Dan Osborn, a 48-year-old military veteran who helped lead the 2021 strikes against food giant Kellogg’s, launched a challenge against 72-year-old Nebraska Republican Sen. Deb Fischer in October. A poll commissioned by Change Research, a liberal research firm, shows Osborn leading Fischer by a margin of 2 points. Nebraska has voted for a Republican president every year since 1964, and the survey, conducted in November, shows that respondents favor former President Donald Trump over President Joe Biden by a margin of 16.

Osborn’s slight edge in the poll — 40 percent to Fischer’s 38 percent — comes despite 59 percent of respondents saying they had never heard of him before. Fischer, meanwhile, has represented Nebraska in the Senate for a decade and sits on the influential Armed Services and Agricultural committees. In response to a question that described both Osborn’s and Fischer’s backgrounds, 50 percent of respondents said they’d vote for Osborn, while only 32 percent said they’d vote for Fischer.

“Nebraskans have had it with Washington. We’ve been starving for honest government that isn’t bought and paid for,” Osborn told The Intercept. “This poll shows that Nebraska’s independent streak is alive and well.”

Democrats have so far not fielded a candidate in the Senate race. In October, shortly after Osborn’s announcement, Nebraska Democratic Party Chair Jane Kleeb said state Democrats were considering supporting his bid. Kleeb told The Intercept that the state party would make an endorsement decision in February and that Osborn could win if “the money is there.”

He could appeal to populists and progressives, Kleeb said, with many Nebraska voters tired of one-party control in the state. “Makes politicians lazy when you have only one party in control and more beholden to corporate interests since they don’t have to answer to voters,” she wrote.

Osborn’s candidacy comes as Democrats face a challenging battle next year to retain their razor-thin Senate majority. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., has announced that he will not run for reelection, all but guaranteeing a Republican pickup in West Virginia, while Sens. Jon Tester, D-Mont., and Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, are vying to defend seats in states Trump won in 2020. 

Democrats are also defending seats in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona (where Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego seeks to beat Kyrsten Sinema, who recently changed her party affiliation from Democrat to independent, and Republican Kari Lake in a three-way race), while Republicans are playing in defense in Florida and Texas, where they have had strong showings in recent statewide elections.

Osborn has focused his campaign on labor and economic issues and the cross-partisan coalition he aims to build. “I will bring together workers, farmers, ranchers, and small business owners across Nebraska around bread-and-butter issues that appeal across party lines,” he pledged when he announced his candidacy.

His platform spans from raising pay for servicemembers and taking on agricultural consolidation to legalizing medical marijuana and pledging to “never supporting handing huge pharmaceuticals a blank check.” The independent also calls to reform railroad safety, with measures like requiring two-person crews and increasing fines for violating rail safety laws — mirroring some of the reforms that were floated after the disastrous Norfolk Southern derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, earlier this year.

Osborn’s platform appears to be popular among would-be voters in Nebraska. Pollsters asked a series of questions regarding his policy platform, after which 53 percent of respondents said they’d vote for him, compared to 30 percent for Fisher. Thirty-three percent of poll respondents were Democrats, 14 percent independent, and 53 percent Republican; 53 percent said they voted for Trump in 2020, while 35 percent said they voted for Biden.

“This poll shows that Nebraska’s independent streak is alive and well.”

Osborn has served as the president of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union Local 50G and garnered national attention two years ago when he helped lead workers in a strike against Kellogg’s that lasted more than two months and also included factories in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee.

“It’s exciting to be a part of something bigger than yourself, knowing that we’re not alone,” the 18-year Kellogg’s veteran said at the time. 

In his campaign launch video, Osborn spoke about the strike. “Two years ago, I successfully led the strike to preserve 500 middle-class jobs here in Nebraska,” he said. “It didn’t matter what party you belonged to. We came together to find solutions and move forward.”

During the strike, the company had threatened to replace all 1,400 workers. At its conclusion, workers won an agreement that included a $1.10 per hour raise, a new cost-of-living pay increase, and a pathway for lower-tier workers to “graduate” into a higher tier of pay.

As an independent, Osborn has no party structure to tap into for campaigning or fundraising. As of September 30, Fischer had $2.6 million on hand; Osborn announced raising $100,000 in two months as of November 16.

The post Shock Poll Shows Independent Nebraska Union Leader Beating Republican Senator appeared first on The Intercept.

Pushing a book into the world is a disorienting experience. It’s at once exhilarating — years of reporting, writing, and revising finally turned into something real — and terrifying. Will it get shredded by haughty reviewers? Or worse, ignored? 

The place of a book in our ecosystem of knowledge production and distribution remains unique. No other medium can have so much intellectual and cultural influence with so few people actually consuming it. Nobody buys books, and ever fewer people read them, yet they still can shape the way we understand the world. Most people who have their views of the world shaped by a book do so by a form of media osmosis, listening to podcasts, reading reviews, excerpts, or news reports about the book. As an author, you hope that your themes and your message are clear enough that they land with some semblance of their original meaning by the time they’re refracted through so many mediated channels. 

And then, the Murdoch empire steps in. 

This weekend, the Daily Mail published a story based on an early copy of my book — called “The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution” — which they somehow acquired. Reading it is a surreal experience, as it misquotes the book, attributes things to me that are said by people I interviewed, and shears it of all context in the pursuit of a wildly sensational and flat-out wrong read. Next, the also-Murdoch-owned New York Post and Fox News followed suit, relying heavily on the faulty Daily Mail article, and then so did the conservative Washington Examiner. Last night, a salacious story on the book was even leading the Post’s website.

Initially, I decided that ignoring it would be smarter than drawing more attention to it. There’s an argument that all press is good press, but I don’t buy that because A) those folks aren’t going to bother to buy or read the book anyway, so the publicity isn’t worth anything and B) the more fake noise injected into the public consciousness there is about the book, the less chance there is that the public will take away a reasonably accurate message. But ignoring it isn’t really an option once a lie starts to pick up major steam, and this one now has. So I figured it was worth sending an email not just to correct the record — those outlets don’t care — but to talk about the way the right-wing media ecosystem is so good at blotting out reality.

In one example, the Daily Mail writes, and the other outlets generally repeat, “Grim claims that AOC’s signature achievement, the Green New Deal, was a ‘total s***show disaster.’” Except I do not at all claim that. In fact, in the book, Sunrise Movement’s political director, Evan Weber, describes one part of the Green New Deal rollout — an FAQ that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office put together — using those words. I also describe the Green New Deal, despite the flaws of the rollout, as an achievement that reshaped the climate debate on a global scale, but that doesn’t get mentioned. 

The articles, and even some headlines, say I call AOC “arrogant,” which I simply don’t. “Grim explains that her arrogance led her to become ‘closed off’ to meeting donors,” the Daily Mail tells its readers. In fact, I celebrate the fact that she was closed off to major donors because she was able to rely on small donors, not because of some arrogance, but because she had confidence that her politics resonated with a broad grassroots base that would continue to power her and the other members of the Squad. Shutting out major donors is a good thing, if that needs to be explained. 

The book is not without criticism of AOC and other members of the Squad, but man did they miss the mark. And yes, I know that “miss the mark” implies they actually tried to get it right and simply made a mistake, which we all know isn’t the case.

What the Murdoch world might not be able to understand is that the book’s criticism isn’t aimed at cynically tearing down a movement that represents one of the few rays of hope we have left in this dark world, but is instead aimed at assessing what lessons can be learned in hindsight from the people who were directly involved in the decision making. 

I write in the book about the 24/7 right-wing media operation that was aimed at making AOC and the Squad toxic, one that gave her higher name recognition among Republicans her first year in office than Democrats, so it shouldn’t be surprising to see my book used as grist for that mill. But it’s still jarring. So I guess all I can say is that you should ignore the right-wing coverage of the book, and if you do actually read it, one way to counter the disinformation is to review it online somewhere. And if you see anybody in your circle getting fooled by it, tell them to read the book itself, or listen to a conversation about it on my podcast, or read an excerpt, or send them this newsletter, or really, do anything but get your news from the ghost of Rupert Murdoch. The book officially launches tomorrow, but you can preorder it now. 

The post Correcting the Record on My Book appeared first on The Intercept.

On this week’s episode of Deconstructed, I spoke with “Breaking Points” co-host Krystal Ball about my new book, “The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution.” You can listen to it on whichever podcast platform you use, and the video has been posted on Krystal’s channel. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has tasked his top adviser, Ron Dermer, the minister of strategic affairs, with designing plans to “thin” the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip “to a minimum,” according to a bombshell new report in an Israeli newspaper founded by the late Republican billionaire Sheldon Adelson. 

The outlet, Israel Hayom, is considered to be something of an official organ for Netanyahu. It reported that the plan has two main elements: The first would use the pressure of the war and humanitarian crisis to persuade Egypt to allow refugees to flow to other Arab countries, and the second would open up sea routes so that Israel “allows a mass escape to European and African countries.” Dermer, who is originally from Miami, is a Netanyahu confidante and was previously Israeli ambassador to the United States, and enjoys close relations with many members of Congress. 

The plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians faces some internal resistance from less hard-line members of Netanyahu’s cabinet, according to Israel Hayom. 

Israel Today and other Israeli media are also reporting on a plan being pushed with Congress that would condition aid to Arab nations on their willingness to accept Palestinian refugees. The plan even proposes specific numbers of refugees for each country: Egypt would take one million Palestinians, half a million would go to Turkey, and a quarter million each would go to Yemen and Iraq. 

The reporting relies heavily on the passive voice, declining to say who put the proposal together: “The proposal was shown to key figures in the House and Senate from both parties. Longtime lawmaker, Rep. Joe Wilson, has even expressed open support for it while others who were privy to the details of the text have so far kept a low profile, saying that publicly coming out in favor of the program could derail it.” 

To underscore how absurd the refugee resettlement plan is, the de facto Houthi government in Yemen claimed an attack today on a U.S. ship as well as commercial vessels in the Red Sea.

Back on October 20, in a little-noticed message to Congress, the White House asked for $3.495 billion that would be used for refugees from both Ukraine and Gaza, referencing “potential needs of Gazans fleeing to neighboring countries.”

“This crisis could well result in displacement across border and higher regional humanitarian needs, and funding may be used to meet evolving programming requirements outside of Gaza,” the letter from the White House Office of Management and Budget reads. The letter came two days after Jordan and Egypt warned they would not open their borders to a mass exodus of Palestinians, arguing that past history shows they would never be able to return. 

The post Netanyahu’s Goal for Gaza: “Thin” Population “to a Minimum” appeared first on The Intercept.

On Friday morning, Israel resumed its bombing campaign against Gaza, and the civilian death toll is once again rising. Both Hamas and Israel accused the other of violating the temporary truce. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has promised, “We will fight in the entire [Gaza] Strip.” Despite meekly worded suggestions from Secretary of State Antony Blinken that Israel make an effort to reduce civilian deaths, the U.S. position remains one of full-throttled support for a military campaign that has killed more than 15,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of them children and other civilians.

In this special episode of Intercepted, political analyst Mouin Rabbani, co-editor of the Arab Studies Institute’s ezine Jadaliyya, offers a provocative analysis of the current situation. In a discussion with Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain, Rabbani suggests that behind the belligerent rhetoric and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proclamations he will eradicate Hamas, Israel may already be heading for a bloody quagmire it is unlikely to transform into an accomplishment of its stated goals. “We’re now well into the second month of this war, and the most Israel has been able to achieve is to raise the Israeli flag on a hospital. It’s not exactly Iwo Jima,” Rabbani says. The “Israeli military is a very effective killing machine when it’s dropping 2,000-pound bombs from the air, but a rather mediocre fighting force when it comes to ground operations.” Rabbani describes the evolution of Hamas’s strategy and tactics over the past decades and maps out several scenarios that might emerge in the coming period. “The idea that you can wipe [Hamas] out, even if you fully succeed in conquering every last square inch of the Gaza Strip, is an illusion,” he says. “It is effectively impossible to resume this war without regional escalation.”

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted.

Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Jeremy Scahill.

Murtaza Hussain: And I’m Murtaza Hussain. 

JS: Maz it seems like the hardliners in Israel are getting their way. On Friday morning the temporary truce was shattered. Israel claims that Hamas fired rockets. Hamas is saying that Israel broke the truce. Regardless of how it happened, we are now back to a situation where Israel has resumed heavy bombardment. Early indications are that they’re increasing their campaign in the south of Gaza. And Israel began its military operations literally as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was taking off to depart Israel. 

Antony Blinken: Well, good evening everyone and thanks for bearing with us through a long day. So this is my fourth trip to Israel since the Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7th.

JS: And it really seems like every time Blinken goes to the region or goes to Israel, it’s then followed by an intensification of Israeli military tactics. And you know Blinken has been trying to publicly sell this talking out of both sides of the mouth from Washington. On the one hand giving full-throttled support to Israel and on the other hand saying, well, we want to try to put some guardrails on Israel’s operations. And one of the things that Blinken said is: 

Antony Blinken: But Israel has the most sophisticated — one of the most sophisticated — militaries in the world. It is capable of neutralizing the threat posed by Hamas while minimizing harm to innocent men women and children. 

JS: All we’ve seen from Israel since this started was the opposite. We’ve seen that Israel clearly wants to maximize the terror being felt by civilians in Gaza. And part of it seems aimed at saying we’re gonna force them through merciless bombing to somehow overthrow Hamas. But it shows a kind of fundamental misunderstanding of the lens of history that many Palestinians are viewing this through and also the history of Hamas itself.

MH: Well, if you look at the satellite footage and even statements from Israeli officials, it is clear that their campaign is not aimed at minimizing damage to the Palestinian people or civilian infrastructure, or civilians themselves. They’ve been carrying it out in such a way to punish the population and you’ve seen this in the death toll as well too.

So Blinken’s statement that Israel has the capability of minimizing the toll to civilians may be true per se but the implication is that they’re not taking that because they have the technology, they have the weaponry and so forth. But we would not be seeing these massive death tolls of 15-plus thousand people by some estimates — total destruction of Gaza City — were Israeli leaders taking, prioritizing and minimizing civilian harm or just focusing on Hamas per se. And we can see that they’re not just focusing on Hamas, not just by the toll on Gaza, but also by the actions of the West Bank recently, where Hamas is not in control and where Israel is still ramping up its suppression of Palestinians killings and the treatment of Palestinians in jail too, which is also deteriorated in recent weeks by many reports.

So it’s very, very clear that Israel is not behaving in the way that Blinken is portraying them as behaving or… This good cop bad cop attitude that the U.S. is taking towards Israel is really not very convincing, even on those terms. It’s clear that Israel is engaging in tactics which we condemn very thoroughly when done by Russia or Syria or other countries that we’re opposed to. But when we’re seeing them in real time by [a] U.S. ally, we’re getting at very minimum defense from the U.S. administration of Israeli actions. 

JS: You know, now we’re about two months into this acute aspect of the war. Of course, this war has been going on a lot longer and started far, far earlier than October 7th, of course. But we thought it would be good and worth it to look at these two months that have shook the world, and to do so we’re joined by Mouin Rabbani. He’s a researcher, analyst, and commentator specializing in Palestinian affairs, the Arab-Israeli conflict, as well as the contemporary Middle East. He is the co-editor of Jadaliyya and contributing editor of Middle East Report.

Mouin thank you so much for being with us here on Intercepted. 

Mouin Rabbani: It’s a real pleasure to be with you. Thanks for inviting me.

JS: Let’s start with the very beginning of this acute aspect of the war. Of course, you can say this has been going on for a very, very long time, but… October 7th. First, talk about what you understand were the strategic objectives of Hamas in what they called “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.”

MR: Well, I think we’re probably going to have to wait, and perhaps wait a long time, to get a definitive answer to that question. But the strategic objective, as I understand it, was to shatter the status quo, and to shatter it irrevocably.

It was a situation in which the Gaza Strip had been under blockade for 16, 17 years, the occupation was well into its sixth decade. Of course, there was also the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948. And, in addition to that, what we had also seen was a number of escalating Israeli measures.

First of all, of particular interest to Hamas as an Islamist movement, the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Haram al-Sharif compound in Jerusalem, the growing settler pogroms, and dispossession and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, particularly in the Jordan Valley.

So, on the one hand, you have those developments. On the other hand, you had a situation where Israel was increasingly seeking to unilaterally resolve the core issues of the question of Palestine, without any reference to either Palestinian rights or Palestinian interests, or even negotiations with those Palestinians who were most amenable to the Israeli agenda; here, I’m referring to the Palestinian leadership, the leadership of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah.

And the reason it was able to do this is because Israel had, on the one hand, the active support of the Americans. And, secondarily, the passive acquiescence of the Europeans, a passive acquiescence that has turned increasingly into active support as well. And I think the reason that Hamas decided it needed to do something, for lack of a better term, genuinely spectacular on October 7^th, is because they had attempted to shatter the status quo on two separate occasions, at least.

The first was the Great March of Return in 2018, when very large numbers of Palestinians went to the boundary between the Gaza Strip and Israel to demonstrate, on the anniversary of Nakba Day. And Israeli snipers shot and killed numerous Palestinians, wounded many more, medics were killed, and so on. And the world shrugged and, the following day, things returned back to what they were.

More recently, in 2021, represented the first time that an Israeli-Palestinian armed confrontation took place at the initiative of Hamas, rather than Israel. And, just as importantly, was initiated by Hamas for reasons that had nothing to do with conditions in the Gaza Strip. It was a response to growing Israeli incursions, and repression, and other measures in East Jerusalem; you may remember the attempted settlement expansion in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. And then specifically, also the Al-Aqsa Mosque. And even then, that lasted for a few weeks, that was a so-called “Unity Intifada,” where you had Palestinians rising up in the West Bank within Israel, and then this confrontation between Palestinians and Israel in the Gaza Strip. A ceasefire was eventually established and, once again, things went back to their usual pattern.

I think, when you look at the scale of what we saw on October 7th, it can’t be seen as a response to the policies of the current far-right government in Israel: Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, and Smotrich, and so on. Sure, that was a factor, but the planning for an operation of this size, scale, and scope must have started before — perhaps even well before — this government took office.

And so, I know there is a tendency to blame anything and everything on Netanyahu — it’s kind of a Netanyahu derangement syndrome, if you will — but the current government is more of a change in scale and intensity, rather than a change in policy. And the issues that I was discussing previously were more or less policies of previous Israeli governments, rather than the current one. In addition, of course, you had the prisoner file, which is of central importance, not only to Palestinians generally and to Hamas, particularly, but also to Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and seen as an architect of the October 7th attacks, personally.

So, if you take all of these issues together, my sense is that if you were to summarize Hamas’ strategic objective in one phrase, it would be to irrevocably shatter the status quo. Did they have very clear ideas of what they wanted beyond that? At the tactical level, yes. It’s quite clear that the reason they took so many Israeli soldiers captive and civilians hostage is because they wanted a comprehensive prisoner exchange, including people who they were unable to get released in the 2011 agreement, that led to the freedom for about a thousand Palestinian prisoners. They wanted changes with regard to the blockade, and so on.

But did they have a clear — and what they consider achievable — political objective? I haven’t really seen the evidence for that. My sense is they did not think that far ahead.

One last point is that I think we also need to recall that, on October 7th, the Israeli military and intelligence services not only failed but, at the first sign of contact, they collapsed like a house of cards. So, we have to consider it quite likely that the scale of the October 7th attacks far exceeded Hamas’s initial planning for that event, and that they ended up basically operating in a geographical area that’s larger than the Gaza Strip itself. I don’t know to what extent Hamas planned for that. I suspect they didn’t think they would be able to, and I suspect that many of these expanded operations were decided, and implemented, and conducted in the heat of the moment, simply because the Israeli defensive measures evaporated into thin air.

MH: Mouin, in the wake of October 7th, the Israeli government has said that its goal is to eradicate Hamas; in various terms, it said that. And it’s reiterated that goal now, over a month into the operation. Despite that, Hamas, by all accounts, still seems to have considerable command and control inside Gaza. The recent prisoner exchange suggests as well that they’re still very well entrenched, and Israel is still very, very far from achieving those stated military objectives.

From your sense, how realistic is this goal of destroying Hamas, or eradicating Hamas, as the Israeli government has put it. Is it an actually achievable objective for Israel? And, if so, what would it take to accomplish that?

MR: I don’t think it’s achievable at all, and I think we should view this primarily as a rhetorical aspiration, rather than a serious policy. It’s quite possible that, on October 7th, Netanyahu Defense Minister Gallant, Chief of Staff, and their biggest champions in Washington — Biden and Blinken — believed that this would be, to use a phrase that was introduced in 2003, “a cakewalk,” and could be easily achieved.

But even before this Israeli offensive started, let’s look at the facts. Hamas and a number of other armed groups are also present in the West Bank. Hamas is a fairly modest militia, even if you compare it to other paramilitary organizations in that part of the world, and especially if you compare it to conventional state armies, and overwhelmingly, if you compare it to the nuclear power that is Israel, that is armed to the teeth with the most advanced weaponry in the U.S. arsenal. So, Hamas is already, in military terms, a quite modest outfit. That’s referring to Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Then, when you talk about Hamas and other groups in the West Bank, they’re not just modest. I mean, they’re very lightly armed. Most of their weaponry consists of, at best, automatic weapons and explosives. Nevertheless, for the past two years, Israel has been conducting regular intensive raids, particularly in the northern West Bank, to wipe these organizations out. It has had the full cooperation of the Palestinian Authority in this campaign. And, if anything, the attacks emanating out of the West Bank — and Northern West Bank in particular — have been escalating.

So, if you can’t eliminate an exceptionally poorly-armed series of militias that are, in many respects, not even a coherent military force from the West Bank where you have total control, and you have the cooperation of the Palestinian authorities, how can you expect to achieve that objective against a much better armed, more coherent, much larger and well developed Palestinian armed group in a territory that it has controlled for almost two decades? That would be my first answer.

Secondly, Hamas is not just a militia or an armed group. It is a deeply rooted movement that exists wherever Palestinian communities exist today, very much, like used to be the case — and in many respects still is a case — with the PLO and its constituent factions. So the idea that you can wipe this group out, even if you fully succeed in conquering every last square inch of the Gaza Strip, is also an illusion. You have the civil service, you have the social services, you have the political movement. It’s a whole network of agencies, organizations, and institutions, and so on.

