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On Monday in Philadelphia, the Democrats ratified what Hillary Clinton’s website touted as “the most progressive platform in party history.” On several issues—the minimum wage and trade, for example—the platform took positions closer to those espoused by Clinton’s erstwhile primary rival, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. On a few issues, though, Clinton’s campaign dictated a platform that took more moderate positions. One was the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the document doesn’t mention Israel’s occupation or its settlements. That was in line with Clinton’s position: Throughout the Democratic primary, she has made a point of trying to mend fences with right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by eschewing any criticisms of Israel whatsoever.

Arriving at the final platform was a long journey, during which Clinton’s delegates had to beat back challenges on her pro-Israel orthodoxies over and over again. During the past two months Democrats gathered three times to set the platform, first to hear testimony from witnesses chosen by the campaigns, then twice to flesh out the platform before passing a draft on to this week’s Democratic National Committee. At the second session, in late June in St. Louis, a month before the convention, the platform committee sat through a series of lengthy debates. It was past one in the morning before Israel came up and the last proposed amendment—to the language about the Mideast conflict—was read aloud.

In the two paragraphs of the platform dealing with Israel, the document called for supporting Israel and pushing for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. James Zogby, the head of the Arab American Institute and a longtime party activist, read aloud a proposed amendment in an unmistakably Midwest accent. Zogby wanted to add language that would explicitly mention Israel’s occupation and strip out the platform’s condemnation of the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel (BDS).

“We didn’t recognize a Palestinian state in our platform until 2004, after George Bush did it,” Zogby said during the debate. “We have an opportunity here to send a message to the world, to the Arab world, to the Israeli people, to the Palestinian people, and to all of America: that America hears the cries of both sides, that America wants to actually move people toward a real peace.”

“The term ‘occupation’ shouldn’t be controversial,” Zogby, a Lebanese-American, added. “If our policy says it’s an occupation and settlements are wrong and they inhibit peace, why can’t our politics say it? It doesn’t make sense!”

Zogby mentioned several times that the proposed changes had come from Bernie Sanders himself. Sanders began his campaign avoiding foreign policy altogether, but eventually became more outspoken on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, taking Netanyahu to task not only for the Israeli settlement project and continued occupation but also for Israel’s conduct of the 2014 war against the besieged Gaza Strip.

The move was a natural one for Sanders. These days, criticisms of Israel are issued among not only from the left-wing of the Democratic Party, but much of its base. American liberals have become disenchanted with Israel as its occupation becomes more permanent. Then the Israeli government led a fight against the Obama administration’s Iran nuclear deal with a misinformation campaign that saw denunciations of Netanyahu among Democratic members of Congress—once a stronghold of unconditional support for Israel. As a result, Pew polls show a consistent trend of liberal Democrats shedding their unquestioning support for the Jewish state.

Like on the minimum wage, Sanders stood at the vanguard of a widespread emerging progressive sentiment. Now his delegates to the platform committee would be doing battle—civil, though it was—with Clinton’s delegates over one of Washington’s most contentious issues. In the end, it would be Sanders who would make decisions of how hard to press the debate. Party activists and progressive Democrats wondered if the candidate would take the fight all the way to the convention floor.

* * *

Stirrings of a debate over Israel-Palestine in the platform had become apparent as Sanders and Clinton each announced their delegates to the committee; Sanders got five positions and Clinton six. Among Sanders’s picks were Zogby, with his long record of advocating for pro-Palestinian causes, and Cornel West, the loquacious left-wing academic who has advocated for the controversial BDS movement. On Clinton’s side, a medley of more establishment delegates—among them Ambassador Wendy Sherman, a former undersecretary of state and Clinton campaign surrogate, and Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress (where I used to work), which has played a role in Clinton’s play to mend fences with Netanyahu and Israel.

The Clinton campaign’s delegates to the platform committee and its witness to the hearings held firm on this stance. Asked by West, Robert Wexler, a former congressman called to testify before the committee before the platform’s drafting, said the document should not refer to “what you refer to as occupation”—let alone settlements.

At the drafting hearing, the issue would reemerge. Zogby read aloud the initial plank calling for a two-state solution. “Here we add our language,” he said, proposing his amendment to insert a call for “an end to occupation and illegal settlements.”

BDS also came up. Initially dismissed by pro-Israel forces, now that BDS is a burgeoning grassroots movement, pro-Israel advocates speak of it in apocalyptic terms—often equating the peaceful activism with the violent terrorism faced by Israelis. Sanders hasn’t endorsed the BDS movement, nor has he condemned it. Clinton, on the other hand, has made a point to attack the movement: in a letter to her top funder, the Israeli-American businessman and philanthropist Haim Saban, Clinton proclaimed BDS “counterproductive” and vowed to advocate against it. The promise was fulfilled in the platform draft. The Democratic Party committed itself to “oppose any effort to delegitimize Israel, including at the United Nations or through the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement.”

Zogby’s amendment sought to strip the language out. “They were pretty damn insistent on it,” he told The Nation of the Clinton campaign’s efforts to keep the plank. “It was gratuitous, is what it was. You wanna say we oppose efforts to delegitimize Israel? Go ahead and say it. I personally think Netanyahu does more to delegitimize Israel than anybody, but go ahead.”

At the drafting hearing, the Clinton campaign defended the inclusion of the anti-BDS plank. “I think the drafters were very careful here not to say outright we oppose BDS, but basically to say if, in fact, there is a delegitimization of Israel through BDS,” said Sherman at the hearing, “this is not a good thing for anyone.”

What was supposed to be a 16-minute debate about Zogby’s amended language turned into more than a half an hour of back and forth. Committee members stated their support for and opposition to the amendment as Representative Elijah Cummings, the committee chair, allocated minutes.

As the debate went on, Zogby brought up 1988—when he had also tussled with Wendy Sherman, who worked for the Dukakis campaign. “I remember being in this same situation with Wendy Sherman in 1988,” he told the committee, “when we called for mutual recognition, territorial compromise and self-determination for both people.”

Sherman acknowledged the shared history: “Jim is right,” she said. “He and I haven’t grown any older since 1988 when we tread this same territory.”

* * *

The Democrats’ 1988 debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in fact tread a very different territory. In 1987, Palestinians had risen up in the First Intifada, overwhelming peaceful organizing against the occupation that was met by Israel’s overwhelming military force. As the 1988 conventions approached, consciousness of the Palestinians’ plight was growing among Americans. Thanks to a campaign organized by, among others, Zogby’s Arab American Institute, seven state Democratic Parties endorsed Palestinian self-determination. The moves became a source of worry for pro-Israel lobbyists. “We’re deeply troubled,” an American Jewish Committee official said at the time, “by any outcropping of the kinds of views we are seeing in some of these states. But I am confident they do not reflect American opinion in general, nor the mainstream of the Democratic Party.”

In 1988, Zogby was acting as a delegate for another progressive primary insurgent, Jesse Jackson. By the time of the convention, Jackson’s campaign had long since lost its race for the nomination, but his supporters and delegates sought to infuse the Democratic Party with the left-leaning vigor that spurred Jackson’s unprecedented run. Zogby, who then as now served on the platform committee, wanted to have the Democratic Party recognize the Palestinians as a people with basic rights. At the time, even such a basic proclamation was controversial, and inserting the language into the party platform would be an uphill battle.

Some party elites bristled at the notion that the Jackson campaign would seek to introduce a pro-Palestinian plank. “Although such a proposal would have no chance of being included in the platform,” reported The Chicago Tribune, “the mere possibility that it might be discussed disturbs many Democrats. ‘It would be bad,’ said a party leader. ‘Rhetoric would be unleashed which Republicans would like to dine out on.’”

As the platform committee met, Zogby fought to include language endorsing “self-determination” for the Palestinians. It was to be a call for a two-state solution: mutual recognition between Israelis and Palestinians. But the effort faltered: the plank was “debated by the committee and defeated without rancor,” reported The Chicago Tribune. Zogby and his allies in the Jackson campaign were determined to press on: they gathered enough signatures to introduce a minority plank to the platform at the convention in Atlanta later that summer. “That was the main platform fight in ‘88, the Israeli issue,” said Gov. Bill Richardson, who served on the platform committee. “You want to avoid a platform floor fight as much as possible,” he added, because independent voters and media pay closer attention once the conventions roll around.

Zogby suspected he had many Democratic delegates behind him. According to a Los Angeles Times/CNN survey released in July 1988, nearly two-thirds of Dukakis’s delegates supported “giving the Palestinians a homeland in the occupied territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.” Of Jackson delegates, 90 percent supported the notion. But the results were inconsistent: An Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll of delegates found that a narrow majority opposed endorsing a Palestinian State. What’s more, anonymous survey results don’t always transfer over to votes made in public.

Those who wanted to amend the platform feared that even some Jackson delegates might not end up voting for the plank. A compromise was brokered: Jackson gave Zogby his blessing to introduce the language and have it debated on the floor, but the amendment would be withdrawn before a vote was taken.

Though there would be no vote, a spirited debate ensued. Zogby read aloud his plank and was met by vociferous opposition. New York Senator Chuck Schumer, then in the House, condemned the plank. Daniel Inouye, a senator from Hawaii known for strong pro-Israel views, called it “a vicious kick in the teeth of America’s interests in that part of the world.” Both Schumer and Inouye were booed by convention delegates.

“The tensions were very high about Middle East policy,” Jesse Jackson told The Nation, recalling the fight in a June interview. “We felt it was the peoples both fighting for a state. And we had to go from a ‘no talk’ policy to a ‘let’s talk’ policy.”

The conversation over Palestinian self-determination had broken new ground for the party. “[O]nly a few years ago, even to discuss an idea so contrary to U.S. policy and to Israel’s view of security would have been unimaginable,” a New York Times editorial proclaimed. Zogby, remarking on the convention floor, said, “The deadly silence that submerged the issue of Palestinian rights has been shattered.”

Though no pro-Palestinian plank would end up on the platform, Jackson’s policy of “let’s talk” would soon become official American policy—and even led to a breakthrough. Though to this day no Palestinian state exists and Israel’s occupation has become more entrenched, a peace process toward a two-state solution was begun just three years after the 1988 fight when, at the Madrid Conference, Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization began unofficial talks. A year later, following a round of secret talks between Israel and the Palestinians, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn, presided over by Bill Clinton, to mark the Oslo Accords—a peace deal that yielded, if not a state, the mutual recognition between the two people Jackson’s delegates had called for.

Bill Richardson said Jackson delegates like Zogby helped bring the party along to the two-state solution. “I think they launched a useful effort that led to that historic handshake,” recalled Richardson, who along with Zogby and other figures in the 1988 fight was on the White House lawn that day.

“I didn’t feel vindicated,” Jackson said, recalling the Oslo Accords. “What happened that day could have happened years before.”

* * *

In St. Louis last month, as the early hours of Saturday morning ticked away, Elijah Cummings finally called a vote on Zogby’s Israel amendment. “It was pretty clear how it was going to go down,” one committee member recalled to The Nation. Throughout the long day, string of lopsided vote tallies had beaten back progressive efforts to get planks in the platform that took aggressive stances on trade, wages and climate change.

The amendment fell by an eight-to-five vote. “It stung,” the committee member said.

In Orlando on July 9, as the full 187-member platform committee gathered to make the additional changes to and approve the 2016 Democratic platform, party activists took another shot. Maya Berry, the executive director of the Arab American Institute, introduced two amendments to the platform that followed on the same changes Zogby had tried to make in St. Louis: one calling for an end to settlements and occupation and another calling for rebuilding the Gaza Strip. Berry and Cornel West gave impassioned speeches, followed by Clinton supporters opposing the additions. Neither amendment passed.

Still, Zogby is not entirely despondent. “Last time we were just trying to get Palestinians recognized as an entity,” Zogby told The Nation. “They wouldn’t let me use the ‘P-word’”—Palestinian—“in the platform. This time we were talking about occupation and settlements and the suffering of people in Gaza. It was a much richer discussion than we had last time.”

The draft language in the 2016 platform, for the first time, spoke of a Palestinian self-determination not just for the sake of Israel’s security, calling for a solution that provides the Palestinians with “independence, sovereignty, and dignity.” Some members of the platform committee lauded the addition. “The language in the platform is different from what it was on 2012, a little more balanced,” a second committee member said. “My view is that it sets us in a more progressive direction than four years ago.”

Other figures from the 1988 fight, however, were less sanguine. Asked whether he thought the Democratic Party had changed on Israel-Palestine issues, Jesse Jackson demurred. “Not very much. Not very much,” he said. “There’s no winners until there’s a resolution.” Jackson went on, “There’s no other nation in the world that could play the broker role. But we’re not inclined to play it. The very term ‘fair’ was put off limits.”

As it was when, 28 years ago, he introduced a minority plank that would never get voted on, Zogby understood his odds were more than long. “I knew we wouldn’t win, so there’s no ‘disheartening’ to it,” he responded when asked if he was upset at the loss. Like many amendments to the draft platform introduced by Sanders delegates, Zogby went into the platform debate without the votes to carry the day. Other similarities with the 1988 fight persisted: “The intensity, the nervousness of the other side was about the same. They didn’t want it debated then, they don’t want it debated now.”

When he was pushing for Palestinian rights in 1988, Zogby sought and received permission from Jackson to push the minority plank at the platform on the convention floor. In the runup to the convention in Philadelphia, Democratic and pro-Palestinian activists spoke of the possibility of pressing forward against Clinton’s mealy-mouthed platform. But on July 11, Sanders endorsed Clinton, ending his run for the Democratic nomination, and his campaign from there forward sought to avoid a confrontation. “It is not easy to introduce a minority plank without the campaign’s blessing,” Zogby told The Nation. “But then Bernie decided not to go forward.”

“I would have preferred to continue the debate as a minority plank,” Zogby went on, “both because it gives the issue much deserved exposure and would provide Bernie with greater leverage enabling him to press for structural reforms. At the same time, I’m going to respect that Bernie didn’t want to continue. I can only imagine the pressure to which he was subjected and the exhaustion he must feel.”

Clinton’s moderate tack on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had finally prevailed among her party. With the Clinton’s Democratic Party shying away from so much as mild criticisms of Israel—even avoiding basic truths about the conflict—liberals who focus on the Middle East are left wondering whether, if she can prevail over Donald Trump in the general election, Clinton will stand up for liberal values and Palestinian rights.

Fifty-one American diplomats issued a “dissent cable” last week to top State Department officials urging a radical change in US policy toward Syria: They want the government to intervene militarily in the civil war and undertake strikes against the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad. The cable, reported by The New York Times—which posted a draft of the memo online—and The Wall Street Journal and signed by mostly mid-level career Foreign Service officers, urged “a judicious use of stand-off and air weapons, which would undergird and drive a more focused and hard-nosed U.S.-led diplomatic process.” The cable has found support among well-respected figures in the foreign-policy community, and rumors swirl that Secretary of State John Kerry agrees with the general thrust of their dissent.

Let’s stipulate a few things about these revelations. First, career Foreign Service officers like those who signed this cable are more often than not the good guys of foreign policy. They hold deep knowledge about the places on which they work and, usually, their policy leanings tilt not toward war but toward, well, diplomacy. Second, Syria’s multi-faceted civil war is a humanitarian disaster. Hundreds of thousands have perished. The power vacuum created by war has allowed the Islamic State to take over in some regions, where it has imposed a horrific reign of terror over civilians under its control. Lastly, there are no good options for the United States in Syria. The diplomatic dissent is well-intentioned, but it offers little more than leaps in logic.

The immediate goal of the memo’s prescriptions is to reestablish the cease-fire put in place in February. Thanks in large part to Assad’s duplicity, it never really took hold. His regime has attacked civilians, including with indiscriminate barrel bombs, and has blocked humanitarian aid. The diplomats who signed the cable are seeking to block these violations of the cease-fire with force. “We believe that achieving our objectives will continue to elude us if we do not include the use of military force as an option to enforce the Cessation of Hostilities (CoH) and compel the Syrian regime to abide by its terms as well as to negotiate a political solution in good faith,” the memo says.

Overwhelming US air power could certainly weaken Assad’s offensive capabilities. The bigger problem, though, lies in what comes next. It’s not evident how yet more military strikes in Syria will strengthen a tattered cease-fire. But even if the cease-fire is reestablished, what happens if Assad continues to refuse to engage in a meaningful diplomatic process? On these questions, the memo gives us nothing. It takes as almost a given that the cease-fire alone will lead Assad to rethink his long-held and bloody stubbornness. Mission creep, at that point, seems almost inevitable; a cynic might think it the goal of the memo in the first place.

One need only look to Libya to see what happens when the United States enters a conflict with limited aims and no vision of medium- and long-term potential outcomes. The responsibility to protect civilians invoked by the State Department officials was used then as a way to get the US military involved in a NATO coalition war. The aim of the intervention turned quickly from protecting civilians to unseating Muammar Qaddafi. But once the dictator fell, chaos ensued. Despite a warning from Barack Obama that Libya would face instability, little was done to minimize the dangers. At this point, it’s difficult to see the NATO intervention as anything but a strategic failure.

Syria offers even less in the way of an organized opposition than did Libya. The web of alliances is sometimes impossible to follow—and always has been. Some commentators have suggested that more robust early American support for rebels would have brought more cohesion. That’s an interesting counterfactual, but it is only that. And there’s certainly no guarantee that protecting rebel forces from Assad today will do anything to unify them.

The diplomats themselves raise another potentially sticky issue: “We are not advocating for a slippery slope that ends in a military confrontation with Russia,” they write. But what if, after an initial US air assault, Russia simply takes an even more aggressive posture in favor of Assad, filling the void left by the Syrian president’s damaged capabilities? For this, neither the dissent cable nor other advocates of US military involvement offer answers. (Update: a mid-air clash last week over Syria between Russian and American jets—albeit only jockeying for space without firing shots—stands as a poignant reminder that slippery slopes are dangerous not because people advocate for them, but because people accidentally step onto them.) 

So what gives? Some reports have suggested the memo’s purpose is to make Syria an issue in the US presidential election. “The internal cable may be an attempt to shape the foreign policy outlook of the next administration,” an official said, as paraphrased in The Wall Street Journal’s report. A Bloomberg article suggested the same thing. Hillary Clinton, both as secretary of state and as a presidential candidate, has been a consistent advocate for more military intervention, whether through more robust arming of rebels or the establishment of a no-fly zone (on the latter, Clinton’s prescriptions have sometimes been incoherent). Clinton, too, however, has failed to address directly the pitfalls of deeper intervention. If deeper involvement in Syria’s civil war takes a sour turn—as, it seems, all US interventions do—what will be her response? Deeper involvement yet?

Officials pressing for military conflict with Assad owe it to all of us to answer these questions. “Despite expressing strong anti-Assad sentiments,” a study from the Brookings Institution released last year found, “the bottom line is that Americans remain strongly opposed to American military operations against Assad’s army in Syria, with 72% opposing and 25% supporting such operations.” Those views held across party lines. In a poll released in February, Gallup found that, while a third of Americans want more military involvement, more than half want no escalation of our intervention there.

The diplomats should not be scorned for their dissent—it is entirely appropriate that they advise top officials of their thinking—and, though the question of leaking the memo to the general public is more complicated, ultimately our democratic process in deciding whether to intervene is strengthened by having more diverse perspectives. None of that, however, means that the dissenting diplomats, Hillary Clinton, or anyone else advocating a broader US war in Syria should escape the hard questions that our nation so often avoids before military adventures. Syria is too dangerous to make that mistake again.

When The Washington Post announced the Democratic Party’s platform-committee appointments for this summer’s convention, the uninitiated might have been forgiven for wondering why, in a primary contest dominated by domestic politics and policy, a foreign-policy issue got top billing. And yet there it was: “Sanders wins greater say in Democratic platform; names pro-Palestinian activist,” blared the headline.

The lead of the article focused on the party’s decision to allot six platform committee spots to the now-presumptive nominee, Hillary Clinton, and a healthy five slots to her challenger, Senator Bernie Sanders. But by the fifth paragraph, there again was the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

Sanders’s slate includes James Zogby, a longtime activist for Palestinian rights as well as a DNC member and official. Zogby currently co-chairs the party’s resolutions committee. His inclusion is a sign of Sanders’s plans to push the party’s policy on Israel toward what he has called a more even-handed approach to the Palestinian cause.

The reduction of longtime Democratic Party activist James Zogby’s career—and, by extension, Sanders’s campaign—to quarrels over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is something to behold. But it’s not surprising. To paraphrase a more generalized saying about the news business: If it’s about Israel, it leads. (It should be noted that this dynamic is one of the Israel lobby’s own making, but that’s for another column.)

That doesn’t mean, however, that picking Zogby holds no significance, or that the looming platform battle over Israel isn’t an important one. Party platforms may be mostly symbolic documents—they’re not binding on candidates—but they are a high-profile venue for setting party agendas and airing ideological disputes. With recent history as our guide, this appears to be exactly what is about to happen in the lead-up to the convention in Philadelphia.

At the 2012 convention in Charlotte, one such fight erupted over Israel. During the drafting of the platform, a foreign-policy wonk and former Defense Department official decided to strike a reference made in the 2008 platform to Jerusalem being Israel’s eternal and undivided capital—an old talking point for the Israeli right and the stateside advocates who so often parrot its positions. But the 2008 assertion was out of step with how the international community regards the holy city—not to mention longstanding US policy, adopted by Barack Obama, as well as a succession of Republican and Democratic presidents before him, of reserving determination of the city’s final status for negotiations. So Jerusalem was initially left out of the 2012 platform.

But at the convention, after some needling from Israel lobby groups and Republicans, the issue came to the forefront. In an extraordinarily awkward moment, convention chair Antonio Villaraigosa asked delegates to approve by voice vote an amendment to reinstate the Jerusalem language in the platform. The vote required two-thirds of the delegates to shout in favor of the amendment, but it was clear Villaraigosa didn’t have such a majority. Despite that, he declared the amendment approved, to the booing of many Democratic delegates.

Over the past four years, more and more liberals and Democrats have broken with the right-leaning pro-Israel positions imposed by the country’s US lobby. The break makes sense; American liberals have been given every reason to question how far their affinity for the small Middle Eastern country should extend. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has led the country in a steady rightward lurch. He vociferously opposed nuclear diplomacy with Iran, and in the course of the fight all but openly campaigned against Obama in the 2012 presidential contest. Netanyahu denounced the nuclear deal, and, insulting the president by arranging behind the White House’s back to address Congress, led a mostly partisan effort on Capitol Hill to kill the accord. In a powerful symbol of discontent, dozens of Democratic members of Congress boycotted the prime minister’s speech.

Meanwhile, progress toward any semblance of a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems stalled, not least because of the Netanyahu government’s intransigence and efforts to entrench the nearly 50-year occupation. It’s no wonder that, slowly but surely, American liberals are siding more and more with the Palestinians.

Bernie Sanders, for his part, has shown flares of leadership on this issue, siding with the vanguard of liberal opinion. He declared in  a debate with Clinton this spring, “There comes a time when if we pursue justice and peace, we are going to have to say that Netanyahu is not right all of the time.” Clinton, on the other hand, has shown the opposite tendency, promising to mend fences with Netanyahu.

The chasm between these two postures could lead to fireworks as the platform is crafted. The platform committee will only begin to gather over the next few weeks, but it’s easy enough to guess where the battles might occur. The candidates have already shown divisions over diplomacy with Iran—which in Washington is an Israeli issue. Likewise over settlements. Though the illegal Israeli colonies haven’t been much of an issue in the 2016 primary, Sanders’s website at least says that Israel should “cease developing settlements on Palestinian land.” He also criticizes the Gaza blockade. This willingness to speak basic truths about the conflict was evident in the Democratic debate in Brooklyn. One would be hard pressed to find Clinton, in Brooklyn or anywhere else, saying anything substantively critical about Israel or its right-wing government. She did criticize settlements early in her tenure as Secretary of State, but such language has disappeared completely from her lexicon. Her website, in contrast to Sanders’s, reads like a paean to Israeli security needs, with a list of her actions on behalf of the Jewish state. 

Another potential battle could come over the burgeoning movement to boycott, divest from, and impose sanctions against Israel (BDS). For her part, Clinton has pledged to her top donor—billionaire Haim Saban, who is solely focused on Israel, with a right-wing bent—to fight BDS. It’s notable, then, that this week New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a close Clinton ally, launched a potentially unconstitutional and certainly illiberal official attack against BDS. Yet another Sanders appointee to the committee, academic Cornel West, long ago endorsed BDS. Will the committee members that Clinton chose provoke a fight by trying to establish an anti-BDS plank?

None of this, however, is to say that these platform fights, should they occur, will have any staying power. Clinton is now the presumptive nominee. Sanders has only five spots on the committee. Between Clinton’s six picks and the remaining four selected by the head of the Democratic National Committee—Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a staunch pro-Israel advocate in the traditional mold—it seems unlikely that a radical departure from Democratic fealty to Israel is in the offing. The 2012 Charlotte convention demonstrates how the party establishment can steamroll insurgent opinion—or even a sitting Democratic president’s actual policy—on this issue.

But Clinton, Wasserman Schultz, and the party establishment are on the wrong side of history. When it comes to Israel, Sanders’s positions and his platform committee choices represent the growing liberal disillusionment with an increasingly right-wing Israel. Not least because of the Israel lobby’s disquieting influence and the acquiescence of politicians like Clinton, progress toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has come at a snail’s pace. In this sense, to have the fight—while not quite as good as winning it—will be a victory, in its own way. The power and influence of liberals fed up with Israel’s repression of Palestinians, and the Israeli government’s unremitting hawkishness toward Iran, is bound to grow, even as the bankruptcy and cravenness of clinging to the status quo is further exposed. In this sense, getting their planks into this year’s platform is less important for liberals than the need to continue pressing for justice whenever they can, in every forum where their voices will be heard. Eventually, the arc of the moral universe will bend toward them.

During last night’s heated Democratic debate in Brooklyn, Senator Bernie Sanders came out firing on Israel. A candidate who initially sought, seemingly at all costs, to avoid foreign policy altogether finally spoke out on the most politically charged issue of global affairs in Washington—the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and he took it by the horns.

That’s why it was so disappointing that, only a few hours earlier, the Sanders campaign suspended one of its young staffers, Simone Zimmerman, who served only briefly as its Jewish outreach coordinator. (Disclosure: I edited Zimmerman at a blog where I worked in 2013, and we have remained friends.) Zimmerman’s sin was to call the right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu an “asshole,” adding “Fuck you, Bibi,” using his nickname, for good measure, in a Facebook post last winter, when she was all of 24 years old.

At the time, Netanyahu was coming to Washington to marshal support against the Iran nuclear deal, claiming to speak on the behalf of all “Jewish People” everywhere, not just Israelis. Zimmerman, who has been deeply involved for years in Jewish and liberal pro-Israel activism—often critical, though it may be—took umbrage at the notion, resulting in her expletive-laden post on social media. Within half a day, Zimmerman edited the Facebook post to remove the curses—mentioning in a comment that she did so to “reflect the seriousness with which I take this issue”—but not soon enough. Someone had screen-captured the original text, and lay in waiting for more than a year to leak it to the McCarthyite smear artists at the right-wing Washington Free Beacon (one only needs to scan the post, where liberal Zionist groups are derided as anti-Israel, to see what ideologues this lot are).

Then the pressure came. First, Abe Foxman, the former head of the Anti-Defamation League, called for Zimmerman’s firing. Then Ron Lauder, a billionaire Republican donor and longtime Netanyahu ally, chimed in along the same lines. It was typical of this kind of Israel lobby campaign: The far right launches a smear, and more mainstream figures latch on to it. Before long, the Sanders campaign succumbed to the pressure and suspended Zimmerman.

In the Brooklyn debate, however, Sanders sounded not unlike his erstwhile staffer. He doubled down on his condemnation of Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza as a “disproportionate” response to sporadic terrorist attacks, leaving too many innocents dead. He expressed dismay that the Palestinian economy, especially in Gaza, was so dismally in the gutter. Like Zimmerman, Sanders supports the two-state solution, but clearly finds the indignities of the half-century-long occupation too much to bear silently. And then Sanders took this most impolitic of shots, by elite Washington standards: “There comes a time when if we pursue justice and peace, we are going to have to say that Netanyahu is not right all of the time.” In more crass terms, fuck that asshole.

Sanders’s statement reflects an obvious truth, but one that politicians aren’t supposed to utter. All indications are that, when it comes to justice and peace, Netanyahu is right (correct) very little of the time. That much is readily evident in the flare-ups of violence in Gaza. It is evident in his lackluster attempts at peace-making, and his constantly unfolding counterproductive policies. It is evident in the right-wing prime minister’s racist electioneering and disavowal of the two-state solution. And it was perhaps most evident to the United States in Netanyahu’s approach to the Iran deal, in his posture of belligerence and bald-faced interference in our national debate.

Even as mainstream liberals supported the Iran deal, however, they were not supposed to go there when it came to Netanyahu. Just ask Hillary Clinton: She has made mending fences with Netanyahu a centerpiece of her Israel policy. Rehabilitating Netanyahu’s bruised image among American liberals became the business of a think tank dedicated to electing Clinton. In Brooklyn on Thursday night, Isaac Chotiner wrote at Slate, Clinton’s talking points “sounded like a back issue of Commentary.”

And why not? Clinton’s top donor, Haim Saban, shares some of Netanyahu’s more noxious views. His top priority—his only priority, according to a 2010 New Yorker profile—is Israel, and it shows: Saban displays a willingness, all too common among the Democratic Party’s unreconstructed pro-Israel hawks, to bend over backwards in an attempt to play nice with the right wing of the pro-Israel community. Saban—and by extension Clinton, who rarely speaks about Israel in a way that would contrast starkly with her billionaire backer—cannot be described by the cliché “Israel, right or wrong”; he, too, is at home with the mantra of the Commentary crowd, one that declares, “Israel, always right!”

This is not Bernie Sanders’s milieu. He does not court the Israel lobby’s billionaire mega-donors. He can speak his conscience. And that’s what makes his caving in on Simone Zimmerman so jarring—especially amid the stark contrast of his fine debate performance. In the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Bernie Sanders sounded like a leader on this issue: He may not have a majority, or even a majority of Democrats, behind him, but he spoke truths about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that needed to be spoken. This kind of honesty on the topic—that Palestinians have rights, that Israel is responsible for violating them—is almost nonexistent on the national political stage, whether among Republicans or Democrats.

Showing this sort of leadership may be “bad politics,” but the great struggles in the name of liberal values are rarely easy in light of electoral politics. Clinton will likely end up winning New York’s Jewish vote and the primary, and then the Democratic nomination. Yet, on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she shows no glimmer of leadership when it comes to, as Sanders put it, the pursuit of peace and justice. But Simone Zimmerman has, and for that she has been cast into the wilderness.

AIPAC has a problem. The pro-Israel group, known by its acronym, which stands for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has over the past several decades been one of Washington’s most influential foreign policy lobbies. But a bruising fight with a Democratic president over the past few years left AIPAC licking its wounds. Where once many of Capitol Hill’s Democrats could be expected to march in lockstep with AIPAC, the Iran nuclear deal led to a fissure: Most Democrats, save for a few of the Hill’s unreconstructed pro-Israel hawks, were torn over whether to side with Barack Obama and his Iran nuclear deal, or AIPAC and Israel’s right-wing government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which opposed the deal vociferously. In the end, Obama prevailed by marshaling Democrats in defense of the deal. Netanyahu had unambiguously sided with Republicans who opposed the accord, leaving the appearance that AIPAC was doing the same.

It was fitting, then, that AIPAC would gather its members in Washington’s Verizon Center over the weekend under a banner of bipartisanship, with the declared theme of the summit—”Come Together”—hailing a reconstitution of the group’s bipartisan appeal. The appeal to Lennon-McCartney was obvious: time to bury the hatchet and move on.

And so it was that invitations went out to all the presidential candidates from both parties; all accepted—Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton—but not Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist running for the Democratic nomination. Sanders sent a letter to AIPAC, released on his website, in which he said AIPAC declined to have him address the crowd by video while he campaigned (a courtesy they had extended to Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney during the 2012 Republican primary contest). Sanders ended up releasing the text of an address he delivered in Utah. “Let me begin that I have a deep personal connection to Israel,” he opened, “and I am fairly certain I am the only U.S. presidential candidate to have ever lived on a kibbutz for a while.” It’s a shame the AIPAC crowd didn’t hear it: Sanders is the only candidate who offered any sort of vision to beat back the tide of apartheid in Israel. The bromides about defending Israel’s legitimacy were there, but so, too, were the criticisms of Israel’s violent occupation and its destructive settlements expansion.

