Jewish News 24 Channel

Jewish News 24 Channel

2/3/2025, 7:17:37 PM

*What is USAID? Explaining the US foreign aid agency and why Trump and Musk want to end it* Dozens of senior officials put on leave. Thousands of contractors laid off. A freeze put on billions of dollars in humanitarian assistance to other countries. Over the last two weeks, President Donald Trump's administration has made significant changes to the U.S. agency charged with delivering humanitarian assistance overseas that has left aid organizations agonizing over whether they can continue with programs such as nutritional assistance for malnourished infants and children. Then-President John F. Kennedy established the U.S. Agency for International Development, known as USAID, during the Cold War. In the decades since, Republicans and Democrats have fought over the agency and its funding. Here’s a look at USAID, its history and the changes made since Trump took office. What is USAID? Kennedy created USAID at the height of the United States’ Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union. He wanted a more efficient way to counter Soviet influence abroad through foreign assistance and saw the State Department as frustratingly bureaucratic at doing that. Congress passed the Foreign Assistance Act and Kennedy set up USAID as an independent agency in 1961. USAID has outlived the Soviet Union, which fell in 1991. Today, supporters of USAID argue that U.S. assistance in countries counters Russian and Chinese influence. China has its own “belt and road” foreign aid program worldwide operating in many countries that the U.S. also wants as partners. Critics say the programs are wasteful and promote a liberal agenda. What’s going on with USAID? On his first day in office Jan. 20, Trump implemented a 90-day freeze on foreign assistance. Four days later, Peter Marocco — a returning political appointee from Trump’s first term — drafted a tougher than expected interpretation of that order, a move that shut down thousands of programs around the world and forced furloughs and layoffs. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has since moved to keep more kinds of strictly life-saving emergency programs going during the freeze. But confusion over what programs are exempted from the Trump administration’s stop-work orders — and fear of losing U.S. aid permanently — is still freezing aid and development work globally. Dozens of senior officials have been put on leave, thousands of contractors laid off, and employees were told Monday not to enter its Washington headquarters. And USAID's website and its account on the X platform have been taken down. It’s part of a Trump administration crackdown that’s hitting across the federal government and its programs. But USAID and foreign aid are among those hit the hardest. Rubio said the administration’s aim was a program-by-program review of which projects make “America safer, stronger or more prosperous.” The decision to shut down U.S.-funded programs during the 90-day review meant the U.S. was “getting a lot more cooperation” from recipients of humanitarian, development and security assistance, Rubio said. What do critics of USAID say? Republicans typically push to give the State Department — which provides overall foreign policy guidance to USAID — more control of its policy and funds. Democrats typically promote USAID autonomy and authority. Funding for United Nations agencies, including peacekeeping, human rights and refugee agencies, have been traditional targets for Republican administrations to cut. The first Trump administration moved to reduce foreign aid spending, suspending payments to various U.N. agencies, including the U.N. Population Fund and funding to the Palestinian Authority. In Trump's first term, the U.S. pulled out of the U.N. Human Rights Council and its financial obligations to that body. The U.S. is also barred from funding the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, or UNRWA, under a bill signed by then-President Joe Biden last March. Why is Elon Musk going after USAID? Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, has launched a sweeping effort empowered by Trump to fire government workers and cut trillions in government spending. USAID is one of his prime targets. Musk alleges USAID funding been used to launch deadly programs and called it a “criminal organization.” What is being affected by the USAID freeze? Sub-Saharan Africa could suffer more than any other region during the aid pause. The U.S. gave the region more than $6.5 billion in humanitarian assistance last year. HIV patients in Africa arriving at clinics funded by an acclaimed U.S. program that helped rein in the global AIDS epidemic of the 1980s found locked doors. There are also already ramifications in Latin America. In Mexico, a busy shelter for migrants in southern Mexico has been left without a doctor. A program to provide mental health support for LGBTQ+ youth fleeing Venezuela was disbanded. In Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Guatemala, so-called “Safe Mobility Offices” where migrants can apply to enter the U.S. legally have shuttered. The aid community is struggling to get the full picture—how many thousands of programs have shut down and how many thousands of workers were furloughed and laid off under the freeze? How much does the U.S. spend on foreign aid? In all, the U.S. spent about roughly $40 billion in foreign aid in the 2023 fiscal year, according to a report published last month by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. The U.S. is the largest provider of humanitarian assistance globally, although some other countries spend a bigger share of their budget on it. Foreign assistance overall amounts to less than 1% of the U.S. budget. What do Americans think of foreign aid? About 6 in 10 U.S. adults said the U.S. government was spending “too much” overall on foreign aid, according to a March 2023 AP-NORC poll. Asked about specific costs, roughly 7 in 10 U.S. adults said the U.S. government was putting too much money toward assistance to other countries. About 9 in 10 Republicans and 55% of Democrats agreed that the country was overspending on foreign aid. At the time, about 6 in 10 U.S. adults said the government was spending “too little” on domestic issues that included education, health care, infrastructure, Social Security and Medicare. Polling has shown that U.S. adults tend to overestimate the share of the federal budget that is spent on foreign aid. Surveys from the Kaiser Family Foundation have found that on average, Americans say spending on foreign aid makes up 31% of the federal budget rather than closer to 1% or less. Could Trump dissolve USAID on his own? Democrats say presidents lack the constitutional authority to eliminate USAID. But it’s not clear what would stop him from trying. A mini-version of that legal battle played out in Trump’s first term, when he tried to cut the budget for foreign operations by a third. When Congress refused, the Trump administration used freezes and other tactics to cut the flow of funds already appropriated by Congress for the foreign programs. The General Accounting Office later ruled that violated a law known as the Impoundment Control Act. It’s a law we may be hearing more of. “Live by executive order, die by executive order,” Musk said on X Saturday in reference to USAID. The contents of this article are © @JewishNews24, copying of this article is only permitted with permission and can only be copied in full with no amendment or editing.

