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The pro-Israel lobby has swayed US presidents since Truman. It must end with Trump

August 11, 2026

Collage of US presidents surrounding a map of Israel — Illustration: Jordan Bohannon/The Guardian/Getty Images/White House

Our new book tracks the growth over nearly eight decades, of the most powerful foreign policy lobby in US history

Ian Lustick and Eli Clifton, The Guardian, Sun 2 Aug 2026

In 1948, with war raging in Palestine, Harry Truman found himself trapped.

On one side were Zionist lobbyists and the president’s domestic political advisers, who were urging him to support the establishment of a Jewish state in as much of Palestine as possible. On the other were his top foreign policy and national security officials, led by the secretary of state, George C Marshall. Their unanimous recommendation was to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state, which they believed would trigger war in the Middle East and endanger the future of US relations with the Arab and Muslim world.

With the exception perhaps of George Washington, no diplomatic or military leader in American history had a reputation for patriotic virtue and skilled devotion to duty comparable to that of Marshall. Truman was in awe of the secretary of state, who, as chief of staff of the US armed forces, had been hailed by Winston Churchill as “the true organizer of victory” in the second world war. After the war, it had been Marshall who launched the plan named after him to rebuild Europe.

In the mid-1940s, Marshall pushed quietly but steadily against the Zionist movement’s proposals to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. He was concerned that American support would open opportunities for the Soviet Union to exploit Arab anger, put Middle Eastern oil supplies at risk in the event of a war between the Soviet Union and the United States, and require the deployment of unavailable American troops to prevent bloodshed and instability in Palestine. These were, indeed, the strongly held views of virtually all of Truman’s most important military and foreign policy advisers.

Exploiting the fact that most voters were ignorant or uncaring on the issue, the [Israel] lobby used enormous resources … to punish or reward politicians

Truman was personally and deeply moved by the suffering of Jewish survivors of the Nazi “Final Solution”, but also irritated by and at times furious with the constant hectoring to which he was subjected by campaigners for recognition of a Jewish state in Palestine, including the World Zionist Organization and a host of other Jewish delegations, friends and politicians. Despite his personal exasperation, he could not ignore them. Coming in an election year that would pit him against Governor Thomas Dewey of New York, pressures from the Zionist lobby forced him into an excruciating and embarrassing position.

With Palestine engulfed by civil war, Arab states threatening to invade and the last British soldiers about to leave the country, Truman called a meeting of his top advisers on 12 May 1948. According to Marshall’s own account of the meeting, he warned Truman against adopting the policy strongly advanced by Clark Clifford, his main political adviser, to recognize the state of Israel before it was established.

two men shake hands — President Harry Truman shakes hands with secretary of state George Marshall in Washington DC on 29 May 1947. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Such a move, according to Marshall, would be a “transparent dodge to win a few votes”, he said, leaving the “great dignity of the office of the President … seriously diminished”. Marshall declared he would not personally be able to vote for Truman should he bow to political pressure on the issue. A shaken Truman closed the meeting by saying he agreed with Marshall.

However, within two days, exquisitely sensitive to the tenuousness of his hold on the presidency and the power of Zionist sympathizers to throw New York’s electoral votes to the Republicans, he ordered that the US recognize Israel.

Today, the influence of the groups loosely known as the Israel lobby has only become more powerful. Truman’s bind – caught between his sense of the national interest and the domestic political price of defying a powerful lobby – was something that, in the decades to come, president after president would experience.

the flags of israel and palestine overlapping

To fast forward: Donald Trump’s decision to go to war on Iran earlier this year came after a sustained campaign by Israel to convince the US to join the disastrous operation. It also came in defiance of several of his top advisers, as well as the 45% of Republicans who hold an unfavorable view of Israel. That decision may be most quickly explained as yet another example of the erratic policymaking that define Trump’s two terms as president. But a closer examination of the experience of several of his predecessors reveals that this presidential decision is more the rule than the exception.

The fact is that from Truman to Trump, most American presidents have caved to the demands of Israel and its advocates. Driven by the fear of domestic political defeats, presidents have regularly rejected or abandoned foreign policies that both they and their most senior advisers believed were in the best interests of the US and at the expense of making meaningful progress in bringing a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Our new book, Israel’s Lobby, tracks the growth over decades of the most powerful foreign policy lobby in American history. Composed of a panoply of organizations, groups and individuals who advocate American policies that explicitly favor the interests of Israel, the lobby was nurtured – and has been encouraged and guided – by Israeli governments. Exploiting the fact that most voters were ignorant or uncaring on the issue, the lobby used enormous resources and concentrated attention to punish or reward politicians at every level depending on their willingness to follow lobby instructions.

Over 20 years after the Truman episode, for example, President Gerald Ford launched what he referred to as a “reassessment” of US policy in the Middle East. The initiative had been advanced by Ford and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, as a way to escape from two years of embarrassing failures to move toward a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace agreement. Both Ford and Kissinger had become intensely dissatisfied with Israeli stonewalling.

two men speak with each other in a train — President Gerald Ford talks with secretary of state Henry Kissinger, in Vladivostok, Soviet Union, on 23 November 1974. Photograph: Consolidated News Pictures/Getty Images

The reassessment was conducted by the committee of “Wise Men” convened by Kissinger: former government officials who had served as pillars of the postwar US foreign policy establishment. The unanimous recommendation of the committee was pressure on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza Strip in order to achieve a comprehensive peace, in cooperation with the Soviet Union.

Clear indications that Ford intended to accept this recommendation triggered a powerful mobilization by leading Israel lobby organizations, such as the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations and the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac). The lobby’s decisive achievement was a letter drafted by Aipac and delivered to Ford demanding that the president “make it clear … that the United States, acting in its own national interests, stands firmly with Israel in the search for peace in future negotiations”, signed by 76 senators.

Ford was “mad as hell” at what he believed to be an Israeli campaign to use the lobby to obstruct diplomacy. But he was cowed. To protect his chances for election the following year, Ford rejected the unanimous recommendation from the “Wise Men”, returning instead to the step-by-step process that had so infuriated him, a process of essentially buying slices of the Sinai Peninsula – seized from Egypt in 1967 – from Israel with increasing amounts of aid and then returning them to Egypt. Ford and Kissinger also vastly increased the scale and scope of US support for Israel.

That included a sweeping new collection of US political, economic, military and diplomatic commitments made in a US-Israeli Memorandum of Agreement that, along with secret annexes, was signed on 1 September 1975. Aides to Kissinger described the guarantees and concessions made to Israel in these negotiations as “mind-boggling” and “simply incredible”. In his memoir, Ford wrote bitterly about the Aipac letter signed by three-quarters of the Senate that had ruined his diplomatic plans and cast a pall on his election campaign.

A peace dove holding an olive branch tries to fly but is weighed down by a heavy metal ball chained to its leg.

Indeed, Ford lost the election to Jimmy Carter. The lobby hoped Carter, who won 71% of the Jewish vote, would abandon aspirations for a comprehensive Middle East peace, but he was quick to disappoint. The president set his sights on a peace treaty resolving the core issues of the Arab-Israeli conflict. With high poll numbers and an American public that seemed ready for a commonsense, problem-solving president, Carter voiced his belief in March 1977 in the need for a “Palestinian homeland” as a key feature of the Middle East peace he wished to achieve.

The pro-Israel lobby immediately mobilized against Carter’s peace initiative. In a closely held 50-page memorandum for the president in early June, Carter’s senior adviser on domestic political affairs warned him that he would suffer serious consequences, including risks of failing to receive the renomination of his party, as a result of lobby opposition to his public consideration of a Palestinian homeland. Undeterred, Carter offered direct criticism of what he described in an Oval Office meeting as the prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s increasingly inflexible positions. His differences with Menachem Begin, who became Israel’s prime minister in May 1977, were even sharper. Meanwhile Carter began intensive communications with Egyptian, Syrian and Palestinian leaders.

In October 1977, the US secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, issued a joint communique with Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, committing the superpowers to achieving “as soon as possible a just and lasting settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict”. Though fully expecting opposition to the president’s Middle East policy, the administration was stunned by the nearly apoplectic reaction to the US-Soviet statement by both the Israeli government and the lobby. Profoundly concerned with the political damage, Carter requested a meeting with the Israeli foreign minister, Moshe Dayan, in New York. According to Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, who was present at the meeting, “Dayan in effect blackmailed the President by saying that unless he had assurances that we would oppose an independent West Bank and that we would give them economic and military aid, he would have to indicate our unwillingness in his public statements here in the United States … ‘I can go,’ said Dayan, ‘to the American Jews.’” Faced with this threat, Carter surrendered.

The next day, Vance and Dayan issued a joint statement summarizing a US-Israeli “working paper” prepared in the early hours of the morning. The statement affirmed negotiations would be dramatically scaled back and would not frame a Palestinian homeland as a central issue. The end result was a celebrated “separate peace” between Israel and Egypt that earned Carter, Begin and Sadat Nobel peace prizes, but also led to the isolation of Egypt in the Arab world and the assassination of Sadat. It also set the stage for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and settlement projects that resulted in Israel’s de facto annexation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

three men smile as they clasp hands — The Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, left; US president, Jimmy Carter, center; and Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin clasp hands on the north lawn of the White House after signing the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, on 26 March 1979. Photograph: Bob Daugherty/AP

It is likely, 13 years later, that President George HW Bush felt just as Carter must have felt when, faced with the Israel lobby’s ferocious opposition to his Arab-Israeli peace initiatives, he made public his frustration with its influence. In a failed effort to boost the prospects for the upcoming Madrid peace conference, Bush suspended US loan guarantees amounting to what Israel was spending on housing in occupied territories and faced ferocious opposition from the Israel lobby for doing so. In a press conference he described his exasperation.

