Jew World Order

Nailing Jell-O to a Wall

A new regime takes over in Washington and just like that the monotonous press conference is back. Out go the carnival barkers gripped by imperial bluster, in come the liberal interventionists well-versed in DC doublespeak.

This brand of stuff rarely goes viral. You don’t have the Vox Video Guy on the beat anymore. You have to put in a bit more effort. Fortunately (the indispensable) Dave Reed has collected all the State Department briefings over at our YouTube channel. There’s been some interesting stuff lately.

At the end of March, Politico’s Nahal Toosi asked State Dept. spokesperson Ned Price whether the Biden administration thought the West Bank was occupied by Israel. He would not give a straight answer. The next day he confirmed that it was occupied.

“In fact, the 2020 Human Rights Report does use the term ‘occupation’ in the context of the current status of the West Bank,” he explained. He added that, “this has been the longstanding position of previous administrations of both parties over the course of many decades.”

On April Fool’s Day, Price was asked a follow-up question on this front by the Al Quds Daily‘s Said Arikat. Read to the end for the punchline:

QUESTION: Thank you. Just to be redundant on the issue of occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, why can’t you say it is occupied, without all the caveats? Can you say that it is occupied, that you acknowledge that position? It’s been like this since 1967.

MR PRICE: Well, Said, and that’s precisely what I said yesterday.

QUESTION: Right.

MR. PRICE: It is a historical fact that Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights after the 1967 war. That’s precisely why the 2020 Human Rights Report uses that term in the current context of the West Bank. It has been the longstanding position of previous administrations of both parties over the course of many decades. Do we think that the West Bank is occupied? Yes.

QUESTION: Mm-hmm. Okay. Let me just follow up on that. I mean, if you consider it occupied – I know you’ve taken a very strong position in the past; you’ve called for ending the occupation of the Ukraine immediately and so on. Why can’t you call for this occupation to end immediately and all the human rights abuses that go along with enforcing it immediately? Why can’t you call for that?

MR PRICE: Said, what we are calling for – and this really gets to the root of this challenge – is that two-state solution.

Amazing. That same day Price had this intriguing exchange with the AP’s Matt Lee:

QUESTION: All right. On the Middle East. Yesterday Shaun tried to nail you down without success – not his fault – on the question of settlements and the occupation. And I want to take another stab at it today, because frankly it’s confused a lot of people and it’s – your position is, to be frank, clear as mud, right? You said in response to him yesterday that, on settlement activity, that you want both sides to refrain from any actions that might hurt or will hurt a two-state solution. Does settlement activity in the West Bank or construction in East Jerusalem hurt prospects for a two-state solution or not?

MR PRICE: Matt, on this, I want to be clear. And we have said this from the start. We believe when it comes to settlement activity that Israel should refrain from unilateral steps that exacerbate tensions and that undercut efforts to advance a negotiated two-state solution. That includes the annexation of territory. That includes settlement activity. We’ve been equally clear when it comes to the potential actions of the Palestinians, whether that is incitement to violence, providing compensation for individuals in prison for acts of terrorism. That, too, moves us further away from a two-state solution. Our goal in all of this is to advance the prospects for that two-state solution.

QUESTION: Okay. So that’s a little better, I think, or a little more clear, not like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall. But does this administration intend to be as forceful in its opposition or criticism of settlement activity as the Obama administration was? Do you know?

MR PRICE: We intend to do everything we can to advance the prospects for a two-state solution. We intend to do that with the knowledge that it is in the interests of – consistent with the interest and values of the United States, but importantly, consistent with the values and the interests of Israelis and also Palestinians. This is something that successive administrations have sought to do; it’s something that we will seek to do.

Shortly after this press conference I read that Israel is planning to expand its illegal settlements in occupied East Jerusalem, directly challenging the Biden administration. It will move forward with a 540-unit extension of the Har Homa settlement. We can be confident that Price will have an excuse for why this can’t be stopped and that excuse will be extremely boring.

UNRWA Funding

This week the Biden administration announced that its resuming U.S. assistance to Palestine including U.N. Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA. This has predictably generated hysterical responses in the United States and Israel. Lawmakers are angry that $150 million might go to refugees, despite the fact that Israel gets $3.8 billion. New York Rep. Lee Zeldin (who is apparently running for Governor) said that Biden was rewarding terror and inciting violence.

