No Boots on the Ground, but Feet in the Water? Cardin/Trone & AIPAC today...Red lines for Ukraine but not for Israel? Washington's Farewell Address, 1796: did he "anticipate" AIPAC's nature?
While Gaza lies in ruins and is starving, the Kerch Bridge to Crimea Still Stands...Biden's State of Union Address: cuts late credit card fees, silent on outrageous card interest rates...
Palestinians wait to receive food at refugee camp in Rafah on Jan. 27th; by Saher Alghorra/Middle East Images/AFP/Getty Images. From the CNN online report: “Catastrophic Hunger in Gaza.” March 7, 2024.
Update, March 17, 2024
A lot has happened since I posted my essay on Wednesday the 13th of March. Let’s start with Senator Majority Leader Schumer’s speech on Thursday, the very next day. I’ve kidded people that it was my phone call to Schumer’s office late on Wednesday afternoon which prompted him to do this, but seriously, I’m sure he had been working on the idea and testing it for a least a couple of days prior to that. And my plea to him, whom I instinctively went to because of his intelligence and my perception of his decency despite his closeness to Wall Street writ large - was this: If the logic of PM Netanyahu’s policies were carried out all the way to the elimination of Hamas (an impossibility I think, given the military dynamics, the facts on - and under - the ground) the world would see 90,000 dead Gaza residents and 270,000 injured based on where we are now with estimates of 10,000 of Hamas’ soldiers killed out of 30,000: very rough estimates to be sure.
Well, here is the link to Schumer’s entire speech, read for yourself from the Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/full-text-of-senator-chuck-schumers-speech-israeli-elections-are-the-only-way/
I think, not being an “expert” in the details of all the struggles there around Israel’s founding in 1948 but being a citizen who has followed along perhaps closer than average due to the extensive coverage given in the NY Review of Books since its founding in the early 1970’s and its especially long and detailed articles about the two major attempts to have a peace process, that Senator Schumer is laying out a pretty conservative case for the right of Israel to exist on historical grounds, and some form of Palestinian state as well, though of course, one without military means.
I would think with so many scholars all over the political spectrum on the many “nodes” - contested nodes - which the Senator emphasizes, someone could rebut, qualify or support them as their own judegments dictate. I can live with most of Schumer’s points - the question is whether Palestinians and Arabs more broadly can as well, and here we come back to the late Mr. Yassir Arafat (1929-2004) walking away from the Camp David meetings late in the administration of Bill Clinton, walking away on July 25, 2000 - these meetings being the last gasp attempts to build on, or perhaps better, rescue the Oslo Accords from 1993. Here is where scholars would have to step in to scrutinize Schumer’s historical outline. Looming up as deeply contested points are the right of return for Palestinian exiles, East Jerusalem territorial and religious issues, how much land the Palestinians have given up overall from their hopes…the question of the boundaries from the 1967 war…enough for books galore on these issues alone.
But having said all that, what Schumer did was still courageous to criticize policies he sees as leading Israel and possibly, the US, to a foreign policy disaster and more bloodshed in the Middle East.
And the responses to his speech prove that it was a gutsy call: universal Republican condemnation, Netanyahu’s outrage at interference with another democracy’s choices (you have to put AIPAC on a shelf somewhere in the desert but not in US politics to swallow that line) and even Maryland’s new Senate Candidate, Republican Larry Hogan writing the exactly predictable response in the Wall Street Journal today, March 17, 2024, which I will not bother to link to.
And Senator Cardin’s response to his fellow champion of Israel, the senior Senator from New York: well, a very muted five paragraphs the following day, up on his own Senate website, citing Schumer’s courage but not really endorsing his stance on Netanyahu.
