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US Lawmakers, Jewish World React to Biden’s Threat to Israel to Change US Policy Toward Gaza
US President Joe Biden, left, pauses during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, to discuss the war between Israel and Hamas, in Tel Aviv, Israel, Oct. 18, 2023. Photo: Miriam Alster/Pool via REUTERS
Members of the US Congress and major Jewish and pro-Israel organizations reacted swiftly to US President Joe Biden’s administration calling for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza and threatening to fundamentally change US policy toward the Jewish state, expressing both outrage and approval at the sharp shift in messaging from Washington.
In a call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday, Biden issued his toughest public rebuke of Israel since its war against Hamas began in the fall, warning that US policy moving forward will be determined by whether Israel takes certain actions to address the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
According to a White House readout, Biden said that “an immediate ceasefire is essential to stabilize and improve the humanitarian situation and protect innocent civilians.”
It is unclear whether such a ceasefire is expected to be implemented unilaterally and unconditionally by Israel or come through an agreement with Hamas. Over the past few months, Hamas has rejected all ceasefire offers, while Israel agreed to a deal that would end fighting for six weeks and release 700 Palestinian terrorists from jail, in exchange for 40 hostages seized during Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel.
The readout also noted that Biden “made clear the need for Israel to announce and implement a series of specific, concrete, and measurable steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering, and the safety of aid workers.”
Without such steps, Biden threatened to fundamentally change the US-Israel relationship: “He made clear that US policy with respect to Gaza will be determined by our assessment of Israel’s immediate action on these steps.”
Likewise, Vice President Kamala Harris told reporters on Thursday: “We will make sure Israel is never left without an ability to defend itself. At the same time, if there are not changes to their approach, it’s very likely we’re going to change our approach.”
Meanwhile, in a press conference in Brussels, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “If we don’t see the changes that we need to see, there will be changes in our own policy.”
Blinken also implied that Israel risks becoming “indistinguishable” from Hamas, a terrorist group committed to the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews, if it does not do more to protect Palestinian civilians. “If we lose that reverence for human life, we risk becoming indistinguishable from those we confront,” he said.
In response, Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) made a sharp break with the Biden administration, arguing that US support for Israel should be unconditional. “In this war against Hamas — no conditions for Israel,” he wrote on X/Twitter.
In this war against Hamas—no conditions for Israel. pic.twitter.com/qCrqHT4pge
— Senator John Fetterman (@SenFettermanPA) April 4, 2024
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) concurred, writing, “It’s Hamas that has rejected a ceasefire — not Israel. Instead of attacking our ally, Joe Biden should demand Hamas release the hostages.”
Without Hamas on board, it is unclear how a bilateral ceasefire would be reached. The only apparent alternative would be a unilateral ceasefire by Israel that would leave Hamas in power and all the hostages in Gaza.
Hamas, which rules Gaza, launched the current war with its invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7, when the terrorist group murdered 1,200 people and took 253 others as hostages. Over 100 of those kidnapped were released as part of a temporary ceasefire agreement in November.
Israel responded to the invasion with a military offensive in neighboring Gaza aimed at freeing all the hostages and incapacitating Hamas to the point that it could no longer pose a major threat to the Israeli people. Hamas leaders have pledged to carry out massacres against Israel like the one on Oct. 7 “again and again.”
Some US lawmakers expressed regret at the rising civilian casualty toll in Gaza but noted Israel has gone to great lengths to minimize such casualties while targeting Hamas, which embeds itself in the civilian population and uses civilian sites such as schools and hospitals as its command centers.
“War is chaotic, and urban warfare more so,” Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) wrote in response to Thursday’s events. “I believe that Israel is doing as good a job as can be done and is working hard to avoid civilian casualties. Analysts indicate that Israeli efforts in this area are favorable to US military actions in Fallujah and Mosul. And of course, ISIS forces in Fallujah and Mosul were not firing rockets at the American homeland.”
