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South African Jewish journalist Jeremy Gordin murdered in home burglary at 70
(JTA) — Jeremy Gordin, one of South Africa’s most prominent journalists, wrote repeatedly in recent months about burglaries at his family’s Johannesburg home.
In a weekly column, he expressed dismay at the rampant levels of crime, growing urban decay and regular power outages endured by South Africans as a result of mismanagement and corruption. In one — titled “It is getting dark, too dark to see” after the Bob Dylan lyric — he addressed his two children, both in their twenties.
“I’m not suggesting that you’re going to find yourselves in desperate flight across your own border, that your graveyard may be ploughed up and strewn with garbage. But there comes a time when things are clearly falling apart,” he concluded.
He added, with the allusion to his Jewish identity clear to anyone familiar with Jewish history, “And you, who have your whole lives before you (as they say), need to consider seriously going to live elsewhere. We’ve been doing it for centuries, after all.”
On March 31, Gordin’s worst fears came to pass: He was murdered during a night robbery at his home. He was 70.
South African police described the incident as “a robbery gone wrong” but did not describe the exact cause of death. Seven people were arrested in Johannesburg two weeks later; one was driving a car that had been stolen from Gordin’s residence.
It was a tragic end for Gordin’s 70-year South African story, which, as with so many of his country’s Jews, intersected sharply with both the story of Israel and with the struggle of Black South Africans. As a lifelong journalist, he had at times headed both South Africa’s version of Playboy and its storied working-class Black tabloid, and also ran an initiative that used reporting to prove the innocence of people who were wrongfully imprisoned. He won the country’s annual top journalism prize multiple times.
Gordin was also a friend to many, frequently opening his home in Johannesburg’s Parkview neighborhood to guests. (This reporter was one of them during a stint in Johannesburg for Efe, the Spanish newspaper.)
Gordin was born in Pretoria in 1952, in a Jewish family with Lithuanian and Latvian origins. After a spell in South Vietnam, where his pharmacist father worked for the United States, the family returned to South Africa. Gordin went to high school in Brakpan, a town in the industrial east of the Great Johannesburg emblematic of the country’s white Afrikaner working class to which he often referred in his articles.
Gordin obtained a scholarship to study in Israel and completed a bachelor’s degree while playing rugby at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Back in his country, he did his military service volunteering for the South African Defence Force’s elite 1 Parachute Battalion, then started a prolific career in journalism.
In a breakout moment, he published a book in 1998 based on his conversations with the apartheid government’s death squad leader Eugen de Kock. Then incarcerated, de Kock candidly told Gordin about his deeds, but most importantly about those who had ordered his crimes, for which they were hardly questioned and never tried.
Gordin authored another canonical book of recent South Africa history, his biography of South Africa’s former president Jacob Zuma. Published in 2010, a year after Zuma took power, Gordin’s went beyond the usual assumptions about the Zulu former freedom fighter who learned how to read and write as an adult and was often underestimated by South Africa’s intellectual class.
Zuma left office in 2018 after a tenure marked by charges of corruption, cronyism and incompetence. Gordin’s biography has been criticized for being excessively indulgent with its subject, but it remains essential for understanding Zuma’s psychology and the motivations behind his actions.
In the early 1990s, after a period living in San Francisco, Gordin became the launch editor of Playboy South Africa. (He posed nude, with only a magazine as cover, to promote Playboy’s South Africa launch.) In a recent essay, Gordin recounted trying to land a then-unknown Charlize Theron for the magazine’s first cover. Invoking Yiddish terms, Gordin recalled journalists who had passed away, described the actress’s unembarrassed audition, and also managed to explore changing race and class dynamics in South Africa.
(Around this time, his friend Roy Isacowitz wrote in a remembrance published shortly after his death, the pair had successfully gotten a media executive censured for calling them “pushy little Jewboys” — though he said they accepted the description.)
Jeremy Gordin, at right, stands in front of covers of the Sun, the South African tabloid he oversaw for many years. (Courtesy Gordin family)
In 2012 he was named caretaker editor of the Daily Sun, a South African tabloid wildly popular among the Black working class. The paper lost much of its appeal after the death of its founder, larger-than-life Afrikaner media executive Deon du Plessis. Gordin brought back the pride, the punch and many of the readers to the paper. Or, as a headline made for him by his colleagues when he retired said, he “brought rock’n roll back to the Sun.”
