#Policies

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Polish Artist Igor Dobrowolski's Posters Showing The Real Side of Supporting “The Terrorist, Fascist, Illegal Occupier of the Palestine 🇵🇸, Apartheid, War Criminal, Bastard Child of the United States and Its Puppet West, Zionist 🐖 Isra-hell’s Policies".

— Credit: Igor Dobrowolski

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The White House’s Defense of “The Fascist, War Criminal, Genocidal and The Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗s’ Illegal Regime of Isra-hell” Is Undermining International Law

The United States tends to hail the ICC when it prosecutes American enemies, but assails the court when it goes after U.S. allies.

— By Sarah Leah Whitson | September 18, 2024 | Foreign Policy

Two War Criminal, Corrupt and Genocidals: U.S. President Joe Biden meets with Fascist, Zionist 🐖 and Prime Minister of the Illegal Regimeof Isra-hell Benjamin Satan-Yahu in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., on July 25, 2024 Andrew Harnike/Getty Images

The United States’ U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield struck an aggressive blow against the rules-based international order at a Council on Foreign Relations talk last week. In response to my question about whether the U.S. government would comply with the orders of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to cease assistance to Israel for its illegal occupation and expected International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants for Isra-helli Prime Minister Benjamin Satan-Yahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant—both of whom have been indicted by the ICC—the U.N. ambassador was definitive: The U.S. government would not comply with any warrant because it has a “problem with the court’s ruling.”

“Let Be Be Clear,” she said. “We Would Not Arrest [Satan-Yahu].”

While the “Hypocrite, War Criminal, Genocidal, Corrupt and Morally Bankrupted United States” is not a member of the ICC and is therefore not obligated to comply with the court’s arrest warrants, Washington has cooperated when the ICC has targeted U.S. adversaries. Indeed, when the ICC issued arrest warrants against officials of other Non-ICC Member States, like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, the U.S. government celebrated those decisions and urged cooperation with the court. Indeed, U.S. President Genocidal Joe Biden “Welcomed” the ICC’s arrest warrant for Putin for war crimes in Ukraine and ordered the U.S. government to start sharing information about possible Russian war crimes with the court.

Congress went so far as to revoke provisions in U.S. laws that prohibited cooperating with an ICC investigation at least insofar as they pertain to Ukraine, and issued a resolution commending the prosecutor for securing the warrant. Republican U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham chimed in, saying that “this arrest warrant is extremely significant because it’s an action of an international evidence-based body that will stand the test of history.”

Graham took a markedly different tone when the court indicted Israeli officials however, calling them “outrageous actions by the ICC against the State of Israel and I will feverishly work with colleagues on both sides of the aisle in both chambers to levy damning sanctions against the ICC…” He attacked the very same prosecutor who had indicted Putin as “drunk with self-importance.”

This is not the first instance of states refusing to cooperate with the ICC. Even some member states have failed to execute arrest warrants the court has issued, like Mongolia’s refusal to arrest Putin earlier this month when he visited, or Jordan’s and South Africa’s failure to arrest Bashir.

Thomas-Greenfield’s declaration means that the United States, the supposed enforcer of the international rules-based order, is now keeping company with states that ignore the court’s orders. This sort of rhetoric from leading U.S. officials further erodes the standing of all international courts and will be used as a justification by authoritarian governments who will copy the U.S. playbook to reject international law and ignore those seeking to enforce it.

The War Criminal and Genocidal Biden Administration has made no secret of its disdain for the International Criminal Court’s decision to prosecute Isra-helli officials and members of Palestinian armed groups for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other violations of the Rome Statute since 2014, following the State of Palestine’s 2018 referral.

On June 4, the U.S. House of Representatives once again passed a bill to sanction the prosecutor, and twelve U.S. senators responded to the prosecutor’s request for warrants by threatening, “Target Israel and we will target you. If you move forward … we will move to end all American support for the ICC, sanction your employees and associates, and bar you and your families from the United States. You have been warned.”

While both War Criminal and Genocidal Secretary of State Antony Blinken and President Joe Biden complained that the ICC had “Equated” Hamas and Israel, presumably because he requested arrest warrants for both Israeli and Hamas officials, Thomas-Greenfield’s comments are the first time that a senior U.S. official has baldly declared that Washington will defy an ICC arrest warrant.

To justify this stance, Thomas-Greenfield explained that the U.S. “has questions” about the court’s exercise of jurisdiction over Israel, presumably referring to the Biden administration’s rejection of the court’s jurisdiction over Israeli nationals. (She also incorrectly asserted that the U.S. had already reflected its unwillingness to arrest Netanyahu when he visited Washington in July, suggesting that the court had issued the arrest warrants, although it has not).

The question of territorial jurisdiction, however, is a matter that the court ruled on in 2021, refusing Israel’s arguments challenging jurisdiction, recognizing Palestine as a member state of the court with legal capacity to refer a case in its territory to the court, and reiterating the court’s authority to exercise jurisdiction over non-member state nationals who commit crimes in such a territory.

The fact that Netanyahu is the head of government in Israel does not immunize him from international criminal prosecution. The ICC has previously held that such domestic immunities do not trump an ICC arrest warrant because they would undermine the ICC’s purpose, including Article 27 of the Rome Statute, which provides that “all people are subject to the statute without distinction based on official capacity.”

The court furthermore clarified that complying with an arrest warrant does not mean subjecting a head of state to domestic prosecution—something that domestic immunity statutes prohibit —but merely transferring them to the The Hague for international criminal prosecution.

More significantly, Thomas-Greenfield’s suggestion that compliance with a court’s rulings is optional depending on whether or not a government agrees with a ruling further undermines the very basis of the ICC’s capacity to act as an international court with the power to issue binding decisions. Basically, Washington’s message to the world is that it loves the ICC when it prosecutes America’s enemies and hates the court when it prosecutes its friends.

While the Biden administration in 2021 canceled U.S. sanctions against the Previous ICC prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, her staff, and their families that the Trump administration imposed on them for pursuing the prosecution of Israelis and Americans, it has not stopped pressuring the New Prosecutor, Karim Khan, to back off; Khan said that “some elected leaders” even told him, that the ICC “was built for Africa” and for “thugs like Putin” but not Western or Western-backed leaders.

Israeli officials have continued their nine-year campaign to spy on, harass, pressure, smear and threaten both the current and former prosecutors in an attempt to derail the investigation. It is exactly such attacks on the court in the face of the first prosecution of a U.S. ally that have led a number of African states to threaten to withdraw from the court, seeing it as mere cudgel with which to beat African abusers, while never allowing it to move against U.S. allies.

A related question Thomas-Greenfield refused to answer was whether the United States would comply with the orders issued by the International Court of Justice, which hears disputes between states. In a recent advisory opinion ruling, the ICJ ruled that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories is illegal and that it must remove its forces and settlers from there and reverse its illegal annexations.

The court ordered states not to recognize any illegal Israeli acts, such as annexations (The Trump administration recognized Israel’s annexations of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, but the Biden administration has not reversed these.) More significantly, the court said that states are under obligation “not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

This is a problem for the U.S government, if it is to obey the directives of a court of which it is a founding member, by virtue of Washington’s ratification of the United Nations Charter. That’s because the United States is Isra-hell’s largest aid provider, with over $20 billion in military aid provided in 2024, and more than that in arms sales authorizations.

As a result, such aid not only violates U.S. laws prohibiting arms to states that violate human rights, but a direct order from the ICJ. The U.S. Mission to the United Nation’s tweet this week stating that it will vote against a pending U.N. General Assembly resolution to enforce the advisory opinion is a pretty clear indication that the U.S. has no intention of complying with the ICJ.

The continued transfer of U.S. weapons to Israel may well become the source of charges against the U.S. government in the ICJ occupation case (as well as the separate case South Africa initiated concerning genocide claims against Israel), but also against individual U.S. officials in the ICC case, for aiding and abetting the crimes with which Israel is charged.

During Her Talk, Thomas-Greenfield made a point of remembering her “Friend and Mentor” Madeleine Albright (Now The Witch is Staying, Resting, Rotting and Burning 🔥 in Hell Forever). I suspect Thomas-Greenfield’s remarks last week may go down as her very own Albright moment.

In 1996, then-Secretary of State Albright infamously responded to 60 Minutes host Lesley Stahl’s question about Whether the “Price” of U.S. Sanctions in Iraq, Which had Caused “Half a Million Dead Iraqi Children… More Children Than Died in Hiroshima” was “Worth It,” by saying “I Think It’s a Very Hard Choice, But the Price—We Think the Price is Worth It.”

It’s sad and somewhat ironic to have solicited an equally damning response from Thomas-Greenfield, highlighting, 30 years later, the persistence of the United States’ highly selective use of international law as a political cudgel against opponents, but never against itself or U.S. allies.

The downside of this approach, of course, is that International Law—and the courts responsible for upholding it—cannot survive the World’s leading Superpower’s continued assaults, and will continue to crumble, to the detriment of all those international legal institutions are meant to serve, Americans included.

— Sarah Leah Whitson is the Executive Director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN). She was Formerly the Executive Director of the Middle East and North Africa Division of Human Rights Watch.

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"The Death of Samson," Engraving By Gustav Doré (1866).

From Gaza To Iran, The Netanyahu Government Is Endangering Israel's Survival

Israel is Facing a Historic Defeat, the Bitter Fruit of Years of Disastrous Policies. If the Country now Prioritizes Vengeance Over Its Own Best Interests, it will Put Itself and the Entire Region in Grave Danger

— Haaretz | Yuval Noah Harari | April 18, 2024

In the coming days Israel will have to make historic policy decisions, ones that could shape its fate and the fate of the entire region for generations to come. Unfortunately, Benjamin Netanyahu and his political partners have repeatedly proven that they are unfit to make such decisions. The policies they pursued for many years have brought Israel to the brink of destruction. So far, they have shown no regret for their past mistakes, and no inclination to change direction. If they continue to shape policy, they will lead us and the whole Middle East to perdition. Instead of rushing into a new war with Iran, we should first learn the lessons of Israel's failures over the past six months of war.

War is a military means for achieving political aims, and there is one key yardstick by which to measure success in war: Were the political aims achieved? Following the horrendous massacre of October 7, Israel needed to liberate the hostages and disarm Hamas, but these should not have been its only aims. In light of the existential threat posed to Israel by Iran and its agents of chaos, Israel also needed to deepen its alliance with Western democracies, strengthen cooperation with moderate Arab forces, and work to establish a stable regional order. However, the Netanyahu government ignored all these aims, and instead focused on revenge. It has failed to secure the release of all the hostages, and has not disarmed Hamas. Worse, it intentionally inflicted a humanitarian disaster on the 2.3 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and thereby undermined the moral and geopolitical basis for Israel's existence.

The humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and the worsening situation in the West Bank are inflaming regional chaos, weakening our alliances with Western democracies, and making it harder for countries like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia to cooperate with us. Most Israelis have now focused their attention on Tehran, but even prior to the Iranian attack we preferred to turn a blind eye to what was happening in Gaza and the West Bank. Yet if we don't change our behavior toward the Palestinians, our hubris and vengefulness will inflict a historic calamity on us.

Khan Yunis in ruins, last week. It was essential to fight and defeat Hamas, but this could have been done even without killing so many innocent civilians.Credit: Fatima Shbair/AP

After six months of war, many of the hostages are still in captivity and Hamas is still on its feet, but the Gaza Strip is devastated, many thousands of its people have been killed, and most of its population are now famished refugees. Together with Gaza, Israel's international standing is also in ruins, and we are now hated and ostracized even by many of our former friends. If an all-out war breaks out with Iran and its proxies, to what extent can Israel count on the United States, the Western democracies and moderate Arab states to risk themselves for us, and provide us with vital military and diplomatic assistance? Even if such war is averted, how long can Israel survive as a pariah state? We don't have Russia's ample resources. Without commercial, scientific and cultural ties with the rest of the world, and without American arms and money, the most optimistic scenario for Israel is to become the North Korea of the Middle East.

Too many Israeli citizens deny or repress what is happening, as well as the reasons we find ourselves here. In particular, too many deny the severity of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza – which is why they cannot understand the severity of the diplomatic crisis we are facing. When they encounter reports about the devastation, carnage and hunger in Gaza, they claim it is fake news, or they find moral and military justification for Israel's behavior.

Those who rush to blame antisemitism for all our troubles should remember the first weeks of the war, when Israel enjoyed unprecedented international support. The American president, the French president, the German chancellor, the prime minister of Britain, and a long list of additional prime ministers, foreign ministers and other dignitaries visited Israel, and expressed their support for it in its fight to defeat and disarm Hamas. International aid came in the shape of weapons as well as words. Enormous amounts of military equipment were rushed to Israel. Arms exports from Germany to Israel, for example, rose 10-fold. Without that materiél, we could not have conducted the war in Gaza and Lebanon, and prepare for conflicts with Iran and its other proxies. Meanwhile, in the waters of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, an international fleet assembled to fight the Houthis and keep open the commercial lane leading to Eilat and the Suez Canal.

Of equal importance, during most of its previous wars, Israel had to fight against the clock, too, since its allies forced it to agree to cease-fires within days or weeks. But given the murderous nature of Hamas, this time its allies gave Israel free rein for many months to conquer Gaza, liberate the Israeli hostages, change the situation in the Strip according to Israel's best judgment, and create a new order in the region.

The Netanyahu government wasted this historic opportunity, and also wasted the bravery and dedication of the soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces. The Netanyahu government failed to exploit its battlefield victories to reach an agreement on the release of all the hostages and to advance an alternative political order in Gaza. Instead, it decided to knowingly inflict on Gaza an unnecessary humanitarian disaster – and in so doing, inflicted on Israel an unnecessary political disaster. One by one, our allies have become horrified by what is happening in Gaza, and one by one, they are calling for an immediate cease-fire, and even for a weapons embargo on Israel. Moderate Arab countries whose interests dovetail with ours, and who are afraid of Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, have found it difficult to cooperate with us while we devastate Gaza. The Netanyahu government has managed to derail even our relations with the United States, as if we have an alternative source for arms and diplomatic backing. The younger generations in the United States, and around the world now see Israel as a racist and violent country that expels millions from their homes, starves entire populations, and kills many thousands of civilians for no better reason than revenge. The results will be felt not only in the coming days and months, but for decades into the future. Even during the worst moments of October 7, Hamas was nowhere near vanquishing Israel. But the ruinous policy of the Netanyahu government following October 7 has placed Israel in existential danger.

Destruction in Hawara, following a settler pogrom last year. Most Israelis have now focused their attention on Tehran, but even prior to the Iranian attack we preferred to turn a blind eye to what was happening in Gaza and the West Bank.Credit: Ilia Yefimovich/dpa

The Samson Syndrome

The failure of the Netanyahu government during the war is not accidental. It is the bitter fruit of many years of disastrous policies. The decision to inflict on Gaza a humanitarian catastrophe resulted from a combination of three long-term factors: lack of sensitivity to the value of Palestinian lives; lack of sensitivity to Israel's international standing; and skewed priorities that ignored Israel's real security needs.

For many years Netanyahu and his political partners cultivated a racist worldview that accustomed too many Israelis to disregard the value of Palestinian lives. A direct line leads from the Hawara pogrom of February 2023 to the current humanitarian tragedy in Gaza. On February 26, 2023, two Israeli settlers were murdered while they were driving through Hawara, in the West Bank. In revenge, a settler mob torched houses, shops and cars in Hawara, and injured dozens of innocent Palestinian civilians, while the Israeli security forces did little or nothing to stop the outrage. Those who became accustomed to burning a whole town in revenge for the murder of two Israelis, took it for granted that it was acceptable to devastate the entire Gaza Strip in revenge for the atrocities of October 7.

There is no doubt that Hamas is a murderous organization that on October 7 committed heinous crimes. But Israel is supposed to be a democratic country, which even when confronted by such atrocities continues to respect international laws, protect basic human rights and abide by universal moral standards. This is why countries like the United States, Germany and Britain stood by us following October 7. Of course, democratic countries have the right – nay, the duty – to defend themselves, and in war it is sometimes essential to take very violent actions to achieve vital political aims. It seems, however, that many of the actions Israel took after October 7 were motivated by a thirst for revenge, or worse, by the hope that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians would be forced permanently out of Gaza.

For many years, Netanyahu and his allies also cultivated a vainglorious worldview that accustomed many Israelis to downplaying the importance of our relations with the Western democracies. In one recent election campaign, huge roadside posters declared "a leader from a different league" and showed Netanyahu smiling and shaking hands with a beaming Vladimir Putin. Who needs Washington and Berlin when the Israeli superpower has new friends in Moscow and Budapest? And if Putin is our new friend, why not act like Putin? Even today there are Israelis who look longingly at how Putin behaves – e.g., cutting off the ears of terrorists – and think Israel should learn from him. Needless to say, after October 7 Putin stabbed Netanyahu in the back, and Victor Orban didn't bother to visit. It was the liberals in Washington and Berlin who rushed to help Israel. But perhaps out of sheer inertia, Netanyahu keeps biting the hands that feed us. Israel's deepening international isolation, and the hatred being expressed toward Israel among academics, artists and young people is not only the product of Hamas propaganda – it is the product of Netanyahu's skewed priorities over the last 15 years.

Putin with the Netanyahus. Needless to say, after October 7 Putin stabbed Netanyahu in the back.Credit: Amos Ben Gershom/GPO

For many years, Netanyahu and his political partners shaped an agenda that ignored not just the importance of our alliance with Western democracies, but also Israel's most profound security needs. Much has been written about what led to the debacle of October 7, and much more will be written. No doubt a prime minister cannot be held responsible for every small detail. But a prime minister is responsible for the most important thing – shaping the country's priorities. And Netanyahu's chosen priorities were calamitous. He and his partners preferred to consolidate the occupation rather than to secure our borders, so that the same leader who for years proved unable to evacuate a single illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied territories succeeded in a single day to evacuate the Israeli towns of Sderot in the south and Kiryat Shmona in the north, with their tens of thousands of inhabitants.

Worse yet, when Netanyahu formed his last government, he had to decide on which of Israel's many problems it should focus. Should Israel prioritize fighting Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran? After much thought, Netanyahu decided to fight the Supreme Court. If between January and October 2023, the Netanyahu government had given Hamas a quarter of the attention it gave to fighting the Supreme Court, the catastrophe of October 7 would have been prevented.

When after October 7, Netanyahu had to decide on the aims of the war, no wonder that security was again placed too low on the list of priorities. Israel obviously had to enter Gaza to disarm Hamas. But the war's long-term aim should have been to create a stable regional order that would keep Israelis safe for years. Such an order could be created only by strengthening the alliance between Israel and the Western democracies, and deepening cooperation with moderate Arab forces. Instead of cultivating these alliances and partnerships, the war aim Netanyahu chose was blind revenge. Like the eyeless Samson in the biblical Book of Judges, Netanyahu chose to collapse the roofs of Gaza on everyone's heads – Palestinians and Israelis – just to exact revenge.

Israelis know their Bible well, and love its stories. How is it that after October 7, we forgot Samson? His is the tale of a Jewish hero kidnapped to Gaza, where he was held in dark captivity by the Philistines, and severely tortured. Why didn't Samson become a symbol following October 7? Why don't we see his image everywhere, on stickers, graffiti and internet memes?

The answer is that Samson's message is too scary. "May I take vengeance," said Samson, "and let my soul perish with the Philistines." Since October 7, we have become so similar to Samson in so many ways – the hubris, the blindness, the vengeance, the suicide – that it is just too terrifying to remember the vainglorious hero who let his own soul perish just to get even with the Philistines.

Smoke billows above the Gaza Strip in October. The blindness of the public gives the government a free hand to continue its spree of destruction.Credit: Ariel Schalit/AP

The Echo Chamber

Following October 7, it was essential to fight and defeat Hamas, but this could have been done even without killing so many innocent civilians and without starving the civilian population. The IDF has achieved many victories on the fields of battle, giving it control over most areas of the Gaza Strip and the routes leading into it. Even if in the midst of combat it is sometimes difficult to separate civilians from combatants, what prevented Israel from flooding Gaza with aid? Some argue that inefficient distribution within Gaza, and theft by Hamas operatives, are what led to the images of starving children and of thousands of desperate people storming aid trucks. Even if those difficulties are real, Israel could have pushed so much food, medicine and other supplies into Gaza that no scale of mismanagement or theft would have resulted in hunger. After all, what can thieves do with stocks of food other than sell it to the population?

Conversely, if Israel found it difficult to deliver enough aid into Gaza, and since Egypt and other countries refused to host Palestinian refugees, Israel could have created safe havens for Palestinian civilians on Israeli territory near the Egyptian border, south of the Strip. Hundreds of thousands of women, children, elderly and sick refugees from Gaza could have found shelter in these safe zones. There, Israel could have made sure the refugees received all the basic necessities and were protected from attack, as long as the fighting in Gaza continued. This idea was suggested already in the first days of the war by Benny Morris, Benjamin Z. Kedar, and several other leading Israeli academics who foresaw the dangers ahead. Such a move would have fulfilled Israel's moral obligations, won it international approval, and simultaneously enabled the IDF to operate with greater ease within Gaza. It isn't too late to implement such a plan.

