Hailing from the village of Hijja in the northern West Bank, the 22-year-old Masalha would frequently cross into Israel without a permit in search of work opportunities. On March 8, 2016, he carried out a stabbing attack in Jaffa, injuring 10 and killing an American tourist, Taylor Force, before himself being killed by the police officer. The killing would change the course of relations between the United States and the Palestinian Authority, the self-governing body that was established in 1994, as a result of the Oslo Accords, to rule over the occupied Palestinian territories.

Force, 28, was a West Point graduate who had served in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the time of his death, he was a first-year student at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management. Force was visiting Israel as part of a Vanderbilt trip to meet with start-up companies and learn about global entrepreneurship.

Some observers of the Middle Eastern conflict, however, see the new law as another step taken by Israel and its backers to make sure that the Palestinian self-rule government cannot give support to those Palestinians who, in any way, resist occupation and end up in prison for it.

“This decision shows that the U.S. prioritizes its interests and its strategic pact with Israel over human rights,” said Hasan Safadi, the local media officer for Addameer, a rights organization based in the occupied West Bank that supports Palestinian prisoners. “All this law attempts to do is label Palestinians who protect themselves, their lands, and homes as terrorists or criminals.”

In other words, Safadi said, rather than assuming the role of an impartial mediator, the U.S. is stripping Palestinians of their right to resist occupation in any form.

As a free-standing law, however, the Taylor Force Act applies to all relevant U.S. funding for the Palestinians, not only amounts approved in the current fiscal year. It also impacts funds in the pipeline that were appropriated in previous years. Unlike the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act, it doesn’t have to be renewed annually and will remain the law of the land until it’s repealed.

The Taylor Force Act was originally introduced by the pro-Israel stalwart Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., in 2016; Force’s parents, Robbi and Stuart Force, live on Kiawah Island, South Carolina, and are Graham’s constituents. As a rider to this year’s appropriations act, it received strong bipartisan backing in both houses of Congress, passing 256-167 in the House and 65-32 in the Senate.

“Passage of the Taylor Force Act will serve as a shot across the bow to President Abbas, as he must be held accountable for the Palestinian Authority’s record of incitement and subsidizing of terror,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a statement shortly before the bill was signed. “It is my hope that by enacting this bill we can put an end to the Palestinian Authority’s disturbing practice all while honoring the memory and sacrifice of Taylor Force.”

“This is the sort of thing where either you get behind it, or you hemorrhage political capital over it.”

In the amendments process, some humanitarian exceptions were included, such as payments made to the East Jerusalem Hospital Network; assistance for wastewater projects, capped at $5 million per fiscal year; and programs that provide vaccinations to children, not exceeding a half-million dollars in any one fiscal year. Funds supporting the Palestinian Authority’s security cooperation with Israel will also be unaffected.

“I don’t envy a responsible, thoughtful member of Congress who’s faced with this kind of legislation,” Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, told The Intercept. She said that tying it to the tragic murder of an American citizen was extremely effective tactic for the bill’s proponents to use: Members of Congress who might have challenged the principle of the bill would have been accused of defending terrorism. “This is the sort of thing where either you get behind it, or you hemorrhage political capital over it.”

According to Friedman, the law is not about money or fighting terror. It’s about rolling back the approach toward Palestinians to the 1980s, before the Madrid negotiations that began the peace process with Israel — “when the word ‘Palestinian,’” said Friedman, “was code for ‘terrorist.’”

As of April 2018, there are 6,036 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli detention centers, mostly men, according to Addameer. Their imprisonment affects the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, said Safadi: “This law is a form of collective punishment on the children who seek to go to school and go on about their lives, as well as the wives of those prisoners who are definitely experiencing increased hardship, with the breadwinner of the family gone.”

“This law is a form of collective punishment on the children who seek to go to school and go on about their lives, as well as the wives of those prisoners.”

Monetary and institutional support for prisoners is anchored in Palestinian law. Over the past several years, subsidies to prisoners, those killed or injured by Israel, and their families have amounted to roughly 7 percent of the Palestinian Authority’s overall budget, according to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, a right-wing Israeli think tank.

The Palestinian statute that calls for the payments, Law No. 14 on Aid for Prisoners in Israeli Prisons, dates back to 2004. Amended Palestinian Prisoners Law No. 19, also from 2004, guarantees prisoners and their families “a dignified life” by allocating a monthly salary to prisoners and exempting them from payments for services such as health insurance and university tuition. Decree Law No. 1, enacted in 2013, expands on the rights of prisoners and prioritizes them in annual job placements across all the authority’s institutions.