And so, I think the most that Israel could hope to attain would be to wipe out the existing leadership and to severely degrade the military capabilities of Hamas, but only in the Gaza Strip. And even that has been a total failure. We’re now well into the second month of this war, and the most Israel has been able to achieve is to raise the Israeli flag on a hospital. It’s not exactly Iwo Jima.

And not only that, I think there’s another point worth making, as your question implied: At the very outset of this war, Israel and the United States vowed, as you said, that they would eradicate Hamas, that there would be no truce until this objective was achieved, and that there would absolutely be no negotiations with this group. Well, if you look at the situation today, there has now been approximately a week of a truce, a whole series of exchanges of captives, and these have been the result of Qatari- and Egyptian-mediated negotiations between the United States and Israel on the one hand, and Hamas on the other. And the person who was leading the negotiations on behalf of Hamas is Yahya Sinwar, the very architect of the October 7th attack.

So, Israel and the United States have already climbed down pretty far from the tree they jumped into. They’re negotiating, they’re accepting truces, they are implementing agreements that overwhelmingly reflect the conditions initially proposed by Hamas, rather than by them. So, how can you eradicate an organization you’re negotiating and reaching agreements with?

Of course, at some point, I do expect the Israeli offensive to resume, but I think we’re now in a stage where most likely we’ll see one, maybe one or two, furious Israeli attempts to inflict as much damage as they can. And then, I think the clock will start winding down pretty quickly.

JS: Mouin, these scenes that we have seen play out over the course of the exchanges of Israeli captives and Palestinian captives are surreal on a number of levels. On the one hand, Hamas is putting out fairly sophisticated video production on its side of the handovers. Sometimes they have drone photography that they’re using to show the vehicles, we’ve also seen these scenes of several Israeli prisoners smiling at them, shaking their hands, waving at them, speaking to them.

And Hamas has what I think is a fairly sophisticated information operation that they’re running. They also, in one of the exchanges, decided to do it right in the center of Gaza City…

MR: Twice, actually.

JS: Twice, right? The first time that it happened, I would have paid serious money to watch Netanyahu’s face as that was happening.

But you also have Yahya Sinwar acting as a sort of commander-in-chief in battle, and reportedly went down into tunnels where some of the Israelis were being held, and had interactions with them. One of the released Israelis, an 85-year-old woman who identifies herself as a peace activist, has been telling Israeli media that she had an exchange with Yahya Sinwar, where she kind of shamed him for attacking them and said, “we’re peace activists.”

But what I’m getting at is that you have a much more sophisticated public imaging operation going on from Hamas, and I want to get your take on what’s at play there, and how this is being received in the broader Arabic language public in the world.

MR: Yes. Well, I would start by saying that Hamas propaganda in the early days was very crude and very ineffective. And what appears to be the case is that they’ve taken a page out of Hezbollah’s playbook. And here, I’m referring to the experience of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant movement, in the 1990s, when it was launching increasingly successful attacks on Israeli occupation forces, and on their local collaborators, the so-called South Lebanon Army.

And every time Hezbollah would claim, “we attacked this and that base or outposts, we can confirm that we inflicted X casualties,” the Israeli military spokesman would come out and say, well, the Arabs are lying again. And this is propaganda, we’ve got everything under full control.

Then, with the technological developments that we saw in the 90s, Hezbollah began recording their attacks on video, and then broadcasting them on its television station, Al-Manar. And, pretty soon, what you had is not only their own constituency in Lebanon — and people in the Middle East, more broadly — realizing that this is an organization whose claims had a lot of credibility. But, also, that its increase in credibility was because it was telling the truth, it was being honest. And it wasn’t inventing and exaggerating achievements that didn’t exist.

And, most importantly, it got to a point where the Israeli public began to trust Hezbollah propaganda more than the propaganda of their own military and their own government. And what I think we’ve seen here is broadly similar.

I know your question was specifically about the release of captives, but what we’ve seen is a whole series of statements by Hamas’s military spokesperson, Abu Obaida, who’s now become perhaps the single most popular figure in the Middle East; that’s not Mahmoud Abbas, as Biden and Blinken would like you to think. And he not only makes statements, but backs them up with video that substantiates those statements.

My sense is that Hamas propaganda is directed — or, at least in the initial stages — was directed primarily at Palestinian and Arab public opinion, and also at Israeli public opinion. But then, when you began to get all these statements coming out of the Israeli leadership, out of the U.S., particularly from European capitals also, saying Hamas is ISIS, Hamas is worse than ISIS, Hamas are Nazis … And it got to the point where people have actually been downplaying the Nazi Holocaust in order to suggest that the real issue here is not Adolf Hitler, but Yahya Sinwar, and so on.

Then Hamas also began, I think, trying to influence global, and particularly Western public opinion, which is, I think, a quite new arena for them. And the way they have tried to do this is to put out videos trying to demonstrate, whether you believe it or not, that they are treating their captives humanely, that they don’t consider attacking civilians a strategic goal, and so on.

Of course this is propaganda and political theater, such things always are, whether it’s by Hamas or anyone else. But I would nevertheless compare and contrast the image Hamas is trying to project in relation to its treatment and release of captives that it holds with those of Israel.

I mean, look at the difference. In these Hamas videos, they are handing over their captives to the International Committee of the Red Cross, pushing old ladies in wheelchairs, handing water bottles to their released captives, waving goodbye and giving them a friendly send-off. Political theater, propaganda? Of course.

But what do we see at Ofer Prison in Beituniya, just outside Ramallah, where Israel is releasing Palestinian captives? Well, you have, first of all, clouds of tear gas being fired by the Israeli forces at gatherings of Palestinian well-wishers. You have actually live ammunition being fired at these people, and several have been killed. Israeli police have been raiding the homes of captives who are about to be released, and literally warning their families that any expressions of joy are verboten. And intimidating journalists, evicting journalists from the homes of released captives.  So, it’s not only what Hamas has been doing, it’s also the contrast between Hamas and the Israelis.

And one more contrast is that — and this is less of a Hamas policy, of course, because it doesn’t really have much or any control over these situations in the West Bank — but the Palestinians have been very eager for their released prisoners to describe the conditions of their captivity, which have been horrific. And to discuss their experience of achieving freedom, and so on. Remember, so far, at least, we’re talking about children — or what I think The Guardian calls “individuals under 18,” because Palestinians aren’t children — and women, many of whom, were never charged with a single offense, let alone tried, even, by a military court for any offense.

So, you have the Palestinians very eager to expose their released captives to the media and to tell their stories, and then you have Israel which, under the pretext of medical checkups, is holding its own released captives incognito, because they’re terrified that these people will say, well, actually, no, we weren’t beheaded and burned alive, and no, it wasn’t quite, the ISIS story that you’ve been trying to convey to the world.

JS: On that specific issue, I think we just have to say clearly that the Israeli civilians who were taken hostage, including very young children, witnessed utterly horrifying acts where their parents were killed, or their neighbors were killed. And you then had the Israeli military come in on October 7th, and there’s serious questions about how many Israelis and foreign workers — Thai workers and others — that were killed by the Israeli response to the attacks orchestrated by Hamas. But I’m saying that because I think it’s important to remember that, no matter what, the people who then were taken hostage by Hamas already went through unspeakable terror as human beings.

Now, having put that on the table, I want to ask you something about the two camps of stories we’re starting to hear emerging from Israelis who were held hostage, and their family members. Several Israelis have described being treated with respect while in Hamas captivity. They described difficult conditions, they talked about how they were eating the same food as the guards or the people that were holding them captive, and that sometimes the food was dwindling, and sometimes it was OK. Same situation with medication.

On the other hand, you’re starting to have family members of children who were held hostage describing things like, the child was made to watch videos of the October 7th attacks. And if they were crying, they had a gun pointed at them. And some of the Thai workers saying that some Israelis were being beaten with electrical cords; not with live wire electricity, but with electrical cords. And these are the two sorts of narratives that have started to bleed out in the Israeli media. And, of course, some are promoted more than others.

But what I wanted to ask you is somewhat of a granular-level question, and that is: do we know that all of these hostages were being held by the same entity? Because we did see, in some of the exchanges, members of Hamas, and members who were identified as Islamic Jihad handing over certain prisoners. We also know that there are, I think, credible reports that some of the people taken hostage that day in Israel were taken by what appeared to be sort of freelance gangs, or people that maybe were not necessarily operating under the umbrella of Hamas, or under the direction of Mohammed Deif, the head of the Qasim brigades.

I know you don’t have inside information, but what is your sense of how different hostages were held, and how Hamas has had to sort of figure out where all of them are, and whether there may be different layers of treatment based on who was holding the Israelis inside of Gaza?

MR: It’s a very good question, and let me start by repeating your point, that no civilian deserves or should be placed in captivity without due process by a legitimate court of law that convicts them for a specific crime. I think the difference between us and many other people is, in this context, we feel that that is a criteria that applies not only to Israelis, but to any human being, and even includes Palestinians.

Secondly, yes, for both Israeli and Palestinian civilians, particularly children, the initial seizure of these people was of course traumatic, can often include violence and brutality. And now I’m speaking specifically about the Israelis and Gaza; there’s several unanswered questions to me, because I think that the main objective of Hamas on October 7th was to knock out The Gaza Division, which is a division of the Israeli military responsible for maintaining the Gaza concentration camp, and launching periodic attacks on it.

I think it’s more or less established that they also sought to attack and, at least temporarily, control a number of population centers in the so-called Gaza envelope. To what extent seizing Israeli civilian captives was part of the initial plan, I don’t know, but it did happen. And we also know — and this is according to both Palestinians, Israelis, the Qatari and Egyptian mediators, and the United States — that the captives are being held not only by Hamas but, as you said, a number are also held by Islamic Jihad. And there are others who are being held by … I don’t know if it’s gangs or ordinary civilians who … Because, you know, once Hamas breached the barrier on October 7th, a lot of people started streaming into nearby Israeli settlements, whether it was simply to experience a taste of freedom, or to engage in looting, or to engage in acts of revenge, or a combination of the above, is not clear. But some of the people who were seized and taken into the Gaza Strip were by those groups.

And we’ve gotten a lot of propaganda. I think this week we heard a story of testimony — I believe it was a seven-year-old child — saying that he was being held by an UNRWA teacher; UNRWA is the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees that has been under systematic U.S. and Israeli and European attack for decades. And we’re expected to believe that the seven-year-old child not only knows what UNRWA is, but also that the first thing his captor said to him is, the most important thing you need to know about me is that I’m an UNRWA teacher, and, if you don’t believe me, here are my pay stubs, because I’m desperate to get fired from my job. You know, it just defies imagination.

I also think that the inconsistencies in the stories of treatment are a little too contradictory for my liking. I would find it believable if the general pattern was abuse, or the general pattern was humane treatment, but the idea that similar people under identical circumstances are treated very differently, I just don’t find it very convincing.

The only explanation that I would have for this, if it is indeed correct, is that there may have been abuse, torture of military prisoners in order to extract information from them by their captors.The other possibility, as you said, is that it may be that you had certain individuals seized by ordinary citizens, or other groups that decided to treat their captives very differently.

But the idea that you have ten people in the same room, five were treated humanely, and five were constantly abused… There’s too much contradiction in there for my liking, unless there are other factors that help explain that.

A final point — and again, no one deserves to be held captive unless they’re convicted of a specific crime by a legitimate authority — having seen these images of these Israeli captives being released, I have to say, and I think it needs to be said, they looked in better condition than many of the Palestinian civilians who were there to witness their release and departure. I think that’s an important point to make.

MH: Mouin, it seems very clear now that the Israeli military and Israeli government embarked on this conflict in Gaza without a clear plan for how they’d like to proceed throughout the course of the conflict, and also, very importantly, after it’s over, whether they achieved their objectives or not. And the U.S. government also has cosigned and encouraged this conflict, again, without really having an idea of what they want to happen, ultimately.

I’m very curious, because I’ve heard Blinken, and Biden, and others say that their ideal situation is that, at the end of the war, the Palestinian Authority will be in charge in Gaza. But it seems like the Palestinian Authority has not been very relevant, and it’s decreased in popularity since the conflict began.

Can you talk a bit about how realistic or unrealistic you see that outcome being?

MR: This is primarily a U.S. project, because Israel’s strategy, of course, has been to keep the Palestinians divided and fragmented. And one reason that Hamas has been able to remain in power in the Gaza Strip all these years is because Israel — its distaste for Hamas notwithstanding — has preferred a situation in which the West Bank — or those parts of it under Palestinian administration — and the Gaza Strip are ruled by separate and rival entities, rather than by a unified entity.

And Netanyahu, for example, has spoken out very clearly against any return of the Palestinian Authority to the Gaza Strip, and I think he speaks for the consensus of the Israeli leadership, and not just this leadership, on that issue. So, again, it’s primarily a U.S. project.

And this has a long history, the crux of which is basically that it is the U.S. and not the Palestinian people who will determine who represents them, who leads them, who rules them. It’s [that] the right of Palestinian representation belongs to Washington, and not the Palestinians.

The thing about the Palestinian Authority is that it is, in fact, a disintegrating entity. Israel, particularly since the eruption of the Second Intifada in 2000, has systematically implemented measures to weaken the Palestinian Authority, to transform it, essentially, into a subcontractor for the Israeli occupation, whose main function is kind of as an adjunct to the Israeli military and intelligence services in the West Bank. This has been quite systematic and, again, it’s not something that has ever been substantively opposed by those who claim that the Palestinian Authority should be empowered so that it can participate in a political resolution of this conflict.

So, you have the Americans kind of actively supporting this Israeli policy, while saying that they want the PA to be strengthened, and you have the Europeans effectively doing the same. Every time there’s a new Israeli outrage, how does the European Union respond? Well, it launches yet another investigation of Palestinian elementary school textbooks. I mean, that’s kind of the extent of European opposition to Israeli policy towards the Palestinians, and its efforts to weaken the Palestinian authority.

So, you have a Palestinian Authority that can’t even impose its authority over those areas of the West Bank which are formally under its administration. And, in this crisis, what you’ve had — as is often the case when Israel tries to eradicate the Palestinian organization — Hamas’ stature has been skyrocketing while the PA is primarily present through its absence in the public consciousness. I mean, Mahmoud Abbas is kind of trotted out every other week to make a meaningless statement. The guy is completely AWOL.

Another thing is, Hamas is far from universally popular in the Gaza Strip. There’s actually been quite a bit of opposition towards its continued rule over the Gaza Strip over the years, perhaps even increasing in recent years. But, that notwithstanding, one thing virtually all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip agree upon is that they detest the Palestinian Authority.

So, opposition to Hamas does not translate into support for the Palestinian Authority, because the Palestinian Authority has played a very, very pernicious role in punishing the people of the Gaza Strip, by participating in the blockade, by doing nothing to … Because the Palestinian Authority — or, rather, Mahmoud Abbas in particular — sees not only Hamas as its enemy, as his enemy, but sees the entire Gaza Strip as an enemy, and has treated it as such over the years.

You have a former Palestinian Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad — who also has a very low popularity ratings, but that’s a different question — he is one of several who I believe are on the record as saying that they received instructions from Mahmoud Abbas to further turn the screws on the Gaza Strip, and refused to do so.

And so, the Palestinian Authority is seen by the majority of Gazans as part of the problem — particularly Mahmoud Abbas — and not part of the solution. Now, the Americans, nevertheless … Again, we’re talking about the Washington echo chamber, so you can say anything provided it has no relationship to reality. They’re under this illusion that they are going to resuscitate the Palestinian Authority, perhaps even appoint a new leader in Washington’s image who will be lionized by the Palestinian people. That they will then bring him into the Gaza Strip on the back of an Israeli tank, and that he will be received with rice and flowers by every Palestinian in the Gaza Strip.

I mean, there’s only one problem here, putting aside all these political issues. If the PA can’t even administer territories under its jurisdiction in the West Bank, and if the U.S. can’t even challenge Israel’s systematic efforts over the years to weaken the Palestinian Authority, how are you going to get a strengthened PA that is actually going to rule the Gaza Strip?

And there’s one other point here, which is that all these scenarios have as a prerequisite the successful eradication of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. If Hamas remains, not even as a coherent movement, but retains residual military capabilities, these scenarios are all pie-in-the-sky and off the table.

JS: The final area we wanted to cover was about the Biden administration, and how Joe Biden, and Antony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan, and this administration have handled the events of October 7th and beyond. And what we saw at the beginning, and for anyone that knows anything about Joe Biden’s career, it was no mystery how he was going to respond. He was all in with full support for scorched earth bombing and ground operations on the part of the Israeli state. So, that shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone. And that was sustained as just the public messaging, also, for the first several weeks of this.

And then you had this kind of moment of schizophrenia from the messaging from the White House where, on the one hand, that was still going on, but then you had primarily Antony Blinken running around starting to say, oh, we need to deal with the humanitarian crisis now in Gaza. And they start planting stories with unnamed officials talking about how Biden is so concerned about the fate of the innocent civilians of Gaza.

And now, we’ve hit a point where this is now, it’s almost like the dominant messaging now from the White House is, this has to stop at some point. And then they’re leaking stories about how they’re trying to put a leash on Netanyahu, and sort of draw a line about what’s going to happen in southern Gaza.

Make sense of this, from your perspective. Like, give us an overview of how you have seen the response from Biden and his brightest guys in the room.

MR: Well, I was hoping you wouldn’t ask me to do some Kremlinology here, but I’ll give it my best shot.

Look, I don’t take any of these statements seriously. I think your characterization of Biden is entirely correct, and it applies equally to Blinken who, certainly when it comes to the Middle East, is somewhat of a clueless airhead. He genuinely believed that the 2003 Anglo-American invasion, occupation, and destruction of Iraq would create a century of peace and security and stability in the Middle East. I think one thing we need to understand about Blinken is there’s never been a war in the Middle East that he hasn’t fully embraced. The guy just loves war.

To give one example, the one difference he’s had with Biden on Middle East policy was Libya, where Biden had some misgivings. Blinken was all in, because he was sure it would turn out as well as Iraq. Blinken is someone who was opposed to U.S. policy in Syria during the Obama administration, because it didn’t result in war. So, you know, this guy, he just loves war. I think maybe he played too many video games as a kid or something? I really don’t know.

But I think the real issue here is not the growing pressure of public opinion in the U.S., which tends to come first and foremost from what the Democratic Party would consider its natural constituency. I think Biden genuinely doesn’t give a damn about this. He’s got more important things, like supporting Israel. Blinken, for his part, I don’t think has a clue. The point I’ve been making is Biden doesn’t care, Blinken doesn’t know.

Then you have a third faction, which I think is represented by CIA director Bill Burns, who knows the Middle East very well, and understands its politics. And I would argue, also, probably Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and much of the top brass in the Pentagon.

And if I could just rewind a bit here, I was earlier referring to the conflict of 2021. And what you had then was not only this uprising by Palestinians throughout Mandatory Palestine — in other words, in the West Bank within Israel and the Gaza Strip — but it also began to spread in the region. Palestinians in Jordan, and Syria, and Lebanon were demonstrating, and then you started getting larger and larger demonstrations by growing masses of people in the Arab countries. And, at a certain point, the Chief of Staff at the time, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley was giving congressional testimony, and he said — I’m paraphrasing here — that if this goes on for much longer, it’s going to begin having a serious impact on our interests in the region. And, next thing you knew, the conflict was over, and a ceasefire was achieved.

So, what I think is going on here is not a response to the growing outrage of public opinion, or even a response to a slight change of tone among some U.S. allies in Europe, particularly, or even a realization that the Western-constructed rules-based international order is effectively past tense. What I think you have — and here is my Kremlinology — what I think you’re seeing is that you have an ascendant faction within the U.S. leadership, represented, I believe, by Burns and Austin, who are looking at this not in terms of civilian casualties or its political consequences for Biden’s reelection campaign, but looking at it from the point of view of U.S. interests in the Middle East.

And what they’re seeing is that it is effectively impossible to resume this war without regional escalation, and their priority is to prevent this regional escalation, because further regional escalation increases the prospect that the U.S. will get directly involved. Particularly at a time when you have certain Israeli leaders who, in view of the U.S. commitment to get directly involved if Hezbollah in Lebanon launches an all-out offensive against Israel, view this as a golden opportunity to enmesh the U.S. in a direct conflict with Iran. In other words: for Israel to fight its enemies to the last American.

And this is what I think is uppermost in the minds of those who want to find an off ramp. And it’s no coincidence, in my view, that the real diplomacy here is being conducted not by Blinken, but by Burns, who’s been in Doha for the past several days, along with a director of the Israeli foreign intelligence agency, Mossad, in Qatar, of course. Oh, and the head of Egyptian intelligence. So, I think that’s where the real discussions are taking place. And Blinken is being allowed to play diplomat, here and there.

Yeah. So, my sense is, I think you very well characterized the initial U.S. response. Then it became clear that this omniscient, omnipotent, unbeatable Israeli military is a very effective killing machine when it’s dropping 2,000-pound bombs from the air, but a rather mediocre fighting force when it comes to ground operations. That it can only make further progress in a context where further regional escalation is a certainty, and I think that those who are most worried about the scenario appear to now have the upper hand.

And it’s because of that, that, all of a sudden, you’re hearing, 15,000 corpses later concern about civilian casualties.

MH: With the caveat that we still don’t know what dimensions this war ultimately may take, there may be a regional implication to it as well, as you said. But I’m curious, in terms of the next day after this conflict’s over, how do you see the political horizon of the Israel-Palestine conflict changed by October 7th, and everything that’s happened since then?

Obviously, the level of death and destruction in such a small time frame is unprecedented, even in this long conflict, and it’s going to have lasting impacts on both Palestinian, Israeli, regional, and, also, Western opinion for many, many years to come.

I’m curious, how do you see politics after this conflict? And what may we actually expect, if anything, in terms of seeing a political resolution any time in the foreseeable future?

