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Can China escape a deflationary trap? Economic outlook 2024
Last year was the most widely anticipated recession in history because tight monetary policy, slower government spending and higher oil prices normally spell doom. Yet total economic output (GDP) in both America and Australia kept growing in real (after inflation) terms. So, what can we expect in 2024? Will economists get it right this year Continue reading »
Joe Biden Wants You to Believe He Is Opposed to Genocide in Gaza
Joe Biden marked 100 days of his no-holds-barred support for Israel’s genocidal war against the people of Gaza by pretending that the killing, maiming, and displacement of the Palestinians were an apparition. “No one should have to endure even one day of what they have gone through, much less 100,” Biden wrote on January 14. But his statement, which emphasized the Israeli deaths on October 7 and the hostages who remain in Hamas’s custody, made no mention of the 10,000 dead Palestinian children and what they never should have gone through. His only reference to the plight of Palestinian civilians was an oblique one: Biden praised himself for presiding over a brief “surge [in] additional vital humanitarian aid into Gaza” when there was a temporary truce to allow the exchange of hostages and prisoners in November.
Biden’s statement is emblematic of the lip service the president has paid to “humanitarian” needs while at the same time facilitating Israel’s every move. The White House knew from the beginning exactly how gratuitous and barbaric Israel’s war of annihilation would be in Gaza, yet Biden made sure that his “great, great friend” Benjamin Netanyahu would have U.S. weapons to carry it out, would enjoy the full support of America’s extensive intelligence and targeting capabilities, and receive the political backing of Washington with no “red lines.” Biden and company ensured that Israel’s lies, no matter how grand or obscene, would be embraced and promoted from the podium at the State Department and White House every single day. Over the past 100 days, the administration has watched the carnage wrought on the people of Gaza, yet officials admit they have “taken great pains to avoid calling for a ceasefire.”
The attempts by the administration over the past months to plant stories in the media — about how Biden is “losing patience” with Netanyahu, how Antony Blinken is concerned about the mounting pile of Palestinian corpses, how the White House seeks no wider regional war — indicates a cynical amorality that permeates the souls of those in power. “At every juncture, Netanyahu has given Biden the finger,” Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen told Axios, characterizing what he hears from senior administration officials. “They are pleading with the Netanyahu coalition, but getting slapped in the face over and over again.”
“What we’re seeing every single day in Gaza is gut-wrenching,” Blinken told New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman at an event in Davos, Switzerland, as though he has not been one of the premiere enablers of the destruction of Gaza. “The suffering we are seeing among innocent men, women, and children breaks my heart.” He then adopted the tone of an analyst at a think tank, not the top U.S. diplomat: “The question is, what is to be done?”
These sentiments, expressed as part of a barely concealed political spin campaign, are not being promoted because they are sincerely held reservations or concerns; rather they are the linchpin of a crass effort to scatter bread crumbs the White House can later point to, including during the 2024 election, in an effort to make it seem as though they were powerless observers who just wanted to help the Israelis defend themselves but that dastardly Netanyahu took it too far. The actual scandal, in this narrative, will not be the mass murder of the Palestinians of Gaza in a genocidal campaign armed by the White House, but how Bibi and his band of rogues, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, used the just war to push their “extremist” agendas.
“If this really goes bad, we want to be able to point to our past statements,” a senior U.S. official told NBC News in early November when the White House intensified its stealth political messaging. “The official said the administration is particularly worried about a narrative taking hold that Biden supports all Israeli military actions and that U.S.-provided weapons have been used to kill Palestinian civilians, many of them women and children,” NBC reported. In other words, the White House was concerned that the cold truths about its actions could not be washed away.
When this is all said and done, this is going to be a central component of the Biden administration’s off-ramping strategy: pile all the evils of this war, including Biden’s crucial support for Israel’s actions as it rained mass destruction on Gaza’s civilians, onto the Bad Ship Netanyahu and then try to sink it. It is a classic Biden maneuver deployed throughout his 50-year career — including during the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, a war that Biden facilitated and later claimed to have opposed — to make sure he can have it both ways when politically convenient.
The emerging narrative is this: Biden’s effort to do right by the victims of October 7 and defend Israel’s “right to exist” from the hordes of bloodthirsty Hamas terrorists was exploited by a few bad apples atop the Israeli government. It’s a convenient plan given that Bibi’s hold on power on October 6 was already swirling around the drain because of his domestic policies, and he will certainly face domestic confrontation for what is being characterized in Israel as the intelligence failures leading up to October 7, as well as his preventable failures to bring home Israeli hostages outside of the negotiated November truce with Hamas. Despite its claims that rescuing the hostages is a top objective in the destruction of Gaza, Israel has not rescued a single hostage, though it has killed at least three of its own people and may well have killed more in the Israel Defense Forces’s attacks on Gaza, as Hamas has alleged.
When Blinken and other officials make statements like “this could end tomorrow” if Hamas releases the hostages and surrenders, it is instructive to clarify what they mean by “this.” “This” ending does not mean the apartheid will end, it does not mean the collective punishment of Palestinians will end, it does not mean the blockade will be lifted or the Gaza concentration camp will be dismantled and its people freed. What Blinken and other U.S. officials really mean when they say “this” could end is that Washington would actually use its unparalleled leverage to end the full-spectrum military assaults on Gaza. Then — and only then — would any meaningful humanitarian relief be permitted to reach a population that is now starving, lacks clean water, and is experiencing the rapid spread of preventable diseases. This stance — conditioning basic human necessities for a civilian population on the decisions of Hamas, a group Washington also accuses of repressing “innocent” Palestinians — is sociopathic.
The truth is that ending “this” does not guarantee that Israel won’t continue to heavily strike whenever it pleases in Gaza in the name of “eliminating” Hamas, as it has done for decades. The Israelis call it “mowing the grass.” The U.S. is effectively lying to the Palestinians and the world about “this” all ending. Nothing short of an entire people, not just Hamas commandos, bending the knee to Israel’s domination and never daring to resist again would end any of “this” on Israel’s terms. And that would mean the end of the aspirations for a Palestinian state, not to mention basic human rights or dignity.
Smoke rises over the residential areas following the Israeli attacks in Khan Yunis, Gaza, on Jan. 17, 2024.
Photo: ehad Alshrafi/Anadolu via Getty Images
As the slaughter in Gaza continues, a panel of judges at the International Court of Justice in The Hague continues its deliberations in the initial phase of South Africa’s suit against Israel, alleging violations of the Genocide Convention. Netanyahu responded to the meticulously documented charges against his government by issuing a preemptive declaration to flout a ruling ordering Israel to cease its attacks on Gaza. “Nobody will stop us — not The Hague, not the axis of evil, and not anybody else,” he said. “We are continuing the war until the end — until total victory, until we achieve all of our goals.” Unsurprisingly, this promise to defy international justice and law resulted in no condemnation from the Biden administration or Israel’s other major allies.
The White House spin masters are working to give Biden the political flexibility to pretend he really tried to limit the mass slaughter — and fought passionately to reign in Bibi — heading into the 2024 election campaign. But the truth is the administration has stayed the course in supporting the genocidal campaign. And not just with deliveries of bombs and offering support for pernicious lies promoted by Tel Aviv. As Ken Klippenstein reported, the U.S. has been flying drones over Gaza and, in late November, deployed a U.S. Air Force team to assist Israel in targeting. One source told The Intercept the likely role of these Americans is “to provide satellite intelligence to the Israelis for the purpose of offensive targeting,” not just to assist in hostage rescue operations. A recent analysis by the Associated Press of Israeli strikes in Gaza found that “the vast majority of bombs dropped on the besieged enclave are U.S.-made.”
The U.S.-backed Israeli military is killing an average of 250 Palestinians a day in Gaza. It has displaced 90 percent of the enclave’s 2.3 million residents. Conservative estimates indicate that some 24,000 Palestinians have died over the past 100 days, the vast majority women and children, and more than 60,000 have been wounded. In the West Bank, Israel is expanding its assaults with government-backed settlers and official Israeli forces killing more than 330 Palestinians, at least 84 of whom were children. Nearly 6,000 Palestinians living there have been detained or imprisoned since October 7.
While the White House is driving the no-holds, no-restrictions agenda for supporting Israel’s war of annihilation in Gaza, it does so with the support of the vast majority of U.S. politicians. On Tuesday, a Senate resolution introduced by Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders and based on legal restrictions that bar the U.S. from giving support to any state “which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights” was brought to the floor for a vote. It would have required Blinken’s State Department to submit a report to Congress about Israel’s human rights violations, any U.S. role in those violations, and how the administration responded. Depending on the State Department response, U.S. aid to Israel could have been frozen.
The White House publicly opposed Sanders’s resolution, calling it “unworkable.” National Security Council spokesperson Adm. John Kirby, one of the most ardent defenders of Israel over the past three months, said, “We don’t think now is the right time.” He repeated a claim the administration has been making repeatedly for many weeks about Israel supposedly “transitioning” to less murderous operations in Gaza. “We believe that that transition will be helpful both in terms of reducing civilian casualties as well as increasing humanitarian assistance,” he said.
By a whopping 72-11 bipartisan majority, senators voted to kill Sanders’s resolution.
While the vote should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed U.S. politics on support for Israel, it offered a morbid clarity: There appears to be no Israeli crime grave enough for U.S. lawmakers to consider pausing, let alone stopping, the U.S. role in facilitating the mass killing of Palestinians even to review whether the White House is abiding by U.S. laws. Despite the common Republican characterization of Biden as running a lawless administration, only one Republican, Sen. Rand Paul, voted in favor of a resolution aimed at investigating whether Biden is actually breaking the law.
