Tag: israel

Stop the Presses! Congress Denies Netanyahu Something He Asked For!

“I want to stop American aid,” Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on June 30. “It’s like welfare; I don’t want it.”

Usually, Netanyahu gets anything he demands from Uncle Sugar. But on July 15, the US House of Representatives voted, 314-104 against even partially granting his wish.

Every Republican except Thomas Massie of Kentucky, and more than half of Democrats, voted down an amendment that would have removed $3.3 billion in “Foreign Military Financing” aid from the National Security, Department of State, and Related Programs Appropriations Act.

What’s up with that?

Was Netanyahu perhaps a wee bit disingenuous in his public request, passing word through back channels that he didn’t really mean it?

Is US Congress more “pro-Israeli” than Netanyahu himself, or perhaps just so addicted to spending that they can’t bear to cut anything at all, even if the recipient doesn’t want it?

Some combination of the above?

This may be the first time I’ve ever found myself in agreement with Benjamin Netanyahu on anything.

Well, partial agreement, anyway.

US aid to Israel isn’t “like welfare.”

It IS welfare.

What does the US regime in return for its billions of dollars per year? Two things:

  1. A way of re-routing tax money to crony “defense contractors” with Israel as the cut-out to obscure the  domestic end of the corporate welfare pipeline; and
  2. Dragged into a Middle Eastern garrison ethno-state’s every conflict with other regional powers — powers which substantially differ from Israel mainly in ethnicity, prevailing religion, and actually having some oil to make the entanglement worthwhile.

Don’t give me the “liberal democracy” stuff. The Israeli regime censors the press, bans political parties it doesn’t like, confines millions of Arabs to apartheid-style “homelands” as rightsless, non-voting serfs under Israeli rule, and just passed a law declaring that theological studies in one, and only one, religion are “fundamental” to its existence and thus deserving of exemption from the compulsory military hitch mere “secular” Jews serve. Politically, the main difference between Israel and Iran is that in Iran, Jews are guaranteed at least one seat in parliament.

Some “pro-Israel” — and “pro-US-aid-to-Israel” — people I talk with love to inform me that Israel has a longer average lifespan, a lower infant mortality rate, and a lower homicide rate (excluding the  Palestinians ruled by, and murdered by, Israeli troops) than the US.

That doesn’t strike me as the “gotcha” they seem to think. Could those billions in aid possibly have anything to do with the statistical differences? Every dollar in US aid is a dollar more the Israeli regime gets to spend on healthcare and police salaries instead of on weapons to power its expansionist foreign policy.

This time, Congress should have given Netanyahu what he said he wanted.

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Politicians Should Stop Hiding Behind the ‘Two-State Solution’ Fantasy

Creation of a Palestinian state next to Israel seemed feasible when President Bill Clinton hosted the signing of the Oslo accords at the White House in September 1993. The goal was reaffirmed in 2011 when 90 percent of the Senate co-sponsored a resolution supporting “a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.”

But today, the two-state scenario is far-fetched to the point of delusion if not evasion.

For politicians, it has become a box to check. According to data from the American Jewish Congress, every Democrat and most Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee currently say they support “the two-state solution.”

Whatever the rhetoric, ending Israeli control over Palestinians in the territories occupied since 1967 is not on the table.

“Nobody who talks about a so-called ‘two-state solution’ talks about an end to settlements and colonization, and an end to the occupation,” Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi said in an interview this year. “If you don’t have those as the preconditions, it’s not a state – it’s some reshuffling of a status quo of colonization and occupation.”

At best, only such reshuffling is on the horizon. The essence of colonization and occupation is baked into Israel’s Jewish nationalism that has hardened into systemic cruelty toward Palestinians undergoing genocide.

Yet the boilerplate refrain for a two-state solution has great political utility in the United States. For most politicians, it’s very handy for virtue signaling. The same holds true for pro-Israel pressure groups. Even AIPAC, while incapable of faulting the Israeli government for anything, blames Palestinians for refusing “to negotiate on the basis of the Trump peace framework – which envisions a two-state solution.”

Especially for politicians eager to have the deep-pocketed Israel lobby on their side at election time, saying “two-state solution” has become little more than a way of dodging key facts that exist on the ground. The Israeli military now controls 70 percent of Gaza after reducing it to rubble that has buried an unknown number of bodies. The 2.1 million Palestinians still alive in the enclave are confined to just 30 percent of its 141 square miles, under terrible living conditions.

Meanwhile, the proliferation of settlements in the West Bank has pushed Palestinian people into smaller and smaller fragmented areas, divided by hundreds of checkpoints, while they face lawless violence from Israelis akin to the KKK’s terrorizing of blacks in the Jim Crow South. Several hundred settlements and outposts in the West Bank are now home to upward of 730,000 Israelis, with more arriving all the time.

