Warped politics: Robert Gates says Israel is “ungrateful,” but Obama will still veto Palestine UN bid

Jeffrey Goldberg’s latest column in Bloomberg shows exactly how the Israel lobby has warped the U.S. political system.  The lobby has such a stranglehold on U.S. policy towards Israel that a Secretary of Defense’s distaste for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu means nothing to the Obama administration’s polices on Israel.

Goldberg reports:

It was Robert M. Gates, the now-retired secretary of defense, who seemed most upset with Netanyahu. In a meeting of the National Security Council Principals Committee held not long before his retirement this summer, Gates coldly laid out the many steps the administration has taken to guarantee Israel’s security — access to top- quality weapons, assistance developing missile-defense systems, high-level intelligence sharing — and then stated bluntly that the U.S. has received nothing in return, particularly with regard to the peace process.

Senior administration officials told me that Gates argued to the president directly that Netanyahu is not only ungrateful, but also endangering his country by refusing to grapple with Israel’s growing isolation and with the demographic challenges it faces if it keeps control of the West Bank. According to these sources, Gates’s analysis met with no resistance from other members of the committee.

Gates has expressed his frustration with Netanyahu’s government before. Last year, when Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel was marred by an announcement of plans to build new housing units for Jews in East Jerusalem, Gates told several people that if he had been Biden, he would have returned to Washington immediately and told the prime minister to call Obama when he was serious about negotiations.

Gates’s frustration also stems from squabbling with Netanyahu over U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia and other Arab allies. In an encounter in Israel in March, according to U.S. and Israeli sources, Netanyahu lectured Gates at length on the possible dangers posed to Israel by such sales, as well as by Turkey and other regional U.S. allies. Gates, a veteran intelligence officer, resented Netanyahu’s tone, and reminded him that the sales were organized in consultation with Israel and pro-Israel members of Congress.

Yet the U.S. relationship with the country that so displeases sectors of the U.S. establishment will not change one bit.  Instead, the Obama administration will defend Israel full tilt later this month when the Palestinian Authority goes to the United Nations to ask for recognition of a Palestinian state.

Why is this?  It’s simple:  President Obama needs to be re-elected in 2012, and needs pro-Israel money and support.  And while Gates is part of the military establishment, the larger military industry that profits from the Israeli occupation will certainly not be pushing back against Obama’s full-throated support for Israel.  The only way to describe a political system like this is warped.

LGBT Center bars Palestine solidarity group

This article originally appeared in the latest issue of the Indypendent. 

When the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center, located on West 13th Street in Greenwich Village, imposed an “indefinite moratorium” early last month on pro-Palestinian groups using their meeting spaces, the center’s leadership hoped to put the controversy over Palestine solidarity organizing there to rest.

Instead, the center has stirred up a hornet’s nest of radical queer activists and their allies who are calling attention to the moratorium and demanding that it be reversed.

Two newly formed groups, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QAIA) and Queers for an Open LGBT Center (QFOLC), are turning up the heat on the Chelsea-area center, making New York the latest battleground over Israel within LGBT communities.

Demonstrations, sit-ins and pickets have greeted the LGBT Center in recent weeks.

Queer Palestine solidarity activists are angry at what they call “censorship” at a community center that has caved to Zionist donor pressure. Activists also say that the center’s response to their protests has disappointed them. For example, activists say the LGBT Center hired private guards in response to a March protest.

“The center [leadership has] betrayed the mission of the center. They have turned their backs on the community that they claim to serve, and they are excluding, expelling and banning people from the center based purely on their political perspective,” said Pauline Park, a founding member of QFOLC and a prominent transgender rights activist.

Read the whole thing here.

IDF, House Republican share goal: kill chance for Palestinian state

An important report in today’s Haaretz by Akiva Eldar further confirms the Israeli government’s intention to illegally annex strategic parts of the West Bank.  Combined with the push by a top House Republican to codify into law President George W. Bush’s 2004 letter to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, these latest news reports mean that current efforts for the creation of a Palestinian state are futile.

