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A Jewish museum exhibit features the Palestinian flag. Some visitors wonder if it belongs.
(J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — Tucked in the far corner of a large, brightly-lit exhibition hall on the ground floor of the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, there is a delicate-looking piece of art with a strong political message.
At first glance, it appears to be three circular vases with flowers in them. The ceramic vases sit on shelves attached to the wall, and colorful collages hang above them. On closer inspection, visitors will notice that the flowers are made out of paper and that affixed to each vase is an image of the Palestinian flag printed on foam board.
A nearby label written by the curators of the exhibit, titled “Tikkun: For the Cosmos, the Community, and Ourselves,” explains that the piece was inspired by a conversation the artist, Tosha Stimage of Berkeley, had with a Palestinian man. He told Stimage about the plants that are native to Palestine — “a place which he can no longer access due to the ongoing conflict in the region,” the curators write.
The label also includes a note about the flag: “Some may find its presence at The CJM troubling or confusing, while others may find it appropriate and forthright. Stimage recognizes the potential for these divergent responses and hopes to use them as a means of generating dialogue.”
On a Sunday afternoon in October, Maury Ostroff read the label and walked away without inspecting the artwork.
Visitors to the “Tikkun” exhibit are encouraged to share their responses to the artwork via comment cards. (Andrew Esensten)
Asked how the presence of the flag made him feel, Ostroff, who is Jewish and lives in Muir Beach, in Marin County, replied, “Unhappy.”
Why?
“It’s not offensive to me in the same way that a swastika is. My skin is a little bit thicker than that. But I wish it weren’t here.”
He added, “What’s so Jewish about this? What’s so ‘tikkun olam’ about all of this?”
For the “Tikkun” exhibit, which opened Feb. 17 and runs through Jan. 8, the CJM invited both Jewish and non-Jewish Bay Area artists to contribute new works on the theme of repair, however they chose to interpret it. “No one is listening to us,” the piece by Stimage, who is not Jewish, is the first work of art featuring the Palestinian flag to be shown at CJM in recent memory; the museum could not say when or if the flag has been displayed on its walls before.
The piece prompted several internal conversations among CJM staff when it was first submitted and, since it has been on display, has generated a variety of responses from museumgoers who have left comments in a box at the entrance to the exhibit. Intentionally or not, Stimage has raised numerous questions with the artwork, including: Does a work of art that is sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle for statehood belong in a Jewish museum? And what is the role of a contemporary Jewish museum, anyway?
“To truly be a contemporary art museum, meaning embedded in the contemporary issues of our day, our job is to provide a platform for dialogue and to share a diversity of perspectives on our walls,” said Chad Coerver, CJM’s executive director since September 2021. “If any institution [like ours] took the path of withholding artwork that troubled our staff, our board or our community, it would be very difficult to mount exhibitions.”
CJM is a member of the Council of American Jewish Museums, a network of 76 museums across the country. CAJM does not have guidelines about the kind of art its member museums can and cannot display, according to Executive Director Melissa Yaverbaum.
J. reached out to several CAJM member museums in New York, Los Angeles and other places by email to ask if they had ever shown artwork with Palestinian iconography or works by Palestinian artists. The museums declined to answer or did not respond.
In recent years, two Jewish museums have been embroiled in controversy over issues relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago staged an exhibit in 2008 on Israeli and Palestinian concepts of homeland that included maps and portraits of Palestinians. Following outcry from members of the local Jewish community who felt the exhibit presented Israel in a negative light, the museum decided to close the exhibit after only a few weeks. And in 2019, the director of the Jewish Museum Berlin resigned after the museum tweeted a link to a pro-BDS article in a German newspaper. (The museum previously came under fire for welcoming anti-Zionist scholar Judith Butler and representatives of Iran.)
In a joint interview with J., two CJM staffers who worked on “Tikkun” — co-curator Qianjin Montoya, who is not Jewish, and a Jewish senior curator who served in an advisory role, Heidi Rabben — shared the story of how Stimage’s piece came to be in the exhibit. (Montoya’s co-curator for the exhibit, Arianne Gelardin, no longer works at the museum.)
Since 2009, CJM has invited local artists from different backgrounds to create new work as part of the museum’s annual Dorothy Saxe Invitational. The idea for “Tikkun” was hatched before the pandemic put the planning process on hold. Once the CJM and Saxe — a local philanthropist and art collector — agreed on the theme, the co-curators invited artists “already engaged in healing through their relationship to community or in their practice of daily life,” Gelardin told J. last February.
