“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 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.’”

“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…”

“To unpack the election results and understand the implications of a second Trump term for U.S. policy on Israel-Palestine, +972 Magazine spoke with Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace (FMEP) and a longtime expert on American and Israeli politics (full disclosure: FMEP is a funder of +972 Magazine). For Friedman, last week revealed the consequences of Democrats’ failure to take the concerns of its base seriously — simply assuming that they would turn out to support Harris — and of trying to outflank Republicans on their pro-Israel bona fides as part of their appeal to the so-called centrist voter. This was a lesson, as Friedman points out, that Democrats could have learned from their Israeli counterparts in the Labor Party, which has rendered itself obsolete by failing to offer a real alternative to the Israeli right…”

“…the more insidious element of the bill, the one targeting nonprofits, doubles down on existing legislation. Providing ‘material support’ for US-designated terror groups is already against the law, noted Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace. ‘It’s already illegal for [nonprofits] to support terror and the Department of Justice actually has a path to say, ‘This is illegal, and this is a foreign terrorist organisation, and here’s our proof,’’ she told Al Jazeera. ‘And it’s accountable: they can take your nonprofit status away, but there’s actual due process.’ Congressman David Kustoff, a Republican and a co-sponsor of the bill, argued when he first introduced the legislation that the current process is insufficient. ‘Right now, our ability to crack down on tax-exempt organisations that support terrorism is inadequate,’ Kustoff said in April. ‘Doing so, under current law, requires a time-consuming bureaucratic process that has sometimes prevented federal authorities from acting.’ But removing checks and balances from the process could turn the legislation into a weapon to be deployed against any group the administration in office may not like. When the bill was first introduced, it generated pushback from across the political spectrum, Friedman noted. ‘Including from the right that said, ‘Well, if this is in the hands of a government that’s anti the things we care about, this could hurt us,’’ she said. ‘Are we at a point now where Republicans have decided there will never again be a government that could come back to bite them so they’re going to support unlimited anything? I don’t know. Trump could do all of this by executive order anyway.’”

“…The resolution stated that members of the MLA, not the organization itself, endorse the 2005 Palestinian Civil Society Call for BDS against Israel. Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, said she doesn’t think a resolution expressing members’ sentiments toward BDS would violate anti-boycott laws, but that ‘doesn’t mean that you won’t see blowback.’ Friedman said these contract laws are weaponized by lawmakers to impose a chilling effect on companies. ‘Folks who are behind these laws, to some extent, are counting on [organizations] not being willing or able to defend their free-speech rights in court,’ she said.”

“…As some advocates for Palestinian rights pointed out, Israel’s most recent attack on UNRWA is part of Israel’s long term strategy to target the UN and the very concept of international law in order to vastly erode the rights of Palestinian refugees, especially their right to return.
‘The campaign to end UNRWA pre-dates 10/7/23 by decades, and has NOTHING to do with terror,’ Foundation for Middle East Peace President Lara Friedman said. ‘It is and has always been about erasing Palestinians and Palestinian rights.’ Friedman pointed to an article she penned in 2018, in which she wrote that efforts to gut UNRWA are part of ‘unilateral action’ by Israel, the U.S., and other actors ‘to re-define Palestinian refugees out of existence.'”

“…’The costs of these new rules of war’ that Biden has co-authored in Gaza, wrote Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, ‘will be paid with the blood of civilians worldwide for generations to come, and the U.S. responsibility for enabling, defending, and normalizing these new rules, and their horrific, dehumanizing consequences will not be forgotten.’”

“Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, said that Ms. Harris seemed to have just hunkered down, waiting for Election Day before making any affirmative effort to change the course of events in the Middle East and pressure Mr. Netanyahu to de-escalate. It isn’t working — politically or diplomatically. ‘She was in a bind from the beginning,’ Ms. Friedman said. ‘if she gave an inch’ toward criticizing the Israeli government, ‘she would be framed as anti-Israel or even antisemitic. Even if she doesn’t give an inch, she’s still being framed as anti-Israel or antisemitic. So maybe it would be better to conceptualize and stand behind a defensible policy’ in the region, Ms. Friedman added.”

“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.’”