Elliott Abrams, the former special envoy on Iran and Venezuela during the Trump administration and a current fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, joined Jewish Insider’s “Limited Liability Podcast” hosts Jarrod Bernstein and Rich Goldberg to discuss violence in Israel and negotiations with Iran.
Eye on Israel: “Is it Intifada 3.0? I don’t think so,” predicted Abrams of the current conflagration between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. “I think Hamas has gotten pretty much what it has wanted, and I don’t think that this will turn into another major war in Gaza. And I’m inclined to think things will quiet down a bit in Jerusalem as well.” Abrams suggested that Hamas is motivated at least in part by the cancellation of the Palestinian national elections by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas last month. “Mahmoud Abbas cancels those Palestinian elections, and what does Hamas do to show, ‘Well, he’s doing nothing, but we’re here, we’re active, we’re leading the Palestinian people’?” Abrams asked. “They do what you see in the last few days in Israel. A lot of violent attacks.”
Regional turmoil: Abrams said that the violence in Israel puts the Arab countries that recently normalized relations with Israel via the Abraham Accords in a difficult situation. “It does put them in a tough spot,” he said. “And you’ve seen several of them make statements decrying the violence and asking Israel to make sure its police do not, any longer, go into East Jerusalem.” But he added that they ultimately want to see “Hamas defeated — so does Mahmoud Abbas and the PLO, the Palestinian Authority and Fatah leadership, whatever they say, because Hamas is their enemy.” The UAE, Bahrain and other nations are “judging Israel now. They’re wondering how are the Israelis going to handle this? Are they in a kind of crisis where they can’t make decisions? Are they unable to hit back the way they normally would? Is this going to be a defeat for the Israelis? If the Israelis come out of this looking weak, their attractiveness to the Arab governments as a friend is greatly diminished.”
Tehran talks: Abrams rejected the Biden administration’s suggestion that Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran failed. “It clearly didn’t fail,” he said. “Our view was that had President Trump won the election, had we been able to face Iran with four more years of the same and actually increasing sanctions, they would have had to make a deal, because of the condition their economy is in right now.” Tehran didn’t make a deal, Abrams suggested, because they were waiting to see who won the 2020 presidential election. Abrams laid out four potential options on Iran: “A successful negotiation with Iran… giving up, finally, the path to a nuclear weapon”; regime change in Tehran; Iran attaining nuclear capability; and the possibility that “someone steps in militarily.” He added: “I don’t think it’s the JCPOA or war. I think it’s the JCPOA or a tougher, better policy.”
Kerry critic: “When you talk to European diplomats, which of course I did, you find that they had—I want to be careful with my language and be diplomatic here—minimum high regard for John Kerry’s negotiating skills. I mean, it’s pretty widely known that the French were near contemptuous of his negotiating skills. For one thing he desperately wanted to deal. That’s obvious. We all know that. So I don’t see any reason to believe that this was the only deal possible. As a matter of fact, if carried out his way, it would have been worse. It’s well known in the State Department that there were moments when Wendy Sherman, for example, or the French, were trying to pull him back from further concessions…it could have been worse.”
Lightning round: Favorite Yiddish word? “Machatunim.” Favorite Jewish food? “Pot roast with kasha varnishkes.” Book recommendation? A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962by Alistair Horne. Favorite boss in government? “It’s a toss-up for me between George Shultz and George W. Bush.”
Virginia Republicans made national headlines last month when a key committee voted against allowing a special voting period for Virginians who — for religious reasons — could not participate in the party’s nominating convention, which took place this past Saturday. The Republican Party of Virginia backtracked three days later, establishing an early voting period the day before the convention for people who observe the Sabbath on Saturday.
After all the wrangling, just 20 to 30 people participated in the early voting period, a state GOP spokesperson told Jewish Insider.
The small number may have been due to timing: The decision to create a Friday voting period came after registration for the convention had closed, preventing individuals who had not already signed up from voting.
Still, the move represents a roadblock for Virginia Republicans, who have not won any statewide office since 2009 and who will need to recruit a broad coalition of voters to counter the state’s recent leftward shift.
“There’s a large number of people in the party who want to shore up the base and get out more of the conservative Christian groups. They just forget that there are Orthodox Jews out there who are quite conservative, too,” said Ken Reid, who previously served as a Republican official in Loudoun County and now lives in Norfolk. “I think that part of the problem is it’s easy to talk to people who are like you, and like-minded; it’s very difficult to talk to people who are on the fence.”
Despite this misstep, Republicans say they understand the need to diversify their ranks, particularly as non-white populations in the state have grown in recent years.
Jeffrey Dove, a Black Republican who ran twice for Congress in Northern Virginia and is now running for a vacant House of Delegates seat in Manassas, said that the party’s selection of Glenn Youngkin — a former CEO of the Carlyle Group and a first-time political candidate — as its gubernatorial nominee is a promising sign.
“He’s very interested in building coalitions in Virginia,” said Dove of Youngkin. “He was very interested in reaching out to communities that have been, I guess, underserved or not reached out to as much as they should have been by the Republican Party.”