MR: Well, I’ll start by getting back to your first question, which is that, on October 6th, the Palestinians were completely marginalized, and Israel and its sponsors in the U.S. and Europe had come to the conclusion that the Palestinians could be safely ignored. And that Israel [can] basically have its way with the Palestinians, and resolve the whole issue unilaterally because, on the one hand, no one cared anymore, and, on the other, the Palestinians were too powerless to do anything about it. That changed on October 7th.

An optimistic scenario would be to recall an incident from the 1970s. In 1971, Israel’s then-defense minister, Moshe Dayan, who was the hero of Israel’s decisive military victory in 1967, was giving a speech and, still full of hubris, he said, you know, if I have to choose, between Sharm El-Sheikh without peace, or peace without Sharm El-Sheikh, and he was referring to a resort in what was then the Israeli occupied Sinai Peninsula. If I have to make this choice, he said, I choose Sharm El-Sheikh without peace.

Two years later, Egypt and Syria launched their joint offensive against Israel to recover their occupied territories, and it caused such a shock within Israeli elites that, by the end of that decade, the Israeli government, then led by the much more radical Likud Party, negotiated a peace agreement with Egypt, part of which gave not only Sharm El-Sheikh, but every last grain of sand in the Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt. And who was a main negotiator of that agreement? Moshe Dayan.

And again, I don’t want to get into the details, but an important reason that Israel concluded its peace treaty was to get a freer hand with the Palestinians, and the colonization of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and to remove the main Arab military force from the conflict, and so on, but that’s not the point I’m making here.

Then you have Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which is known as Operation Peace for Galilee, but its real name was Operation Big Pines. And there, Israel had a very well-developed strategy: you invade Lebanon, you eradicate the PLO, you install Bachir Gemayel, the leader of the fascist Phalangist Party as head of state in Lebanon.

He concludes a peace treaty with Israel, he expels all the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon to Jordan. There is a revolution in Jordan, and it’s transformed from a Hashemite monarchy into a Palestinian republic. That becomes the Palestinian homeland, and Israel can then proceed with the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. And, eventually, not only the West, but the international community will recognize this.

Well, first of all, Israel eventually proved incapable of seizing West Beirut by military force. It was only able to do so after the U.S. sent a mediator to Beirut to negotiate the orderly withdrawal of the PLO from Beirut. And then, it only took one bomb — an Operation Valkyrie-type operation — to knock off Bachir Gemayel, and the whole plan collapsed.

And then you had, a few years later, the popular uprising, the Intifada, from 1987 to 1993, and the PLO that was supposed to be eradicated in Beirut ended up leading the Palestinians from the occupied territories. And again, this is without getting into any analysis of the Oslo Agreements, but I think the broader point is clear.

But in 1973 there was also another dynamic, which is that Israel — or those Israelis who were most committed to the permanent retention of the occupied territories — began to see the threat of a potential Arab-Israeli peace, and you had groups like Gush Emunim and others that began to very strongly intensify — with full government support I should add — settlement activity in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. So, you have these different dynamics at work.

How will this play out? It’s very difficult to say. On the one hand, I think, when you hear Biden, and E.U. Foreign Affairs Commissioner [Joseph] Borrell, and others, talking about a reinvigorated initiative to achieve a two-state settlement, you can take all that with a grain of salt. Not because a two-state settlement is no longer on the table, but because you can’t have a two-state settlement without an end to the occupation. And, since 1967 — so, now, for over half a century — there is literally not a single instance in which either the United States or Europe have confronted Israel with a single consequence for any of its actions in the occupied territories.

So, this whole process of creeping and now leaping annexation has proceeded without challenge, and has been enabled by, for example, the U.S. and Europe making these settlements economically viable, by allowing them to export their illegal products from their illegal settlements into the European and American markets.

Yes, there have been verbal condemnations and statements, and so on, but in terms of practical consequences? Literally zero. And a world in which Washington or Brussels challenge Israel and take measures to compel Israel to end its occupation, that doesn’t exist, any more than the moon is made out of cheese.

So, my view, and I’m perhaps in a minority here, is that, at least as a theoretical matter, a two-state settlement is entirely achievable, because I don’t believe there is such a thing as a point of no return.

If you compare the West Bank to Algeria, Algeria was internationally recognized as an integral part of the French homeland until 1954 by the entire international community as it existed then. That’s never been the case for Israel and the West Bank. And all it would take is a phone call from Washington and the occupation would end. Again, that’s never going to happen, but you can think of ways in which Western interests in the Middle East are sufficiently challenged, that the U.S. and Europe may begin to change their policies.

So, the issue is not whether there can be a two-state settlement. I think one question we need to ask ourselves in view of what we’ve seen in the past month is whether there should be peace with Israel. And here’s what I mean by that.

If you look at Europe in the 1940s, at a certain point, a conclusion was reached that there could be no peace in Europe without the dismantling of the Nazi regime, because it was a rabid, lunatic, irrational state with whom peace was simply impossible. No one talked about exterminating or expelling the German people, but about dismantling the state and its key institutions.

You go to Southeast Asia in the late 1970s, and a conclusion was reached that, in addition to the expulsion of American forces, peace in Southeast Asia could not be attained without dismantling the rabid, lunatic, thoroughly irrational Khmer Rouge regime. You go to Southern Africa in the 1990s and, similarly, it became apparent that, unless you dismantle the white minority regime in South Africa, peace in Southern Africa would remain a pipe dream.

Now, you look at Israel today. It’s a state that has reached such a degree of irrational, rabid lunacy that its government routinely accuses its closest allies of supporting terrorism. And, in the last week or two alone, Israel has accused the leaders of Spain, Belgium, and Ireland of supporting terrorism for having even the slightest disagreement with it.

You have Israel’s clownish representative to the United Nations, who attends security council meetings wearing a concentration camp outfit, or at least the yellow star, and demanding the immediate resignation of the U.N. Secretary General, whose position … He hasn’t named Israel once as responsible for anything. But he demanded his immediate resignation simply because he made the obvious factual observation that the attacks of October 7th were not the beginning of the history of this conflict, and is demanding resignations left and right.

For Israel, slaughtering 15,000 people in a month, conducting the most intensive bombing in the history of the Middle East — and we’re talking about the Middle East, not Scandinavia — has become perfectly normal. It is a state that has become thoroughly incapable of any form of inhibition. I would argue that the Israeli regime is a clear and present danger to peace in the Middle East, and, rather than drawing any conclusions, rather than or in addition to having a discussion and debate about how Israeli-Palestinian peace might be achieved, we should also be asking ourselves, should that peace be achieved? Or, rather, can it only be achieved by dismantling a regime and its key institutions the way that was done in Europe in the 1940s, in Southeast Asia in the 1970s, in South Africa in the 1990s, Southern Africa in the 1990s, and I’m sure there are other examples as well.

And, just to be clear, I’m not talking about expulsion of Israeli citizens or whatnot. I’m talking about a regime and its institutions. Again, let’s not jump to conclusions, but let’s ask the difficult questions.

JS: On that note, Mouin Rabbani, we want to thank you very much for being with us. And I know it’s not popular to give out people’s Twitter — or they call it “X” — handles right now, but I really recommend to people to give you a follow on whatever we’re calling Twitter these days. It’s @MouinRabbani. We’ll also link to it.

But, Mouin, thank you very much for sharing your analysis with us.

MR: Thank you. And, just on your last point: I don’t block trolls, because they always help me substantiate my argument.

JS: All right. Thanks so much, Mouin. We really appreciate it.

MR: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure being with you.

MH: That was Mouin Rabbani, the co-editor of Jadaliyya. He also has his own podcast called, Connections. We’ll link to that on our website. 

JS: And that does it for this episode of Intercepted. We won’t have an upcoming episode this upcoming Wednesday but we’ll be back the following week as usual. 

Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. José Olivares is the lead producer. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. Roger Hodge is Editor-in-Chief of The Intercept. Rick Kwan mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

MH: If you want to support our work, you can go to theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter what the size, makes a real difference. And, if you haven’t already, please subscribe to Intercepted, and definitely do leave us a rating and review whenever you find our podcasts. It helps other listeners to find us as well.

JS: If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com

Thank you so much for joining us. Until next time, I’m Jeremy Scahill. MH: And I’m Murtaza Hussain.

The post Two Months That Shook the World: The First Phase of the Gaza War appeared first on The Intercept.

Ryan Grim has a new book out called “The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution.” This week on Deconstructed, Grim’s “Breaking Points” co-host Krystal Ball, a former MSNBC host, interviews him about his latest book. The conversation was held at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. Like we did earlier with our Naomi Klein interview, we’re running the conversation here as today’s episode. The event included a brief reading and a wide-ranging conversation that touched on the Squad’s relationship to Democratic leadership, criticism of its willingness to stand up to Democratic Party bosses, and the big-money operation launched by pro-Israel super PACs, organized by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, to oust members of the Squad and purge the party of Democrats who agree with them. You can preorder the book here.

Transcript coming soon.

The post Krystal Ball and Ryan Grim on the Squad appeared first on The Intercept.

Despite his reputation as a geopolitical kingmaker, Kissinger was never able to fully impose total U.S. authority upon Israel, but he did seek to leverage U.S. influence — sometimes against what the right-wing Likud party viewed as its interests.

In the 1970s, Kissinger was so hated by the Likud party, which now controls Israel’s far-right coalition government, that some of its members tried to have him assassinated, according to a news report from the time.

“A die-hard clique of Israeli right-wingers has put out a $150,000 ‘contract’ for the assassination of Secretary of State Kissinger,” the New York Daily News reported in 1977, citing senior State Department officials. When reports of a possible hit on Kissinger first came out, it was believed to be the work of Palestinian militants, but senior officials told the paper that they were certain that the threat was emanating from the Likud party.

The Likud hard-liners who put up the money — described as “a small, radical splinter faction within Israel’s Likud opposition bloc” — were reportedly upset at Kissinger’s diplomacy around the end of the 1973 Arab–Israeli War. Kissinger had been instrumental in disengagement agreements with Egypt and Syria that saw Israel withdrawing from territories it had conquered. On the Israeli side, Likud’s rival Labor Party had worked with Kissinger to agree to the compromises.

The 1973 war had also led to a damaging oil embargo by Arab states against the U.S., and Kissinger was said to be willing to cut any deal necessary to turn the spigot back on — which the 1974 disengagement deals accomplished.

Of the hit, the Daily News reported, “The motive was said to be revenge against Kissinger for allegedly selling out Israel during his Mideast shuttle diplomacy.”

The Likud strongly denied the allegation at the time, as did the State Department. (The reported plot to assassinate Kissinger is just one of several instances in which Israelis displayed intense hostility toward their strongest ally, including a 1967 attack on an American spy ship and an espionage operation in the 1980s.)

While Kissinger succeeded in his short-term goal of ending the oil embargo and returning the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, his efforts at statesmanship intentionally obstructed efforts to find a long-term solution to the permanent occupation of Palestine.

As my colleague Jon Schwarz wrote today, Kissinger went against Richard Nixon’s own directive to find a way for lasting peace when everything and anything was on the table. Kissinger believed that a constant state of conflict and instability granted America an upper hand in the Middle East. “My assessment is a costly victory [for Israel] without a disaster is the best,” Kissinger told his subordinates at the onset of the Yom Kippur War.

Despite his Jewish heritage, Kissinger showed little regard for the Israeli state or Jewish people beyond their utility to the American empire. Helping Soviet Jews escape to the United States to avoid the Russian crackdown was “not an objective of American foreign policy,” Kissinger told Nixon in 1973, “and if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

Whatever animosity once existed between the Likud party and the former secretary of state was long past them. Today, the party is led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was first elected to the post in 1996. (That election was prompted by the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, who many believe was the last great hope for enduring peace in Israel.)

Netanyahu has taken a page out of the Kissinger playbook, using unending conflict to cling to power and inviting ever more extremist politicians into the Likud coalition. In September, just weeks before Israel launched its all-out war on Gaza, the pair had an affectionate meeting in New York.

Israel’s bombing campaign on the Gaza Strip in recent weeks rivals the concentrated bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia that Kissinger oversaw decades ago.

The post Members of Israel’s Ruling Likud Party Once Planned to Assassinate Henry Kissinger appeared first on The Intercept.

The encomiums have flowed voluminously for Henry Kissinger, and there have been some condemnations too. But even in the latter, little attention has been paid to his efforts to prevent peace from breaking out in the Mideast — efforts which helped cause the 1973 Arab–Israeli War and set in stone the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This underappreciated aspect of Kissinger’s career adds tens of thousands of lives to his body count, which is in the millions.

Kissinger, who died at 100 on Wednesday, served in the U.S. government from 1969 to 1977, during the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations. He began as Nixon’s national security adviser. Then, in Nixon’s second term, he was appointed secretary of state, a position he held on to after Ford became president following Nixon’s resignation.

In June 1967, two years before the start of Nixon’s presidency, Israel had achieved a gigantic military victory in the Six-Day War. Israel attacked Egypt and occupied Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, and, following modest responses from Jordan and Syria, also took over the West Bank and the Golan Heights. 

In the following years, the ultimate fallout from the war — in particular, what, if any, of the new territory Israel would be able to keep — was still fluid. In 1968, the Soviets made what appeared to be quite sincere efforts to collaborate with the U.S. on a peace plan for the region.

The Soviets proposed a solution based on United Nations Security Council Resolution 242. Israel would withdraw from the territory it had conquered. However, there would not be a Palestinian state. Moreover, Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Arab–Israeli War would not return to Israel; rather, they would be resettled with compensation in Arab countries. Most importantly, the Soviets would pressure their Arab client states to accept this. 

This was significant because at this point, many Arab countries, Egypt in particular, were allies of the Soviets and relied on them for arms supplies. Hosni Mubarak, who later became Egypt’s president and/or dictator for 30 years, started out as a pilot in the Egyptian air force and received training in Moscow and Kyrgyzstan, which was a Soviet republic at the time.

When Nixon took office in 1969, William Rogers, his first secretary of state, took the Soviet stance seriously. Rogers negotiated with Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the U.S., for most of the year. This produced what American diplomat David A. Korn, then assigned to Tel Aviv, Israel, described as “a comprehensive and detailed U.S. proposal for a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict.” 

One person prevented this from going forward: Henry Kissinger. Backstage in the Nixon administration, he worked assiduously to prevent peace.

This was not due to any great personal affection felt by Kissinger for Israel and its expansionist goals. Kissinger, while Jewish, was happy to work for Nixon, perhaps the most volubly antisemitic president in U.S. history, which is saying something. (“What the Christ is the matter with the Jews?” Nixon once wondered in an Oval Office soliloquy. He then answered his own question, explaining, “I suppose it’s because most of them are psychiatrists.”)

Rather, Kissinger perceived all the world through the prism of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Any settlement at the time would require the involvement of the Soviets, and hence was unacceptable to him. At a period when it appeared in public that an agreement with the Soviets might be imminent, Kissinger told an underling — as he himself recorded in his memoir “White House Years” — that was not going to happen because “we did not want a quick success [emphasis in the original].” In the same book, Kissinger explained that the Soviet Union later agreed to principles even more favorable to Israel, so favorable that Kissinger himself didn’t understand why the Soviets acceded to them. Nevertheless, Kissinger wrote, “the principles quickly found their way into the overcrowded limbo of aborted Middle East schemes — as I had intended.”

The results were catastrophic for all involved. Anwar el-Sadat, then Egypt’s president, announced in 1971 that the country would make peace with Israel based on conditions in line with Rogers’s efforts. However, he also explicitly said that a refusal of Israel to return Sinai would mean war.

On October 6, 1973, it did. Egypt and Syria attacked occupied Sinai and the Golan Heights, respectively. Their initial success stunned Israeli officials. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was convinced Israel might be conquered. Moreover, Israel was running out of war matériel and desperately needed to be resupplied by the U.S.

Kissinger made sure America dragged its feet, both because he wanted Israel to understand who was ultimately in charge and because he did not want to anger the oil-rich Arab states. His strategy, as another top diplomat put it, was to “let Israel come out ahead, but bleed.”

You can read this in Kissinger’s own words in the records of internal deliberations now available on the State Department website. On October 9, Kissinger told his fellow high-level officials, “My assessment is a costly victory [for Israel] without a disaster is the best.”

The U.S. then did send huge amounts of weaponry to Israel, which it used to beat back Egypt and Syria. Kissinger looked upon the outcome with satisfaction. In another high-level meeting, on October 19, he celebrated that “everyone knows in the Middle East that if they want a peace they have to go through us. Three times they tried through the Soviet Union, and three times they failed.”

The cost to humans was quite high. Over 2,500 members of the Israeli military died. 10,000-20,000 were killed on the Arab side. This is in line with Kissinger’s belief — recorded in “The Final Days” by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — that soldiers are “dumb, stupid animals to be used” as pawns in foreign policy.

After the war, Kissinger returned to his strategy of obstructing any peaceful settlement. In another of his memoirs, he recorded that in 1974, just before Nixon resigned, Nixon told him to “cut off all military deliveries to Israel until it agreed to a comprehensive peace.” Kissinger quietly stalled for time, Nixon left office, and it didn’t come up with Ford as president.

There’s much more to this ugly story, all available at your local library. It can’t be said to be the worst thing that Kissinger ever did — but as you remember the extraordinary bill of indictment for him, make sure to leave a little room for it.

The post On Top of Everything Else, Henry Kissinger Prevented Peace in the Middle East appeared first on The Intercept.

Prosecutors dropped their case against Tracy McCarter last December, citing insufficient evidence. In the lawsuit, which was filed on November 2 in the Southern District of New York, McCarter said she had “sustained serious physical and psychological harm as a result of being wrongfully arrested, charged, imprisoned, searched, and prosecuted.” 

The lawsuit names four NYPD officers who were involved with the arrest and one investigator from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office who worked on the case. All four of the police officers have previously faced civilian complaints of misconduct, though such allegations are famously hard to prove. A spokesperson for the NYPD declined to comment on whether any of the officers are being investigated in relation to McCarter’s case, citing the pending litigation. The district attorney’s office declined to comment on the allegation involving the undisclosed search warrant. 

According to the NYPD’s disciplinary guidelines, making false, misleading, and inaccurate statements is cause for termination. There’s no data showing how often that happens, however. 

Still, New York City taxpayers end up footing the bill when officers are accused of abusing their authority. The majority of lawsuits against the NYPD are settled, according to Jennvine Wong, a staff attorney with the Cop Accountability Project at the Legal Aid Society, a public defense organization in New York City.

“It seems like unless the story makes it to the press, somehow, cops are not actually paying the price for their perjury or for their false statements that are made in investigations.”

Those settlements are paid out from the city, not NYPD coffers, and New York City is on track to pay more than $100 million for such lawsuits this year alone, according to an analysis by the Legal Aid Society. As The Intercept previously reported, that figure is separate from the $30 million the city paid to settle lawsuits ahead of litigation, while 16 of the 20 officers named in the lawsuits with the highest payouts have been promoted. 

“It seems like unless the story makes it to the press, somehow, cops are not actually paying the price for their perjury or for their false statements that are made in investigations,” said Wong. “It’s obscured in a way that they’ve always been obscured, with DA’s offices pleading out a case to a lesser charge or dismissing cases, or avoiding calling that particular officer to the stand and calling a different officer instead.”

Police arrested McCarter, a nurse at New York-Presbyterian, after the death of her estranged husband, James Murray, in March 2020. The lawsuit provides the following account of their relationship and Murray’s death: Murray struggled with alcoholism and abused McCarter when he was drinking, including choking her. On the night of his death, he drunkenly went to McCarter’s apartment demanding money. After she refused, Murray put her into a chokehold. McCarter held out a kitchen knife in an attempt to ward him off, but Murray tripped and fell into the kitchen knife, piercing him in the chest. (This account was later confirmed by forensic experts hired by both McCarter’s team and the prosecution, according to the lawsuit.) McCarter said she immediately called for help and applied pressure to Murray’s wound. 

A transcript of body camera footage reviewed by The Intercept shows McCarter in distress and pleading for officers to help Murray. “Jim. Please stay with us,” she screamed, according to the transcript. “Oh god. Oh god. Why [unintelligible] did you do this Jim? Why did you do this? Why did you do this? He tried to take my money. Why did he do this? Oh my god.”

Shortly after, Officer Shahel Miah handcuffed McCarter. Another officer, Samantha Cortez, stated, “She said he tried to take her money and she stabbed him in the chest.” The transcript of the body camera footage does not show McCarter making the second part of that statement, but Cortez memorialized it in her report nonetheless, according to the lawsuit. 

Former Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance’s office cited the alleged confession to charge McCarter with second-degree murder, an offense that carries a possible sentence of 25 years to life. McCarter’s lawyers later tried to refute the claim with body camera footage, but the judge overseeing the case ruled against them. 

At the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, McCarter was jailed on Rikers Island; she was ultimately released on house arrest in September 2020. Meanwhile, the prosecution used Cortez’s account as probable cause to obtain search warrants on McCarter’s phone and computer, including for dating apps that she shared with Murray. District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who entered office in January 2022, dismissed the charge against McCarter in December of that year after determining there was insufficient evidence to prosecute her. 

Months after the charge was dropped, McCarter learned that the district attorney’s office had withheld information about its surveillance activities. In August 2023, Google notified McCarter that it had given prosecutors access to information about an email account she used to communicate with people who were advocating on her behalf. Google, in its email, wrote that a court order had previously prohibited the company from notifying her about the request. 

McCarter’s lawyers later obtained the warrant from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. It shows that prosecutors got a search warrant for the account, StandWithTracy, in December 2021, during Vance’s last month in office, on the grounds that it was being used to “commit or conceal the commission of a crime.” Prosecutors were seeking access to the emails, addresses, and calendars associated with the account, according to the warrant. 

New York law requires prosecutors to turn over all documents related to the case. The district attorney’s office provided McCarter’s legal team with documents related to other search warrants, but those records did not mention the activism account. 

In the lawsuit, McCarter alleges that the warrant was based on “false information from members of the NYPD.” Her lawyers asked the district attorney’s office — now run by Bragg — about the basis for searching the account, but prosecutors refused to turn over that documentation without a court order, the lawyers said. 

“We don’t know what could possibly have been used to justify searching an account that was created to advocate on Tracy’s behalf as a survivor of domestic violence who was criminalized,” said Tess Cohen, one of McCarter’s lawyers. “We didn’t even know the search happened or what the result of that search was.”

