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Forgotten for decades, Marxist novelist William Attaway’s 1941 Blood on the Forge is a brilliantly brutal depiction of the connection between racism and capitalism. Haunting and sublime, it will leave you feeling the scars of working-class life.

US Steel Duquesne works, blast furnace plant, along the Monongahela River, Duquesne, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. (Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

History’s shadow can be longer than one might think. Eight decades ago, a thirty-year-old African-American Communist writer published a bold and alarming dramatization of the social costs of capitalism and racism at the time of the Great Steel Strike in 1919. Failing to recognize common class interests, African-American and Euro-American workers were at each other’s throats.

Today, in a polarized era of anti–Black Lives Matter backlash and a union movement struggling to be reborn, it’s hard to think of another work of imaginative literature that reminds us so vividly of the deep relationship between racism and class oppression. Written in an audacious and colorful style, at times more expressionistic than realistic, William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge is a masterclass in how novels can be an alternative archive, a conduit for the preservation, transmission, and elucidation of the experience of oppressed people. In five scintillating parts, the novel follows the lives of three African-American sharecroppers, the Moss brothers, who are uprooted from rural Kentucky and hurled into the industrial inferno of Western Pennsylvania.

As with all literature, the landscape of Blood on the Forge expresses an interplay between the author’s biography and imagination. The characters and events grew partly out of field research and interviews, but also from the novelist’s personal circumstances, radical commitments, and literary sensibility. Some passages may even provide glimpses of a shadow self.

An Elusive Subject

An aura of mystery clings to the life of William Alexander Attaway (1911–86). He now seems like a promising star quarterback of the literary left’s Great Depression generation who was puzzlingly cut from the team. A plethora of personal details about Attaway have been unearthed by several scholars, especially Richard Yarborough. Yet there are ample inconsistencies, contradictions, and elisions, so much so that the architecture of his experiences and personality persists as an elusive subject.

William Attaway (Wikimedia Commons)

We know for certain that Attaway was the son of a successful doctor who moved from Mississippi to Chicago when he was age five (some sources say six). From childhood, he was much under the influence of one of his older sisters, Ruth, to whom he would dedicate Blood on the Forge. Ruth was later a well-known stage and screen actress; his other sister, Florence, became a Chicago public school teacher and administrator. All three Attaway siblings attended the University of Illinois at Urbana, but Bill — as he was universally known to friends — dropped out following his father’s death in 1931. He rode the rails, traveling throughout the United States, Mexico, and Canada.

In 1934, Attaway completed his first novel, Children of Night, which he failed to publish, before returning to the university and graduating in 1936. After some brief contact with Richard Wright’s pro-Communist South Side Writers Group in Chicago, Attaway moved to New York, where he befriended the young painter Beauford Delaney and published short pieces in the Amsterdam News, Pittsburgh Courier, and left-wing Challenge. Unable to earn a living with his writing, Bill joined Ruth in the traveling theater company of the comedic play You Can’t Take It With You.

While he toured for two years, Attaway completed his first published novel, an on-the-road narrative about white itinerant workers. Titled Let Me Breathe Thunder (1939), it was positively reviewed in the popular newspapers and the Communist Party press (the Daily Worker featured an interview; the New Masses ran a book appraisal, as well as a later commentary by Ralph Ellison). But the book didn’t sell well.

An aura of mystery clings to the life of William Alexander Attaway.

Undeterred, Attaway secured a fellowship to research the steel industry for his next book. Blood on the Forge appeared two years later to even more favorable reviews in mainstream publications, but the same poor sales. Even worse, Communist publications explicitly condemned the alleged politics of the new novel’s conclusion.

His literary career now in limbo, Attaway joined the military after the United States entered World War II, serving in North Africa. He then returned to New York to launch a career in commercial mass media and popular culture. Although he was prolific and indeed pioneering in this milieu, he never received much public attention. He would gain his most visible notoriety for collaborating with singer Harry Belafonte and authoring two books about music, Calypso Song Book (1957) and Hear America Singing (1967).

Front cover of Blood on the Forge. (Wikimedia Commons)

In 1962, Attaway married the artist Frances Settele, after which the interracial couple moved to Barbados for a decade and raised two children. He died of either cancer or heart failure (both were reported) in Los Angeles at age seventy-four.

Who Was William Attaway?

