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Shaming Biden and slashing budgets: Republicans and Democrats accuse each other of dissing Israel
WASHINGTON (JTA) — As the 2024 election gets into gear, both Republicans and Democrats are again using Israel as a wedge issue.
A lot has changed in both countries since the last presidential election, but in the halls of Congress, the battle over Israel is playing out in familiar ways.
Republicans have accused President Joe Biden of snubbing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he has yet to invite to the White House amid policy disagreements. Democrats, meanwhile, say that the Republicans’ proposed spending cuts endanger foreign aid to Israel.
And leaders of both parties have indicated that, even amid a high-states fight over the debt ceiling, displaying support for Israel remains a priority. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House speaker, took time this week to lead a bipartisan delegation to Israel, where he addressed the Knesset.
That was just a week after Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader from New York, led his own delegation to the country, and laid a wreath to mark its Memorial Day. Also visiting the country recently to demonstrate his support: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is expected to launch his bid for the GOP presidential nomination this month.
Hakeem Jeffries, center, the New York Democrat who is the House minority leader, lays a wreath on Israel’s Memorial Day in Latrun, Israel, April 25, 2023. (Office of Hakeem Jeffries)
McCarthy’s speech in Israel’s parliament was nonpartisan, but his remarks to reporters were less so. McCarthy told Israel Hayom, a right-leaning tabloid, that Biden was wrong not to invite Netanyahu to Washington, saying Netanyahu has waited “too long” since returning to office in December.
“If that doesn’t happen, I’ll invite the prime minister to come meet with the House,” McCarthy said. “He’s a dear friend, as a prime minister of a country that we have our closest ties with.”
Amir Ohana, the speaker of Knesset and a member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, had hinted that his invitation to McCarthy was a sort of rebuke to Biden. The U.S. president has indicated that he is not interested in seeing Netanyahu until the Israeli leader limits the influence of his far-right coalition partners, and walks back his controversial effort to weaken Israel’s judiciary. Biden has said the judicial overhaul would undercut Israel’s democracy.
As McCarthy was getting ready to leave Israel, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a senior Democrat, was telling colleagues that Republican budget maneuvers were imperiling U.S. assistance to Israel.
Wasserman Schultz’s warning came after House Republicans, voting on party lines, passed a debt limit bill that would curb and then reduce government spending. What, exactly, the bill proposes to cut and keep is not clear. But Wasserman Schultz, a Jewish representative from South Florida, said that the bill’s language mandates cuts across all non-defense spending, including foreign aid. That means, she said, that the $3.3 billion Israel gets annually in defense assistance could be reduced by as much as $726 million.
“That puts Israel’s security at risk,” Wasserman Schultz told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Without any specificity or explicit protection we can’t be sure that Israel is safe.”
McCarthy has pitched the debt limit bill as an opening gambit: It has no chance of advancing as is in the Democratic-led Senate, and McCarthy has said he will get to specifics once negotiations start. Legislation is needed to lift the amount the government is able to borrow, or it could risk a default on its debt.
On Sunday, a McCarthy spokesperson told JTA that security assistance to Israel would remain untouched, and McCarthy made the pledge explicit in his Knesset speech the following day. “As long as I am Speaker, America will continue to support full funding for security assistance in Israel,” he said.
In some ways, this week’s debate mirrors the way Israel was discussed in 2011, the last time a Democratic president was up for reelection as Republicans controlled the House. Back then, Republicans chided President Barack Obama for being insufficiently friendly to Israel, while Democrats warned that Republican spending cuts would harm aid to Israel.
But Wasserman Schultz said that in one respect, that year’s Republican spending bill was not as risky for Israel. Before the 2010 election,Rep. Eric Cantor, a Jewish Republican, pledged that Israel spending was sacrosanct, and the Republicans’ subsequent bill said that aid to Israel would not be reduced.
“They have nothing in that bill with specificity that ensures that foreign aid to Israel will be protected,” Wasserman Schultz said regarding this year’s spending bill.
