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I come from a long line of Jewish Bundists. Now, Molly Crabapple is part of our family.
My grandparents live in a small apartment in Santa Monica. It has white walls and wood floors and is full of light. The living room window faces the street, and my grandma, Kathy, likes to poke her head out and talk to her neighbors, many of whom moved here after the Palisades fire, just like them.
To me, the Palisades house where my grandparents lived for 60 years always felt frozen in time. While opulent mansions sprung up on their street, their house served as a reminder of the days when a humble community college English professor (my grandpa, Marvin) could buy property in those idyllic, quiet, near-enough-to-smell-the-ocean streets. It was filled with books and family photographs. The living room mantle was covered in beach glass, sea-shells and surf paraphernalia, reminders of Kathy’s 1950s Malibu surf career that was immortalized in my great-grandfather’s novel Gidget, which inspired a series of books, a movie and a TV show.
Marvin’s office was filled with hundreds of Yiddish books with multi-colored spines and black-and-white photos, some of which showed his Bundist father in Polish prisons. As a child, I would scan the spines of fat history books with frightening titles like The War Against the Jews 1933-1945 and Never Say Die! Printed out and pinned to the wall was a quote by Marek Edelman, the Bundist second commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: “To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed & never the oppressors!”
The Bund was a socialist Jewish political party, at one point the most popular in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe. The party was founded on the premise of doikayt, or hereness, the belief that Jews deserved to live in freedom and dignity wherever they happened to be. In practice, this meant that the Bund ran a complex network of schools, self-defense squads, athletic clubs, literary journals, unions and local courts, designed to celebrate Jewish life and protect Jews from ever-surging antisemitic hostility. Knowing that my great-grandfather and namesake, Rubin Zuckerman, was a Bundist meant knowing that he was secular, proudly Jewish, believed firmly in egalitarian values, and was critical about the founding of Israel.
During the pandemic, I would sit in Marvin and Kathy’s overgrown garden, six feet away next to a rusted exercise bike. I would practice my Yiddish by reading aloud postcards sent from some young woman Marvin thought was the greatest — Molly Crabapple.
Molly began interviewing Marvin for her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund, seven years ago. She has a resume that would make anyone’s head spin. Her art is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and her journalistic output has covered Occupy Wall Street, Syrian rebels, and Guantanamo Bay. She’s won two Emmys and was nominated for a National Book Award.
Marvin told me about her with glowing eyes, and I responded with the type of disinterest reserved for recommendations from elder family members. OK, yes, there’s this young woman, she cares about the Bund, she makes art. But I too was a young woman who cared about the Bund and made art, and the narcissism of small differences precluded any real enthusiasm.
In 2026, with my grandparents’ Palisades sanctuary in ashes, I came to their house with a galley copy of Molly’s book. I had received it in the mail a few days earlier, and was quickly stripped of any skeptical haughtiness. Molly was describing a world, an ideology and a sensibility I knew so dearly and intimately from Marvin and Kathy. I had never seen this world so well described, neatly explaining concepts I have failed to adequately convey to even my closest friends.
I was eager to show Marvin the book, hear what Molly had gotten right or wrong, and share in the strange melancholic joy that comes from jewels of truth surviving over time, even as the physical, lived experience is washed away. With our personal archive up in smoke — the letters written by my great-grandparents, the stray notes, the marginalia in books toted from Poland to the Bronx to the Palisades — Molly’s book had a lot to live up to.
We sat on the couch and Marvin licked his finger to flip through the first pages. He went down the opening “Cast of Characters,” which outlines major players in Bundist history.
“Rafael Abramovich — I met him,” he said. “Meyer London — my father was in a picture with him.”
At 93, Marvin struggles to read without reading glasses and a dentist-grade clip-on magnifying glass. I read the introduction aloud to him and he recognized himself as the “octogenarian Yiddish scholar” who sang “partisan hymns” to Molly.
I continued to read aloud — about Molly’s own connection to her Bundist great-grandfather, her experience with leftist organizing, the overwhelming outpouring of support when she wrote about the Bund for the New York Review of Books, and her travels to the former Pale of Settlement, Ukraine and Gaza.
Despite my best intentions, my voice broke when I read this line: “The Bundists built alternate worlds of beauty, of courage, and of hope, which allowed their people to persevere even in the midst of an apocalypse. Their ideas are still vital today.”
