“We were at a village that Israeli settlers had destroyed, they had destroyed the school, they had destroyed that village, and we were just looking at it. And these hoodlums come in with machine guns—M4, an American-made machine gun—and they detain us. They block off the road. And then they call the IDF and the IDF is on their side, not on the side of the Americans,” Rep. Ro Khanna told Reuters on Thursday night, according to a prominent story today in the Times of Israel.
The settlers taunted and swore at Rep. Khanna and his team, the California Democratic Congressman told the New York Times. Two Israeli Defense Force (IDF) cars pulled up, but instead of ordering the settlers to disband, the soldiers chatted with them, and when the settlers left, moved a car in order to continue blocking passage. Finally, after calls to the U.S. Embassy, Israeli police showed up to end the detention.
The Congressman reflected: “I felt powerless in that situation… Imagine how people feel every day, Palestinians under the occupation, if they could make an American congressperson feel powerless for 90 minutes.”
Multiple media are now reporting the outrageous settler-IDF actions, and the Congressman has begun posting videos and pictures from his visit to the West Bank. Interviews from the several towns he visited will be included. He told reporters that he had visited Israel several times before, but since he had never spoken with any Palestinians, he decided he should visit the West Bank himself. As he told the NY Times, he now has personally seen “the apartheidlike conditions, the inequality” against the Palestinians. “No American would support this,” he said, “if they knew the details of what was going on here.”
Khanna also said he is “strongly considering” a run for the U.S. Presidency, even more so after this trip. He promised that whether he runs or not, he will talk about what he saw all over the U.S. The Democratic Party establishment is “clueless about how much of a moral test Palestine, Gaza and Israel have become,” he added. “If you’re unwilling to speak up for Palestinian human rights, if you’re unwilling to speak up against the genocide in Gaza, the apartheid in the West Bank, then you are morally compromised,” and you won’t stand up for justice for Americans either.
Times of Israel noted in its coverage that in May, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that Israel’s favorability rating among Democrats is only 22% (it was 59% in 2018), and reminded its readers that Barack Obama’s former chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel had also warned in Tel Aviv this week that “Israeli policies toward Palestinians were eroding support for the US-Israeli alliance.”
None of the coverage monitored mentions the growing fight against NDAA Section 219 in the House and Section 1217 in the Senate to merge the U.S. military and IDF. This incident, however, should increase the effectiveness of action to block such treasonous legislation.
