Trying to Block Arms to Israel, Bernie Sanders Denounces AIPAC’s Massive Election Spending

As Israel continued its monthlong blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza and pounded the enclave with American bombs, in Washington the Senate on Thursday voted down two resolutions from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., to block the sale of tens of thousands of 2,000-pound bombs and other offensive weapons to Israel.

The resolutions marked the second time since November that Sanders forced a vote on arms sales. Once again, they exposed a deep divide among Democrats and blanket Republican support for Israel.

The Senate voted 15-82 on the first resolution, concerning 2,000-pound bombs, with all Republicans present voting against it, along with most Democrats. Sanders was joined by 14 Democrats.

The second resolution, focusing on other weapons, fared even worse. It was defeated 15-83.

The Trump administration officially opposed the resolutions, along with the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Sanders, in a passionate floor speech, denounced AIPAC for its massive spending on last year’s elections.

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Israel removes all remaining tariffs on US imports

Israel has canceled all previous tariffs on products from the US, a joint statement from the Prime Minister’s Office, Finance Ministry, and Economy and Industry Ministry confirmed on Tuesday.

The Finance Committee approved it, and the Economy and Industry Minister, Nir Barkat, signed the order to amend the Trade Tariff and Protective Measures Order.

free trade agreement between the US and Israel signed in 1985 had already led to nearly all imported goods from the US being fully exempt from tariffs.

The joint statement clarified that, due to this, the tariff reduction will apply to a very limited number of products, primarily in the food and agricultural categories.

The removal of remaining tariffs would expand the strategic relationship between the two countries, the statement added.

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War, Doublethink, and the Struggle for Survival: Geopolitics of the Gaza Genocide

In a genocidal war that has spiraled into a struggle for political survival, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition and the global powers supporting him continue to sacrifice Palestinian lives for political gain.

The sordid career of Israel’s extremist National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, epitomizes this tragic reality.

Ben-Gvir joined Netanyahu’s government coalition following the December 2022 elections. He remained in the coalition after the October 7 2023 war and genocide, with the understanding that any ceasefire in Gaza would force his departure.

As long as the killing of Palestinians and the destruction of their cities continued as long as Ben-Gvir stayed on board – though neither he nor Netanyahu had any real ‘next-day’ plan, other than to carry out some of the most heinous massacres against a civilian population in recent history.

On January 19, Ben-Gvir left the government immediately following a ceasefire agreement, which many argued would not last. Netanyahu’s untrustworthiness, along with the collapse of his government if the war ended completely, made the ceasefire unfeasible.

Ben-Gvir returned when the genocide resumed on March 18. “We are back, with all our might and power!”  he wrote In a tweet on the day of his return.

Israel lacks a clear plan because it cannot defeat the Palestinians. While the Israeli army has inflicted suffering on the Palestinian people like no other force has against a civilian population in modern history, the war endures because the Palestinians refuse to surrender.

Yet, Israel’s military planners know that a military victory is no longer possible. Former Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon recently added his voice to the growing chorus, stating during an interview on March 15 that “revenge is not a war plan”.

The Americans, who supported Netanyahu’s violation of the ceasefire – thus resuming the killings – also understand that the war is almost entirely a political struggle, designed to keep figures like Ben-Gvir and extremist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich in Netanyahu’s coalition.

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The JFK files and the curious case of Israeli exceptionalism

With the recent release of the JFK files, Twitter—sorry, X—is ablaze with amateur detectives sifting through the document dump with more fervour than an especially high Shaggy devouring Scooby Snacks. The question on everyone’s lips: whodunnit? The answer remains elusive, given the lack of a definitive smoking gun, but what is clear is that the lone gunman theory is dubious at best. What is clear is that Kennedy had managed to upset a lot of important people, and the list of suspects remains extensive.

