Biden must get tougher on Israel, hundreds of campaign staffers urge

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Over 500 Biden campaign, DNC staffers sign letter questioning Israel arms sales

Fox News' Peter Doocy reports that some Democrats are joining GOP's call for progressives to stop inflammatory rhetoric towards Israel on 'Special Report'

More than 500 former members of President Biden’s 2020 election campaign and other Democratic staffers have signed onto an open letter calling on the president to "unequivocally condemn" Israel over the fierce fighting earlier this month between Israel and Hamas.

The letter calls the current status quo in the Middle East between Israel and the Palestinian people "untenable" and charges that Israel’s imposing "conditions of occupation, blockade, and settlement expansion that led to this exceptionally destructive period in a 73-year history of dispossession and ethnic cleansing." 

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The letter – posted on Medium on Sunday by Matan Arad-Neeman, a former Biden field organizer in Arizona – spotlights a list of five demands that urge the president to make to Israel’s government.

They include halting the eviction of some Palestinian residents from East Jerusalem, halting the further expansion of West Bank settlements, and making sure that U.S. aid to Israel "no longer funds the imprisonment and torture of Palestinian children, theft and demolition of Palestinian homes and property, and annexation of Palestinian land."

Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip and has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States, began launching massive rocket attacks into neighboring Israel on May 10, after violent clashes between Israeli forces and Palestinian protesters in Jerusalem at the Al-Aqsa compound, Islam's third holiest site.

The Hamas missile attacks quickly sparked a ferocious aerial response by Israeli forces.

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A cease-fire between the two sides took effect on Friday. More than 230 Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and at least 12 Israelis, were killed in the 11 days of fighting – the worst fighting between the two camps in seven years.

While there is uniform support for Israel’s ability to defend itself from attacks by Hamas among congressional Republicans, a growing number of progressive Democrats in Congress are questioning Washington’s support of conservative Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

And some progressive Democrats were anything but pleased with the Biden administration’s repeated assertations of Israel’s right to defend itself from the Hamas rocket attacks. 

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Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan – a member of the progressive group of diverse House lawmakers known as the "Squad" and the first Palestinian-American woman elected to Congress – last week spoke with the president about the Israeli-Hamas fighting for nearly 10 minutes on the tarmac at Detroit’s airport, where Biden had landed on his way to an event at a nearby Ford automotive facility.

While Biden later praised Tlaib as a "fighter," he told reporters on Friday that there has been "no shift" in his support for the Jewish state.