Tom Roche

Professor Kaldellis' new history of Byzantium is out now in the USA and on Kindle everywhere.

In our second conversation we discuss the adoption of Christianity as the Roman religion. How much did Roman society change as a result? Why was early Christianity so riven with disputes?

We also talk about the function of the law in Roman society. How did it help define individual rights and responsibilities beyond criminal behaviour? 

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Professor Kaldellis' new history of Byzantium is out now in the USA and on Kindle everywhere. He has kindly agreed to talk to us about it across 4 episodes!

In this first conversation we discuss the new Roman government that Constantine established in 330AD. What was the 'personality' of government? How did it achieve legitimacy in the eyes of the people? Was it really a Republican Monarchy? 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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“Have you been surprised at all at how extreme Biden has been in supporting Israel,” we asked Professor Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, “refusing to call for a ceasefire and downplaying the death toll?”

“Short answer,” he responds. “No.”

“I think that what the president said about the Palestinian death toll is absolutely despicable and unforgivable, and requires a public apology by the president himself. When you have, day after day after day after day, the administration harping on Israeli civilian casualties, and you have nine times the number of Palestinian civilian casualties, with the president of the United States disparaging the numbers, it is insulting, demeaning, and repugnant.”

Khalidi continues on to explain that Biden’s actions are not just morally untenable, but politically as well.

“He will lose the support of vast numbers of people. This administration has been beyond Trumpian in its furtherance of every position put forward by the Trump administration, without exception.” Khalidi predicts that if Biden stays on this track, he’ll not only lose the presidency, but also cost the Democrats the House.

“So, was I surprised? No.”

Subscribe to hear the full episode with Professor Khalidi where he responds to a recent Atlantic article claiming that Israel is not a settler colonial project, an important update on the occupied West Bank, and his final answer to the question:

“What should we be fighting for right now?”

Plus, catch this week’s Thursday Throwdown: Israel stuns former Israel lobbyist Wolf Blitzer

And join the Absurd Arena live discussion board with Katie and Wilson every Tuesday at 12pm est in the Substack app.

Watch the full interview here:

Read more

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“The United States fully endorses Israel’s war crimes,” says Greece’s former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis. “Because that’s what it is. When you switch off the water to two and a half million people, by the Geneva Convention that’s a war crime.”

The economist, who shares a European perspective on the war, says that “the West has conspired to ensure a generalized massacre.”

And the real question is “how much Palestinian blood is required to cleanse the hands of Europe?”

As a European, Varoufakis tells us how his continent’s mix of guilt and cowardice are keeping the war fueled. “You have a situation where the European Union simply doesn’t exist anymore as a geopolitical entity, and therefore it simply mimics whatever is coming from Washington DC.”

This wasn’t the case even twenty years ago, but today governments are too afraid to have their own positions. “Even if they secretly oppose what the United States is doing, European presidents and prime ministers are too scared to actually express these disagreements. And that is a major defeat of European democracy.”

So for now, without faith in any government to do what’s right, Yanis Varoufakis encourages the people to take the streets.

“I try to make the point that the protests in favor of Palestinians are also protests of solidarity with our Israeli and Jewish comrades who are suffering immensely under the apartheid regime of Netanyahu.”

Subscribe for the full interview where Varoufakis shares his deep disappointment in Bernie Sanders, the nefarious reasons for NATO’s existence, the disaster that is the war in Ukraine, and a look at his new book Technofeudalism, which posits that capitalism actually ended over a decade ago.

Plus, catch this week’s Thursday Throwdown: John Kirby has no tears and no red lines for Gaza, and Norm Finkelstein destroys his debate partner.

And join the Absurd Arena live discussion board with Katie and Wilson every Tuesday at 12pm est in the Substack app.

Watch the full interview here:

Read more

On September 29 1923, the British Empire reached its geographical zenith, covering a quarter of the world and nearly 500 million people. But in spite of Britain’s triumphalism, Matthew Parker discovers a ruling power be-set by debt and doubt, and on the ground, the sounds of shackles being shrugged off.

Guest:  Matthew Parker, author of ‘One Fine Day – 29 September 1923 – Britain’s Empire on the Brink’, published by Abacus Books. 