Diverse sources refer to a mosaic of occupational claims made by the six-foot-tall, one-hundred-and-eighty-five-pound, handsome, boyish-looking Attaway. He was alleged at various times to have been an aspiring auto mechanic, college tennis champion, student of medicine and law, seaman, dockworker, stevedore, salesman, union organizer, Federal Writers Project (FWP) member, actor, playwright, hobo, cabin boy, migrant farm worker, mint cutter in the fields, dress-shop clerk, laborer, captain of black troops in North Africa, participant in clandestine military operations, wounded recipient of a wartime medal, part owner of a Greenwich Village restaurant, songwriter and arranger, the first African-American author of television scripts, composer of radio dialogues, screenwriter, and more. Unfortunately, there is little documentation for much of this blizzard of largely anecdotal information; the main exceptions are TV screenplays and songs clearly attributed to him, where he often used the name “William A. Attaway,” and his co-ownership of a Greenwich Village restaurant for eight months with Belafonte (“The Sage”).

Such vagueness about time and place hardly amounts to a recipe for coherence, leaving his identity somewhat up for grabs. Where and when, for example, did Attaway develop his extraordinary musical skills? Sometimes, in the absence of precise information, there is a tendency to create an imaginary portrait of the artist. It’s doubtful, for instance, that Attaway spent much time as a “union organizer,” as many sources report without naming a union, and his alleged work for the FWP — especially the frequent contention that Attaway coauthored the 1939 Guide to Illinois — is without evidence. (Perhaps there is more puffery than outright fabrication in the latter claim, as he likely did hang out with FWP authors in Chicago and New York.)

About some matters Attaway stayed deeply private. This includes any explanation of why he joined and then left the Communist movement, very much unlike the detailed remembrances of Richard Wright. He was also vague in mentioning his very middle-class activities at the University of Illinois, where he joined the elite Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, and where a play credited to him but lost (Carnival) was performed by the Cenacle, a literature and drama society partly aimed at “promoting Negro Arts and Letters” to white audiences. Nor did he ever refer to his marriage-like relationship in the late 1940s and early 1950s with German-born Communist dancer and choreographer Miriam Pandor. Pandor, who had a studio that doubled as the couple’s apartment, was associated with George Balanchine, Martha Graham, Jose Limón, Sophie Maslow, and Alvin Ailey. She was active in the Progressive Party’s 1948 presidential campaign for Henry Wallace, using her work to address racism, antisemitism, and social injustice, eventually teaching in Cuba and writing for the People’s Daily World.

Documentation, mostly found in oral history, does locate Attaway in postwar Communist cultural circles. The recollections of former black Communists Harold Cruse, Howard “Stretch” Johnson, and John Oliver Killens, along with fellow traveler Belafonte, variously depict Attaway as a party member at times, possibly allied with the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) leadership against Wright’s 1944 public criticism of the party and then dissidents in the Harlem Writers Club (in whose Harlem Quarterly he published in 1950); assisting secondary leaders who had gone underground; and active in the Literature Chapter of the Communist-led Committee for the Negro in the Arts. By the early 1950s, however, Attaway seems to have drifted out of the Marxist political picture (the same period when he ended his intimate relationship with Pandor, who eventually relocated to East Germany). His only other known radical political act was participating in the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery.

All of this suggests a man of precocious brilliance who was hard to pin down.

All of this suggests a man of precocious brilliance who was hard to pin down; his college writing teacher called him “a negro Hamlet,” and there are hints in his fiction of a dark sexual past. Perhaps Attaway, known as an entertaining raconteur of his hoboing experiences, dispensed over the years a résumé, both overstuffed and selective, that proved helpful in surviving the McCarthy era — a time when he and many others had to move cautiously through multiple revisions of who they had been and what they were becoming. In 1955, for instance, Attaway probably had to keep his mouth shut about politics when he directed Winner by Decision for TV’s General Electric Theater; the program was hosted by Ronald Reagan, an anti-communist FBI informant, and based on a short story by Budd Schulberg, a friendly witness for the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Class War With No Discernible End

Blood on the Forge kicks off with a big bang of melodramatic events. It is two weeks after the brutal death and mutilation of the Moss brothers’ mother, who collapsed while plowing the fields of Kentucky’s red clay hills and was dragged until unrecognizable by a mule. The oldest sibling, Big Mat, destroyed the animal in a furious outburst: “He came back hog wild and he took a piece of flint rock and tore the life out of that mule, so that even the hide wasn’t fit to sell.” Now the Moss family faces serious threats to their financial survival from the white Mr Johnston, owner of both the mule and the land.

Blood on the Forge kicks off with a big bang of melodramatic events.