Netanyahu continues to promise Israelis "total victory," but the truth is, we are a step away from total defeat. Whatever could have been achieved by fighting – rebuilding domestic trust in the IDF following the October 7 debacle, rebuilding Israeli deterrence abroad, and eliminating most of Hamas' military capabilities – have already been achieved. Nothing more will be gained from continuing the war. It is a dangerous illusion to believe that one more victory, in Rafah, will bring about the collapse of Hamas, the release of all the hostages, and the surrender of Israel's many enemies. Every additional day of war only serves the purposes of Hamas and Iran, and intensifies Israel's international isolation.

Large parts of the Israeli public are blind to what is happening. For too many Israelis, time came to a stop half a year ago. Every day, our media is still full of updates from October 7, 2023, seemingly without taking notice that it is already April 2024. It is of course important to remember and investigate what happened in Israel on that cursed Saturday, but it is also important to know what is happening in Gaza right now. The entire world sees the horrific images coming out of the Strip, but too many Israeli citizens either dare not look or regard all such images as deceitful propaganda. The blindness of the public gives the government a free hand to continue its spree of destruction, which devastates not only Gaza, but also what remains of Israel's international standing and moral compass. How can we break the echo chamber that entraps us, and see what is really happening?

Divine Voice

In history, it sometimes happens that entire populations are trapped in an echo chamber and lose touch with reality. It is particularly likely to happen during wars. For example, in early August 1945, when isolated Japan stood on the verge of defeat, the Japanese continued fighting for the victory promised them by the government and the media. Japanese who dared think otherwise were denounced as defeatist, severely punished and sometimes executed.

What broke the Japanese echo chamber were two atom bombs – one dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, the other on Nagasaki on August 9. In fact, even the atom bombs didn't suffice. Divine intervention was also required. For another week the citizens of Japan continued to believe in victory, until on August 15, 1945, they turned on their radios, and heard a divine voice talking to them.

For many Japanese, Emperor Hirohito was a living god. Hitherto, he had never spoken to them directly. No person outside of his inner circle and Japan's highest officials was permitted to hear the voice of the god Hirohito. But a week after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese government realized it had no alternative to surrender. Having previously promised its citizens victory, the government was afraid they wouldn't understand and accept the abrupt change in policy. Even the atomic bombs couldn't explain it. So the Japanese god was called upon to intervene. "Despite the best that has been done by everyone," explained the divine emperor in his historic broadcast, "the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest … [therefore] We have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace … by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable."

The Netanyahu government, December 2022. A government that adopted a Samson-like policy of revenge and suicide.Credit: Ammar Awad/Reuters

Israel of 2024 is of course not Japan of August 1945. Israel did not seek to conquer half the world, and it hasn't killed millions. Israel still enjoys local military superiority, and its international isolation is not complete. Most important, in our region nuclear weapons are yet to be used, and there is still time to prevent a Middle Eastern Hiroshima. But despite all these huge differences, there is also one point of similarity. Like the Japanese in 1945, many Israelis in 2024 are trapped in an echo chamber that promises them victory, even as we are on the verge of defeat. How to break this echo chamber? It would be unwise to wait for the atomic bomb, or for God to speak on the radio.

The Netanyahu government, which has failed in so much, must finally take responsibility. It is the Netanyahu government that adopted the disastrous agenda that brought us here, and it is the government that adopted the Samson-like policy of revenge and suicide. Woe to us if the same Samsons are now permitted to make the most important strategic and political decisions in Israel's history.

This government has reached the point at which it must endure the unendurable, admit failure, and immediately resign so that someone else can open a new page. It is vital to establish a new government, one that will be guided by a different moral compass, will end the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and will begin to rebuild our international standing. If we don't change our policy toward the Palestinians, we will be left to face Iran alone, and our end will be like that of Samson, who in impotent rage brought down the house on the heads of everyone.

— Professor Yuval Noah Harari is a Historian, Author of "Sapiens," "Homo Deus" and "Unstoppable Us," and Cofounder of the Social-Impact Company Sapienship.

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Sheikh Zayed Towers, Which Were Destroyed By The Terrorist, Fascist, War Criminal, Apartheid, Liar, Conspirator and the Illegal Regime of the Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗 Isra-helli Attacks in Gaza City, seen on June 4, 2024. Photo: Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu via Getty Images

A Federal Judge Visited “The Terrorist, Fascist, War Criminal, Apartheid, Liar, Conspirator and the Illegal Regime of the Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗 Isra-hell” On A Junket Designed To Sway Public Opinion. Now He’s Hearing A Gaza Case.

Activists Suing The Biden Administration Over Gaza Policy Are Demanding The Judge Recuse Himself Over The Sponsored Trip.

— Shawn Musgrave | June 5 2024

Plaintiffs Suing The Biden Administration Over Gaza Policy have asked a federal appellate judge to recuse himself because of a trip he took to Israel in March. The World Jewish Congress, which sponsored the junket for 14 federal judges, framed the delegation as part of Israel’s “fight in the international court of public opinion.”

In an emergency motion filed Tuesday, the plaintiffs’ lawyers argued they were “ethically compelled” to ask Judge Ryan Nelson of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to recuse himself because the WJC trip was “explicitly designed to influence U.S. judicial opinion regarding the legality of ongoing Israeli military action against Palestinians.”

The plaintiffs are a mix of Palestinian human rights organizations and individual Palestinians, including Dr. Omar Al-Najjar, who has written about his experiences working in the decimated health infrastructure in Gaza. In November, they filed a complaint in federal court against President Joe Biden and other top officials, seeking “an injunction requiring the United States to fulfill its international law duty to prevent and cease being complicit — through unconditional financial and diplomatic support — in the unfolding genocide in Gaza.”

The district court dismissed the case in late January but urged the administration “to examine the results of their unflagging support of the military siege against the Palestinians in Gaza.” The plaintiffs appealed to the 9th Circuit, which is scheduled to hear oral arguments next week. Nelson’s selection for the three-judge argument panel was announced on Monday.

In March, Nelson joined 13 colleagues from the federal bench on the WJC-sponsored trip. Like Nelson, many of the judges on the trip were appointed by former President Donald Trump.

According to a disclosure about the trip, the judges met with high-ranking members of the Israel Defense Forces about “Operation Swords of Iron” — what Israel calls its current military operation in Gaza — and the application of international humanitarian law during war. The trip also included sessions with one of the attorneys defending Israel before the International Court of Justice, Tal Becker; former Israeli President Reuven Rivlin; and members of Israel’s Supreme Court and Knesset, the disclosure shows.

The judges met with a high-ranking official at the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, to get the “American perspective,” one judge told the Jerusalem Post. State Department Secretary Antony Blinken is one of the defendants in the case before the 9th Circuit.

In a LinkedIn post summarizing lessons from the trip, Judge Matthew Solomson of the Federal Court of Claims, who helped organized the delegation, wrote, “Israel’s military culture is very attuned to international law; commanders consult lawyers at every step and the lawyers have veto power. We watched many video clips of Israeli military lawyers stopping strikes based on proportionality and collateral damage assessments. Their enemy doesn’t play by such rules.”

In late March, Nelson and Solomson spoke about the trip at a lunch talk hosted by Harvard Law School’s chapters of the Federalist Society and the Jewish Law Students Association. Their remarks were not made public, but Solomson wrote in a LinkedIn post that Nelson “expressed his inspiring faith in God and, concomitantly, an optimistic view of the future.”

Kath Hochul’s Trip of “The Terrorist, Fascist, War Criminal, Apartheid, Liar, Conspirator and the Illegal Regime of the Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗 Isra-hell” Bankrolled By Group Funding Illegal Settlements! New York Disgusting Governor Kathy Hochul Visits “The Terrorist, Fascist, War Criminal, Apartheid, Liar, Conspirator and the Illegal Regime of the Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗 Isra-hell” on October 19, 2023. Photo: Shlomi Amsalem/Office of Gov. Kathy Hochul

UJA-Federation of New York, A Tax-Exempt Nonprofit, Has Sent More Than Half a Million Dollars to Groups Supporting “The Terrorist, Fascist, War Criminal, Apartheid, Liar, Conspirator and the Illegal Regime of the Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗 Isra-helli” Settlements.

“The UJA Has Helped Destroy Any Semblance of a ‘Peace Process’ or Possibility of a Two State Solution.”

In their recusal motion, the plaintiffs highlight coverage of the trip in the Israeli press, particularly by the English-language ILTV. “This invaluable experience allowed them to delve deeper into the legality of Israel’s conduct in the operation,” ILTV said of the trip in an Instagram post.

“At this time, when Israel is facing so much in the court of public opinion and in the courts around the world,” WJC’s chief marketing officer, Sara Friedman, told ILTV in March, “it’s so important for people who understand the judicial system, who understand the laws of war, to come here.”

“The World Jewish Congress is sending a message by bringing these groups that we are supporting the state of Israel,” Friedman told ILTV. “By bringing these groups here and showing them the truth about what is going on, it’s the best diplomacy we can do.”

Friedman did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment about the trip. The Intercept also asked WJC for copies of materials given to the judges during the trip.

An anonymous statement by federal judicial clerks last month criticized the Israel trip.

Peter Joy, who studies legal ethics at Washington University in St. Louis, said it is often difficult to predict how judges will rule on recusal.

“They make a strong case for the judge to step down,” said Joy. “Here’s somebody who went on a trip, the explicit purpose of which was to try to get Israel’s point of view across.”

Cassandra Burke Robertson, director of the Center for Professional Ethics at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, did not think it was a clear-cut case for recusal.

“The closest issue here is that it sounds like officials on the trip may have been providing specific information about the legality of the operation,” Robertson said. “But if the information was more general, then I don’t think it would be disqualifying.”

“Although Judge Nelson certainly COULD recuse, I don’t think recusal is required under the statute or Judicial Canons,” Rory Little, a professor at UC Law San Francisco, told The Intercept in an email. “He might recuse; it’s not a clear case in either direction.”

Arguments are scheduled for June 10, and the plaintiffs asked the 9th Circuit to rule on their emergency recusal motion by Thursday. A spokesperson for the 9th Circuit said the panel will address the motion, “presumably before Monday.”

The Justice Department, which did not oppose the recusal motion, declined to discuss the case.

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An Isra-helli Terrorist Soldier Kneels on the Chest of a Palestinian Protester on the Streets of Hebron, in the Occupied West Bank, in October 2022. Photo: Mosab Shawer/AFP/Getty Images

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) Ruling Confirms What Palestinians Hav Been Saying For 57 Years

War Criminal, Terrorist, Genocidal, Apartheid and The Illegal Regime of The Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗, Isra-hell’s Occupation of Palestinian Territories is Illegal, a Form of Apartheid, and Must End, Says the U.N.’s High Court at The Hague, The Netherlands.

