Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 135
December 3, 2023
December 3, 2023
It’s been a while since a night off, so let’s take one.
I’m still on the road, but back home, traps are coming up as winter comes into view....
[Photo by Buddy Poland.]
December 2, 2023
December 2, 2023
On Wednesday, November 29, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) delivered a landmark speech on American antisemitism, inspired by the fact that protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza after the October 7 attack by Hamas have descended into an embrace of Hamas’s stated goal of the complete destruction of Israel. From there it has, for some people, been a short step to attacking Jewish people in general.
“I feel compelled to speak because I am the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in America; in fact, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official ever in American history,” Schumer said. “And I have noticed a significant disparity between how Jewish people regard the rise of antisemitism, and how many of my non-Jewish friends regard it. To us, the Jewish people, the rise of antisemitism is a crisis—a five-alarm fire that must be extinguished. For so many other people of good will, it is merely a problem, a matter of concern. Today, I want to use my platform to explain why so many Jewish people see this problem as a crisis.”
Schumer anchored his speech in the long history of civil rights advocacy on the part of American Jews. In 1909, New York Jew Henry Moskowitz was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Jack Greenberg, whose family fled pogroms in Europe, served 23 years at the head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund after its founder, famous Black jurist Thurgood Marshall, stepped down.
In 1958, in a speech to the American Jewish Congress, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “My people were brought to America in chains. Your people were driven here to escape the chains fashioned for them in Europe. Our unity is born of our common struggle for centuries, not only to rid ourselves of bondage, but to make oppression of any people by others an impossibility.”
Five years later, the president of the American Jewish Congress, New Jersey rabbi Dr. Joachim Prinz, spoke before King at the March on Washington. “I speak to you as an American Jew,” he told the crowd. “As Americans we share the profound concern of millions of people about the shame and disgrace of inequality and injustice which make a mockery of the great American idea. As Jews we bring to this great demonstration, in which thousands of us proudly participate, a two-fold experience—one of the spirit and one of our history…. It…is not merely sympathy and compassion for the Black people of America that motivates us. It is above all and beyond all such sympathies and emotions a sense of complete identification and solidarity born of our own painful historic experience.”
It was that painful historic experience and an attempt to make oppression impossible that led Jewish activists to support the civil rights movement. In the Freedom Summer of 1964, half the civil rights workers who traveled to Mississippi were Jewish, including Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, murdered alongside Black activist James Chaney outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi.
That history of Jewish support for civil rights is written across the landscape of our country: the main bridge dominating the Boston skyline is named for civil rights worker Leonard P. Zakim in memory of his work to “build bridges of understanding between different ethnic, racial, and religious groups,” as his wife said at the bridge’s dedication.
In his speech, Schumer tied into that history, saying that “bigotry against one group of Americans is bigotry against all” and noting that he had worked to protect Asian-Americans and Arab-Americans, as well as to protect houses of worship for all religions from extremists. He also noted, at some length, that it is possible both to abhor Hamas and to deplore the destruction that has rained down on the Palestinian people.
But Schumer expressed dismay that as hatred toward American Jews is rising dangerously—the Anti-Defamation League estimates that antisemitic incidents have increased nearly 300 percent since October 7—some Americans, people that Jews believed were “ideological fellow travelers,” are celebrating the October 7 attack as an assault on “colonizers.”
“Not long ago,” Schumer said, “many of us marched together for Black and Brown lives, we stood against anti-Asian hatred, we protested bigotry against the LGBTQ community, we fought for reproductive justice out of the recognition that injustice against one oppressed group is injustice against all. But apparently, in the eyes of some, that principle does not extend to the Jewish people.”
“Many, if not most, Jewish Americans, including myself, support a two-state solution,” he said, “We disagree with Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu and his administration’s encouragement of militant settlers in the West Bank, which has become a considerable obstacle to a two-state solution.” But “the most extreme rhetoric against Israel has emboldened antisemites who are attacking Jewish people simply because they are Jewish.”
These attacks, Schumer said, conjure up the history of millennia in which Jews were slaughtered. “[W]hen Jewish people hear chants like ‘From the river to the sea,’ a founding slogan of Hamas, a terrorist group that is not shy about their goal to eradicate the Jewish people, in Israel and around the globe, we are alarmed.”
“More than anything, we are worried—quite naturally, given the twists and turns of history—about where these actions and sentiments could eventually lead. Now, this is no intellectual exercise for us. For many Jewish people, it feels like a matter of survival, informed once again by history.”
“Can you understand why Jewish people feel isolated when we hear some praise Hamas and chant its vicious slogan?” Schumer asked. “Can you blame us for feeling vulnerable only 80 years after Hitler wiped out half of the Jewish population across the world while many countries turned their back? Can you appreciate the deep fear we have about what Hamas might do if left to their own devices? Because the long arc of Jewish history teaches us a lesson that is hard to forget: ultimately, that we are alone.”
Schumer begged the American people “of all creeds and backgrounds” to defend the “pluralistic, multiethnic democracy” that has enabled Jewish people in the United States “to flourish alongside so many other immigrant groups.”
He asked them to “learn the history of the Jewish people, who have been abandoned repeatedly by their fellow countrymen—left isolated and alone to combat antisemitism—with disastrous results,” and to “reject the illogical and antisemitic double standard that is once again being applied to the plight of Jewish victims and hostages, to some of the actions of the Israeli government, and even to the very existence of a Jewish state.”
Schumer asked all Americans “to understand why Jewish people defend Israel.” They do not “wish harm on Palestinians,” he said, but instead “fear a world where Israel is forced to tolerate the existence of groups like Hamas that want to wipe out all Jewish people from the planet. We fear a world where Israel, the place of refuge for Jewish people, will no longer exist. If there is no Israel,” he said, “there will be no place, no place for the Jewish people to go when they are persecuted in other countries.”
In view of history and of rising antisemitism, Jewish Americans are afraid of what the future might bring, Schumer said. “And perhaps worst of all,” he said, “many Jewish Americans feel alone to face all of this, abandoned by too many of our friends and allies in our greatest time of need.”
He implored “every person and every community and every institution to stand with Jewish Americans and denounce antisemitism in all of its forms.”
“We are stewards of the flames of liberty, tolerance, and equality that warm our American melting pot, and make it possible for Jewish Americans to prosper alongside Palestinian Americans, and every other immigrant group from all over the world,” he concluded.
“Are we a nation that can defy the regular course of human history, where the Jewish people have been ostracized, expelled, and massacred over and over again?” he asked. Then he answered his own question: “Yes. And I will do everything in my power—as Senate Majority Leader, as a Jewish American, as a citizen of a free society, as a human being—to make it happen.”
“Ken Y-hi Ratzon,” he concluded. “May it be his will.”