Next week, lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights will test the principles of the judicial branch of the U.S. government as they present arguments in a lawsuit filed on behalf of Palestinians in Gaza charging that Biden, Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin violated U.S. and international law. One of the laws Biden and his underlings are accused of violating was actually sponsored by then-Sen. Biden in 1988, which officially made U.S. law consistent with the obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention, imposing criminal penalties for committing, assisting, or inciting genocide. The suit charges “that these U.S. officials have failed to prevent genocide and are aiding and abetting genocide.” Similar to South Africa’s requests at The Hague, the U.S. lawyers are asking a federal court in California to “order an end to U.S. military and diplomatic support to Israel” while the case is being adjudicated.
“The Biden administration knows what the law is internationally and it knows what the law is domestically,” said Katherine Gallagher, a senior attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and one of the lead attorneys litigating the suit. In an interview, she pointed to volumes of U.S. statements and legal assertions addressing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including filings submitted to the International Court of Justice in support of prosecuting Russia, and argued those apply to the war against Gaza. “When the victims are Palestinian and the perpetrators are Israeli, we see the United States do a 180 and absolutely ignore its obligations to not provide the means by which a genocide is being carried out.”
Israel’s War on Gaza
Regardless of court rulings or the specific legal terms ultimately attached to the conduct of Israel’s war against Gaza — or the role of Biden, et al., for that matter — there remain basic facts that cannot be credibly denied. This has been an unrestrained slaughter unleashed against a civilian population with the full support of the U.S. and a small clique of other powerful nations. Even if Israel beats the genocide rap at The Hague, the inevitable backslapping among the ranks of the coalition of the killing cannot erase the fact that the world has witnessed what they did and continue to do in Gaza.
Over the course of the past 100 days of Israel’s bloody rampage in Gaza, Biden has had an infinite series of events that each could have justified ceasing U.S. political and military support for Israel’s explicitly offensive war. There is no nation on Earth that wields more influence over Israel and no politician who holds more sway than Biden. The U.S. is the arms dealer and defender of this entire enterprise. If Biden was truly as dissatisfied or impatient or whatever other terms are being fed to the media about his supposed handwringing over Bibi’s war, he could have acted. But he didn’t.
Instead, the White House made sure no ceasefire took hold, offered a public defense of Israel’s conduct in the face of clear evidence of its genocidal intent submitted before the world court, circumvented Congress to keep the arms flowing, and then publicly opposed a resolution that sought to uphold U.S. law aimed at ensuring U.S. weapons and other aid are not used to commit human rights abuses. Those are the relevant facts. There is no need for media outlets to serve as conveyor belts for the administration’s disingenuous posturing. Biden’s actions are the only evidence that matters. And that evidence is damning.
The post Joe Biden Wants You to Believe He Is Opposed to Genocide in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.
The Ukrainian Military Is Experimenting With Psychedelic Drug Ibogaine to Treat Traumatic Brain Injuries
The Ukrainian military is experimenting with ibogaine, a psychedelic drug banned in the U.S. but often used to treat opioid use disorder elsewhere, to treat traumatic brain injury and promote battle readiness.
To do so, it is partnering with a founder of the Yippie movement, Irvin Dana Beal, a longtime ibogaine advocate. Beal recently traveled to Ukraine to help launch the project. Oleksii Skyrtach, a Ukrainian military psychologist, provided Beal with a letter for immigration authorities to help him move through customs with the drug.
Ibogaine’s most famous American patient may well be Hunter Biden, who has battled his own drug addiction with help from ibogaine treatment at a Mexican clinic. At low doses, Beal and researchers behind the project believe ibogaine can have salutary effects on TBI as well as help with battle readiness. “These guys need something for traumatic brain injury,” Beal said. “But nobody else is willing to fucking go into a war zone with ibogaine but me, apparently.”
Skyrtach agreed. “We really need as much Ibogaine as possible,” he said. “Even if the war ends now we’ll have too many ‘rambos’ to come back home from the frontline. It’ll be much more serious problem [than the] USA faced when thousands of veterans came home from the Vietnam war.”
Militaries since World War II have plied soldiers with amphetamines, with Nazi Germany relying heavily on the practice. Russian soldiers in the current war are known to rely on Captagon, a dirt-grade speed produced primarily in Syria. The benefits of amphetamines — the ability to remain alert while on watch duty or obtain some of the chemical courage helpful for combat — come with significant risks to the mental and physical health of soldiers, including addiction, paranoia, premature aging, and other complications.
A recent study on ibogaine and TBI published in the prestigious journal Nature Medicine found positive results. Ibogaine, like marijuana, is a Schedule 1 drug in the United States, meaning the federal government bans it outright and considers it to have no therapeutic value. “This is possibly the first study to report evidence for a single treatment with a drug that can improve chronic disability related to repeated TBI from combat/blast exposures,” the authors of the Nature Medicine study wrote. “After [treatment], participants showed a remarkable reduction in these symptoms with large effect sizes … and the benefits were sustained at the 1-month follow-up.”
“Areas of improvement after treatment” included “processing speed and executive function, without any detrimental changes observed.” Cardiovascular risks, including heart attack, are a known potential side effect of high doses of ibogaine.
Beal, known as something of a godfather of the pro-pot movement, was a founder of the Youth International Party, known as the Yippies. He’s been interested in ibogaine as a treatment for opioid addiction since the 1970s, when he challenged Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern on live television on the role of the CIA in assisting heroin traffickers in Southeast Asia.
Rick Doblin, head of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, the leading organization aimed at the advancement of the therapeutic potential of psychedelics, said MAPS helped raise funds to back the project bringing medical-grade ibogaine from Africa for Ukrainian military research. Doblin said that the use of MDMA, sometimes known as ecstasy, is banned in Ukraine even for research purposes, which left ibogaine as an intriguing alternative. High doses of ibogaine, the kind used for opioid treatment, put users into a dreamlike state of intense hallucinations — not ideal for combat, which explains why Beal’s project relies on microdoses.
Beal said that veteran Jon Lubecky, who has made repeated humanitarian relief visits to Ukraine, also helped finance the project and made connections, including to the Ukrainian Psychedelic Research Association. Lubecky, legislative director for Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions, confirmed his involvement. “As a combat Veteran of Iraq who suffered through 8 years of crippling PTSD, returning to a war zone, and having no effects, while seeing everyone around suffering as I once did, I knew something had to be done, and I could,” said Lubecky.
MAPS is also pushing forward with an educational program around MDMA and post-traumatic stress disorder for Ukrainian therapists now in Poland as refugees, as well as with interested Polish therapists. The aim is to treat Ukrainians in Poland suffering from PTSD, with the goal of expanding the work to Ukraine if and when changes in the law allow it. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is considering approving MDMA for therapeutic use and may rule as early as this summer.
Asked to describe the feeling of a microdose of ibogaine, Beal said it has a softer lift than speed. “Say you’re in the morning, and you’ve just done your first thing of the day successfully, you sit back, maybe with a cup of coffee,” Beal said. “On ibogaine, the extra feeling of satisfaction is ineffable. People have better ups, and that kind of reward is extremely important for keeping people’s morale up in a battlefield situation. Also, ibogaine is good for pattern recognition and coincidence detection. The NMDA receptor, which is the one for ketamine, which is also activated by ibogaine, is the coincidence detector and it up-regulates right-brain functioning, so that you have better pattern recognition, faster pattern recognition, get-out-of-the-way-of-the-incoming-shell kind of pattern recognition.”
Skyrtach, in the letter he provided Beal, said that both battlefield burnout and TBI were areas the military hoped could be addressed by ibogaine. “On the initiative of Rick Doblin of the Multi-Disciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies, we have contracted with I. Dana Beal and Howard Lotsof’s Ibogaine Company IboGrow to supply Ukrainian veterans hospitals and the Ukrainian Army with pharmaceutical grade ibogaine both for traumatic brain injury and experimental micro-dose use for battlefield burnout and enhanced performance and survival,” he wrote in the letter to Ukrainian immigration authorities. Skyrtach confirmed the letter as authentic. “It is urgent that we find a battlefield energy supplement other than amphetamine (which promotes premature aging) that will instead act as neurotrophigen and rejuvenant.”
Ibogaine extract tinctures and ibogaine root.
Photo: Getty Images
Ibogaine is derived from an African root, but, the letter adds, a synthetic version is being pursued: “The sample amounts Mr. Beal is bringing us are derived from Voacanga Africana, produced in Accra, Ghana; however Beal is also in talks with [a Ukrainian company] to give Ukraine the process to make completely synthetic cGMP ibogaine in a production-sharing arrangement with his Israeli affiliate Ibogacine.”
Beal turned toward Ukraine after he ran into immigration problems in Mexico in December, when, he said, he was barred entry at the behest of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, citing his past criminal record related to cannabis. (DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) Beal, who had flown to Mexico from Spain, was put back on a plane to Europe and made his way to Ukraine. After setting up the experimental project, he has been able to return to the United States — but was reportedly arrested on Monday for marijuana trafficking.
Beal noted the Russian use of Captagon and argued Ukrainians would be at an advantage. “We think what we’ll do is we’ll get our side to live longer,” he said. “It’ll be the Ukrainians on ibogaine versus the Russians on meth.”
Update: January 17, 2024, 3:56 p.m. ET
This article was updated to include Dana Beal’s reported arrest in Idaho on Monday.
The post The Ukrainian Military Is Experimenting With Psychedelic Drug Ibogaine to Treat Traumatic Brain Injuries appeared first on The Intercept.
Hakeem Jeffries Bucks AIPAC, Endorses Squad Member Summer Lee
Bucking pro-Israel lobby groups, the top three members of House Democratic leadership endorsed Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa., on Wednesday. Like other progressive members of the Squad, pro-Israel groups are seeking to oust Lee in 2024.
Members of the House Democratic leadership have mostly remained close to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee even as it sought to unseat Democratic incumbents. On Wednesday, though, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., bucked AIPAC, a major donor, and endorsed Lee. House Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., and House Minority Whip Katherine Clark, D-Mass., joined Jeffries in the endorsement.
