Protesters demand it. Politicians promise it. Journalists expose its absence. Nations wage wars in its name. Even terrorists describe their violence as justice.
Perhaps that is why this week’s Torah portion, Shoftim, does not simply command “Justice, justice shall you pursue.” First comes a warning:
“You shall not pervert judgment; you shall not recognize faces.” – Deuteronomy 16:19
Lo takir panim. Do not recognize faces. The biblical commentator Rashi explains that “this is an admonition addressed to the judge that he should not be lenient to one and harsh to the other, e.g. letting one stand and the other sit; because as soon as he (the party treated harshly) observes that the judge shows more respect to his fellow his ability to plead is hampered (i.e. he loses self-confidence and cannot present his case with assurance) (cf. Shevuot 30a).”
Justice becomes corrupted when we look first at who stands before us and only afterward decide how to judge what happened.
Was the attacker powerful or weak? Majority or minority? Progressive or conservative? Do we admire the cause or despise it?
Sometimes the distortion comes from empathy. Suffering naturally draws us toward the person in pain. But compassion can obscure how the suffering began, what that person did, or what they intend to do next. Empathy is a human instinct. It is not a verdict.
Once we recognize the face, an attack can become “resistance.” A defeat becomes an injustice. The suffering of an aggressor eclipses the aggression that produced it. Terrorism becomes “liberation,” and “peace” only has relevance for one party.
Shoftim understands that the greatest threat to judgment can come from the judge himself. Human beings have an extraordinary ability to bend principles around the people before them.
Erase the faces. Reverse the identities.
If the nationalities were switched, would you reach the same judgment? If the religion were different, would you excuse the same violence? If people you admire committed the act you condemn, would you still condemn it?
If the verdict changes when the faces change, the principle was never really the principle.
The first justice is judging the act. The second is judging ourselves—whether we would render the same verdict after changing the faces.
WAFA, the Palestinian Authority’s official media, has spent years describing Jews who enter the Temple Mount as “storming Al-Aqsa.” I have written about that linguistic sleight of hand before.
Now WAFA is promoting something more dangerous: that Jews have no right to enter Judaism’s holiest site without Muslim permission, and that Jewish worship there is an assault on Islamic sanctity.
In April 2026, WAFA reported a Palestinian statement declaring the site one that “belongs exclusively to Muslims, to which no one else has any right of entry without their consent.”
On August 13, WAFA carried an Arab League statement condemning Jews entering the site and performing religious rituals as a “blatant violation of the sanctity of the mosque.”
WAFA promoted several lies:
Muslims do not control entry. Israel controls security and access to the Temple Mount. The Jordanian-backed Waqf administers Muslim religious affairs there. Presenting Muslim consent as a prerequisite for Jewish entry is totally false.
The compound does not “belong exclusively to Muslims.” That is a religious and political claim masquerading as settled fact about the Temple Mount—the holiest site in Judaism.
Jewish presence does not inherently violate Islamic sanctity. Islam does not have a general rule that a Jew entering Muslim sacred space desecrates it. Restrictions on Jewish prayer under the status quo are one issue; declaring Jewish worship itself an assault on Islam is another.
Then comes another sleight of hand.
Having defined Jewish presence as an offense against Islam, these organizations pivot to demanding action by the international community on behalf of Palestinians.
But those categories – Muslims and Palestinian Arabs – are not interchangeable.
Some 1.85 million Muslims live in Israel, nearly one-fifth of the country’s population. And the Muslim religious administration of the Temple Mount is handled by the Jordanian-backed Waqf. Palestinian Arabs do not exercise control over entry to the site, nor do they represent all Muslims in the region.
So why transform an asserted Muslim religious grievance into a Palestinian national claim demanding international intervention?
Because the lies are the tell.
The argument is no longer about protecting Muslim worship. It takes an assertion of Muslim religious exclusivity, converts it into a Palestinian territorial right, and then asks the world to enforce that right against Israel and Jews.
The implications become darker when the same logic is applied beyond the Temple Mount. Hamas’s 1988 charter declared all of Palestine an Islamic waqf. Combine that doctrine with the claim being promoted around Al-Aqsa—that Jewish physical presence and worship offend Islamic sanctity—and expelling Jews can be transformed into protecting Muslim holy land.
“the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up.” – Hamas Foundational Charter, Article 11
That is why the Arab League and WAFA’s language matters. By repeatedly publishing these false assertions, it helps turn a Palestinian territorial claim into a purported Islamic prohibition against Jewish presence.