The tabloid’s news largely relied on cases of violence, gossip and sex often featuring “tokoloshes,” fantastic creatures of popular African mythology whose encounters with the Sun’s readers were reported nationwide in the first person to its many correspondents. The readership and the paper’s foot soldiers were 100% Black. They collected the stories and sent them to the Johannesburg newsroom, where a group of experienced white male journalists including Gordin translated their texts in the characteristic Daily Sun language.
Gordin’s world couldn’t be further away from the one his newspaper reflected. But as his colleague at the paper Vincent Pienaar wrote after his death, “Not only did he understand the ethos of the publication, he embraced it.”
The tabloid took on serious stories, too. During his tenure as the paper’s editor the Daily Sun broke the story of the death at the hands of police officers of Mozambican immigrant taxi driver Mido Macias. A reader had filmed his gratuitously brutal arrest and sent it to the newspaper. Eight police officers involved in the victim’s death in custody were ultimately sentenced to 15 years in prison.
After leaving the Daily Sun, Gordin took on a role coordinating the Wits Justice Project, a journalism program focused on the plight of innocent or unfairly treated prisoners. In 2011 he helped secure the release of Fusi Mofokeng and Tshokolo Joseph Mokoena, who had served 19 years in prison for a crime they didn’t commit.
Gordin’s many friends say that his sympathy for the underdog was inextricable from the Jewish traditions and attitudes he inherited.
Although not religiously observant, Gordin peppered his articles with Jewish stories and jokes and Yiddish words and expressions. His sense of humor was strongly influenced by his Jewishness, as it was the combination of principle and humorous compassion that defined his personality. He was extremely well-read and voraciously curious, loved to share what he discovered with friends and indulged in sassy but harmless gossip both in private and in his articles.
Sometimes, his Jewish identity and his journalism entwined as when, in 2016, he reported from Johannesburg about the extradition hearing of a Hasidic rabbi, Eliezer Berland, wanted in Israel on rape charges. His final column, published the day before his death, explained, and condemned, the proposed right-wing judicial reforms in Israel.
Rabbi Sa’ar Shaked of the Beit Emanuel Progressive Synagogue in Johannesburg said Gordin as a friend and “wild spirit” who didd’t regularly attend services but was a repeat guest speaker at the synagogue to discuss weekly Torah portions and a variety of aspects of Jewish history and law.
Despite not attending services regularly, Gordin’s role in the community is described as “very active” by Wendy Ovens, a South African health professional in the NGO sector who served with him on the management committee of Beit Emanuel in 2011.
“His knowledge on Judaism and Jewish history was incredible,” Ovens said. She said his Jewish identity fueled his core mission: “He was community-minded and believed in justice and in what was right.”
Gordin is survived by his wife, Deborah Blake, and his children, Jake and Nina.
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The post South African Jewish journalist Jeremy Gordin murdered in home burglary at 70 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Being a soccer superstar couldn’t save him from the Nazis
For the past 20 years, the German Soccer Federation has awarded the Julius Hirsch Prize for organizations combating racism. This year, the recipients included an 11th-grade class that created an educational tool for anti-discrimination events, a children’s soccer league based in a disadvantaged area and a club originally founded in a refugee center.
Now, graphic novelist Julian Voloj has decided that it’s time for people to learn Hirsch’s story.
In 1911, Hirsch became the first Jewish player to serve on the German national team. He was the first player to score four goals in a single game, and he played for several soccer clubs that won the German football championship. Hirsch also was a decorated war veteran in WWI. Nevertheless, Hirsch was not spared from being a victim of the Holocaust.
“He was first seen as a hero and then seen as evil that needed to be destroyed,” Voloj said.
Voloj’s previous graphic novels have included an anthology of diverse Jewish voices and a story about the first Jewish congregation in America. He learned about Hirsch when he was working with Bayern Munich on a novel, completed in 2020, that explored the life of Oskar Rohr, another Jewish soccer player, who helped lead Bayern Munich to a 1932 championship.
With the help of a grant from the German soccer federation, Voloj is planning to complete Hirsch’s novel, “Juller,” in three years. He is working with an Israeli artist, Avi Blyer, to illustrate his work.
