(Headline USA) The House on Tuesday passed a Republican-led resolution reaffirming its support for Israel with strong bipartisan approval—an implicit rebuke of a leading Democrat who, over the weekend, unleashed an anti-Semitic attack on the Jewish state but later apologized.
The resolution, introduced by Rep. August Pfluger, R-Texas, passed with over 400 lawmakers backing the measure. It did not mention Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., by name, but was clearly a response to her recent remarks.
The measure was drafted soon after she accused Israel of being “racist” at a conference on Saturday for its treatment of Palestinians who routinely wage terrorist attacks on Israel from settlements including the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as northern Hezbollah outposts like Beirut, Lebanon.
Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, also voted in support of the resolution. “I am not going to be bullied by their political games, and I’m not going to let them try to continue this debate,” she told reporters after the vote.
The Washington Democrat had walked back her comments from over the weekend, insisting they were aimed at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and not the Jewish state.
Netanyahu, the country’s longtime leader, returned to power in December after a year and a half hiatus during which the country disastrously failed to convene a functional coalition government under his successor—the leftist, pro-Iranian Naftali Bennett.
“I do not believe the idea of Israel as a nation is racist,” Jayapal said in a statement Sunday. “I do, however, believe that Netanyahu’s extreme right-wing government has engaged in discriminatory and outright racist policies and that there are extreme racists driving that policy within the leadership of the current government.”
The GOP-led effort highlighted the divide among House Democrats over Israel, with younger progressives adopting a more critical stance toward the longtime U.S. ally than party leaders.
“If there’s anybody in the Democrat party that does not think that anti-Semitism is bad, then I think this puts them on the record,” Pfluger said Monday.
Some radical Democrats are vowing to boycott on Wednesday when Israeli President Isaac Herzog is slated to address a joint session of Congress in commemoration of Israel’s 75th anniversary.
The same handful—nine Democrats in total, including all of the members of the notorious “Squad”—voted against the resolution Tuesday.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.—the only Palestinian–American in Congress—who is not attending the session, criticized the resolution as normalizing violence against those living in the West Bank.
“We’re here again reaffirming Congress support for apartheid,” Tlaib said during floor debate. “Policing the words of women of color who dare to speak up about truths, about oppression.”
In solidarity with the Palestinian people and all those who have been harmed by Israel's apartheid government, I will be boycotting President Herzog’s joint address to Congress.
I urge all Members of Congress who stand for human rights for all to join me. #BoycottApartheid pic.twitter.com/2ixUdCT1Kq
— Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (@RepRashida) July 17, 2023
Over at the White House, Herzog on Tuesday sought to assure President Joe Biden that Israel remains committed to democracy, despite leftist smear attacks over Netanyahu’s plans to overhaul his country’s corrupt judicial system and ongoing settlement construction in the West Bank.
Top Democrat leaders in the House also reaffirmed their support for Israel ahead of the vote, responding Sunday to Jayapal’s comments with a blistering joint statement.
The statement—from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and members of his leadership team—declared that “Israel is not a racist state.”
It also said America’s long-held commitment to “a safe and secure Israel as an invaluable partner, ally and beacon of democracy in the Middle East is ironclad.”
Jeffries has weathered his own accusations of anti-Semitism, including allegations that he has shown tacit support for the radical hate speech of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who has previously likened Jews to “termites.” His uncle, Leonard Jeffries, is also an outspoken anti-Semite who has taught controversial theories as a professor at City University of New York.
Hours later, more than 40 House Democrats, including a large group of Jewish members, issued a separate letter also condemning Jayapal’s comments.
“Any efforts to rewrite history and question the Jewish State’s right to exist, or our historic bipartisan relationship, will never succeed in Congress,” the group, led by Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., said Monday night.
Most Democrats supported the GOP resolution Tuesday, even as they accused Republicans of playing politics.
“These are straightforward things that we should be supporting,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., who is Jewish, told reporters.
“But I certainly questioned the intentions of the Republicans by putting it on the floor,” added the disgraced ex-Democratic National Committee chair, who was caught trying to rig the 2016 presidential primary for Hillary Clinton and later resigned.
“I wish their intentions were genuine,” Schultz added.
Schultz also called out House Republicans’ efforts to condemn Jayapal’s comments with a vote but their refusal to disinvite Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from a hearing Thursday on censorship, despite off-the-record comments he made about the COVID-19 virus being engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.
“That type of vile messaging and statements should never be given those world’s largest platforms to fan the flames of conspiracy theories and racial and ethnic and religious hate,” she said. More than 100 Democrats have signed a letter as of late Tuesday calling for Republican leadership to remove him from the panel.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy and committee chair Jim Jordan, who is holding the hearing, have so far refused to disinvite Kennedy. Both said while they disagree with his comments, taking him off a panel about censorship would be contrary to the point Republicans are trying to make.
Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic and traditional liberal who threatens to derail President Joe Biden’s stranglehold on the increasingly radical and out-of-touch Left, has attempted several times to clarify his remarks by offering a scientifically supported justification for what he actually said: that a particular area of the cell known as the furin cleave docking site, which the COVID-19 virus was known to attack, is more pronounced in some ethnic groups than others.
The @nypost story is mistaken. I have never, ever suggested that the COVID-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews. I accurately pointed out — during an off-the-record conversation — that the U.S. and other governments are developing ethnically targeted bioweapons and that a 2021…
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) July 15, 2023
Several of his Democrat critics, hoping to neutralize his political threat on the 2024 campaign trail, carped only on the alleged anti-Semitic trope while ignoring entirely the Sinophobia that ostensibly accompanied it, underscoring the cynical focus on optics and messaging over principles that have often driven the Democratic narrative.
Some came to Kennedy’s defense, observing that even if COVID-19 was not a genetically engineered bioweapon, it is certainly within the realm of plausibility that China is attempting to develop such a technology, and that it would be dangerous simply to dismiss those concerns as a racist “trope.”
People say @RobertKennedyJr fueled an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, but he didn't. China has indeed been researching ethnically-targeted bioweapons. What's more, Kennedy triggered a long-overdue debate about how to rein in the dual-use research that has spiraled out of control. pic.twitter.com/AWHnspaTFD
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) July 15, 2023
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
