columbia’s website does not contain any mention of the Special Committee before the November 10 announcement, which did not elaborate on the new committee’s members or purview. 

“We don’t know who’s on it, who created it, what its authority is, under what rules is it operating.”

“We don’t know who’s on it, who created it, what its authority is, under what rules is it operating,” said Franke. Franke has asked Rosberg, the chair of the Special Committee, for more information about the new group and the specific rhetoric that led to SJP and JVP’s sanctioning. She says she has not received a response. 

Additionally, internet archives show Columbia quietly updated its student group event policy some time between June 12 and October 20 to include new language around the sanctioning of student organizations “for failure to obtain event approval and/or not abiding by terms of an approved event.”

“They edited the student conduct rules without any consultation with the groups that normally are required to be consulted,” said Franke. 

Columbia University did not respond to a request for comment.

During her 25-year tenure, Franke noted she’s seen “a lot of demonstrations,” from the Iraq War to 9/11. “All manner of things have been debated, protested, and the university’s structure was able to handle it,” she said. “But somehow, they had to create — without any consultation with any of the responsible governing bodies — a whole new way of dealing with these issues.”

Columbia is one of three private universities that have now sanctioned their SJP chapters in an unprecedented cascade of crackdowns on student organizing around Palestine solidarity. 

Earlier this month, Brandeis University announced an outright and total ban on its SJP chapter, claiming the group “openly supports Hamas.” On Tuesday, George Washington University suspended its SJP chapter from hosting on-campus events for three months.

Roz Rothstein, co-founder and CEO of StandWithUs, wrote in a statement to The Intercept that after the group sent letters to thousands of universities, “many responded privately thanking us for the letter or, in the days after receiving it, taking concrete action on their campuses, such as Columbia, Brandeis, and GWU banning SJP for the rest of the semester.” 

She added, “Other schools have notified us that they have launched independent investigations or task forces to address antisemitism. We look forward to seeing the results of those inquiries.”

Changing Standards

At Pomona College in Claremont, California, student organizers have also been challenged by a shifting web of guidelines. Samson Zhang, an editor of a student publication focused on leftist campus organizing called Claremont Undercurrents, noted that new policies seemed to arise in direct response to specific Palestine solidarity campus actions. 

In one instance, 150 students attended a vigil at the student services center. “It was very intentionally organized so that no club claimed it, and the messaging was that it was organized by everybody and nobody,” said Zhang. “That happened Friday, and by Monday they sent out an email with a new demonstration policy that an event is only compliant with the student code of conduct if there’s a specific student club that it’s registered under.” 

And, on November 7 — the day before a planned divestment protest — Pomona President Gabi Starr sent a letter to students and alumni with a reminder of campus demonstration rules. Claremont Undercurrents reported that one day before Starr’s email blast, StandWithUs sent her a letter expressing concern over the event. The letter urged the administration to take immediate action “to prevent discriminatory treatment of Jewish and Israeli students” and specifically noted that the administration has “the right to prohibit masks worn for the purpose of concealing identity.” Starr’s email similarly states that “masks that prevent recognition of individuals pose a challenge to the ability to maintain campus codes of conduct,” adding that students may be asked to remove them. 

In response to inquiries from The Student Life, a campus newspaper, Pomona’s spokesperson said Starr’s mention of masks “was in response to significant concerns related to our own campus — not in response to any outside organization.”

StandWithUs has targeted Pomona before. In April 2021, the Associated Students of Pomona College voted to ban the use of student government funds on items or companies that “knowingly support the Israeli occupation of Palestine” — a move that triggered a swift condemnation from Starr. That same day, StandWithUs sent a letter praising Starr for her statement and calling on her to use “whatever means at your disposal to invalidate this resolution.” Every student government representative that voted in favor of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions resolution that year was then doxxed on Canary Mission, a secretive website that posts public blacklists of Palestinian rights organizers.