Several Republicans speculated that without former President Donald Trump in the White House, Youngkin will be able to more clearly define his positions.
“Instead of having to answer questions about, ‘What about this, what about that’ about Trump, he can focus on issues in Virginia,” said Mike Ginsberg, a member of the Republican Party’s State Central Committee.
With no voting record of his own or much of a public track record from the prior presidential administration, Republicans are hopeful that Youngkin can win over voters who were skeptical of previous Republican policies or candidates. “He’s a new face, so he didn’t have any baggage on immigration or any of the other issues,” noted Tom Davis, a Republican who represented Northern Virginia in Congress for 14 years.
Still, Youngkin has embraced the former president. In March, his campaign released an ad touting a comment Trump made last year praising Youngkin’s performance at Carlyle and his stance on China. Yesterday, just hours after Youngkin clinched the nomination, he received an official endorsement from Trump — which Youngkin avoided mentioning in a Tuesday night speech.
Youngkin has yet to make an impression on much of the state, with six months until the November election. Around 50,000 people signed up to participate in Virginia’s nominating convention, with estimates that 30,000 actually showed up.
“It’s really up to him as to how he wants to present and organize the larger campaign,” said Quentin Kidd, dean of the College of Social Sciences at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Va. “If he wants to run by embracing Trump and Trumpism, I think it’s going to make it harder for him to then reach out to non-conservative, white, Christian voters. If he wants to distance himself to some extent from Trump, and run as a fiscal conservative or some other kind of conservative Republican, that I think then makes it possible for him to reach out to groups of voters that aren’t or haven’t been aligned with Republicans in Virginia for the last decade.”
Recent statewide elections have been landslides for Democrats. In November, Joe Biden beat Trump in Virginia by 10 percentage points. Four years ago, Ralph Northam won the governor’s race by 9 points. In 2018, Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine beat Republican Corey Stewart by 16 points.
Democrats have tried to tie Youngkin to Stewart, who has been criticized for his relationships with white nationalists and attacked as xenophobic for linking immigrants to violent crime. Stewart endorsed Youngkin’s campaign last week.
“I think people have become keenly aware that when the debate on immigration gets toxic, as it has been for way too many years, it undermines the civil rights and civil liberties of Latinos,” said Clarissa Martinez de Castro, deputy vice president of policy and advocacy at UnidosUS, a nonpartisan Latino civil rights organization. “That’s why even when it’s not top of the agenda, sometimes voters see it as a sort of barometer, to gauge how candidates or parties regard their community.”
Democrats, meanwhile, view Youngkin’s lack of electoral history as an opportunity — a blank slate to define him on their terms. “Glenn Youngkin has fully embraced Donald Trump and Corey Stewart’s dangerous extremism,” Democratic Party of Virginia spokesperson Manuel Bonder told JI. The day Youngkin won the nomination, leading Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe, who served as Virginia’s governor from 2014 to 2018, made a similar claim in his first tweet commenting on Youngkin’s win.
“That’s just a bunch of name-calling, a bunch of whatabout-ing, a bunch of strawman arguments, and a bunch of equating our candidates with candidates in the past,” said John March, communications director of the Republican Party of Virginia. But, he noted, Virginia Democrats might have their own baggage when it comes to winning over Black voters.
“They allowed [current Gov.] Ralph Northam to continue as the governor of Virginia, and they’re actually singing his praises now, even after he put on a KKK hood to pose for a picture for a yearbook,” March noted. (After yearbook photos emerged showing Northam in a photo of one man in blackface and another in a KKK outfit — Northam did not say which person was him — he ignored calls from some Democrats in the state to resign.) A Virginia State University poll released ahead of Election Day in November 2020 revealed that 20% of Black voters in the state did not affiliate with a party, though 97% said the candidates they supported in the past had been Democrats.
In the quest to broaden its base, Republicans are also looking to one of the fastest growing populations in the state: Asian Americans. From 2012 to 2018, the number of eligible Asian-American and Pacific Islander voters in Virginia grew by 37%, compared to a 6% growth rate for the voting population as a whole.
Youngkin “did a lot of outreach for Koreans and some of those groups to get them out for him,” said Davis, the former House member. “I think he’s got a real opportunity to make some inroads there. Democrats have made some mistakes in those areas that give the Republicans some chances — for example, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.”
Davis was referring to the Alexandria public school recently ranked as best in the nation. In recent weeks, the school has made national headlines after the Fairfax County Public Schools superintendent made changes to the admissions criteria, including canceling the admissions test. The goal was to change the school’s practices to create more racial equity at the school, which is 70% Asian. Republicans view this as a key way to bring in Asian American voters who might see the change as an affront.
Ginsberg, the State Central Committee member, called the proposed changes “a dagger aimed directly at that community,” and argued that “the Republican Party understands that.”
That message could be working “for some segments of the population, maybe for some initial first-generation immigrants that are just now coming over, and have not necessarily been as exposed to all the different discussions around affirmative action,” said Christine Chen, executive director of Asian Pacific Islander American Vote, a nonpartisan organization that seeks to increase electoral and civic engagement.“I think still for a large segment of the population, that doesn’t necessarily resonate with them.” A survey conducted by Chen’s organization found that 70% of Asian Americans support affirmative action.