Voloj told me that, prior to the second World War, Hirsch was one of many Jewish German soccer players. “Soccer was an academic sport,” he said. Popular within universities, soccer emphasized values like teamwork and brotherhood, which stood in stark contrast to “the Nazi ideal” of manliness, which praised individual displays of strength and talent. In Austria-Hungary, many Jews became pioneers of the sport, including Hirsch’s teammate Gottfried Fuchs, who set a world record of 10 goals in a single soccer match. Unlike Hirsch, Fuchs survived the Holocaust by immigrating to Canada; he never returned to Germany.
For Voloj, the biggest struggle in writing about Hirsch comes with illuminating his personal life, rather than solely celebrating his accomplishments. “I know a lot about the statistics, but I don’t know so much about Julius Hirsch, the human being,” he told me.
He plans to start by depicting the religion and culture Hirsch was a part of — which he says might be the first time for non-Jewish readers to learn about these traditions. Voloj told me how he plans to recreate Hirsch’s Jewish wedding: showcasing the Chuppah and the smashing of the glass. In the scene, a rabbi will discuss its symbolism — a reminder of the fragility of life and the destruction of the Temple.
Tragically, though, this moment will be followed by one later in life, in which Hirsch divorced his non-Jewish wife as the German climate became increasingly dangerous for Jews. Hirsch hoped this would spare his children from persecution, but it was no use: Both of Hirsch’s children were sent to concentration camps. They ultimately survived, though, and Hirsch’s son later worked with a historian, Werner Skretny, to publish a biography of Hirsch.
A grandchild of Holocaust survivors, Voloj says he doesn’t want to focus overwhelmingly on Hirsch’s death, but instead to honor the life he led. However, it was still important for him to represent the antisemitic reality that Hirsch lived in; in the last part of the book, Voloj said, he will discuss how “the people who celebrated him basically abandoned him.”
Voloj says he believes that exploring Hirsch’s story is especially important today, when soccer is more diverse than ever and the German soccer team has become inclusive of many ethnic minorities. However, prejudice has also increased in many ways.
Voloj told me he sees “a lot of parallels in the experience” between the hatred that Jewish players faced under Nazi rule and what many Muslim players are experiencing today. However, he also said that many lessons could be taken from Hirsch’s early experiences when few fans cared that he was Jewish.
“There is something we can learn about the acceptance of the German Jewish players back then on the national team,” Voloj said. From his work, he hopes that readers can learn both from Germany’s dark past and also “overcome misconceptions about Jewish identity.”
The post Being a soccer superstar couldn’t save him from the Nazis appeared first on The Forward.
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As Jewish Republicans sour on JD Vance, many are rallying behind Marco Rubio for 2028
(JTA) — It’s no secret that JD Vance has lost the confidence of many Jewish Republicans, who have taken issue with the vice president’s reprimanding of Israeli officials, indulgence of anti-Israel conspiracy theories and silence on Tucker Carlson, the prominent pundit who has turned against Israel.
But Vance is still thought by many to be Donald Trump’s likeliest successor at the top of the party’s ticket in 2028, leaving the GOP’s Jewish supporters with the question of whom to back when Trump’s second term ends.
Many are finding an answer elsewhere in the Trump administration.
“The overwhelming majority of American Jewish MAGA voters, donors, and policymakers are enthusiastically supporting a Marco Rubio presidential run,” Shabbos Kestenbaum, whose high-profile activism against campus antisemitism has made him a hero among Jewish conservatives, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency this week. “I look forward to voting for him as well.”
Kestenbaum was offering an update on a claim he made in an interview at a Republican Jewish Coalition gala in May.
“I can certainly tell you with confidence that in the American Jewish conservative circles, it’s Marco Rubio by a margin of 99 to 1,” he said at the time. “In fact that’s probably underselling it, it’s probably closer to 100 to 0. I can’t think of anyone within the American Jewish MAGA movement who would not want Marco Rubio as the nominee.”
Rubio, who is Trump’s secretary of state and national security adviser and served as a U.S. senator from Florida for 15 years, has won the support of a number of Jewish Republicans with his staunch support of Israel and hawkish opposition to Iran. He has signaled a willingness to remove restrictions the Biden administration had placed on violent Israeli settler groups in the West Bank and this week vowed to dismantle the International Criminal Court, which has an arrest warrant for multiple Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The RJC praised Rubio’s ICC vow on Monday, tweeting, “Leadership. Thank you, @SecRubio.”
