Ted Cruz Slams Biden Administration Over West Bank Research Ban

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) slammed the Biden Administration on Sunday for its decision to prohibit US agencies from funding scientific research and development projects in the West Bank.

“Joe Biden and Biden administration officials are pathologically obsessed with undermining Israel,” Cruz said in a statement. “Since day one of their administration they have launched campaigns against our Israeli allies that are granular, whole of government, and done in secret. This new boycott of Israeli Jews is yet another example. The State Department is telling the entire U.S. government not to cooperate with Jews in Judea and Samaria. And of course it was sent to Congress in secret, and only revealed because reporters found out.”

Cruz contrasted the ban on funding in the West Bank with the administration’s defense of now-halted funding for research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology and described the West Bank research ban as “antisemitic.”

Arabic-language outlet Asharq News first reported on Friday that the Biden administration had informed Congress on 16 June that it was reversing a 2020 Trump administration agreement that permitted three US-Israeli binational research agencies to fund projects in the West Bank. A State Department spokesman told Asharq that this was a reversion to a pre-2020 policy that had been in place since the agencies were founded in the 1970s and that the US would continue to support US-Israel scientific cooperation. Since their founding, the three agencies have funded some $1.4 billion in research grants.

Former US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, who signed the 2020 agreement days before the US presidential elections, said the Biden administration’s reversal was an embrace of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

“Make no mistake. The United States, by this action, is embracing the BDS Movement, violating a binding bilateral agreement with Israel, and creating a lose/lose dynamic whereby the people of the region — Israelis and Palestinians — will lose the most,” Friedman wrote on Sunday.

The Biden administration move comes amid diplomatic friction between the US and Israel over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies in the West Bank, his domestic political agenda, and the Biden administration’s approach to Iran. 

Israel on Monday advanced plans for the construction of 5,700 new settlement units, and has advanced more than 13,000 such units in just six months — more than the 12-month record set in 2020. The State Department has previously said it is “deeply troubled” by Israeli settlement planning, which describes as “unilateral actions that make a two-state solution more difficult to achieve.”

Israeli officials have also hit back at President Biden’s comments in March when he said that the Netanyahu government “cannot continue” with its controversial judicial reform package that has sparked 25 weeks of mass protest. Since he resumed the premiership in January, Netanyahu has also not yet received an invitation to visit Washington, with Biden saying in March that he would not be sending such an invitation “in the near term.”

Netanyahu for his part has been critical of any US attempt to re-enter a nuclear deal with Iran either formally or as part of an informal, smaller agreement. 

“No arrangement with Iran will obligate Israel, which will do everything to defend itself,” the Prime Minister’s office said in an 8 June readout of a call between Netanyahu and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

The post Ted Cruz Slams Biden Administration Over West Bank Research Ban first appeared on Algemeiner.com.