In tandem with the question of admissions standards at Jefferson, Republicans are also hoping that criticisms of the emerging field of critical race theory will win back suburban voters who disliked Trump but may now be unhappy with public school curriculum changes that include a focus on the history of racism and white supremacy.
“You have this kind of ‘woke’ ideology that really is just deeply offensive to a lot of people, whether you’re to the left or to the right,” said Ian Cummings, a Republican activist in Norfolk who was active in urging the Republican Party to create an opportunity for Orthodox Jews to participate in the convention. “The woke ideology has obviously provoked a big backlash among conservative voters, but it’s also sparked a backlash from what I’ve seen, among a lot of middle-of-the-road suburban moms and suburban families, the same suburban people that have fled Trump.”
Others, though, are skeptical that such efforts will resonate with voters.
“Especially with the critical race theory, I think that’s still very new, that whole concept,” said Chen. “I don’t think that will actually work well, because for us the solution to combating anti-Asian violence is actually more education about our community.”
“I have yet to see anybody other than card-carrying base Republicans be excited about the issue of ‘wokeness,’” said Kidd. “I’m not convinced that that’s the path that’s going to excite suburban voters to say, ‘We’re going to shift from what we’ve been doing for the last 10 years to this person that we don’t know and we’ve never seen before.’”
Ultimately, Republicans think that the best message they have to win over voters of color and disenchanted Democrats is that winning the governor’s race would be a check on the power of Virginia Democrats.
Davis likened the situation to states like Maryland and Massachusetts, which are heavily Democratic overall but have a history of electing Republican governors. “Voters know that you still have a Democratic legislature,” Davis argued, “so it’s not like you’re giving the keys over to Republicans to run the state. You’re kind of balancing it, at a time when the Democratic legislature probably moved a little faster than the state was willing to go, was ready to go.”
As violence continued to escalate in Israel and the Palestinian territories on Tuesday, with Hamas firing barrages of rockets at Israeli population centers and Israel retaliating with strikes against Hamas targets in Gaza, U.S. lawmakers on Capitol Hill weighed in on the conflict, in some cases trading barbs over who should be blamed for the violence.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), a vocal pro-Israel Democrat in Congress, appeared to criticize colleagues who have singled out Israeli strikes on targets in Gaza or downplayed Hamas rocket attacks on Israel.
“A critical point for some of my colleagues whose facts are a bit off: Hamas is the terrorist organization, as designated by the United States,” Gottheimer said. “The U.S. supports our ally Israel’s right to defend itself, particularly against heinous Foreign Terrorist Organizations.”
In a statement, Rep. Elaine Luria (D-VA) also seemingly hit back at progressive Democrats who criticized Israel’s response to the missiles.
“My heart is with the Israeli people as they shelter from rockets fired by terrorists in the Gaza strip. The current situation highlights the importance of American security assistance to Israel, as Iron Dome is intercepting many of these rockets and saving lives,” Luria said. “As a sovereign nation and our strongest democratic ally in the Middle East, Israel must defend itself from terrorist attacks and Hamas must end their deadly assault.”
Luria’s statement appears aimed at far-left Democrats in Congress who have called to condition U.S. security aid to Israel.
In his first public comments on the clash, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called on both sides to work to de-escalate the situation.
“Clearly Hamas’ rocket attacks into civilian populations is condemnable and violates all international norms, and so I certainly condemn those in the strongest possible terms,” Menendez said during a CNN interview. “The Israeli and Palestinian political and military leaders have to actively discourage agitators from any further action that provoke more violence and also that the Israeli National Police has to take steps to lower tensions throughout Jerusalem… This violence begets violence, and so we have to have it dramatically reduced on both sides.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) also issued a statement on Tuesday night.
“I condemn the escalating and indiscriminate rocket attacks by Hamas against Israel. Israel has the right to defend herself against this assault, which is designed to sow terror and undermine prospects for peace,” Pelosi said in a statement. “The recent inflammatory provocations including by extremist forces in Jerusalem have exacerbated the situation and restraint must be shown by all to de-escalate the crisis.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) acknowledged the missiles’ toll on Israeli civilians in a statement that was otherwise critical of Israel.
The Vermont senator condemned Israeli nationalists as the source of the latest violence, tweeting, “once again we are seeing how the irresponsible actions of government-allied right-wing extremists in Jerusalem can escalate quickly into a devastating war,” but added that “Israeli children should not have to spend the night scared in bomb shelters as many are doing tonight. Palestinian children should not have to grow up under the constant violence and oppression of occupation, as so many do, and have done.”
Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) tweeted: “Enough of Black and brown bodies being brutalized and murdered, especially children. Enough of the inhumanity. The White House must act,” and attached a lengthier statement.
“The United States must step in and rapidly broker a ceasefire to de-escalate and bring us closer to a two-state solution,” Bowman wrote. “Violently evicting families from their homes in which generations have lived is not an act of peace. A show of strong force during prayer is not an act of peace. Destroying holy sites is not an act of peace. Hamas rocket attacks are not an act of peace. Israeli government airstrikes are not an act of peace.”
