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From Alfred Dreyfus to Josh Shapiro: How the ‘dual loyalty’ charge shadows Jewish public life
(JTA) — When Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro wrote in his new memoir that Kamala Harris’ vice-presidential vetting team asked whether he had ever been a “double agent” for Israel, many Jewish leaders heard something painfully familiar.
“These questions were classic antisemitism,” Deborah Lipstadt, the former U.S. special envoy on antisemitism, wrote on X, a view shared by, among others, Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League; Abraham Foxman, the ADL’s former leader, and Josh Gottheimer, the Democratic congressman from New Jersey.
These critics agreed that the question put to Shapiro echoed the “dual loyalty” charge: that Jews — especially those with visible ties to Israel — have divided allegiances, loyal first to their people and only conditionally to the countries they serve.
Other Jewish commentators insisted that the questions put to Shapiro by the Harris team were routine, similar to those asked of anyone being vetted for top security clearance. “So please,” Shaul Magid, visiting professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School, wrote on Facebook. “Can we just calm down and stop looking like hysterical conspiracy theorists.”
But as the reactions rolled in, so did a quieter, more complicated debate — one that goes to the heart of American Jewish identity. Does the normative American Jewish attachment to Israel — Israeli flags in synagogues, Zionist education in day and Hebrew schools, pride in the young American Jews who serve in the Israeli military — invite accusations of dual loyalty? And if so, should Jews do a better job of explaining how their often fierce attachment to Israel does not compromise their loyalty to America? Should they even have to?
Shapiro, 52, has been open about his connections to Israel, which represent a not unusual arc for a day-school-educated Jew of his generation: a high-school volunteer program affiliated with the IDF, a six-month stint working at the Israeli Embassy in Washington after college, and outspoken views during the Gaza war that combined criticism of Israeli government policy with condemnation of some pro-Palestinian protests.
Those ties, Jewish leaders argue, are well within the American Jewish mainstream — and far from evidence of disloyalty. “No one ever accused Irish Americans of dual loyalty for caring deeply about Ireland,” Foxman wrote. “This reflects something very troubling about our political culture.”
In his memoir, “Where We Keep the Light,” Shapiro wonders whether he was singled out as “the only Jewish guy in the running,” and says he told Harris’ team the questions were offensive. After the New York Times reported the exchange this week, Harris’ team sought to control the damage, telling CNN that every finalist was asked whether they had ever acted as an agent of a foreign government — a standard question on federal vetting forms. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who was ultimately chosen, was pressed about his multiple trips to China, where he lived for a year after college, these sources told CNN.
“The crux of vetting is asking uncomfortable and even farfetched questions,” one person close to the process said. “The point isn’t that you believe it — it’s that it’s on the record.”
Jeffrey Salkin, a rabbi and columnist for Religion News Service, rejects that equivalence. Writing about the episode, he contrasted Walz’s questioning about China with Shapiro’s experience. Walz, Salkin argued, was asked about what he did, writes Salkin. Shapiro was asked about who he is.
“For Jews, dual loyalty is the oldest antisemitic charge in the book,” Salkin wrote. “The crime is all within the imagination of the accuser.”
The charge predates the creation of Israel, going as far back as Exodus when the pharaoh warns that the growing number of Israelites in Egypt “may join our enemies in fighting against us.”
The charge was revived in the modern era, when Jews were gradually granted full citizenship in exchange for renouncing their ties to a Jewish national identity. In 1789, speaking on behalf of Jewish emancipation in the French National Assembly, the Count of Clermont-Tonnerre proclaimed famously that “Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals,” warning: “The existence of a nation within a nation is unacceptable to our country.”
The promises of emancipation were nearly revoked in 19th-century France, when Alfred Dreyfus was falsely convicted of treason amid mass cries of “Death to the Jews.” Later, Hitler rose to power behind the myth that Germany could have won the First World War if it had not been “stabbed in the back” by disloyal Jews and communists.
“You don’t need Israel to have the dual loyalty charge,” Pamela Nadell, the American University historian and author of “Antisemitism, an American Tradition,” said in an interview. “Think about the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ and the idea that Jews are more loyal to their people than to any state, that they are a kind of fifth column.”
In that light, Nadell said, asking a Jewish governor who has sworn an oath to the U.S. Constitution and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania whether he had ever been an Israeli “double agent” suggested the vetter is either “utterly clueless” or something worse.
“It suggests the interviewer either didn’t understand the weight of what she was saying — or actually believes the dual loyalty charge,” said Nadell.