— Jonah Valdez | July 19, 2024

The United Nations’ Top Court Filed a Ruling Friday that echoed what Palestinian advocates have been saying for decades: Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, including its Settlements in the West Bank, is Illegal and Must End.

The International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion also called for reparations for Palestinians who have lived under Israel’s occupation since it began in 1967, an unprecedented step for the court. The court also notably declared Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians to be a form of segregation and apartheid. It further ruled that nations cannot offer aid in support of the illegal occupation without violating international law, and upheld the Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

Advisory opinions from the ICJ are not legally binding and cannot, in itself, force a country to act. But their legal and moral weight can have significant influence on countries’ decisions and foreign policy.

Jessica Peake, an International Law Professor at UCLA Law, said the ruling has the potential to shift the international community’s ability to push for Palestinian statehood. She added that the ruling exceeded her expectations, specifically around the issue of the Israeli government’s systemic abuses toward Palestinians.

“What was particularly surprising was that they basically made a finding that Israel is creating a situation of apartheid against Palestinians within Israel,” Peake said, “because of the racially discriminatory laws and policies in place that basically treat Palestinians as second-class citizens.”

But some advocates for Palestinians living within the occupied territories are less enthusiastic about the ruling.

“In The West Bank, It’s Business As Usual.”

Eitay Mack, an Israeli attorney and advocate for Palestinians in the West Bank, said the ruling does little to immediately change the lived reality for Palestinians. While ICJ officials read out their ruling on Friday from the Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands, Mack received new reports of Israeli settlers attacking Palestinians in the West Bank.

“The court just said the obvious,” Mack told The Intercept. “In the West Bank, it’s business as usual unless governments have the political will to force both Israelis and Palestinians” into implementing a two-state solution that gives Palestine sovereignty.

Amid the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, Israel began its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and annexed East Jerusalem. Soon after, Israel began to establish settlements inside the occupied territories, supporting Israeli civilians as they built communities atop land taken from Palestinians. While Israel withdrew its troops and settlements from Gaza in 2005, it continued to promote and expand its settlements in the West Bank. And in recent months, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government has used its war in Gaza as a cover to expand its settlements at a rate faster than previous decades.

The Isra-helli government immediately dismissed the ICJ ruling, with a defiant Satan-Yahu calling Jerusalem “Our Eternal Capital 😂” and referred to the West Bank as “the land of our ancestors,” using the biblical names “Judea and Samaria.”

“No false decision in The Hague will distort this historical truth,” he said in a statement, “and likewise the legality of Israeli settlement in all the territories of our homeland cannot be contested.”

B’Tselem, an Israeli-based human rights group, was among a host of organizations that welcomed Friday’s ruling after decades of their own advocacy calling for an end to Israel’s occupation. They said the international community has been avoiding the issue by buying Israel’s claim that its occupation is temporary and that it is engaged in negotiations and diplomacy toward a solution.

“The release of the ICJ’s advisory opinion puts an end to these justifications, and now the international community must use every tool — criminal, diplomatic and economic — to force Israeli decision-makers to end the occupation,” the group said on Friday.

In recent months, more nations have officially recognized Palestine as a state, with Norway, Spain, and Ireland joining 143 other nations in recognition. The ICJ ruling, which declares Israel’s occupation an obstacle to Palestinian statehood, may embolden more nations to follow suit. In April, the U.S. vetoed a measure in the U.N. Security Council, that would have recognized Palestine as a member of the U.N. At the time, the U.S. said Palestinian statehood could only come from direct negotiations between Palestine and Israel. The United States sends billions of dollars of military aid to Israel each year.

Israel made similar arguments in the lead-up to the ICJ decision, stating that the ruling would interfere with ongoing negotiations. Separately, Israel’s Parliament this week also passed a resolution that rejects Palestinian statehood, calling it “an existential danger to the State of Israel and its citizens.” Friday’s ICJ decision, Peake noted, undercuts that notion and upholds Palestine’s right to self-determination.

“The ICJ decision, I think really will give states the legal backing or the legal cover that they need to recognize Palestine,” Peake said, “and insulate them a little bit from some of the political pressure that would come from the United States and Israel.”

Peake acknowledged that the U.N. has made declarations in the past condemning Israeli occupation. But most of those were issued by U.N. bodies that were organized to specifically address Palestine. A separate ICJ advisory opinion, issued in 2004, declared Israel’s 400-mile wall in the West Bank illegal.

But the U.N.’s top court has never before issued such strong language about the occupation with the backing of the majority of U.N. membership.

“I don’t think this is going to change everything tomorrow,” Peake said. “Hopefully what this does do is provide an even stronger set of tools to states and to the international community to try and address some of what is going on in occupied Palestine.”

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In 2022 Alone, The U.S Congress Received $23,734,981 From The Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗 Lobby. The disproportionate influence this money has over U.S legislation is clearly evident in how the U.S. is supporting Israeli genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Zionist influence shapes policies that perpetuate the ongoing occupation of Palestine and enable Israeli violence against Palestinians. We are here to say that the American people will no longer be complicit in this oppression! Add your name to the petition demanding U.S officials stop accepting money from the Zionist lobby!

We, the undersigned constituents, stand united in our demand that our elected officials in Congress must cease to accept money from the Zionist lobby. The acceptance of this money in exchange for legislation supporting Israel is profoundly undemocratic and contrary to the values of human rights and international law. We vehemently reject the prioritization of Israel’s interests — a foreign entity — over those of the American people.

In the 2022 election cycle alone, Congress received $23,734,981 from the Zionist lobby, and the disproportionate influence this money has over US legislation is extremely evident. Zionist influence shapes policies that perpetuate the ongoing occupation of Palestine and enable Israeli violence against Palestinains, and we are witnessing its worst form as Israel commits genocide in Gaza, armed and supported by the US. Zionist influence in our politics has implicated the US in war crimes and crimes against humanity, and we are here to say that the American people will no longer be complicit in this oppression!

It is your duty as elected officials to prioritize the demands of the American people, and principles of justice over the demands of powerful lobbying groups that are proxies for the Israeli regime. Accepting money from the Zionist lobby makes you complicit in perpetuating policies that actively oppress Palestinians, and others who face violence at the hands of Israel, and damages the reputation of the US in the international order.

We call on you to reject all contributions from the Zionist lobby and to promote values of justice globally. It is your responsibility.

Sincerely,

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Spain Has Refused Permission For a Ship Carrying Arms To “The Terrorist, Fascist, Apartheid, War Criminal, Liar, Conspirator and The Illegal Regime of The Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗 Isra-hell” To Dock at a Spanish Port, Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares Has Said.

The ship, which had requested permission to call at the Southeastern Port of Cartagena on May 21, is reportedly loaded with 27 Tonnes of Explosive Material From India and may have avoided entering “The Terrorist, Fascist, Apartheid, War Criminal, Liar, Conspirator and The Illegal Regime of The Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗 Isra-hell” through the Red Sea where Yemen's Houthis hold sway.

Albares said refusing permission to dock in Spanish Ports was consistent with Spain's policy to ban the exports of all arms to “The Terrorist, Fascist, Apartheid, War Criminal, Liar, Conspirator and The Illegal Regime of The Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗 Isra-hell” since the outbreak of the war on Gaza in October.

"This will be a consistent policy with any ship carrying arms to “The Terrorist, Fascist, Apartheid, War Criminal, Liar, Conspirator and The Illegal Regime of The Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗 Isra-hell” that wants to call at Spanish ports. The foreign ministry will systematically reject such stopovers for one obvious reason. The Middle East Does Not Need More Weapons, It Needs More Peace," he added.

Spain has been one of Europe's most critical voices about Israel's Gaza offensive and is working to rally other European capitals behind the idea of recognising a Palestinian State. Spain halted arms sales to “The Terrorist, Fascist, Apartheid, War Criminal, Liar, Conspirator and The Illegal Regime of The Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗 Isra-hell” after it launched a military onslaught against besieged Gaza.

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Police tear down tents on UCLA’s Campus, Los Angeles, CA, on May 2, 2024. Photo: Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times via Getty

They Used to Say Arabs Can’t Have Democracy Because It’d Be Bad For “The Terrorist, Fascist, Apartheid, War Criminal, Liar, Conspirator, The Illegal Regime of The Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗 Isra-hell.” Now “The War Criminal, Complicit in Genocide in Gaza, The U.S. Can’t Have It Either.”

On Campus, Inside the Capitol, and in Court, There’s an All-out Assault on American Democracy in the Name of “The Terrorist, Fascist, Apartheid, War Criminal, Liar, Conspirator, The Illegal Regime of The Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗 Isra-hell.”.

— Murtaza Hussain | May 8 2024 | The Intercept

There’s An Adage among observers of American Middle East policy that suggests the Arab world can’t have democracy because it would be bad for Israel. Arab publics favor the Palestinians, the thinking goes, and will vote in governments that act accordingly — and that is a no-go zone.

Now, with discontent in the U.S. boiling over amid Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip, the framing might need a small update: The U.S., it seems, can’t have democracy either, lest an American democracy end its support for everything and anything Israel wants to do to the Palestinians.

Recent weeks saw violent crackdowns on protests, the passage of bills severely curtailing American free speech rights, and lawsuits seeking to effectively outlaw student groups hostile to Israel.

A serious red line has been crossed: America’s democratic freedoms, expansive on paper, will simply not tolerate serious dissent on the U.S.–Israel relationship. As criticisms of Israel have become more mainstream, the attempt to shut them down entirely has become more extreme.

“Pro-The Terrorist, Fascist, Apartheid, War Criminal, Liar, Conspirator, The Illegal Regime of The Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗 Isra-hell Forces” in the U.S. are attacking our own democratic freedoms in order to suppress public outcry about apartheid and potential genocide 6,000 miles away.

In pursuit of this blank-check relationship with an Israeli government that is becoming ever-more intransigent with each passing year, pro-Israel forces in the U.S. are attacking our own democratic freedoms in order to suppress public outcry about apartheid and potential genocide 6,000 miles away. And, if the recent campus crackdowns are any indication, these forces are winning their battle.

With tens of thousands of Palestinians left dead and the Israeli assault on Gaza ongoing, the U.S. protests targeting university ties with Israel over the last month — voluble and outspoken — have been overwhelmingly nonviolent.

Yet these nonviolent protests have met with the full brutal force of the U.S. security state. Dispersing the protest encampments, police have viciously beaten protesters, fired rubber bullets, and enveloped students in dense clouds of tear gas.