A Bowman spokesperson did not respond to a request for clarification as to which holy sites had been destroyed.
Some Republicans also turned their fire toward President Joe Biden, casting blame on him for the renewed violence.
Sen. Rick Scott accused Biden of having taken insufficient action in comparison to former President Donald Trump.
“While President Trump took unprecedented action to stand with Israel, under President Biden, rockets are raining down on our great ally. It’s time for Biden to stand up and make it clear that the U.S. stands with Israel as it defends its people from these reprehensible terrorist attacks,” Scott said in a statement. “President Biden should take immediate action to remind these terrorists and the world of the United States’ strong and unwavering support of the Israeli people.”
Many Democrats are accusing Trump of setting the stage for the latest conflagration by ignoring warnings about Palestinian unrest and involving himself in Israeli domestic politics.
Some lawmakers also sought to cast blame for the rocket attacks toward Iran; Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) highlighted Hamas’s ties to Iran in speculating that the missiles may have been made by Tehran.
In New York City on Tuesday, mayoral candidate Andrew Yang received some backlash over a Monday tweet in which he said he was “standing with the people of Israel.” Yang was confronted by protesters in public and disinvited from a Muslim community event over his statement.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) responded that it is “utterly shameful for Yang to try to show up to an Eid [ul-Fitr] event after sending out a chest-thumping statement of support for a strike killing 9 children, especially after his silence as Al-Aqsa was attacked.”
The first major survey of American Jews since 2013 finds a population that is growing and increasingly religiously diverse — to the point that some American Jewish communities feel they have no connection to others.
The survey, “Jewish Americans in 2020,” from the Pew Research Center, puts the Jewish population at 7.5 million, or 2.4% of the U.S. population, compared with 6.7 million, or 2.2% of the population, estimated in Pew’s “A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” published in 2013.
The 2013 study was received with distress by a number of leading academics and pundits who read it as an indication of apathy to Jewish life. Some see the new data as evidence that efforts to build Jewish community and identity outside the synagogue are working. Others see those efforts as fragile. The debate hinges on the question of how to measure Jewish vitality.
“This is corroboration that the Jewish community is growing, not shrinking, and that there’s diversity in how people express their identity and where they come from,” said Len Saxe, director of the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies and the Steinhardt Social Research Institute at Brandeis University, and a consultant to Pew on “Jewish Americans in 2020.”
The survey found that 92% of American Jews identify as white, while 8% say they identify with another ethnic group, including 1% who identify as Black, less than 1% who identify as Asian and several other groups and combinations of groups who comprise 1% or less of the total. This data shows a 1% increase in the population that identifies as non-white, compared with the 2013 report. In 2019, the Jews of Color Field-Building Initiative estimated that 12% to 15% of the American Jewish population was Jews of Color.
Michelle Shain, the assistant director of the Orthodox Union’s Center for Communal Research, read the report differently from Saxe, telling eJewishPhilanthropy she sees American Jewry’s robustness in Orthodoxy, and especially in the study’s findings on younger Jews. The report shows that among Jews ages 18 to 29, two populations are growing: those who describe themselves as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular,” who comprise 40% of that group, compared with 27% of all adults, and those who identify as Orthodox, who are 17% of that group, compared with 3% of Jews 65 and older. Shain also served as an advisor on the study.
“On the one hand, you see a growing and self-confident Orthodoxy, with distinctive Jewish attitudes in behavior that reflect commitment to Torah, and to God, and at the same time, you see a growing group of Jews of no religion,” she said. “Both of those groups seem to be growing as the generations continue, and those who identify with liberal movements appear to be declining.”
This divergence on religion is reflected more broadly in certain Jewish groups’ feelings that they don’t have much in common with each other, Shain said. Most Jews of no religion feel that they have little or nothing in common with the Orthodox Jews, for example, while about half of Orthodox Jews say they have little or nothing in common with Jews in the Reform movement.
Yet in some ways, the 2020 survey shows that American Jewry hasn’t changed much since the 2013 survey was conducted, said Becka A. Alper, the study’s senior researcher, on a conference call Pew hosted for members of the media. She pointed out that the intermarriage rate, at 61%, is the same. The percentage of American Jews identifying as Reform – 37% — and Conservative —17% — are almost unchanged from 2013, as is the Orthodox share of the population, at 9%. The share of Jewish adults who don’t identify with any particular stream of Judaism is 32%, up only slightly from 30% in the 2013 survey.
Saxe said the diversity that characterizes American Jewry is strikingly evident in data showing that the population finds Jewish meaning in a variety of ways, including but not limited to traditional religious practice.
The 2013 survey established that many American Jews, especially younger ones, rarely attended synagogue, but didn’t explore why that was so, or whether that group connects with Judaism or a Jewish community in other ways. In designing the 2020 survey, the Pew team was careful to include such questions, said Alan Cooperman, Pew’s director of religious research, on the media call.
They found that of respondents who didn’t attend services, two-thirds said they stayed out of synagogue because they weren’t religious; 57% said they’re not interested and 55% said they express their Jewishness in other ways.