I turned to Marvin and he was weeping as well.
“It’s true,” he said, “they were beautiful, beautiful people.”
“Are you two crying?” Kathy called in disbelief from the kitchen.
In Santa Monica, my grandpa’s office is inside of a closet. When I first got the news that the Palisades house had burned down, I emailed David Mazower, the curator at the Yiddish Book Center. I wanted to know if he could help me replace Marvin’s Yiddish books. Over the course of several months, he generously mailed nearly 100 books to us. They have strangers’ names written on their inside covers.
Feteshizing books
Family history embeds itself in your psyche through roundabout means. Marvin picked me up from school every Wednesday from the time I was in kindergarten until I graduated high school. He would buy me ice cream and listen to my favorite CD’s — The Beatles or Simon & Garfunkel, which sounded brand new to him since he stopped listening to popular music after Benny Goodman and prefers classical to anything else. He was my caring friend, who prioritized my own curiosity over anything else. Words like Bund, Yiddish, democratic socialism, Poland, the Holocaust, Zionism entered my subconsciousness, but I didn’t recognize the particular bent of Judaism I was born into until my later teens, when I started to seek out my own community.
Marvin urged me to attend the Yiddish Book Center’s Great Jewish Books program for high school students in 2015. Stepping inside their shtetl-inspired wooden building deep in lush Western Massachusetts was the first time my Yiddishist, Bundist history had a context. I recognized a Jewishness based in literature. A Jewishness based in solidarity and multiculturalism, without borders or armies. Today, my great-grandparents, Manye & Rubin, are featured in the permanent exhibit curated by David Mazower. Their picture stands above a bookshelf with Yiddish translations of Darwin, Marx and George Brandes’ literary criticism, and a full set of Guy de Maupassant and Jack London. Next to the books is a video of Marvin, describing how his parents, although they had no formal education and were garment workers, read all the time. When I tell friends that my great-grandparents are in an exhibition, they ask what they achieved.
“They liked to read,” I say, with my heart full of pride. Their values speak to me as loud as any accomplishment.
“Secular Yiddish literature and the Bund grew together,” Molly writes in her book, “until Bundists became the literature’s greatest champions.”
“Jews fetishized books,” Molly writes elsewhere, describing the “gluttony” for knowledge most working class Eastern European Jews nourished.
Marvin is often critical of any work describing his history, but as we read the first 30 pages of Here Where We Live Is Our Country aloud, he had little to say other than brief exclamations of excitement and agreement. Molly’s writing style is full of delicious and evocative details that allow us to fully inhabit this vanished world. As we read about how Polish borders were drawn and re-drawn, Marvin told me about how he would fill out forms for his parents when he was a child.
“The forms would ask when were you born,” he said, “well, they didn’t really know. OK. Then, the forms ask where you were born. They would shrug and look at each other, saying, ‘Poland? Russia? Was it Russia then? Was it Poland?’
“Then the form would ask, what is your profession. They would say ‘operator.’ They meant sewing machine operator, but as a boy, I just thought, what’s wrong with these people? They don’t know when they were born, they don’t know where they were born, and they’re telling me ‘operator’ is a real job?”
Molly and I share the same generational gap from our Bundist great-grandfathers. Both of us have parents who are not Jewish. And we are both women. Her perspective about female psychology, sexuality and experience allowed me to relate to Bundist history from a new axis. She writes about women who lost their virginity or had sex with multiple men in one day while surviving in the Warsaw Ghetto. She brings Pati Kremer to the forefront over her better known husband, the official founder of the Bund, Arkady Kremer, starting with Pati’s abandonment of her bourgeois upbringing and ending with a visit to her unmarked mass grave in Poland. Molly articulates the pull that many women, including myself, feel to “[subsume themself] in the domestic sphere that takes so many women out of historical record, while sometimes compensating them with private joys”
Women in Here Where We Live Is Our Country crush on their “family maid with sapphic fervor,” have long noses that “a male comrade mentioned unkindly in his memoirs,” make men their projects, sustain relationships with incarcerated men, or sometimes, “never married… had no lovers… just worked for the Bund.” She describes Sophia Dubnova’s efforts to disseminate birth control and lecture series about a woman’s right to orgasm. A non-Jewish Polish Socialist ally woman hides a message in her lipstick case. Abortion happens inside the Warsaw Ghetto, where many women were unwilling to risk bringing a life into such terrifying circumstances. It’s thrilling to hear these subjects written about so candidly, with no sense of shame or secrecy. I realize that in some ways, only a woman from my generation can do this.
