Attention to the Unseen

Jonathan Martin writes: Biden aides have clearly absorbed the blowback they got from even friendly Democratic lawmakers for making no mention of Palestinian suffering in official statements they issued marking 100 days since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Indeed, it’s hard to overstate how contemptuous even staunchly pro-Israel Democratic lawmakers have become of Netanyahu. One House Democrat told me of a dinner last month with about eight other colleagues, a cross-section of the caucus ideologically and generationally. “It…

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Reuters reports: President Joe Biden on Sunday denounced anti-Arab rhetoric in response to a Wall Street Journal opinion piece targeting Dearborn, Michigan, that the mayor called “bigoted” and “Islamophobic.” The WSJ published the piece on Friday headlined as “Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital,”, suggesting the city’s residents, including religious leaders and politicians, supported Palestinian Islamist group Hamas and extremism. The column drew outrage from Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, as well as several U.S. lawmakers and rights advocates from the…

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The New York Times reports: More than 800 officials in the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union released a public letter of dissent on Friday against their governments’ support of Israel in its war in Gaza. The letter is the first instance of officials in allied nations across the Atlantic coming together to openly criticize their governments over the war, say current and former officials who are organizing or supporting the effort. The officials say that it…

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Julian Borger writes: US retaliation, when it came, was broad and deep, and telegraphed five days in advance. The White House, the Pentagon and state department had spent the best part of a week talking about the response to Sunday’s drone attack on a US base in northern Jordan, which killed three Americans and wounded more than 30. They warned that retaliation against the suspects, primary among those the Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah militia, would be “multi-tiered” and continue over many…

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Time reports: As much of the world’s attention has focused on the ongoing carnage in Gaza, where Israel’s war of retribution will soon enter its fourth month, the issue of rising Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank largely fell by the wayside. But on Thursday, the Biden administration unveiled an executive order imposing new financial sanctions on Israeli settlers who have been implicated in such violence, in what is perhaps the most significant step taken by…

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The Washington Post reports: Samantha Power, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development and a world-renowned scholar on genocide, was pointedly challenged by current and former USAID employees who during a public event Tuesday questioned her stance on the war in Gaza and complicity in the divisive U.S. policy. “You wrote a book on genocide and you’re still working for the administration: You should resign and speak out,” said Agnieszka Sykes, a global health specialist who told The Washington…

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The Guardian reports: A robust and united position among EU member states convinced Viktor Orbán to end his “blackmail” and support a €50bn (£43bn) funding package for Ukraine, European prime ministers have said. The Hungarian prime minister, who had been vowing to block the funds since December, performed one of the fastest U-turns seen at a leaders’ summit after six weeks of brinkmanship. There was relief that the deal was finally done but also a sense of fury among leaders…

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The Times of Israel reports: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government does not support the immediate discontinuation of UNRWA, a senior Israeli official said on Tuesday as a host of Western countries moved to suspend funding for the UN relief agency for Palestinians amid allegations that roughly a dozen of its employees took part in Hamas’s October 7 terror onslaught and hundreds more are either operatives or have close ties with members. “If UNRWA ceases operating on the ground, this could…

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