On a multispectral satellite image of the West Bank, Ramón Bieri, an analyst at SITU Research, shows me how to watch the vineyards. A box in the bottom right-hand corner displays the year, beginning in 1984. As the map moves forward in time, orange and yellow spots, inside the blue outlines, shift to deep green and eventually spill out beyond their squiggly boundaries.

Bieri explains to me the variegated colors represent vegetation signatures and the time-lapse displays olive groves, and other untended land, transforming into neatly rowed vineyards. The underlying map, he says, shows areas of the West Bank where Israeli settlers have forcibly taken over Palestinian villages. The colors I am watching are not simply a record of agricultural planning. It is, SITU Research Director Brad Samuels claims, empirical evidence of apartheid.

Prosecuting the crime of apartheid is tricky in any context, but especially in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. SITU believes this novel technology could finally unlock legal cases that have long eluded activists in the West Bank.

In July, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered an advisory opinion declaring the Israeli military’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza illegal and suggesting that its policies and practices amounted to a system of apartheid. Organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Al-Haq, and B’tselem—not to mention Palestinian activists themselves—have drawn similar conclusions. As HBO’s John Oliver recently pointed out, even prominent Israelis, including former prime ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak, as well as a former Mossad chief and a former IDF general, have deployed the term “apartheid” when describing the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Some find apartheid a harsh characterization. In a recent interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein said the term was “appropriate” but worried the label would “shut some people’s minds down.” It leads the conversation, Klein worried, into the “technical.” The “technical” minutiae of definition may be ill-suited to the conversation Klein hopes to have, but it is fundamental to the legal mechanisms of proving and prosecuting apartheid in international courts.

The technology, an expert said, may make it possible for prosecutors to secure the first apartheid conviction in history.

Over the past few years, a growing chorus of states, human rights organizations, and international legal bodies have applied an apartheid legal framework to the Israeli occupation, hoping to seek justice. Yet no one has successfully prosecuted allegations of Israeli apartheid in any jurisdiction.

Samuels, along with collaborators from Israeli human rights organizations Yesh Din and Bimkom, and researchers at Princeton University’s Department of Geosciences, hope to change that. In his West Bank investigation, Samuels is one of many researchers attempting to actually prove the existence of a widespread, systematic regime enforcing one group’s dominance over another in a way that could be accepted by legal systems.

For the past nine months, the team used remote sensing methodologies and satellite imagery to document three hallmarks of apartheid in the West Bank: land dispossession, restriction of access, and forced displacement.

To Samuels, the body of evidence they have amassed so far is moving “towards an evidentiary file” for prosecutors everywhere. It’s a proof of concept, one that he and his collaborators hope will encourage apartheid litigation across domestic and international jurisdictions.

The project began in the summer of 2023. Michael Sfard, an Israeli lawyer and activist with Yesh Din, met up with Samuels in New York while on an advocacy trip in the United States. The two had known each other since 2009, when Sfard enlisted Samuels to help him with the case of Bassem Abu Rahma, an unarmed Palestinian man attending a nonviolent protest in the West Bank whom the Israeli military killed with a tear-gas canister. 

Over breakfast, the two discussed a legal opinion Sfard had published on apartheid. As a litigator, Sfard could easily point to evidence of apartheid in law books and testimony. But Samuels, an architect and visual investigator, was curious whether apartheid in the West Bank had any spatial representations. In other words, how can we see apartheid? 

Spatial representations of apartheid aren’t new: photographer Johnny Miller’s famous drone footage, for example, shows the legacy of South African apartheid and segregation through stark aerial images of wealthy, verdant neighborhoods on one side of an invisible line, and crowded plots of shacks on another. But the legal fight has been more complex. 

No one has ever been prosecuted for apartheid—not even in South Africa. As international law scholars Gerhard Kemp and Windell Nortje wrote, “There remains a significant accountability deficit pertaining to this crime against humanity.”

Defined by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, apartheid is not only specific but multilayered. It is “inhumane acts…committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”

These specific elements can put successful litigation of the crime out of reach even for skilled prosecutors in favorable jurisdictions. “You have to prove things like a special intent of domination by one racial group over another,” Kemp told me, “which is more difficult than, say, using the same facts to prosecute war crimes.” Then there’s the added challenge of collecting evidence under an occupation that limits outside access and keeps Palestinian institutions weak—all in the midst of war. 

Sfard told Samuels that even with dossiers of testimony evidence, it can be nearly impossible to get remedies for their Palestinian clients in domestic Israeli courts. “Justice for Palestinians whose lands were taken does happen—but at the rate of miracles,” Sfard said. “It’s not a neutral court. We’re not in the Hague. We’re not in some Swiss Tribunal. It’s the court of the occupier.” 