One year prior, in February 2020, the David Horowitz Freedom Center wrote to Starr and Pitzer College President Melvin Oliver, claiming that the colleges had violated Title VI by fostering “pervasive, college-sponsored anti-semitism.” The Southern Poverty Law Center has classified Horowitz as an extremist, noting that “the Freedom Center has launched a network of projects giving anti-Muslim voices and radical ideologies a platform to project hate and misinformation.” 

“Political Cudgel”

A core ask from groups like the David Horowitz Freedom Center and StandWithUs is that university policies adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Association, or IHRA, working definition of antisemitism, which critics say falsely equates broad criticism of Israel with antisemitism. The IHRA definition found new footing in 2019, when then-President Donald Trump signed an executive order instructing federal agencies to “consider” the IHRA definition in Title VI enforcement. 

“IHRA expressly recognizes that criticism of Israel, similar to criticism of other countries, is not antisemitic,” wrote Rothstein of StandWithUs. “And it recognizes that some rhetoric and actions related to Israel do cross the line into bigotry.”

By eliding meaningful differences between critique of Israel and Jewish discrimination, said Saba of Palestine Legal, the groups warp claims of antisemitism into a “political cudgel” to be wielded against students voicing solidarity with Palestine.

The Brandeis Center’s recent Title VI complaint against the University of Pennsylvania conflates disparate events as uniform examples of campus antisemitism. The letter notes recent disturbing attacks against Hillel, a Jewish student organization, including bomb threats and an instance in which a Penn student vandalized the Hillel building and yelled “fuck the Jews.” But the letter also highlights Penn’s “Palestine Writes” literature festival, condemning the September event’s inclusion of speakers “known for their aggressive stance against the Jewish State.”

In November 2022, the International Legal Forum, an Israel-based organization dedicated to “fighting legal battles against terror, antisemitism, and de-legitimization of Israel,” filed a Title VI complaint against the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, after nine student groups banned supporters of Zionism from speaking at their events. In its complaint, the group wrote, “Zionism is an integral and indispensable part of Jewish identity.”

Since its founding in 2001, StandWithUs, which is registered as a nonprofit under the name “Israel Emergency Alliance,” has launched efforts to oppose “anti-Israel bias” in libraries, supported anti-BDS laws, and encouraged supporters to buy Caterpillar stock amid scrutiny over the construction company’s role in Israel’s demolition of Palestinian homes. The group recruits annual student fellows to serve as pro-Israel activists on American campuses nationwide and once invited Elvis Costello on a VIP trip in an attempt to convince the singer to change his mind about canceling concerts in Israel.

Last year, StandWithUs filed a Title VI complaint against George Washington University, after assistant professor of clinical psychology Lara Sheehi hosted a brown-bag lunch with a Palestinian professor, leading to a pressure campaign and an internal investigation that turned up nothing. “Many of the statements the complaint alleges were made by Dr. Sheehi were, according to those who heard them, either inaccurate or taken out of context and misrepresented,” the university said in a summary of its findings at the time, adding that Sheehi had “denounced antisemitism as a real and present danger” in classroom discussion. StandWithUs refuted this characterization. In February, Palestine Legal filed its own Title VI complaint against GWU for a “hostile environment of anti-Palestinian racism,” which cites the Sheehi case among others.

“The byproduct of all of this is that you have now a lot of obfuscation about what the meaning of antisemitism is and what constitutes antisemitism, which is very dangerous for Jewish students on campus,” said Saba. “It makes it much more difficult to be able to identify and work to eliminate real instances of antisemitism and threats to Jewish students, which tend to come from the political right.”

“It makes it much more difficult to be able to identify and work to eliminate real instances of antisemitism and threats to Jewish students.”

Meanwhile, many members of the Jewish community are resisting these groups’ efforts to conflate Judaism and Zionism, noting that their faith inspires resistance to injustice, not blanket support for a regime. 

