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Biden administration rebukes Israel for repealing a settlement evacuation
WASHINGTON (JTA) — A law passed by Israel’s government yesterday has sparked a strong rebuke from the Biden administration, words of caution from some of Israel’s strongest supporters in the Senate — and damage control from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The new law repeals a portion of Israel’s 2005 disengagement, in which it withdrew settlers and troops from the entirety of the Gaza Strip and from four settlements in the northern West Bank. While much of Israel and the world focused on the evacuation from Gaza, opponents of the decision have committed themselves primarily to securing a return to the West Bank settlements. The vote on Tuesday allowed settlers to do just that — making it once again legal for Israelis to enter the sites where the West Bank settlements once stood.
That led to one of the Biden administration’s most lacerating criticisms of Israel’s new right-wing government. On Tuesday, State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said the law was “particularly provocative and counterproductive” and would not be “consistent” with Israel’s commitment to the United States.
“The U.S. strongly urges Israel to refrain from allowing the return of settlers to the area covered by the legislation, consistent with both former Prime Minister [Ariel] Sharon and the current Israeli government’s commitment to the United States,” Patel said.
In another sign of the Biden administration’s attitude toward the law, Israeli ambassador Michael Herzog was summoned to discuss it with the deputy secretary of state, Wendy Sherman — a rare move that indicates displeasure.
Netanyahu responded to that condemnation on Wednesday by asserting that the law was purely symbolic. The vote “brings to an end discriminatory and humiliating legislation that prevented Jews from living in areas of the northern West Bank,” a statement from Netanyahu’s office said, according to the Times of Israel. “However, the government has no intention of building new communities in these areas.”
The United States warning Israel that it is running the risk of its “commitment” to its closest ally is unusually strong language, and suggests that the Biden administration would see the rebuilding of the settlements as a major rift.
The drama follows a recent commitment by Israel to hold off on settlement expansion. Earlier this week, Israel and the Palestinian Authority agreed to cooperate on stemming a recent escalation of violence in the West Bank. As part of that agreement, Israel pledged to suspend settlement planning for six months. The summit where the agreement was reached was also attended by U.S., Jordanian and Egyptian officials.
The law allowing settlers to return to the area in the northern West Bank is one of a battery of far-reaching changes Netanyahu’s new government is hoping to push through. Most prominent among those plans is legislation to sap the courts of their independence, which has sparked massive, frequent protests in Israel’s streets and criticism from President Joe Biden and a range of other public figures.
Netanyahu is leading a coalition with far-right partners in senior roles, and his largest coalition partner, the Religious Zionist Party, strongly supports massive settlement expansion. On Tuesday, Orit Strock, a member of the party who serves as a minister in Netanyahu’s government, said she believes Israelis will one day resettle Gaza as well.
“How many years it will take, I don’t know,” she said in a television interview. “Very unfortunately, the return to the Gaza Strip will also involve many victims, just as leaving the Gaza Strip involved many victims. But there’s no doubt that at the end of the day, the Gaza Strip is part of the Land of Israel, and the day will come when we will return to it.”
Israeli-Palestinian relations — already tense since a sequence of Palestinian terrorist attacks over the past year and Israeli army raids on Palestinian population centers — have intensified since Netanyahu’s government was sworn in in December. This week’s summit was a bid to stem the violence ahead of a holiday season that includes the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the Jewish holiday of Passover and the Christian holiday of Easter, when tensions in Israel and the West Bank have led to violence in previous years.
On Tuesday, some of Israel’s best friends among Democrats in Congress sent the Netanyahu government a message, urging it to abide by this week’s agreement with the Palestinian Authority.
“As we enter the holy month of Ramadan and prepare to celebrate both Passover and Easter, such de-escalation is crucial,” said the statement signed by Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, among them Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Ben Cardin of Maryland, two of Israel’s fiercest Democratic defenders. “Israelis and Palestinians deserve to live with security and in safety, enjoying equal measures of freedom, prosperity, and dignity. We remain committed to supporting a negotiated two-state solution.”