Tom Sexton of the Trillbillies podcast joins us to talk some Kentucky, looking at another round of losses for Republicans, and victory for the bluegrass state’s democratic governor Andy Beshear. We go in on the GOP continuing to kill itself by being as cruel and annoying as possible on social issues, while Democrats insist their approval numbers are down because the kids are watching the wrong TikToks. Finally, we check in on Eric Adams and his Turkish Connection.

Find the Trillbillies wherever you get podcasts, on twitter @thetrillbillies, and find their Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty  

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Enlarge / The facility seen in this architect's rendering will not be built. (credit: Idaho National Lab)

Nuclear power provides energy that is largely free of carbon emissions and can play a significant role in helping deal with climate change. But in most industrialized countries, the construction of nuclear plants tends to grossly exceed their budgeted cost and run years over schedule.

One hope for changing that has been the use of small, modular nuclear reactors, which can be built in a centralized production facility and then shipped to the site of their installation. But on Wednesday, the company and utility planning to build the first small, modular nuclear plant in the US announced it was canceling the project.

Going small

Small modular reactors take several steps to potentially cut costs. Their smaller size makes it easier for passive cooling systems to take over in the case of power losses (some designs simply keep their reactors in a pond). It also allows the primary components to be built at a central facility and then shipped to different plant sites, allowing a lot of the manufacturing equipment to be reused for all the sites that use the reactors.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Ryan and Emily discuss abortion and weed winning in Ohio, McConnell ally goes down in Kentucky, Youngkin humiliated in Virginia, Rashida Tlaib censured over pro-Palestine statements, Zelensky begs for credit promising to pay back the US, shocking poll has RFK surging in swing states, and Ryan and Emily preview the third GOP debate tonight. 

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Krystal and Saagar discuss the 3rd GOP Debate's Winners and Losers, Biden endorses Gaza occupation, Insane Combat footage from Gaza, Republicans cope over lost elections, and Tucker is shocked by the right wing hypocrisy over free speech with Palestine.

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We all know about Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” that he won the 2020 election. This is of course laughable, there is nothing in the real world to support Trump’s fantasies of massive voter fraud.

However, there is arguably an even bigger lie that enjoys near universal acceptance in intellectual circles. It is the claim the huge rise in inequality over the last half century was due to market forces.

The usually insightful Peter Coy plays along with this Big Lie in his New York Times column today. Coy lays out the argument of a new NBER paper, by Ilyana Kuziemko, Nicolas Longuet Marx, and Suresh Naidu, that the Democrats have been hurt politically because they adopted a strategy, beginning in the seventies, of compensating losers from market outcomes.

The model of this story is that removing protectionist barriers in a movement towards free trade invariably creates winners and losers. According to standard theory, the winners are supposed to get more than the losers lose, so in principle we can tax the winners and pay the losers and make everyone better off.

The paper argues that this strategy is a political loser because people don’t want to see themselves as beneficiaries of government handouts. It’s also the case that there were never any serious proposals to tax the winners within an order of magnitude of what would be needed to compensate the losers.

However, the more important point, ignored by Coy, is that how we chose to move to “free trade” was itself a political choice. We could have moved to free trade by radically reducing the barriers that prevent doctors and dentists trained in India and other developing countries (or even rich countries) from practicing medicine in the United States. This could have still involved meeting U.S. standards, but medical students could train and test in other countries rather than the United States.

If we had gone this route, our doctors and dentists would likely be paid more in line with what they get in other rich countries, (e.g. around $150,000 a year rather than $350,000 a year) saving us close to $200 billion a year in health care expenses ($1,600 a family). We could have aggressively applied the quest for free trade to all highly paid professions, making highly paid professionals losers and blue collar workers winners.

The same story applies to patent and copyright monopolies. We have made these government-granted monopolies longer and stronger in the last half-century. Our elites have turned language and logic on its head and called these protections “free-trade.” They redistribute massive amounts of income upward, more than $400 billion a year ($3,200 per family) in the case of prescription drugs alone. Democrats have been fully complicit in making these protections longer and stronger, having supported the Bayh-Dole Act (approved under Carter) and a variety of other measures that meant greater protection both domestically and internationally.   