The 30 artists who accepted the museum’s invitation were given only four months to conceive of and submit new works. That was likely the shortest timeline in the history of the invitational, which has been held 11 previous times, according to the museum. Each artist received a packet of materials compiled by CJM staff, with input from the Shalom Hartman Institute, a non-degree granting Jewish education center, to guide their thinking on “tikkun.”
Stimage was invited to participate because she is “very active” in the Bay Area and because “her work reflects ideas of community and connection,” Montoya said.
The curators said Stimage’s inclusion of the Palestinian flag in her submitted piece came as a surprise and prompted challenging conversations. However, they noted that they found the content of some of the other artists’ work surprising, too, and that it’s not unusual for contemporary artists to push the envelope in their work.
“I wouldn’t say we expected to receive a piece about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but we weren’t steering anyone away from that, either,” Rabben told J., adding that the submission guidelines did not place any topic off limits. “That’s a commitment from the museum to authentically represent the creative spirit of the artists that we’re working with,” she said.
Still, the curators said they engaged in a dialogue with Stimage in order to better understand each aspect of her piece and her overall intentions. Through those conversations, the curators learned that Stimage wanted to explore a moment of “rupture,” and that through her piece she hoped to communicate “that before healing or repair might happen, you have to first acknowledge that rupture,” Rabben said.
The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco is showing “Tikkun,” an exhibit of works by Jewish and non-Jewish artists on the theme of repair. (Andrew Esensten)
Coerver, who was involved in some of the conversations, stressed that “careful consideration” was given to including the piece in the exhibit. “We felt an artwork addressing the plight of the Palestinians was appropriate in an exhibition on healing and repair,” he said. (No work submitted as part of the Dorothy Saxe Invitational has ever been outright rejected, the museum said.)
Stimage did not respond to interview requests from J. According to a CV on her website, she was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and earned an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2016. She is a past fellow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and was an artist-in-residence at Facebook in 2018. She also owns a floral gift shop in Oakland called Saint Flora.
Her work often touches on Black identity; she created a piece honoring Sandra Bland, an African-American woman whose 2015 arrest and death in a Texas jail cell sparked protests, and contributed to a 2019 San Francisco Art Institute exhibit on the Black Panther Party.
“I have a responsibility to create things that will, to the best of my present knowledge, do more good than harm, heal, inspire and uplift other humans,” she told the San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper in 2015.
Stimage’s precise views on Israel are unknown. CJM referred J. to her artist statement for “No one is listening to us,” which reads: “Olive, sage, and sumac are flowering plants native to the Mediterranean (including regions of Gaza and the West Bank) that have a direct relationship to contested ancestral land and affect the livelihood of so many Palestinian farmers and families caught in the conflict. They are positioned in the space of The Contemporary Jewish Museum as a metaphor for the ongoing conflict over land rights and the desperate need for restoration and healing of an age-old wound.”
The curators told J. that during their conversations with Stimage about her piece, they asked her why including images of the Palestinian flag was important to her but did not request that she remove them.
“We determined that none of [the piece’s] components in and of themselves signified something problematic or concerning,” Rabben said. “Of course, we had the awareness that the symbol [of the flag] will be read in a variety of ways by a variety of people.”
(Rabben pointed out that the exhibit includes other works with national symbols rendered in provocative ways, such as a black-and-white photograph of an American flag that was torn apart and partially reassembled by Mexican-American artist Jose Arias.)
The Palestinian flag — which contains the Pan-Arab colors of black, white, green and red — was adopted by the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964. Since then, it has been the primary symbol of Palestinian nationalism.
For decades, the PLO was considered an enemy organization by Israel, and anything associated with it “had no place in Israeli public life,” said Eran Kaplan, an Israeli-born professor of Israel studies at San Francisco State University. Israel never went so far as to ban the flag. However, during the First Intifada, which lasted from 1987 to 1993, Israeli soldiers sometimes followed orders to confiscate the flag from protesters in the West Bank and Gaza.
