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Andrea Stricker at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies warns:

[S]ince the election of Joe Biden, Tehran has not only made impressive strides toward a nuclear weapons capability but repaired much of the financial damage done by US sanctions.

It’s plain to see the clerical regime is in no rush to negotiate a revised nuclear deal. What’s the hurry when both oil exports and enriched uranium stockpiles are surging? But the risk here is not just that Tehran keeps stalling. It is that protracted negotiations may provide cover for a nuclear breakout—that is, the production of enough weapons-grade uranium for one or more bombs.

…all the necessary elements have aligned for the Islamic Republic to move for nuclear weapons: reduced international monitoring, substantially improved atomic assets that are increasingly hardened against aerial strikes, an absence of international penalties, a reviving economy, and brutal ultra-hardliners in charge of the government who might be eager to go nuclear.

On Monday, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) introduced a resolution calling for US recognition of the Palestinian “nakba,” a term meaning “catastrophe” that is used by Palestinians to refer to the establishment and continuing existence of the State of Israel. The co-sponsors are members of the “Squad” and others, well-known for their antipathy to Israel: Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Cori Bush (D-MO), Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), Betty McCollum (D-MN), and Marie Newman (D-IL).

RJC National Chairman Senator Norm Coleman responded:

The “Nakba” resolution distorts history and international law in service to an anti-Israel agenda that has no place in the US Congress.

This is another attempt by the most radical leftists in Congress to delegitimize our ally Israel and to promote anti-Israel and frankly antisemitic efforts to destroy the only democracy in the Middle East. The fact that such a resolution could be introduced at all demonstrates that the Democratic leadership in the House is completely unwilling or unable to rein in the worst impulses of their caucus.

This resolution, filled with false claims and hate-mongering, should be rejected by every member of Congress.

Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur posted a Twitter thread that made some interesting points about the Palestinian “Nakba” narrative and its role in continuing the tragedy of constant war between Palestinians and Israel.

Gur is right to worry that the Palestinian “Nakba” narrative leads only to more hatred and violence. We are seeing that right here in America.

A “Nakba Day” demonstration in Los Angeles last weekend featured chants of “long live the Intifada,” a reference to the waves of terrorist attacks in the late 1980s and early 2000s that left more than 1,000 Israelis dead. Likewise in New York City, “Nakba Day” protesters shouted, “From New York to Palestine, globalize the intifada” and “We don’t want two states, we want all of it.” The ADL has collected other calls for violence at “Nakba Day” events in the US.

The Jerusalem Post reports on an important bill introduced this week by Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO):

A new bipartisan Taylor Force Martyr Payment Prevention Act was introduced on Wednesday, seeking to build on the original Taylor Force Act by strengthening the Treasury Department’s existing anti-terrorism financing authorities.

The bill will give the Treasury “the additional authority to designate foreign banks as institutions of primary money-laundering concern, and to forbid them from holding or using correspondent accounts in the United States if the banks are used to facilitate or promote martyr payments to terrorists or if the banks knowingly provide financial services to Hamas.”

… Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who introduced the Senate version of the bill, said in a statement: “Radical Islamic terrorists shouldn’t be rewarded for killing innocent people, and banks should be held responsible for processing any sort of ‘martyr payments.’”

The RJC strongly supports this legislation. When the Taylor Force Martyr Payment Prevention Act was introduced in the Senate last year, RJC National Chairman Senator Norm Coleman said:

The 2018 Taylor Force Act was an important first step toward ending the Palestinian Authority‘s outrageous "pay-for-slay" system that incentivizes deadly terrorist attacks against Israelis and Americans. Senator Cotton's bill will make important progress toward this goal by targeting the financial institutions that facilitate these so-called "martyr payments.

Yesterday, Rep. Lamborn noted the Republican Jewish Coalition’s support in his press release announcing the introduction of the bill in the House.

The JNS reports:

Jewish Indiana businesswoman Angela Grabovsky won the Republican nomination for the House of Representatives in Indiana’s 7th Congressional District on May 3… Grabovsky, a former Soviet refusenik who fled to the United States from Ukraine in 1989 together with her family, said she was “very grateful to America and, of course, Hoosiers for opening their hearts and their arms when we arrived in Indianapolis. … They became our mentors—they taught us about the economy, American culture, and it helped us to be successful, so it’s time to give back.”

US economic ‘aid’ to Israel no longer exists

Lenny Ben David writes that, “The US is no longer Israel’s ‘patron’ and Israel is no longer a ‘client.’ … Sometime in the last decade, perhaps after the joint development of the Stuxnet cyber-weapon by the US and Israel in 2010, the relationship between the two countries switched from a ‘patron-client’ to a ‘partnership’ relationship.”

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