Wasserman Schultz hasn’t been the only one to seek assurances that aid to Israel would be left alone. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby, has also asked that Israel cuts be taken off the table.
“We are continuing our work with congressional leaders to ensure full funding of security assistance to Israel, without additional conditions,” Marshall Wittmann, AIPAC’s spokesman, told JTA. “This is a top legislative priority, as it is in the security interests of the U.S and our ally Israel, and we are pleased that many members of Congress have already written senior members of the Appropriations Committee in support of this funding.”
Wasserman Schultz said that while she welcomed McCarthy’s reassurance on Israel, she worries that Republican cuts could impact foreign aid overall. AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups have also said that foreign aid generally — not just to Israel — is essential to preserving U.S. influence internationally.
“Words matter but the actions in the House Republican Default on America bill that passed the House doesn’t match the rhetoric,” she said in a text message on Monday, using a derisive name for the Republican bill. “But even if his Caucus allows him to follow through on those words, the drastic cuts called for in the Default on America Act would decimate support for our partners and diplomatic efforts in the region and undercut Israel’s overall security.”
Asked in Jerusalem about the debt limit negotiations, McCarthy said that in at least one respect, he and the prime minister were in the same boat.
“The president still hasn’t talked to me,” he said, just hours before Biden invited him to the White House to launch debt limit negotiations. “I’m a little like Netanyahu.”
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The post Shaming Biden and slashing budgets: Republicans and Democrats accuse each other of dissing Israel appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Australia’s Jewish History Might Have Unfolded Differently
People attend the ‘Light Over Darkness’ vigil honoring victims and survivors of a deadly mass shooting during a Jewish Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach on Dec. 14, in Sydney, Australia, Dec. 21, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hollie Adams
The deadly pogrom that took place in Australia at a Hanukkah event on Bondi Beach was the culmination of more than two years of hate and violence directed at Jews following the October 7 Hamas terror attack on Israel.
Australian Jews have learned that what they once considered to be one of the safest and most comfortable places in the world to be a Jew, is anything but. Yet the Jewish experience in Australia might have been very different.
The idea of a Jewish refuge somewhere other than Israel predates the modern Zionist movement. In the 20th century, two possible havens for Jewish refugees were considered during the lead up to World War II; both were rejected.
The more widely known effort involved a proposal for a refuge in Alaska. It was the initiative of Harold Ickes, US Secretary of the Interior, who was concerned that Alaska’s sparse population (only 70,000) would make it a tempting target for attack. (This story is the historical basis for Michael Chabon’s 2007 novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.) The proposal received only lukewarm support from President Roosevelt and after three days of presentations to the US Senate Committee on Territories and Insular Affairs in May 1940, it died.
The second effort, less widely known, involved a proposed Jewish sanctuary in Australia, a possibility I learned about only recently when I was going through some Yiddish literature left by my parents.
I grew up in Montreal, the son of Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.
For the first half of the 20th century, Montreal, the home of writers such as the poet J. I. Segal, was a major center of North American Yiddish culture. My parents would often mention Melech Ravitch, pen name for Zecharia-Chune Bergner, a well- known Yiddish poet and essayist, who was a leading figure in Montreal Yiddish circles.
I discovered that Ravitch, originally from Poland, spent several years during the 1930s in Australia, before ending up in Montreal. While there, he investigated the feasibility of establishing a haven for Jewish refugees in a sparsely inhabited region of northwestern Australia known as the Kimberley.
The proposal, backed by a European group, the Freeland League, would involve the purchase of land (a little over 10,000 square miles) in Western and Northern Australia. An advance contingent of 500 Jewish refugees from Europe would begin the process of creating a settlement, followed by 75,000 to 100,000 people to follow. Ravich envisioned an eventual population of one million, this at a time when the population of Australia as a whole was less than seven million.
