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In her speech at the DNC, Kamala Harris emphasized Israel’s right to defend itself but also spoke about the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, vowing to work so that “the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.” The audience cheered that sentence more than any other in her whole speech.

I saw two analyses of the speech: for the Israeli news site Ynet, Nadav Eyal wrote that Israel got exactly what it wanted from Harris; the progressive American news site Vox, meanwhile, wrote that Harris presented a different approach to the conflict compared to that of Biden, more supportive of the Palestinians. How do you see her speech?

I think she achieved what she wanted: that both of those kinds of reporting could come out, and that both AIPAC and J Street could endorse it. But if we shift attention to the Palestinian rights movement or the Uncommitted Movement, there is nothing there for them. The way the DNC treated the issue tells you everything you need to know about the ways things aren’t changing — for instance, [the fact there was] no Palestinian speaker or perspective on the stage.

Harris can talk about bad things that have happened to Palestinians, but from her words you wouldn’t know who caused it — a natural disaster? An earthquake? When Hamas does something bad, they are named and shamed; but when bad things happen to Palestinians, there is never any acknowledgement that they are caused by Israel.

In an episode of Two Nice Jewish Boys, which aired three weeks ago, host Weinstein said: “If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza, every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow. I would press it in a second.”

He claimed that “most Israelis” would do the same.

Meningher added that they would also want to wipe out Palestinians in “the territories”.

The clip of Weinstein and Meningher lauding the idea of all five million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank being wiped out has drawn fierce criticism online.

“Radio Rwanda in full effect here. This is deeply disturbing,” journalist Samira Mohyedeen wrote on X, referring to the broadcasts that incited genocide against the Tutsis during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Harvard economist Jeffery Sachs, whose ideas for quickly transforming communist economies to market-based systems were dubbed “shock therapy,” saw his name become synonymous with pain. Though he’d overseen successful reforms in a similar sitution in Poland, fellow Harvard acolytes Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais had a lot less luck when appointed economic czars in Boris Yeltsin’s Russia. Russians early on associated “shock therapy” with inflation and the removal of public safety nets they’d grown used to in Soviet times (though residents were awarded their apartments as property, and kept a few other important subsides like cheap home energy). I wish I’d taken a picture, but I remember seeing graffiti on an apartment building when visiting the arctic mining town of Vorkuta during the 1998 crisis. It read, ФОК ТЕРАПИЯ: “Fuck Therapy.”

Several weeks ago I heard from fellow Substacker and former Intercept writer Ryan Grim, to whom Sachs had sent a note and an essay. With the professor’s permission he was kind enough to let me read it. I was shocked. The gist of the Sachs essay was not that U.S. economic policies toward Russia were misguided or poorly executed, or even that he’s been misunderstood. Rather he described an American strategy in which economics were subservient at all times — and crucially, from the start — to a security mission. Led by military and security agencies that believed “the cold war never ended,” the U.S. viewed subjugation of Russia and NATO expansion as primary goals from the very beginning. In hindsight, this makes a lot more sense than the conventional wisdom, which is that Bill Clinton, Strobe Talbott and Dick Cheney tried to be friends with Russia, and just made a dog’s breakfast of it.

After Yeltsin was in office in what was now democratic Russia, Sachs thought for sure authorties would change their minds. No go. Here, he describes meeting with former George H.W. Bush Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger after proposing his “Marshall Plan” on TV

Ordinary Russians certainly believed Americans wanted to be their friends. I know this because they wanted to be my friend, throughout the “messy transition” period when people like Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin made exaggerated displays of bro-ship. However, I recall Russian attitudes turning after the bombing of Kosovo in 1999, and especially as NATO began expanding toward Moscow. Most Americans have not heard the story that in negotiations for the dissolution of the Soviet empire, James Baker III promised Eduard Shevardnadze NATO would not “leapfrog” East Germany toward Russia. CIA whistleblower Melvin Goodman confirmed that story to me years ago, and I remember it meant a lot to Russians.

In the telling of Sachs, NATO expansion all the way to Ukraine was a goal from the start. Why not bring in Russia as an imperfect, but more stable and democratic partner? Because “the men in the suits,” as Sachs described the natsec officials behind the White House, never wanted any part of a Russia that retained significant military power, or its own sphere of influence. “They sought and until today seek a unipolar world led by a hegemonic US, in which Russia and other nations will be subservient,” Sachs writes.

