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You are listening to an art media podcast.
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It's Friday, june 12th. This episode was recorded at 9pm new york time on Thursday. I'm deborah pardes and this is arc news daily. Trump declared victory again yesterday and again Iran said Not so fast. On Wednesday, Qatari mediators and Iranian officials spent the day in Tehran working through the final gaps in a draft agreement. According to three sources briefed on the talks, the key issues were how Iran's frozen assets abroad would be released, the details of reopening the Strait of Hormuz, and how nuclear negotiations would be structured during a 60 day ceasefire period. Yesterday, Trump posted on Truth Social that Iran's leadership had approved the discussions and he was canceling a major strike he had ordered that evening. Iran was less certain. The Foreign Ministry said a large part of the text had been finalized but not officially approved. One official quoted by an IRGC affiliated news agency, wrote that Trump had announced a deal 38 times in the last two months and that until Iran announced an agreement, Trump's statements should be taken with a grain of salt. But they later said there is a high probability that the Iranian leadership will agree to the terms, given the deal hasn't been officially signed yet. Trump was asked directly how he could be so sure this time it was done. In response, he said, they've taken a pounding.
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They've taken a pounding like very few people could take, and they want to make the deal a lot more than I do.
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According to Trump, the deal would ensure that Iran will, quote, never have a nuclear weapon. But he also acknowledged that the nuclear material itself is addressed only conceptually and not in binding terms. As for Israel, Netanyahu was reportedly caught off guard by Trump's announcement. His office put out a statement that said Israel is not a party to the agreement. Over the last several weeks, Trump has focused his demands on two the nuclear program and the Strait of Hormuz. He has largely stopped talking about Iran's ballistic missiles and proxy network, both of which are critical to Israel. For more than two decades, the Institute for Middle East Understanding stayed completely out of electoral politics. It's a pro Palestinian media group that's trained journalists on how to cover the conflict and placed opinion pieces into mainstream news outlets. But months after the October 7 attacks, the institute launched a political wing called the Policy Project, and according to an investigation published yesterday by Jewish Insider, that new wing has become the single largest donor to Justice Democrats this year. Justice Democrats is the political action committee that built a squad in 2018, which includes Congress members. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. They're all progressive Democrats and all very critical of Israel. And this year the same pipeline is producing a new class of candidates. Two of them just won their primaries, Chris Robb in Philadelphia and Adam Hammawi in New Jersey. Hamawi is a 56 year old Egyptian born army combat surgeon who volunteered in Gaza in 2024 and recently came home to run for Congress. He campaigned on Medicare for All, abolishing ICE and a weapons ban on Israel. During the campaign, it emerged that he had testified in defense of Omar Abd al Rahman, otherwise known as the Blind Sheikh. His followers carried out the 1993 World Trade center bombing. Hammawi called the renewed attention to testimony a guilt by association attack, according to Jewish Insider. It's not clear who originally provided the funds for the Institute for Middle East Understanding. The group is structured as a nonprofit, which means it has no obligation to disclose its donors. The campaign watchdog group Open Secrets calls that dark money. That's not unusual these days. The New York Times reported this week that nearly 1 in $5 donated to Super PACs this year comes from nonprofits that don't disclose their don. So the Institute for Middle East Understanding's network is just one example of a much wider problem. But the bigger picture is that a pro Palestinian advocacy group has shifted from media coverage to who gets elected, and two of its favored candidates are expected to win in November. Last week, Dave Matthews stopped a concert to talk about the Jews. In front of about 20,000 fans in Raleigh, North Carolina. He pulled out a piece of paper and read a prepared statement.
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It's no secret. At least I don't try to make it a secret that I disagree with the policies of Israel and the United States and the treatment of the civilian population in Gaza and the West Bank. That should by no means be twisted into anybody thinking that I am bigoted or anti Semitic in any way at all.
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The backstory to the speech is that at some concerts, Matthews had been draping a keffiyeh over his shoulders on stage and holding up signs that said Stop the genocide and Stop killing Children. Then at a show in West Palm beach, he was speaking about Gaza again when someone in the crowd shouted, f the Jews. A fan named Jacqueline Clark, a civil rights attorney, wrote about that night in the Times of Israel. A link to her piece is in the show notes. She said her friend had been at the show, sitting near the kids, shouting that slur. As soon as it began, her friend walked out. It seems Matthews read Clark's blog that chronicled the incident, and he answered her from the stage. In Raleigh, Matthews listed a bunch of famous Jews he said he admired, from Albert Einstein to Anne Frank. He said he had many close friends who were Jewish, and he apologized, saying he was sorry for any misunderstandings or pain he might have caused. But what he didn't do was explicitly call out the people who felt it was okay to shout slurs about Jews and tell them they no longer are welcome at his shows. We spoke with Clark, who wrote the blog, and she told us this.
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I don't need Dave to agree with me on Israel. I need him to stop handing the bigots in his crowd the words to perpetuate hate. I need him to stop fanning the flames of anti Semitism with his rhetoric. Honestly, this isn't even really a Dave problem. It's a celebrity culture problem. Everyone with a microphone is a social justice warrior now, weighing in on things they're completely ill informed about.
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Matthews has a lot of company when it comes to celebrities speaking out about Israel. The rapper Macklemore released a track in 2024 explicitly calling Israel's war a genocide. Billie Eilish is one of the biggest artists in the world with an overwhelmingly young audience. And she said, I will never stop speaking about Palestine. The Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg is also a vocal critic of Israel. So much so that in 2025, Israel's Ministry of Diaspora affairs ranked her second most influential anti Semitic figure in the world. She has 17 million followers on Instagram. These celebrity views connect with young people. According to the recent Yale Youth Poll, young Americans are significantly more likely to hold anti Semitic beliefs than older generations, especially if they get their news from TikTok and Instagram. Clark says she doesn't think Dave Matthews is a bigot, but the message he's promoting is spreading hate at scale. Debbie I'm Deborah Pardes and this is Arknews Daily. Have a good weekend.
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Hi, I'm Dan Senor, host of the Call Me Back podcast. These past few years have asked a lot of the Jewish world. We've been wrestling with pain, disagreement and dilemmas. The war in Gaza, the war with Iran, the pressure on Jewish communities in diaspora societies, and the upcoming Israeli elections, which may bring many of these tensions to a head. These are not simple stories, and in a moment filled with bad information and overly simplistic answers, it can be hard to know who to trust@callmeback. We know that trust has to be earned and we know your time is valuable. So when you spend it with us, we take that seriously. We don't claim to have all the answers, but we do try to ask better questions with honesty and humility. And maybe that is where hope begins. Not in pretending this moment is simple, but in believing at a minimum, we must face it together. You can find Call me back on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you there.