And it begins at the most perverse possible location: Judaism’s holiest site.
The progression is stark:
Declare the Jewish holy site exclusively Muslim.
Deny Jews the right to enter without Muslim permission.
Call Jewish presence and worship a desecration of Islam.
Turn that religious claim into a Palestinian territorial right.
Ask the world to enforce it.
The Arab League and Palestinian Authority are building a religious and political case for removing Jews from their own holy land.
A predator attacks a porcupine expecting an easy meal. Instead, it gets a face full of quills.
Photograph the predator afterward and it may look like the victim. Its wounds are real. Its suffering is real. But the photograph is missing the most important fact: it attacked the porcupine.
That injured predator Nakba’d itself.
Consider Argentina in 1982. It invaded the Falkland Islands expecting Britain to accept the conquest. Britain sailed across the Atlantic, fought back and retook them. Hundreds of Argentine servicemen died, including 323 when a British submarine sank the General Belgrano.
Begin the story with the sinking and Britain looks like the aggressor. Begin it with Argentina’s invasion and you understand why British forces were there. Chronology changes the story.
Which is core of the word Nakba.
In 1947, the United Nations proposed Jewish and Arab states for two people with long ties to the area of Palestine, one for Jews who had ruled for hundreds of years in the land, and one for local Arabs who aspired to their own country. Jewish leaders accepted partition while Arab leaders rejected it. After Israel declared independence in May 1948, armies of five neighboring Arab states entered the war against the reborn Jewish state.
The Arab calculation was breathtaking.
Only three years after the Holocaust, a tiny Jewish state was filled in part with survivors and refugees. Six million Jews had just been murdered. Its enemies looked at a shattered people surrounded by a much larger Arab world and saw weakness.
They mistook vulnerability for helplessness.
They attacked the porcupine. And they lost.
Israel survived. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs fled the battlefield as they waited for their Arab brothers to wipe out the Jews. And they lost the war they launched. In the end, Israel ended the fighting with more territory than the UN partition plan had allocated it.
Palestinian Arabs named their defeat “al-Nakba” — the Catastrophe. But over time, their catastrophe became a romanticized socialist-jihadi word stripped of its rejection of coexistence and fervor for extermination of Jews, even as the sentiments remained deeply embedded in Arab culture.
Still, the photojournalists showed the wounds as evidence of who must have been the victim.
So the Nakba lives on.
Hamas demonstrated that Israel was vulnerable, murdering 1,200 civilians and soldiers and abducting 250 hostages. When Israel fought back Gaza suffered terrible destruction. Once again, the world’s camera focused on the wounded predator rather than the beginning of the encounter.
The Gazans Nakba’d themselves again. They attacked, suffered, and then pointed to their injuries in a plee.
The animal kingdom does it. The quills can be devastating. But the story is clear.
Stop the hatred. Stop the attacks. Stop the complaining after losing the fight you sought and launched.
From his perch at The New York Times, Thomas Friedman wants to be “very clear” about Hamas. Instead, his formulation gets the moral order backwards.
“Hamas is a terrible organization,” he writes, “first and foremost for Palestinians.”
Hamas is not primarily a terrible organization. It is a terrorist organization whose foundational ideology targeted Israel and Jews.
Hamas said so itself. Its 1988 charter declares that “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.” Article 7 invokes a religious tradition about Muslims fighting and killing Jews. Article 13 rejects negotiated settlements: “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.”
October 7 was the depravity of those words turned into action. Hamas terrorists crossed into Israel, attacked civilian communities, murdered families and kidnapped hundreds of people. Terrorism was not an unfortunate byproduct of Hamas rule. It was the method of an organization whose charter had openly described its enemy and objective.
Nor was Hamas imposed upon Palestinian Arabs. In the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, voters handed Hamas 56% of the seats in parliament — 74 of 132 — and control of the legislature.
October 7 did not sever that political connection. In December 2023, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 72% of Palestinians believed Hamas’s decision to launch the October 7 attack was correct, including 57% in Gaza and 82% in the West Bank. Even in October 2025, 53% still called the decision correct.
That context makes Friedman’s criticism of Western Hamas apologists particularly revealing. He calls the “free pass” Hamas receives from some pro-Palestinian progressives “shameful.”
The issue runs much deeper than shame.