Much of the focus has been on the crackdown in New York City, where Columbia University students established the first major encampment the day its president testified at a House antisemitism hearing — but these incredible scenes of police attacking students have played out across the country. By recent count, over 2,300 people have been arrested on campuses in the U.S. since April 18.

It’s not the Middle East, but it is the same anti-democratic suppression of dissent. And one could be forgiven for noting that the crackdown sometimes resembles the suppression in dictatorships like Egypt, Jordan, and Bahrain.

In one stateside case, the squashing of a campus protest even involved what could be called “baltagiya”: the signature Egyptian tactic where unofficial state-aligned militias armed with clubs attack demonstrators before the police swoop in.

This wasn’t, however, Cairo in 2011. It was Los Angeles. At the University of California, Los Angeles, a pro-Israel mob videotaped itself descending on a protest camp and brutally beating protesters, including journalists.

The violence at the UCLA raged on for three hours before police intervened to restore order. Roughly two dozen people were reportedly hospitalized for injuries. It is not clear whether the gangs that attacked the encampment were students of the school.

The following day, police came to tear down the protest camp, firing rubber bullets and arresting some of the same demonstrators who had been attacked by thugs the night before.

Anti-Democracy in D.C.

While brutal suppression is being carried out on the street level, the ground is being prepared for even more disfiguring restrictions on democratic freedoms in Washington.

Last week, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill called the Antisemitism Awareness Act. While on its face the bill simply seeks to express Congress’s view in favor of tackling anti-Jewish bigotry, in reality its provisions would encode a controversial definition of antisemitism geared at inoculating Israel from criticism.

Drawing from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, the bill would categorize acts of speech as antisemitism. The IHRA definition states that “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” “applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation”; and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” are all prima facie antisemitic speech.

The vague nature of these IHRA standards, including inevitable ambiguity about the definition of “double standards” regarding the state of Israel, has led the definition to be widely condemned as a Trojan horse for defining any criticism of Israel as antisemitism.

In Europe, where there is no First Amendment, the IHRA definition of antisemitism has already been widely used to criminalize speech that is critical of Israel.

The Antisemitism Awareness Act doesn’t quite go so far as to challenge the First Amendment. Instead, the bill gives the “sense of Congress” about the IHRA language. On Capitol Hill, it is a familiar technique: Resolutions that carry no criminal weight are used to mainstream language and ideas that are later used to enact more stringent statutes.

The purveyors of the Washington IHRA bill have already suggested that the legislation is, indeed, a first step toward something more concrete. “This bill has broad, bipartisan support and will begin the process of cracking down on the antisemitism we’ve seen run rampant on college campuses across America,” the lead sponsor, Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., boasted on X.

Lawler’s legislation is only one of a number of other proposed bills that would create a new congressional body to subpoena individuals over ill-defined allegations of antisemitism, criminalize and increase punishment guidelines for engaging in nonviolent protest, force federal agencies to submit lists of employees allegedly supportive of Hamas, force colleges to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism to receive federal funding, and bar entry or deport individuals who are even charged in connection with demonstrations deemed by authorities to be antisemitic.

Attacks on Dissent

The efforts to crush dissent on Israel aren’t limited to campuses or the halls of power in Washington. The multipronged approach is playing out everywhere: in courts, in state legislatures, and elsewhere.

In state houses, measures taken by Republican officials in states like Florida, Indiana, and Arizona have already aimed to ban the activities of pro-Palestinian activist groups on college campuses. Many of these proposals employ language that would ban funding for groups accused of antisemitism or “supporting the activities of a foreign terrorist organization,” despite criticism from educators and activists that their ambiguous language could simply outlaw any pro-Palestinian activism.

Finally, survivors and families of those slain in the October 7 attack in Israel are now filing lawsuits against the pro-Palestine activist groups.

Backed by the Big Law firm Greenberg Traurig, the plaintiffs are suing Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine, accusing the groups of acting as “as collaborators and propagandists for Hamas,” demanding they pay damages to compensate for the October 7 attacks in Israel.

This sweeping crackdown on the basic rights of Americans would effectively declare public discussion of a core area of U.S. foreign policy off-limits.

SJP is one of the largest pro-Palestinian student organizations involved in the recent protests, and the lawsuit says the group is “operating and managing Hamas’s mouthpiece for North America, dedicated to sanitizing Hamas’s atrocities and normalizing its terrorism.”

Put all together, this sweeping crackdown on the basic rights of Americans to speak, organize, and freely debate would effectively declare public discussion of a core area of U.S. foreign policy off-limits.

The scenes of crackdowns on U.S. campuses have already prompted statements of concern from international human rights and civil liberties organizations that are more accustomed to condemning suppression of civil society activism in places like China and Russia.

It’s an approach that will likely become even more stringent if, as likely, and in defiance of international opinion, the Israeli government continues with its policy of annexing the West Bank or expands the present war to Lebanon.

A free and frank debate about U.S. ties with Israel in such a context is more necessary than ever. But armed with political and legal support, along with street pressure from the police and even armed agitators, it seems that holding such a debate in the U.S. may soon no longer be possible.

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Former President National Union of Students (NUS), Shaima Dallali. "I Am An Anti-Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗, And A Proud Pro-Palestinian.”

Former NUS President Settles With Union Over Antisemitism Claims

Shaima Dallali, ousted as NUS president in 2022, said to have accepted ‘substantial’ settlement before tribunal

— Richard Adams, Education Editor | May 07, 2024 | Guardian USA

A former president of the National Union of Students is said to have accepted a “substantial” settlement to end her legal action against the union following her dismissal over allegations of antisemitism.

Shaima Dallali was ousted as NUS UK president in November 2022 after an investigation claimed she had made “significant breaches” of the union’s antisemitism policies. But shortly before Dallali’s legal challenge was to be heard by an employment tribunal, the NUS and Dallali’s lawyers said a settlement had been agreed.

A joint statement read: “We are pleased to confirm that a settlement has been reached between Shaima Dallali and the National Union of Students, bringing an end to the proceedings before the employment tribunal.”

Dallali’s dismissal came after an investigation into antisemitism within the organisation, headed by a barrister, Rebecca Tuck, amid concerns over a social media post written 10 years earlier by Dallali that referenced a seventh-century battle between Muslims and Jews.

The NUS said it now accepted that “pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist beliefs may be protected beliefs, as may pro-Zionist beliefs. As a private individual Ms Dallali is, and as president of NUS she was, entitled to hold protected beliefs.”

The NUS statement added: “Throughout this matter, Ms Dallali has suffered truly horrific abuse, which has included death threats, threats of sexual assault and flagrant Islamophobia. This is wholly unacceptable, and NUS categorically condemn it.

“Ms Dallali now has the right to move on with her life and her career free from harassment or abuse.”

While both sides said the terms of the settlement were confidential, people familiar with the case said it was likely that the union had paid Dallali’s legal costs and a further sum as part of the settlement.

The settlement follows a ruling earlier this year that David Miller, a former professor at the University of Bristol, had been unfairly dismissed over his anti-Zionist views, which qualify as philosophical beliefs protected under the Equality Act.

Tayab Ali, the director of the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians, said: “We now have clear legal recognition that criticism of Israel and of Zionism amounts to a protected belief and cannot be suppressed. This must be considered by universities before they decide to take any disciplinary or other action against their students.”

Dallali said: “I am an anti-Zionist and a proud pro-Palestinian. Following today’s settlement, I look forward to being able to focus on continuing to dedicate myself to the Palestinian cause and to serving my community.

“I am immensely grateful to those who have supported me during this difficult chapter in my life and I am pleased that all parties can now move on. Now more than ever, it is important that all communities come together for peace and justice.”

The NUS UK’s latest accounts revealed that the union spent more than £800,000 on the antisemitism investigation since 2022.

After Dallali’s election as president in March 2022, the NUS received complaints about her 2012 tweet that read: “Khaybar Khaybar O Jews … Muhammad’s army will return Gaza,” referencing a historical battle. Dallali later apologised for the tweet.

The joint statement issued on Tuesday said: “As has been noted repeatedly in the media, NUS was very concerned by a tweet that was written by Ms Dallali when she was a teenager, before she was even a student, in 2012.

“Ms Dallali has accepted that while it was not her intention, the tweet was antisemitic. Both parties accept that Ms Dallali has repeatedly apologised for that tweet.”

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Türkiye 🇹🇷 Suspended All Trade With “The Terroris, Fascist, Apartheid, War Criminal, The Bastard Child of The US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Australia And The Rest of The Puppet West, The Illegal Regime of The Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗: Isra-hell” Effective Immediately Over The Humanitarian Crisis It Has Caused In Gaza, The Turkish Trade Ministry Announced On Thursday.

"Export and import transactions related to Israel have been stopped, covering all products," the ministry said. "Turkey will strictly and decisively implement these new measures until the Israeli Government allows an uninterrupted and sufficient flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza." On Friday, Turkish Trade Minister Omer Bolat said Turkey's trade halt with Israel will continue until a permanent ceasefire in Gaza is secured as well as unhindered humanitarian aid flow to the region.

Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz criticised the move on the social media platform X, saying that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was behaving like "a dictator". Katz accused Erdogan of breaking bilateral agreements between the two countries and said the country would work to create trade alternatives with other countries. Turkey and Israel have a free trade agreement that has been in effect since 1997. Trade volume between the two countries was $6.3bn in 2023, out of which 76 percent were Turkish exports, according to the Turkish Statistical Institute.

The trade ministry said in the same statement that they are coordinating with the Palestinian Ministry of National Economy to ensure that Palestinians who live in occupied territories such as the West Bank wouldn't be harmed by the move. Turkey was also exporting products to Palestinian territories through Israeli customs.

Since suffering significant losses in Turkey's local elections in March, the Turkish government has intensified its criticism of Israel and taken a series of steps against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government. The government has assessed that its comparatively more balanced policy regarding Palestine and Gaza had negatively impacted its core voters who are pious Muslims concerned about the ongoing Israeli invasion in Gaza.

The war in Gaza began on 7 October, when Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups launched a surprise attack on southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking at least 240 people hostage. Israel responded to the attacks with a declaration of war, launching a siege on Gaza and a devastating aerial bombing campaign that was followed by a ground invasion.

Israel's war on the enclave has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, most of whom are women and children, levelled entire residential neighbourhoods, and targeted other civilian infrastructure including schools, hospitals, and mosques. The Turkish government first imposed export restrictions to Israel on more than 50 products on 9 April.