In a statement to Jewish Insider, Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) said, “Every conceivable effort should be made to minimize casualties and maximize humanitarian aid for Palestinians in distress. But any attempt to fundamentally undermine the US-Israel relationship will only serve to benefit Hamas, which perpetrated the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust — a fact that the world seems to have forgotten.”
Others, however, are supporting Biden in his sharp change of rhetoric. In an interview on CNN, Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) said he believes it is “at that point” where conditions on aid to Israel are prudent.
“If Benjamin Netanyahu were to order the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] into Rafah at scale … and make no provision for civilians or for humanitarian aid, I would vote to condition aid to Israel,” he said.
Coons is a long-time supporter of Israel and is considered a moderate Democrat.
Others offered more enthusiastic praise for Biden’s warning to Netanyahu.
“I commend President Biden’s call for an immediate ceasefire and warning to Prime Minister Netanyahu that Israel must change course immediately, and that US policy toward Israel will depend on it,” Rep. John Larson (D-CT) said.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), on the other hand, argued that “calls for an ‘immediate ceasefire’ should be directed exclusively to Hamas.”
“Threatening or conditioning American support for Israel only serves to embolden Hamas and make a deal to pause fighting, free hostages, and surge aid harder to achieve,” the pro-Israel lobbying group added, hinting at the fact that such declarations from the US give Hamas leverage in negotiations.
The American Jewish Congress took a less combative approach.
“We welcome President Biden’s clarity and leadership in protecting America’s interests and in supporting our ally Israel at war while striving to mitigate the inevitable harm that a military conflict does to innocent people on all sides. The president speaks and acts like a true friend of Israel,” the group said in a statement.
“While Israel should hold itself to a higher moral standard, the fact remains that Hamas has methodically delayed negotiations and avoided the decisions that could have ended the war,” the statement continued. “Hamas does not share the American and Israeli concern for the innocent suffering in Gaza.”
The post US Lawmakers, Jewish World React to Biden’s Threat to Israel to Change US Policy Toward Gaza first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site
FILE PHOTO: The atomic symbol and the Iranian flag are seen in this illustration, July 21, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
JNS.org – The Israeli airstrikes on Iran last month destroyed a secret nuclear weapons research facility in Parchin, 19 miles southeast of Tehran, Axios reported on Friday.
The clandestine site held sophisticated equipment used for testing explosives needed to detonate nuclear devices, the report read, citing three US officials, one current Israeli official and one former Israeli official.
The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security acquired high-resolution satellite imagery of the facility, which showed that it was completely destroyed in Israel’s Oct. 26 attack.
Israeli and US intelligence agencies began noticing activity in the Taleghan 2 facility in the Parchin military complex in early 2024, which had been largely inactive since 2003, when the Islamic Republic froze its military nuclear program, according to Axios.
One unnamed US official quoted in the report said: “[The Iranians] conducted scientific activity that could lay the ground for the production of a nuclear weapon. It was a top secret thing. A small part of the Iranian government knew about this, but most of the Iranian government didn’t.”
Although President Joe Biden asked Jerusalem not to target Tehran’s nuclear facilities, the site in Parchin was chosen as a target because it was not part of Iran’s declared nuclear program.
This placed the mullah regime in a position where admitting a hit to the site would expose its efforts to resume activity forbidden by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Moreover, “The strike was a not so subtle message that the Israelis have significant insight into the Iranian system even when it comes to things that were kept top secret and known to a very small group of people in the Iranian government,” the report cited a US official as saying.
Last week, Rafael Grossi, the director of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, visited Iran for the first time since May.
He is expected to meet with his agency’s board of governors in Vienna this week for a vote on a resolution to censure Tehran for its lack of cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
Speaking about the tensions between Israel and Iran, Grossi said during a news conference in Tehran on Thursday that the Islamic Republic’s “nuclear installations should not be attacked.”
Earlier in the week, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz suggested that Iran’s nuclear facilities may be targeted.
Iran is “more exposed than ever to strikes on its nuclear facilities. We have the opportunity to achieve our most important goal—to thwart and eliminate the existential threat to the State of Israel,” Katz said.