The survey also supplied other measures of Jewish engagement, some of which have traditionally religious components, such as sharing holidays with friends who are not Jewish, and some of which were more purely cultural, such as cooking Jewish foods.
It found that a quarter of Jews with a medium level of traditional observance cook and eat traditional food, while 21% celebrate holidays with friends.
“There is a growing population of ‘Jews not by religion,’ Saxe said. “These are people who engage their identities not by going to shul. There’s a flourishing of Jewish culture.” He said the emphasis on synagogue attendance as the key metric of Jewish identity forces a Christian paradigm of religion onto being Jewish, which is an ethnicity and not just a religion.
“The issue for funders is how to create a Jewish network of programs and institutions that can sustain people’s involvement, however they would like to be involved,” he said.
Shain pointed out that the people who participate most frequently in those Jewish activities that take place outside of synagogue also tend to be those who are the most traditionally religious.
For example, among highly observant Jews, 31% say they listen to Jewish or Israeli music, compared with 7% of those with a medium level of traditional observance.
“Those sorts of new observances don’t substitute for traditional observance, they complement it,” she said. “Other people do these things, but they do them less often, and with less frequency, and less intensity.”
Pew surveyed 4,718 U.S. adults who identify as Jewish, including 3,836 Jews by religion and 882 Jews of no religion, online and by mail from Nov. 19, 2019 to June 3, 2020. The respondents met the survey’s criteria for Jewishness if they said their current religion was Jewish, said that they consider themselves Jewish in another way, or said they were raised in the Jewish tradition or had a Jewish parent.
This definition is consistent with that of the 2013 survey; however, there is one big difference between the methodology of the two surveys. In 2013, Pew conducted the survey by phone instead of mail. That means the two studies cannot always be reliably compared with each other. The answers to some questions, such as how often people attend synagogue, tend to be significantly shaped by whether a respondent is talking to an interviewer or filling out a survey privately. Pew conducted a separate study to ascertain which questions might be affected by how people take the survey. They found that the share of people who say they attend synagogue at least monthly was 11% higher among those speaking with an interviewer. Other questions susceptible to this effect include the importance of being Jewish in one’s life, the importance of religion in one’s life and how emotionally attached one is to Israel, Shain said.
More than 300 rockets were fired at Israel from Gaza in less than 18 hours, including the first missiles aimed at Jerusalem since the 2014 war.
Jerusalem burns: Monday, which marked Jerusalem Day, kicked off with violent clashes atop the Temple Mount between Palestinian worshipers and Israeli police officers. Tensions in the city have been high for weeks over the now-delayed legal ruling on the potential eviction of dozens of Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem. Palestinians threw rocks at police outside al-Aqsa Mosque and police responded with rubber-tipped bullets and stun grenades. Hundreds of Palestinians were wounded and more than 20 police officers were hurt. As the clashes raged, Palestinians threw rocks at a passenger vehicle just outside the Old City, causing it to crash into some of the gathered crowd, which then attacked the driver. Later, Palestinians threw fireworks at a muted Jerusalem Day celebration at the Western Wall, resulting in a tree atop the Temple Mount catching fire.
Rockets fly: As tensions seethed across Jerusalem yesterday and threatened to spill over in protests around the country, Hamas issued a warning to Israel: Withdraw all forces from the Temple Mount and Sheikh Jarrah by 6 p.m. Shortly after the deadline, a barrage of seven rockets from Gaza was fired toward Jerusalem. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad continued to fire rockets at southern Israel throughout the night and this morning, including a heavy barrage at Ashdod that hit an apartment building this afternoon. A rocket that hit a home in Ashkelon early this morning wounded at least six people, one seriously, and school was canceled for students across most of southern Israel today. The IDF continued a steady stream of air strikes on Hamas sites in Gaza in response. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, 25 Palestinians have been killed, including at least nine children and more than a dozen Hamas operatives.
Spilling over: Violent protests among some Israeli Arabs raged in cities across Israel last night as tensions escalated. In Lod, Ramle, Haifa, Nazareth and other towns, Israeli Arabs clashed with police and on some occasions with Jewish counter-protesters, and dozens were arrested. In Lod, an Israeli-Arab man was shot dead during a protest last night and two others were wounded. Two Jewish suspects from the city were arrested on suspicion of being involved in the shooting. Defense Minister Benny Gantz approved calling up 5,000 reservists to the IDF to boost the military presence on the Gaza border and throughout the West Bank.
Political pause: Ra’am chief Mansour Abbas halted all coalition negotiations yesterday amid the violence, putting a hold on Opposition Leader Yair Lapid’s plans to announce a government as early as this week. Analysts suggested the speed bump is indicative of the larger problems that could face such a government in the future. “The rioting in Jerusalem and the rockets from Gaza only serve to highlight the shaky grounds on which the alternative, Netanyahu-free government would be built,” wrote Lahav Harkov in The Jerusalem Post. Former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren told JI on Sunday that “if the Arab parties are supporting riots in Jerusalem in which policemen are getting seriously hurt, it’s going to be really hard for someone like Naftali Bennett to cooperate with them in a government… It also indicates the problematic effect of, everytime we’re going to have some kind of security issue with the Arabs, the government is liable to fall.”
