It was clear from the outset that the Joint Resolutions of Disapproval from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would not pass. The trio of bills, brought to a vote on Wednesday night, would have stopped $20 billion in weapons from being sent to Israel. Every single Republican in the Senate voted against Sanders, as expected. A majority of Democratic senators voted against the bills, too.
But there has still been movement in favor of limiting military aid: About 40 percent of the Democrats present for the vote wanted to stop billions in arms sales to Israel, despite loud opposition from the White House, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
Major figures in the Democratic Party—Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.)—voted for at least one of the resolutions. Nineteen senators backed at least a piece of Sanders’ call to limit aid, a historically high number showing explicit, public support for upholding American law as it applies to Israel.
Pollsshow that the majority of Americans support suspending offensive weapons to Israel until an end comes to the country’s yearlong bombardment of Gaza—in which, experts estimate, over 100,000 people have already been killed. But that majority view—endorsed even by some explicitly pro-Israel organizations, such as J Street—has not been reflected in the US government.
In fact, hours before Sanders brought his resolutions to the Senate floor, the United States vetoed another ceasefire resolution in the United Nations. It is the fourth such resolution since Israel’s war in Gaza—which United Nations agencies, independent experts, and several world governments have declared a genocide—began. (That resolution would have demanded the release of all hostages, and implemented Biden’s own ceasefire plan.)
On the Senate floor, Sanders spoke next to a large photo of a dead, emaciated Palestinian child. “Every member of the Senate who believes in the rule of law, that our government should obey the law, should vote for these resolutions,” he said. “The Foreign Assistance Act and the Arms Export Control Act are very clear. The United States cannot provide weapons to countries that violate internationally recognized human rights or block US humanitarian aid. That is not my opinion, that is what the law says.”
In mid-September, Biden administration leaders sent a letter to Netanyahu warning him of these specific provisions of US law, and saying Israel had 30 days to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza or face cuts to military aid. But 30 days came and went, Palestinians continued to starve, and the Biden administration refused to enforce its own deadline.
Joint Resolutions of Disapproval are not unheard of—they’ve previously been levied against Saudi Arabia and Egypt, for example—but this is the first time that this type of weapons-trade-restricting measure has been brought against Israel, which is by a far larger recipient of US weapons, having been given about $310 billion in military aid from the US since its founding.
Sanders recounted anecdotes from doctors who saw civilians shot in the head in Gaza, explained that per satellite imagery two-thirds of the buildings in Gaza are flattened entirely, and told fellow congresspeople that reporting showed almost no one in Gaza has had consistent access to electricity or clean water for nearly 14 months.
“Fundamentally, [President] Joe Biden will not uphold the law,” Matt Duss, a former Sanders aide now at the Center for International Policy, said of the White House pressure campaign to vote against Sanders. Instead, it’s “purely ideological: [Biden] just believes that Israel is entitled to absolute total wall-to-wall support, no matter how catastrophic the impact on Palestinians or Lebanese.”
“A lot of people wrongly thought that it was because of political considerations,” Duss continued. “But no, even after the election, [the administration] remains completely committed to ignoring US law and keeping the flow of weapons running, even with the knowledge that these particular weapons will not reach Israel for over a year.”
The first bill to be voted on Wednesday night concerned exploding tank shells. Cat Knarr of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights noted that these shells are thought to have killed 6-year-old Hind Rajab as she sat alone with the bodies of her family, pleading for help. Knarr’s group staged a protest the day before the vote at the Senate. “You’re either on the side of justice and stopping the weapons, or you’re on the side of arming a genocidal state, and you will go down in history for how you vote today,” she said.
When opponents of the JRDs came to the floor, their talking points sounded like they were lifted directly from a White House memo circulated earlier that morning. As reported by Akbar Shahid Ahmed of the Huffington Post, the White House declared that those who would block weapons to Israel were aiding Hamas and prolonging the war.
Ted Budd (R-N.C.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) are among the senators who seemed to speak from that playbook. “If you love peace you have to destroy those who hate peace,” Graham said.
No one argued against Sanders’ fundamental point—that sending weapons to a nation blocking humanitarian aid is illegal. Instead, they said Israel needed to defend itself against a region in which it is the only reliable ally for the West. Senator John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) spoke vaguely of a world of evil people: “They hate Americans. They want to kill us and drink our blood out of a boot.”
But the closeness of Israel and the West is showing signs of cracking.
The next day, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant forusing starvation as a weapon of war as well as “murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.” This marked the first time the ICC has ever indicted a pro-Western official on war crimes charges—which means the United States is certain to push back. After 14 months of unabated carnage, opposition to arming Israel even within the United States is looking less fringe.
Correction, November 22: The article has been updated to more accurately reflect who Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) believes wants to kill Americans and “drink our blood out of a boot.”
The long, strange saga of the “nonprofit-killer bill” continues. The legislation—officially called HR 9495, or the “Stop Terror Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act”—would give the Secretary of the Treasury unilateral power to designate nonprofits as suspected “Terrorist Supporting Organizations,” taking away their tax-exempt status unless they are able to prove they are not terrorist supporting.
The bill was unable to meet the two-thirds majority vote it needed to make it through the House last week. But, today, with only a simple majority vote required, the legislation passed the House in a 219–184 vote. This time, it garnered far less Democratic support than it had only days ago.
In the bill’s original iteration, it was popular among both Republicans and Democrats, who saw it as an appealing way to police Palestinian rights organizations after protests last year. An earlier version, in April, passed the House easily, with only 11 votes against the bill. It didn’t make it through the Senate and was reintroduced in the House this fall.
One of those early no votes was Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who said on the House floor today, “This is going to be my third time voting against this bill, because I don’t care who the president is. This is a dangerous and an unconstitutional bill that would allow unchecked power to target nonprofit organizations as political enemies and shut them down without due process.”
When Tlaib was first voting against the bill, most Democrats disagreed with her. Since then, they have become concerned that a law they would have considered reasonable under a Harris administration would be dangerously applied under Trump.
This time, 183 Democrats and one Republican voted against the bill, and only 15 Democrats voted for it—down from 52 last week. Since then, there’s been a full-court-press civil society campaign to take down H.R. 9495. Nearly 300 organizations—including the ACLU, the Sierra Club, the AFL-CIO, Planned Parenthood, and the NAACP—have signed a letter pointing out that Trump is likely to use this bill to silence any of his enemies, not just Palestinians and their supporters. As Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) pointed out, that could also include nonprofit news outlets.
Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) is one of the dozens of Democrats who flipped their vote on the bill since Trump’s election.
He gave a personal example of why. One of the organizations whose nonprofit status Trump wants to terminate, Doggett said, “has protested one of my speeches.”
“Protests are inconvenient,” he said. “The one I had was inconvenient.” Nonetheless, “America is stronger when we protect dissent in all its forms, as long as it is done in a proper way.” For Doggett, the bill itself is less of a concern than the man who could be utilizing it.
“There has been much made in this debate of the fact that some of us have been switching positions,” he said. “Well, we listen to our constituents.”
It was clear from the outset that the Joint Resolutions of Disapproval from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would not pass. The trio of bills, brought to a vote on Wednesday night, would have stopped $20 billion in weapons from being sent to Israel. Every single Republican in the Senate voted against Sanders, as expected. A majority of Democratic senators voted against the bills, too.
But there has still been movement in favor of limiting military aid: About 40 percent of the Democrats present for the vote wanted to stop billions in arms sales to Israel, despite loud opposition from the White House, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
Major figures in the Democratic Party—Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.)—voted for at least one of the resolutions. Nineteen senators backed at least a piece of Sanders’ call to limit aid, a historically high number showing explicit, public support for upholding American law as it applies to Israel.
Pollsshow that the majority of Americans support suspending offensive weapons to Israel until an end comes to the country’s yearlong bombardment of Gaza—in which, experts estimate, over 100,000 people have already been killed. But that majority view—endorsed even by some explicitly pro-Israel organizations, such as J Street—has not been reflected in the US government.
In fact, hours before Sanders brought his resolutions to the Senate floor, the United States vetoed another ceasefire resolution in the United Nations. It is the fourth such resolution since Israel’s war in Gaza—which United Nations agencies, independent experts, and several world governments have declared a genocide—began. (That resolution would have demanded the release of all hostages, and implemented Biden’s own ceasefire plan.)
On the Senate floor, Sanders spoke next to a large photo of a dead, emaciated Palestinian child. “Every member of the Senate who believes in the rule of law, that our government should obey the law, should vote for these resolutions,” he said. “The Foreign Assistance Act and the Arms Export Control Act are very clear. The United States cannot provide weapons to countries that violate internationally recognized human rights or block US humanitarian aid. That is not my opinion, that is what the law says.”
In mid-September, Biden administration leaders sent a letter to Netanyahu warning him of these specific provisions of US law, and saying Israel had 30 days to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza or face cuts to military aid. But 30 days came and went, Palestinians continued to starve, and the Biden administration refused to enforce its own deadline.
Joint Resolutions of Disapproval are not unheard of—they’ve previously been levied against Saudi Arabia and Egypt, for example—but this is the first time that this type of weapons-trade-restricting measure has been brought against Israel, which is by a far larger recipient of US weapons, having been given about $310 billion in military aid from the US since its founding.
Sanders recounted anecdotes from doctors who saw civilians shot in the head in Gaza, explained that per satellite imagery two-thirds of the buildings in Gaza are flattened entirely, and told fellow congresspeople that reporting showed almost no one in Gaza has had consistent access to electricity or clean water for nearly 14 months.
“Fundamentally, [President] Joe Biden will not uphold the law,” Matt Duss, a former Sanders aide now at the Center for International Policy, said of the White House pressure campaign to vote against Sanders. Instead, it’s “purely ideological: [Biden] just believes that Israel is entitled to absolute total wall-to-wall support, no matter how catastrophic the impact on Palestinians or Lebanese.”
“A lot of people wrongly thought that it was because of political considerations,” Duss continued. “But no, even after the election, [the administration] remains completely committed to ignoring US law and keeping the flow of weapons running, even with the knowledge that these particular weapons will not reach Israel for over a year.”
The first bill to be voted on Wednesday night concerned exploding tank shells. Cat Knarr of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights noted that these shells are thought to have killed 6-year-old Hind Rajab as she sat alone with the bodies of her family, pleading for help. Knarr’s group staged a protest the day before the vote at the Senate. “You’re either on the side of justice and stopping the weapons, or you’re on the side of arming a genocidal state, and you will go down in history for how you vote today,” she said.
When opponents of the JRDs came to the floor, their talking points sounded like they were lifted directly from a White House memo circulated earlier that morning. As reported by Akbar Shahid Ahmed of the Huffington Post, the White House declared that those who would block weapons to Israel were aiding Hamas and prolonging the war.