Come Together was a strange slogan for a summit where Donald Trump got raucous applause. This is a man whose campaign is based on demagoguery and divisiveness, some of it directed at Latin American immigrants and some of it against Muslims (though AIPAC has already shown it cares little for the latter). Should AIPAC have denied Trump an invitation? I’ll leave that for others to decide, but will note that the group has previously declined to host presidential candidates it deemed beyond the pale: In 2012, the group shunned GOP candidate Ron Paul, who opposed aid to Israel, which apparently is a greater crime than heading up American history’s most successful quasi-fascist movement.

More troubling still, the candidate promulgating a fascist-like ideology was well-received. At Rolling Stone, Sarah Posner reported that the appreciative reception for Trump drowned out two non-disruptive protests—some rabbis walked out of Trump’s speech and a group of some 200 young people protested outside the arena. Trump’s biggest crowd-pleasers came mostly along the same lines Netanyahu has laid out over his years as Israel’s prime minister: glowing praise for Israeli democracy (with no mention of Palestinians’ subjugation), attacks on the United Nations, denunciations of “rampant incitement” and an unwillingness to negotiate from the Palestinians. There were many standing ovations.

Even as AIPAC has quietly pushed initiatives that would scuttle the nuclear deal, it has been more muted lately than before last year’s congressional vote on the accord, where the group dedicated some $20 million to try to get to a No vote on the Hill. At the AIPAC summit this year, however, Trump brought the flame-thrower for his assault on diplomacy with the Islamic Republic: “My number-one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran,” Trump said, adding a typically arrogant aside (“I’ve studied this issue in great detail, I would say actually greater by far than anybody else”). That red meat for the AIPAC crowd was a sharp departure from Trump’s comments last summer, when he mocked his GOP opponents for wanting to “rip up” the Iran deal and instead pledged he “would police that contract so tough that they don’t have a chance.” Then came the attack against the deal’s author, with Trump mentioning “President Obama in his final year—yeah!” and the crowd going wild. The attacks on Obama were enough for AIPAC’s president Lillian Pinkus to repudiate them the following day: “We say, unequivocally, that we do not countenance ad hominem attacks, and we take great offense against those that are levied against the president of the United States of America from our stage.”

The hostility toward Obama, however, was in part AIPAC’s own doing. AIPAC’s obvious tensions with Obama erupted in tandem with Netanyahu’s anger at the president’s proposal to halt Israeli settlements in 2009. Things deteriorated sharply from there when diplomacy with Iran blossomed. AIPAC spent years pushing the line that the deal Obama was working to strike—and eventually did—was dangerous for Israel. The logic seems to go: This man is grievously harming your beloved Jewish state, but let’s not criticize him. For all the many problems with Trump, his attacks were less ad hominem than in keeping with what many AIPAC members surely believe: that Obama “may be the worst thing that ever happened to Israel,” as Trump put it.

Then there was the other leading presidential candidate, this one from among the Democrats. Hillary Clinton has made a point throughout the campaign of continuity between herself and Obama. But on foreign policy, she has consistently been more hawkish than the incumbent president. That was apparent at AIPAC, where she eschewed hard truths in favor of shameless pandering, taking subtle jabs at Obama’s Middle East policies. She defended the Iran nuke deal, but talked tough against Iran; mentioned the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but placed no blame on the Israelis (save a grammatically oblique reference to settlements that failed to finger the culprits); and attacked as anti-Semitic the movement to Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) Israel. None of this should have come as a surprise: Clinton has been willing to use GOP talking points to attack her Democratic rivals for not being tough enough on Iran; she made the point of telling her biggest donor, Haim Saban, who has himself flirted with anti-Muslim bias, that she would help lead the fight against BDS; and, despite her past condemnations of Netanyahu and his pro-settlement policies, she long since made clear that she would like to mend fences with the right-winger.

Perhaps more than anything else, Clinton’s courting of pro-Netanyahu AIPAC members rankled: “One of the first things I’ll do in office is invite the Israeli prime minister to visit the White House,” she said, echoing a previous promise. One might think a new president assuming office next January will have bigger fish to fry. And yet here she is, prioritizing not only AIPAC’s vision but the relationship with Netanyahu as well. The pandering is all the more galling because of Netanyahu’s own rank bigotry, which was on display during his reelection effort. Speaking about efforts to resist BDS on campus, Clinton had this to say to pro-Israel students: “If you see bigotry, oppose it. If you see violence, condemn it. If you see a bully, stand up to him.” She should consider heeding her own advice when it comes to Netanyahu, who is a bigot, who has visited violence upon Palestinians, and who has proved himself a bully—albeit a failed one—during the Iran deal fight in Washington. (The pro-Clinton think-tank, the Center for American Progress, where I used to work, helped rehabilitate Netanyahu last fall by asking him to speak—though there was some internal dissent—and then utterly failing to challenge him, thanks to hapless moderation of the question-and-answer session.)

The two leading presidential candidates of both parties, then, have struck the same tone, with small differences. One thinks the Iran deal was good, but that Iran must be bludgeoned into subservience. The other opposes the Iran deal, and believes that Iran must be bludgeoned into subservience. Both oppose action at the United Nations against Israel’s decades-long occupation of the Palestinians. Neither is daring enough to mention Netanyahu’s culpability in killing the two-state solution through rapacious settlement expansion, nor his anti-Palestinian bigotry. If either of the two front-runners succeed in their quest for the White House, Obama’s fortitude in standing up to Israel—if only at the margins on most issues, but on central ones like the Iran deal as well—will become a thing of the past. The occupation will go on, with neither American party’s leadership willing to do anything to stop it. They will invite the dreaded one-state solution—not the pie-in-the-sky democratic state version but apartheid. In this twisted way, maybe “Come Together” is an appropriate theme after all.

This is a frightening time for Muslims in America. One of the country’s major parties is in thrall to anti-Muslim ideologues.

If this was not clear before—and it should have been—it is now. On March 17, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who is in second place in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, announced his foreign-policy team. As Matt Duss, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, put it on cable news, the advisers “run the gamut from Iran-contra conspirators to anti-Muslim conspiracy theorists.” Duss was referring, on one side, to the sometimes loopy warmonger Michael Ledeen and the convicted liar Elliott Abrams, both of whom were implicated in the Reagan administration’s dirty dealings of the 1980s, and, on the other, a to cadre of Islamophobes whose bigoted and McCarthyite ideas would be laughable if they hadn’t gained so much traction among GOP elites and voters.

Chief among the latter cohort stands Frank Gaffney, perhaps the most notorious anti-Muslim activist in America today. Gaffney is the author of a long list of incredible hypotheses not only about the ills of Islam—the faith of about a third of the world’s population—but particularly about what Muslims are trying to do here in the United States. One of those Muslims, Gaffney suspects, is Barack Obama. That’s why, his twisted logic goes, the Obama administration redesigned the US Missile Defense Agency logo so that it “appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo.” Sounds like an open and shut case.

Seemingly eager to prove that he is endorsing this bigotry, Cruz added a few more prominent Islamophobes’ names to his list of advisers. Fred Fleitz, a disgraced former top aide to the famously mustachioed and infamously hawkish George W. Bush administration UN Ambassador John Bolton, and Clare Lopez, who among other things thinks Iran already has nuclear warheads, both work for Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy. A Bloomberg View report on Cruz’s advisers also included Gaffney’s combative deputy Jim Hanson, bringing the number of CSP officials on the list up to four—more than any other institution represented therein. Next, there’s Andrew McCarthy, a former prosecutor, and Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin, a religious-right activist and Holy Warrior, both of whom traffic in Shariah conspiracy theories and otherwise agree with Gaffney on a whole lot.

None of this love for Gaffney should come as much of a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to what Ted Cruz has been saying. In November, Cruz all but called for an explicit religious test to determine which refugees fleeing conflicts abroad can come to the United States, urging the exclusion of all Syrian Muslims. He only danced around a de jure declaration of discrimination by suggesting that Muslims are “not facing genocide the way Christians are.” And, as Slate pointed out, Cruz has also declared that the Justice Department’s pledge to prosecute anti-Muslim violence is tantamount to “muzzling the free-speech rights of Americans.” It’s not just that he wants to see purported anti-Christian crimes prosecuted more; Cruz wants to actively reduce the enforcement of laws against anti-Muslim attacks.

According to Eli Lake, the Bloomberg View columnist who broke news of the retinue, the fact that warmongering Islamophobes are balanced among Cruz’s advisers by the likes of Abrams and Ledeen is supposed to be some kind of comfort. “Cruz’s team includes former officials who reject Gaffney’s broad view that any Muslim who believes in Sharia law by definition believes in a totalitarian and violent ideology at war with America,” writes Lake.

All of this, of course, is meant to stand in contrast to Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, who has staked out positions against Muslims so demagogic (“I think Islam hates us,” he said this month, upping the ante by flatly refusing to distinguish between terrorists and more than a billion peaceful Muslims, including millions of Americans) that they invite comparisons to fascism.

The problem for Cruz is that one doesn’t balance hateful rhetoric with the “Ledeen Doctrine.” (“Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”) Or with this lawyerly evasion of Cruz’s own Islamophobia offered by Abrams in Lake’s piece: “When Donald Trump talked about barring all Muslims from entering into the United States, Senator Cruz of course did not endorse that opinion, in part because he knows the law.” That Cruz merely knows that the law prevents him from barring all Muslims from entering the United States—with no lip service to any semblance of liberal democratic norms or basic decency (which he so clearly lacks)—is cold comfort.

Earlier this month, a group of some 120 Republican foreign-policy thinkers said in an open letter that they could not support Trump, citing among other reasons his anti-Muslim positions (though not without a hypocrite or two among them). If they are serious about their objections to these positions, they ought to write a similar letter declaring that they could not support Cruz’s candidacy so long as bigots like Gaffney and his claque remain advisers to the campaign.

Lake, in his story, calls Cruz’s advisory group “a big tent—by GOP standards—when it comes to foreign affairs.” The key phrase there is “by GOP standards.” Trump’s bigoted rhetoric catapulted him into a commanding lead for the Republican nomination. It speaks to how poorly the party has done at beating back sentiments like Gaffney’s among its grass roots. That Cruz holds second place while including this arch-Islamophobe and his posse speaks to his role in perpetuating that problem. There is no room for a balancing act with Gaffney on one end and Abrams and Ledeen on the other; their baggage is too heavy on both sides and will ultimately break the scale. Who can deny that the Republican Party today is awash in rank bigotry?

Last year, Investigative Project on Terrorism head Steven Emerson quietly pulled out of the annual conference of Washington’s most influential pro-Israel lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). He pinned the withdrawal on “an unexpected medical problem that required my immediate attention,” but it was impossible not to notice that it came amid reverberations of criticism for the latest of Emerson’s Islamophobic outbursts.

A couple of months before the AIPAC summit, Emerson had taken to the airwaves of Fox News to expound on so-called no-go zones in Europe, purported Muslim enclaves where governments dared not go. But there was a problem: “They don’t exist,” David Graham wrote in The Atlantic. And yet Emerson took the myth even further. In the United Kingdom, he reported on Fox, “There are actual cities like Birmingham that are totally Muslim, where non-Muslims simply don’t go in!”

The Birmingham comment elicited ridicule from across the spectrum—”This guy is clearly a complete idiot,” British Prime Minister David Cameron said in an interview—and eventually Emerson and, perhaps more improbably, Fox News itself apologized. A few weeks later, Emerson was out at AIPAC.

Now, Emerson is back. His name appears on a list of confirmed speakers published by AIPAC ahead of its Washington, DC, conference later this month.

That Emerson is no stranger to AIPAC summits—he has appeared other times at the conference, including 2012, 2013 and 2014—does not mitigate the impression created by AIPAC that its quest to further Israeli interests involves relying on and stoking the anti-Muslim animus that has exploded into a national crisis in the United States. With the new invite to Emerson, AIPAC is showing how little it cares for reining in the hate that has come to characterize not only the right-wing pro-Israel milieu, but Republican Party politics as well.

Emerson has a long history of Islamophobic statements and what have been described as “anti-Arab” and “anti-Palestinian” sentiments—much of it, like the Birmingham claim, is of dubious provenance. The 2011 Center for American Progress report, Fear, Inc., names Emerson as a “misinformation expert” and “leading light” of the Islamophobia industry. “Emerson frames Islam as an inherently violent and antagonistic religion,” the report says. “Such wildly over-the-top portraits of Islam as inherently radical require some creativity on Emerson’s part. Proving he’s up to the challenge, Emerson boasts a history of fabricating evidence that perpetuates conspiracies of radical Islam infiltrating America through Muslim civil rights and advocacy organizations.”

Emerson is far from AIPAC’s only link to the anti-Muslim right. Nina Rosenwald, a major Islamophobia industry donor, was an AIPAC National Board member (her relationship to the group at this point is unclear; she runs her own anti-Muslim shop these days). Sheldon Adelson, the extremist billionaire GOP donor, has also given large sums of money to AIPAC—when not threatening to close the taps because the group was too moderate (Adelson has also funded Emerson’s groups). As recently as 2011, Daniel Pipes, another prominent Islamophobe and frequent Emerson ally, was listed as an adjunct scholar by the AIPAC spin-off think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (I have seen Pipes glad-handing attendees at AIPAC summits in the past). And AIPAC hasn’t hesitated to leverage others with anti-Muslim bias in its policy initiatives: the “military expert” the group turned to in its campaign to undo the recent nuclear deal with Iran is mixed up with the notorious Islamophobe Frank Gaffney.

Emerson, however, stands out because of how prominently he was disgraced: His Birmingham remarks were followed by a slew of articles reminding readers that he had been similarly discredited before (he claimed the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing bore a “Middle Eastern trait” because the terrorist—eventually discovered to be a right-wing white American—sought to inflict maximum casualties). Emerson’s scholarship, if you can call it that, has frequently been full of holes but was in one way too consistent: It always pointed a demagogic finger at Muslims living in the United States and abroad. His AIPAC panel is supremely unlikely to offer much else, and he will face few challenges in doing so; these forums are not, after all, debates.

If AIPAC wants to convince people that Israel is a country worth supporting, it ought not do so by giving platforms to those figures who weaken American values by casting suspicion on neighbors because of their faith and their faith alone. Everyone already knows that Steven Emerson is a bigot and a charlatan. The invitation extended by AIPAC tells us more about the pro-Israel group than it does about the twice-disgraced talking head.

Last April, someone called up the school operated by the Islamic Society of Baltimore, a nearly half-century-old mosque and community center in Catonsville, in Baltimore County, Maryland. More than 350 kids attend the society’s primary school, according to its website. The caller must have seemed innocuous enough in asking, “What time do you close?” After getting the answer, however, the caller’s ill intent became clear. “It’s the perfect time to bomb the bus,” the person reportedly said. Less than a week later, another call to the society threatened to “spill Muslim blood.”

Wednesday afternoon, President Obama visited the Islamic Society of Baltimore—the very target of these threats—and offered wide-ranging remarks that sought to show the breadth of Muslim-American life and, at the same time, call for aid in beating back the threat of extremist terrorism. If one message stood out, however, it was Obama’s exhortation to young American Muslims—whose concerns about discrimination and harassment he had repeatedly cited—to be proud of their dual identities, that precisely this dynamic in their lives made them as American as apple pie.

“Today, there are voices in this world, particularly over the Internet, who are constantly claiming that you have to choose between your identities—as a Muslim, for example, or an American,” Obama said. “Do not believe them. If you’re ever wondering whether you fit in here, let me say it as clearly as I can, as president of the United States: You fit in here—right here. You’re right where you belong. You’re part of America, too. You’re not Muslim or American. You’re Muslim and American.”

Obama’s remarks were a stunning—if overdue—rebuke to the dark forces that have plagued our national discourse, giving rise to increasingly mainstream bigotry. He chided the “inexcusable political rhetoric against Muslim Americans that has no place in our country”—a clear shot at virtually the entire Republican presidential field, which has embraced anti-Muslim hatred either as a matter of ideology or political utility. He took on the “distorted media portrayals in TV or film,” something Muslims and those of Muslim extraction grouse about frequently but rarely hear aired in major fora, let alone in a presidential speech.

“So the first thing I want to say is two words that Muslim Americans don’t hear often enough—and that is, thank you,” Obama said. “Thank you for serving your community. Thank you for lifting up the lives of your neighbors, and for helping keep us strong and united as one American family.”

He went on to lambast the double threat faced by Muslims in America, that not only must they fear the terrorism that (infrequently) targets their country, but “that as Muslim Americans, you also have another concern—and that is your entire community so often is targeted or blamed for the violent acts of the very few.” He went to great lengths to note that the vast majority of Muslims worldwide lead entirely peaceful lives and follow a peaceful faith. He readily acknowledged that “it is undeniable that a small fraction of Muslims propagate a perverted interpretation of Islam”—specifically citing the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria as well as Al Qaeda and other groups that “misuse God’s name.”

But here is where things got tricky for Obama: He noted, as he has before, that “Muslims around the world have a responsibility to reject extremist ideologies that are trying to penetrate within Muslim communities”—then acknowledged that they already had (“Here at this mosque, and across our country and around the world, Muslim leaders are roundly and repeatedly and consistently condemning terrorism”), even noting that sometimes the burden “doesn’t feel fair.”

He went on to say that “engagement with Muslim-American communities must never be a cover for surveillance.” And yet that was exactly what it was when the New York Police Department demanded (and often received) cooperation from the metro area’s Muslim communities—then turned around and, as the Associated Press reported in a Pulitzer Prize–winning series, spied on them, in some cases based on nothing more than their faith. Despite his remarks Wednesday, the Obama administration failed—refused, even—to condemn the spying, which it had helped fund through grants that were used to defray costs of the program. One top administration official, John Brennan, then Obama’s counterterrorism czar and now his CIA head, even praised the NYPD’s blatantly bigoted tactics. (Upon assuming office, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio disbanded the unit responsible for the spying, and last month the city settled a lawsuit over it by agreeing to impose restrictions and civilian checks on the department’s counterterrorism activities.)

Neither did Obama mention Washington’s continued Forever War, a borderless military undertaking that seems, nonetheless, to affect only Muslim countries. Obama mentioned, briefly, the hashtag campaign joined by many military service members and veterans pledging to protect 8-year-old Sofia Yassini, a Muslim-American child who became afraid that sometime GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump’s Islamophobic policy proposals threatened her safety. “Think of our men and women in uniform,” Obama said Wednesday, in a show of Muslim Americans’ place in our national society, “who, when they heard that a little girl was afraid because she’s a Muslim, sent her a message—’I Will Protect You.’” The tale is a heartwarming anecdote, but it will be of little comfort to the 21 Muslim children in Yemen who reportedly perished in a drone strike launched by US service members acting on Obama’s orders. Those Muslim children—and countless and uncounted more like them—weren’t even lucky enough to have the Obama administration explain the circumstances of their deaths; unlike the two non-Muslim Westerners accidentally killed in a drone strike, most civilian deaths in American targeted killings abroad—the vast majority of them Muslims—go unaccounted for by the Obama administration.

And yet, despite these issues, the speech must be viewed as a small victory for justice amid the growing crisis of anti-Muslim invective in American politics. Indeed, Obama’s visit to the Islamic Society of Baltimore was attacked by all the usual purveyors of Islamophobia on the right—the same pundits and activists who have spurred the mainstream of the Republican Party to embrace its hateful present-day positions.

Obama has made small outreaches to the Muslim-American community over the years—most recently as a rebuke to bigotry with his invitation to Ahmed Mohamed, the young inventor who was perp-walked from his school on suspicion of building a bomb that was really just a clock—but had yet to visit an American mosque as a sitting president. With his visit to Baltimore, Obama became just the third president to make such a gesture, following in the footsteps of Dwight Eisenhower and George W. Bush.

“We are one American family,” Obama said toward the end of his remarks. “We will rise and fall together. It won’t always be easy. There will be times where our worst impulses are given voice. But I believe that ultimately, our best voices will win out. And that gives me confidence and faith in the future.” His speech and his choice of venue gave heft to those sentiments. But “belief” and “faith in the future” aren’t nearly enough.

“There is a battle of hearts and minds that takes place—that is taking place right now, and American Muslims are better positioned than anybody to show that it is possible to be faithful to Islam and to be part of a pluralistic society,” Obama said in Baltimore, referring to the “burden” of peace-loving Muslims, who continually have to demonstrate their good intentions amid the scourge of extremist terrorism. That statement might as well apply to the battle for the hearts and minds of those Americans in thrall to anti-Muslim ideologies, but it will take more than just American Muslims’ example to sway them, and it will take more than just the leadership on display in a single presidential speech.

Campaigning in Iowa recently, Hillary Clinton, who is facing tightening primary races in key early states, made a shift. She went after her rival for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders, and she hit him on foreign policy. “Senator Sanders doesn’t talk very much about foreign policy,” Clinton told the crowd in Iowa. “And when he does, it raises concerns because sometimes, it can sound like he hasn’t really thought it through.”

So far, I’m in agreement with the former Secretary of State. Sanders doesn’t talk much about foreign policy. Who, for example, are Sanders’s foreign policy advisers? I pay some attention to these things, and I have no idea. When he’s asked about global affairs, Sanders often steers his answers back to his domestic bêtes noires, such as inequality, and applies the concepts abroad. Not the worst sin in the world—certainly, issues like inequality affect global and geopolitics as much or more than then do at home—but the lack of depth about the specifics of global affairs has long been on display.

The Clinton attack, however, went farther, hitting Sanders on the topic of Iran. Her campaign released an ad featuring Clinton foreign policy adviser Jake Sullivan almost mockingly describe Sanders’s various position on Iran. The ad raises three issues: Sanders’s purported proposal to invite Iran to send more troops to Syria to battle the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS); his notion of an anti-ISIS coalition that would include Iran and Saudi Arabia; and his comments during last weekend’s Democratic debate calling for moving toward warmer relations with the Iranians.

Without delving into the details, on the first score, the Clinton camp is basically right; on the second, they’ve got a point. But they fail on the third point, which seems to be based on a willful distortion of Sanders’s position. Here’s what Sanders said on warming relations with Iran:

Can I tell you that we should open an embassy in Tehran tomorrow? No, I don’t think we should. But I think the goal has got to be, as we have done with Cuba, to move in warm relations with a very powerful and important country in this world.

That should have been entirely uncontroversial; as Sanders made clear, improved relations is a worthy, long-term goal. But Clinton’s camp used it in order to fear-monger not only about a Sanders presidency, but as a matter of his electability. In a conference call for reporters, another Clinton aide, Brian Fallon, said, “I can safely predict that Republicans would love to have a debate with someone who thinks we should move quickly to warmer relations with a major sponsor of terrorism like Iran. Bernie Sanders represents that caricature that Republicans like to put forward.”

One might remind Fallon that Republicans lambasted—and continue to lambast—Barack Obama for his diplomacy with Iran, that they made our current president out to be just the caricature that we’re now being warned Sanders represents. And yet not only did Obama win the White House—twice, including beating Clinton—he also broke through decades of enmity with Iran to strike a nuclear accord, an agreement that was opposed exactly on the grounds that Iran remains “a major sponsor of terrorism.”

Clinton, in the wake of her Benghazi/e-mail non-scandal, should understand the pitfalls of Republican demagoguery as well as anyone else. Indeed, should she reach the general election, Clinton should expect a barrage of Republican attacks precisely on her role in diplomacy with Iran. And yet her campaign seems happy to leverage Republican demagoguery in order to attack Sanders.

What should be most troubling to foreign-policy progressives about these attacks is that they call into question Clinton’s own bona fides on matters of war and peace. Yes, Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state saw the initial openings with the Iranians that led to the nuclear accord in July, but that all happened under Obama’s authority; her State Department staff carried out the meetings on the president’s orders. It’s hard not to view her latest attacks on Sanders as raising questions about whether Clinton could have mustered the political will and courage to strike the deal that Obama did. Or on a larger scale: Does she have the imagination and derring-do to accomplish similar Big Things on the world scale?

That much came into focus on the phone briefing with reporters. On the call, Sullivan said, “Many of you know Iran has pledged the destruction of Israel.” As The New York Times reported, “The Clinton strategy on this front raises the risk of deterring powerful supporters of Israel from embracing Mr. Sanders should he capture the nomination.” I would contend it’s not just about deterring pro-Israel supporters in the general election, but also encouraging them to give donations to Clinton in the here and now. Clinton has made no secret of her courtship of the incredibly problematic megadonor Haim Saban.

The Saban angle is notable because of his own bluster on Iran—that Israel should “bomb the living daylights” out of Iran in spite of a nuclear accord, if Israel disagreed with the tenets of that accord. Of course, Israel and the vast majority of its stateside lobbyists did oppose the final deal, and so did Haim Saban. Clinton is no stranger herself to this sort of bluster: In the 2008 presidential primary race, she remarked that her response to an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel would be to “obliterate” the country of nearly 80 million people. (No doubt a retaliatory attack would be in order, but the inherent violence of the verb seemed incredibly unstatesmanlike). What’s more, such bombastic rhetoric is unhelpful to diplomacy: Shane Bauer, who was held hostage in Iran for more than two years until his 2011 release, bluntly said as much about his own captivity, specifically about Clinton. More generally, the era of threats and saber-rattling should be behind us; Obama and the moderate Iranian president Hassan Rouhani have shown that there is a better approach that can yield results.

All this, nonetheless, ought to be seen through the lens of that primary race some eight years ago—and it’s not a pretty picture for Hillary Clinton. In that contest, Obama expressed a willingness to meet with hostile world leaders without preconditions. Clinton attacked the notion as “very irresponsible and frankly naive.” Obama, at the time, fired back: “If there is anything irresponsible and naive it was to authorize George Bush to send 160,000 young American men and women into Iraq apparently without knowing how they were going to get out.”

The Iraq war vote and the 2008 spat over Iran diplomacy—raising these memories isn’t a good look for Clinton. They should lead any foreign-policy progressive to wonder about Clinton’s lack of imagination and fortitude in pursuing ambitious foreign-policy goals. Would she pursue a politics of triangulation if she were to lead US foreign policy as president? Maybe Republicans and the pro-Israel lobby wouldn’t vociferously attack Clinton as much as they have Obama, but at what cost to the progressive foreign-policy agenda?

For almost a half a century, Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories occupied during the Six Day War have grown, imposing a two-tiered system—one that not only discriminates against Palestinians but deprives them of basic rights and adversely impacts their society’s economic viability. Proponents of a two-state solution have watched with dismay as every new apartment and settlement erected in occupied territory created new stumbling blocks on the path to peace and ending the conflict. And yet Israel has faced few consequences. On Tuesday morning, however, New York–based Human Rights Watch released a report calling for an end to this impunity, at least where the international business community is concerned.

The new 162-page report, “Occupation, Inc.: How Settlement Businesses Contribute to Israel’s Violations of Palestinian Rights,” calls for businesses operating in and dealing directly with Israeli settlements to end their endeavors there. “In Human Rights Watch’s view, the context of human rights abuse to which settlement business activity contributes is so pervasive and severe that businesses should cease carrying out activities inside or for the benefit of settlements,” the report says. “They should also stop financing, administering, trading with or otherwise supporting settlements or settlement-related activities and infrastructure.”

The report coincides with recognition from an unlikely place of just how bad Israeli discriminations and rights abuses have gotten. On Monday, US Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro, a fluent Hebrew speaker who is well liked in the Jewish state, told an audience in Tel Aviv that “at times it seems Israel has two standards of adherence to rule of law in the West Bank: one for Jews and one for Palestinians.” Though Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decried Shapiro’s statement as “unacceptable and untrue,” the settlement enterprise—which is illegal under international humanitarian law—patently imposes different standards on many aspects of life in the West Bank.

“Occupation, Inc.” leverages case studies to demonstrate just how businesses contribute to discrimination, rights abuses, and violations of humanitarian law. It divides businesses into two broad categories: those that directly contribute to supporting settlements—such as construction of settlements and the infrastructure needed to establish and maintain them—and those that are based in settlements, which don’t necessarily directly bolster the inherently rights-abusive enterprises, but nonetheless provide benefits to exclusive Jewish Israeli communities in Palestinian territories.

“We’re trying to be very strongly based in law,” says Sari Bashi, HRW’s Israel-Palestine country director. “Under international law, businesses have responsibilities. Our position is doing business in the settlements is inconsistent with those responsibilities.”

The move will no doubt be seen as controversial. “Israel is not going to care about this distinction that Human Rights Watch is making,” said Ali Abunimah, an activist and journalist who advocates for boycotting Israel. “As far as Israel is concerned, it’s a call for a boycott.”

The Israelis are almost certain to view the report as part of the growing movement to Boycott, Divest, and Sanction Israel, known by its initials BDS. As BDS has gained traction, it has been met by increasingly fierce resistance from the Israeli government and many pro-Israel groups in the United States. In his 2014 speech to the most influential American pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC, Netanyahu focused on the fight against the movement, but said it was doomed to fail. By last summer, Israeli rhetoric against BDS grew more intense and the government poured $25 million into anti-BDS efforts. “We are in the midst of a great struggle being waged against the state of Israel, an international campaign to blacken its name,” said Netanyahu. The issue has even percolated into American presidential politics: in a letter to megadonor Haim Saban, an Israeli-American businessman, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton pledged to “make countering BDS a priority.”

Even while BDS most often targets Israel as a whole, some peace activists, both from the pro-Palestinian and liberal pro-Israel camps, prefer to single out settlements. Not only is the occupation viewed as a humanitarian and human-rights disaster, but settlements impede chances for a two-state solution, the thinking goes. Calls outside the BDS movement for boycotting settlements have even caused rifts among liberal pro-Israel groups: Some, like Americans for Peace Now, support settlement boycotts while others, such as J Street, oppose settlements, but don’t call on their membership to boycott.

Nonetheless, such distinctions are lost on Israel’s right-wing government, where settlers rule the roost. Netanyahu has overseen a massive boom in settlement growth, and his government coalition is populated by pro-settlement parties and even many politicians who disavow the two-state solution altogether. Over the holidays, Israel’s Ambassador in Washington gave gifts produced in settlements to foreign officials, ironically mimicking the erasure of the Green Line that hardcore BDS activists push for.

Those BDS activists, for their part, welcome the Human Rights Watch report. Omar Barghouti, a founding member of the BDS movement, calls the report “ground-breaking—even courageous, given the current environment of increased repression and McCarthyism in the US.” Abunimah, also a strong supporter of BDS, says it was “a very good step in the right direction,” adding, “This report will be a really useful tool for BDS activists.”

The report calls on third-party states to deny settlement products the benefits afforded by trade agreements to Israeli products, therefore subjecting those goods to full tariffs. In accordance with that, HRW calls on countries to impose strict protocols for labeling the origins of settlement products as such. The European Union is working through its own origin labeling regulations with regards to the settlements and, on Monday, stated that any EU deals with Israel must exclude the occupied territories, a move Israel opposed. Israel reportedly softened the language from European foreign ministers, an outcome one activist, who works on EU and Israeli-Palestinian issues and asked to remain anonymous, says that an earlier release of the HRW report could perhaps have forestalled.

Abunimah, the pro-Palestinian activist, also lauds HRW for having made “a big shift form their previous position and accept[ing] that any and all business is abusive and helps Israel in grave violations of Palestinian rights and international law.”

In 2010, Human Rights Watch released a report on discrimination against Palestinians in the West Bank that called on businesses to “to prevent and mitigate any corporate involvement” in rights abuses, only cutting off business entirely when the activities were inextricable from abuses. The shift occurred in part because the new report and the recommendations it makes to businesses active in the settlements, Israel, and third-party states relies heavily on the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which was not adopted by the UN Human Rights Council in June 2011, says Arvind Ganesan, who directs the Business and Human Rights division at HRW. “It’s very clear that if a company is contributing to violations or operating in a place where there is a high risk of exacerbating or contributing to violations, you shouldn’t do that,” says Ganesan. “The whole nature of settlements and way land is seized and the nature of who benefits makes it hard to see how you can operate there.”