World reacts: Secretary of State Tony Blinken said yesterday that the U.S. is “very deeply concerned about the rocket attacks that we are seeing now, that need to stop, and need to stop immediately.” He also expressed concerns about “provocative actions” on the Temple Mount and said “all sides need to de-escalate and reduce tensions.” The U.N. Security Council weighed issuing a statement expressing “grave concern” over tensions and calling on Israel to halt any evictions, but the U.S. reportedly held up a formal statement. U.K. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab condemned “the firing of rockets at Jerusalem and locations within Israel” and called for “an immediate de-escalation on all sides.” Thousands protested in Jordan against Israel yesterday, and Turkey and Egypt issued condemnations of Israeli actions.
Weighing in: Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), who leads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee subcommittee that oversees the Middle East, called on leaders on both sides to “commit to a path of de-escalation” during a call with reporters on Monday. “This constant ratcheting up of violence may serve political interests, but it could lead to chaos that is ultimately going to get a lot of people killed,” Murphy continued. “Hamas needs to stop rocket attacks but Israel needs to stop the forcible eviction of Palestinians from their homes.” During the call, Murphy also weighed in on prospects for broader peace and the Iran nuclear negotiations. Read more here.
Capitol reactions: Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) called for a de-escalation of tensions and condemned the “ongoing violence” in Jerusalem, singling out “Hamas’ recent attacks on the holy city.” In a follow-up tweet, he voiced concern over “evictions in East Jerusalem, settlement expansion, and home demolitions,” which he called “unilateral actions that place a two-state solution further out of reach.” Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) posted that the latest rocket fire “underscores the need for missile defense programs, such as Iron Dome, which protects Israeli civilians — both Arabs and Jews.” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called for “calm for all in Jerusalem” while reiterating that the U.S. “stands by our ally Israel.” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) tweeted that “Palestinians deserve protection. Unlike Israel, missile defense programs, such as Iron Dome, don’t exist to protect Palestinian civilians.”
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), called on Israel and the Palestinians to de-escalate ongoing violence, days after returning from a trip to the Middle East.
“Israeli and Palestinian leaders need to commit to a path of de-escalation,” Murphy told reporters Monday, addressing the rising violence in Jerusalem, which has included scuffles between Palestinians and Israeli police, protests and rocket attacks from Gaza.
“This constant ratcheting up of violence may serve political interests, but it could lead to chaos that is ultimately going to get a lot of people killed,” Murphy continued. “Hamas needs to stop rocket attacks but Israel needs to stop the forcible eviction of Palestinians from their homes,” he added, referencing the potential eviction of dozens of Palestinian families in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.
The Connecticut senator said he believes that the Biden administration is committed to pursuing peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, but said the U.S. is waiting to forcefully engage on the issue until the ongoing coalition negotiations in Israel and Palestinian elections, which have been postponed indefinitely, have been settled.
“But we are saddled with the here and now,” Murphy said. “Our focus today needs to be on convincing both sides to take steps towards de-escalation. A tit-for-tat, one side responding to the other’s escalation with more escalation, is not the path forward here. And we’ve got to be delivering that message to both sides.”
During his confirmation hearing earlier this year, Secretary of State Tony Blinken appeared more pessimistic about the prospects for peace in the region under the Biden administration, saying “[a two-state solution] seems more distant than it’s ever been, at least since Oslo” and indicated that the U.S.’s current priority is not on an overarching peace deal.
Murphy also recently signed onto an as-yet unreleased letter from Democratic senators to President Joe Biden calling on him to reopen the Palestine Liberation Organization mission in Washington, D.C., and the U.S. consulate in East Jerusalem.
Murphy, who leads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, also discussed his trip to Qatar, Oman and Jordan and other recent regional developments, including nuclear negotiations with Iran.
Murphy, a vocal supporter of reentering the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran, said that he came away from the trip “more convinced than before… that it’s important for us to get back into the deal.”
The Connecticut senator reiterated his previous support for withdrawing the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” sanctions as part of a re-entry into the 2015 deal.
“Some in Washington may draw issue with the Iranians wanting Trump’s sanctions lifted that did not exist prior to the signing of the JCPOA,” he said. “I don’t think it’s unreasonable for the Iranians to be asking, for instance, for the Biden administration, to take a look at the personal sanctions on the Supreme Leader, the foreign minister, or the sanctions on the [Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps].”
Those sanctions, Murphy added “got the United States nothing. Iran’s behavior didn’t get better… Iran’s behavior got worse.”
Murphy also told reporters he believes the approaching Iranian elections, scheduled for next month, are increasingly becoming an obstacle to JCPOA re-entry negotiations.
“My advice to the Biden team has been to be flexible and noble but be consistent,” he said. “What we need to do is get back to the deal’s original terms.”
Murphy framed the JCPOA as a lynchpin for peace throughout the region, including between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which have been holding Iraqi-faciliated talks.
