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Shaming Biden and slashing budgets: Republicans and Democrats accuse each other of dissing Israel
WASHINGTON (JTA) — As the 2024 election gets into gear, both Republicans and Democrats are again using Israel as a wedge issue.
A lot has changed in both countries since the last presidential election, but in the halls of Congress, the battle over Israel is playing out in familiar ways.
Republicans have accused President Joe Biden of snubbing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he has yet to invite to the White House amid policy disagreements. Democrats, meanwhile, say that the Republicans’ proposed spending cuts endanger foreign aid to Israel.
And leaders of both parties have indicated that, even amid a high-states fight over the debt ceiling, displaying support for Israel remains a priority. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House speaker, took time this week to lead a bipartisan delegation to Israel, where he addressed the Knesset.
That was just a week after Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader from New York, led his own delegation to the country, and laid a wreath to mark its Memorial Day. Also visiting the country recently to demonstrate his support: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is expected to launch his bid for the GOP presidential nomination this month.
Hakeem Jeffries, center, the New York Democrat who is the House minority leader, lays a wreath on Israel’s Memorial Day in Latrun, Israel, April 25, 2023. (Office of Hakeem Jeffries)
McCarthy’s speech in Israel’s parliament was nonpartisan, but his remarks to reporters were less so. McCarthy told Israel Hayom, a right-leaning tabloid, that Biden was wrong not to invite Netanyahu to Washington, saying Netanyahu has waited “too long” since returning to office in December.
“If that doesn’t happen, I’ll invite the prime minister to come meet with the House,” McCarthy said. “He’s a dear friend, as a prime minister of a country that we have our closest ties with.”
Amir Ohana, the speaker of Knesset and a member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, had hinted that his invitation to McCarthy was a sort of rebuke to Biden. The U.S. president has indicated that he is not interested in seeing Netanyahu until the Israeli leader limits the influence of his far-right coalition partners, and walks back his controversial effort to weaken Israel’s judiciary. Biden has said the judicial overhaul would undercut Israel’s democracy.
As McCarthy was getting ready to leave Israel, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a senior Democrat, was telling colleagues that Republican budget maneuvers were imperiling U.S. assistance to Israel.
Wasserman Schultz’s warning came after House Republicans, voting on party lines, passed a debt limit bill that would curb and then reduce government spending. What, exactly, the bill proposes to cut and keep is not clear. But Wasserman Schultz, a Jewish representative from South Florida, said that the bill’s language mandates cuts across all non-defense spending, including foreign aid. That means, she said, that the $3.3 billion Israel gets annually in defense assistance could be reduced by as much as $726 million.
“That puts Israel’s security at risk,” Wasserman Schultz told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Without any specificity or explicit protection we can’t be sure that Israel is safe.”
McCarthy has pitched the debt limit bill as an opening gambit: It has no chance of advancing as is in the Democratic-led Senate, and McCarthy has said he will get to specifics once negotiations start. Legislation is needed to lift the amount the government is able to borrow, or it could risk a default on its debt.
On Sunday, a McCarthy spokesperson told JTA that security assistance to Israel would remain untouched, and McCarthy made the pledge explicit in his Knesset speech the following day. “As long as I am Speaker, America will continue to support full funding for security assistance in Israel,” he said.
In some ways, this week’s debate mirrors the way Israel was discussed in 2011, the last time a Democratic president was up for reelection as Republicans controlled the House. Back then, Republicans chided President Barack Obama for being insufficiently friendly to Israel, while Democrats warned that Republican spending cuts would harm aid to Israel.
But Wasserman Schultz said that in one respect, that year’s Republican spending bill was not as risky for Israel. Before the 2010 election,Rep. Eric Cantor, a Jewish Republican, pledged that Israel spending was sacrosanct, and the Republicans’ subsequent bill said that aid to Israel would not be reduced.
“They have nothing in that bill with specificity that ensures that foreign aid to Israel will be protected,” Wasserman Schultz said regarding this year’s spending bill.
Wasserman Schultz hasn’t been the only one to seek assurances that aid to Israel would be left alone. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby, has also asked that Israel cuts be taken off the table.
“We are continuing our work with congressional leaders to ensure full funding of security assistance to Israel, without additional conditions,” Marshall Wittmann, AIPAC’s spokesman, told JTA. “This is a top legislative priority, as it is in the security interests of the U.S and our ally Israel, and we are pleased that many members of Congress have already written senior members of the Appropriations Committee in support of this funding.”