In my March 13th posting of a 2100 word letter I wrote to Cardin after his “Washington’s Farewell” speech in the Senate, I pointed out that Washington’s comments about political parties and staying away from foreign entaglements carried more weight in the overall speech than Cardin’s defense of US-Israel ties by emphasizing Washington’s analogy on not betraying personal friends. And going further to prove my point is the fact that when Washington wrote his address in 1796 for US neutrality in foreign affairs aside from short emergency arrangements, he was walking a fine line in betraying old friends himself from our Revolution, not the least of which was his “adopted son,” General Lafayette. It was the events after France had written its new Constitution and the Rights of Men/Citizens in 1789, the violent turn the Revolution took after 1791, the Terror, which tells me that Washington was writing no nation a “blank check” of loyalty no matter what they did after the initial friendship. Terror or not, France being the only other major Republic of the day, was soon fighting all the enraged monarchs in Europe: Prussia, Austria-Hungary, Britain, Russia…but even those fearsome odds could not overcome the repugance felt by some in the US towards the Guillotine and methods of the Civil War in France itself. And it got worse, as with France’s conduct in fighting in Spain, brutal guerilla tactics and atrocities on both sides. The world has some famous artwork testifying to that, the prelude to Guernica from the 1930’s. No, no blank checks for former allies, remembering here even the fact that it was French supplies, French troops and then France’s naval intervention which allowed the new Republic to triumph at Yorktown, and even given that Washington remained in touch with the French volunteers who served as officers under him, later intervening to save the imprisoned Lafayette’s life when he was unable to walk the tightrope of shifting loyalties required to negotiat the swings in French Revolutionary politics.
And just one final question: what am I missing, if anything, of the coverage of these events in Maryland, given Ben Cardin’s prominence, the audacious speech given by Senator Schumer, Larry Hogans partisan response (remember Mr. Bipartisanship himself?)…I hope somewhere there is a vigorous debate inside Maryland for the sake of its citizen’s if not its journalists themselves, but so far, it hasn’t reached my “in” basket, I’ve had to go looking for it - in vain.
Best to my readers.
Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
As I work on a much longer piece for my “World On Fire” series, on foreign policy, I have been unable to keep silent, of course, about ongoing developments. And outrages. Therefore, I’m going to continue to share a portion of my letters back to Senator Ben Cardin which I have also sent to some additional members of the Maryland delegation as well as other Reps. in Congress whom I know personally. Cardin’s recent feature of postings to constituents, with an expedited means of response returns, seems to have emerged as the world-wide backlash against Israel’s continuing destruction of Gaza, if not the Palestinians themselves, intensifies.
The logic of Israel’s method to destroy Hamas forever, which was apparent and horrific even by week two in October (all one had to do was listen to the analogies used by the PM and members of his cabinet), has not deterred them in their revenge, even as the death toll in Gaza tops 31,000 with some 70,000 injured. If the bombardments have slowed down, the starvation practice of trickling in aid worsens. The world is not fooled. And everywhere Democratic officials go to speak, they are meeting protesters in the streets and in the Congressional hearings - even on the DC roads to the State of the State Address last Thursday, March 7th, calling for a prolonged ceasefire, cessation of military aid to Israel, the release/exchange of the hostages. One would have thought, along Israeli lines of tactics, that by mid-March after five months of the most intensive bombardment since the Vietnam war, that Palestinians doing the dying, suffering and starving would be publicly pressing the Hamas leadership for a change of values and course of action. I haven’t found any evidence of that, have you, Senator Cardin?
On those missing dynamics, I thought it might be useful to consider the work of Martin Evans, his 2012 book on “Algeria: France’s Undeclared War (1945-1962). It has some sobering lessons for Israel and the US: that the most militant and violent parts of the “insurrections” against colonial and settler regimes tend to push aside the more compromising, accomodationist ones. Well, you can cite books which prove that isn’t the nature of Israel’s situation, but I think the facts on the ground, in Algeria and in Gaza-West Bank-Israel, point to a different reality. Here is a description of the May, 1945 “signal” uprising in the Setif area of Eastern Algeria, with the rebel forces calling for a complete break with France: “Chanting ‘Holy War in the name of Allah’ and ‘Allauh Akbar’ racial and religious hatreds, fuelled by hunger, produced indiscriminate anti-settler violence…Over the following three days 102 Europeans were killed. Much of it was crude face-to-face violence, followed up by ritualistic dismemberment where genitals were cut off and placed in the mouths of corpses, breasts slashed, throats slit, and bellies disembowelled.” (pages 86-87).