—
Notes:
https://www.justice.gov/opa/blog/justice-department-recognizes-jewish-american-heritage-month
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/29/schumer-antisemitism-speech/
December 1, 2023
December 1, 2023
Former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court, died today. Named to the court by President Ronald Reagan to honor a campaign promise, O’Connor was known as a pragmatist who paid attention to the real-world consequences of the court’s decisions and who was willing to rethink her positions.
Traditionally, this understanding of how court decisions affect lives has come from justices who have held elective office before their elevation, and O’Connor fit the bill: she served in the Arizona state senate for 5 years, eventually becoming majority leader. Since she stepped down in 2006, there have been no judges on the court with that elective experience, and the court has swung hard to the right.
For the sixth time in U.S. history, the House of Representatives today voted to expel one of its members, Representative George Santos (R-NY). Expulsion requires two thirds of the House. The resolution to expel Santos passed by a vote of 311 to 114, with 105 Republicans voting with all but four Democrats (two voted no and two voted present).
Representative Max Miller (R-OH) told his colleagues that Santos’s campaign had charged both Miller’s credit card and that of his mother for contributions that exceeded legal limits and of which they were both unaware. “You, sir, are a crook,” he told Santos.
But the top four members of the Republican leadership—Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA), Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN), and Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-NY)—and more than 100 other Republicans voted against expelling Santos, who is under criminal indictment and by whom a House Ethics Committee report suggested even more “uncharged and unlawful conduct.”
Santos was a reliable right-wing vote, and losing him will make the Republicans' majority even slimmer than it already was, suggesting that Republican leadership and much of the rank and file were more interested in power than concerned about criminal behavior among their conference.
“To hell with this place,” Santos said after the expulsion.
The quest for power also showed up this week when a federal appeals court released secret text messages from Representative Scott Perry (R-PA) to other participants in the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, revealing his frantic attempts to end the right of the American people to choose their president.
In that attempt, Perry communicated with Justice Department attorney Jeff Clark, Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, many of Trump’s lawyers, and numerous Pennsylvania state lawmakers including Doug Mastriano, none of whom contacted authorities about the attempt to overthrow our democratic system.
Perry also contacted other Republican representatives, including Jody Hice (R-GA), Jim Jordan (R-OH), Chip Roy (R-TX), and representative-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) about the effort. They didn’t alert anyone to the anti-democratic effort, either.
Stopped by a gag order from attacking the staff of Judge Arthur Engoron, who is overseeing the fraud trial of the Trump Organization in Manhattan, former president Trump has turned to attacking Engoron’s family. Trump has alleged on social media that Engoron’s wife has been posting about him on social media, but she has not: the posts Trump has identified are not from her, although blog posts by far-right extremist Laura Loomer said they were.
Trump seems to be trying to get out from under the legal cases against him by threatening participants in the legal system and by delaying the trials until next year’s election. It is his position that if he wins the presidency in 2024, Trump’s lawyer told a judge in Georgia today, Trump cannot be tried as part of the racketeering case of those who tried to overturn the 2020 election until at least 2029.
In the Washington Post yesterday, neoconservative scholar Robert Kagan warned that “a Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable,” and today in The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last agreed. He pointed to a conversation neoconservative thinker William Kristol had this week with journalist Jonathan Karl, in which Karl described a dystopian future painted not by Democrats but by former Trump employees: a government full of Trump loyalists who understand “that they are free to break the law because they will be pardoned” as Trump seeks retribution against those he sees as his enemies.
“The storm is coming,” Last warned readers. “The world looks normal right now, but it is not. Forces are in motion that will bring us to a point of national crisis one year from now.”
And yet, in Washington, D.C., the federal judge overseeing the case concerning Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election today rejected Trump’s request to throw the case out on the grounds that, as president, he had absolute immunity for anything he did while in office.
Judge Tanya Chutkan wrote that being president “does not confer a lifelong ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ pass.” Trump’s “four-year service as Commander in Chief did not bestow on him the divine right of kings to evade the criminal accountability that governs his fellow citizens,” she added.
Trump is not exactly going out of its way to attract voters, either. He has once again embraced the idea of getting rid of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. More than 40 million Americans get their health coverage under the ACA, and as many as one out of every two people too young for Medicare have a pre-existing health condition that, without the protection of the ACA, could make healthcare insurers discriminate against them.
Trump says he will replace the ACA with something better, but his advisors acknowledge that they have no plans to do more than chip away at the existing law.
President Joe Biden and Democratic leaders are calling attention to Trump’s threats against the ACA and today are touting that under Democratic governor Roy Cooper, North Carolina has become the 40th state to expand Medicaid under the ACA. This means that 600,000 North Carolinians are now eligible for healthcare coverage.
“Despite this progress, MAGA Republicans still want to get rid of the Affordable Care Act,” Biden said, “just like my predecessor tried and failed to do repeatedly.”
Other Republican leaders don’t seem terribly worried about attracting anyone but their base, either. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) was in the news today for having written the foreword for and promoted a book that advanced conspiracy theories against Democrats and attacked poor voters as “unsophisticated and susceptible to government dependency.”
And perhaps even the base will be dismayed by news out of Florida, where the chair of the state Republican Party, Christian Ziegler, is under investigation for sexual battery and rape. Ziegler is married to Bridget Ziegler, the co-founder of Moms for Liberty; she has said public schools are “indoctrination centers for the radical left,” and that she wants to bring “religious values” into them.
The Florida Center for Government Accountability, which broke the story, calls the Zieglers “one of Florida’s top political power couples,” close to both governor Ron DeSantis and Trump.
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Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/01/politics/george-santos-expel-resolution-vote/index.html
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/gop-congressman-says-roughly-400-donors-were-ripped-off-by-santos
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/29/scott-perry-texts-unsealed-00129195
https://themessenger.com/politics/trump-judge-engoron-wife-social-media-posts
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2023/12/01/congress/new-leadership-fury-00129614
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/01/trump-georgia-trial-date-00129669
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions
/2023/11/30/trump-dictator-2024-election-robert-kagan/
The BulwarkThere’s a storm coming. We all know it. And yet Americans are pretending that everything is normal.I want to connect the dots running from the monster Bob Kagan piece that Charlie talked about this morning to Bill Kristol’s interview with Jonathan Karl. It’s dark and it’s urgent. Buckle up…Read more21 hours ago · 311 likes · 490 comments · Jonathan V. Lasthttps://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/us/florida-republican-party-christian-ziegler.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/30/trump-obamacare-repeal-00129223
https://www.cms.gov/CCIIO/Resources/Forms-Reports-and-Other-Resources/preexisting
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/30/trump-obamacare-repeal-00129223
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/01/us/sandra-day-oconnor-dead.html
November 30, 2023
November 30, 2023
Although the original truce deal between Hamas and Israel ended this morning, negotiations kept it going for another day. The extension was hard won after Hamas could not produce a list that had ten women and children on it, a condition of the deal. Israel rejected a list of seven living women and children and the bodies of three more Hamas claimed were killed by Israeli airstrikes. The Israeli government did agree to accept the two Israeli-Russian hostages who were released yesterday as part of Thursday’s list.