Tensions mount in a dispute between Mat and Johnston’s riding boss over a replacement mule, and Mat explodes upon hearing a racist epithet aimed at his mother: “The riding boss fell to the ground, blood streaming from his smashed face. He struggled to get to his feet. A heavy foot caught him in the side of his neck.” Realizing that “the riding boss would live to lead the lynch mob against him,” Mat knows that he must flee. Within a few hours the Moss brothers take advantage of an offer from a white labor recruiter. Leaving Mat’s pregnant wife behind, the three board a train headed north, finding themselves “squatted on the straw-spread floor of a boxcar, bunched up like hogs headed for the market, riding in the dark for what might have been years.” From the outset we’re propelled forward, freighted with a sense of foreboding that we’re headed toward apocalypse.

Disembarking from the boxcar in a Western Pennsylvania steel-mill town on the Monongahela River, the Moss brothers are gradually introduced to a class war with no discernible end. The mill town, possibly modeled on Duquesne, offers a culture utterly foreign to these three industrial conscripts, although the racist past of Kentucky has been indelibly burned in their collective consciousness. Among their first encounters is with a young black sex worker who has a rotting, cancerous left breast. They then meet a half-mad, disabled black worker named Smothers, who hears voices from the mills that threaten retributive violence for despoiling nature: “It’s wrong to tear up the ground and melt it in the furnace. . . . It’s the hell-and-devil kind of work.” These potent images linger and flavor the ensuing events as the three brothers learn steel production by day and indulge in the sex, drink, and dogfights of “Mex Town” by night.

The Moss brothers are gradually introduced to a class war with no discernible end.

Attaway doesn’t paint a monolithic African-American mass. Distinctions in personal temperament and experience are foregrounded through the novel’s indirect narrative style, which toggles between the three Moss brothers and a panoply of settings. As Attaway explained in a “Plan of Work” submitted for his fellowship, “the strong point of the historical novel” is that “not alone does it give us the facts out of a dim past, it also permits us to experience those facts through identification with the human beings depicted.”

Mat mostly radiates a bearish gloom but can suddenly morph into a coiled cobra, ready to strike; Chinatown, with his gleaming gold tooth, brings laughter and sociability despite merciless surroundings; and Melody, the moody artist figure, creatively uses his guitar to “slick away” what ails him. What we get is an unsentimental portrait of individuals caught up in a vicious, unsparing class war, where men and women struggle to find some measure of self-determination, endure a corrosion of scruples, and mostly do whatever the situation demands to survive. Middle-class moral judgments are thrown into question as almost any action brings the risk of danger.

Mat’s decision at the end of the book to become deputized to crush a strike of mostly white workers has been taken by some as a critique of the “black nationalist” response to the labor crisis. Yet there is little in Mat’s behavior that suggests a coherent ethnic politics. More likely, he is driven by a wounded masculinity (after learning that Anna, the fourteen-year-old former sex worker with whom he is obsessed, has returned to her trade to earn money to abandon him) and a ferocious urge to turn the tables (“He, Mat, was the riding boss, and hate would give this club hand the strength it needed”). Melody is initially attracted to the strikers’ cause but is dissuaded by black politicians who insist that his own job wouldn’t exist if the union had its way; when he learns that these politicians were paid to promote the bosses’ views, he is further disillusioned from taking sides. Chinatown, who by this time has lost his eyesight in a horrific explosion that killed fourteen men, is oblivious to the dilemma.

Blood on the Forge reissue cover. (NYRB)

For readers with narrow notions of the “proletarian novel” or “social realism,” Blood on the Forge provides a crash course in showing that what has also been called “the radical novel” is perpetually challenged and shaped by its own practitioners. It is elastic and regenerative, melding together many types of writing, and in this case widening one’s emotional repertoire. Perhaps due to the blinkered pigeonholing of the conservative postwar environment, Attaway’s books were mostly ignored by critics and scholars for nearly two decades after publication, existing in a literary netherworld through pulp paperback reissues. When the political climate changed from the late twentieth century to the present, Blood on the Forge was rereleased and elevated to the object of scholarly inquiry. This has dramatically expanded appreciation of the novel beyond Attaway’s original aim, which was to rebut the popular criticisms of African American scabbing in the labor movement by revealing the fuller context.