What’s curious, though, is the feeling of uneasiness, a sense of hesitation when considering Israel’s possible involvement in the ‘63 assassination. Discussions about the Mob, the CIA (arguably the same entity in post-war America), the military, and the Fed all feel acceptable within the Overton Window, yet raising the question of Israeli connections feels problematic and that it must be treated with exceptional delicacy. Why does any criticism of Israel provoke an instinctive sense of foreboding, as if any questioning could incite the next Holocaust, invite accusations of antisemitism, and lead to cancellation or social exile, akin to getting a swastika tattooed on one’s forehead? The answer is simple: we have been indoctrinated and propagandised by a Zionist movement determined to pursue its goals without scrutiny, protest, or backlash.

This influence permeates all tiers of society. The CIA, for example, specifically demanded that all mentions of Israeli intelligence be redacted from the JFK files. Thankfully, they weren’t. The documents indicate that Israel, like the other key players, had the means, motive, and possibly the opportunity. This bizarre exceptionalism extends beyond public discourse into the very corridors of power. Trump is now pressuring universities with threats of defunding, arguing that it is antisemitic to protest against genocide. The paradox is staggering: recognising the Holocaust as one of history’s greatest atrocities somehow inhibits criticism of an ongoing holocaust against a minority group, ironically within the nation-state of Israel. The bullied have become the bully. Even asserting that Palestinians are human beings deserving of self-determination is almost as dangerous as being displaced to a refugee camp in the West Bank. Imagine if Putin had deliberately targeted refugee camps, hospitals, and women and children. The media would double down on the Hitler comparisons, yet when Netanyahu does it, we get justifications, sanitised language, and deflection tactics designed to desensitise us to human suffering—so long as the victims are Muslim and not Jewish. Without eyewitness videos capturing the daily brutality in Gaza, the mainstream media would still have us believe that the IDF is the “most moral army in the world”. October 7th, of course, is the official start of history, with Hamas launching an entirely unprovoked and exceptionally evil attack that now somehow justifies the ongoing mass slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocents, mostly children.

Israeli exceptionalism is even evident in the way definitions are constructed. The Stockholm Declaration of 2000 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), adopted by numerous governments, originally referenced only Jewish victims, omitting other groups targeted by the Nazis. Only recently were the Roma added as a secondary consideration, yet most people still equate the Holocaust solely with the murder of six million Jews, forgetting the communists, Slavs, intelligentsia, disabled people, and others who perished. It is also evident in political rhetoric: politicians can discuss Islamic extremism and Asian grooming gangs without fear of career-ending repercussions from Muslim lobby groups. But criticising Zionist influence in domestic politics? That is antisemitic. Al Jazeera produced an in-depth documentary exposing the role of Israeli lobbying in UK politics, demonstrating how a coalition of bad-faith actors—including figures from the UK military, intelligence services, and the Labour Party itself—helped neutralise the “Corbyn threat” due to his pro-Palestinian stance. Luckily, the British public, of course, opted for Boris Johnson instead, another pyrrhic victory in the ongoing destruction of the country to “Build Back Better’. That wasn’t sarcasm. Confessions of an Economic Hitman outlines what would have come next if Corbyn hadn’t been stopped by the PR wing of the establishment, aka the media—something confirmed by leaked emails between then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo and top UK army generals. No one critical of Israel, capitalism, or the poverty gap will ever be allowed to hold real power. That’s not how pseudo-democracy works. The system’s genius lies in making people believe they have agency while using every cog in the machine to propagandise them into voting against their own interests, vilifying any true opposition, and infiltrating grassroots movements to sabotage them from within. Thatcher being Blair’s hero was no coincidence. Nor was it a coincidence that NHS privatisation began under a Labour government.

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Quakers condemn police raid on Westminster Meeting House

Quakers in Britain strongly condemned the violation of their place of worship which they say is a direct result of stricter protest laws removing virtually all routes to challenge the status quo.

Just before 7.15pm more than 20 uniformed police, some equipped with tasers, forced their way into Westminster Meeting House.

They broke open the front door without warning or ringing the bell first, searching the whole building and arresting six women attending the meeting in a hired room.

