Media

  • What anti-Palestinian legislation to look out for in the new Congress (Mondoweiss)

    “Mondoweiss U.S. correspondent Michael Arria spoke with Foundation for Middle East Peace (FMEP) President Lara Friedman. Friedman’s weekly Legislative Round-Up is required reading for anyone who wants to stay informed on the latest bills in Congress and the discussion in Washington, DC. In the conversation Friedman discusses Trump’s pro-Israel Executive Orders and what anti-Palestinian bills people should watch during this congressional session.”

  • Trump Is Bullying Jordan and Egypt to Help in Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza. It Isn’t Working. (The Intercept)

    “Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, said it was a deal neither country can afford to make. For Egypt, argued Friedman, moving Palestinians into effectively ‘concentration camps’ along the Sinai, would open them up to military conflict from Israel. ‘There is inevitably going to be residual recidivist military action by Palestinians against Israel, which is going to lead to war between Israel and Egypt,’ she said. There’s also the broad domestic support for the Palestinian cause in Jordan — already home to the world’s largest population of Palestinian refugees — as well as Egypt. ‘For Jordan, the idea of de-populating Gaza and potentially asking Jordan to take more Palestinians is an existential threat for the Jordanian regime,’ said Friedman. ‘From an Egyptian perspective, politically, national security-wise, I don’t know how anyone imagines that Egypt can give in on this and not see itself massively destabilized.’”

  • How Title VI investigations are silencing grade-school students against Israel’s genocide in Gaza (Prism)

    “For years, defenders of Israel have accused its critics of being antisemites, a notion that the DOE has also entertained. Since at least 2018, the department has considered adopting a definition of antisemitism that includes criticism of Zionism or Jewish ethnonationalism. Although the DOE has never formally adopted it, such a definition has been used to challenge student and staff organizing in support of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, which advocates economic opposition to the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Individual schools have also incorporated the definition into their internal policies, including Harvard University, which did so in January to settle a Title VI complaint filed by the Brandeis Center. Such complaints of alleged antisemitism are filed with the DOE against schools or school districts, which often opt for settlements rather than litigating cases, thereby incurring more significant costs—including further accusations of antisemitism.

    “’The core of that is the argument that any meaningful protest or criticism of Israel or Zionism is antisemitism,’ Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, which tracks such Title VI complaints, told Prism. ‘The overwhelming majority of these cases that they’re making are about things that a teacher said about Israel, or allowed to be said in class about Palestine, or was written on a wall—that sort of thing.’

    “As an example, Friedman cited the phrase ‘from the river to the sea,’ a popular rallying cry for Palestinian liberation, which Title VI complainants have claimed is antisemitic.”

  • Trump’s EO to ‘Combat Antisemitism’ Wields Jewish Safety as a Weapon to Crush Palestine Solidarity (Religion Dispatches)

    “Casting a broad net, the legal code penalizes concerted activity to deprive individuals of their rights. It remains to be seen how the administration may wield this statute against Palestine solidarity protesters, a tactic encouraged by a Heritage Foundation legal scholar last year. ‘This incredibly broad, easily abused statute,’ tweeted Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, ‘is what they intend to weaponize against anyone who dares voice public support for Palestinian lives/rights.’”

  • Free speech crises loom with crackdown on Israel criticism (Responsible Statecraft)

    “‘The goal here has long been to refocus the fight against antisemitism — and there is real antisemitism out there, which needs to be fought — to redefine it and make the central focus of this battle the shutting down of criticism of Israel and anti-Zionism,’ said Lara Friedman, the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace. Friedman has spent years documenting legislative and lobbying efforts in the U.S. to restrict speech on Israel and pass the IHRA definition into federal law. Many states have already passed resolutions or adopted laws to embrace this framing, according to the Foundation’s data. ‘This has been fought since long before October 7, and it hasn’t passed in Congress because it is so obviously controversial,’ Friedman said. ‘You have major organizations that are not Israel-focused that have come out and said this would massively violate free speech.’ The antisemitism bill has been stalled in the Senate for months, so its definition of antisemitism is not yet the legal standard. But Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer recently proposed adding the legislation to the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). ‘Schumer wants to put it on the NDAA, basically saying, ‘I want this to pass, but I don’t want to force Democrats to vote on it because some will vote against it, and then they’ll call Democrats bad on antisemitism,” Friedman told RS. ‘And [Republican Speaker of the House Mike] Johnson is saying, ‘No, we have to have an up-or-down vote and force the Democrats all to vote on it.’”

  • Trump likely to use antisemitism claims to launch crackdown on US universities

    “Targeting ‘woke’ education is catnip for the right right now, and the fact that they used antisemitism, or alleged antisemitism, as the tool to do so enabled them to mitigate to a great degree Democratic opposition and actually get Democrats to support them in this agenda,” said Lara Friedman, the President of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, who tracks efforts to use antisemitism as a pretext to punish critics of Israel.

  • The Civil Rights Law Shutting Down Pro-Palestine Speech (Jewish Currents)

    “The ADL and allied groups’ push to use Title VI to target anti-Zionist speech has ample support in Congress, where members have advanced a range of measures to supercharge the statute’s repressive utility. One such bill, introduced in April in response to pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia, would allow the DOE to install an antisemitism monitor at any college or university receiving federal funding. The monitor would publish public reports detailing the progress universities have made in combating alleged antisemitism, and would provide an annual report to Congress recommending policies and sanctions the DOE and Congress should pursue in response to what they call antisemitism. Another bill, introduced in July, would impose increased fines on, and potentially revoke the tax-exempt status of, universities found to be in violation of Title VI. While neither of these bills has received a vote so far, a third measure has advanced farther: the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which mandates that the DOE, while investigating Title VI complaints, consider the IHRA definition when determining whether a school presents a hostile environment for Jewish students. The bill was passed by the House of Representatives in May; while the Senate has yet to take up the bill, the office of Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he planned to bring it up for a vote before the end of the year. ‘These members of Congress are looking at the situation and saying that universities clearly have too much wiggle room on how they deal with protesters and what they do and don’t consider antisemitism,’ said Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation of Middle East Peace. ‘The legislation is intended to remove that wiggle room.’”

  • Trump’s Fervent Christian Zionists Poised to Lead the Military — And US-Israel Relations (Religion Dispatches)

    “Huckabee’s ‘Biblical mandate’ has led him to march in lockstep with the maximalist Israeli Right. As leading Middle East analyst Lara Friedman has documented, he has: claimed there is ‘no such thing as a Palestinian’; called a Palestinian state a ‘fantasy’; called on the US to fund West Bank settlements; and considered buying a home there himself…”