Around the time the two earlier laws were enacted, shortly after the uprising known as the Second Intifada, Israel stopped providing basic needs for Palestinian political prisoners and shifted to a canteen system. According to Safadi, prisoners have since spent their stipend on essentials such as food and clothing in prison. Families of prisoners can barely make ends meet, he said, and are more likely to end up with debt by the time a prisoner is released.

The very cooperation between Israeli authorities and the Palestinian payment system belies some of the objections, said Friedman, of the Foundation for Middle East Peace. “We have Congress legislating that this money is illegitimate and represents the ill-gotten gains for terrorism,” she said, “and yet you have the Israeli prison system with the canteen actively working with the Palestinian system.”

The funds, in a roundabout way, help Palestinians fund their own oppression by the Israeli state. Safadi said, “By accepting to pay prisoners stipends, the PA helped Israel deny its responsibilities for those prisoners.”

Legally, the Palestinian Authority defines prisoners as “anyone incarcerated in the occupation’s prisons for his participation in the struggle against the occupation.” It doesn’t distinguish between violent and nonviolent resistance, or clearly point out which acts were targeted at civilians.

According to Qaddoura Fares, head of the Palestinian Prisoners Association, these distinctions are unnecessary, “because the families have no share in the blame. The way we see it, we’re spending money on the family, not the prisoner. What if someone with 10 children decided to kill Trump and was convicted? Will the U.S. government let his family end up in the street? Or are they not entitled to social welfare?”

What makes it difficult to distinguish Palestinian perpetrators who have committed serious offenses from others is not ambiguity in Palestinian law, but the oppressive court system in Israel, according to Mia Swart, a visiting fellow at Brookings Doha Center and research director for the Human Sciences Research Council. Palestinians are often arrested and detained without trial. If they do get a trial, it’s in an Israeli military court under separate justice mechanisms “which are by no means fair,” Swart said. “It’s an incredible double standard.”

The Palestinian Authority has already stopped paying salaries for political prisoners associated with Hamas — the rival to Abbas’s ruling Fatah party — even though those prisoners often find themselves accused of similar acts, according to Swart.

The Taylor Force Act doesn’t discriminate between attackers who purposefully targeted civilians and other Palestinians who receive subsidies.

The high proportion of Palestinians held as political prisoners is an important aspect of the debate, Swart added, because many of them are being loosely associated with certain acts or are arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Taylor Force Act doesn’t discriminate between attackers who purposefully targeted civilians and other Palestinians who receive subsidies, and who might be victims of human rights abuses such as unjust detention. “To say that the Palestinian Authority should turn its back on many of those men who are arrested for not committing any crime whatsoever, I think would be seriously problematic from a human rights perspective,” said Swart.

According to Friedman, the new law is only the beginning. In a late-2017 summary of the proposed law, Friedman wrote, “It will open the door for calls for the U.S. to apply anti-terror laws to the PA – likely the real objective of many of those who pushed this issue from the start.”

“I told my children, we were struck by fire and we must endure the heat,” said Mohammad Masalha, Bashar’s father. “What Bashar brought upon us is a scorching fire.”

“I told my children, we were struck by fire and we must endure the heat. What Bashar brought upon us is a scorching fire.”

After Masalha’s attack in 2016, Israel demolished the family’s home. According to Mohammad Masalha, the Palestinian Authority has subjected the family to humiliation and residents of the village started distancing themselves from the family.

In 2017, the Palestinian intelligence services accused Mohammad Masalha’s eldest son, Alaa, of joining and accepting payments from Hamas. “But we haven’t taken a single shekel, not from Hamas and not from Fatah,” said Mohammad Masalha.

In January, Palestinian security forces came knocking at Alaa’s door again, accusing him of wanting to sell land to Jewish settlers, which is a criminal offense under Palestinian Authority statutes. Alaa has been in administrative detention since, held without charge.

His detention has been particularly hard on the family, said Mohammad Masalha, because Alaa was the person looking out for them since Bashar Masalha’s attack. A lawyer by trade, Alaa put a roof over their heads after Israel demolished their house.

“Instead of standing by us and supporting us, the Authority is holding us accountable,” Mohammad Masalha said. “It’s using us to make a point and say, ‘Look at how things turned out for the martyr’s family.’”

Top photo: Palestinians hold portraits of relatives jailed in Israeli prisons as they protest to demand for their release during a demonstration to mark Prisoners’ Day in the northern West Bank city of Nablus on April 17, 2018.

The post U.S. Law Cutting Aid to Palestinians Punishes Any and All Resistance to Israeli Occupation appeared first on The Intercept.

