About Those Benjamins and the Survival of Israel

By Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News

05 April 19

 

UCSON, Arizona – Donald Trump’s daft assertion, “Democrats hate Jews,” not only reflects an Israel policy that fans smoldering anti-Semitism across the world but also threatens the very survival of a hard-won Jewish homeland in a region armed for Armageddon.

“Democrats have become an anti-Israel party,” Sarah Sanders told reporters recently. Then, sticking by that absurdity under harsh questioning, she added: “They’ve become an anti-Jewish party.”

Judaism is a faith and a heritage. Zionism is politics. They can overlap, or not. No one speaks for an ancient religion defined by perpetual argument. And if Jews did have a pope, he or she would hardly be Bibi Netanyahu, much less Sheldon Adelson, Trump’s Israel-First funder.

Since 1967, I have reported off and on from Israel, nearly every Muslim country, and European slums where Islamist zealots whip up hatreds. Today, I see Trump’s embrace of hardcore Zionists feed growing hostility that risks conflict no one’s God can stop.

Tom Friedman had it right in a New York Times column evoking an existential danger from Congress and AIPAC, the formidable lobbying group: “It’s the threat that America will love Israel to death.”

If a two-state option remains open, negotiation is possible. “But once that’s gone,” he wrote, “all hell will break loose in the Jewish world.… It would rip apart every synagogue, Jewish Federation and Jewish institution in America.”

That’s in the United States. Imagine the impact across the Middle East, beginning with the West Bank and Gaza with no Palestinian Authority to balance extremists.

Trump’s casual recognition of Israel’s claim to the Golan Heights opened wounds festering since 1967. This comes at a time when Syria, now fortified by a belligerent Russia, is determined to reassert its role in the region.

Iran, reviled by Washington, spent $14.5 billion on weaponry in 2017, nearly as much as Israel. Despite sanctions, it arms anti-Israel militias with sophisticated weaponry. ISIS lost its caliphate, but it is as dangerous as ever with shadowy cells from Africa to the Philippines.

Across Europe, perceived injustice to Palestinians provokes indiscriminate attacks against Jews, including those who want an equitable peace with an end to illegal settlements.

In Washington, lunacy erupted after the Republican House minority leader dug up 2012 tweets from Ilhan Omar, now a Minnesota congresswoman. She called Israeli overkill in Gaza “evil” and blamed U.S. support on AIPAC lobbyists’ funding for paid politicians.

In fact, plenty of Israelis and American Jews agree with her views. But her offending tweet earlier this year – “it’s all about the Benjamins baby” – turned a reference to $100 bills into what sounded like an especially nasty slur in the politically charged circumstances.

Omar apologized, saying Jewish allies and colleagues had educated her “on the painful history of anti-Semitic tropes.” But she was criticized again two weeks later for telling an audience that some politicians were wrong in expressing allegiance to a foreign country.

Rep. Liz Cheney, whose unapologetic father set the Middle East ablaze on spurious evidence, said Democrats enabled anti-Semitism by not repudiating Omar. The House passed a compromise kumbaya resolution against all hate speech, as if that might stop anyone’s bigotry.

And then Jeanine Pirro weighed in with her habitual invective. It was so extreme that Fox News put her temporarily on ice despite Trump’s defense of her. But she’s back again with hate-laced diatribes that harden divides in a polarized America prone to shallow thinking.

I happened on Pirro’s Fox News raving in 2015 after a terrorist attack in France. “We need to kill them,” she began. “We need to kill them, the radical Muslim terrorists hell-bent on killing us. You’re in danger. I’m in danger. We’re at war and this is not going to stop.”

Such sweeping Islamophobia translates to carte blanche for hardline Israelis who intensify colonization of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Netanyahu countered corruption charges at home with a grand trip to Washington, where he gushed over Trump’s Golan Heights recognition.

A closer look at Ilhan Omar, a naturalized Somali who escaped brutal war in the early 1990s as a kid and found refuge in America, explains global realities too often missed when seen at a distance in simplified generality.

Omar kept her hijab but developed a sense of humor, excelling at school despite taunts and attacks by classmates. In Minnesota, she sailed through the state legislature and was elected to Congress at age 36 with a large Jewish constituency.

“You know, I have P.T.S.D. around, like, guns and ammunition and bombs,” she told The New Yorker. “I have vivid memories of the bodily reactions that you have as you contemplate whether you get under the bed, and if that will keep you safe or if that’s going to crush you, and maybe you should just stand by a wall. I see conflict that has violence and I think deeply about what the little children are going through.”

Omar exemplifies what America now badly needs: freshly minted patriots who want their adopted nation to do the right thing — and know what the right thing isn’t. They know the complex answers to that hoary question: Why do they hate us?

Most Jews support the idea of Israel, but a hefty percentage want it to function as designed, a democratically run state that respects international law and shares territory according to negotiated boundaries. Hardliners want it all as a biblical right.

Many Arab Israelis prefer being second-class citizens in Israel to living in Palestine, where conflict and neglect by Arab nations have crippled education, health care, and employment. Many Palestinians blame their plight on Israeli settlements and border controls.