Eldar reports:

The IDF Civil Administration is taking steps to increase state-ownership of West Bank lands, an internal military document reveals. The policy enables increased construction not only around settlement blocs like Ariel, Ma’aleh Adumim and Gush Etzion, but also in strategic areas like the Jordan Valley and Dead Sea…

The inclusion of the Jordan Valley, northern Dead Sea and area surrounding Ariel in the “settlement blocs” whose takeover the administration is advancing, would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state with territorial contiguity. In addition, the scope of land in question thwarts the possibility of exchanging areas in a peace settlement, according to the formula presented by U.S. President Barack Obama on May 19.

This is because on the western side of the Green Line there is not enough open land to compensate the Palestinians for such an extensive annexation, according to examinations carried out during previous talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

The settlements of Ma’ale Adumim and Ariel are widely acknowledged as core obstacles to a viable Palestinian state. If Ma’ale Adumim completes its long-planned E1 extension, and was then incorporated into Israel proper, the West Bank would be cut off from East Jerusalem, the presumed future capital of a Palestinian state.  Even now, though, Ma’ale Adumim constitutes an obstacle to a viable state.

And if Israel annexed the settlement of Ariel, one of the largest in the West Bank, it would permanently cut off Palestinian villages from each other, making a contiguous and viable state impossible.  Ariel severely impedes Palestinian movement, and it sits on top of one of the largest water aquifiers in the West Bank.  A 2005 “settlements in focus” issue published by Americans for Peace Now noted that Ariel “blocks Palestinian contiguity between the large Palestinian town of Salfit to the south and a group of Palestinian villages to the north, including Marda, Zaita, Jammai’n, and Hares – a strategy of ‘divide and rule’ which has played a part in the location of settlements across the West Bank.”

The IDF’s plans for the Jordan Valley, an area that current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to hold onto forever, would also kill off any chance for an independent and sovereign Palestinian state.  The area is Palestine’s only link to the outside world that does not run through Israel, and contains some of the West Bank’s most fertile agricultural lands.  Israeli policy toward the Jordan Valley was highlighted in Human Rights Watch’s landmark “Separate and Unequal” report last December, which documented the “two-tier system of laws, rules, and services that Israel operates” in areas under its control.

Reports that Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican who heads the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is pushing to enshrine Bush’s 2004 letter is just one more indication that no matter what happens in September at the United Nations, there will be push back from right-wing American politicians.  Ros-Lehtinen’s intention is to effectively make any viable Palestinian state an impossibility.  Bush’s letter to Sharon reads:

In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949

The reference to “major Israeli population centers” is a nod to Israel’s insistence that it annex settlements such as Ariel and Ma’ale Adumim.  Documents leaked as part of Al Jazeera‘s publication of the “Palestine Papers” further confirms that the Bush administration pushed Israeli demands regarding these settlements onto Palestinian negotiators.

While the Obama administration has not backed Ros-Lehtinen’s demand that Bush’s letter become official U.S. policy, it has little appetite to fight for a viable state of Palestine.  The Israel lobby, along with Ros-Lehtinen and most of the U.S. Congress, have curtailed any chance that Obama would pressure Israel on issues such as Ariel, Ma’ale Adumim and the Jordan Valley.

The only question remaining is why anyone still believes that a Palestinian state is possible.

Senator wants U.S. Navy to help block flotillas to Gaza

Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois sure is earning the hundreds of thousands of dollars the Israel lobby dumps into his coffers.  In a report based on a recent “fact-finding” trip to the Middle East, Kirk calls for U.S. naval and special operations forces to support Israel in combating the upcoming flotilla to Gaza.

Kirk’s report reads:

The IHH plans to send a second flotilla to breach Israel’s coastal security later this month. To prevent further violence, the United States should:

1) immediately designate the IHH as a terrorist entity under Executive Order 13224, which targets “terrorists, terrorist organizations, and those providing financial, technological, or material support to terrorists, terrorist organizations, or acts of terrorism”;

2) make available all necessary special operations and naval support to the Israeli Navy to effectively disable flotilla vessels before they can pose a threat to Israeli coastal security or put Israeli lives at risk; and

3) make it clear to Turkish President Erdogan that Turkey will be held accountable for any actions that support or enable the IHH to launch its flotilla.

