The U.S. conversation on Israel is changing, no matter Biden’s stance .. By Ishaan Tharoor

For his part, Biden has issued a number of statements urging deescalation and defending Israel’s right to defend itself, while equivocating over the wrongs of violence on both sides. At the United Nations Security Council, the United States once more shielded Israel from any form of meaningful censure by blocking a statement calling for a ceasefire. Appearing on both Israeli and American television on Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signaled that his country was not ready to halt military operations no matter the mounting international outrage over its perceived excesses.

A predawn Israeli strike Sunday on the besieged territory killed 42 people, including 10 children, according to health officials in Gaza. Israeli bombardments have now killed at least 192 people in Gaza, including 58 children, since hostilities flared last week. Hamas and other militant factions in Gaza have launched more than 3,000 rockets into Israeli territory, according to the Israeli Defense Forces — nearly three-quarters the number fired during the 2014 Gaza war, in just a fraction of the time. Israel’s sophisticated defense systems have thwarted the bulk of these attacks, but at least 10 people have died in Israel in rocket attacks. Violence has also spread to the West Bank and to cities within Israel’s 1948 borders.

Israel justified its hitting of hundreds of targets in Gaza as a necessary response to the threat posed by Hamas, which is firing its munitions indiscriminately into Israeli territory. But its assault has yet again led to a high Palestinian civilian death toll and destroyed critical infrastructure, homes and high-rises — including offices used by international media outlets. Thousands of Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced in recent days in the cramped territory, where many residents belong to families forced to flee their homes and villages in 1948 by Israeli forces and paramilitaries. Around the world this weekend, Palestinian commemorations of the “Nakba,” or the “catastrophe” of their original dispossession more than seven decades ago, were deepened by the new traumas of the past week.

In Washington, support for the Palestinian plight is getting louder in Congress. On Friday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote a widely circulated New York Times op-ed pulling the spotlight away from Hamas’s provocations to the deeper reality of life for millions of Palestinians living under blockade and occupation. He pointed to the havoc unleashed in recent weeks by rampaging mobs of Jewish extremists in Jerusalem, as well as the questionable Israeli legal attempts to forcibly evict the Palestinian residents of a neighborhood in the contested holy city.

“None of this excuses the attacks by Hamas, which were an attempt to exploit the unrest in Jerusalem, or the failures of the corrupt and ineffective Palestinian Authority, which recently postponed long-overdue elections,” Sanders wrote. “But the fact of the matter is that Israel remains the one sovereign authority in the land of Israel and Palestine, and rather than preparing for peace and justice, it has been entrenching its unequal and undemocratic control.”

In another era, Sanders would have cut a lonely figure among his colleagues. But he is not alone. A number of Democratic lawmakers, including solidly pro-Israel politicians, issued statements indicating their displeasure with the casualties caused by Israel’s attacks in Gaza. Others were more vocal, accusing Israel of “apartheid” — a charge made in recent months by prominent human rights groups, but which in Washington used to be taboo.

Bipartisan support for Israel still endures, but analysts say the ground is perceptibly shifting. A new focus on Palestinian rights — as opposed to the long-deferred aim of Palestinian statehood — may mean more people will view the conflict through a clearer social justice frame. “We must recognize that Palestinian rights matter,” Sanders wrote. “Palestinian lives matter.”

It also serves as a particularly thorny test for a Biden administration that has insisted upon championing human rights on the world stage. “U.S. foreign policy has always been good at managing inconsistency and hypocrisy, but being so out on a limb and so far from these professed commitments and values when it comes to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians exposes the U.S. government to vulnerabilities that can easily be exploited by others,” wrote Daniel Levy and Zaha Hassan in Foreign Policy. “It’s not hard to imagine the refrain in Beijing: ‘You say Uyghurs, we say Palestinians.’” (China accused the United States of not shouldering “its due responsibilities” at the Security Council this weekend.)

Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, a center-left pro-Israel advocacy organization that increasingly reflects the mainstream position of American liberals, said in a briefing with reporters last week that the “diplomatic blank check to the state of Israel” given out by successive U.S. administrations has meant that “Israel has no incentive to end occupation and find a solution to the conflict.”

President Donald Trump’s close alliance with Netanyahu may have helped erode the once ironclad bipartisan consensus around Israel. But many Democrats are also waking up to how Trump’s predecessors, including Biden himself during the Obama years, did not stop the steady expansion of Israeli settlements or impose any costs on Israel for undermining the prospects of a viable Palestinian state. The United States “must remain committed to Israel’s security,” said Ben-Ami, “but it also should recognize that … it’s facilitating the ongoing annexation of Palestinian territory and cementing a permanent one-state reality.”