There is a straight line from a charter describing the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews, to terrorists carrying out a massacre in Israel, to people defending the decision to launch that attack. The depravity lies in the ideology, the terrorism committed in its name and the willingness to celebrate or excuse it afterward.
And that depravity has migrated into American politics. The Democratic Socialists of America and radical left-wing university professors describe Israel as a colonial project and Israelis as “colonialists,” a framework to erase the distinction between combatants and civilians and recast violence against Israeli Jews as “resistance.” This movement is no longer confined to demonstrations and campuses; DSA member Zohran Mamdani has ridden the democratic-socialist movement into the New York City mayoralty and is now helping other left-wing candidates like Mohamed El-Zayed in Michigan win office.
Friedman’s formulation reverses the danger. Hamas becomes “terrible” rather than terrorist. Palestinians become its primary victims rather than a population which supports Hamas. And those in the United States and elsewhere who give Hamas political cover are merely “shameful.”
That formulation grants absolution to terrorists and their knowing supporters.
The endorsement and celebration of mass violence against Jews — a tiny minority-minority — is becoming a motivating force in American politics. That should terrify Thomas Friedman. It should terrify every decent American.
Because when a movement can watch the mass murder of Jews and explain why their killers were engaged in “resistance,” the problem is no longer simply Hamas.
Staring at the sun is dangerous. It can permanently damage your eyes.
That is true today, during a solar eclipse. It was true yesterday. And it will be true tomorrow.
Yet almost no one spends an ordinary sunny day warning people not to stare at the sun. There are no news alerts. No public-service campaigns. No rush to buy protective glasses.
Then an eclipse arrives, and suddenly everyone is talking about retinal damage.
The eclipse does not make the sun more dangerous. It makes us more likely to look.
On an ordinary day, the sun is painfully bright. We instinctively turn away. During an eclipse, the moon covers much of that brightness. The sun becomes darker, stranger and irresistible. Curiosity tells us to keep looking precisely when the covering makes the danger easier to underestimate. We look at the danger precisely when the danger hides behind a mask.
The danger was always there. What changed was our behavior.
Violent jihad presents a darker version of the same phenomenon.
An ideology that glorifies murdering civilians, suicide bombings and religious war does not become less dangerous because something is placed in front of it. Yet organizations, activists and politicians can provide a kind of ideological eclipse—describing jihadist violence primarily through the language of “resistance,” “liberation” or Palestinian Arab self-determination.
October 7 should have been impossible to romanticize. Thousands of Hamas terrorists murdered families in their homes, slaughtered young people at a music festival and dragged hostages into Gaza. Yet almost immediately, people began searching for language that could place a covering over the horror.
“Palestinian self-determination” became one such covering. It transformed a discussion about what Hamas actually did and what it openly sought into a more familiar political argument about nationalism, borders and statehood. The words did not change the violence. They changed how people were invited to look at it.
The head of the CAIR posted that October 7 was a Martin Luther King moment for Palestinian Arabs while the massacre in Israel was ongoing
And once the horror is covered, something disturbing happens. What should repel people can become a passing fascination. Violence acquires slogans, symbols and intellectual rationalizations. Terrorists are recast as revolutionaries; psychopaths and cowards as heroes. People who would instinctively recoil from the naked ideology are encouraged to stare at a filtered version of it.
That is the danger of an eclipse. It does not destroy the source of the danger. It obscures enough of it to change human behavior.
The sun was dangerous before the moon passed in front of it. It will remain dangerous when the moon moves away.
Violent jihad was dangerous before October 7. It remained dangerous while people explained its atrocities through socialist-jihadi language. And it will remain dangerous after today’s political fascination moves somewhere else.
The eclipse does not change the sun nor does political covering change violent jihad. It only changes whether people recognize the danger when they look at it.
Is there a more gay-friendly capital than Reykjavík?
Walk through Iceland’s capital and Pride is everywhere. Rainbow flags fly from storefronts. Streets are painted in LGBTQ colors. Businesses and government buildings proudly proclaim their support for gay rights, queer rights and equality.
Then look a little closer.
On those same Reykjavík streets are Zionists Not Welcome stickers and other expressions of hostility toward the one country in the Middle East where LGBTQ people openly flourish: Israel.
Anti-Israel sticker on parking pay station in Reykjavik, Iceland (photo: First One Through)
The contradiction is hard to miss.
In Israel, gay people serve openly in government and the military. Tel Aviv Pride is one of the world’s best-known LGBTQ celebrations. Gay couples live openly. LGBTQ organizations operate publicly.