What made the move so unusual is that there is already a Democrat safely in the seat.

In a year defined by fierce resistance to President Donald Trump, the move marked the most aggressive challenge to a sitting Democrat this cycle, because it wasn’t organized by groups that have been set up specifically to challenge Democrats from the left, but rather by ones that often support those who’ve already been elected, while training their fire instead on Republicans.

The groups broadly come from the activist wing of the party that is comfortable working with establishment Democrats, if at occasionally an arms-length distance: NARAL Pro-Choice America, the Human Rights Campaign, MoveOn.org, Democracy for America, and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. The five joined Daily Kos, which had previously endorsed Newman.

As a signal of how significant the move was, take note of who did not join in the endorsement: Planned Parenthood, EMILY’s List, or organized labor.

The latter absence is not hard to explain, as Rep. Dan Lipinski, D-Ill., much like his father before him, has long commanded the loyalty of unions in the district, who are closely tied to the party machinery, a machine that can still move a lot of ground in the state. “We’ve been gunning for Lipinski for something like 10 years now, and until organized labor abandons him, it’s always an uphill slog. But he certainly has no business being a Democrat and would love to see Newman catch fire,” Markos Moulitsas, head of Daily Kos, told The Intercept.

But for Planned Parenthood and EMILY’s List, the abstention is a window into the power of incumbency and the influence of the national Democratic Party.

The letter “D” might come after Lipinski’s name, but he doesn’t vote like a Democrat in 2017. Anti-choice, skeptical of LGBT rights, and often on the side of anti-immigrant efforts, Lipinski’s record is far out of step with his district, which went for Bernie Sanders by roughly eight points in the Democratic primary, and to Hillary Clinton by about 16 points in the 2016 general election.

On paper, there is no question which candidate EMILY’s List or Planned Parenthood would be supporting in a straight-up race between a pro-choice, progressive woman and an anti-choice, conservative man. Newman knows the 3rd District well; she was raised in Palos Park, attended Carl Sandburg High School, and currently resides in La Grange with her husband and two children. She comes from a corporate background and made her career as a marketing professional, but she became a rights advocate and formed a nationwide coalition of anti-bullying nonprofits after her child, who is transgender, was bullied at school. More recently, Newman met with state and federal lawmakers to discuss gun control, as part of her work with Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.

EMILY’s List is specifically dedicated to electing pro-choice women and didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment on its decision not to back Newman. Erica Sackin, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said that the organization has yet to make decisions on 2018 elections, but did not look fondly on the record of Lipinski. “It’s essential to elect people who will be champions for reproductive health and rights,” she said in a statement. “We’ve seen over the years that Rep. Dan Lipinski has not been a champion for women or women’s rights, and in fact has only a 23 percent voting record rating from the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.”

But the race is not fought on paper, but rather in the world in which taking on the establishment and losing can come with payback. “I’d welcome their support,” Newman told The Intercept.

Just how dramatic those consequences would be for EMILY’s List is not obvious, however. The fact that NARAL and HRC, which often work closely with establishment Democrats, are willing to challenge Lipinski openly suggests that party leadership is not going to war to defend Lipinski, who couples his conservative politics with an abrasive personality. If Lipinski loses his primary, the party is no worse off, as Newman would easily win the general election.

The calculation for Planned Parenthood is different, as the Illinois machine controls some of the purse strings that keeps the organization funded. And that machine has been good in Illinois on abortion rights. In a move that was seen as a way to box in Republican Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner, Democratic state House Speaker Mike Madigan pushed the most progressive pro-choice bill in the country on to the governor’s desk. If he signed it, he’d get a primary from the right, and if he vetoed it, Democrats would use it to crush him. He signed it and got a primary.

Madigan was a longtime ally of Lipinski’s father and is tight with the younger Lipinski, as well, whose career he is partly responsible for. Lipinski became a member of Congress in 2005, when he inherited his father Bill Lipinski’s public service career. He is staunchly opposed to providing federal funding for abortions and has continuously voted against including abortion coverage in qualified health care plans. This was partly the reason why he was the only Illinois Democrat who voted against the Affordable Care Act in 2010, even though he is currently one of Obamacare’s public defenders. Most recently, he supported a bill that would criminalize abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

“Congressman Lipinski is way out of touch with the values of his district. He used his position in Congress to advance an anti-choice, anti-LGBT, anti-immigrant agenda,” said James Owen, NARAL states communications director.