For decades, legal systems have grown more skeptical of subjective human accounts in general, as scientific approaches and forensic evidence became the “evidentiary holy grail,” said Sfard. This is especially true of Palestinian testimony in Israeli courts. To prove apartheid in court, Sfard explained, this meant olive groves could be key. In the West Bank, settler expansion is all about land. “When settlers take over Palestinian land, they uproot it and plant their own stuff,” Sfard said. “And I told Brad this is, for example, one thing we can see.” 

There are exceptions, but typically Palestinian farmers cultivate olive groves using traditional methods, and settlers build industrially irrigated vineyards. Samuels and Sfard hypothesized that this distinct cultural approach to agriculture could serve as a reliable proxy for land dispossession—one of the essential components of the apartheid system—and that remote sensing technology could detect these changes over time from space.  

Documenting this is not as simple as firing up Google Earth Pro. Satellites can produce imagery with a resolution high enough to make out neat rows of grape leaves versus patches of olive trees. But this documentation only dates back a few years—long after the point in the late-1970s when the settler land grab dramatically increased. Other restrictions, such as the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment, also limited the quality and availability of US satellite imagery over Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories from 1997 until the law was repealed in 2020.

Samuels and his team brought the puzzle to Adam Maloof, a professor in Princeton University Department of Geosciences, and Ryan Manzuk, a researcher who recently obtained his PhD from Maloof’s department. Though access to satellite imagery with high spatial resolution was limited, they realized that one particular US government satellite called Landsat provided free access to high spectral resolution imagery, which uses colors and wavelengths undetectable to the human eye. With Landsat’s Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), the team could track differences in vegetation health and lushness over time, allowing them to differentiate vineyards from olive groves in areas of the West Bank dating back to Landsat’s launch in 1975.

Landsat had another advantage: evading the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment restrictions. “It’s a blind spot,” Samuels said. “The government scrambled US space agency satellites that had high spatial resolution, but not high spectral resolution, probably because they didn’t perceive Landsat as a threat.”

The team then narrowed their investigation to three villages that illustrated different aspects of apartheid: land dispossession, restriction of access to land, and forced displacement. “There are all different kinds of ways in which settler expansion presents itself,” Samuels said. “And the fact that we focused on three really was a function of time, resources, and fit, in terms of remote sensing.”

When Samuels and his team presented their initial analysis to Sfard and Yesh Din, there was a long silence. “This is remarkable,” Sfard remembered a colleague finally saying. “This is science fiction come true.”

Still, he could not help but feel the remarkable dissonance between believing Palestinians and having to show it on a map: “We already know all of this,” he said. The maps could corroborate testimony in a scientific, clinical way. “It was like a new set of glasses was placed on our eyes, and we suddenly saw more,” he said. But, with it, there was still a realization that Palestinian voices would not be believed without overwhelming evidence.

Sfard hopes that with this new tool, the courts, both Israeli and non-Israeli, will also start to see more—or at least differently. Now, when alleging that the Israeli government declared a parcel of land as state property and allocated it to settlers, “it’s not just the head of the village that is telling you this and making this allegation,” Sfard said. “We have scientific proof that this is the history of it.” 

Apartheid has been firmly established as a crime against humanity for decades. And some hope to expand it, including new distinctions like gender apartheid. “But the difficulty,” Kemp explained, has been “to apply the legal standard to the facts on the ground. And this is where the project comes in.” Kemp said that SITU and Yesh Din may make it possible for prosecutors to secure the first apartheid conviction in history.

The ultimate goal is for prosecutors to apply this new approach in courtrooms, but the project faced its first test in a German museum. On October 8—just a day after the one-year anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attacks—the project premiered as one of several case studies in a new exhibition called “Visual Investigations: Between Advocacy, Journalism, and Law” at the Architekturmuseum der TUM in Munich. SITU’s corner of the exhibition centers around a giant map of the West Bank, sprawled across a 25-foot long wall, with time lapses of land dispossession, archival photographs of olive groves and Palestinian farms, videos, and a lengthy methodology section.

“I wanted to make clear that this is a super-focused, very specific, and rigorous unpacking of the question of the manifestation of apartheid,” Samuels said. “And not just an ideological rant.”

After Samuels walked a crowd through the findings and dense methodology on opening day, an Israeli student who had concerns about the project during its planning phase approached him. In an emotional exchange, she expressed her gratitude over the fairness and rigor with which Samuels and his collaborators approached the investigation. 

Exchanges like that one make Sfard hopeful about the investigation’s potential, but he is careful not to let forensic analysis eclipse the human element.

“Palestinian accounts of the crimes committed against them are of utmost importance,” he said. “While I’m ecstatic about the project, and I think that its fruits are extremely important, they do not replace the direct Palestinian account. I hope that this project will not only allow us to prove in a court of law that certain land was dispossessed, but will also give Palestinians a stage to tell their story.”