The flotilla, set to sail to Gaza at the end of this month, aims to nonviolently challenge the Israeli blockade that has suffocated the Gaza Strip.  Kirk’s call for the U.S. Navy to provide “special operations and naval support to the Israeli Navy” to stop the flotilla is particularly alarming because a contingent of American citizens will be a part of the flotilla.  Kirk would have no problem, it seems, with the U.S. Navy being deployed against U.S. citizens aiming to break the blockade, which has been termed “collective punishment” by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

 

 

 

Emergency Committee for Israel ad highlights bipartisan support for occupation

The first shot of what promises to be many that target President Barack Obama’s stance on Israel was fired yesterday when the Emergency Committee for Israel released an ad blasting Obama for siding “with the Palestinians.”

It’s unclear whether the noise about Obama’s call at the State Department for the 1967 borders to be the starting point for negotiations will amount to anything.  But the neoconservative group’s ad does contain an important kernel of truth:  that support for Israel and its occupation runs across the aisle.

The transcript of the ad reads:

Voiceover: When President Obama sided with the Palestinians, members of both parties stood with Israel.

Harry Reid: Nobody should set premature perimeters about borders.

Steny Hoyer: Israel’s borders must be defensible.

Bob Casey: Jerusalem is the undivided and eternal capitol of Israel.

Benjamin Netanyahu: And I see a lot of new friends of Israel here…. Democrats and Republicans alike.

Voiceover: The Emergency Committee for Israel thanks Israel’s true friends, Democrats and Republicans alike.

Obama’s remarks on the borders of Israel were mild, and reflected long-standing U.S. policy.  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu picked a fight, though, and the Israel lobby went into high-gear.  And so you have Bob Casey, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, proclaiming his support for unending occupation when he vows that “Jerusalem is the undivided and eternal capitol of Israel.”  And you have Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, publicly rebuking Obama–the leader of Reid’s party–for daring to say that the pre-1967 borders should be the starting point for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

This political dynamic of  unquestioning support for Israel and its occupation will produce, and already has begun to produce, a rush from Obama and his allies to assure donors and the Jewish establishment that Obama is truly pro-Israel (meaning pro-occupation).

Ben Smith at Politico reports:

Amid a certain amount of…tsouris…in the Jewish community over Benjamin Netanyahu’s confrontational visit, Danielle Borrin, the Biden aide who serves as Jewish Liaison, emails Jewish leaders the link to “a powerful new resource on the White House website designed to answer any questions about President Obama’s commitment to advancing Israel’s security and supporting peace.”

The extensive talking points, and an op-ed by Rahm Emanuel, represent a new round of pushback against a drumbeat of claims that Obama has, as Romney said, thrown Israel under the bus.

So the fight over Israel in the 2012 elections will not be about which politician is most capable of producing peace.  Instead, you will have both Democrats and Republicans fighting over who can support Israel more.  And in the meantime, land theft, settlement expansion and the crackdown on Palestinian protest continues without a peep from Israel’s number one ally.

AIPAC’s thuggery comes home

The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is committed to supporting Israel’s thuggish right-wing government–no matter how much land is confiscated from Palestinians, no matter how many homes are bulldozed, and no matter how many Palestinians are killed.  And, it appears, AIPAC’s support of violence also applies to the U.S.

Rae Abileah, a Jewish-American activist with CODEPINK and Jewish Voice for Peace and who is of Israeli descent, interrupted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress yesterday.  She shouted:   “No more occupation! Stop Israel war crimes! Equal rights for Palestinians! Occupation is indefensible!”  She was tackled by members of AIPAC, and was subsequently hospitalized and then arrested.

From the CODEPINK press release:

Police arrested CODEPINK peace activist Rae Abileah at the George Washington University Hospital in Washington DC. Abileah was taken to the hospital after having been assaulted and tackled to the ground by AIPAC members of the audience in the House Gallery during Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech to Congress.

Abileah interrupted Netanyahu with a banner that said  “Occupying Land Is Indefensible” and shouting, “No more occupation, stop Israel war crimes, equal rights for Palestinians, occupation is indefensible.” She rose up to speak out just after the Prime Minister talked about the youth around the world rising up for more democracy.