A family affair
This past New Year’s Day, my parents and siblings crowded into Marvin and Kathy’s cramped living room. We ate the pastries Kathy had carefully assembled until the atmosphere abruptly shifted from friendly to tense. My father, a sociology professor, admitted he was planning on going to an academic conference in Israel. Although all of our family leans heavily left, my father feels a more profound connection to Israel. He lived there and worked on a kibbutz for several years.
My dad and I fell into the kind of argument many children have had with their parents since Oct. 7th, 2023. Despite fully knowing our shared values, we couldn’t help accusing the other of representing extremes: My dad must believe war crimes and genocide are legitimate means of self defense; I must believe Jews don’t deserve their own country. Marvin intervened thoughtfully, trying to bring our commonality to the forefront. Repeatedly, he referenced the Bund.
The Bund’s story is able to sidestep so many claustrophobic tropes around Zionism. Their devotion to Jewish safety and cultural autonomy leaves no room for accusations of antisemitism. If nothing else, they prove a point that bears urgent repeating for Jews and non-Jews alike — there has never been a singular Jewish consensus on the necessity of our own ethnostate. Like the Warsaw Ghetto fighters Molly resurrects in her book, like my own family, Jews have always argued about the best way forward.
I take enormous comfort reading Bundist leader Henryk Erlich’s 1933 speech, one that Marvin shared with me a few years ago when I was full of desperation about the atrocities unfolding in Gaza. Reprinted in Molly’s book, his words are clear as ever: “Our nationalism is just as ugly, just as harmful, and has the same inclination to fascist debauchery as the nationalisms of all nations.”
A strange sense of ownership
A few days after finishing Molly’s book, I met her at Canyon Coffee, and the two of us sat on the sidewalk while the east side creatives meandered by.
“I feel this strange sense of ownership over your book,” I said.
“You should,” said Molly, “without your grandfather’s encouragement, I would have never been able to finish it.”
I was overwhelmed by a new feeling. Here we were, chatting about the hectic nature of her upcoming book tour and the stress I’ve been feeling as a bridesmaid for my friend getting married next month. Against all odds, the movement that united our great-grandparents created a thread strong enough to find us sitting together. I felt that Molly was family.
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Israel is dominating Democratic politics. How did we get here?
For decades, American politicians considering a presidential run have traveled to Iowa cornfields and New Hampshire town halls to introduce themselves to voters before launching their campaigns.
Last week, two potential 2028 presidential contenders chose a different route.
Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor and Barack Obama’s White House chief of staff, traveled to Tel Aviv, where he delivered a speech defending the U.S.-Israel relationship but also cautioning about the growing erosion of Democratic support for the Jewish state in the wake of the Gaza war and amid settler violence.
A tiny fraction of the target audience was in the room. The majority was back home in the U.S., considering who in their party could possibly win as their party’s White House nominee — and more immediately how to use their votes this year to regain power.
Meanwhile, Rep. Ro Khanna, a leading progressive Democrat from California, took a high-profile trip to the occupied West Bank, where he was caught in an altercation with armed Israeli settlers who blocked his route to an elementary school that extremist settlers had destroyed. Khanna said he plans to share what he witnessed firsthand about the Palestinians’ “injustice” on the campaign trail if he runs.
The contrasting trips reflected a trend already reshaping Democratic politics. Graham Platner, the Maine Senate nominee who was forced to withdraw from the race following allegations of sexual assault, made opposition to Israel and AIPAC one of the defining themes of his campaign. His defiant parting message — in which he denied the allegations — included a vow to keep working to “end the genocide.”
On Tuesday, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, hoping to become speaker after the midterm elections, added his voice to the mix. In guidance issued to his members ahead of a vote to cut off aid to Israel — introduced by Republican Rep. Thomas Massie from Kentucky and co-sponsored by Khanna — Jeffries said that while he’ll oppose the measure, “given the strongly held views throughout the Caucus in this important area of foreign policy, we are not whipping this vote” against it. He added that going forward, “a meaningful change in direction is needed.”