The Turkish president last month publicly met Hamas leaders, including the political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh, for the first time since the 7 October attack against Israel by the group, and dispatched his Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan to Doha to meet senior Hamas officials. Fidan, in a separate statement earlier this week, announced that Ankara would also join South Africa's genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

Fidan said that Turkey has been deliberating on how to respond to Israel's actions during the war on Gaza for a while, and has already taken steps against Israel, such as restricting some exports. "Our legal experts have been studying how to participate in the legal case against Israel at the ICJ," Fidan said during televised remarks on Wednesday.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan approved the officials' plan, Fidan added, so Turkey "will legally support South Africa's case against Israel at the ICJ, and file our application to the court soon". Turkey aims to strengthen South Africa's case with this step. Nicaragua and Colombia have previously tried to intervene in the same case with separate applications, but the court has yet to make a judgment on their request. Fidan said Turkey discussed the issue with some members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, who said they are likely to also join the case.

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How Columbia’s Campus Was Torn Apart Over Gaza, Forever Palestine 🇵🇸

The University Asked the N.Y.P.D. to Arrest Pro-Palestine Student Protesters. Was it a Necessary Step to Protect Jewish Students (The Zionist 🐗🐖🐷 🐖), or a Dangerous Encroachment on Academic Freedom?

— By Andrew Marantz | April 25, 2024

Photograph by C.S. Muncy/NYT/Redux

In the Predawn Hours of Wednesday, April 17th, more than a hundred student activists walked onto a lawn in front of the Butler Library, in the middle of Columbia University’s campus. The center of campus is usually open to city foot traffic, but, because of recent tensions, campus administrators had restricted access to Columbia I.D. holders; many of the activists, trying to stay anonymous, were careful not to swipe their I.D.s on the way in. They set up a few dozen green tents, a couple of Palestinian flags, and some handwritten signs (“columbia funds genocide”; “while you read, gaza bleeds”). One of the signs in the encampment read “liberated zone,” a reference to a wave of protests at Columbia in the late sixties. “We’re calling it an occupation,” Maryam Iqbal, a first-year Barnard College student wearing hoop earrings, told me. “We’ve been building up to this action for months.”

Since October 7th, Columbia, like many universities, has been roiled by protests and counter-protests. (“It’s basically the only thing anyone here can talk about,” one student told me.) Iqbal, an eighteen-year-old from Seattle, is a leader of the Columbia chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, an organization that was suspended in November, after administrators alleged that the group had “repeatedly violated University policies.” Next to the lawn, about a hundred more protesters marched in support of the encampment, though here the message discipline was more lax (“we will not be silent,” but also “globalize the intifada”). Eventually, some counter-protesters showed up, chanting “Am Yisrael chai” (“The people of Israel live”) and waving a huge Israeli flag.

In the past six months, several students have reported being physically assaulted on or near Columbia’s campus. Some of these students were apparently targeted for being visibly Jewish or pro-Israel, others for being visibly Muslim or pro-Palestine, and some for being Jewish but critical of Israel (including some who were called “self-hating Jews”). “Any time there is violence in the region where Israelis and Palestinians kill each other, there is an increase in antisemitic and anti-Muslim incidents in the U.S. and Europe,” Yinon Cohen, a professor of Israel and Jewish studies at Columbia, told me in November. The majority of the controversy at Columbia, though, has concerned not violence but speech: radical slogans, hastily planned protests, even contentious discussions in classrooms. This included squarely political speech (“Free Palestine,” say, or “Israel is an apartheid state”) of the sort that many members of the Columbia community might disagree with, but which few would be inclined to punish. (“Some of these reported antisemitic incidents are not really antisemitic but rather anti-Israel or anti-Zionist,” Cohen added.) And, even when the speech was abhorrent, or plainly antisemitic, it was still generally protected by the First Amendment. Still, for Columbia’s administration, the First Amendment was not the only guiding principle; the university also has an institutional duty, and indeed a legal obligation, to foster a safe environment for its students. According to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, entities that receive federal funds are required to prevent discrimination on the basis of race or national origin. “Columbia is mandated by federal law to ensure equal access to all University services for Jews and Israelis, including those who identify as Zionists,” a group calling itself Columbia Faculty and Staff Supporting Israel wrote in an open letter.

Maytal Polonetsky, a Barnard first-year and a modern Orthodox Jew, told me, “I have a necklace with a pendant in the shape of Israel, and in class I’ll often tuck it in, because I don’t want to deal with the blowback.” Polonetsky grew up in Potomac, Maryland, and spent a year studying at a religious school in Jerusalem before college. She said that she thought of the necklace as both a political symbol and religious one. Obviously, it would be unacceptable to ostracize anyone simply because of her Jewish identity; being criticized for one’s political ideology, however, might be painful but not beyond the pale. “For the past month, my mom has been seeing stuff on the news about Columbia and telling me, ‘Come home, you’re not safe there,’ ” Polonetsky said. “I told her, ‘Mom, it’s emotionally wrenching, it’s exhausting, but I’m not in physical danger.’ ”

Columbia’s administrators seemed at pains to show that they had things under control. They set up a Doxing Resource Group, after the identities of many student activists were revealed by outside agitators, and a Task Force on Antisemitism, to insure that Columbia would be “safe, welcoming, and inclusive for Jewish students.” (Many people noted, with indignation, that there was no Task Force on Islamophobia.) Still, the more the administration intervened, the worse things seemed to get. In February, a Jewish student sued Columbia under Title VI, claiming that its failure to “prohibit discrimination and retaliation against Jewish persons” had rendered the university a “hostile environment.” Later that month, in a separate lawsuit, fifteen more students filed a hundred-page complaint, which detailed several allegations of antisemitism on campus; it also argued that “anti-Zionism is not merely a political movement—although many try to disguise it as such—but is a direct attack against Israel as a Jewish collectivity.” While these students maintained that the university had not done enough to crack down on demonstrations, another lawsuit, filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union and the advocacy group Palestine Legal, argued that the university had already gone too far, violating the demonstrators’ legal rights in the process. “The tactic of our administration, and of other people in power, has been to conflate critique of Israel with anti-Jewish hate,” Debbie Becher, a sociology professor at Barnard, told me. “It’s not a novel tactic, but it’s been very effective and very damaging.” Becher is Jewish, as are the members of Jewish Voice for Peace, another student group that was suspended from Columbia in November after protesting the war. On Wednesday, a couple of the activists on the lawn wore yarmulkes, as did many of the counter-protesters. “ ‘To protect the feelings of some of our Jewish students, we’re going to ban the political speech of our other Jewish students,’ ” Ilan Cohen, an undergraduate pursuing a dual degree at Columbia and the Jewish Theological Seminary told me, paraphrasing what he saw as the university’s position. “Make it make sense.”

Photograph by Mark Peterson/Redux

Another student at Barnard and the Jewish Theological Seminary was more muted in her critique. “Is there antisemitism at Columbia? Of course,” she told me. “We’re in New York City. Even before this protest, we had a self-declared neo-Nazi standing outside the campus gates and shouting things. Now, it’s only gotten worse.” She has found it hard to discuss this honestly with her progressive friends, she continued, “because of how antisemitism is exploited. The conservative pro-Israel position is ‘Columbia is this horrible den of antisemitism. People are only protesting Israel because they hate the Jews’—which is wrong, so then the pro-Palestine students’ instinct is to deny that there’s antisemitism within the movement at all.” She maintained that the antiwar protests were not primarily motivated by antisemitism. “Those people, they’re in no way a majority—often they’re not even Columbia students,” she said. “But, still, it’s the movement’s job to acknowledge it, and root it out.” Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, wrote that he was “deeply troubled” by “the University’s severe and seemingly viewpoint-discriminatory enforcement of rules relating to student demonstrations.” Although the university obviously had “a responsibility to take action against genuine threats and harassment,” he continued, it also had an obligation to encourage “free inquiry and the production of knowledge.”

At the Center of the Encampment, shortly after 10 a.m., Mahmood Mamdani, an anthropologist at Columbia, spoke about the protests against segregation in the American South and apartheid in South Africa, and added, “This is the next great international-solidarity movement.” A police helicopter hovered overhead. “I won’t talk too loud. I don’t want the police to hear,” he added—a joke, or maybe a half-joke. The rumor passing through the crowd was that anyone who did not leave the lawn by 11 a.m. would be risking suspension, and possibly arrest. In April, 1968, when hundreds of students were occupying several buildings on campus, the university’s president, Grayson Kirk, asked the N.Y.P.D. to remove them. Police officers in riot gear stormed in, arresting more than seven hundred students and beating many of them in the process. (The Times later referred to Kirk’s “ill-fated decision” as “an emblem of the generational conflict characterizing the Vietnam War era,” and it ultimately cost Kirk his job.) Since then, the N.Y.P.D. has been invited onto the campus only in rare circumstances, and never without controversy. A professor standing near the lawn told me, “If they think they can calm down this situation by arresting students, that will absolutely have the opposite effect.”

The demonstration had been timed to coincide with events in Washington, D.C. The current president of Columbia, Minouche Shafik, was about to testify in Congress, before the same committee that had grilled the presidents of Harvard, M.I.T., and the University of Pennsylvania four months earlier. Representative Elise Stefanik—a Harvard alum, and a former Bush Administration moderate turned pugnacious Trump loyalist—implied that the college presidents had allowed students to call for the “genocide of Jews.” Her framing was disingenuous, but she was rewarded with glowing coverage in the conservative press and mentioned as a potential running mate for Donald Trump. Four days after the hearing, Liz Magill, the president of Penn, resigned. “One down. Two to go,” Stefanik tweeted. Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, also resigned a month later.

Now it was Shafik’s time in the barrel. The title of her hearing—“Columbia in Crisis: Columbia University’s Response to Antisemitism”—seemed to assume that the sole cause of campus turmoil was antisemitism, and that a more robust “response” might be needed. Going into the hearing, Shafik seemed determined to demonstrate to Congress that she was not afraid to take the situation in hand, with force if necessary. “This isn’t like the anti-apartheid protests we had here in the eighties, and this isn’t like 1968, either,” someone familiar with the thinking of Columbia’s administration told me. “These protests are pitting groups of students, and some faculty, against each other. They can turn vicious, hateful at times, and quickly become about personal identity.” Shortly after Shafik announced that she would testify, Becher and two dozen other Jewish professors at Barnard and Columbia drafted an open letter to Shafik, acknowledging that antisemitism “exists everywhere, including at Columbia,” but objecting to “the ways charges of antisemitism are being weaponized.” Becher and her colleagues mentioned McCarthy-era “Red-baiting” and recent book bans in Texas and Florida, and urged Shafik to respond “with an affirmation of our values”—academic freedom, for instance—“that refuses to concede the premise of these traps.” (I, too, signed an open letter last year, calling for “a diplomatic path towards peace.”) Some students had sympathy for Shafik, who was both the first woman and the first person of color to serve as Columbia’s president, and who seemed to be in a nearly impossible position. “I don’t see things getting better if she gets fired,” one told me. Others were unmoved. “She’s our ‘first African president,’ ” a student of Black and Arab ancestry told me, with an eye roll. “But, trust me, we do not claim her.”