Scholars have spotlighted Attaway’s attention to environmental matters and compared his fiction and that of Carl Sandburg, John Steinbeck, and Wright. Others have quibbled with the novel’s perceived stereotyping of Latinas and disturbing treatments of rape. Nevertheless, while the themes of male sexual predators, gendered power dynamics, and sexual abuse are very strong, and female characters are less developed, Attaway’s is not exactly a sexism typical of the period in which he lived. Melody, something of a stand-in for the author, is mostly devoid of male aggression. The one exception is his fixation on Anna that starts with a fear of commitment and ends with a desire to dominate and control. Throughout the novel, starting with references to Mat’s beating of his wife in Kentucky, those oppressed by racism are shown to be further weakened by misogynous illusions about gender.

What we get is an unsentimental portrait of individuals struggling to find some measure of self-determination, enduring a corrosion of scruples, and mostly doing whatever the situation demands to survive.

A Telos of History?

For those with a special interest in Communist Party aesthetics, the “Attaway Affair” deserves a separate essay of its own. The gist, however, is that the response of party-associated critics in the Daily Worker, New Masses, and even six years later by African-American playwright Theodore Ward in the postwar Mainstream, enthusiastically lauded the book’s style and young Attaway’s promise, but mercilessly attacked what they took to be Attaway’s conclusion. The first two publications were coupled with a public symposium at the Schomburg library in Harlem, where Ellison and New Masses editor Samuel Sillen confronted Attaway, and then a private debate between Ellison and Attaway at the apartment of New Yorker cartoonist William Steig.

Ralph Ellison in 1961. (United States Information Agency / Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

Attaway’s Communist critics argued that the novel was politically misleading to the point of uselessness (or worse) because it ended at a cataclysmic impasse, denying the reader the model of a class-conscious black proletariat, whose numbers had swelled in the 1930s and were certain to expand even more in the future. Ralph Warner, a pseudonym for a prolific drama critic, felt there should have been a “Mr. Max,” the pro-Communist lawyer in Native Son (1940), to “evaluate the social significance.” Ellison wanted a character who would embody the “fusion” of agricultural and industrial experiences and therefore a higher consciousness. Ward called the book “defeatist” and linked it to a similar take on Ann Petry’s The Street (1946).

In truth, Blood on the Forge was a work refreshingly free from the assumption that a Communist novelist must write as if holding the master key to political salvation. In fact, despite the bellyaching, there is evidence of a developing class consciousness in Attaway’s novel. There is the suggestion of interracial working-class unity when Mat feels a new pride as white workers dub him “Black Irish” to show their admiration for his strength and skill. Later, when Mat dies at the hands of a Slavic union member defending himself, he displays a glimmer of awareness that he had chosen the wrong side.

Attaway’s Communist critics argued that the novel was politically misleading to the point of uselessness (or worse).

Then again, Blood on the Forge may have been only the first stage of an uncompleted series intended to show further growth; Attaway’s 1939 “Plan of Work” explains that he had thought of “doing a sequel to this work sometime in the future.” So, even though Attaway did not wish to use literary characters to didactically illustrate a reassuring progressive master narrative, he may well have been revealing various paths wrongly taken in an attempt to provoke readers to consider alternative possibilities.

There is another explanation for CPUSA critics’ almost-choreographed response to the book’s terminus: Attaway’s incontestable antiwar conclusion, in which the blind Chinatown is paired with a blind black World War I veteran. The work was conceived during the 1939–41 Hitler-Stalin Pact, when the CPUSA admirably targeted US racism as the homegrown fascist enemy, and blacks were discouraged from supporting military intervention to save Western imperialism. However, just months before the book’s publication, the USSR was invaded by Germany and Moscow reversed its position. Under the new Communist line, the CPUSA called upon African Americans to full-throatedly promote a war effort; even black activists’ “Double V” campaign (the vow to continue the fight against discrimination along with the war against the Axis) was condemned as undercutting the necessary unity.

Attaway’s books were mostly ignored by critics and scholars for nearly two decades after publication, existing in a literary netherworld through pulp paperback reissues.

At best, committed CPUSA anti-racists fell into a strange epistemological limbo in deciding how to respond to the continuing threat of bigotry. What followed was often dismaying: the CPUSA supported the internment of Japanese Americans and besmirched the 1943 Harlem Rebellion as Hitler-inspired — pronouncements that triggered the exodus of Wright, Ellison, Chester Himes, and others. Nonetheless, one Marxist reviewer got Blood on the Forge right. George Breitman (writing as Albert Parker), a Trotskyist who later authored The Last Year of Malcolm X (1967), wrote in the May 16, 1942 Militant that Attaway compellingly linked the brutality of Southern racism and the refusal of the labor movement to take specific anti-racist action. These, he argued, were the decisive factors in the tragedy of 1919, and the novel was effective in “leaving the reader to draw the conclusion” about what this meant for action in the present.