The episodes in the past week highlight how quickly and powerfully the U.S. relationship to Israel — which has been receiving $3.8 billion annually under a 10-year memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Israel, which runs through 2028, plus additional billions in arms sales — has come to dominate Democratic Party politics.
A stew of different factors are in the mix — ranging from President Donald Trump’s fateful decision to wage war on Iran alongside Israel, the success of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America in showing how to mobilize voters on the issue, and voter backlash against massive spending on elections by U.S. supporters of military aid to Israel, all against the backdrop of the Gaza war and Israel’s continued military action in the region.
Sudden shifts
Israel’s role in Democratic politics this year signals a major shift — especially after a wave of insurgents who made condemning Israel central to their campaigns beat mainstream Democrats in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Colorado primaries.
The Democratic revolt is not entirely new. In the 2024 presidential race, the conflict in Gaza spurred some voters to stay home rather than cast ballots after the “uncommitted” movement blamed President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for civilian deaths — missing voters who may have swayed the results in Michigan, a swing state with a large Arab-American population. Activists said Democratic National Committee officials acknowledged that the Biden administration’s support for Israel contributed to Harris’ loss to Donald Trump.
But the protest movement has since swelled to include a bigger constituency — one not content to sit out elections or confined to moments of war. For many progressive candidates, challenging the U.S.-Israel alliance and advocating for Palestinian rights have become a marker of ideological identity and the party’s future.
Bill de Blasio, who himself evolved from a staunch supporter of Israel and an ally of AIPAC after he left office as New York City mayor and mounted an unsuccessful campaign for Congress, said in an interview that the shift reflects a deeper emotional connection to the conflict that is driving the engagement and organizing. Disaffected voters feel personally implicated by U.S. support for Israel, de Blasio said: “It’s a sense that this was done with our weapons and our money.”
In some districts with entrenched incumbents, such lines of attack by challengers went nowhere in Democratic primaries. But in some districts where the grassroots Democratic Socialists of America endorsed candidates and mobilized voters, they have scored significant upsets.
The result is a growing wave of democratic socialists and progressives winning Democratic primaries, portraying support for Israel as incompatible with progressive values.
Matt Duss, a former senior foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, said Gaza became a breaking point for many Democratic voters because of its human toll, but added that the political shift runs deeper. “It has come to stand for an issue of the establishment versus the insurgent populist left,” Duss said. Gaza, he added, “created this breaking point” where the “floodgates opened” to challenging the pro-Israel consensus that has dominated American politics for so long.
The Mamdani model
Zohran Mamdani’s left-field victory last year as New York City mayor showed candidates nationally that running against Israel could energize voters even in a local election. Mamdani, a young democratic socialist, rose to power by embracing pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel activism in a mayoral campaign otherwise focused on economic justice and progressive reform. Mamdani defeated establishment candidates despite refusing to scale back on his support for boycotts and declining to condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada” even as many Jewish voters heard it as a call to violence. Public opinion polls showed that Mamdani’s unapologetic criticism of Israel resonated with a majority of New York City voters.
The wins of three candidates endorsed by Mamdani in congressional primaries last month reinforced running against Israel as a winning strategy in progressive-leaning districts. Brad Lander, the former city comptroller allied with Mamdani, defeated two-term incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman by labeling Goldman as insufficiently activist on Israel, even as both — identifying themselves as liberal Zionists — touted similar views on addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Lander was the first Jewish candidate to call for an end to U.S. aid to Israel.
In Upper Manhattan and the Bronx, Rep. Adriano Espaillat, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, lost to Darializa Avila Chevalier, a former organizer of the pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia. Avila Chevalier drew backlash for inflammatory comments about Israel and for attending a Times Square rally on Oct. 8, 2023, widely condemned for celebrating Hamas — but won anyway.
And in Brooklyn, Assemblymember Claire Valdez beat the establishment favorite for an open House seat. Her supporters condemned her opponent, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, for refusing during much of the campaign to call the Gaza war a genocide and for taking a 2015 trip to Israel.
The AIPAC factor
The trend is not limited to New York. Across the country, Israel has become a defining issue, even in races with relatively small Jewish electorates or where foreign policy would once have played little role. In Colorado, Melat Kiros, a democratic socialist, unseated a 15-term incumbent using Israel as a wedge throughout the campaign.