In short, the issue is not just that the Democrats have supported a regime where the winners are supposed to compensate the losers from a “free market.” They have supported structuring the free market in ways that make the working-class losers.  (Yes, this is my book, Rigged [it’s free.])

This means the working-class has very good reasons for not liking the modern Democratic Party, even if the Republicans are no better on this score. But, they won’t let you make these points in the New York Times, it hits too close to home.

The post Democrats Did Not Embark on a Strategy of Compensating the Losers, They Embarked on a Strategy of Making the Working-Class Losers appeared first on Center for Economic and Policy Research.

With the death toll climbing by the hour in Gaza, including over 1000 children, the whole world is wondering if there will be a ceasefire or if a larger war is likely. Rania Khalek asked Osama Hamdan, a senior representative of Hamas located in Lebanon, about what happens next. 

Watch the full interview for free on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/hamas-rep-will-91415177

Listen to the extended version of this interview on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/audio-genocidal-91798227

Israel’s genocide in Gaza has shocked the conscience of the entire world, with an endless flow of videos and images of Palestinian children cut into pieces by American bombs dropped by Israeli warplanes deliberately intended to destroy a civilian population. Despite the explicitly genocidal rhetoric of Israeli officials, Western leaders continue to proclaim their support for Israel’s right to “defend itself.” But this war on Gaza is different from past wars, not only in the level of Israeli aggression, but in the reaction on the street, from the Middle East to the United States. Israel is losing the narrative war. Most people want to see a ceasefire and tens of thousands have protested across the US to demonstrate their opposition to Biden’s unconditional support for this genocide. 

To discuss Israel’s genocidal onslaught in Gaza ahead of a looming ground invasion and how it has the potential to snowball into a catastrophic regional war, Rania Khalek was joined by journalist Abby Martin, creator and host of The Empire Files. 

Watch the extended version of this interview on our Patreon. Become a member at https://www.Patreon.com/BreakthroughNews to access the full episode and other exclusive content.

Watch Abby’s documentary “Gaza Fights For Freedom”:

https://youtu.be/HnZSaKYmP2s?si=deHf3iQYlMetgPy7 

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the tiny drifting organisms in the oceans that sustain the food chain for all the lifeforms in the water and so for the billions of people who, in turn, depend on the seas for their diet. In Earth's development, the plant-like ones among them, the phytoplankton, produced so much oxygen through photosynthesis that around half the oxygen we breathe today originated there. And each day as the sun rises, the animal ones, the zooplankton, sink to the depths of the seas to avoid predators in such density that they appear on ship sonars like a new seabed, only to rise again at night in the largest migration of life on this planet.

With

Carol Robinson Professor of Marine Sciences at the University of East Anglia

Abigail McQuatters-Gollop Associate Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of Plymouth

And

Christopher Lowe Lecturer in Marine Biology at Swansea University

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Juli Berwald, Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone (Riverhead Books, 2018)

Sir Alister Hardy, The Open Sea: The World of Plankton (first published 1959; Collins New Naturalist Library, 2009)

Richard Kirby, Ocean Drifters: A Secret World Beneath the Waves (Studio Cactus Ltd, 2010)

Robert Kunzig, Mapping the Deep: The Extraordinary Story of Ocean Science (Sort Of Books, 2000)

Christian Sardet, Plankton: Wonders of the Drifting World (University of Chicago Press, 2015)

Helen Scales, The Brilliant Abyss: True Tales of Exploring the Deep Sea, Discovering Hidden Life and Selling the Seabed (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2022)

Chief Foreign Policy correspondent Derek Davison returns to the show for updates on Palestine, including discussion of recent videos of Palestinian arms and tactics, the Biden administration’s response to the war, the potential for further regional conflict, and where the new American focus on Israel leaves Ukraine.

Find Derek’s podcast American Prestige at:

Americanprestigepod.com

And find Derek’s newsletter Foreign Exchanges at:

Foreignexchanges.new

fx.substack.com

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Apparently you can get the cops called on you for sieg heiling too loud with your mates...

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Bryce Green and Aaron review the excellent fourth season of Blowback.

Get Blowback Season 4 at the Blowback homepage.