The company that owned the land agreed to sell the desired tract, and leading religious and public figures, including the Premier of Western Australia, were in favor. But opposition at the federal level prevented the plan from moving forward. The League was informed that the Australian Government, led by Prime Minister John Curtin, was not in favor of “alien settlement in Australia.”
The Australian government was consistent. The Évian Conference, held in July 1938 at the French resort city of Évian les Bains, was initiated by President Roosevelt to find a solution to the plight of hundreds of thousands of stateless European Jews. Thirty-two nations, including Australia, participated. The conference achieved very little. The Australian chief delegate, Colonel T. W. White, declared “as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one by encouraging any scheme of large-scale foreign migration.”
The Jews murdered in the Holocaust were doomed by worldwide indifference to their fate, but also by the fact that there was no independent Jewish state that could have served as a refuge when they needed one. That’s why Israel is needed now — and why an Australian refuge would have made such a huge difference nearly 100 years ago.
Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.
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Debunked Hamas Casualty Figures and Their Impact on Reporting
Palestinian gunmen stand guard on the day that hostages held in Gaza since the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack, are handed over to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), as part of a ceasefire and hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel, in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Oct. 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
Since October 7, 2023, Hamas has shaped global public opinion through its propaganda warfare. The terrorist organization excitedly recorded and uploaded the atrocities committed against Israelis that day to social media platforms, and those who saw any trace of it were rightfully horrified.
But shortly after, when the images weren’t as fresh and no longer front-page news, Hamas turned to a new strategy — playing victim to the Israeli army. And since then, the media has run with it.
For instance, on October 17, 2023, reports claimed an explosion occurred inside the Al-Ahli Hospital. The media rushed to re-print Hamas’ claim that more than 500 people had been killed.
Evidence then came out that displayed it was a parking lot adjacent to the hospital that had been hit by a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket, and the casualties were fewer than reported.
The media has continued this pattern since. Any death toll that the Hamas-run Ministry of Health (MoH) publishes is immediately reported on by Western media, oftentimes without any attribution to Hamas.
This has resulted in blood libels being printed on the front pages of newspapers, blaming Israel for targeting non-combatants, including women and children.
But the vast majority of the casualty numbers that have been used throughout the war have been purposefully misrepresented by Hamas.
As of December 2025, the Hamas-run MoH has claimed that over 70,000 people have died in Gaza since the start of the war.
But further analysis done by Salo Aizenberg, a board member of HonestReporting, displays that this includes the casualties of Hamas fighters, natural deaths, and internal fighting amongst Gazans.
While the analysis is based on informed estimates, and the precise toll may take years to verify, it nonetheless highlights the extent to which Gaza casualty figures have been misrepresented in media coverage over the past two years.
Although it is difficult to determine the exact number of terrorists killed by the IDF since the beginning of the war, estimates suggest the number to be more than 22,000 as of October 2025, not including those who were killed during the terrorist attacks on October 7. President Donald Trump has confirmed the number to be greater than 25,000, the number used in Aizenberg’s analysis.
Beyond combatants, throughout the war, there were likely to be around 11,000 natural deaths, based on pre-war patterns. Another 4,000 deaths were caused by internal fighting within Gaza from different factions, including firing on civilians at aid sites or executions of individuals Hamas deemed to be collaborating with Israel. An additional 1,000 estimated deaths can be attributed to errors in reporting.
After removing these casualty numbers from the total of 70,000, there are a remaining 54,000 deaths. Of the 54,000, one can reasonably assume that around 25,000 were terrorists, leaving 36,000 civilian casualties. While every innocent civilian casualty is a tragedy, this is nonetheless a remarkably low civilian-to-combatant ratio of 1.45:1, especially given the circumstances of urban warfare.
Visualization based on data by Salo Aizenberg.
These numbers entirely dispute the claims that the majority of deaths are civilians — a claim the media has previously made. One “investigative” piece done by The Guardian and +972 Magazine, published in the summer of 2025, claimed that 83% of casualties were civilians.