“A civil rights champion, advocate for organized labor and the first Black woman to represent Pennsylvania in Congress, Summer Lee has worked tirelessly to deliver for working families,” the three leaders said in a statement Wednesday morning. They added that Lee had fought for good union jobs and reproductive rights since her first day in Congress and would help oppose “the extreme MAGA Republican agenda” in Pennsylvania.
The endorsements are among the first by House Democratic leadership for a progressive incumbent facing attacks from AIPAC and other pro-Israel lobbying groups in 2024. Jeffries endorsed Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., in August amid news that AIPAC was recruiting candidates to challenge her.
The endorsements are among the first by House Democratic leadership for a progressive incumbent facing attacks from AIPAC.
AIPAC has also tried to recruit candidates to challenge Lee and other progressive lawmakers who’ve led calls for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to U.S. military funding for Israel since its recent war killed more than 20,000 Palestinians. In Lee’s race, two people declined AIPAC’s efforts to recruit them to challenge the incumbent in the 2024 Democratic primary, The Intercept reported last year.
AIPAC spent $5 million against Lee’s 2022 campaign, including on mailers picturing her with former President Donald Trump, claiming she wasn’t really a Democrat.
The same year, AIPAC faced heavy criticisms from Democrats for endorsing more than 100 Republicans who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
AIPAC and its close ally, Democratic Majority for Israel, have ramped up attacks against progressive lawmakers since the siege on Gaza began. Members of the Squad and a handful of other Democrats have led measures calling for a ceasefire and voted against a measure that pledged support for Israel and did not mention Palestinians killed.
Attacks on Progressive Democrats
The show of support for Lee from House Democratic leadership comes as conservative Democrats have attacked Squad members and major party donors have signaled their intentions to target incumbents who are critical of Israel.
Mainstream Democrats PAC, funded by billionaire Democratic donor Reid Hoffman, is reportedly considering teaming up with AIPAC and DMFI to target Squad members including Reps. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Cori Bush, D-Mo., who led a ceasefire resolution in October. The resolution immediately drew attacks from conservative Democrats, along with AIPAC and DMFI, including a new ad in November that attacked Tlaib.
In addition to Lee, AIPAC has sought to recruit challengers to Bush, Tlaib, Omar, and Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y.
AIPAC has emerged as one of the largest players in electoral politics. The group spent millions against progressives in 2022 and reportedly plans to spend $100 million in 2024.
Jeffries had said he would back all Democratic incumbents, but the endorsement of Lee stood in contrast to his previous tone on attacks against Squad members.
The minority leader had previously issued muted responses to news about plans by AIPAC, DMFI, and Mainstream Democrats’ efforts to oust Squad members. Asked to respond to the attacks during a press conference in November, Jeffries said, “Outside groups are gonna do what outside groups are gonna do. I think House Democrats are going to continue to support each other.”
Israel’s War on Gaza
In a statement touting the new endorsements, Lee noted her work to invest in infrastructure, union jobs, and STEM, as well as her use of progressive policies to rebuild support for Democrats in the western part of the state.
“Our progressive movement is creating a blueprint, not just for Western Pennsylvania, but for our entire country for what it looks like to beat Trumpism by leading with compassion and equity and justice,” Lee said in the statement, released Wednesday morning. Lee’s primary opponents include Bhavini Patel, a borough council member in Edgewood, Pennsylvania, and Laurie MacDonald, who leads a victims services organization in Pennsylvania and describes herself as a moderate.
The post Hakeem Jeffries Bucks AIPAC, Endorses Squad Member Summer Lee appeared first on The Intercept.
Senate Kills Measure to Scrutinize Israeli Human Rights Record as Condition for Aid
On Tuesday, the Senate voted down a resolution that would have set the stage for Congress to place conditions on U.S. military aid to Israel — quashing what has so far been the most serious effort on Capitol Hill to hold the U.S. ally to account for its brutal assault on Gaza.
Introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in December, the resolution would have required the State Department to submit a report to Congress about allegations of Israel committing human rights violations, and whether and how the U.S. played a role and responded to such acts. If the bill had passed and the State Department failed to submit the report within 30 days, U.S. aid to Israel would have been frozen. If the State Department had submitted a report to Congress, however, U.S. aid to Israel could have come to a vote, giving Congress the option to condition, restrict, or terminate security assistance to Israel (or to do nothing at all). Such votes would have required only a simple majority for passage.
When it came to a vote Tuesday evening, the Senate voted 72-11 to table the resolution, effectively killing it.
“It’s frankly historic that this vote took place at all,” said Andrew O’Neill, the legislative director for the political advocacy group Indivisible. “The number of senators willing to take a vote like this even weeks ago, on the face of it, would have been zero.”
Israel’s War on Gaza
Israel receives billions of dollars per year in U.S. aid, making it the largest recipient of American security assistance in the world. In the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, President Joe Biden asked Congress to approve an additional $14 billion in aid to the country, whose retaliatory war on Gaza has killed more than 24,000 Palestinians.
Sanders’s resolution was based on the Foreign Assistance Act, which prohibits the American government from providing security assistance to any government “which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” Section 502B(c) of the law empowers Congress to request information on a country’s human rights practices, which Sanders took advantage of to force this vote.
“The Senators who lent their support to this resolution did so in spite of enormous political pressure,” O’Neill said, noting that, for decades, there has been a bipartisan status quo of not scrutinizing assistance to Israel. “The 502B process had never been used before, and now that tool is on the table. These are lonely votes, but votes that can be the start of something bigger.”
The votes in support for Sanders’s resolution came almost entirely from Democratic senators: Laphonza Butler of California, Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, and Peter Welch of Vermont. Rand Paul was the only Republican to vote against tabling the resolution.
Van Hollen told The Intercept that it’s important for the Senate to get the information required by the proposed report. “That’s important for transparency and I think taxpayers have a right to know how their funds are being used.”
Speaking with reporters ahead of the vote, Warren said, “Prime Minister Netanyahu needs to understand that he does not get a blank check from the United States Congress.”
She continued: “The Senate has had a role in overseeing our military involvement overseas running back to the drafting of the Constitution. We have a responsibility to stand up now and say that given how Netanyahu and his right-wing war cabinet have prosecuted this war, we have serious questions that we are obligated to ask before we go further.”
Some Democratic senators who voted to kill the resolution told The Intercept they were concerned about Israeli human rights abuses, but they did not think Sanders’s proposal was the way to address them. Others, mostly Republicans, deflected from questions about Israel’s conduct during the war.
Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., said he was opposed to the resolution because the timeline for potential congressional action would have conflicted with the aims of Israel’s war. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense to be conditioning a military campaign engaged in by an ally,” he said. He added that “there’s no question if there are allegations, they will be the subject of scrutiny and review,” but said he doesn’t think the resolution is the right approach.
Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., explained his opposition to the resolution by pointing out that 502B(c) has never been used in its 50-year history, and that he prefers a measure introduced by Van Hollen. That amendment would require weapons received by any country under Biden’s proposal for supplemental aid to Israel and Ukraine to be used in accordance with U.S. law, international humanitarian law, and the law of armed conflict.
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who has a record of scrutinizing human rights abuses by U.S. allies, voted against the resolution. He told The Intercept that he supports Israel’s right to defend itself and that he has deep reservations about the way it has conducted its campaign, but he doesn’t support measures “potentially designed to cut off funding for Israel.” The resolution, he said, is a vehicle toward completely cutting off aid to Israel. “I don’t think that’s the right move for Congress at this time,” he said.
Sen. Mike Braun, R-Ind., told The Intercept that he is “sensitive” to the allegations of human rights abuses by Israel, and that he understands Sanders’s sensitivity to “trying to keep the collateral damage down, and I think everybody would be for that.” Still, he said, he opposed the resolution “because I think it then draws attention away from how it started, and how it has to be litigated, and that’s not easy,” referring to Hamas’s attack on October 7 and Israel’s stated aim of rooting out the organization.
Asked if he thought Israel was doing enough to mitigate civilian casualties, Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., told The Intercept that “they need to kill every Hamas member and anybody that dies in Gaza is a result of Hamas.” He voted against the resolution.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., referred to Hamas’s attack on Israel as he explained his opposition to the resolution. “To give them respite would be to allow them to do it again,” he told The Intercept. When asked whether Israel is doing enough to protect civilians, Cassidy repeated a frequent Israeli government talking point about Hamas, saying that “when you build your tunnels with your commanders beneath mosques, hospitals, and schools, then you have created an environment where it’s difficult to prevent civilian injury.”
On his way to vote against the resolution, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, told The Intercept that he has been consistent with his position on the issue. “Of course it does,” he said when asked if he’s concerned about the number of casualties in Gaza. Asked if Israel is doing enough to mitigate the casualties, he responded simply: “Good talking to you,” as the Senate elevator doors closed.
The post Senate Kills Measure to Scrutinize Israeli Human Rights Record as Condition for Aid appeared first on The Intercept.
The remarkable global impact of the Chinese car industry: Trade beats war every time
Around 25 years ago, wise commentators said China may, in due course, be able to produce acceptable basic, manufactured white-goods but making motor cars that would sell globally was not conceivable. Far too many complex inputs went into making a modern family sedan compared to a refrigerator. As for landing a rover on the Moon Continue reading »
Pro-Israel Effort to Smear Penn President Started Well Before Oct. 7
Few U.S. colleges have generated more controversy for their response to Israel’s war on Gaza than the University of Pennsylvania. Penn’s president Liz Magill faced criticism for her answers about hypothetical scenarios of antisemitism posed during a congressional hearing by Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., who has herself faced criticism for embracing antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Stefanik’s line of questioning last month was part of a wider campaign in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel: demonizing pro-Palestine activism. Stefanik conflated calls for “intifada” — an Arabic word for “uprising” — with antisemitic attacks and asked Magill, along with other university presidents, if these purported calls for the genocide of Jews constituted harassment. Magill, by all accounts, stumbled through a non-answer.
Under pressure from billionaire donors and pro-Israel lobby groups, Magill and Penn board chair Scott Bok resigned four days after the hearing.