Ted Budd (R-N.C.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) are among the senators who seemed to speak from that playbook. “If you love peace you have to destroy those who hate peace,” Graham said.
No one argued against Sanders’ fundamental point—that sending weapons to a nation blocking humanitarian aid is illegal. Instead, they said Israel needed to defend itself against a region in which it is the only reliable ally for the West. Senator John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) spoke vaguely of a world of evil people: “They hate Americans. They want to kill us and drink our blood out of a boot.”
But the closeness of Israel and the West is showing signs of cracking.
The next day, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant forusing starvation as a weapon of war as well as “murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.” This marked the first time the ICC has ever indicted a pro-Western official on war crimes charges—which means the United States is certain to push back. After 14 months of unabated carnage, opposition to arming Israel even within the United States is looking less fringe.
Correction, November 22: The article has been updated to more accurately reflect who Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) believes wants to kill Americans and “drink our blood out of a boot.”
The long, strange saga of the “nonprofit-killer bill” continues. The legislation—officially called HR 9495, or the “Stop Terror Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act”—would give the Secretary of the Treasury unilateral power to designate nonprofits as suspected “Terrorist Supporting Organizations,” taking away their tax-exempt status unless they are able to prove they are not terrorist supporting.
The bill was unable to meet the two-thirds majority vote it needed to make it through the House last week. But, today, with only a simple majority vote required, the legislation passed the House in a 219–184 vote. This time, it garnered far less Democratic support than it had only days ago.
In the bill’s original iteration, it was popular among both Republicans and Democrats, who saw it as an appealing way to police Palestinian rights organizations after protests last year. An earlier version, in April, passed the House easily, with only 11 votes against the bill. It didn’t make it through the Senate and was reintroduced in the House this fall.
One of those early no votes was Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who said on the House floor today, “This is going to be my third time voting against this bill, because I don’t care who the president is. This is a dangerous and an unconstitutional bill that would allow unchecked power to target nonprofit organizations as political enemies and shut them down without due process.”
When Tlaib was first voting against the bill, most Democrats disagreed with her. Since then, they have become concerned that a law they would have considered reasonable under a Harris administration would be dangerously applied under Trump.
This time, 183 Democrats and one Republican voted against the bill, and only 15 Democrats voted for it—down from 52 last week. Since then, there’s been a full-court-press civil society campaign to take down H.R. 9495. Nearly 300 organizations—including the ACLU, the Sierra Club, the AFL-CIO, Planned Parenthood, and the NAACP—have signed a letter pointing out that Trump is likely to use this bill to silence any of his enemies, not just Palestinians and their supporters. As Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) pointed out, that could also include nonprofit news outlets.
Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) is one of the dozens of Democrats who flipped their vote on the bill since Trump’s election.
He gave a personal example of why. One of the organizations whose nonprofit status Trump wants to terminate, Doggett said, “has protested one of my speeches.”
“Protests are inconvenient,” he said. “The one I had was inconvenient.” Nonetheless, “America is stronger when we protect dissent in all its forms, as long as it is done in a proper way.” For Doggett, the bill itself is less of a concern than the man who could be utilizing it.
“There has been much made in this debate of the fact that some of us have been switching positions,” he said. “Well, we listen to our constituents.”
Last Thursday, workers with the Democratic National Committee (DNC) were told they would be laid off without severance and with little notice, according to the DNC’s union. The cuts included some longtime workers of the organization, the union said.
With the election over, the DNC intends to downsize from about 680 staff to fewer than 200. Some degree of seasonality is expected in political campaign jobs. But this degree is unusual—and has affected DNC staffers who’ve stayed with the organization across several campaigns, or even multiple decades, according to the union.
One former DNC union member, whose last day was Friday, said she was shocked. “For a lot of folks, this is life-altering,” said the laid-off employee, who spoke with Mother Jones on the condition of anonymity.
“Amongst the members that were laid off includes one deeply beloved union member who worked at the DNC for 38 years,” the staffer said. “So I push back against the claim that this is normal, because we have members who have been here for decades who are shocked and angry and trying to figure out how they’re going to survive this layoff.”
In a statement to the Washington Post, the DNC said that “while the DNC has met the terms of the union agreement negotiated by the CBA, we share the entire DNC family’s frustration and continue to provide resources to all members of the team to support them in this transition.”
A DNC official told Mother Jones that all workers were informed of the possibility of layoffs as early as September 13, and that 95 percent of those being let go had a post-election end date in their offer letter.
But one laid-off worker who spoke with Mother Jones said that she, like some other employees, felt pressured into leaving a full-time role for a temporary contract position prior to the election.
“I was told in order to get a title change or a promotion or any raises, it would only be if I agreed to sign a contract that had an end date of November 15,” she said. The staffer said management had said an extension was expected.
“We tried to get answers about why this was happening, and we were stonewalled over and over again by management,” she said. DNC representatives would not comment on specific workers’ cases, but stated that all of the terms of the workers’ collective bargaining agreement are being upheld.
The DNC workers are not trying to get their jobs back. Instead, the union is organizing for a severance package, similar to what workers on the Harris-Walz campaign got. (Run for Something, a major Democratic campaign support PAC, also faced a wave of post-election layoffs in recent weeks, letting go off 35 percent of its staff—and well over half of its staff union.) A DNC spokesperson told Mother Jones that the DNC is in ongoing communication with SEIU Local 500, the union representing DNC workers.
Among those DNC employees who have not been laid off, the mood is uncertain, said one employee who was unaffected by the layoffs but requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from the DNC.
“One thing that has been a common thread during my employment has been that we’re trying to break the boom and bust cycle of democratic infrastructure. So I’d say this feels very antithetical to that,” she said. She plans to look for another job soon—but calls that decision “heartbreaking” as someone who’s spent years working in Democratic electoral politics.
Workers said that DNC donors have reached out to them, concerned about how, exactly, the money the Harris campaign raised is being spent, if not to allow them severance pay.
“We find it very cruel that DNC management is trying to claim that layoffs are just part of the job,” a DNC union member said. “And we feel strongly that losing an election has not absolved the organization of its responsibility to treat its workers with basic dignity.”
Correction, November 21: An earlier version of this article misstated the conversation between SEIU Local 500 and the DNC. They are in communication, not negotiations.
Last week, a bill that would give the Treasury Department power to designate a nonprofit as a “terrorist-supporting organization” for supporting pro-Palestine protests was narrowly voted down in Congress. But the saga is far from over. It could still be passed in the coming days.
Funding terrorism is already illegal. Still, all but one Republican in the House backed the bill when it came to a vote last week. There were also 52 Democrats who supported the measure.
Nonprofits such as the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and NAACP came out against the bill in a letter in to House leaders. “These efforts are part of a concerted attack,” they wrote, “on civil society that is targeted at more than just groups involved in the campus protests regarding Gaza.”
Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) has been particularly outspoken against the bill, which he believes could be applied beyond those opposed to Israel’s mass killings in Gaza to pretty much anyone opposed to Trump.
“A university has too many protests against Donald Trump? Terrorists,” McGovern said on the House floor Tuesday. “Environmental groups suing the administration in court? Terrorists. Think tanks that think differently than Donald Trump? Terrorists…Donald Trump says you’re a terrorist, so you’re a terrorist.”
“This bill has been hijacked and turned into a vehicle to give the incoming administration the ability to revoke the nonprofit status of any advocacy group they want, simply by labeling them as terrorist sympathizers.”
As I wrote last week, the bill shows the ways in which the Biden-era crackdown on pro-Palestine activists sets up the possibility for Trump to take revenge on protesters.
Last week, a bill that would give the Treasury Department power to designate a nonprofit as a “terrorist-supporting organization” for supporting pro-Palestine protests was narrowly voted down in Congress. But the saga is far from over. It could still be passed in the coming days.
Funding terrorism is already illegal. Still, all but one Republican in the House backed the bill when it came to a vote last week. There were also 52 Democrats who supported the measure.
Nonprofits such as the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and NAACP came out against the bill in a letter in to House leaders. “These efforts are part of a concerted attack,” they wrote, “on civil society that is targeted at more than just groups involved in the campus protests regarding Gaza.”
Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) has been particularly outspoken against the bill, which he believes could be applied beyond those opposed to Israel’s mass killings in Gaza to pretty much anyone opposed to Trump.
“A university has too many protests against Donald Trump? Terrorists,” McGovern said on the House floor Tuesday. “Environmental groups suing the administration in court? Terrorists. Think tanks that think differently than Donald Trump? Terrorists…Donald Trump says you’re a terrorist, so you’re a terrorist.”
“This bill has been hijacked and turned into a vehicle to give the incoming administration the ability to revoke the nonprofit status of any advocacy group they want, simply by labeling them as terrorist sympathizers.”
As I wrote last week, the bill shows the ways in which the Biden-era crackdown on pro-Palestine activists sets up the possibility for Trump to take revenge on protesters.
Donald Trump has made it clear that there are groups he’d like to punish.
Much attention has been paid to the president-elect’s planned crusades for his next term against immigrants and transgender people. But less discussed has been another group on the list: protesters. Building off the bipartisan crackdown on anti-war student dissent last year, Trump has made clear he hopes to discipline, and potentially prosecute, civil disobedience with increased force.
In May, he promised a group of donors that “any student that protests, I [will] throw them out of the country.” Trump hoped this would serve as a warning. “You know, there are a lot of foreign students,” he continued. “As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.”
This is more than just bluster. Reutersreported that sources said Trump hopes to follow through on the promise on day one of his administration, by signing an executive order prioritizing deporting “international students who support Palestinian militant group Hamas and have violated the terms of their student visas.”
In Trump’s first term, “his instincts were to bring as much federal power as he could to bear on essentially peaceful protests,” Jamie Kalven, founder of Chicago’s Invisible Institute and a journalist who has studied First Amendment law for decades, told me. This time, there will be fewer guardrails. “It was complicated enough before Trump was elected. Now you’re going to have various demagogues in Congress and the Trump administration actually bearing down in various ways on universities and on university students, seeing it as the bastion of the enemy within.”
“Given how it’s been under Biden, it unfortunately normalizes what Trump is then allowed to do.”
Many of the plans for targeting protesters are taken from tactics employed by Democrats in recent years. For years, Palestinian-rights activists in the US—and Palestinians in the US, whether activists or not—have often been smeared as terrorists and threatened with deportation and imprisonment. In 2023, a wave of protest was met with a crackdown. The Department of Education pressured schools to stop pro-Palestine student organizing, as Mother Jones reported in September. Dozens of universities across the nation instituted strict new disciplinary codes prohibiting many forms of public assembly. Over 3,600 protesters were arrested.
