Pro-Israel hawks lash out after most House Dems vote to cut aid

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Public opinion on Israel is shifting rapidly, but there was little evidence of that at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing Wednesday. The Middle East and North Africa Subcommittee's discussion of "The Next Phase of the Abraham Accords" largely reflected a Washington consensus on Israel that is quickly losing support. The discussion was ostensibly focused on expanding the agreements, signed during President Donald Trump’s first term, that normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco. But the conversation quickly expanded to broader questions of the U.S.-Israel and Israel-Palestine relationship. In particular, lawmakers and witnesses explored whether the pursuit of a Palestinian state was a necessary step to further the accords and bring in Saudi Arabia, which has previously said they would not sign the accords without a pathway to statehood. Four of the five Democratic members present – Reps. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), Brad Schneider (D-Ill.), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), and Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) — were among the narrow minority of the party who voted against an amendment to cut off aid to Israel. The one exception to this was Rep. Bill Keating (D-Mass.), who was among the 19 AIPAC-supported Democrats later “punished” by the lobby group as a result of their support for the amendment, according to the New York Times. The witness panel skewed the same direction. David Friedman, President Donald Trump's first-term ambassador to Israel, has previously called for "Israeli sovereignty over the entirety of Judea and Samaria" — the biblical name for the West Bank favored by the Israeli right. Asher Fredman testified as executive director of the Misgav Institute, a think tank that, in October 2023, called for the "relocation and final settlement of the entire Gaza population," according to a translation reported by Mondoweiss. The third witness — Daniel Shapiro, U.S. ambassador to Israel under President Barack Obama — offered the panel's closest thing to a dissenting voice. Shapiro argued that the biggest impediment to peace was the ongoing war in Iran, which he said would result in either “leaving our regional partners to contend with an emboldened Iran” or “a highly costly forever war with massive sustained U.S. military presence,” neither of which would be conducive to regional integration. For the other panelists, however, blame fell squarely on Palestinians' rejection of peace. “The United States should have no role, no role in putting its imprimatur on a corrupt Palestinian state,” Friedman said during his opening remarks. He later said that, in his analysis, Tel Aviv would welcome normalization with Riyadh, but not at the cost of a Palestinian state, which Friedman said was akin to “suicide” for Israelis. The staunchly pro-Israel voices on the panel certainly sensed that the political winds were shifting against Israel, and argued these dynamics would block an expansion of the Abraham Accords. Friedman argued that no Arab country would choose to “make a deal with Trump for two years” and then enter a more unpredictable political landscape. “We'll have to relitigate everything all over again,” he lamented. “We have to take this issue and make it a bipartisan, predictable issue, and that I think will bring a lot of good, a lot of good outcomes.” Speaking directly about the recent vote to cut aid, Friedman added that “If Arab countries think that Israel is losing American support, throw the accords out the window.” Fredman of Misgav, for his part, made the case that there is currently no viable Palestinian partner for peace, citing polling that 53% of Palestinians viewed the October 7 attack favorably and that Hamas remains more popular than rival factions. The strongest point of friction between the Democratic members present and the witnesses was over the issue of settler violence in the West Bank. Sherman pressed on rising attacks, citing Israeli military figures showing a 27% increase and reports of severe attacks up 50%. Friedman waved off the framing entirely. Settler violence, he said, is a "man bites dog" story – because “it doesn't happen that often. But it's so prone with emotion and anger that it gets the headlines."

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