Israel has agreed to extend the truce so long as Hamas produces ten living women and children a day, but negotiators think that Hamas will not be able to meet that requirement much longer. When it cannot, Israel says it will recommence the war.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who is currently in Israel for the fourth time since the October 7 attack, said today that he is there to work “to extend the pause so that we can continue to get more hostages out of Gaza and more assistance in.” After describing the pressing needs of the Palestinians in Gaza, he asserted that the government of Israel “agrees with the imperative of humanitarian assistance and the need to sustain it.”
Blinken noted that Israel “intends to resume its military operations against Hamas when Hamas stops releasing hostages,” and he said the United States agrees that “Israel has the right to do everything it can to ensure that the slaughter Hamas carried out on October 7th can never be repeated.” That means, he said, “Hamas cannot remain in control of Gaza,” and he pointed to an attack this morning on a Jerusalem bus stop, for which Hamas claimed responsibility, that killed three Israeli citizens and wounded at least six others, including two American citizens.
But, Blinken continued, “the way Israel defends itself matters. It’s imperative that Israel act in accordance with international humanitarian law and the laws of war, even when confronting a terrorist group that respects neither.” Blinken said that when he met today with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior Israeli officials, “I made clear that before Israel resumes major military operations, it must put in place humanitarian civilian protection plans that minimize further casualties of innocent Palestinians.”
They must, he said, protect Gazans by designating places in central and southern Gaza where they are out of the line of fire. They must avoid more displacement of citizens in Gaza and allow those already displaced to return as soon as conditions permit. They must avoid further damage to “life-critical infrastructure, like hospitals, like power stations, like water facilities.”
Even though Hamas embeds itself with civilians, “Israel has…one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world,” Blinken said. “It is capable of neutralizing the threat posed by Hamas while minimizing harm to innocent men, women, and children. And it has an obligation to do so. Ultimately, that’s not just the right thing to do, it’s also in Israel’s security interest.”
Blinken said that Netanyahu and the members of the Israeli war cabinet “agreed with the need for this approach.” Blinken added that he had “underscored the imperative to the United States that the massive loss of civilian life and displacement of the scale we saw in northern Gaza not be repeated in the south. As I told the prime minister, intent matters, but so does the result.”
Blinken noted that Hamas, too, could defuse the situation. It could release the remaining hostages immediately, “stop using civilians as human shields and stop using civilian infrastructure to stage and launch terrorist attacks.” It “could lay down its arms, surrender the leaders who are responsible for the slaughter, the torture, the rapes of October 7th. Hamas could renounce its stated goal of eliminating Israel, killing Jews, and repeating the atrocities of October 7th again and again and again.”
He added that “everyone around the world who cares about protecting innocent civilians, innocent lives, should be calling on Hamas—indeed, demanding of Hamas—that it immediately stop its murderous acts of terror and deplorable use of innocent men, women, and children as human shields.”
Blinken reiterated that he had discussed with both Israel and Palestinian leaders in the West Bank the need to keep the conflict from spreading, “whether to the West Bank, to Israel’s northern border, or to the broader region.” To that end, he expressed “our deep concerns about steps that could escalate tensions in the West Bank, including extremist settler violence and proposals from parts of the Israeli coalition government to further expand settlements,” both key policies of the Netanyahu government. “I made clear our expectations about addressing these issues,” he said.
He clarified for a reporter that the U.S. is “looking to the Israeli Government to take some additional steps to really put a stop to this. And at the same time, we’re considering our own steps.”
Breaking the cycle of violence in order to ensure Israel’s security, he said, “demands improving the lives of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank in immediate, tangible ways, and providing them with a credible path toward their legitimate aspiration for statehood.” To a reporter’s question, Blinken answered that the administration does, in fact, hope to see a revitalized Palestinian Authority that can speak for the Palestinians.
This was an extraordinarily strong statement, delivered in Tel Aviv itself, and a far cry from Blinken’s usual diplomatic language, which was on display at a press opportunity with Israeli president Isaac Herzog before the two began their meeting. Herzog eulogized “a giant, a titan—Dr. Henry Kissinger,” expressing admiration for the former secretary of state, who died yesterday, and praising the “peaceful results” of his “great decisions…and processes” (likely referring to Kissinger’s work to end the 1973 Mideast war after Syria and Egypt attacked Israel).
But for all that Herzog and others praised Kissinger, his pragmatic view of diplomacy meant that he oversaw the coup that deposed popularly elected Chilean president Salvador Allende and replaced him with vicious right–wing dictator General Augusto Pinochet, prolonged the war in Vietnam, supported the secret bombing of Cambodia, and so on, becoming responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands and, for many people, becoming the face of American arrogance in foreign affairs, a legacy Biden’s State Department is still working to overcome.
Blinken answered: “Few people were better students of history—even fewer people did more to shape history—than Henry Kissinger.”
—
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/30/politics/israel-and-hamas-truce-extension
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/30/jerusalem-bus-stop-shooting-attack-killed-injured
https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-at-a-press-availability-43/
November 29, 2023
November 29, 2023
In the final exchange of hostages taken by Hamas for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel under the current truce, Hamas released 16 people—10 Israelis and four Thai nationals, along with two Russian-Israeli women in a separate release—while Israel released 30 people from its jails.
Negotiators from Qatar, Egypt, Israel, and the U.S. are rushing to try to get another truce in place, even as far-right Israeli leaders are pressuring Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to restart the assault on Hamas. Far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir warned today that unless he does, Ben-Gvir’s faction will leave the government coalition Netanyahu leads. “Stopping the war = breaking apart the government,” Ben-Gvir said.
Losing that faction would not overturn the government, but it would weaken Netanyahu enough that he could have to call elections. Netanyahu, who remains under indictment for bribery and fraud, is eager to stay in power, but recent polls show his popularity is perilously low: only 27% of Israelis in one recent poll said they would vote for him. Two members of his staff told Sheera Frenkel of the New York Times he wants to avoid an election at all costs.
Shortly after Ben-Gvir’s statement, Netanyahu said: “There is no situation in which we do not go back to fighting until the end.”