Just months ago, Cornell University threatened PhD student Momodou Taal with revocation of his F-1 student visa—and, effectively, deportation—after Taal spent much of the previous year attending various pro-Palestine actions. On September 18, Taal and fellow students disrupted a career fair Cornell held that featured weapons manufacturer L3Harris. The university alleged that Taal had shoved police on his way in, a charge he denies.
After public pushback, Cornell backed down on deportation. But Taal has still been banned from campus and is no longer permitted to teach his classes. When we spoke the week of the election, he told me that he was still negotiating the opportunity to use library resources to write his thesis. (“I don’t want to budge on library access,” he said.)
“Given how it’s been under [President Joe] Biden, it unfortunately normalizes what Trump is then allowed to do,” he said. “I think, if the position taken by the [Biden] administration was that these kids should be protected, there would be more of an outcry if Trump then did a clampdown. I think what Biden has allowed for is that the clampdown is made easier for Trump now because the groundwork has already been laid.”
One piece of potential infrastructure is the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act—a House bill designed to strip tax-exempt status from any nonprofit the Treasury Department designates a “terrorist-supporting organization.” A version of the bill was introduced last year with broad bipartisan support. But earlier this week, it was voted down on the House floor, as a majority of Democrats were concerned that the bill would hand undue power to Trump to silence his political enemies. 144 Democrats and one Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, voted against the fast-tracked bill. Nearly all Republicans—and dozens of Democrats—still supported it.
“All of us support stopping terrorism,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) told The Intercept. “[But] if he is on a march to make America fascist, we do not need to supply Donald Trump with any additional weapons to accomplish his ill purpose.” Doggett had initially supported the bill but changed course after Trump’s election.
The “nonprofit killer” bill, as critics have dubbed it, is not dead. It will go back for a vote next week. This time, with a simple majority, the bill will likely pass.
“I think we should anticipate something akin to the McCarthy era in terms of government being turned against certain categories of citizens,” Kalven said of this legislative trend.
The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing group behind Project 2025, has also given Trump a workable plan to stop pro-Palestine dissent. It is called Project Esther. Nominally a policy proposal to tackle antisemitism on the left, it reads instead as a blueprint for taking down pro-Palestine activists. It suggests deporting “foreign Hamas Support Organization members,” classifying anti-war nonprofits—like American Muslims for Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace—as members of a shadowy “Hamas Support Organization” network that is “attempting to lay siege to our education system, political processes, and government.”
Attorney Zoha Khalili at Palestine Legal, an organization that has spent the past decade providing legal advice and support to Palestinian-rights activists, said Trump’s election gives universities a chance to change their role.
“[Now] it’s one of those situations where, you know, universities who have been repressing student activism might also now find themselves in this position where they have to care a bit more about their students,” Khalili said. “Because of the values that they claim to uphold—wanting diversity, not wanting to have their students deported for political purposes.”
What worries Khalili most, though, is not so much Trump’s crackdown on protesters in the United States, but how his presidency will harm the people in Gaza on whose behalf Americans protest in the first place.
“The broader question that is on my mind is: How is the Trump administration going to impact Palestinians on the ground?” she asked. Trump’s plans for the region are unclear—though he has expressed a desire for the war to end, he’s also said he wants to ban refugee resettlement from the Gaza Strip and looks to be stocking his administration with war hawks, including an evangelical end-times Zionist ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who has declared that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.”
“How aggressively Israel is engaging in genocide also impacts the climate here for activists, who are increasingly desperate to try to save people’s lives,” Khalili said. “So the stakes are quite high at the moment.”
Donald Trump has made it clear that there are groups he’d like to punish.
Much attention has been paid to the president-elect’s planned crusades for his next term against immigrants and transgender people. But less discussed has been another group on the list: protesters. Building off the bipartisan crackdown on anti-war student dissent last year, Trump has made clear he hopes to discipline, and potentially prosecute, civil disobedience with increased force.
In May, he promised a group of donors that “any student that protests, I [will] throw them out of the country.” Trump hoped this would serve as a warning. “You know, there are a lot of foreign students,” he continued. “As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.”
This is more than just bluster. Reutersreported that sources said Trump hopes to follow through on the promise on day one of his administration, by signing an executive order prioritizing deporting “international students who support Palestinian militant group Hamas and have violated the terms of their student visas.”
In Trump’s first term, “his instincts were to bring as much federal power as he could to bear on essentially peaceful protests,” Jamie Kalven, founder of Chicago’s Invisible Institute and a journalist who has studied First Amendment law for decades, told me. This time, there will be fewer guardrails. “It was complicated enough before Trump was elected. Now you’re going to have various demagogues in Congress and the Trump administration actually bearing down in various ways on universities and on university students, seeing it as the bastion of the enemy within.”
“Given how it’s been under Biden, it unfortunately normalizes what Trump is then allowed to do.”
Many of the plans for targeting protesters are taken from tactics employed by Democrats in recent years. For years, Palestinian-rights activists in the US—and Palestinians in the US, whether activists or not—have often been smeared as terrorists and threatened with deportation and imprisonment. In 2023, a wave of protest was met with a crackdown. The Department of Education pressured schools to stop pro-Palestine student organizing, as Mother Jones reported in September. Dozens of universities across the nation instituted strict new disciplinary codes prohibiting many forms of public assembly. Over 3,600 protesters were arrested.
Just months ago, Cornell University threatened PhD student Momodou Taal with revocation of his F-1 student visa—and, effectively, deportation—after Taal spent much of the previous year attending various pro-Palestine actions. On September 18, Taal and fellow students disrupted a career fair Cornell held that featured weapons manufacturer L3Harris. The university alleged that Taal had shoved police on his way in, a charge he denies.
After public pushback, Cornell backed down on deportation. But Taal has still been banned from campus and is no longer permitted to teach his classes. When we spoke the week of the election, he told me that he was still negotiating the opportunity to use library resources to write his thesis. (“I don’t want to budge on library access,” he said.)
“Given how it’s been under [President Joe] Biden, it unfortunately normalizes what Trump is then allowed to do,” he said. “I think, if the position taken by the [Biden] administration was that these kids should be protected, there would be more of an outcry if Trump then did a clampdown. I think what Biden has allowed for is that the clampdown is made easier for Trump now because the groundwork has already been laid.”
One piece of potential infrastructure is the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act—a House bill designed to strip tax-exempt status from any nonprofit the Treasury Department designates a “terrorist-supporting organization.” A version of the bill was introduced last year with broad bipartisan support. But earlier this week, it was voted down on the House floor, as a majority of Democrats were concerned that the bill would hand undue power to Trump to silence his political enemies. 144 Democrats and one Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, voted against the fast-tracked bill. Nearly all Republicans—and dozens of Democrats—still supported it.
“All of us support stopping terrorism,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) told The Intercept. “[But] if he is on a march to make America fascist, we do not need to supply Donald Trump with any additional weapons to accomplish his ill purpose.” Doggett had initially supported the bill but changed course after Trump’s election.
The “nonprofit killer” bill, as critics have dubbed it, is not dead. It will go back for a vote next week. This time, with a simple majority, the bill will likely pass.
“I think we should anticipate something akin to the McCarthy era in terms of government being turned against certain categories of citizens,” Kalven said of this legislative trend.
The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing group behind Project 2025, has also given Trump a workable plan to stop pro-Palestine dissent. It is called Project Esther. Nominally a policy proposal to tackle antisemitism on the left, it reads instead as a blueprint for taking down pro-Palestine activists. It suggests deporting “foreign Hamas Support Organization members,” classifying anti-war nonprofits—like American Muslims for Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace—as members of a shadowy “Hamas Support Organization” network that is “attempting to lay siege to our education system, political processes, and government.”
Attorney Zoha Khalili at Palestine Legal, an organization that has spent the past decade providing legal advice and support to Palestinian-rights activists, said Trump’s election gives universities a chance to change their role.
“[Now] it’s one of those situations where, you know, universities who have been repressing student activism might also now find themselves in this position where they have to care a bit more about their students,” Khalili said. “Because of the values that they claim to uphold—wanting diversity, not wanting to have their students deported for political purposes.”
What worries Khalili most, though, is not so much Trump’s crackdown on protesters in the United States, but how his presidency will harm the people in Gaza on whose behalf Americans protest in the first place.
“The broader question that is on my mind is: How is the Trump administration going to impact Palestinians on the ground?” she asked. Trump’s plans for the region are unclear—though he has expressed a desire for the war to end, he’s also said he wants to ban refugee resettlement from the Gaza Strip and looks to be stocking his administration with war hawks, including an evangelical end-times Zionist ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who has declared that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.”
“How aggressively Israel is engaging in genocide also impacts the climate here for activists, who are increasingly desperate to try to save people’s lives,” Khalili said. “So the stakes are quite high at the moment.”
In mid-October, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin sent a strongly worded letter to top Israeli officials. In the note, they made clear the United States was aware of Israel’s blocking of aid into the north of Gaza. They demanded that Israel improve humanitarian conditions by letting in 350 trucks of food aid per day, ending the forced evacuation of north Gaza, and opening more crossings into the territory. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United Nations ambassador for the US, said such moves were necessary to combat a “policy of starvation.” If Israel failed to do so within 30 days, Blinken and Austin threatened, the US would consider enforcing arms-transfer laws which prohibit sending weapons to nations that block humanitarian aid.
“30 days are up, and all the metrics you put out don’t matter.”
Yesterday, thirty days later, Biden administration officials declared they would not be enforcing their own deadlines. Military aid to Israel will not end, despite the fact that even data from Israel’s own government finds the amount of aid entering Gaza decreased between September and November.
In a November 12th State Department press briefing, officials were unable to answer reporters’ questions about whether or not Israel managed to hit that 30-day deadline. “We at this time have not made an assessment that the Israelis are in violation of US law,” department spokesperson Vedant Patel said.
In their October 13 letter, Blinken and Austin said the Israeli government must reaffirm “that there will be no Israeli government policy of forced evacuation of civilians from northern to southern Gaza.” This, also, has not happened. Instead, an Israeli Defense Force general told the media last week that civilians who have fled the north will not be allowed to return to their homes.
COGAT, the Israeli agency overseeing humanitarian aid in Gaza, told reporters Tuesday that “Israel allowed a daily average of 76 trucks over the past 30 days.” The United Nations stated that the number is closer to 50—far lower than the 350 the US said would be needed to stave off widespread starvation, and a minuscule fraction of the 500 aid trucks that entered Gaza every day prior to October of 2023.
Last week, Israel signed a $5 billion contract for 25 fighter jets produced in the United States.
On Tuesday, Reporter Matt Lee of the Associated Press asked State Department spokesperson Patel why the letter contained so many specific provisions if vague assurances of “improvement” in Gaza would be enough to satisfy the United States.