Wasserman Schultz said that while she welcomed McCarthy’s reassurance on Israel, she worries that Republican cuts could impact foreign aid overall. AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups have also said that foreign aid generally — not just to Israel — is essential to preserving U.S. influence internationally.
“Words matter but the actions in the House Republican Default on America bill that passed the House doesn’t match the rhetoric,” she said in a text message on Monday, using a derisive name for the Republican bill. “But even if his Caucus allows him to follow through on those words, the drastic cuts called for in the Default on America Act would decimate support for our partners and diplomatic efforts in the region and undercut Israel’s overall security.”
Asked in Jerusalem about the debt limit negotiations, McCarthy said that in at least one respect, he and the prime minister were in the same boat.
“The president still hasn’t talked to me,” he said, just hours before Biden invited him to the White House to launch debt limit negotiations. “I’m a little like Netanyahu.”
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The post Shaming Biden and slashing budgets: Republicans and Democrats accuse each other of dissing Israel appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Board of Peace Members Have Pledged More Than $5 billion for Gaza, Trump Says
A drone view shows the destruction in a residential neighborhood, after the withdrawal of the Israeli forces from the area, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, in Gaza City, October 21, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas/File Photo
US President Donald Trump said Board of Peace member states will announce at an upcoming meeting on Thursday a pledge of more than $5 billion for reconstruction and humanitarian efforts in Gaza.
In a post on Truth Social on Sunday, Trump wrote that member states have also committed thousands of personnel toward a U.N.-authorized stabilization force and local police in the Palestinian enclave.
The US president said Thursday’s gathering, the first official meeting of the group, will take place at the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, which the State Department recently renamed after the president. Delegations from more than 20 countries, including heads of state, are expected to attend.
The board’s creation was endorsed by a United Nations Security Council resolution as part of the Trump administration’s plan to end the war between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas in Gaza.
Israel and Hamas agreed to the plan last year with a ceasefire officially taking effect in October, although both sides have accused each other repeatedly of violating the ceasefire. According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, more than 590 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli troops in the territory since the ceasefire began. Israel has said four of its soldiers have been killed by Palestinian militants in the same period.
While regional Middle East powers including Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel – as well as emerging nations such as Indonesia – have joined the board, global powers and traditional Western US allies have been more cautious.
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Why a forgotten teacher’s grave became a Jewish pilgrimage site
Along Britton Road in Rochester, New York, a brick gatehouse sits across from ordinary homes. Beyond it lies Britton Road Cemetery, its grounds divided into family plots and sections claimed over time by Orthodox congregations and fraternal associations, past and present. Names like Anshe Polen, Beth Hakneses Hachodosh, B’nai Israel, and various Jewish fraternal organizations are found here.
On the east side of the cemetery, a modest gray headstone draws visitors who do not personally know the man buried there, who were never taught his name in school, and who claim no personal connection to his life. Some leave notes. Some light candles in a small metal box set nearby. Others whisper prayers and stand for a moment before going. They come because they believe holiness can be found here.
The grave belongs to Rabbi Yechiel Meir Burgeman, a Polish-born teacher who died in 1938. He did not lead a major congregation or leave behind an institution that bears his name. And yet, nearly a century after his death, people still visit.
Over time, Burgeman has come to be remembered as a tzaddik nistar, a hidden righteous person, whose holiness is known through their teaching and daily life rather than through any title or position. His grave has become a place of intercession. People come to pray for healing, for help in times of uncertainty, and for the hope of marriage. What endures here is not an individual’s biography so much as a practice: the belief that a life lived with integrity can continue to shape devotion, even after the body has been laid to rest.
In life, Burgeman was not known as a miracle worker or a public figure. He was a melamed, a teacher of children, living plainly among other Jewish immigrants in Rochester’s Jewish center in the early decades of the 20th century. At one point, he was dismissed from a teaching post for refusing to soften his instruction. He later opened his own cheder, or schoolroom. There was no congregation to inherit his name, no institution to archive his papers. When he died, he was buried in an ordinary way at Britton Road Cemetery, one grave among many.
What followed was not immediate.