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to Israel today with a different agenda than Netanyahu’s. “We'd like to see the pause extended because what it has enabled, first and foremost is hostages being released and being united with their families,” Blinken said. “It's also enabled us to surge humanitarian assistance into the people of Gaza who so desperately need it. So, its continuation, by definition means that more hostages would be coming home, more assistance would be getting in.”
The foreign ministers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization met today in Brussels, Belgium, where they met with Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba as part of the NATO-Ukraine Council. Before the meeting, Kuleba noted that Ukraine is “pretty much becoming a de facto NATO army, in terms of our technical capacity, management approaches and principles of running an army."
A statement by the NATO-Ukraine Council agreed that it was deepening the NATO-Ukraine relationship, vowing that allies would “continue their support for as long as it takes” and declaring, “A strong, independent Ukraine is vital for the stability of the Euro-Atlantic area.” In the statement, Ukraine also committed to reforming the government and security sector as it moves toward a future NATO membership.
David Andelman, a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times and CBS News who now writes Andelman Unleashed, noted today in CNN that President Biden has brought a very clear-eyed set of principles to foreign affairs, making him “one of the rare presidents who has accomplished something quite extraordinary: He has carefully defined and quite successfully defended democracy and democratic values before a host of existential challenges.”
In the Middle East he has defended Israel, which The Economist’s Democracy Index identifies as the only democracy in the Middle East and North Africa, while also trying to restrain the Israeli government and to get humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, all while (so far) keeping Iran and Hezbollah from spreading the conflict. Andelman also called out that Biden avoided the direct conflict with Russia that Russia's president Vladimir Putin so clearly wanted, supporting Ukraine but delaying its admission to NATO and ratcheting up military aid slowly enough that the U.S. did not get directly involved.
Biden is defending democracy where it has a foothold and can survive and then prosper, Andelman says, noting that he had little interest in continuing to send U.S. troops to Afghanistan, where it seemed clear democracy “never really took root.” Andelman writes, “Its ill-conceived and improbable ‘elections’ were little more than window dressing on a deeply flawed and corrupt kleptocracy that America had been backing with the bodies of thousands of its troops.”
Defending democracy “is something that makes [Biden] tick,” Andelman writes, “and remain appealing to others, as I’ve seen in so many parts of the world.”
The administration has also been crystal clear that its approach to governance at home is also designed to protect democracy by demonstrating that a democracy can do more for people than an authoritarian government, but in a speech at a campaign reception in Houston, Texas, Vice President Kamala Harris acknowledged that voters somehow don’t seem to understand that transformation.
Even as former president Trump threatened to use the government to silence press outlets he doesn't like, Harris noted the billions of dollars invested in infrastructure and clean energy, allowing the U.S. to be a global leader in new technologies; the cap of insulin at $35; rural broadband and the clean-up of lead pipes; and pointed out that all of the things the Democrats have accomplished are “incredibly popular with the American people.” The challenge, she noted, is getting people to understand these transformations, and which party is responsible for them.
“[T]here’s a duality to the nature of democracies,” Harris said. “On the one hand, …it is very much about strength—the strength that it gives individuals in terms of the protection of their rights and freedoms and liberties. When a democracy is intact, it is very strong in its capacity to lift the people up.” But, she added, “It is also very fragile. It is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it.”
Today the Democrats’ economic program got another boost with the news that the economy grew faster in the third quarter than previously reported, coming in at a blistering 5.2%, and that a record 200.4 million shoppers visited stores and websites on the five days after Thanksgiving, the traditional start of the holiday shopping period. That number reflects people’s confidence in their own finances, but also that the economy appears to be cooling and there are therefore bargains to be had.
A new analysis by the Treasury Department shows that the Inflation Reduction Act, which puts money into climate change technologies, is delivering investment to communities that have benefited least from the economic growth of the past few decades. Today, President Joe Biden presented his case for his economic policy directly to one such community in the Colorado district of MAGA Republican mouthpiece Representative Lauren Boebert.
Biden visited CS Wind, the largest wind tower manufacturer in the world, which is expanding its operations in Pueblo, Colorado, thanks to the IRA. Boebert voted against the IRA, calling it “dangerous for America” and saying it was her “easiest no vote yet.” But the new $200 million expansion will create 850 new jobs, and CS Wind has already hired 500 new employees. And a solar project in the district will bring both power and as many as 250 jobs.
The White House listed the many projects underway in the district thanks to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, including nearly $30.2 million to redesign and revitalize streets and $160 million for a 103-mile pipeline that will bring clean water from Pueblo to 50,000 people in southeastern Colorado. Boebert called the law “garbage” and “wasteful” and said it was “punishment for rural America.”
“President Biden made a commitment to be a President for all Americans, regardless of political party, and he’s kept that promise,” the White House said. “The Biden-Harris Administration will continue to deliver for workers and families in Colorado’s third congressional district and across the country—even if self-described MAGA Republicans like Representative Boebert put politics ahead of jobs and opportunities created by Bidenomics.“
Biden was even blunter. After listing the benefits the new laws have brought to Boebert’s district, he said: “She, along with every single Republican colleague, voted against the law that made these investments in jobs possible…. And then she voted to repeal key parts of this law, and she called this law a massive failure. You all know you’re part of a massive failure? Tell that to the 850 Coloradans who got new jobs.… It all sounds like a massive failure in thinking by the congresswoman and her colleagues.”
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Notes:
https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-news-11-29-2023-57e73a26c647ecd97e77afe19c08e077
https://www.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news-11-29-23/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/29/world/middleeast/netanyahu-cease-fire-politics.html
https://www.timesofisrael.com/ben-gvir-threatens-to-tear-down-government-if-war-not-resumed/
https://www.politico.eu/article/nato-vows-to-stick-with-ukraine-as-long-as-it-takes/
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_220818.htm
Andelman UnleashedUnleashed Voices: In the Kremlin’s shadow—competing crises This is the latest compelling individual, to whom Andelman Unleashed has given voice, exploring the most critical issues of our time. RIGA, Latvia—The Baltic nations and Europe broadly find themselves today in a most difficult and dangerous convergence of crises: Torn by an existential conflict on their eastern flank when Russia invaded Ukraine, then a c…Read morea month ago · 10 likes · 5 comments · David A. Andelmanhttps://www.cnn.com/2023/11/29/opinions/biden-democracy-israel-ukraine-taiwan-andelman/index.html
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-third-quarter-economic-growth-revised-up-52-2023-11-29/
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/28/black-friday-weekend-shopping-turnout-soars-to-a-record.html
https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/the-inflation-reduction-act-a-place-based-analysis
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/11/29/politics/biden-gop-economy-boebert/index.html
Twitter (X):
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November 28, 2023
On this fifth day of the pause in the fighting between Hamas and Israel, Hamas released 10 Israeli and dual-national hostages and two Thai nationals; Israel said it released another 30 Palestinians from imprisonment. An Israeli official told the Washington Post that they expect another two or three days of the pause and hostage-prisoner exchanges, “after which we either resume operations in Gaza or potentially reach a follow-on agreement.”