“Why did you bother to put in 350 trucks a day if it didn’t matter?” Lee asked.
“I’m not gonna speak to that,” Patel said.
“We didn’t give the Israelis 30 days, you guys did,” Lee responded. “And now those 30 days are up, and all the metrics you put out don’t matter.”
“We are not giving Israel a pass,” Patel said. “We want to see the totality of the humanitarian situation improve, and we think some of these steps will allow the conditions for that to continue to progress.” Some conditions, he said, are improving: a new border crossing was opened in central Gaza, and a limited number of people were allowed to move inland instead of being trapped on the beach in tents in winter.
On that same day, though, eight humanitarian organizations issued a report demonstrating that, per aid workers and international observers on the ground, the Biden administration’s conditions for continuing military aid had not been reached.
“Israel not only failed to meet the US criteria that would indicate support to the humanitarian response, but concurrently took actions that dramatically worsened the situation on the ground, particularly in Northern Gaza,” the eight organizations, including Oxfam and MedGlobal, wrote. “That situation is in an even more dire state today than a month ago.”
Nonetheless, the State Department has not indicated that they will follow through on their threats to suspend arms shipments: and, in fact, just last week, Israel signed a $5 billion contract for 25 new fighter jets produced in the United States as part of continuing aid.
In mid-October, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin sent a strongly worded letter to top Israeli officials. In the note, they made clear the United States was aware of Israel’s blocking of aid into the north of Gaza. They demanded that Israel improve humanitarian conditions by letting in 350 trucks of food aid per day, ending the forced evacuation of north Gaza, and opening more crossings into the territory. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United Nations ambassador for the US, said such moves were necessary to combat a “policy of starvation.” If Israel failed to do so within 30 days, Blinken and Austin threatened, the US would consider enforcing arms-transfer laws which prohibit sending weapons to nations that block humanitarian aid.
“30 days are up, and all the metrics you put out don’t matter.”
Yesterday, thirty days later, Biden administration officials declared they would not be enforcing their own deadlines. Military aid to Israel will not end, despite the fact that even data from Israel’s own government finds the amount of aid entering Gaza decreased between September and November.
In a November 12th State Department press briefing, officials were unable to answer reporters’ questions about whether or not Israel managed to hit that 30-day deadline. “We at this time have not made an assessment that the Israelis are in violation of US law,” department spokesperson Vedant Patel said.
In their October 13 letter, Blinken and Austin said the Israeli government must reaffirm “that there will be no Israeli government policy of forced evacuation of civilians from northern to southern Gaza.” This, also, has not happened. Instead, an Israeli Defense Force general told the media last week that civilians who have fled the north will not be allowed to return to their homes.
COGAT, the Israeli agency overseeing humanitarian aid in Gaza, told reporters Tuesday that “Israel allowed a daily average of 76 trucks over the past 30 days.” The United Nations stated that the number is closer to 50—far lower than the 350 the US said would be needed to stave off widespread starvation, and a minuscule fraction of the 500 aid trucks that entered Gaza every day prior to October of 2023.
Last week, Israel signed a $5 billion contract for 25 fighter jets produced in the United States.
On Tuesday, Reporter Matt Lee of the Associated Press asked State Department spokesperson Patel why the letter contained so many specific provisions if vague assurances of “improvement” in Gaza would be enough to satisfy the United States.
“Why did you bother to put in 350 trucks a day if it didn’t matter?” Lee asked.
“I’m not gonna speak to that,” Patel said.
“We didn’t give the Israelis 30 days, you guys did,” Lee responded. “And now those 30 days are up, and all the metrics you put out don’t matter.”
“We are not giving Israel a pass,” Patel said. “We want to see the totality of the humanitarian situation improve, and we think some of these steps will allow the conditions for that to continue to progress.” Some conditions, he said, are improving: a new border crossing was opened in central Gaza, and a limited number of people were allowed to move inland instead of being trapped on the beach in tents in winter.
On that same day, though, eight humanitarian organizations issued a report demonstrating that, per aid workers and international observers on the ground, the Biden administration’s conditions for continuing military aid had not been reached.
“Israel not only failed to meet the US criteria that would indicate support to the humanitarian response, but concurrently took actions that dramatically worsened the situation on the ground, particularly in Northern Gaza,” the eight organizations, including Oxfam and MedGlobal, wrote. “That situation is in an even more dire state today than a month ago.”
Nonetheless, the State Department has not indicated that they will follow through on their threats to suspend arms shipments: and, in fact, just last week, Israel signed a $5 billion contract for 25 new fighter jets produced in the United States as part of continuing aid.
As the sun set over the New York Times building on election night, the Times Tech Guild—the union of workers that power the infrastructure for the company’s news, games, and cooking—closed out their second day on the picket line. Their strike, an attempt to push for a deal they’ve negotiated for over two years, might bring down tonight one of America’s most beloved and beloathed election-night prognosticators: the Needle.
As reporter and polls expert Nate Cohn explained on X, the tech team “built and maintain the infrastructure that feeds [the Needle] data and lets [the Times] publish [it] on the internet.” As of the time of publication, the Needle is up. But it’s unclear if without the guild’s work it will last.
The Tech Guild wants pay equity, remote work protections, and—top of many minds on Tuesday night—protection from being arbitrarily fired, known as “just cause.”
The 173-year-old Times has over the past several years transformed into something more like a tech company with the news as a key, but not singular, component. Its games and cooking apps drive subscriptions; it has expanded into audio and sports. With that transformation has come a change in how workers organize at the company. Now, alongside their newspaper and advertising workers’ unions, the paper hosts one of the largest tech unions in the country.
Kathy Zhang, unit chair for the New York Times Tech Guild, has had “probably hundreds of conversations” with her fellow workers leading up to this moment. I asked her about the picket line, the Needle, and why workers are striking.
What would you normally be doing on election day if you weren’t on the picket line?
I am a senior analytics manager on the audience team at the New York Times, which means that I pull data around traffic trends, and I look at how people are listening to audio and engaging with our coverage.
This will be my third presidential election here. I’ve been at the Times for nine years. In 2017, on January 20th, inauguration day, I was the person who stayed up past 1 a.m. waiting for our data to come through to let our editors know what election traffic looked like. Election day is one day, but election season is a long time, and we spend a long time prepping for it. It’s unfortunate the management let it drag out this far.
I know you all have been saying this could happen for some time, right?
We have been bargaining for almost two and a half years. We started bargaining in July of 2022. It was September 10 when we passed a strike authorization vote with 95 percent support. We told management the very next day, we gave them two months in advance. We were in bargaining all last week, but on Sunday night, management decided to walk away from the table. So the ball is literally in their court.
Online, I’ve seen right-wing media focusing in on some unusual concerns they claim you’re bargaining over stuff, like pet bereavement leave, trigger warnings on political topics, that kind of thing.
The most important issues that are unresolved right now are just cause—meaning that we can’t be fired for no reason whatsoever—and flexible work, so that people who have caretaking responsibilities or live hundreds of miles away aren’t forced to come into the office. We’re a unit in which, you know, our members see a lot of inequity in how we’re paid. We want to be paid fairly.
Management, instead of talking about the actual issues at play, has been seeding talking points to right-wing media. It’s actually pretty depressing coming from a newspaper that’s supposed to care about independent journalism; they’re putting misleading talking points out there.
I saw a clip on Fox News that said we were looking for job security for illegals. Now, I’ve spent a lot of time working on the visas and immigration proposals that we have on the table. I don’t know what job security for illegals means, because it’s literally about people with visas, right? We care about people getting notice about whether they’re going to get their visas sponsored.
I myself am an immigrant, I am a naturalized citizen, and I care about democracy—that’s why I’m out here in a union! It was a complete mischaracterization of our proposal. It brought up stuff that was maybe on the table two years ago, for maybe seven minutes, and hasn’t been talked about since. I think it’s really telling that the company would rather talk about things they think make us look like we are being unreasonable, rather than talk about the fact that this company has authorized $400 million in stock buybacks, which is money that goes directly into shareholders’ pockets, not to workers.
It doesn’t do anything other than make rich people richer, and they’d rather threaten election night coverage than come to a fair deal with their workers.
If this continues, how is the strike going to affect coverage during and beyond election night?
There are so many interconnected systems that power what we work on, I couldn’t even tell you all the things that could go wrong or could maybe not go wrong. And there are systems that readers aren’t gonna see that will cause a lot of problems for us.
But we have a lot of support from our colleagues in the newsroom and in advertising. They’ve written letters to management telling them that they need us. Our newsroom colleagues are the people who supplied our lunch today—some of them are on the picket line right now in their free time before their shift starts or after they’ve already worked a whole day.
This is the biggest tech-worker strike that I’m aware of in American history. What makes you all different from other tech unions? What’s helped you get this far?
We are the largest “high-tech” union in the country with bargaining rights, but we had a lot of support and solidarity from other tech workers who have been unionized.
I think part of it is, that the New York Times is a newspaper company, but what other newspaper has six or seven hundred tech workers in the company? Sometimes, power comes down to the sheer number of people that you have. We have hundreds of people, and that’s hard to organize! But it also means that when people are standing together in solidarity, when we are out here fighting, we know that we can get through this.
So, right now we’re fighting to make sure that we have more pay equity. We’re fighting to make sure that people just don’t get fired for no reason. That’s really all we’re fighting for.
One of the most amazing things that I’ve seen is people that I knew voted against unionization and voted against the strike authorization vote, are on the picket line today. Because when it comes down to it, which side are you on, right?
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
This year, America’s largest stateis primed to play a key role in deciding who controls the House of Representatives.
Incumbent Mary Peltola (D-Alaska)—the state’s first Native woman elected to Congress and the first Democratic representative in 50 years—will defend her seat in a close race against challenger Nick Begich III. Begich is a software developer, part-owner of a conspiracy-theory publishing company, and the surprise Republican heir to a several-generation Democratic political lineage.
Peltola’s win was a surprise upset in 2022. She beat former vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin on a campaign of “fish, family, and freedom,” promising to “ignore Lower 48 partisanship” and focus on solutions. In Congress, she has been a member of the new “Blue Dog Democrats,” a loose group of 11 Democratic members who push centrist policies.
Alaska uses ranked-choice voting. So, while the winner will almost certainly be Peltola or Begich, the secondary selections of voters who chose minor-candidate voters will matter, too. (The process will also slow down ballot tabulation, meaning we may not know the outcome on Election Day itself.)
In Alaska, rural areas tend to hew to the Democratic Party line, while cities vote red. It’s a place where the top issues aren’t the “culture wars you’ll see downstate,” as Michelle Sparck, director of the nonprofit Get Out The Native Vote, put it. “60 percent of Alaskans do not identify for one party or another.” Instead, the things people are likely to hinge their vote on are much more concrete: fisheries regulation, oil policy, and electric subsidies.