“Occupation, Inc.” makes this case through meticulous research and careful attention to the consequences of Israel’s illegal actions in the West Bank. One particularly strong section deals with one of the most common pro-Israel defenses of settlement business: that it supports Palestinian economic life. Settlement businesses claim to bring jobs for Palestinians, but HRW’s report shows that the discriminatory legal system makes labor abuses possible. And as the report and countless others have pointed out, the World Bank has estimated that with an end to restrictions on Palestinian economic activity in Area C (some 60 percent of the West Bank that is controlled exclusively by Israel), the Palestinian GDP could jump by more than a third, making way for more Palestinians to be employed by Palestinian companies.

“There is an ongoing and concerted Israeli pushback against the compelling logic of acting on the illegality of settlements and the illegality of Israeli actions beyond the Green Line by way of more than rhetorical condemnation,” says Daniel Levy, the head of the European Council on Foreign Relations’ Middle East and North Africa program. “That Israeli pushback rests on very weak legal and substantive grounds. The flimsiness of those grounds is being further exposed by this Human Rights Watch report.”

Ultimately, settlements and settlement business don’t account for a huge portion of Israeli economic activity, but liberals like Levy who work on Israel-Palestine issues welcome the renewed focus. Levy says the “the major propelling factor for the status quo, the impunity that Israel feels in the face of its actions toward to the Palestinians” needs to give way to “the obvious consequences that have been called for by this Human Rights Watch report.”

“We’re a long way from that being addressed,” he adds, “but this takes us in the right direction for those who want to see peace between Israel and Palestine.”

Hillary Clinton’s Muslim problem isn’t actually her own Muslim problem. She’s spoken eloquently, several times now, about tolerance for Muslims. “Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism,” she said this week at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The obsession in some quarters with a clash of civilizations or repeating the specific words ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ isn’t just a distraction. It gives these criminals, these murderers, more standing than they deserve. It actually plays into their hands by alienating partners we need by our side.”

On the issue of Syrian refugees, where the right’s bigotry has been most starkly on display, Clinton was just as unequivocal: “We cannot allow terrorists to intimidate us into abandoning our values and our humanitarian obligations. Turning away orphans, applying a religious test, discriminating against Muslims, slamming the door on every Syrian refugee—that is just not who we are.”

With these and other points, in this and other fora, Clinton took a firm stand against Islamophobia. That’s why her Muslim problem is not her own. It stems, instead, from those most bedeviling of problems: her friends. One was the mayor of little Roanoke, Virginia, who released a statement citing the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II as part of his opposition to housing Syrian refugees. The mayor, David Bowers, sat on the Clinton campaign’s Virginia Leadership Council. Before the day he made his comments was out, so was he.

It will be more difficult for Clinton to distance herself from another friend, Haim Saban, who spent last Thursday trying to claw out of the hole he dug: Saban happens to be Clinton and her husband’s top political patron. An Israeli-American businessman, he came into billions of dollars in the entertainment business. According to The Washington Post, Saban and his wife have poured more than $2 million into Hillary Clinton’s presidential coffers; he has vowed to spend “as much as needed” to see her installed in the White House.

So it must’ve been with some apprehension that the Clinton camp watched as Saban contradicted all the basic tenets of what Clinton laid out in her remarks. In an interview with the Hollywood industry site the Wrap published on the same day as Clinton’s CFR speech, Saban said (with my emphasis):

Many members of the Hollywood community are very liberal and they value their civil liberties more than they value life. I disagree with that. You want to be free and dead? I’d rather be not free and alive. The reality is that certain things that are unacceptable in times of peace—such as profiling, listening in on anyone and everybody who looks suspicious, or interviewing Muslims in a more intense way than interviewing Christian refugees—is all acceptable [during war]. Why? Because we value life more than our civil liberties and it’s temporary until the problem goes away.

But to say this is shameful—I disagree. … I’m not suggesting we put Muslims through some kind of a torture room to get them to admit that they are or they’re not terrorists. But I am saying we should have more scrutiny.

Instead of garnering a swift rebuke from the Clinton camp, as did Bowers, Saban ended up releasing a statement, published by the Washington Post, gently walking back his comments. “I misspoke. I believe that all refugees coming from Syria—a war-torn country that ISIS calls home—regardless of religion require additional scrutiny before entering the United States,” Saban told the paper. “I regret making a religious distinction as opposed to a geographical one: it’s about scrutinizing every single individual coming from a country with ISIS strongholds.”

That’s a walk back, all right. But I’m not buying. First, look at the breadth of Saban’s opening paragraph. It’s not just about the “religious distinction” for refugees: It’s about civil liberties at home—something refugees, who must apply and be accepted before they arrive here, do not enjoy. Of Saban’s list of things that are “acceptable” in times of war, only one (“interviewing Muslims in a more intense way”) refers to refugees. The rest are more general positions and would apply to broader policy making. One is left wondering what Hillary Clinton thinks of these positions. Does she believe in profiling? (It’s worth noting that Saban’s notion of “temporary” limits on civil liberties during a time of war is meaningless when we’re waging an endless war.)

Second, Saban, without naming him, cites Obama—whom Saban has never really supported—saying that the policies put forward are “shameful.” Obama’s use of that word was in precise reference to the religious test for refugees. Here’s the full quote from Obama:

When I hear folks say that, well, maybe we should just admit the Christians but not the Muslims, when I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted, when some of those folks themselves come from families who benefited from protection when they were fleeing political persecution, that’s shameful.

Forgive my skepticism over whether Saban “misspoke” when he came out in favor of the religious test for refugees and took a shot the very same word that Obama used—a word that, by this time, had been burned into the national discourse on this topic in specific reference to that religious test. It seems abundantly clear that Saban meant what he said, and walked it back in coordination with the campaign—which sent The Washington Post not a new statement but a reiteration of her remarks at the exact same time Saban sent over his statement—only when some political heat began to come down.

Saban is, of course, aligned with the Democratic Party, to which he is a major donor. But on matters of the Middle East, he is firmly in the right-leaning camp of Israel supporters—exactly the milieu among whom the sort of Islamophobia Clinton and Obama have been busy denouncing has for too long gone unchecked. Saban has even been known to try, at least, to play nice with Sheldon “Nuke Iran” Adleson, the bigoted far-right GOP megadonor and patron of Israel’s hawkish Likud Party. At one joint event with the two men in 2014, Saban said that if he was running Israel and the Iran nuclear deal was unsatisfactory to the Jewish state, he “would bomb the living daylights out of these sons of bitches.”

As nuclear negotiations reached the homestretch, Saban suggested he had insider knowledge that Clinton opposed it. When the deal did finally come, Clinton endorsed it, but Saban denounced it. He called the accord a “bad deal” and said “we need to fight against” it—comments that, like last week’s remarks on refugees, Saban quickly sought to walk back (though his clarification was a bit incoherent).

Clinton, despite the break with Saban on the Iran nuke deal, has shown a willingness to make his priorities her own. In July, Clinton sent a subsequently leaked personal note to Saban vowing to fight against the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel. She appended a handwritten postscript that said, “Look forward to working with you on this.”

No one should expect Clinton to jettison Saban as she did Bowers—for one, Saban’s rhetoric reached nowhere close to the level of Bowers’s—but it’s worth keeping an eye on his views, access, and influence as the campaign moves forward, especially if Clinton wins the Democratic nomination and, most importantly, goes on to the White House.

When a foreign terrorist organization launches an attack on another country’s soil, it seems inevitable that the targeted nation responds by some military force. It’s a perfectly logical path forward: One must “do something,” it goes. And yet, looking at France’s response to the horrific attacks over the weekend in Paris, one must be forgiven for wondering what such a response seeks to and can accomplish. France, after all, was already flying bombing sorties over Syria directed against the Islamic State (ISIS)—the very justification for the Paris attacks—when the group, as nearly all the evidence indicates, orchestrated the deaths of at least 129 people in coordinated attacks on Paris. It was left, therefore, to France to not launch a new military attack but to ramp one up.

The early returns from Islamic State’s self-proclaimed “caliphate” are in: according to a report in The New York Times, the increased bombings—dozens of sorties in a matter of days against the terrorized town of Raqqa, the caliphate’s designated capital—resulted, thankfully, in no civilian casualties, but not many blows to ISIS either. Here’s the Times:

Several people in Lebanon, Syria and Turkey who have been able to make contact with relatives in Raqqa say the recent French airstrikes—a barrage of about 30 on Sunday night and seven more on Monday—did not kill any civilians. But neither did they inflict serious military damage, those people said, instead hitting empty areas or buildings, or parts of the territory of factory complexes or military bases used by the Islamic State.…

More French airstrikes, reaching 25 to 30, struck Raqqa late Tuesday, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group in Britain that has a network of contacts in Syria. Many of the strikes hit deserted areas that had already been struck, but casualties were reported in addition to property damage, the group said.

Without putting too fine a point on it, the French response, so far, is something of a hollow “shock-and-awe”: lashing out with overwhelming force, but not in a manner that accomplishes much. That would seem to be a break from what RAND Corporation analyst Michael Shurkin, writing in Politico, called the “French way of war”: “an insistence on modest objectives, on limiting strictly the aims of a military invention in line with a modest assessment of what the military can accomplish.” Perhaps, as Shurkin says, the bombing runs are merely the opening salvo of a more well-thought-out broader intervention—remember, France was already bombing—but it’s difficult to see what the modest military goals going forward would be.

Shurkin points to two relatively successful recent French interventions, in the Central African Republic and Mali. Both were notably different from the fight against the Islamic State, but the latter, for its part, fits the basic bill of seeking to unseat jihadi forces from territory they had seized in the northern part of the country. But that, too, was different, at least to what has been floated so far for a French intervention in Syria: beating back jihadis in Mali involved units from more than 25 regiments of the French military. (What’s more, the Malian insurgency continues to simmer.) In other words, there were plenty of, as the ubiquitous descriptor goes, boots on the ground. Is France prepared to mount a similar effort in Syria?

That’s a question for the “do something” chorus in America, too. Many American politicians so far have shied away from putting significant numbers of troops on the ground in Syria—though the usual suspects, the Lindsey Grahams of the world, have called for it and others have begun to discuss it as an inevitability. Here comparisons seem more apt to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars than to France’s foray into West Africa. If ground troops go in to unseat the Islamic State, what can we expect next? Like the two wars launched more than 10 years ago—both of which we are still engaged in to one degree or another—and unlike Mali, where a central government in Bamako stood at the ready (if incapable of retaking territory on its own), those part of Syria and Iraq dominated by the Islamic State are likely to be devoid of any centralized authority.

If the French are indeed thinking in their traditional “way of war,” perhaps they will offer answers; we can all hope such an effort could be successful without the costs entailed in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the costs of such lack of foresight are still being paid. For the meantime, doing something for the sake of doing something doesn’t appear to be doing much at all.

There is dissent at the Center for American Progress. Late last month, the Democratic Party–aligned think tank announced that it would, with encouragement from the influential pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, accept an offer from Benjamin Netanyahu’s office to host the right-wing Israeli prime minister for an event. The invite stirred controversy: Many liberals who normally fall within the Democratic Party milieu were miffed that Netanyahu, a figure who has been widely seen over the past several years as openly siding with Republicans and neoconservative ideologues, would be given an opportunity to rehabilitate his image as a bipartisan figure. “He’s looking for that progressive validation,” a former Center for American Progress (CAP) staffer told the Huffington Post, “and they’re basically validating a guy who race-baited during his election and has disavowed the two-state solution, which is CAP’s own prior work.”

The discomfort felt by many former CAP employees—including us, who, by way of disclosure, both worked at CAP in 2011 and 2012 (more on which in a bit)—turns out to also be felt inside the think tank. According to a report in Foreign Policy, around a dozen CAP employees rose at a tense all-staff meeting to deliver a statement of dissent over Netanyahu’s talk. The statement, which was obtained by The Nation from a person who was at the meeting, elucidates the staffers’ objections to hosting Netanyahu as well as the process by which the prime minister’s offer to appear came to be accepted. (The full statement follows below this post.)

“During one of our regular all-staff meetings,” a CAP spokesperson told The Nation in a statement, “we discussed the November 10th event with the Prime Minister. We discussed why CAP was holding the event and why holding the event is consistent with our progressive values. Staff expressed their thoughts and concerns about the event and had an open and engaged conversation with senior CAP leadership.” Two sources with knowledge of the all-staff meeting said CAP president Neera Tanden, who has publicly defended the Netanyahu invite and will moderate the Q&A with Netanyahu, did not attend the meeting. “Neera was traveling out of town for a few ” the CAP spokesperson said in response to a question on Tanden’s attendance, “and rather than wait to hold the meeting, we held it with senior CAP leadership.” According to Foreign Policy, the meeting was presided over by Winnie Stachelberg, a senior vice president, and Brian Katulis, a senior fellow.

The staffers who rose to deliver the statement of dissent said they were left out of the process and now face difficulty returning to the communities from which they come and work with. “It becomes difficult to step outside of our building and say to our allies why this visit is happening, for some of us here we ourselves feel that we were not considered in that decision,” the statement reads. The authors cited, for example, the strong relationships built between Palestinian protesters, who face routine tear-gassing at their demonstrations, and Black Lives Matter activists in places like Ferguson, Missouri. “[I]t’s hard to separate American progress from world progress when young people in Palestine are advising young people in Ferguson on how to deal with tear gas and flash grenades,” they wrote.

In one of three sections of the statement asking tough questions of their senior colleagues, the dissenting CAP staffers questioned Netanyahu’s unapologetic justification of Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2014, citing the more than 2,000 Palestinian deaths, “many of them children,” in that flare-up of violence. A UN commission said both Israel and Hamas may have been responsible for war crimes in the fighting. The commission found that over 1,400 Palestinian civilians, more than 500 of them children, died in the fighting (six Israeli civilians died in the conflict). “What do we call a disagreement of that magnitude?” the CAP staffers wrote of Netanyahu’s defense of the war. “A thing that terrible? Would we bring other leaders to this institution who had committed similar crimes?”

The internal dissent at CAP comes after a report by Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept that exposed CAP’s conduct following a smear campaign against several of its staffers in 2011 and 2012, including us (Gharib was quoted in Greenwald’s report). After being attacked by Israel lobby groups and neoconservatives for critical writing about Israel, Tanden implemented a protocol to monitor our writing, including setting certain subjects—such as criticism of AIPAC—off limits and, in one instance, censoring our work after publication. According to the Intercept, CAP imposed the measures as a means of currying favor with right-leaning pro-Israel groups and figures.

The statement at Friday’s meeting hinted that some of pressure on staffers still exists. “Some are standing; many, many more don’t feel empowered to do so,” the statement said, suggesting that the handful of staffers who rose to read the statement were supported by colleagues who were not comfortable doing do. Nonetheless, according to Foreign Policy, the statement earned a round of applause during the meeting. “There weren’t just isolated pockets of disapproval, among the staff—it was practically the whole room clapping for 10-15 seconds,” one staffer told Foreign Policy.

The dissent among CAP staffers over the invitation to Netanyahu shows that staffers at the progressive think tank remain uncomfortable with the Israeli prime minister and his right-wing agenda—even as CAP’s leadership shows deference to Netanyahu and helps reestablish his bipartisan credentials.

Here’s the full statement read aloud by the CAP staffers:

We all came to work at this institution with a passion and belief for the CAP mission, being an organization dedicated to improving the lives of all Americans, through bold, progressive ideas and to change the conversation and to change the country.

Coming to work at CAP gives many of us the opportunity to make this country safe and accepting of all. While we watch the hate crimes, discrimination and biases faced by some of our communities, we come to work every day proud that this institution is a space where our voices will be respected and where our leadership assures we feel safe, respected and heard. In that sense this place isn’t so much a job or a profession or a nine-to-six. It’s a survival tactic. But it’s not just about our individual struggles because, in the words of MLK, we’re not free until we’re all free.

And at CAP we are a family. We spend more hours with one another at this institution than we do with our own families and friends outside the office. It is imperative that we feel confident in this building to improve the lives of all Americans, and essentially to work on getting us all free. It becomes difficult to step outside of our building and say to our allies why this visit is happening, for some of us here we ourselves feel that we were not considered in that decision.

We come with questions and thoughts on how things have been developing and where we go from here:

1) Our approach is to think creatively at the cross section of traditional boundaries. It’s hard to talk about poverty without talking about the economy or women’s issues or education. Similarly, it’s hard to separate American progress from world progress when young people in Palestine are advising young people in Ferguson on how to deal with tear gas and flash grenades. So, while the decision occurred in the policy portfolio of [CAP’s national security team], the ramifications of that decision lives outside of that team.

2) Some of our teams have a concern that there’s something distinctly not bold or progressive about referring to the Prime Minister as “someone with whom we disagree” or “someone who said some terrible things.” We disagree with Mitch McConnell; Don Lemon has said some terrible things. So this is not just a “policy difference,” this is a person who continues to defend the deaths of over 2000 people—many of them children—last summer alone. What do we call a disagreement of that magnitude? A thing that terrible? Would we bring other leaders to this institution who had committed similar crimes?

3) Finally, on the free exchange of ideas and progressivity. How do we engage in progressive discourse, while continuing to fight for basic human rights of all people, across the globe and in our own country, if we fail to emphasize this respect for human rights in whom we choose to engage in conversation with? How do we engage in conversation with world leaders whose views and actions undermine our core principles, while maintaining the integrity of those principles?

And so we know Prime Minister Netanyahu is set to come. But that decision was made in our collective name, without enough consideration of the diverse backgrounds and experiences dedicated employees bring to the table.

Bringing in another head of state on “the other side” is not the solution. Our goal is to promote humanity and shut down oppression and genocide and terrorism. Bringing in another head of state with a record of oppression would further push our mission away.

So what comes next? What happens when we come back to work on Thursday Nov. 12? What is the Center for Americans Progress to the people whose lived experiences Netanyahu’s policies directly impact? How do we face our communities with answers?

These are all questions that we, as passionate and committed employees of the Center for American Progress have been asking ourselves this past week and hope for answers to. As you look around the room, people of faith and all backgrounds are asking these questions. Some are standing; many, many more don’t feel empowered to do so. This is a humanity and human rights issue universally felt. Some of us think this event shouldn’t be happening at all and others think a broader discussion of this with CAP family should have happened before this major decision.

Again, we are appreciative of this institution, and the opportunity to speak out because this is a family and right now as members of the CAP family we are in a place of confusion and hurt.

Thank you for taking the time to listen to us collectively.

For Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, cozying up to Israel’s right-wing leadership—or at least eschewing criticisms of it—seems like a no-brainer. The groundswell of liberal disillusionment with the Jewish state hasn’t quite trickled up to the Democratic Party’s elites yet and, as the flap over the party platform during President Obama’s reelection bid showed, the grassroots can be bowled over on Israel issues. On the other hand, posturing that she will bring a new day to the relationship with Israel has potential upsides for Clinton: A longtime Clinton donor, Haim Saban, an Israeli-American businessman and Democratic Party megadonor with notably hawkish views, was cool on Barack Obama, and Clinton’s pursuit of his contributions is already in full swing—and has already borne fruit.

Amid America’s broken Israel politics, tacking toward the Israeli right holds a lot of potential gain, with very little risk.

On Wednesday evening, Clinton took her courtship of pro-Israel Democrats to another level: she penned an op-ed for the venerable Jewish newspaper the Forward. The piece got a flashy headline—”How I Would Reaffirm Unbreakable Bond With Israel—and Benjamin Netanyahu“—but its body displays a superficiality about the issues at hand and offers few concrete steps towards achieving its stated aims. The only real piece of outreach to Netanyahu, for instance, is a pledge to “invite the Israeli prime minister to the White House in my first month in office.” How much that will help remains unclear. Netanyahu’s antagonism to American liberals has never been merely about access—he enjoyed plenty under Obama—but rather about ideology: Like the American neoconservatives he is so close to, he abhors the liberal left because its notions of human rights, justice, and peace clash with his revanchist militarism.

Instead of any concrete policy changes to either “reaffirm” the bond with Israel and Netanyahu, Clinton offers up platitudes, peppered with veiled shots against Obama. “The alliance between our two nations transcends politics,” she writes, as if it was Obama and not Netanyahu who politicized the relationship. “As president I will never stop working to advance the goal of two states for two peoples living in peace, security and dignity,” she says. But how? It was exactly in pursuit of these aims that Obama announced in 2011 that an Israeli-Palestinian peace should be based on the “1967 lines.” That was the longstanding American policy, but Netanyahu swiftly rejected it, immediately approving 1,500 new East Jerusalem settlement units in response. Netanyahu has shown time and time again that he’s not willing to make peace—the unifying thrust of his two stints in office has been to dash the very possibility.

The pursuit of peace, then, seems an unlikely foundation upon which to rebuild one’s relationship with the Israeli prime minister. And Clinton must know it: It’s why, as Secretary of State, she had to repeatedly condemn Israel’s announcements of settlement expansion, particularly when they came at provocative moments (she called one such announcement, as Vice President Joe Biden was arriving in Israel, “insulting”).

But all that talk was gone from Clinton’s brief op-ed.

There was no mention of the occupation, let alone settlements. For their part, Palestinians barely featured in Clinton’s piece; millions of subjugated Palestinians’ legitimate aspirations merited zero words, their roles reduced to “a cleric encouraging worshippers to stab Jews.” If Clinton wants to tack toward a stance of willful blindness on the occupation, fine. But she should dispense with the mutually exclusive commitment to a two-state solution whose prospects are rapidly fading under the pressure of Netanyahu’s policies—the same policies, for the purposes of patching things up, she’s now ignoring.

Then there’s the problem of the Iranian nuclear deal. As secretary of state, Clinton helped initiate the talks, and she disappointed liberal pro-Israel hawks by endorsing the agreement. In her Forward op-ed, Clinton says she will “remain committed to preventing Iran from ever acquiring a nuclear weapon, and to vigorously enforcing the new nuclear agreement.” But the rift over the nuke deal—a central one in precipitating icy relations between Obama and Netanyahu—won’t be papered over: For years, Netanyahu’s top aim for his policy toward America has been to roundly oppose diplomacy with Iran, often in apocalyptic terms. How will Clinton smooth over the seemingly unbridgeable gap between her support for the deal and Netanyahu’s steadfast opposition? We really don’t know. And, unlike the Palestinian issue, which American politicians are able to cast aside with few political risks, the Iran deal will likely require active defense; Israel and its lobby’s attacks against the deal, and the pitfalls they bring in relations with the Jewish state, will be harder to sidestep.

And that gets at the real issue: The partisan gap that has emerged over Israel in the United States, over Israeli-Palestinian peace and over diplomacy with Iran, isn’t one merely of optics; the divergence between what Israel has become and American liberalism is not one of style but of substance. An op-ed from Clinton with no real plans of how to move forward won’t do the trick. The way to Netanyahu’s heart isn’t a prompt meeting upon taking office, it’s silently acquiescing to all his policies, no matter how detrimental to the peace efforts that Clinton says she has supported and will continue to support. In this sense, Clinton’s winking suggestion—the ahistorical implication that Obama, not Netanyahu, is to blame for the rift between the United States and Israel—is in keeping with the traditional right-leaning pro-Israel view that dominates within the Jewish state’s Washington lobby groups.

Paying lip service to the moribund peace process while avoiding talk of the occupation and papering over the split on the nuke deal might make for good campaigning, but the contradictions are unsustainable as policy. If and when she becomes president, Clinton will have the same hard choices to make that Obama did.

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu comes to town next month, he’ll meet with President Obama at the White House for the first time since the right-wing Israeli led a failed campaign to block the liberal Democrat’s nuclear deal with Iran. During the course of his long, no-holds-barred fight against diplomacy with Iran, Netanyahu took a stand with congressional Republicans against the White House, attracting minimal Democratic support for his position against Obama’s signal foreign policy achievement. Three years ago, Netanyahu all but endorsed Obama’s opponent in the presidential race, Mitt Romney. And Netanyahu’s own behavior at home—most notably the modus operandi of his successful reelection bid this year, which included anti-Arab bigotry and a vow to block a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—strained relations further.

So it was altogether fitting that Netanyahu, during his swing through Washington, would be given an award by the American Enterprise Institute, a neoconservative think tank close to the Republican Party that never strays too far from Netanyahu’s ideological home turf. Though Israel—and its most influential DC lobby group, AIPAC—has traditionally garnered bipartisan support, neoconservatives don’t give a whit about it; they have long thought Democrats, and especially today’s Democrats, were insufficiently hawkish to give Israel the kind of support it needed in the Middle East. And Netanyahu has more than made clear where his allegiances lay on the American political spectrum: with the Republicans, and especially the neoconservatives among them.

It was jarring, then, to see the news yesterday that Netanyahu would be invited to address the liberal Washington think tank Center for American Progress, a group that serves the purpose of fueling the Democratic Party with progressive policies and ideas. The Israeli embassy approached CAP, the Huffington Post reported (in an article in which I was quoted), and asked for an opportunity to speak. “He’s looking for that progressive validation,” a former CAP staffer told the news website, “and they’re basically validating a guy who race-baited during his election and has disavowed the two-state solution.”

Jarring, but not ultimately surprising—especially not to me. An important disclosure: I worked at CAP for more than a year, from 2011 through much of 2012, writing for the site ThinkProgress, mostly on Middle East policy. My stint there was defined by an attack on my and my colleagues’ work by pro-Israel groups; our taking a progressive stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and pointing at pro-Israel figures as leading the charge for a war with Iran in Washington had attracted the attention of some of the Israel lobby’s nastiest apparatchiks. Though there was no evidence to back up the charge, we were smeared as anti-Semites. It’s a long story—I suggest reading accounts of the affair by Joshua Holland and Glenn Greenwald—but suffice it to say for our purposes that AIPAC played a significant role in the affair. And CAP’s positions moving forward from the attacks—including but not limited to virtually banishing criticisms of Israel and Netanyahu from our writings and, in at least one case, needlessly censoring a piece after publication—were guided by how to return to AIPAC’s good graces, often in coordination with AIPAC itself.

And it was AIPAC, the Huffington Post added, that “applied pressure to CAP to allow Netanyahu to speak.” Let’s be blunt: AIPAC is an organization that, though it gives lip-service to the two-state solution, supports the status quo in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s leaning to the right side of the Israeli political spectrum is well known. And though the group can still pick up some Democratic support for its causes—see, for example, Chuck Schumer and three other Senate Democrats’ objections in an otherwise party-line vote on the Iran deal—what’s left of liberal support for AIPAC has been reduced to a thin veneer of bipartisanship, owing no doubt to factors like general liberal disillusionment with Israel and the growth of liberal pro-Israel groups like J Street and Americans for Peace Now. That a liberal institution feels the need to kowtow to AIPAC in a climate like this speaks volumes about either how out of touch or how craven it can be.

Of course, Netanyahu’s own politics and policies alone are more than enough to raise questions about the invitation. The problem is lending, as the CAP staffer said, legitimacy to Netanyahu’s views and policies. The Israeli prime minister, for anyone not blinkered by ideology to see, has taken steps to entrench the occupation, with security policies as well as settlement expansion. His opposition to the Iran deal was waged with distortions, ignoring his own security establishment’s assessment that it was a good deal. He waged a war in Gaza against an occupied population where hundreds of civilians were killed, leading the UN to suspect war crimes had been committed. It is those positions, those policies, those acts which would justify denying Netanyahu’s request to speak at a liberal institution; instead, he’s being offered a chance for exactly the validation he seeks.

Still, there is some sense in agreeing to host Netanyahu. For one, he is the head of state of a nominal ally, however noxious he can be and however much he spurns his country’s best ally. No one should be surprised that CAP seriously entertains an offer to speak from any head of state. What’s more, CAP is in a mode now of switching from being Obama’s think tank to being Hillary Clinton’s; the gravitational pull of an election is too great for the think tank’s ideological imperative (progressivism) to outweigh its unstated partisan mission. Clinton continues, in the 2016 race, to stake out at least moderately hawkish positions on the Middle East, either from a political calculation (to distinguish herself from Obama’s overstated reluctance to conflict), a campaign one (Haim Saban, the hawkish Israeli-American businessman is a longtime Clinton and Democratic donor, though notably cool on Obama), or an ideological one (she’s just a hawk). It makes a lot more sense for Clinton’s think tank to invite Netanyahu than it would for Obama’s.

Theories of how the invitation happened aside, there are philosophical and ideological issues at hand. Liberals should have a commitment to the free airing of ideas, and hosting Netanyahu could be justified in this manner. As a scholarly institution, CAP should hold the values that could inspire such a move (however cynically they are applied, with an eye, for instance, back to my colleagues’ and my flap there). But CAP does not need to adhere to these standards: In addition to being a scholarly institution, it is an avowedly ideological one. It’s hard to see how giving a liberal platform to Netanyahu helps advance any progressive cause at all—indeed, considering his policies and positions, Netanyahu’s appearance looks poised to do the opposite: help the right wing. That’s what makes the invitation particularly perplexing.

All that said, the invitation is a done deal. (For whatever it’s worth—and it’s probably not much—a user-generated petition on the progressive group MoveOn’s website aims to compel CAP to disinvite Netanyahu.) The big question now is: What comes next? CAP has an opportunity here to hold Netanyahu accountable. To do so is not only in accord with CAP’s mission as a progressive think tank but mandated by it. A national leader with Netanyahu’s right-wing positions—one who has overseen policies that further entrench the occupation of Palestinian territories, waging needless wars against occupied civilians; trade on racism to shore up political fortunes; and combat American foreign policy priorities with distortions and clownish, bigoted falsehoods—demands it.

According to the Huffington Post, the Q&A with Netanyahu will be conducted by CAP’s head, Neera Tanden. For those of us who worked under her when pressure was brought to bear by right-wing and -leaning pro-Israel groups, Tanden’s place as Netanyahu’s interlocutor doesn’t inspire confidence. But we’ll have to wait and see if she can muster some good questions. If not, Netanyahu’s appearance at the Center For American Progress will be nothing short of a total victory for the Israeli prime minister, a liberal stamp of approval for noxious right-wing policies, and a setback for the changing discourse over Israel in this country. Given all the progress that has been made, even as Israel backslides into destroying any hope for peace, that would be a terrible shame.

Editor’s Note: This article has been corrected to say that the petition to compel CAP to disinvite Netanyahu was user-generated, not sponsored by MoveOn itself.

On Monday afternoon, an unassuming kid—a nerd, a geek, with his glasses and his NASA shirt—was led away from his Irving, Texas, school in handcuffs, for all his classmates to see. A perp walk. His crime was building something that, in the wild imaginations of a security-paranoid society, might be misconstrued as a bomb or, as the police who arrested the young student suggested, a “hoax bomb.” “He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation,” a police spokesman said, apparently still unsatisfied with the notion that a kid with an engineering hobby would build a homemade device just for telling the hour. By the time of the city officials’ press conference, the story had become a national embarrassment for Irving, for the schools, the politicians, and the police—and yet the department’s spokesman could not fully grasp the simple truth before him.

The significance of this misunderstanding—though the word seems a drastic understatement—cannot be chalked up simply to the appearance of the homemade digital clock. Instead, we must look to the student’s identity, his name. The clock was made by Ahmed Mohamed, just 14 years old, a dark-skinned boy of Sudanese extraction. Mohamed’s parents had lived in their Irving house for 30 years. As Mohamed was being arrested, one police officer reportedly said, “Yup. That’s who I thought it was.” Uncowed, the Mohamed family gave their own press conference. “As-salam alaykum,” the young inventor began his remarks, tucking his chin into his chest in a moment of brief shyness before letting loose a grin. Ahmed Mohamed built a clock—“He wakes up with it most mornings,” the boy’s father said—and showed America what time it was. The hour was dark.

Mohamed’s ordeal shone a spotlight on our national Islamophobia problem. “That is not America,” Mohamed’s father, Mohamed El Hassan, said of the arrest at a Wednesday-afternoon press conference. Sadly, this was very much America—or at least half of America, with most of the Republican Party drinking from the well of anti-Muslim bigotry. “Fifty percent of those who report a great deal of prejudice toward Muslims”—self-proclaimed bigots—”say they are Republicans,” a Gallup poll analysis on the subject of Islamophobia found, “compared with 17% of those who identify as Democrats and 7% as independents.” Just yesterday, anti-Muslim radicals spray-painted racist slogans on a mosque in Kentucky. Earlier this month, vandals burned the shape of a cross into the lawn of an upstate New York mosque. Last month in Nebraska, someone threw a rock through a mosque window.