Check out the four classic 9/11 articles from Peter Dale Scott, Aaron Good, and Ben Howard:

• Prequel to Terror: The 9/9 Massoud Assassination
• The Twenty Year Shadow of 9/11: U.S. Complicity in the Terror Spectacle and the Urgent Need to End It
• The Twenty Year Shadow of 9/11: Why Did Key U.S. Officials Protect the Alleged 9/11 Plotters?
• The Twenty Year Shadow of 9/11: U.S. Complicity in the Terror Spectacle and the Urgent Need to End It

Special thanks to Dana Chavarria for producing the episode!

Music: "Feel it Now” by Mock Orange

Andy Zaltzman quizzes the week's news. With him to find the answers to all our problems Daliso Chaponda, Susie McCabe, Bethany Black, and Hugo Rifkind

This week, Andy and the panel discuss the cancellation of the world's most delayed train, a very awkward work event, and the most patient guide dog (such a good boy).

Written by Andy Zaltzman

With additional material by Alice Fraser Cody Dahler and Caroline Mabey

Producer: Sam Holmes Executive Producer: Pete Strauss Production Co-ordinator: Dan Marchini Sound Editor: Giles Aspen

A BBC Studios Production

The ICA writing season is now behind me. I can write about how I write my ICA papers, again. Previously, I wrote about how I prepare ICA papers in 2021. In that post, I said I wrote my ICA papers in RMarkdown over trackdown. Basically, putting the RMarkdown source code on Google Doc.

Now, it’s 2023 and I have another job. I think it’s time to give you an update.

First, I abandon trackdown; and it also means I partially abandon RMarkdown. The new kid Quarto actually has the same problem. Collaboratively writing a Markdown file on Google Doc is simply unnatural. And the workflow actually introduces many issues, for example, Google Doc converts all double quotes to some weird shit like Microsoft Word. It is also the worse of both worlds: It does not have preview of how the paper would look like and it does not run any embedded R code. Both tech and non-tech people are unhappy. For one time, I tried to write one Markdown paper collaboratively on HackMD. HedgeMD/HackMD open source politics aside, writing RMarkdown paper on HackMD was significantly better than trackdown because of the HTML preview. But still, HackMD was worse of one world: It won’t run R code.

To many people, writing paper locally and submitting patches via Git and editing a file via pull requests are just unnatural. There is only one super techie and R savvy person (my team lead David Schoch) who can write papers with me this way (we wrote two papers this way so far). I just can’t nudge my other collaborators to write papers this way. My e-mails about “the paper is available on GitHub too” were usually just a not useful sidenote.

There should be a RMarkdown / Quarto collaborative writing environment that supports code execution. But the fact that RMarkdown formats have been available for almost a decade but no one sees this as a business opportunity bothers me. Look at all those Notebook environments!

I talked to my collaborator Nathan Teblunthuis previously about his writing setup. His advice is “always write in \(\LaTeX\).” Although it sounds like the so-called Atwood’s Law, he has his point. It likes the mantra of Choose Boring Technology. Yeah, \(\LaTeX\) is not as flashy and trendy as any new shit. But it has been available since 1984. You know, the year when the perpetual war between Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia was still going on and that running lady with a hammer did not smash the Telescreen of the Big Brother.

Of course, another reason is Overleaf. It has been the de facto \(\LaTeX\) environment for many fields, including my neighboring field Political Science. So, I decided to write all my ICA papers this year in pure \(\LaTeX\) on Overleaf with my coauthors. And this decision was also opportunistic because all of my coauthors this time are (I believe) tech-savvy.

Overleaf is fine. Of course it is a freemium service ¹. But it is probably the best of two ordinary worlds. At least it has instant rendering and some form of literate programming. Here are the tricks:

Literate programming on Overleaf

Actually, Overleaf supports literate programming in some way. Of course, I can upload my data files to my Overleaf project. If one wants to use literate programming, the \(\LaTeX\) file needs to be in .Rtex file extension. So, just rename my \(\LaTeX\) files to *.Rtex and Overleaf will allow code execution.

The next question is: How the heck can I embed code in those *.Rtex files? Well, I need to use the Sweave…-inspired knitr notation. Isn’t knitr just for RMarkdown / Quarto? Well, it supports \(\LaTeX\) as well.

