Unitarian Universalists call for an end to the war in Gaza and an end to US Complicity
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- Written by Curt Bell Curt Bell
- Published: 24 June 2024 24 June 2024
Filings show a political action committee tied to AIPAC spent $1.3 million on attacks against former Multnomah County Commissioner Susheela Jayapal in May while giving $1 million to a group supporting her opponent.
The nation’s most prominent pro-Israel group spent big last month to influence the race to replace outgoing Oregon U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer.
New filings show a political action committee affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, donated $1.3 million in May to a group that spent more than $3.2 million waging attacks on one of three central candidates in that race: former Multnomah County Commissioner Susheela Jayapal.
The group also poured $1 million into a separate group that lavished more than $2 million in support on Maxine Dexter, the physician and state lawmaker who ultimately won the race.
Those efforts, combined with a surge in fundraising from donors with ties to AIPAC, provided a major boost to Dexter. She is now all but assured a seat in Congress next year as the Democratic nominee in the deep blue Portland district.
The $1.3 million contribution was reported on Thursday by an AIPAC-affiliated political action committee called the United Democracy Project. The money went to Voters for Responsive Government, an out-of-state PAC that surfaced in April, that has offered no reasons for its interest in the Oregon primary.
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An influential member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition told settlers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank that the government is engaged in a stealthy effort to irreversibly change the way the territory is governed, to cement Israel’s control over it without being accused of formally annexing it.
In a taped recording of the speech, the official, Bezalel Smotrich, can be heard suggesting at a private event earlier this month that the goal was to prevent the West Bank from becoming part of a Palestinian state.
“I’m telling you, it’s mega-dramatic,” Mr. Smotrich told the settlers. “Such changes change a system’s DNA.”
Read more at: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/21/world/middleeast/israel-west-bank-netanyahu-bezalel-smotrich.html
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/13/israel-gaza-war-rafah
Israeli tanks rolled into the western part of Rafah on Thursday as the city came under intense helicopter, drone and artillery fire in what residents described as one of the worst bombardments of the area so far.
The assault on Rafah has driven out more than a million Palestinians who had been sheltering there, forcing them into areas with little or no access to food, water or shelter. The UN has warned that more than a million people are expected to “face death and starvation by the middle of July”.
Joe Biden had warned he would cut off the supply of US weapons if Israel went ahead with an attack on Rafah, in part because of the lack of an adequate humanitarian plan for all the civilians who would be displaced, but the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his war cabinet launched the attack anyway over a month ago.
The Biden administration has yet to slow the flow of arms in response, arguing that Israel had yet to carry out “major operations”.
People living in Rafah described the level of fighting as devastating, however.
[Mitchel Plitnick plots the obvious, simplest, and most humane path to avoid a regional conflict: Ceasefire and release of hostages]
And yet, the way to avoid all of this has never been clearer: stop playing games with the terms of a ceasefire and demand that all hostilities end, Israel fully withdraws from Gaza, and all hostages—Israeli, Palestinian, and international—are freed.
There doesn’t need to be three stages; just one, where the above terms are carried out forthwith. Hamas has made it abundantly clear that they would accept such a deal. The Israeli people will accept that deal. And Netanyahu will accept it if the United States tells him we will cut off the arms supply and political support for his genocide.
It really is that simple. Yes, it would still be a political minefield for Biden, but even he seems to have finally realized that the Israeli misadventure to “eradicate” Hamas is a failure. If he is worried about the backlash from the Republicans and from Israel’s zealots within his own party, especially the funders—which, to be fair, will be enormous—imagine what he’ll have to contend with politically if American soldiers are once again being killed and maimed in a Middle Eastern war.
The Americans seem to have correctly assessed at last that there can be no ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah without an end to the Gaza slaughter. It may well be that was a factor in Biden’s futile announcement last week.
It was pointless because Biden still hasn’t learned that Netanyahu, and Israel more broadly, does not act because they are cajoled, convinced, or pleaded with. They act when there are consequences if they don’t. And so, almost immediately, Netanyahu made it clear that the deal Biden announced was not the “Israeli offer” Israel meant to put forth.
If Israel does intend to raise the stakes with Hezbollah, then the risk of the regional war the U.S. fears grows enormously. If all Biden cares about is the politics, the political risk of letting that happen is far greater than the political risk of coercing Israel to stand down both in Gaza and at the northern border. If he is concerned about the potential damage to the entire world that a regional Middle East war could do, then he has every reason to finally act.