For too long, anti-Muslim bigotry has gone unremarked upon by too many Americans. And despite its having proportionally the fifth-most Muslim residents by state, anti-Muslim sentiment flourishes in Texas. The apathy has allowed hate to creep into the mainstream of politics. Mohamed’s own senator, Ted Cruz, a GOP presidential hopeful, appeared at a rally last week against the Iran nuclear deal organized by one of America’s leading anti-Islam activists, Frank Gaffney. Likewise, Mohamed’s mayor, Beth Van Duyne of Irving, has long recited the chapter and verse of anti-Muslim bigotry. In response to her own misinterpretation of a private group that performs arbitration on civil matters—a misunderstanding no doubt fueled by right-wing media—Van Duyne launched an asinine campaign against Sharia, or Islamic law. She became a hit with Gaffney, appearing numerous times on the notorious birther’s radio show and eliciting defenses from his websites. That Gaffney’s group—and its many allies on the American right—have not been deemed persona non grata in polite company speaks volumes about how far, as a society, we have to go. Have you seen any prominent media reports about GOP presidential candidates kowtowing to Gaffney? Me neither.

The right is lost. But what can American liberals do? We have belatedly come to recognize this scourge; the time of tolerating the Marty Peretzes of the world among our own ranks has more or less passed. But too few of our intellectual and political leaders—even President Obama—consistently and directly take on the bigotries of the right. Obama has raised the notion, at the United Nations, among other places, that the U.S. is not at war with Islam. These are welcome sentiments. After Ahmed Mohamed’s clock ordeal, President Obama tweeted, “Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House?” The invitation is a nice gesture—Mohamed accepted—but it does not go far enough. Dwight Eisenhower and George W. Bush remain the only sitting American presidents to have visited an American mosque; despite the pleas of leaders from the American Muslim community, Obama hasn’t ventured into a Muslim house of worship in the U.S. since assuming office. This is the perfect opportunity.

Obama should announce that, in addition to inviting Mohamed to Washington—who would deny the kid a chance to attend NASA’s Astronomy Night at the White House?—he’s taking a trip to Texas to visit the family’s mosque. In Irving, on Mayor Beth Van Duyne’s home turf, this would send a powerful message. It would have the benefit of coming in the wake of an incident of anti-Muslim bigotry, rather than an incident of Muslim terrorism. After Mohamed’s arrest, the Twitter hashtag #IStandWithAhmed began to trend, before going completely viral. This would be the real way to stand with Ahmed: in his home, in his place of worship. And the president should use the occasion to speak frankly on anti-Muslim bigotry. The message isn’t, for once, “We are not at war with Islam”; rather, Obama should declare, We are at war with anti-Muslim bigots. It is past time to name names: Obama should call out the GOP candidates, Frank Gaffney, and the rest of America’s most influential Islam-haters.

Such a message would—and forgive my cynicism—be politically useful at this moment as well. Obama’s most notable foreign policy achievement of late is his nuclear deal with Iran, and many of the opponents of the diplomatic accord are steeped in the sort of anti-Muslim invective that has grown all too commonplace at the highest level of office. One would be shading their eyes from reality if they failed to recognize the growing anti-Muslim animus among right-wing pro-Israel forces, extending even to mainstream groups. The leaders of an pro-Israel groups traffic in this messaging—sometimes in softer forms, as the former head of the ostensibly anti-bigotry group, the Anti-Defamation League, did a few years ago. And they draw on the bevy of anti-Muslim bigots when it suits their purpose: for years, the flagship Israel lobby AIPAC—a major opponent of the Iran deal—invited Steve Emerson to speak at its annual conferences, until the embarrassment of Emerson’s serial errors became too great to bear. In its tens-of-millions-dollars campaign to beat the nuke deal in Congress, AIPAC didn’t hesitate to call on “experts” with ties to the Islamophobic fringes. Those to AIPAC’s right are even worse, and their followers among Republicans are legion: the Zionist Organization of America, along with Gaffney’s group, helped organize the anti-diplomacy rally attended last week by Cruz and Donald Trump.

Lastly, more liberals—including Obama—ought to focus their ire on Sheldon Adelson and his corrupting, bigoted influence on American politics. Adelson, perhaps the largest Republican mega-donor, was reportedly involved in the distribution of the anti-Islam film Obsession during the 2008 presidential campaign. (Another one of the film’s boosters, Sarah Stern and her right-wing group EMET, helped organize the Times Square rallies against the Iran deal.) Adelson’s corrosive effect on Republican politics is obvious to anyone who looks: GOP candidates hoping for a piece of his billions grovel before him and tailor their messages to match his extreme positions.

None of this will end anti-Muslim bias in America—like other pervasive bigotries, it will likely remain strong for some time. But now, with the positive story of a talented boy and his engineering hobby, is an ideal time to launch this fight in earnest. Obama can finally stop hiding from the conspiracy theorists and visit a mosque to celebrate this young man, Ahmed Mohamed. He should call out Mohamed’s haters by name—from the elected officials that represent him and have failed him, like Van Duyne and Cruz, to the mega-donors and political structures that encouraged them in this dereliction of duty. Ahmed Mohamed’s clock has announced that it is time. We should all wake up.

Editor’s note: This piece originally stated that George W. Bush was the only sitting American president to have visited an American mosque. Dwight Eisenhower visited the same mosque, the Islamic Center of Washington, in 1957.

With Maryland Democratic Senator Barbara Mikulski’s announcement on Wednesday that she supports President Obama’s nuclear accord with Iran, the last ray of hope for opponents of the deal to kill it via congressional disapproval seemed to go dim. Mikulski’s approval, bucking a relentless campaign by Israel lobby groups against the deal, raised to 34 the number of senators supporting the deal, enough to ensure that Obama’s promised veto of a deal-killing measure from the Hill can be sustained. That means the deal can be implemented—specifically, that legislative sanctions can be waived by the president—according to a compromise law drawn up by Senator Bob Corker, a Republican opponent of the accord, and Mikulski’s fellow Marylander Ben Cardin, a staunch supporter of Israel who’s still on the fence.

The Israel lobby, however, isn’t done. Several plays are at hand. The first sees intense pressure on the seven remaining undecided Democrats in the upper chamber in an effort to do little more than embarrass the president. If Obama can marshal four of them into voting against a resolution of disapproval of the deal, he can avoid having to veto an effort to knock down a signal foreign-policy achievement; a vote slated for next week on the resolution, despite the cries of congressional hawks, requires, as any other bill does, a 60-vote threshold to end debate. That won’t be a cakewalk—Cardin, who is under pressure even from his own rabbi, and Oregone’s Ron Wyden are all close to the Israel lobby and facing a flood of ads against the deal—but Obama got a boost on Thursday. New Jersey Senator Corey Booker, a close ally of right-wing pro-Israel figures, announced his tepid support for the deal. Mark Warner of Virginia and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota then piled on, bringing the total of senators in support of the deal to 37.

But opponents of the deal already have plans B, C, and D. Reports began floating around on Wednesday of efforts in Congress to pass a bill in tandem with the doomed-to-fail resolution of disapproval that would put onerous requirements on Obama’s implementation of the deal, and throw in a few poison pills for good measure. In addition, hawks in state legislatures and among Republicans on Capitol Hill itself are pressing to de facto reimpose full sanctions on Iran, through the so-called “non-nuclear” sanctions—those targeted at human-rights violations and terrorism—that the Obama administration had said from the get-go it would not lift as part of the accord. The fight to keep the historic nuke deal alive, in other words, is just getting started.

So far, though, the agreement itself and Obama’s apparent ability to block a resolution of disapproval in Congress constitutes a major defeat for the pro-Israel flagship, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The debate has in many ways been clarifying. Opponents of the deal like New York Senator Chuck Schumer and New Jersey’s Bob Menendez—the only Democratic senators to announce their opposition to the deal—are in an isolated position. They are siding with Republicans and the right-leaning center of gravity in the pro-Israel world at a time when Democrats, at the grassroots and, for one of the first times, at an elite level, are becoming more and more critical of Israel (or at least more willing to oppose Israel’s goals). Liberals, in other words, are falling onto the liberal side of the budding Democratic civil war over Israel politics—that is, the anti-war side. As if to reinforce this, former Vice President Dick Cheney, who will give a speech next week opposing the deal at—where else?—the inveterate hawk house of the American Enterprise Institute, told Fox News that America should trust his judgement because he “was right about Iraq.” This is the company Schumer and Menendez are keeping.

The rearranging of Democratic politics regarding Israel evidenced in support for the Iran deal, however, isn’t a sea change: Even the deal’s proponents cite Israel’s security in their endorsements of the deal. Those politicians are probably right: Much of Israel’s security establishment, too, thinks the deal makes Israel safer. But the Israeli electorate has utterly failed to recognize this; instead, the man at its head, Benjamin Netanyahu, has continued to wage a scorched-earth campaign against the deal. For those opponents of a deal who aren’t daunted by siding with Cheney, they’re unlikely to reconcile with the fact that Netanyahu reportedly already tried repeatedly to push for a war with Iran in 2010, 2011, and 2012.

That’s one of the reasons a presumably AIPAC-backed effort to introduce the Iran Policy Oversight Act of 2015—which I’m told isn’t finalized yet and will be introduced by Cardin—is so dangerous. The bill, as it’s drafted now, includes authorization for the transfer of so-called bunker-busting bombs, otherwise known as Massive Ordinance Penetrators (MOPs), to Israel. MOPs would be crucial to Israel’s efforts to inflict serious damage to Iran’s nuclear sites, but the military has so far rejected handing the weapons over—not least because the MOPs need as a delivery vehicle advance bombers whose design the United States holds closely. Giving Israel increased abilities to attack Iran when it has already sought to do so would seem the height of irresponsibility; inviting the very war the diplomatic deal is meant to avert. As Jim Lobe, who broke the draft-bill summary on Wednesday, points out, there are other poison pills: among them, a neoconservative-designed effort to reimpose many banking and targeted sanctions at the outset, and imposing restrictions on business with Iran during the implementation of the deal, as well as imposing new nuclear requirements on the Iranians.

With Republicans looking to dismantle any Obama accomplishment and Democrats looking to repair the rift with the Israel lobby, myriad challenges to the deal remain—despite the accomplishment of blocking a bill designed to kill the deal in Congress. Progressives’ early celebrations of this milestone may yet prove to be premature. As opponents of the accord, who strongly overlap with proponents of war, grow more desperate, the fight over the Iran nuclear deal will only grow more intense.

Since Iran and world powers struck a historic nuclear deal in July, all eyes have fallen on Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democrat from New York. Last Thursday, the notoriously camera-hungry Schumer announced his opposition in a lengthy online statement. That he would become the first and only Senator, so far, to break with his party and his president didn’t come as a surprise: Schumer has long approached the Middle East with what can properly be called an unreconstructed pro-Israel hawkishness.

That hawkishness permeated Schumer’s statement; it proclaimed a thoughtful deliberation, gave plaudits to the Obama administration for its hard work, then proceeded to throw up the standard right-wing pro-Israel talking points against the nuclear deal. “Schumer’s missive came across a bit like your crazy uncle who gets his opinions from talk radio and wants to set you straight at Thanksgiving,” wrote the nonproliferation expert Jeffery Lewis in Foreign Policy, before dismantling Schumer’s technical objections. (Other nuclear experts, too, have questioned Schumer’s points against the deal.)

The timing of Schumer’s announcement reportedly riled the White House: Coming as it did just before Congress’s August recess, Schumer’s rejection of the deal shifts the attention away from himself and onto other undecided members, despite several prominent Democrats recently coming out in favor of the accord. That’s why, though Schumer’s objection to the deal was not unexpected, it nonetheless constituted a major development; in part for the prospects of the nuclear deal itself and in part for what his dead-end Middle East hawkishness means for the future of the Democratic Party—which Schumer hopes to lead in the upper chamber when Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (NV) retires this winter.

Accordingly, Republican hawks are heartened on both counts. “I hope we see the re-emergence of Joe Lieberman Democrats,” said GOP presidential hopeful Senator Ted Cruz (TX), referring to the neoconservative former Connecticut senator whose Iraq war vote cost him a Democratic primary—and a spot in the party—in 2006. “They have been an endangered species in the United States Congress, and it is my hope that with Senator Schumer coming out that he will take a significant role leading and encouraging his fellow Democrats to stand together.”

Many observers assumed Schumer’s absence from the Sunday shows last weekend indicated he won’t be working to gain support for his position against a deal. But a Democratic Senate staffer, who asked to be unnamed to preserve their boss’s relationship with Schumer, told me unequivocally that the New York Senator has been making calls. “Schumer is whipping,” the staffer said, confirming Schumer’s remarks to the press today.

While Schumer is engaged in elite activism, however, a bevy of grassroots progressive groups are pushing back hard. More than 76,000 people signed a petition on the website Daily Kos denouncing Schumer’s decision and CREDO, another progressive group, amassed more than 160,000 signatures on a petition criticizing Schumer’s decision. MoveOn Action, the anti-war group, released its own statement in response to Schumer and launched a campaign to withhold donations from Democrats who side with the would-be Democratic Senate leader. MoveOn Action executive director Ilya Sheyman said that, as of Sunday evening, the group had amassed pledges to withhold more than $8 million in political giving, and expected to hit its goal of $10 million withheld this week.

Though the MoveOn statement makes reference to Schumer’s leadership bid, Sheyman made clear the group’s “north star” was getting the Iran agreement through Congress: “Our focal point isn’t a political battle, it’s how do you keep this deal in place,” he said, adding that the donation boycott would “send a clear message to other elected officials who haven’t come out in favor of a deal.” Nonetheless, the stakes for the Party’s future may hang in the balance: “If you want to be a leader in the Democratic Party, you have to stand up for diplomacy and not a return Bush-era foreign policy.”

The Democratic Senate staffer suggested, however, that planting a hawkish pro-Israel flag may be exactly what Schumer has in mind. “He’s basically come out very early and said to the entire Democratic caucus, ‘Israel issues are just off the table,’” the staffer said. “He’s saying, ‘Any time anything like this comes up, you can count on me to be in the extreme pro-Israel position.’ That’s a tell for the future.”

Laying down that marker, though, doesn’t necessarily mean killing Obama’s Iran deal. The staffer told me Schumer knows that, according to the procedure laid out in the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, if either chamber passes a resolution disapproving of the deal and Obama, as he has promised to, vetoes it, the bill would then go back to Congress, where only one chamber would need to sustain the veto for the deal to stand. If that vote goes to the House—where Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi (CA) has argued forcefully in support of the deal—first, then the Senate may never see the agreement again.

A Schumer bundler who supports diplomacy told me he suspected the New York Senator was counting on it. “I would hope that someone who aspires to be majority leader in the next round would not knowingly undermine his own party’s president if he thought the deal was at risk,” said the donor, who asked not to be named to preserve his access to Schumer. Despite that likely calculation, the donor added, “I’m disappointed with his decision to stand against a deal.”

With Pelosi marshaling support for the Iran accord in the House, then, it seems unlikely to me that the deal will be upended by Schumer’s opposition. But his position might yet become kindling that fuels discontent among Democratic Senators on his future leadership role. “The other thing that might be his undoing,” the Senate staffer told me of Schumer’s leadership prospects, “is the government funding fight that we’re going to have after the Iran debate. Schumer is positioned, because he’s a deal-cutter, right in the center of it as a guy who wants to triangulate out of this.” Bucking the White House and his fellow Democrats for the second time in a row, only to side with Republicans, on a major issue would be a “dangerous path,” the staffer said. “Then, if that comes on the heels of Iran, you’ve got a situation where it’s like, What the hell is Schumer up to?”

Still, Schumer’s decision has riled up the Democrats’ anti-war base against him, and they’re poised to be a thorn in his side. “What we saw last week was that Chuck Schumer, a senior Democratic leader—someone who had gotten it wrong and voted for the war in Iraq—once again got it wrong and came out against this agreement,” said Sheyman. “This is a defining moment that will live with elected officials over their career.” Sheyman harkened back again to Joe Lieberman: “If you’ll remember, Joe Lieberman was defeated in a Democratic primary over the [Iraq] war.” He added, “When Ted Cruz thinks you did the right thing, it might be a moment to reconsider the company you keep.”

Just two years ago, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was still the president of Iran. His crude manner and belligerent obstinacy inspired threats from the West—from Congress and from its allies in Israel’s right-wing government. A few years before, a massive Atlantic cover story had declared a 50-50 chance of war. It seemed all but assured that the probability of such a confrontation, universally regarded as a disastrous proposition by anyone who didn’t have an ideological commitment to it, could only increase. Those were dark days.

Twenty-five months ago, Iranians went to the polls and elected a mullah—from among the much demonized Iranian mullahs—as president. The man at the pinnacle of power in Iran, the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, would remain firmly in place, but Hassan Rouhani’s win signaled flexibility nonetheless. The bellicose Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took to the American airwaves to deride Rouhani’s “smile.” The remark was not without irony: Ahmadinejad smiled a lot himself, but his grins were those of a mischievous child, the needling of authority that came after a misdeed. That Netanyahu didn’t recognize the smiling precedent and the distinction with a difference that Rouhani represented spoke ill of his interpretation of events. Both smiled, but the new Iranian president was clearly of another breed.

By August 2013, Rouhani was in power; by September, he was on the phone with Barack Obama, the first such contact between the heads of Iran and the US since Jimmy Carter rang up the last Shah; in November, an interim deal was signed between Iran and world powers. These small rays of light shone through the ominous clouds that had hung over the Iranian nuclear crisis for a dozen years.

This morning, daybreak came before dawn on the East Coast. Negotiators from the so-called P5+1—the US, China, France, Russia and the United Kingdom along with Germany—and Iran announced a historic comprehensive nuclear deal. The 20 months of negotiations were a long haul: There were extensions, blown deadlines, and attempts to scuttle the deal by Congress and Iran’s hardliners. But the talks finally culminated in a marathon session of 27 days in Vienna, blowing through another few deadlines and finally ending with this morning’s announcement.

The accord places long-term curbs on Iran’s nuclear progress, even rolling back its past progress in key areas like enrichment capabilities and fissile material stockpiles, and imposes the most stringent negotiated inspections regime in the history of the world. The life of the restrictions and intensified inspections vary according to the specifics—the toughest limitations will be in force for at least 10 years, some for 15; some of the new verification measures will hold for 25 years and a few are permanent. In exchange, the Iranians get relief from the sanctions that have bitten its economy.

“Today, after two years of negotiations, the United States, together with our international partners, has achieved something that decades of animosity has not—a comprehensive, long-term deal with Iran that will prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” Obama said in early morning remarks welcoming the deal. He harkened back to what things were like before the talks got under serious way, making the stakes clear: “Put simply, no deal means a greater chance of more war in the Middle East.”

For the moment, that fate has been averted; perhaps that’s what has the deal’s main stateside opponents—neoconservatives, Israel lobby groups and much of the congressional GOP—positively apoplectic. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) had the hottest of hot takes this morning, telling Bloomberg View that the accord was “akin to declaring war on Sunni Arabs and Israel by the P5+1.” That’s right: Graham is saying the aversion of war is actually the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (plus Germany, for good measure) bombing Israel. The catch: Graham told CNN later in the morning that he hadn’t read the deal, whose core runs only 20 pages, with scores more of annexes.

Those sorts of evaluations should merit nothing but eye-rolls, but sadly one cannot ignore the halls of American power entirely, despite their proclivity to ignorance. The deal will, after all, need to pass through a congressional review. According to a procedure passed by Congress and reluctantly accepted by the administration, the people’s representatives have 60 days to review the accord. If they disapprove of a deal, they must pass a resolution saying so in order to block its implementation (the US sanctions relief is achieved by Obama’s waiving the laws that impose them, which Congress could block). In his remarks, Obama vowed to reject any measure that attempted to do so. Such a veto would then need the support of only one-third-plus-one of either chamber to be sustained. Despite Graham’s prediction of congressional rejection, Obama seems likely to be able to marshal enough support from his party to keep the deal on track.

The agreement’s opponents may be shocking in their shamelessness, but not their substance. The objections are entirely predictable, with neoconservative pundits and Israel lobby groups like AIPAC forecasting them for months as the contours of the agreement became apparent in media reports. The deal won’t last long enough, they say, though by that they mean Iran won’t accept draconian permanent curbs, something no nation would do. Iran’s behavior hasn’t changed, they stammer, citing the Islamic Republic’s foreign-policy alliances with dictators like Bashar Assad, rebel groups like Yemen’s Houthis, and the unpalatable anti-Israel militants of Hamas and Hezbollah. That much is true, but the negotiations were strictly about the nuclear issue—which, by the way, the same hawks in Washington and Tel Aviv have been grousing about for years as the gravest threat to mankind since the White Walkers.

Now there is a deal that without question reduces that grave threat, at least for a long-term period. The deal includes provisions to “snap-back” sanctions if Iran violates its terms, ingeniously designed to prevent the malcontents among the veto-wielding UN powers—Russia and China—from blocking their reimposition on spurious grounds. The deal, crucially, has international buy-in because of the participation of the world powers. Netanyahu and his congressional allies may complain endlessly, but they are swimming against the overwhelming international tide.

That said, the central players of this drama were always the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran. They will continue to be so, by virtue of the history of enmity between the nations, which will not evaporate overnight. The United States will continue to criticize and counter Iran, both in its near abroad—the Middle East, our sometime playground—and at home, where the human-rights violations of the regime are sure to continue, if not initially get worse. And yet there is hope: nothing is certain, but many proponents of the deal, including stern critics of Iran’s malfeasance over the years, hope that the lifting of the clouds of war and Iran’s economic opening will lead to political and civil rights reforms.

“The fight after a nuclear deal is really going to be about the future of Iran, not about the deal itself,” Vali Nasr, the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a former Obama administration official, told me late last week. “Most of the people who are supporting the deal, myself included, they’re supporting it not because of the narrow details of, y’know, 1,500 centrifuges for so many sanctions. They’re supporting it in the belief that it will do something much bigger in terms of socio-political change.”

The reactionaries of Iran’s hard-line institutions are likely to resist those changes. Their grip may hold for a time, even for the long term. But this much is clear: the path of isolation and punishment—the path, that is, toward confrontation we were all set on before these nuclear talks started—wasn’t yielding any fruits. Iran achieved milestone after milestone in its nuclear program. It meddled in its neighbors affairs. And it violated its own people’s human rights. That path held no prospects for reform—think Cuba—but now there is an opportunity, a reason for hope. The critics of this deal offer no alternative to it; theirs is a vision bereft of anything near the accomplishments of the agreement and the possibilities it proffers. Obama is right: The status quo of two years ago meant a path to war. This deal was itself the alternative, but not the one which Washington’s hawks wanted to see.

If, after more than three decades of the most vitriolic hostility, Iran and the United States can sit at the negotiating table and hammer out a deal that gives the world security from a potentially nuclear-armed Iran and presents economic opportunities for the Iranian people, then no one can deny the possibility of further movement between these two nations. Critics will holler that Obama “caved,” but that is just a code word for “compromised.” A willingness to bend without breaking was always necessary for a deal; the perfect has been the enemy of the good throughout the talks.

The forces of reaction, in the United States, in Iran, in Israel, and in the Sunni Arab states, will be furiously advocating for retrenchment. But there’s is a perspective cast into doubt by what has already been achieved so far. A new day has come.

Negotiators for Iran and world powers announced Tuesday that they would keep talking in Vienna until July 9, extending the self-imposed June 30 deadline in order to attempt to reach a historic nuclear accord. The talks have taken on a level of extraordinary seriousness; reports out of Vienna indicate back-and-forth over the few remaining sticking points, not minor ones either, but a deal is widely expected to emerge soon. However, one party with a clear stake in the talks, but no seat at the table, has decided to mark the end of the nuclear negotiations with a salvo of decided unseriousness. I’m talking, of course, about the Israelis.

What was Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, thinking when he had his office release a video on the occasion of the original deadline that portrayed the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, morphing into Iran? And then portraying the “Islamic State of Iran”—instead of Iran’s actual name, the Islamic Republic—getting nuclear weapons? The 30-second cartoon makes a mockery of the Iran nuclear negotiations, which are intended to prevent Iran from being able use its nuclear program to get those weapons. Instead of raising substantive concerns with the emerging accord, Netanyahu’s opted for ham-handed war propaganda, making light of the talks. Any reasonable viewer won’t be laughing with Netanyahu, they’ll be laughing at him.

Take a look for yourself:

Here’s a hint about what Netanyahu was up to: The video is in English. It’s not aimed at his domestic, Hebrew-speaking audience but at the United States. And here’s another hint, among the remarks Netanyahu gave yesterday at a meeting with the Italian foreign minister:

The world is properly concerned and aghast at the violence and savagery of ISIS. No one would dream of allowing the Islamic State of ISIS to have nuclear weapons. Why would anyone consider giving the Islamic State of Iran, which is a lot more powerful than ISIS and acts with much greater power than ISIS to have additional power of nuclear weapons? That’s a mistake. The Islamic State of Iran, the foremost sponsor of international terrorism, should not have access to nuclear weapons.

We need a better deal. This deal should not pass.

To which one must ask: Pass what, exactly? Deals don’t pass, they are made between parties. The nuclear deal at hand will be forged between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, which includes the United States, plus Germany, collectively known as the P5+1. But, under a US law passed earlier this year, Congress will have a shot at voting a deal up or down. As Congress is a redoubt of support for Netanyahu, despite (or perhaps because of) his recent racist election tactics, the prime minister is hoping to leverage it into a No vote. That’s unlikely—the law requires that Congress get a veto-proof majority, so President Obama must only hold down one-third plus one of either chamber to sustain the deal—but if Netanyahu has a fighting chance, it’s hard to see how this video will help him.

In its substance, too, the cartoon seems aimed at Americans. Advocates of Israel have every right to be offended at the ridiculous #JSIL—the Jewish State of Israel in the Levant—campaign on Twitter, but you can’t be offended if your own side is constantly making the same ridiculous comparison. That’s exactly what Netanyahu is doing. The tactic is transparently propagandistic: Most Americans think ISIS is a major threat to the United States—a bigger threat than Iran—so why not try to point out that Iran and ISIS are the same?

The reasons not to do so are many. As odious as the Iranian government is—it’s a repressive regime with an abysmal human rights record that supports terrorist groups—they’re simply not ISIS, whose reign of brutality and terror in the areas of Iraq and Syria it controls rightly elicits gasps of disbelief (see: propaganda videos burning prisoners alive or shooting rocket-propelled grenades at them). The geopolitical context, too, makes the feeble comparison obvious: Iran was the first country to provide manpower and resources to the fight against ISIS as it swept through Iraq over the past two years. That’s because ISIS and Iran are mortal enemies. ISIS has been taking Iran’s co-confessionalists in Iraq—Shias, whom the Sunni extremists view as apostates—and summarily executing them by the hundreds.

Netanyahu’s straw-grasping propaganda—that Iran and ISIS are one and the same, a note he’s been hitting for a while now, though not in such crude fashion—leads inevitably to the conclusion that the United States should make war on Iran. You don’t, after all, put pressure on ISIS to try to bring the group to the negotiating table and hammer out “a better deal,” you drop bombs on ISIS. And that’s just what happened: The United States was compelled by ISIS’s capturing of territory and terrorizing of its inhabitants enough to launch a war in Iraq and Syria. Why would that not also hold if the Islamic Republic of Iran were just like ISIS?

The answer is: Things that Netanyahu says are just like ISIS are not, in fact, just like ISIS. Just ask Netanyahu. Last fall, he spent a good deal of his UN General Assembly address comparing the Palestinian militant faction Hamas with ISIS. Because simplicity is necessary to such facile propaganda, Netanyahu just came out and said it: “Hamas is ISIS, and ISIS is Hamas.” That was last September. Where are we today, some nine months later? Israel is negotiating with Hamas over a long-term cease-fire. So either Netanyahu is dealing with ISIS or, as the DC Middle East security expert Ilan Goldenberg put it, Netanyahu has “no credibility.” (As it happens, The New York Times had a story just yesterday about how ISIS-linked groups are targeting—you guessed it—Hamas. ISIS does not equal Hamas, Hamas and ISIS are at war, just like ISIS and Iran.)

While Netanyahu is busy engaged in what has become his usual shenanigans, however, there are some cooler heads in Israel. Israel’s military chief recognizes that a nuclear deal with Iran will make his country safer with an accord that effectively curbs Iran’s nuclear program. A senior Israeli military officer said in a June radio report, “this is a threat in decline.” Instead, Netanyahu opts for overblown warnings of an Iranian bomb, resulting from precisely the deal that will help foreclose that possibility. It’s a lose-lose for America: Imagine if there were no talks, no looming deal, would Netanyahu not also then be saying that Iran was about to get the bomb? Unlike his security chiefs, the man is a pure ideologue, undeterred from the ends he seeks—war—by the changing landscape of reality.

You might think the Netanyahu government would know better than to release such a stupid cartoon. Less than two weeks ago, the Israeli Foreign Ministry pulled a similar cartoon that portrayed foreign media during last year’s Gaza war as dupes of Hamas. The video prompted a harsh backlash, but Netanyahu seems undeterred. The video, like many of his pronouncements on Iran, exposes the right-wing Israeli leader for what he is: a joke. Here’s hoping everyone recognizes this and treats Netanyahu and his stateside boosters in Congress accordingly.

There’s so much to unpack about former Israeli ambassador to the US Michael Oren’s recent forays into generating book publicity. Many people have noted that the former scholar keeps getting things wrong and stepping on toes. Oren relies on everything from “bong-hit psychoanalysis,” as my friend Matt Duss brilliantly put it, about Barack Obama’s family history with Muslims to encounters with The New York Times that didn’t quite go down like he says. It is, as Duss wrote of one such play, “not analysis, but an ideological argument.” Even Anti-Defamation League head Abe Foxman—who shouldn’t be taken seriously on account of his own bigotries, but is nonetheless a marker of a certain brand of fiercely pro-Israel activism—thinks Oren’s gone too far. All this to make a not very persuasive case that Obama set out to damage the US-Israel relationship.

I’m not as interested, however, in all of that, per se, as I am in what the shitstorm Oren stirred up says about Israeli politics in America. The dynamics of these politics are shifting, and Oren’s rants shed a clarifying light on the changes. No one really disputes what’s going on—liberals and Democrats are, as evidenced by a series of flaps large and small, becoming disillusioned with Israel—but different voices attribute the roots of these shifts to different parties. For the pro-Israel right, there seems little question that the shifts emanate from a concerted campaign. I’m talking, of course, about the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel, known by its initials, BDS.

The contradictions of blaming—or crediting, depending on your perspective—BDS speak for themselves. Pro-Israel forces constantly deride BDS as a fringe movement with no major victories or chances of success, and yet pro-Israel groups and individuals spend an inordinate amount of time inveighing against the movement. In a sense, they’re right on both counts: BDS has had limited successes, but the campaign is clearly gaining steam. And it does represent a threat to the established order of Israeli politics here: By shifting the debate to one about rights, and taking a nonviolent tack at addressing the deficits of those rights for Palestinians in territories controlled by Israel, BDS puts a tough choice to American pro-Israel liberals, those who adhere to a notion of “liberal Zionism.” (For a progressive Israeli take on that term, listen to my friend Noam Sheizaf’s remarks at the liberal J Street conference.)

Some of these liberal Zionists tend to lash out at BDS the same way the right does. Just last week, Rutgers historian and media-studies professor David Greenberg released a review in Democracy of a new anti-BDS book. One wouldn’t be surprised to learn Greenberg thinks BDS is anti-Semitic and a malicious campaign to delegitimize Israel. You should read the review for yourself, but for our purposes it suffices to say that Greenberg positions himself as a liberal defender against BDS while also mentioning, at least in passing, that liberal Zionism is under assault from the “chauvinistic pro-Israel right.” That seems fair enough, but there’s a legitimate question here about what side the liberal pro-Israel position is really under attack from: Is it BDS, which comes in for so much liberal-Zionist criticism, or right-wing Israeli leaders and pro-Israel ideologues, who come in for much less, that is undermining the tenability of liberal Zionism?

Enter Michael Oren. Oren, of course, speaks to and from the pro-Israel right (and moves further right with each op-ed). One of the most curious strains of Oren’s recent attacks were those against liberal American Jews. In his book (which came out this week and I haven’t read), he reportedly directs substantial ire at American liberals. A Haaretz article reviewed the attacks: “Obama isn’t Oren’s only target: he is also critical of American Jewish liberals and their ‘religion’ of Tikkun Olam, and turns devastating when it comes to American journalists who are also Jews.” Oren went after the New York Times editorial board, Times writer Thomas Friedman, and Leon Wieseltier, formerly with The New Republic and more recently of The Atlantic—liberal Zionists all.

