“Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, told The Intercept that such muted responses from the U.S government after the killings of American citizens in the occupied West Bank has become de facto policy. ‘The policy of the U.S. government, both the executive and legislative branches, has effectively been that not all Americans are equal when it comes to dying in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians,’ Friedman said. ‘Israeli Americans are worth fighting for accountability and Palestinian Americans and Americans who stand with them are not. It almost feels farcical to have to say that out loud, because the record is so clear.’

“Friedman, a former U.S. diplomat in Jerusalem, recalled the death of fellow American peace activist Rachel Corrie, who was crushed by an armored Israeli bulldozer in 2003 while she protested against the demolition of Palestinian homes in the West Bank. Eygi, like Corrie, was a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement, an organization dedicated to nonviolent support of Palestinian popular resistance to the Israeli occupation. Corrie’s death was ultimately ruled by Israeli officials as an accident, a conclusion rejected by human rights organizations, who pointed to patterned killings. Friedman, who at the time was an activist with Americans for Peace Now, which opposes settlement expansion in the West Bank, said Corrie’s ‘crime was being in line with Palestinian rights.’

“She also recalled the 2021 killing of prominent Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. An Israeli sniper shot and killed her while she was wearing a press vest covering an Israel Defense Forces raid in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. Forensic evidence showed her killing to be intentional, though an FBI probe into her death remains pending with U.S. officials, having gone silent. ‘We have a president who says if you hurt Americans, you will pay,’ Friedman said, referring to President Joe Biden’s comments made after three American soldiers were killed by a drone strike in Jordan. ‘That is clearly not the case if the Americans are Palestinian American or if they are sympathetic and standing with Palestinians.’

“…Friedman said she hoped the U.S. would respond to Eygi’s killing with equality and that her activism and support for Palestinians wouldn’t prohibit accountability. ‘There is not an ideological litmus test of whose lives count and which ones don’t,” Friedman said, ‘And by imposing this litmus test — and it is bipartisan — we have sent a clear message to Israel and to others in the world: If Americans are politically on the wrong side of the conflict, they’re not really Americans and we don’t really care about them.’”

“The accusation of anti-Israel bias raises the specter of legal trouble for the airlines, because several laws impose financial penalties for boycotting Israel. Even though most of these laws protect companies’ ability to make ‘normal business decisions,’ Torres’ ‘threat itself is a power move,’ says Lara Friedman, president of the nonprofit Foundation for Middle East Peace. ‘No private company wants to be dragged into these disputes over whether they’re being antisemitic by boycotting ‘the Jewish State,” Friedman says…”

“… getting investors to overlook reputational risks or international legal concerns is one thing. Getting airline pilots, crews, and passengers to fly into physical danger might be a much taller order. ‘Unless the U.S. government says so, you can’t make a decision in the best interests of your shareholders and the safety of your crew,’ Friedman says Torres’ letter implies. ‘If that’s what he believes, that’s almost nationalizing the decisions of the private sector when it comes to Israel.'”

“There’s a built-in assumption that there’s nothing at all weird about viewing the US as sort of an open field for Israel to operate in, that there are no limitations,” said Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace.

“If someone like Segal can’t criticize Israeli policies, ‘then who in the world is going to be allowed to speak about this?’ said Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace…”

“In 2024, the two have unfinished Israel business from Trump’s presidency. Along with annexing the West Bank, the first Trump administration proposed recognizing Israeli settlers’ right to remain in homes on occupied lands. Also for Israel to remain an occupying force in any future Palestinian state. ‘I would take them at their word,’ says Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace. They told us what they wanted to do in 2020. We should believe them, she thinks. ‘Last time around, they showed every interest in using antisemitism as a sharp-edged heavy weapon to try to shut down’ talk of Palestinian rights.”