Of course, when the ritual is repeated today, the horrors and tactics must be condemned, and if visited upon powerful nation states there will be all hell to pay in retribution, but until more moderate voices prevail - and it looks like these have to emerge from Gazians/Palestinians in exile - there is no short run hope. Until dissenting voices right inside Gaza emerge - in Hamas itself - and can be protected from certain assassination, things don’t change, and outside Arab nations are going to have to take the lead spinning such thin threads of hope.
Things have intensified, to say the least. President Biden has “escalated” his criticism of the Israeli Government, threatening undefined “red lines” - presumably over the pending attack on the Southern Gaza city of Rafah, as well as the continuing difficulty of getting humanitarian supplies into Gaza. Now Biden is twisting himself and the US into strange policy shapes with the already-in-motion military “seaside pier” construction project, the 21st Century version of the WWII D-Day, June, 1944 “Mulberry Harbors” that allowed cargo ships to unload offshore at two of the famous five Normandy beaches to floating bridges which met the beaches.
It’s not a flattering exposition of US policy “logic” to consider that we supply the military aid to keep Gaza in ongoing ruins and the humanitarian aid to a deliberate and cruel Israeli-designed trickle, refuse to cut off that military aid or even suspend it “until” - and then have to build a way around our own policies to try to avert, in the clumsiest and “iffyiest” way, an even worse disaster of outright starvation and amazingly still yet to unfold: widespread disease outbreaks.
Meanwhile, my letters below will fill in all the red lines the US has drawn over aid to Ukraine in “honor” of Putin’s nuclear blustering. Prime Minister Macron of France, instead of “toes in the offshore waters” has broached the idea of French “boots on the ground,” in Ukraine itself, keeping “all the military options on the table” for Ukraine and against Putin, supported by some Baltic states, while President Biden keeps repeating no US boots on the ground there, his “piers in the water” off Gaza offering a Monty Python contrast of twisting himself and our nation into a policy pretzel. Macron has broached the correct military and foreign policy response to Putin’s ground pressure on Ukraine and the US Republican hard right’s siding with Trump and Putin. Macron of all people! Wasn’t it not too long ago when “keeping all the options on the table” was the standard US warning to not push us too far in foreign policy provocations?
Still, Biden shies away from what Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed, building on the work of Senator Van Hollen of Maryland (to his credit) to pass a bill cutting off military aid to Israeli because of US policy requirements that such aid not impair humanitarian aid. The details are here (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/us/politics/democrats-biden-israel-letter.html) Sanders being joined by seven Democratic Senators including Elizabeth Warren. I support them.
And Van Hollen sticking his neck out to save lives in this disaster did not go “unrewarded.” On March 11, Jewish Insider reported that 70 Maryland Rabbis had protested the Senator’s stance on Israel. (See the article by Marc Rod: ewishinsider.com/2024/03/maryland-rabbis-urge-van-hollen-to-change-course-on-israel-rhetoric/
Meahwhile, continuing a theme I raised in my response to Senator Cardin’s use of the annual Washington Fairwell Address honorary speech, I said AIPAC seemed to me to be exactly the type of domestic danger that Washington warned would be a possible if not likely consequence of too close a relationship (either friendship or hatred) with a foreign power. That was way back in September of 1796. For those who want to read all of Washington’s dignified address, here’s the link: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CDOC-106sdoc21/pdf/GPO-CDOC-106sdoc21.pdf
I had already known, though all too recently, that Rep. David Trone (D, D-6), running hard and expensively for retiring Senator Cardin’s vacant Senate seat, contributed $100,000 to AIPAC, and has done so on a regular basis for some time. But I needed a refresher course in what that meant, aside from “ironclad” support of the State of Israel and its policies.
