In posthumous interview, progressive stalwart Barney Frank issues final warning on Israel |
JTA — Barney Frank, for years the progressive conscience of his party, who died on Tuesday night, had one last piece of advice for Democrats as he entered hospice care earlier this month: Repudiate litmus tests — except for Israel.
The United States should cut off weapons sales to Israel as long as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not relieve Palestinian suffering, Frank told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency this month, using his imminent death to state bluntly what he believed other Democrats could not.
“It’s what the Democrats should be doing, it’s what America should be doing, and it should be what the Democrats are advocating, is giving an ultimatum that [Netanyahu] either changes things substantially in Gaza and the West Bank, or we cut off any aid,” the onetime congressional powerhouse said in a May 8 phone call from his home in Ogunquit, Maine.
“I’ve been talking about the importance of repudiating positions from the left and from the far left, but the Israel one is almost 180 degrees” different, he said. “It’s the one area where we are not doing enough in terms of making our position clear.”
Jewish lawmakers criticizing Netanyahu’s Israel was extraordinary a decade or so ago, but has become commonplace. Frank’s plea, however, came from a lawmaker who grew up in a Zionist household and who was throughout a decades-long career in the US House of Representatives solidly pro-Israel, albeit with occasional deviations from the pro-Israel lobby’s orthodoxy.
In one of his final interviews, he acknowledged being heartbroken by Israel under Netanyahu, recalling his family’s support for the struggle to shake off the British mandate and create a Jewish state.
“We had a ‘boycott Britain’ bumper sticker on our car,” he said. His older sister, Anne Lewis, brought the family into the Zionist fold after a summer at a Habonim camp.
“During my congressional career, I was very supportive, emotionally as well as politically, and for a while earlier in this century, I volunteered and traveled at the request of Hillel to a couple of college campuses to defend Judaism and Israel,” he said, adding that it would be hard to do in the current moment.
“I guess I held on longer than I should have, ‘Well, we can work with them, etc.,'” he said. “But it’s become clear to me, particularly due to what they’re allowing to happen in the West Bank, that it is important morally and politically to repudiate the policy of supporting Israel’s military activity.”
From the home he shared with his husband in Ogunquit, Frank in his final days took calls from the media well ahead of the scheduled publication of his book, “The Hard Path to Unity.”
He freely admitted he was doing a virtual publicity tour because his survival until the September........