GOP senators accuse Biden of initiating an ‘antisemitic boycott’ of Israel for settlement policy change
Sen.zTed Cruz (R-Texas) on May 11, 2023. Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images
By Jacob Kornbluh July 11, 2023
A group of Republican senators is threatening to derail the confirmation of administration nominees if the State Department does not rescind a recently-reimposed ban on U.S. scientific research and development projects in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
“It is untenable for State Department officials to continue testifying to Congress that they support the U.S.-Israel relationship and then – once out of view – to push policies designed to undermine that relationship,” 14 Republicans wrote in a letter Tuesday to President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. “Without a reversal in these trends, congressional oversight and the expeditious vetting of nominees would become intractable.”
The Democrats hold a razor-thin majority in the Senate, through which all nominees must pass, and a single Republican senator can block a nominee at the committee level, or throw up obstacles on the Senate floor.
The strongly-worded letter, spearheaded by Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, comes in response to a recent revelation that the Biden administration would return to a long-running policy prohibiting government agencies from funding many projects in the settlements, the expansion of which the U.S. has historically opposed. The rule, which had been reversed in the fall of 2020 during the final months of Trump’s presidency, was communicated to Israeli officials last month. It became public only weeks later in an Axios report.
The Republicans blasted the administration for what they claimed was a significant change kept from Congress and the public. They went as far as to accuse the Biden administration of initiating “an antisemitic boycott of Israel.” The group also alleged that Ambassador Deborah E. Lipstadt, the special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism “was excluded from deliberations over this guidance and did not clear it.”
A spokesperson for the office on antisemitism didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesperson, told reporters last month that despite the change, the administration has not taken steps to reverse the key principle of Trump’s settlement policy. Called the “Pompeo Doctrine” — because it was advanced by then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – it asserted that settlements were not inherently inconsistent with international law. It overturned a 1978 memo by State Department legal adviser Herbert Hansell, which deemed Israeli settlements beyond the 1949 armistice lines illegal.
Though the change essentially impacts only three U.S. agencies (the Binational Industrial Research and Development Foundation, the Binational Science Foundation, and the Binational Agricultural Research and Development Foundation, according to the U.S. government), the letter states that the guidance “does something America has never done before: unilaterally impose territorial restrictions on U.S. scientific research aid to Israel.”
Halie Soifer, chief executive of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said in an interview that the Republicans’ attempt to “misconstrue” the Biden administration’s return to long-standing U.S. policy as antisemitic “has no basis in reality.” She accused them of cheapening the term “antisemitism” as they deceive themselves and the public over actual antisemitism and extremism that “has found a political home in the GOP.”
Soifer added, “No president has done more to stand with Israel and Jewish Americans amid the dangerous rise of antisemitism than President Biden, including through his historic strategy to combat antisemitism.”
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