Complexity and Precarity

Sadly, Attaway became like a runner who leads the pack and then vanishes. If his novels were read in the still-ample CPUSA milieu, not one piece of evidence surfaced in its press that anyone ever defended it or even mentioned it again. How could they after the 1947 death blow by Ward in Mainstream describing Blood on the Forge as “part of the contemporary literature of defeat”? In Attaway’s unglamorous depiction of labor, with the white unionists mostly oblivious to “the race issue” and unidealized African-American male workers abusing women, was the author provocatively aiming to shift the Overton window of politically acceptable discourse on the Left? Was he perhaps knowingly seeking an aesthetic that was a rebuke to the putative formalities of Communist cultural criticism of the time? Whatever the reason, Attaway was treading dangerously in his uncompromising attempt to illustrate the political straits of the Southern black worker who was brought North but was still enmeshed in both the older legacy and the newer forms of race hatred.

Attaway’s novel aimed to awaken consciousness by shocking rather than instructing.

In 2023, Blood on the Forge still reads as a strong reminder that organizing for black equality remains a crucial part of the class struggle, a driving force of any movement for political democracy and a socialist economy. One cannot ignore race-specific demands and the need for unions and other left institutions to lead the fight against all forms of discrimination. Attaway’s novel, which aimed to awaken consciousness by shocking rather than instructing, has the virtue of making us face the facts of history and aspects of a past that has not fully passed.

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Drill ‘will be vital to them should they ever face such a scenario in the field,’ says United Hatzalah president.

By TPS

A terrorist has opened fire on a bus full of civilians, hitting the driver. The bus crashes into other vehicles, leaving 50 people wounded, some critically.

In just minutes, with lights and sirens blaring, women from different backgrounds from all over Israel converge on the scene, wearing protective vests and helmets, in specially equipped motorcycles, ambulances and private vehicles.

The first to arrive on the scene, they cut through the fire and smoke and quickly assess the wounded. They categorize and stabilize them and arrange for transport to hospitals.

While the prospect of such an attack is very real, this scenario was a simulated, “mass casualty incident” drill, which United Hatzalah of Israel held in Janana Park in Jerusalem, on April 28, just days after Yom Ha’Atzmaut, Israel’s 75th birthday.

“We are the only Hatzalah in the world that incorporates women into the EMT team,” said Raphael Poch, United Hatzalah international spokesman and digital media manager and himself an emergency medical technician.

Hatzalah began including women in its program in 2006. Some 1,300 of its current 6,500 volunteers are women—some 20%.

Hatzalah prides itself on being the largest independent, nonprofit, fully-volunteer organization of its kind, which it says provides the fastest, free emergency first-response medical care throughout the country. It does not receive government funding.

Holzer and two of her daughters participated in the drill. One is an EMT on a Magen David Adom ambulance and a Hatzalah volunteer, and the other played a “victim,” complete with make-up to simulate real injuries. “It’s her third time, and she loves it,” said Holzer.

Two years ago, Holzer helped secure 100 “victims,” but this time, since it was for just women and girls, she only needed to help recruit 40. Children from Bet Shemesh schools love to participate, according to Poch.

With a recent rise in terror attacks, Hatzalah has been on a mission to train all its volunteers to respond to mass-casualty events, Eli Beer, the nonprofit’s founder and president, stated in a release.

“We’re proud to say that Friday’s drill was a success, and all of the female volunteers who participated were able to gain hands-on knowledge of how to respond quickly and effectively to the scenario we presented,” he added. The group worked together successfully as a team, and the experience “will be vital to them should they ever face such a scenario in the field.” Beer stated.

The drill also included one of Hatzalah’s helicopters. A pilot flew one of the critically “injured” participants to Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem, where hospital staff practiced receiving a “patient” from a medevac copter.

In the simulation, victims without pulses or who weren’t breathing wore black tags. Volunteers grouped those very critically “injured” together, and instead of performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation, they put CPR masks on participants to indicate how they would treat the latter.

Dr. Joel and Adele Sandberg, parents of former Facebook and Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg, who helped launch Hatzalah’s women’s initiative, attended the drill. Also present were many of those who donated 75 ambucycles and 75 e-bikes to Hatzalah marking Israel’s 75th anniversary.

“Our donors are partners in lifesaving in every sense of the word,” said Dov Maisel, Hatzalah vice president of operations.

In the next five years, Hatzalah hopes to double its number of female volunteers.