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 generous government 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 +972 Magazine 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 Ruger rifles 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 yearly olive 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 a blisteringly sunny October day in Washington, DC, tens of thousands of Christians gathered on the National Mall for a day of intense prayer. A self-proclaimed prophet from Colorado named Lou Engle had summoned them for an event he called the “Esther Call on the Mall” because, he said, he had a dream in which the nation’s capital was filled with “a million Esthers,” a reference to the Old Testament queen who stood up for her people against the wicked king Haman. “You’ll say to your children and your grandchildren that you were there when God gathered the Esthers to save a nation,” Engle promised in a trailer video for the event.

Esther’s people, of course, were the imperiled Jews, and not by accident, Engle’s prayer rally took place on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. The speakers, a racially diverse group, praised Jesus, but, on a stage festooned with Israeli flags they also often prayed in Hebrew. Some in the crowd wore Jewish prayer shawls and stars of David and blew shofars, the rams’ horn that ancient Israelites used to call troops to battle. Others told me they were fasting, just as observant Jews do on Yom Kippur. Engle and some of the other speakers bowed back and forth as they spoke looking as if they were engaged in the Jewish prayer practice of davening.

Fundamentalist Christians have long supported Israel because of their belief that the Jews are God’s “chosen people.” The modern Christian Zionist movement goes back to the Messianic Jewish movement of the 1970s, widely known as Jews for Jesus, who aimed to convert Jews to Christianity. Their approach, says Rabbi Jack Moline, the emeritus president of the religious pluralism advocacy group Interfaith Alliance, was, “‘The friendlier I can make Christianity to your Jewish experience, the more likely you are to embrace the one true religion, which is generic Christianity.’” Modern Christian Zionists, on the other hand, mostly aren’t looking to immediately bring any Jews to Jesus. Instead, says Moline, they want to “facilitate the gathering of the exiles back to the Holy Land…which will pave the way for the second coming.” But there’s a catch: In this scenario, most of the Jewish inhabitants of Israel will perish, and the remainder will finally accept Jesus—bringing about both “Armageddon and the elimination of the ‘Jewish problem,’” says Moline.

“‘The friendlier I can make Christianity to your Jewish experience, the more likely you are to embrace the one true religion, which is generic Christianity.’”

In the past few years, at the forefront of Christian Zionism has been a rapidly growing global charismatic movement called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), whose leaders, including Engle and many others who attended the march, believe God has commanded Christians to take over the government, in part because doing so will hasten this particular end-times scenario.

This movement has gained even greater propulsion since the Hamas attack on Israel and the war in Gaza. Prominent NAR pastors have claimed that this conflict is the latest chapter in an existential spiritual war. Damon Berry, a religious studies professor at St. Lawrence University in New York, says NAR leaders believe “that what we’re doing politically on the ground [in Gaza] despite the incredible loss of life, is necessarily a battle raging between the forces of good and evil.” In this battle, NAR leaders see Trump as anointed by God to command the fight for the United States and Israel. Berry adds that they are convinced that “if we don’t support Trump, this is something that America would be judged for.” Some of the most influential Christian Zionist Trump supporters have served as spiritual advisers to the former president and their influence can be seen in some of his foreign policy decisions.

In this election, Christian Zionists’ pleas for their followers to support Israel at any cost are only growing louder. Leaders in this movement, including many of those present at the Esther Call, are working from the top down, leveraging relationships with key GOP leaders, including vice presidential candidate Ohio Sen. JD Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson.

They are also working from the bottom up, warning their followers that God’s favor for the United States depends on Christians’ support for Israel. The Christian Zionist voting bloc is considerable: Nearly a quarter of Americans identify as evangelical. In a 2020 poll, half of evangelicals said that supporting Israel was “important for fulfilling biblical prophecy.” By back-of-the-napkin math, that’s about 41.5 million people—certainly enough to sway an election. The share of Republicans who support Israel has grown from half in the late ’90s to 80 percent in 2018, a Pew survey found. What’s more, some voters, especially younger ones, have said they plan to protest the Biden administration’s support for Israel by not voting in the election, or even, as NPR reported earlier this month, casting a ballot for Trump—in fact, the former president is now the favored candidate among Arab American voters, an October poll found.

At the Esther Call event, Lou Engle stood before a row of Israeli flags and admonished the crowd. “You can’t listen to what the media is telling you, you’ve got to align with the word of God!” he cried. “If we stand and bless Israel, He may save our nation!”

“You can’t listen to what the media is telling you, you’ve got to align with the word of God! If we stand and bless Israel, He may save our nation!”