Jewish News 24 Channel

2/27/2025, 5:18:17 AM

*How a small delegation of US Jews got to Syria for the first time in decades* Even as tensions between Israel and Syria ramped up in recent days, a small group of Syrian Jews recently celebrated a milestone that once seemed unthinkable: a return visit to their home country. Under the auspices of the new Syrian government, a small delegation toured Jewish heritage sites in and around Damascus last week, just two months after the fall of the dictatorial Bashar al-Assad regime. The group said it was the first official Jewish delegation to visit Syria, a country that once was home to as many as 100,000 Jews, in over three decades. Visiting historic synagogues and praying with Torah scrolls that had remained intact through the country’s brutal, 14-year civil war, these Jews were celebrating a homecoming. The visit could allow them and their descendants to imagine a potentially bright future in a place long thought lost to the many Jews who’d once called it home. Days after the trip, Israel launched military strikes on Syria as the country’s new leader, and large numbers of protesters demanded Israeli troops withdraw from the country’s southwestern region. Israel says it is occupying the area, the Syrian side of the Golan plateau, as a security measure amid instability in Syria. Despite the overarching uncertainty — or perhaps because of it — members of the Jewish trip said anything felt possible. “Everyone was so excited,” Rabbi Asher Lopatin, one of the Jewish delegates, told JTA about the heritage tour. “The people are so kind and really, very, very nice.” Spearheading the trip was Rabbi Yusuf Hamra and his son Henry, Jews who left Syria during the final wave of mass Jewish emigration in the early 1990s. Henry was 15 at the time. The Hamra family resettled in New York, along with thousands of other Syrian Jews who maintain a vibrant and distinctive community but retain dreams of returning to the Damascus of their past. “The whole community was like one family,” Henry Hamra told the Times of Israel about his upbringing in Syria. “Then you’re changing a whole country. Especially when you go to America, you get lost in the big city.” For more than a century, Syria became increasingly inhospitable to its once-thriving Jewish population. Blood libels and other incidents targeting the country’s Jewish minority persisted from the 1800s through the 20th century. As in countries across the Arab world, antisemitic persecution and Jewish emigration spiked with Israel’s establishment in 1948, when Syria was one of a group of neighboring states to attack the nascent country. It was the first of three wars Israel and Syria would fight over the next 25 years, including the 1967 Six Day War, when Israel captured the Golan Heights. The countries have not fought in half a century but still do not have relations, despite some attempts years ago at peace talks. Over that time, Syria’s Jewish population has only dwindled further, to a current population estimated at fewer than a dozen who still call the country home. Graves at a historic Jewish cemetery were disinterred to build a highway decades ago. Some non-Jewish locals, by contrast, have guarded ancient Torah scrolls, preventing them from being damaged or lost. And since the 2011 outbreak of the brutal Syrian civil war — in which Assad launched an assault on citizens and rebel factions trying to oust him from power — synagogues and other Jewish landmarks were destroyed or badly damaged as overall death tolls topped 600,000 and the Syrian refugee population skyrocketed into the millions. After Assad fled and a new government headed by interim president Ahmad al-Sharaa — who used to belong to groups affiliated with al-Qaeda and ISIS — took control, the Hamras saw an opening to return for an official visit. (A relative of theirs had been making several unofficial trips to Syria in the intervening decades, including a Damascus “vacation” in 2021.) They contacted the Syria Emergency Task Force, a U.S.