News of the resignations was framed as part of the university’s failure to handle antisemitism on campus in the wake of October 7. But the effort to oust Magill began months before the Hamas attack, according to public letters and people familiar with the fight over Israel and Palestine at Penn. As early as August, Magill had drawn the ire of pro-Israel lobbying groups, nonprofits, and university donors after rebuffing their efforts to cancel a literary festival on campus called Palestine Writes.
The story of what happened at Penn was distorted to obscure the earlier round of anti-Palestinian attacks against the literary festival, said Radhika Sainath, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal who works on speech and academic freedom. Palestine Legal advised the festival and urged Magill to resist censoring the event.
Sainath, who attended the festival to conduct research for a novel, said that media reports ran with unverified claims that Palestine Writes had stoked antisemitism, even suggesting that the festival was linked to the Hamas attack.
“You could really see how pretty much every newspaper was just adopting the framework of these Israel lobby groups as a given, as if the festival was antisemitic,” she said. “People were just really upset in part about a large number of Palestinians potentially coming to campus to talk about Palestinian literature.”
That coverage amplified the attacks that led to the congressional hearings, eventually precipitating Magill’s resignation. University officials squandered an opportunity to correct false claims that students had called for the genocide of Jewish people, Sainath said: “They kind of went along with it and fell into this trap.”
A banner for the University of Pennsylvania on campus in Philadelphia on Dec. 8, 2023.
Photo: Michelle Gustafson/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Over the summer, wealthy donors, along with local and national Jewish groups, lined up to take issue with the university’s plans to host a festival in September celebrating Palestinian authors.
One of the leaders of the informal network of critics was Marc Rowan, CEO of the investment firm Apollo Global Management. Rowan serves as advisory board chair of the university’s Wharton School, which he attended, and was previously a member of Penn’s board of trustees. He also chairs the board of the UJA-Federation of New York, an influential Jewish group involved in pro-Israel advocacy.
Another major force against the festival was billionaire Republican donor Ronald Lauder, also a Wharton alum, who pushed Magill to cancel Palestine Writes in a meeting in Philadelphia and two subsequent phone calls.
The Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia and the Anti-Defamation League of Philadelphia sent two letters to Magill in August complaining of “a high likelihood” that the festival would “promote inflammatory and antisemitic narratives about Israel.” They alleged that some of the speakers, including Marc Lamont Hill; Noura Erakat; Maysoon Zayid; Huwaida Arraf; Roger Waters; and the festival’s executive director, Susan Abulhawa, had a “history of antisemitism,” citing criticisms of Zionism and Israel’s human rights abuses. The groups said the university should issue a statement “questioning the judgment” of the departments working with the festival, which included Penn’s English, near Eastern languages and civilizations, and cinema and media studies departments.
Festival organizers pushed back. In a September 2 letter to Magill and other university leaders, Abulhawa described the complaints as part of “a campaign to discredit and denigrate” the literature festival. “We categorically reject this cynical, sinister, and ahistorical conflation of bigotry with the moral repudiation of a foreign state’s criminality, particularly as most of us are victims of that state,” she wrote. “Every instance of the examples listed in the original letter refers to Zionism, Zionists, or Israel. Situating those individual Palestinians and our allies in league with actual antisemites is wholly irresponsible and dangerous.”
Ten days later, Magill and other university leaders issued a statement distancing Penn from the festival, citing concerns raised about certain speakers “who have a documented and troubling history of engaging in antisemitism by speaking and acting in ways that denigrate Jewish people.” The university condemned antisemitism, the officials wrote, but supported the free exchange of ideas. “This includes the expression of views that are controversial and even those that are incompatible with our institutional values.”
When it became clear that Palestine Writes would go forward as planned, Rowan, Lauder, and other trustees organized an open letter to Magill reiterating concerns about the festival. The letter eventually gained more than 4,000 signatories, including prominent alumni.
The festival began on September 22 and went off mostly without a hitch, despite threats against organizers and at least two high-profile attendees who were kept from attending in person. Gary Younge, a sociology professor at the University of Manchester; Waters of Pink Floyd; and author Viet Thanh Nguyen were scheduled as plenary speakers. Nguyen was the only one of the three who could attend in person. Younge said his visa was inexplicably revoked prior to his trip to the U.S., and Waters said the university prohibited him from stepping on campus; he spoke to the festival online from the Philadelphia Airport. The university countered that Waters was originally set to attend virtually and a last-minute change would have required additional security. Festival organizers disputed the university’s account.
Attendees and festival board members who spoke to The Intercept described Palestine Writes as a multigenerational, multicultural event that welcomed everyone and fostered an important cultural space on campus, particularly for Palestinian students.
But in the weeks following October 7, media outlets and critics linked the festival to the Hamas attack and said it had fomented an unsafe campus environment for Jewish students. In a letter to the university newspaper published October 12, Rowan and other donors called on Magill and Bok to resign and urged alumni to “close the checkbooks” and halt donations. “It took less than two weeks to go from the Palestine Writes Literary Festival on UPenn’s campus to the barbaric slaughter and kidnapping of Israelis,” Rowan wrote.
Israel’s War on Gaza
Appearing on CNBC, Rowan said his appeal to alumni was a “difficult call for a place that I love for the last 40 years.” He insisted the issue wasn’t about free speech, which he supported — it was about university leaders saying they condemned antisemitism but allowing the literature festival to happen.
“There has been a gathering storm around these issues,” Rowan said. “Microaggressions are condemned with extreme moral outrage, and yet violence — particularly violence against Jews, antisemitism — seems to have found a place of tolerance on the campus, protected by free speech.” Magill was “not capable of exercising moral leadership,” he said, “because she feels academic pressure and peer pressure.”
Lauder threatened to cut additional funding in a letter to Magill on October 17, saying that she was forcing him to reexamine his financial support “absent unsatisfactory measures to address antisemitism at the university.” The letter brought him great sorrow, Lauder wrote. “I am so sorry you did not cancel the event.”
That university administrators, media outlets, and politicians accepted that narrative uncritically underscored the hysteria of the moment, said Bill Mullen, a board member of Palestine Writes. “It’s amazing to me that people can get away with this without being fact-checked,” he said. “You just have to say antisemitism and you terrify people into not asking questions.”
“The attack on Palestine Writes was a very targeted attack on Palestinian writers and intellectuals. And since October 7, we have literally seen Israel murdering Palestinian poets and writers and journalists,” Mullen added. “They wanted to silence these voices.”
After Magill and Bok resigned, Julie Platt, vice chair of the university board, was named interim board chair. Platt also serves as board chair of the Jewish Federations of North America. Penn named J. Larry Jameson, the dean of its medical school, as interim president.
Since the resignations, the university has further aligned itself with pro-Israel lobbying groups and donors. Last week, a delegation of faculty took a three-day “solidarity tour” of Israel that included meetings with Israeli government officials and a visit to the Gaza envelope.
Rowan, meanwhile, has sought to guide a transformation at Penn. Days after Magill’s resignation, he sent a letter to trustees raising concerns about the university’s culture and “political orientation,” warning that it had “allowed for preferred versus free speech” and asking how the university considered “viewpoint diversity” in hiring.
An anonymous petition circulated that called on the university to fire three faculty members who had protested in support of Gaza on campus, including festival organizer Huda Fakhreddine, an associate professor of Arabic literature; her husband, a poet and professor of creative writing; and another professor of Persian literature. Fakhreddine, one of several Penn faculty named in the congressional hearing, said that she has since been doxxed and received death threats.
At its annual convention last week in Philadelphia, the Modern Language Association’s Delegate Assembly passed an emergency motion defending speech on Palestine and supporting Fakhreddine and others at Penn facing retaliation for criticizing Israel’s war on Gaza.
University faculty have pushed back against interference by donors and trustees. The executive committee of Penn’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors called on the university to address harassment, intimidation, and threats against faculty and warned of “the chilling effects of statements by trustees, donors, and university administrators on teaching, learning, and scholarship.”
Palestine Writes is now battling a court order that it remove from its website a logo for the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, which had awarded a grant to the organization. After the dustup over the festival reached the mainstream, the council sent a cease-and-desist letter, which was immediately published by the Anti-Defamation League with unredacted contact information for Abulhawa. In November, a judge on the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas ordered the logo removed, saying she understood why the council would not want to be affiliated with the festival in the current political climate.
The issue reached the office of Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who publicly denounced Magill and the university after the congressional hearing. The governor’s office represented the arts council in court proceedings against the festival.
“It was just so eye-opening to me that something as simple as a literature festival could be so threatening to pro-Israel supporters,” said Marie Kelly, a board member for Palestine Writes. The festival was a historic celebration and affirmation of Palestinian culture, Kelly said. “That’s not anything that any pro-Israel academic, millionaire, or politician can take away.”
The post Pro-Israel Effort to Smear Penn President Started Well Before Oct. 7 appeared first on The Intercept.
At The Hague, Israel Mounted a Defense Based in an Alternate Reality
A team of Israeli lawyers and officials presented their defense at The Hague on Friday in the second day of the genocide case brought before the International Court of Justice by the government of South Africa. The lawyers portrayed Israel as the actual victim of genocide, not Gaza, accused South Africa of supporting Hamas, and painted South Africa’s government as functioning as the legal arm of the Palestinian militants who led the deadly raids into Israel on October 7.
Israel benefitted greatly from the fact that there was no cross examination permitted or debate allowed during these proceedings. It embarked on a bold mission to do in a court of international law what its military and political officials have done day and night throughout the course of this war against Gaza: unleash a deluge of what was known within the Trump administration as “alternative facts.”
Israel’s defense was the inverse of South Africa’s case yesterday, and as weak in offering documented facts as South Africa’s was powerful. History began on October 7, the Israelis seemed to say, South Africa is Hamas, South Africa did not give Israel a chance to meet up and chat about Gaza before suing for genocide, and actually the Israel Defense Forces is the most moral entity on Earth. As for the voluminous public statements by senior Israeli officials indicating genocidal intent, those were just “random assertions” by some irrelevant underlings. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statements invoking a murderous story from the Bible about killing the women, infants, and cattle of your enemies? The South Africans just don’t understand theology and presented Netanyahu’s words out of context.