For McCarter, the surveillance of the account was “beyond terrifying.” 

“That is Orwellian,” she said. 

New Yorkers have previously complained about the conduct of all of the police officers named in McCarter’s lawsuit, according to The Intercept’s review of the public database for the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent agency that investigates police misconduct.

One detective, Carlos Pagan, has faced six CCRB complaints for offenses such as use of force and abuse of authority dating back to 2011. None of those complaints have ever been substantiated, an outcome that means the CCRB found enough evidence of wrongdoing to recommend discipline. The majority of CCRB complaints are found to be unsubstantiated, but that doesn’t always mean it’s because there was no misconduct — the process for proving a case is difficult and burdensome.

Miah, the officer who handcuffed McCarter, has been the subject of three complaints. One of them, for abuse of authority, was substantiated, though the CCRB does not publicly provide details of the basis for the complaint. Miah did not face disciplinary action from the NYPD, according to a department database.

Cortez, the officer who said that McCarter confessed to stabbing Murray, faced a complaint for abuse of authority in September 2021, yet the investigation has been closed pending the outcome of the criminal case. 

And Alexander Cruz, a detective who signed off on search warrants and the criminal complaint against McCarter, was the subject of a CCRB complaint in 2008 for abuse of authority. He was exonerated during those proceedings but was named in a lawsuit the following year alleging he filed false police reports and gave false testimony. The suit resulted in a $27,000 settlement that did not include an admission of wrongdoing. The NYPD later disciplined Cruz for knowingly filing “ inaccurate, and factually incorrect departmental reports” on 19 occasions and making “incomplete and inaccurate entries into the department memobook.” (His penalty was losing 15 vacation days.) The CCRB database lists Cruz as inactive. 

Miah referred questions to the NYPD press office, which responded with a link to the department’s discipline database. Cortez did not respond, and Pagan and Cruz could not be reached for comment. 

Emily Tuttle, a spokesperson for Bragg, told The Intercept that the district attorney’s office takes into consideration police officers’ records. The office maintains “records with any information that could negatively impact a testifying officer’s credibility and proactively disclose it in any prosecution where they may be called as a witness,” Tuttle wrote in an email.

McCarter is seeking an unspecified amount in damages related to her loss of income and the trauma she said she endured as part of her arrest. According to her lawsuit, the experience left her with post-traumatic stress disorder, suicidal ideations, and medical bills for in-patient counseling she sought for her PTSD. She was suspended from both her job and her master’s program during the case, and she opted for a hysterectomy instead of a simpler medical procedure out of fear she’d be incarcerated and not receive adequate medical care for her condition. 

In an interview, she said she hopes lawmakers in Albany, New York, will take note of the alleged misconduct in her case and review laws that protect police, prosecutors, and judges. She said, “The legislature actually prevents the accountability necessary in a just society to stop these abuses of power.” 

The post NYPD Accused of Fabricating Domestic Violence Survivor’s Murder Confession appeared first on The Intercept.

Kissinger helped prolong the Vietnam War and expand that conflict into neutral Cambodia; facilitated genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; accelerated civil wars in southern Africa; and supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America. He had the blood of at least 3 million people on his hands, according to his biographer Greg Grandin. 

There were “few people who have had a hand in as much death and destruction, as much human suffering, in so many places around the world as Henry Kissinger,” said veteran war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody.

A 2023 investigation by The Intercept found that Kissinger — perhaps the most powerful national security adviser in American history and the chief architect of U.S. war policy in Southeast Asia from 1969 to 1975 — was responsible for more civilian deaths in Cambodia than was previously known, according to an exclusive archive of U.S. military documents and interviews with Cambodian survivors and American witnesses.

The Intercept disclosed previously unpublished, unreported, and under-appreciated evidence of hundreds of civilian casualties that were kept secret during the war and remained almost entirely unknown to the American people. Kissinger bore significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians — up to six times more noncombatants than the United States has killed in airstrikes since 9/11, according to experts.

Born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in Fürth, Germany, on May 27, 1923, he immigrated to the United States in 1938, among a wave of Jews fleeing Nazi oppression. Kissinger became a U.S. citizen in 1943 and served in the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps during World War II. After graduating summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1950, he earned an M.A. in 1952 and a Ph.D. two years later. He then joined the Harvard faculty, with appointments in the Department of Government and at the Center for International Affairs. While teaching at Harvard, he was a consultant for the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson before serving as national security adviser from 1969 to 1975 and secretary of state from 1973 to 1977 under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. A proponent of realpolitik, Kissinger greatly influenced U.S. foreign policy while serving in government and, in the decades that followed, counseled U.S. presidents and sat on numerous corporate and government advisory boards while authoring a small library of bestselling books on history and diplomacy.

Kissinger married Ann Fleischer in 1949; the two were divorced in 1964. In 1974, he married Nancy Maginnes. He is survived by his wife, two children from his first marriage, Elizabeth and David, and five grandchildren.

As National Security Adviser, Kissinger played a key role in prolonging the U.S. wars in Southeast Asia, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of American troops and hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, Laotians, and Vietnamese. During his tenure, the United States dropped 9 billion pounds of munitions on Indochina.

In 1973, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Kissinger and his North Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho “for jointly having negotiated a cease fire in Vietnam in 1973.”

“There is no other comparable honor,” Kissinger would later write of the prize he received for an agreement to end a war he encouraged and extended, a pact that not only failed to stop that conflict but also was almost immediately violated by all parties. Documents released in 2023 show that the prize — among the most controversial in the award’s history — was given despite the understanding that the war was unlikely to end due to the truce.

Tho refused the award. He said that the U.S. had breached the agreement and aided and encouraged its South Vietnamese allies to do the same, while also casting the deal as an American capitulation. “During the last 18 years, the United States undertook a war of aggression against Vietnam,” he wrote. “American imperialism has been defeated.”

North Vietnam and its revolutionary allies in South Vietnam would topple the U.S.-backed government in Saigon two years later, in 1975. That same year, due in large part to Nixon and Kissinger’s expansion of the war into the tiny, neutral nation of Cambodia, the American-backed military regime there fell to the genocidal Khmer Rouge, whose campaign of overwork, torture, and murder then killed 2 million people, roughly 20 percent of the population. Kissinger almost immediately sought to make common cause with the génocidaires. “You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them,” he told Thailand’s foreign minister.

As secretary of state and national security adviser, Kissinger spearheaded efforts to improve relations with the former Soviet Union and “opened” the People’s Republic of China to the West for the first time since Mao Zedong came to power in 1949. Kissinger also supported genocidal militaries in Pakistan and Indonesia. In the former, Nixon and his national security adviser backed a dictator who — according to CIA estimates — slaughtered hundreds of thousands of civilians; in the latter, Ford and Kissinger gave President Suharto the go-ahead for an invasion of East Timor that resulted in about 200,000 deaths — around a quarter of the entire population.

In Latin America, Nixon and Kissinger plotted to overturn the democratic election of Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende. This included Kissinger’s supervision of covert operations — such as the botched kidnapping of Chilean Gen. René Schneider that ended in Schneider’s murder — to destabilize Chile and prompt a military coup. “You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende,” Kissinger later told Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the leader of the military junta that went on to kill thousands of Chileans. In Argentina, Kissinger gave another green light, this time to a terror campaign of torture, forced disappearances, and murder by a military junta that overthrew President Isabel Perón. During a June 1976 meeting, Kissinger told the junta’s foreign minister, César Augusto Guzzetti: “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly.” The so-called Dirty War that followed would claim the lives of an estimated 30,000 Argentine civilians.

Kissinger’s diplomacy also stoked a war in Angola and prolonged apartheid in South Africa. In the Middle East, he sold out the Kurds in Iraq and, wrote Grandin, “left that region in chaos, setting the stage for crises that continue to afflict humanity.”

Through a combination of raw ambition, media manipulation, and an uncanny ability to obscure the truth and avoid scandal, Kissinger transformed himself from a college professor and bureaucrat into the most celebrated American diplomat of the 20th century and a bona fide celebrity. Hailed as the “Playboy of the Western Wing” and the “sex symbol of the Nixon administration,” he was photographed with starlets and became a fodder for the gossip columns. While dozens of his White House colleagues were laid low by myriad Watergate crimes, which cost Nixon his job in 1974, Kissinger skirted the scandal and emerged a media darling.

“We were half-convinced that nothing was beyond the capacity of this remarkable man,” ABC News’s Ted Koppel said in a 1974 documentary, describing Kissinger as “the most admired man in America.” There was, however, another side to the public figure often praised for his wit and geniality, according to Carolyn Eisenberg, author of “Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia,” who spent a decade reading Kissinger’s White House telephone transcripts and listening to tapes of his unvarnished conversations. “He had a disturbed personality and was unbelievably adolescent. He admitted he was egotistical, but he was far beyond that,” she told The Intercept. “He was, in many respects, very much stuck at age 14. His opportunism was boundless. His need to be important, to be a celebrity, was gigantic.”

“He was, in many respects, very much stuck at age 14. His opportunism was boundless. His need to be important, to be a celebrity, was gigantic.”

Kissinger was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom — America’s highest civilian award — in 1977. In 1982, he founded Kissinger Associates, an international consulting group that became a revolving door refuge for top national security officials looking to cash in on their government service. The firm leveraged their and Kissinger’s reputations and contacts to help huge multinational corporations, banks, and financial institutions — including American Express, Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, Heinz, Fiat, Volvo, Ericsson, and Daewoo — broker deals with governments. “A big part of Henry Kissinger’s legacy is the corruption of American foreign policymaking,” Matt Duss, a former adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, told Vox in 2023. “It is blurring the line, if not outright erasing the line, between the making of foreign policy and corporate interests.”

Kissinger counseled every U.S. president from Nixon through Donald Trump and served as a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 1984 to 1990 and the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board from 2001 to 2016. After being tapped to head the 9/11 Commission, families of victims raised questions about potential conflicts of interest due to Kissinger’s financial ties with governments that could be implicated in the commission’s work. Kissinger quit rather than hand over a list of his consultancy’s clients.

In his 2001 book-length indictment, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,” Christopher Hitchens called for Kissinger’s prosecution “for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture” from Argentina, Bangladesh, Chile and East Timor to Cambodia, Laos, Uruguay, and Vietnam.

Kissinger ducked questions about the bombing of Cambodia, muddied the truth in public comments, and spent half his life lying about his role in the killings there. In the early 2000s, Kissinger was sought for questioning in connection with human rights abuses by former South American military dictatorships, but he evaded investigators, once declining to appear before a court in France and bolting from Paris after receiving a summons. He was never charged or prosecuted for deaths for which he bore responsibility.

“Much of the world considered Kissinger to be a war criminal, but who would have dared put the handcuffs on an American secretary of state?” asked Brody, who brought historic legal cases against Pinochet, Chadian dictator Hissène Habré, and others. “Kissinger was not once even questioned by a court about any of his alleged crimes, much less prosecuted.”

Kissinger continued to win coveted awards, and hobnobbed with the rich and famous at black-tie White House dinners, Hamptons galas, and other invitation-only events. By the 2010s, the Republican diplomat had become a darling of mainstream Democrats and remained so until his death. Hillary Clinton called Kissinger “a friend” and said she “relied on his counsel” while serving as secretary of state under President Barack Obama. Samantha Power, who built her reputation and career on human rights advocacy and went on to serve as the Obama administration’s ambassador to the U.N. and the Biden administration’s head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, befriended Kissinger before receiving the American Academy of Berlin’s Henry A. Kissinger Prize from Kissinger himself. Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, also had a long, cordial relationship with his distant predecessor.

Kissinger was repeatedly feted for his 100th birthday in May 2023. A black-tie gala at the New York Public Library was attended by Blinken; Power; Biden’s CIA director, William J. Burns; disgraced former CIA director and four-star Gen. David Petraeus; fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg; New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft; former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg; former Google CEO Eric Schmidt; and the Catholic Archbishop of New York Timothy M. Dolan, among other luminaries.

To mark Kissinger’s centenary, Koppel — who became Kissinger’s friend following the 1974 documentary — conducted a sympathetic interview for CBS News that nonetheless broached the charges that dogged Kissinger for decades. “There are people at our broadcast who are questioning the legitimacy of even doing an interview with you. They feel that strongly about what they consider, I’ll put it in language they would use, your criminality,” said Koppel.

“That’s a reflection of their ignorance,” Kissinger replied.

When Koppel brought up the bombing of Cambodia, Kissinger got angry. “Come on. We have been bombing with drones and all kinds of weapons every guerilla unit that we were opposing,” he shot back. “It’s been the same in every administration that I’ve been part of.”

“The consequences in Cambodia were particularly —”

“Come on now.”

“No, no, no, were particularly —”

“This is a program you’re doing because I’m gonna be 100 years old,” Kissinger growled. “And you’re picking a topic of something that happened 60 years ago. You have to know that it was a necessary step. Now, the younger generation feels that if they can raise their emotions, they don’t have to think. If they think, they won’t ask that question.”

When The Intercept asked that question about Cambodia — in a more pointed manner — 13 years earlier, Kissinger offered the same dismissive retorts and flashed the same fury. “Oh, come on!” he exclaimed. “What are you trying to prove?” Pressed on the mass deaths of Cambodians resulting from his policies, the senior statesman long praised for his charm, intellect, and erudition told this reporter to “play with it.”

“The covert justifications for illegally bombing Cambodia became the framework for the justifications of drone strikes and forever war.”

Kissinger’s legacy extends beyond the corpses, trauma, and suffering of the victims he left behind. His policies, Grandin told The Intercept, set the stage for the civilian carnage of the U.S. war on terror from Afghanistan to Iraq, Syria to Somalia, and beyond. “You can trace a line from the bombing of Cambodia to the present,” said Grandin, author of “Kissinger’s Shadow.” “The covert justifications for illegally bombing Cambodia became the framework for the justifications of drone strikes and forever war. It’s a perfect expression of American militarism’s unbroken circle.”

Brody, the war crimes prosecutor, says that even with Kissinger’s death, some measure of justice is still possible.

“It’s too late, of course, to put Kissinger in the dock now, but we can still have a reckoning [with] his role in atrocities abroad,” Brody told The Intercept. “Indeed, his death ought to trigger a full airing of U.S. support for abuses around the world during the Cold War and since, maybe even a truth commission, to establish an historical record, promote a measure of accountability, and if the United States were ready to apologize or acknowledge our misdeeds — as we have done in places like Guatemala and Iran — to foster a kind of reconciliation with the countries whose people suffered the abuses.”

Correction: December 1, 2023
An earlier version of this article included a pre-publication title for Carolyn Eisenberg’s book. The story has been updated to reflect the actual title.

The post Henry Kissinger, Top U.S. Diplomat Responsible for Millions of Deaths, Dies at 100 appeared first on The Intercept.

The debate in Congress over Israel’s overwhelming response to the October 7 attack by Hamas would look much different today had not a big-money operation, unprecedented in its scope and scale, launched — purging the Democratic Party of some of its toughest critics of the Israeli government and cowing others into silence. 

That operation was organized by AIPAC and an allied super PAC called Democratic Majority for Israel, which was founded by Mark Mellman, a longtime adviser to a top Israeli government official, Yair Lapid, who rose from foreign minister to prime minister, a position he held only briefly before being knocked out by Benjamin Netanyahu. 

That operation, aimed squarely at the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, is the subject of an excerpt from my new book I just published at The Intercept. 

The book is called “The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution,” and it’s officially out on Tuesday, December 5, so if you order it now, you’ll get it by then. Some bookstores already have it in the back, and if you ask for it they should be able to sell it now.

Meanwhile, this morning on “Counter Points,” my show co-hosted by Emily Jashinsky, we had on Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. He was there to promote his new book, and I joked at the end of the segment that viewers should actually buy mine instead to knock him off the bestseller list next week. The interview itself wasn’t a joke, however, as we focused mostly on his unconditional support for Israel. I couldn’t find anything he would condemn, up to and including the use of nuclear weapons on Gaza. 

Cruz: “Members of the Squad have tweeted out, ‘From the river to the sea.’ But the answer — I’d allow them to say it but I wouldn’t sit there quietly. I would point out that you are calling for, once again, the extermination of millions of Jews.”

Me: “As I’m sure that you know, though, in Likud’s platform, it says, ‘From the river to the sea, there will only be Israeli sovereignty.’ Are they suggesting genocide of all Palestinians?”

“Of course not.”

“Exactly, so if they’re not, why is the other suggesting genocide?”

“Because that’s what Hamas supports.”

“That’s just restating it.”

“Hold on, let me say, yesterday morning I started the day by watching a 46-minute video of the actual atrocities that Hamas committed.” He then described in vivid detail the atrocities Hamas carried out. 

After we all rightly condemned them, I asked if we could attempt to find some moral common ground, and I read Cruz a list of genocidal rhetoric from Israeli officials, like Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter’s comment that “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba … Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end,” or Israeli Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu saying that a nuclear bomb is “one of the possibilities” being considered against Gaza.

“Would you join us in condemning that as well?”

“I condemn nothing that the Israeli government is doing,” he said. “The Israeli government does not target civilians, they target military targets.” 

Our exchange from there:

“Why are they so bad at their targeting then, if they’re killing so many civilians?”

“So they’re actually not.”

“So then they are targeting civilians?”

“No … I can tell you there is no military on the face of the planet, including the U.S. military, that goes to the lengths that the Israeli military goes to avoid civilian casualties.”

“But the IDF says their focus is on damage, not on precision.”

“Yes, damage to Hamas, to terrorists.”

“No, they have said the opposite. They keep saying that what they’re doing is what they’re intending to do, yet here in the Unites States we say that’s not what they’re doing.”

“That’s simply not true. They are targeting the terrorists.”

“Are they lying?”

“No. My focus is on damage. Good, damage Hamas.” 

The full, outrageously maddening interview is here.

The post Ted Cruz: “I Condemn Nothing That the Israeli Government Is Doing” appeared first on The Intercept.

Some members of Congress are coupling their calls for a ceasefire with conditions like the removal of Hamas, which is ostensibly Israel’s justification for its brutal campaign against Gaza, while others are using the word in vague statements that leave room for interpretation. 

“Calls from members of Congress that demand regime change before there is an end to Israel’s bombardment are calls to extend and prolong a situation in which Israel is killing Palestinian children every single hour,” said Beth Miller of Jewish Voice for Peace Action, an organization that has co-led massive pro-peace demonstrations across the country. 

The push for a ceasefire began about a week into Israel’s assault on Gaza, when Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., led a 13-member resolution for an “immediate deescalation and cease-fire in Israel and occupied Palestine.” (The resolution now has 18 co-sponsors.) As people across the country have inundated their representatives with demands for a ceasefire — Yasmine Taeb, political director for Muslim-led justice group MPower Change Action Fund, said an effort by her organization and the Adalah Justice Project has generated more than 429,000 letters to the House — the number has slowly climbed to 49 across both chambers of Congress.

A poll from left-leaning outfit Data for Progress in October found 66 percent of voters in favor of a ceasefire. A Reuters poll conducted nearly a month later found 68 percent of respondents in favor of one, while a YouGov poll released days later found only 20 percent of respondents opposed to a ceasefire.

On Monday, four days into the ongoing humanitarian pause, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told Israel Defense Force soldiers that when Israel re-ups the fighting, its “strength will be greater, and it will take place throughout the entire Strip. … We will use the same amount of power and more.”

The pledge comes while the World Health Organization warns that more Palestinians may die from disease than the 15,000 who have already been killed by Israel’s bombardment campaign since October 7 — and that’s if conditions remain as they are, not if they worsen.

There’s no way the conflict ends other than a permanent ceasefire, said Yousef Munayyer, a political analyst and senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC. “How much do you actually need to see before you decide to see enough?”

As most of Congress remains mum on stopping the violence — with no Republican calling for a definitive end to the hostilities and beginning of a peace process — some members are invoking the word “ceasefire” but are hedging.

On November 19, as the Gaza death toll eclipsed 11,000, California Democratic Reps. Judy Chu and Jared Huffman both called for a ceasefire. Like other members of Congress, they conditioned their demand on Hamas’s release of every hostage, but they placed a new demand as well: that Hamas be removed from power.

Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., who has faced ongoing protests from Jewish peace groups and their allies, took to Twitter on Monday to thank Joe Biden for securing a pause in the fighting. He went on to invoke a “mutual and unconditional ceasefire” dating back to May 2021 (the last war between Israel and Hamas) that he said Hamas violated on October 7. Unless a call for a ceasefire includes the removal of Hamas, Goldman wrote, the U.S. “must continue to support Israel’s just and legitimate defense of its borders and its people.”

“What it amounts to is a way for members to kind of hide in a safe spot or safer spot to not really take a position.”

This requirement mirrors Israel’s justification for the violence: to weed out Hamas. Even for those who do see that as a necessary pathway to peace, Munayyer argued, it couldn’t be accomplished without a permanent ceasefire. “How does that happen? You know, it doesn’t happen unless you have a ceasefire,” he said. “What it amounts to is a way for members to kind of hide in a safe spot or safer spot to not really take a position.”

For Munayyer, the reluctance and ambivalence around the word “ceasefire” in Congress is about politics, not policy. “We’re talking about thousands of people dying and you’re wordsmithing ‘ceasefire,’” he said. “The interests that are shaping those decisions are wildly different than the stakes that actually matter here. And it’s quite stunning.”

Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, D-N.M., for her part, expressed support for the Biden administration’s work toward the temporary ceasefire and added that she supports “such a ceasefire and additional actions to release all the hostages, address the humanitarian crisis, and protect all civilians from violence — Palestinian and Israeli,” but did not call for a total end to the war. 

Other members of Congress, meanwhile, have used the word “ceasefire” in ambiguous statements that don’t make it readily clear where they fall.

Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, tweeted that he urges “a more comprehensive ceasefire to stop the killing of innocent Palestinians and free all hostages.” He added that “we need Hamas accountability without the continued devastation and siege of Gaza, with clear red lines for Netanyahu.” His office did not respond to The Intercept’s request for clarification. 