Overall, Peltola has anchored her campaign on keeping the issues local. At an October 10th debate, she turned a question about immigration into an answer about “outmigration.” For the past 12 years, more Alaskans have left the state than moved there—pushed out by high prices and limited job opportunities.
“We do need immigration reform,” she said, but “I don’t think that this is necessarily an Alaskan problem. This is definitely a lower 48 problem…Alaska is desperate for workers and we have an outmigration problem in Alaska.”
Peltola has spent most of her time in Congress working on issues immediately relevant to her base: the funding of broadband internet in Alaska’s rural areas, and, of course, fish. Throughout much of the state, subsistence hunters are facing “salmon scarcity” in warming waters, and the state’s fishing industry is losing billions per year.
And while abortion wasn’t always an issue that could be tackled from the center-leaning position Peltola occupies, she’s made it a cornerstone of her re-election campaign. “Being pregnant and delivering a baby is one of the most lethal things a woman can do in her lifetime,” she said recently. “Myriad things can go wrong, and it is not anyone’s place in DC or in the state legislature to get between a woman and her doctor.”
Nick Begich and Peltola have a lot in common: they both support military spending in Alaska, the development of a trans-Alaska natural gas pipeline, and Second Amendment rights.
Begich, however, has also said he will not support federal funding for abortions, and has, like many Republican candidates, spent time during debates criticizing the size of the federal budget. The longest paragraph on Begich’s policy-positions webpage is about cryptocurrency’s importance to the future of Alaska. While he talks a lot about the Second Amendment, Peltola is the candidate who’s been endorsed by the National Rifle Association.
John Howe of the Alaskan Independence Party, whose platform includes abolishing all taxation, will likely receive some small percentage of Alaska’s 600,000 votes. And Eric Hafner, who is currently imprisoned in New Jersey for bomb threats, is also running as a Democrat in Alaska, though he has never been there. (Hafner also ran for Congress in Hawaii in 2016 and Oregon in 2018, the latter campaign while on the run from the law.)
Neither the taxation abolisher nor the imprisoned man have much likelihood of winning the race. They might, however, be part of tipping the scales towards Begich, as Republican consultant Matt Shuckerow speculated to the New York Times recently. “The chances of Eric Hafner having an impact on this election are legitimate and real,” he said. “This is an extremely tight race and every vote will count.” If voters pick Howe first and Begich second, for example, their second-place vote would count for more than their first-place one.
Begich is loyal to his party, and in a state that is technically majority-Republican, that might be enough to win. That technical majority, however, doesn’t tell the whole story. In the 86 percent of Alaska communities that aren’t connected by roads—generally, majority-Native —residents aren’t likely to declare a party affiliation. “Long-term investment in party politics is really the privilege of a road-system people.” Michelle Sparck of Get Out The Native Vote says. Those communities, too, could sway the election.
But disinvestment in the infrastructure of voting in rural, majority-Indigenous districts can mean low turnout. In 2020, the Northwest Arctic Borough, where 83.8 percent of voting-age residents are Indigenous, had a turnout of only 38 percent. In many cases, counting those votes requires flying ballots into the cities from small, isolated villages in bush planes. “Even if weather wasn’t a barrier, there’s all kinds of systemic barriers that are at play that create a chronic polling problem for a lot of our rural villages,” Sparck said. In Bethel, Peltola’s hometown, 56 percent of voters turned out in 2022. It is a town of 6,000 with only one polling location.
Alaska’s race is one of only a few that will determine control of the House of Representatives. Since the state only has one House seat, it can’t be gerrymandered—making it a true toss-up in a way few other House districts can be.
On the final day before the election, Peltola’s social media posts were less focused on Democratic control of the house, though, and more on, once again, fish. “Tomorrow, we choose the future of our fisheries,” Peltola wrote. “Do we work to get back to abundance and keep our communities food secure for generations to come, or do we see our fisheries collapse?”
“When Mary and I were kids, our rivers were lousy with fish,” Sparck, of Get Out The Native Vote, remembered. “We don’t have that anymore. If we had crickets in Alaska, all you’d hear is crickets out there. And it’s a crying shame that we don’t even have enough fish coming up our rivers anymore for reliable subsistence. It’s literally under our feet, what is happening with the world.”
It was Friday, September 6, in the town of Beita, and just like on many Fridays in the West Bank, Mariam watched as people gathered to pray and protest the construction of an Israeli settlement.
For Mariam (whose name has been changed to protect against retribution from Israeli settlers and police), the routine was normal. A few dozen people gathered at midday in a garden at the foot of Mount Sabih: old men, young boys, and international “protective presence” activists like her. A new volunteer, Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, was with Mariam. A recent graduate from the University of Washington, it was only her third day in the West Bank. It would be, Mariam realized, Eygi’s first demonstration.
For decades, settlers have expanded into the West Bank, taking Palestinian land. Over the past several years, Beita has become a bulwark of Palestinian civil resistance against the Israeli outpost of Evyatar, which was built on a nearby hilltop in 2021. In July, the United Nations’ top court declared that settlements in the West Bank—housing over 500,000 Jewish Israelis, buoyed by religious fervor and generousgovernment tax breaks—are illegal under international law. But that same month, Israel’s government moved to formally authorize Evyatar and four other settlements rather than push settlers to withdraw as the International Court of Justice ordered.
Before the protest began, international activists and Palestinians shared coffee and dates; photos from that morning show Eygi grinning in a bright purple shirt and sunglasses. She was one of many international volunteers who have traveled to the West Bank since the early 2000s to accompany Palestinians—mostly in villages under threat from settlers—throughout their day-to-day lives to document instances of violence, home demolition, and displacement.
It began as one of the “calmer days,” Mariam remembers. Then, there was a push up the mountain by protesters and tear gas thrown by Israeli forces. Palestinian protesters had barely finished praying when soldiers advanced on them, Oren Ziv, an Israeli journalist with the outlets +972Magazine and Local Call, told Mother Jones. “The army was dispersing the demo with tear gas and live ammunition at the start”— soldiers firing bullets from the very beginning.
Mariam, Eygi, and another volunteer ran downhill to take shelter behind olive trees. A group of teenage boys farther up the road shouted at the soldiers on top of the hill. What was left of the protest, Mariam said, dispersed, and things quieted down as protesters cleaned tear gas out of their eyes.
About 20 minutes later, shots rang out once more. A bullet reportedly hit a Palestinian teenager in the leg. Another hit Eygi in the head.
Mariam rode in the ambulance with her to Rafidia hospital in Nablus, where, according to the hospital director, Eygi was declared dead. “We were just standing there, clearly visible to the Israeli army,” Mariam said. Because women from Beita rarely come to the protests, it was, to Mariam, clear to the soldiers that Eygi was an international volunteer. She thinks the purpose was obvious: “It was an intentional shot.”
The United States has not made that same determination. State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel said the government takes “the safety and security of American citizens incredibly seriously.” Shortly after Eygi’s killing, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “No one should be shot and killed for attending a protest.”
But US government statements have stopped short of criticism of Israel. The State Department has said it will wait for Israel to investigate and determine what happened that day. An initial press release from the Israel Defense Forces suggested that the gun was not aimed at Eygi, but at an “instigator” of what they describe as a “violent riot.” The IDF has said it is conducting a formal investigation and has not said when findings might be available.
“She was a human being. She wasn’t a symbol. She had a life. She has people that are in deep pain because of what’s happened, and the inaction of our government only deepens that pain.”
“I mean, the secretary of state himself called Aysenur’s killing unprovoked and unjustified,” Eygi’s husband, Hamid Ali, told Mother Jones. “Why are we allowing the country that admitted to killing my wife to conduct their own investigation on themselves? In what situation does that make sense?”
A month after Eygi’s death, I began to speak with her fellow protective presence activists, many of whom have remained in the West Bank as the olive harvest—always a season of increased violence—begins. The US government response has disillusioned them. It is now clear, they say, that the US has no interest in protecting them if doing so would mean critiquing Israel and perhaps would rather that they just go away.
“The Israeli authorities now are just trying to get rid of us,” Mariam said.
Noah, another volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement—the activist group that brought Eygi to the West Bank—says they feel similarly horrified by the US response. (Noah’s name, like Mariam’s, has been changed for their safety.) Noah helped Eygi coordinate her travel, texting her about picking out a SIM card and planning her flights. After the shooting, Noah was left to notify Eygi’s family when she died.
“They murdered Aysenur,” Noah told Mother Jones. “And somehow, they’re getting away with it because the United States is not willing to take a stand for Aysenur or for all the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have been murdered by Israel.”
The first time President Joe Biden addressed Eygi’s death, he said, “Apparently, it was an accident.” (A Biden administration official told Mother Jones, “He did not misspeak, that’s what the Israeli investigation concluded.”) A day later, he called the death “unacceptable,” a “tragic error”—but he promised the Israeli army would investigate its own soldiers. Turkey, the country where Eygi spent her early childhood and held dual citizenship, has pushed for an independent investigation. In the month since, there has been little further US response.
Over the past four years, at least 15 Palestinian protesters have been killed on that hillside where Eygi was shot.
Ziv, the Israeli reporter, called the US response naive. “The army doesn’t really want to investigate itself,” he said. “If they were under real pressure, they would have published something like, ‘We detained a soldier, we investigated a soldier, we took their weapons,’ [and] I think, if there was real pressure from the US, they could have done that.”
For Eygi’s family and supporters, that is not enough. More than 100 members of Congress, led by Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Adam Smith. (D-Wash.), are pushing the US government to conduct an independent investigation to determine whether what happened that day constitutes a homicide. “I have had numerous briefings with State Department officials, and I have been in close touch with Eygi’s family, as her father is my constituent,” Jayapal wrote in a statement October 9. “I am frankly appalled with the lack of movement on this case.”
The State Department has been in contact with Eygi’s family since her death, and a Biden administration official told Mother Jones on Monday that the White House had reached out to her family. Earlier this year, Biden said, “If you harm an American, we will respond.” But as of Thursday, Eygi’s husband said he has heard nothing from Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris.
“We were expecting to hear from either the president or the vice president by now, especially since they have expressed, from their statements, that this was something that shouldn’t have happened,” Ali told Mother Jones. “It’s kind of hurtful to have not heard from them.”
IDF violence against Palestinians and their supporters in the West Bank is rarely investigated. The Israeli anti-occupation nonprofit Yesh Din reports that between 2017 and 2021, the Israeli military received 409 reports alleging a soldier killed a Palestinian. Only three resulted in indictments.
Protective presence activists know their work is dangerous. “But it’s not a suicide mission,” Noah told me. “You don’t go there expecting to be killed.”