Remembered in return
The meaning attached to Burgeman’s resting place accumulated slowly. Stories began to circulate. People spoke of his kindness, his discipline, his integrity. Over time, visitors came. The grave became a place not of answers, but of belief. For generations, this turning toward the dead has taken this same form. It is not worship. It is proximity. A way of standing near those believed to have lived rightly, and asking that their merit might still matter.
In Jewish tradition, prayer at a grave is a reflection on those believed to have lived with righteousness, asking that their merit accompany the living in moments of need. Psalms are traditionally recited. Words are often spoken quietly.
I have done something similar too. Years ago, before I converted to Judaism and before I had the means to travel, I sent a written prayer through a Chabad service that delivers letters to the grave of the Lubavitcher Rebbe in New York. Someone else carried it. I cannot say with absolute certainty what happened because of it. Only that the practice itself made space for hope that I was seen, and that a prayer was later answered in ways that shaped my life and deepened my understanding of Judaism.
Burgeman’s grave functions in a similar register, though without any institutional frame. People come not because his name is widely known, but because the story has endured. Over time, that story gathered details. The most persistent involves a dog said to have escorted Jewish children to Burgeman’s cheder so they would not be harassed along the way by other youths. The dog then stood watch until they were ready to return home. The versions differ. Some are reverent. Some are playful. Some verge on the miraculous. The story endures because it names something children needed: care, in a world that could be frightening.
In recent decades, Burgeman’s afterlife has taken on a digital form. His name surfaces in comment threads and genealogical forums, passed along by people who never met him and are not always sure how they are connected. Spellings are debated. Dates are corrected. A descendant appears. A former student’s grandchild adds a fragment. Someone asks whether this is the same man their grandmother spoke of. No single account settles the matter. Instead, memory gathers. What once traveled by word of mouth now moves through hyperlinks.
The internet allows fragments to remain visible. Burgeman’s story survives not because it was officially recorded, but because enough people cared to remember it. In this way, his legacy resembles the man himself: quiet, unadorned, sustained by actions rather than declaration.
This story does not offer certainty. It is about remembering a life and asking if we might still learn from it and if, perhaps, it can bring us closer to faith. Burgeman left no grand monument. He left descendants. A grave. A life of Jewish values that continues to teach.
Burgeman did not seek recognition in life. After death, he became something else: a teacher still teaching, not through words, but through the way people continue to act on his memory. That is the lesson. Not any miracle. Not any legend. The quiet insistence that a life lived with integrity does not end when the casket is placed into the earth.
Some graves are instructions.
This one still asks something of us.
The post Why a forgotten teacher’s grave became a Jewish pilgrimage site appeared first on The Forward.
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Turkey Sends Drilling Ship to Somalia in Major Push for Energy Independence
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan speaks during a ceremony for the handover of new vehicles to the gendarmerie and police forces in Istanbul, Turkey, Nov. 28, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Murad Sezer
i24 News – Turkey has dispatched a drilling vessel to Somalia to begin offshore oil exploration, marking what officials describe as a historic step in Ankara’s drive to strengthen energy security and reduce reliance on imports.
Turkish Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Alparslan Bayraktar announced that the drilling ship Çagri Bey is set to sail from the port of Taşucu in southern Turkey, heading toward Somali territorial waters.
The vessel will pass through the Strait of Gibraltar and around the coast of southern Africa before reaching its destination, with drilling operations expected to begin in April or May.
Bayraktar described the mission as a “historic” milestone, saying it reflects Turkey’s long-term strategy to enhance national energy security and move closer to self-sufficiency.
The operation will be protected by the Turkish Naval Forces, which will deploy several naval units to secure both the vessel’s route and the drilling area in the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea. The security arrangements fall under existing cooperation agreements between Ankara and Somalia.
The move aligns with a broader vision promoted by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, aimed at reducing Turkey’s dependence on foreign energy supplies, boosting domestic production, and shielding the economy from external pressures.
Bayraktar said Turkey is also working to double its natural gas output in the Black Sea this year, while continuing offshore exploration along its northern coastline. In parallel, Ankara is preparing to bring its first nuclear reactor online at the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant, which is expected to begin generating electricity soon and eventually supply about 10% of the country’s energy needs.
The current drilling effort is based on survey data collected last year and forms part of Ankara’s wider plan to expand its energy exploration activities both regionally and internationally.