For decades, Christian Zionists have been working behind the scenes in Washington to strengthen US support for Israel, mainly through the powerhouse evangelical group Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which was founded in 2006 by Texas minister John Hagee to bring together the patchwork of pro-Israel Christian groups. Another aligned group is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the massive lobbying organization that advocates for pro-Israel policies (and spent aggressively in 2024 to sink progressive candidates who spoke out against the war in Gaza). A major breakthrough for Christian Zionists came in 2017 when the Trump administration answered their calls to officially recognize Jerusalem, a holy city for Christians, as the capital of Israel, and announced plans to relocate the US embassy there the following year. The United Nations criticized the move because Jerusalem is in the occupied territory of the West Bank. But Christian Zionists saw the move as a victory—and a further validation that Trump had been chosen by God to lead the United States in the world.

One prominent NAR leader, a South Carolina–­based pastor named Dutch Sheets, said in a broadcast that the embassy move “did something in the spirit realm. It aligned us in a significant way with Israel. I believe God was saying He is going to rain Holy Spirit oil down all over America.” In a 2018 interview on a Christian news show, Paula White-Cain, one of Trump’s major spiritual advisers, recalled telling him shortly after he made the decision, “Sir, you’ve done the right thing.” Lance Wallnau, a Texas-based former business strategist and a leader in the New Apostolic Reformation, said the embassy move fulfilled “a prophecy” in the Bible that the Jews would be able to return to their land, and that Trump had been “stirred by the spirit of God.”

In reality, Trump had likely also been stirred by the spirit of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a fervently pro-Israel Orthodox Jew, as well as the many pro-Israel groups that had been lobbying hard on the issue (and stocking his campaign war chest). One of the main cheerleaders of the move was CUFI’s John Hagee. In 2017, before the embassy was officially moved, Hagee told a group of his supporters, “When I spoke to [Trump] in the White House about this several weeks ago, he said this very emphatically. He said, ‘Other presidents have failed you, but I will not disappoint the Christian community in this issue. I will stand with Israel, and we will at some point in time, move the embassy.’”

Trump’s goodwill with NAR leaders was tested a few years later when his administration tried to broker a peace deal between Israel and Palestine. Christian Zionists have long opposed the idea of a “two-state solution,” which would recognize the existence of both Israel and Palestine. During the Middle East peace talks of 2013, for example, televangelist Pat Robertson warned that if the United States recognized Palestine, God would punish Americans with a “natural disaster.” In 2019, a group of pastors, including Hagee, White, and Wallnau were invited to the White House for a briefing on a possible two-state solution. Afterward, Right Wing Watch reported, in a YouTube broadcast, Wallnau lambasted the plan. “Every time we have given land up of Israel, we have had a curse on our country,” he said. “You watch. Every time a president has taken something away from Israel, the judgment of God inevitably calls down.”  

Negotiations for the two-state solution, of course, collapsed—and Christian Zionists seemed eager to forgive the administration’s blunder. During then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s 2019 trip to Jerusalem, a Christian Broadcasting Network journalist asked Pompeo, a devout evangelical Christian, “Could it be that President Trump is being raised for such a time as this, just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from an Iranian menace?” Pompeo responded, grinning, “As a Christian, I certainly believe that that’s possible.”

When Trump lost the 2020 election, some of the same NAR pastors who had praised Trump for moving the embassy—including Lance Wallnau, Dutch Sheets, and Paula White-Cain—emerged as leaders in the “Stop the Steal” campaign claiming that the election was stolen. In a 2022 broadcast, Sheets said that Trump had told him in a dream, “‘God has put the tools in me to tear down, root up, and confront the system.’”

Fast forward to October 7, 2023, when NAR pastors’ commitment to Israel became an all-out obsession. In a forthcoming paper for the religion studies journal Nova Religio, Berry, the St. Lawrence University religion scholar, chronicles how NAR pastors characterized the war in Gaza as part of “a cosmic battle between God and satanic forces.” Berry references a broadcast on Rumble titled “Is This WWIII?” that Wallnau published on October 8, 2023. In it, Wallnau claimed that Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel was the result of God punishing the United States for electing Biden, abandoning Trump, and allowing trans people to serve in the military. Because of these transgressions, Wallnau says, the United States has become “spiritually vulnerable.” In another podcast a few weeks later, Wallnau returned to those themes, warning his 21,000 viewers that the pro-Palestine protests on college campuses aimed “to deconstruct the legitimacy of the United States and Israel.”

Berry also quotes Jonathan Cahn, a rabbi and NAR-aligned charismatic Christian. Cahn, who also spoke at the Esther Call event, has said in the past that even to utter the word “Palestine” was “to take part in a war against the promise of God and the will of God.”

To some NAR adherents, paradoxically, the October 7 attack and all the bloodshed that followed was actually good news. NAR pastor Cindy Jacobs, another leader in the “Stop the Steal” campaign, told the crowd on the Mall that God had warned her about Hamas’ attack—but he also told her that “after the dark time, Israel would come into a great revival”—presumably, the prelude to Christ’s return.