Given such realities, advocates for a two-state solution have no credible answer to a basic question that is rarely asked: Where would the putative Palestinian state actually be located?

When Britain, Canada and Australia announced their formal recognition of a Palestinian state last fall, putting the number of nations doing so over 150, they were recognizing a phantom. “Israelis and Palestinians alike say the possibility of a two-state solution seems more remote than ever,” the New York Times reported at the time. “Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has devastated the enclave. Israeli settlements have become ever more entrenched in the West Bank.”

But in U.S. politics, the routine is to maintain the convenient fantasy of a two-state solution. Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris was simply offering up requisite platitudes during a CNN interview in August 2024 when she declared her commitment to “work toward a two-state solution, where Israel is secure and in equal measure the Palestinians have security and self-determination and dignity.”

David Mandel, a Sacramento chapter leader of Jewish Voice for Peace, told me: “In light of demographic and political realities, a ‘two-state solution’ has become a mostly empty mantra, frequently mouthed by politicians who did nothing to bring it about when it might have been a viable path to end violence and build toward something better.” He added: “It has also become a political refuge for many Americans, including a great many Jews, who are generally progressive and want to differentiate themselves from Benjamin Netanyahu and his ilk, but only performatively, without joining efforts to end real violations of Palestinian rights like occupation, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide.”

A grim truth is that no one really knows what a genuine “solution” might be for the mega-tragedy that continues to unfold in Palestine. Unhelpful from Americans is the facile prescription of a two-state solution or, for that matter, any other supposed remedy. Claiming to know what’s best for Palestinians is built into a colonial mindset that has propelled intervention in the region for more than a hundred years.

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Latest Case of “Palestine Exception” to Free Speech Is “Golden Gate Defendants”

Jury deliberations in the case of a group of San Francisco protesters dubbed the “Golden Gate Defendants” resulted in multiple misdemeanor convictions on July 2, 2026. The case stems from an organized action that took place April 15, 2024, in protest of the U.S.-enabled Israeli genocide in Gaza. Twenty-six people were initially arrested for blocking traffic on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge and jailed for more than 48 hours. After a majority of the 1,144 combined charges were dropped, seven people went to trial.

In spite of being found guilty of multiple misdemeanors, the Golden Gate Defendants view the outcome as a victory. Tori Porell, senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, who has been supporting the defendants, said San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins “failed to secure convictions on the most serious charges” of felony conspiracy. Jury members were deadlocked on the felony charges that could have resulted in 15-year prison sentences.

Still, defendants and their allies have spent two years enmeshed in the stress of a long-drawn-out trial. Now, those charged and convicted await a sentencing hearing in August.

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Media Cheering a Deal That Puts Lebanon on the Chopping Block for Israel

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on June 26 triumphantly announced the “signing of the Trilateral Framework between Lebanon, Israel and the United States.” The document allegedly “builds a realistic path out of endless conflict” between Israel and Lebanon—“the inheritors of ancient civilizations that date back to the time of the Bible.”

According to Rubio:

This agreement establishes a clear and structured process to restore Lebanon’s sovereignty, disarm Hezbollah and dismantle its terrorist infrastructure, and enable Israel to return to its borders once that threat to its citizens is removed.

The framework also creates a cool-sounding “Military Coordination Group for Lebanon (MCG4L), facilitated by the United States.”

As should be immediately clear to anyone who has paid minimal attention to politics over the past 80 years, any US-brokered agreement between the two inheritors of ancient civilizations will automatically be designed to screw over Lebanon in favor of Israel—which has harbored designs on Lebanese territory from the get-go.

As Amnesty International noted, the agreement “betrays victims of war crimes in Lebanon” by essentially blocking their right to seek justice in international forums. It also signs off, Amnesty said, on the “prolonged and indefinite forced displacement of tens of thousands of residents of vast swathes of southern Lebanon occupied by Israeli forces.”

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Far-Left Ro Khanna’s Own Video From the Scene Completely DESTROYS His ‘Detained by Violent Settlers and IDF’ Hoax — No Detention Visible as He Lied About Coordinating with Israel

Far-left California Democrat Rep. Ro Khanna is once again exposed as a serial fabricator after his team who accompanied him released video of the West Bank incident that flatly contradicts his dramatic claims of being “detained” by armed settlers and the IDF.

As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, Khanna tried to sneak into a closed military zone in the West Bank for an anti-Israel photo-op without proper coordination.

The Israel Defense Forces have disputed Khanna’s characterization of the incident, stating that troops responded after receiving reports that Israeli civilians were blocking foreign visitors’ vehicles and that soldiers dispersed those civilians. The IDF has also said Khanna’s visit had not been coordinated with Israeli authorities.