“As encouraging as it is that the Iranians and the Saudis are talking, it’s hard to imagine that those discussions would bear fruit if the United States continues to be engaged in Trump’s maximum pressure campaign,” Murphy said, adding, “I think it’d be a mistake to believe that the JCPOA and the future of Yemen are disconnected.”
The Connecticut senator claimed that the Gulf nations also generally support a return to the nuclear deal to facilitate intra-regional talks.
“We’ve heard fairly consistently from countries in the Gulf that they would welcome a return to the Iran deal because they see it as necessary to continue these early talks of a new regional security architecture,” Murphy said.
U.S. allies in the region have expressed concerns in recent weeks about Washington’s current approach to re-entering the JCPOA.
A group of Democratic senators is urging President Joe Biden to follow through on commitments to reopen the U.S. consulate in East Jerusalem and the Palestine Liberation Organization mission in Washington, D.C. — both of which were closed under the Trump administration.
The senators lay out their request in a letter to Biden obtained by Jewish Insider, which has been circulating since mid-April and will close for signatures on Friday.
Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) organized the letter, which has also been signed by Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Chris Murphy (D-CT), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Ed Markey (D-MA) and Dick Durbin (D-IL).
The PLO mission, the letter reads, “long served as a critical point of contact… providing a range of core diplomatic services for Palestinians in the United States” and “helped facilitate the U.S. role as a mediator… and was an important component of the United States’ commitment to advancing a two-state solution.”
The mission was shuttered in 2018 by former President Donald Trump, who ordered the closure due to the Palestinians’ failure “to advance the start of direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel,” the State Department said at the time.
Before taking office, Biden had pledged to reopen the mission, but the effort has faced obstacles, as the Palestinians would become liable for more than $650 million in financial penalties in U.S. courts if they establish an office in the U.S. due to legislation passed in 2019 and signed into law by Trump.
The senators acknowledge the legal issues involved with reopening the Washington mission, calling on Biden to do so “in a manner that is consistent with U.S. law” — without providing further details.
The East Jerusalem consulate, the senators wrote, is “essential to effectively conducting U.S. Palestinian bilateral affairs, while demonstrating that the relationship is not ancillary to or in any way subsumed by the U.S. bilateral relationship with Israel.”
Biden has pledged to reopen the consulate in East Jerusalem, which was closed in 2019 as part of a consolidation effort with the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, which opened a year prior.
The senators also claim that foreign service officers in Jerusalem have said that the consulate’s closure has handicapped U.S. efforts to engage with the Palestinian Authority and provide information on the situation within the Palestinian territories.
The signatories also applaud Biden’s decision to reinstate aid to the Palestinians and the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which it calls “critical to improving the lives of Palestinians and, as Israel’s top security officials have often noted, to Israel’s security interests.”
UNRWA materials distributed to Palestinian schoolchildren in recent months were found to contain language encouraging violence against Israelis.
The long arc of Jewish history can be summed up in two words: exile and return.
And so can the essence of American author Joshua Cohen’s new historical novel, The Netanyahus, whose central character is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s father Benzion, a politically charged historian who was denied a job at Hebrew University for his views — later to be redeemed by the success of his son.
“[Benzion] was a resentful, intelligent man trembling with rage at being excluded from history, at being denied what he regarded as his rightful place in history, and he raised children to take the glory that was denied him,” Cohen told Jewish Insider in a recent interview. “Be careful with the people you reject, because their sons will come and rule you.”
Based on a true experience that legendary literary critic and Yale Sterling professor Harold Bloom, who died in 2019, shared with Cohen before he died, The Netanyahus, which comes out next month, explores the fictional relationship between the Netanyahu family and a college professor.
The book — whose subtitle, “An Account of A Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family,” hints at some of its comic dimensions — is set in the 1950s at a liberal arts college in western New York. Ruben Blum, a professor in the fictitious Corbin College’s history department, studies taxation — but as the only Jewish faculty member at the school, he is assigned to host Benzion, his wife, and their three children, including a young Benjamin, when Benzion interviews for a position at the university. Blum, whom Cohen called a “weak conformist,” must contend with his own unsettled attitude toward this very proud, loudmouthed historian while also dealing with a flood of well-intentioned if deep-rooted antisemitism from his employer.
The book is based on a real experience Bloom had earlier in his career. “One very minor [story] that he dismissed and I had to really pull from him,” said Cohen, “was a little bit of a campus visit by an obscure medieval historian, historian of the Inquisition, from Israel, named Benzion Netanyahu, when he showed up with his wife and three sons in tow for a fairly disastrous job interview.”
Cohen said “it was a sort of minor episode” in Bloom’s life, but “it really stuck with me.” He would bring bagels from New York City’s Russ & Daughters to Bloom’s home in New Haven, checking in on him while letting Bloom, a mentor whom he met late in Bloom’s life, share stories from his life. “His body was failing, but his mind was as penetrating as it ever was,” Cohen recalled. He never got to discuss The Netanyahus with Bloom before he died.