Rep. Danny K. Davis, D-Ill., reportedly called for a ceasefire on November 12 during a radio talk show. “There needs to be a pause, if not a cessation, to let aid and medical supplies, food, get to these individuals who are maimed, shot up, bombed up,” Davis said. “There needs to be at least enough stoppage to let these kinds of items get through. I join with anybody who says let’s do that. Let’s make it happen.” He has not released any subsequent statements about the issue, and his office did not respond to a request for more information on his position.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., urged a “pause in hostilities” but refused to say what exactly that means. “I am not interested in playing semantics, call it what you want: a ceasefire or a humanitarian pause,” he said in a statement. “The fact of the matter is the violence must stop.” His office did not respond to a request for clarification on the length of time he wants the violence to stop.

Some members, meanwhile, like Reps. Troy Carter, D-La., and Sylvia Garcia, D-Texas, “pray” for a permanent ceasefire. Carter’s office did not respond to an inquiry about whether his prayers amount to a firm policy position, while Garcia’s office said that she has nothing else to add.

“One of the reasons folks are now using the word more is because they’ve been seeing all the polls from the majority of the American people, the majority of Democrats,” said a staffer for a progressive member of Congress, who requested anonymity to speak freely about the subject of ongoing congressional deliberations. Some members of Congress are only using the word “ceasefire” at all because they can equivocate the temporary pause with a full ceasefire while giving credit to Biden, the staffer said. “They have clearance to say, ‘I agree that we should extend this ceasefire,’ but it’s really like not taking any courageous stance at all.”

While using the word “ceasefire” itself is not necessarily indicative of a lawmaker’s position, the same is true of a politician’s failure to use the word too. For instance, Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., issued a statement on November 17, before the temporary pause was announced, declaring that both Hamas and Israel must stop the violence. “The US government must use all of its influence and leverage to bring a lasting peace to a bleeding, traumatized Middle East,” he said. He did not use the word “ceasefire” but seemed to call for such an outcome. His office did not respond to repeated requests for clarification.

In the Senate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said last week that she urges “all parties to extend this agreement and work to achieve an enduring end to this fighting.” She added that things should not “return to the status quo” and that the “Israeli government should not resume bombing in Gaza, which would be a grave strategic and moral mistake.” 

Her statement was followed by Vermont Democratic Sen. Peter Welch, who said Tuesday that the ceasefire expiring “would be a grave mistake” and called for it to continue “indefinitely.” 

Welch’s counterpart from Vermont, meanwhile, independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, has called for an end to Israel’s indiscriminate bombing, unconditional aid, and settler violence in the West Bank and on Tuesday told The Intercept he may push a vote on placing conditions on U.S. military aid to Israel, but he has stopped short of calling for a total cessation of hostilities.

“You can look at this war that Israel has waged on the Palestinians in Gaza, which has set all kinds of records for brutality … and come to the conclusion that this is somehow contributing to a better outcome for Israelis and Palestinians,” said Munayyer of the Arab Center. “Or you could look at this and come to the far more reasonable conclusion that it’s not.”

“It seems like Welsh and Warren are indeed much more in line with that latter conclusion and that Sanders is not quite there yet,” Munayyer continued. “He still seems to be trying to, you know, split the difference here. And I’m not sure how that can be helpful.”

As the Israeli government plans to resume its bombing of Gaza after the temporary pause in fighting, Congress is preparing to send another $14.3 billion in military aid to Israel, per Biden’s request. “Biden and Congress need to do everything possible to pressure the Israeli government to permanently stop this genocide,” said Miller of Jewish Voice for Peace Action, “and that should include refusing to send Israel more military funds and weapons.”

The post Some Politicians Calling for a “Ceasefire” Are Not Actually Calling for a Ceasefire appeared first on The Intercept.

The indictment alleges that Gupta, after being recruited by the Indian government official, hired a hitman and paid him a $15,000 advance to carry out the murder this past summer. The hitman was actually an undercover agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration. According to a report on the indictment in the Washington Post, the intended target of the killing was Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, general counsel for the New York-based Sikh activist group Sikhs for Justice. In the DEA’s press release, Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen said investigators had “foiled and exposed a dangerous plot to assassinate a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil.”

“India showed a clear disregard for the rule of law when its government orchestrated the killing of an American activist on U.S. soil.”

The alleged assassination plot against Pannun was in the works around the same time as the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen who was also a leader in the Sikh separatist movement. Nijjar was murdered outside Vancouver in June; the Canadian government has alleged the involvement of Indian intelligence in his death. 

The Indian government has come under scrutiny over an alleged transnational assassination program targeting its opponents in foreign countries. In addition to the murder of Nijjar, The Intercept has also reported on alleged FBI warnings to Sikhs in the U.S. as well as alleged plots by India to assassinate Sikh activists in Pakistan. Both the Nijjar killing and the Gupta plot came ahead of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s trip to the U.S. in June. 

“India showed a clear disregard for the rule of law when its government orchestrated the killing of an American activist on U.S. soil, coinciding with Modi’s White House visit,” said Pritpal Singh, a coordinator for the American Sikh Caucus Committee who was among the Sikh American activists who were contacted by the FBI after Nijjar’s killing.

The details in the indictment reveal a murder-for-hire plot gone awry. Gupta, 52, described as being tied to the international weapons and narcotics trade, was alleged to have worked as a co-conspirator to an Indian government official with a background in security and intelligence. Along with others based in India and elsewhere, Gupta helped plan the murder of Pannun over his advocacy for an independent Sikh state and criticisms of the Indian government. In return, the government official indicated he would help secure the dismissal of criminal charges against Gupta in India, including during a meeting in New Delhi to discuss the plot. The Indian government official provided Gupta with details about Pannun, including his address, associated phone numbers, and his daily routine, which Gupta then gave to the DEA agent working undercover as a hitman. 

According to the indictment, the Indian government official told Gupta that he was targeting multiple people in the U.S. In communications, the Indian official told Gupta that he had a “target in New York” as well as another target in California. Gupta replied: ”We will hit our all Targets.” The indictment also indicated that Pannun was surveilled in New York using a cellphone application that tracks GPS coordinates and enables the user to take photographs. The Indian official allegedly agreed to pay $100,000 for the murder of Pannun, with a $15,000 advance paid to the undercover agent around June 9, according to the indictment. Nijjar was fatally shot less than 10 days later outside a Sikh temple in the Vancouver suburbs. 

According to the indictment, Gupta instructed the DEA hitman to kill Pannun “as soon as possible,” but not when high-level meetings were expected to take place between U.S. and Indian officials. Modi was scheduled to visit the U.S. on an official trip between June 21 and 23. On June 18, the day of Nijjar’s murder, the Indian government official sent Gupta a video of the Sikh leader slumped dead in his car. The next day, Gupta allegedly contacted the undercover DEA agent to tell them that Nijjar, like Pannun, had also been targeted for his opposition to the Indian government, telling the agent, “We have so many targets.”

Gupta also allegedly promised “more jobs, more jobs” to the hitman, referring to more assassinations that would be carried out in the future. In a video call with the DEA agent, roughly a week before the killing of Nijjar, Gupta and a group of men dressed in business attire and seated in a conference room allegedly told the agent, “We are all counting on you.” 

There is mounting evidence that India is running a transnational targeted killing program against dissidents. Documents reported by The Intercept last week alleged that India’s Research and Analysis Wing was coordinating the murders of individuals in Pakistan, using local criminal networks and assets based in the United Arab Emirates and Afghanistan. A slew of Sikh and Kashmiri separatists in Pakistan have been killed over the past few years, the pace of which has picked up in recent months. Such killings may be taking place in the West as well. In addition to Nijjar, in recent years a number of Sikh activists have died in mysterious circumstances in the United Kingdom and Canada, prompting accusations from family members and others of Indian government involvement.

According to the indictment, Gupta was arrested in the Czech Republic in late June. He is charged with murder-for-hire and conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire. Gupta is currently “in jail waiting to answer to these charges,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office press release.

The accusations against Gupta expand the scope of what is publicly known about India’s alleged assassination campaign in Western countries. 

“These revelations are deeply unsettling and have shocked our community,” said Singh. “The Indian rogue regime must be held accountable, and the perpetrators must face justice.”

The post India Accidentally Hired a DEA Agent to Kill Sikh American Activist, Federal Prosecutors Say appeared first on The Intercept.

“I think this is a ridiculous position to put us in,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut. “Holding Israel aid and Ukraine aid hostage to solving a complicated domestic issue is really unfortunate.” 

The current negotiation has been the latest in a series of efforts by Democrats to placate Republican criticisms of Biden’s handling of the southern border, as well as an effort by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to win Ukraine funding and placate Republicans skeptical of the war.

The so-called Gang of Four negotiators includes Murphy, who chairs the appropriations subcommittee that funds immigration operations at the Department of Homeland Security; Sens. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., and Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., who have made themselves fixtures in migration policy negotiations during the current Congress; and Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., an avowed immigration hawk with close ties to Donald Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller.

Hispanic Caucus senators, historically included in bipartisan migrant policy talks, were not happy to be excluded from the negotiating room. “There are four Democratic members of the United States Senate who are Latino and it’s important that their ideas, their inclusion, their expertise to be included in this,” said Sen. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., when asked if Murphy should be negotiating migrant policy with GOP nativists on behalf of Senate Democrats. 

Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto has been a nonfactor in the negotiations, despite having little to fear electorally having just won her reelection last year in Nevada. Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., usually a vocal advocate for migrant rights, has been sidelined by criminal charges.

Murphy rejected the characterization of nativists versus migrant rights. “We’ve been engaged in serious talks and I’m not really sure they want to get ‘Yes,’” he said of Lankford and Tillis, implying that his GOP counterparts may be negotiating in bad faith. 

“I know Padilla would like to legalize 14 million people,” said Tillis. 

“No hay acuerdo,” Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., who chairs the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on immigration, countered on Tuesday when I asked if asylum rights were on the chopping block, a Tillis priority. There’s still no deal. “If we’re going to continue to entertain these negotiations there has to be consideration for legalization,” he continued. 

On Wednesday, Padilla and Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin issued a joint statement signed by nine other Senate Democrats demanding that any permanent changes to asylum rights include “a clear path to legalization for long-standing undocumented immigrants.”

Right-wing groups like Heritage Action on Tuesday came out against Ukrainian military funding, an ominous foreshadow for the House prospects of any Senate bill. “A group of senators is undermining Republican unity and effective policy solutions by negotiating with Democrats who support open border policy,” Heritage Action President Kevin Roberts wrote in a statement. “Worse, the proposal coming out of these ‘negotiations’ will likely be used as leverage to advance President Biden’s request for $106 billion in fiscally irresponsible spending, including an additional $60 billion for Ukraine that fails to meet conservative standards and $13.6 billion for fake ‘border security’ that would accelerate Biden’s open border operations.”

The right in Congress is deeply unhappy about being asked to trade a watered-down version of the party’s aspirational immigration crackdown bill for Ukraine funding. “It’s not about the border, it’s about a fig leaf for funding Ukraine,” as one Senate GOP aide told Emily Jashinsky of “Counter Points.”

A senior Democratic aide granted anonymity to discuss the bill conceded it “is going to make nobody happy.” 

At issue is whether Republicans will agree to fund the Ukrainian military in a war with Russia if Democrats agree to further gut migrant rights during Biden’s presidency while militarizing the border at taxpayers’ expense. The proposed change would sacrifice credible fear standards in asylum screening, severely narrowing the definition of who is eligible for safe haven in the U.S. Current standards require that migrants applying for asylum demonstrate to an immigration judge a “significant fear” of death, persecution, or torture if they’re returned to their country of origin. The president’s supplemental request also includes funding for 1,600 asylum officers and 1,300 Border Patrol agents to catch and expedite the processing of asylum-seekers.

GOP senators have also floated the idea of restricting the use of advance parole to limit migrant detention at the border, although Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican with influence over his party’s immigration outlook in the Senate, tells The Intercept that ending Biden’s special designation of parole for migrants from Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti, and Nicaraguans is a priority for GOP negotiators. 

This is especially true for migrant communities with no negotiator at the table as Tillis pushes to limit asylum rights and Lankford wants to limit the use of migrant parole. “It’s really about what to do with that 7,000 people that are currently released in the country,” said Tillis. 

Schumer’s office has taken the lead on writing a bill text with the tacit support of ailing Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who has made funding Ukrainian military operations a top priority. Whether House Speaker Mike Johnson has the votes or the political will to pass a border-plus-Ukraine bill remain open questions. 

House Republicans have famously failed to pass even the most basic funding measures in the current Congress. A motion to vacate rule leftover from Kevin McCarthy’s doomed speakership remains in place that allows any member of Johnson’s majority party to demand a vote to remove him within 48 hours. 

Nevertheless, allies close to Schumer insist a bill text is imminent. Migrant rights advocates for Fwd.us and the American Immigration Council tell The Intercept that despite being cut out of negotiations by the Gang of Four, the senator’s office has been adamant about making themselves available for updates on the legislation which is expected to be introduced as early as this week.

The post Bipartisan Plan to Trade Immigrant Rights for Ukraine Money Is Sinking Fast appeared first on The Intercept.

Despite a temporary pause in Israel’s massive bombardment and ground operations in Gaza, the humanitarian catastrophe continues to worsen. With more than 15,000 dead Palestinians and whole neighborhoods and towns left in ruin, Israel’s defense minister has defiantly vowed to dramatically escalate the attacks inside Gaza the moment the truce ends. This week on Intercepted, Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain discuss the state of the war as well as the propaganda campaigns being waged by each side. Then Roy Yellin, head of public outreach at Israel’s leading human rights organization B’Tselem, discusses recent developments on the hostage and prisoner exchanges, how the crisis has impacted Israeli society, and describes the conditions faced by Palestinians when they are thrown into Israel’s military court system. Yellin also explains the state sponsorship of violent Israeli settlers, the mass detentions underway of Palestinians in the West Bank, and the dangerous nature of Israel’s far-right Interior Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Transcript coming soon.

The post Prisoners, Propaganda, and the Battle Over the Gaza War Narrative appeared first on The Intercept.

“There’s an Israel PR blitz happening this week facilitated by a handful of senators,” said a source familiar with the meetings in the upper chamber. “Practically all of the briefings on this issue these last few weeks have been members-only,” meaning congressional staff and the public are not welcome.

One briefing exclusive to members of the Senate scheduled on Monday and organized by Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., involved three senior Israel Defense Forces officers stationed at the Israeli Embassy.

“Sen. Duckworth would like to invite your boss to a last-minute meeting with Israeli Defense officials to discuss Israel’s strategy, how they are waging the war and what to expect in the day after the scenarios,” according to a memo obtained by The Intercept. (Duckworth did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The briefings are coming as Israel faces an international backlash over its assault on the Gaza Strip. Israel says it is seeking to eliminate Hamas, the Palestinian terror group that killed hundreds of Israeli civilians in its October 7 surprise attack.

The Intercept has learned of around half a dozen events coordinated with Israeli officials during recent weeks. The Intercept reviewed materials relating to four of the briefings. Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, who said he had not spoken with the Israel Defense Forces in recent days, told The Intercept, “I know there are going to be some folks from the IDF here tomorrow or the day after to brief members of Congress.” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., told The Intercept, “I have had private conversations with IDF officials but I didn’t attend any briefings.” (She declined to comment on her meetings.)

In response to the Hamas attack, Israel launched airstrikes against Gaza and undertook a ground invasion. Israel’s offensive has faced criticisms for its death toll, with more than 14,000 Palestinians dying, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, and enormous damage to Gaza, one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Over the weekend, Hamas and Israel agreed to a “pause” in fighting to allow for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza in exchange for humanitarian aid for Palestinians. The temporary truce is set to expire, but talks for an extension are ongoing.

“The IDF didn’t anticipate that there would be this much backlash to Israel.”

Calls for a ceasefire on Capitol Hill started slowly but have gained steam in recent weeks. As of Tuesday morning, a total of 43 members from both chambers of Congress had called for a ceasefire. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a progressive who had publicly sided with Israel after the October 7 attack, said on Tuesday he may put forward a bill conditioning aid to Israel, The Intercept reported.

The shifts spurred the increased pace of congressional briefings with IDF officials, some of which were hastily arranged.

“The IDF didn’t anticipate that there would be this much backlash to Israel,” said the source, who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to speak. “And, with the prospect of an even longer-term ceasefire, are putting together an all-hands-on-deck PR blitz to keep Senators at bay.”

Frequent and Secret Briefings

While members of Congress and their staff frequently hold meetings with foreign officials, including military officials, the invitations for briefings with current and former Israeli officials have come in rapid succession over recent weeks.

“It isn’t entirely unusual for senators to have member-only meetings or briefings on sensitive or classified issues,” said the source. “What is unusual is the frequency with which they’ve happened recently — especially this week — the secrecy involved, and the single-issue focus.”

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., appeared to suggest some of the briefings were secret. “My friend, I would not speak about those classified meetings,” Booker told The Intercept when asked about the IDF briefings. (None of the materials reviewed by The Intercept indicated the briefings were classified.)

Briefers in the closed-door meetings were to include several senior Israeli military officials stationed at the embassy, including Maj. Gen. Tal Kelman, former head of the strategic directorate and Iran Division; Col. Itai Shapira, a former senior Israeli Defense Intelligence officer; and Lt. Col. Yotam Shefer of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, the Israeli military unit responsible for mediating between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. (The Israeli Embassy referred questions to the IDF, which did not immediately respond.)

One briefing was scheduled to take place in-person on Capitol Hill for an hour on Monday evening.

Another briefing, scheduled for Tuesday, is slated to have the former chief of Israeli military intelligence, retired Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, brief Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M. Yadlin has issued fiery statements following the Hamas attack, saying that Hamas “will pay like the Nazis paid in Europe.” (Heinrich and Yadlin did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

Another briefing, scheduled for Tuesday morning and organized by Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., is a closed screening of 47 minutes of footage of Hamas atrocities committed on October 7.

“It isn’t a coincidence that these briefings are now happening as public opinion is shifting.”

“It’s important to bear witness in real time,” Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., who helped arrange the viewing, told reporters. “Sometime in the future, we’ll go — there’ll be a museum, there’ll be a memorial, there’ll be another Yad Vashem or Holocaust museum.”

“It isn’t a coincidence that these briefings are now happening as public opinion is shifting and the pressure to corral lawmakers,” the source said, “and the recipients of their campaign contributions.”

The post With Ceasefire Calls Growing, Israeli Military Launches Closed-Door “PR Blitz” on Capitol Hill appeared first on The Intercept.

The law is one of more than 30 introduced in recent years — at least six have been enacted — to make it easier to remove or restrict elected prosecutors who lawmakers disagree with, particularly targeting those district attorneys implementing criminal justice reforms and prosecuting police misconduct. 

The order said that the court would not review proposed rules governing a new commission with the power to discipline and remove elected prosecutors, including Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who indicted Trump. Without such a review, the agency can’t operate. 

“While we celebrate this as a victory, we remain steadfast in our commitment to fight any future attempts to undermine the will of Georgia voters and the independence of the prosecutors who they choose to represent them,” DeKalb County District Attorney Sherry Boston said in a statement on the order. 

One member of the Georgia state House who helped push the bill through, Rep. Houston Gaines, told the Associated Press that he and fellow Republicans planned to keep pushing the bill until the commission’s rules were approved and prosecutors could be removed. “As soon as the legislature can address this final issue from the court, rogue prosecutors will be held accountable,” Gaines said.

Bills to restrict the authority of prosecutors have proliferated in recent years since reform prosecutors started winning office in greater numbers. The bills tended not to pass in previous years, but in the era of Trump, the George Floyd protest movement, and perceptions about increased crime, polarized legislatures have passed the measures more swiftly. 

The Georgia law passed with support in both chambers. While many of the laws passed in recent years targeted prosecutors who took steps like implementing bail reform or declining to charge for drug possession, Willis became a target under the Georgia law after she indicted Trump in August. 

Immediately after the indictment, Georgia Republicans said they would use the law to remove Willis from office. Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed the bill into law in May, making Georgia one of at least five states to sign into law a bill to restrict or undermine prosecutors since 2017. Kemp’s office did not respond to a request for comment. 

More than a third of states have tried to pass such bills, a total of 30 pieces of legislation over the same period.

Boston, the DeKalb County district attorney, is one of four elected prosecutors in Georgia who sued in August to stop the law from going into effect. The plaintiffs emphasized the law could be used to restrict the authority of prosecutors across the political spectrum, not just reformers. 

Conservative Towaliga Judicial Circuit District Attorney Jonathan Adams also supported the complaint because of his concerns over how it could be used to restrict prosecutors who exercise various forms of discretion afforded to the office of the prosecutor, regardless of their ideological position. Adams said he had already rescinded guidelines not to prosecute certain adultery crimes still on the books in Georgia over fear that it might make him vulnerable to removal under the new law. 

“I have already received threats that members of the public plan to file superfluous, unsubstantial complaints against me under SB92,” he wrote. “This comes after I have received death threats and had my home address disseminated online.” 

While the court has authority to regulate the practice of law by district attorneys, it had “grave doubts” that it had constitutional power to take action on the draft standards and rules of the prosecutorial commission. “Because we are under no legal directive to take action, the most prudent course for us is to decline to take action without conclusively deciding any constitutional question,” the court order read. 

The commission can’t start its work without review from the court. 

“The Georgia Supreme Court recognized what we have said throughout this litigation: SB 92 is a flawed law,” said Josh Rosenthal, legal director at the Public Rights Project, which led the suit against the law. 

“We are grateful that as a result of this decision, district attorneys throughout Georgia are not subject to removal for deciding how to best promote safety and justice,” he said. “The Georgia Supreme Court’s decision leaves the PAQC” — Prosecuting Attorneys Qualifications Commission — “without authority to act on any complaint. Without approved rules, the Commission cannot lawfully investigate or discipline prosecutors across the state. This is an important victory for communities’ ability to choose their vision for safety and justice and a district attorney that will reflect those views.”

The post Georgia Supreme Court Blocks GOP Attack on Trump Prosecutor — For Now appeared first on The Intercept.

Sanders spoke to The Intercept minutes before a Senate Democratic caucus luncheon, where the question of placing conditions on $14 billion in aid to Israel is on the agenda. “Yes,” he replied gruffly when asked if there was a chance he would push for a floor vote. 