Noah often thinks about how when soldiers and settlers do harm to Americans in the West Bank, they might be using American guns to do so. “Every time someone’s shot in the West Bank, it’s almost certainly weapons that were…originally purchased from the US or purchased with money from the US,” Noah said.
Although it’s unclear what type of gun was used to kill Eygi, IDF soldiers have over the years shot at other protesters with .22-caliber Rugerrifles manufactured in the United States and used for “riot control.”
As Israel’s war on Gaza expands into Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank are getting less attention—even as they increase their violence. International Crisis Group, a think tank that monitors conflict globally, stated in a major report that there have been over 1,000 documented instances of settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank in the past year in which over 1,300 Palestinians have been driven from their homes.
“We do hope that, with our presence, there’s a bit less violence from the army,” said Mariam, the volunteer who was with Eygi as she died.
But the Palestinians of Beita tell her to be mindful that her international status is not a cure. “They always warn us to be careful, and they don’t want us to get injured, because they know that once you’re in the West Bank, the Israeli army doesn’t really differentiate,” she said.
Eygi was not the only American shot by Israeli forces in the West Bank this year. Tawfic Abdel Jabbar and Mohammad Alkhdour—both 17-year-old US citizens—were killed in the West Bank in 2024. On each occasion, the US government has condemned the killings without launching investigations. Daniel Santiago, a teacher from New Jersey volunteering with the protective presence group Faz3a, was shot in the leg on August 9 in Beita. Over the past four years, at least 15 Palestinian protesters have been killed on that hillside where both Santiago and Eygi were shot, according to human rights research group Al-Haq; thousands more have been injured.
Santiago is now back home recovering from his wounds. He wrote in a recent op-ed that his hopes for an official US reprisal for his injury by a foreign army are vanishingly slim: “Through the power of our passports and our phones, we hoped to document their crimes and provide a buffer between Palestinians and Israeli forces. But as we’ve seen over the last year, the blood of non-Israelis is not only meaningless, it is praised and humored. International outrage is either non-existent or fleeting to the point of insult.”
Joshua,a PhD candidate studying settler violence, traveled to the South Hebron Hills—a few hours’ drive from where Eygi was killed—in February of this year with the protective presence group the Center for Jewish Nonviolence. Since October 7, 2023, Joshua says, the distinction between settler and soldier has faded: These days, he refers to the armed men in IDF fatigues who patrol the West Bank as settler-soldiers, eliding the distinction altogether. Some are active-duty soldiers, others reservists—or even heavily armed civilians living in the West Bank’s settlements and outposts.
“Something new is happening,” he said, “which is that the near-complete immunity granted to nonstate settler actors [has] allowed them to basically do anything they want, including put on military garb and patrol the place and arrest people and harass people with no consequence.”
Israeli politicians have continually said foreigners in the West Bank are the ones creating the violence, calling them violent anarchists or terrorists. That rhetoric, promoted by ministers like Itamar Ben-Gvir—who established a new police team specifically to monitor left-wing activists in April, calling it “the team for handling the anarchists”—was used not only to threaten the foreign activists, but the Palestinians they work with. “Settlement emergency squads” and civilian settlers have been furnished with military-grade weapons by Ben-Gvir’s decree.
“If you come back with these anarchists, we’re going to shoot you,” Joshua remembered a settler threatening a Palestinian friend. He wondered if that meant his presence was making the village safer or putting it in more danger.
With the yearlyolive harvest underway, the violence has not slowed down. On October 15, two American activists with Faz3a were arrested, charged with entering a closed military zone and “identifying with a terrorist organization,” and slated for deportation, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The next day, Hanan Abd Rahman Abu Salameh, a 59-year-old Palestinian woman, was killed while harvesting olives by someone in IDF fatigues. (Reporters initially were unable to clarify whether the killer was or was not an active-duty soldier.) Patel, the State Department spokesperson, called her death “incredibly concerning” but once again did not call for an independent investigation. An IDF spokesperson said that the incident is under investigation and that “the commanding officer present during the incident has been suspended from her duties.”
Palestinians going about their daily life are much more likely to end up on the wrong end of a soldier’s gun than American solidarity activists. The color of Eygi’s passport brought her death into the news—but that same day, not far from Beita, a 13-year-old Palestinian girl named Bana was killed by Israeli soldiers, too.
Eygi was given a hero’s funeral in Palestine. Back home in the US, her family is still waiting for a full response from the government. “What we’re asking for is not uncommon,” Ali said. “Americans were killed on October 7. Each one of their deaths was investigated, as it should have been. We know this is possible, and it’s something that should happen; I’m glad that it happened. It seems to be not as much of a priority to investigate Americans that are killed by Israel.”
Ali continued: “She was a human being. She wasn’t a symbol. She had a life. She has people that are in deep pain because of what’s happened, and the inaction of our government only deepens that pain.”
On October 26th, Donald Trump promised that “WHEN I’M PRESIDENT THE MCDONALD’S ICE CREAM MACHINES WILL WORK GREAT AGAIN!” But it is Lina Khan, Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, who, earlier today, announced she had actually done something about it.
The day before Trump’s proclamation, the United States Copyright Office announced a new copyright exemption that will grant some small business owners and franchisees—such as those operating the 13,000 McDonald’s in the United States—the “right to repair” the machinery within their own shops. Back in March, the FTC submitted a comment to the US Copyright Office asking to extend the right to repair certain equipment, including commercial soft-serve equipment.
The saga is in miniature a good example of how to potentially combat Trumpism. There is a problem: To many, the McDonald’s soft-serve extruders of this great nation seem perpetually broken (a fact that McDonalds itself has acknowledged). Trump vaguely promised to do something about it. Khan—on the vanguard of a new class of anti-monopolistic Democrats—moved aggressively to try to push a change unpopular with business interests, solve the problem, and get you ice cream more easily.
The new ruling could be a game-changer for drive-through employees, too. They often contend with rageful customers over broken devices. “Victory is sweet,” wrote Elizabeth Chamberlain of iFixIt. “This is a big win—and we’ll be celebrating with ice cream!—but copyright law still needs fixing before we’re free to fix everything we own.”
McDonald’s soft serve machines are manufactured by the Taylor Company. Since 1956, those soft-serve machines could only be legally repaired by Taylor Company licensed technicians—and if anyone without that license attempted to repair the machines, they voided the warranty. That, the FTC said, squashes competition for replacement parts and for repair technicians.
It shows Khan’s knack for proving the government can do things to help make life suck less. And it is a window into how Khan has used the FTC to respond to American grievances.
In 2020, an independent developer scraped data from delivery apps to create a constantly updating map of broken and unbroken ice cream machines. (Called McBroken, it showed that 32 percent of all McDonald’s soft serve machines were out of order at the time of this writing.) In 2021, the FTC launched an inquiry that showed that the broken ice cream machine memes populating the internet contain a grain of truth. When they asked franchisees about the issue, they called the devices overly complicated and hard to fix. In 2023, iFixit, a DIY-focused website and tools retailer, published a breakdown of the machine’s “easily replaceable” parts which frequently break, and which McDonald’s workers were nonetheless forbidden to replace themselves. It seems simple and unspectacular when you lay it out, but the basics are here: hear about a problem, ask why it’s happening, try to find a solution.
Khan has earned a reputation for big moves. She has introduced sweeping crackdowns against companies the FTC considers to be monopolies, such as Amazon, and pushed for consumer-protection interventions like the “click to cancel” rule, designed to make the process of canceling unused gym and magazine subscriptions less arcane. On October 31st, the House Oversight Committee called for her to be replaced, claiming that she is infecting the agency with “left-wing ideology.” Elon Musk tweeted today that “[Khan] will be fired soon.” (Under Musk’s plan for a $2 trillion cut to the federal budget, it’s possible that the FTC would be eliminated entirely.)
Even some Harris-aligned figures, such as billionaires Mark Cuban and Reid Hoffman, have publicly jostled for a less active FTC and to potentially replace Khan.
The ice cream saga may prove why her ways of running the FTC are so valuable.
On October 26th, Donald Trump promised that “WHEN I’M PRESIDENT THE MCDONALD’S ICE CREAM MACHINES WILL WORK GREAT AGAIN!” But it is Lina Khan, Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, who, earlier today, announced she had actually done something about it.
The day before Trump’s proclamation, the United States Copyright Office announced a new copyright exemption that will grant some small business owners and franchisees—such as those operating the 13,000 McDonald’s in the United States—the “right to repair” the machinery within their own shops. Back in March, the FTC submitted a comment to the US Copyright Office asking to extend the right to repair certain equipment, including commercial soft-serve equipment.
The saga is in miniature a good example of how to potentially combat Trumpism. There is a problem: To many, the McDonald’s soft-serve extruders of this great nation seem perpetually broken (a fact that McDonalds itself has acknowledged). Trump vaguely promised to do something about it. Khan—on the vanguard of a new class of anti-monopolistic Democrats—moved aggressively to try to push a change unpopular with business interests, solve the problem, and get you ice cream more easily.
The new ruling could be a game-changer for drive-through employees, too. They often contend with rageful customers over broken devices. “Victory is sweet,” wrote Elizabeth Chamberlain of iFixIt. “This is a big win—and we’ll be celebrating with ice cream!—but copyright law still needs fixing before we’re free to fix everything we own.”
McDonald’s soft serve machines are manufactured by the Taylor Company. Since 1956, those soft-serve machines could only be legally repaired by Taylor Company licensed technicians—and if anyone without that license attempted to repair the machines, they voided the warranty. That, the FTC said, squashes competition for replacement parts and for repair technicians.
It shows Khan’s knack for proving the government can do things to help make life suck less. And it is a window into how Khan has used the FTC to respond to American grievances.
In 2020, an independent developer scraped data from delivery apps to create a constantly updating map of broken and unbroken ice cream machines. (Called McBroken, it showed that 32 percent of all McDonald’s soft serve machines were out of order at the time of this writing.) In 2021, the FTC launched an inquiry that showed that the broken ice cream machine memes populating the internet contain a grain of truth. When they asked franchisees about the issue, they called the devices overly complicated and hard to fix. In 2023, iFixit, a DIY-focused website and tools retailer, published a breakdown of the machine’s “easily replaceable” parts which frequently break, and which McDonald’s workers were nonetheless forbidden to replace themselves. It seems simple and unspectacular when you lay it out, but the basics are here: hear about a problem, ask why it’s happening, try to find a solution.
Khan has earned a reputation for big moves. She has introduced sweeping crackdowns against companies the FTC considers to be monopolies, such as Amazon, and pushed for consumer-protection interventions like the “click to cancel” rule, designed to make the process of canceling unused gym and magazine subscriptions less arcane. On October 31st, the House Oversight Committee called for her to be replaced, claiming that she is infecting the agency with “left-wing ideology.” Elon Musk tweeted today that “[Khan] will be fired soon.” (Under Musk’s plan for a $2 trillion cut to the federal budget, it’s possible that the FTC would be eliminated entirely.)