Central Intelligence Agency director William J. Burns arrived in the city of Doha, the capital of Qatar, today to meet with Qatar’s prime minister and Burns’s counterparts from Israel and Egypt: David Barnea, chief of Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad, and Abbas Kamel, director of Egyptian General Intelligence. They will discuss a broader deal for a longer truce between Israel and Hamas.
Also today, the U.S. airlifted more than 54,000 pounds of United Nations–provided medical supplies, food, and winter clothing to Egypt for delivery to Gaza. The administration took credit for the humanitarian aid transfers underway, noting that when Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel on October 16, Israeli policy was that it would shut Gaza off from water, fuel, and supplies until Hamas released all the hostages.
Blinken cut a deal for aid before Biden arrived two days later—the deal was a condition of his visit—and trucks began to travel into Gaza on October 21. Since then, deliveries have ramped up to 240 trucks a day of medicine, shelter, food, and supplies to keep infrastructure functioning. This is still not enough, an official told reporters: it is imperative to get commercial contractors back in service in Gaza. Fuel, which is crucial for purifying water to prevent disease, among other things, is also making it into Gaza, but not in the quantities required.
The pause in fighting has enabled supply deliveries to ramp up significantly. A White House official acknowledged that “from the President on down, we understand that what is getting in is nowhere near enough for normal life in Gaza, and we will continue to push for additional steps, including the restoration of the flow of commercial goods and additional basic services.”
Here at home, the 2024 presidential campaign is heating up. This morning, Katherine Faulders, Mike Levine, and Alexander Mallin of ABC News broke the story that former vice president Mike Pence had offered to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office new details about Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Pence allegedly said he had told Trump that they had lost the election, but Trump turned to those lawyers who would tell him otherwise.
Pence also allegedly decided—briefly—that he would not attend the January 6 counting of the electoral votes because it would be “too hurtful to my friend,” Trump. But his son, a Marine, later reminded him that they had both taken the same oath to “support and defend the Constitution,” making Pence reconsider his plan to avoid the ballot counting.
Also on the topic of Trump’s attempt to overturn the election was a story by Jamie Gangel, Jeremy Herb, and Elizabeth Stuart of CNN about a forthcoming book by former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY). The trio obtained an early copy of the book, which will be released on December 5, and say it outlines the many lawmakers and media figures who knew Trump had lost the election but lied about it.
“So strong is the lure of power that men and women who had once seemed reasonable and responsible were suddenly willing to violate their oath to the Constitution out of political expediency and loyalty to Donald Trump,” Cheney says. She notes that now-chair of the House Judiciary Committee Jim Jordan (R-OH) didn’t appear to care about rules or legal processes surrounding the election results. “The only thing that matters is winning,” he told her.
Cheney wrote of how she and then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi came to respect each other over their common defense of the Constitution, a nonpartisan stance that foreshadows her conclusion that Trump is dangerous to the country. “Every one of us—Republican, Democrat, Independent—must work and vote together to ensure that Donald Trump and those who have appeased, enabled, and collaborated with him are defeated,” she writes. “This is the cause of our time.”
Still, MAGA Republicans are defending the former president, in part by trying to launch an impeachment case against President Joe Biden. But that effort took a hit today. Representative Lisa McClain (R-MI), who sits on the House Oversight Committee that is out front on the impeachment effort, admitted on Fox Business that the committee has found no evidence that President Biden changed any policies after what Republicans claim was a bribe from China.
Also today, the lawyer for the president’s 53-year-old son Hunter responded to a subpoena from Representative James Comer (R-KY), chair of the Oversight Committee, for Hunter Biden’s testimony in what Republicans insist is business corruption (there is no evidence of such wrongdoing by either Hunter Biden or his father).
Although his lawyer noted that the committee appeared to be ignoring the business activities of the Trump family, whose members were actually in office whereas the younger Biden is a private citizen, he said that Biden agreed to testify but that he would do so in a public hearing, not in the closed-door session Comer wanted.
“We have seen you use closed-door sessions to manipulate, even distort the facts and mislead the public,” Biden’s lawyer wrote, and indeed, Comer did not even attend the July closed-door deposition of Biden’s former business partner Devon Archer but nonetheless went on television to misrepresent Archer’s denial that Hunter Biden’s father was involved in the business. “If, as you claim, your efforts are important and involve issues that Americans should know about, then let the light shine on these proceedings,” the lawyer wrote.
Comer, whose previous hearings have tended to blow up in his face as well-prepared Democrats tear into the Republicans, rejected the idea of holding a hearing in public.
“Let me get this straight,” Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top Democrat on the committee, said. “After wailing and moaning for ten months about Hunter Biden and alluding to some vast unproven family conspiracy, after sending Hunter Biden a subpoena to appear and testify, Chairman Comer and the Oversight Republicans now reject his offer to appear before the full Committee and the eyes of the world and to answer any questions that they pose? What an epic humiliation for our colleagues and what a frank confession that they are simply not interested in the facts and have no confidence in their own case or the ability of their own Members to pursue it.
“After the miserable failure of their impeachment hearing in September, Chairman Comer has now apparently decided to avoid all Committee hearings where the public can actually see for itself the logical, rhetorical and factual contortions they have tied themselves up in,” Raskin said. “The evidence has shown time and again President Biden has committed no wrongdoing, much less an impeachable offense. Chairman Comer’s insistence that Hunter Biden’s interview should happen behind closed doors proves it once again. What the Republicans fear most is sunlight and the truth.”
MAGA Republican lawmakers’ defense of Trump ran into another snag today as Americans for Prosperity Action, an anti-Trump super PAC backed by billionaire Charles Koch, announced it was backing former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. A memo from AFP Action said Haley offers “the opportunity to turn the page on the current political era.”
The AFP Action endorsement is a window on the reaction of pro-business Republicans to the party’s recent shift to embrace Christian nationalism. Today’s party rejects small government and a market economy, which was the rallying cry of the Reagan Revolution, in favor of laws based on right-wing religious ideology. As Florida governor Ron DeSantis showed with his attack on Disney for supporting LGBTQ+ rights, this ideology would require businesses to ignore market forces and instead bow to the will of a strong government.
AFP Action stayed out of the presidential races of 2016 and 2020, but now, saying that Haley’s policies are close to AFP Action’s free-market ideology, it is taking a stand against the MAGA movement. Even if Haley doesn’t win the nomination—and that looks unlikely considering Trump’s commanding lead—weakening Trump so he is defeated in the general election would get rid of the MAGA base and enable libertarian-leaning business leaders to regain control of the Republican Party.