“A lot of institutions across the country, and also at the university, have pushed this idea of a hegemonic Jewish community that all shares the same political beliefs,” said Rafi Ash, a Brown University sophomore who was one of 20 Jewish students arrested during a November sit-in at an administrative building organized by BrownU Jews for Ceasefire Now. “We all have been kind of disturbed by the ways in which a Jewish identity has been twisted in a way that makes it political.”

While the Department of Education is expected to field a new influx of Title VI complaints from organizations representing Jewish students, Saba noted that groups like Palestine Legal have also filed complaints regarding instances of anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic discrimination on campuses. The Department of Education has never made a finding of antisemitic or anti-Palestinian discrimination in any of its investigations so far, though that could soon change as the Israel–Hamas war puts Title VI in the limelight. The American Civil Liberties Union has begun to take legal action over the First Amendment rights of Palestinian solidarity protesters.

“We are in touch with many, many, many student groups across the country, and we are seeing a pattern of heightened scrutiny and suppression,” said Saba. “Fortunately, despite the mass suppressive effort, students are continuing to organize, continuing to speak out, and are refusing to be silenced. We’re seeing one of the largest upsurges in pro-Palestine organizing and demonstration that we’ve ever seen.”

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The letter, sent on Wednesday, urges Sanders to introduce a Senate companion bill to a ceasefire resolution introduced last month in the House of Representatives. The Sanders convention delegates also called on him to support an end to the Israeli blockade of Gaza, the occupation of Palestinian land, U.S. military funding for war crimes against Palestinians, and the expansion of Israeli settlements. 

“Palestinians require more than just a ‘humanitarian pause.’”

“We’ve progressed beyond the stage of seeking mere condemnations or symbolic gestures,” the delegates wrote. “We concur with your assertion that these ‘unspeakable crimes’ must cease and that ‘the bombs and missiles from both sides’ should be halted. But Palestinians require more than just a ‘humanitarian pause.’” 

The House resolution was introduced by by Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo.; Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.; André Carson, D-Ind.; Summer Lee, D-Pa.; and Delia Ramirez, D-Ill. The House resolution now has 18 co-sponsors. So far, at least 31 members of Congress, including Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., have come out in favor of a ceasefire — although Durbin and others conditioned their calls on the release of Israeli prisoners in Gaza. 

The letter comes three weeks after hundreds of Sanders presidential campaign alumni sent a letter urging the senator to back a ceasefire. Since that letter’s release, Sanders has all but supported a ceasefire: calling for a humanitarian pause; to “stop the bombing”; and saying Congress, the Biden administration, and the world “must take action.”

“We Need Him Now, More Than Ever”

Sanders’s delegates delivered the letter to the Vermont senator one day after more than 115 former staffers for President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama — including former Biden chief of staff Ron Klain and former Treasury Secretary and Harvard University President Lawrence Summers — applauded Biden for his “staunch support of Israel.” The former top administration officials lauded Biden’s proposed $14.3 billion in military aid for Israel. 

It also follows a decision by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D. N.Y., and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., to join Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., and Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, at Tuesday’s March for Israel in Washington, D.C., where the quartet proclaimed, “We stand with Israel.” 

Hours later, Israel invaded Al-Shifa hospital, the Gaza Strip’s largest hospital, where thousands of displaced and injured civilians were trapped, including dozens of premature babies. 

Wednesday is the fifth consecutive day that the Gaza Ministry of Health has been unable to update its death toll, owing to a lack of fuel and power that has totaled the health care system, making tallying the dead and communications nearly impossible. The last time the ministry updated the death toll, on Friday, Israel had killed 11,078 people.

“As a Jewish person of conscience watching Israeli genocide in real time, I say, not in my name, not with my tax dollars, shall Israel bomb and deprive a trapped population, half of them children, of water, food, medicine and fuel,” said Marcy Winograd, a 2020 Sanders delegate from California’s 24th congressional district, and a co-founding member of the Los Angeles chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. “As a Jewish member of Congress, Senator Sanders’ voice would be particularly persuasive in demanding an end to Israel’s violations of international law that shock the world to leave us feeling unmoored from our own humanity.”