Across the Palestinian Arab territories and much of the surrounding Muslim Middle East, the reality is radically different. Hamas governs Gaza according to an Islamist ideology hostile to homosexuality. Iran criminalizes same-sex relations and has imposed the death penalty for homosexual conduct.
Yet in Reykjavík, the political sympathy often seems to run precisely backward.
The rainbow flag is supposed to say that gay rights are human rights. That should apply in Iceland, Israel, Gaza, Iran and everywhere else.
Reykjavík proudly covers itself in rainbows but should follow those colors all the way to the Middle East and ask where gay people can actually live beneath them.
The New York Times published a photo essay under the headline “Still Waiting for Peace in Gaza.” Its Palestinian Arab photojournalist documents the world around him: shattered buildings, displaced families, rubble and danger. The photographs powerfully show what war looks like from inside Gaza.
But what does peace look like?
For Israelis living a few miles away, peace means sleeping without rockets overhead. It means children not watching their parents gunned down before them. It means young adults attending a music festival without being hunted, families living on kibbutzim without gunmen entering their homes, and civilians never again being murdered or dragged across the border as hostages.
Those images are outside the Times’ frame. And their absence raises the central question: Are Gazans waiting for peace with Israel, or peace from Israel?
Palestinian Arab polling makes the distinction important. After October 7, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research repeatedly asked whether Hamas had been correct to launch its attack. In March 2024, 71 percent of Gazans said yes. Three months later, after enormous destruction inside Gaza, 57 percent still considered the decision correct. Support showed a desire to live with violence inside Gaza if it led to the destruction of Israel.
The pattern predates October 7. Palestinian polling over decades has repeatedly recorded substantial support for attacks against Israelis, including civilians. The question of peace therefore cannot be answered simply by photographing people who desperately want the war around them to end.
Peace is reciprocal. It requires imagining security for the people across the border as well as for oneself.
A revealing photo essay would turn its lens outward. Ask Gazans whether Jewish families should live safely in Sderot and Kfar Aza. Whether Israelis should be able to dance near Gaza without fear of armed Palestinian Arabs crossing the border. Whether rockets should stop permanently. Whether Hamas should disarm. Whether the future they envision includes Jews living securely beside them.
Those answers would tell us whether Gazans are waiting for an end to war or waiting for peace.
And this is where the New York Times itself enters the frame. This is the newspaper’s own photojournalist, presented under the Times’ own headline and editorial framing. By calling the desire for calm inside Gaza “waiting for peace,” the newspaper takes one side’s desire for relief from war and gives it the language of reconciliation between two parties. It portrays the Palestinian Arabs as desirous of coexistence when it is plainly not so.
That framing is particularly consequential when the war began with Hamas crossing into Israel on October 7 to murder and abduct civilians. When thousands of Arab civilians invaded Israel to rape women and abduct children and spit on their corpses as they arrived in Gaza. Removing Israel from a story about “peace” reduces peace to what happens to Gaza after the attack, rather than what Gazans want to happen to Israelis in the future.
The Times reinforces a distorted understanding of the conflict: Palestinian peace becomes the absence of Israeli violence against Palestinians, while the Palestinian attitude toward violence against Israelis disappears beyond the edge of the photograph.
A camera pointed only into Gaza can show us what Gazans want to stop seeing. Peace begins with asking what they want Israelis to stop seeing too.
The Promised Land is repeatedly described as “a land flowing with milk and honey.” It sounds like a simple promise of abundance. But for the Israelites, food carried a deeper meaning. Food was the reason their ancestors ended up in Egypt.
Three times in Genesis, famine strikes Canaan. Abraham leaves for Egypt. Isaac faces another famine but is commanded by God to remain. When famine comes in Jacob’s generation, his sons go to Egypt for grain. Eventually the entire family follows. They go because their land cannot feed them. They stay long enough to become slaves.
Seen against that history, “a land flowing with milk and honey” is more than a promise of fertile soil. It is a promise of independence. You will have a land that can feed you. You will not have to leave it to survive or depend upon another nation for the food that keeps you alive.
Deuteronomy makes the promise explicit: “a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing.”
The Exodus therefore does not really end when Israel leaves Egypt. Nor does it end in the desert, where the people remain dependent upon manna falling each morning. It ends when they can live from their own land.