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The post Biden administration rebukes Israel for repealing a settlement evacuation appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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A quiet diplomatic shift in the Middle East, with monumental consequences for Israel
Something significant is happening between Israel and Syria, and it deserves more attention than it is getting.
With the backing of the United States, Israeli and Syrian officials have agreed to create what they call a “joint fusion mechanism” — a permanent channel for coordination on intelligence, de-escalation, diplomacy and economic matters — during meetings in Paris. It appears to be the beginning of institutionalized contact between two countries that have formally been at war since 1948.
If this process continues, it will count as a genuine foreign-policy success for President Donald Trump’s administration.
To understand how profound that change would be, it is worth recalling the two countries’ shared history.
Israel and Syria — which the U.S. struck with a set of targeted attacks on the Islamic State on Saturday — have fought openly or by proxy for decades. Before 1967, Syrian artillery positions in the Golan Heights regularly shelled Israeli communities in the Hula Valley and around the Sea of Galilee. After Israel captured that region in 1967, the direct shelling stopped, but the conflict did not.
Syria remained formally committed to a state of war; Israel entrenched itself in the Golan Heights; both sides treated the frontier as a potential flashpoint to be managed carefully. After Egypt and Israel made peace in 1979, Syria became Israel’s most dangerous neighboring state.
A 1974 disengagement agreement created a United Nations-monitored buffer zone, which mostly ensured peace along the border, but did not resolve anything fundamental. In Lebanon, Israel and Syria backed opposing forces for years, and their air forces clashed briefly during the 1982 Lebanon War. Later, Iran’s growing role in Syria and Hezbollah’s military buildup added new threats. The Syrian civil war then destroyed basic state capacity and created precisely the kind of militia-rich environment Israel fears along its borders.
Now, with the dictator Bashar al-Assad gone and the former rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa in power, Syria is a broken country trying to stabilize. Sharaa’s past associations, disturbingly, include leadership of jihadist groups that were part of the wartime landscape in Syria. But today he governs a state facing economic collapse, infrastructure ruin and a population that needs jobs and basic services. His incentives are simple and powerful: ensure the survival of his regime, invite foreign investment, and secure relief from isolation and sanctions. Those goals point toward the U.S. and its partners, including Israel.
The Trump administration has made it clear that it wants to see new Syrian cooperation with Israel, with the suggestion that progress with Israel will become a gateway to international investment, and to a degree of political acceptance that Syria has lacked for years. Al-Sharaa’s willingness to engage is therefore not a mystery.
Israel’s motivations are also straightforward. After the Gaza war, Israel is facing a severe reputational problem. It is widely viewed abroad as reckless and excessively militarized. The government is under pressure over not only the conduct of the war but also the perception that it has no political strategy and relies almost exclusively on force. A diplomatic track with Syria allows Israel to present a very different picture: that of a country capable of negotiations with ideologically opposed neighbors, de-escalation, and regional cooperation.
There are significant security incentives, too.
Israel wants to limit Iran and Hezbollah’s influence in Syria. It wants a predictable northern border. It wants assurances regarding the Druze population in southern Syria — brethren to the Israeli Druze who are extremely loyal to the state, and who were outraged after a massacre of Syrian Druze followed the installation of al-Sharaa’s regime. It wants to ensure that no armed Syrian groups will tread near the Golan. A coordinated mechanism supervised by the U.S. offers a strong diplomatic way to address these issues.
The U.S. will benefit as well. The Trump team is eager to show that it can deliver lasting diplomatic achievements in the Middle East after the success of the Abraham Accords in Trump’s first term. A meaningful shift in Israel–Syria relations would be a very welcome addition, especially as the U.S.-brokered ceasefire in the Gaza war faces an uncertain future.
The main questions now are practical. Can the “joint fusion mechanism” function under pressure? What will happen when there is, almost inevitably, an incident — a drone downed, a militia clash, a cross-border strike? Will the new system effectively lower the temperature, or will it collapse at the first crisis?