And yet despite the deep roots of the charge, Zionism and Israel have added new fuel to an old accusation. In the years before Israel’s founding, American Jewish leaders fiercely debated Zionism and whether a Jewish state in Palestine “would imperil our position here,” as the Reform movement’s Pittsburgh Platform put it in 1885.
Thirty years later, Louis Brandeis, the Supreme Court justice and Zionist leader, sought to quash such doubts by asserting, “Multiple loyalties are objectionable only if they are inconsistent.… Every American Jew who aids in advancing the Jewish settlement in Palestine, though he feels that neither he nor his descendants will ever live there, will likewise be a better man and a better American for doing so.”
That proposition was deeply tested in the 1980s, when Jonathan Pollard, a Navy intelligence analyst, received a life sentence for passing classified information to Israel. Richard Cohen, then a columnist for the Washington Post, called the Pollard case a “nightmare-come-true for American Jews. In Pollard, the Israelis created an anti-Semitic stereotype — an American Jew of confused loyalties who sold out his country.”
In his 1996 book “Jewish Power,” J.J. Goldberg cites sources saying that the Joint Chiefs of Staff urged a life sentence for Pollard — the first for an American convicted of espionage — as a warning to the thousands of American Jews working in the federal government.
But despite a vocal “Free Pollard” movement that preceded his release in 2015, most Jews see Pollard as an outlier, and recoil at the idea that ordinary expressions of Jewish peoplehood invite suspicion.
That idea has gained renewed urgency in the post-Oct. 7 climate. A June 2024 ADL study found that 51% of Americans agree with the statement that Jews are more loyal to Israel than their home countries. College students report being accused of caring more about Israel than the United States simply for identifying as Zionists.
In a fact sheet on the dual loyalty charge, the ADL acknowledges that many Jews have an emotional attachment to Israel, citing a 2013 Pew study showing that 87% of American Jews said that caring about Israel is either “essential” or “important” to “what being Jewish means to them.”
“But the observation that Israel is important to many American Jews becomes anti-Semitic when it is used to impugn Jewish loyalty or trustworthiness,” according to the ADL.
Magid has written how Jews sometimes leave themselves vulnerable to the dual loyalty charge, either by claiming that Israel is their true “home” — perhaps a religious assertion that can be heard as a statement of allegiances — or when American Jewish families signal that they’d rather their children serve in the IDF than the U.S. military. “If Jews reflexively claim that the accusation of ‘dual loyalty’ is anti-Semitic, we too easily ignore that it was, and remains, one of the great challenges of Jews in modernity,” writes Magid.
For Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz, the senior rabbi at Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, California, the answer is not to deny dual loyalty — but to redefine it. In his recent book, “The Case for Dual Loyalty: Healing the Divided Soul of American Jews,” Lebowitz argues for embracing Jewish peoplehood alongside American patriotism, calling it a “double helix” binding Jews in Israel and the diaspora. Once Jews accept the notion that they are part of a global people, he writes, there is no contradiction in being loyal to what both America and Israel represent.
“The State of Israel stands as the strongest symbol of Jewish Peoplehood,” Lebowitz wrote in an email exchange. “While the presence of the flag of Israel in our congregation and schools represents the ideal that we are connected to our Jewish brothers and sisters in Israel, the flag also represents the bond that we share with our brothers and sisters in places such as Australia’s Bondi Beach. All American Jews should maintain a loyalty to our country, the United States, and loyalty to our people across the world.”
The historian Gil Troy, who was raised in Queens and now lives in Israel, also insists that loyalty to America and the Jewish people is not contradictory — and that Jews face suspicions not placed on other groups.
“The accusation says much more about the accuser than the accused,” Troy said in an interview. “Which is the oldest story in the book with antisemitism.”
Troy, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, recalls growing up with the hypothetical question, “If the U.S. and Israel were to go to war, which side would you be on?” His answer, then and now, is “it’s inconceivable.”
“Again and again, although I had to ultimately choose an address, my liberalism, my Americanism, my Zionism, have converged much more than they’ve clashed, and if anything, one has reinforced the other,” said Troy, who moved to Israel in 2010.
Troy’s assertion is similar to that of Ruth Wisse, the Yiddishist and conservative thinker, who in a video last year for the Tikvah think tank said she “never could understand this concept of dual loyalty.”