Some, including the far-right Jewish activist Laura Loomer, have also pointed to Rubio’s hardline stance on pro-Palestinian protesters; he celebrated revoking hundreds of student visas in connection with such protests last year.
“We are finally getting the pro-Hamas thugs OUT,” Loomer wrote on X, adding that Rubio “is a LEADER” who is “not afraid of taking on Islamic immigrants who don’t belong here.” In another post, Loomer revealed her ambitions for Rubio: “He is going to be President someday. Mark my word.”
Rubio’s deep ties to the pro-Israel community predate his national profile; his main benefactor during his career in the Florida legislature was Norman Braman, a major donor to Jewish causes. Rubio’s support for Israel is typical of Cuban-American politicians who see the country as a bulwark against communism. His closest ally in the Florida legislature was Adam Hasner, who is Jewish.
Some Israel critics who have spread conspiracy theories about Jews and the Jewish state are now accusing Rubio of working toward Israeli interests above American interests, and say Israel is pushing his candidacy.
Besides his pro-Israel bona fides, Jewish conservative commentators have also praised Rubio for his fiery rhetoric about his hope for the future of the United States, including in a speech at the Munich Security Conference, which Commentary editor Seth Mandel called “profound.”
Eric Levine, an RJC board member and major GOP fundraiser, said there is “overwhelming support” for Rubio, among both Jewish and non-Jewish Republicans.
“Look, my first choice in 2016 was Marco Rubio,” said Levine, who spoke in a personal capacity and not for the RJC, adding that he was an early fundraiser for Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign.
“Marco has always been an extraordinarily strong and effective advocate for the American-Israel relationship,” Levine said. “More importantly, he’s a very strong and effective communicator regarding America’s place in the world.”
Vance has seen his support eroding, both in and outside of Jewish circles. Some of Trump’s top advisers are reportedly pushing for Rubio, and not the vice president, to be the 2028 nominee. GOP megadonor Ken Griffin said last week that he would support Rubio over Vance in a 2028 presidential primary, Axios reported. Even live betting markets say Rubio’s chances are climbing.
Trump himself has floated a Vance-Rubio ticket, without saying which of the two he thinks should be president. The president asked a room of donors at Mar-a-Lago in late February, as he joined Israel in launching a war against Iran, which candidate they preferred, and Rubio carried the room, NBC News reported at the time. (Kestenbaum said he had heard about the vote from donors who were there. “To be fair, they’re in Florida, so it’s a bit of a self-selecting crowd — but Marco wins hands-down,” Kestenbaum said.)
The RJC has so far refused to wade into the 2028 waters. CEO Matt Brooks told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency at the RJC’s America 250 gala that the presidential primary is “light years away from right now,” and that the focus is on holding the Republican majority in the House and Senate come November.
But the group, and Jewish Republicans writ large, have been embroiled in a battle over the party’s stance on Israel, and how it should deal with figures like Carlson, Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens, all of whom have spread antisemitic conspiracy theories to their large online followings.
Trump drew the RJC’s effusive praise when he disavowed Carlson. Vance, on the other hand, has remained mum despite mounting calls by Jewish conservatives for him to condemn the former Fox News host.
“I’d like to see Vice-President Vance change tack on a lot of this; I hope that he will,” commentator Ben Shapiro said in a New Yorker interview earlier this year, when asked about who in the conservative world “would cast out the kind of characters that Tucker Carlson and company are encouraging.” Shapiro said he would “likely” support Rubio in a primary over Vance.
The State Department did not respond to a request for Rubio to comment on Carlson and whether he believes there is rising antisemitism on the right. Other possible 2028 presidential candidates — chief among them Texas Sen. Ted Cruz — have been outspoken in warning about the threat of right-wing antisemitism.
Brooks, asked about Vance, told JTA that Trump’s voice is “the voice that matters right now.”
“As we start to head into after the midterms and whether people run or not, I’m sure they’re going to be asked about all these things,” Brooks added.
Levine has weighed in on Vance, telling Politico this week that it’s “hard to find any support for him at all in the Jewish community.” He declined to discuss Vance with JTA.