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/11/28/world/israel-hamas-gaza-war-news
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/28/politics/cia-director-qatar-meetings-israel-egypt/index.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/11/28/cia-william-burns-israel-hamas-hostages/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/28/israel-hamas-war-news-gaza-hostages-palestine/
https://abcnews.go.com/US/pence-told-jan-6-special-counsel-harrowing-details/story?id=105183391
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/28/politics/liz-cheney-trump-mccarthy-book
https://apnews.com/united-states-presidential-election-9d4595ba4f3140c6bb6a3473a91f4a4c
https://www.thedailybeast.com/james-comer-has-a-new-unlikely-story-for-missed-deposition
https://www.politico.com/f/?id=0000018c-161a-dbbc-a1de-7e7e397f0000
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/28/biden-impeachment-probe-republicans/
November 27, 2023
November 27, 2023
Today Hamas released 11 more hostages into Israel; in exchange, Israel released 33 Palestinians from prison. Both sides have agreed to extend the truce for two days and to continue the exchanges. Hamas has committed to releasing an additional 20 women and children, and if the past pattern holds, Israeli releases will be three times that number.
The four-day pause in fighting has permitted aid to Gaza to increase. Since the 21st of October, when the first aid trucks began to cross into Gaza, more than 2,000 trucks of aid and assistance have gone in.
Once the deal was secure, President Joe Biden issued a statement: “I have remained deeply engaged over the last few days to ensure that this deal—brokered and sustained through extensive U.S. mediation and diplomacy—can continue to deliver results.” He noted that more than 50 hostages have been released and that the U.S. “has led the humanitarian response into Gaza—building on years of work as the largest funder of humanitarian assistance for the Palestinian people.”
In his third trip to the region since the October 7 attack, Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to Israel and the West Bank later this week. He is currently in Brussels for a meeting of foreign ministers in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and will go to the Middle East from there. The State Department says that, among other things, Blinken will “discuss the principles he outlined in Tokyo on November 8, tangible steps to further the creation of a future Palestinian state, and the need to prevent the conflict from widening.”
In that November 8 address, Blinken outlined the U.S. administration’s policy for the future of Gaza. “[K]ey elements,” he said, are “no forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza—not now, not after the war. No use of Gaza as a platform for terrorism or other violent attacks. No reoccupation of Gaza after the conflict ends. No attempt to blockade or besiege Gaza. No reduction in the territory of Gaza. We must also ensure no terrorist threats can emanate from the West Bank.”
Blinken said that “the Palestinian people’s voices and aspirations” must be “at the center of post-crisis governance in Gaza” and that “Palestinian-led governance and Gaza unified with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority” are U.S. requirements.
Gaza will need a “sustained mechanism for reconstruction,” Blinken said on November 8, “and a pathway to Israelis and Palestinians living side by side in states of their own, with equal measures of security, freedom, opportunity, and dignity.”
At home, the administration today announced nearly 30 new actions to strengthen the country’s supply chains, both because smoother supply chains should reduce consumer prices and because stronger supply chains should ensure that the U.S. doesn’t fall short of critical supplies, such as medicines.
On February 24, 2021, about a month after he took office, Biden established a task force across more than a dozen departments and agencies to figure out where supply chains were vulnerable. After research and analysis, as well as input from industry leaders, experts, and the public, the task force issued a 250-page report in June 2021.
Their recommendations, along with investments in key industries such as semiconductors and in infrastructure, helped to untangle the supply chains that remained snarled through 2021 (remember the 100 cargo ships waiting to dock in fall 2021? Now, two years later, there are fewer than 10). From October 2021 to October 2023, supply chain pressure, which is tracked by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, fell from near-record highs to a record low. That, in turn, has helped to lower inflation.
Now Biden has established a new White House Council on Supply Chain Resilience to make sure those supply chains stay strong. He will also use the Defense Production Act—a law from 1950 that requires companies to make a certain product deemed necessary to national defense in exchange for guarantees that the product will have a buyer—to make more essential medicines in the United States and to increase production of new clean energy technologies. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, one of the many government entities involved in supply chains, will invest $196 million to strengthen domestic food supply chains.
The country is also working with other countries on this issue: two weeks ago, Biden signed a supply chain agreement with 13 countries in the Indo-Pacific that he said will enable the countries to identify supply chain bottlenecks “before they become the kind of full-scale disruptions we saw during the pandemic.”
Clearly staking out positions for the upcoming election, Biden in his explanation of his new supply chain policy warned that MAGA Republicans want to cut the recent investments in roads, bridges, the Internet, and so on, that have created so many new jobs in infrastructure and manufacturing. (Those measures are popular: House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) joined members of the Florida congressional delegation today to view an expansion project at the Sarasota Bradenton International Airport funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law although Johnson voted against it.)
“[T]hey want to go back to the ‘bad old days,’” Biden said, “when corporations looked around the world to find the cheapest labor they could find, to send the jobs overseas, and then import the products back to the United States. Now we’re building the products here and exporting products overseas.”
In contrast to the governance Democrats have been delivering, the Republicans appear to be doubling down on their grievances. Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), who chairs the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government, announced today the committee will hold another hearing on Thursday concerning “the federal government’s involvement in social media censorship, as well as the recent attacks on independent journalism and free expression.”
The idea that the federal government is silencing right-wing speech is an article of faith among MAGA Republicans, although their committee’s last hearing, eight months ago, turned up nothing. Thursday’s hearing will feature three witnesses, two of whom also testified in the last hearing.
MAGA Republicans might be keen to create distraction after Colorado District Judge Sarah B. Wallace found that Trump “engaged in an insurrection on January 6, 2021.” Wallace found that “Trump acted with the specific intent to incite political violence and direct it at the Capitol with the purpose of disrupting the electoral certification.” She did not disqualify him from the ballot, but the decision will continue to move up through the court system.
Meanwhile, former president Trump appears to be getting nervous that former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley is gaining momentum. On Saturday he showed up at the University of South Carolina–Clemson football game, South Carolina’s main football rivalry. As Isaac Bailey of The State wrote, that Trump felt he had to try to upstage Haley suggests not strength, but weakness. Indeed, while there were cheers for him, there were also boos.
Yesterday, on Face the Nation, Representative Ken Buck (R-CO), who is not running for reelection, went after Trump. “Everybody who thinks that the election was stolen or talks about the election being stolen is lying to America,” Buck said. “Everyone who makes the argument that January 6 was, you know, an unguided tour of the Capitol is lying to America. Everyone who says that the prisoners who are being prosecuted right now for their involvement in January 6, that they are somehow political prisoners or that they didn’t commit crimes, those folks are lying to America.”