No single example can tell the whole story of these complex politics, but Oren’s attack is representative of something broader: Unlike BDS, the Israeli right and, by extension, their American allies hold real power. It is they, not those one-staters among BDS advocates, who are squeezing liberals out of the pro-Israel camp in America. It happens in two ways. First, Israel’s own rightward shift is reflected in policies that make liberal Zionists’ dreams of a two-state solution more difficult to achieve (one cannot, for example, blame the Palestinians and their advocates for the Netanyahu government’s enthusiasm for settlements). Secondly, the right-wing Zionists who have come to dominate Israel’s body politic actively squeeze out the liberals. Consider, for example, Sheldon Adelson’s recent anti-BDS summit, which deliberately excluded liberal pro-Israel groups despite the fact that their campus presence

In this latter formulation, there’s a bit of typical sectarian politics: The Stalinists hated the Trotskyites above all, and the right-wing Zionists seemingly hate their liberal counterparts more than they do the Palestinians. But there’s also a practical dimension that speaks to why BDS puts liberal Zionists in a tough place; the pro-apartheid right wing offers a one-state solution that is de facto already the operating principle on the ground, whereas liberal Zionist two-staters (see Greenberg, Friedman and Wieseltier) and liberal pro-BDS one-staters (who support democracy in the Holy Land) are pushing for “solutions” to the conflict that increasingly seem equally unlikely.

In other words, the pro-Israel right—exemplified most recently in Michael Oren’s attacks on American liberals—is winning. The point is fast approaching at which liberal Zionists will have to choose between their liberalism and their Zionism, if only because the notion of liberal Zionism itself is everyday becoming less of a plausible ideology for what’s happening on the ground in Greater Israel. I’m not asking them to join BDS efforts, but at least if they can’t see who their real comrades are—those dedicated to human rights and equality as universal values—they should recognize who their real enemies are. Instead, the right is rendering liberal Zionism, such that it is, a moot ideology, even as liberal Zionists themselves take the fight to BDS. Michael Oren must be pleased.

The Wanted 18 is a deadly serious documentary, a film about rebellion, resistance to occupation and the tragic toll that can come with it. But it’s also a very funny story about cows. The film, which is screening at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival this Saturday, oscillates between these modes seamlessly, with a few overlaps. How else can one explain the Israeli military’s orders to shut down a small Palestinian dairy farm except as both an example of the total control sought by the occupying power and also an exemplar of absurdist humor?

Through archival footage, claymation, illustrations, interviews, and some contrived reenactments, filmmakers Amer Shomali and Paul Cowan tell the tale of Beit Sahour, a small Christian town on the outskirts of Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, during the First Intifada, or uprising. In late 1987, Palestinians began to organize a mass uprising in response to 20 years of Israeli occupation, which began with 1967’s Six-Day War. Local committees organized the demonstrations, strikes, mass refusals to pay taxes to the occupying authorities, and boycotts of Israeli products.

Beit Sahour was a hotbed of creative nonviolent activism. In 1988, activists decided to stop buying Israeli milk. But a substitute would be needed to feed the town’s families, so Jalal Qumsieh went to a friendly kibbutz, or Jewish collective community, and purchased 18 cows. But, as one Beit Sahour resident says in the film, Palestinians didn’t have a culture of cow farming, so a local university student was dispatched to the United States to learn everything from how to care for the cows to how to milk them. “The moment I saw the cows at the farm,” says Qumsieh in the film, “I felt as if we had started to realize our dream of freedom and independence.”

The sense of community that the cows helped to build comes across through present-day interviews with the neighborhood committee members. Everyone pitched in for the Intifada. One Beit Sahour resident tells of how a group of women would divide duties in order to sew Palestinian flags, which were banned at the time—including one woman to serve as a lookout for Israeli soldiers as the sewing happened. Majed Nasser, a doctor, recounts being stopped by soldiers as he swept the street; they did not believe a medical doctor would stoop to such a task. The soldiers then recognized, he said, “There was more to the Intifada than throwing stones and burning tires.” And, indeed, there were the cows.

The Israeli army didn’t like it one bit. Occupation was, so far as they were concerned, predicated on control—and dependence played a big part in that. Like much of the West Bank, many Palestinians in Beit Sahour depended on the Israeli economy for their livelihoods and for the products that sustained their lives; with the Israelis asserting firm control over open lands, especially so close to the so-called Green Line that sectioned off the occupied territories under military rule, agriculture proved enormously difficult. The neighborhood committees of the Intifada were themselves seen as a threat. The Israeli military governor, Shaltiel Lavie, explains in The Wanted 18:

We had a strict directive on dealing with those who formed the neighborhood committees with all the necessary force, and all legal means at our disposal in order to control them so as to prevent the possibility of their setting up an administrative apparatus which was ultimately designed to replace our own.

The Israeli military began keeping an eye on the small dairy farm and eventually intervened, ordering the farm shut down within 24 hours and, failing that, threatening to destroy it with bulldozers. Qumsieh asked the Israeli soldier why the farm had to be shut down and recalls the response word-for-word: “These cows are dangerous for the security of the State of Israel.”

Thus began a game of cat and mouse: The cows were moved to a secret location and the milk delivered by subterfuge to local residents on schedule, with the Israeli military searching the town for the bovine contraband. The search involved hundreds of soldiers and even two helicopters. “It was a real joke,” says one of the committee members, “to see the Israeli army looking for the Intifada cows.”

But here’s where things get more serious. Throughout the existence of the farm, the barn had been used by Palestinian activists wanted by the army for interrogation or arrest as a shelter. One such young activist, Anton Shomali, a cousin of the filmmaker, roosted with the cows, but left before sunrise. In the event farm workers ran into Anton, they wouldn’t speak to each other—“for security,” says a committee member, implicitly nodding to plausible deniability. When the cows were moved to a secret location, the activists kept up their interspecies cohabitation: What better place for a secret hideout than a secret hideout that worked for such conspicuous animals, too?

The 1991 Madrid Conference, where Palestinians and Israelis finally got together to negotiate, took the wind out of the Intifada and, by some accounts, marked its end. But the true death-knell of the uprising came with the signing of the Oslo Accords. Many of the residents of Beit Sahour involved in Intifada activism were disappointed by the accords, feeling that the deal was a good one for the exiled Palestinian leadership that had signed it, but at the expense of those who had made progress inside Palestine itself by organizing people on the ground. Nonetheless, residents of Beit Sahour approved of the deal by pouring out into the streets, car horns honking with approval. “We’re being fucked,” says one committee activist, “and we are celebrating.”

Discontented, several of the activists decided to stage one last Intifada demonstration. They hurled rocks at the military until the soldiers burst past the improvised barricade. Eventually, the soldiers chased down Anton Shomali, who was shot four times at close range with rubber bullets before being left on the street to bleed to death.

Anton’s fate shows how high the stakes were and the film reflected this; there are cows farting, sure, but there’s so much more. What’s remarkable is how much of the film’s themes of oppression and resistance remain relevant to this day. A Palestinian Authority now ostensibly exercises control over some of the West Bank, but the Israeli military can still go wherever it damn well pleases. And a movement to boycott Israel is again derided by Israeli hard-liners as a threat to the Jewish State’s security. Moreover, the reservations harbored about Oslo by activists have so far been borne out by history: Though the accords were set to create a Palestinian state within five years, now, almost a quarter-century after the deal was signed, hope for a two-state solution is rapidly receding.

And the cows? Their dwindling number and falling demand after Oslo made maintaining the small dairy farm economically unviable. The four remaining cows were sold to a butcher but, on the way there, one of them, a calf, escaped into the West Bank hills.

The controversy over two gay New York City entrepreneurs helping out Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz’s campaign just won’t die—and that’s a good thing. The row is highlighting the hypocrisy of advocating for civil rights at home and seeking to deny them abroad. And yet the coverage has focused mostly on the hypocrisy of gay businessmen supporting an anti-gay politician, less about the hypocrisy of why they do. Let me explain.

In late April, The New York Times reported that Mati Weiderpass and Ian Reisner, a pair of hoteliers with a small empire of gay-oriented businesses, hosted a meeting at their Manhattan penthouse for Cruz. They introduced Cruz to a business partner who makes political donations. Weiderpass and Reisner made for curious matchmakers: two openly gay businessmen lending a hand to a politician who has, in the words of the Human Rights Campaign, “consistently opposed equality for LGBT Americans.” The backlash from New York’s gay community came swiftly. Activists announced boycotts of Weiderpass and Reisner’s businesses, and hasty Facebook apologies ensued.

The national political press covered the flap extensively. More than a month after the meet, the tide of press has yet to subside—just last week the Times ran a feature on the row, a web item noting Reisner’s own maximum donation to Cruz (which he subsequently got returned) and an opinion piece incredulous that the gay duo were unaware of the breadth Cruz’s virulent anti-gay stances.

Less attention, however, has been paid to what sparked the meeting in the first place. Rich businessmen might be a natural constituency for Republicans, but Weiderpass and Reisner didn’t cite Cruz’s tax policies in their public remarks. Instead, the meeting, the introduction to the donor and Reisner’s own short-lived campaign donation were predicated on one issue: Israel.

In an interview with New York magazine, Reisner said the meeting was explicitly set up to introduce Cruz to Sam Domb, the business partner whom the Times described as having “raised considerable funds for pro-Israel politicians.” (“I know Sam would love to meet [Cruz] because Sam has all his views on Israel,” a sometime consultant to Cruz on matters of Israel reportedly said.) Same with Reisner’s direct donation: “I gave Senator Cruz a $2,700 check to show my support for his work on behalf of Israel,” he said.

There seems to be little question that Weiderpass and Reisner hold right-wing views on the Jewish state—Reisner said that Cruz, an überhawk even by the hawkish standards of Congress, “was on point on every issue that has to do with national security.” The TImes added: “The three men”—Reisner, Weiderpass and Domb—“are strong supporters of Israel, as is Mr. Cruz.” Cruz, for his part, has expressed an openness to sidelining Palestinian rights altogether. In March, he said he supports Israel deciding “whether they want to adopt a one-state solution”—that is, apartheid—“or a two-state solution.”

The obvious contradictions are there in full force: two of New York’s most well-known gay businessmen coming dangerously close to forsaking their own civil rights at home in order to help ensure that Palestinians don’t get them in Greater Israel. But the issue is more complicated, and hints at some of the more heated debates around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in recent years.

I’m talking of course about “pinkwashing,” a portmanteau used by pro-Palestinian activists to describe efforts by pro-Israel figures to deflect attention from Israel’s treatment of Palestinians by citing the country’s laudable record on gay rights. Pinkwashing burst into the mainstream in 2011 with a New York TImes op-ed, but remains a contentious term.

It’s amid this context that the kerfuffle over Weiderpass and Reisner’s ill-fated invitation brings other contradictions into sharp relief—a twist on the debate over pinkwashing. The natural home for gay-rights advocates in the American political system is the Democratic Party, which, though slow to embrace change, has officially come around. And yet American politics around Israel run the other way: prominent national Democrats, not least among them Barack Obama, have a tense relationship with Israel as its own politics shift to the right. (The shifting politics are reflected in fights like those over Iran diplomacy and support for a “unified Jerusalem” in the 2012 Democratic platform.)

The strongest source of unflinching support for Israel these days, then, isn’t the American Jewish community writ large, which trends liberal and Democratic, but instead right-wing Republicans—namely, a few Jewish megadonors and especially masses Christian evangelicals. And the wealthy right-wing donors have reacted in kind: billionaires like the hawk Sheldon Adelson lavish Republican politicians with millions, asking in exchange for total fealty to hardline pro-Israel stances. Yet neither the GOP nor Christian Zionists offer anything near robust support for gay rights—quite the opposite, in fact, with Ted Cruz as a paragon of these retrograde, anti-gay politics.

The political convergence of the anti-gay Republican Party and doctrinaire right-wing pro-Israel activism seem not to trouble these gay Zionists. But they might be making the case against pinkwashing for the pro-Palestinian activists: the struggle for civil rights is universal, whether you’re a Palestinian in the West Bank or an LGBT person in the U.S. The American right is the wrong side of both these issues, and l’affaire Cruz is a perfect opportunity to point that out.

A war movie about a US drone pilot seems counterintuitive. A joystick and some computer screens in a shipping container–sized office cube outside Las Vegas—it ain’t exactly the stuff of a Hollywood action thriller. But that’s just the setting director Andrew Niccol gives us in his new drama Good Kill, which opened in theaters on Friday.

The film, written and directed by Niccol, follows Maj. Tommy Egan, an Air Force pilot who used to fly fighter planes, played by a convincing Ethan Hawke, at the height of the escalation of the drone war around 2010. Unmanned aerial vehicles, as drones are properly known, are becoming all the rage. War from a safe distance—“We’ve got no skin in the game,” Egan complains at one point—has its obvious appeal, and everyone at the base on the Las Vegas outskirts knows it. Egan’s commanding officer at one point tells a group of new recruits, “Drones aren’t going anywhere. In fact they’re going everywhere.”

The increase in drone attacks coincided with a more active CIA role in the program; in the film, a disembodied voice referred to only as “Langley” calls in strikes and communicates with the drone pilots’ cubicle via speakerphone, making repeated decisions that the “collateral damage”—civilian casualties—is worth it to blow up some “high-value target” or another. And, with the CIA’s more prominent role, civilian casualties do indeed climb. “Splash,” the drone pilots say after each explosion, followed by a less and less enthusiastic echo of “good kill,” giving the film its title.

The falling enthusiasm of some, far from all, of the drone operators gives the movie its tension. Though not a typical war movie—the explosions happen, without any audio, on a screen within a screen—Good Kill does explore what has become a common theme of today’s war films: post-traumatic stress disorder. This, like the civilian casualties, which are ripped right from headlines, is a real phenomenon: A 2013 study found drone pilots are just as likely as pilots in manned aircraft to suffer PTSD.

Hawke’s Tommy Egan drinks more and more heavily, and keeps a sprawling emotional distance from his wife, played by January Jones in a fine performance as the military wife. Jones is happy to have her husband home from long engagements abroad, but discovers slowly that he’s not so pleased to be fighting a war on office hours and returning to suburban life with two kids by evening. Egan stops at the convenience store several times in the film—a trope of PTSD in movies, but given a little extra punch in that the pilot is driving his Mustang home directly from waging war: “I blew up six Taliban in Pakistan today,” he tells the clerk. “Now I’m going home to barbecue.”

The entire film takes place in just a handful of locations: on base, at home, in the liquor store, in the car in between and, for one unnecessary scene, in a Vegas strip club. That latter moment serves mostly to heighten the sexual tension between Egan and a young airman played by Zoë Kravitz, who becomes Egan’s co-pilot. The airman—the Air Force uses the masculine for both sexes—seems to be little more than a sounding board for Egan’s moral concerns. But Kravitz’s acting stinks, and no wonder: She’s burdened by perhaps the worst writing in the film, including a cringeworthy pick-up line delivered to Hawke as the film winds down.

It’s particularly a shame because Hawke’s quiet acting is good enough to convey the emotional and moral weight that the movie centers on. Niccol’s best previous efforts—namely the sci-fi flick Gattaca (1997), which also stars Hawke, and The Truman Show (1998), which Niccol wrote—raise their big questions without ever needing to spell them out to the viewer.

Then there’s the big question Good Kill itself presents. Egan’s descent into PTSD drives the film—it is borne of boredom and propelled by the growing tally of civilian deaths on the other side of those monitors. And while drone pilots, as any other veterans, deserve our most sincere sympathies and society’s care, one can’t help but get the feeling that, though Hawke and Kravitz’s characters are burdened by the civilian drone victims, the Pakistanis and Yemenis who die are but bit players in the drama of the American military men and women thousands of miles away. We never learn any of their names. We see that they are women and children on the screen, but there’s no depth beyond that. We never learn of their PTSD because they die almost as quickly as they appear on screen; the shots of them wandering too close to targets of missiles already let loose last about as long as the camera lingers on their dead bodies.

Though the story is novel in that it deals with the anti-action of a drone operator’s cubicle, I’m left wanting for a more novel anti-story: that as told from the perspective of the brown people getting bombed.

That criticism might be a bit unfair, however. The warring while at a distance from war is itself a central theme of Good Kill. And Niccol’s clearly deep research will yield a fruit of knowledge for the average American viewer; they will know their nation has sinned even without any foreign names in the film. And anyone who’s met a war correspondent will know how difficult these stories can be to pitch—editors simply prefer stories about the Americans abroad, not the people those Americans are making war on. One imagines sources of financing in the film industry are even more shrewd.

Nonetheless, this drama deserves to be seen by both those interested by America’s conflicts in the age of the remote war, and those who know too little of it. The toll taken on our own fighters—tele-warriors or not—needs more attention; Niccol’s sensitive portrait, buoyed by Hawke’s acting, delivers some. And the viewer will get, at least, that the drone war’s only costs aren’t PTSD for American fighters; they will also understand how counterproductive the drone war could turn out to be. In another too obvious line delivered by Kravitz’s character, the upstart drone pilot reacts to yet another obvious civilian death: “We are a regular fucking terrorist factory. Best recruitment tool A Qaeda ever had.”

In January, a barrage of American missiles struck a suspected Al Qaeda hideout in Pakistan. Unbeknownst to intelligence officials, however, American Warren Weinstein and Italian Giovanni Lo Porto, both kidnapped aid workers, were held hostage inside and died in the attack. Then three weeks ago, after a preliminary investigation, President Obama did something wholly unprecedented in his global war of “targeted killings”: he stepped up to a podium in the White House and apologized to Weinstein and Lo Porto’s families.

“One of the things that sets America apart from many other nations,” Obama said, “one of the things that makes us exceptional is our willingness to confront squarely our imperfections and to learn from our mistakes.”

Yet Obama’s square confrontation with his mistakes has never included an apology before—the overwhelming majority of as many as, by one count, 1,250 civilian deaths in what has become known as his “drone war” never get acknowledged by the administration at all, let alone elicit public contrition.

Now, a coalition of human and civil rights groups are pushing the administration to put its policies in line with Obama’s lofty rhetoric. Today, they wrote a letter to the president demanding that he do for all the alleged civilian victims of drone strikes what he’s doing in Weinstein and Lo Porto’s cases.

The groups—which include the ACLU, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, CIVIC, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, Columbia Law’s Human Rights Clinic, Human Rights First, Open Society Foundations and Reprieve—welcomed Obama’s promise of an independent investigation into Weinstein and Lo Porto’s deaths as well as the offer of compensation to their families.

“We write to urge your administration to adopt the same approach to all other U.S. counterterrorism strikes in which civilians have been injured or killed—regardless of their nationalities,” the coalition letter goes on. “To that end, your administration should establish a systematic and transparent mechanism for post-strike investigations, which are made public, and provide appropriate redress to civilian victims.”

And the rights groups came with suggestions of some places for the Obama administration to start: the letter included an appendix of ten cases—not “an exhaustive list, but ten examples of strikes in which civilian harm has been credibly alleged”—for the administration to investigate and make its findings known. The ten cases, based upon on-the-ground investigations of strikes by some of the groups on the letter, first appeared in post by a professor and three students from the Human Rights Clinic on the legal blog Just Security.

The list of strikes spans 2009 through 2014—covering a period of dramatic escalation of the drone war—and cites cases in Yemen and Pakistan, two hotbeds of Obama’s covert military strikes, totaling over 120 civilian casualties. The earliest such attack took place in Yemen with a cruise missile; according to the Human Rights Watch, 41 civilians—including 21 children and nine women, five of them pregnant—were killed. A 2012 strike in Pakistan killed 18 civilians, said the letter, ten of whom Amnesty International found “were killed by a second round of strikes targeting those who had arrived at the scene to help the wounded and recover the dead.”

And yet none of these scenes of unacknowledged but investigated carnage has elicited apologies. “This is the first time that they’re acknowledging it and apologizing for” civilian deaths, said Naureen Shah, of Amnesty International USA, in a phone interview. “And that’s pretty glaring because there is an obligation under international law to investigate credible allegations of loss of the right to life.”

Shah added that both human rights law and the laws of armed conflict require such investigations. “This is what the US government asks of countries all over the world,” Shah said. “This is just another example where the CIA wants to be an exception to the rules they apply all over the world.”

In an e-mail response to questions from The Nation, National Security Council assistant press secretary Ned Price said the administration can’t comment on specific operations, but that “the US government seeks to avoid [civilian casualties] if at all possible,” noting that “the standard that we hold ourselves to when conducting these kinds of operations is higher than that required by international law.” Price said when “it appears non-combatants may have been killed or injured, after-action reviews have been conducted to determine why.” (The reviews, however, are not made public, nor are aggregate statistics about combatants or civilians killed. Price declined to comment on why.)

In his April 23 remarks, Obama said “the Weinstein and Lo Porto families deserve to know the truth”—a statement difficult to reconcile with the administration’s general silence on civilian casualties. In one notable exception in 2013, the United States acknowledged that four of its own citizens had been killed in covert counter-terrorism operations—but it stated that only one of the four, the radical cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki, had been “specifically targeted.” The other three American deaths, including Al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son Abdulrahman, resulted in no explanations, and certainly no apologies. Indeed, the government stonewalled the Al-Awlaki family’s attempts to get answers in court about Abdulrahman’s death.

While the NSC’s Price said the release of information about Weinstein and Lo Porto’s deaths was disclosed “in order to continue to facilitate transparency when U.S. citizens are killed in our counterterrorism operations,” he did not offer a response to a follow-up about why the deaths of three other Americans had been acknowledged, but went unexplained.

Last year, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence passed a measure that would have required the administration to disclose the numbers of both “combatant” and “noncombatant civilian” deaths in drone strikes. But Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper wrote to the committee’s chair and ranking member declaring that the administration was “currently exploring ways in which it can provide the American people more information about the United States’ use of force outside areas of active hostilities.” In response, Congress stripped the reporting requirements from the final bill.

More than a year later, there has been no follow-up—publicly, at least—from the administration. And that the intelligence committee’s ranking member Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) only said after Obama’s announcement of Weinstein and Lo Porto’s deaths that she was going over the strike “in greater detail” suggested, said Amnesty’s Shah, that there had been no behind-closed-doors follow-up either.

“I find it pretty ridiculous that the administration would quash the legislation and then not do anything,” Shah said.

The administration denied it had taken no action on its pledges for more transparency. Obama “has directed a policy process, which is ongoing, but has already produced results,” said the NSC’s Price. “For example, that process has been manifested in how the military has disclosed every recent lethal operation in Somalia.” (The administration hasn’t acknowledged any civilian casualties in any of these Somalia operations.)

Obama was clearly moved by Weinstein and Lo Porto’s deaths; he noted his “grief and condolences” and expressed regret. “I take full responsibility for all our counterterrorism operations,” he said. Though he invoked “not just innocent Americans, but all innocent lives in our counterterrorism operations,” Obama has little to publicly show for all his claims to working towards more transparency—aside from apologies for two of some hundreds of cases.

Without mechanisms for proper investigations and redress, in other words, the drone war is killing civilians largely in the shadows, and it will likely continue to do so. “It’s a game of selective disclosure, where they tout the successes and obscure the evident failures,” said Shah. “The part that really, really bothers me is that this is a course that all future administrations can follow.”

The latest news from the US-led war in Syria against the Islamic State, known as ISIS, ought to give Americans some pause about our intervention there. When the Obama administration stipulated that its modus operandi for the covert war of targeted killing—that there needed to be a “near certainty” no civilians would be killed (however poorly the policy is implemented)—didn’t apply to Syria, it raised eyebrows. A report by McClatchy on Wednesday indicates that not only are the civilian casualties mounting, but points to the US-led coalition, perhaps unwittingly, helping a Kurdish militia carry out ethnic cleansing and a possible war crime.

The first batch of civilian casualties came early on in the Syria campaign launched last September: while targeting a terrorist bomb maker, air strikes killed at least seven civilians, Human Rights Watch said at the time. As the sporadic bombings continued, civilian deaths slowly mounted; an opposition human rights group said in March that coalition forces had caused more than 100 civilian deaths in Syria. (Others have placed the number of confirmed deaths at around 60.)

Then, over one half-hour period last Thursday night, coalition-caused civilian deaths spiked: an initial report from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said missile strikes in the village Bir Hamalli killed least 50 civilians from among the village’s 1000 inhabitants; the following day, it raised the toll to 64 confirmed deaths, including 31 children and 19 women. Yesterday, another rights group, the Syrian Network for Human Rights, corroborated the numbers, adding incredibly troubling details of how the attack was carried off.

Mousab Alhamadee of the indispensable McClatchy news agency tied together the Network’s release with his own reporting:

An activist, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity for his safety, told McClatchy last week that he suspected that members of the local Kurdish militia known as the People’s Protection Units, or YPG in the Kurdish language, which had worked closely with the United States during the fight for Kobani, had intentionally called in the strike to drive away Arab residents.

Alhamadee went on to note that the US military had confirmed a Kurdish role in intelligence gathering for the strike: the militia had—apparently incorrectly—“reported there were no civilians present in that location and that there had not been any civilians present for two weeks prior to the coalition airstrikes,” a US spokesman had said. (The Syrian Network reported that the village was under ISIS’s control, but that the jihadi group doesn’t have any bases there.)

The account proffered to Alhamadee by the Syrian Network was even more troubling: “When two fuel trucks entered the town, the network said residents had reported, the YPG opened fire with tracer rounds. When villagers gathered to aid those wounded by the YPG fire, coalition aircraft fired missiles.”

Whoa, Nelly! If this report is accurate—it’s admittedly thinly sourced, as is so much reporting about what’s happening on the ground in Syria—Kurdish militias are calling in US bombings to deliberately murder civilians, with the aim of ethnically cleansing Arab villages. And the US is obliging them. (The US denied any civilian casualties, leading one of the rights groups to express shock at the denial.) The tactic seems to have worked: most of Bir Mahalli’s residents reportedly fled.

Wars are always confusing affairs—that cliché about fog springs to mind. Mistakes are made; civilians inevitably die. Journalists and historians often find themselves unable to unearth whole truths even after the dust clears. But some previously obscured lessons, at least for the conduct of war itself, seem to always emerge as conflicts settle down, as the heat of the moments where life and death decisions are pass into reflection and studies of patterns.

One such pattern apparent in America’s new modes of warfare—a “light-footprint” of limiting “boots on the ground,” or air campaigns that seek to further minimize risk to US personnel, whether covert drone attacks or overt airstrikes—consist of poor targeting practices exacerbated by alliances with dubious, self-interested local actors. The pitfalls were evident in the Iraq war from the get-go, thanks to an over-reliance on the huckster Ahmed Chalabi for the justification to war.

In his critically acclaimed book No Good Men Among the Living, journalist Anand Gopal elucidated a theme of how unsavory local allies in Afghanistan may have cost the US its best chance of actually winning the war. His account weaves in and out of stories of US-allied strongmen falsely accusing local rivals of belonging to the Taliban, prompting the Americans to take many Afghans prisoner or, worse, attack and kill them on faulty premises. As resentment grew, disaffected Taliban fighters who’d laid down arms after the US invasion picked them back up—and were joined by a host of new supporters fed up by US-sponsored warlordism.

What’s so extraordinarily troubling about the new McClatchy report on Syria, then, is that the US seems to not have been chastened at all by its experiences. “Whether allegations hold, it demonstrates dangers of relying heavily on local actors. YPG get good press but local politics don’t go away,” Daniel Trombly noted astutely on Twitter. But, as Gopal demonstrated, we should have already learned that lesson in the past decade (and so many times before).

The lack of reliable allies has vexed thoughtful proponents of US intervention in Syria from the start, and given ammunition to its opponents, myself included. Despite proclamations by war hawks, their has never been an obvious military ally for the US in Syria’s civil war. The Free Syrian Army has from the beginning of the war been an ill-defined, loose organization, at best, with some factions demonstrating criminal intent all along. The Kurds in Syria, the closest thing to natural American allies, are today demonstrating the same thing.

Now we’re involved, at least narrowly in the fight against ISIS, and the results have been predictable. Rebel activists told the Financial Times last week, “US-led strikes are turning people against the western-backed rebels and the coalition. They say it drives many closer to the group the coalition is fighting, the Islamic State.” No wonder American foreign wars these days last forever: our conduct perpetuates them.

Last week, the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade announced that a controversial Iranian exile opposition figure would be testifying via video uplink at a hearing on the Islamic State, known as ISIS. What does the witness, Maryam Rajavi, a co-leader of the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), have to say about the subject at hand?

Rajavi’s written testimony, a copy of which was obtained by The Nation, focuses on an unexpected way of bringing ISIS to heel: by fostering regime change in Iran. “The ultimate solution to this problem” of Islamic extremism, such as ISIS, Rajavi says in the written statement, “is regime change by the Iranian people and Resistance”—a reference to the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the MEK’s political wing.

It sounds counter-intuitive—Iran’s aid to the Iraqi government and various Iraqi militias, after all, is widely credited with stopping ISIS’s advances there—but not when you know about the MEK’s tortuous past. Over the years, the MEK has been nothing if not opportunistic; animated by the twisted logic that the enemy of its enemy is its friend, the group seizes whatever political angle is fashionable at the moment to bring them relevance (Congress is happy to oblige). But more to the point, the MEK has always had only one goal: the overthrow of the Iranian regime. For decades, it has tried to shoehorn regional and geopolitical dynamics into its aim, irrespective of any salient connections.

The plan to bring down ISIS by toppling Iran’s government, then, is little more than the latest chapter of group’s 50-year history of monomaniacally trying to install itself atop the Iranian government. Indeed, Rajavi is testifying at Congress with the title of “president-elect” of the NCRI, which hopes to run a transitional government immediately upon the fall of the Islamic Republic.

Founded as an Islamo-Marxist revolutionary group in the 1960s, the MEK spent its early years pursuing its quixotic aims by opposing the Shah’s government with a vengeance: through student organizing, outright terrorism—including against American targets when the United States was allied with the Shah, helping to earn its 1997 American designation as a terror group—and fighting at the vanguard of the Islamic Revolution. By the 1980s, after the leader of the revolution, Ruhollah Khomeini, kicked the group out of Iran, critics were regularly deriding the MEK as a cult of personality—not least because of its continuing “wacky” behavior, as a former congressional aide put it to me for a feature I wrote this winter with Eli Clifton.

So how do Rajavi and MEK plan to end the threat from ISIS by upending the Iranian regime? That’s not so clear. But it definitely involves ignoring, despite the current clashes, the distinction between Sunni and Shia extremism—including, for example, propagandistic exaggerations like saying that “Shiite militias act more viciously than their Sunni equivalents, such as ISIS”—and pointing out several times that Iran went Islamist before anyone else. That’s about it.

It’s worth noting, however, that the MEK does have some experience in Iraq: after going into exile, its leaders gathered their fighters in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, to take his side in the Iran-Iraq war—earning the enmity of many Iranians. After the war ended, the MEK, led by Maryam Rajavi and her husband Massoud (who hasn’t been seen in public for a dozen years), stuck around and enjoyed Hussein’s largesse, acting, periodically, as mercenaries to crush incipient uprising against the Iraqi strongman—earning, in turn, the enmity of many Iraqis.

After Hussein’s fall in 2003, the American invaders stripped the MEK of its multitude of arms. (Curiously, for a group that claims to have renounced violence in 2001, Rajavi cites in her Congressional testimony the “disarming” of the MEK as a “misguided polic[y]” that helped give rise to Muslim extremism—but not the invasion that toppled their benefactor itself.) The MEK then languished in its camps, coming under periodic attack by a murky combination of the Iraqi army and, reportedly, government-aligned Shia militias. Dozens of MEK adherents were slaughtered.

The period also marked the growth of an ardent pro-MEK lobby in the United States. As Eli Clifton and I detailed in our Intercept piece this winter, a multimillion-dollar campaign kicked into gear to remove the MEK from the US State Department’s terrorist list. Once that hurdle was cleared, the MEK—despite its cult-like practices—began to accumulate more mainstream power in Congress, where super-hawkishness against Iran is guaranteed to attract powerful bedfellows, including large amounts of pro-Israel donor money and more modest cash from MEK supporters themselves.

Meanwhile, the massacres of the MEK’s ex-fighters at its Iraqi desert bases fueled the group’s hatred of the Iraqi government led by Nouri al-Maliki, which had failed to protect them. Just as the MEK had grown close to Hussein because he was an arch-enemy of the Iranian regime, the group likewise reviled Maliki’s government, and vice-versa, for its closeness to the Iranians—the Islamic Republic had hosted and fostered Maliki’s movement in exile before the 2003 war, and supported his Shia government after its rise to power in Iraq.