The latest letter adds to a growing opposition among Democrats against unconditional U.S. support for Israel. Over a dozen former Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., campaign staffers, 411 current congressional staffers, 400-plus current Biden administration employees, 500-plus former Biden campaign alumni, 133 Obama staffers and appointees, and 260 former presidential campaign staffers for Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., issued statements demanding support for a ceasefire. More have since signed on.

“From coastal cities to rural valleys like mine, millions of young people turned their attention to politics for the first time in 2016 and 2020 because we shared Bernie’s vision for peace and justice,” said Taran Samarth, a student organizer and 2020 Sanders delegate from Pennsylvania. “We need him now, more than ever, to champion those values once more and call for a ceasefire in the face of the Biden administration’s unconditional support for the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”

The post More Than 300 DNC Delegates for Bernie Sanders Push Senator to Call for Ceasefire in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

In a letter sent on Friday, the 133 alumni asked Obama to “leverage” his influence to push his former vice president and other elected officials toward supporting a ceasefire, brokering the release of Israeli hostages and Palestinian civilians, and setting a path for collective peace.

The House ceasefire resolution — led by Reps. Tlaib; Cori Bush, D-Mo.; André Carson, D-Ind.; Summer Lee, D-Pa.; and Delia Ramirez, D-Ill. — has 18 members supporting it. At least 24 members of Congress, including Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., have come out in favor of a ceasefire.

The list of signatories on the Obama letter is not public, with some of the signers fearing professional retaliation for their stance. But they are hopeful Obama will be receptive; despite his checkered history in the Middle East, he has historically been more open than most other U.S. politicians to the Palestinian cause.

In an essay three weeks ago, Obama reiterated support for Israel to defend itself against Hamas but cautioned for how the country would pursue the goal, noting that already Israel’s bombing had killed and displaced thousands of Palestinians, including children, in Gaza. He stressed “acknowledging that Palestinians have also lived in disputed territories for generations; that many of them were not only displaced when Israel was formed but continue to be forcibly displaced by a settler movement that too often has received tacit or explicit support from the Israeli government; that Palestinian leaders who’ve been willing to make concessions for a two-state solution have too often had little to show for their efforts; and that it is possible for people of good will to champion Palestinian rights and oppose certain Israeli government policies in the West Bank and Gaza without being anti-semitic.”

And, at a staff reunion last week, Obama called to maintain “what on the surface may seem contradictory ideas,” saying, “What Hamas did was horrific, and there was no justification for it. And what is also true is that the occupation, and what’s happening to Palestinians, is unbearable.”

“You have to admit that all of us are complicit to some degree.”

Contrary to Obama’s more measured statements, on Tuesday, a letter signed by more than 115 former Joe Biden and Obama staffers — including former Biden chief of staff Ron Klain and former Treasury Secretary and Harvard University President Lawrence Summers — applauded Biden for his “staunch support of Israel” and the proposed $14.3 billion in military aid for Israel. Tuesday is the fourth consecutive day that the Gaza Ministry of Health has been unable to update its death toll, as lack of fuel and power has made tallying the dead and communications nearly impossible. The last time the ministry was able to update the death toll, on Friday, Israel had killed 11,078 people.

The signatories cited Obama’s own words throughout the letter, including at an event in Jerusalem over a decade ago where he said that “neither expulsion or occupation is the answer.” They asked the former president to encourage U.S. leaders to instead focus on goals including accomplishing a ceasefire, the release of hostages and imprisoned civilians, and the establishment of a path to collective peace and Palestinian self-determination.

Khalilah Harris, former deputy director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans, told The Intercept that she signed on because “there cannot be silence in the pursuit of peace and justice,” adding that Obama, “whose commitment to those efforts is undeniable around the globe,” is a proper voice for the moment.