As pressure on him increases, Trump is playing hard to his base, promising on Saturday, for example, that he was “seriously looking at alternatives” to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), more popularly known as Obamacare. He suggested the law should be overturned.
Democratic National Committee chair Jamie Harrison noted on social media that more than 40 million Americans depend on the ACA for their health insurance and that the law also protects as many as 135 million Americans with preexisting conditions from losing their health insurance.
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Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/27/israel-hamas-war-hostages-news-gaza-palestine/
https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-at-a-press-availability-41/
https://www.state.gov/secretary-travel/travel-to-brussels-november-27-29-2023/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67542209
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/100-day-supply-chain-review-report.pdf
https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/policy/gscpi#/interactive
https://www.axios.com/2023/11/27/inflation-supply-chains
https://www.thestate.com/opinion/article282337408.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/26/ken-buck-election-stolen-lie-00128626
Twitter (X):
harrisonjaime is/status/1729226750683492862
November 26, 2023
November 26, 2023
A four-year-old dual Israeli-American citizen was among the 17 more hostages released by Hamas today. Israel released 39 Palestinian prisoners, all of whom were under 19 years old. Hamas has expressed interest in extending the truce; Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has echoed that interest so long as each day brings at least ten more hostages out of captivity. Officials from the U.S., Egypt, and Qatar continue to negotiate.
In the Washington Post today, reporters Steve Hendrix and Hazem Balousha put on the table the idea that both Netanyahu and Hamas “may be on the way out.” Such a circumstance would permit changes to the current political stalemate in the region, perhaps bringing closer the two-state solution for which officials around the world, including U.S. president Joe Biden, continue to push.
Israelis are furious that Netanyahu failed to prevent the October 7 attack, and seventy-five percent of them want him to resign or be replaced when the crisis ends. At the same time, Hendrix and Balousha write, Palestinians are angry enough at Gaza’s leadership to be willing to criticize Hamas.
Whether Hendrix and Balousha are right or wrong, it is significant that a U.S. newspaper is looking for a change of leadership in Israel as well as in Gaza. That sentiment echoes the statement of Netanyahu’s own mouthpiece, Israel Hayom, about a month ago. Begun by U.S. casino mogul Sheldon Adelson to promote Netanyahu’s ideas, the paper in early November said that Netanyahu should “lead us to victory and then go.”
Meanwhile, Iran-backed Houthi forces from Yemen fired two ballistic missiles at a U.S. Navy destroyer, the USS Mason, this evening, missing it by about ten nautical miles (which are slightly longer than miles on land), or eighteen and a half kilometers. Earlier in the day, the USS Mason and Japanese allies rescued a commercial vessel, the Central Park, when it came under attack by five pirates in the Gulf of Aden near Somalia. The USS Mason captured and arrested the attackers as they fled. The USS Mason is part of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group deployed to the region. Attacks on shipping in the area have increased since the October 7 attack. Last week, Yemeni Houthis seized a cargo ship linked to Israel.
As Congress prepares to get back to work after the Thanksgiving holiday, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today released a letter addressed to his colleagues outlining the work he intends to get done before the end of the year. He emphasized that he and the Democrats want bipartisan solutions and urged his colleagues to work with Republicans to isolate the Republican extremists whose demands have repeatedly derailed funding measures.
Top of Schumer’s list is funding the government. The continuing resolution that passed just before Thanksgiving extended funding deadlines to two future dates. The first of those is January 19, and Schumer noted that lawmakers had continued to work on those bills over the Thanksgiving holiday to make sure they pass.
Next on Schumer’s list is a bill to fund military aid to Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific region as well as humanitarian assistance for Palestinian civilians and money for U.S. border security, including funding for machines to detect illegal fentanyl and for more border agents and immigration courts. President Biden requested the supplemental aid package of about $105 billion back in October, but while the aid in it is popular among lawmakers, hard-right Republicans are insisting on tying aid for Ukraine to a replacement of the administration’s border policies with their own. Some are also suggesting that helping Ukraine is too expensive.
Schumer noted that U.S. aid to Ukraine is vital to its ability to continue to push back the Russian invasion, while Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has pointed out that money appropriated for Ukraine goes to the U.S. defense industry to build new equipment as older equipment that was close to the end of its useful life goes to Ukraine.
Foreign affairs writer Tom Nichols of The Atlantic explains that foreign aid is normally about 1% of the U.S. budget—$60 billion—and 18 months of funding for both the military and humanitarian aid in Ukraine have been about $75 billion. Israel usually gets about $3 billion; the new bill would add about $14 billion to that. (For comparison, Nichols points out that Americans last year spent about $181 billion on snacks and $115 billion on beer.)
Schumer reminded his colleagues that backing off from aid to Ukraine would serve the interests of Russian president Vladimir Putin; backing off from our engagement with the Indo-Pacific would serve the interests of China’s president Xi Jinping.
“The decisions we will have to make in the coming weeks on the aid package could determine the trajectory of democracy and the resilience of the transatlantic alliance for a generation,” Schumer wrote. “Giving Putin and Xi what they want would be a terrible, terrible mistake, and one that would come back to haunt us…. We cannot let partisan politics get in the way of defending democracy….”
Schumer said he would bring the measure up as soon as the week of December 4.
Schumer’s letter came the day after the annual day of remembrance of the 1932–1933 Holodomor famine in Ukraine, when the Soviet Union under leader Joseph Stalin starved 3.5 to 5 million Ukrainians, seizing their grain and farms in an attempt to erase their national identity.
In a statement in remembrance of Holodomor yesterday, President Biden drew a parallel between the Holodomor of the 1930s and Russia’s war against Ukraine today, noting that “Ukraine’s agricultural infrastructure is once more being deliberately targeted” as Russia is “deliberately damaging fields and destroying Ukraine’s grain storage facilities and ports.” (Even so, Ukraine has managed to deliver more than 170,000 tons of grain to Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Yemen in the past year.)
“On this anniversary, we remember and honor all those, both past and present, who have endured such hardship and who continue still to fight against tyranny,” Biden said. “We also recommit ourselves to preventing suffering, protecting fundamental freedoms, and responding to human rights abuses whenever and wherever they occur. We stand united with Ukraine.”
On the Ukrainian remembrance day of Holodomor, Russia launched 75 drones at Kyiv, its largest drone strike against Ukraine since the start of its invasion in February 2022.