“We’re up against very strong and effective, sometimes, groups that go up to [Capitol Hill]” Bush said. “I heard today there was something like a thousand lobbyists on the hill working the other side of the question. We’ve got one lonely little guy down here doing it.”

The lobby’s ability to thwart presidential peace initiatives was on particularly powerful display again during the Obama administration. No president before him had entered the White House with such detailed knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, such a record of personal engagement with both Jews and Palestinians, and such a sustained commitment to closer American relations with Arabs and Muslims. Fully embracing a “two-state solution” to the problem, he launched a high-profile peace initiative to be jumpstarted by a full-scale Israeli freeze on West Bank settlements.

But a storm of outrage in Israel and among leaders of Israel’s lobby in the United States, and the public feud that erupted between Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu, proved more costly to the former than the latter. Obama quickly reversed course, in effect replacing his peace process envoy George Mitchell, who was closely identified as friendly to the Palestinians, with Dennis Ross, a lobby insider, whose advice to ditch the effort altogether the president quickly implemented. Instead of pressing Israel to stop settlements, Obama made a personal call to Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, threatening to pull $450m in American aid to the Palestinians if Abbas did not withdraw an anti-settlement resolution put forward at the UN security council. In Obama’s address to the United Nations, general assembly, in the first year of his second term, he shifted dramatically from language used in his previous UN speeches. Instead of criticizing Israeli settlements and pressing for a two-state solution, he identified himself with Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorism, opposed any UN action contrary to Israel’s insistence on direct negotiations between the parties, and condemned challenges to the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state.

three men in suits walk in a corridor — President Barack Obama, center, arrives with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, left, and Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, right, to make a statement on Middle East peace talks in the east room of the White House on 1 September 2010. Photograph: Jason Reed/Reuters

The reason for Obama’s dramatic retreat is easily inferable from his memoir, A Promised Land, in which he complains about Aipac’s ability to cow American politicians into obeisance by invoking fears of being labelled antisemitic, and emphasized his own particular vulnerability to such threats as “a Black man with a Muslim name who lived in the same neighborhood as Louis Farrakhan”.

In the wake of the genocide, the politics of the issue in America have changed as numerous Americans react with passion to Israeli onslaughts

More recently, in Joe Biden, the Israel lobby found a president who genuinely believed the Jewish state deserved the “special relationship” with the US. The firmness of that commitment was put to the test by Israel’s response to the 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Socialized into accepting the lobby’s mantra that any “daylight” between Washington and Jerusalem would encourage Arab intransigence, and remembering the political punishment Obama received for showing “tough love” to the Israelis, Biden, quashed all recommendations from his top advisers to do something meaningful to stop the Israeli onslaught on Gazan Palestinians. When he did make limited complaints about excessive civilian casualties and implemented minor delays in American resupply of Israeli armaments, the Republican Jewish Coalition responded by slamming the administration for inserting daylight into the US-Israel relationship, while Aipac sent a detailed memorandum to members of Congress defending Israeli actions as limited, necessary and designed to reduce civilian casualties.

The experience of these administrations demonstrates the wisdom and extraordinary insight of America’s first president, George Washington. In his Farewell Address, Washington warned that the American system of government could all too easily be exploited by a group with a “passionate attachment” to a foreign country. In a system designed to rely on the mobilization of countervailing power to limit the effects of factions driven by self-interest or very particular points of view, Washington argued that since any faction committed to the interests of another country would not naturally find its influence checked by effective domestic opposition, it would therefore drive the United States into exaggerated and dangerous commitments abroad and implicate it in quarrels and wars contrary to the country’s interests.

In the wake of the genocide, the politics of the issue in America have changed as numerous Americans react with passion to Israeli onslaughts in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank. Biden and Kamala Harris paid heavy costs for knuckling to Israel and its lobby. Nearly a third of voters who voted for Biden in 2020 and did not vote for Harris in 2024 said that ending Israel’s violence in Gaza was the top issue influencing their voting decisions. Across both parties, support for Israel has plummeted; 60% of Americans hold an unfavorable view of Israel, and a record number of Israel critics are winning congressional primaries.

But these losses have not deterred Israel or its lobby from working to reverse Trump’s 2024 campaign promises to avoid wars in the Middle East, to pursue even closer relations between the US and Israeli militaries, and to spend millions to thwart the rise of critics of the country.

The surface of the earth spinning like a vortex with a Palestinian flag at the center.

To be sure, American supporters of Israel and its governments have every right to express their opinions and work to shape public policy, and the lobby is by no means the only vehicle for moneyed interests that warp American democracy. Moreover, American presidents have free will: the George W Bush administration was run by many who were in perfect ideological alignment with the Israeli right. An incompetent and gullible Trump is plainly responsible for yielding to Israeli pressure and dragging the US into the latest war.

But unless other groups are able to act freely with other interests in mind – and without the threat of antisemitism accusations – US policy in the Middle East will remain dangerously distorted. Both to secure and advance American interests abroad and to protect American freedoms at home, Americans must unite to prevent any foreign power from enjoying the influence over policy and public debate that Israel has exercised, both directly and through the faction operating on its behalf.

Eli Clifton is a co-founder and senior adviser at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft
Ian Lustick is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania specializing in Arab-Israeli relations and US foreign policy
This essay was adapted from the bookIsrael’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power , out11 August by Atria/One Signal Publishers

Tags:Gaza, Israel, israel Lobby, Palestine, politics, USA, Zionism.
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The Subsidized Occupation: Palestine and the Arabs

July 22, 2026

By M. Reza Behnam, Z Net, July 20, 2026, 7 Mins Read

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

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President of the United States Donald Trump with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and President of Syria Ahmed al-Sharaa during Donald Trump’s state visit to Saudi Arabia. US State Department.

The modern Middle East suffers from a consequentially glaring paradox: oil-rich Arab states undoubtedly possess some of the most concentrated geopolitical and economic leverage on the planet. Yet, they have, since the 1970s, declined to use their economic indispensability in defense of Palestinian statehood and to uphold their own sovereignty.

The pivot of Arab Gulf states away from historical Arab nationalism to Western alignment reflects a fundamental shift in regional priorities. Arab monarchs have traded their independence and vast regional clout for Western economic integration, advanced defense technology and foreign security assurances.

The global community has, for decades, been led to believe that the path to Palestinian self-determination is a knot too complex to untangle. The reality, however, is far more transactional.

The wealthy Gulf capitals and the wider Arab oil-producing bloc possess four critical pressure points that could be acted on to force a diplomatic breakthrough or affect meaningful regional change. None, however, have been employed: 1) oil power; 2) sovereignty over waterways; 3) petrodollars; and 4) power of the umma.

Oil Power

In 1973, Arab oil-producers demonstrated the efficacy of wielding oil as an economic weapon. It was one of those rare moments when Arab regimes exploited their leverage to challenge Western imperialism.

After the start of the October 1973 Arab-Israel War between Egypt, Syria and Israel, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) imposed a total oil embargo in response to U.S. support for Israel during the war. They demanded that Israel withdraw from Palestinian lands they occupied in the 1967 War.

OAPEC’s collective action caused shortages, triggered a massive recession and led to a realignment of the global economy. The embargo generated massive revenue windfalls for producing states. The sudden influx of capital accelerated the nationalization of their oil industries, allowing them to gain control of assets previously held by U.S. and British stakeholders.

Despite the unprecedented wealth gained by Arab producers, the geopolitical landscape remained unchanged when OAPEC lifted the embargo in March 1974. Israeli forces remained entrenched in occupied Palestine.

The weaponization of oil has, since 1973, been unilaterally retired by Gulf elites. During successive crises, including the catastrophic destruction and genocide in occupied Gaza and the West Bank, as well as the current war on non-Arab Iran, they have explicitly ruled out oil embargoes or production cuts to pressure Israel’s western enablers.

Rather than utilizing energy as a tool of opposition to U.S.-Israeli hegemony, Arab regimes have aligned with and normalized relations with the perpetrators of occupation, apartheid and genocide.

They have, for example, prioritized maintaining market predictability and maximizing revenues to fund domestic mega-ventures and “eco-normalization” energy projects, integrating Israeli infrastructure (in a dominant position) into Arab utility grids and gas imports.

Sovereignty Over Waterways

Some of the most critical maritime corridors and strategic chokepoints, indispensable to global commerce, are situated in the Middle East; most notably the Suez Canal, connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea, Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf and the Bab al-Mandab in the Red Sea.

The ongoing U.S. Israel war on Iran has underscored the critical importance of the region’s waterways to global commerce and how military disruptions can send shockwaves through energy and financial markets.