Will Iran — facing its own profound internal political crisis — accept a Syria that coordinates with Israel under U.S. supervision, or will it work to undermine al-Sharaa? How will Hezbollah react if Damascus appears to move away from the axis of “resistance” and toward a security understanding with Israel?
How would an Israel-Syria deal impact Lebanon’s moribund efforts to dismantle Hezbollah’s military capacity? Al-Sharaa has already helped significantly by ending the transfer of weapons to Hezbollah from Iran through his territory. Might he also actively help with the disarming of the group?
No one should expect a full peace treaty soon. The question of possession of the Golan Heights probably remains a deal-breaker. Public opinion in Syria has been shaped by decades of official hostility to Israel, and Israeli politics is fragmented and volatile.
But diplomatic breakthroughs can confound expectations. They usually begin with mechanisms like this one, involving limited cooperation, routine contact and crisis management.
If this effort helps move the border from a zone of permanent tension to one of managed stability, that alone would be a major shift. It would also send a signal beyond the region: U.S. engagement still matters, and American pressure and incentives can still change behavior.
The post A quiet diplomatic shift in the Middle East, with monumental consequences for Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel’s Netanyahu Hopes to ‘Taper’ Israel Off US Military Aid in Next Decade
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to the press on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, July 8, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an interview published on Friday that he hopes to “taper off” Israeli dependence on US military aid in the next decade.
Netanyahu has said Israel should not be reliant on foreign military aid but has stopped short of declaring a firm timeline for when Israel would be fully independent from Washington.
“I want to taper off the military within the next 10 years,” Netanyahu told The Economist. Asked if that meant a tapering “down to zero,” he said: “Yes.”
Netanyahu said he told President Donald Trump during a recent visit that Israel “very deeply” appreciates “the military aid that America has given us over the years, but here too we’ve come of age and we’ve developed incredible capacities.”
In December, Netanyahu said Israel would spend 350 billion shekels ($110 billion) on developing an independent arms industry to reduce dependency on other countries.
In 2016, the US and Israeli governments signed a memorandum of understanding for the 10 years through September 2028 that provides $38 billion in military aid, $33 billion in grants to buy military equipment and $5 billion for missile defense systems.
Israeli defense exports rose 13 percent last year, with major contracts signed for Israeli defense technology including its advanced multi-layered aerial defense systems.
US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a staunch Israel supporter and close ally of Trump, said on X that “we need not wait ten years” to begin scaling back military aid to Israel.
“The billions in taxpayer dollars that would be saved by expediting the termination of military aid to Israel will and should be plowed back into the US military,” Graham said. “I will be presenting a proposal to Israel and the Trump administration to dramatically expedite the timetable.”
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In Rare Messages from Iran, Protesters ask West for Help, Speak of ‘Very High’ Death Toll
Protests in Tehran. Photo: Iran Photo from social media used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law, via i24 News
i24 News – Speaking to Western media from beyond the nationwide internet blackout imposed by the Islamic regime, Iranian protesters said they needed support amid a brutal crackdown.
“We’re standing up for a revolution, but we need help. Snipers have been stationed behind the Tajrish Arg area [a neighborhood in Tehran],” said a protester in Tehran speaking to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity. He added that “We saw hundreds of bodies.”
Another activist in Tehran spoke of witnessing security forces firing live ammunition at protesters resulting in a “very high” number killed.
On Friday, TIME magazine cited a Tehran doctor speaking on condition of anonymity that just six hospitals in the capital recorded at least 217 killed protesters, “most by live ammunition.”
Speaking to Reuters on Saturday, Setare Ghorbani, a French-Iranian national living in the suburbs of Paris, said that she became ill from worry for her friends inside Iran. She read out one of her friends’ last messages before losing contact: “I saw two government agents and they grabbed people, they fought so much, and I don’t know if they died or not.”