Sanders’s comment comes as the death toll in Gaza is around 15,000 — with some estimating it to have exceeded 20,000 — and amid a temporary pause in the fighting between Israel and Hamas. The Vermont senator has thus far refrained from calling for a permanent ceasefire, a key demand of activist groups that has broad support among the American public and has gained traction among members of Congress. He has instead only gone as far as calling for humanitarian pauses in fighting. 

The Department of Defense has already sent a variety of heavy weapons and ammunition to Israel to support its continuing war in Gaza, according to a leaked list obtained by Bloomberg. Congress is now seeking to approve another $14 billion, requested by President Joe Biden, to provide advanced weapons systems, support for artillery and ammunition production, and more projectiles for Israel’s Iron Dome system. 

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., has also called for restrictions on weapons transfers to Israel. 

“We regularly condition our aid to allies based upon compliance with US law and international law,” Murphy said on Sunday. “I think it’s very consistent with the ways in which we have dispensed aid, especially during wartime, to allies, for us to talk about making sure that the aid we give Ukraine or the aid we give Israel is used in accordance with human rights laws.”

One way the U.S. could place conditions on the aid is through what is known as the Leahy law, named after Sanders’s longtime colleague and former senator from Vermont Patrick Leahy. The Leahy law prohibits U.S. aid to foreign military units that commit human rights violations. 

While the idea faces opposition within the Democratic caucus, and the U.S. has never before placed conditions on its billions of dollars in military aid to Israel, Biden seems to be considering the proposition. He told reporters the day after Thanksgiving — at the start of the temporary truce — that conditioning aid is a “worthwhile thought,” adding that “I don’t think, if I started off with that, we’d [have] ever gotten to where we are today.”

When pressed on whether he might use his position on the Senate Budget Committee to push for reining in the Israeli military’s onslaught, Sanders said, “there are ways we can approach it and that is what we are exploring right now.” 

The post Bernie Sanders May Push Vote on Conditioning Aid to Israel in Coming Weeks appeared first on The Intercept.

Israel has been widely condemned for its brutal response to the October 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas. With the coming expiration of the ceasefire, this will only become more vociferous. But many U.S. supporters of Israel have responded to the criticism with a question: What else is the beleaguered country supposed to do?

The answer is simple. Israel should do what it has never done before: agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state, based on international law.

This straightforward statement is scarce in mainstream U.S. political culture. In the speeches of politicians and in newspaper op-eds, it’s a matter of faith that Israel has always yearned for peace but has been constantly rebuffed by the Palestinians. The Palestinians, according to this narrative, prefer holding onto a dream of destroying Israel. 

This is not quite 180 degrees the opposite of reality, but close. In the actual world outside of high-level American political rhetoric, Israel could have had peace at many times in the past 75 years. However, such a peace would have required Israel giving up most of the Palestinian land — specifically, Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem — it conquered in the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel has always preferred conflict with stateless Palestinians to that.

Amos Malka, one-time head of Israeli military intelligence, explained it straightforwardly in 2004. “It is possible to reach an agreement,” he said, “under the following conditions: a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital and sovereignty on the Temple Mount; 97 percent of the West Bank plus exchanges of territory in the ratio of 1:1 with respect to the remaining territory; some kind of formula that includes the acknowledgement of Israel’s responsibility for the refugee problem and a willingness to accept 20,000-30,000 refugees.”

In polite circles of U.S. power, these facts are considered preposterous. Anyone describing them exiles themselves from serious discussion of the issue. It’s similar to the situation before the invasion of Iraq, when there was uniform agreement across the political spectrum that Iraq possessed so-called weapons of mass destruction. Any claims to the contrary were seen as self-evidently ludicrous, as ludicrous as now saying that Israel is a huge obstacle to peace.

From the Beginning

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is not unfathomable. It’s a fight over land.

The British Peel Commission was tasked with investigating violent clashes between Arabs and Jews in Mandatory Palestine. It proposed in 1937 that the historic area of Palestine be partitioned into a Jewish state, making up about 17 percent of the area, and an Arab state, granted 75 percent. The remainder, including Jerusalem, would be under intentional supervision.

In 1947, following World War II and the Holocaust, the United Nations approved another partition plan. This gave Israel-to-be 56 percent of the area, and a Palestinian nation 43 percent.

In the standard U.S. story, the Zionist movement accepted both two-state solutions, and the Arab world rejected both. In fact, neither side accepted either. 

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is not unfathomable. It’s a fight over land.

The Arab side formally rejected the plans. The Zionist movement rejected the specifics of the Peel proposal and accepted the U.N. plan — but only in public. The founders of Israel privately agreed that once the country came into being, they would consolidate their power and then take over as much additional land as possible. David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel’s first prime minister, put it this way in a famous 1937 letter to his son: “A Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning. … The establishment of a state, even if only on a portion of the land, is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country.” 

In any case, the U.N. adoption of the partition plan in November 1947 led to a moderate civil war between the Jewish and Arab populations. Then during the Arab–Israeli War of 1948 following Israel’s declaration of independence, the new country conquered 78 percent of Palestine, leaving 22 percent in Arab hands. Egypt controlled Gaza, and Jordan controlled the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Palestinians experienced the Nakba, meaning “catastrophe,” in which 700,000 people were expelled or fled, and 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed.

Subsequent history shows Ben-Gurion and other Israeli leaders meant what they said. In 1956, Israel joined with France and the U.K. to invade Gaza and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, though it was ultimately forced to withdraw by the Eisenhower administration. In the 1967 war, Israel took over Sinai and Gaza again, as well as the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights in Syria.

Israel would eventually be forced to return the Sinai Peninsula following the 1973 Arab–Israeli War but has held onto everything else since.

The Early Years

It’s generally believed in the U.S. and Europe that after Israel’s founding, the Arab world spent decades devoted to destroying it. This is not so. There were absolutely factions in Arab politics who wished to reverse the establishment of Israel, and a great deal of blood-curdling Arab rhetoric on this subject. But various leaders of the relevant countries at various times — including Syria, Egypt, and Jordan — showed they understood the balance of forces and were willing to consider a compromise.

However, Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary in 1949 that Abba Eban, the Israeli ambassador to the U.N., “sees no need to run after peace. The armistice is sufficient for us; if we run after peace, the Arabs will demand a price of us: borders or refugees or both. Let us wait a few years.” That year Ben-Gurion also told his cabinet, as paraphrased by British–Israeli historian Avi Shlaim: “With the passage of time, the world would get used to Israel’s existing borders, and forget about U.N. borders and the U.N. idea of an independent Palestinian state.” 

The U.S. pushed Israel to participate in a peace conference in Switzerland during the middle of 1949. The Arab position was that Israel’s borders should be not the armistice lines giving it 78 percent of Palestine, but the partition plan’s borders granting it 56 percent. The Arab participants also demanded that refugees from areas designated for an Arab state be able to return to their homes. Israel rejected both concepts. One of the Israeli delegates privately noted that his country’s government “think they can achieve peace without paying any price, maximal or minimal.” A cable from a U.S. State Department delegate asserted, “There never has been a time [during negotiations] when a generous and far-sighted attitude on the part of the Jews would not have unlocked peace. … As an advocate of the new state I hope they come to it eventually. Otherwise there will be no peace in the Middle East.” 

The Emergence of the PLO

The Palestinian Liberation Organization was founded in 1964 and represented the increasing coherence of Palestinian national consciousness.

Following the 1967 war, the international consensus gradually came to be that peace would require the creation of a Palestinian state. At the same time, the PLO accepted internally that the overall war was over, and they had lost: They were therefore willing to make peace in return for a state on the 22 percent of Palestine constituting Gaza and the West Bank. A 1976 draft resolution at the U.N. Security Council called for this and stated that Israel should “withdraw from all the Arab territories occupied since June 1967.” The PLO supported the resolution. Every country on the Security Council except the U.S. — including the U.K., France, Italy, Japan, and Sweden — voted for it. But Israel had no interest in it, and the U.S. vetoed it. Instead of encouraging further moderation from the PLO, Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 with — according to Zeev Maoz, an Israeli historian who served in the military during three of the country’s wars — several goals. The first was to destroy the PLO and hence Palestinian nationalism.

Bill Clinton’s Catastrophic Failure

In 1981, the PLO formally endorsed a Soviet proposal calling for a Palestinian state and “the security and sovereignty of all states of the region including those of Israel.” In 1988, the PLO officially recognized Israel and accepted its right to exist in peace and security.

Israel still had no interest in the establishment of a Palestinian state. And by the beginning of the Clinton administration in 1993, the PLO was not what it once had been. It was headquartered in Tunis, and little respected by younger Palestinians who had led the first intifada of the late 1980s. Then the PLO’s leader, Yasser Arafat, made the unfortunate decision to back Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Gulf War.

The PLO’s weakness made Arafat eager to accept a terrible deal in the 1993 Oslo Accords. While they were greeted with rapture in the U.S. media, there was nothing in them that would necessarily lead to the creation of a Palestinian state and peace. Indeed, one of the signatories, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, soon explicitly explained, “We do not accept the Palestinian goal of an independent Palestinian state between Israel and Jordan. We believe there is a separate Palestinian entity short of a state.” 

What happened then was exactly what anyone paying attention would anticipate: The PLO essentially took over security for Israel in some 18 percent of occupied territories — Israel solely controlled about 60 percent and shared responsibility for the remainder — and enriched itself, while the occupation and Palestinian misery continued unabated. But by the end of President Bill Clinton’s second term in the summer of 2000, he was eager to leave a legacy other than his affair with Monica Lewinsky. He cajoled Arafat to come to Camp David to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, in hopes of conjuring a conflict-ending agreement.

The Palestinian attitude was that they had already made a gigantic compromise by accepting just the 22 percent of historic Palestine for their state. They were willing to compromise still more — but not much more.

Barak had no understanding of this. At Camp David, he offered the Palestinians what were essentially three disconnected bantustans — i.e., the equivalent of the separate black “homelands” in apartheid South Africa — in the West Bank, with Israel occupying and controlling the border with Jordan for some long period of time. Clinton tried to pressure Arafat to accept this; he did not. Long afterward, Shlomo Ben-Ami, a key Israeli negotiator at the talks, said, “Camp David was not the missed opportunity for the Palestinians, and if I were a Palestinian, I would have rejected Camp David as well.”

Clinton had promised Arafat that he would not blame him if the talks failed. He then reneged after the summit ended. Nonetheless, the Israelis and Palestinians continued to negotiate through the fall and narrowed their differences. 

Clinton came up with what he called parameters for a two-state solution in December 2000. Several weeks afterward, Clinton proclaimed, “Both Prime Minister Barak and Chairman Arafat have now accepted these parameters as the basis for further efforts. Both have expressed some reservations.”

In the 22 years since, Bill Clinton has lied over and over again about what happened, claiming that Arafat was the one who rejected a settlement.

The Israelis and the Palestinians kept talking in late January 2001 in Taba, Egypt. It was not the Palestinians but Barak who terminated the discussions on January 27, a few weeks before Israeli elections. The negotiators issued a joint statement that the two sides had “never been closer to reaching an agreement and it is thus our shared belief that the remaining gaps could be bridged with the resumption of negotiations.”

This was in fact true: The records of the Taba talks show the Israelis and Palestinians had come agonizingly close to specific solutions to what the territory of a Palestinian state would be and whether and how any Palestinian refugees could return to Israel, with less progress on who would control which parts of Jerusalem.

But Barak was defeated by Ariel Sharon, who did not want a Palestinian state and did not restart the talks. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared that the Clinton parameters “are not binding on the new government to be formed in Israel.”

Clinton then made a fateful, disastrous decision. In the 22 years since, he has lied over and over again about what happened, claiming that Arafat was the one who rejected a settlement. This has convinced both Israelis and Americans that Clinton made every effort to give Palestinians a state. But it was impossible, because — in what became a standard formulation — there was “no partner for peace” on the Palestinian side. Hillary Clinton, who was elected to the Senate in 2000 and later became secretary of state, also joined in this key deception.

The Arab Peace Plan

In 2002, Saudi Arabia proposed a solution to the conflict known as the Arab Peace Initiative. The API called for a settlement along the standard lines that had been known for decades: an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories with some small adjustments, a fair division of Jerusalem, and “a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem.” The 22 members of the Arab League endorsed it, as did the 57-state Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Israel, with Sharon leading the country, simply ignored it.

The Olmert Offer

The two sides again came close after Sharon suffered a debilitating stroke and Arafat died. Ehud Olmert became the Israeli prime minister. Olmert was right-wing but had become convinced that Israel had to settle the conflict with Palestinians for its own safety. 

In the standard U.S. narrative, Olmert made a wonderful offer to Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, and Abbas either rejected it or never responded. In reality, Olmert and Abbas held 36 secret meetings between 2006 and 2008. 

However, Olmert, under investigation for accepting bribes, resigned from his position in 2008. He later said, “If I had remained prime minister for another four to six months, I believe it would have been possible to reach an agreement. The gaps were small.” 

Olmert was succeeded as prime minister by Benjamin Netanyahu, who has consistently opposed a Palestinian state throughout his career and had no interest in continuing the talks with Abbas.

Lost Opportunities With Hamas

In the U.S., Hamas is considered anathema, for understandable reasons. Its original 1988 charter is explicitly antisemitic and calls for the obliteration of Israel. (A new Hamas charter was issued in 2017 and states that “Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion.”)

However, there have long been clear signs that factions within Hamas were moderating and open to long-term agreements with Israel. In 1997, Khaled Mashal, then the top Hamas leader, offered a 30-year ceasefire to Israel. Israel did not respond — but did immediately try to assassinate Mashal in Jordan.

In 2004, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, Hamas’s chief religious leader, called for a 10-year truce with Israel if it returned to its pre-1967 borders. Israel assassinated him two months later.

In 2006, Hamas won Palestinian elections over the PLO-affiliated Fatah. The new Palestinian prime minister, Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh, wrote secretly to President George W. Bush. Haniyeh told Bush, “We are so concerned about stability and security in the area that we don’t mind having a Palestinian state in the 1967 border and offering a truce for many years.” Haniyeh also wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post, in which he said Palestinians priorities “included resolution of the refugee issue from 1948; reclaiming all lands occupied in 1967; and stopping Israeli attacks.” The Bush administration did not respond.

Around the same time, Mashal said Hamas would not oppose the Arab Peace Initiative. An Israeli spokesman responded that this was irrelevant “verbal gymnastics.”

In 2009, Efraim Halevy, the former head of Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, wrote that Hamas has recognized “its ideological goal is not attainable and will not be in the foreseeable future,” but “Israel, for reasons of its own,” was not interested in such a discussion.

The same year, the U.S. Institute of Peace, a think tank funded by the federal government, reported that Hamas had “sent repeated signals that it may be ready to begin a process of coexisting with Israel.”

There are many more examples of this, along with Israeli disinterest demonstrated in the most extreme ways possible. In 2012, according to an Israeli peace activist, the head of Hamas’s military wing had become convinced that Palestinians should negotiate a long-term truce with Israel. On the same day Ahmed Jabari, Hamas’s military chief, was reviewing a draft proposal for such a truce, Israel assassinated him.

It is, of course, possible that this has all been a PR operation by Hamas, and that it has been making the same calculation as the Zionist movement originally did — i.e., that it could accept a partition of Palestine and then later expand to take the whole thing. But given the relative power of the two sides, this seems unlikely — and even if true, largely irrelevant.

Where Things Stand Now

It’s true that it may now be, from a political standpoint, impossible for Israel to make peace. Thanks to decades of nationalist propaganda, most left-of-center Israelis believed even before October 7 that there was no way to make peace with Palestinians. Meanwhile, right-wing nationalists and religious conservatives simply want to keep the West Bank and so wouldn’t make peace even if they thought it were possible. 

Now, after last month’s shocking Hamas assault, the situation appears insoluble. Any Israeli leader who tried to do what’s necessary for a two-state solution, especially withdrawing settlers from the West Bank, would face the possibility of a revolt from a faction of the Israeli military and would personally be in great physical danger.

Nevertheless, we are where we are. What hope there is lies in the fact that the world — at least, the world minus the U.S., Israel, and the tiny island of Nauru — recognizes the incredible urgency of peace. The appalling suffering of Palestinians remains what it has been for 75 years: a sanguineous wound, both literally and metaphorically, at the center of the Middle East. If it is never healed, we will continually face the possibility of regional or even larger wars. Long ago, James Baldwin observed that “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” We don’t know if this horrendous tragedy can be ended, but if it can be, the first thing Americans and everyone else have to do is face reality.

The post All the Times Israel Has Rejected Peace With Palestinians appeared first on The Intercept.

Some opposed to Israel’s disproportionate assault on Gaza think the flyers are propaganda, a crass manipulation of suffering designed to cement a bond between the United States and Israel and ensure that Washington continues to give Israel both a free hand and what it wants in weapons to continue its assault on Gaza, exempt from the so-called Leahy Law, which prohibits supplying weapons to states involved in wide-scale human rights violations. As we approach the two-month mark since the hostage-taking, the posters have become rallying points in what is shaping up to be a global war for hearts and minds. Videos of people ripping down the flyers have gone viral, providing evidence that those who claim to speak on behalf of Palestinians are heartless and inhumane. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” CNN’s Jake Tapper recently said of the posters being ripped down. Some Americans, Tapper said, “are actually rooting for the hostage takers.”

As a New Yorker and historian who has worked on political terror in Latin America, I think there is another way to tell the story of the controversy these posters are causing, why some see them as a plea for help and others a call for war. They exist in a loop. In psychoanalytic terms, we might say it’s an endless return, a vortex of shared, unending trauma, starting with the Holocaust, continuing through death-squad terror in Latin America, onward to 9/11, and now to Gaza and back to the Shoah.

Night and Fog

In Latin America, the repressive tactic of “disappearing” enemies of the state came into widespread use in the early 1960s, as Washington mobilized its allies to ensure the containment of the Cuban Revolution. The tactic itself emulated Adolf Hitler’s famous 1941 Nacht und Nebel, or Night and Fog, decree, which directed security forces operating in occupied territories, mainly France, to capture dissidents and hold them incommunicado. Most were executed. The Nazis coined a neologism for these victims, vernebelt, which loosely translates as transformed into mist. Latin Americans called their missing los desaparecidos, the disappeared. It was an especially cruel method of repression. Family members and friends exhausted their energies dealing with labyrinthine bureaucracies trying to find some hint of where their loved ones might have been taken, only to be met with indifference by government officials. “To disappear” is normally an intransitive verb, meaning the object of the sentence is doing the action. “My keys disappeared.” “That book disappeared.” Latin Americans turned it into a transitive verb, used often in what linguists call the adversative passive voice, to indicate an unfortunate occurrence: “She was disappeared.”

By whom? Everyone knew. The sentence’s subject noun was left unstated, underscoring the covert nature of the death squads: Fue desaparecido. Into the mist.

As violence intensified in Guatemala in the early 1980s, relatives and comrades of those taken by security forces would, within days, put up flyers on city walls with their faces, names, and dates of disappearance, along with, often, the unions or political organizations to which they belonged. The walls of union halls were filling with photographs of the missing, yet this was still a moment when it was possible to believe that the Left was in ascendence. Deborah Levenson, a historian who documented the 1985 siege of Guatemala City’s Coca-Cola plant during this period, says that images of the missing were not meant to convey defeat, nor to preserve what later would be called “historical memory.” Levenson, in response to a query for this essay, recalls that the bottling plant’s cafeteria was adorned with large photographs of the vanished staring down on surviving militant unionists as they ate. The missing and the dead alike were understood to be something like Christian martyrs, who had sacrificed their lives for those fighting for a better life. The subtext was clear, she said: “The loss of this person will not stop us but make us stronger.”

But the Left in Guatemala, as throughout Latin America, was defeated, brutally so, and the meaning of the public photographs of the missing changed. They evolved from inspiration to accusation, evidence of crimes against humanity, proof that this person once lived and now is gone. By the end of the 1980s, death squads, police units, and military detachments had, in addition to committing run-of-the-mill extrajudicial assassinations and massacres, disappeared thousands in Chile; tens of thousands in Argentina; around 10,000 in El Salvador; and 45,000 in Guatemala. As Gabriel García Márquez told his Swedish audience in his 1982 Nobel acceptance lecture, it’s “as if no one could account for all the inhabitants of Uppsala.” This form of repression has outlived the Cold War; more than 100,000 Mexicans have disappeared over the last two decades, victims of a never-ending war on drugs.

Defeat brought forth the need to find an appropriate way to render the disappeared, a way to fully represent both the specific individual who had been taken and the magnitude of what had been lost. In Argentina, the junta had been disappearing people since 1976, but it wasn’t until the early 1980s, in increasingly bold actions taken by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, that people began to openly come out into the street with photographs of their missing. Elías was last seen in the clandestine concentration camp El Vesubio on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1978. His son, a friend of mine, remembers his mother making their placard with a heavy black marker. The family had little money, so a human rights organization paid to have the photograph from Elías’s citizenship card enlarged.

In late 1983, a collective of Argentine artists working with relatives of the disappeared decided it was time to defy the generals and stage a large demonstration, and they searched for an artistic medium that could convey the enormity of the suffering, some way to represent both humanity and its loss. One of the organizers landed on panel series titled “Each Day at Auschwitz” by the Polish artist Jerzy Skapski. Skapski had crammed each poster with thousands of silhouettes, meant to represent the people who were killed daily at the death camp.

Skapski’s silhouettes captured exactly what the Argentines hoped to convey: an outline of loss, a trace of something that was at once particular and universal, a human and humanity.

It made sense for this group of activists to look to the Holocaust for ideas on how to represent loved ones taken. The Argentine junta was viciously antisemitic, and Latin America was indispensable in the creation of Israel, casting more than a third of the total United Nations votes in 1947 in favor of partition and voting unanimously, all 18 Latin American nations, for Israel’s admission into the U.N. The horror of Hitlerism resonated in Latin America. Pablo Neruda made anti-Nazism a topic in his writings, and Jorge Luis Borges addressed the Holocaust in his short stories. For decades, the Latin American Left understood itself as struggling against local variants of fascism, as if World War II hadn’t ended but merely shifted venues.