In the current asymmetrical war, Iran has demonstrated how to effectively use a vital waterway as a strategic tool. It has leveraged the closure and disruption of the Strait of Hormuz to establish control over the waterway and force major strategic concessions. Like Iran, Yemen’s Ansar Allah has threatened to close the Bab al-Mandab—the only entry point to the Red Sea from the Indian Ocean, which facilitates trade between Asia and Europe.

Major Arab states have not advantaged their geography to challenge U.S.-Israel regional supremacy. Instead, they have acted as guardians of the imperial status quo, securing these indispensable passages to ensure the uninterrupted flow of global commerce to the very nations underwriting the occupation of Palestine and genocide in Gaza.

Petrodollars

The structural foundation of America’s financial dominance has been the “petrodollar”—a decades-old system in which oil is priced in dollars, with resulting surplus recycled back into U.S. Treasury bonds and Western financial assets.

In addition to holding the “petrodollar card,” vast critical energy supplies and pivotal energy chokepoints, Arab states, particularly the Gulf Cooperation Council monarchies (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) control approximately six trillion dollars in sovereign wealth funds in Western markets.

Any coordinated effort to price energy in alternative currencies, diversify reserve holdings away from the dollar, or liquidate U.S. Treasuries would pose an existential threat to Western financial hegemony.

Instead of harnessing their immense economic and financial wealth to advance regional and Palestinian interests, Arab regimes continue to park petrodollars in Western institutions; effectively subsidizing the very financial systems of countries that have used their United Nations Security Council vetoes to block Palestinian statehood.

Power of the Umma

The force of the umma—the global community of Muslims—stems from the powerful concept of unity that transcends borders. It is sustained by spiritual solidarity rather than military might or economic dominance. The collective consciousness of the faith is reflected in the Prophet’s teaching that the umma is one body—when any limb aches, the whole body feels the pain.

The global Muslim community maintains a deep solidarity with Palestine, which is intrinsically woven into Islamic history and spirituality. The conscience of the community has been awakened by the ongoing atrocities and the suffering inflicted on the Palestinians and on the destruction of Palestine, revered as sacred land.

Across the artificial boundaries of the Middle East, the umma is an ocean of untapped revolutionary power willing to confront imperialism and the colonial Zionist occupation of Palestine.

Arab political classes should pay heed that geopolitical strength stems from regional integration and solidarity with the umma, not the West. Instead of understanding Palestine as a unifying force and security imperative, they have used it as a card to be traded for Washington’s favor. In so doing, they have sacrificed the moral authority of a righteous cause and converted their vast geopolitical clout into an instrument of passive complicity and regime survival, at the expense of liberation, integrity and dignity.

The liberation of Palestine will not be won by the ink of compromised treaties and flawed diplomacy. Instead it will be driven by the unified strength, outrage and heartbeat of millions across the Arab world, who refuse to let artificial borders or foreign forces dictate the limits of their solidarity.

Following months of deadly U.S. airstrikes on Iran, Arab states that have hosted American military bases and provided airspace for the war, are facing retaliatory strikes and severe economic disruptions.

Caught in the crossfire, they face a critical choice: submit to continued foreign subjugation or utilize the collective power and resources they possess to rectify the historical and ongoing injustice inflicted on Palestinians, rid the region of destructive foreign meddling and restore dignity to the region.

The Palestinian quest for statehood is not solely over external occupation; rather, it is about regional abandonment masked by rhetorical solidarity. By prioritizing regime survival, lucrative global trade networks and authoritarian stability over pan-Arab alignment and the Palestinian cause, Arab states have allowed themselves to become structurally subservient to the geopolitical dictates of Washington and the strategic ambitions of Tel Aviv.

The ruling elite across the Arab world have been blind to the reality that the U.S. and Israel are wedded to subjugation, not cooperation.

In the final analysis, the black gold that once promised regional self-determination has instead financed a status quo of complicity and servitude, leaving the Palestinian cause marooned on an altar of transactional diplomacy and dynastic preservation.

Dr. Behnam is a political scientist who specializes in comparative politics with a focus on West Asia. His “Cultural Foundations of Iranian Politics,” published by University of Utah Press, and still in print, was recognized by Choice as Outstanding Academic Book for 1987-1988.

Tags:Gaza, Israel, Palestine, politics, Zionism.
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Is America Truly Becoming a “Zionocracy?”

July 4, 2026

New legislation could kill the freedom to criticize the Jewish state

Philip Giraldi • July 4, 2026

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The country that once was the United States of America is now, in its 250^th year, led by a president whose ignorance of history and policy is so profound that almost anything goes, including the initiation of wars fought for a foreign nation that is widely regarded as manifestly evil. I am of course speaking of the power that Israel has over US foreign policy in particular, though that leverage has been increasingly also impacting on the running of the economy and the elimination of fundamental liberties like freedom of speech. One has to ask, what kind of independence does America actually have when it allows another country, supported by domestic Jewish and Christian Zionists, to drain resources stolen from taxpayers through endless wars and a managed foreign policy that doesn’t benefit American citizens in any significant way. Above all, it is a “policy” driven by false religious beliefs that the former Palestine should become a wholly Jewish state that is “chosen” to expand and become “Greater” through wars initiated throughout the Middle East.

And pretty much the same elite Zionists that control the White House and Congress largely manage the other elements in the federal government while also controlling central banking through the Federal Reserve, which is privately operated and has less than 5% of money in “Reserve.” Most Americans are unaware that this financial runaway train will soon bring bankruptcy to the nation by way of a current $39.4 trillion in Federal government debt (122.1% of GDP), which amounts to $356,620 per taxpayer.

And there is more bad news! President Donald J Trump might rightly be regarded as the most pro-Israeli in the history of our nation, which is saying quite a lot, and it comes as no surprise that when one of his most ardent Jewish supporters Mark Levin recently described him as the “First Jewish president!” Trump responded “That’s true!” Whether that was confirmation of the reality of the assertion or merely agreement that Levin had said that can perhaps be in dispute, but it does reflect a certain reality. In a speech at Mount Rushmore on July 3^rd Trump went on and on about purging the country of its “communists” but what he was really talking about was its liberals who are critics of Israel such as the New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Congressman Ilhan Omar!

Trump has been fighting a totally pointless and extremely unpopular war with a non-threatening Iran due to Israel convincing him to do so and he has tolerated a horrific genocide in what was once Palestine while also making the US complicit in the slaughter by providing the weapons, money and the political cover to permit Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to get away with the war crimes. And now there are reports that Trump has ordered the US military to begin preparations to engage in Lebanon to destroy Hezbollah, which is no threat to American though an enemy of Israel.

That is the current reality. Our America, a victim of the powerful domestic Israel Lobby which has corrupted Congress with money and which controls most of the mainstream media, is truly a slave of what Israel regards as its national security policy. This has led some American critics of what is taking place to begin to refer to the USA as the “Zionization of America to create a Zionocracy” a name that has a certain resonance as it reflects a certain reality in that maintaining Jewish/Israeli dominance of the United States has stripped the nation of what once were basic constitutional rights.

Consider for example what already exists to favor Israel and what is impending that will make the US a virtual client state of the ruthless apartheid entity that has taken control of both the White House and Congress. It is often noted how the US Congress gave war criminal Netanyahu 58 standing ovations when he addressed that body in 2024. And there is already in the State Department a Bureau that exists to counter what it describes as antisemitism worldwide. It is called the Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism (SEAS), which was created to advance US efforts in addressing antisemitism globally. It was established by the Global Antisemitism Review Act of 2004 and is led by a special envoy with ambassador status who reports directly to the Secretary of State. It is currently headed by a Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun. It accepts the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism to include verbal or written criticism of the behavior of Jewish groups or of Israel as ipso facto evidence of antisemitism, which it regards as a crime. By way of comparison, no other country except Israel has an office that goes around the world with a mission to root out what it chooses to regard as antisemites.

So all right, let us accept that it is really bad, but there are some new initiatives that have surfaced that are about to make things worse at a time when we have a president who is prepared to give the Israelis and the Jewish domestic lobby anything they ask for. Some of the legislation coming out of Congress will dramatically strengthen Israel’s ability to interfere directly with the policies that might be supported by the US government. There is in fact serious discussion going on concerning several bills passing through the House of Representatives and Senate that will dramatically reshape the relationship with “best friend and greatest ally” Israel. The debate relates to section 224 of the National Defense Appropriations Act (NDAA) for 2027, and section 622 of the National Intelligence Act for the same year. There is also a proposed re-configuration and granting of American military veteran benefits to citizens who choose to fight for the Israel Defense Force, requiring amendment of title 38 of the United States Code as well as of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act. All the relevant bills are currently circulating in Congress including the questionable sections and, though there is growing resistance to them, they are at this time expected to pass.

NDAA Section 224, entitled the “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative,” reads in part: “The Secretary of Defense shall designate an executive agent, as such term is defined in Department of Defense Directive 5101.01 (relating to 6 DoD Executive Agent, issued February 7, 2022), responsible for synchronizing cooperative efforts between the United States and Israel, to expand and accelerate bilateral defense technology research, development, testing, evaluation, integration, and industrial cooperation, by… identifying jointly developed or Israeli-origin technologies with operational utility for potential integration into United States systems and programs of record.”