With the signing of the Oslo Accord in 1993, Israel and the PLO recognized each other as negotiating partners. Yet the Palestinian flag remains a contentious symbol in Israel today. Kaplan noted that it recently served as a flashpoint during the funeral procession of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian American broadcaster who was killed in the West Bank in May. (The IDF conducted a review and admitted that the Israeli soldier who shot her had most likely misidentified her as an armed militant.) After warning Abu Akleh’s family not to display the flag, Israeli police attacked mourners in East Jerusalem, ripping flags out of their hands and off of the vehicle carrying her casket.
Today, the flag holds different meanings for Israelis and American Jews from different generations and political persuasions.
“There are large segments in Israeli society who view any form of Palestinian national identity as a threat to the existence of Israel,” Kaplan said. “There are others who view the PLO as legitimate partners in any form of negotiations [over the creation of a Palestinian state], but there’s an absolute split over those questions.”
Given the sensitive nature of Stimage’s work and others in the exhibit, the curators decided to solicit feedback from visitors via comment cards available at the entrance to the hall. Rabben said the museum has received a number of comments specifically about “No one is listening to us,” most of which were positive. “The majority of those comments were ‘Thank you for offering space for this topic at the museum,’” she said.
Last month, a security guard sitting in the “Tikkun” exhibition hall told a reporter that he had not witnessed any expressions of outrage or protest through the first nine months of the exhibit. “When we opened we were afraid of negative reactions, but they’re not stressed about it,” he said of visitors. “We have shown worse things here.” The guard, who has worked at the museum since it opened in 2008, mentioned a 2010 exhibit, “Our Struggle: Responding to Mein Kampf,” which included a copy of Hitler’s autobiography. “Some people were cussing us out” for displaying the book, he recalled.
Meanwhile, on the same floor as “Tikkun,” there is another, smaller exhibit containing potentially offensive art. A sign outside of the room warns visitors that inside is a Hitler marionette created by the parents of puppeteer Frank Oz. “Our intention in displaying this object is to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive through the objects and firsthand stories of those who experienced its persecution, and to encourage conversation and education about the ongoing horrors of antisemitism and authoritarianism today,” the sign says.
Coerver, CJM’s executive director, said he was proud that the museum’s three current exhibits — “Tikkun,” “Oz is for Oznowicz: A Puppet Family’s History” and “Gillian Laub: Family Matters,” which includes photographs that Laub took of her Trump-supporting relatives — are raising “challenging questions” and providing opportunities for both visitors and museum staff to “expand our horizons.”
“We’ve been wading into some issues that I think are a little thicker than maybe we’ve been confronting in the past,” he said, “and I hope that continues.”
A version of this piece originally ran in J. The Jewish News of Northern California, and is reprinted with permission.
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Progressive Jews are trying out post-Zionism. There’s one big flaw in their approach
The data is clear: American Jews are feeling increasingly alienated from Zionism. But a new progressive coalition is failing to reckon with why the Zionist ideology their members mostly reject was so powerful in the first place.
On May 18, more than 40 Jewish organizations launched the Jewish Diaspora Movement, which, in their words, rejects “the vision of Judaism that is state-centric, militarist, ethno-nationalist.” The organizations declared on their website they want to build “an ethical future for Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism” and that they “joyfully view wherever we are in the entire world as our home.” They charge the Jewish establishment with “conflating antizionism with antisemitism” and “refusing to engage in meaningful dialogue with dissenters.”
JDM is right that too many Jewish spaces exclude thoughtful criticism of Israel. But even as it seeks to build new Jewish spaces, where Jews can live freely and practice their version of Judaism without hindrance, JDM isn’t reckoning with the fact that Zionism itself sprang out of exactly this kind of desire for Jewish self-determination — or the clear historical explanations for why it did.
What the movement is
Rabbi Alissa Wise, one of JDM’s organizers, has said the rollout was meant to be “an agitation.”
The founding members of the Jewish Diaspora Movement include Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, Rabbis for Ceasefire, the American Council for Judaism and the magazine Jewish Currents, as well as synagogues and prayer groups in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Hartford, Minneapolis, New York, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh.
JDM has no executive, no paid staff, and no physical location. It says it will be run horizontally, through a referendum of member organizations, under the fiscal sponsorship of a project called Beloved Garden, supported by the Fetzer Institute and Henry Luce Foundation.
Whatever one makes of its aims, JDM is a serious attempt to build parallel Jewish institutions, based on an old argument made new again.
The flawed argument of ‘hereness’
As the First Zionist Congress convened in Basel, Switzerland in 1897, a different vision for the Jewish future was emerging in Vilnius, Lithuania.
