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Sunday Reads: The long list of Republicans who have abandoned Trump, The Herzl-Ahad Ha’am rivalry

[additional-authors]
October 9, 2016

US

While we normally try to focus on issues concerning US foreign policy and US-Israel relations, it’s virtually impossible to ignore the recent Trump scandal. So here is the Guardian’s long list of Republicans who have abandoned Trump:

On Friday and Saturday, after the release of an 11-year-old recording that revealed Donald Trump boasting about his advances on a married woman and his desire to “grab [women] by the pussy”, a succession of Republican lawmakers condemned the remarks and in some cases withdrew their support for their party’s presidential nominee.

Here is a list of those Republicans and their current statements and positions regarding Trump, in context of what they have previously said on the subject.

Paul Wood discusses the immense tension between the US and Russia surrounding Syria:

The Russian military has now announced that it is sending a battery of the S300 air defence missiles to Syria. This is not world war three, but it is starting to look like a new Cold War. Hillary Clinton’s no-fly zone rests on the belief that Vladimir Putin will deflate like a punctured balloon when challenged. But what if he does not?

Israel

Shlomi Eldar examines how the Peres funeral highlighted a rift among Israeli Arabs:

Arab Israelis are not only critical of the funeral boycott. Their anger spills over into other issues that came up as a result. Many questions are now being asked, such as who the dominant forces are within the Joint List alliance and who dictates its direction. Is it the representatives of the communist Hadash Party or perhaps the lawmakers of the smaller Balad Party, considered the most militant among the various forces that make up the Joint List? After all, the man who started the whole campaign delegitimizing Peres’ road to peace was Knesset member Basel Ghattas, who claimed in a post he wrote while Peres was fighting for his life that the former president had been cruel and directly responsible for war crimes.

Jonathan Tobin takes a look at President Obama’s latest condemnation of Israeli building and what it might mean in the near future:

The decision of the Obama administration to issue a full throttle condemnation of Israel over new housing in the West Bank is an ill omen for the post-election conduct of the outgoing president when it comes to Palestinian efforts at the United Nations in November and December.

Middle East

Samer Attar discusses US inaction in Syria from the perspective of a medical professional on the ground in Aleppo:

Experts who have never set foot inside Syria say nothing can be done. I welcome them to spend one day volunteering in any Syrian field hospital amputating children’s limbs. I encourage them to spend one day with the White Helmet rescue workers digging with bare hands through the rubble for survivors as helicopters drop bombs on them. Then see if they still say nothing can be done.

This is not a call for a U.S.-led invasion of Syria. It is simply a call to protect civilians and the medics who are trying to save them from Bashar al-Assad’s air force. With or without Russia, the United States and its allies must enforce U.N. Security Council resolutions — by grounding the Syrian air force, destroying runways and airfields if necessary, demanding an end to humanitarian sieges and implementing a global response if the Syrian government refuses. There can be no meaningful cease-fire or political solution as long as Syrian jets and helicopters rain hell from the skies.

Arthur Herman believes that the US has beaten the Saudis in the oil war:

Above all, it means America has truly re-emerged as the world’s energy superpower. It’s not at all clear if the Saudi-led decision at the OPEC meeting last week in Algiers to cut production by some 800,000 barrels a day will really push oil prices higher. But either way, the verdict is clear. The Americans have won, and the Saudis have lost, this crucial round of the oil war.

 

Jewish World

For Mosaic’s monthly essay, Hillel Halkin writes about the rivalry between Theodor Herzl and Ahad Ha’am:

It was to prove the most contentious Jewish book review of the century, although the century was but three years old when it appeared. Published in December 1902 in the prestigious Hebrew monthly Hashiloaḥ, Ahad Ha’am’s long, caustic attack on Theodor Herzl’s Zionist-utopian novel Altneuland touched off a furor that did not die down until the following summer, when an even fiercer controversy broke out at the Sixth Zionist Congress.

Yair Rosneberg and Yedidya Schwartz compile a list of interesting Israeli Rabbis you should know:

The individuals below are traditionalists and radicals, artists and activists, of the left and of the right. They are men and women, Mizrahim and Ashkenazim, Ethiopian and American, secular and ultra-Orthodox. And though institutional Israeli Jewry skews Orthodox, the list endeavors to highlight emerging forms of non-Orthodox expression as well.

Together, its members comprise the metaphysical mosaic that makes up the state of Israel, and what it means to be a Jew there today.

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