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023 have criminalised many forms of protest and allow police to halt actions deemed too disruptive.

Meanwhile, changes in judicial procedures limit protesters’ ability to defend their actions in court. All this means that there are fewer and fewer ways to speak truth to power.

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Another Soldier Confesses: IDF Used Palestinians As Human Shields, Committed Other War Crimes

Another Israeli soldier and veteran of Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza has admitted that he was a party to war crimes — and says his commander ordered him and other soldiers to continue perpetrating those crimes even after they’d raised objections. This latest of many such accounts was given to CBS News by an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldier who agreed to speak on the condition that his identity wouldn’t be revealed. The experience that troubled him the most was his unit’s practice of forcing Palestinian civilians to probe buildings for improvised explosive devices.  

“They were Palestinian,” he said. “We sent them in first to see if the building was clear and check for booby traps…They were trembling and shaking.” So apparently common is the practice of using Palestinians in such a manner that it has a name of its own: the “Mosquito Protocol,” where Palestinians civilians are equated with the hated insects.  

The soldier told CBS that he objected to that abusive treatment of civilians, to the point that he took his concern to the chain of command — where it fell on deaf ears. “We talked to our commander, and we asked him to stop doing it,” he said, but said the unconscionable orders continued to be issued. 

The whistleblowing soldier who spoke to CBS says he continues to be troubled by what he personally did in Gaza. “I’m morally wounded. It’s fucked up, you know, to use citizens as your human shield like a dog.” The term “moral injury” describes psychological problems that spring from having observed, perpetrated, or failed to prevent actions that violate one’s sense of right and wrong. 

Of course, the people on the other end of the depraved practice battle their own psychological demonsCBS spoke to a 14-year-old Palestinian in the West Bank, where the IDF is accused of the same form of abuse. He claims he and his nine-year-old cousin were forced at gunpoint to search a four-story apartment building. “I was so scared. Then they started beating us,” he said. The IDF told CBS it prohibits this behavior.  

The soldier said he was witness to other IDF evils: “We’ve burned down buildings for no reasons, which is violating the international law, of course.” That confession should come as little surprise to even the most casual observer of the war, given the IDF’s astonishingly thorough and plainly visible destruction of neighborhoods, towns and cities throughout Gaza — and IDF soldiers’ enthusiastic use of personal social media accounts to share videos of themselves joyfully demolishing entire housing complexes. A January before-and-after analysis of Gaza using satellite imagery concluded that between 50% and 61% of buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed

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Arab Complicity in Israel’s Genocide

Explaining Arab political failure to challenge Israel through traditional analysis — such as disunity, general weakness and a failure to prioritize Palestine — does not capture the full picture.

The idea that Israel is brutalizing Palestinians simply because the Arabs are too weak to challenge the Benjamin Netanyahu government — or any government — implies that, in theory, Arab regimes could unite around Palestine. However, this view oversimplifies the matter.

Many well-meaning, pro-Palestine commentators have long urged Arab nations to unite, pressure Washington to reassess its unwavering support for Israel and take decisive actions to lift the siege on Gaza, among other crucial steps.

While these steps may hold some value, the reality is far more complex, and such wishful thinking is unlikely to change the behavior of Arab governments. These regimes are more concerned with sustaining or returning to some form of status quo — one in which Palestine’s liberation remains a secondary priority.

Since the start of the Israeli genocide in Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023, the Arab position on Israel has been weak at best, and treasonous at worst.

Some Arab governments even went so far as to condemn Palestinian resistance in United Nations debates. While countries like China and Russia at least attempted to contextualize the Oct. 7 Hamas assault on Israeli occupation forces imposing a brutal siege on Gaza, countries like Bahrain placed the blame squarely on the Palestinians.

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30+ Met police smash down Quaker meeting house doors to raid anti-genocide gathering

Quakers in Britain have strongly condemned the violation of their place of worship by a gang of Met Police officers last night, which they describe as “a direct result of stricter protest laws removing virtually all routes to challenge the status quo”.

