The Anti-Defamation League’s Ken Jacobson wants you to believe that I called Israel racist in my recent article “The Real Reason So Many Republicans Love Israel. Their Own White Supremacy.” “Characterizing Israel as fundamentally racist,” he claims, constitutes one of my “arguments.” But he has a problem. I didn’t call Israel racist because that’s not what I believe. I called it an “ethnic democracy.” Jacobson calls that ...

If you listened earlier this month to Republican responses to Donald Trump’s call for Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley to “go back” to the “places from which they came,” you noticed something odd. Trump’s defenders kept mentioning Israel. “They hate Israel,”replied Lindsey Graham when asked about Trump’s attacks on The Squad. Republican Congressman Lee Zeldin called Omar and Tlaib “anti-Israel.” Trump himself ...

What politicians don’t say is often as important as what they do. In his foreign policy speech on Thursday at The City University of New York, Joe Biden warned about the “Rapid advance of authoritarianism, nationalism and illiberal tendencies around the world — not just in Russia and China but among our allies, in places like Turkey, the Philippines, and Hungary.” Notice what’s missing here. Biden is ...

If you don’t think Benjamin Netanyahu has changed the debate about Israelinside the Democratic Party, just listen to Pete Buttigieg’s foreign policy speech yesterday at Indiana University. Buttigieg is no radical; he’s a darling of the post-Obama Democratic establishment. And yet he said things on Tuesday that would have been unthinkable during Obama’s campaigns. …

The mantra of Kirsten Gillibrand’s presidential campaign is “Brave Wins.” Yet in her video message to the American Jewish Committee’s Global Forum this week, the New York Senator didn’t even mention the word “Palestinian.” That was typical. The 2020 Democratic hopefuls talk a lot about having the courage not just to challenge Donald Trump but to transform America’s political and economic system. But with the exception of ...

Last month, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declared that American aid to Israel is “something that can be discussed” in Washington. Her comments made news precisely because America’s policy of giving Israel billions in aid without expecting any policy changes in return hasn’t actually been discussed — or at least questioned — in either party in more than a quarter-century. That needs to change. …

On Saturday, April 27, a few hours before the shooting at the Chabad in Poway, California, I walked from my hotel in Amsterdam—where my family has been on vacation—to a synagogue I found online. I arrived at a building with no external Jewish markings. The door was locked. When I tried to open it, a man with a walkie-talkie showed up and explained that he ...

The lesson of Benjamin Netanyahu’s apparent reelection victory is simple, and old. Frederick Douglass articulated it 162 years ago: “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” …

So far, the theme of AIPAC’s 2019 Policy Conference has been peril, not just to Israel, but to AIPAC itself. AIPAC’s CEO accused unnamed critics of “trying to silence each of us.” AIPAC President Mort Fridman declared that, “none of us are willing to be silenced.” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer warned of forces that seek “to silence others through exclusion, disenfranchisement, or fear.” …

“If you find yourself using the tragedy in New Zealand to take backhanded swipes at conservatives in America,” tweeted Congressman, and rising GOP star, Dan Crenshaw on Friday, “then you really have no shame and you are part of the problem.” “Conservatives” is a broad category. So let’s narrow the focus to the Trump administration. And let’s be blunt — no “backhanded swipes.” Has this administration blessed and fueled ...