In the months since calls first escalated for him to condemn Carlson, Vance’s role in seeking to broker a deal with Iran has only further alienated pro-Israel Republicans. He drew backlash from Republican Jews — both from the rank-and-file and from a sitting member of Congress — when he warned Israeli critics of the Iran deal, which has since fallen apart, not to cross Trump, saying, “If I was in the Cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.”
Florida Rep. Randy Fine, the Jewish right-wing firebrand, called Vance’s comments “absolutely inappropriate and frankly disgusting.” He did not reply to a texted query about Rubio.
Valerie Greenfeld, an RJC member and former senatorial staffer who now lives in Jerusalem, said in an interview that “it was incredibly arrogant of him to say such a thing, because we’re partners.”
She added that Rubio is currently the most popular choice for president in 2028 among her circle of American voters in Israel. Meanwhile, she said, “the more JD Vance speaks about Israel and antisemitism and teams up with Tucker Carlson and his ilk, the worse it is for him in terms of the Jewish vote.”
American Jewish voters skew heavily toward voting for Democratic candidates; somewhere between 63% and 71% of Jewish voters supported Kamala Harris in 2024.
But as a growing number of Jewish Democrats say they feel unwelcome in their party amid tensions over Israel and the pro-Israel lobby, there is a sense that a Republican nominee could pick up votes from a Democrat who is more sharply critical of Israel than any of their predecessors.
George Mason University law professor David Bernstein predicted on X that there will be “a significant shift in Jewish behavior” if Rubio wins the nomination. “The vote change will be relatively modest, but the energy and money will shift dramatically.”
He added, “If it’s Vance, nope.”
Pro-Israel criticism of Vance has grown in response to the terms of the Iran deal last month which delivered multiple concessions to the Islamic Republic. Shapiro told Fox News that Vance, as a key negotiator, had “not well served the president.” Trump this week resumed the war with Iran and said the deal was history.
Rubio, meanwhile, came out of the deal with positive reviews from the pro-Israel crowd, who viewed his silence as disapproving of the concessions made in the deal. Rubio notably brokered a parallel framework agreement between Israel and Lebanon that undercuts a key objectionable element of the Vance-brokered deal, which codified Iran’s role in Lebanon.
“Rubio does not look happy,” wrote Eylon Levy, a former Israeli government spokesperson, alongside a video of the secretary of state appearing stoic while Trump announced the deal.
Commentator Lisa Daftari wrote, “Today, we are all Marco Rubio.”
Meanwhile, Israel critics on both the left and right have been quick to call out the burgeoning support for the secretary of state.
Cenk Uygur, the host of The Young Turks, wrote that “half the officials” in Trump’s administration “work for Israel,” including Rubio.
Michael Rectenwald, who heads the Anti-Zionist America Political Action Committee, blasted Rubio’s plan to dismantle the ICC and said the “U.S. is ‘israel’s’ bitch.”
Clint Russell, host of the “Liberty Lockdown” podcast, accused Israel of launching a propaganda campaign and paying influencers to “tank Vance and boost Marco Rubio for 2028.” Russell did not provide proof but was steadfast in his accusation.
“They’ve been boosting him for months. Hard,” he wrote. “He’s their guy.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post As Jewish Republicans sour on JD Vance, many are rallying behind Marco Rubio for 2028 appeared first on The Forward.
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In seismic party shift, nearly half of House Democrats vote to end aid to Israel
Cutting off U.S. military aid to Israel came closer than ever to becoming the majority position among House Democrats on Wednesday, a striking sign of how swiftly the party has shifted just months before the midterm elections that could determine control of Congress.
As many as 103 of 212 Democrats supported a measure to eliminate the $3.3 billion in annual military assistance to Israel, while 98 joined all Republicans in opposing the amendment proposed by Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a fierce Israel critic who lost the Republican primary in May. Another 10 Democrats abstained. It received more support than the Block the Bombs Act, which would only prohibit the sale of certain offensive weapons to Israel and has 77 co-sponsors.
The vote underscored that support for ending U.S. military aid to Israel is no longer confined to the Democratic Party’s progressive left.
Less than three years ago, only 37 members opposed an emergency defense package for Israel following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack and the start of the war in Gaza. Opposition to U.S. aid to Israel has now moved toward the Democratic mainstream, fueled by voter anger over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the wars in Gaza and Iran, a string of progressive primary victories and growing frustration with the influence of election spending by the group AIPAC in Democratic politics.