The Jewish Labor Bund emphasized doikayt, or “hereness,” the idea that a Jew’s future belongs to the place where they already live. The Bundist theorist Vladimir Medem argued in 1920 that “a national home in Palestine would not end the Jewish exile.” The Jewish Diaspora Movement makes the same point: that “all Jews live in diaspora.”
The Bund was right that Jews should be able to live freely in whatever community they were already in, whether it’s Vilnius or Warsaw, Baghdad or Tehran, Paris or Amsterdam, Buenos Aires or New York. But the reason Jews so intensely debated questions of home and future was largely because of forces outside of their control.
My late grandfather did not choose to be deported from Lithuania, the birthplace of the Bund, to a Soviet gulag. My grandmother did not choose, as a young child, to run away from her Polish neighbors who chased her and other Jews in her town with sticks and knives. The Jews who had lived across the Islamic world for centuries did not choose to be expelled after the creation of the State of Israel. Whether they believed in “hereness” as an ideology turned out not to matter.
Even today, emigration to Israel is frequently driven not by idealistic Zionism or a rejection of the diaspora, but by the cold calculus of safety. Many contemporary French and British Jews, for example, describe the sense that they have no future in the place where they grew up. They are not dismissing “the joy of intermixing and learning from our non-Jewish friends and neighbors,” which JDM describes as one of its core values. Rather, they are increasingly — and justifiably, amid an upsurge in violent antisemitic attacks — scared of their neighbors.
It’s telling that across a lengthy FAQ and thousands of words on their site, the single mention the Jewish Diaspora Movement makes of antisemitism appears to be an objection to conflating it with anti-Zionism.
A flawed reaction to a real issue
JDM is right to point out the ways in which establishment Jewish spaces have shut off criticism of Israel, including foundations who cut off funding for Jewish organizations that speak in favor of Palestinians and rabbis who have been fired for talking about Gaza.
Years ago, while interning at a legacy Jewish institution, I pressed its leadership on their silence about Palestinian casualties during Israel’s 2021 Guardian of the Walls Gaza operation. The head of the organization told me that he held his tongue because there was enough criticism out there already — even as he allowed that people inside the organization might privately object to some of Israel’s actions.
Mainstream Jewish leaders increasingly recognize, however, that shutting down criticism risks creating alienation. Yehuda Kurtzer of the Shalom Hartman Institute warned on a podcast this past January that narrowing the bounds of acceptable dissent threatens “to irreparably change the boundaries of Jewish identity itself.”
For many counter- and anti-Zionists, opposing Zionism offers the clearest way to stand against the things Israel does wrong. But JDM, at least in one domain, risks taking things too far.
To say that “all Jews live in diaspora, even those who live in Jerusalem” as JDM does, is to tell nearly half the world’s Jews that the place they live is not really home — even if JDM may view diaspora as a theological or spiritual condition rather than a geographic one.
It’s one thing to say Jewish people don’t need to center Israel to live a full Jewish life. It’s quite another thing to tell Israelis themselves that the place they see as home isn’t. Just as it’s fair to say that legacy Jewish organizations shouldn’t get to define a single diaspora attitude toward Israel, it’s fair for Israelis to say this new diaspora organization shouldn’t get to define them.
Rather than seek to redefine, JDM might follow the example of someone like the progressive Zionist author Joshua Leifer, who resigned as a contributing editor from Jewish Currents after Oct. 7. In his book Tablets Shattered, Leifer writes that the “ethical task of global Jewish life is now to make the modern experiment in Jewish sovereignty a just one.” Or like Rabbi Sharon Brous, a progressive Zionist, who has described the war in Gaza as a spiritual catastrophe.
Neither of these figures loosened their attachment to Israel to make room for their criticism.
Escalating Alienation
American Jewish life is being driven to the extremes by escalating alienation. Each side increasingly acts as if to acknowledge the other’s valid points is a concession they cannot afford. And each such refusal becomes the next side’s alibi for digging in.
Many Jews live somewhere in the middle. They might believe a Jewish state has a right to exist, and be critical of the Israeli government.
I count myself among them. I’m an American Israeli who is furious at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition and those who ignore the state’s misconduct. But I’ve simultaneously become estranged from former friends and colleagues on the political left who have engaged in Hamas apologism and crossed the line into antisemitism.