Today, I got some of that “instruction” in a letter I received from the Working Families Party, filling us in on AIPAC’s plans for the Democratic Primaries now on the table in 2024. here’s the Email I received, only some of the fundraising details edited out, and a Washington Post version of the coalition and AIPAC’s response here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/11/israel-palestinians-aipac-2024-election-squad/82da3e74-dfa7-11ee-95aa-7384336086f3_story.html ;
William,
This year, Republican megadonors are planning to spend at least $100 million in Democratic primaries to unseat some of our biggest progressive champions in Congress — all through AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
Today, we are fighting back:
The Working Families Party is joining more than 20 other progressive groups and allies to demand that Democratic elected officials and candidates reject AIPAC and their Republican megadonors, once and for all. We know we can beat back their attacks and protect our champions — but only if we all do our part.
AIPAC has spent years supporting extremist MAGA Republicans, including those who tried to overturn the 2020 election.
Now they are aiming their sights directly at Black and brown progressives in Congress who have called for a ceasefire, the safe return of hostages taken by Hamas, and an end to Netanyahu’s siege of Gaza civilians — even as polls show that Democratic voters overwhelmingly support a ceasefire and oppose the U.S. sending more blank checks to the Israeli military.
The Republican megadonors fueling these attacks also know that this $100 million effort will also help MAGA achieve their ultimate goal in November: recapturing the White House for Trump and regaining full control of Congress.
But our champions in Congress who are under attack have won election after election in their districts because they fight for the constituents they represent — and represent the views of their constituents.
If we all come together and make sure we have the resources we need to fight back, we can defeat AIPAC’s Republican-funded primary challengers and preserve the progress we've fought so hard to achieve.
In solidarity, always,
Working Families Party
Given the participation of conservative GOP funders, and their targets, it’s pretty clear to me that AIPAC has taken on, besides its traditional “ironclad” support of Israeli and its policies, a very conservative tack against the most Progressive wing of the Democratic Party. In the WaPo article AIPAC denies it has turned to the right, but stop and think what its ironclad support for Israel means under P.M. Benjamin Netanyahu: the country has reduced the Israeli left to tiny trickle, amidst 6-7 parties in the Knesset, and the Religious Right has come to dominate the tenor of domestic and foreign policy, and keep the PM moving Right. In that sense, the drift of Israeli politics has matched the Right turn in the US, right down to the successful attempt to dominate the Supreme Court. And the American far Right, especially Protestant fundamentalists, is wedded to Israel no matter what, with the most blood-thirsty quotes from the Old Testament on “smiting” your adversaries likely to emerge in a discussion, just as they did from the PM himself. Right alongside his justification for the destruction of Gaza in the Allied saturation bombing of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during World War II.
Biden’s State of the Union Address:
And so I gave Working Families $10.00. That’s a commentary in itself, isn’t it, compared to Rep. Trone’s annual $100,000 to AIPAC. And I’ll share another story with you, about Biden’s “fighting” State of the Union Address from last Thursday. I was glad to see the “life” and the “fight” in him, so long overdue. I doubt Joe Manchin saw any of that. But I was scratching my head over the once again typical Joe Biden “brokering” on policy.
I, like so many millions of Americans rely on credit cards to bridge the gaps in income which we need but don’t have, in my case because I’m below the median income from Social Security and NJ never increases its retired worker pensions. No adjustments, period. I never miss a payment, and have only once in decades gotten a late payment penalty. Why then, President Biden, encourage even the poorest of the poor by cutting their penalties for late payments, since the banks and credit card retailers can still retaliate, as the Wall Street Journal quickly noted, by raising their interest rates, cutting the amount of credit extended, and lowering their credit rating. Or worse?
My response was I guess triggered in part because I had just received a notice from a major retailer based in Maine that their bank, Citibank, N.A., was raising my credit card interest rate to 31.4% come mid-April, even though I’ve never…(you know the refrain by now…).
