US Press
Washington reads an Iran offensive, AIPAC's price and a Muslim nominee
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
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What the American papers and Washington's research institutions put in front of policymakers on Monday morning, and where Palestine sits in it.
The papers#
The New York Times leads its politics file on the pro-Israel lobby's changed standing. Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate nominee in Michigan, has asked the American Israel Public Affairs Committee not to advertise for him against Abdul El-Sayed, three weeks after the committee and its allies lost a $30 million effort to stop El-Sayed in the Democratic primary.
The same desk reports Hakeem Jeffries, the man in line to be speaker if Democrats take the House, meeting Jared Kushner privately to discuss how the two sides might work together — a meeting worth noting here because Kushner remains the American principal on the Gaza framework.
The Times also finds the midterms rhyming with 2006, an unpopular war and high prices moving voters, and reports on Powerus, a Florida start-up supplying low-cost counter-drone interceptors for the Iran war whose route to becoming a global supplier ran through the Trump family and a golf course.
The Washington Post's analysis of the campaign against El-Sayed is the piece Palestinian and Arab-American readers should not miss. Anti-Muslim hate directed at him online rose twentyfold in the days after his win, by the count of the Center for the Study of Organized Hate, and by mid-August religion had displaced socialism as the dominant theme of conservative commentary about him.
Senator Tommy Tuberville called him a terrorist and a radical Islamist, the president called him a jihadist, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee's advertisement called him radical.
The Post also reports Judge Jeannette Vargas of the Southern District of New York striking down the indefinite pause on immigrant visas for nationals of 75 countries as patently unlawful — a ruling that leaves the separate suspension covering Palestinian Authority travel documents standing.
The Hill spent the weekend on the Iran escalation. Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso said Monday would be D-Day for the economy in Iran; Mohsen Rezaei of Iran's Supreme National Security Council warned neighbouring states against joining an American economic war; and former vice-president Mike Pence said further American strikes are inevitable.
Axios reported the meeting between Syria's foreign minister and the Mossad's director to lower tensions after Israel bombed a Syrian air base without notifying Washington.
The think tanks#
The Quincy Institute's Responsible Statecraft, which argues for American military restraint, published the week's most consequential Palestine-adjacent paper: Jennifer Kavanagh of Defense Priorities against the plan by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America to sign a mutual defense treaty with Israel, base American forces there, and write a fresh $38 billion ten-year aid memorandum.
The same publication carries the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' count of 31 former members of Congress and senior staff who joined military contractors and lobbies in the past decade.
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish institute close to sanctions policy, spent the weekend on the Iran financial campaign it calls Operation Economic Fury. The Atlantic ran the counter-argument in essay form, holding that the dominant power in the Middle East from here will be neither the United States nor Israel but Iran.
What is missing#
Not one outlet swept for this roundup covered what Israel's own press led with on Monday: the investigation showing that Palestinian villages in the occupied West Bank are being emptied by a repeatable method, now operating inside the areas the Oslo agreements assigned to Palestinian authority.
Gaza reconstruction financing is again absent as a file with money and a timetable attached — the fourth consecutive week this desk has recorded that gap.
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