“It becomes a conflict when the two countries … that you stand for are in conflict,” she said. “But in the case of Israel and America, which share the same basic values, and in fact, stem from very much the same traditions, it’s really a doubled loyalty. The people who feel most loyal to America should be those who feel most protective of Israel, which is the greatest ally that America has, certainly in the Middle East, and possibly … the entire world.”
For now, anyway. For many Jews, cracks are showing in that vaunted relationship, whether it is liberal Jews who warn that Israel is drifting toward the illiberal, undemocratic right, or conservative Jews warning that the Democratic party is being coopted by an increasingly anti-Israel left. (Jonathan Tobin, editor-in-chief of the conservative Jewish News Syndicate, suggested that Shapiro may have told the vetting story in order to distance himself from Israel’s critics and “to save the soul of a party that has been badly compromised by Jew-hatred since Oct. 7.”)
Both sides have looked on anxiously as President Donald Trump has threatened or shredded alliances with other allies around the world.
Whether the questions put to Shapiro were normal vetting, clumsy phrasing or something darker, the reaction to them reveals how fragile the boundary remains between Jewish peoplehood and American belonging. More than 200 years after emancipation promised Jews full acceptance as individuals, the old suspicion still flickers — ready to be rekindled whenever Jewish identity and power become visible at the same time.
The post From Alfred Dreyfus to Josh Shapiro: How the ‘dual loyalty’ charge shadows Jewish public life appeared first on The Forward.
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The exceptional translator Barbara Harshav has died
פֿון אַבֿיה קושנער און שחר פּינסקער
באַרבאַראַ הרשבֿ, פֿאַררעכנט פֿאַר איינעם פֿון די וויכטיקסטע איבערזעצערס פֿון דער העברעיִשער און ייִדישער ליטעראַטור, איז אַוועק אין דער אייביקייט צו 85 יאָר.
הרשבֿ, באַקאַנט ווי באָבי בײַ אירע פֿרײַנד און קאָלעגעס, האָט איבערגעזעצט און אַרויסגעגעבן מער ווי 40 ביכער פּאָעזיע, דראַמע, בעלעטריסטיק, פֿילאָסאָפֿיע, עקאָנאָמיק, סאָציאָלאָגיע און געשיכטע. צווישן אירע איבערזעצונגען זענען געווען די ווערק פֿונעם נאָבעל־לאָרעאַט שמואל יוסף עגנון און די פּאָעטן אַבֿרהם סוצקעווער, מענקע קאַץ און יהודה עמיחי.
אַחוץ דעם וואָס זי איז געווען אַן ערשט-ראַנגיקע איבערזעצערין איז זי אויך געווען שטאַרק באַליבט בײַ אַנדערע אַקאַדעמיקער און איבערזעצער איבער דער וועלט, סײַ ווי אַ וועגווײַזערין אינעם געביט פֿון איבערזעצערײַ סײַ צוליב איר מענטשלעכקייט און ברייטהאַרציקער שטיצע פֿאַר אירע קאָלעגעס.
אַ צענטראַלער אַספּעקט פֿון איר קאַריערע איז געווען איר ברייטע און פֿרוכפּערדיקע צוזאַמענאַרבעט מיט איר מאַן, בנימין הרשבֿ (אַ העברעיִזירונג פֿונעם נאָמען הרושובסקי). צוזאַמען האָבן זיי איבערגעזעצט און רעדאַקטירט אויף ענגליש אַ ריי וויכטיקע טעקסט־זאַמלונגען ווי למשל דעם אייגנאַרטיקן באַנד „אַמעריקאַנער ייִדישע פּאָעזיע: אַ צוויישפּראַכיקע אַנטאָלאָגיע“ (1986), וואָס האָט אַרײַנגענומען סײַ דעם אָריגינעלן ייִדישן טעקסט סײַ די פּרעכטיקע ענגלישע איבערזעצונגען. אַזוי אַרום האָט דער לייענער געקענט אָפּשאַצן די קוואַליטעט פֿון די ווערק אויף ביידע שפּראַכן.
איינער פֿון הרשבֿס גרעסטע אויפֿטוען איז געווען דאָס וואָס זי האָט נישט פֿאָרגעשטעלט די ייִדישע פּאָעזיע סתּם ווי נאָסטאַלגישן פֿאָלקלאָר, נאָר האָט זי געשילדערט אינעם קאָנטעקסט פֿונעם גלאָבאַלן מאָדערניזם. דער באַנד האָט אַרײַנגענומען סײַ אַוואַנגאַרדישע עקספּערימענטן סײַ שטאָטישע טעמעס, צוזאַמען מיט די וויזועלע קונסטווערק פֿון בען שאַהן און ראַפֿאַעל סויער, וואָס האָבן געהאַט אַן ענלעכן הינטערגרונט ווי די פּאָעטן.