Inserting a code chunk and inline R code look like this:

<<test, echo = FALSE >>=
mod <- lm(Sepal.Length~Sepal.Width, data = iris)
@

The regression coefficient is \Sexpr{round(coef(mod)[2], 2)}

For this code, I can just render the project and I will get the result. And complex things like ggplot2 also work. The problem, however, is that I cannot install any R package. I must use the ones preinstalled. I recommend running this to get a list of all preinstalled R packages.

<<listpackages, echo = TRUE >>=
dimnames(installed.packages())[1]
@

Actually, there are many packages. Notably, all tidyverse packages and rio (thank you) are available. Even some which I think are potentially dangerous are available too, e.g. fs, ps, and curl. But unfortunately, some packages I like are not available, e.g. here. The point is to be mindful about the limited set of R packages available. For packages not available, I recommend running the analysis locally, saving the output as RDS. And then upload the RDS files and use the literate programming interface to unpack the output in the \(\LaTeX\) source. I would add the R scripts for generating those RDS files to the project too.

From online to offline

The Overleaf project can be brought offline to my computer via Git (a premium feature). Click on the Main Menu and there are GitHub, Git, and Dropbox integration. The Git option gives you the command to clone the current project offline, something like

git clone https://git.overleaf.com/xxxxxxxxxxx

On my local machine, there would be questions about how to render those files like I did online. Suppose the file is called wonderful.Rtex.

Rscript -e "knitr::knit(\"wonderful.Rtex\", output = \"wonderful.tex\")"

Like Rmarkdown, knitr::knit() executes the code chunks and inline R code and generates a clean \(\LaTeX\) file. And that \(\LaTeX\) file can be render by my favorite \(\LaTeX\) renderer. These days, I am getting lazy and I just use latexmk. I usually write a Makefile like this:

appendix:
	Rscript -e "knitr::knit(\"wonderful.Rtex\", output = \"wonderful.tex\")"
	latexmk online_wonderful.tex -pdf
	rm -f *.out *aux *bbl *blg *log *toc *.ptb *.tod *.fls *.fdb_latexmk *.lof *.fff *.run.xml *.bcf *.ttt
	rm wonderful.tex

Another issue is how to edit those .Rtex files offline. RStudio is just a matter of double click. On emacs, I just need to associate the file extension .Rtex to the poly-noweb+r-mode.

(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.Rtex" . poly-noweb+r-mode))

From offline to online

Actually, the Git integration allows me to edit the files offline and then push my edits back to Overleaf. However, this can be problematic because my collaborators might have edited the files via the web interface. And my edits via Git might overwrite my collaborators’ edits.

So, most of the time I just use the web interface. The emacs keybinding on the Overleaf web interface is a joke, don’t use it. Previously, I wrote about using GhostText with Overleaf and edit the text with emacs. Now, It works unreliably. I really hope that it can work again.

For writing from zero, I usually just write my text offline on emacs and then paste it into the file on Overleaf. For editing existing text, I use the web interface.

Conclusion

Despite all these limitations, it is still a usable literature programming online platform. If Overleaf can serve as a gateway drug to nudge people away from using Microsoft Word / Google Doc and all these US big-tech path-dependency bullshit, and embrace open source and computational reproducibility, it is already a good service. I also like the fact that my files are not locked in the platform. So, I think I will support this little uncomfy service. But, dear Overleaf: Please don’t sell your damn company to an evil conglomerate like Elsevier or Springer Nature. Thank you!

After her “solidarity mission” following the October 7 Hamas surprise attack, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul initially declined to say who covered the cost for the journey to Israel. Her administration would only say it was a “nonprofit that works with the Jewish community.”

Last week, Hochul’s office relented, telling reporters that the funder was the UJA-Federation of New York, a Jewish philanthropy that has supported dozens of similar trips for elected officials, including, recently, New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Citing a delay in a state ethics office review, Hochul’s office said it would cover the $12,000 cost after all. 

UJA-Federation of New York belongs to a sprawling network of tax-exempt charities under the umbrella of the Jewish Federations of North America, or JFNA. In addition to funding Jewish community groups, federation chapters have also been accused of sending millions in tax-exempt dollars to organizations that support Israel’s illegal settlement program in the occupied West Bank. According to published reports and an Intercept review of recent tax filings, UJA itself has provided more than half a million dollars since 2018 to groups that support Israeli settlements. 