“I joined and devoted my youth to the Obama/Biden admin because of the courage it inspired in me. The root of all of President Obama’s speeches was courage and justice,” Valentina Pereda, the former deputy director of Hispanic media in the White House, said, describing how some colleagues have remained fearful or hesitant to voice their opinion. “It felt like the spirit of courage had been replaced by one of complacency and fear. I don’t want to live my life that way,” she added.

Citing former State Department official Josh Paul — who, though having helped facilitate weapons transfers for years, resigned out of moral disagreements with the Biden administration’s approach to Israel — the signers describe Israel’s retaliatory war against Hamas as “shortsighted and a detrimental miscalculation.” Paul, as they note, said the Biden administration’s “impulsive reaction built on confirmation bias [and] political convenience” is “decades of the same approach that have shown security for peace leads to neither security, nor to peace.”

“In a world that has dehumanized and securitized people who look like me, President Obama reminded us we belong, and we must demand justice and accountability,” said Rumana Ahmed, former senior adviser to the deputy national security adviser. “What we are witnessing has implications for Palestinians and also for the whole world.”

The Obama alumni letter joins a rising tide of voices opposing the United States’s unconditional support for Israel. Over a dozen former Sen. John Fetterman campaign staffers, 411 current congressional staffers, 400-plus current Biden administration employees, 500-plus former Biden campaign alumni, and 260 former Elizabeth Warren presidential campaign staffers issued statements demanding support for a ceasefire (and more have since signed on).

“We cannot be bystanders to a historic collapse of empathy,” the former Obama staff wrote. “We only live once on this earth. And what we do with that time and space is what we are accountable for. It is our legacy and our duty to generations that follow. And while history does not move in a straight line, we have the choice on where we stand.”

The post Obama Alumni Call on Former President to “Leverage” Influence for Gaza Ceasefire appeared first on The Intercept.

The 89-page lawsuit, filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights in a California federal district court, traces 75 years of history and analyzes acts committed and rhetoric espoused by the Israeli government that exhibit a disregard for international law. It is accompanied by a declaration from a genocide expert who describes Israel’s actions as signs of genocide and argues that the Biden administration has breached its duty under international law to prevent it. 

“Under international law, the United States has a duty to take all measures available to it to prevent a genocide. Yet, Defendants have repeatedly refused to use their obvious and considerable influence to set conditions or place limits on Israel’s massive bombing and total siege of Gaza,” the lawsuit reads. 

“Despite escalating evidence of Israeli policies directed at inflicting mass harm to the Palestinian population in Gaza,” the Biden administration has opposed “a life-saving cease-fire and lifting of the siege, even vetoing United Nations measures calling for a ceasefire,” the lawsuit continues. “Instead, their actions to fund, arm, and endorse Israel’s mass and devastating bombing campaign and total siege of the Palestinians in Gaza constitutes a failure to prevent an unfolding genocide and complicity in its development.”

The Biden administration’s opposition to a ceasefire comes despite mass protests across the U.S. (and the world) urging the government to act to save Palestinian lives, and the suit follows dire warnings from human rights and United Nations experts that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza and that its actions may amount to a genocide. The Center for Constitutional Rights, or CCR, a U.S.-based nonprofit, itself warned Biden, Blinken, and Austin last month that they could be held responsible for failing to prevent — and indeed supporting — Israel’s crimes in Gaza. 

“To be culpable, the provider need not share the recipients’ genocidal intent.”

In their lawsuit, the plaintiffs ask the court to enjoin the U.S. officials from providing further military, financial, or diplomatic support to Israel. In a press release, CCR said that some courts have identified “the providing of weapons and other materials to the perpetrators of genocide as a form of complicity. To be culpable, the provider need not share the recipients’ genocidal intent.”

The Pentagon declined to comment, and the White House and State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 

Israel has severely escalated its campaign against Gaza in recent days, spurring hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to leave their homes in northern Gaza for the southern part of the strip. The bombing campaign has targeted locations that American officials have described as sacred, including hospitals and corridors that Israel had designated as “safe.” Gaza officials have deemed some hospitals out of service because of the intensity of the bombing, to the point of removing babies from incubators.