-based organization formed in 2011 to oppose the Assad regime. “We welcome your visit and your generous initiative,” Moaz Mustafa, the group’s director, wrote to the Hamras in response to their request to tour Damascus, in a letter translated from the Arabic and viewed by JTA. A rabbi poses next to a large headstone with Hebrew inscriptions in Syria Rabbi Asher Lopatin poses at a Jewish historic site in Damascus, Syria, as part of the first Jewish delegation to the country in 33 years, February 18, 2025. (Courtesy of Asher Lopatin) Mustafa also assured the group that the Syrian government would provide security details for the Jewish delegation throughout the four-day trip. The task force, which aims to lift international sanctions on Syria now that Assad is out of power, would go on to trumpet the trip as “marking a historic step toward reestablishing Jewish life in Damascus.” For now, though, there is only a tiny trickle of Jews returning to Damascus. The Hamras were able to round up nine participants for their delegation, not enough for a minyan required for some Jewish prayers. Travel into Syria was its own logistical challenge, with much of the group flying in from Qatar, while another small contingent drove in from Lebanon, where Israel has troops stationed in response to the war with Hezbollah that followed Oct. 7. Lopatin, who works for the Jewish Federation of Ann Arbor, Michigan, has no Syrian heritage; he joined the group at the behest of a Syrian Muslim interfaith coalition partner Still, he said, the trip was eye-opening. “I kept on thinking about the Jews returning to Europe, to Poland, after World War II, all over Europe, they were suspicious,” he said. By contrast, “Here, everyone was so excited.” Local Syrians, Lopatin said, were excited to greet the Jews, who he said were welcomed everywhere they went, even with him openly sporting a kippah. “For them, the Jews coming back represents a restoration of, I think, civility to Syria, the idea that we are all one,” he said. “That’s what the government is promoting.” One subject that did not come up much during the Jewish delegation’s trip was Israel. In recent days, prior to the Israeli strikes, Syrians had begun demonstrating at the border against Israel’s military presence as Israel has demanded a complete demilitarization of the country’s south. At a constitutional dialogue in Syria on Tuesday attended by Sharaa, during which the country’s leaders outlined basic freedoms for their people they hope to one day enact, national rulers also took the opportunity to denounce Israel’s incursion. Lopatin said the omission of any mention of Israel was an intentional move and a “smart” one on behalf of the group’s Syrian handlers. “There’ll be a time to negotiate with Israel and talk about that,” he said. “But for now it was, let’s try to bring Syrians together, let’s try to get rule of law in Syria.” In the future, he mused, “If this could be a breakthrough for Syria to recognize Israel, that would be something.” Back in the United States, Lopatin said he wants to try to “advocate” for Syria any chance he gets. “It’s a charming city,” he said of Damascus. “It’s a little scruffy, but it’s a wonderful place and very charming and very nice.” The contents of this article are © @JewishNews24, copying of this article is only permitted with permission and can only be copied in full with no amendment or editing.