The vote marks a break from one of the last bipartisan consensuses on foreign policy: stalwart support for Israel as a U.S. ally.
Leadership and Jewish Democrats split
The Democratic leadership, Jewish members and Jewish organizations were split over Wednesday’s measure, which supporters described as an urgent message to the Israeli government to change course.
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, hoping to become the chamber’s next speaker, opposed the amendment, arguing that cutting off all U.S. assistance to Israel would go too far and could also affect humanitarian aid for Palestinians. Still, he declined to pressure members to vote against the measure, and acknowledged the deep divisions within his caucus. Rep. Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, the Democratic whip, and outgoing Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, supported the measure.
That balancing act and the overall vote may foreshadow an even bigger challenge should Democrats reclaim the House in November. A Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday found that 49% of Pennsylvania voters in the key presidential election battleground state believe the Democratic Party has moved too far to the left.
Ahead of the vote, Jeffries called to renegotiate the next memorandum of understanding between the United States and Israel to reflect what he described as a changed reality — a move welcomed by many Democrats. And he wasn’t humiliated by the outcome. But allowing nearly half the caucus to support even a symbolic vote to end aid could further empower the expanding democratic socialist bloc that may seek greater leverage in his upcoming speakership bid.
The vote also highlighted the growing diversity of views among Jewish members.
Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts, Becca Balint of Vermont, Sara Jacobs of California, Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Jan Schakowsky of Illinois all voted in favor. Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, co-chair of the Jewish Caucus, did not vote due to a family medical emergency. Nonetheless, he said in a lengthy statement, had he been present he’d have voted against the measure because it would have also cut funding for U.S.-backed peacebuilding programs.
Rep, Brad Schneider of Illinois, the other co-chair of the caucus, echoed Nadler’s concerns and added, “We must work to rebuild a bipartisan consensus that supports Israel’s security and sovereignty as a Jewish and democratic state, while also recognizing the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people to self-determination, and ultimately statehood.”
Jewish organizations were similarly divided.
Democratic-allied groups, the Jewish Democratic Council of America and Democratic Majority for Israel, called Massie’s bill a “cynical political ploy” by Republican leaders to allow a vote to “drive a wedge within the Democratic Party.”
J Street, the pro-peace advocacy group, likewise opposed the amendment, while saying the level of support among Democrats reflected a dramatic shift in the old consensus in Washington.
The Union for Reform Judaism lobbied lawmakers to oppose the amendment, arguing that eliminating aid outright would undermine Israel’s security.
The New Jewish Narrative welcomed the vote. “The level of support for this amendment reflects a sea change in how Americans view the actions of the Israeli government,” the organization said in a statement. “We hope that our Israeli brothers and sisters take notice of this loud and clear statement and will take the necessary steps to change what their government is doing.”
What happens to AIPAC?
The vote presented one of the biggest strategic tests yet for AIPAC.
In recent years, the pro-Israel campaign fundraising organization and its affiliated super PAC invested heavily in Democratic primaries, aiming to elect and protect candidates supportive of military aid while drawing clear lines around who it considered friends of Israel.
Wednesday’s vote raises new questions about whether that approach can still hold.
One early sign came from Rep. Pat Ryan of New York. Ryan, who has represented a competitive swing district and was once among the most outspoken pro-Israel Democrats — including voting to censure Rep. Rashida Tlaib in 2023 — announced after the vote that he would reject future support and return contributions he had received from AIPAC.
In a statement following the vote, AIPAC proclaimed that “AIPAC members will be actively engaged throughout this election cycle, and future election cycles, to support members of Congress of both parties who support a strong U.S.-Israel alliance and oppose those who don’t. “
Whether Wednesday’s vote proves to be the high-water mark of Democratic frustration with Netanyahu or another step in a continuing realignment may depend less on Congress than on events in Israel itself.
Netanyahu, who is running for reelection in October, has himself suggested that Israel should eventually phase out its reliance on American military aid when the current 10-year memorandum of understanding expires in 2028. That possibility could make positions once viewed as politically risky increasingly acceptable even among traditionally pro-Israel Democrats.
The post In seismic party shift, nearly half of House Democrats vote to end aid to Israel appeared first on The Forward.