While Israel’s lawyers made legal arguments that the genocide charges leveled against it are invalid, their primary strategy was to appeal to the court on jurisdictional and procedural matters, hoping that they could form the basis for the panel of international judges to dismiss South Africa’s case. Aware of the global audience, Israel also sought to reinforce its claims of righteousness and self-defense in fighting the war in Gaza.
Israel’s representative Tal Becker opened his government’s rebuttal by telling the judges at the ICJ that South Africa’s case “profoundly distorted the factual and legal picture,” claiming it sought to erase Jewish history. He charged that the legal arguments made by South Africa’s team were “barely distinguishable” from Hamas’s rhetoric and accused them of “weaponizing” the term “genocide.”
Becker called October 7 “the largest calculated mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust” and pleaded with the court to factor in the “brutality and lawlessness” of the enemy Israel says it is fighting in Gaza. Israel, he said, has a lawful right to use all available means to respond “to the slaughter of October 7 which Hamas has vowed to repeat.”
He repeatedly attacked the South African government, accusing it of doing Hamas’s bidding and alleging that its true agenda was to “thwart” Israel’s right to defend itself. “South Africa enjoys close relations with Hamas,” Becker said. “These relations have continued unabated even after the October 7 atrocities.” He said that South Africa, not Israel, should be subjected to provisional measures by the ICJ for its alleged support of Hamas. Becker neglected to mention the fact that Netanyahu himself long advocated for Hamas to retain power in Gaza and worked to ensure the flow of money to the group from Qatar continued over the years, believing it to be the best strategy to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Becker rejected South Africa’s characterization of the historical scale of civilian destruction in Gaza — which has now killed over 10,000 children — arguing that what is actually “unparalleled and unprecedented” in this war is Hamas “embedding its military operations throughout Gaza within and beneath” densely populated areas. Becker spoke as though many of Israel’s most outlandish claims about Hamas’s underground operations have not been proven false or shown to be greatly exaggerated, such as the Israeli claim that there was essentially a Hamas Pentagon under al-Shifa Hospital.
While Israel’s lawyers made legal arguments that the genocide charges leveled against it are invalid, their primary strategy was to appeal to the court on jurisdictional and procedural matters.
Becker also alleged that South Africa’s lawyers had failed to mention how many of the buildings blown up and destroyed in Gaza over the past three months of sustained Israeli bombing were actually “boobytrapped” by Hamas rather than destroyed by Israel. It was a risible claim given not only the scale of the Israeli bombardment of entire neighborhoods, but also because Israeli soldiers have posted videos of themselves gleefully hitting the detonate button to obliterate whole neighborhoods. He dismissed civilian death and injury figures provided by Gaza health authorities, saying that South Africa’s lawyers had failed to mention how many of the dead Palestinians were actually Hamas operatives. It was a striking point given that Israeli officials have openly and repeatedly said that there are no innocents in Gaza, and that United Nations workers and journalists killed by Israel are actually secret Hamas agents.
“The nightmarish environment created by Hamas has been concealed by” South Africa, Becker charged. “Israel is committed to comply with the law, but it does so in the face of Hamas’s utter contempt for the law.” Becker did not bother to address any of the scores of U.N. resolutions over the decades condemning the illegality of Israel’s apartheid regime and its illegal occupations, not to mention its own well-documented use of Palestinian children as civilian shields and the intentional killing and maiming of nonviolent protesters.
Becker also claimed that Israel was complying with international law in all of its operations in Gaza. “Israel does not seek to destroy a people, but to protect a people — its [own] people,” he said, adding that Israel is engaged in a “war of defense against Hamas, not the Palestinian people.” There could “hardly be a charge more false and more malevolent than the charge of genocide.” He accused South Africa of abusing the world court and turning it into an “aggressor’s charter.”
Malcolm Shaw, a British lawyer representing Israel, opened his argument by attacking South Africa’s reference on Thursday to what it described as Israel’s 75-year Nakba against the Palestinians. Shaw called this characterization as “outrageous” and said the only relevant historical “context” were the events of October 7, which he termed “the real genocide in this situation.” Given the civilian death toll caused by Israel in Gaza — upward of 23,000 as of this week — it was a stunning statement. By Israel’s own official count, some 1,200 people were killed on October 7. Of these, 274 were soldiers, 764 were civilians, 57 were Israeli police, and 38 were local security guards. It has still not been determined how many Israelis were killed in “friendly fire” incidents by Israeli forces who responded to the Hamas attacks that day.
Shaw and other lawyers representing Israel acknowledged that civilians had been killed during Israel’s military operations, though Shaw contended that “armed conflict, even when fully justified and conducted lawfully, is brutal and costs lives.” But, he said, Israel was engaged in a lawful and proportionate military campaign and said the ICJ was not an appropriate venue to review the Gaza war. “The only category before this court is genocide. Not every conflict is genocidal,” Shaw asserted. “If claims of genocide were to become the common currency of our conflict … the essence of this crime would be diluted and lost.”
Shaw spent much of his time arguing that South Africa had failed to follow the mandated procedures for bringing a third-party genocide charge before the world court. He accused South Africa’s government of failing to sufficiently engage in direct communications with Israel to inform it that there was a conflict between the two states. South Africa “seems to believe that it does not take two to tango,” he said. South Africa “decided unilaterally that a dispute existed” between Israel and South Africa, despite what Shaw called Israel’s “conciliatory and friendly” offers to meet with South Africa to discuss its concerns about the Gaza war. This defies common sense, given that in November, Pretoria publicly accused Israel of genocide and called for the International Criminal Court to issue a warrant for Netanyahu’s arrest. Israel responded by withdrawing its ambassador.
Shaw then addressed the voluminous statements made by Israeli officials introduced in court by South Africa as evidence of “genocidal intent.” Shaw dismissed these statements as “random assertions” that failed “to demonstrate that Israel has or has had the intent to destroy” the Palestinian people. He contended that none of those statements constituted an official policy of the Israeli government and said the only relevant factor for the court to consider is whether such statements reflected official decisions or directives made by the Israeli leaders and its war Cabinet. Shaw declared they did not, citing several official Israeli statements directing armed forces to comply with international laws and to make efforts to protect civilians from harm or death. He neglected to respond to the direct connections drawn, including through video evidence, by South Africa’s legal team showing how Israeli forces on the ground echoed Israeli officials’ statements about destroying Gaza as they laid siege to the strip.
The British lawyer directly addressed Netanyahu’s invocation of the biblical story of the destruction of Amalek, in which God ordered the Israelites to “attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” Shaw argued there was “no need here for a theological discussion.” South Africa, he charged, took Netanyahu’s words out of context and failed to include the portion of his statement where he emphasized that the IDF was the “most moral army in the world” and “does everything to avoid harming the uninvolved.” The implication of Shaw’s argument is that Netanyahu’s platitudes about the nobility of the IDF somehow nullified the significance of invoking a violent biblical edict to describe a military operation against people Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant described as “human animals.”
After offering a litany of public Israeli statements about protecting civilians and offering humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, Shaw quipped, “Genocidal intent?” as though these words and claims somehow erase the actual actions the entire world has watched daily for more than three months. With no sense of shame, Shaw characterized Israel’s statements directing Palestinians in Gaza to immediately evacuate their homes as a humanitarian gesture. Yesterday, South Africa called the evacuation order for over a million people on short notice an act of genocide in and of itself.
In a moment of supreme gaslighting, Shaw concluded his presentation by accusing the government of South Africa of “complicity in genocide” and failing in its “duty to prevent genocide.” He charged, “South Africa has given succor and support to Hamas at the least.” He said the allegations against Israel “verge on the outrageous” and argued that Hamas’s conduct, not Israel’s, meets the “statutory definition of genocide.” Unlike Hamas, he continued, Israel has made “unprecedented efforts at mitigating civilian harm … as well as alleviating hardship and suffering” to its own detriment.
Galit Rajuan, another Israeli lawyer, argued that Israel was operating within the rules of law in its attacks on Gaza. She spent considerable time accusing Hamas of using hospitals and other civilian sites to operate militarily and to hold Israeli hostages. South Africa, she said, pretended “as if Israel is operating in Gaza against no armed adversary” and said the civilian deaths and destruction caused by Israel’s operations is “the desired outcome” Hamas wants. “Many civilian deaths are caused by Hamas,” she alleged.
A leaflet with a drawing of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the text “genocide” lies on the curbside in front of the International Court of Justice on Jan. 12, 2024 in The Hague, Netherlands.
Photo: Michel Porro/Getty Images
She repeated claims that have been debunked about Hamas using hospitals for military operations and holding hostages, claiming that any damage Israel had done to hospitals in Gaza was “always as a direct result of Hamas’s abhorrent method of warfare.”
Responding to South Africa’s assertion that Palestinians were given just 24 hours to flee their homes and hospitals, Rajuan claimed Israel had given the warnings weeks in advance through leaflets, online maps, and social media accounts. She did not mention that Israel has frequently shut down the internet in areas of Gaza and has repeatedly struck areas to which it told people to flee.
After describing what she characterized as Israel’s extensive efforts to deliver aid to the people of Gaza, Rajuan said it was evidence that the charge of genocide is “frankly untenable.” She said she had only told the court of a “mere fraction” of the efforts Israel had made to warn civilians to leave their homes and to deliver aid but that it “is enough to demonstrate … that the allegation of the intent to commit genocide is baseless.” Her portrayal of Israel as a beneficent humanitarian moving mountains to alleviate the suffering Palestinians would be laughable if it wasn’t so deadly. But such statements are easy to offer when your official policy is to portray aid organizations and U.N. workers as Hamas operatives.