The arrangement has come under scrutiny in recent years for funneling publicly subsidized money to settlements in Israel that are considered to be illegal under international law, part of Israel’s increasingly successful efforts to foreclose the possibility of a contiguous future Palestinian state.

Eva Borgwardt, the national spokesperson for the American Jewish anti-occupation group IfNotNow, said that funding settlements diminishes hopes for peace between Palestinians and Israelis. 

“The UJA has helped destroy any semblance of a ‘peace process’ or possibility of a two state solution.”

“The UJA has helped destroy any semblance of a ‘peace process’ or possibility of a two state solution, instead deepening a violent apartheid reality for Palestinians with no end in sight,” Borgwardt told The Intercept. While funding groups operating in settlements, UJA has not supported efforts to de-escalate the current war, Borgwardt said: “If the UJA and Governor Hochul are concerned about safety for Israelis and hostage returns, they should join us in calling for an immediate ceasefire, release of the hostages, a de-escalation, and an end to the conditions of occupation, apartheid and siege that led to the current nightmare.”

In response to questions about the trip and UJA’s funding of groups operating in or supporting settlements, Hochul’s office sent a statement shared with reporters last week. The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment or questions about the payment arrangement for the trip. 

While JFNA, the umbrella group, has in the past said it has a policy not to fund investments in the occupied Palestinian territories, individual federations have said they don’t have guidelines for distinguishing grants made over the so-called Green Line that demarcates Israel’s internationally recognized borders.

“Jewish Federations’ long-standing policy is that we do not allocate funds for capital investments beyond the Green Line,” JFNA, the umbrella group, said in a statement. “We are also adamant that the incredible support we provide for humanitarian aid, medical assistance, helping victims of terror, and building a stronger, more tolerant, and more accepting civil society should not be denied to those who may need it based on their address.”

In many cases, the cash goes to groups that carry out activities on both sides of the so-called Green Line, including groups that do humanitarian work, with the destination of funds sometimes reported in tax filings and other times not. Grants to groups that work on both sides of the Green Line defray other costs, enabling greater resources to flow into settlements or supporting their expansion.

UJA has directed funds to a wide array of groups in Israel. Among them are organizations promoting Arab–Israeli cooperation and supporting Arab inclusion in Israeli society. The group has also given to Zionist educational and policy organizations. Many recipients of UJA cash are not involved in the settlements, but the group has also donated money to organizations, both in Israel and stateside, that support and participate in the settlement project. (UJA did not respond to a request for comment.)

Since 2018, UJA has given sums totaling in the six figures to groups supporting settlement activity in the West Bank, according to media reports, UJA reports, and tax filings. Through JFNA, New York’s UJA gave nearly $23,000 last year to Ohr Torah Stone, a modern Orthodox Jewish movement founded in the West Bank settlement of Efrat and operates schools in settlements.

The group gave at least $105,000 to Nefesh B’Nefesh, a group that promotes American immigration to Israel and has encouraged migrants to move to the West Bank. American Friends of Or National Missions, a New York-based nonprofit that helps expand existing settlements in Israel and establish new ones in the West Bank, received $45,000 from UJA, earmarked for information centers in the Negev and Galilee, areas inside the Green Line. And, in 2019, the group gave $10,000 to the Jewish National Fund, which has financed settlement activity for decades and purchased land from Palestinians to hand it to settlers.

And UJA has donated at least $350,000 to Kedma, earmarked for “building resilience in the Gaza envelope,” an area inside Israel’s internationally recognized border that abuts the occupied Gaza Strip. Kedma provides housing for gap year students, including in Israeli settlements, and administers scholarship and volunteer programs. Among the volunteering tasks, according to Haaretz, is working security for ranches used by settlers to seize large swaths of land for so-called hilltop settlements — those considered illegal even under Israeli law.

In recent weeks, ideological settlers in the West Bank, emboldened by the Israeli government’s response to Hamas’s deadly surprise attack and armed with state-issued rifles, have killed at least 100 Palestinians and displaced at least 13 entire communities.