When ISIS began to rip apart what was still then Maliki’s Iraq, the MEK’s prevailing logic seemed to again fall back on the enemy of its enemy. Perhaps chastened by their own labeling by the US as a terrorist organization, the group seldom uses the word “terrorism” in conjunction with ISIS. Instead, MEK propaganda refers to ISIS as “extremists,” in some instances. At other times, the language is more ambiguous: Last June, when ISIS took the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, one MEK website gave a triumphalist account of the conquest, referring to ISIS as “revolutionary forces.”

Historical revisionism of the ISIS assault started almost immediately. “These forces have taken over the Badoush prison and they had hundreds of prisoners that had been proclaimed to be terrorists and they freed them,” read a Persian-language post on the website Mojahedin.org. HRW, however, collected survivor testimonies from the prison takeover that told a different story: “After seizing Badoush Prison near Mosul, the gunmen from Islamic State, also known as ISIS, separated the Sunni from the Shia inmates,” an HRW release said, “then forced the Shia men to kneel along the edge of a nearby ravine and shot them with assault rifles and automatic weapons.”

Herein lies the MEK contradiction behind its early positions. On the one hand, ISIS, like the MEK, is militantly opposed to Iranian influence in the region. But Rajavi needs to gin up support in Washington. So she poses herself in opposition to ISIS, claiming the best strategy for fighting the marauding Sunni terrorists is to… overthrow the first regime in the region to commit blood, money and heavy weaponry to the fight against ISIS.

As ISIS became the world’s most famous terrorist group, the MEK eased its whitewash and adopted the stances Rajavi will bring to Congress on Thursday: namely, that ISIS is an extremist group—whose model and inspiration is Iran, however nonsensical that point is. That Congress would invite these ex-terrorists—Rajavi’s past prevents her from getting a visa, the reason for her video testimony—speaks ill of their commitment to shaping serious policy on either ISIS or Iran. Rajavi’s participation proved such an embarrassment that a distinguished diplomat, Ambassador Robert Ford, and another witness withdrew from the hearing rather than speak alongside her on the dais—just as the top UN official for human rights in Iran withdrew from a program last year in Canadian parliament where Rajavi was set to appear.

The MEK’s story is a tragic one of sustained failure, of being massacred and massacring, of being abused and abusing its own people, of terrorizing and being terrorized, and of a constantly morphing politics consistent only in its oddness and toxicity. That story needs to be heard, but as a cautionary tale, not as expert advice. Instead, Congress is asking one of the groups most hated in Iraq and Iran what to do about those countries’ woes. What could go wrong?

There’s a fascinating divide emerging over the Corker-Cardin compromise bill that would give Congress a vote on an Iran deal and which unanimously emerged from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week. The compromise, engineered by committee chair Bob Corker (R-TN) and ranking member Ben Cardin (D-MD), softened some provisions in Corker’s original bill. With Democrats supporting the bill, the White House perhaps saw the writing on the wall and dropped its opposition—and veto threat—against the new version.

Now, though, Republican hawks in Congress are looking to weigh the bill down with amendments that would certainly invoke a veto. The charge is being led by Sen. Tom Cotton, the combative Arkansas Republican who has emerged as the upper chamber’s most vociferous Iran hawk. Cotton has vowed to introduce several amendments that would make congressional approval of any Iran nuclear deal virtually impossible. Several other Republican senators have promised to do the same.

What’s so fascinating is that AIPAC supports the Corker-Cardin compromise. The flagship Israel lobby group likely sees the bill, which creates a procedure for Congress to vote approval or disapproval of a final Iran nuclear accord, as a good first step to kill the deal it has opposed from the start. The logic would be that enacting Corker-Cardin would lay the groundwork, then the lobby would set about trying to convince enough Democrats to support its anti-diplomacy position to get Congress to vote down the final agreement when that time comes.

A piece today in Bloomberg View headlined the fight between the Israel lobby and the Republican über-hawks as “Aipac vs. Pro-Israel Republicans.” But it would more accurately be called “AIPAC vs. the Neocons.” And we shouldn’t forget for a moment that the bankrupt ideology of neoconservatism is behind these efforts; the line between leading neocons and this obstructionism is too easy to trace—and too laughably reminiscent of their misadventure in Iraq.

Cotton, after all, is a protégé of neoconservative don Bill Kristol. And Kristol has come out firing at the Corker-Cardin compromise. In a Weekly Standard editorial later distributed by his attack-dog letterhead group the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI), Kristol labeled the compromise bill “at worst misleading, at best toothless,” denouncing Corker and “the leading establishment pro-Israel lobbying group”—AIPAC—for their support of it.

Kristol couched his call for “implant(ing) teeth in the legislation’s clammy gums” as a way to avoid conflict: “Perhaps future wars in the Middle East can be made less likely,” he mused. Who does he think he’s kidding? Kristol has already called for war with Iran! Cotton, for his part, has been totally frank about opposing any deal with Iran whatsoever, not simply seeking a “better deal.” And Cotton’s alternative? He has said war with Iran will be easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy—or, if you prefer to harken back to the drumming for war with Iraq, a cakewalk. (Kristol’s ECI—which, speaking of Iraq, was birthed in the same office as the neoconservative Committee to Liberate Iraq—threw a million dollars behind Cotton’s Senate campaign.)

As Jim Lobe noted, all this comes as Republican presidential hopefuls—some of whom in the Senate are set to introduce their own compromise-killing measures—are getting ready to prostrate themselves before Sheldon “Nuke Iran” Adelson, the Republican mega-donor and hard-line Likudnik that funds a virtual who’s who of Washington’s network of neocon think tanks and anti-Iran diplomacy groups. Adelson demands of his beneficiaries total fealty to his extraordinarily hawkish pro-Israel views (he even publicly upbraided AIPAC, which he has funded to the tune of millions, over the group’s support for George W. Bush’s short-lived Annapolis process for Israeli-Palestinian peace).

That tidbit of a fact helps to place some of this maneuvering (some might say posturing) in an important historical context. For the neocons, what’s wrong with the Corker-Cardin compromise is not the compromise itself, but rather who it was with: namely, Democrats. There’s a long history that we needn’t get into here (check out Dan Luban’s excellent review of neoconservatism’s history for some of it and Norman Podhoretz’s disappointment in Jewish Democrats for another angle), but suffice to say that neoconservatives have realized for some years now that Democrats, especially staunchly liberal Democrats, are too squishy on foreign policy to be good allies. A lot of it boils down to Democrats just not being excited enough for foreign wars.

And so the neoconservatives and their closest allies in the far-right pro-Israel world hammer away at anything that Democrats have touched; the rejectionism and obstructionism of the Tea Party makes for a fine comparison to the way neocons treat moderate Republicans on foreign policy, not to mention the Democrats they would work with. And AIPAC has not been immune: my old boss Peter Beinart has documented this well in instances like the 2012 Democratic convention Jerusalem platform fight and the Chuck Hagel nomination row. The neocons want to pull AIPAC—with all its clout and money—into the Republican fold because they think bipartisan Middle East hawkishness is, not to put too fine a point on it, bullshit.

AIPAC seems pretty freaked out about it, and who can blame them: they’re losing. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started really alienating Democrats with his constant, cocksure interventions into the American debate over Iran—not to mention effectively endorsing the Republican in the 2012 US election—and kept driving coffin nails with his racist election tactics. The GOP, however, is eating it all up. What’s more, the big pro-Israel money, particularly but not limited to Sheldon Adelson, is firmly committed to yanking the GOP right on Israel—and that’s working, too!

In the case of the Iran bill, this is likely to hamper neoconservatives and AIPAC alike in their efforts to squash an Iran nuclear deal. If any of the negotiation-killing amendments are added to the Corker-Cardin bill, hawkish Democrats are going to squirm but eventually sustain President Obama’s veto. The naked partisanship of the neocons’ machinations are so obvious that it’ll be an easy decision, even for hawkish Democrats like Chuck Schumer. This would be just the latest instance where GOP partisanship has staved off a congressional affront to Obama’s diplomacy.

But it’s still worth noting that causes considered “pro-Israel”—and make no mistake that killing an Iran deal is, in Washington, a pro-Israel cause—are increasingly being conflated with doctrinaire neoconservatism and taken up solely by Republicans. This is the battle neocons are winning—but being the ideologues that they are, Kristol and his comrades will be satisfied with nothing short of total victory in the war. Which, in the case of Iran, would be launching an actual one.

An NBC News journalist is involved in a harrowing scene of battlefield danger. The journalist’s first-person story serves as the dominant narrative for years—but it turns out to be wrong, very wrong. Sound familiar? This isn’t the Brian Williams scandal. It’s worse: the story of the December 2012 kidnapping and rescue of Richard Engel, NBC’s chief foreign correspondent, in Syria.

The prevailing narrative held that, as Engel reported immediately after he was freed, a group of Shia militiamen loyal to Basher Assad’s embattled government had kidnapped and mistreated the star reporter and his colleagues. Engel pointed to the language his captors used and other pronounced signs of their allegiances, ranging from graffiti scrawled on the wall of their prison to the coffee cups they drank from.

But the narrative was false, a set-up by a Sunni rebel group opposing Assad. That much became clear on Wednesday night, when NBC quietly posted a piece to its website where Engel corrected the record. “The group that kidnapped us was Sunni, not Shia,” Engel wrote. Curiously, the piece is posited as producing “new details” about the attack, not as a correction; there was no retraction of or apology for earlier errors in reporting, as is customary.

Far from answering all the questions about the episode, Engel’s update piece did not give a full accounting of the story from NBC’s perspective. Those gaps were filled, in part, by a subsequent report in The New York Times. The resulting picture looks very bad for NBC, in many ways worse than Brian Williams’s fall from grace due to self-aggrandizement of his now-infamous helicopter incident in Iraq. This was war propaganda spread by NBC, a respected institution in American news. And if the Times’s account is to be believed, the network let the false story stand for years knowing full well that it was at least questionable, if not entirely false.

In Engel’s clarification of his original version story, he wrote:

About a month ago, we were contacted by The New York Times. The newspaper had uncovered information that suggested the kidnappers were not who they said they were and that the Syrian rebels who rescued us had a relationship with the kidnappers.

But in the Times story that subsequently hit the Internet, some part of NBC’s operation was well aware of the doubts over the culpability of pro-Assad forces (with my emphasis):

NBC executives were informed of [known Sunni rebels’] possible involvement during and after Mr. Engels’s captivity, according to current and former NBC employees and others who helped search for Mr. Engel, including political activists and security professionals.

Engel explained in his update piece that the “group that kidnapped us put on an elaborate ruse to convince us they were Shiite Shabiha militiamen.” That may be so, and one can hardly blame Engel, amid and immediately following his ordeal, for falling for such a ruse and reporting what he believed to be the facts upon his release. As any conflict correspondent can tell you, the fog of war is very real for journalists working in war zones, and discerning the truth can be difficult.

What’s difficult to fathom is how NBC executives who had this information allowed Engel’s report to air without immediately getting on the phone to demand that the story be walked back. Such a move would only have been appropriate considering the information that they had themselves gathered (detailed by the Times) and, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out yesterday, the fact that at least two prominent voices—the popular blogger As’ad AbuKhalil and the Daily Beast’s Jamie Dettmer—had cast serious doubt on the involvement of pro-Assad militias.

Why is this so much more serious than the Brian Williams scandal? At stake in l’affaire Williams was merely the reputation of a veteran journalist—Williams himself—and not decisions of war and peace for the United States. In the Engel saga, the aim of the rebels who kidnapped his crew clearly became to demonize the Assad regime (an aim, it bears mentioning, whose realization hardly requires spreading falsehoods) with the goal of goading the West into military intervention against Assad.

This is exactly what other rebel commanders, once they became aware of the kidnapping, hoped to accomplish, according to the Times: “Several rebels and others with detailed knowledge of the episode said that the safe release of NBC’s team was staged after consultation with rebel leaders when it became clear that holding them might imperil the rebel efforts to court Western support.” (Engel, too, acknowledged this: “it is clear we were…released for propaganda purposes,” he wrote.)

Engel noted in his piece last night that the new account “underscore[s] the treacherous and violent nature of the conflict inside Syria.” It’s a shame that whichever NBC executives were aware of the (ultimately true) counter-narrative chose to do nothing to revise the original story quickly, instead opting to shield their viewers from this picture, even at a time when more robust military support for the so-called Free Syrian Army was being hotly debated in the United States.

NBC News’s failure to quickly correct the record made the network into a willing conduit for pro-war propaganda by a murky coalition of Syrian rebel groups. (And let me repeat that the executives who apparently failed to impose a course correction despite the information they had acquired, rather than the correspondent and team on the ground, deserve the blame.)

“An NBC News spokesman said the network would have no comment beyond the statement posted on its site,” reported the Times. That’s a shame, too, because there are still plenty of questions NBC News’s audience deserves answers to.

Last we heard from Tom Cotton, he was marshaling most of his Republican Senate colleagues into a widely ridiculed letter to Iran, trying to rile up the Islamic Republic's hard-liners to oppose a nuclear deal with President Obama. Whereas other opponents of a deal couch their opposition in hopes for a unicorn "better deal," Cotton had been explicit about his aim of killing talks.

What's his alternative to negotiations? The freshman senator form Arkansas has been shy on this front: he's stopped short of directly calling for military strikes on the Islamic Republic. But in an appearance on a religious right radio show on Tuesday, Cotton suggested he doesn't think a new war would be such a big deal.

Here's BuzzFeed's transcript of the relevant bits of Cotton's remarks:

Even if military action were required—and we certainly should have kept the credible threat of military force on the table throughout which always improves diplomacy—the president is trying to make you think it would be 150,000 heavy mechanized troops on the ground in the Middle East again as we saw in Iraq and that’s simply not the case.

It would be something more along the lines of what President Clinton did in December 1998 during Operation Desert Fox. Several days air and naval bombing against Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction facilities for exactly the same kind of behavior. For interfering with weapons inspectors and for disobeying Security Council resolutions.

There's a lot wrong with this (more on which in a moment), but the first thing to note, as the analyst Matt Duss quickly did, is that Cotton's formulation—Attacking Iran? NBD!—smacks of the prediction neoconservative hawks made about the Iraq war: that it would be a "cakewalk." Astoundingly, given how that war played out, this isn't the first time neoconservative ideologues have dismissed the complexity, difficulty and potential consequences of a new war against Iran.

The first notable salvo downplaying a future war came from then-Senator Joseph Lieberman, who declared in 2010 that an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities wasn't a war at all, despite the clear implications of dropping bombs on a foreign country. "We're not talking about a war, because nobody is talking about invading Iran," Lieberman said.

Then during the 2012 campaign, as Obama pointed out the dangers of war with Iran, the neoconservative pundit and then-Mitt Romney adviser Dan Senor attacked the administration's public airing of potential consequences of a strike. Obama "talk(s) about how disastrous military action against Iran would be for the United States, for the global economy, for the region," Senor complained, as if Americans are not entitled to a public debate about what they're getting into.

These are but a few examples; other neoconservatives, too, have routinely downplayed the potential consequences of an attack—sometimes, as pundit Lee Smith has, denying the broad consensus of the American defense community and military brass that a strike would only delay Iran's nuclear program.

That Cotton—a protégé of Bill Kristol whose campaign enjoyed an almost $1 million ad buy thanks to Kristol's hardest-line letterhead group—would follow neoconservative suit on the ease of an Iran war shouldn't be surprising. Nor should it be that his case is based on head-spinning historical revisionism.

Let's plug a few of the holes in Tom Cotton's narrative of Operation Desert Fox. The attacks of the late 'nineties only came after Iraq violated the conditions imposed on it after defeat in 1991's Gulf War (a full-scale invasion). Then came Desert Fox—the relative ease of which was aided by the destruction of Iraq's military and years of no-fly zones. Then neoconservative ideologues argued that Clinton's brief war, just like Bush Sr.'s Gulf War, hadn't gone far enough in that it didn't force regime change. Clinton's weakness, one neocon bogusly argued (we now know), forced Saddam Hussein in to Osama Bin Laden's hands. Therefore, the second Iraq war—the costly, bloody quagmire that we were promised would be a "cakewalk"—became necessary. "There were no inspectors left to investigate" whether Clinton's strikes had really destroyed Hussein's WMD programs, argued Kristol and his comrade Bob Kagan in a 2004 Weekly Standard article patting themselves on the back for pushing the war.

Of course, Iran has stymied some inspections, but by-and-large international inspectors are today operating there and would, in the case of the deal Cotton and his hawkish allies oppose, be given a much broader mandate. (Decrying the framework for talks agreed to last week, Cotton, amid blowing a few more facts, complained that the deal will do nothing to staunch Iran's non-nuclear malfeasance in the region—something a few days of targeted strikes on Iran's nuclear sites are sure to exacerbate, not help, though Cotton on Tuesday made no mention of Iranian retaliation whatsoever.)

What's more, if the US or Israel were to attack Iranian nuke sites, that could very well spur Iran to do something, according to American and Israeli intelligence estimates, it hasn't yet: make the decision to build a bomb. But don't take my word for it: two former top security chiefs from Cotton's favorite country, Israel, have explicitly made this point.

That scenario presents a problem for hawks like Cotton, though he and many others scrupulously avoid making the stakes of what they're discussing clear. Only one neoconservative that I've seen was honest enough to explain. In the Washington Post last month, Joshua Muravchik wrote that the solution for dealing with Iran's reconstitution of its program after an attack was simple: just bomb again and again (nevermind that the task will be more complicated with the Iranian program driven underground). The Israelis call this "mowing the lawn," a euphemism for perpetual war. No wonder Cotton and his comrades don't bring it up very much; to do so would show their plan for attacking Iran would be anything but a cakewalk.

Just wait for the congressional freakout that comes if world powers and Iran sign a comprehensive nuclear accord this summer. Negotiations advanced on Thursday with a framework agreement between Iran and the P5+1—the United States, UK, France, China, Russia and Germany—that maps out the imposition of restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. The sides will now begin to draft the final accord, due by the end of June. That leaves plenty of time for the most hawkish and recalcitrant members of Congress to try to scupper talks. And if the reaction to Thursday’s agreement is any indication, they most certainly will.

Take Mark Kirk, the Republican senator from Illinois and AIPAC stalwart. A leader in efforts to sanction the Iranians—even during the last year of talks, when it would spell the end of negotiations—led the way with the most outlandish statement. Building on his past theme comparing negotiations to the Munich Agreement that ceded the Sudetenland to Hitler, but didn’t satisfy the Nazi appetite for conquest, Kirk lashed out. “Neville Chamberlain got a lot of more out of Hitler than Wendy Sherman”—the State Department number three—“got out of Iran,” he said.

That talking point belies what proponents of an Iran nuke deal have been saying for years: that those opposing a compromise want war. The stale neoconservatism that dominates Kirk’s thinking—and fear-mongering—doesn’t dictate that Chamberlain should’ve gotten a better deal in Munich, but that Munich should never have happened and Europe should have gone to war against Hitler earlier.

Meanwhile, the Arkansas GOP freshman Senator Tom Cotton—who led a, shall we say, unorthodox effort last month to kill the talks by appealing directly to his hardline counterparts in Iran—came out with a point blank denial of reality: “There is no nuclear deal or framework with Iran,” he said in a statement. “Contrary to President Obama’s insistence, the former deputy director of the UN’s nuclear watchdog has said terms such as these will allow Iran to achieve nuclear breakout in just a few months, if not weeks.”

Except that Cotton got that wrong. The UN nuclear official he referred to is Olli Heinonen, now with Harvard. Heinonen affirmed in the Washington Post yesterday that the terms of the deal, leaving Iran with 5000 centrifuges, would yield a breakout time—the period needed for Iran to “dash” to enough fissile material for a bomb, if a deal collapsed—of a year, not months or weeks. And a year-long breakout time has long been the goal of talks, a key aim by which a variety of nuclear experts have said a deal should be measured. A well-established skeptic of the talks, Heinonen seemed “impressed” with the framework, according to The New York Times, whom he told the agreement “appears to be a fairly comprehensive deal with most important parameters.”

These congressional reactions are of course the most outlandish, but they don’t bode well for hawks’ effort to wrangle support for deal-killing measures. The hyperbolic rhetoric and sloppy statements will make it still more difficult for Democrats to sign on with them. If anything, Kirk’s ideological rants should shame those Democrats who already did work with him. Kirk and AIPAC’s most frequent Democratic collaborator, New Jersey Democrat Bob Menendez, took time away from pleading not guilty to federal corruption charges yesterday to release a brief, mild-mannered statement on the agreement that departed sharply from Kirk’s tone.

Other Democrats, while cautious, were more sanguine than Menendez has generally been on talks anyway; many expressed support for the framework. For the moment, the guarded support resulted in the latest Kirk Menendez sanctions push getting put on hold. That leaves the other congressional play: to win the right for approval of any final deal. With history as a guide, though, these efforts seem likely to soften in the face of Democratic support for diplomacy. Last year, as Eli Clifton and I wrote in the magazine, Kirk and Menendez’s last attempt at new sanctions—which were likely to kill talks—ended up falling flat when Democrats refused to buck the Obama administration and grassroots support for an interim deal. The Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton’s support for the framework will only strengthen that dynamic. (Prospective Republican presidential nominees are—surprise!—lining up against the framework agreement.)

Earlier this week, another nuclear expert skeptical of a deal, former administration non-proliferation czar Gary Samore, who works with a hawkish anti-Iran group, told a Columbia University audience that Congress was unlikely to reject any deal. (Samore, who has the ear of Congress, told the Times yesterday he found the new agreement’s key provisions to be “very satisfactory.”) But in downplaying likely congressional intransigence, Samore got the big issue wrong: he cited the difficulty for Congress of putting sanctions back in place if it rejects a deal.

That’s not really what’s at stake here. Congress, especially Democrats, the reasonable ones at least (not those willing to work with Mark Kirk, for example), will be hesitant to kill a deal because the heightened prospect of another disastrous war of choice in the Middle East is too daunting. AIPAC, in its statement, rejected the notion “that the only alternatives to this framework are capitulation or military action,” but they’re wrong. Killing this deal—the result, so far, of more than two years of grueling diplomacy—would put the United States back on the path to confrontation with Iran. The progress made cannot simply be undone and remade; American credibility would be destroyed. John Bolton’s recent pro-war op-ed was right about this one thing: as Dana Milbank put it, “The alternative to a negotiated settlement is not stronger sanctions—it’s war.”

Congress’s demand for a vote on a final deal isn’t on its own unreasonable. But, when Congress is controlled by Republicans hellbent on quashing every item on Obama’s agenda, seeking to avoid their official input isn’t either. The fight over getting an up-or-down vote—a Republican led proposal garnering some Democratic support is deeply flawed, for instance, and a Democratic alternative is unlikely to win many Republican votes—will now become the central front of the congressional-executive war over Iran diplomacy.

Kirk, still pressing the stalled sanctions bill he introduced this winter with Bob Menendez, who never saw a hawkish GOP Iran bill he didn’t like, has proven himself a warmonger. Any Democrat or Republican who follows his lead will expose themselves, too—and should be held to account for it.

Yesterday, the Justice Department hit Democratic New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez with fourteen counts of corruption, including 8 bribery charges that alone could carry more than a century in prison. The indictment was based on Menendez’s relationship with Salomon Melgen, a Florida ophthalmologist and major donor. In exchange for a litany of gifts, including Caribbean resort stays, campaign cash and flights, according to the indictment, Menendez used his influence to benefit Melgen’s interests, extending to his businesses and even helping to get visas for “several of Melgen’s girlfriends.”

Menendez held a defiant press conference on Wednesday evening (before officially pleading not guilty today), declaring his innocence and, as he did when news of the imminent charges broke last month, telling reporters, “I am not going anywhere.” That may be true, in terms of Menendez’s Senate seat, but the Democratic hawk already gave up his powerful post as ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (a position he hopes to retake when cleared of the charges).

Some of the media coverage of the charges suggested that Menendez’s departure from his leadership position would harm Democrats—but that’s not quite as clear as it seems. Indeed, in lamenting the Democrats’ loss, National Journal noted Menendez was able “to work with Republicans and has earned their respect through his occasional battles with the White House over foreign policy.” That hardly sounds like a leader of the caucus, but rather like a senator who has worked hand in hand with the most obstructionist critics of the Obama administration’s foreign policy.

The constant efforts, in cahoots with Republicans, to constrain the Obama administration’s diplomacy with Iran, for instance, have divided Democrats bitterly. In January of 2014, Menendez, along with rapacious anti-Iran Senator Mark Kirk (Ill.), introduced a new sanctions bill backed by the powerful anti-diplomacy American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Critics said the bill would kill the interim agreement struck by Iran and world powers—the framework that just today bore fruit as negotiations toward a comprehensive pact advanced—leading to widespread opposition among the Democratic Senate leadership. When liberal grassroots groups rallied enough Democrats to sustain a promised presidential veto, the bill failed to come to a vote.

This year, Menendez introduced another sanctions measure with Kirk, but it too has so far stalled without the necessary Democratic support. He also sponsored a bill with Republican Foreign Relations Chair Bob Corker to empower Congress to vote on any deal with Iran—earning another veto threat from Obama. And working with Republicans came back to bite Menendez when Majority Leader Mitch McConnell couldn’t restrain his partisan impulses and sought to bring the bill to a quick vote; even Menendez himself had to object.

These are just a few examples of Menendez siding with AIPAC and its Republican stalwarts over the White House and a majority of Senate Democrats. At times, Menendez’s rhetoric has been harsh. He reportedly clashed directly with Obama at a Democratic congressional luncheon in January. Later that month, he berated administration officials defending diplomacy: “The more I hear from the administration and its quotes, the more it sounds like talking points that come straight out of Tehran,” he said. In a 2013 hearing, Menendez went after Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman over the administration’s policy on the exiled Iranian exile group the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), a hawkish, cult-like outfit that pushes for regime change.

But Menendez’s strategy has paid off—literally. Menendez received more campaign contributions from the MEK and its allies than any other member of Congress, according to a study by Eli Clifton and me for our piece on their relationship in the Intercept. And during his 2012 re-election campaign, Menendez garnered more contributions from pro-Israel groups than any other senator, according to Open Secrets. This winter, the Israel lobby flagship gave Menendez a hero’s welcome. Today, AIPAC leaders and other pro-Israel donors are funding and bundling contributions for his legal defense.

So Menendez has a long record of taking money from donors and advocating the policies they support. No one—certainly not me—is suggesting that his work on behalf of groups like AIPAC and the MEK rises to the level of corruption. And, despite the neocon conspiracy theories, the charges aren’t retribution from Obama. But allegations that Menendez took money to do favors shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to anyone. He is, after all, from New Jersey.

Almost 200 House Republicans are sending a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu congratulating him on his victory in Israel’s snap election Tuesday. Netanyahu sailed to victory on the heels of two controversial late-campaign statements to rally his base: a warning, replete with George Wallace–esque shades of bigotry, that Palestinian citizens of Israel were “coming out in droves to the polls” and a vow that a Palestinian state would not be created on his watch.

In a spate of interviews with American news outlets, Netanyahu tried to walk back his remarks. Whatever one makes of his new Thursday position on a Palestinian state—a lot of people aren’t buying it—Netanyahu’s explanation of his bigoted warning about Arab voters left much to be desired: “I wasn’t trying to suppress a vote; I was trying to get out my vote,” he said.

Enter House Republicans. In the letter, which no Democrats have signed on to, Representative Ron DeSantis of Florida lauded Netanyahu’s victory and even his means of achieving it. “Your victory was no doubt hard-fought and well-earned,” the letter, first reported by the neoconservative news site Free Beacon, said. A hundred and ninety members of the House GOP signed on as of this morning.

The White House complained that the remark about Arab voters undermined the foundations of the US-Israel relationship. “These kinds of cynical, divisive election day tactics stand in direct conflict to… the values that are critical to the bond between our two countries,” said spokesperson Josh Earnest. Palestinian citizens of Israel make up roughly 20 percent of the Jewish state’s population.

DeSantis also complained in a separate statement released Wednesday alongside the letter that President Obama had not yet congratulated Netanyahu on his victory (though Netanyahu had himself taken two days to congratulate Obama on his 2012 re-election). On Thursday, Obama called Netanyahu to congratulate him, but added that the United States “will need to reassess our options following the prime minister’s new positions and comments regarding the two-state solution,” a White House official told Reuters—hinting at allowing possible action against Israel and toward a two-state solution in international fora, where the United States has heretofore exercised blanket opposition to measures targeting Israel.

The DeSantis letter’s partisan nature underscores the closeness of Republicans and Netanyahu’s Likud party—a trend largely driven by the GOP and Likud themselves, as when Netanyahu effectively endorsed Mitt Romney in 2012. Republican House Speaker John Boehner, who engineered Netanyahu’s controversial Congress speech earlier this month with Netanyahu’s US ambassador (and former Republican operative) Ron Dermer, today announced plans to travel to Israel. The cozy relationship, it seems, extends to a fondness for racially charged electioneering tactics.

The American political class has spent decades convincing itself that the Israeli political class really does want a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The last six years have been the hardest—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proclaimed a tepid desire for peace, but consistently acted contrary it—and yet the image of an Israel that would strike the deal if only this or that condition was met by the Palestinians persisted. Perhaps the image even grew stronger: who can forget all the standing ovations Netanyahu received during his 2009 address to Congress and, despite all the controversy, again this winter?

The illusion, however, of an Israeli body politic, perhaps even an Israeli electorate, happy to make peace was shattered as Netanyahu sailed to another victory—especially in light of the way he did it. Netanyahu’s last minute bid to strengthen his hand came not from fear-mongering about Iran, as he’d done for years, but about the Palestinians. His fired salvos at both Palestinian citizens of Israel (some 20 percent of the population) and against those Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. In the former case, Netanyahu warned his base Arabs were “coming out in droves to the polls”; in the latter, he boldly declared that no Palestinian state would be birthed were he elected (something Netanyahu had been hinting at throughout the campaign).

The mantra of American Israel supporters, from grassroots lobby groups right up to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, has always been that the United States and Israel hold “shared values”—chief among them the countries’ common democratic characters. But Netanyahu’s campaign put the lie to the notion. “Remember that Netanyahu’s version of democracy includes as few Arab voices as possible, simply because they are not Jewish,”wrote +972 Magazine’s Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man. “Remember that the peace processes he has overseen for decades were not genuine, that he never had any intention of ushering in, let alone seeking, a two-state solution.”

The problem for American policy-makers, with the illusion of “shared values” shattered, is that they have spent decades enabling Israel’s pursuit of its worst instincts. The US subsidizes about a fifth of Israel’s defense budget—the largest American foreign aid package—to help the country defend itself as it pursues peace, not for it to hold the Occupied Territories in perpetuity and create, as many Israeli officials have put it, a de jure Apartheid state where half the people under its control get no vote. The United States gives Israel diplomatic cover in international fora to prevent the Jewish state from being unfairly targeted and maligned, not to avoid criticisms of a state deserving of censure. How can we keep graciously offering these benefits to Israel if it has so blatantly defied its own claims—and ours—of being a strong, if flawed, democracy?

The answer is twofold, though both aspects are connected: one is the inertial strength of the Israel lobby and the other is its favorite party, the Republicans. The lobby has faltered in recent years, losing out at key points in the Iran diplomacy fight, for instance, but lobby groups’ aggressive policing of politics and media will continue apace, and can still bite those who transgress it as well as lavish benefit on those who proclaim their fealty. The lobby’s biggest problem is that those quarters of American politics in lock step with its aims are increasingly falling squarely in the Republican camp. Think of the Jerusalem platform fight at the 2012 Democratic National Convention or, again, the Iran issue, particularly the continuing partisan efforts to kill nuclear talks and the GOP invitation to Netanyahu to address Congress on Iran.

Republicans, too, have professed a desire to see a two-state solution, but they were nonetheless quick to congratulate their political ally Netanyahu on his victory (GOP hypocrisy is nothing new). That leaves it to the Democrats and their leader for the next two years, President Barack Obama, to take a stand. The signs are heartening, even from Congress: 56 members boycotted Netanyahu’s address earlier this month, and so far a critical mass of Democrats haven’t signed onto measures designed to kill negotiations with Iran. The administration, meanwhile, expressed concern over Netanyahu’s election tactics and vowed to “evaluate [its] position going forward” on the peace process, such that it is.