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“We need to shame the Zionists and make it clear that they are not wanted here,” says Kuwaiti man who verbally attacked Israeli mother and children in Emirati airport.

By Adina Katz, World Israel News

An Israeli family was verbally harassed while waiting for a flight in Dubai’s airport by a Kuwaiti national who posted the video on social media platforms.

The man, identified as Walid Al-Matri, approached a family in the terminal while filming them on his cell phone. It’s unclear how he knew they were Israeli nationals.

“Free Palestine!’ Al-Matri is heard screaming at a mother and three children, who look to be under eight years old, as they sit quietly at the gate.

In broken English that is difficult to understand, Al-Matri rants that “this country is for Palestinian people, not for all.” It’s unclear if his statement is referring to Israel or the United Arab Emirates.

“God gave you… a chance …to be good, but you don’t take it,” he continues. “There is… not your country [sic].”

Al-Matri’s implication may have been that the State of Israel does not exist, but it is difficult to determine exactly what he meant due to his poor grammar and heavy accent.

Oddly, Al-Matri adds “thank you very much” before walking away and ending the video.

The children immediately appear startled by the presence of the strange man, who is shouting at them and filming them without their permission.

Professor Eddie Cohen, an Arab affairs expert, tweeted that it is against the law in the Emirates to film children without their parents’ permission, and urged the authorities to look into criminally charging Al-Matri.

Notably, the Israeli mother ignores the verbal onslaught, continuing to text on her phone and does not look at or engage with the man.

“I only wanted to harass them. I could not bear the presence of happy Israelis in the land of the Gulf states,” Al-Matri wrote on Twitter, after posting the video.

The clip immediately sparked backlash from Emiratis, including one who stressed that Al-Matri is not from the country.

“I hope this woman and her children know that not all Arabs are as extreme and wild as this insane Kuwaiti,” wrote an Emirati man.

Others called Al-Matri “dramatic and pathetic,” as well as an “impolite, empty, and petty man.”

Shortly after the video was posted, the Emirati Interior Ministry said it was investigating the incident.

In a later interview with an Arabic language media outlet, Al-Matri added that “we need to shame the Zionists and make it clear that they are not wanted here, even if these countries have normalized [relations with Israel.]”

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The four things Riyadh wants of the U.S. do not include progress on the Palestinian front.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The Biden administration is seriously considering four policy changes Saudi Arabia is demanding of the U.S. in order to normalize relations with Israel, Israel Hayom reported Sunday.

The four issues, some of which were first revealed last month in an article in the Wall Street Journal, are: formalizing a defense alliance between Riyadh and Washington, helping the Saudis develop nuclear power for civilian purposes, increasing bilateral trade, and putting a stop to the heavy criticism the Gulf state has absorbed from the Biden administration since its government was accused by American officials of being behind the assassination of a fierce critic of the regime, Jamal Kashoggi, in Turkey in 2018.

An American official told the Hebrew daily that the process of assessing the demands is expected to take several months.

Israel’s chief concern may be the issue of helping Saudi Arabia obtain nuclear power, even if it is not for offensive purposes, considering that this is how Tehran’s nuclear program got started. As the leading Sunni Muslim country, Saudi Arabia has said that if its Shiite Iranian foe produces a nuclear bomb, it would go nuclear as well.

Jerusalem is also keeping in mind that Riyadh and Tehran reestablished diplomatic ties last month under Chinese mediation, a move whose consequences for Israel are considered negative.

The White House’s main worry may be the upgrade in its military ties, after President Biden had come into office saying that the countries’ relationship needs a reset due to Riyadh’s human-rights record, with the Kashoggi affair topping the list of Saudi offenses in this area.

This issue has yet to be smoothed out, and the Democrats’ progressive wing would undoubtedly be extremely critical of this kind of turn-around. Biden knows he will need their support when he runs for a second term in office next year.

Perhaps surprisingly, considering its constant public support of the Palestinian cause, progress in any kind of peace process in Israel was not among the demands, which were outlined in a letter Riyadh sent to Washington through Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who visited the Saudi capital two weeks ago and then came to Jerusalem before flying back to the U.S.

After meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Graham said that he had told Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, the country’s de fact ruler, that “the best time to upgrade our relationship is now, that President Biden is very interested in normalizing relationships with Saudi Arabia and in turn, Saudi Arabia recognizing the one and only Jewish state.”

The Republican party would work with its colleagues across the aisle to get a deal done, he added, but he believes that time is of the essence.