That makes the report of the spies remarkable. They enter Canaan and find exactly what God promised. They return carrying its enormous fruit and concede: “It indeed flows with milk and honey.” They cannot say the land will not feed Israel. So they invert the warning. “It is a land that eats its inhabitants.” Eretz ochelet yoshveha. A land that eats those who live in it.
Genesis presented the danger of a land that could not feed the Jews, forcing them to leave. The spies imagine the opposite danger. The land will produce abundantly, but the Jews who enter it will be consumed.
The Promised Land will become their tomb.
The dispute is therefore not really about agriculture. Everyone has seen the fruit. It is about whether Jews can survive in their own land. Joshua and Caleb believe they can. The other spies do not. They can imagine Jews surviving in Egypt, even as slaves. They have watched Jews survive in the desert through miracles. What they cannot imagine is Jews entering their own land, defending it, cultivating it and sustaining themselves there.
Jewish history would give that argument an extraordinary afterlife.
Jews established themselves in the land, lost their sovereignty and spent centuries living among other nations, dependent upon those nations for permission to remain. They were welcomed and expelled, protected and persecuted. Again and again, Jews had to leave one place and seek survival somewhere else.
The modern return to Israel was therefore a return not merely to territory, but to the promise behind the milk and honey: Jews would once again sustain themselves, defend themselves and build a society that did not depend upon another country’s willingness to shelter them.
They succeeded beyond what the spies could have imagined. A poor and vulnerable country became one of the Middle East’s most advanced economies, producing food, technology, medicine and military power and selling its innovations around the world.
Yet the ancient question has not disappeared. Israel still depends upon alliances, foreign markets and imported goods, as modern nations do. It worries whether its most talented people will remain and build there. It receives substantial American military support while hostile powers seek increasingly dangerous weapons and some openly call for the destruction of the Jewish state.
Self-sufficiency does not mean isolation. No modern country survives alone. The deeper promise is that Jews should possess enough economic, military and human strength that they are never again forced to abandon their home simply to survive.
For centuries, Jews were forced to leave one country after another. They finally returned to the land their ancestors had feared entering and built a country capable of feeding, defending and sustaining them.
Yet the spies’ fear still hovers over the Jewish state: could the land in which Jews finally learned to defend themselves also become the place where their enemies destroy them? The question is as old as the spies and as current as Israel itself.
We normally think about free will as a choice between good and evil. Do the right thing or the wrong thing.
But that is not how Moses presents the choice at the beginning of this week’s Torah portion, Re’eh.
“See, I set before you today a blessing and a curse.” – Deuteronomy 11:26
Good and evil describe the choice we make. Blessing and curse describe what comes from that choice.
The language takes us back to the Garden of Eden and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Adam and Eve ate from it, acquiring the moral awareness that would define humanity: the ability to recognize alternatives and choose between them.
It was an extraordinary power. Alone, it was insufficient.
The Bible soon becomes a history of choices and their consequences. Cain murders Abel. Humanity descends into the violence preceding the Flood. Babel rebels and is scattered. Sodom becomes corrupt and is destroyed.
People possess knowledge of good and evil, but God still delivers the judgments. Humanity acts; God determines the consequences.
Sinai changes the dynamic. Israel receives commandments revealing a divine framework for how to live. The knowledge acquired in Eden is now joined to God’s instruction about how that knowledge should be applied.
And in Re’eh, something more happens.
Moses is speaking to the Israelites as they prepare to enter the Promised Land. They know the commandments. They know what God expects. And now blessing and curse are given a physical location. When they cross the Jordan, the blessing is to be pronounced on Mount Gerizim and the curse on Mount Ebal.
Archaeological site on Mount Gerizim
The consequences of human choice that had unfolded across the world in Genesis are now brought home. They will be proclaimed on two mountains in the land where the Israelites themselves will live.
That gives Re’eh — “See” — added force.
See the choices before you. See the commandments that guide them. And now, quite literally, see where their consequences will reside.
In Eden, humanity acquired the knowledge of good and evil. At Sinai, Israel received a framework for choosing. And upon entering the Promised Land, blessing and curse would be placed before them on the very mountains of their new home.
The lesson was no longer abstract.
They knew good and evil. They had been given the commandments. And now, in their own land, they would live with the consequences of their choices.
Congress did not arrive at legislation protecting Hamas overnight. It arrived there one bill at a time.