As one can easily discern, the arrangement is very broadly conceived and exists to greatly benefit Israel. It is already being mooted that the “executive agent” of the program will be an Israeli. If all of the legislation passes into law, which is almost certain, and is signed on by Trump, who has been seeking a “new security cooperation framework” with Israel, it would bind Israel to the United States in a way that is unique. Its broad commitment is not one shared even by NATO allies, and is well-nigh irreversible, something that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clearly has been seeking to accomplish. When he is speaking in Hebrew to a Jewish audience, Netanyahu even grins and takes credit for having covertly manipulated an acquiescent White House and Congress to incorporate the sections of the bills on Defense and Intelligence. Netanyahu has said he wants America’s elected officials, whom he largely owns and has even thanked for their subjugation, to ram the broad new “partnership” arrangement through over the next two years before Trump leaves office.

And even worse is being contemplated! In May and June, a bipartisan coalition of 15 House Republicans and 14 Democrats led by Congressman Dan Goldman of New York formally sponsored the Jewish American Security Act (JASA), a piece of legislation that if passed would possible constitute one of the most devastating attacks on the First Amendment in American history. It would also, uniquely, make Jews as a group and the state of Israel deserving of special treatment and protection by the federal government. The bill is supported by nearly all Jewish non-profits and Zionist activist groups and is headed “To strengthen Federal efforts to counter antisemitism in the United States and protect the Jewish community.”

The bill includes the appointment of an Anti-Semitism commissar to run the Department of Education’s already existing program to eliminate pro-Palestinian activism on college campuses, a $1 billion dollar cash fund to “secure” Zionist and Jewish properties, mandatory government monitoring of online social media to compel the censorship of “anti-Semitic” political speech or writing on their platforms, and recasting the law enforcement missions of the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and National Counterintelligence and Security Center to prioritize the targeting of critics of Jews and Israel as “foreign enemy actors and domestic terrorists.” Ironically, in addition to the $1 billion proposed in the bill to protect Jewish properties, those properties already get more than 90% of the discretionary security spending by the Department of Homeland, amounting to more than $300 million per year!

The act will also reinforce and make permanent Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14188 (“Additional Measures to Combat Antisemitism”), which included making Israelis a “protected class above criticism” under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Eric Striker observes how “Under executive orders signed by Joe Biden and Donald Trump, this interpretation of the law has been used to weaponize access to federal subsidies to American higher learning institutions in order to shut down pro-Palestinian and anti-war activism among students. In addition to having an ‘Antisemitism Coordinator’ micro-manage this ongoing war on dissent, JASA calls for a ‘public awareness campaign’ that will plaster propaganda posters in ‘high-traffic public places, such as a cafeteria, gymnasium, or student center, and digital posting on 1 or more high-traffic institution web pages, such as a web page for a student services department’ warning students and professors about the consequences of partaking in speech and activism that offends Jews or singles out Israel.”

Interestingly, 37 states already have laws or rules that deny jobs or services to anyone who supports boycotts or otherwise seeks to damage Israeli interests, so the concept of punishing presumed “antisemites” is already on the table. But a federal mandate takes it to a new and much higher level. Striker comments how “Such a law, if passed, would treat figures as prominent as Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Megyn Kelly, Thomas Massie, Ana Kasparian, Ilhan Omar and Candace Owens, as well as many smaller critics that have arisen in recent years, as terrorists and enemies of the state.” The move to criminalize any criticism of Israel or the collective behavior of Jewish groups, if pursued aggressively at a national level, would have a devastating impact on the freedom of Americans to speak openly and honestly on issues like war and peace, for example. And of course that it what it is intended to do and you can count on the Jewish billionaires who have corrupted congress and bought the media to do what is wanted by monsters like Netanyahu to bring about that result. And it is all also just one part of the deliberate murder of American democracy. It is a major step to arrive at the “Zionocracy.”

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

Tags:Gaza, Israel, Palestine, politics, USA, Zionism.
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‘Response to Antisemitism is Decolonization of Palestine’: Pappé on Zionism and Europe

June 30, 2026

The Palestine Chronicle, June 27, 2026

Pappe_Jazic2_Keynote_PC — Ilan Pappé addressed the Second Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress. (Photo: The Palestine Chronicle)

By Romana Rubeo

Addressing the Second Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress, Ilan Pappé urged Jewish anti-Zionists to challenge Zionism while advancing Palestinian liberation.

‘Universal Voice for Palestine’

DUBLIN – Opening his keynote address at the Second Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress in Dublin, Israeli historian Ilan Pappé admitted that, after more than four decades of activism, he had often questioned whether a specifically Jewish anti-Zionist movement was necessary at all.

After all, he reflected, the struggle for Palestine should never depend on religious or ethnic identity.

“What we need is a universal voice for Palestine,” Pappé said during his address. “Who cares whether you are Jewish, Muslim or Christian? If you are a human being with even a modicum of decency, how can you remain indifferent to the suffering of the Palestinian people?”

Yet, he acknowledged, recent political developments had convinced him that a distinct Jewish anti-Zionist voice remains indispensable—not because Jews bear greater moral responsibility than others, but because Judaism continues to be invoked to justify Israel’s policies and silence criticism of them.

Referring to the appointment of a prominent pro-Israel lobbyist as chief adviser to Britain’s incoming prime minister, Pappé argued that whether such lobbying networks possess the extraordinary influence often attributed to them is almost secondary. What matters politically, he said, is that governments believe they do.

That perception, he argued, continues to shape Western policy, where accusations of antisemitism are routinely weaponized to shield Israel from accountability despite overwhelming evidence documenting occupation, apartheid and genocide.

“This is abnormal,” Pappé said. “It is unjust. It is immoral.”

For that reason, he argued, Jewish anti-Zionists carry a particular responsibility to dismantle the idea that Zionism represents Judaism itself.

“If we fail to challenge the idea that Zionism represents the only authentic expression of Judaism,” he warned, “we should not be surprised if others eventually conclude that this is what Judaism itself represents.”

Solidarity Begins by Listening

Although much of his address focused on challenging dominant political narratives, Pappé repeatedly returned to a simpler principle: solidarity begins by listening to Palestinians rather than speaking for them.

“This Congress is devoted to action,” he said, referring to its theme, From Words to Action. “Solidarity does not consist of telling Palestinians what they need.”

Instead, he argued, Palestinians themselves must define the priorities of the international solidarity movement.

“Our role is to listen,” Pappé said, expressing concern that even within progressive circles, authentic Palestinian voices are still too often marginalized by what he described as lingering colonial—and sometimes Islamophobic—assumptions.

“The stage belongs to Palestinians,” he insisted, “not only to describe their suffering—but to articulate their political vision.”

That responsibility, he argued, extends beyond immediate solidarity work.

Jewish anti-Zionists must also continue dismantling two narratives that remain deeply entrenched across Western societies: the claim that Zionism is the natural expression of Judaism, and the assertion that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic.

Both, he said, require sustained historical education rather than political slogans.

“This requires patience,” Pappé observed. “It requires education. It requires historical work.”

Those conversations, he argued, must move beyond audiences already sympathetic to Palestine and reach ordinary people whose understanding of the conflict has largely been shaped by decades of political mythmaking.

Europe’s Unfinished Reckoning

Moving beyond the present, Pappé devoted much of his address to what he described as Europe’s unresolved historical responsibility for Palestine.

The international order established after the Second World War, he argued, presented itself as universal through institutions such as the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet the people designing that order were almost exclusively representatives of colonial powers, while the colonized world remained absent from the conversation.

That omission, he suggested, became decisive when Europe confronted what it called “the Jewish question.”

“When those same leaders confronted what they called ‘the Jewish question,’ almost none of them proposed the obvious solution,” Pappé said. “Almost nobody said: ‘Let us invite Europe’s Jews back into Europe.’”

Instead, he argued, European governments embraced Zionist colonization in Palestine, transferring the consequences of centuries of European antisemitism onto a people who bore no responsibility for those crimes.

Germany, he said, occupies a central place in that history.

Contrary to the dominant postwar narrative, Pappé argued that Germany “was not denazified” in any meaningful political sense. Instead, he said, the country’s relationship with Israel became a substitute for confronting the deeper structures that had produced Nazism and antisemitism.

According to Pappé, postwar reparations did more than compensate Holocaust survivors. They also helped build Israel’s military establishment, while subsequent German political and military support—including assistance that strengthened Israel’s strategic capabilities—cemented a relationship that continues to shape European policy today.

“This historical relationship still shapes contemporary politics,” he said, arguing that Europe has “never fully reckoned with the consequences of exporting its own historical crimes onto the Palestinian people.”

For Pappé, acknowledging that history does not mean imagining that Israeli Jews should somehow return to Europe. Rather, it requires Europe to recognize that Palestinians paid the price for crimes committed on another continent.

Recovering another forgotten history, he continued, is equally important.

Long before Zionism, Palestine formed part of a broader Arab world in which Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together despite inevitable tensions and inequalities.

“There was a Jewish presence in Palestine,” Pappé recalled. “There were Arab Jews.” Almost nobody, he said, believed that the future required an exclusively Jewish state.

That history of coexistence was fractured by colonialism and Zionism, yet it remains one of the strongest challenges to the ideological foundations of the Israeli state.