What ever happened, Mr. President, to the notion from Senator Sanders and Rep. “AOC” from 2019, when they sponsored legislation to limit credit card interest charged to 15% APR in a bill subtly entitled the “Loan Shaark Prevention Act.”?
My memory, damn it, goes back to the late William Greider, of “Secrets of the Temple” fame, reminding our parties that at one time, all the major religions forbid “usury,” but you don’t here much about those ancient practices now. Who’s running the show, by the way, the banks or the citizens through their parties?
Why have no Democrats signed on to a Republican reprising of the notion - Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri’s bill - which would cap credit card rates at 18% APR?
Senator Schumer, what’s your response? Senators Cardin and Van Hollen?
Yes, Mr. President, I know: you’re a capitalist and pro Labor too, at the same time, no contradictions. As long as we don’t have historical memories, much less ones that go way back to that Second Bill of Rights from 1944.
And now readers, on to my recent correspondence:
From the Wall Street Journal, Dec. 30, 2023, “The Ruined Landscape of Gaza”: Beit Lahia in north Gaza on Dec. 26th, following Israeli bombardment: Photo: Agence France Presse/Getty Images.
From March 2, 2024
Dear Senator Cardin:
I read with interest you letter expounding upon the political wisdom of our first President. However, I do have some return questions in applying his advice when it comes to American-Israeli relations.
First, is not our relation to Israel, since at least the Seven Days War in June of 1967 a very good example of "entangling" if not permanent alliances? I thought the former UN Ambassador from South Carolina, at the time running for President in the Republican Primary, and responding to an audience question at a CNN town hall, captured the current state of the relationship: "The US ought to do exactly as Israel wants and needs. There should be no difference in the two countries policies." Shocking in its absolutism, doubly so in light of the war in Gaza.
As he has done in the war on Ukraine, President Biden, following Haley's advice, has no clear strategic goal in mind in either Ukraine or Gaza. Israel may have had one, to "wipe out" Hamas but their own estimate of the nature of Hamas' relationship to the people of Gaza, military fish swimming in a civilian sea and embedded with the civilian infrastructure like barnacles on piers, ought to have told the world what the likely result of Israeli tactics would be: slaughter on a grand scale, the "grandest" since the US saturation bombing of North Vietnam.
In the Ukraine, Biden and German Chancellor Scholz have delayed and denied all the weapons systems which might have given the outgunned and out-manned Ukrainians a chance to hold off the Russians, but in every case the West has been intimidated by Putin's nuclear bluster, even as retired US Commander in Europe, Gen. Ben Hodges, says it is just that, bluster, because other than intimidation, Putin's nuclear rattling has no rational gain for Russia: instead, as Biden has made clear, any nuclear use by Russia in the War will bring an overwhelming NATO response. But time and time again: tanks, planes, long range missiles, (and the famous US unmanned killer drones rarely talked about) we kneel to the threat that Hodges has put in a more realistic perspective. Again, what's the US policy: stalemate, leading to negotiations and territorial loss to Ukraine, or victory by pushing Russia back to the 1991 borders? I'm for the later and whatever it takes to achieve that, including "boots on the ground" and "NATO in the skies." Hodges agreed, by the way with President Macron’s gambit to put French troops on the ground without specifying the type of deployment, as part of keeping "everything on the table." Of course, since before the invasion in Feb. of 2022, Biden has told Putin very clearly what he will not do, which is very helpful to Putin and been a bloody disaster for Ukraine. Again, General Hodges makes more sense of the war and Putin's thinking than Biden, Blinken and Sullivan.
And finally: as Israeli policy not only reduces Gaza to rubble, and starves the population, Israel, despite repeated requests to allow foreign journalists access to Gaza, has denied it only on reasons which apply to almost all wars: it’s too dangerous. But I see this Israeli policy as the extension of Washington's fear of "permanent alliances" with foreign powers: the American people are being denied independent assessments in the propaganda war between Hamas and Israel.