He then ran to the cameras claiming violent settlers with American-made M4s and IDF soldiers detained him and other Americans, blocked their vehicle, laughed at them, and showed “arrogance of power.”

He demanded prosecutions and used the episode to push his usual America-last narrative against Israel

Now the video his own side released tells a different story.  The footage simply does not support the narrative he sold to the media.

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The West Won’t Punish the Settlements. Its Two-State Solution Was Always a Sham

If I asked you to cut off your arm, would you do it?

What if I pointed out that that your arm regularly punched a neighbor in the face so violently that it broke their nose and teeth, and left them unconscious? Would you cut your arm off then?

I’m guessing the answer to both questions is a firm, “No.”

Which is exactly why the European Union, Britain and the United States have precisely no intention of severing their support for Israel’s illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, however violent the Jewish colonizers who live on stolen Palestinian land prove to be.

For decades, settler militias – backed by Israeli soldiers – have beaten up Palestinians, shot them, poisoned their wells, chopped down their olive groves, torched their homes, all in an attempt to ethnically cleanse them from their historic homeland.

The relentless expansion of these illegal settlements has left any hope of a two-state solution in tatters. The West Bank is now an archipelago of Palestinian villages and towns isolated from one another by marauding violent settlers, apartheid roads only for Jews, steel and concrete barriers, and army checkpoints.

All of this has happened in full view of western states over many decades. The International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, ruled back in 2004 – nearly a quarter of a century ago – that these Jewish settlements violated international law and needed to be dismantled.

It reiterated that demand in a decision two years ago in which it identified Israel as an apartheid state ruling over Palestinians. It warned states to “take steps to prevent trade or investment relations that assists in the maintenance of the illegal situation created by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory”.

And yet the West has done nothing meaningful year after year as the settlements have stolen more land from Palestinians, made their lives there ever more miserable, and trashed any chance of the West’s supposed ambition of two states living alongside each other.

Remember this when Israel’s apologists tell you to wait for the same court’s definitive ruling – in a year or two, or maybe three – on what it deemed in early 2024 to be a “plausible” genocide in Gaza, just three months into Israel’s mass slaughter there.

Not only will any such ruling be far too late to make any difference to the victims of the genocide, but the US, Britain and Europe will do precisely no more to punish Israel for this crime of crimes – one we can see for ourselves without an ICJ ruling – than they have done in punishing Israel for the settlements.

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Under Israeli pressure, US seizes Max Blumenthal’s devices on return from Tehran reporting trip


On July 10, 2026, American journalist Max Blumenthal was traveling back to the United States from Iran, which he had visited to report on the funeral of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the largest gathering in human history. While in Iran, Blumenthal interviewed members of Iran’s negotiation team, top political officials, academics and average citizens for a series of video and print reports for this news outlet, which he founded.

He also documented several US and Israeli war crimes from the ground, including the destruction of an entire neighborhood in Eastern Tehran which left at least 40 civilians dead.

Upon reentering the country at Dulles International Airport, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) interrogated Blumenthal about his trip, searched his belongings, and demanded that he provide access to his smart phones. When he refused to open his phones, CBP officers forced him to turn them over for detention. Other journalists and travelers have been threatened with the loss of their passports for a month for failing to hand over their devices.

Blumenthal entered Iran exactly as reporters working for establishment media outlets like CNN and NBC did – on a press visa granted by the Iranian Foreign Ministry. While in Tehran, he participated in official press events alongside those mainstream reporters, who were also in the country to cover the Ayatollah’s funeral. When journalists from CNN, NBC, and other American outlets returned to the US, however, they were not subjected to the same harassment Blumenthal experienced, nor were they required to give the US government their electronic devices.

Blumenthal is a widely recognized journalist in American independent media, with a record of reporting spanning 25 years. He is the author of four books, including a New York Times bestselling volume, and numerous widely viewed documentary films. Having reported from numerous countries and conflict zones around the world, he is the winner of several awards, including the Online Journalism Award and, most recently, the Pierre Sprey Award for Defense Reporting and Analysis.

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The Inconvenient Jew Is One of Zionism’s Biggest Problems

Israeli Ambassador to the United States Yechiel Leiter recently offered what he apparently believed was a devastating answer to those decrying the genocide in Gaza.

“Jews do not use children’s blood for rituals,” Leiter said. “Jews do not poison wells. And Jews do not starve populations or commit genocide.”

The smear in this common Zionist talking point is obvious: Those who accuse the Israeli government belong in the same moral category as those who spread medieval blood libels against innocent Jews. To say the regime of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has committed genocide is not merely to criticize a government, an army, or a political ideology. It is to accuse “the Jews.”

But there is a growing problem for Zionism and its favorite smear: the moral indignation of Jews.