“I would say that that this opportunity is not unlimited and that if we do not do it in 2023 or early 2024 the window may close,” he said.

Almost as soon as Netanyahu regained his office late last year, he announced the expansion of the Abraham Accords to include Saudi Arabia as one of his most important foreign policy goals.

“If we make peace with Saudi Arabia,” he told CNN in February, it would “effectively bring the Arab-Israeli conflict to an end.”

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‘The legal reform will pass,’ said MK Simcha Rothman. ‘It is necessary for the survival of the coalition.’

By World Israel News Staff

MK Simcha Rothman (Religious Zionism) said that judicial reform legislation must be passed during the Knesset’s summer session, which began today, and that should the overhaul fail to come to fruition, the right-wing coalition led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will likely collapse.

“The reform is still as necessary as it was on the first day” it was introduced to the Knesset, Rothman said in an interview with Ynet. “It is urgent… and I think the public that attended the protest on Thursday wants a deadline… it is impossible to leave the State of Israel in this limbo.”

Rothman, a legal scholar and chief proponent of the reform who drafted much of the legislation alongside Justice Minister Yariv Levin (Likud), said that the public was “frustrated” with the lack of progress regarding the overhaul.

Acknowledging recent surveys that have shown the right-wing parties plunge in popularity, Rothman attributed the poor polling to the coalition’s choice to pause the overhaul and negotiate with the opposition parties.

“Stopping the legislation destroyed value for the right-wing government, but as soon as we get back on track, the [support from the public] will go up,” he said.

Some critics have speculated that Netanyahu is willing to abandon the overhaul legislation or agree to a softer version of the reform that would not be effective in changing the judicial system.

But Rothman hinted Netanyahu’s coalition partners would not tolerate a watered-down reform or perpetual stalling.

“The legal reform will pass,” he added. “It is necessary for the survival of the coalition.”

Rothman noted that the issue of reform “did not start four months ago” and said he had been looking into the issue for over a decade.

“It’s not something new. In the last few months, [the initiative] went into overdrive, and today, God willing, there is an almost complete consensus that a fundamental reform within the judicial system is necessary. This reform will happen.”

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A Pakistani journalist called his nuclear country an antidote to ‘the cancer named Israel,’ in rush of anti-Israel articles and demonstrations during Ramadan.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

During a recent Al-Quds day event in Afghanistan’s third largest city, an Iranian government-sponsored event called for Israel’s “nuclear extinction,” according to a Tuesday report by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

The NPO, which monitors what is said in the Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Pashtu, Turkish and Russian media about Israel, translated a report on an exhibition organized in Herat by the Iranian consulate’s Cultural Center as part of month-long Al-Quds Day celebrations during Ramadan, which began on March 23.

Besides advocating Israel’s destruction, the program included “a discussion about the media terrorism of the occupier regimes of Israel, and America and its allies in different periods when it invaded the territory of Islamic countries,” Consul-General Majid Khaliqnia said, according to MEMRI’s translation of Afghan news portal Watan24.com.

Israel has been warning the world about Iran’s nuclear ambitions for years, and Western intelligence agencies have confirmed that the Islamic Republic could already build at least a “dirty bomb” within a matter of weeks if it chose to do so.

The MEMRI report noted that Iran has extra influence in the Herat province, which is on its border, but many rallies, seminars and exhibitions denouncing Israel and proclaiming support for “Palestine” were held over the entire month in the Afghani capital of Kabul and other provinces as well.

The extremist Taliban have been in power since last August in Afghanistan, and have imposed their strict variation of Sharia, Islamic law, over the country.

Meanwhile, in neighboring Pakistan, Mohammad Abdullah Hamid Gul, the son of the former chief of the country’s military Intelligence agency, wrote an article on April 11 decrying reports of indirect trade between Pakistan and Israel, although the two have no diplomatic relations.

“This century’s mega project of the Jews is ‘Greater Israel’ and Pakistan is the biggest obstacle in its path,” he wrote in Roznama Dunya, an Urdu-language daily, making point-blank reference to “Pakistan’s nuclear assets.”

“There is no doubt that [nuclear] Pakistan is the antidote to the cancer named Israel,” he added.

MEMRI reviewed what it called an “upsurge” of anti-Israel and antisemitic statements made in South Asia during this period, focusing on Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also India, which has a sizeable Muslim population. In India, a friendly country that has robust trade and security relations with the Jewish state, Shiite leaders in Mumbai and Lucknow led marches, for example, where speakers talked about the “obliteration” of Israel, said the report.