Women IDF soldiers posing in front of Gaza Ruins: AP collection Week of Feb. 22, 2024; Image from Feb. 19, 2024 (AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov)
How "democratic is that"? About as democratic as keeping someone as knowledgeable about the Middle East and Foreign Affairs as Chris Hedges off the major airways; I would love to see him debate you, Senator Cardin, at a CNN town hall, on just what Israel is about in Gaza, because as events unfold his analysis is closer to the truth than the American political median. Certainly the overall policy towards Palestinians is very close to Apartheid (a clue as to why South Africa has brought forth its charges), and continued shelling and bombing with no plan for evacuation except a cruel shell game, like Russian roulette, within Gaza itself, coupled with settler policy in the West Bank - are meeting the thresholds, given 100,000 casualties - of ethnic cleansing, and I'll let the legal scholars in front of the International Tribunals adjudicate the final, shameful charge against a people/nation who were themselves the victims of the practices under Nazi rule, 1933-1945.
It's not the dangers to journalists keeping them out of Gaza. After all, Israel hasn't been terribly troubled by the long list of dead Muslim journalists; it rather is the fear of documenting not the letter of Israel's policy, but the facts on the ground, well on the way to Apartheid and Ethnic Cleansing.
As far as Hamas is concerned, it's dictatorial internal policy means there is no political process inside Gaza and Palestinians on the ground in Israel itself. More broadly, no Gandhi, Sadat, or MLK to struggle for a two state solution, only an Arafat and an Abbas. And come to think of it, all but Abbas were assassinated for their efforts. Hope for the Palestinians is going to have to come from someone of their cause, in exile, who does not support pushing Israel into the sea, with the backing of the states who were willing to sell the Palestinians out in the Abraham Accords, which is already a tall order of running the political odds.
Just to be clear then, a tragedy of enormous proportions, failures on all sides. But Israel is the superpower of the region, and the bankruptcy of their policy in Gaza is turning the whole world, including US voters, against them, which means, given the embrace between the two countries, against the US as well. I doubt Washington would be taking political donations from AIPAC, based on what you have laid out in your most recent correspondence.
I guess the best way for me to summarize the two US policies, towards Israel and Ukraine, is that Gaza is starving and lies in ruins, and the Kerch Bridge is still standing. No restrictions in one case, all of Putin's in the other.
Sincerely,
William R. Neil
Frostburg, MD
Picture by Alex xxx1979 May 2, 2021 for Wikipedia. For my readers: the Kerch Bridge is the longest in “Europe,” connecting the south-western portions of Russia near the Sea of Azov to the Russian occupied Crimean Peninsula, some 12 miles away. It was completed in 2018, is Putin’s pride, four years after his invasion of Crimea in 2014. It has been attacked seriously at least three times, the greatest damage occuring on Oct. 8, 2022 when a tractor trailer full of explosives detonated just as a train carrying flammable cargo was passing on the two separate spans of the bridge: auto and rail. Less damaging attacks occured on July 17 and Aug. 12 of 2023. The military analysis I read says that barring great luck, it doesn’t get knocked down until Ukraine obtains the larger and longer range missiles which Germany and the US are currently denying.
March 12, 2024
Dear Senator Van Hollen:
Thank you very much for signing on to Senator Sanders’ letter and the law which must bar military aid to Israel if they block humanitarian aid.
Anyone who stands up against AIPAC when they are wrong deserves our admiration.
As I continue to ponder Washington's Farewell Address in light of Senator Cardin's letter to constituents (March 2, 2024) I would note the following: Senator Cardin makes a mountain of policy out of Washington's mere aside, that friendships between nations, like between individuals, should not be casually discarded, and yes Senator Cardin, we got the message in that observation. What you left out was that Washington feared that when and if our nation became so bonded to a foreign power, either in hatred or admiration, it raises the danger that the foreign power will enter into the factionalism of American domestic politics that Washington was also warning against, in fact it was his very first warning in the address.