“Recovering the history of Arab Jewish life,” he argued, “is one of the most powerful ways of dismantling Zionist mythology,” because it demonstrates that coexistence existed before colonialism intervened—and therefore can exist again.

Returning to the central theme of his address, Pappé rejected the idea that nationalism or ethnic supremacy could ever constitute a meaningful response to centuries of antisemitism.

“The greatest response to antisemitism today,” he concluded, “is the decolonization of Palestine.”

That, he argued, requires dismantling Zionism “as a colonial political project” while allowing Palestinians to live as free people “on their own land.”

(The Palestine Chronicle)

– Romana Rubeo is an Italian writer and the managing editor of The Palestine Chronicle. Her articles appeared in many online newspapers and academic journals. She holds a Master’s Degree in Foreign Languages and Literature and specializes in audio-visual and journalism translation.

Tags:Gaza, Ilan Pappe, Israel, Palestine, politics, Zionism.
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Palestinian elites have been collaborating against the resistance for a century

June 14, 2026

Joseph Massad

MEE, 12 June 2026

The Palestinian Authority’s war on the resistance is the continuation of a collaboration with colonialism that Palestinian elites have practised for more than a century

A member of the Palestinian Authority security forces fires tear gas towards a protest against their security operation in Jenin in the occupied West Bank on 16 December 2024 (Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP)

Amid the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza and its terror in the West Bank and Lebanon, the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance must confront not only their Israeli enemy, but also their own elites who are collaborating with that enemy.

The historical reaction to colonial conquest and imperial control across much of the world has been threefold.

First, radical resistance by the majority of poor peasants and workers, and by a substantial sector of the urban middle class.

Second, cooperation and compromise by much of the wealthy elite and some sectors of the middle class, justified by the belief that such cooperation would lead to colonial concessions and avert an outright confrontation in which the colonised would surely be the losers.

Third, complete subservience and collaboration by another sector of the wealthy, hoping to receive preferential treatment over rival elite cooperators and compromisers, based on the logic that the persistence of colonial control benefits the elite as local agents of colonialism.

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These responses have been recorded across the colonised and post-colonial world – from Asia to Africa.

The Arab world – including the Palestinians – has been no exception.

Pre-Nakba Palestinian society responded to British colonialism and Zionist settler-colonialism by following this script exactly

Indeed, pre-Nakba Palestinian society responded to British colonialism and Zionist settler-colonialism by following this script exactly, as it would after the Nakba.

Since the early 1920s, while divided among themselves, wealthy Palestinian elites broadly agreed that resisting Zionist colonialism required cooperation with the British occupiers.

The strategy was led by the Arab Executive and the Supreme Muslim Council, both dominated by major wealthy Jerusalem, Jaffa and other urban Palestinian families.

They were opposed by other elites, mainly a rival Jerusalem family and other families marginalised within these two bodies, who supported full collaboration with the British and the Zionists.

The latter, with Zionist funding and support, established the “Agricultural Party” (al-Hizb al-Zirai), the National Muslim Society and later al-Hizb al-Watani (the National Party).

The majority of peasants and workers chose resistance, with substantial support from the urban middle classes.

The independence movement

Middle-class intellectuals were so dismayed by Palestinian elites – whether the outright smaller group of collaborators or the larger group of “cooperators” – that they formed Hizb al-Istiqlal (the party of “independence”) in 1932.

The party supported peasant and worker resistance and launched a civil rights movement of demonstrations, boycotts and civil disobedience.

A story of a 1930s uprising against British colonialism is key to understanding Gaza today

Hamdi al-Husayni of Gaza (unrelated to the elite Jerusalem Husayni family) and other young Istiqlal leaders were inspired by other anti-colonial struggles, especially Gandhi’s activities in India.

Emulating Gandhi, the Istiqlal Party leadership, including Husayni and Akram Zuaytar, a young schoolteacher from Nablus, Izzat Darwazah, a nationalist publicist and teacher, and the lawyer Awni Abd al-Hadi, who was also a secretary of the elite-controlled Arab Executive after 1928, called for non-cooperation with the British rulers of Palestine.

They borrowed tactics, including Gandhi’s March 1930 month-long Salt March across India, as well as boycott and civil disobedience.

Soon after forming the party, Istiqlal leaders openly criticised elite Palestinians for complicity with British rule.

At the party’s first mass meeting in December 1932, its leaders called for independence, denounced Britain and Zionism, and called for cooperation with newly independent Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Accusing the Arab Executive of passivity, they demanded its leaders refuse cooperation with the British Mandatory authorities.

The following year, Istiqlal’s capacity for mobilisation peaked, as British suppression, Zionist apartheid, evictions of Palestinian peasants and Jewish immigration to Palestine reached unprecedented levels.

Resistance and repression

Failing to persuade the Arab Executive to adopt non-cooperation, the Istiqlal Party mobilised demonstrations in October 1933, protesting British policy and Jewish colonisation.

The executive eventually relented and backed calls for demonstrations, despite “opposition” from the collaborationist elite faction.

Thousands marched across Palestine, including 8,000 in Jaffa alone – among them 600 Palestinians from Wadi al-Hawarith whose lands were taken over by Zionist colonists a few months earlier. Rampaging British police killed 26 unarmed demonstrators in Jaffa and Haifa and injured dozens more.

Palestinian elites began to organise political parties that competed for British favour and to curry favour with the Zionists

British authorities, wealthy elite Palestinians of both camps and Zionists all saw a common interest in suppressing the Istiqlal Party.

Their combined efforts succeeded in all but destroying what had become the most popular Palestinian anti-colonial party by 1934-1935.

Still, younger Palestinian activists, including former members of Istiqlal and the Congress for Youth, intensified their calls on Palestinian elites to abandon their futile efforts to win British support against Zionism and adopt non-cooperation instead.

By 1936, Palestinian workers launched multiple strikes that elite leaders opposed, costing them further support among the youth movement, the rump of the Istiqlal Party and its working-class supporters.

As elite politicians continued talks with the High Commissioner about establishing a legislative assembly, new meetings – led by Istiqlalists such as Hamdi al-Husayni and joined by urban workers – culminated in a major general strike declared on 19 April 1936.

Lasting for six months, it remains the world’s longest general strike to date.

Highly mobilised Palestinians, led by Istiqlalists and youth groups, including the Young Muslim Men’s Association, moved to the forefront of political life.

Their momentum compelled elite politicians – among them the Mufti Amin al-Husayni, who had initially opposed the strike – to establish the Arab Higher Committee a week later as a coalition to replace the defunct Arab Executive, which had been dissolved in August 1934 amid elite factionalism.

The Higher Committee sought to moderate demands for civil disobedience, while the British High Commissioner reminded the elite leadership of their role in restraining the masses.

The 1936 Palestine strike: A history of Palestinian revolt

The mufti’s reticence to support the general strike and the broader Palestinian revolt lasted well into the summer of 1936.

Meanwhile, Palestinian elites began to organise political parties that competed for British favour and, in the case of the collaborationist National Defence Party, to curry favour with the Zionists.

Amid the commitment to resistance among peasants, workers and middle-class youth and intellectuals, and the elite’s continued cooperation and collaboration, the Palestinians’ Great Revolt erupted and lasted until its final brutal suppression by the British and their Zionist colonial settlers in 1939, with more than 8,000 Palestinians killed.

Palestinian elite collaborators formed a counter-revolutionary militia called the “peace bands” to kill Palestinian revolutionaries.

The defeat of the Revolt led to the 1948 Nakba nine years later.

Oslo’s heirs

These dynamics re-emerged in the post-Nakba period.

The children of expelled Palestinian peasants and workers, alongside some of the middle classes, launched a new political struggle in the late 1950s, which transformed into an armed resistance movement by the late 1960s.

Elite Palestinians would soon co-opt the movement, ostensibly to help it gain “international” legitimacy, first by interceding with Arab regimes to recognise the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1974 as “the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people”.

Follow Middle East Eye’s live coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza

Funding from Arab regimes soon domesticated the PLO.

Replicating the strategy of the pre-Nakba Palestinian elite, the PLO sought to cooperate with the US and Europe by “moderating” its demands for Palestinian liberation from Zionist settler-colonialism to calling instead for a “two-state solution”.

Secret channels with the US and open channels with Europe ultimately diminished the erstwhile PLO agenda from total liberation to demanding a mini-state on a fraction of Palestine’s territory.

But if the PLO after 1974 replicated the role of elite Palestinian cooperators and compromisers between the 1920s and 1940s, the signing of the 1993 Oslo accords transformed the PLO yet again into that other part of the 1920s-1940s elite – including the Agricultural Party and the National Defence Party – who collaborated outright with the Zionists and their colonial sponsors.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) today is a mirror image of these collaborator forces.

Meanwhile, Yasser Arafat’s PLO and the successor PA have tried to extinguish all attempts to reinvigorate the struggle championed by the Istiqlal Party and the peasant revolutionaries, which was initially espoused by the PLO’s “rejectionist front” since the mid-1970s, as well as by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and what remained of the PLO left since the late 1980s and early 1990s.

This culminated in the coup against the elected Hamas government in 2007, organised by the US, Israel and the PA, echoing how a similar coalition ganged up against the Istiqlal Party in the 1930s.

