“Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, said that US officials were ‘weaponising’ anti-Semitism in a bid to repress human rights organisations critical of Israel. Friedman’s criticism focuses on the prevailing understanding of anti-Semitism adopted by both parties in the US, which was first defined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). The ‘working definition’, which Friedman says is politicised, states not only that anti-Semitism includes hostility towards Jews, but also ‘applying double standards” to Israel or requiring of Israel “behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.’”

“Israel has written off progressive American Jews according to Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace…Lara Friedman gets straight to the point when she says: ‘It’s understandable of Israelis to seek allies. It’s a question though of who you decide to align with and what it says about you. It’s the irony of our times that there are great friends of the Jewish people who can be seen as anti-Semitic.’”

“Allowing the reopening of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s diplomatic mission in Washington or restoring much of the aid to projects that directly benefited the Palestinian Authority would require Mr. Biden to overcome a number of legal obstacles, some of which might require Congressional approval. And re-establishing the United States Consulate in Jerusalem, which until 2019 functioned as the American diplomatic mission to the Palestinians, would require Israel’s permission — something it may not be too quick to grant in a city that Mr. Trump himself formally recognized as Israel’s capital. ‘These are all possible but they would require heavy political lifting,’ said Lara Friedman, the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace and an expert on the role of Congress in the region.”

“Given that opposition to the F-35 sale has been overwhelmingly Democratic, one might conclude that it has been largely politically motivated. But Foundation for Middle East Peace President Lara Friedman dismissed the assumption. ‘Supporting Israel’s QME is something that members of Congress — even those critical of Israeli policy — take very seriously,’ she said. “The idea that Israel lives in a tough neighborhood and needs these kinds of weapons that others don’t have has been beaten into the psyche of those on the Hill,” the head of the dovish DC-based organization said. ‘So when all of the sudden Congress members are being told by the White House that they need not worry, it’s rattling.’”

“Friedman focused on potentially significant shifts in the U.S. political environment, including Rep. Eliot Engel’s (D-NY) primary loss to Jamaal Bowman and the resultant race to replace Engel as chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and other similar defeats of longtime House members to upstart progressive challengers. ‘Things are going to be changing in the next Congress,’ she said. ‘We’re going to see some of the old guard departing.’ Friedman noted that outside spending in Engel’s race and other primaries failed to prevent several incumbents from being unseated.
‘That sends a really powerful message to members of Congress,’ she said. ‘There is some hope that [in] the next House in particular, you will see more backbone.'” But Friedman said she does not expect much change from the status quo in a potential Joe Biden administration. ‘I think fundamentally it will be an effort to roll it back to the ‘highly successful’ — I say that with sarcasm — policy of the Obama administration,’ Friedman told the panel, adding: ‘Either Trump or Biden… I think it is going to be a more interesting situation next year where you potentially have more progressives willing to hold the line, particularly on constitutional matters.’”

“Yet, the people behind this campaign are neither interested in irony nor in justice, and certainly not in justice for Palestinians. As Lara Friedman, the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace who wrote an expose on the Facebook campaign for Jewish Currents, has pointed out, their letter to the Board of Directors “’represents the latest front in the battle to use the IHRA definition to officially exclude criticism of Israel from the bounds of acceptable discourse’”.

“ON AUGUST 7th, amid broad efforts to get Facebook to clamp down on extremist activity and hate speech, more than 120 organizations sent a letter to the social media giant, urging it to “fully adopt” the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism as the “cornerstone of Facebook’s hate speech policy regarding antisemitism.” This definition, which was adopted by the IHRA in 2016 and has been promoted to governments worldwide, includes several examples of what it describes as “contemporary” antisemitism—including “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “applying double standards” to Israel—that can be interpreted to define much criticism of Israel, Israeli policies, or Zionism as antisemitism. This letter represents the latest front in the battle to use the IHRA definition to officially exclude criticism of Israel from the bounds of acceptable discourse…”

“It will be up to the Biden team to resolve the contradictions between progressive activists and the pro-Israel establishment. Lara Friedman, the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace (FMEP) and a Jewish Currents contributing writer, told me she suspects that Biden and Blinken ‘want to avoid making Israel/Palestine an issue in the election.’ The tug of war over the platform, then, may best be understood as a struggle to determine what the campaign considers safe.”

“Lara Friedman…excoriated Blinken for his statement during a webcast in May that ‘Joe Biden believes strongly in keeping your differences—to the greatest extent possible—between friends behind doors,’ referring to how Biden would handle disagreements with Israel. The event was hosted by the Democratic Majority for Israel, a super PAC funded in part by people who have donated to Republicans and that has targeted progressive candidates, including Sanders, with negative ads. ‘It’s quite striking,’ said Friedman. ‘They didn’t put this out in August. They put this out in May, before the July 1 annexation date,’ referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pledge to annex parts of the occupied West Bank this summer, in violation of international law and against pre-Trump US policy. (As of this writing, the process had not formally commenced.) ‘He’s saying aid will never be used as leverage of any kind. He’s promising to protect Israel at the United Nations, which I have a hard time reading as anything other than a shot at Obama’—a reference to Obama’s decision not to veto a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank in December 2016. Friedman was pessimistic about a Biden administration’s willingness to listen to pro-Palestine activists. ‘If they’ve already annexed by the time you come in, how much political capital are you going to spend trying to undo or unwind annexation?’ she asked.”

“In the statement, Greendorfer called for the US government to look into the alleged ties between BLM and Palestinian ‘terror’ groups: ‘We urge the Department of Justice to take action to fully investigate the ties among Black Lives Matter, their BDS partners and foreign terror groups that are promoting violence and unrest in the United States.’ Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace responded to these outrageous smears by saying, ‘If you weren’t expecting this you weren’t paying attention.’ This is clearly part of a pattern.”