Even some Harris-aligned figures, such as billionaires Mark Cuban and Reid Hoffman, have publicly jostled for a less active FTC and to potentially replace Khan.
The ice cream saga may prove why her ways of running the FTC are so valuable.
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa has volunteered as a trauma surgeon in Ukraine, Haiti, Burkina Faso, and Ghana. But when he went to Gaza in March and April of this year, it changed him. Sidhwa had never seen so much horror in his life.
“There’s nothing like Gaza right now,” he said. “Almost 100 percent of Gaza’s population is homeless and displaced…does that sound like a place where people are going to survive?”
With international journalists banned from Gaza and Palestinian journalists openly targeted by the Israeli military, international medical aid workers have become some of the few people able to tell the world about the toll of the war.
When the New York Times approached Sidhwa to write for its opinion section about what he saw in Gaza—widespread starvation, collapsed sanitary systems—he took it as an opportunity. He went beyond writing from his own experience and corroborated his account with 64 other doctors. In particular, he was haunted by something he saw again and again: children shot in the head.
“Nearly every day I was there, I saw a new young child who had been shot in the head or the chest, virtually all of whom went on to die,” he wrote. At first, he thought this was an anomaly, the work of “a particularly sadistic soldier located nearby.” But when he asked other health care workers, he found that dozens were seeing the same thing.
After his essay in the Times was published, prominent right-wing accounts on X and Instagram, as well as publications like the New York Sun and Israel Hayom, began insisting that the CT images included in Sidhwa’s essay—showing bullets embedded in children’s skulls—had been photoshopped and that Sidhwa was a propagandist desperate for the fall of Israel.
The New York Times did something unusual in response: It released an editors’ note defending its own fact-checking process. “While our editors have photographs to corroborate the CT scan images, because of their graphic nature, we decided these photos—of children with gunshot wounds to the head or neck—were too horrific for publication,” Times editor Kathleen Kingsbury wrote. “We made a similar decision for the additional 40-plus photographs and videos supplied by the doctors and nurses surveyed that depicted young children with similar gunshot wounds.”
Sidhwa found the pushback odd. “I don’t really care about Palestinian nationalism. In fact, I don’t really care about any nationalism as a concept,” he told me. The issue, he said, is simpler than that: “My government, meaning me, is involved in major crimes, and I don’t want that.”
On October 18, as reported by the Washington Post, Israel banned six medical aid organizations—including the Palestinian American Medical Association (PAMA), which Sidhwa has worked with—from entry to Gaza going forward. The WHO received no explanation from Israel as to why.
I spoke with Sidhwa by Zoom between surgeries about his work in Gaza, his advocacy since then, and why he’s still hoping—even now—that the US government might be pressured to change course.
Let’s go back to before all the media attention. How did you end up going to Gaza?
So a very large number of physicians, and especially surgeons, have been killed and probably about an equal number have fled.
Mark Perlmutter, he was involved in a telemedicine project with Gazans. He’s an orthopedic surgeon. He was looking at pre- and post-op X-rays, and he was like, “What on earth is this stuff? Who’s doing these operations?” He found out it was just junior residents or sometimes medical students. And he asked, “Where’s your attending?” And they said, “Well, he’s dead.”
We said: Well, we will go provide that service.
I was at European Hospital from March 25 to April 8. At that time, European Hospital was easily the best-resourced city block in all of Gaza—and it was still a total disaster. There were 10,000 to 15,000 people sheltering on the grounds of the hospital. I walked the hospital grounds several times. I was able to find four toilets, so 10,000 to 15,000 people, four latrines, one water spigot.
Feroze Sidhwa
I got the chance to go to Rafah, before it was obliterated, and drive through Khan Younis. And while we’re driving through, there was a group of four boys, probably like 10 to 12 years old. Young kids. They’re going through a garbage heap, trying to find anything, and they’re working together to do it. It’s pretty obvious that this wasn’t the first time they had done this.
On the way through Khan Younis, I told the driver to stop. He said it’s not safe, but I asked him to stop, just for a second. I got out and I looked around.
I don’t think, if I grew up at this intersection, I would know where I am. There weren’t any buildings that were more than 3 feet tall anymore. It looked like an atomic bomb hit the place.
Since your New York Times article came out, you’ve been the subject of a backlash campaign, with people claiming to be former law enforcement officers suggesting that the X-rays of children with bullets in their skulls embedded in the article were fabricated. What’s your reaction to those claims?
The article polled 65 American health care workers—doctors, nurses, one paramedic—and gathered their experience in the Gaza Strip. How many of them saw children who had been shot in the head? How many of them regularly? How many of them saw malnourishment and easily treatable infections? How many of them saw infants die from malnutrition or dehydration? How many saw such extreme, universal psychiatric distress in small children, to the point that small children were actually suicidal?
It’s 65, which represents, as far as I can tell, about half of the health care workers in the US that have been to Gaza since October 7 [of 2023].
The New York Times fact-checking process is fanatical. It’s beyond anything I could have possibly imagined. I don’t know if people realize it took months to write this. It was an incredible effort of time and resources, on my part and theirs—the team of four people working on it.
So then when all this manufactured nonsense from people claiming to be either doctors or ballistics experts, none of whom are either one of these things, came up…
I asked them: Guys, how are we going to prove that? They’re like: Oh, Feroze, we have photographs of these kids. We have the entire CT image on video. Like, there’s no question. I saw 13 kids who had been shot in the head. So there were almost certainly more kids who came in when I wasn’t in the ER, got shot in the head, died, and were sent directly to the morgue.
On the occasions where the child survived, and I think this only happened once, honestly—on the occasion when the child survived long enough and there was family available in the ICU the next day to ask what happened—they would say, the kids were just playing. I never heard from a family that they were in a crossfire, that there was lots of fighting and the bullet went through the window; I never heard that.
What do you think people are getting out of ignoring the evidence here? When you spoke at the Uncommitted press conference at the DNC, you referenced the book Slavery by Another Name and talked about what Douglas Blackmon calls “moral rationalization”—when people know something’s wrong and illegal and continue to do it anyway. Is that part of what’s happening here?
The book is about how slavery was resurrected in the Reconstruction era after the Civil War. And it’s quite literally chattel slavery was just reinstituted in the South, maybe on a smaller scale, but nevertheless reinstituted. And this is under Northern occupation, with the Northern judicial systems, you know?
It’s interesting, because you read through it and you think, how could this have happened? Like, slavery was a large part of the reason for the war, and then after the war…the whole society just knew when to lie and when to tell the truth. They knew who to beat up and who not to beat up. They knew who to kill, who not to kill, who to torture, who not to torture.
I don’t remember the exact words I used at the DNC, but I said something like, lying became a virtue. It just turned all of our normal moral values on their head when the whole society committed to this transparently and obviously immoral enterprise.
It’s hard not to see that here.
I hope the fact that this piece was published in the New York Times—and you gotta remember that the Times opinion section reached out to me, I didn’t go to them—I hope that it represents a change in the elite consensus around Gaza.
I think a lot of people have a misunderstanding. They say, “Oh, look, the mainstream is becoming pro-Palestine.” I seriously doubt that. I think there’s a recognition that the Israelis have kind of gone nuts in Gaza and that American objectives there have been achieved. And the extent of what has been done to Gaza—it takes about 10 minutes just to describe the actual extent of destruction and devastation of the Gaza Strip in any accurate form.
How does it feel to see people online refusing to believe these images are real?
I think that’s just, it’s completely amongst die-hard believers.
I’m not Israeli, I’m not Jewish, I’m not Palestinian, I’m not Arab, I’m not Muslim, I’m not Christian—like, I don’t know how much further away I can get from the conflict. It’s just got nothing to do with me, except for the fact that I’m an American.
After this is done, we Americans need to take a long, hard look at ourselves. What does it say that the United States doesn’t have a mainstream political party for which genocide is just a no-go?
The US entered four or five caveats to its signing of the of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. So it basically immunized itself from the convention. And yeah, that was [under then-President Ronald] Reagan. But still, we don’t have a mainstream political party that is opposed to genocide on principle.
That’s very scary, given the power of the state that we live in. My intention in writing the piece was to bring people to such realizations. It doesn’t seem to have worked.
Beyond your media work, you helped lead this effort to send Joe Biden a letter signed by, I think, 99 volunteer medical professionals who served in Gaza. And in that letter, you all asked him to meet with you and support an arms embargo. Have you received any response to that letter from the administration?
No, nothing, which is quite frustrating. I don’t know how often almost a hundred doctors send a letter to the president of the United States, but it doesn’t happen very often. So I’m kind of surprised that we received literally no response whatsoever.
I’m not that important of a person, I understand that. But I mean, on that letter are veterans, are reservists, are people whose names don’t sound scary like mine: Monica, Nina, Mike, Mark, Adam. It’s not just people that you can dismiss, and yet they’re dismissing them. It’s a little scary to see the American elite kind of ignoring its own. You kind of wonder how extreme that can get.
There’s no shortage of information about this. It’s not like Brett McGurk [the White House coordinator for the Middle East] and people like him and [Secretary of State] Antony Blinken—they know what’s going on. They’re not idiots. They can read English, just like I can. There’s no way they didn’t see that New York Times piece, or at least one of their aides did and told them about it.
If I could, I’d say: “Mr. Biden, the Israelis have decided to turn Gaza into a howling wilderness, and there are a million children there. You don’t have to let the Israelis keep spitting in your face like this. You can just tell them the money’s gone, the arms are gone. Withdraw from Gaza, withdraw from the West Bank, remove the settlements.”
Did you stay in touch with the folks you met at European Hospital? What have you been hearing from them?
There was a young man whose name was Abdulrahman Al-Najjar. And he was a third-year med student, a smart kid. If he was born in the US, he really would have gone far. He was probably 21 or 22 when I met him. The medical students were all at European Hospital because it was the safest place to be, and they had all been displaced from Gaza City and were living in tents just like everybody else. But they would come to the hospital, and they would help run the ER. Even the first-year med students, who know literally nothing about anything, they just came and did their job, and these are 18- and 19-year-old kids.
But Abdulrahman, he was a good kid. He wanted to be a plastic surgeon or maybe a neurosurgeon. And I remember when I left, he said: “Don’t remember Gaza like this. Come back when there’s no war, and we’ll go to the beach and we’ll have tea. And that’s how you should remember Gaza.” He’s a sweet kid, smart, you know?
He was killed in an airstrike on August 31. That’s the same day Hersh Goldberg-Polin is thought to have been killed. The 23-year-old Israeli American guy who was taken hostage at the music festival and was found dead in a Hamas tunnel, probably executed before he could be rescued.