According to a new AP-NORC poll, 30% of Jewish adults in the United States say Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Only 49% say it has not. Among religiously unaffiliated Jews, the share rises to about four in ten. Also, only about four in ten Jewish adults believe Israel’s continuing military operations in Gaza are justified, while roughly six in ten view Netanyahu unfavorably.

In light of the grave public perspective of a growing percentage of Jews, the Zionists look more and more foolish. Their go-to argument – if you can even call this substanceless insult an argument – has become an argument ad absurdum: Nearly one-third of American Jews, Zionists believe, are secretly medieval antisemites; Jewish critics of Netanyahu believe Jews poison wells; Jews who watch children starve in Gaza and call it genocide are not morally serious observers but morons trafficking in blood libel … against themselves.

But the absurdity is rapidly leading to yet another Zionist offense – as if a genocide were not enough. Since the inconvenient Jew is now one of Zionism’s biggest problems, the Jew himself – insofar as he accepts the universal human principles that genocide flies in the face of – must be treated as an impossibility.

He cannot be debated honestly, because his very existence blows the argument apart. He proves that Jewish identity does not require loyalty to Netanyahu. He proves that revulsion at starving children is not (forgive the grotesque suggestion – it is not mine but Zionism’s) an anti-Jewish prejudice.

So Zionism does to the inconvenient Jew what it does to every inconvenient person.

It erases him.

He becomes “self-hating,” “brainwashed,” “disloyal,” or – perhaps most insultingly of all – “not a real Jew.”

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Congressman Outraged After Brief Detention By Gun-Wielding Israeli Settlers In West Bank Visit

A group of extremist Jewish settlers equipped with US-made M4 rifles detained US lawmaker Ro Khanna and his group during their visit this week to the southern occupied West Bank, the Democratic representative has disclosed.

“We were at a village that Israeli settlers had destroyed; they had destroyed the school, they had destroyed that village, and we were just looking at it,” Khanna told Reuters on Thursday.  “And these hoodlums come in with machine guns – M4, an American-made machine gun – and they detain us. They block off the road.“ Khanna said, adding, “And then they call the IDF and ​the IDF is on their side, not on the side of the Americans.“

Khanna’s aide, Cameron Kasky, said the delegation was held for over an hour near Khirbet Zanuta, a Palestinian hamlet ethnically cleansed by Israeli settlers in 2023, before appealing to the US Embassy in Jerusalem to free them. 

Khanna’s visit to the occupied West Bank comes as support for Israel splits Democrats ahead of the US midterm elections in November, with the issue contributing to primary defeats for incumbent lawmakers financed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Israel’s favorability rating among Democratic voters has fallen from 59 percent in 2018 to 22 percent in May 2026, according to recent polls. 

The US lawmaker’s confrontation with extremist settler groups occurs amid a broader campaign of state-supported settler violence that, by mid-2026, has escalated into systematic ethnic cleansing and land theft in the occupied West Bank. 

As of July 2026, illegal settler outposts effectively control 18 percent of the occupied West Bank, following an “unprecedented” expansion directly backed by the Israeli government.

Former Israeli officials have characterized the current escalation as a “systematic campaign” of “Jewish terrorism” intended to facilitate de facto annexation of the Palestinian territories.

An Oxfam analysis based on UN data revealed that since 2023, Israeli forces and settlers have killed at least 1,244 Palestinians, exceeding the total from the previous 17 years combined, and forcibly displaced nearly 46,000 people.

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The Board That Wanted a Country

This investigation is about a body whose legal personality remains contested, whose accountability framework remains opaque, and whose money has been routed through a private JPMorgan Chase account outside the official World Bank fund created for Gaza reconstruction. The Board of Peace was announced by Donald Trump in January 2026 as the vehicle for Gaza’s post-war governance and reconstruction, with Trump as chair and Tony Blair among its founding executive members. What emerges from official filings, leaked governance drafts, congressional hearing records, financial reporting, and testimony from former insiders is not simply a reconstruction body, but an attempt to privatise the governance architecture of Gaza’s future.

The timing of this story is critical because the contracts have not yet been awarded, the official World Bank fund has received no donor money, and several of the people involved in designing or executing the system sit at the intersection of government, finance, technology, Gulf capital, and post-war reconstruction planning.

The name “Board of Peace” does not necessarily refer to some peace mechanism. The entity will be best characterized as a financial, legal, and political architecture for governing 2.3 million Palestinians through a structure Palestinians did not elect, that member-state parliaments did not ratify, and that no court or auditor has yet clearly shown it can compel.

The Mandate Returns

The piece that sparked this investigation was published by Follow the Money, which reported that Tony Blair had become “Trump’s Gaza salesman in Europe,” using his institute and his contacts to lobby European policymakers into joining the Board of Peace. That reporting was important, but the framing understates the story. Blair is not merely the salesman. He is one of the architects of the governance model that European officials were later asked to legitimise.

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