In California, State Sen. Scott Wiener, a candidate for Congress who is one of the leading Jewish Democrats statewide, has found himself navigating intense pressure and confrontations from progressive activists even after he capitulated to demands that he characterize Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as a genocide.
According to data compiled by Milan Singh, a fellow at The Argument, a liberal opinion-focused media publication, insurgent progressive candidates for Congress mentioned Israel in 48% of their fundraising emails.
Opposition to AIPAC and criticism of the Israeli government have increasingly become shorthand for challenging “entrenched power, big money politics and the party establishment,” said Democratic strategist Lis Smith.
Nowhere is the changed climate being tested more vigorously than in Michigan’s open Senate race. The Aug. 4 primary between Rep. Haley Stevens and former Wayne County health director Abdul El-Sayed has become one of the most expensive races in the country this year.
Like other candidates who have run campaigns with Israel front and center, El-Sayed has focused heavily on condemning AIPAC, the campaign group backing congressional candidates who support U.S. military aid to Israel.
AIPAC has returned the favor with massive spending to attempt to defeat El-Sayed. Its super PAC, the United Democracy Project, has already spent $14.9 million backing Stevens. AIPAC also raised several million dollars for Stevens by directing its donors to online portals that funnel money directly to the candidate’s campaign.
Until this year, AIPAC was obscure to most voters. But its massive spending to support favored House and Senate candidates has been matched by progressive opponents using it to rally voters to shun those candidates.
In primaries this year, AIPAC and -aligned groups are pushing back against candidates who made Palestinian rights and support for restricting offensive arms sales to Israel a theme of their campaigns. AIPAC is also spending heavily to defend a seat in St. Louis, Missouri, that it helped win in 2024.
Duss said the politics surrounding Israel increasingly functions as a broader test of credibility for candidates seeking to dislodge Democratic Party leaders seen as holding back progress — not just on Israel, but also on such goals as Medicare for All. “It’s become an issue that you could speak out on if you want to demonstrate your anti-establishment bona fides,” he said.
In Michigan, voter scrutiny has broadened beyond just Israel to the question of why powerful interests are aligned with Stevens.
The changing politics is beginning to impact how incumbents are voting in Washington. In April, 40 Senate Democrats voted to block $295 million for the transfer of bulldozers — used by the Israeli military to demolish homes in the West Bank and Gaza — and 36 of them also supported a measure to block the sale of 1,000-pound bombs to the Jewish state. Those counts shattered a previous high of 27 Democrats who backed a similar pair of resolutions last year.
The governing challenge
The electoral victories may only be the beginning. The real test will come should the Democrats regain control of the House in November.
Matt Bennett, executive vice president at the centrist Democratic group Third Way, said that Israel “has exploded as a divisive issue in democratic politics” at a moment when Democrats have no power, as the minority in both the House and Senate, to shape the foreign policy of the United States. “It’s remarkable how anger is being directed at people who have no agency over these questions.”
If they win back the House, he said, those divisions will become much harder to avoid.
Whether driven by outrage over Gaza, frustration with the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or broader resentment of political institutions, Israel has become a defining issue — something few Democratic strategists expected even a few years ago.
Smith, who advises political organizations Majority Democrats and the Bench, called the events of the 2026 primary seasoin a “turning point” in the Democratic Party’s stance toward Israel. “I think that relationship is going to be strained for the foreseeable future,” she said.
The combination of Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank, and Trump’s actions in the war on Iran, are going to have a “lasting impact on our politics,” said de Blasio. “I don’t think that it can be put back in the bottle.”
Israel’s election crossroads
Throughout the debate over Israel, mainstream Democrats have tried to direct their criticism at Netanyahu and his far-right partners. Even Bernie Sanders, the elder in the progressive caucus, framed the charge for ending U.S. military aid as opposition to the “extremist Netanyahu government.”
Israelis will get a chance to change leadership in the upcoming Oct. 27 Knesset election. Recent polls show that Netanyahu, seeking a seventh term in office, is trailing an opposition bloc led by two contenders for premier — former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot.
If Netanyahu loses, some centrist Democrats believe a different Israeli government will help ease tensions.
“The intense emotion surrounding the issue could lessen somewhat,” said Matt Bennett of Third Way. Though the next Israeli leader will not dramatically break with Netanyahu’s policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or Gaza, “not having Netanyahu there would matter a lot because he has become he has inserted himself into partisan politics in the United States to such a degree that he has become the face of these campaigns,” he added.