What exactly that “great revival” might look like in the near term is a matter of some debate. While many of the NAR leaders make no secret of their disdain for a two-state solution, a new guard of Christian Zionist groups seems to have realized that loudly calling for Palestine’s obliteration doesn’t play well with younger Christians. Take the Philos Project, a decade-old nonprofit with an annual budget of $8 million whose mission is to “promote positive Christian engagement in the Near East.” The group, which in 2020 received a $9.4 million grant from the public charity National Philanthropic Trust, says on its website that it supports “some variant of the two-state solution—ideally a Jewish state with a Palestinian minority and a Palestinian state with a Jewish minority.”

Yet elsewhere, Philos leaders express a different set of beliefs. As the New Republic recently reported, its founder Robert Nicholson appeared last year on a podcast hosted by the pro-life activist Lila Rose during which he warned that Islamist terrorists aligned with Hamas were likely flowing into the United States over the southern border, thanks to lax US immigration policies. On Facebook in January, the organization’s executive director, Luke Moon, posted a photo of himself in Israel proudly signing a bomb that was “bound for Hezbollah.” That summer on Facebook, he posted a photo of himself wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Jesus giving the thumbs-up sign, accompanied by the slogan “Jesus Was a Zionist.” Philos Project leaders devoted a recent podcast episode to debunking what they called a “conspiracy theory” that AIPAC wields political power.

“Jesus was a Zionist.”

Philos Project is platformed by powerful groups and people. In January, Moon spoke at the inaugural event of the National Taskforce to Combat Antisemitism, a post-October 7 initiative of the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation. In addition to the Philos Project, other groups involved in the effort included the MAGA group America First Policy Institute, the conservative Christian organizations the Concerned Women of America, the old guard Christian right Family Research Council, and the Independent Women’s Forum.

On October 7, 2024, the Philos Project hosted an event in Washington, DC. The stated purpose was to recognize the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ attack on Israel, but it also served as a quasi-campaign stop: The event was headlined by vice-presidential candidate JD Vance.

By positioning itself as a thought leader, Philos Project exerts its influence far beyond politicians. One prominent example involves Mike Cosper, an opinion writer for the leading Christian magazine Christianity Today. In 2022, Cosper earned a following among progressive Christians with a wildly popular investigative podcast about a scandal-plagued Seattle megachurch. The following year, Cosper decided to turn his attention to the war in the Middle East. In a podcast series called “It’s Complicated,” Cosper promised to travel to the Middle East to unpack the nuances of the war, to “meet the people whose lives have been shaped by this conflict, this war, and this hope.”

As it turned out, Cosper’s reporting included the voices of only a few Palestinians. Ultimately, in a March 2024 Christianity Today cover story, he compared Hamas to campus protesters, writing, “Hamas uses an Islamist and nationalist ideology to demonize Jews, and the academic Left uses anticolonial ideology to do the same.” What Christianity Today did not disclose to its 4.5 million online readers was that Cosper’s fact-finding missions to the Middle East was actually a junket organized by the Christian Zionist Philos Project.

After the Esther Call event in DC, Engle’s group sent out an email urging attendees to donate to a consortium of Christian Zionist groups run by an Alabama-based Christian Zionist named Heather Johnston, who also spoke at the Esther Call. On her groups’ websites, Johnston says that her journey progressed from the life of an ordinary Christian mom “to passionately seeking God and the world of international politics.” The flagship program Johnston runs, the US Israel Education Association, has conducted tours to Israel for congressional representatives since 2011. Their promotional materials give off the veneer of neutrality; the website promises, for example, that congresspeople will learn about “efforts to build an integrated economy between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank as a grassroots peace movement.”

In contrast, on social media, Johnston writes about her “risk-taking relationship with Jesus” and waxes hawkish about Israel. Earlier this month in a post about Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the globetrotting chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, she called on Biden to “speed up weapons shipments to Israel, including 2,000-pound bombs,” noting that there had been “delays due to human rights concerns, but McCaul emphasizes their necessity for Israel’s defense as tensions rise in the Middle East.”

 In her posts, Johnston regularly mixes her own Christianity with a little folksy Judaism—one mini-essay, for example, explains how New Testament characters showed “chutzpah.” Her connections to power brokers are also fodder, as she regularly posts photos of herself with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom she calls “a dear friend of mine,” “King Bibi,” and a “strategic genius.” House Speaker Mike Johnson, she wrote in a post last November, “is a brilliant leader and God’s favor is resting on Him.”

At the Esther Call event, Johnston read a text message she said she had received from him. “He told me, ‘I genuinely wish I could be there with you today because I believe it has never been more important for us to stand together and pray together for the peace and security of Israel, and to speak with moral clarity about the fateful battle we are in between good and evil, light versus darkness.’”

But her work is not restricted to the US. She also runs an Israel-based group called the National Leadership Center, which trains Israeli youth in leadership skills in partnership with Israel’s Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Education. The group’s headquarters are in the West Bank, which is referred to as “Samaria” on the website. “In the last 13 years there has been a noticeable change in the spiritual climate of the nation,” the group’s promotional materials say. “We believe we are contributing to and seeing the fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy that hearts of stone will be turned to hearts of flesh.”