מיט איר מאַן האָט זי אויך אַרויסגעגעבן דאָס בוך, „זינג, פֿרעמדער: הונדערט יאָר פֿון אַמעריקאַנער ייִדישער פּאָעזיע“, וואָס האָט אַרײַנגענומען ווערק פֿון די „סוועטשאַפּ“־פּאָעטן מאָריס ראָזענפֿעלד און דוד עדעלשטאַדט, ווי אויך „אינזיכיסטן“ ווי ציליע דראָבקין.
הרשבֿ איז געבוירן געוואָרן אין דעטרויט, מישיגען, אין 1940. זי איז נישט געווען קיין נאַטירלעכע רעדערין פֿון העברעיִש אָדער ייִדיש. „איך בין געווען 34 יאָר אַלט ווען איך האָב אָנגעהויבן זיך לערנען העברעיִש און איך האָב זיך ממש פֿאַרליבט אין דער שפּראַך,“ האָט זי דערציילט בעת אַן אינטערוויו אין 2012. מיט דער צײַט האָט זי אָנגעהויבן איבערזעצן די וויכטיקסטע העברעיִשע ווערק.
דערנאָך האָט זי זיך גענומען צו ייִדיש. „ייִדיש איז די לעצטע שפּראַך וואָס איך האָב זיך אויסגעלערנט. צוליב דעם וואָס איך האָב שוין געקענט דײַטש און העברעיִש, האָב איך שוין פֿאַרשטאַנען אַרום 90% פֿון ייִדיש.“ כאָטש אירע טאַטע־מאַמע האָבן געקענט ייִדיש האָבן זיי עס בלויז געניצט צווישן זיך ווען זיי האָבן נישט געוואָלט אַז די קינדער זאָלן פֿאַרשטיין. „דערצו בין איך סײַ ווי נישט געווען אַזוי פֿאַראינטערעסירט אין וואָס זיי זאָגן,“ האָט זי געזאָגט.
איין סיבה פֿאַר וואָס זי איז געוואָרן אַן איבערזעצער — האָט זי דערקלערט — איז „ווײַל די איבערזעצונגען וואָס איך האָב געלייענט זענען געווען אַזוי שלעכט. כ׳האָב דעמאָלט געוווינט אין ירושלים און כ׳האָב זיך באַקענט מיט אַ שרײַבער וואָס האָט זיך באַקלאָגט פֿאַר מיר, און טאַקע מיט רעכט, וועגן די אומגעלומפּערטע איבערזעצונגען וואָס מע האָט געמאַכט פֿון זײַנע ווערק. האָב איך אָנגעהויבן לייענען יענע איבערזעצונגען און דערפֿילט אַז איך קען דאָס טאָן בעסער. ס׳איז מיר אָבער געווען אַ חידוש, ווען מײַן ערשטער פּרוּוו איז טאַקע פּובליקירט געוואָרן אין אַן אַקאַדעמישן זשורנאַל.“
אַחוץ איר אַרבעט ווי אַן איבערזעצער האָט הרשבֿ אויך געדינט ווי די פּרעזידענטין פֿון דער אַמעריקאַנער אַסאָציאַציע פֿון ליטעראַרישע איבערזעצער, און האָט געפֿירט איבערזעצונג־וואַרשטאַטן אינעם דעפּאַרטמענט פֿון פֿאַרגלײַכיקער ליטעראַטור אין יעל־אוניווערסיטעט, דערבײַ שטיצנדיק יונגע איבערזעצער זיך צו פֿאַרנעמען מיט דער ייִדישער און העברעיִשער ליטעראַטור. זי האָט זיך אויך איבערגעגעבן צום קאַמף פֿאַר געשלעכט־גלײַכקייט און פֿאַר שלום און גערעכטיקייט אין ישׂראל/פּאַלעסטינע.
אין 2018 איז הרשבֿ געוואָרן די ערשטע העברעיִשע און ייִדישע איבערזעצערין צו באַקומען די „פּען/מאַנהײַם מעדאַל פֿאַר איבערזעצונג“.