Progressives are less convinced. They see the shift and generational reassessment of the U.S.-Israel relationship as a larger challenge. “If you had a different figure, one who is not so odious, that would give an opportunity to change the relationship,” Duss said. “But I don’t think it’s going back because the differences here are not just about one person; they are systemic.”
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UK lawmakers press government on why West Bank imports haven’t yet been banned
(JTA) — British lawmakers from across the political spectrum are pressing the government to ban imports from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, saying that explanations for why such a ban has not yet been imposed were inadequate.
During a three-hour House of Commons debate on Thursday, lawmakers argued that Britain’s long-standing position that the settlements are illegal under international law means it should fall in line behind other countries advancing bans, particularly at a time of rising settler violence and efforts to expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
The debate — the latest in a number of formal discussions about a potential ban in Parliament — was led by Abtisam Mohamed, a politician from the governing Labour Party who is the first Arab woman and first Yemeni member of Parliament. She was denied entry into Israel in 2025, a year after being elected.
“I want to pose a simple question to the government today, a question that sits at the heart of this debate,” Mohamed said in opening the session. “If settlements are illegal, why have we not made an outright ban on trade? What exactly is it that we’re waiting for?”
Lawmakers from other parties piled on.
“There is no excuse that we have to wait for other countries to move because they’ve moved ahead of us,” said Ellie Chowns from the left-wing Green Party, which has made opposition to Israel part of its platform. “There is no excuse that this is too technically difficult because the legal framework already exists.”
And a member of the Conservative party, which has traditionally favored strong ties with Israel, said he was unconvinced by the argument, made recently by a government official, that other measures that are potentially less complicated to administer could achieve the same pressure on Israel.
“We’ve done everything except the obvious, which is just the ban,” said the lawmaker, Kit Malthouse. “The question I’m left asking is, why? Why the reluctance? Why the hesitation? Nobody’s buying the complexity argument.”
On Monday, EU foreign ministers met to discuss a ban on products from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, in order to gauge if there is enough support for the move. The EU’s foreign minister said a ban on imports was the most popular option under discussion and said she expected that the conversation would soon advance.
The discussion in the House of Commons comes as the British Labour government is in flux, with a new prime minister set to take over from Keir Starmer next week. It also comes as the government is taking steps to reassure a Jewish community that has been rattled by a number of violent incidents. This week, the government both allocated more than $300 million in security funding for Jewish institutions while also formally declaring Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, seen as tied to many of the attacks, to be a terrorist group, in a move that enables more intense prosecution.
In an appearance before the Foreign Affairs Committee earlier in July, the government’s top Middle East minister fended off allegations that the Labour government was slow-walking pressure on Israel. Hamish Falconer also noted that British Jewish leaders are urging against an import ban.
“There are legitimate and reasonable concerns from the British Jewish community that if we were to take steps which were crude, which were untargeted, could have unintended consequences on the lives of the community who are already under considerable pressure,” he said. “I do take that seriously for obvious reasons.”
The Board of Jewish Deputies, an umbrella organization for almost 200 Jewish groups in Britain, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that it was reluctant to comment on a potential ban on West Bank imports before a new prime minister is installed. But the group has previously weighed in strongly against efforts to boycott Israel, arguing in a 2017 report that “to hasten a solution to the settlements would be to assist the chances of negotiations through promoting peace, rather than the problematic boycott campaign.”
Falconer also signaled that all bets could be off if the Israeli government moves forward with a settlement project known as E1, telling the Foreign Affairs Committee, “I have said repeatedly that no one should benefit from a profit made on land that has been unlawfully procured.”
The E1 initiative would expand Jewish settlements on a stretch of land east of Jerusalem, bisecting the West Bank, and is seen by both its proponents and critics as a bid to undercut a potential future Palestinian state. The current right-wing Israeli government has moved the E1 project significantly toward actualization, approving it formally.
If the project proceeds further, Falconer told lawmakers, “then we and our friends and allies would take tangible action in response.”
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Cori Bush to fellow progressives: My reelection would be ‘the knockout’ punch to AIPAC
(JTA) — Cori Bush told fellow progressives during a virtual rally on Monday night that she intends to deliver a “knockout” punch to AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, by winning her congressional primary next month.