The PA security forces played the role of the 1930s “peace bands”. This is the situation that the Palestinian people have found themselves in since 1993.

Their struggle today continues to be one between a collaborationist PA and a pro-liberation resistance intent on ending settler-colonialism.

The Gaza genocide is how Israel and its western sponsors have responded to the Palestinian resistance, while their PA proxy has intensified its war and repression against the resistance in the PA-controlled West Bank areas during the genocide.

The PA is aided in its efforts by the Israeli occupation army and armed Jewish colonial settlers.

But just as the collaborating and cooperating Palestinian elites of the 1920s to 1940s were unable to halt the resistance, the current PA collaborators are failing at their assigned task of vanquishing the spirit of resistance among Palestinians.

It is this ongoing resistance to Israel and its western sponsors, and the collaborating PA and the wealthy Palestinian elites who support it, that will ultimately decide the future of the Palestinian people.

After more than a century of collaboration and resistance, and Israel’s refusal to halt its genocide, the scales continue to tip persistently in favour of the resistance.

Tags:Gaza, Israel, pa, Palestine, politics, Zionism.
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Arab states condemned Israel publicly, but quietly moved on from Gaza

June 11, 2026

MEM, June 11, 2026 at 8:00 am

An aerial view of destruction in Sheikh Ridwan neighborhood following the Israeli forces’ withdrawal with the ceasefire agreement in Gaza City, Gaza on October 17, 2025. [Mohammed Abu Samra – Anadolu Agency]

by Dr Mustafa Fetouri MFetouri

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Since the launch of Israel’s devastating war on Gaza, Tel Aviv—heavily shielded by Western political pressure and strategic intimidation against any state rejecting its actions—has faced widespread regional rhetorical backlash. Almost all Arab states, including those with formal ties to Israel, have issued varying forms of public condemnation. Yet behind the theatre of diplomatic outrage, a far more cynical reality has solidified: the core normalizers—including the Abraham Accords signatories, alongside Jordan and Egypt—have fiercely protected their foundational ties to Tel Aviv, ensuring that the machinery of state relations remains fundamentally uninterrupted.

In other words, business continued as usual, albeit with varying degrees of public caution. Shockingly, not a single normaliser country took concrete diplomatic or legal steps that could amount to the actions taken by non-Arab European nations.

While European governments like Spain and Norway formally recognised the State of Palestine, and Madrid officially intervened in the genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, Arab capitals remained entirely absent from these legal mechanisms.

Even the United Kingdom, a staunch Western ally of Tel Aviv, moved to partially suspend arms export licenses over international humanitarian law concerns. By contrast, the Arab normalizers refrained from any punitive measures—whether legal, economic, or diplomatic—that could fundamentally disrupt their bilateral frameworks with Israel.

READ: Israel plans wide Gaza operation amid ceasefires elsewhere

The profound irony lies in the stark divergence between rhetoric and responsibility. From the constituent members of the League of Arab States (LAS), the regional public naturally expected serious, immediate, and material reactions to the catastrophe in Gaza. After all, the Palestinian struggle is explicitly enshrined in almost every single LAS document as the supreme, ‘central cause’ of the Arab world—a boilerplate phrase mechanically inserted into nearly every summit declaration, including those ostensibly dedicated to economic reform or environmental cooperation. Yet, despite the immense, unyielding public rage boiling across the Arab streets, these governments stood their ground.

Instead of translating their institutional mandates into punitive diplomatic, legal and economic actions against Israel, they chose to hide behind empty rhetoric and meaningless communiqués, weaponising the Palestinian cause as a convenient distraction to pacify local populations while ensuring that their actual state policies remained entirely unchanged.

Even the official media apparatuses of the LAS countries actively collude in disillusioning the Arab audience. They tirelessly repeat empty government slogans and safe debates on Israeli aggression—though even this minimal coverage is heavily sanitized or absent in the UAE and Bahrain, and strictly curtailed in Morocco. Crucially, these networks enforce an absolute embargo on debating their own governments’ shameful positions. As a frequent guest on these regional talk shows, I have witnessed this systemic paralysis firsthand. I repeatedly pleaded with a Libyan TV station to dedicate a few episodes of its flagship program to analysing these regional diplomatic failures. They never did. The explanation they gave me was chillingly simple: ‘We are based in Jordan, and doing anything like that is highly likely to generate severe problems for us with the host authorities. The same happened with another one based in Istanbul.

Nowhere is the disconnect between moral posturing and material reality more visible than in the ledger of regional trade. As I have previously argued in these pages, Arab capitals possess immense economic and financial levers—ranging from sovereign wealth divestments to the suspension of market access—that could exert genuine pressure on Tel Aviv. Yet, they have deliberately chosen not to leverage them. Instead, the economic machinery has hummingly defied all expectations.

The UAE-Israel Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), which systematically removed tariffs on 96 percent of goods and was signed just months before October 2023, went into full force implementation within months as if nothing was happening, and it remains so today.

According to the UN Comtrade Israel-UAE Registry Israel-UAE Registry, bilateral commerce did not freeze nor even slow; it thrived. The UAE alone exported over $1.6 billion worth of goods to Israel. Most damningly, this transactional pipeline included hundreds of millions of dollars in refined petroleum—highly needed to keep Israel’s killing machine turning—beside vital industrial metals. While the streets of Amman, Cairo, and Casablanca burned with indignation, the normalisers ensured that the fuel, funds, and supply lines keeping the Israeli economy resilient were never compromised.

READ: Former European leaders urge tougher EU action against Israel over Gaza and West Bank

This absolute insulation of state policy from popular will exposes the grim effectiveness of the modern Arab security state. Historically, authoritarian regimes across the region approached the Palestinian cause very cautiously, fearing that a failure to project nominal solidarity had the potential to become a lightning rod for domestic uprisings. Today, that calculus has fundamentally shifted. Through sophisticated digital surveillance networks—frequently utilising Israel’s own advanced cyber-intelligence and surveillance products—intense policing, and a strategic pivoting toward hyper-nationalistic or purely transactional domestic development projects, such as the UAE’s tech-driven economic models, these ruling elites have effectively decoupled public sentiment from executive state actions. In countries like Egypt and Jordan, security apparatuses are highly adept at acting as pressure valves. They systematically permit tightly controlled, heavily policed street protests within designated perimeters, allowing the public to exhaust its emotional fury and chant anti-normalisation slogans for the cameras. Yet, the moment that popular outrage attempts to cross the line from performative condemnation to demanding actual structural policy changes—such as the blockage of transit corridors or the total severance of treaties—the state security fist clamps down instantly. The message written into this enforcement strategy is as clear as it is cynical: public rage is tolerated as an emotional outlet, but it will never be permitted to interfere with the permanent geostrategic and economic architecture of the state. Even a country like Libya, despite its long history of unyielding ideological, financial, and military support for Palestine under the late Muammar Gaddafi, has been neutralised by internal division; today, its fragmented authorities are no more active or effective in confronting Tel Aviv than, say, Egypt.

Ultimately, the ongoing tragedy in Gaza has pulled back the curtain on a profound structural mutation in Middle Eastern geopolitics.

The era in which the Palestinian struggle served as the ultimate litmus test for Arab state legitimacy is effectively over, replaced by cold, hyper-transactional policies.

Even the LAS’ usually empty statements now hardly criticise Israel more openly than some of its individual members do, showcasing a total institutional breakdown. By protecting the underlying architecture of normalization, keeping the trade pipelines operational, and managing domestic anger as a security threat rather than a political mandate, the region’s leaders have sent an unmistakable signal to the global community: business as usual is outlasting a genocide. While the modern security apparatus can successfully suppress the rage of the Arab street today, building a regional order on such a cavernous moral vacuum is a dangerous gamble. In their desperate bid to secure immediate geostrategic alignments, the Arab normalisers may have preserved their treaties, but they have undeniably sown the seeds of deep, systemic instability for generations to come.

Tags:arab-states, Gaza, Israel, Palestine, politics, Zionism.
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Tel Aviv advances de facto annexation of occupied West Bank with massive settlement expansion

June 4, 2026

Israel’s genocidal finance minister holds significant authority over the West Bank Civil Administration, allowing him to expand illegal settlements freely

News Desk, The Cradle,

JUN 3, 2026

(Photo credit: Reuters)

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced a new and major illegal settlement project in the occupied West Bank on 3 June, which aims to see the construction of around 2,000 houses on Palestinian land.

According to the minister, 1,006 housing units will be in a new settlement near the occupied holy city of Jerusalem.

Over 920 are planned near occupied Nablus and another 234 near the city of Hebron. “We are continuing to build the Land of Israel in practice,” Smotrich said.

The settlements will “strengthen our hold on the land, reinforce Israel’s security, and establish clear facts on the ground that prevent the creation of an Arab terror state in the heart of the country.”

Smotrich holds significant authority over Israel’s Civil Administration in the occupied territory.

In the summer of 2023, around six months after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government came to power, significant portions of the Civil Administration in the West Bank – an Israeli military body – were placed under Smotrich’s authority.

This gave the minister free rein to swiftly expand illegal settlements.

Smotrich’s announcement on Wednesday comes as Tel Aviv is also moving to seize private Palestinian land around an archeological site in the occupied West Bank.