If a member of Congress is out of step with his district, one way to remedy it is to change the district. In the 2010 redistricting, controlled by the Illinois machine, Lipinski swapped some of his voters out for new ones. Rep. Luis Gutiérrez, a fellow Illinois Democrat, watched it happen. “All of a sudden, one day I woke up and I saw the 2011 map that I was going to run in 2012 under, and I said, ‘Whoa! What happened to Bucktown? Wicker Park? What happened to all my inner-city folks? All of a sudden I have cul-de-sacs, I have Brookfield Zoo, I have southern suburbs. Doesn’t sound like part of a Hispanic congressional district, right?” Gutiérrez said. “But I guess the question is, why did he jettison them?”

The answer is simple: to make his district more conservative and fend off a primary challenge from the left. In a redistricting that affected a number of different members of Congress, Lipinski gave up white, lefty enclaves like Brookfield and Riverside in exchange for more conservative white voters. “He gerrymandered it to suit his very far-right, radical needs,” is how Newman put it.

Whether Newman can pull it off will likely depend not just on national progressive groups and the power of the local machine, but in how active the local immigrant rights community decides to get.

Lipinski has a deplorable record on the issue, in a community dominated by immigrants both recent — a third of the district is Latino — and less recent, like those from Poland. While Lipinski has major labor groups locked down, the Hispanic American Labor Council has gotten behind Newman. Gutiérrez, who represents the 4th District in Illinois and is outspoken on immigration issues, told The Intercept he’s “definitely going to sit down with the challenger.”

“Lipinski on a whole array of issues is outside the mainstream of the Democratic Party,” he said.

On immigration, Lipinski has voted yes to building a fence along the Mexican border and voted against the DREAM Act in 2010. But then in July, he co-sponsored a bill that would protect the recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program from deportation.

Lipinski voted against government recognition of same-sex marriage and was the only Democrat to co-sponsor legislation that would have allowed businesses to discriminate against LGBT people based on their religious beliefs.

Lipinski hasn’t responded to The Intercept’s interview requests but told The Hill that his voting record is “very much in line” with his district. The suburbs in the southwest side of Chicago tend to vote conservative, according to Dick Simpson, a political science professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and former Chicago alderman.

In March, frustrated constituents organized a town hall meeting and aired their grievances at a cardboard cutout of Lipinski. Newman told The Intercept that without polling or surveying his constituents, Lipinski “has no idea what his district wants.”

The Illinois primary race is surfacing as “a battle for the soul of the Democratic party,” according to Kate Sweeney, press secretary of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.

“There is this belief that the way forward for the Democratic Party runs through going moderate, or supporting corporate issues, or doing for Republicans more than you do for Democrats. It’s a broken translation. It’s false. We saw in Virginia just a month ago that you can engage a whole new generation of voters by really putting economic populism at the center of your campaigns,” she said.

But going against Lipinski will be an uphill battle for Newman. Lipinski’s campaign has $1.5 million cash on hand, to Newman’s $97,600. The odds are also in his favor: Incumbents have a 90 percent re-election rate.

Newman said she has spoken with 40 or 50 unions and that while some unions will continue backing Lipinski, “ultimately some of them will end positively with me.” Even though Newman seems like a more logical candidate for labor unions, they wouldn’t want Lipinski as an opponent, because of his powerful position in Congress, particularly on transportation issues.

Newman told The Intercept she has received support and mentorship from individuals within the Democratic Party, but no financial support from the party as a whole. Both Lipinski’s father and son were supported by the Chicago Democratic machine, which puts in precinct workers who go door to door and make sure Democratic voters show up and elect their chosen candidate. It’s in the Illinois Democratic establishment’s interest to support Lipinski, because his congressional district controls a lot of the southwest side wards that Rahm Emanuel would need to secure another term as mayor.

When asked if there might be repercussions to coming out against the establishment-backed Democrat, Neil Sroka of Democracy for America said he doubted it. “I think if the national Democrats are smart, they’ll stay the hell away from this race, because few representatives in Congress more poorly reflect where the Democrats are right now than Dan Lipinski,” he said.

Newman added an additional reason that progressive groups might want to get behind her: she plans to win. “Never bet against Marie Newman,” she said. “Don’t do it.”

Update: Dec. 12, 2017
This story was updated to include comment from Planned Parenthood Action Fund. 

Top photo: Rep. Dan Lipinski, D-Ill., and fellow Democratic members of Congress hold a news conference to voice their opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal at the U.S. Capitol on June 10, 2015 in Washington, D.C.

The post A Primary Challenge to a Right-Wing Democrat in Illinois Divides the Resistance appeared first on The Intercept.