Golan is a tough one. After the disruptions of World War II, U.N. accords forbade countries from seizing territory by invasion. That’s why coalition forces liberated Kuwait. But Israel was attacked in 1967. It pushed back and then kept the Heights to protect rich farmland below.

U.N. Security Council resolution 242 calls on Israel to withdraw from occupied territory, but that is contingent on a negotiated settlement that secures peace on Israel’s borders. After a half-century of failed efforts, smoldering tensions risk conflagration.

Now, rather than seeking a durable accord based on quid pro quo, Trump propped up Netanyahu with the gift of Golan. That ensured the flow of Benjamins to Republicans from American Zionists. And it stoked hatreds across the unholy land.

This is dangerous beyond description. In the past, with few exceptions, Muslims saw Jews, like Christians, as people of the same book with shared origins. I, for one, am now acutely aware of my name and nose in places I once loved to travel.

Back in 1981, I drove from Damascus to the Syrian side of the Golan Heights with a military minder, and we looked down over Israeli settlements below. “Rosenblum?” he asked. “Is that a German name?”

“You know perfectly well what kind of name it is,” I replied, “and you know the difference between Jewish and Zionist.” He laughed. I wouldn’t try that today.

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Mort Rosenblum has reported from seven continents as Associated Press special correspondent, edited the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and written 14 books on subjects ranging from global geopolitics to chocolate. He now runs MortReport.org.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

Congress Is Pushing for an End to Decades of Wars

By Bernie Sanders and Mike Lee, USA TODAY

05 April 19

Congress is finally reasserting its constitutional role in war making. We need a serious discussion of when and where to intervene, and who decides.

ongress made history this week by passing a resolution that cuts off U.S. support for Saudi-led forces in the civil war in Yemen. This is the first time since Congress originally passed the War Powers Resolution in 1973 that we have used it to call on the president to withdraw from an undeclared war.

The passage of this resolution has implications far beyond Yemen and opens a much broader and extremely important debate about how and when the United States uses our military, and who must authorize that use.

Yemen is now experiencing the worst humanitarian disaster in the world because of the four-year-old Saudi-led intervention into Yemen's civil war. According to the United Nations, Yemen is at risk of the most severe famine in 100 years, with some 14 million people facing starvation. In one of the poorest countries on earth, because of this war, according to the Save the Children organization, an estimated 85,000 children have already starved to death over the last several years, and millions more face death if the war continues.

Since the Saudi-led intervention began in 2015, the United States has been supporting it, refueling the Saudi coalition’s planes and assisting with intelligence. The bombs the Saudi-led coalition is using are American made. A CNN report found evidence that American weapons have been used in a string of deadly attacks on civilians since the war began.

As far as the people of Yemen are concerned, when they see “Made in USA” on the bombs that are destroying their country, it tells them that the U.S.A. is to blame.

This week Congress said clearly: No more.

Congress is taking back its war powers

Importantly, this resolution shows that Congress has begun to reassert its constitutional responsibility over war making. As we have both repeatedly stressed, Article I of the United States Constitution states that it is Congress which has the power to declare war, not the president. The Framers gave that enormously important responsibility to the branch of government that is closer and more accountable to the people.

Over many years, Congress has abdicated that responsibility to Democratic presidents and Republican presidents. This week, Congress reclaimed its constitutional authority by calling for the end of U.S. involvement in an unauthorized and unconstitutional war.

We must not stop with Yemen, however.

We believe that Congress has become far too comfortable with the United States engaging in military interventions all over the world. We have now been in Afghanistan for nearly 18 years, the longest war in American history. We have been in Iraq since 2003. Our troops are now in Syria under what we believe are questionable authorities, and President Trump has made clear he intends to keep them there despite earlier promises to withdraw.

On March 20, Amnesty International released a report alleging that U.S. drone attacks in Somalia had indiscriminately killed civilians, farmers, women, and an 8-year-old girl. These deaths, the report said, could amount to war crimes.

Draw the line and end decades of wars

According to the Trump administration, U.S. forces are currently fighting in seven different countries — Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Niger, and Libya — against militants linked to Al Qaeda, the terrorist group that attacked the United States on September 11, 2001. The administration justifies these interventions under the Authorizations for the Use of Military Force passed by Congress in in 2001 and 2002.

It is time for Congress to ask whether, nearly 18 years after 9/11, we really want to continue to be involved in these wars for another 18 or more. According to a recent study by the Costs of War Project at Brown University, the War on Terror will have cost American taxpayers almost $5 trillion through Fiscal Year 2019. When taking in to account future health care obligations for veterans injured in post-9/11 wars, the bill comes closer to $6 trillion.

Even after this enormous expense, the world has more militants, not fewer. A November 2018 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that the number of militants has continued to grow. “Despite nearly two decades of U.S.-led counterterrorism operations,” the report said, “there are nearly four times as many Sunni Islamic militants today as there were on September 11, 2001.”

The time is long overdue for Congress to reassert its constitutional responsibility over war making. We need a serious national debate over when and where we put our military in harm’s way, and about how much we are prepared to spend on those interventions. Congress’s historic vote on Yemen this week is an important beginning in that process, now we must continue forward.