The Civil Administration announced on 2 June that it has started to expropriate 320 dunams (about 80 acres) of land for the “preservation and development” of the Herodium – a massive fortress complex built between 23 and 15 BC.

“[The expropriation] is being advanced in accordance with the law, following comprehensive professional assessments conducted by the Civil Administration’s Staff Officer for Archaeology and Staff Officer for Nature Reserves,” the administration said in a statement.

“Their findings pointed to an urgent need to regulate the area and promote preservation efforts at the site in order to prevent damage to archaeological remains of unique historical and cultural significance,” it added.

Since Netanyahu’s government took office in late 2022, Israeli authorities have accelerated plans for the de facto annexation of the occupied West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem.

In February, the Israeli government approved a land registration process allowing Israel to claim territory in the occupied West Bank as “state property” if Palestinians cannot prove ownership.

A few weeks later, dozens of new illegal settlements were approved.

Middle East Eye (MEE) released an investigation in May detailing the “New Nakba” that has escalated against the Palestinian communities of occupied East Jerusalem since 7 October 2023.

According to the investigation, 20,000 Palestinian-owned homes are currently under Israeli demolition orders across occupied East Jerusalem.

Israel is also moving forward with plans to steal large amounts of Palestinian-owned property near Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Tel Aviv is openly working to establish continuity between illegal settlements in order to solidify its control over the West Bank and the city of Jerusalem, and block any prospect of Palestinian statehood.

Tags:Gaza, Israel, Palestine, politics, Zionism.
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Europe’s new strategy to hide the rot in Israeli society is to scapegoat Itamar Ben-Gvir

June 2, 2026

European governments are finally being forced to condemn Israel as its crimes have become impossible to ignore. But they are scapegoating National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir rather than confronting the system he represents.

By Qassam Muaddi, mondoweiss, May 30, 2026

Gathering in support of Israel in front of theAC European Parliament in Brussels in the wake of the October 7 attacks, October 11, 2023. (Photo: European Parliament Flickr Account. Creative Commons License CC-BY-4.0: © European Union 2023 – Source: EP)

The brutal treatment of activists aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla for Gaza by Israeli forces during their detention in international waters last week triggered a wave of international condemnation, including from many European and other Western countries.

Italy, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Poland, and Greece summoned Israeli ambassadors or envoys to condemn the treatment of activists detained during the interception of the Global Sumud Flotilla. The UK said it was “appalled” by the images of the activists’ detentions. These reactions, however, centered around one figure: Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who had posted a video of himself overseeing and encouraging the mistreatment of the activists.

The focus on Ben-Gvir was so singular that France’s foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, included in his condemnation post on X a claim that other Israeli officials had rejected Ben-Gvir’s actions.

That much is true: across the Israeli political spectrum, Ben-Gvir became the convenient scapegoat to draw attention away from the entirety of Israeli politics, which differs very little from Ben-Gvir when it comes to the treatment of Palestinians. But the outrage in Israel wasn’t at the treatment itself, but rather the fact that Ben-Gvir revealed it to the world, causing an international embarrassment. The difference is that Ben-Gvir doesn’t care about the PR problem he’s created, while other Israeli officials do.

So do European politicians. That is why EU governments, in being forced to condemn Israeli conduct, have taken great pains to direct their opprobrium at a specific part of the Israeli system, rather than the system itself. They have repeatedly deployed this tactic in recent weeks, which appears to have become a common doctrine for responding to Israeli violations when they become impossible to ignore.

Two weeks ago, the European Union greenlit the sanctioning of Israeli groups and individuals implicated in settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. The decision, which followed years of failed attempts, sanctioned only five groups and four individuals, despite the fact that the settler movement in the West Bank, including its most violent factions, is part of official state policy, openly sponsored by ministers with public budgets.

Another example is when several European countries issued a joint statement last week condemning the ongoing expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The statement, signed by France, the UK, Italy, Germany, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, and the Netherlands, characterized settlement expansion as “illegal” and called on Israel to halt it. It then added that the signatories “opposed” those who call for the annexation of the West Bank, including members of the Israeli government. The statement stressed the signatories’ commitment to the two-state solution.

The statement made no mention of the fact that in the past two years, the Israeli Knesset passed two bills with an overwhelming majority, one in 2024 rejecting a Palestinian state, and one in 2025 allowing the government to annex the West Bank.

A new-old pattern

This increasingly repeated pattern of individualizing Israeli policies when condemning them contrasts with the older pattern of either ignoring Israeli practices or outright justifying them as “self-defense.” But is this a new paradigm in Western politics, and will it lead to a larger change of policy toward Israel?

According to Roula Shadid, co-director of the Palestinian Institute for Public Diplomacy (PIPD), “part of the change in Western discourse towards Israel is the global mobilization in solidarity with Palestinians since October 2023.” Shadid points to a gap between the official discourse of Western governments and the awareness expressed by solidarity movements, noting that “when we talk with diplomats and political actors, they admit that Israeli policies are more structural than they admit publicly, but they have political reasons to maintain their criticism of Israel under a certain ceiling.”

For Shadid, the fragmenting of Israeli policies, pinning them on individual ministers or settler actors, is a reflection of how Israel has fragmented Palestinian reality on the ground. “Israel has imposed a different set of conditions for Palestinians in Gaza from those in Jerusalem or in the West Bank, and Palestinian leadership is also fragmented, which makes room for Western actors to treat different issues separately,” Shadid told Mondoweiss, adding that this forecloses any treatment of Israeli policies as one coherent whole.

In Europe, particularly, governments have for many years invested in the political paradigm created by the Middle East peace process, according to Shadid. “Countries invested politically and financially in the two-state solution project, which in essence is the administration of occupation, and this makes them insist on clinging to the narrative that there is a peace process underway that needs to be saved from a few extremists,” she explained.

Shadid considers that limited condemnations of parts of the Israeli system give Western countries “the ability to continue business as usual with Israel, while containing the increasing demands and legal obligations to dissociate from violations of Palestinian rights.” She also thinks this policy is short-lived.

“Western governments might hope this moment passes, and then recycle their image and go back to business as usual,” she said. “There will be obstacles, because Israel will increase its aggression, its regional wars will continue to expose its colonial project further, and awareness will continue to rise globally about this reality, and so will pressure coming from citizens.”

Tags:Gaza, Israel, Palestine, politics, Zionism.
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How Iran’s strength bolsters Gaza’s resistance

May 16, 2026

Ali Abunimah Rights and Accountability 11 May 2026

https://www.youtube.com/embed/UoyDOx5KOWM?feature=oembed& When representatives of Palestinian resistance factions arrived in Cairo in mid-March for talks with Egyptian and Qatari mediators, they were not told in advance that Nickolay Mladenov would be waiting for them.

Mladenov is no neutral broker. The former UN official now serves as director-general of US President Donald Trump’s so-called Board of Peace and its “High Representative for Gaza.”

According to Muhammad Shehada, Mladenov did not come to mediate. He came to deliver an ultimatum on behalf of Israel and the United States: Accept full unconditional disarmament or face a renewed Israeli onslaught.

On The Electronic Intifada Livestream on 7 May, Shehada said Palestinian factions saw Mladenov as “an emissary or an envoy of Benjamin Netanyahu,” the Israeli prime minister.

Citing accounts from participants, Shehada said Mladenov was “extremely condescending,” issuing a threat “that if you don’t accept my proposal, immediately, unconditionally, Israel would get a free hand in Gaza and would resume its military operations.”

A Palestinian writer and researcher from Gaza, Shehada is a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

You can watch his full conversation with co-hosts Ali Abunimah and Nora Barrows-Friedman in the video above.

From the UN to the Israel lobby

Mladenov’s bias is hardly hidden. After leaving his post as UN special coordinator for the “peace process” in 2021, he immediately joined the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, an offshoot of the Israel lobby group AIPAC.

His conduct in Cairo exposed what this whole process has really been about: forcing and formalizing Palestinian surrender.

In October, Israel agreed on paper to a ceasefire framework. The Palestinian resistance would ensure the return from Gaza of all living and dead Israeli prisoners of war and captives.

Israel, in turn, was supposed to stop its genocidal attack on Gaza, halt “all military operations,” pull back its forces, allow at least 600 aid trucks a day into the territory, permit 200,000 tents and 60,000 temporary homes, open the Rafah crossing and allow both an International Stabilization Force and the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza – a Palestinian-run body meant to begin civilian governance – to enter the territory.

From there, negotiations on a second phase were supposed to begin.

Man in suit speaks from a podium — Nickolay Mladenov at the launch of the Board of Peace at the World Economic Forum in January 2026. The former UN official, now acting as Board of Peace “high representative,” is seen by Palestinians as a messenger for Israel. (Photo by World Economic Forum/Benedikt von Loebell via Flickr, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

All this was set out in Trump’s so-called peace plan for Gaza, endorsed by the UN Security Council in November – in the face of united opposition from Palestinians who viewed the resolution as capitulating to Tel Aviv and Washington and violating fundamental principles of international law.

The Palestinian resistance nevertheless kept its side of the deal. Israel, to no one’s surprise, violated virtually all of its commitments, while the supposed mediators, especially the United States, did nothing.