So I understand JDM’s impulse to create a communal space for those who feel excluded, even if I wouldn’t feel at home in their framework.
When you feel you cannot live your Judaism freely in the institutions you have, you make your own. But the act of building parallel Jewish spaces concedes that Jews do not simply get to define how we live. It’s a tacit acknowledgement that the terms are sometimes set by others, and that the freedom to practice on our own terms must be deliberately built.
That is the animating spirit of Zionism, bubbling up in a movement trying to leave it behind.
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It’s time for Jews who love Israel to give up on Zionism
Why have I, a longstanding democratic Zionist who lived in Israel for five years and loves the country passionately, abandoned my belief in a democratic Jewish state?
My short response is that I did not abandon democratic Zionism. Democratic Zionism abandoned me.
More than two-and-half years after Hamas slaughtered close to 1,200 people in the Oct. 7, 2023 attack, after Israel’s subsequent destruction of Gaza, growing numbers of liberal Zionist American Jews like me have reached a crossroads. Cognitive dissonance over Israel has left us feeling homeless and bereft.
In our horror at the indiscriminate killing of civilian Palestinians, we are alienated from the mainstream American Zionist echo-chamber, dominated by the likes of the Anti-Defamation League and AIPAC, which rejects almost all criticism of Israel as antisemitic. Yet we also cannot make common cause with stridently anti-Zionist groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, which demonize Israel and Israelis, with no distinctions, as the enemy.
Fortunately, there is a little known but compelling third way, known as post-Zionism.
Post-Zionism focuses on supporting efforts to build a shared society in which all the people residing between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — Israelis and Palestinians alike — can live side by side in peace and security. It sees the structure of this shared society as less important than ending the mentality of “us against them” that has animated both Jewish and Palestinian national movements for more than a century. Such counter-productive ideologies must give way now to a true sharing of the Holy Land, in which the rights of all people are cherished and protected.
A return to principles
Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence contains a promise: the new country would “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.”
Yet successive Israeli governments led by both left and right-wing Zionist parties have, in the decades since the 1967 Six-Day War, sabotaged the dream of a democratic Jewish state by deliberately building Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. By prioritizing settlements over peace, Israel has worked to ensure that there will be no Palestinian state alongside a democratic Jewish Israel, but instead an apartheid Jewish state ruling over millions of Palestinians without rights.
That means in short, the only morally acceptable form of Zionism has been effectively taken off the table by Israel itself.
Instead, a return to post-Zionism — which emerged in the 1980s, and went into abeyance with the collapse of the Oslo peace process — is called for. Difficult debates over definitions of Zionism aren’t changing anything. To ensure that Israel survives and inspires generations of diaspora Jews to come, a new way forward is needed.
A common land
Roughly equivalent numbers of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs live between the river and the sea. The path down which they are presently hurtling leads directly to mutually assured destruction, and must be abandoned.
The present Israeli course of action — oppressing and seeking to again disperse our Palestinian neighbors in the name of Jewish security — has led to a state of perpetual if unofficial war, which places the security and well-being of Israelis and diaspora Jews at ever-graver risk. The strategy of Palestinians and their supporters around the world — holding out some vague hope that Israel will somehow cease to exist — is similarly dysfunctional.
Post-Zionism, in contrast to both current strategies, advocates acceptance between Israeli Jews and Palestinians, and a shared embrace of our common land.
In adopting a post-Zionist perspective, I’ve found a route out of paralysis. And I think it could provide an avenue for Jews like me — who feel alienated from what Israel has become but retain deep ties to it — to contribute to building a shared Israel-Palestine. That coexistence could look like one state, two states, or my personal favorite possibility, an Israeli-Palestinian confederation with two states bonded together by a European Union-like structure. Post-Zionism also allows its adherents to maintain our abiding love for and spiritual connection to the land of Israel; as opposed to anti-Zionist Jews’outright rejection of “next year in Jerusalem.”
Ideological change comes slowly. Substituting the vision of a safe home for Jews in the Middle East for that of an explicitly Jewish state will take time. Right now, the key post-Zionist priority looks much like that of left-Zionism: convincing the Israeli public that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s expansionist agenda of Jewish-supremacism is morally and politically unsustainable, and to bring about the beginnings of change by ousting his coalition in upcoming elections.
