Posted on 07/12/23
| News Source: JPost
Fifteen US Senators threatened to hold up the process of approving Biden administration nominees if the State Department does not reverse a guidance banning US funding for scientific and technological cooperation in east Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria or the Golan Heights.
In a letter spearheaded by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and signed by GOP presidential primary candidate Sen. Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) and Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho), the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, among others, the senators accused the Biden administration of an “antisemitic boycott of Israel.”
The Trump administration decided in 2020 to remove territorial limitations in the Binational Science Foundation, Binational Industrial Research and Development Foundation, and Binational Agricultural Research and Development Fund agreements with Israel. All three had large endowments that provide grants to American and Israeli academics and companies for research and technology. The US and Israel signed a new science and technology agreement at the time.
Last month, the Biden administration decided that all US-Israel government-funded cooperation in those areas must take place in pre-1967 Israel, which has been the more typical position in recent decades.“Without a reversal in these trends, Congressional oversight and the expeditious vetting of nominees would become intractable,” the senators wrote.
“The new guidance as written constitutes an antisemitic boycott of Israel,” they said, adding that “the State Department’s own Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism was excluded from deliberations over this guidance and did not clear it.”
According to the senators, “the American people and Congress broadly and deeply oppose boycott efforts against Israel, which have been repeatedly defined in US law as efforts to limit commerce with persons doing business in any territories controlled by Israel… This guidance in particular puts Americans’ safety, security, and prosperity at risk because it politicizes and undermines cooperation on science and technology, including in areas such as defense and medicine where also our Israeli allies have proven themselves critical partners.”
When the guidance came into effect last month, the State Department said its new guidance “is simply reflective of the longstanding US position, reaffirmed by this Administration, that the ultimate disposition of the geographic areas which came under the administration of Israel after June 5, 1967, is a final status matter and that we are working towards a negotiated two-state solution in which Israel lives in peace and security alongside a viable Palestinian state. This is essentially reverting through US policy to longstanding pre-2020 geographic limitations on US support for the activities of the binational foundations.”