There’s been some concise, instructive explainers on this issue. I’d start with Lara Friedman’s legislative roundup from last week. It goes into detail, but she summarizes the issue with a little FAQ:

Q: Is it true that Congress cut off all aid to UNRWA during the Trump era?

A: No, that is not true.

Q: Is it true that the Trump Administration cut off all aid to UNRWA to comply with the will of Congress?

A: No, that is not true.

Q: In that case, why did the Trump Administration cut off all funding to UNRWA?

A: The Trump Administration cut off all funding to UNRWA for its own political/ideological  reasons.

Q: So what DID Congress do/say with respect to UNRWA funding during the Trump era?

A: The short answer is that Congress continued support for UNRWA during the Trump era in a manner consistent with that support under previous administrations.

Then a Twitter thread from Omar Baddar is worth your time. I have stuck it together as two paragraphs below:

I don’t want to trivialize the importance of this, very vulnerable people rely on this aid. But US policy under Biden remains deeply harmful to Palestinians, including these refugees. The US enables Israel’s occupation, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid through unconditional military funding and diplomatic protection, allowing Israel to commit a range of atrocities, including keeping these refugees trapped in horrible conditions, unable to go home. Basically, the US pays billions to Israel to oppress Palestinians, then pays millions in aid to Palestinians to help them survive the very oppression the US funds. Palestinians aren’t victims of a natural disaster in need of aid, they are victims of oppression in need of freedom!

The bar for applause cannot be Biden’s reversal of *some* of Trump’s worst policies; we need a FUNDAMENTAL change in US policy on Palestine/Israel, which at bare minimum should include ending US complicity in Israel’s crimes. We need true accountability!

Odds & Ends

🇺🇸 Human rights groups had called on the Biden administration to take a stand against land mines, but it looks like that won’t happen. A Defense Department spokesman told The Daily Beast that Biden will maintain Trump’s embrace of the explosive devices and referred to them as “a vital tool in conventional warfare.”

✉️ Last month we covered an Angela Davis event that got delayed at Butler University after pressure from pro-Israel campus groups. A group of Zionist students with the group Hillel wrote a letter to the school’s paper, claiming to speak for all Jewish students and claiming their views are under attack.

A group of Jewish students have now responded to that letter with one of their own:

To us, it is apparent that Israel does not exist for the benefit of the Jewish people. The false presentation of critique of the state of Israel as antisemitism is a distraction from the central issue regarding Zionism — the displacement and oppression of the Palestinian people. We, being Jewish activists with no less claim to our identity than the Zionist members of Hillel, have a right to make our voices heard on this matter without being homogenized into collaboration with a government that we believe to be racist and oppressive. 

Let us be clear: antisemitism does exist on Butler’s campus — but in no way does it stem from the student organizers of color who are fighting to have their humanity recognized. It exists in the coded language that many of us know all too well; the prevalent conspiracy theories about Jewish billionaires secretly running the world, the invocation of tired tropes and caricatures and ‘harmless’ jokes made at the expense of our long history of systemic oppression. To eliminate the real, prevalent antisemitism at Butler, we must stand in solidarity with other members of Butler’s campus who doggedly fight to dismantle white supremacy in our community. 

🇮🇱 This Sunday CUNY will vote on a resolution to adopt the IHRA working definition of antisemitism.

🇵🇸 Great thread from DCI-Palestine that I recommend checking out: “In honor of #PalestinianChildrensDay, our child-led protection teams created several videos to educate other children about their rights. DCIP trains 450+ children on 60 teams across the West Bank to monitor rights violations and advocate for increased protections.”

🗽 Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had a public chat with the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York. Her comments on Israel were confounding and vague at best.

⚖️ The Biden administration lifted the Trump sanctions on ICC prosecutors, but they still oppose the investigations into alleged U.S. and Israeli war crimes.

🇾🇪 Activists with the Yemeni Liberation Movement are on a hunger strike in Washington, DC demanding the Biden administration end its support for the Saudi-led blockade on Yemen. I interviewed Monica Isaac, who participated in the hunger strike. “We really want to stress that what we’ve gone through is just a fraction of what the people of Yemen deal with,” she told me.

Stay safe out there,

Michael

Source