On the domestic front, post-Zionist American Jews must work together to strengthen ties with interfaith allies, including the Muslim community, to combat antisemitism and Islamophobia, and to defend democracy and pluralism. We cannot work for a truly democratic Middle East without a truly democratic government of our own.
Embracing post-Zionism does not mean refusing to work together with Zionists who also want freedom, safety and self-determination for Israelis and Palestinians alike. But it means thinking about the course of history that brought us to this point differently. I and so many post-Zionists have come to understand that the ideology of Zionism, while representing genuine liberation for Jews, had within it a fatal flaw: forcing the structure of a Jewish state on a land that was only partly Jewish. The idea that this could somehow have worked out was, from the beginning, a form of self-delusion.
Right now, post-Zionists and left-Zionists are working together fruitfully in collaboration with Palestinians in a variety of movements and NGOs dedicated to peace and reconciliation, including through increasingly prominent groups like Standing Together.
We must continue to open our minds to a broader range of better futures for the Middle East. Every civilian in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank deserves peace, security, justice and equal rights. That possibility may feel far off, but to paraphrase Theodore Herzl himself, if we will it, it is no dream.
Walter Ruby, formerly a Forward correspondent in Moscow, is co-author with Sabeeha Rehman of We Refuse to Be Enemies: How Muslims and Jews Can Make Peace, One Friendship at a Time.
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Majority of House Democrats vote to defeat Lebanon war powers measure
(JTA) — A House resolution aimed at preventing U.S. involvement in hostilities in Lebanon failed Thursday.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat and fierce critic of Israel, forced a vote on the House floor Thursday. It was defeated 324 to 92, with 91 Democrats voting in favor. The sole Republican vote came from Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, who will be departing Congress next year after losing his primary.
The resolution, which would have ordered President Donald Trump to remove U.S. troops from Lebanon within seven days, was defeated after Democratic Party leaders noted in a joint statement that there are “no U.S. servicemembers involved in combat operations or hostilities in Lebanon.”
The statement issued by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Minority Whip Katherine Clark and Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar continued: “We stand with the Lebanese people, the government of Lebanon and the Lebanese Armed Forces in their efforts to live peacefully and defeat Hezbollah, a violent terrorist organization that is a sworn enemy of the United States.”
Jewish Democratic Reps. Jerrold Nadler and Dan Goldman of New York also voted “no” on the resolution, writing in a joint press release that their opposition “should not be taken as an approval of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s prosecution of Israel’s military action in Lebanon.”
“To the extent that American armed forces are present in Lebanon, it is to support the current Lebanese government, which deserves our assistance,” the statement continued.
But Tlaib defended her resolution in a post on X Thursday ahead of the vote. “The people of Lebanon can’t wait another month for Congress to act,” Tlaib wrote. “Every day that we do nothing, 11 more Lebanese children are killed or injured by the Israeli military in this U.S.-supported invasion. Congress must pass today’s Lebanon War Powers Resolution.”
Tlaib was citing a UNICEF report of data from Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health last month that found 77 children in Lebanon had been killed over the course of a week as Israeli strikes continued to pummel the country.
Some of those who opposed Tlaib’s resolution, including Nadler and Goldman, said they would vote for an alternative version of the resolution that would preserve cooperation with the Lebanese Armed Forces in their fight against Hezbollah.
The defeat of the resolution came the same day that Hezbollah rejected the latest ceasefire agreement brokered between Israel and Lebanon, as fighting between the Iranian proxy and Israel has intensified in recent weeks.
On Wednesday, the House narrowly passed a resolution for the first time that would limit President Donald Trump’s power to continue the war in Iran. While the development was largely symbolic, it marked a rebuke of the president’s increasingly unpopular strategy in Iran.
On Friday, 85 members of Congress also signed onto a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio calling on the Trump administration to “use every available diplomatic tool to halt imminent settlement construction in the E-1 area of the West Bank,” a corridor east of Jerusalem.
Citing Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s orders to demolish a Palestinian Bedouin village in the West Bank last month, the letter, which was led by Democratic Reps. Mark Pocan and Jan Schakowsky, who is Jewish, argued that the issue of settlements in the area had reached a “critical and final inflection point.”
“The window for meaningful diplomatic intervention is closing rapidly, and we believe it is not too late for the United States to act,” read the letter, which was also signed by Nadler and Jewish Tennessee Rep. Steve Cohen.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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