Republican senators, led by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, are threatening to delay President Joe Biden’s State Department nominees over policies prohibiting U.S. scientific research aid to certain Israeli-held territories in what the lawmakers refer to as an “antisemitic boycott of Israel.”
Fifteen Republican Senators pledged on Tuesday to stall the confirmation of State Department appointees unless the current administration rescinds what they have termed an “antisemitic boycott” of the Jewish State.
The Senators — including Lindsey Graham (SC), Marco Rubio (FL), Marsha Blackburn (TN), James Risch (ID), and Tom Cotton (AR) — raised their concerns in a recent letter to President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, pointing to the hypocrisy of the State Department voicing support for the U.S.-Israel relationship while endorsing policies undermining it.
“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,” the letter reads.
Blasting the Biden administration for “unilaterally impos[ing] territorial restrictions on U.S. scientific research aid to Israel,” the letter also states that “the new guidance as written constitutes an antisemitic boycott of Israel,” and that the American people and Congress “broadly and deeply oppose boycott efforts against Israel, which have been repeatedly defined in U.S. law as efforts to limit commercial [activity] with persons doing business in any territories controlled by Israel.”
The letter, spearheaded by Sen. Cruz — who is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — follows the Biden administration’s decision last month to halt government-funded cooperation for research, science, and technology initiatives in the Golan Heights, Judea, Samaria, and parts of Jerusalem.
The action undoes a policy established in 2020 by the Donald Trump administration, which allowed American researchers to work with Israeli institutions across the 1949 armistice line, ending a de facto boycott that existed prior to Trump.
The Republican lawmakers assert that the original agreement to withdraw funding from those territories was established long ago due to distinctive regional circumstances while criticizing the current administration for overturning the policy without due public or congressional examination.
They also cautioned that “any effort to deepen American policies that discriminate between territories Israel controlled before and after June 1967 will risk a full rupture in my/our ability to engage the Department of State on these issues.”
After blasting the Biden administration last month for imposing the “boycott” following its “outrageous” and “antisemitic” reversal of former President Trump’s policy of allowing cooperation between U.S. universities and Israeli institutions in Judea and Samaria, Sen. Cruz accused President Biden and his administration officials of being “pathologically obsessed with undermining Israel.”
Given the slender Democratic majority in the Senate, obstructing nominee confirmations could potentially impede the Biden administration’s foreign policy trajectory.
The position of the U.S. ambassador to Israel is set to be vacant later this summer, with the imminent departure of the incumbent ambassador, Tom Nides — who claimed in an interview Monday that Israelis wanted America to interfere in its internal politics, as he criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial reforms.
The matter comes as the Biden administration faces accusations of persistently exhibiting hostility toward Israel.
On Tuesday, Florida Governor and aspiring presidential candidate Ron DeSantis (R) called out both the president and the outgoing ambassador for their stances toward the Jewish State.
“How disrespectful for the U.S. Ambassador to Israel to falsely claim ‘most Israelis want the United States to be in their business,’” he wrote.
“Biden meets with dictators of countries such as Venezuela but snubs the democratically elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” he added. “This is not how you should treat an ally.”
Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio also contrasted Israel’s treatment with that of other countries.
“Unfortunately, under the Biden Administration, nations are better off being our enemies than our allies,” he argued. “They’ve granted concessions to Cuba, Venezuela, and even China while publicly condemning and stabbing allies Israel, El Salvador, and Guatemala in the back.”
Last month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted that Judea and Samaria are part of the Jewish “ancestral homeland” to which Jews have been attached for 3,000 years, claiming the notion of banning Jews from settling in those areas is the true “obstacle to peace.”
Follow Joshua Klein on Twitter @JoshuaKlein.
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