Israel’s War on Gaza
For months, international aid organizations have condemned Israel, which functions as the overlord of what goes in and out of Gaza, for obstructing humanitarian aid deliveries into Gaza. Just this week, U.N. officials said that Israel is blocking it from getting aid to northern Gaza, while the World Health Organization said it is facing “insurmountable” challenges in delivering aid. Nonetheless, Omri Sender, another lawyer for Israel, claimed that Israel is delivering large quantities of aid daily to Gaza, despite “Hamas constantly stealing it.” He told the judges that “Israel no doubt meets the legal test of concrete measures aimed specifically … at ensuring the rights of the Palestinians in Gaza to exist.”
Christopher Staker closed Israel’s legal arguments by charging that South Africa was trying to force a unilateral ceasefire by Israel and that this would allow Hamas to be “free to continue attacks, which it has a stated [intent] to do.” He said that the civilian carnage and destruction in Gaza cited by South Africa do not inherently constitute genocide and that it is “not within the court’s power” to order provisional measures directing Israel to cease all military operations under the Genocide Convention. He contended that Israel has a legitimate right to engage in military conduct in Gaza that South Africa is seeking to restrain, and that an ICJ order to cease all operations would cause “irreparable prejudice” to the rights of Israel. South Africa, in its argument on Thursday, contended that by refusing to cease its operations, Israel was ensuring that the pile of Palestinian corpses would continue to grow alongside the amputations of limbs without anesthesia and babies dying of treatable illnesses.
Staker took a page from Netanyahu’s well-worn propaganda playbook and compared the Gaza war to World War II, saying an international court ordering Israel to cease operations in Gaza would be akin to a court in the 1940s forcing the Allies in World War II to surrender to the Axis powers in Europe. He said a suspension of military operations would “deprive Israel of the ability to contend with the security threat against it” and allow Hamas to commit further atrocities. Such measures by the ICJ, he alleged, would assist Hamas. He also said the orders requested by South Africa were too broadly framed and, if enforced by the world court, would incapacitate Israeli operations in Palestinian territories other than Gaza. He said this as though Israel is protecting a country club in the West Bank from robbers and vandals rather than presiding over an illegal apartheid regime where Palestinians are subjected to conditions not unlike those found in South Africa decades ago.
Staker also said that South Africa’s request that the court order Israel to preserve evidence of potential crimes had no basis in fact and that no proof was offered that Israel was destroying evidence in Gaza. He said such an order would be an “unprincipled and unnecessary tarnishing of [Israel’s] reputation.” Staker may want to peruse the list of Palestinian libraries, archives, cultural sites, monuments, historic churches, and mosques that Israel has destroyed. Not to mention the academics, poets, storytellers, and historians its forces have erased from the earth.
Israel’s representative Gilad Noam closed his government’s defense by claiming that South Africa portrayed Israel as a “lawless state that regards itself as beyond and above the law. … in which the entire society” has “become consumed with destroying an entire population.” This was remarkable in that it represented an accurate characterization of precisely what South Africa argued in its presentation. Of course, Noam assured the court that this characterization was “patently false.”
South Africa, Noam said, “defames not only the Israeli leadership but also [Israeli] society.” Returning to the statements made by Israeli officials that South Africa’s lawyers said constituted proof of genocidal intent, Noam claimed that some of these “harsh” statements by Israel’s leaders were in response to the “destruction of Jews and Israelis.” He said that Israel’s courts take incitement seriously and are currently investigating such cases.
Noam accused South Africa of engaging in a “concerted and cynical effort to pervert the term ‘genocide’ itself.” He asked the judges to reject the requests to order a halting of Israeli military operations in Gaza and to dismiss South Africa’s case in full. The president of the court, U.S. Judge Joan Donoghue, adjourned the hearing, saying the judges would rule as soon as possible.
During its presentation before the court, Israel made no arguments to defend its conduct in Gaza that it—and its backers in the Biden administration for that matter—has not made repeatedly in the media over the past three months as part of its propaganda campaign to justify the unjustifiable. Each day that passes, more Palestinians will die at the hands of U.S. munitions fired by Israeli forces and the already dire humanitarian situation will deteriorate further. Should the court take Israel’s side and dismiss South Africa’s claims, Israel will point to that as evidence of the justness of its cause. If the judges approve South Africa’s request for an order to halt Israel’s military attacks, the question will be called on whether Israel and its sponsors in Washington, D.C., will respect international law. If history offers any insight on that matter, the future remains grim for the Palestinians of Gaza.
The post At The Hague, Israel Mounted a Defense Based in an Alternate Reality appeared first on The Intercept.
Israel Bombed an Al Jazeera Cameraman — and Blocked Evacuation Efforts as He Bled to Death
“It was as if a storm had targeted us.” On the afternoon of December 15, an Israeli airstrike slammed into the Farhana school in Khan Younis where Al Jazeera Gaza bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh and his cameraman, Samer Abu Daqqa, had just wrapped up filming the aftermath of an earlier bombardment in the area.
Dahdouh was thrown to the ground. “I lost balance to the point of faintly losing consciousness until I regained my strength,” he told The Intercept. “I tried to get up in any way because I was sure that another missile would target us — from our experience that’s what usually happens.” Dahdouh realized he was bleeding profusely from the arm and that if he didn’t get medical attention, he would die. He had also temporarily lost much of his hearing from the blast. He looked over and saw the three Civil Defense workers who had been accompanying the two journalists had been killed.
“In those milliseconds I thought I couldn’t offer him anything. I couldn’t. And he couldn’t move, he couldn’t get up.”
Then, he saw Abu Daqqa lying on the ground some distance away. “He was trying to get up and it seemed like he was screaming,” Dahdouh said. “In those milliseconds I thought I couldn’t offer him anything. I couldn’t. And he couldn’t move, he couldn’t get up. I decided to take advantage of the remaining glimmer of hope, which was to try to go towards the ambulance.”
Dahdouh somehow managed to make his way across the rubble to an ambulance hundreds of meters away and was evacuated to a nearby hospital. But Abu Daqqa, wounded in the lower part of his body, could not walk to the ambulance and was left lying on the ground. Hours went by, but emergency workers were unable to reach him without approval from the Israeli military. As his life slipped away, Al Jazeera posted a live counter on its broadcast showing the number of hours and minutes since Abu Daqqa had been wounded. When emergency crews were finally able to reach Abu Daqqa over five hours later, he was dead.
A still from a video published by Al Jazeera of Samer Abu Daqqa speaking to a colleague while working in Gaza in early December before he was killed by an Israeli airstrike on Dec. 15, 2023.
Screenshot: Al Jazeera
Over the course of those five hours, humanitarian organizations and fellow journalists repeatedly pressed the Israeli military to facilitate the evacuation of Abu Daqqa, according to people involved in the efforts as well as chat logs obtained by The Intercept from multiple journalists. The in-depth timeline of the hours before Abu Daqqa’s death shows that Israeli forces did not allow safe passage for emergency crews for hours, though they were aware a journalist was urgently in need of help.
All told, Abu Daqqa had lain wounded and bleeding just two kilometers away from the nearest hospital, yet no one could reach him for well over five hours while his colleagues and much of the world watched. The Israeli military were well aware that an Al Jazeera journalist was lying helpless, The Intercept’s reporting shows, yet it did not allow emergency teams to safely pass for nearly four hours and did not send a bulldozer for over an hour after that. (The Israeli military did not respond to questions from The Intercept.)
Much of the evidence points toward a targeted Israeli strike on the Al Jazeera journalists. “In this area there was no one but us. Therefore there was no room for error by the Israeli army considering that drones, large and small, were in the sky in the area,” Dahdouh said. “They knew everything we were doing the whole time, and we were targeted as we were returning — of this there is no doubt.”
Smoke rises following Israeli airstrikes in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis, on Dec. 15, 2023.
Photo: Rizek Abdeljawad/Xinhua via Getty Images
Dahdouh, Al Jazeera’s bureau chief in Gaza, and Abu Daqqa, a veteran cameraperson for the network, arrived at the Farhana school at around noon that day to cover the aftermath of an Israeli bombardment in the area, Dahdouh told The Intercept. Wearing helmets and flak jackets with the word “press” emblazoned on them, they made their way toward the school in an ambulance with a crew of uniformed Palestinian Civil Defense workers — a government branch responsible for emergency services and rescue — who had coordinated with and received approval from the Israeli military through the Red Cross to be in the area, according to Dahdouh.
Repeated Israeli airstrikes had left many of the roads impassable with rubble blocking the streets. Dahdouh said that on their way to the school, the ambulance had to stop at least three or four times over a distance of just 600 to 800 meters for the crew to clear rubble to allow for it to pass. Eventually, the Al Jazeera journalists and Civil Defense workers covered the final distance to the school on foot with the ambulance drivers agreeing to wait for the team up the street.
Dahdouh and Abu Daqqa spent around two and a half hours filming in the school and surrounding area, the buzz of Israeli drones filling the sky overhead the entire time. At around 2:30 p.m., they started to make their way back to the ambulance when an Israeli airstrike hit.
Dahdouh put pressure on his wounds and stumbled to the ambulance, a distance of some 800 to 1,000 meters. Upon reaching the ambulance, he immediately told the emergency workers to go in and rescue Abu Daqqa. They insisted on first evacuating Dahdouh to a hospital and said they would send another ambulance to retrieve Abu Daqqa. Videos of Dahdouh in Nasser Hospital show him wincing in pain as he is treated for his wounds and calling for Abu Daqqa to be saved. “Coordinate with the [Red] Cross,” he says repeatedly. “Let someone get him.”
The head of Al Jazeera’s bureau in Ramallah, Walid al-Omari, was doing just that. Omari told The Intercept that he first contacted the International Committee of the Red Cross at 3:35 p.m. and asked them to liaise with the Israeli military to facilitate a rescue effort for Abu Daqqa. Omari said he kept in close contact with the ICRC both locally and abroad and that they put in a “great effort” to try and coordinate with Israeli authorities.