The change in attitudes isn’t just reflected within the Democratic party. A slim majority of Americans now believe the U.S. government should exert more pressure on Israel, according to a Gallup poll this year. Shibley Telhami, a political scientist at the University of Maryland who has spent the past three decades polling American views of the conflict, has found that a majority of Americans surveyed believe their lawmakers lean more toward Israel than the U.S. public.

According to Telhami’s research, a majority of Democratic voters support imposing sanctions or at least some form of tougher measures on Israel over its expansion of settlements. If a two-state solution were no longer possible, a large majority of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, would choose a democratic Israel, even if it would no longer be a Jewish state, over a Jewish state without full equality for all its citizens.

Biden, for now, is not one of them. “On social and racial issues, Biden has evolved over the years, closer to his Democratic constituents,” Telhami told Today’s WorldView. “On Israel-Palestine, he’s been a throwback to another era of Democratic political culture, and out of touch with the transformed environment and with the Democratic constituency that elected him.”

Talking Points

• A court in Cameroon sentenced a transgender social media influencer to five years in prison. Her crime: wearing feminine clothing. The case has put a spotlight on the growing practice in Cameroon of jailing people whose gender expressions break the norm.

• China successfully landed a rover-carrying spacecraft on Mars for the first time. It marks another major victory for the country’s ambitious space program, which aims to rival NASA.

• A British soccer final became a much-scrutinized science experiment. Fans who filed into Wembley Stadium for the FA Cup final on Saturday may have been there for the soccer, but they were also providing data that could guide how to reopen society as the pandemic loosens its grip.

• In case you missed it: Unrest in the West Bank turned deadly on Friday when Israeli forces fired on protesters, killing at least 11. The Post’s Adam Taylor examines the Hamas tunnel network and Israel’s strategy of “mowing the grass.” And my colleagues show how the density of the Gaza Strip makes civilian casualties there virtually inevitable.

Top of The Post

Viewpoints

China’s repression of Uyghurs is not only cultural, but also physical, a new report shows By The Washington Post Editorial Board ●  Read more »

Drag commodity traders out of the shadows By Javier Blas and Jack Farchy | The New York Times ●  Read more »

No one is coming to help the Palestinians By Kim Ghattas | The Atlantic ●  Read more »

Rural peril

A woman with covid-19 symptoms is isolated on a cot outside her room. (Photo by Niha Masih/The Washington Post)

BANAIL, India — The illness traveled silently through the narrow lanes of this prosperous village in Uttar Pradesh, infecting both young and old. People complained of fevers, cough and breathlessness. Then they began to die.

Vipin Kumar, a farmer in his 40s, was one of them. After his breathing became labored, his family was advised to rush him to a big city 25 miles away — a formidable task the family could not manage, according to his son, Devendra. That evening, on May 10, his body began to shake violently and he died soon after.

The story of Banail has been playing out in villages across India as the virus continues its deadly surge: Rural areas, where over 65 percent of India’s 1.3 billion people live, had been spared in the first wave of the pandemic but are now facing devastating numbers of infections. Health-care infrastructure in villages is ill-equipped. India’s rural health-care system has far fewer specialist doctors than needed. Low levels of awareness among villagers about coronavirus prevention and a slow vaccine rollout has added to worries.

At the center of this crisis is the state of Uttar Pradesh, home to 230 million people. This week, dozens of bodies have been found floating in India’s holy Ganges river in Uttar Pradesh and its adjoining state, raising fears that corpses of coronavirus patients are being cast into the river because crematoriums are overwhelmed.

“He would have been alive if there had been medical facilities here,” said Bimla Devi, Kumar’s sister, breaking into tears. “This was not his age to die.” — Niha Masih

Read on: India’s coronavirus crisis spreads to its villages, where health care is hard to find

1,000 Words

Sana’a al-Kulak spent the night under the rubble, struggling to breathe, her leg trapped. About five hours after Israeli airstrikes flattened their home, al-Kulak, 56, and her 24-year-old son, Mohammed, were pulled out by rescuers. She soon learned that her husband, their two sons, a daughter, daughter-in-law and a one-year-old grandchild had all been killed, alongside at least 11 other family members. They had lived across two four-story buildings in Gaza’s Wehda Street, which were reduced to rubble early Sunday. Forty-two people, including 16 women and 10 children, were killed in the predawn strikes, according to Gaza health authorities, the deadliest incident in the current round of violence between Israel and Hamas. (Mohammed Saber/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)