פֿאַר אונדז וואָס האָבן זי געקענט, איז באָבי געווען אַ בריליאַנטענע, ברייטהאַרציקע פֿרײַנדינע און קאָלעגע, שטענדיק גרייט צו העלפֿן אַנדערע מיט עצות און הדרכה.
The post The exceptional translator Barbara Harshav has died appeared first on The Forward.
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Rahm Emanuel: Pursuit of Greater Israel as ‘fanatical’ as the chant ‘from the river to the sea’
(JTA) — The pursuit of Greater Israel is a corrosive fantasy, veteran Democratic politician Rahm Emanuel is expected to tell a Tel Aviv audience on Wednesday, calling it as “destructive and fanatical” as the chant “from the river to the sea.”
Emanuel, who has held multiple top roles in the Democratic Party, in Congress and in the Obama White House, is a potential 2028 presidential candidate.
He will warn that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is leading the country to a “dead-end” that has turned the country into a “pariah” and is threatening Israel’s historic alliance with the United States, according to an advance copy of his speech shared with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Tuesday.
He blamed as “our mistake” America’s assumption that “the best thing Washington could do for Jerusalem was to blindly and silently stand behind your government, without conditions, without demands, and without consequences.” That path has led to policies including Israeli extremists terrorizing West Bank Palestinians and Gazans suffering from a lack of food that means “Israel has never been so isolated,” a situation that he terms “a countdown clock” for Israel’s security.
Instead, his remarks state, “we need a fundamentally new and different approach to the alliance.”
At the same time, he criticized the Palestinians for what he said were mistakes and obstacles to peace over the years. He lambasted their supporters in the United States who support replacing Israel with a Palestinian state stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
“Those chanting ‘from the river to the sea’ need to hear this loud and clear: they will never have their way,” he declares in his prepared remarks. “But those calling for a greater Israel must also hear this loud and clear: you’re never going to have your way, either. Both are fantasies chanted by fanatics.”
Emanuel, who is a former U.S. congressman from Illinois as well as a former Chicago Mayor and served as White House Chief of Staff under President Barack Obama, is considering a presidential run in 2028. His trip has garnered media attention given that his ideas on Israel could signal the direction of his party on the issue, particularly as they come from a Jewish politician with close ties to the country. Emanuel once volunteered as a civilian with the Israeli army and his father was an Israeli citizen.
His trip to Israel to underscore the importance of the Israeli-U.S. alliance and to advocate for a new regional diplomatic initiative comes at a time when politicians in his Democratic Party are increasingly disavowing Israel to gain an edge in upcoming elections as the country’s reputation plummets.
A Pew Research Center Poll published in April found that 60% of Americans had an unfavorable view of Israel, but its standing was worse among Democrats and Democratic-leaning Independents, where 8 out of 10 had negative views about Israel.
According to his prepared speech, Emanuel is set to highlight his deep connection to the Jewish state and his family’s sacrifice in bringing about its creation, noting that his uncle, who was a member of the pre-state underground, is buried on Jerusalem’s Mt. of Olives. His father, Benjamin, was born in Jerusalem in 1927 and fought in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence before immigrating to the United States, where he raised his family in Chicago.
Emanuel plans to recount Israel’s history of overtures in the name of peace and in the face of Palestinian violence during the second intifada and the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on southern Israel. He will explain that he understands Israel’s cynicism regarding any future arrangement with the Palestinians since Israel’s past offers of Palestinian sovereignty in exchange for security were frequently met with violence.
“I understand why, even if you oppose the Netanyahu government, you’re so prone to dismiss criticism from the outside world,” Emanuel wrote, underscoring that a “corrupt Palestinian leadership has never lived up to the Palestinian people’s legitimate aspirations for sovereignty and self-determination.”
Still, he wrote, Israel’s future can’t be “held hostage to a past defined exclusively by recriminations,” warning that such a stance will endanger its “historic alliance with the U.S.,” which is now “at a crossroads.” Israel must embark on a path that pairs military and diplomatic efforts, rather than relying solely on military prowess, he wrote.
“Israel will be alone if its leaders choose to attempt to annex the West Bank and pursue the fantasy of a greater Israel,” Emanuel plans to say.
“America will not and cannot be complicit or complacent in that endeavor,” he wrote, explaining that it has erred in the past by “blindly and silently” supporting Netanyahu’s government.
The speech calls for an end to the “American taxpayer’s subsidy of Israel’s defense budget,” maintaining that Israel should buy U.S. arms with the same financial terms and restrictions as every other ally “that abides by our laws.”