In Columbia’s student center, in a lounge called the Audre Lorde Community Space, the leaders of a few student-activist groups were hosting an impromptu hearing watch party. A projector and a Bluetooth speaker had been set up between the Community Conference Room (a sign outside the room read “What does community mean to you?”) and the Liberation Conference Room (“Without community, there is no liberation”). One of Columbia’s trustees, Claire Shipman, was on the screen, testifying in a tone of steely resolve: “We’ve suspended two student groups for noncompliance—more than a dozen individual students—and we disciplined faculty members,” she said. “We are far from done.”

Members of the committee questioned Shafik in tones that ranged from lightly veiled intimidation to theocratic farce. Rick Allen, a Republican congressman from Georgia, shared his opinion that “Washington, D.C., is not the center of the universe—Jerusalem is the center of the universe,” and suggested that Columbia should offer “a course on the Bible.”

“The Bible is in our core curriculum!” a student at the watch party cried. “Did this man even Google us?”

Allen loosely quoted Genesis 12:3—“ ‘If you curse Israel, I will curse you’ ”—and asked Shafik, “Do you want Columbia University to be cursed by God?” (Shafik clarified that she did not.) “ ‘Columbia: Cursed by God,’ ” a student in the lounge said. “Somebody has to put that on a T-shirt.” When it was Stefanik’s turn, the room grew quiet. In the back of the room, a student knitting a scarf nervously picked up the pace of her stitches. Stefanik brought up, by name, several professors who had made controversial statements since October 7th, asking what disciplinary actions had been taken against them. “She is really out for blood,” Becher, the Barnard professor, said.

Shafik could have condemned some of the speech she’d heard on campus while asserting the rights of students and scholars to free expression. Instead, when lawmakers urged her to discipline her students and faculty, she sometimes seemed almost eager to comply. If one of the goals of the hearing was to strike fear into the hearts of student activists, then, judging from the silence in the Community Space, it seemed to be working. And yet some observers, especially on the right, still insisted that Shafik had not done enough to prove her commitment to protecting Jewish students. “Watch Columbia President Shafik squirm, hem & haw,” Jason Greenblatt, Donald Trump’s former envoy to the Middle East, tweeted. “Wake up America.”

Before Shafik’s testimony was over, campus-security officers handed out flyers to the students in the encampment, warning them to “stop your disruption now.” The next day, Shafik sent an e-mail to the “University community.” “Out of an abundance of concern for the safety of Columbia’s campus, I authorized the New York Police Department to begin clearing the encampment from the South Lawn,” she wrote. “ ‘Clear and present danger’ is the language used by Columbia University in their letter to us,” John Chell, a bureau chief at the N.Y.P.D., said, at a press conference.

Police officers moved in, wearing riot helmets and carrying plastic zip ties. The campus was packed with hundreds of people who supported the encampment, forming a picket line on all sides of the lawn; when the police broke through, the supporters erupted in chants and jeers. According to the National Lawyers Guild, the officers arrested two legal observers; they also arrested more than a hundred students, cuffing their wrists and loading them onto white Department of Correction buses. “We walked past the entire school, everyone we knew, chanting ‘Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest,’ ” Iqbal, the Barnard student from Seattle, told me. “Almost all of us made the decision not to resist.” (“The students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, just saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner,” Chell has said.) Once the protesters had been removed, the police broke down some of the tents and banners and tossed them into an alley. Among the scattered belongings that were left behind on the lawn were a few rumpled Palestinian flags, some sleeping bags, and a copy of “Culture and Imperialism” by Edward Said.

In 1966, Ronald Reagan, a former actor running for governor of California, gave a campaign speech about what he called the “morality and decency gap at the University of California at Berkeley,” which he blamed on “a small minority of beatniks, radicals, and filthy speech advocates.” In his opinion, these “so-called ‘free-speech advocates’ . . . should have been taken by the scruff of the neck and thrown off of the campus permanently.” Richard Nixon sounded a similar note two years later, during his Presidential campaign. None of this rhetoric did much to pacify the campuses in question, and it certainly did nothing to address the root causes of the unrest, such as Jim Crow and the Vietnam War. It did, however, help both candidates win their respective elections.

Although Columbia is a private university, it is not immune to government pressure. Its Manhattan real-estate holdings are exempt from more than a hundred million dollars in property taxes, an exemption that could be reversed by state legislation. It receives federal grant money, which could also be rescinded. (On April 23rd, Stefanik wrote a letter to the Secretary of Education, demanding that he “revoke any federal funding flowing to Columbia and similar institutions.” The following day, Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, gave a speech at Columbia, while onlookers heckled him. “We respect diversity of ideas,” he said, “but there is a way to do that in a lawful manner and that’s not what this is.”) The ostensible purpose of the congressional hearing had been to protect Jewish students, but some on campus argued that the lawmakers’ true motive was to exert control and ideological influence. “I think they want to frame élite universities as engines of woke indoctrination, and this gives them a perfect pretext,” Becher said, of “maga Republicans” in Congress. “And meanwhile they hope they can strong-arm administrators into doing their bidding, like hiring more conservatives or firing professors who seem too far left.”

Every politician, college president, and public intellectual claims to be in favor of free speech, a stance that is about as brave as being in favor of puppies and ice cream. The more difficult question, not just for politicians but for all of us, is not whether freedom of speech is an essential value but what to do when it comes into tension with other essential values, such as, in this case, Columbia’s mandate to insure that it does not create a hostile environment for Jewish students, Muslim students, or anyone else on campus. For the past few years, the prevailing narrative, culturally dominant even when not entirely justified by the facts, has been that conservatives are champions of free speech and progressives are delicate snowflakes who can’t handle challenging ideas. Now, suddenly, the left was sticking up for unfettered expression, and Republican legislators were the ones asking Columbia to provide a safe space. In the opinion of some Jews (including, full disclosure, the one writing this piece), Judaism and Zionism are closely related, but they’re not the same, something that has seemed to be a source of confusion not only at Columbia but around the world. Title VI protects Jewish students from discrimination on the basis of being Jewish, but it does not shield anyone from experiencing discomfort over political disagreements. In other words, it seems to me that antisemitism is against the rules, but criticism of Israel’s actions is not, or at least it shouldn’t be.

After the encampments were cleared, much of the protest activity was pushed off campus, and the mood became even more volatile. On Saturday night, Polonetsky, the Orthodox Jewish student from Maryland, was walking across campus, on her way home from Shabbos services. She told me, “Some Jewish kids I knew were standing on the Sundial”—a raised platform in the middle of campus—waving Israeli and American flags. She stood off to the side, waiting to see what would happen. The students sang “One Day,” by the vociferously pro-Israel singer Matisyahu. (“There’ll be no more wars / And our children will play / One day.”) They were surrounded by protesters, but, for a while, things were relatively calm. Then one of the Jewish students dropped an Israeli flag, and one of the protesters ran over and tried to grab it. A lot of people seemed eager for a confrontation. Another protester—blond hair, face obscured by a kaffiyeh—stood next to the Sundial holding up a handwritten cardboard sign that said “Al-Qasam’s Next Targets,” with an arrow pointing up at the Jewish students. (Al-Qassam Brigades are the military wing of Hamas.) Polonetsky and a few friends decided to leave campus in a group, so that none of them would have to walk home alone. When they got to the only gate that was open, on Amsterdam, protesters heckled them, shouting “Yehudim! Fuck you!” and “Stop killing children!” and “Go back to Poland!” Most of these antisemitic hecklers seemed to be unaffiliated opportunists, not Columbia students, but in the chaos no one could tell for sure. Polonetsky got back to her dorm safely, but she found it hard to sleep. “The next morning, I called my mom, and said, ‘You’re right, I’m not sure I’m safe here,’ ” she told me. She had not been planning to leave campus until the following day, for Passover, but instead she booked a ticket on the next train home.

When I asked a university spokesperson to comment on the mass arrests, she pointed me to the letter that Shafik had sent to the N.Y.P.D., requesting its presence on campus. The letter read, in part, “Columbia is committed to allowing members of our community to engage in political expression—within established rules and with respect for the safety of all.” And yet, at least in the short term, none of this seemed to be making anyone feel safer. Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, visited Columbia, and then suggested in a video that it was time to “bring in the National Guard” to protect Jewish students. “This is an unhinged thing to propose,” Harry Reis, formerly Greenblatt’s special assistant and now a student at Columbia Law School, wrote in response, arguing that Greenblatt was “actively ‘causing us harm’ by cosplaying as the Tom Cotton of Jewish-American politics.”

On Saturday night, Columbia’s School of General Studies held a gala at the Museum of the City of New York. An Arab American student who attended told me that the event was full of tense confrontations between students who wore kaffiyehs, including herself, and others who were supporters of Israel, including former members of the Israeli military. “One of them called me a sharmouta, the Arabic word for ‘bitch,’ ” she told me. “Another student was punched in the face.” Shortly before Iqbal, the Barnard student from Seattle, was arrested, she was given an interim suspension, meaning that she was banned from campus, effective immediately. Another student suspended from Barnard was Isra Hirsi, whose mother, Ilhan Omar, was one of the representatives who had just finished questioning Shafik on Capitol Hill. Campus-security officers were given printouts with Iqbal and Hirsi’s photos and disciplinary records, in the style of a “Wanted” poster, with “No entry” scrawled at the top. On her way to jail, Iqbal received an e-mail from a dean, written in brusque bureaucratese. “You will not have access to the residence halls, dining facilities, classrooms, or any other part of campus,” it read. “If you need to come to retrieve any of your belongings from your residence hall . . . you will have 15 minutes to gather what you might need.” That night, when she came back to gather her possessions, Iqbal told me, “They literally set a timer. They stood there next to me, watching me, and I haphazardly threw my stuff in a bag.” She was staying with a Barnard alumna near campus. She was trying to decide whether to keep staying nearby, in case her suspension was lifted, or to go back to Seattle for the rest of the semester, or possibly for good. Her suspension hearing and her nineteenth birthday are both this week.