As this 28-year-old Jewish American woman spoke out for the human rights of Palestinians, other members of the audience—wearing badges from the conference of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee—brutally attacked her. The police then dragged her out of the Gallery and took her to the George Washington University Hospital, where she was being treating for neck and shoulder injuries.

“I am in great pain, but this is nothing compared to the pain and suffering that Palestinians go through on a regular basis,” said Abileah from her hospital bed. “I have been to Gaza and the West Bank, I have seen Palestinians homes bombed and bulldozed, I have talked to mothers whose children have been killed during the invasion of Gaza, I have seen the Jewish-only roads leading to ever-expanding settlements in the West Bank. This kind of colonial occupation cannot continue. As a Jew and a U.S. citizen, I feel obligated to rise up and speak out against stop these crimes being committed in my name and with my tax dollars.”

Abileah explained that she stands in solidarity with the Palestinian and Israeli activists who are routinely jailed and beaten for speaking out for democracy.

Watch Abileah’s interview with Democracy Now! this morning:

Bucking Obama and Netanyahu, Palestinian refugees assert their centrality

When President Barack Obama delivered his much awaited speech on the “Arab Spring” last Thursday, outlining his administration’s policy on the Arab revolts and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he proposed a negotiations process that would delay discussions on Palestinian refugees.

“These principles provide a foundation for negotiations.  Palestinians should know the territorial outlines of their state; Israelis should know that their basic security concerns will be met,” he said at the State Department.  “I’m aware that these steps alone will not resolve the conflict, because two wrenching and emotional issues will remain:  the future of Jerusalem, and the fate of Palestinian refugees.  But moving forward now on the basis of territory and security provides a foundation to resolve those two issues in a way that is just and fair.”

Obama didn’t even mention refugees once during his May 22 speech to the annual conference of the powerful pro-Israel lobby, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee.

But Palestinian refugees themselves are not having any of that, despite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vow that Palestinians’ insistence on returning is “not going to happen,” as he told President Obama at the White House May 20.  As the Nakba day protests that erupted on May 15 show, the fate of Palestinian refugees, and their demands to return to their homeland in what is now Israel, remain a core issue in the conflict.

Obama is “now attempting to parse away the negotiations by turning it into a very piecemeal negotiation, where first you focus on borders and security, and then leave all of the other issues to a later date,” Diana Buttu, a former spokesperson of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Negotiations Support Unit, told the Institute for Palestine Studies.  “This is the policy the Israelis have been pushing for a very long period of time.”

But Palestinian refugees are not waiting on a U.S. president to show them the way forward.  Through the kinds of unarmed, popular resistance that have overthrown the regimes of Hosni Mubarak and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali–and that Palestinian themselves first used during their intifadas–they are reinserting themselves into the discourse on Israel/Palestine.

The next big event for refugees and their supporters will be June 5, a date that marks the start of the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel captured and occupied the Golan Heights in Syria, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt–all of which remain in Israel’s hands, save for the Sinai.

The Ma’an News Agency reported May 21 that “masses of Palestinian refugees will march to Israel’s borders and ceasefire lines again on June 5, organizers of the May 15 ‘return rally’ said…The committee organizing the ‘return rallies’ said Saturday that the May 15 protests were ‘just the beginning.’  In a statement, the group called on all Palestinian refugees living in exile to march peacefully to the borders of historic Palestine on June 5.”

The “right to return” rallies represent the clearest sign yet that Palestinian refugees are done waiting for a peace process that has done nothing for their rights.  The rallies could be looked at as a wholesale rejection of a negotiations process that has systematically shut refugees and the whole Palestinian diaspora out.  And it represents a rejection of the Obama/Netanyahu line on refugees.

Role reversal: Jeffrey Wiesenfeld comes under scrutiny

Jeffrey Wiesenfeld has made it a career habit to try and marginalize anyone he perceived to be insufficiently pro-Israel and to smear Muslims and Arabs.  But in the wake of the Tony Kushner degree controversy, it is Wiesenfeld’s politics, racism and abuse of power that are coming under scrutiny.