As Shehada explained on the Livestream, the only item ever fulfilled was the release of Israeli captives.

Since then, Israel has continued killing Palestinians, choking off aid, blocking temporary shelters and preventing the Palestinian-run administrative committee from even entering the territory.

Yet Washington, the other so-called mediators and much of the media shifted the focus away from Israel’s violations and ongoing crimes and back onto the old colonial demand that Palestinians surrender all means to resist and defend themselves.

Palestinian factions rejected the ultimatum, infuriating Mladenov.

“Israel never fulfilled phase one of the Trump deal. How are you asking us to move to phase two when the first phase was never fulfilled?” Shehada said, summarizing the position Palestinian resistance representatives put to Mladenov.

Terms of surrender

In a recent +972 Magazine article, Shehada reports on two Arabic-language documents laying out Mladenov’s demands.

Mladenov set out a 250-day timeline ending with Palestinians handing over even personal weapons and, “only once an investigative committee verifies that Gaza is completely free of any weapons whatsoever – a very elusive process – would Israel make a limited and ‘gradual’ withdrawal over an undefined period of time to the ‘Red Line’ that would still leave it in control of about 38 percent of Gaza.”

“Rubble removal and reconstruction under Mladenov’s proposal would only begin on day 251,” Shehada adds.

The documents – reviewed by The Electronic Intifada – strip Hamas and the other factions of any governing role. They place Gaza under external control, similar to the colonial Mandate under which Britain ruled Palestine after World War I.

Israel would remain in control of Gaza deep into the process, with the final stage still preserving an indefinite Israeli “security perimeter” inside the territory.

The point is plain enough. Israel and the US want to keep using hunger, destruction, despair and blackmail to impose what Israel’s army – despite more than two years of genocide and devastation – could not impose by force.

Shehada summarized the logic clearly on Livestream. Mladenov, he said, demanded that Palestinians “become absolutely defenseless, weaponless,” and trust their lives to an occupier and its backers who have never stopped killing them.

What then is the endgame? According to Shehada, Mladenov’s proposals aim “to completely rewrite the Trump plan to [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s satisfaction,” in order to render it unworkable and “give Israel an absolute free hand to do whatever it wants.”

While humanitarian relief and recovery were supposed to begin immediately in phase one, Mladenov is holding the civilian population’s most basic rights and their very survival hostage to total surrender by the resistance.

He is, according to Shehada, seeking the “destruction of everything that they [Palestinians] have that might be used as either defensive weaponry or as basic leverage in any future negotiations.”

Decommissioning vs. disarmament

Trump’s plan does not even mention disarmament. Instead it calls for “placing weapons permanently beyond use through an agreed process of decommissioning.”

That language comes directly from the Northern Ireland peace process. In practice, decommissioning meant armed groups did not immediately give up their weapons, but placed them out of sight and out of use so long as the political process advanced and Britain took reciprocal steps to withdraw its forces and dismantle its repressive apparatus in the north of Ireland.

The weapons remained an insurance card if commitments were violated. Indeed, the Irish Republican Army slowed, and at crisis points suspended, its participation in decommissioning to pressure the British government to fulfill its promises.

“Hamas was saying that we can do this,” according to Shehada. “Lock all the weapons up in depots for the next five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, and then you need an agreement to end the Palestinian question, to end Israel’s apartheid.”

Actual disarmament – the final destruction of resistance weapons – would therefore be the result of a political settlement and a reciprocal process, not a precondition imposed only on one side.

As flawed and Israel-biased as it was, Shehada acknowledged that by adopting the concept of decommissioning, the Trump framework “was premised on the idea that you don’t have to surrender, you don’t have to capitulate.”

According to Shehada, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ireland and the United Kingdom support decommissioning as a mechanism for Gaza.

Netanyahu and Mladenov replaced that with demands for outright disarmament – meaning, as Shehada put it, “surrender everything you have. You have absolutely no leverage whatsoever.”

But the comparison has limits.

Northern Ireland involved a political process that at least formally recognized the rights and aspirations of all participants and established a path towards a united Ireland, the core objective of the Irish anti-colonial struggle.

With Palestine, even states backing decommissioning still start from the colonial premise that Palestinian resistance is the problem, not Zionist colonization, apartheid, siege and genocide.

Iran changes the power balance

This is why the regional dimension matters. The demand that the Palestinian – and for that matter Lebanese – resistance surrender rests on the assumption that the US and Israel still dominate the region so completely that they can dictate terms and everybody else must obey.

But the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran, and Hizballah’s formidable resistance in Lebanon, have exposed real limits to that power.

Iran has not only withstood a full-scale joint assault by the world’s and the region’s strongest and most genocidal military forces, it has arguably emerged stronger.

Shehada said Trump’s Board of Peace “began to unravel” once the US and Israel attacked Iran.

He noted that Indonesia suspended its participation and said Gaza’s factions drew a blunt lesson from the regional confrontation: “If you stand your ground, if you hit back, you strike back, you maintain steadfastness, you will get your way.”

“That lesson was immediately caught by people in Gaza,” Shehada said. It made the resistance factions “even more uncompromising on accepting the Mladenov proposal.”

Despite the catastrophic humanitarian situation Israel deliberately maintains, Washington and Tel Aviv have not secured the regional omnipotence they claim.

The existence of Palestinian weapons is not the root problem, but the consequence of the root problem: Zionist occupation, land theft, apartheid and genocide, sustained by US imperial power.

This basic truth cannot be wished away.

Any plan that begins by demanding Palestinian submission while leaving Israeli colonial power intact is a fraud.

Palestine, especially Gaza, does not need more such scams dressed up as “peace.” Its people need liberation and the restoration of all their rights.

The durable Western support for Israel even as it has perpetrated genocide since 7 October 2023 underscores that liberation will not be a gift from the likes of Mladenov, nor a reward for what Israel’s arms suppliers and financiers consider Palestinian good behavior.

As in every anti-colonial struggle, liberation will be won by Palestinians through their own efforts and sacrifices – and through the broader regional struggle to end the US imperial domination without which the Zionist colony in Palestine would disintegrate.

Tags:Gaza, Israel, Palestine, politics, Zionism.
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‘Death to Arabs’: Settler mobs storm Jerusalem’s Muslim, Christian quarters for ‘Flag March’

May 15, 2026

Israelis organize the Jewish supremacist march each year to celebrate the conquest of Jerusalem in 1967

News Desk, The Cradle, MAY 14, 2026

(Photo credit: Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

Tens of thousands of Jewish settlers descended on occupied Jerusalem on 14 May to celebrate the so-called ‘Flag March,’ beating Palestinian residents in the Muslim Quarter of the city, damaging storefronts, and shouting anti-Arab slogans.

The event, also known as the Flag Dance, commemorates the Israeli conquest of East Jerusalem during the Six-Day War in 1967.

Even before the parade began, Zionist youths pushed and cursed Palestinian residents and activists from “Standing Together,” an Israeli-Palestinian group established to protect Palestinians during the parade.

“When we put our bodies on the line, it oftentimes reduces the violence because settlers are less willing to attack when there are Jews there or when we document what’s going on,” stated Ori Shaham, the group’s international spokesperson.

The parade has long been marked by violence, extreme racism, and hate songs directed against the Palestinian residents of the Old City.

On Wednesday, the Knesset’s Aliyah, Absorption, and Diaspora Committee held a discussion on the violence directed against Christians during the annual parade.

The committee’s chairman, MK Gilad Kariv, stated that “there is nothing more ugly and offensive to the status of Jerusalem than the ugly behavior on the sidelines of the Flag Parade.”

“Every year we know what will happen … Muslim and Christian residents will close their shops, close their homes and schools, and lock themselves in their homes so as not to be exposed to violence? Is this the way of Judaism and the Torah of Israel?”

Last month, Haaretz reported that the Authority for Jewish National Identity in the Prime Minister’s Office provided nearly $200,000 in funding to organize the parade.

The remainder of the $400,000 budget was provided by the Foundation for the Renewal of Communities in Israel, an umbrella organization for several Torah groups.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir used the Flag Day march to make a provocative raid on the Temple Mount, home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam.

Tags:Gaza, Israel, Palestine, politics, Zionism.
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Peace and Justice Post

Posts Tagged ‘Zionism.’

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Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters

The independence movement

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Oslo’s heirs

Arab states condemned Israel publicly, but quietly moved on from Gaza

Tel Aviv advances de facto annexation of occupied West Bank with massive settlement expansion

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A new-old pattern

How Iran’s strength bolsters Gaza’s resistance

From the UN to the Israel lobby

Terms of surrender

Decommissioning vs. disarmament

Iran changes the power balance

‘Death to Arabs’: Settler mobs storm Jerusalem’s Muslim, Christian quarters for ‘Flag March’

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Addressing the Second Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress, Ilan Pappé urged Jewish anti-Zionists to challenge Zionism while advancing Palestinian liberation.

‘Universal Voice for Palestine’

Solidarity Begins by Listening

Europe’s Unfinished Reckoning

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New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch

Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters

The independence movement

Resistance and repression

Oslo’s heirs

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A new-old pattern

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From the UN to the Israel lobby

Terms of surrender

Decommissioning vs. disarmament

Iran changes the power balance

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