The police, some armed with tasers, forced their way into the Quakers’ Westminster Meeting House and arrested six women campaigners who were meeting peacefully in a hired room – the first time in living memory that someone has been arrested in a Quaker meeting house, according to the religious group.

Police smashed the front door of the building without warning or attempting to gain peaceful entry first by simply ringing the bell. Young people’s anti-genocide group Youth Demand have also condemned the ‘insane’ assault on free speech and peaceful assembly, in a video statement by one of the young women at the event – who reported that police had seized laptops and phones despite only being there for supposed ‘conspiracy to commit public nuisance’. Three of the women remained in custody this afternoon.

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Israel Leveled Gaza — Then Killed the Drone Journalists Who Showed it to the World

Four years ago, Mahmoud Isleem al-Basos began messaging Shadi al-Tabatiby on social media, again and again, asking to join him on shoots. Al-Tabatiby, one of Gaza’s best-known drone journalists, didn’t pay much attention at first.

“But Mahmoud was persistent,” al-Tabatiby said. “So I told him, ‘Fine, I’ll meet you.’”

Twice, al-Tabatiby told al-Basos where he’d be filming; both times, al-Basos showed up and waited.

“There’s an age gap between us, but I love people who work hard and want to learn,” al-Tabatiby said. “I found that in Mahmoud.”

The two grew close, and al-Basos began joining al-Tabatiby on shoots.

Then came Israel’s war on Gaza. Al-Tabatiby, who was freelancing for The Associated Press, relocated to the south. Al-Basos stayed in the north. With movement between the two areas cut off by the Israeli military, they kept in touch.

Al-Tabatiby started assigning al-Basos shoots from afar, and the young journalist picked up work with international outlets, including Reuters and the Turkish news agency Anadolu.

Even after al-Tabatiby evacuated to Egypt a year ago, they stayed in close contact.

Two weeks ago, on March 15, al-Basos was filming preparations for a Ramadan iftar in the northern Gaza city of Beit Lahia. The backdrop was a new expansion of a displacement camp opened by the London-based Al-Khair Foundation, which was paying al-Basos to film the event. Then two Israeli airstrikes hit the area. At least seven people were killed, including al-Basos.

“I was in shock,” Al-Tabatiby said. “I couldn’t believe it.”

He added, with incredulity, “We were in a ceasefire.”

Al-Basos became the fifth drone journalist to be killed by Israel since the start of the war in Gaza.

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Publisher’s Firing Shows Double Standard in Israel/Palestine Cartooning

“Watch your step,” says the soldier as he and a medic lead a hostage over a mound of corpses labeled “Over 40,000 Palestinians killed…” The caption reads, “Some Israeli Hostages Are Home After Years of Merciless War.” This cartoon by Jeff Danzinger (Rutland Herald1/20/25) was selected by editorial page editor Tony Doris to run in the Palm Beach Post (1/26/25).

After the cartoon ran last month, a local Jewish activist group took offense at the perceived antisemitic nature of the anti-war cartoon. The Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County was so upset it purchased a full-page ad condemning the cartoon to run in the Sunday edition (2/9/25).

That Doris and Danzinger are both of Jewish descent did not deter the complainers. Neither did their politics. Doris (Stet News3/2/25) describes himself as pro-Israel, as well as the Post‘s “only Jewish editor.” Danzinger told comics scholar Kent Worcester (Comics Journal11/05) that he agreed “with a great many things that the Republicans have been traditionally for,” and that he voted for George H.W. Bush twice.

For his temerity to run an anti-war cartoon acknowledging the Palestinian dead, Doris was fired by Gannett, the conglomerate that owns hundreds of newspapers across the country, including the PostGannett issued a statement that the cartoon “did not meet our standards” and “would not have been published if the proper protocols were followed.” “We sincerely regret the error,” said the spokesperson for the Post, “and have taken appropriate action to prevent this from happening again.” Doris (New York Times3/2/25) remarked that Gannet executives are “afraid of their shadow.”

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