But the administration’s criticisms leave room for ambiguity: Will there be any more concrete consequences for Israel in light of its newly clarified intransigence on peace? It’s doubtful, but with the free hand of a second term president, Obama could let a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements pass instead of vetoing it or, better yet, give the Palestinian Authority support in its efforts to join international organizations (so far, the Obama administration has resisted both these moves). The shibboleth of the so-called special relationship between Israel and America—the generous military aid to a wealthy country—should be the first thing to go, but will probably be the last.

So not much is likely to happen. In a way, it makes perfect sense. Netanyahu’s remarks during the campaign didn’t totally re-order how any half-witted observer of Israeli politics views the Prime Minister. He’s been acting this way for years and has now, belatedly, added word to deed. If America wasn’t willing to face up to these realities before, why should it now? Israel’s ardent defenders will no doubt dismiss Netanyahu’s comments and call for keeping up the status quo. But at this moment another step has been taken for Americans coming to realize what the status quo is: a belligerent American client state willfully careening towards apartheid with our help, trying, along the way, to drag us into disastrous conflicts in the region. It’s a small step, but for the principled American liberals increasingly fed up with Israel, this march is slow and steady.

Many opponents of a nuclear deal with Iran simply won’t come out and say what they seem to be constantly getting at: that the United States should go to war. Well, kudos to the hawkish opinion pages of The Washington Post and the neoconservative scholar Joshua Muravchik for making just that argument in Sunday’s paper. Muravchik purports to explain how negotiations will never work with a regime like Iran’s (“akin to communist, fascist and Nazi regimes”), and that attacking is the only way to forestall an Iranian nuclear bomb. It’s good to see some of these anti-diplomacy hawks have the courage of their convictions.

There are other reasons to welcome Muravchik’s salvo, too. It makes the case for war, yes, but that case comes off as so laughably weak that one wonders how anyone not already ideologically committed to the notion could be swayed into supporting it. That makes the particulars of Muravchik’s argument worth delving into.

But first a word on the man. A fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Muravchik has the biography of a neoconservative archetype, moving left to right through socialist youth groups, the Scoop Jacksonite Coalition for a Democratic Majority, then finally into full-blown neoconservatism. His current and former affiliations, accordingly, read like neocon alphabet soup, including groups like AEI, WINEP, PNAC and JINSA, among others.

And this isn’t Muravchik’s first rodeo. A board member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, he aggressively pushed war there after 9/11. Since at least as far back as 2006, he’s periodically called for war with Iran. At the end of that year—as Iraq spiraled into its bloodiest period of chaos—Muravchik published two opinion pieces, one in the Los Angeles Times that began with the breathless declaration, “We must bomb Iran.” The headline was half as long: “Bomb Iran.” He repeated the call in, at least, 2007, 2008, 2011 and 2014.

The latest reprise of Muravchik’s monomaniacal aim, in the Washington Post, carried a bit of a different title: “War with Iran is probably our best option.” Probably? So we—with Muravchik, it’s always “we,” the collected national mass to be dragged along into his follies—ought to go down this path again because he’s pretty sure it’s best for us! War is supposed to be a last resort; that doesn’t mean it’s “probably our best option,” but that it’s our only one. (In 2011, in a USA Today op-ed calling for—you guessed it!—war with Iran, Muravchik concluded that “force should always be a last resort, but perfect certainty that nothing else will work only comes when it’s too late.”)

Maybe Muravchik didn’t write the Post headline, but the uncertainty over outcomes pervades his piece. “What if force is the only way to block Iran from gaining nuclear weapons?” he asks, before answering, “That, in fact, is probably the reality.” That, in fact, is probably not true. Other analysts with far fewer flops in their records think our attacking could spur Iran to take a decision toward building a bomb (something, contra Muravchik, they haven’t done, according to American and Israeli intelligence).

An Iranian decision to produce a weapon would be especially dangerous because attacking can’t actually “block Iran.” Rather, the best possible outcome of airstrikes is to set Iran’s nuclear program back a few years. Muravchik’s response to this is as simple as it is scary: just keep bombing. “[W]e can strike as often as necessary,” he wrote. The Israelis call this “mowing the lawn”—an anodyne euphemism for perpetual war.

Note Muravchik’s use of the word “perhaps” along the same lines that “probably” appears in his headline and in four places in the body of the article: meek statements declaring, Hey, maybe this’ll work! Here’s another instance of “perhaps”:

Wouldn’t an attack cause ordinary Iranians to rally behind the regime? Perhaps, but military losses have also served to undermine regimes, including the Greek and Argentine juntas, the Russian czar and the Russian communists.

Setting aside that Muravchik is already declaring victory, reaching back to the Russian czar shows how bankrupt this argument is. As Georgetown and Harvard’s Ariane Tabatabai pointed out, one need only look to the 1980s, when the Islamic Republic solidified its shaky grip on Iran with the help of a bloody war started by Saddam Hussein. A proud peoples, Iranians rallied around their flag. “The Iranian people—including myself—will resist any military action,” the Nobel laureate and human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi, hardly a pro-regime stalwart, said in 2010 of the prospect of a Western attack.

Muravchik has been admittedly wrong about this sort of thing before. In a shallow 2006 reflection about the Iraq war, he wrote that neoconservatives, himself included, “were glib about how Iraqis would greet liberation.” No shit. But don’t let that stop you now.

For all their preening about democracy and freedom, Muravchik and his ilk must ignore the Iranian democracy and human rights activists who lay their asses on the line and oppose war. Indeed, he ignores altogether the consequences of an attack on Iranians. But he does at least address the potential for adverse effects on Americans:

And finally, wouldn’t Iran retaliate by using its own forces or proxies to attack Americans—as it has done in Lebanon, Iraq and Saudi Arabia—with new ferocity? Probably. […W]e might absorb some strikes.

“Probably…might.” Sigh. We’re talking about dead Americans here.

What’s most remarkable about Muravchik’s case is that, despite making if for nigh on a decade, the Post chose to publish it at this moment. The United States and Iran are reportedly on the cusp of an agreement to curtail Iran’s nuclear program. Muravchik’s arguments are weaker and less confident than in 2006, when diplomacy was falling flat.

That itself is telling: this is not a scholar responding to events of the day, but rather one retro-fitting his long-held predispositions onto them—the definition of an ideologue. It shows what a small clique of even quasi-respectable analysts the poor Washington Post opinion editors have to draw on to make these sorts of inane arguments. If this is the best the hawkish paper and its neoconservative allies can muster, maybe we will be okay after all.

This weekend, freshman Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas spearheaded a completely innocent effort to let Iran know that, basically, the Senate GOP would fight any nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic even after it was signed. That, at least, was the implicit threat in the open letter Cotton wrote; the explicit one was that any future president could easily undo such an accord.

Except Cotton, a Harvard-educated lawyer, got his US Constitution wrong (an “embarrassing” error, wrote one Harvard law professor and former George W. Bush administration lawyer) and failed to even mention that his threat to withdraw from an agreement would be a violation of international law—something Iran’s foreign minister, in an epic bit of trolling, brought to his attention.

None of that, though, stopped forty-six other GOP senators from signing onto the letter—including the party’s full leadership slate in the upper chamber! (Notably, Foreign Relations chair Bob Corker of Tennessee, who co-authored the bill to get congressional say-so on a deal, stayed off.) So who is this freshman senator leading his party around by the nose with factually challenged and bellicose pronouncements?

At first blush, Cotton is quite an accomplished figure. Born in Arkansas in 1977, Cotton went to Harvard, where he wrote for the school paper and joined the Republican Club, before graduating from the law school there. Then he joined the army and became an officer, deploying to Iraq in 2006 and earning decorations along the way.

His army service was no doubt a noble pursuit, but it was during this time that Cotton’s particular brand of politics began to shine through a little bit. From Iraq, Cotton published an open letter—apparently he’s a fan of the format—in the right-wing blog Power Line calling for two journalists and the then–executive editor of The New York Times to be jailed and prosecuted for publishing an investigative piece about how the United States tracks terrorist finances. (Jim Lobe pointed out yesterday that those who would defend Cotton’s latest open letter to the Iranians on free-speech grounds may want to check this episode out first.)

The Power Line item made a big splash, and, according to The Atlantic, he struck up a correspondence with neocon don Bill Kristol. When Cotton returned for a stateside army posting, the pair "met frequently over drinks and dinner at Washington’s downtown Mayflower Hotel." Again to his credit, Cotton volunteered for another combat tour, this time in Afghanistan, eventually attaining the rank of captain. Then Cotton returned stateside again as a civilian and clerked for a judge.

When Cotton entered politics in 2012, winning a House seat representing his native Arkansas, things again started to turn a little bit hawkish, then a little bit unreasonable. (The Atlantic characterized his domestic record in the House as “conservative absolutism,” as he voted, for instance, against emergency disaster relief.)

The hawkishness was, initially, pro-forma: in an interview after the election but before taking his seat, Cotton told the neoconservative Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin, “There are evil people in the world who would do evil things.” He added that Iran was gaining influence and “It’s important to remind the American people why we’re still engaged [militarily].” Rubin, who has herself advocated attacking Iran for years, lauded Cotton as a potential ideological replacement for the Democratic hawk Joseph Lieberman.

Once in the House, Cotton’s anti-Iran advocacy showed a mean streak. When, in 2013, a new Iran sanctions bill came before the lower chamber, Cotton introduced an amendment that would “automatically” punish family members of sanctions violators. “There would be no investigation,” Cotton explained during the mark-up. “It’d be very hard to demonstrate and investigate to conclusive proof.” Cotton wanted to punish innocent people; he called it “corruption of blood,” and extended the category to include “parents, children, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, grandparents, great grandparents, grandkids, great grandkids.”

After some debate, Cotton withdrew the amendment. But it had earned him some attention among Iran hawks. Kristol, the neocon star-maker and founder of The Weekly Standard, which had pushed Cotton’s political career from the get-go, decided to put his money where his mouth is. When Cotton ran for a Senate seat last year, Kristol’s far-right pressure group, the Emergency Committee For Israel, threw almost a million dollars into his race.

Cotton won, and Kristol and company immediately started getting their money’s worth. In December, at a forum hosted by Kristol’s Foreign Policy Initiative (another pressure group modeled on the Project For a New American Century that pushed the Iraq War), Cotton said that the United States should allow the sale to Israel of the bombers and advanced bombs it would need to make an attack on Iran more feasible. In February, at the CPAC summit, he reportedly called for not just regime change in Tehran, but "replacement with a pro-Western regime." The New Republic’s David Ramsey remarked that, on almost any foreign policy issue, “Cotton can be found at the hawkish outer edge of the debate.”

Most Iran hawks in Congress pushing sanctions measure that would effectively end nuclear talks insist they’re only trying to strengthen President Obama’s hand in negotiations. But Cotton, to his credit, has been much more blunt about his Bill Kristol–esque aims: to end talks and foreclose any possibility of a deal. In January, Cotton told a Heritage Foundation conference (my emphasis):

The United States must cease all appeasement, conciliation and concessions towards Iran, starting with the sham nuclear negotiations. Certain voices call for congressional restraint, urging Congress not to act now lest Iran walk away from the negotiating table, undermining the fabled yet always absent moderates in Iran. But, the end of these negotiations isn’t an unintended consequence of Congressional action, it is very much an intended consequence. A feature, not a bug, so to speak.

This week, Cotton launched his letter, earning forceful pushback from Democrats and hesitant criticisms from those Republicans not foolish enough to sign on. That hasn’t stopped Cotton from using Twitter to promote all the deeply flawed defenses of the letter he’s been making on cable news networks—and Bill Kristol is damned pleased. And the Intercept’s Lee Fang reported today that Cotton will appear tomorrow at an event hosted by a defense industry lobbying association—an audience sure to be receptive to his über-hawkishness, a boon to their bottom lines

Despite the myriad criticisms, it seems Tom Cotton is exactly where he wants to be.

Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to include Cotton's initial contacts with Bill Kristol and his February call for regime change in Iran.

Word came down last week that Senator Bob Menendez would soon face federal corruption charges stemming from his relationship with a donor, the wealthy Florida ophthalmologist Salomon Melgen. You can read the initial report for details about the likely indictment, which concerns Menendez’s advocacy for Melgen’s business interests. I don’t know if the looming charges have any merit, but the story of Menendez’s career renders them not implausible. Menendez is known, for example, for receiving huge donations from the Israel lobby and, in turn, dutifully pursues its agenda. He also, as recently recounted in the Intercept by my colleague Eli Clifton and I, advocates for less savory groups that give him money, like a culty Iranian opposition group.

With Menendez, it seems, money talks. And as far as the Melgen allegations go, the investigation has already borne fruit: after its details were disclosed, Menendez in 2013 tardily reimbursed Melgen to the tune of more than $50,000 for flights on the doctor’s private plane.

The latest round of news about potential charges yielded a furious reaction, not least from Menendez himself, who vociferously denied any wrongdoing in a Friday press conference. But other, more surprising players, too, pushed back against the story: a host of right-wing pundits weighed in that the scandal here isn’t the alleged corruption but the potential charges themselves. This clutch of neoconservatives and other hawks suggested that the charges to be brought by the Justice Department were political retribution for Menendez’s consistent work against Barack Obama’s diplomacy with Iran over its nuclear program.

Over the past several years, the New Jersey senator has distinguished himself as the Democrat in Congress most willing to work with hawkish Republicans to push legislation aimed at killing talks with Iran. The moves by Menendez sparked testy exchanges between the senator and the Obama administration, which looks to a possible Iran deal as a legacy foreign-policy achievement. All that seems to be enough to have earned Menendez a few neocons in his corner.

On Friday, the retribution meme began to surface. “Mess with the Iranian nuclear bull, get the DOJ horns?” tweeted Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, using the initials of the Department of Justice. Many others took a similar conspiratorial line, but none quite as hilariously as Michael Goldfarb. Having the good sense to call this sort of innuendo what it is—a “conspiracy theory“—Goldfarb nonetheless went on to posit: “Menendez prob[ably] is guilty—but they held it over him to keep him in line, and dropped the charges just before the deal… real abuse of power.” Got that? The Obama administration framed up a guilty man for a crime he probably committed.

The crux of the neocon conspiracists’ charge, then, hinges on the timing. And that was exactly the line that percolated up all the way to the upper chamber of Congress, where two seized on the conspiracy theory. Speaking at a summit in Iowa, Senator Ted Cruz of of Texas linked the potential charges with Menendez’s opposition to Iran diplomacy:

I will point out that the timing seems awfully coincidental.… It raises the suggestion to other Democrats that if you dare part from the Obama White House, that criminal prosecutions will be used potentially as a political weapon against you as well.

The voraciously anti-diplomacy Senator Mark Kirk, a frequent co-author of sanctions bills with Menendez, piled on. “On the eve of a bad deal with Iran, the timing of leaks makes many worry that there’s a vendetta against Senator Menendez for his many years of good work on preventing the Ayatollahs from getting nuclear weapons,” Kirk told Bloomberg’s Eli Lake.

But a few relevant details cast doubt on the conspiratorial notion of Obama’s revenge. The neocon conspiracy theorists would do well to look at the timing of the investigation itself, which began before talks with Iran yielded the November 2013 interim deal that Menendez has so assiduously threatened to kill.

What’s more, Menendez, though certainly at loggerheads with the administration over Iran, has proved malleable at key moments. Last year, when Obama forcefully rejected the prospect of new sanctions, Menendez backed down. He did so again recently when he vowed not to bring a vote on his own new sanctions (with Kirk) despite having gone on about their urgency. When Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell threatened to circumvent agreed-upon procedures to bring another new anti-diplomacy bill to the Senate floor—a partisan effort that could hardly have surprised the Democrats colluding with the Republicans—Menendez led the charge of Democratic co-sponsors against their own bill moving (McConnell backed down). So manipulating the justice system to contain Menendez’s opposition to a deal hardly seems necessary.

The much criticized timing of the possible charges also doesn’t really benefit the administration. Menendez vowed that he’s “not going anywhere,” and spokesman added to Bloomberg that the senator planned to keep pushing his new Iran sanctions despite his recent woes. With the deadline for a framework nuclear agreement only weeks away, charges against Menendez never would’ve been acted on quickly enough to derail this sort of continued activism.

The irony, of course, is that many of Menendez’s neocon defenders (though perhaps in Goldfarb’s case, that’s not the right word) frequently deride Middle Eastern cultures for their conspiracy theories. They ought to then know better before they spout off serious accusations of criminal wrongdoing without any evidence. One can only presume, in Menendez’s case, that the Justice Department has been more judicious in its investigation and with the charges it plans on bringing.

Last year, I thought The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer’s innovative examination of mass slayings in Indonesia during the 1960s, deserved to win the Oscar for best feature documentary. Instead, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave the award to a film with broader appeal, 20 Feet From Stardom, a review of life as a background singer on pop records. At the time, a friend quipped, “20 Feet From Politics.” This year, however, the academy didn’t shy away from awarding a nakedly political film: Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour, a stunning vérité account of the initial reporting on Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency leak, took home the biggest documentary prize of the year.

At a moment when the most powerful nation in the history of the world is going astray, upending the very foundations of liberal democracy, Citizenfour’s victory was urgent and necessary. The New York Times film critic A.O. Scott might have put it best, calling the picture “a primal political fable for the digital age, a real-time tableau of the confrontation between the individual and the state.”

The stakes are established early in the film, when Poitras reads aloud an e-mail she got from Snowden at the start of their conversations: “From now, know that every border you cross, every purchase you make, every call you dial, every cellphone tower you pass, friend you keep, article you write, site you visit, subject line you type is in the hands of a system whose reach is unlimited but whose safeguards are not.”

In the course of the documentary, Poitras travels to Hong Kong with Glenn Greenwald to meet Snowden, who explains on camera who he is and what he is handing over to the journalists: a trove of documents detailing worldwide spying operations of the NSA and its partners. The challenge of exposing such information seems considerable, but Snowden handles it with an ease that betrays his intelligence and determination; he remains his own best spokesman.

Snowden himself couldn’t have been more clear about understanding all of this in a statement he released shortly after the announcement of Citizenfour’s Oscar. “When Laura Poitras asked me if she could film our encounters, I was extremely reluctant. I’m grateful that I allowed her to persuade me,” Snowden said, via the American Civil Liberties Union. “My hope is that this award will encourage more people to see the film and be inspired by its message that ordinary citizens, working together, can change the world.”

The importance of Snowden’s revelations was on display again recently, when the Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill and Josh Begley published a piece based on documents Snowden had leaked. They detailed efforts of the NSA and its partners in British intelligence to steal, in bulk, encryption keys for cellphone SIM cards, allowing the spy agencies to listen in easily on any communications—calls, texts, e-mails, anything—sent over the cellphone-service provider’s network. In order to acquire encryption keys, Scahill and Begley reported, the spies “accessed the e-mail and Facebook accounts of engineers and other employees of major telecom corporations and SIM card manufacturers.”

Scahill and Begley point out that after the Snowden revelations began, Barack Obama sought to reassure the world that “the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security.” But that turns out, in this latest story, to be yet another falsehood pushed by the US government about its intelligence work. ACLU technologist Christopher Soghoian told the Intercept, “These people [engineers and telecom employees] were specifically hunted and targeted by intelligence agencies, not because they did anything wrong, but because they could be used as a means to an end.”

Perhaps most disturbing, that “end” doesn’t even pretend to be an aim of thwarting terrorist plots or even listening in on terrorist communications. Rather, what was once regarded as a means of achieving such an aim—collecting intelligence—has become the end in and of itself. That goal stems from an ethos attributed to former NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander: “collect it all.” In January, the journalist Mattathias Schwartz, writing in The New Yorker, cast more doubt on the efficacy of vacuuming up “the whole haystack,” as Alexander once rendered it.”

So “collect it all” might not even work well, yet it remains the order of the day for America’s top spies. And at every turn before and after Snowden’s revelations, US officials can’t seem to tell the truth about what they’re doing. At one point in Citizenfour, Snowden, in his typical stark manner, explains just what the goal is: “We are building the biggest weapon for oppression in the history of mankind.”

Weapons aren’t always deployed, but we should all worry about the potential power they can unleash when they are. That’s what makes Snowden’s revelations so essential to our democracy. If an Oscar win brings more attention to the film and the warning Snowden persuasively delivers in it, all the better.

Last year at the Oscars, I thought The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer’s innovative examination of mass killings in Indonesia during the 1960s, deserved to win for best feature documentary. Instead, the Academy gave the award to to a film with broader appeal, 20 Feet From Stardom, a review of life as a background singer on pop records. At the time, a friend quipped, “20 Feet From Politics.” This year, however, the Academy didn’t shy away from awarding a nakedly political film: Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour, a stunning vérité account of the initial reporting on Edward Snowden’s leak of secret material about the National Security Agency, took home the biggest documentary prize of the year.

While, to my mind, The Act of Killing may have deserved to win, Citizenfour’s victory was more necessary. No matter its reverberations in today’s Indonesia and despite the sheer artistry of the story’s presentation, a film ultimately about history cannot take precedence, in a political sense, over one telling us precisely where the most powerful nation in the history of the world is going astray—on a crash course with the very foundations of hundreds of years of liberal, democratic progress. And that’s just what Citizenfour does. The New York Times film critic A.O. Scott might’ve put it best, calling the film “a primal political fable for the digital age, a real-time tableau of the confrontation between the individual and the state.”

The stakes are established early on the film, when Poitras’s voice reads aloud an e-mail she received from Snowden towards the beginning of their conversations: “From now, know that every border you cross, every purchase you make, every call you dial, every cell phone tower you pass, friend you keep, article you write, site you visit, subject line you type is in the hands of a system whose reach is unlimited but whose safeguards are not.”

In the course of the documentary, Poitras travels to Hong Kong with Glenn Greenwald to meet Snowden, who explains on camera who he is and what he is handing over to the journalists: a trove of documents detailing worldwide spying operations of the NSA and its partners. The challenge of exposing such information seems considerable, but Snowden handles it with an ease that betrays his intelligence and determination; he remains his own best spokesman. And that’s why more people, even if just a few at a time, need to see the film, something the Oscar win is sure to help accomplish.

Snowden himself could not have been more clear about understanding all of this in a statement he released shortly after the announcement of Citizenfour’s Oscar victory. “When Laura Poitras asked me if she could film our encounters, I was extremely reluctant. I’m grateful that I allowed her to persuade me,” Snowden said, via the ACLU. “My hope is that this award will encourage more people to see the film and be inspired by its message that ordinary citizens, working together, can change the world.” (Disclosures: Greenwald, a principal subject of Citizenfour, and Jeremy Scahill, a former contributor to The Nation who also appears in the film, are both personal friends. I am under contract with the site Greenwald, Scahill and Poitras started, The Intercept, for a forthcoming piece.)

The importance of the Snowden saga’s shocking revelations was on display again last week, when The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill and Josh Begley (also a friend) published a piece based on yet more Snowden documents. They detailed efforts of the NSA and its partners in British intelligence to steal, in bulk, encryption keys for cell-phone SIM cards, allowing the spy agencies to easily listen in on any communications—calls, texts, e-mails, anything—sent over the cell-phone service provider’s network. In order to acquire encryption keys, Scahill and Begley reported, the spies “accessed the e-mail and Facebook accounts of engineers and other employees of major telecom corporations and SIM card manufacturers.”

Scahill and Begley pointed out that Barack Obama, after the Snowden revelations began, sought to reassure the world that “the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security.” But that turns out, in this latest story, to be yet another falsehood pushed by the US government about its intelligence work. ACLU technologist Chris Soghoian told The Intercept, of the engineers and telecom employees, “These people were specifically hunted and targeted by intelligence agencies, not because they did anything wrong, but because they could be used as a means to an end.”

Perhaps most disturbing, that “end” doesn’t even pretend to be an aim of thwarting terrorist plots or even listening in on terrorist communications. Rather, what was once regarded as means of achieving these aims—collecting intelligence—has become the end in and of itself. That goal stems from an ethos attributed to former NSA chief General Keith Alexander: “collect it all.” Just a few weeks ago, the journalist Mattathias Schwartz, writing in The New Yorker, cast more doubt on the efficacy of vacuming up, as Alexander once rendered it, “the whole haystack.”

So “collect it all” might not even work well, yet it remains the order of the day for America’s top spies. And at every turn before and after Snowden’s revelations, US officials up to and including Obama himself can’t seem to tell the truth about what they’re doing. At one point in Citizenfour, Snowden, in his typical stark manner, explains just what the goal is: “We are building the biggest weapon for oppression in the history of mankind.”

Weapons aren’t always deployed, but we should all worry about the potential power they can unleash when they are. That’s what makes Snowden’s revelations so significant, and so essential for our democracy. If an Oscar win brings more attention to the film and the warning Snowden persuasively delivers in it, all the better.

Benjamin Netanyahu says he’s definitely coming to Washington to deliver a speech about Iran to a joint session of Congress. He’ll almost certainly oppose a nuclear deal whose details aren’t public yet. The whole “tawdry and high-handed stunt,” as Senator Patrick Leahy put it, will be correctly read as an insult to the president.

So how best for Obama to make his displeasure known? He’s already denied Netanyahu an audience. But if Obama really wants to stick it to the Israeli prime minister, he should fight to ink a deal with Iran before the March speech on Capitol Hill. That would dare Netanyahu to come and forcefully denounce a major global foreign policy achievement.

Democrats, at least, will be loathe to turn their backs on Obama. The speech already faces stiff opposition from the party—fifteen members of the House and three senators are on board for a boycott. Even some right-leaning pro-Israel groups, if the current rifts among the Israel lobby are any indication, might not openly revolt against a deal.

What Obama has going for him is the ability to correctly cast this an issue of avoiding a confrontation with Iran rather than seeking one. It worked last year when Obama beat back a sanctions bill that would’ve quashed talks, and it will work this time. Imagine Netanyahu declaring, as he did after the interim deal with Iran, that an comprehensive accord limiting Iran’s nuclear program is a “historic mistake” when Obama has half the American body politic at his back.

What’s more, the international community is on Obama’s side, too, and Netanyahu knows it. In his statement yesterday, affirming the trip amid all the pressure, Netanyahu mentioned his “profound disagreement with the United States administration and the rest of the P5+1”—referring to the US’s international partners in Iran talks. Last week, Netanyahu vowed to “stand up to Iran and the international community.”

The most onerous maneuvering for Obama, then, isn’t managing politics, domestic or international, but getting the deal itself. This, however, might not be as difficult as it sounds. Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif hinted this week at how close the sides came to an agreement when he said at a security conference in Munich that the last extension of talks in November wasn’t “necessary or useful.”

The extension, though, was useful for Obama: whereas in November his party was coming off a beating in midterm elections, today the economy is in better shape and Obama seems to be feeling his oats. The sort of swagger he showed in the State of the Union address will only serve to help the president sell an agreement.

Ironically, the most detailed information the public has about a potential nuclear deal comes through Israeli officials, who are informed by the United States and its negotiating partners about talks, then go leak it to the press. Even if the Israelis are releasing accurate information about the negotiations—something they have a spotty record on—the fear-mongering about the likely outcome doesn’t capture its complexity.

Luckily for Obama, as things are lining up opponents of a deal aren’t themselves much interested in nuance and complexity. Aside from a few hardline pro-Israel Democrats, most of the opposition will come from Republicans and hawks in the Bill Kristol mode—in other words, those who, like Netanyahu himself, have poor records on matters of war and peace.

When the administration comes out and focuses on how opponents of a deal are pushing the United States to war, the hawks will object that they are being labeled warmongers. The administration isn’t quite making the “warmonger” argument, but the salient point is that killing a deal would bring us closer to confrontation. That’s why inking a deal ASAP would be good policy, and why it’s the high road to delivering the ultimate slap to Netanyahu.

President Obama’s State of the Union Address was light on foreign-policy specifics. When it came to what Obama wanted exactly from his audience, Congress, he was even more limited. He made legislative demands on only two facets of foreign policy: Iran sanctions and an act to belatedly authorize his administration’s war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). But the approaches were different: in one case, to shut Congress down in order to avert a war; in the other, to gain Congress’s explicit backing in one.

Obama’s shown over his first six years in office that, despite “ending” the Iraq war and “winding down” the war in Afghanistan, he’s not much of an anti-war president. See his secret, expansive drone and special forces war against terrorism. Sure, he has avoided “getting dragged into another ground war” in Syria, but the war that he has launched against ISIS there and in Iraq is war nonetheless. Top military brass have said they expect our engagement in the fight to last at least three years. No wonder Obama’s asking Congress for an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) against ISIS.

The devil will be in the details; at this point, we know nothing about the contours of a proposed resolution, its scope, its duration. Moreover, Obama’s plea for an AUMF rested on a strange double premise. The call to “show the world that we are united in this mission” is all fine, but the president ended his ask by saying, “We need that authority.” That is evidently not true: the war against ISIS has lasted for five months, well over the ninety days allowed for the president to act militarily without congressional approval. Instead, Obama has relied on a hodgepodge of murky legal justifications, including the broad 2001 AUMF against Al Qaeda—the same justification that sustains the covert everywhere war. So, unity? Sure. “Need”? No so much: Obama will prosecute the ISIS war with or without Congress, a power he has done more to dangerously expand than any other president.

But, to be fair to Obama, his efforts on Iran are directed exactly at avoiding a new war. And rightly so: experts the world over think a conflict with Iran would be disastrous for everyone involved. That’s why, on Tuesday night, Obama reiterated his threat to veto new sanctions legislation wending its way through Congress—to keep the slow but progressing nuclear talks with Iran alive. Adding sanctions now, whether they’re on a delayed trigger or not, would be an affront to the interim deal signed with Iran in November 2013 (no matter what lies neocons and hawks peddle). And a breakdown in diplomacy would set us right back on the path to the confrontation Obama—and most of the sane world—seeks to avoid so badly.

That’s why it was reassuring to see Obama on Tuesday make explicit the stakes of torpedoing talks. “I will veto any new sanctions bill that threatens to undo [diplomatic] progress,” he said. “The American people expect us to only go to war as a last resort, and I intend to stay true to that wisdom.” This wasn’t as forceful as last week, when Obama said killing talks risked war and Congress would need to “own that,” but hammering the point home is welcome; and it’s a tactic that, as Eli Clifton and I wrote in The Nation last summer, worked the last time the Senate pressed more sanctions.

We shouldn’t be surprised that Obama’s State of the Union speech was, from a progressive standpoint, a mixed bag: it is of a piece with Obama’s foreign policy. His legacy seems likely to pan out this way, too. Just as Obama seems to conduct America’s policies abroad in an ad hoc fashion, progressives must address these policies as they arise—support them when they promote our values, and oppose them when they transgress us. There are, such as on Iran diplomacy, times when such support will be crucial. And in that case, the stakes couldn’t be bigger.

One of the works appearing prominently in the Egyptian artist Ganzeer’s first US solo show has already been displayed to the thousands who attended this fall’s anti-police brutality protests. It’s a silkscreened print in yellow and blue, with a picture of Eric Garner being choked by an NYPD officer. Along the side, bold lettering reads: BE BRUTAL. The mock recruiting poster carries contact information at the bottom: NYPDKILLS.COM / 212-KILL-PEOPLE.

Mohamed Fahmy, 32, who goes by the name Ganzeer (or “bicycle chain”) achieved international fame during the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt. For many foreign artists, a New York show might be viewed as an opportunity to focus an audience’s attention on their home country, but Ganzeer wasn’t interested. “I think that’s what they were expecting: ‘This guy’s from Egypt. He’s going to do a show about Egypt and the situation there,’” he said about being approached by the Leila Heller Gallery curator and Middle Eastern art expert Shiva Balaghi. But Ganzeer had other ideas; he wasn’t going to be Orientalized—a problem, he noted, that never seemed to be experienced by the British street artist Banksy or the Italian artist Blu. “I’m interested in making art about relevant things that are happening in the world,” he said. In other words, when in America, set your sights on America. “At first there was some hesitancy,” he said of the gallery, “but I think they really got into it.”

He arrived in New York in mid-May, his first trip to the United States. He began to immerse himself in American politics and history. “He’s been reading Howard Zinn,” said Balaghi. The only link to his Egyptian work is a reference to a poster that landed him in the clink. In 2011, Ganzeer and two associates were arrested by Egyptian security forces while hanging a silkscreen called The Mask of Freedom, of a man wearing a ball-gag and blinders, wings protruding from his temples. In the new image, the ball-gag remains, the blinder is replaced by a full Captain America mask with no eye holes, and the man sports a business suit. “Great American Mask of Freedom,” the poster reads, “since 1776 and still going strong.” At least for now, Egypt’s loss is our gain. Ganzeer’s show will be on display at the Leila Heller Gallery through February 21.