Meanwhile, after weeks of American officials prodding Israel to follow international law, Israel’s own officials are clear about their intentions. “We are now actually rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” Avi Dichter, Israel’s Minister of Agriculture and former Shin Bet security agency head, said on Saturday.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit include the Palestinian human rights organizations Defense for Children International – Palestine and Al-Haq; Gaza residents Omar Al-Najjar, Ahmed Abu Artema, and Mohammed Ahmed Abu Rokbeh; and U.S. citizens Mohammad Monadel Herzallah, Laila Elhaddad, Waeil Elbhassi, Bassim Elkarra, and “A.N.,” who all have family members who have been killed and displaced by Israel’s war.

“To be honest, it’s difficult to revisit all the scenes of the past weeks. They open a door to hell when I recall them,” said Al-Najjar, a 24-year-old intern physician who works at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis, Gaza, in a statement. “I’ve lost five relatives, treated too many children who are the sole survivors of their families, received the bodies of my fellow medical students and their families, and seen the hospital turn into a shelter for tens of thousands of people as we all run out of fuel, electricity, food, and water. The U.S. has to stop this genocide. Everyone in the world has to stop this.”

The plaintiffs trace their case back to the 1948 Nakba (Israel’s displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians) and up to the present day to demonstrate Israel’s persistent violations of human rights and international law. The lawsuit notes that in September, for example — just weeks before Hamas’s attack on Israel — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held up a map before the U.N. General Assembly titled “The New Middle East” that totally erased the existence of Palestine.

The lawsuit also presents a meticulous timeline from October 7 up to November 8, detailing the scale of violence Israel has inflicted upon Gaza, including its siege and bombing campaign that has now displaced nearly 2 million Palestinians and killed over 11,000. It details Israel’s targets during the military campaign, including repeat bombings of refugee camps and hospitals, and statements by Israeli officials that demonstrate a disregard for international law.

“The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy,” Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Daniel Hagari said on October 10, discussing the “hundreds of tons of bombs” Israel had already dropped by then.

“Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction,” said Israeli Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian. “You wanted hell, you will get hell.” 

Since those remarks, the Israeli military has waged a campaign that has left millions of Palestinians displaced, thirsty, hungry, sick, and without fuel; launched indiscriminate airstrikes; and used white phosphorus, a chemical weapon that causes burns, in densely populated areas, in direct contravention of international law.

Biden, Blinken, and Austin, meanwhile, have repeatedly affirmed support for Israel. In one instance, after it was widely reported that Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called Palestinians in Gaza “human animals,” Austin assured his counterpart that the U.S. was ready to deploy additional military aid to Israel. 

Biden, backed by nearly every congressional Republican and most Democrats, is preparing to send $14 billion in military aid to Israel. (Biden’s request to Congress for the funding includes an unprecedented loophole that would allow the White House to approve $3.5 billion in future weapons sales without notifying Congress, In These Times reported.) The lawsuit notes that Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid since World War II. As of January 2023, America had sent $260 billion (adjusted for inflation) in military and economic aid to Israel since 1946, and as of March, Israel had $4.4 billion worth of American-provided munitions.

In the diplomatic arena, the U.S. has repeatedly used its veto power in the United Nations to block resolutions critical of Israel’s human rights and international law violations. Amid the current war, the U.S. has opposed multiple resolutions calling for a ceasefire. 

“We have lost so many people, but there are still many more who are living, and we owe it to them to do everything possible to stop this genocide,” said Herzallah, one of the plaintiffs with family in Gaza. “I have done everything in my power: I have participated in protests, sit-ins, wrote letters to my representatives, civil disobedience. Now I am asking the courts to end this ongoing genocide.”

The post Palestinians Sue Biden for Failing to Prevent Genocide in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.