I can't think of a better example of this aspect of Washington's address that the senior Senator from Maryland ignored than that of AIPAC in American policy formation - foreign policy and domestic policy, since now AIPAC is launching a campaign against "the squad" in aiding candidates to run against them. This reminds me of the courageous intellectual stances taken by Professors Mearsheimer and Walt in 2006-2007 in tackling the questions about both the issues I have raised in this letter.
Once again, I remind readers that while Gaza lies in ruins and starvation, the Kerch Bridge leading to Crimea is still standing, and while aid to Ukraine has had to endure many and I would add, crippling red lines drawn out of fears of Putin's nuclear bluster, aid to Israel has had no such obstacles, and only recently has had one line drawn by President Biden over the coming offensive in Southern Gaza. Maybe. Let's hope he defends such lines, when he draws them, better than he did in negotiating with Senator Joe Manchin.
Sincerely,
William R. Neil
Frostburg, MD 21532
Postcript: I’m adding in the briefing which Justice Democrats has supplied about AIPAC. I think you will find it instructive. I received it as an Email, March 12, 2024.
By the way, I have not been a recent contributor or member of either Justice Democrats or Working Parties families, aside from a $10.00 contribution today to fight AIPAC. I do think I might have given to the WPF’s once or twice before over the past ten years.
William,
We just launched a coalition of 20+ progressive groups united to demand the Democratic Party reject AIPAC, but you might be wondering, who is AIPAC anyway?
Otherwise, here’s an explainer on AIPAC and why we’re taking them on:
AIPAC stands for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a lobby group founded in the 1950s to build bipartisan support for Israel in Congress.
For most of AIPAC’s existence, it didn’t get involved in elections. They didn’t need to. But following the groundbreaking elections of AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley, Congress for the first time had members willing to speak out for Palestinian human rights. The Democratic base began to shift on the issue, recognizing Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestinians.
As a result, in 2021 AIPAC formed its own PAC and Super PAC known as United Democracy Project (UDP) that waded into Democratic primaries, spending millions against progressive, pro-peace candidates like Summer Lee and Ilhan Omar.
Let’s be clear: AIPAC’s campaign spending is a sign of weakness. Unconditional support for Israel’s far-right government has been significantly weakened, particularly among Democratic voters. AIPAC’s tactic of last resort is to threaten to spend millions of dollars to silence anyone who may speak out for Palestinian human rights.
So where does AIPAC’s funding come from? While they claim to be bipartisan, AIPAC is fueled by massive donations from millionaires and billionaires, including right-wing megadonors who’ve donated to Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Nikki Haley. The same people trying to re-elect Trump are bankrolling AIPAC’s primaries against the Squad.
AIPAC’s dark money influence is widespread: last cycle, only 33 out of 535 members of Congress did not receive money from the group's network. Who AIPAC targets, however, is a narrow group of candidates and elected officials. AIPAC’s Super PAC exclusively spends against Democrats in primaries — particularly young, Black and brown progressive champions like the Squad. In fact, more than 85% of the money UDP (AIPAC’s Super PAC) has spent has been against candidates of color.
Not only that, but AIPAC has ardently endorsed and contributed to 109 Republican insurrectionists who denied the 2020 election results, as well as more than 200 anti-abortion Republican extremists. They recently congratulated retiring Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on a job well done for his decades of work stonewalling progress, stacking the SCOTUS with Republicans, and pushing a far-right agenda.
All in all, AIPAC is a right-wing organization, and it’s our job to build a movement to expose their right-wing agenda to all voters so that they are rejected by the Democratic Party, following the same path as other lobby groups like the NRA.
That fight starts now. AIPAC and its affiliates are going all-out to try and take down the Squad and any other Democrat who expresses support for a ceasefire and peace in Gaza. Last year, they announced plans to spend an unprecedented $100 million in this year’s elections. They’ve already run attack ads against Jamaal Bowman, Summer Lee, and Cori Bush while hand-picking their primary opponents.
Enough is enough. It is time for the Democratic Party as a whole to do what’s right and stand up against AIPAC’s threat to our democracy.
We’ve defeated AIPAC and its millions of dollars of right-wing megadonor money before — now more than ever, we need to do it again, and we need to put an end to their interference in our Democratic elections.