Skapski’s silhouettes captured exactly what the Argentines hoped to convey: an outline of loss, a trace of something that was at once particular and universal, a human and humanity.

On September 21, 1983, as Buenos Aires’s city center, the Plaza de Mayo, filled with protesters, organizers asked those who had lost family members to lie down on sheets of white paper and let an artist draw outlines of their bodies. The name of the disappeared, along with the date they went missing, was then painted on the silhouette. By the end of the day, thousands — some say 30,000 — silhouettes were plastered on the walls of government buildings surrounding the plaza and adjacent streets. Later, the sheets were turned into stencils and the images spray-painted on walls, making it look as if ghostly shadows were walking the streets of Buenos Aires.

The event was called the siluetazo, which might best be translated as silhouette-a-thon, and it was the largest protest against disappearances in Latin America of its time. Soon, similar silhouettes began to appear in other Latin American cities. Most recently, the silhouette image was used to represent the 43 Mexican students from Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, who, in 2014, were brutally executed and disappeared by Mexican security forces.

I’ve walked by untold numbers of desaparecido posters. One still sees them today, decades after the worst of Central America’s terror, plastering walls in the center of Guatemala City; Santiago, Chile; and Buenos Aires, Argentina. “Where are they?” they ask.

The 9/11 Missing

In New York after 9/11, the spontaneous display of “missing” posters seemed familiar. The flyers reportedly started in response to rumors that the city’s hospital beds were filled with thousands of unconscious, unidentified victims and that some people were found walking the streets with amnesia. The first set was done in a rush, with hastily compiled information about a missing person, including their height and weight and the color of their hair and eyes, along with where they worked and on what floor, in either the north or south tower. As the days went by and the rumors of unidentified survivors proved untrue, the posting continued, with physical details giving way to more personal information, including details about their children, their partners, and their hobbies.

Within a week, they were everywhere in the city, taped to chain-link fences, pasted on walls and lamp posts and on subway entrances. The walls of St. Vincent’s — since closed and sold to developers, like so many of New York’s community hospitals in the early 21st century — were covered with them. Many of the victims and left-behind family members were of a different status than the Latin Americans who were disappeared. They lived in the most powerful nation in the world, in history, and presumably most weren’t especially politically active, unlike the majority of Latin America’s disappeared. The World Trade Center, though, employed hundreds of migrant workers, many undocumented, from Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and El Salvador. The union UNITE HERE counted 43 immigrant workers at Windows on the World among the dead.

“The whole United States was forced to look into the abyss of what it means to be desaparecido, with no certainty or funeral possible for those missing.”

Class and status mattered nothing in the dust and rubble. All shared a disorientation that was recognized by Ariel Dorfman, a Chilean writer who has devoted himself to considering the problem of Latin America’s “disappeared.” “Suddenly,” he wrote in an essay published in the Los Angeles Times just after the towers fell, “the whole United States was forced to look into the abyss of what it means to be desaparecido, with no certainty or funeral possible for those missing.” Such pain was routine for much of the world, leading Dorfman to hope for a kind of reconciliation, a way to end the “famous exceptionalism” that had kept the United States sequestered from much of the world. “Their suffering is neither unique nor exclusive,” he wrote, but rather connects them “with so many other human beings who have suffered unanticipated and often protracted injury and fury.”

Dorfman was wrong on that score. George W. Bush’s advisers were already determined to “move swiftly” — as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said before the sun set that first day, according to the notes of an aide — to “go massive – sweep it all up, things related and not.” Liberal and neocon hawks were quick to lay out the case for an expansive war, not just to bring the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice, but also to remake the Middle East in a way that would ensure U.S. global dominance. On September 14, George W. Bush, standing atop a crushed fire truck with a bullhorn in hand and a firefighter by his side, let the world know it would soon hear from the United States.

The “missing” flyers, though, were like flowers pushing up through cracks in cement. Some displays had American flags, but they were small and had nothing of vengeance about them. They conveyed a range of feelings, none of them warlike. It took your breath away, coming upon a wall or a chain-link fence papered with them. The photographs showed victims as their relatives wanted to remember them: holding pets, hugging partners, or playing with their children, or just a close-up portrait. Some had hearts and flowers drawn in yellow, blue, red, and green, perhaps by the victims’ children. They were intimate portraits, handmade by people who knew the missing, and, like their Latin American counterparts, they were affirmations of humanity.

For a few brief weeks, as the country was being prepped for what we were told would be a prolonged campaign, these flyers continued to affirm life’s fragility, as brittle as the tape holding them in place. No doubt many families of the World Trade Center dead did want revenge and were roused by Bush’s rallying cry. Yet judging from the composition of most flyers, the people who made them weren’t thinking about geopolitics or civilizational wars. They weren’t trying to crystalize an us-versus-them absolutism. I don’t remember any of them mentioning Al Qaeda. They were the closest atheist New Yorkers would come to the sacred.

Pointless Provocations

The posters made on behalf of the October 7 Hamas victims are different. Mintz, one of the artists who came up with idea, describes herself as a “visual poet,” but there’s no poetry in this particular work. Moral values are inescapably artistic in nature, as E.L. Doctorow wrote in his 1977 essay “False Documents,” and these flyers convey a martial aesthetic. They are starkly uniform in arrangement, all topped with an uppercase “KIDNAPPED” headline running in block letters. Under the header to the left is a picture of a victim or victims, and to the right, their details. The information, though, is sparse. Sometimes the flyers don’t even give names, but simply say “entire Israeli family” or “young Israeli couple.”

It’s the generic sameness of the posters, complete with QR codes, not the individuality of the missing, that is most striking. Sen. John Fetterman has wallpapered his entire outer office with these flyers, a strident brick-like array of red, black, and white. Fetterman says they are staying up until all the hostages come home. Over 200,000 Arab Muslims, including many Palestinians, live in Pennsylvania; were they to enter that antechamber, would they feel welcomed or excluded by what they saw there?

The critic Roland Barthes used the word “punctum” to describe an eye-catching detail in an image that establishes a relationship between a viewer and the objects and people in the image. In these “kidnapped” posters, the punctum, to me at least, is the word “Israeli,” an insistence that the most important thing about the kidnapped is not their humanity, but their nationality. In this sense, they differ from their Latin American and 9/11 forebears, which stressed a universality, a shared human vulnerability and collective mourning. The nationalism of the “kidnapped” flyers is underscored by the artists’ decision not to include, in some form or other, Palestinians in Gaza in their art project. A few posters do make mention of “Argentines” and other nationalities, including unidentified “migrant workers,” taken by Hamas. Yet amassed together on a wall, they don’t — as did past projects to visually eulogize victims of political terror in Latin America, New York, and during the Holocaust itself, including Skapski’s memorials — seem concerned with transmuting terror into a deeper commitment to a shared universalism. The statement of the “kidnapped” posters is different: We want you to share our outrage against Hamas’s atrocities, but the pain and right of retribution, unlimited, belongs to Israel alone.

The statement of the “kidnapped” posters is different: We want you to share our outrage against Hamas’s atrocities, but the pain and right of retribution, unlimited, belongs to Israel alone.

Over the last few days, after a blessed but limited ceasefire went into effect, Hamas and Israel have exchanged scores of captives. Among those released by Hamas were a number of migrant Thai workers, while both sides have freed children and elderly people. For a moment at least, the joy of family reunions, smiles, tears, and hugs among both Israelis and Palestinians raised hopes that out of shared pain and vulnerability, a common humanity could emerge, a reprieve from the bellicosity of the “kidnapped” posters. As I write this, I can almost hope that the peace will hold. But Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, has made it clear that “the respite will be short.” Once the ceasefire is over, the Israel Defense Forces will resume its assault on Gaza “with intensity” in a war that may last months more.

Meanwhile, the “kidnapped” posters have been transformed into antagonistic performance art. Supporters of Israel put them up, at times in places intentionally meant to provoke, such as near Palestinian restaurants. And then advocates for Palestinians pull them down, with the video of the act posted online, taken as evidence that what really moves those who claim to care about Palestinians is antisemitism, that they are so coldhearted they can’t bear to leave a memento of a stolen child on the wall. A report in Miami’s New Times found cases in which individuals had put the poster up with a clear intention of videoing someone tearing it down, in a bid to have them fired from their place of employment. Viral videos posted by defenders of Israel show defaced posters, some with feces.

We live in a precarious time of heightened sensitivity. Contretemps over slogans, placards, and posters can deepen schisms, charging routine acts with malicious meaning, transforming every utterance into an insult. We should tread carefully and avoid, at all costs, pointless provocations. 

War does radicalize, so it is useful to keep in mind that even the most obscene slurs and outrages — including painting synagogues with antisemitic graffiti, or Israel’s supporters telling anti-Zionist Jews that Hitler should have gassed them — are byproducts of the main thing: killing and kidnapping; siege; occupation; dispossession; the bombing of hospitals, bakeries, and refugee camps; the denial of water and electricity to civilians; and the massacre and maiming of children.

The post How to Read the Israeli “Kidnapped” Posters appeared first on The Intercept.

In May 2021, the Israeli government began pushing ahead with evictions of Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem. It was one more creeping step forward in an occupation and annexation process that had been under way for decades, but what was new this time was the reaction of Hamas, the government in Gaza. If Israel didn’t back off its plan to evict the families and the Palestinian Authority wouldn’t stand up for the homeowners in Sheikh Jarrah, Hamas announced, they would do it themselves.

The Israeli government did not back off, as was to be expected, and Hamas responded by launching rocket attacks into Israel, attacks that were intercepted by the U.S.-built Iron Dome air-defense system or that otherwise crashed to the earth. Israel launched an assault on Gaza, and what became known as the Gaza War of 2021 broke out.

In Gaza wars past, the Washington ritual had always been repeated. Israel had “a right to defend itself,” each statement began, even if the support for that right was occasionally caveated with a hope that Israel might decide to respect human rights and, perhaps, if it saw fit, limit civilian casualties.

This war was different. In the United States, the tenor of the coverage was far less sympathetic than it had been, with images of Israeli police attacking protesters in East Jerusalem and reports of widespread casualties from the Israeli strikes. Mark Pocan, the Madison, Wisconsin, congressman who’d previously co-chaired the Congressional Progressive Caucus, reserved an hour of time on the House floor on May 13, and Democrats paraded through to denounce the assault.

It was like nothing the U.S. Congress had ever seen. Ilhan Omar, standing in the well of the House, bluntly but not inaccurately called Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu an “ethno-nationalist.” Rashida Tlaib added, “I am a reminder to colleagues that Palestinians do indeed exist.”

Omar recalled her own experience as an 8-year-old huddled under a bed in Somalia, hoping the incoming bombs wouldn’t hit her home next. “It is trauma I will live with for the rest of my life, so I understand on a deeply human level the pain and the anguish families are feeling in Palestine and Israel at the moment,” she said.

Ayanna Pressley, the elder of the Squad and the least inclined to challenge the status quo on Israel-Palestine, spoke directly to the political guardrails put up around members of the House of Representatives—and then ran right through those guardrails. “Many say that ‘conditioning aid’ is not a phrase I should utter here,” she said, “but let me be clear. No matter the context, American government dollars always come with conditions. The question at hand is should our taxpayer dollars create conditions for justice, healing, and repair, or should those dollars create conditions for oppression and apartheid?”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hit hard, too. “Do Palestinians have a right to survive? Do we believe that?” she asked, reminding the House that Israel had barred Omar and Tlaib from traveling to the country. “We have to have the courage to name our contributions,” she said, referring to the U.S. role in perpetuating and funding the fighting.

The clerk of the House addressed Cori Bush: “For what purpose does the gentlelady from Missouri rise?”

“St. Louis and I today rise in solidarity with the Palestinian people,” Bush responded.

What made the moment dramatically different, however, was that the Squad wasn’t isolated, but instead was part of a sizable group pushing back. Rep. Betty McCollum of Minnesota rose to slam the assault on Gaza, as did Reps. Andre Carson of Indiana, Chuy Garcia of Illinois, and Joaquin Castro of Texas.

As chair of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, McCollum had influence over U.S. foreign military aid. “The unrestricted, unconditioned $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military aid . . . gives a green light to Israel’s occupation of Palestine because there is no accountability and there is no oversight by Congress,” McCollum said. “This must change. Not one dollar of U.S. aid to Israel should go toward a military detention of Palestinian children, the annexation of Palestinian lands, or the destruction of Palestinian homes.”

Castro thanked Tlaib for her presence, agreeing with her statement, “My mere existence has disrupted the status quo.” He seemed to address Israeli leaders directly when he said that “creeping de facto annexation is unjust.” “The forced eviction of families in Jerusalem is wrong,” Castro said from the floor, offering what would have been an uncontroversial assertion most anywhere else, but that was a foreign one to the House floor.

Marie Newman, who had been beaten by the combined force of No Labels and AIPAC donors in 2018, had come back and won in 2020, and she joined her colleagues on the floor. In January 2021, she spoke out publicly against Israel’s unequal distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine, demanding that the country vaccinate people in the Palestinian territories it was occupying and allow the vaccine to get to Gaza through the blockade. She organized a letter sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken demanding that he act. “They ended up negotiating that the vaccine would go through. And so, as a freshman, that was kind of a big coup,” she said. “Never before on any matter that engaged on Palestine, on any letter, resolution, legislation, did you get 23 or 25 members of Congress to sign up something, it just didn’t happen. So, we felt like, Oh, gosh, this is so good. Then that’s when the DMFI [Democratic Majority for Israel] first was like, ‘Oh, shit, she’s a pain. She’s a problem.’”

“That’s when I started getting donors that had given to me in 2018, and even some of them in 2020, saying, ‘This is going to really hurt you, Marie, just so you understand.’”

Newman was warned that being outspoken on the issue would come with a cost. “A couple of folks in my delegation, and then a couple of folks in Congress that were Democrats—more conservative than I am, said, you know, you need to be careful, because it’s really going to ruffle some feathers,” she told me. Speaking against the Gaza War on the floor brought out more opposition. “That’s when I started getting donors that had given to me in 2018, and even some of them in 2020, saying, ‘This is going to really hurt you, Marie, just so you understand.’ And it did; they were correct.”

The hour of speeches critical of Israel’s bombing of Gaza was a sloshing together of watery metaphors—a high-water mark and also a watershed moment, one that unleashed a flood of money that would erode the foundation on which the Squad had built its power to date.

After the success of the first Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, Democratic politicians began to recognize that voters were in a progressive mood. This early recognition had saved Ed Markey’s Senate seat and produced the environment in which progressive Democrats—and groups like the Sunrise Movement—had so much influence over legislation. If Sanders had led a self-described political revolution, the Gaza speeches galvanized the counterrevolution and brought tens of millions of dollars off the sidelines and into Democratic primaries, with the express purpose of blunting the progressive wave. “We’re seeing much more vocal detractors of the U.S.-Israel relationship, who are having an impact on the discussion,” Howard Kohr, head of AIPAC, told the Washington Post in a rare interview. “And we need to respond.”

Throughout the 2020 cycle, AIPAC had been content to let DMFI run the big-money operation in Democratic primaries. To encourage support for it, AIPAC donors were even allowed to count money given to DMFI as credit toward their AIPAC contributions, which then won them higher-tier perks at conferences and other events. But the unprecedented display of progressive Democratic support for Palestinians amid the Gaza War, as seen on the House floor, was triggering. AIPAC would go on to spend well over $30 million against progressive candidates in the coming cycle, potentially upping that to $100 million in the 2024 race. Their first target was Nina Turner.

The problem, Kohr said, was “the rise of a very vocal minority on the far left of the Democratic Party that is anti-Israel and seeks to weaken and diminish the relationship. Our view is that support for the U.S.-Israel relationship is both good policy and good politics. We wanted to defend our friends and to send a message to detractors that there’s a group of individuals that will oppose them.”

A Controversial Vote

In September 2021, Congress prepared to cut Israel a fresh check. It was considering its latest bill to both avoid a government shutdown and raise the debt ceiling—a legislative maneuver needed to avert both default on the debt and a global financial crisis—and Pelosi decided at the last minute to add a billion dollars in new money to the bill to replenish Israel’s Iron Dome, which had been depleted by the Gaza War. The round number had a symbolic, slapped-together feel and was well out of whack with what the United States had previously provided, representing 60 percent of the total funding given to the Iron Dome over the entire last decade. Sen. Pat Leahy, who chaired the Appropriations Committee, which doles out the money, told reporters the request wasn’t remotely an urgent one. “The Israelis haven’t even taken the money that we’ve already appropriated,” he said. Democrats, though, were making a billion dollar point, whether the money was needed or not.

But so was the Squad. Jayapal, backed up by the now six members of the Squad and by Minnesota’s Betty McCollum and Illinois’s Marie Newman, threatened to take the bill down if the money were included. Pelosi relented and pulled the bill from the floor on a Tuesday. The Washington insider outlet Axios described the stunning development for its readers: “Why it matters: There has never been a situation where military aid for Israel was held up because of objections from members of Congress.”

Mark Mellman’s client Yair Lapid, not yet prime minister, was serving at the time as Israel’s foreign minister. According to a readout later provided by the Israeli government, Lapid called Steny Hoyer to demand to know what had happened. Hoyer assured him that it was a “technical” glitch and that the House would get Israel its money quickly.

Making good on his promise, Hoyer moved to schedule a new vote, suspending the House rules so the bill could hit the floor on Thursday of that week. Omar spoke with him the night before and pleaded for a delay, arguing that a spending increase that large needed to at least be discussed and that there were other ways to move the legislation. Why use this moment, Omar asked him, to force a fiery debate on the House floor? Doing it this way would put a target on the backs of the opponents, she said—with part of her aware that this was the precise purpose of hurrying with the vote. “Israel wants a stand-alone vote to show the overwhelming support for Iron Dome,” Hoyer told Omar.

Bowman and Ocasio-Cortez both lobbied Hoyer for a delay or for a different legislative vehicle, but both were told the same thing. The vote was going ahead. In a floor speech, Rep. Ted Deutch charged Tlaib with anti-semitism for accurately referring to Israel’s government as engaged in apartheid. Pelosi made an unexpected appearance to claim that the proposed money was part of a deal President Obama had cut with Israel to fund Iron Dome. Voting against the funding, speaker after speaker said, would be tantamount to killing innocent Israeli civilians. “All of this framing starts to cross a new line—that we are now removing and defunding existing defense, when the bill is actually just shoveling on more,” Ocasio-Cortez texted from the Capitol, trying to lay out her frame of mind. “Meanwhile the vitriol started to really heat up—AIPAC has escalated to very explicit, racist targeting of us that very much translates to safety issues. This is creating a tinderbox of incitement, with the cherry on top being that Haaretz’s caricature of me holding and shooting a Hamas rocket into Jerusalem with Rashida and Ilhan cheering on.” Back at home in New York, she said, rabbis from City Island who were typically progressive and on her side were sending out mass emails warning that her vote would put people’s lives at risk. She had even been banned from attending High Holidays in her district.

Ocasio-Cortez walked onto the House floor and voted against the Iron Dome funding. She and Bowman, in the neighboring district, had gotten a barrage of calls and emails to their offices urging them to support the funding, but almost nothing at all from constituents telling them to vote it down. “Those on the ‘yes’ side were very clear, and very loud, and very consistent with why they believed the vote needed to be ‘yes,’” Bowman told me. “And that’s why I’m saying there needs to be much organizing on the left around this issue and others.” But back in the cloakroom, Ocasio-Cortez was shaken. For the first time in her life, she had been trailed that week by her own private security detail, the Capitol Police having refused to offer protection, even as the FBI was investigating four credible threats on her life, one of them a still-active kidnapping plot.

The other three members of the original Squad—Pressley, Omar, and Tlaib—had all cast “no” votes. The two newest additions, though, were split, with Cori Bush voting “no,” but Bowman voting to approve the funding. In the cloakroom, AOC began to tear up while telling Omar and Tlaib that she felt she had to go out there and change her vote.

“Alex, it’s fine,” Omar said, embracing her. “Just don’t go out there and cry.” Omar was a big believer in the mantra that you couldn’t let them see they’d hurt you.

Tlaib cut in. “Ilhan, stop telling people not to cry!” They all laughed, knowing Rashida’s penchant for letting her emotions flow freely down her cheeks.

It may have been good advice from Omar, but Ocasio-Cortez didn’t put it into practice. On the floor, she saw Pelosi, who knew AOC was angry at being forced to vote on the funding. Pelosi approached her, telling her she hadn’t wanted this stand-alone vote, that it was Hoyer, who controlled the floor schedule, who had forced it. “Vote your heart,” she told Ocasio-Cortez.

AOC broke down, this time on the floor, with tears flowing in full view of the press and her colleagues, some of whom gave a shoulder of compassion, others giving awkward back pats as they slid past. She switched her vote to “present.”

Speculation about the tactical designs behind the vote quickly shot through the press. Did this nod toward the pro-Israel camp mean AOC was angling for a New York State Senate bid? Was she worried that redistricting would bring heavily Jewish New York suburbs into her territory? Or was all of it just becoming too much?

Her “present” vote was the epitome of Ocasio-Cortez’s effort to be the consensus builder and the radical all at once. Voting her heart, she felt, would have permanently undermined her ability to serve as a peacemaker on the issue. “While I wanted to vote NO[,] the dynamics back home were devolving so fast that I felt voting P[resent] was the only way I could maintain some degree of peace at home—enough to bring folks together to the table[,] because all this whipped things up to an all out war,” she said.

Omar and Tlaib held firm, though, and the threats of violence ratcheted up. “For Muslim members of Congress, it’s a level no one understands,” Omar messaged me when speaking about the death threats the next day. “The anti-American rhetoric is a violent beast and our vote yesterday makes it 10x worse.”

Marie Newman also faced serious pressure after she had announced her opposition. Ahead of the vote, she said she got a call from a member of party leadership, and from other from rank-and-file members, urging her to reconsider. Pressure had been applied in the run-up to the vote, too. “I was like, well, it is what it is. It’s done. And I feel good about it,” she said. The resistance was fiercest on the floor during the vote. “I got bullied on the House floor. Two of AIPAC’s members—congressional members—came over and literally yelled at me,” she said, demanding to know why she had voted the funding down. “First of all, my husband is an engineer, and from an engineering standpoint, there’s no way that battery system costs a billion dollars,” she told them. But also, she said, her district was opposed to it and would rather the billion dollars be spent here, in the United States.