In general, Al-Quds Day, established by the Islamic Republic to call for the “liberation of Jerusalem,” is marked on the last Friday of the holy month when Muslims fast all day and is supposed to be a time of reconciliation and goodwill. In Iran and throughout much of the Muslim world, it was observed on April 21 by massive anti-Israel demonstrations where vows to “free Palestine” and speeches calling for “Death to Israel and America” were ubiquitous.

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UK Jewish activists and NGOs swiftly condemned the cartoon, along with prominent lawmakers.

By World Israel News Staff

The far-left UK newspaper The Guardian has apologized for publishing a political cartoon that depicted the recently ousted head of the BBC, British-Jewish executive Richard Sharp, using antisemitic tropes and imagery.

Sharp, who recently was forced to resign from his position as the Chairman of the BBC after it was revealed that he did not disclose financial support for former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is shown in the cartoon with an exaggerated, large hooked nose typical of antisemitic caricatures.

A marionette resembling the current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is shown in a box being held by Sharp, presumably implying that the lawmaker is under his control, along with a squid. Many antisemitic cartoons throughout the years have depicted Jews as having tentacles that control various aspects of culture and government.

UK Jewish activists and NGOs swiftly condemned the cartoon, along with prominent lawmakers.

“The depiction of Richard Sharp in today’s @guardian cartoon falls squarely into an antisemitic tradition of depicting Jews with outsized, grotesque features, often in conjunction with money and power. It’s appalling,” wrote David Rich, an expert on left-wing antisemitism, on Twitter.

“Disappointed to see these tropes in today’s Guardian,” former Health Minister Sajid Javid tweeted. “Disturbing theme – or at best, lessons not learned?”

The Guardian, which has a long history of biased reporting that critics have said demonizes Israel and glosses over Arab and Palestinian terror attacks, issued a laconic statement that only briefly mentioned the antisemitic nature of the cartoon.

“We understand the concerns that have been raised. This cartoon does not meet our editorial standards, and we have decided to remove it from our website,” the Guardian said, adding that they apologize “to Mr. Sharp, to the Jewish community and to anyone offended.”

Martin Rowson, who drew the cartoon, also issued an apology. He wrote that he actually attended school with Sharp, “though I doubt he remembers me.”

Rowson added that Sharp’s “Jewishness never crossed my mind as I drew him as it’s wholly irrelevant to the story or his actions, and it played no conscious role in how I twisted his features according to the standard cartooning playbook.”

But Rowson also admitted that he had “f–ed things up” and that “the cartoon was a failure.”

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Government gears up to meet May 29th deadline for passing state budget, while under pressure to pass new haredi draft bill, death penalty for terrorists bill, and the controversial judicial reform package.

By Pesach Benson, TPS

Despite national demonstrations for and against a controversial judicial overhaul, the government’s priority will switch to passing a state budget as the Israeli parliament’s summer session begins on Sunday.

Failure to pass a budget by May 29 will automatically dissolve the Knesset and send Israel to its sixth election in under four years.

However, according to coalition agreements between the Likud party and its partners, other controversial pieces of legislation must be passed ahead of the budget.

Among the Likud’s commitments is legislation exempting Orthodox men from Israel’s universal military service. Religious men are exempt from conscription if they pursue religious studies through the age of 26. The coalition agreement between Likud and the United Torah Judaism party commits the government to lower the age for men leaving their studies while remaining exempt from the draft.

Lowering the age would enable Orthodox men to more easily integrate into the workforce.

At the same time, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seeking to placate soldiers by boosting economic incentives for military service.

A separate Likud commitment to the Otzma Yehudit party is legislation allowing the death penalty to be applied to people convicted of terrorism. A death penalty bill introduced passed a preliminary vote in March with some opposition support.

The only individual ever executed by Israel after the War of Independence was Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi architect of the Holocaust. He was hanged in 1962 and his ashes scattered at sea after he was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity.

The budget and Likud’s legislative commitments are expected to put judicial reform on the Knesset backburner for the time-being, despite continuing national protests.

The governing coalition’s judicial reforms are deeply controversial. Legislation advancing through the Knesset would primarily alter the way judges are appointed and removed, give the Knesset the ability to override certain High Court rulings, restrict the ability of judges to apply standards of “reasonableness,” and change the way legal advisors are appointed to government ministries.

Supporters of the legal overhaul say they want to end years of judicial overreach while opponents describe the proposals as anti-democratic.

President Isaac Herzog has been trying to mediate a compromise between the government and opposition but so far has little to show for his efforts.

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