Meta’s company-funded oversight body ruled Wednesday that the social media giant shouldn’t automatically take down posts using the phrase “from the river to the sea,” a decades-old rallying cry for Palestinian nationalism that has reignited a national debate about the boundaries of acceptable speech.

Meta’s Oversight Board, an independent collection of academics, experts and lawyers who oversee thorny content decisions on the platform, said posts they examined using the phrase didn’t violate the company’s rules against hate speech, inciting violence or praising dangerous organizations.

“While [the phrase] can be understood by some as encouraging and legitimizing antisemitism and the violent elimination of Israel and its people, it is also often used as a political call for solidarity, equal rights and self-determination of the Palestinian people, and to end the war in Gaza,” the board said in its ruling.

A pro-Israel legal group in the United Kingdom has threatened to press charges against the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) chief Prosecutor, Karim Khan, over professional misconduct, claiming that his efforts to to issue arrest warrants against top Israeli officials are based on false premises.

According to the British newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, the organisation UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) wrote a letter to Khan dated 27 August, in which it attempts to refute Karim Khan’s accusations against Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant. Going through each point one by one, the letter provided what it asserted as detailed evidence disproving all the allegations against the top Israeli officials.

The Israel Air Force is crafting a recommendation to increase production of bombs, missiles and other ammunition at home, in an attempt to reduce its dependence on other countries, especially the United States, a senior air force officer says.

The air force's stance echoes one by Israel in 1967. After the Six-Day War, French President Charles de Gaulle imposed an arms embargo on Israel, which included tanks, missile boats and Mirage jets.

Israel then switched over its dependence on a foreign power to the United States, which provides the air force with all of its fighter planes and some of its bombs, missiles and intelligence equipment – on top of the development of joint weapons systems for all three layers of air defense.

The senior air force official told Haaretz that without the Americans' supply of weapons to the Israel Defense Forces, especially the air force, Israel would have had a hard time sustaining its war for more than a few months.

Last month, several Israeli army reservists crossed into the Gaza Strip and assaulted Palestinian truck drivers working for international aid agencies.

These drivers had been vetted by Israel's Shin Bet security service, which confirmed they were neither Hamas members nor suspected of terrorism. Although the IDF has footage of the incident, no one involved has been prosecuted or summoned for questioning so far.

The incident happened after reservists from the Magen unit, stationed on the Israeli side of the Gaza border, were requested to help with aid transfers at the Kerem Shalom crossing. Some reservists, uncomfortable with the mission, chose to harm the truck drivers in protest.

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It should have been a quiet public holiday in New York City, but anti-war activists and pro-Palestinian protesters had other plans.

Thousands of people roared through Manhattan on Monday afternoon, chanting and screaming, blocking traffic and blaring vuvuzelas as they reminded the city that a devastating war continues to unfold in Gaza.

On Monday, protesters said they wanted to emphasise one more thing: they would not be distracted by election fever while Palestinians were being bombed in Gaza.

"Both the Republicans and the Democrats are bipartisan when it comes to genocide, and we won't vote for people who have blood on their hands," Nerdeen Kiswani, chair of Within Our Lifetime, told Middle East Eye. We're boycotting the Democratic Party. We are calling for people to understand that Killer Kamala and Genocide Joe are just one in the same."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used a map of Israel that erases the occupied West Bank, marking it as Israeli territory, in an address to the media yesterday.

The Israeli premier appeared standing in front of a wall-sized digital map that obliterated the West Bank. Palestinians decried the move as an explicit annexation of the occupied territory by Tel Aviv.

The US has a “biblical” duty to support Israel’s annexation of the occupied West Bank, former US President Donald Trump’s ambassador to Israel argues in a new book, unveiling a plan for “one Jewish state" that he said he would share with Trump.

“President Trump has often said that he was indifferent to one state or two states - whatever the parties might agree to,” former US ambassador David Friedman writes in the book, One Jewish State: The Last, Best Hope to Resolve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

“His goals always were practical and targeted toward tangible improvements in the quality of life. I believe that if Israel will support this plan, he will as well,” according to a copy of the book obtained by The Forward.

Friedman argues the US should support Israel’s annexation “based first and foremost on biblical prophecies and values”, saying that such a policy “hearkens back to basic Judeo-Christian values of kindness, human dignity, humility and prosperity”.

Friedman told The Forward he will share his annexation plan with Trump “at the appropriate time”.

Source https://www.nytimes.com/1899/06/20/archives/conference-of-zionists-elect-delegates-at-their-meeting-in.html