“…’This is part of a broader effort to demonize parts of the tax-exempt sector that a part of the Republican Party views as a key target in the war on woke,’ says Lara Friedman, president of the nonprofit Foundation for Middle East Peace, which has been tracking Congress’ stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. ‘If you make this about supposedly fighting antisemitism, you bring parts of the Democratic Party with you.'” and “Friedman, the Foundation for Middle East Peace president, believes that the congressional letter is more likely to have a ‘chilling effect’ on nonprofits than to turn up any real evidence of illegal activity. ‘It’s partly a fishing expedition,’ she says. ‘And by lodging an accusation, they hope to paint a picture in the mind of the public.'”

“Critics have said the ADL has aligned itself with rightwing organizations, which was a central issue in the 2022 Drop the ADL campaign calling on progressives not to work with the group. The group has also joined forces with rightwing donors and groups pushing for the same legislation, said Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace. ‘The way that ADL and company are arguing for Jewish safety makes a zero-sum battle between that and the right to protest, and it’s weird for an organization like the ADL to play a key role in accrediting that paradigm,’ Friedman said.”

“In a tactic familiar from the post-9/11 landscape, GOP lawmakers and civil society leaders from groups like the ADL and the Brandeis Center have endeavored to paint student protesters and groups as ‘terrorists’. This is bad news for activists across the country: a 2024 report by the Center for Constitutional Rights details how ‘core features’ of US antiterrorism law, ‘driven by anti-Palestinian agendas’, were ‘expanded and ‘brought home’ to repress other protest movements’, including the Black Lives Matter movement and the protests against the ‘Cop City’ Atlanta police training center. As early as next week, the Senate could vote on a bill designed to penalize criticism of Israel by suspending tax-exempt status for ‘terrorist supporting organizations’ – which Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, said would ‘dispense with the due process’ and empower ‘a single US official to act as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner of [American] orgs whose viewpoints that official disagrees with’.

“The resurgence of antisemitism in the U.S. led several states to adopt the definition. Since 2017, 40 states have taken it up, with 14 states passing it into law and 14 more adopting it by proclamation. In nine states it was adopted by resolution and in three states by executive order, according to the Foundation for Middle East Peace.”

“‘This looks like almost dictatorial power given to a single political appointee, who will serve as prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner,’ says Lara Friedman, the president of the DC-based Foundation for Middle East Peace, whose late April X thread on HR 6408 drew the first wave of significant public attention to its fiercely anti-free speech M.O. ‘This is about how you accuse and hold accountable American citizens in violation of US material support laws, and there’s a well established way to do that that involves due process. This is a new track to do that without any due process protections.’” and

“‘This is about being able to rescind SJP’s tax exemption,’ Friedman says. ‘I don’t think a lot of people in Congress want to get up and say ‘I’m going to defend this group that allegedly has ties to Hamas.’ And since no one will make a courageously factual case that this is bullshit, that’s how all this got traction.’ It’s a familiar dynamic for groups like Foundation for Middle East Peace, which advocates for just outcomes in the Israel-Palestine conflict. ‘This is very much along the lines of the anti-BDS legislation that passed in state legislatures,’ she adds. ‘Back then, everyone sort of overlooked that, thinking it was a narrow Israel-Palestine issue that didn’t really concern anyone else. And now that legislation is the template for anti-DEI bills and other legislation that punishes speech.'” and

“Given the fraught state of discourse surrounding the present wave of anti-Gaza protests, it’s not hard to envision a ratified COLUMBIA Act being used by hardcore supporters of the Gaza war—and skittish campus administrators—to dismantle Arabic and Middle Eastern studies programs outright. ‘What they’ve got there is the complementary legislation to Trump’s executive order, which makes the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition the official definition of antisemitism’—a version of the term that Palestinian activists have protested on the grounds that it equates Judaism and Zionism, says Friedman. ‘Then you create this monitor, and the IHRA definition becomes the official definition of antisemitism on campus.’ It’s always tempting, given Congress’s steady transformation into a glorified theater of culture warfare, to shrug off such measures as mere donor-pandering on autopilot. But the repercussions of such posturing in the real world are all too chilling. ‘They’re saying that the IRS should be using a political litmus test to determine a group’s nonprofit status,’ Friedman says. ‘That should alarm anyone.'”