What the outlets willfully omitted, however, was that this figure counted only terrorists whom the IDF had identified before the war and could conclusively confirm as eliminated, excluding thousands of combatants who could not be identified during the fighting. By presenting this partial dataset as comprehensive, the article created a misleading impression that was then cited as authoritative.
This information is not necessarily new either.
A December 2024 report by the Henry Jackson Society found that 84% of the publications analyzed failed to make the critical distinction in total numbers between combatant deaths and civilian deaths, further illustrating the extent to which misleading casualty narratives have been allowed to take hold. The report also found that men of combat age were disproportionally represented, and natural deaths were included in casualty statistics.
Perhaps even more telling is the ratio between male and female casualties. Males of combat age (18-59) died at 3x the rate of women the same age, resulting in a 3:1 ratio. The 32,690 deaths of men of combat age account for 46.7% of total casualties.
Visualization based on data by Salo Aizenberg.
Outlets, including the Associated Press, BBC, and Washington Post, have all previously parroted the claim that 70% of the casualties in the war were women and children. Naturally, it was based on falsified data, and the new casualty analysis once again disproves this claim.
Even after the UN walked back this percentage due to incomplete information, news outlets have continued to print that more than half of the casualties are women and children.
Throughout the two years of war, the media have repeatedly reprinted Hamas’ libels and casualty figures with little skepticism, allowing a terrorist organization to shape the narrative without rigorous analysis or verification.
Inflated civilian casualty claims will continue to distort public understanding of the war by obscuring the true civilian-to-combatant and male-to-female casualty ratios.
It is therefore only responsible journalism for every outlet that published Hamas’ casualty figures without questioning them to issue corrections and acknowledge that not every casualty during the war has been the result of IDF action.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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Fatah’s Gender Equality Terror: ‘Since the Start, Women Have Been Partners in the Struggle’
Palestinian demonstrators display a poster showing terrorist Dalal Mughrabi alongside the late PLO leader Yasser Arafat. Photo: File.
In two recent videos, Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah Movement highlights its message to youth: Female terrorist murderers are heroes, and should be emulated.
Fatah’s university student group for women, “Sisters of Dalal,” is named after terrorist Dalal Mughrabi, who led the murder of 37 people, 12 of them children.
Introducing one of the videos, Fatah presented “Sisters of Dalal” as a continuation of terrorist murderer Dalal Mughrabi:
Posted text: “The Sisters of Dalal Mughrabi
Not only yesterday, but today on every front; symbols of sacrifice and creators of pride and self-sacrifice.“
Fatah’s video showed various images of Mughrabi. At the end of the video, young female students are seen standing in formation while wearing vests with the text: “Al-Asifa Forces (i.e., Fatah terror unit) — Sisters of Dalal.” The video included a song with the following lyrics:
Lyrics of song: “O lady of the girls, O noble and brave one, O women wrapped in keffiyehs
O lady of the girls, O daughter of the Shabiba. Pride and firmness. She is equal to a brigade”
[Fatah Commission of Information and Culture, Facebook page, Nov. 26, 2025]
In a second video, a Fatah official praised murderer Mughrabi as the woman “who led a group of men” to carry out “a self-sacrificing operation” — i.e., the hijacking of a bus and taking Israeli passengers hostage, eventually murdering 37 of them, 12 of them children.
The Fatah official presented as an achievement that women have always been “partners in the struggle,” and that the student group for women is named after a murderer:
Fatah intellectual academy leadership council member Ala’ Mleitat: “Since the start of Fatah, women have been partners in the struggle.
‘The Sisters of Dalal’ in the Fatah Shabiba [Student Movement] are named after our sister Dalal Mughrabi, the great Martyr who led a group of men to the Palestinian [i.e., Israeli] coast to carry out a self-sacrificing operation.” [emphasis added]
[Fatah-run Awdah TV Live, Facebook page, Nov. 25, 2025]
Palestinian Media Watch has previously documented the status of role model given to Dalal Mughrabi by the PA.
The author is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this story first appeared.