Wiesenfeld, a trustee at the AIPAC-created think-tank called the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, was a board member for the so-called Stop the Madrassa Coalition, which led the vicious anti-Arab and anti-Muslim campaign against the Khalil Gibran International Academy.  He also played a role in the short-lived firing of Kristofer Petersen-Overton, a professor at Brooklyn College whose academic scholarship focused on Palestinian identity.  And now, he has single-handedly blocked an honorary degree for playwright Tony Kushner solely for his views on Israel.

This time, though, Wiesenfeld is on the defensive, and it’s entirely his doing.  His abuse of power in nixing an honorary degree for one of the most celebrated artists in America was the first transgression.  His second one was telling the New York Times’ Jim Dwyer that, in effect, he believes that the Palestinian people are “not human.”

The double-shot to the foot has led to a piling up of calls for Wiesenfeld to resign  The New York Times upped the ante in a May 6 editorial calling for Wiesenfeld’s removal:

The trustees of the City University of New York got it exactly backward this week. They supported the political agenda of an intolerant board member and shunned one of America’s most important playwrights. They should have embraced the artist and tossed out the board member.

Wiesenfeld is also taking heat from the former mayor of New York City Ed Koch, despite the fact that Wiesenfeld served in the Koch administration and that Koch shares many of Wiesenfeld’s right-wing political views.

Activist groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations-NY and Jewish Voice for Peace are also demanding Wiesenfeld’s resignation.  Cyrus McGoldrick, the civil rights director for the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said:

The underlying issue here is a taboo on addressing the conditions of Palestinian people in the public space. Wiesenfeld may feel that his bigotry is the order of the day, but our tax dollars which support CUNY should not be utilized to dehumanize any people, and we call on CUNY to enforce this basic yet critical notion by removing or demanding the resignation of Jeffrey Wiesenfeld

Some prominent academics have renounced their honorary degrees from CUNY.

The uproar over Wiesenfeld marks an important and ongoing shift in the U.S. discourse on Israel/Palestine, as Jerry Haber writes.  Instead of Kushner being the focus of controversy, Wiesenfeld’s actions have backfired, and it is the powerful CUNY trustee who finds himself the subject of scrutiny.

The controversy will peter out in the coming weeks, as CUNY is set to award Kushner the degree Wiesenfeld sought to nix.  But if the pressure escalates on CUNY so much so that Wiesenfeld is forced to go, it would a victory for free speech and Palestine solidarity and a blow to the Israel lobby.

The upshot of the Tony Kushner muzzling

Image from Columbia.edu

The decision by the City University of New York’s (CUNY) Board of Trustees to block famous playwright Tony Kushner’s honorary degree at John Jay College is rightly being met with outrage.  But there’s also an important upshot to the controversy:  the racism that right-wing supporters of Israel deploy against Palestinians is getting an airing, as is the unrelenting attempts by powerful pro-Israel types to shut down debate on Palestine.  It’s a tiny airing, but it’s a start.

Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, the far-right supporter of Israel behind the decision to block Kushner’s degree, is being pilloried in the press.  For instance, while Jeffrey Goldberg minces words and refuses to call him a racist, he did write three blog posts criticizing Wiesenfeld.

The narrative that Wiesenfeld wanted to disseminate–that Kushner is an extremist and an anti-Semite–has backfired, and has turned into a story about Wiesenfeld’s politics and how one powerful supporter of the State of Israel successfully managed to block debate and smear a prominent American artist.

Wiesenfeld’s racism against Palestinians, and the shameful way Kushner was treated, was cataloged in an interview published today by the New York Times’ Jim Dwyer:

Mr. Wiesenfeld is the City University of New York trustee who rose this week at a board meeting to block an honorary degree to the playwright Tony Kushner, declaring him an “extremist” opponent and critic of Israel.

It was a startling development for a board that appeared to be on the verge of rubber-stamping a bundle of honorary degrees proposed by the colleges within the university, including one for Mr. Kushner from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Mr. Kushner was not present, and fragments of his views — which are complicated, passionate, critical — were balled up into a few pellets by Mr. Wiesenfeld, who gave a 900-word speech that was mostly devoted to other figures who he felt were radically hostile to Israel. He quoted about 75 words that he said showed that Mr. Kushner’s thinking was beyond the pale.