Al Jazeera correspondent Wael al-Dahdouh receives medical treatment at Nasser Hospital after he was wounded by an Israeli airstrike on Khan Younis, Gaza, on Dec. 15, 2023.
Photo: Hani Alshaer/Anadolu via Getty Images
Dahdouh said he later learned from colleagues that early on in the ordeal, when ambulances initially approached the area to reach Abu Daqqa, Israeli forces fired in their proximity, forcing them to return and wait for approval from the Israeli military to go in. He also said Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance crews had demanded a Red Cross vehicle accompany them so that they would not be targeted by the Israeli military.
Meanwhile, news had begun to spread about Abu Daqqa’s dire state.
Israel’s War on Gaza
Orly Halpern, a freelance reporter and producer based in Jerusalem, learned what had happened when an acquaintance sent her a link to a story at 3:08 p.m. Halpern decided to post about it on a WhatsApp group of over 140 journalists of the Foreign Press Association, or FPA, a Jerusalem-based nonprofit representing reporters from over 30 countries. According to screenshots of the WhatsApp group obtained by The Intercept, at 4:27 p.m. Halpern outlined what happened and wrote: “Samer Abu Daqqa is seriously injured and still trapped at the school. The ambulance is waiting for Israeli forces to let it evacuate him. But that has yet to happen….Walid al-Umari, the AJ bureau chief said that ICRC is trying to liaise with the IDF. But still no progress. It has been two hours since they got hit. Maybe we can all call the IDF spox and demand that he be allowed to be evacuated.”
She continued in another post three minutes later: “What matters is to save the cameraman. And the Israelis need to allow the ambulance to reach him.” Halpern tagged Ellen Krosney, the FPA’s executive secretary, and added, “would the FPA be able to contact the IDF, too?” At 4:57, Krosney responded, “I’m getting involved in this.”
Meanwhile, other journalists in the group worked to confirm Abu Daqqa’s location, and one posted a photo of a map showing the position of two schools in Khan Younis — Haifa and Farhana — while another journalist confirmed that Abu Daqqa was at Farhana.
Halpern then posted contact information for three Israeli officials at 5:17 p.m., including the press office for the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, an Israeli Defense Ministry agency, as well as the contact information for three senior Israeli military spokespeople.
Explaining her reasoning for sharing the contacts, Halpern told The Intercept, “I believe there is power in numbers. Even more so when those numbers are journalists. I don’t think my voice alone would have gotten the army to do something, particularly if the Red Cross hadn’t succeeded. But I thought that if many journalists contacted the army, along with the Foreign Press Association, then the army might be more pressed to act, particularly knowing that we were aware of the situation and that we would report on it.”
At 5:27 p.m., a full three hours after Abu Daqqa was wounded in the airstrike, Krosney wrote that Israeli authorities had still not granted permission for emergency teams to reach him: “Ambulances still not cleared, but I am in touch with IDF, who know about this. And they know the fpa members are deeply upset.”
Halpern continued to urge journalists in the group to individually message Daniel Hagari or Richard Hecht — both Israeli military spokespeople whose contact information she had just shared — to pressure them to facilitate a rescue effort. “If everyone who cares about fellow journalists writes a message to Hagari or Hecht and tells him that we as journalists are following this case, then there’s a much better chance that this will be resolved before Samer dies, if that’s still possible,” Halpern wrote.
“What matters is to save the cameraman. And the Israelis need to allow the ambulance to reach him.”
In parallel, a more focused effort by a smaller group of more senior FPA members was yielding responses from the army, but no real action. At 5:31 p.m., a journalist in the smaller group had messaged an army official and was told that the IDF was aware and handling the situation. Two minutes later, he got a new message back saying that the military’s Southern Command, which oversees Gaza, had been informed, but there were problems with “passage” from the school to the hospital. This was despite the fact that it was the Israeli military that had reduced many of the streets to rubble in earlier airstrikes and maintains near-constant drone surveillance of Gaza.
The smaller group got another message at 6:22 p.m. that the military was still working on it. At 6:27 p.m., four hours after Abu Daqqa was wounded, Halpern received word from her producer in Gaza that ambulances were still unable to reach the school. Meanwhile, Omari, who had been added to the WhatsApp group shortly after the discussion began, wrote: “The road is closed. A destroyed building blocks the road, they need bulldozer to open it. They can’t reach the school.” Halpern then posted to the group that they needed to request the Israeli military to send in a bulldozer to clear the way. At 7:02 p.m., Tania Kraemer, a Jerusalem-based correspondent for Deutsche Welle and the chair of the FPA, responded: “In touch with the IDF Orly. No news yet on the above.” At 7:23 — now after five hours of bleeding — the smaller group was told that the IDF was sending a bulldozer within 10 minutes and that it would take 20 minutes to reach the location.
Meanwhile, Halpern posted an update on the larger group chat at 7:25 p.m. that the Israeli military had approved a Palestinian bulldozer to come through.
It was too late. Palestinian emergency crews had finally managed to reach the school after a Palestinian-operated bulldozer cleared a path for an ambulance only to find Abu Daqqa dead. At 7:55 p.m., Halpern posted a message in the group chat she had received from her producer in Gaza that he had been killed.
A stretcher carries the body of Samer Abu Daqqa in Khan Younis, Gaza, after his body was recovered in the evening hours of Dec. 15, 2023.
Photo: Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images
Al Jazeera reported that Abu Daqqa had been subjected to continued shelling while he tried to crawl to safety. Dahdouh and Halpern said they received reports that Abu Daqqa was found without his flak jacket, several meters from where he was wounded.
The FPA released a statement shortly afterward, saying it was “alarmed by the [Israeli] military’s silence and [called] for an immediate inquiry and explanation as to why it apparently attacked the area and why Samer could not be evacuated in time to be treated and potentially saved.”
The next day, Al Jazeera announced it was preparing a legal file to submit to the International Criminal Court, or the ICC, over what it called the “assassination” of Abu Daqqa by Israeli forces in Gaza. The brief would also encompass “recurrent attacks on the Network’s crews working and operating in the occupied Palestinian territories.” In a statement, the network said, “Following Samer’s injury, he was left to bleed to death for over 5 hours, as Israeli forces prevented ambulances and rescue workers from reaching him, denying the much-needed emergency treatment.”
Gaza is now the deadliest place for journalists on record.
Reporters Without Borders also included Abu Daqqa in a war crimes complaint the group filed with the ICC regarding the deaths of seven Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza between October 22 and December 15.
Gaza is now the deadliest place for journalists on record. The Palestinian Journalist Syndicate has documented the killing of over 100 journalists in just three months. Meanwhile, the Committee to Protect Journalists found that more journalists have been killed in the first 10 weeks of the Israel’s war on Gaza — nearly all of them Palestinian — than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year. Many of the journalists still alive in Gaza have lost multiple family members and their homes.
Al Jazeera correspondent Wael al-Dahdouh, center, attends the funeral of Al Jazeera cameraman Samer Abu Daqqa in Khan Younis, Gaza, on Dec. 16, 2023. Dahdouh was injured in the same Israeli attack the previous day that killed Abu Daqqa.
Photo: Ahmad Salem/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Dahdouh himself has become a symbol of both the suffering and resilience of Palestinian journalists in Gaza. In October, his wife, son, daughter, and grandson were killed in an Israeli airstrike on the Nuseirat refugee camp where they had sought shelter after their house was bombed. On Sunday, his eldest son, Hamza, also a journalist, was killed alongside another journalist, Mustafa Thuraya, in an airstrike on their car in the western part of Khan Younis.
“Holding the killer accountable is the least that can be done so that they don’t escape punishment every time, which leads to the continuation of the targeting and attacks of Palestinian journalists without accountability and without trial,” Dahdouh said. “The targeting and destruction of offices, like Al Jazeera’s offices; the targeting of Palestinian families, such as is the case with my family; and the targeting of homes, like my home that was destroyed and where there are no houses around it in the first place, so they know they are targeting the house of the head of Al Jazeera. It is clear that this is all happening in the context of pressure and punishment of Palestinian journalists by the Israeli military. Yet, as I always say, despite all the hurt and pain, we will continue in carrying this message and fulfilling our duty and relaying information and pictures and news to our viewers, so they can be the first ones with everything that is happening in the Gaza Strip.”
Ryan Grim and Natasha Lennard contributed reporting.
The post Israel Bombed an Al Jazeera Cameraman — and Blocked Evacuation Efforts as He Bled to Death appeared first on The Intercept.
Biden’s Strikes in Yemen Are Unconstitutional, Bipartisan Members of Congress Say
The U.S. and U.K. led a series of airstrikes in Yemen on Thursday evening, setting off alarms globally about how the attacks play into the smoldering regional risk of conflict — including a stream of questions from Congress about whether Joe Biden was legally authorized to conduct the strikes at all.
In a statement, Biden said, “Today, at my direction, U.S. military forces—together with the United Kingdom and with support from Australia, Bahrain, Canada, and the Netherlands—successfully conducted strikes against a number of targets in Yemen used by Houthi rebels to endanger freedom of navigation in one of the world’s most vital waterways.”
Yemen’s Houthis responded to Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip by attacking and blocking commercial ships in the Red Sea destined for or originating from Israeli ports. The attacks led to the near total shutdown of Israel’s port of Eilat in recent weeks.
With Israel being brought before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, for allegedly committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, the Houthi blockade of Israeli trade in the Red Sea could gain a newfound global legitimacy.
The strikes in Yemen more directly involved the U.S. in Israel’s war against Hamas and Hezbollah, which, like the Houthis, are backed by Iran. Biden justified the strikes as a “defensive action” — a nod to the issue of presidential powers — and promised more measures to secure the Red Sea. “I will not hesitate to direct further measures to protect our people and the free flow of international commerce as necessary,” Biden said.