When asked why he chose to focus his book on the real-life Benzion Netanyahu, rather than creating a fictional Israeli historian in the same way he created the narrator from scratch, Cohen laughed: “Because it sells more books,” he joked. But more seriously, he said, Benzion was a historian known for recasting long-ago events through a modern lens. “History, in his hands, became a political tool,” Cohen explained, arguing that Benzion shaped historical narratives in much the same way that novelists shaped fictional narratives.
“I don’t want to use the word fictionalizing, because I feel like people will read that in a certain way, but if [he’s] not in some way doing the same thing that a fiction writer does, or a nonfiction writer does, shaping narratives in certain prejudicial ways in order to fit preconceived outcomes or preset outcomes — I mean, that was very much what Benzion Netanyahu was up to in his career as a historian,” Cohen said. If Benzion would bend genres to apply some fiction-writing techniques to his study of history, then Cohen felt he could do the same, putting a historical figure at the center of his novel.
Benzion Netanyahu is better known for his embrace of Ze’ev Jabotinsky and revisionist Zionism than his scholarship on the Spanish Inquisition. Right-wing politics may be dominant in Israel now, but in the 1940s and 1950s, Jabotinsky’s vision of “Greater Israel” stood in contrast to the more practical Zionism of David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann. Jabotinsky — and Benzion, his personal secretary — opposed the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, which the United Nations voted to approve, with support from most Zionists, in 1947.
“During the most consequential decades of modern Jewish history, the ‘40s and ‘50s, where is Benzion Netanyahu? He’s not being slaughtered in Europe, and he’s not in Palestine, founding the State of Israel,” Cohen noted. “He’s in New York and suburban Philly. He has essentially been exiled from Hebrew University, because he is a Jabotinskyite, because he doesn’t believe we have to wait for the British [or] for any great power to grant us a land. We have to take it.”
The elder Netanyahu’s politics made him a pariah in some left-wing Zionist circles in Palestine, but he also had to contend with an economic problem: “His job opportunities are disappearing to immigrants,” Cohen said. “Every year that he’s in school, at Hebrew University where he’s studying, there’s a new crop of refugee professors from the greatest universities of Europe who will work for peanuts. If you could hire the faculty of Friedrich Wilhelm University [in Berlin] for peanuts, why are you going to hire a Sabra scholar? So he really finds this necessity of finding his career abroad, of making his career abroad.”
In reality, Benzion did find success in the U.S., teaching at the University of Denver before serving as the dean of the department of Semitic Languages and Literatures at Cornell in the early 1970s. He returned to Israel after his son, Yonatan, was killed rescuing Israeli hostages in Entebbe, Uganda.
The book was a new challenge for Cohen, who had never before written about past eras or set his stories on college campuses. “When I was writing it every day, I said to myself, I’m doing the two dumbest things I could think of. I’m making the two biggest mistakes of my life: I’m writing a historical novel, and I’m also writing a campus novel,” he said. “It felt like if I had taken up jogging or something… so, so out of character.”
He also felt — wrongly, he now admits — that writing books set on college campuses “seems like a kind of tweedy, fusty old man’s game, when you’re washed up,” he explained. But he has found that the reason writers often set books in the past and on campuses is because people like both of those settings. “If I should be concerned [about] anything, it’s that people like this book too much,” Cohen said.
The Netanyahus is Cohen’s 10th book, but it is not his first to focus on Jewish themes. (Bloom referred to Cohen’s 2015 novel Book of Numbers as one of the “four best books by Jewish writers in America.”) Still, he rejects the notion that “Jewish” should be the foremost descriptor for a book with Jewish characters that addresses Israel and antisemitism. “I accept the idea that this is a Jewish book, whatever that means,” he said. “It’s not written in Jewish language.”
Instead, Cohen, 40, prefers to think of The Netanyahus as “a book about campus politics and identity politics.” Although set more than 60 years ago, Cohen said its plot has implications for the complicated issues playing out on campuses today, on topics like intellectual diversity and liberal values and concerns about safe spaces. But, he says, “for me to have sat down and written something about how identity has become ideology on campuses in the third millennium of Christ, that to me would be a little ridiculous.”
Instead, he wanted to write about a situation that could have implications for the modern campus discourse — while also turning readers’ ideas about the politics of the issue on their head.
“In many ways, Benzion Netanyahu would be in agreement with a lot of the politics going on on American campuses today and these sort of self-segregating ideologies. I think that in many ways, he wanted to found a safe space, but he wanted to call that safe space Israel, and he wanted to make a safe space with a nuclear program,” Cohen explained. Campus progressives might have more in common with one of the forefathers of Israeli right-wing politics than they may think. “I wanted to see how the left would feel when I associated them so closely with the right,” he said.
Still, by choosing to place a major historical figure at the center of the book, Cohen wanted his novel to have broader political implications.
“There was, at the heart of the story, a fable,” he pointed out. “It’s the man who is exiled from his land, whose son returns and becomes the king.”
Cohen thinks there are lessons to be learned from the Netanyahu family’s political moves. “I think it’s an important lesson about what we do with our political enemies,” Cohen argued. “If you don’t kill them, they only grow stronger. So there has to be some other way to bring them in.”