“We believe we are contributing to and seeing the fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy that hearts of stone will be turned to hearts of flesh.”

Another prominent Christian Zionist leader is Michele Bachmann, the former Republican representative from Iowa and 2012 presidential hopeful. Bachmann is a board member of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, and earlier this year, she helped found a new institute for studies about Israel at Regent University, a Christian college in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The institute, Bachmann said at its opening, would “help expand national and global understanding of the Jewish state.” Around the same time, Bachmann partnered with Philos Project’s Moon and several other Christian leaders to create the Conference of Presidents of Christian Organizations in Support of Israel. “We’re in a magic moment right now, a very special moment, when I’ve seen more flowering than I’ve ever seen in my life between the Christian community and the Jewish community,” she told the Jewish News Syndicate.

Part of this commitment appears to be a hardline rejection of the rights of Palestinians. Last year, in remarks at a conference hosted by the right-wing student group Turning Point USA, Bachmann said of Palestinians, “They need to be removed from that land. That land needs to be turned into a national park.” In an October 2023 appearance in Los Angeles, Bachmann theorized that “wokeness” in Israel prevented the military from anticipating the attack. “It’s entirely possible that perhaps the intel service in Israel also had wokeness and decided not to pass the information along,” she said. She blamed “a spiritual, demonic presence” for the Hamas attack.

Christian Zionism isn’t just happening at the national level. This summer, while I was reporting a story about the New Apostolic Reformation in Pennsylvania, I attended a service at the Lord’s House of Prayer, a NAR-adjacent church in the city of Lancaster. That morning, a young Christian couple from Jerusalem, Yair and Anna Pinto, stood at the pulpit. (They didn’t respond to requests for comment for this article, nor did the Philos Project, Johnson, and Bachmann.) Yair, a fighter with the Israeli Defense Forces who documents his experiences for the Christian media outlet Trinity Broadcasting Network, told us how God had protected him as he rode in a tank through Gaza. Anna talked about misinformation circulating about Hamas’ October 7 massacre.

“They’re just on social media, TikTok University, saying, ‘Oh, here, this is what happened. My poor Palestinian friends, massacred by this great army, the most inhumane army in the world.’” But that was a distortion of reality, she said. The real enemy was Hamas—the opposite of what young people hear on social media. “My heart goes out to the teens because ours is a world where we have people who define themselves as ‘they’ or ‘it’ or a cat or a dog or a unicorn—I think we’ve got a glimpse of this evil, and it’s just spreading, like a root in a tree.”

Some Jewish people welcome the support of Christian Zionists, and it’s not hard to see one compelling reason why: Pastors are fundraising powerhouses, whose contributions are helping to rebuild areas of Israel that are ravaged by the war. According to the Associated Press, in the weeks immediately following Hamas’ attack, John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel raised $3 million to support Israeli first responders. Sean Feucht, a pastor who has organized a series of prayer rallies on the steps of state capitols, led a pro-Israel rally at New York’s Columbia University. (The Philos Project’s Luke Moon was a fellow organizer.)  Jentezen Franklin, a Georgia-based NAR-aligned pastor who served as a spiritual adviser to Trump, recently pledged to donate $15 million to Israel; he has received awards and accolades from Jewish leaders for his efforts to help Israel rebuild after the attacks.

Other Jews bristle at the appropriation of their culture—which, says Moline, of Interfaith Alliance, can feel transactional. For many Christian Zionists, he says “there’s something important in Jewish practice and Jewish belief, and they want to absorb it. They want it to become part of who they are. It increases a sense of legitimacy.” The appropriation can also seem like a bit of a grift: Get your special edition Israeli army shofar here for only $555! Grab a “solidarity mezuzah” to protect your home for just $18! As Moline put it, “It’s like saying to a Catholic, ‘Where can we get some of those communion wafers? They’re so delicious!’”

It can also appear that there is something transactional about Christian Zionists’ support—they need the Jews to hasten the second coming of Christ. Michele Bachmann said in 2015 that she wanted to “convert as many Jews as we can” (though she later apologized). Southern California pastor Jack Hibbs, who presides over the influential Calvary Chapel network of NAR-affiliated churches and was a leader in the Stop the Steal campaign, said on Turning Point CEO Charlie Kirk’s TV show last year that Christians must “look past the sins of Israel and the sins of the Jew and give them the hope of Jesus.” As Mother Jones has reported, Hagee of Christians United for Israel said in 1999, “God sent Adolf Hitler to help Jews reach the promised land.” (He also later apologized.) 