Immediately following the strikes, however, bipartisan members of Congress called into question the constitutionality of the attack. “It’s great to see the bipartisan opposition to this from the progressive left and populist right,” said Aída Chávez of Just Foreign Policy. “It’s appalling that instead of acting to stop Israeli war crimes, the Biden administration chose to further damage both our global reputation and our Constitutional system by launching a new unauthorized conflict against Yemen.”
Progressives led the way in questioning Biden’s attack, but more moderate Democrats and a clutch of Republicans quickly followed suit.
“.@POTUS is violating Article I of the Constitution by carrying out airstrikes in Yemen without congressional approval,” tweeted Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich. “The American people are tired of endless war.”
.@POTUS is violating Article I of the Constitution by carrying out airstrikes in Yemen without congressional approval. The American people are tired of endless war.
— Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (@RepRashida) January 12, 2024
“The President needs to come to Congress before launching a strike against the Houthis in Yemen and involving us in another middle east conflict. That is Article I of the Constitution. I will stand up for that regardless of whether a Democrat or Republican is in the White House.” said Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif.
“Section 2C of the War Powers Act is clear: POTUS may only introduce the U.S. into hostilities after Congressional authorization or in a national emergency when the U.S. is under imminent attack. Reporting is not a substitute. This is a retaliatory, offensive strike.”
The President needs to come to Congress before launching a strike against the Houthis in Yemen and involving us in another middle east conflict. That is Article I of the Constitution. I will stand up for that regardless of whether a Democrat or Republican is in the White House.
— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) January 11, 2024
Section 2C of the War Powers Act is clear: POTUS may only introduce the U.S. into hostilities after Congressional authorization or in a national emergency when the U.S. is under imminent attack. Reporting is not a substitute. This is a retaliatory, offensive strike.
— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) January 12, 2024
“This is why I called for a ceasefire early. This is why I voted against war in Iraq,” said Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif. “Violence only begets more violence. We need a ceasefire now to prevent deadly, costly, catastrophic escalation of violence in the region.”
This is why I called for a ceasefire early. This is why I voted against war in Iraq.
Violence only begets more violence. We need a ceasefire now to prevent deadly, costly, catastrophic escalation of violence in the region. https://t.co/acd6bwiRPF— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) January 12, 2024
“The United States cannot risk getting entangled into another decades-long conflict without Congressional authorization. The White House must work with Congress before continuing these airstrikes in Yemen,” posted Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis.
The United States cannot risk getting entangled into another decades-long conflict without Congressional authorization. The White House must work with Congress before continuing these airstrikes in Yemen. https://t.co/IovPPE3ayn
— Rep. Mark Pocan (@RepMarkPocan) January 12, 2024
“These airstrikes have NOT been authorized by Congress. The Constitution is clear: Congress has the sole authority to authorize military involvement in overseas conflicts. Every president must first come to Congress and ask for military authorization, regardless of party,” said Rep. Val Hoyle, D-Ore.
These airstrikes have NOT been authorized by Congress. The Constitution is clear: Congress has the sole authority to authorize military involvement in overseas conflicts. Every president must first come to Congress and ask for military authorization, regardless of party. https://t.co/Yo4QOWfbgr
— Val Hoyle (@RepValHoyle) January 11, 2024
Khanna’s tweets sparked several Republicans to weigh in, most prominently Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, who said, “I totally agree with @RoKhanna. The Constitution matters, regardless of party affiliation.”
I totally agree with @RoKhanna.
The Constitution matters, regardless of party affiliation. https://t.co/74ofiUw0Hb— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) January 12, 2024
“Only Congress has the power to declare war,” tweeted Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky. “I have to give credit to @RepRoKhanna here for sticking to his principles, as very few are willing to make this statement while their party is in the White House.”
Only Congress has the power to declare war. I have to give credit to @RepRoKhanna here for sticking to his principles, as very few are willing to make this statement while their party is in the White House. https://t.co/kD95sII05J
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) January 12, 2024
“Ro is absolutely correct on this,” said Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida.
Ro is absolutely correct on this. https://t.co/W8CzLDKwEx
— Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) January 12, 2024
Far-right Republican Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said, “The President must come to Congress for permission before going to war. Biden can not solely decide to bomb Yemen.”
The President must come to Congress for permission before going to war.
Biden can not solely decide to bomb Yemen.
And what is the condition of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin? Is he still laid up in the hospital?
Biden admin wants to fund war in Ukraine, control the war in…— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene?? (@RepMTG) January 12, 2024
“Exactly. We did not declare war. Biden needs to address Congress!” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican from Florida, added in response to Khanna and Lee.
Exactly. We did not declare war. Biden needs to address Congress! @BasedMikeLee @RoKhanna https://t.co/m5Swutc2Xq
— Anna Paulina Luna (@realannapaulina) January 12, 2024
“The U.S. has a solemn responsibility to protect our service members in harm’s way, and free and open laws of the sea. While I’m glad that congressional leadership was briefed, Congress alone authorizes war. I’m also concerned this strike could lead to further escalation,” posted Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif.
The U.S. has a solemn responsibility to protect our service members in harm’s way, and free and open laws of the sea. While I’m glad that congressional leadership was briefed, Congress alone authorizes war. I’m also concerned this strike could lead to further escalation. https://t.co/9w4zbThX67
— Congresswoman Sara Jacobs (@RepSaraJacobs) January 12, 2024
“.@POTUS can’t launch airstrikes in Yemen without congressional approval,” iterated Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo. “This is illegal and violates Article I of the Constitution. The people do not want more of our taxpayer dollars going to endless war and the killing of civilians. Stop the bombing and do better by us.”
.@POTUS can’t launch airstrikes in Yemen without congressional approval.
This is illegal and violates Article I of the Constitution.
The people do not want more of our taxpayer dollars going to endless war and the killing of civilians. Stop the bombing and do better by us. https://t.co/PFYYoknib6— Congresswoman Cori Bush (@RepCori) January 12, 2024
“The President must come to Congress before launching a strike and embroiling the US in another conflict. Article I of the Constitution demands this of both Democratic and Republican presidents,” said Rep. Summer Lee, D-Penn. “Americans don’t want more of our tax dollars funding these endless wars.”
The President must come to Congress before launching a strike and embroiling the US in another conflict. Article I of the Constitution demands this of both Democratic and Republican presidents.
Americans don’t want more of our tax dollars funding these endless wars.— Congresswoman Summer Lee (@RepSummerLee) January 12, 2024
At the same time, several members of Congress expressed strong support for the strikes, as part of a broader push by Republicans for a military confrontation with Iran.
Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., said the attack was justified: “These strikes are necessary, responsive, and proportionate—not escalatory. President Biden is right to act,” he said. “The Houthi attacks imperil the global economy and increase the risk of a wider war. Minimizing the risk of a regional conflict is the utmost priority.”
These strikes are necessary, responsive, and proportionate—not escalatory. President Biden is right to act.
The Houthi attacks imperil the global economy and increase the risk of a wider war. Minimizing the risk of a regional conflict is the utmost priority.— Seth Moulton (@sethmoulton) January 12, 2024
“The air strikes against these Iranian proxies is long overdue. The US must respond strongly to attacks against Americans or our interests, including freedom of navigation,” said Rep. Max Miller, R-Ohio. “I hope these operations shift Biden’s posture from appeasement of Iran & its terrorist puppets.”
The air strikes against these Iranian proxies is long overdue. The US must respond strongly to attacks against Americans or our interests, including freedom of navigation.
I hope these operations shift Biden's posture from appeasement of Iran & its terrorist puppets. https://t.co/sAIRYh2cl1— Congressman Max Miller (@RepMaxMiller) January 12, 2024
“We must stand in full support of sending the strongest message possible to the Iran-backed Houthi militants,” posted Rep. Don Davis, D-N.C.
We must stand in full support of sending the strongest message possible to the Iran-backed Houthi militants. https://t.co/T9eCnsxjnv
— Congressman Don Davis (@RepDonDavis) January 12, 2024
“Iran sowed hatred across the Middle East, and the world is now reaping endless attacks from Hezbollah, Hamas and Houthis,” said Rep. Brian Mast of Florida, who showed up to Congress in an Israel Defense Forces uniform on October 13, 2023. “It’s simple: If Iran is the state sponsor of terrorism, then Houthis are the terrorists. @POTUS should re-designate the Houthis as a terrorist group TODAY.”
Iran sowed hatred across the Middle East, and the world is now reaping endless attacks from Hezbollah, Hamas and Houthis.
It’s simple: If Iran is the state sponsor of terrorism, then Houthis are the terrorists. @POTUS should re-designate the Houthis as a terrorist group TODAY.— Rep. Brian Mast (@RepBrianMast) January 12, 2024
“Iran, the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world, only understands one thing: strength. Today’s show of force against Iranian proxies that threaten American vessels in the Red Sea is long overdue. The sooner this administration embraces peace through strength in foreign policy, the safer we will be,” posted Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma.
Iran, the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world, only understands one thing: strength. Today’s show of force against Iranian proxies that threaten American vessels in the Red Sea is long overdue. The sooner this administration embraces peace through strength in foreign…
— Markwayne Mullin (@SenMullin) January 12, 2024
While Biden justified his Yemen strikes without congressional authorization, in 2020, when President Donald Trump was escalating hostilities with Iran, he was a staunch defender of the notion that Congress should be consulted before taking military action that could spark U.S. involvement in a regional war.
“Let’s be clear: Donald Trump does not have the authority to take us into war with Iran without Congressional approval,” Biden said on Twitter at the time. “A president should never take this nation to war without the informed consent of the American people.”
Let's be clear: Donald Trump does not have the authority to take us into war with Iran without Congressional approval. A president should never take this nation to war without the informed consent of the American people.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) January 6, 2020
Correction: Friday, January 12, 2024
Rep. Thomas Massie represents a district in Kentucky, not a district in West Virginia.
The post Biden’s Strikes in Yemen Are Unconstitutional, Bipartisan Members of Congress Say appeared first on The Intercept.