The next day, Ocasio-Cortez sent a long note of apology to her constituents. “The reckless decision by House leadership to rush this controversial vote within a matter of hours and without true consideration created a tinderbox of vitriol, disingenuous framing, [and] deeply racist accusations and depictions,” she wrote. “To those I have disappointed—I am deeply sorry. To those who believe this reasoning is insufficient or cowardice—I understand.”

Then Came the Money

Amid the 2021 war in Gaza, Nina Turner was setting on a 30-point lead in a special election when DMFI and an allied organization, called Mainstream Democrats, decided to make an example of her. 

Mainstream Democrats PAC, backed by LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman, and DMFI were effectively the same organization, operating out of the same office and employing the same consultants, though Mainstream Democrats claimed a broader mission. Strategic and targeting decisions for both were made by pollster Mark Mellman, according to Dmitri Mehlhorn, a Silicon Valley executive who serves as the political adviser to LinkedIn’s Hoffman. DMFI also funneled at least $500,000 to Mainstream Democrats PAC. Together, Mehlhorn and Mellman controlled the kind of money that could reshape any race they targeted.

“Our money is going to the Mainstream Democrats coalition, which we trust to identify the candidates who are most likely to convey to Americans broadly an image of Democrats that is then electable,” Mehlhorn told me, saying he relied on the consultants linked to DMFI to make those choices. “I trust them. I think Brian Goldsmith, Mark Mellman—they tend to know that stuff.”

The super PACs came in with a deluge of money and swamped Turner, electing Shontel Brown instead. On election night, she thanked supporters of Israel for her victory. 

Mehlhorn, Hoffman’s right-hand man, was explicit about his purpose. “Nina Turner’s district is a classic case study, where the vast majority of voters in that district are Marcia Fudge voters. They’re pretty happy with the Democratic Party. And Nina Turner’s record on the Democratic Party is [that] she’s a strong critic,” he told me. “And so, this group put in money to make sure that voters knew what she felt about the Democratic Party. And from my perspective, that just makes it easier for me to try to do things like give Tim Ryan a chance of winning [a U.S. Senate seat] in a state like Ohio—not a big chance, but at least a chance. And he’s not having to deal with the latest bomb thrown by Nina. So anyway, that’s the theory behind our support for Mainstream Democrats.”

Mellman, in an interview with HuffPost, acknowledged that his goals extended beyond the politics of Israel and Palestine. “The anti-Biden folks and the anti-Israel folks look to [Turner] as a leader,” Mellman said. “So she really is a threat to both of our goals.” His remark was itself a case study in the strength of Washington narratives to withstand reality. The party’s right flank, led by Manchin, Gottheimer, and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, was actively undermining Biden’s agenda, while Turner’s allies in Congress were the ones fighting for it.

In response to DMFI’s spending in 2020, the group J Street, a rival of AIPAC that takes a more progressive line on Palestinian rights, launched its own super PAC to compete. Its leaders guessed DMFI would spend somewhere between five and ten million dollars. If the advocacy group could cobble together $2 million, said J Street’s Logan Bayroff, that would at least be something of a fight, given that AIPAC and DMFI had to overcome the fact that what they were advocating for—unchecked, limitless support for the Israeli government, regardless of its abuses—was unpopular in Democratic primaries.

But then AIPAC itself finally stepped into the super PAC game in April 2022, funding what it called the United Democracy Project. It would go on to spend $30 million, with its first broadside being launched against Turner in her rematch against Brown.

The constellation of super PACs and dark-money groups around No Labels, the political vehicle for Josh Gottheimer and Joe Manchin, kicked into gear, targeting progressives in primaries around the country. And then came the crypto. Hoffman’s super PAC spent heavily, while crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, his Ponzi scheme having yet to collapse, chipped in a million dollars against Turner. SBF, as he became known, seeded his Protect Our Future PAC with nearly $30 million and began spending huge sums.

 “We’re always gonna expect the right to have more money, given that they’re operating off of the basis of big donors. But that’s a little bit more of a fair fight,” he said of the disparity between J Street and DMFI. “But now you add to what DMFI is doing, 30 million [dollars] from AIPAC—that’s just in a whole other realm,” he said. “It’s been a radical transformation in the politics of Israel-Palestine and the politics of Democratic primaries.”

Going into 2022, Turner was joined by the biggest number of boldly progressive candidates running viable campaigns in open seats since the Sanders wing had become a national force. There was Gregorio Casar in Austin, Delia Ramirez in Chicago, Maxwell Alejandro Frost in Orlando, Becca Balint in Vermont, Summer Lee in Pittsburgh, Nida Allam and Erica Smith in North Carolina, Donna Edwards in Maryland, Andrea Salinas in Oregon, and John Fetterman and Mandela Barnes running for Senate in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — both, coincidentally, their respective state’s lieutenant governor. Also in Oregon, Jamie McLeod-Skinner was challenging incumbent Kurt Schrader, one of the most conservative Democrats left in Congress, who had made it his personal mission to block the Build Back Better Act and to stop Medicare from negotiating drug prices.

Redistricting had also produced two progressive-on-centrist primaries between sitting Democratic members of Congress, as Marie Newman and Andy Levin were both crammed in against centrist incumbents. On January 31, kick-starting the primary season, Jewish Insider published a list of fifteen DMFI House endorsements, nearly all of them squaring off against progressive challengers.

“In Michigan and Illinois, Reps. Haley Stevens (D-MI) and Sean Casten (D-IL) are, with support from DMFI, waging respective battles against progressive Reps. Andy Levin (D-MI) and Marie Newman (D-IL), who have frequently clashed with the pro-Israel establishment over their criticism of the Jewish state,” the Jewish Insider piece read.

In January, DMFI released its first list of fifteen endorsements, the start of the year’s battle to shape what the next Democratic class would look like. The constellation of progressive groups that played in Democratic primaries scrambled to respond. Their loose coalition consisted of J Street, Justice Democrats, Sunrise Movement, Indivisible, the Working Families Party, the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC, and Way to Win.

Because Justice Democrats had been unable to form a collaborative relationship with the Squad, it hadn’t been able to raise the kind of small dollars that AOC or the Sanders campaign could. This meant it was increasingly relying on the small number of left-wing wealthy people who wanted to be involved in electoral politics and were okay angering the Democratic establishment. This left the organization without many donors, but with enough to stay relevant.

Collectively, the groups would be lucky to cobble together $10 million, up against well more than $50 million in outside spending, and that’s before counting the money that corporate-friendly candidates could raise themselves. Remarkably, the Squad and Bernie Sanders were conspicuously absent from this organized effort to expand their progressive numbers.

In the summer of 2020, facing down their most intense opposition from within their party, the four members had created a PAC called the Squad Victory Fund. But in the 2022 cycle, it raised just $1.9 million, and a close look at the finances show that it spent nearly a million dollars to raise that money—renting email lists to hit with fund-raising requests, advertising on Facebook, and so on. The remaining million was doled out mostly to the members of the Squad.

Had the Squad worked collaboratively with the coalition of organizations—lending their name, attending fund-raising events, and the like—several million dollars could have been raised. If Sanders had turned on his fire hose, the resources available to the left would have been considerable. As it was, the left had to find a way to even the playing field, and, to a handful of progressive operatives, Sam Bankman-Fried seemed like the only path left.

After SBF was arrested, he texted with a reporter at Vox, saying his effective altruism evangelism and woke politics was all a cover. “It’s what reputations are made of, to some extent. I feel bad for those who got fucked by it,” he said in a series of direct messages the reporter published, “by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shib[b]oleths and so everyone likes us.”

John Fetterman was locked in what threatened to be a tight primary race with Rep. Conor Lamb for a Senate nomination, and Lamb’s campaign was openly pleading for super PAC support to put him over the top. Early in the year, Jewish Insider reported, Mellman had reached out to Fetterman with questions about his position on Israel. “He’s never come out and said that he’s not a supporter of Israel, but the perception is that he aligns with the Squad more than anything else,” Democratic activist Brett Goldman told the news outlet.

Mellman said the Fetterman campaign responded to his inquiry and “came with an interest in learning about the issues.” Following the meeting, the campaign reached out again. “Then they sent us a position paper, which we thought was very strong,” Mellman said. But it wasn’t quite strong enough. Jewish Insider reported that DMFI emailed back some comments on the paper, which “Fetterman was receptive to addressing in a second draft.”

In April, Fetterman agreed to do an interview with Jewish Insider. “I want to go out of my way to make sure that it’s absolutely clear that the views that I hold in no way go along the lines of some of the more fringe or extreme wings of our party,” he said. “I would also respectfully say that I’m not really a progressive in that sense.” Fetterman, unprompted, stressed that there should be zero conditions on military aid to Israel, that BDS was wrong, and so on. “Let me just say this, even if I’m asked or not, I was dismayed by the Iron Dome vote,” he added. DMFI and AIPAC stayed out of his race.

During the Gaza War in 2021, Summer Lee had once posted support for the Palestinian plight. “It was really one tweet that kind of caught the attention of folks,” she said. “Here, this is it, we got you. And it was really a tweet talking about Black Lives Matter and talking about how, as an oppressed person, I view and perceive the topic. Because the reality is—and that’s with a lot of Black and brown progressives—we view even topics that don’t seem connected, we still view them through the injustice that we face as Black folks here and the politics that we see and experience here, and are able to make connections to that.”

Lee had written on Twitter: “When I hear American pols use the refrain ‘Israel has the right to defend itself’ in response to undeniable atrocities on a marginalized population, I can’t help but think of how the West has always justified indiscriminate and disproportionate force and power on weakened and marginalized people. The US has never shown leadership in safeguarding human rights of folks it’s othered. But as we fight against injustice here in the movement for Black lives, we must stand against injustice everywhere. Inhumanities against the Palestinian people cannot be tolerated or justified.” That was the extent of her public commentary on the question.

But the comment was shocking to some in Pittsburgh. Charles Saul, a member of the board of trustees of the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, was later quoted by the paper saying he was concerned about Lee because “she’s endorsed by some people I believe are antisemites [sic], like Rashida Tlaib.” He went on: “Another thing that worried me was her equating the suffering of the Gazans and Palestinians to the suffering of African Americans. That’s one of these intersectional things. If that’s her take on the Middle East, that’s very dangerous.”

In January 2022, AIPAC transferred $8.5 million of dark money to the new super PAC it had set up the previous April, United Democracy Project. Private equity mogul and Republican donor Paul Singer kicked in a million dollars, as did Republican Bernard Marcus, the former CEO of Home Depot. Dozens of other big donors, many of them also Republicans, along with more than a dozen uber-wealthy Democrats, kicked in big checks to give UDP its $30 million war chest.

On May 11, Israel Defense Forces sparked global outrage, first, by killing Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and then, again, days later at her funeral procession, by attacking her mourners and pallbearers and nearly toppling her casket.

Primary Elections

That Tuesday in May was a day that DMFI, AIPAC, and Mainstream Democrats had been hoping would be a death blow to the nascent insurgency that had been gaining traction in the primaries. In April, AIPAC had begun its furious barrage of spending, tag-teaming with DMFI, Mainstream Democrats, and Sam Bankman-Fried to make sure Nina Turner’s second run against Shontel Brown never got off the ground. Turner was smothered. Reid Hoffman’s PAC had spent millions to prop up conservative Democratic representative Kurt Schrader, who was facing a credible challenge from Jamie McLeod-Skinner in Oregon.

Nida Allam, a Durham County commissioner and the first Muslim woman elected in the state, ran for office after three of her Muslim friends were murdered in a gruesome Chapel Hill hate crime that drew national attention. AIPAC would spend millions to stop her rise. Elsewhere in the state, it spent $2 million against progressive Erica Smith in another open primary. United Democracy Project, for its part, began hammering away at Summer Lee, whose Pennsylvania primary was held the same day as North Carolina’s.

Justice Democrats, the Working Families Party, Indivisible, the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC, and the Sunrise Movement worked in coalition with J Street on a number of races in which DMFI and AIPAC played. Where the progressive organizations could muster enough money, the candidates had a shot. “If you look at the races we lost, we were outspent by the bad guys six, eight, ten to one. If you look at Summer’s race, it was more like two to one,” said Joe Dinkin, campaign director for the Working Families Party.

AIPAC and DMFI did manage to win their rematch against Marie Newman, who had beaten the incumbent Democrat Dan Lipinski in 2020. That win had been critical, as Lipinski would certainly have been a “no” vote on Biden’s Build Back Better and the Inflation Reduction Act. In 2022, Newman was redistricted out of her seat, with much of her former area being sent to a new district, the one Ramirez claimed. Illinois Democrats carved up the Palestinian-American stronghold and split it into five separate districts, diluting its strength. This forced Newman into an incumbent-on-incumbent contest with a centrist. AIPAC and DMFI also knocked off the synagogue president Andy Levin.

Nida Allam lost a close race, and Erica Smith, who also faced more than $2 million in AIPAC money, was beaten soundly. And in Texas the following week, Jessica Cisneros was facing Rep. Henry Cuellar in a runoff she would lose by just a few hundred votes. But McLeod-Skinner knocked off Schrader, and progressive Andrea Salinas overcame an ungodly $11 million in Bankman-Fried money through Protect Our Future PAC to win another Oregon primary.

The marquee race, however, was in Pittsburgh, where AIPAC and DMFI combined to put in more than $3 million for an ad blitz against Summer Lee in the race’s closing weeks. In late March, Lee held a 25-point lead before the opposition money came in—and that amount of money can go a long way in the Pittsburgh TV market. As AIPAC’s ads attacked Lee relentlessly as not a “real Democrat,” she watched her polling numbers plummet.

But then she saw the race stabilize, as outside progressive groups pumped more than a million dollars in and her own campaign responded quickly to the charge that she wasn’t loyal enough to the Democratic Party. Her backers made an issue of the fact that AIPAC had backed more than one hundred Republicans who had voted to overturn the 2020 election while pretending to care how good a Democrat Lee was.

“When we were able to counteract those narratives that [voters] were getting incessantly—the saturation point was unlike anything you’ve ever seen—when we knocked on doors, no one was ever saying, ‘Oh, hey, does Summer have this particular view on Middle Eastern policy?’ Like, that was never a conversation. It was, ‘Is Summer a Trump supporter?’” she said. “We were able to get our counter ad up, a counter ad that did nothing but show a video of me stumping for Biden, for the party. When we were able to get that out, it started to really help folks question and really cut through [the opposition messaging].”

On Election Day, Lee bested Irwin by fewer than 1,000 votes, winning 41.9 percent to 41 percent, taunting her opponents for setting money on fire. Had she not enjoyed such high popularity and name recognition in the district, AIPAC’s wipeout of her 25-point lead in six weeks would have been enough to beat her.

John Fetterman, meanwhile, was able to face his centrist opponent in an open seat for the U.S. Senate without taking on a super PAC, too, and won easily. In Austin, Casar and the progressive coalition behind him had known he was within striking distance of clearing 50 percent in the first-round election, which would avoid a May runoff—and avoid the opposition money that would come with it. They spent heavily in the final weeks, and Casar won a first-round victory, another socialist headed to Congress. Once sworn in to the House, one of his first major acts as a legislator was to support Betty McCollum’s bill to restrict funding of the Israeli military. He quickly became one of the leading progressive voices critical of U.S. adventurism abroad, likely producing regret among DMFI and AIPAC that they had allowed him to slip through.

The big-money coalition had not gotten the knockout win in the spring it had hoped for. But AIPAC itself posted impressive numbers. It spent big against nine progressive Democrats and beat seven of them, losing only to Summer Lee and an eccentric, self-funding multimillionaire in Michigan. Without their intervention, Turner, Donna Edwards (who saw AIPAC spend more than $6 million against her), Nida Allam, and, potentially, Erica Smith would have joined the progressive bloc in Congress, in districts that are now instead represented by corporate-friendly Democrats. And many of the ones who did make it through had been forced to moderate their stances on the way in. Still, the Squad of AOC, Omar, Tlaib, Pressley, Bowman, and Bush was being joined by Summer Lee, Delia Ramirez, Greg Casar, Maxwell Frost, and Becca Balint. On a good day, that was ten. But what kind of ten?

“I see people who are running for office or thinking of running for office in the future, and they feel deterred because this is a topic that they know will bury them.”

Summer Lee, reflecting on her near-death experience, was pessimistic. I asked if the amount of spending had gotten into her head and influenced the way she approached the Israel-Palestine issue. “Yes, absolutely, and not just with me. I see it with other people. I see people who are running for office or thinking of running for office in the future, and they feel deterred because this is a topic that they know will bury them,” she said. “There’s absolutely a chilling effect . . . I’ve heard it from other folks who will say, you know, we agree with this, but I’ll never support it, and I’ll never say it out loud.”

More broadly, though, it makes building a movement that much more difficult, Lee added. “It’s very hard to survive as a progressive, Black, working-class-background candidate when you are facing millions and millions of dollars, but what it also does is then, it deters other people from ever wanting to get into it,” she said. “So then it has the effect of ensuring that the Black community broadly, the other marginalized communities, are just no longer centered in our politics.”

Her narrow win, coupled with some of the losses, began to crystalize into a conventional Washington narrative that the Squad was in retreat and that voters wanted a more cautious brand of politics. “It’s a way of maintaining that status quo,” Lee told me. “But also it’s just disingenuous when we say that we’re not winning because we’re not winning on the issues. No, we’re not winning because we’re not winning on the resources.”

Israel’s Rightward March Continues

Whatever the fears of hard-line Israel hawks, the rise of the Squad did not materially slow the expansion of Israeli settlements into occupied Palestinian territory. In 2019, the Squad’s first year in office, Israel added more than 11,000 new settlement units. In 2020, the figure doubled to more than 22,000, many of them in East Jerusalem and deep into the West Bank. “As stated in numerous EU Foreign Affairs Council conclusions, settlements are illegal under international law, constitute an obstacle to peace and threaten to make a two-state solution impossible,” said an EU representative to the United Nations in a report chronicling the increase. The settlement expansion included multiple “outposts”—seizure of farmland and pasture—which puts any semblance of Palestinian independence or sustainability farther out of reach. In 2021—despite Israeli prime minister Lapid’s campaign promise not “to build anything that will prevent the possibility of a future two-state solution”—settlement expansion in East Jerusalem doubled in 2021 compared with the year before, threatening to fully slice the remaining contiguous parts of Palestinian territory into small, prisonlike enclaves.

On August 5, 2022, without the support of his cabinet, Lapid launched air strikes on the Gaza Strip, agreeing to a truce on August 7. Palestinian militants fired more than a thousand rockets, though no Israelis were killed or seriously wounded. The three-day conflict left forty-nine Palestinians dead, including seventeen children.

Israel’s initial denial of any role in the killing of reporter Abu Akleh gradually morphed under the weight of incontrovertible evidence into admission of possible complicity. Partnering with the London-based group Forensic Architecture, the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq launched the most comprehensive investigation into her death. On the morning of August 18, at least nine armored Israeli vehicles approached the group’s headquarters in Ramallah and broke their way in, ransacking it and later welding shut its doors. An attempt by the Israeli government, headed by Mellman ally Yair Lapid, to have the European Union label Al-Haq a terrorist organization was rejected by the EU, which reviewed the evidence Israel provided and found it not remotely convincing.

With the primaries over, Bankman-Fried’s PAC, AIPAC, and DMFI had mostly stopped spending to help Democrats. In September 2022, the Democratic National Committee refused to allow a vote on a resolution, pushed by DNC member Nina Turner and other progressives, to ban big outside money in Democratic primaries. Leah Greenberg, cofounder of Indivisible, said it was absurd that Democrats continued to allow outside groups to manipulate Democratic primaries even though they clearly had little interest in seeing the party itself succeed. Their goal is to shape what the party looks like; whether it’s in the minority or majority is beside the point. “For a group called Democratic Majority for Israel, they don’t seem to be putting much effort into winning a Democratic majority,” Greenberg said.

Rep. Elaine Luria, a Democrat from Virginia whose race was listed as “key” by AIPAC, had been one of the organization’s most outspoken and loyal allies since her 2018 election and had regularly teamed with Gottheimer as he made his various power plays. Her first significant act as a member of Congress had been to join him in confronting Rashida Tlaib with their white binder of damning quotes. Still, AIPAC’s United Democracy Project had declined to help her, and Luria was among the few incumbent Democrats to lose reelection in 2022.

Instead, AIPAC’s first foray into the general election had been to spend its money in a Democrat-on-Democrat race in the state of California. According to Jewish Insider, “a board member of DMFI expressed reservations over [David] Canepa’s Middle East foreign policy approach, pointing to at least one social media post viewed by local pro-Israel advocates as dismissive of Israeli security concerns.” The allegedly dismissive message, which Canepa posted on May 13, 2021, as the Gaza War raged, had read, “Peace for Palestine.”

But AIPAC saved the rest of its energy for Summer Lee. Because the Republican in the race had the same name, “Mike Doyle,” as the popular retiring incumbent Democrat—deliberately, no doubt—voters thought that a vote for Doyle was a vote for the guy they’d known for decades. After spending millions of dollars attacking Lee for not being a good enough Democrat, AIPAC spent millions in the general elections urging voters to elect the Republican. Lee won anyway.

At the end of 2022, Bibi Netanyahu, at the head of a right-wing coalition so extreme that mainstream news outlets had dubbed it fascist, was once again sworn in as prime minister, ousting Yair Lapid, the prime minister backed by DMFI’s Mark Mellman. 

Disclosure: In September 2022, The Intercept received $500,000 from Building a Stronger Future, Sam Bankman-Fried’s foundation, as part of a $4 million grant to fund our pandemic prevention and biosafety coverage. That grant has been suspended. In keeping with our general practice, The Intercept disclosed the funding in subsequent reporting on Bankman-Fried’s political activities. A nonprofit affiliated with Way to Win, called Way to Rise, has donated to The Intercept, facilitated by Amalgamated Foundation.

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