Religion historian Daniel Hummel, who leads the Lumen Center religious studies research institute in Madison, Wisconsin, points out that Christian Zionists’ support does not extend to all Jewish people. Christian Zionists, says Hummel, often express scorn for non-religious and cultural Jews. Indeed, even amid all the fetishization of Israel and Judaism at the Esther Call event, some speakers blamed America’s problems on George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist who has become a target of antisemitic conspiracy theories all over the world. “American Jews are really dividing over whether they should even support Israel,” says Hummel. “And Christian Zionists see this as endemic of a deeper problem within secular liberal Judaism.”

Trump himself has expressed that same disdain for liberal Jews. In 2019, he called Jewish people who vote for Democrats “very disloyal to Israel.” Earlier this year, he said, “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion.”

Despite Trump’s seeming ambivalence about American Jews, as the election approaches, NAR pastors seem more convinced than ever that the former president has been divinely to lead the defense of Israel and God’s “chosen people.” Last year, a few weeks after October 7, Engle, the prophet, announced his intention to make Israel “the Goliath” of his crusade (abortion was his “bear,” he said, and the LGBTQ movement was his “lion,” the NAR research X account @SometimesPDX reported.)

This past July, Jentezen Franklin spoke at the prayer breakfast at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, telling the attendees that he believed that God had providentially saved Trump from being assassinated. A month later, at a sermon at the Free Chapel in Gainesville, Georgia, Franklin gave a sermon about godly voting. “Whether we like it or not, [the Jews] are still his chosen people,” he said, holding a Bible up and waving it around emphatically. “God has blessed America because we have blessed and stood with the nation of Israel. And when you vote for anyone who is anti-Israel, you literally are voting against every part of this book, from Genesis to Revelation.”   

At the Esther Call, the dozen or so attendees I talked to all told me that supporting Israel was a top issue for them in the presidential election. Toward the end of the day, I met Donna Neiman, a middle-aged woman who had traveled from Pennsylvania to attend the rally. She was carrying a shofar, and wearing lion earrings, which she said represented Jesus as the “lion of Judah.” Jesus, she said, “was born in Israel. He’s coming back in Israel. And if you want to know what’s going on in the world, you’ve got to watch Israel, because Israel is precious to him. It’s the apple of his eye.” Because of this, she said, Israel was a top concern for her in the election, which was why she had decided to cast her vote for Trump. “It’s Trump—he’s the only one, and he literally got on his knees the day when that that attack came on him, when they tried to shoot his ear,” she said, her voice raspy with emotion. “Yes, that is what it is! He will pray for Israel!”

When Benjamin Netanyahu took the stage at the United Nations General Assembly in New York City on Friday morning, he looked out over a world transformed by almost a year of unabated bombing and tens of thousands of civilian deaths in Gaza. Several delegations walked out of his speech and throngs of people outside protested his presence in the city. 

The way the world views Netanyahu, and Israel, has changed. But the man’s view of the world remains seemingly unaltered.

After a year of war, global pressure to stop bombing Gaza, protests in Israel to make a peace deal bringing hostages home, and an Israeli military whose soldiers are exhausted and stretched thin, Netanyahu is not preparing for peace. Instead, he’s planning further war. “Israel’s war on Hamas and Hezbollah will continue unabated,” until “total victory,” he told the UN.

As he gave his speech, reports showed Israel had bombed a neighborhood in southern Lebanon targeting, they said, Hezbollah’s headquarters. Images of destruction flooded social media. This was seemingly, as Israeli sources reportedly said earlier this week, the plan for “de-escalation through escalation.” Peace, Netanyahu told the UN, would come from war.

This stuff is so exhausting. No, Netanyahu doesn't "share the aims" of US policy in Lebanon or Gaza. He wants to bomb the shit out of both places, ignore all US concerns about civilian casualties or regional escalation, and then demand more American weapons and money. https://t.co/jj7oZHShqd

— Tommy Vietor (@TVietor08) September 27, 2024

“They put a missile in every kitchen, a rocket in every garage,” Netanyahu told the UN, casting Lebanese civilian homes as legitimate targets. “As long as Hezbollah chooses the path of war, Israel has no choice, and Israel has every right to remove this threat.” 

The day before his UN speech, the Israeli Prime Minister spoke of “sharing the aims” of American policy but rejected a US-backed proposal for a ceasefire with Lebanon. That same day, the US signed off on $8.7 billion more military funding for Israel. 

Netanyahu’s battles are now expanding on at least three fronts: Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank. Despite that, he is still speaking the same way he did a year ago. 

In September 2023, he brought a map labeled “the new Middle East” to his UN speech, in which he spoke of two paths forward for the region: a “blessing,” in which Israel is powerful and allied with Saudi Arabia, and a “curse,” in which it is not. In 2024, as an arrest warrant from the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for war crimes hung over his head, Netanyahu spoke as though the past year simply had not happened. 