The roughly 150 independent U.S. nonprofits under the umbrella of the Jewish Federations of North America came under heightened scrutiny after a 2017 Haaretz investigation revealed that some had sent millions of effectively subsidized dollars to settlements, including to extremist settler groups in the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. 

While most federation funds are spent within the United States, the federations have historically also donated around 10 percent or more of their disbursed funds to Israel, both directly and through other U.S. nonprofits that route the money to Israel. Local federations gave at least $6 million to Israeli settlements between 2012 and 2015, Haaretz reported.

The transfer of millions of tax-exempt dollars to settlements in Palestine through private U.S. foundations has raised questions among nonprofit, legal, and foreign policy experts. The U.S., for its part, officially opposes Israeli settlements and their expansion, though the donations are thought to not run afoul of laws governing tax-exempt charities.

Local leaders have tried to stem the flow of private cash to the settlements. In May, New York State Assembly member Zohran Mamdani and Sen. Jabari Brisport, both Democrats, introduced the Not on Our Dime Act to prohibit nonprofits in New York from supporting Israeli settlement activity. The proposal would empower the state attorney general to impose penalties on violators. The bill was met with stiff opposition from the legislators’ Democratic colleagues.

Overall, charities in the U.S. funneled more than $220 million in tax-exempt money to settler organizations in Israel between 2009 and 2013, another Haaretz investigation found. Funds to Israel were transferred through some 50 U.S.-based organizations, including the Hebron Fund and the New York-based Central Fund of Israel.

Federations under the JFNA umbrella haven’t always been able to support West Bank settlements. In the 2000s, the group changed its rules to allow federations to send humanitarian aid to any Israelis, opening the door for local chapters to funnel millions past the Green Line that separates Israel’s internationally recognized territory from occupied Palestinian lands. Since then, as settlers have forced more and more Palestinians out of their homes and off their land, the JFNA has relaxed other restrictions on operations in the West Bank.

In June, JFNA and the UJA-Federation, among other organizations, co-sponsored a conference in New York City promoting Israeli settlements, The Forward reported. The event featured Israeli ministers, Zionist leaders, and heads of settlement councils, who partook in panels on how to spread the Israeli presence in the West Bank.

In 2016, JFNA’s board voted to allow federation-sponsored trips to visit West Bank settlements. Between 2014 and 2021, UJA-Federation also gave at least $12 million to Birthright programs, which have been criticized for regularly taking participants into Israeli-occupied territories without notifying them, including the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Golan Heights, whose annexation from Syria is not internationally recognized. (JFNA told The Forward it had not seen a copy of the conference programming before agreeing to take part.)

During Adams’s UJA-Federation-organized excursion, he met with Yisrael Gantz, chair of the Binyamin Regional Council, which governs roughly 50 Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. The visit drew criticisms, including from liberal pro-Israel advocacy organization J Street.

The UJA-Federation is a “partner” organization and the primary funder of another Israel excursion-sponsoring organization: the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York. The council has taken over 1,500 public officials on “study tours” to Israel, according to its website. On the trips, Israeli military representatives accompany participants on visits to “strategic locales,” like the West Bank “Security Barrier” and a town near the Gaza Strip. The junkets also frequently venture into the West Bank beyond the wall, including Efrat, a purportedly “liberal” settlement where nearly half of the residents voted for an extremist far-right party last year.

The trips have shaped elected officials’ politics. Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y. — one of Congress’s most aggressive Israel backers, including strident support of the ongoing Israeli military campaign that has killed more than 8,000 Palestinians in Gaza — credits his views on Israel–Palestine to a 2015 trip he took as a city council member. The trip was co-organized by the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York and UJA-Federation.

“There’s a false narrative that I am pro-Israel because of ‘the Jewish lobby’ or ‘Jewish money’ or whatever antisemitic tropes critics wish to invoke,” Torres, whose top campaign contributor is America’s flagship Israel lobby group, tweeted on Tuesday. “Left unmentioned is the fact that I have been pro-Israel for nearly a decade—long before I ever thought of running for Congress.”

While smearing critics of his pro-Israel positions as antisemitic and racist, Torres cited the trip paid for by the two New York charities.

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