In solidarity,
Justice Democrats
Best to you all,
Bill Neil
Second Bill of Rights Greened
Economy, Ecology, Equality
Second Bill of Rights, Greened
Economy, Ecology and Equality
In a rather timely fashion, no sooner had I put Senator Schumer front and center in my first comment, but on Thursday, March 14th, he took to the Senate floor to give a long and objectively dramatic and strategic speech on Israel, Gaza and the Netanyahu administration. On a nature hike yesterday, I was musing about how Meliville's Captain Ahab might be the right analogy for the Israeli Prime Minister, because he seems to me, and apparently many others, bent on taking his whole nation and perhaps the US down with the Pequod in his pursuit exterminating the White Whale of Hamas.
Today Schumer after a long justification of his creditentials to speak as someone who loves Israel and gave it long historical justifications "to be there" in addition to the Palestinians, said that Netanyahu had to go via new elections, along with his policies crushing civilians in Gaza: he was dragging down Israel's reputation among the nations. Schumer, given AIPAC et al, I think has struck a courageous stance, and of course was condemned by the Republican Right, with Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell leading the way in blasting Schumer's recommendations. Here's the NY Times account: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/14/us/politics/schumer-netanyahu-israel-elections.html
This is rare: high level policy advocating against the conduct of a long time ally in public, not behind closed doors or the usual hidden diplomatic channels. Whatever one thinks of Schumer's problematic relation to Wall Street and the ethereal heights of Neoliberal capitalism, is a smart man, and on the whole, a decent one.
No surprise, AIPAC has attacked Schumer for this speech. A week ago, Schumer was addressing AIPAC and the nature of the conflict in Gaza in terms that upset a lot of progressives, in religious terms of the Torah, and apparently minimizing Palestinians historical claims. Very complex grounds here, so it must have been shocking to AIPAC and the Republicans to hear Schumer's speech earlier today. Peace and a lasting solution seem very far away, as do even a meaningful ceasefire, and to break the strangle hold of previous positions of both Hamas and a Right-wing dominated Knesset, there is going to have to be statemanship, not politics of the highest order, and risk taking on the order of Sadat's - in the Arab world and inside Israel. And here in the US as well. Tragic that it takes 100,000 casualties to begin to shake everyone out of their pre-existing stances. And inside Hamas...? We have no idea, it's like a sealed tomb.
The NY Times, seemingly a step or two behind the AIPAC situation and the liberal-left groups rallying to oppose it, ran the following story today: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/13/us/politics/aipac-israel-gaza-democrats-republicans.html
It doesn't tell you anything new beyond what I've just reported with my copies of the fund raising efforts from Working Families and Justice Dems to stop AIPAC, and the transformation of a mainly FP lobbying organization into a full spectrum conservative effort to smash the liberal left in Congress. I took much note of Senator Schumer's comment at the very end of the article: "As long as Hamas exists...no chance for a two-state solution." Well, fair enough, but it supposes no changes possible in either side. I read it this way and just passed this read on to Schumer's office which listened with politeness: If killing 1/3 of Hamas's 30,000 fighters - which is about where the stats and analysis put the situation today, has cost 30,000 dead Gazians and 70,000 wounded, to get the other two thirds of Hamas fighters, we're looking at maybe 90,000 dead and 210,000 wounded. I asked if those numbers, which are logical projections, were acceptable to Senator Schumer? Of course you don't get answers to questions like that. I closed by saying that the Senator is a very smart man whom I respect...Do the math, Senator, is that acceptable to you? I would also note that these are not dynamic figures, they're static projections. Everytime a see a newly bombed heap of rubble in Gaza, I see hundreds of fighting age men not in any uniforms trying to peel away the debris to get at survivors. What is the ongoing action adds 50.000 new fighters to the HAMAS total, which, psychologically to me is an equal if not higher proposition that 50,000 young Gazian men turn out to demand all Hamas leadership step down. Go figure.