Israel’s two assaults against Iran’s air defense system this year have left the country vulnerable to future attacks, with all four of Tehran’s Russian-made S-300 surface-to-air missile batteries destroyed, according to U.S. media.
On April 19, Israel took out one of the S-300 systems in response to Tehran’s first-ever direct attack against the Jewish state. On Oct. 26, in response to a second Iranian attack, Israel targeted 20 sites in Iran, destroying the remaining three.
“The majority of Iran’s air defense was taken out,” a senior Israeli official told Fox News.
The post Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat
Houthi-mobilized fighters ride atop a car in Sanaa, Yemen, Sept. 21, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
Yemen’s Houthi forces attacked “a vital target” in Israel’s Red Sea port city of Eilat with a number of drones, the Iran-aligned group’s military spokesperson Yahya Saree said on Saturday.
The terrorist group has launched dozens of attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea region since November in solidarity with Hamas.
“These operations will not stop until the aggression stops, the siege on the Gaza Strip is lifted, and the aggression on Lebanon stops,” Saree added in a televised speech.
The Houthi attacks have upended global trade by forcing ship owners to reroute vessels away from the vital Suez Canal shortcut, and drawn retaliatory U.S. and British strikes since February.
The post Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks
US Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, Sept. 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
JNS.org – Muslim leaders in the United Stated who called for supporting President-elect Donald Trump at the expense of Democrat runner Kamala Harris are deeply disappointed with the former president’s Cabinet nominees, Reuters reported on Thursday.
“It’s like he’s going on Zionist overdrive,” Abandon Harris campaign co-founder Hassan Abdel Salam, a former professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, said about Trump’s recently announced picks.
“We were always extremely skeptical. … Obviously we’re still waiting to see where the administration will go, but it does look like our community has been played,” Abdel Salam told Reuters.
Rabiul Chowdhury, a Philadelphia investor who chaired the Abandon Harris campaign in Pennsylvania and co-founded Muslims for Trump, was cited as saying: “Trump won because of us and we’re not happy with his secretary of state pick and others.”
Some political strategists believe that the Muslim vote for Trump, or the renunciation of Harris, helped tilt several swing states such as Michigan in the favor of the Republican candidate.
“It seems like this administration has been packed entirely with neoconservatives and extremely pro-Israel, pro-war people, which is a failure on the side of President Trump, to the pro-peace and anti-war movement,” said Rexhinaldo Nazarko, executive director of the American Muslim Engagement and Empowerment Network.
On Wednesday, Trump named Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as his choice to be secretary of state.
Rubio is known for his staunch pro-Israel stance, including calling on Jerusalem earlier this year to destroy “every element” of Hamas and dubbing the Gaza-based terrorist organization as “vicious animals.”
Rubio joins a slew of pro-Israel officials Trump has tapped since he won the U.S. election, including former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) as his U.N. ambassador with a seat in the Cabinet.
Blaise Misztal, vice president for policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), told JNS that Trump’s focus so early in the transition process on Israel-related foreign policy picks is a mark of how his second administration will approach the region.
“That, in and of itself, signals that President Trump and his administration are going to take the region, the Middle East, the threats confronting Israel, seriously and take the U.S. friendship with Israel seriously,” Misztal said.
“The people that we’ve seen are known to be tremendously strong friends of Israel, first and foremost, but also very clear-eyed about the threats that the United States and Israel face together in the region.”
Before the election on Nov. 5, Trump promised Arab and Muslim voters he would restore stability in Lebanon and the Middle East, while criticizing the current administration’s regional policies during campaign stops targeting Muslim communities in Michigan.
Trump recently addressed Lebanese Americans, stating, “Your friends and family in Lebanon deserve to live in peace, prosperity and harmony with their neighbors, and this can only happen when there is peace and stability in the Middle East.”
Israel has been at war for more than a year on its southern and northern borders, ever since Hamas led a surprise attack on communities near the Gaza Strip border on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering some 1,200 people and abducting 251 more into the Palestinian enclave. A day later, Hezbollah joined Hamas’s efforts by firing rockets into Israel’s north.
The post Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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