The trustees pulled the playwright’s name from the motion and moved on to wholesale rubber-stamping of the remaining honorary degrees.

Was this any way for one of the great public universities of the world to discuss the views of one of the leading dramatists of modern times, author of the epic “Angels in America”?

[...]

I tried to ask a question about the damage done by a short, one-sided discussion of vigorously debated aspects of Middle East politics, like the survival of Israel and the rights of the Palestinians, and which side was more callous toward human life, and who was most protective of it.

But Mr. Wiesenfeld interrupted and said the question was offensive because “the comparison sets up a moral equivalence.”

Equivalence between what and what? “Between the Palestinians and Israelis,” he said. “People who worship death for their children are not human.”

Did he mean the Palestinians were not human? “They have developed a culture which is unprecedented in human history,” he said.

A separate New York Times article notes that this was not the first time Zionists attempted to nix an award for Kushner:

In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Mr. Kushner has received 15 honorary degrees. In 2006, some pro-Zionist groups tried to block him from getting an honorary degree at Brandeis University, but the university decided to go ahead with the honor.

In response to the current episode, former New York City Mayor Ed Koch, a vehement supporter of Israel, has called on CUNY to fire Wiesenfeld:

Ed Koch call for the City University of New York to terminate its relationship with a trustee who engineered the denial of an honorary degree to Tony Kushner because of the playwright’s criticism of Israel…

Neither Kushner nor anyone else was invited to speak in his defense.

“Mr. Wiesenfeld and the trustees who followed his request should immediately reverse their action and urge Mr. Kushner to forgive them,” Koch wrote. “I consider Mr. Wiesenfeld’s action so outrageous as to be an abuse of power on his part requiring his resignation or removal from the Board of Trustees.”

This was probably not what Wiesenfeld was expecting.  CUNY is already backpedaling.  Former Mayor Koch is airing his outrage over Wiesenfeld’s actions.  The New York Times and Jeffrey Goldberg are calling him out for his repugnant views.  Some discussion of the history of these attempts to shut down dissent over Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is being heard.  What needs to happen next is an honest discussion about the facts concerning the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

Bipartisanship at last: U.S. politicians line up to castigate Palestinian unity deal

In stark contrast to partisan wrangling over the budget and women’s rights, Democrats and Republicans are lining up to demand the cut-off of U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority as a response to the reported unity deal between Hamas and Fatah.  Expect the Obama administration to take heed and agree with Congress–especially with the 2012 elections approaching.

The rhetoric from both sides of the aisle is uniform.  It’s the Israel lobby’s line.  It’s telling, for example, that a staunch Republican and neoconservative pro-Israel hawk like Jennifer Rubin would approvingly quote an otherwise reliable liberal like Representative Gary Ackerman, a Democrat from New York:

The purported deal, which does not require Hamas to accept Israel’s right to exist, or the binding nature of prior Palestinian commitments, or even to require Hamas to temporarily forgo violence against Israel (as if it were some kind barbaric of addiction, or compulsion), is a recipe for failure, mixed with violence, leading to disaster. It is a ghastly mistake that I fear will be paid for in the lives of innocent Israelis.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Republican chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs committee, similarly said:

The reported agreement between Fatah and Hamas means that a Foreign Terrorist Organization which has called for the destruction of Israel will be part of the Palestinian Authority government. U.S. taxpayer funds should not and must not be used to support those who threaten U.S. security, our interests, and our vital ally, Israel.

Interestingly, though, there are some, if not many, analysts and activists in solidarity with the Palestinian cause that will be happy with a cut off of U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority (for different reasons than Congress).  U.S. aid, which has gone to train the Palestinian Authority’s security forces, has contributed deeply to the split between Hamas and Fatah.

As Ali Abunimah noted for the Electronic Intifada, “in The Palestine Papers, the main concern of Ramallah officials was always to maintain Western financial aid to the PA, and not to make any agreement with Hamas that would jeopardize American and European financing for the PA.”  The Western financial aid has been used to crack down on Hamas.  But if U.S. and European aid is cut off, perhaps the Palestinian Authority would no longer imprison Hamas members and quash dissent.  That would go a long away towards true Palestinian unity.