When Bush, the two-term progressive Democratic congresswoman, was defeated in a bruising primary two years ago, both she and her adversaries attributed the loss in part to AIPAC.
The group’s PAC spent more than $4 million to defeat Bush, who was one of two members of Congress to vote against a measure to deny entry to the United States to Hamas terrorists who perpetrated Oct. 7, and declined to call Hamas a terror group on the campaign trail.
Now, as AIPAC has rapidly transformed into a radioactive bogeyman among Democrats and Bush’s fellow progressives have mounted an ascent across the party, Bush is out for revenge.
“Jamaal Bowman says it best: He said that Chris Rabb gave a jab to AIPAC. He says that Darializa and Claire … they gave uppercuts to AIPAC,” Bush said. “But then when I win, that will be the knockout.”
Bush is currently running against Missouri incumbent Rep. Wesley Bell in a field with three other candidates. In 2024, Bell defeated Bush 51.1% to 45.6% in a field of four candidates. A February poll sponsored by Bush’s campaign had Bell and Bush tied, with Bush receiving 44% of the votes, while Bell had 40%. (The survey had a margin of error of 5.4%.)
Bush was referring to a list of prominent progressives, including one, Bowman, who like her was primaried out of Congress in 2024, and three who won primaries decisively in Pennsylvania and New York this year. She was speaking at an online rally organized by Our Revolution, the group formed by Sen. Bernie Sanders to advance the progressive movement.
The rally came as the movement tries to move past a setback in Maine, where Graham Platner, a progressive and staunch critic of Israel, withdrew after winning the Democratic Senate primary amid allegations of sexual assault. One of the candidates vying to replace Platner on the ticket, Troy Jackson, joined other leading progressives including Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and California congressman Ro Khanna in taking the virtual stage.
Jackson did not mention Israel or AIPAC in his comments, even after announcing in recent days that he believes Israel committed genocide in Gaza. Instead, he listed an array of other issues animating left-wing voters.
“I know that there’s real pain, anger, and disappointment, and I’m not going to try and minimize that. But look, this movement has always been bigger than one person,” he said, alluding to Platner’s exit. “It’s about taking on a system rigged against working people, fighting for Medicare for all, strong unions, higher wages, reproductive freedom, and an economy where billionaires and corporations finally pay their fair share.”
Other candidates took aim more squarely at Israel and its supporters. El-Sayed, who in recent days has taken to calling Israel a “rogue state,” noted that AIPAC and its allies have spent more than $40 million to defeat him. (AIPAC has spent nearly $15 million on the race to date.)
“Donald Trump is not himself the disease in our politics; he’s the worst symptom of the disease of our politics,” El-Sayed said. “The disease is the system that allows big corporations, billionaires, special interest groups like AIPAC, to buy and sell politicians in ways that leave them rigging the system against us.”
El-Sayed also took aim at foreign military aid in his remarks, telling those gathered, “It shouldn’t be this hard to pay your taxes and know that that money is going to be spent on you and your kids rather than to annihilate somebody else and their kids.”
Minnesota congressional candidate Kaela Berg similarly cast her refusal to accept AIPAC money as part of a broader rejection of corporate influence in politics.
“We are the revolution, we are bringing that working class voice, that lived experience, two and a half decades of fighting the bosses, being people in Congress who cannot be bought, being the antidote to corporate Democrats and to Republicans,” Berg said. “I do not take AIPAC money. I do not take corporate money.”
Khanna, fresh off a trip to the Middle East during which he claimed that Israeli soldiers took the side of armed settlers who detained him in the West Bank, used his remarks during the town hall to shift attention from his detention to the treatment of Palestinians.
“Yes, people know I was detained, but if there’s one obligation, I feel I want to tell in every part of this country the story of apartheid in the West Bank,” Khanna said. “The story of these Palestinians who are being treated in an inhumane, undignified way, and if we can tell that story, I believe we will finally get change.”
Khanna, who has emerged as one of Israel’s fiercest critics in Congress since Oct. 7, also told attendees that the progressive wins across the country reflected growing support for the movement’s policy positions, including its opposition to Israel.
“We are winning, and we’re winning not because of candidates,” Khanna said. “We’re winning because we stand for Medicare for all. We stand against the genocide. We stand against foreign wars.”
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