When I saw the pictures of him in the news, I thought, good lord, he looks exactly like Abdul. If you look at them side by side, they’re almost identical human beings. They have the same smile. They have the same ears, the same nose. And I didn’t find out Abdul was dead until the day after.
I’m still in touch with some people. They don’t have much cell service. And my Arabic is as close to zero as you can imagine, so it’s hard.
As you know, six medical aid groups were banned from sending doctors to Gaza, including PAMA, the group that you’ve worked with. What was your reaction to that?
It’s kind of wild. COGAT, the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories—the part of the Israeli government that’s supposed to coordinate between humanitarian groups and the military—COGAT apparently provides nothing to the WHO in writing. I couldn’t believe that. I was like, this is insane, what are you talking about? All of this is just by word of mouth. It’s actually not even clear how many organizations have been banned or who they are. So who the hell knows?
They were western NGOs—some were American, some were Canadian, and one was from Australia or New Zealand. But they have Arab boards. That’s all it is. Arab names on their boards. It’s just outrageous. They knew they could get away with it, and they did. No one even claims that there has ever been a security incident associated with any of these people that any of these groups have brought to the territories.
It tells you something about our own society. I just got an email five minutes ago from the [Kamala] Harris campaign saying, oh my God, Michigan is in play, and we’re so screwed. Like, yeah, that’s your fault. I’m sure everybody wants to vote because they’re so frightened of Donald Trump. I mean, it’s a sensible thing to be frightened of; I am, too.
But all she would have to do is get on TV and say, “Israel has banned several Arab-led western NGOs, I find this totally unacceptable, and when I’m president, I will tell the Israelis they have to reverse that immediately.” If she did that, she’d probably get, like, 90 percent of that Arab vote back. She won’t even do that. It’s pathetic. It’s so crazy how committed this administration, including very clearly its vice president, is to this insane project of just obliterating Gaza. It’s just a fanatical dedication to this project, and it’s weird.
There’s been some speculation that the ban might’ve had to do with how doctors like yourself are serving as these sort of de facto international spokespeople. What do you think about that?
I’ve had several people tell me this is my fault, for the New York Times article. And I have to tell them, honestly, you might be right. I don’t think you are, but it’s entirely possible, you know? They were trying to help people. They feel like that’s been cut away from them. They’re angry about it. If they want to blame me for it, that’s understandable.
The Israelis have always had veto power over who goes in when. I suspect that this has been in the works for a while, and the timing probably just is happenstance, but I can’t prove it. I don’t know.
You mentioned wanting to go back. Why do you want to go back to Gaza?
I’ve got to be honest, I didn’t want to leave. I think it’s kind of a universal thing. Everybody, as they exit, suddenly has an existential crisis, like, why do I get to leave and these people have to stay?
And then you’re thinking, man, I’ve got to come back somehow. These people need help, they need protection. They need a hand to hold. They need—anything.
When the vans were coming to pick us up, we had all gathered there at 8 in the morning, 7:30 in the morning. The sun’s just come up. And there was this security guard who was there with his one-and-a-half-year-old, 2-year-old son, just kind of playing with him, babying him, you know. I remember Mark, like, force-feeding the kid all the candy he had left over. At one point, the conversation stopped, and we all just kind of looked at each other, and then we looked at that kid, and we were all thinking exactly the same thing. Why does this kid have to live in this Hobbesian hellhole of violence and hunger and fear and terror, and we just get to leave?
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.
On Wednesday, during a routine operation in Gaza, Israeli soldiers reportedly killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar—seemingly stumbling into realizing a major military objective. Despite over a year’s worth of efforts, Israeli soldiers appear to have found Sinwar by accident. After killing three people during a normal operation, they apparently realized that one of the men resembled the Hamas leader. The Israeli military confirmed Sinwar’s death on Thursday.
“I think Netanyahu has zero interest in ending this war and I don’t think he’s motivated to help Biden before the elections.”
Israel and the United States have been trying to find and kill Sinwar since last October. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has cast his death as one of the main reasons for Israel’s unceasing bombardment of Gaza, saying a main war objective is “eliminating” Hamas leadership.
With this objective met, Sinwar’s death could present a chance to end what has become a regional war. Vice President Kamala Harris said after the killing that Sinwar’s death gave “us an opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza.” But it seems unlikely that Israeli and American leaders will fully press in this moment.
A former Biden administration official said they do believe that Sinwar’s death will be viewed by the administration as “somewhat of an opportunity to secure an end to the conflict,” particularly ahead of the elections as they try to win back votes that they “certainly have lost.” The problem, the former official explained, is that “I think Netanyahu has zero interest in ending this war and I don’t think he’s motivated to help Biden before the elections.”
The next move from Israel’s government, at the moment, is unclear. On Thursday, Netanyahu stated that “the mission ahead of us has not been completed.” In an initial statement Benny Gantz, a centrist member of Netanyahu’s war cabinet, said that while Sinwar’s death is a vital goal it would not mean the end of the war in Gaza.
Sinwar was killed just over a year after he orchestrated the October 7 attack in which Hamas killed nearly 1,200 Israelis. In response, the Israeli military has leveled Gaza, killing at least 42,000 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry. (The full death toll is feared to be more than double that number, according to some public health experts.)
Sinwar’s death comes at a time when ceasefire talks to end the war in Gaza have effectively fallen apart and the conflict has expanded throughout the region.
Israel recently launched a major invasion of Lebanon, where more than 2,000 people have now been killed. And Israel is on the verge of striking Iran in response to the ballistic missiles it launched against Israel on October 1. Iran’s decision to strike Israel came after a series of increasingly aggressive Israeli escalations in Lebanon—including extensive bombardment of residential areas in Beirut—that seemed all but guaranteed to provoke an Iranian retaliation. Hezbollah officials supported multiple ceasefireoffers in early October, none of which Netanyahu accepted. (The US is not currently pushing publicly for a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel.)
The Biden administration could use Sinwar’s death as leverage to push for an end to what is now a regional war. This would build on a letter the United States recently sent to Israel that gave Israel 30 days to allow in more humanitarian aid to Gaza, or face potential restrictions on US weapons exports to Israel. “I don’t think [the Israeli government] will be responsive to the letter,” the former Biden official said. “I don’t think they take our threat seriously. I don’t think the US government would withhold weapons. I think this is a signal that won’t be followed through on.” (Human rights groups, according to a report in Politico, voiced similar concerns that “rules don’t apply” to Israel.)
Israel has now killed the top leaders of both Hamas and Hezbollah: Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike on September 27, and in July, Israeli is widely understood to have assassinated Hamas’ political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. (Haniyeh, who was Hamas’ key ceasefire negotiator, was considered to be more moderate than Sinwar.)
Israel has reduced much of Gaza to rubble following one of the most intense aerial bombardment campaigns in modern history. The IDF has dropped at least 75,000 tons of bombs on the territory, killed at least one out of every 55 people in Gaza, and has cut off nearly all humanitarian aid. Its actions in Gaza have reportedly violated international human rights law and—along with Hamas’ actions on October 7—constitute potential war crimes in the view of the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. A case in the International Court of Justice asserting Israel is actively committing a genocide is proceeding as well.
Both Iran and Hezbollah, which is closely aligned with Iran, have signaled they would like to avoid a full-scale war with Israel that could potentially further involve the United States. The question remains whether the Biden administration is willing to use its extensive leverage as Israel’s primary weapons supplier to force an end to the conflict.
Update, October 17: This post has been updated to reflect a new statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahuand a new statement from Vice President Kamala Harris.
Yesterday, Axios reporter Barak Ravid published a copy of a letter from Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to Israel urging the country to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza—and, in a rare move for the Biden administration, backing that request up by publicly threatening to remove some military aid.
“Failure to demonstrate a sustained commitment to implementing and maintaining these measures may have implications for US policy under NSM-20,” Blinken and Austin wrote, suggesting that the US could withhold money from Israel if the country does not: enable 350 aid trucks to enter daily, reinstitute “humanitarian pauses” in their military operations, allow Palestinians to move inland before winter, and open an additional aid crossing within thirty days.
“Today’s action falls into the category of better late than never—we will carefully monitor the situation to see if the Administration will finally hold the Netanyahu government to account.”
The State Department confirmed the veracity of the letter. And Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US representative to the United Nations, today said the effort was to ensure there was not a “policy of starvation” for a region that has received zero food or medical aid since October 1st.
Israeli press reported that 50 trucks of food aid entered North Gaza today, likely in response. But it still is not clear yet whether the administration will actually back up its words with action before the election and pull military funds if Israel continues blocking aid.
NSM-20, the policy directive Blinken and Austin reference in their letter, is based on an amendment filed by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) in December of 2023. The policy requires that the provision of US “security assistance” comply with international law, and that countries receiving US weapons and military funding—of which Israel has received over $17.9 billion in the past year—do not also obstruct the provision of humanitarian aid. This past spring, two US government agencies concluded that Israel was deliberately blocking aid; Blinken rejected the reports, according to ProPublica.
“As the humanitarian situation in Gaza has gone from horrible to catastrophic, the Biden Administration has failed in its ongoing duty to apply the law and terms of NSM-20,” Van Hollen said Tuesday. “Today’s action falls into the category of better late than never—we will carefully monitor the situation to see if the Administration will finally hold the Netanyahu government to account in meeting the requirements set forth in the secretaries’ letter.”
Annelle Sheline, a Quincy Institute analyst who resigned from the State Department in April over Biden’s Gaza policy, wrote on X that the letter, which expresses “concern” that Israel is impeding the movement of civilians within Gaza and prohibiting nearly all aid from entering the strip, is also a “clear acknowledgement” that section 620I of the foreign assistance act is being violated. 620I—which prohibits the provision of military aid to foreign governments which restrict humanitarian aid—“has never been systematically implemented,” according to the Center for Civilians in Conflict.
According to Blinken and Austin’s letter, September was the worst month for relief efforts since the war began a year ago. The United Nations said that Israel blocked all food aid from entering north Gaza between October 1st and October 14th. Health officials at North Gaza hospitals say food, medicine, and even water are running out.
The letter’s 30-day deadline means any threats it contains won’t be enforceable until after the US presidential election. And Austin announced on October 13th, just days before the letter, that the US would send another THAAD missile defense battery—along with about 100 soldiers to operate it—to supplement Israel’s pre-existing air defenses.
Annelle Sheline, the ex-State-Department official, told the Wall Street Journalshe suspects it’s a strategy to gain Arab and Muslim votes in key swing states like Michigan for Harris, rather than a real attempt to shift Israel’s policy long-term. “It’s very convenient that the deadline is after the election,” she said.
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