The speech laid out a broad-based policy with regard to a two-state resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that rejects extremist Israeli violence against Palestinian civilians and illegal West Bank settlement building but does not spell out prescriptions for divisive issues such as the future of Jerusalem or using the pre-1967 lines for determining the borders of a Palestinian state.
Emanuel does not mention the U.S.-based political advocacy group J Street in his speech, but the text picks up on the 23-state policy idea that J Street put forward last year, involving 21 Arab states, alongside Israeli and Palestinian ones, that would include recognition of Israel by the Arab League.
Such a regional integration would allow for Israel and the larger Middle East to become a technological and transit hub for trade between Europe and India, he plans to say.
To achieve this regional peace, Emanuel continues, the Arab states would have to support a Palestinian governing entity that would accept the Jewish historic connection to Israel, stop teaching its children to hate Israel and end the “heinous practice” of financially rewarding terrorists who kill Jews.
Israel, he wrote, would have to halt unilateral actions in the West Bank, stop nurturing harmful organizations and support “real partners in pursuit of peace.”
This scenario rests on a three-part U.S. policy in the region that would leverage the Arab world’s desire for stability, Israel’s need for security, and Palestinian demands for sovereignty.
“The political benefits for all parties would be far greater than a two-state solution could ever offer. But to get there, everyone would need to make good on their piece of the bargain,” he wrote in his speech.
The alternative path, he wrote, is one that has seen Israel isolated and turned it into a pariah state.
“Israel has failed to convert its military wins into strategic advantages,” Emanuel is expected to say, noting that the country has “lost Europe” and its support in the U.S. is plummeting. U.S. unconditional support for Israel without demands and consequences has been a mistake, he added in his speech, in which he blamed Israel’s poor global standing on Netanyahu’s policies.
A centrist Jewish Democrat embracing a policy promulgated by J Street, a group founded in 2008 to counter the influence of what was then the mainstream pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, illustrates the degree to which the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its credo of creating a bipartisan consensus of support for Israel has eroded.
Emanuel plans to recall his own tensions with Netanyahu, who during his time as White House Chief of Staff labeled him a “self-loathing” Jew for opposing West Bank settlement construction.
Netanyahu, he wrote in his prepared remarks, “cannot fight indefinitely against a world that has stopped believing you have the right to fight. You must instead find a new sustainable path to peace, security, and prosperity.”
Alternatively, he wrote, the United States would stand “shoulder-to-shoulder” with Israel as it pursued peace and security.
The post Rahm Emanuel: Pursuit of Greater Israel as ‘fanatical’ as the chant ‘from the river to the sea’ appeared first on The Forward.
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US launches ‘powerful strikes’ against Iran
(JTA) — The U.S. military announced that it had launched strikes against Iran Tuesday evening, marking the latest exchange of blows between the countries amid a fragile ceasefire.
In a post on X, U.S. Central Command announced that American forces had begun launching a “series of powerful strikes against Iran to impose heavy costs for targeting and attacking commercial shipping crewed by innocent civilians in an international waterway.
“The U.S. strikes are in response to Iranian attacks on three commercial vessels that were transiting the Strait of Hormuz,” the post continued. “Iran’s demonstrated aggression was unwarranted, dangerous, and a clear violation of the ceasefire.”
The latest round of violence could further imperil U.S. negotiations over fully reopening the Strait of Hormuz and reviving talks over Iran’s nuclear program.
Israel has treated the U.S.-Iran negotiations warily, chafing especially at the proposed imposition of terms of engagement with Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Iran has not claimed responsibility for the attacks on commercial vessels. Qatar’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Majed Al Ansari wrote in a post on X that the country held Iran “fully legally responsible” for an attack on the Qatari ship Al-Rekayyat in the strait.
“We demand that the Islamic Republic of Iran immediately cease all practices that undermine regional security or threaten the safety of international maritime navigation, & refrain from endangering global energy supplies & the resources of the countries of the region in pursuit of narrow interests,” Al Ansari wrote.
Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Affairs Ministry also condemned Iran’s alleged attack on a Saudi tanker, in a post on X shortly before the U.S. strikes were announced.
“The Kingdom affirms that these reprehensible attacks constitute an assault on the security and safety of international navigation and on the security of global energy supplies,” the post read.
The strikes come over a week since the last known round of U.S. strikes on the country late last month, which followed Iranian attacks on both Bahrain and Kuwait.
The post US launches ‘powerful strikes’ against Iran appeared first on The Forward.