On Friday, after the encampment had been cleared, a lot of supporters stayed on the lawn, singing and giving speeches. Eric Lerner, who participated in the 1968 demonstrations as a Columbia undergrad, drove to the campus from his home in Warren, New Jersey, to encourage them. That evening, after the students took a prayer break—Shabbos for the Jews, Salat-al-Jum'a for the Muslims—Lerner addressed the crowd. “This is a historic step forward,” he said. “We have to escalate.” These days, Lerner is a physicist working on nuclear-fusion technology, which he sees as an extension of his anti-capitalist aims. (“Fusion,” he told the students, “is essential to socialism.”) Afterward, I reached him by phone. “Shafik isn’t interested in free speech,” he told me. “She was just trying to demonstrate to Congress that she’ll do their bidding.” Over the weekend, Columbia’s campus filled with encampments again, and some classes on Monday were held online to accommodate suspended students. There had already been rallies at Yale, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Michigan, in solidarity with the Columbia students, and there would be more to come. “The Vast Majority Of Youth Oppose This War,” Lerner Said. “Their Movement Will Only Grow From Here.” ♦

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Amid Gaza War, College Campuses Become Free Speech“Testing Ground”! Protests At Universities Are Now Being Met With A Wave Of Censorship And Suppression, Targeting Students Most Directly.

— Intercepted | April 10, 2024

American University students attend a campus protest against ongoing “Terrorist, Fascist, Genocidal, Apartheid, War Criminal Zionist 🐗 🐷 🐖 Isra-heelli”attacks on Gaza, in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 1, 2023. Photo Illustration: The Intercept / Photo by Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images

THE CONFLICT IN Gaza has galvanized a new generation of young anti-war activists, in the same way that opposition to the Vietnam War and apartheid South Africa did in decades past. A backlash is now building in the United States, led by right-wing activist and pro-Israel groups aimed at eliminating any public dissent over U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

As the death toll of Palestinians rises, a new authoritarian climate is sweeping across the U.S. — particularly on college campuses, which have transformed into laboratories for censorship and surveillance. Intercepted host Murtaza Hussain discusses this new political reality with Sahar Aziz, distinguished professor of law at Rutgers Law School and author of a new report on free speech and discrimination in the context of the Gaza conflict.

Continue……..

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Illegal Regime of Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐗 Isra-hell’s Settlements | IMEU Policy Backgrounder

— Published: May 06, 2022 | Tuesday March 19, 2024 Institute For Middle East Understanding (IMEU)

Illegal Israeli settlement near the Palestinian city of Bethlehem. Photo credit: Svala Jonsdottir/Flickr. Creative Commons License.

Since 1967, Israel has been establishing illegal Jewish-only colonies on stolen land in the Palestinian West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as well as in the Syrian Golan Heights. According to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, Israel had authorized 12 settlements in East Jerusalem and 138 settlements in other parts of the West Bank. In addition, there are an estimated 150 settlement outposts which have received Israeli government support but not official authorization. According to the settler lobby Yesha Council, there were approximately 674,000 Israelis living in these settlements as of 2020. In addition, according to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, there were 24,000 Israeli settlers in the Golan Heights as of 2020 living in 33 settlements, according to the Golan Regional Council. The expansion of Israeli settlements has gotten a big boost from the current Israeli government, led by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, a former head of the primary settler’s organization.

All Israeli settlements–whether located in East Jerusalem or other parts of the West Bank, or whether officially sanctioned by the government or not authorized–are illegal under international law. Israel is in belligerent military occupation of the West Bank (and Gaza Strip) and Golan Heights, and is obligated under international law to abide by the Fourth Geneva Convention in its policies toward these occupied territories. Article 49 categorically states: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” In addition, Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines as a war crime “The transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies”.

Israeli settlements are the primary driver of and pretext for Israel’s dispossessing Palestinians from their land, demolishing Palestinian homes, fragmenting Palestinian space, and appropriating Palestinian natural resources. The map below (click here for enlarged version), produced by the UN, shows how Israeli settlements carve up the West Bank into disconnected islands of Palestinian population centers completely cut off from one another and surrounded by Israeli areas of control.

Map credit: UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Israeli settlers, often backed by the army and state, frequently engage in violence against Palestinians by injuring and killing them, destroying their houses and uprooting their trees, and in general threatening and harassing them. Israeli settlers have greatly increased the frequency of these attacks, with Israeli military data showing a 150 percent increase over recent years. According to the UN, in the first ten months of 2021, Israeli settlers attacked Palestinians and their property 410 times, resulting in four fatalities. As B’Tselem noted, these attacks against Palestinians are best understood as an extension of Israeli government policy. “Settler violence against Palestinians serves as a major informal tool at the hands of the state to take over more and more West Bank land. The state fully supports and assists these acts of violence, and its agents sometimes participate in them directly. As such, settler violence is a form of government policy, aided and abetted by official state authorities with their active participation.”

An official US legal opinion written by the State Department confirms the illegality of Israeli settlements. This 1978 opinion, written by the State Department’s legal adviser for congressional leaders, concludes that “the establishment of the civilian settlements in those territories is inconsistent with international law.” Subsequent statements to the contrary by President Ronald Reagan and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were political, not legal, statements and in no way diminish the validity of this sole US legal opinion on the illegality of Israeli settlements. Nevertheless, dozens of tax-deductible organizations raise yearly tens of millions of dollars that are funneled to illegal Israeli settlements. In 2021, seven Members of Congress expressed their concern to the IRS that “Granting and sustaining 501(c)(3) status recognizes and supports this unlawful conduct that is contrary to existing U.S. obligations under international law and established U.S. public policy,” and called for an investigation into these organizations’ tax-exempt status.

Precedent in US law exists for ensuring that US funding does not benefit illegal Israeli settlements. P.L. 108-11 mandates that loan guarantees to Israel “may be issued under this section only to support activities in the geographic areas which were subject to the administration of the Government of Israel before June 5, 1967.” The law also stipulates that loan guarantees “shall be reduced by an amount equal to the amount extended or estimated to have been extended by the Government of Israel during the period from March 1, 2003, to the date of issue of the guarantee, for activities which the President determines are inconsistent with the objectives and understandings reached between the United States and the Government of Israel regarding the implementation of the loan guarantee program.” During the Bush administration, the United States deducted more than $1 billion from the amount of loan guarantees available to Israel due its expenditures on Israeli settlement, according to Congressional Research Service.

Current legislation in the 117th Congress would strengthen reporting requirements on the impact of Israeli settlements. H.R.2590, the Defending the Human Rights of Palestinian Children and Families Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act, would require a State Department report on “the nature and extent of Israeli settlement activities, including an assessment of the compliance of the Government of Israel with United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334.” This Security Council resolution reiterates the “demand that Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and that it fully respect all of its legal obligations in this regard.” H.R.2590 would also require a Government Accountability Office report assessing Offshore Procurement for Israel and “the manner and extent to which these funds have directly or indirectly supported illegal Israeli settlement activity in the occupied West Bank.”

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The Left Is Finally Building A Response To AIPAC 🐖 🐷 🐗 (The Incurable Zionist Cancer)

AIPAC has Become the Key Force Against Progressives in Democratic Primaries, But a New Coalition is Seeking to Protect the Party’s Left Flank.

— Akela Lacy | March 11 2024 | The Intercept

Palestine Solidarity Demonstrators hold placards that say “Dump AIPAC” at a rally in New York City on February 22, 2024. Photo: Jimin Kim/Sipa via AP

After Decades Of avoiding Direct Involvement in Electoral Politics, the country’s flagship Israel lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, formed a pair of political action committees in recent years and has been spending millions on political races.

Its targets have been progressives, with AIPAC becoming heavily involved in Democratic primaries. In addition to recruiting candidates to challenge incumbent Democrats, the group plans to spend at least $100 million on 2024 races.

Now, progressives are fighting back, building a bulwark against the pro-Israel lobby onslaught with a new campaign to reject AIPAC.

A group of 25 progressive organizations — including Justice Democrats, the Working Families Party, the IfNotNow Movement, and Jewish Voice for Peace Action— launched the Reject AIPAC coalition Monday. The coalition plans to organize against AIPAC across electoral, political, and digital arenas. One facet of the plan calls for a seven-figure electoral spending campaign to defend members of Congress being targeted by AIPAC.

In a press release announcing its launch, the coalition said it would work to “organize Democratic voters and elected officials to reject the destructive influence of the Republican megadonor-backed AIPAC on the Democratic primary process and our government’s policy towards Palestine and Israel.”

Financed by AIPAC’s major donors, including Republican billionaires and key GOP funders, the 2021 launch of the Israel lobby’s new super PAC was readymade to outspend progressives. AIPAC and its allies have reshaped the electoral field in key primaries, shifted the balance of power in Congress, and imposed costly consequences for criticism of U.S. support for Israel’s human rights abuses.

The Washington debate around the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has become particularly fraught amid Israel’s relentless assault on the Gaza Strip. Even as the International Court of Justice ruled that a case against Israel for genocide should proceed, progressive members of Congress have been attacked for using the term — or, early on in the war, just for calling for a ceasefire.

AIPAC recruited and is bankrolling a challenger to Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., for instance, who made early and forceful calls for a ceasefire in the Gaza war. Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa., who faced an AIPAC spending onslaught in 2022, is expected to face millions in AIPAC expenditures again this year.

“We have watched as AIPAC has done everything it can to silence growing dissent in Congress against Netanyahu’s assault on Gaza — which has killed over 31,000 Palestinians — even as Democratic voters overwhelmingly support a ceasefire and oppose sending more blank checks to the Israeli military,” the coalition said. “Now, AIPAC’s Republican donor-funded Super PAC, the United Democracy Project, is threatening to spend $100 million targeting the handful of Black and brown members of Congress who have led the calls for a ceasefire and the equal protection of Palestinian and Israeli lives.”

AIPAC And Its Allies’ Growing Influence on Democratic Party Politics has presented a major problem for progressives. The organizations backing progressives rely mostly on small-dollar donors and can’t compete with AIPAC’s war chest.

Even as it attacks Democrats on the parties left flank, however, AIPAC has cozied up to the GOP’s far right. In the 2020 election, AIPAC endorsed more than 100 Republicans who voted to overturn the results of that year’s presidential race.

This year, the group encouraged Republicans to switch parties to vote in at least one Democratic primary where it recruited Westchester County Executive George Latimer to run against Bowman. AIPAC is the biggest donor to Latimer’s campaign so far, The Intercept reported.

While progressive candidates like Lee have fended off AIPAC and its allies, its chilling effects reach far beyond elections. The group also has an outsized lobbying influence on Capitol Hill and spends millions of dollars a year on lobbying efforts, another arena in which the left has been outmatched.

The Reject AIPAC coalition says it will try to counterbalance those efforts on the Hill and call on members to disavow AIPAC’s endorsement and instead sign a pledge not to take any more money from the group. For the moment, however, many senior Democrats, including those in leadership, have benefited from AIPAC’s largesse.

“The overwhelming influence of corporate Super PACs on our democracy and elections has expanded the gap between voters and their elected leaders into a canyon that has been exploited by every special interest and corporate lobby,” the coalition said. “Rejecting AIPAC is a crucial step in putting voters back at the center of our democracy.”