One of the works that will appear prominently in the Egyptian artist Ganzeer’s first New York solo show today has already been displayed to any of the thousands who attended one of this fall’s anti-police brutality protests. It’s a silk-screened print in yellow and blue, with a picture of Eric Garner being choked by an NYPD officer. Along the side, bold lettering reads “BE BRUTAL.” The mock recruiting poster carries contact information at the bottom: “NYPDKILLS.COM / 212—KILLPEOPLE.”

Mohamed Fahmy, 32, who goes by Ganzeer, or “bicycle chain,” achieved international fame during the uprisings in Egypt. But don’t pigeonhole him as just an artist of the revolution—though his work has always been political, he was producing pieces years before “Tahrir Square” was on the tip of everyone’s tongue. And though his perhaps most famous piece, a huge mural of a tank facing off with a bicyclist under Cairo’s 6th of October Bridge, was a masterwork of street art, don’t limit him to that label either: a graphic designer by trade, street art only constitutes a tiny portion of his oeuvre.

“I’m not really a street artist,” Ganzeer told me after arriving to Leila Heller Gallery to help oversee the installation of his show, his mouth upturned in a constant grin and framed by a few days of thick stubble and a mustache. “I’m not as talented as those guys. They have crazy control of spray paint.” What he may lack in spray-paint skills, though, Ganzeer more than makes up for in aesthetic appeal and ingenuity—as his prolific New York debut is bound to demonstrate. And now, after several months living in New York, he has a brand new subject: America.

Ganzeer, Stop Pamphleteering, 2015, screenprint, 25 x 38 in.

For many foreign artists, especially those from outside the West, a New York show might be viewed as an opportunity to showcase their home country: gallery-goers in Chelsea might arrive at an Egyptian artist’s show hoping to learn something about Egypt. That can go doubly for an artist like Ganzeer, whose work is loaded with politics and social commentary: Come here and tell us about Egypt’s problems. Ganzeer wasn’t interested.

“I think that’s what they were expecting,” he said about being approached by the Leila Heller curator and Middle Eastern art expert Shiva Balaghi. “‘This guy’s from Egypt. He’s going to do a show about Egypt and the situation there.’” Ganzeer had other ideas; he wasn’t going to fall into being Orientalized—something, he noted, was never expected of British street artist Banksy or Italian artist Blu, whose work focuses on whatever locale they’ve wound up in.

“It’s weird for someone to sit down and think, ‘Who am I and where do I come from?’” he told me. “I’m interested in making art about relevant things that are happening in the world.” In other words, when in America, set your sights on America. “At first there was some hesitancy,” he said of the gallery, “but I think they really got into it.”

He arrived in New York in mid-May, his first trip to the United States. “It’s not landing in Amsterdam: ‘Welcome to Amsterdam! You’re an artist? That’s cool.’” He dove into work, linking up with arts-oriented printing shop Booklyn to produce and sell his silkscreens. And he began to immerse himself in current American politics and its history. “He’s been reading Howard Zinn,” said Balaghi.

Ganzeer, Mickey, Marilyn, and Me, 2015, screenprint, 25 x 38 in

“I think he is fucking bad-ass as all hell to tackle America and the powers that he deals with now,” said the artist Molly Crabapple (who has contributed to The Nation), a friend of Ganzeer’s who recalled her excitement at learning of his show’s focus. “His work is not about self-plagiarism. It’s not about taking this revolution that he became famous in and commodifying it and selling it to American collectors of kitsch. It’s about taking a genuinely rebellious outlook that he has and turning it on America and making people uncomfortable.”

In the past week, Ganzeer has been overwhelmed by the work of designing the installation of his own show and putting the final touches on the around eighty pieces that will appear in it; he’d slept more than ten hours the night before our meeting, but not at all for days before, he said.

The show features beautiful silk screens, original painting and drawing and some letter-press work—often all in the same piece. Aside from the “BE BRUTAL” poster (which will appear in a genuine New York subway advertisement frame), none has been seen publicly. And the only link to his Egyptian work is a callback to a poster that landed him in the clink. In 2011, Ganzeer and two associates were arrested by Egyptian security forces while hanging one of his prints: a silkscreen called The Freedom Mask, of a man wearing a ball-gag and blinders, wings protruding from his temples. In the new image, the blinder is replaced by a full Captain America mask with no eye holes, the ball-gag remains, and the man sports a business suit. “The Great American Mask of Freedom,” the poster reads, “since 1776 and still going strong.”

Ganzeer, Masked Congress, 2015, screenprint, 25 x 38 in

In the back room at Leila Heller, Ganzeer showed me where binder clips hung from the ceiling; posters will form the walls of a maze guiding the viewer to larger pieces: The Great American Mask of Freedom on a piece of wood; twenty-four small portraits of pop icons smiling, a commentary on America’s need for its celebrities to be happy, not complicated; a series of four handpainted black-and-white pictures of American presidents (Obama, Bush, Clinton and Nixon) smoking joints, with speech bubbles (“Four presidents having a dialogue with each other—while smoking pot—about pot!” Ganzeer explained); and a series of American currency called Honest Money designed and printed by Ganzeer, with Native Americans on the one, slaves on the five, North America wildlife gone extinct since European settlement on the twenty, and plundered artifacts and art from abroad on the hundred.

For the three windows of Leila Heller Gallery running along Eleventh Avenue, too, Ganzeer has something planned: literally confronting America with its own face—or faces. Each window will show a giant posterboard silkscreened with an image of a young black boy with his hands in the air, after the slogan of the Ferguson marches, “Hands up, don’t shoot.” But the faces of the boys are cut out, and behind them a screen will show a video that Ganzeer himself shot around New York: a montage of faces of kids of color. To get a taste of Ganzeer’s message for Americans, all you have to do is drive by.

“I just love his work on a technical level,” commented Crabapple on Ganzeer’s style. “These bold lines! It’s like graphic and scathing and gorgeous in a really fucked-up way.” From what I saw at the gallery, the New York show fits that description to a T.

And yet for some of Ganzeer’s longest-standing fans, his move from Egypt to the United States, however long, is bittersweet. Thoughtful, sometimes scathing art like Ganzeer’s exploded in Egypt because that’s where thoughtfulness needed to retreat to. “Art has become a space where opposition voices and a cacophony of opinions can be expressed,” said Jonathan Guyer, an editor at the Cairo Review of Global Affairs who frequently writes about cartoons and art in the Middle East, “especially because within the news media and public forums, political expression has been stifled to a great extent in Egypt today.”

But even street art fell victim to the pressure. Soraya Morayef, who documents and writes about street art in Egypt, said, “Ganzeer is actually part of this mass exodus of young Egyptians who left Egypt during the post-revolution, who left to make a better life.” She added, of his New York show, “I’m glad there’s some positivity coming out of this brain drain. There are a lot of young artists leaving and doing works that will never appear in Egypt.”

“Everyone back home is getting fucked over by the state,” said Ganzeer. “Everyone who has something to say is getting fucked over by the state.” But his New York show is a testament to the notion that things are honky-dory here, either, even if the severity isn’t comparable. For Ganzeer’s part, the breadth of things he has to say extends naturally to his new surroundings. Egypt’s loss, at least for now, is our gain.

The anti-Iran pressure group United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) claims as its mission to stop the Iranian nuclear program. A big part of its effort revolves around what it calls “private sanctions campaigns”—attempts to get consumers to boycott or otherwise pressure companies doing business with Iran, while at the same time “striving not to punish the Iranian people,” as the group’s mission statement puts it.

But the pledge to avoid harming “the Iranian people”—heard from many who take a hard line against Iran—rings hollow amid the breadth of UANI’s advocacy. A Nation investigation into UANI’s Iran Business Registry reveals a more muddled picture. The registry lists more than 1,100 companies doing business with or in Iran—legal or otherwise. While UANI accuses many of the companies of violating US or international sanctions, the listings also target for public pressure some companies doing entirely legal, humanitarian trade with Iran, including those engaged in selling Iran medicines—economic activity that is specifically exempted from sanctions by the US Treasury Department.

The result appears to be an attempt to impose an unofficial total embargo on Iran. When successfully enacted as official policies, total embargoes have wrought extreme harm to the peoples of targeted countries. The most draconian period of sanctions against Iraq, for example, coincided with increases in malnutrition, and infant mortality there rose from one death per thirty births in 1990 to one per eight in 1997. One of Washington’s most vociferous Iran hawks, Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL), whom UANI regularly praises and whose legislative initiatives it supports, has said, “It’s okay to take the food out of the mouths” of the Iranian people to punish their government for its misdeeds.

Intrigue seems to swirl around everything about UANI: its finances, ties to mining interests and policy positions have all raised many unanswered questions. And yet the group wields considerable clout in Washington. Its executive director, Mark Wallace, a former George W. Bush–appointed ambassador to the UN, has testified three times before Congress since taking UANI’s helm in 2008, and former intelligence chiefs from Germany, Israel and the UK lend their credibility by serving on the group’s advisory board. In September 2013, Dr. Gary Samore joined UANI as the group’s president following his retirement from the Obama administration as the White House’s coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction. At UANI, Samore now leads a group campaigning for blacklisting companies doing humanitarian trade, some of which received Treasury Department licenses while he was still in the administration.

UANI’s Iran Business Registry is aimed at “increasing the economic isolation of the Iranian regime by pressuring corporations to end their Iran business,” according to the group’s website. But unlike most of UANI’s name-and-shame campaigns, the registry makes no claim that all its listings expose sanctions violators—those doing illegal business in Iran in contravention of US and international bars on such trade.

The Nation found at least five well-known pharmaceutical companies engaged in Treasury Department–xempted humanitarian trade listed in the registry. In an informational document on Iran sanctions, the Treasury Department explicitly acknowledges its aim of allowing humanitarian trade with Iran, noting that “under U.S. law, the sale and export of nearly all types of food and medicine to Iran are broadly authorized, and require no specific license or special authorization.”

Nonetheless, UANI includes these companies on their registry, citing news articles about legal trade with Iran. Boston Scientific and Abbott Laboratories are listed with a citation to a December 2010 New York Times list of “Companies with Permission to Bypass Sanctions.” The permission came in the form of special licenses, most of them for “humanitarian” purposes, issued by the Treasury Department. Sanofi, AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline wound up on the registry after they were named in a December 2013 Wall Street Journal article on targeted sanctions relief for humanitarian trade, specifically loosening financial restrictions on the trade of food, agricultural and medical products to Iran.

Contacted for comment about the five pharmaceutical companies listed on UANI’s business registry, a Treasury Department spokesperson confirmed to The Nation that none of the five pharmaceutical companies had at any point been announced as violators of Iran sanctions. “These companies have each been listed [by the Treasury Department] for being awarded different exemptions or licenses,” the Treasury spokesperson said.

UANI, for its part, has denied that it advocates for cutting off humanitarian trade with Iran. Last year, the group tweeted that “our campaign stance is that there is no legitimate trade w/ #Iran EXCEPT humanitarian (food, pharm included).” It added that the Iran Business Registry “is a comprehensive directory of all biz in #Iran. UANI does not campaign/advocate 4 divestment from humanitarian co.’s.”

But that doesn’t appear to be true. The Iran Business Registry’s automated “Message Center” allows users to contact “all companies with recently reported business with Iran” and send them a pre-written e-mail demanding that they end their trade with the country.

Neither Samore nor UANI responded to requests for comment to clarify the apparent contradictions.

The Iran Business Registry’s listing of trade in medicines isn’t the first alleged instance of UANI’s targeting and trying to cut off legal, humanitarian trade with Iran. Such allegations also appeared in a bizarre lawsuit wending its way through court. In 2013, UANI accused Victor Restis, a Greek shipping magnate, of violating Iran sanctions and, with an associate, acting as “front-men” for the Iranian regime. Restis sued UANI for defamation. In his suit, Restis contended that he’d done no illegal business with sanctioned entities in Iran and, according to The New York Times, that “his ships made only authorized humanitarian shipments” to the Islamic Republic, including legal shipments of soya beans.

Last week, we reported that Restis’s lawyers now allege in court filings that UANI continues to spread false information about the Greek shipping magnate. In that instance, the alleged conduit for the UANI’s allegations, an Israeli newspaper, retracted the claim after concluding Restis had shipped soya beans to Iran in a legitimate humanitarian transaction that violated no sanctions.

A new wrinkle in an already bizarre lawsuit is shaping up to potentially embarrass the Obama administration. If allegations made in a recent court filing are true, then the Justice Department, with an unprecedented assertion of the state secrets privilege, might be shielding from any accountability a group actively engaged in spreading false information.

The lawsuit revolves around an anti-Iran group called United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), a pro-sanctions outfit that takes a hard line against Iran and lodges name-and-shame campaigns against companies it says are doing business with Iran. The group is made up of former officials from the Bush and Obama administrations, as well as a host of academics, former diplomats and former intelligence officials from foreign countries, including Israel.

In May 2013, UANI accused Victor Restis of doing illegal business with Iran’s sanctioned energy sector and working with an associate to act as a “front-men” for the Iranian government. But Restis fought back: he sued for defamation in July 2013.

All seemed to be proceeding normally after Restis filed his suit. His lawyers asked for documents in an effort to get UANI to back up its allegations against their clients, as well as some general information about UANI. That’s when things got strange: in September, the Justice Department stepped in to block the release of the documents. Justice officials asserted the so-called state secrets privilege, claiming that national security secrets would be at risk of exposure if the disclosures proceeded. The government also suggested the court dismiss the suit. The Justice Department’s reasons for intervening remain a mystery and, unlike any case in the past where the government has intervened in a private suit to which it is not party, refused to even explain privately to the court its reasoning for asserting the privilege.

Last week, things got even weirder: in a motion filed on Wednesday, Restis’s lawyers suggested that UANI had leaked information to the Israeli daily The Jerusalem Post that resulted in a piece accusing Restis of doing more illegal business in Iran. The Post later retracted the article, citing “new information” that indicated the purportedly illegal shipping had been “legitimate and permitted,” and scrubbing the article from its website.

“Defendants appear to have provided The Jerusalem Post with false information purporting to show an American company’s legal and humanitarian cargo of soya beans to Iran aboard Plaintiffs’ vessel violated sanctions against Iran,” said a footnote in the filing from Restis’s lawyers. “Although it printed Defendants’ false allegations against Plaintiffs, The Jerusalem Post recognized the falsity of the allegations and issued a retraction and apology.”

Restis’s legal team contends that the acknowledgment by a media organization that the information—which Restis alleges was provided by UANI—was false shows a pattern by the group of making defamatory allegations and using the government’s intervention in the case to shield themselves.

“Defendants continue to say whatever they want and then, when their targets fight back, they run and hide behind the Government without ever having to defend their words or actions,” said the filing. (The Justice Department declined to comment for this story, and UANI did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

“We appreciate The Jerusalem Post recognizing the falsity of these claims and taking the responsible step of retracting the inaccuracies relating to Victor Restis and his company,” Restis’s lawyer Abbe Lowell told The Nation, “and we will continue to expose UANI’s tactics and lies for as long as they keep spreading them.”

If true, the alleged UANI leak of false information to The Jerusalem Post would contradict UANI lawyers’ assertion in an October hearing that “UANI has made no statements whatsoever about Victor Restis or his companies, about any subject, doing business with Iran or any subject since February of 2014.” The Jerusalem Post article also said that the information it revealed would be “raised… in an upcoming hearing in a US federal court.” UANI’s lawyers brought up the purported revelations the following day in the October 8 hearing. It has not been proven that UANI leaked information to The Jerusalem Post.

The October 29 filing by Restis’s lawyers containing the latest allegations came in an effort to compel the government to justify its assertion of states secrets and to oppose dismissal of the suit.

Iin a separate filing last Wednesday, lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other groups spelled out how unusual the Justice Department intervention was. The groups submitted a friend of the court briefing—itself an unusual move, since amicus briefs are usually filed when cases reach the appellate stage—agreeing with Restis’s team.

“Never before has the government sought dismissal of a suit between private parties on state secrets grounds without providing the parties and the public any information about the government’s interest in the case,” the lawyers from the groups wrote. “It is hard to see why, unlike in every other state secrets case in history, meaningful public disclosure to the parties is not possible in this case.”

That UANI would allegedly strike out with false allegations even as it was receiving extraordinary protection from the Justice Department only underscores the mystery surrounding the government’s intervention.

The October 7 Jerusalem Post article in question, headlined “Evidence obtained by JPost shows alleged ongoing violation of Iran sanctions” and written by legal correspondent Yonah Jeremy Bob, went through several iterations online before being retracted. (Bob did not respond to requests for comment.)

The original version of the article purported to present evidence that Restis’s companies were continuing to violate Iran sanctions by pointing to information that a ship owned by Restis docked in Iran on September 27. (The article was amended without notice before being captured by a web archive on October 8.) Lowell, the lawyer for Restis, denied the charges to the Post at the time. “In September 2014, a major US-based food company made a legal shipment of soya beans from Argentina to Iran aboard the Helvetia One, a vessel owned by the Restis family,” Lowell told the paper. “The provision of food cargo to Iran is entirely legal and encouraged under the humanitarian carve-outs to international sanctions regimes.”

On October 22, the Post came around to Lowell’s perspective, scrubbing the story and issuing a “clarification and correction” that expressed regret for publishing the story. The Post said its assertions of illegal business were “contradicted by new information provided to us and therefore no allegations of misconduct should be concluded from the above article.”

Updated below. A story in the press this week about Iran sheds a little light on how detached some of Washington’s inveterate Iran hawks are from reality. Opponents of diplomacy and advocates of military force are of course entitled to their opinions, but they’re not entitled to their own facts. And yet that’s what some of them offer to support their positions.

But first some background. The news item concerned an explosion at an Iranian military facility, reportedly in or near Parchin, a controversial site deeply intertwined with negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. Parchin is considered an important facility in all the diplomatic wrangling because intelligence agencies and watchdog groups suspect the site was used to test detonators that could be used in an explosive nuclear device. It’s relevant to note—though hawks rarely will—that these suspicions of “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s nuclear program date back to pre-2004, after which point Iran is thought to have shut down its weaponization program.

In negotiations, Parchin has been a lightning rod because accounting for Iran’s possible past nuclear weapons work is a notional aim of a final accord with world powers. So far, however, Iran has complied with only some of the “outstanding issues” laid out by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). And that’s where the hawks come in.

Take Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post. Rubin’s post on this week’s explosion wasn’t surprising because of the triumphalist tone she strikes over the possibility that this was an act of covert war—from 2010 through 2012, several mysterious explosions have killed nuclear scientists and military officials—but rather because she stuns with her inability to grasp the basic facts about Parchin.

With regard to the explosion, Rubin quotes a news report stating that Parchin hasn’t been inspected by the IAEA since 2005. She then states: “That is right—the West still has had no access to one of Iran’s key enrichment sites yet has now twice extended sanctions relief.” That is not right—and it deserves a correction. The absence of inspections at Parchin is troubling because of the alleged nuclear trigger testing, not because of enrichment; in fact, Parchin is not an “enrichment site” at all, let alone a “key” one.

Rubin also doesn’t seem to know that no one currently suspects ongoing nuclear weapons work at Parchin. Instead, the IAEA wants to examine the site for evidence of pre-2004 work there (residual radioactive traces would likely persist). Her analysis misses entirely that Iran destroyed an outbuilding there and paved over part of the site—an effort, many suspect, to literally bury the evidence of its past experiments. So what sense, then, would it make for saboteurs to destroy the Parchin site further with an enormous blast? Not much, unless you are, as Jim White suggested, Iran trying to cover your tracks.

It’s all the more galling, then, that Rubin leverages her misunderstanding of these matters to propose—what else?—beefing up Israel’s military option against Iran’s nuclear program. She suggests sending Israel bunker-busting bombs “along with an appropriate delivery system” (large bomber aircraft, in other words).

“It seems remarkable that the administration is making so little effort to amplify the potential for Israeli action,” Rubin writes. Well, it’s not really remarkable: Israel has been a thorn in the side of US efforts to engage Iran over its nuclear program from the start, lodging a campaign rife with misinformation against talks and lambasting the interim deal as a “historic mistake.” Rubin, for her part, has favored attacking Iran militarily as far back as 2010.

Rubin isn’t alone. David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter, also lodged a complaint similar to Rubin’s when he said the lack of inspectors’ access to Parchin “reminds us how limited and defeated U.S. inspection rights have been in Iran, through this year of negotiation.” But actually, experts roundly agree that the November interim deal significantly strengthened the inspections regime, allowing daily inspections at Iran’s enrichment sites instead of scheduled visits with constant monitoring (Jen Rubin, take note).

The attention to Parchin is partly deserved and partly a distraction. There should be accountability for Iran’s past actions, but as nuke expert Jeffrey Lewis has argued, understanding exactly what Iran has done in the past is not essential for ensuring that a nuclear deal would prevent Iran from constructing a nuclear weapon. Either way, the hawks are entitled to an incessant focus on the site, but they ought to get their basic facts right.

Update: After we published this at The Nation, the Washington Post issued a correction on Jennifer Rubin's post. It now reads:

That is right — the West still has had no access to one of Iran’s key enrichment testing sites yet has now twice extended sanctions relief.

That's certainly more accurate, but doesn't capture that, again, experts and policy makers suspect the site was used for nuclear trigger testing a decade ago, not today. Nonetheless, at least the post no longer flagrently misrepresents what the facility's suspected role.

In the September 1 issue of The New Yorker, reporter Connie Bruck offers a long article on America’s top Israel lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Bruck’s granular reporting and rich history make the piece well worth the read, though longtime followers of Middle East issues in Washington may find little surprising in her summary of how AIPAC operates. One notable exception comes in a thread running through the story about AIPAC's fight against diplomacy with Iran.

AIPAC works very hard to not appear as an overt opponent of Iran diplomacy. And with good reason: the growing party-line make-up of efforts to kill talks doesn’t fit with AIPAC’s professed bipartisanship. What’s more, the alternative to diplomacy is a path to confrontation with Iran, while unremitting hawkishness remains out of vogue among the American public. And yet members of Congress closest to AIPAC, such as Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL), do seem to oppose diplomacy, comparing negotiations to “Munich” at every turn.

The most revelatory disquisition contained in Bruck’s piece, however, wasn’t the discussion of the dramatic turnaround in support for new sanctions in the Senate (which Eli Clifton and I detailed in a Nation feature in July), but rather in the lower chamber of Congress. Bruck recounts how two AIPAC stalwarts in the House, Representatives Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and Eric Cantor (R-VA), parted ways over the latter’s attempts to derail talks:

According to the former congressional aide, Cantor told Hoyer that he wanted a bill that would kill the interim agreement with Iran. Hoyer refused, saying that he would collaborate only on a nonbinding resolution. Cantor sent Hoyer a resolution that called for additional sanctions and sought to define in advance the contours of an agreement with Iran.

"The pressure was tremendous—not just AIPAC leadership and legislative officials but various board members and other contributors, from all over the country,” the former congressional aide recalled…

The members of Hoyer’s caucus pressed him, and, on December 12th, just as the language of the resolution became final, he asked to set aside the effort, saying that the time was not right.

Though Cantor eventually backed down—the final result was a congressional letter “so anodyne that most Democrats in the progressive caucus signed it,” according to Bruck—the fact that his effort was an explicit attempt to kill negotiations and that it earned vociferous backing from AIPAC says something about the lobby’s activities. (Another revealing aspect of this episode came in AIPAC’s pressuring House Democrat Debbie Wasserman Shultz, another pro-Israel stalwart, by distributing an article from the often partisan, lowbrow neoconservative blog, the Washington Free Beacon.)

Cantor’s push, thanks to Bruck’s reporting, stands as the best example to date of how Washington’s pro-Israel community (which is diverse but whose center of gravity falls well to the right of center) is blowing smoke with its incessant proclamations that it merely wants to strengthen diplomacy with Iran. Cantor—and AIPAC, it seems, as part of a long campaign against talks—wants no deal at all.

At the same time, AIPAC and its closest allies are among the crowd who most loudly insisted over the years that, should diplomacy fail, airstrikes would be needed to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran (though it will likely only delay, rather than prevent, Iran’s progress).

When the Obama administration derided a sanctions push last fall as a “march to war,” Democrats close to AIPAC such as Bob Menendez (NJ), who’d co-sponsored the initiative with Mark Kirk, objected. Hoyer, too, recoiled, but it turns out he, at least, actually knew better at the time.

My colleague Eli Clifton has a new piece up at Salon about the pro-sanctions group United Against a Nuclear Iran (UANI) and its somewhat murky links to a billionaire precious-metals investor named Thomas Kaplan. I suggest everyone check it out: it’s a fascinating tale of colliding interests; namely, that the head of UANI also helms ventures with the billionaire that stand to, by its own account, make a lot of money in the case of instability in the Middle East—up to and including “confrontation” with Iran.

Eli mentions in the course of his reporting a recent New York Times article that describes an intervention by the Justice Department to protect information held by UANI from being disclosed in court. There’re a lot of granular details about the case—a defamation suit by Victor Restis, a Greek shipping magnate whose company UANI accused of being “frontmen for the illicit activities of the Iranian regime”—but for our purposes here the important parts revolve around UANI’s ties to Israel. The suit alleges that UANI dispatched an Israeli businessman (otherwise unconnected to UANI) in order to broker a resolution to the dispute over the alleged defamation, and raises suspicions that Meir Dagan, a former Israeli spy chief and UANI advisory board member, provided information to the group about Restis’s company.

Now, UANI has former officials from a host of countries on its advisory board, but an observer would need to be willfully blind to miss the consistent pattern among pro-sanctions hardliners in Washington: most, if not all, align with DC’s right-leaning pro-Israel camp. Indeed, one need only listen to members of Congress raise Israel’s security as they vie to take the toughest positions on sanctions. Despite its diversity, UANI delivers on this front, with staunch Israel supporters, such as Joseph Lieberman, on its board, and with its staff drawn from and moving among pro-Israel activist and media circles.

One of the most active and most hardline groups on Iran, of course, is the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), whose influence Eli and I discussed at length in our recent Nation feature. (UANI and FDD officials have appeared together at events sponsored by dedicated pro-Israel groups.) The neoconservative think tank is certainly no exception to the pro-Israel bent of Iran hawks in DC. But even the extent to which the group serves as a pro-Israel outfit has been obscured in the course of its thirteen-year history.

FDD’s origin myth is, in fact, just that: a myth. Today the group’s website proclaims, “FDD was founded shortly after 9/11 by a group of visionary philanthropists and policymakers who understood the threat facing America, Israel and the West.” But according to its application for tax-exempt nonprofit status, FDD was “incorporated or formed” on April 24, 2001—five months before the September 11 attacks.

The FDD application also homes in on a narrower focus than its stated purpose today, which is “to promote pluralism, defend democratic values and fight the ideologies that drive terrorism.” Instead, the group was founded to concentrate almost solely on Israel advocacy. “Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Inc. (‘FDD’) was incorporated in New York on April 24, 2001, as EMET: An Educational Initiative, Inc. (‘EMET’),” says the application, which is dated January 30, 2002. (Emet is Hebrew for “truth.”) “The initial purpose of EMET was to provide education meant to enhance Israel’s image in North America and the public’s understanding of issues affecting Israeli-Arab relations.”

“These goals continue as part of FDD’s purpose,” the application says. It continues:

As a result of the terrorist attacks on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, the Board of Directors determined that EMET’s mission should be expanded. The Board has recognized the sad fact that Israel is no longer the only democracy in the world facing the scourge of terrorism.

The application goes on to list things the FDD board “believes.” Among the five bullet points are two focused exclusively on Israel. One states, “The way to achieve peace in the Middle East is not by compromising Israel’s existence as the only democracy in the region, but rather by defeating terrorism.” Defending Israel, in other words, remained central to FDD’s work, despite the expanding mission.

Indeed, FDD has a disproportionate focus on Iran—of twenty-one officials and experts listed on its website, more than half are described as Iran specialists of one sort or another—which, as I’ve said before, is an Israel issue in Washington. And looking at other groups working intently on Iran, as described by Eli and myself in our feature, one needs not look very hard to find the Israel angle: one of the groups we spent a great deal of time on was the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, America’s pre-eminent pro-Israel organization.

This is not to say all pro-Israel groups oppose diplomacy with Iran, of course: two of Washington’s most astute pro-diplomacy groups, Americans for Peace Now and J Street, hail from the liberal pro-Israel camp. But the center of gravity of Israel advocacy trends right, and many of these groups and their staffs have staked out aggressive pro-sanctions or outright hawkish pro-war positions.

Pro-Israel advocates recoil at the notion that they played a major role in the build-up to the Iraq war. But if diplomacy with Iran fails due to measures pushed by these groups, a confrontation over its nuclear program becomes all the more likely. With all their activism against negotiations and compromise, it won’t be difficult to draw a line from pro-Israel groups like FDD and deeply Israel-linked groups like UANI to the potential conflict.

Over the past two weeks, on the heels of an announced extension to nuclear talks with Iran, Republicans in the Senate introduced two measures that could erect obstacles in reaching and implementing a final agreement with the Islamic Republic. One of the efforts, led by Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, would mandate congressional approval before a nuclear deal could be struck. Another, spearheaded by the Senate’s most ferocious Iran hawk, Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois, would strip President Barack Obama of his ability to waive Iran sanctions—something the president might need to do in order to hold up the American end of the bargain and give Iran relief.

What’s most notable about these efforts, however, is their distinctly Republican nature. Both are co-sponsored by a bevy of GOP hawks, with no Democrats having yet signed on. (As of press time, the Corker bill has nine Republican co-sponsors and the Kirk bill has eight.)

This portends a further shift along the lines of what Eli Clifton and I discussed in our recent Nation feature on how hawkish groups influence the Hill: with diplomacy advancing as far as it has under Obama, the stakes were suddenly raised and Democrats became skittish about being seen as in opposition to one of their own president’s biggest foreign policy initiatives. As we wrote, some sixteen Democrats signed onto a sanctions measure introduced this winter—S. 1881, co-sponsored by Senators Kirk, Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY)—but failed to generate more Democratic support after its initial introduction (whereas a number of additional Republicans signed on). In the end, many of the Democrats jumped ship when the party’s leadership, the White House and constituents pressured them.

From the perspective of opponents of diplomacy—and make no mistake that these new bills are sponsored by opponents of diplomacy—this is bad news. And they know it: when the Democrats, including Menendez, an original co-sponsor, backed off on holding an immediate vote on S. 1881, the influential pro-Israel lobby the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) tapped the brakes, too. “[S]topping the Iranian nuclear program should rest on bipartisan support and there should not be a vote at this time on the measure,” the group said in a statement.

Whatever Democrats AIPAC is able to wrangle to support measures like Kirk’s and Corker’s will simply act as fig leafs for what is in fact an increasingly partisan fight over Iran policy. To understand this dynamic, one needs only look at the anti-diplomacy lobby Eli and I outlined in our piece and the funders highlighted in a sidebar: the three billionaires against diplomacy—Paul Singer, Bernard Marcus and Sheldon Adelson—are all heavyweight Republican donors. (Adelson, for one, has said that the United States should use a nuclear weapon against Iran instead of negotiating with it.)

It’s not a coincidence that those three are also, according to the most recent comprehensive numbers, the three top donors to the Foundation of Defense Democracies (FDD), an influential and hawkish Iran-focused think-tank that Eli and I discussed at length in our report. Though FDD works with some of the most hawkish Democrats on the Hill, GOP connections abound: its president, Cliff May, was a communications director with the Republican National Committee and edited the party’s official magazine before launching FDD. The GOP bent became clear in 2008, when an FDD offshoot, the now defunct defenseofdemocracies.org, launched political attack ads against fifteen Democrats, precipitating the resignations of major Democrats on the group’s board.

With the Democratic leadership aligning in favor of diplomacy, hawkish members of the partly like Menendez are likely to only become more isolated and, should they persist, could end up working on overwhelming Republican initiatives. That could help insulate the Obama administration from criticisms over negotiating with Iran and legislative efforts that have potential to block a deal. It wouldn’t be surprising, in other words, to learn that the White House was secretly supportive of Republicans—and Republicans alone—taking up efforts to kill diplomacy.