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Notes:
https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-news-11-26-2023-556b251fadc25a234a499e957edd218d
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-israel-hamas-war-hostage-qatar-0126c6443a9b3b32fe97032b81eaa515
https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-news-11-26-2023-556b251fadc25a234a499e957edd218d
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/26/netanyahu-hamas-israel-gaza/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/11/israel-new-leader-benjamin-netanyahu
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/20/politics/us-israel-ukraine-aid-package/index.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/26/senate-vote-biden-ukraine-00128631
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/10/the-diner-trap/675841/
https://www.state.gov/in-remembrance-of-the-holodomor-famine/
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/ukraine-conflict-updates
https://apnews.com/article/biden-ukraine-congress-zelenskyy-border-security-8592ddcb1627fc6d0b43349bac3fe329
Twitter (X):
POTUS/status/1728866466965913985
JenGriffinFNC/status/1728954129236865481
CENTCOM/status/1728982985238843665
November 25, 2023
November 25, 2023
The second exchange of hostages taken from Israel by Hamas on October 7, for prisoners held by Israel took place today. Hamas released thirteen Israelis and four Thais into the hands of the Red Cross at the Egyptian crossing into Gaza, and Israel dropped off nearly three dozen Palestinian prisoners in the West Bank.
In the first exchange, on Friday, Hamas released 24 of about 240 hostages it took during its October 7, 2023, attack on Israel: 13 Israeli women and children, along with 10 Thais and a Filipino who were working in Israel. In exchange, Israel released 24 imprisoned Palestinian women and 15 teenage boys. Israel holds more than 6000 Palestinians on grounds they are a security threat; on the list of 300 prisoners Israel is willing to release, most are awaiting trial. Less than a quarter have been convicted of a crime.
The hostage-prisoner exchanges are at the heart of a four-day truce finalized yesterday, on November 24, after five weeks of what a Biden administration official described as “extremely excruciating” negotiations between the leaders of Qatar, Egypt, and Israel, under the strong influence of the United States.
According to Ayman Mohyeldin, Anna Schecter, and Corky Siemaszko of NBC News, the U.S. and Qatar began to try to get the hostages released hours after the October 7 attack. But Israel was not willing to talk to Hamas, and Hamas officials maintained it had taken only about 70 Israeli soldiers and 50 women and children, saying they did not know where the rest of the missing captives were, although some, they said, had been kidnapped by individual Palestinian gangs.
When talks began, Israel wanted all the hostages released, but this was a nonstarter for Hamas leaders, who need hostages for their own bargaining power. Then Israeli airstrikes so pulverized Gaza that the Biden administration insisted on halts to the bombing so relief agencies could deliver food and aid, as well as the construction of humanitarian corridors to permit Palestinians in northern Gaza to travel to the south. Officials from Qatar, where many of Hamas’s leaders live, stepped in to broker talks.
Those talks began to gain headway when Israel gained more control of northern Gaza and began to negotiate through U.S., Qatari, and Egyptian officials for the release of women and children. Finally, yesterday a deal was hammered out that over the course of a four-day truce, Hamas would release at least 50 hostages and Israel would release 150 Palestinian prisoners, all women and children. More aid trucks are supposed to be allowed into Gaza, and Israel is supposed to stop drone surveillance flights over Gaza for six hours a day.
Israel has said it is willing to extend the truce an extra day for each additional 10 hostages freed.
Still, Israel prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing supporters refused to agree to the terms of the truce until U.S. President Joe Biden pressured them to do so. “This deal was a Biden deal, not a Netanyahu deal,” a senior official in the Israeli government told the NBC reporters. Biden administration officials have been constantly engaged with the region’s leaders to help hammer out the agreement.
Yesterday, when the deal was finally firm, Biden spoke from Nantucket, where he and his family were celebrating Thanksgiving. “I have consistently pressed for a pause in the fighting for two reasons,” he said: “to accelerate and expand the humanitarian assistance going into Gaza and…to facilitate the release of hostages.”
Once again, he emphasized that “this cycle of violence in the Middle East” must end. And, once again, he called for “a two-state solution where Israelis and Palestinians can one day live side by side…with equal measure of freedom and dignity.” He told reporters, “There’s overwhelming interest—and I think most Arab nations know it—in coordinating with one another to change the dynamic in their region for a longer-term peace.” He noted that he was “working very closely with the Saudis and others…to bring peace to the region by having recognition of Israel and Israel’s right to exist” when Hamas attacked on October 7, a move Hamas leaders told reporters was intended to make sure the Palestinian cause did not get forgotten.
While two Americans were released on October 20, no more Americans were released in these first two groups under the truce. Holding Americans keeps the U.S. deeply involved in the struggle, and since pressure from the U.S. is key to moderating the behavior of Israel’s right-wing coalition leadership under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, continuing to hold Americans provides leverage for Hamas.
Yesterday the United Nations delivered the largest convoy of aid, fuel, and cooking gas to Gaza that it has been able to since it started sending aid convoys into the war-torn area on October 21. Still, after seven weeks of fighting, far more is needed.
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Notes:
https://apnews.com/article/gaza-hostages-thai-workers-qatar-iran-1e712be6ab4446574128f36a5c6130e8
https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-news-11-25-2023-7d83895eb736c09fab3eada4c31524b0
https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-news-11-24-2023-172256dd593189f7b37f7c62f4739c6b
https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-775052
https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/11/1143957
November 24, 2023
November 24, 2023
For all that the news these days is faster and more furious than ever—and that much of it is horrifying—it is clear to me that those of us eager to protect our democracy are becoming a force to be reckoned with.
These Letters from an American began in September 2019 as a response to questions people asked about the confusion swirling around us. At the time, we had just heard about a whistleblower complaint that then–acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire was illegally withholding from Congress. Then–House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) had written an angry letter to Maguire demanding that he hand over the complaint, as the law required, and suggested the complaint was likely about an important figure in the Trump White House. We were all trying to piece together what on earth was going on.
Within days, we were in the midst of what would become the first impeachment of former president Trump for refusing to release money to Ukraine that Congress had appropriated to enable Ukraine to fight Russian occupation unless Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky helped Trump smear Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
We are now more than four years into these letters, and the contours of the national crisis we are facing are ever so much clearer than they were when we started.
But what has remained the same is that this project, along with the new book that grew from it, really belongs to you. While I do the legwork of trying to explain the politics of these turbulent times, and my heroic editors keep my writing clean and factual, it is your voices that inspire me when I am so dead tired I fall asleep sitting up. You bring in related material, ask questions, and correct my stupid errors.
Above all, it is you who are helping to model what we so desperately need in America: a respectful community based in facts, rather than in anger and partisanship, a community that can defend our democracy and carry it into a new era.
And we are only one community out of many dedicated to the same principles.
Until the past two months of travel across this country, I did not realize how deep and wide this movement has become.
One thing and another conspired to make my family have to put off our Thanksgiving until today, so I am a day late in telling you all how honored I am to be walking this road alongside all of you and how very proud I am of what we are building together.
Thank you, for all of it.
[Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images]
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Notes:
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