For decades, debates over Israel revolved around diplomacy. Republicans and Democrats argued over settlements, negotiations, Jerusalem, and the contours of a future Palestinian state. Even lawmakers sharply critical of Israel generally framed their proposals around advancing a negotiated two-state solution. The disagreement was over how peace should be achieved, not whether Israel had the right to defend itself against terrorist organizations.
In 2020, as the Trump Administration unveiled its peace plan and Israel considered extending sovereignty to portions of the West Bank, progressive lawmakers introduced legislation preventing American assistance from supporting annexation. Whether one believed annexation was prudent or unwise, the objective remained fundamentally political. These bills sought to influence the outcome of negotiations and preserve the possibility of a future Palestinian state. The debate was about borders, diplomacy, and competing visions for peace.
That bill did not stand in isolation.
In 2019, Representative Betty McCollum (D-MN) also introduced legislation prohibiting U.S. assistance from supporting the military detention of Palestinian minors. On its face, the proposal carried moral appeal. No civilized society wants children caught in war, and few slogans resonate more powerfully than protecting minors.
Yet the legislation missed the point. Israel’s military justice system does not prosecute minors because they are children. It prosecutes minors accused of security offenses, including violent rioting, firebomb attacks, shootings, stabbings, and participation in terrorist organizations. Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine have all recruited teenagers into violent activity for decades.
Arab minors caught on camera right before they stab Israelis
The debate was no longer centered on where Israel’s borders should ultimately lie. It was becoming a debate over whether Congress should restrict Israel’s ability to prosecute those participating in terrorism.
That evolution became unmistakable after October 7.
The largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust might reasonably have been expected to produce overwhelming congressional support for dismantling Hamas. Instead, it accelerated an entirely different legislative movement.
Arabs in Gaza take the body of Israeli woman they had just killed into Gaza where the crowds pelted her body and spat on her
One proposal after another sought to block the military tools Israel argued were necessary to fight the war. Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) repeatedly forced votes to halt major arms sales. Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Representative Delia Ramirez (D-IL), and others introduced the Block the Bombs Act. Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) sought to impose additional legal restrictions before military assistance could proceed.
US Senator Chris Van Hollen attends a Senate subcommittee on the Justice Departments proposed 2027 budget, on Capitol Hill in Washington, May 19, 2026.
Supporters presented these bills as humanitarian safeguards designed to protect civilians and uphold international law. Their practical effect, however, would have been to deny or delay weapons while Israel was engaged in combat against a U.S.-designated terrorist organization that had murdered, raped, tortured, kidnapped, and burned civilians alive.
Congress was no longer principally debating the contours of a future peace agreement. It was debating how much of Israel’s wartime capability should be withheld while the war itself was still being fought.
And it continued.
In July 2026, Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) introduced an amendment eliminating the entire $3.3 billion annual Foreign Military Financing package for Israel. Previous proposals had sought to condition aid or block particular weapons systems. Massie’s proposal went much further. It would have ended America’s regular military assistance altogether.
The amendment failed by a wide margin. But 104 members of Congress voted for it, including 103 Democrats alongside the bill’s Republican author.
That vote tells a larger story than the amendment itself.
Over the course of a few years, the legislative progression moved from opposing territorial annexation, to restricting Israeli counterterrorism practices, to limiting the weapons available to fight Hamas, and finally to questioning whether the United States should continue military assistance at all. Each bill built upon the political space created by the one before it. What once occupied the outer edge of congressional debate gradually became part of mainstream legislative discussion.
The coalition itself is unusual. Rashida Tlaib approaches the issue through Palestinian nationalism. Bernie Sanders emphasizes humanitarian law and civilian casualties. Chris Van Hollen argues for greater legal oversight of military assistance. Thomas Massie opposes foreign aid as a matter of constitutional principle. They arrive from very different ideological traditions, yet increasingly find themselves casting the same vote.
For generations, support for Israel was one of Washington’s few enduring bipartisan constants. That consensus has not disappeared; overwhelming majorities in Congress still support the alliance. But the terms of the debate have unmistakably changed.
Six years ago, Congress debated how American policy might influence a two-state solution. Today, members openly introduce legislation that would limit—or eliminate altogether—the military support Israel says it needs to defeat jihadist organizations committed not to coexistence, but to its destruction.
That is the real story of the Jihadi Protection Bills. Not that any single measure became law. But that, one bill at a time, the center of the American political conversation migrated from shaping the peace process to constraining Israel’s ability to wage war against jihadist movements to its basic ability to protect itself in a deeply hostile region.
First One Through 