Just as he did in 2023, he waved around maps as props. (Once again, the maps did not include Gaza or the West Bank—two places whose residents hardly merited a mention in his half-hour speech.) Once again, he said this was justified because of Iran, not only calling for sanctions as he did last year, but suggesting that Iran funds the protests against him: “Who knows? Maybe, maybe some of the protesters, or even many of the protesters outside this building now.” 

Netanyahu spent more time berating the United Nations for antisemitism than addressing the prospect of a ceasefire with either Hamas or Hezbollah. “For the Palestinians, this UN house of darkness is home court,” Netanyahu said. “They know that in this swamp of antisemitic violence, there is an automatic majority willing to demonize the Jewish state on anything.” He dismissed his own potential ICC arrest warrant as nothing other than “pure antisemitism.” 

Israeli National Security Minister and lifelong anti-Arab extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has threatened to boycott Netanyahu’s governing coalition if the prime minister signs a temporary ceasefire with Lebanon, tweeted his approval of Netanyahu’s speech minutes after it concluded. 

"נצח ישראל לא ישקר"
חזק ואמץ ראש הממשלה

— איתמר בן גביר (@itamarbengvir) September 27, 2024

As he gave his address, Israel launched a massive bombing campaign across Beirut, a city that only days ago the IDF told Lebanese civilians to flee to for their safety. Reports said that Netanyahu personally approved these bombings from New York, in order to target Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Netanyahu’s office released an image of him sitting in a New York hotel room before his speech, making the call for bombs to come down. 

Donald Trump’s Republican Party platform, released in July, contains little in terms of tangible policy proposals.

But one of the few concrete ideas is a call to (apologies for the capitalization) “PREVENT WORLD WORLD III” by building “A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY”—a plan that experts say is nearly impossible to execute, unnecessary, and hard to even comprehend. 

Trump has vowed to build this Iron Dome in multiple speeches. It is among his campaign’s 20 core promises. The former president has said that the missile shield would be “MADE IN AMERICA,” creating jobs, as well as stopping foreign attacks. 

An expert called Trump’s Iron Dome idea “the insane ramblings of a senile old person.”

While it might sound nice to talk of building the “greatest dome of them all,” as Trump recently said, Jeffrey Lewis, a missile expert at the Middlebury’s James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, says such a plan is ridiculous.

“It’s dramatically unclear to me what any of this means,” Lewis said of the Iron Dome idea, “other than just treating it like the insane ramblings of a senile old person.”

It may be more useful to consider an American Iron Dome as a bombastic businessman’s branding exercise, rather than a viable policy position, said Lewis: “The Iron Dome here has just become a kind of brand name, like Xerox or Kleenex for missile defense.”

The Iron Dome, a short-range missile defense system created by Israeli state-owned company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and American weapons manufacturer Raytheon, has been a prized part of the country’s military arsenal since it became operational in 2011. It is not, as the name suggests, an impenetrable shield. It’s more mobile: when a short-range missile reaches Israel’s airspace, “interceptor missiles” are launched to blow them up before they can touch the ground.

The Iron Dome’s functionality depends on Israel’s comparatively miniscule size and proximity to enemies. This makes it particularly hard to imagine a similar setup in the US, which is over 400 times the geographical size of Israel. Such an apparatus, national security analyst Joseph Cirincione estimated, would cost about 2.5 trillion dollars. That’s over three times the country’s entire projected military budget for 2025.

Such a system would also be unnecessary. As of now, there are no armed groups sending missiles toward the United States from within a theoretical Iron Dome’s 40-mile interception range. Such a system “couldn’t even protect Mar-a-Lago from missiles fired from the Bahamas, some 80 miles away,” Cirincione wrote in late July. 

America’s pre-existent missile defense network, which has been in place since the Bush administration, is currently made up of 44 interceptors based in California and Alaska, geared towards longer-range missiles, such as those that could be fired from North Korea. But the system has performed abysmally in tests, despite Republicans generally claiming “it works,” said Lewis. (Groups like the right-wing Heritage Foundation have been calling for increased missile defense funding since at least the 1990s.)

“This is why it’s so hard to make heads or tails of what Trump is saying,” Lewis continued. “Is Trump saying the system in Alaska doesn’t work? Is Trump saying that Canada is going to develop artillery rockets to use against North Dakota?” 

Donald Trump’s Republican Party platform, released in July, contains little in terms of tangible policy proposals.

But one of the few concrete ideas is a call to (apologies for the capitalization) “PREVENT WORLD WORLD III” by building “A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY”—a plan that experts say is nearly impossible to execute, unnecessary, and hard to even comprehend. 

Trump has vowed to build this Iron Dome in multiple speeches. It is among his campaign’s 20 core promises. The former president has said that the missile shield would be “MADE IN AMERICA,” creating jobs, as well as stopping foreign attacks. 

An expert called Trump’s Iron Dome idea “the insane ramblings of a senile old person.”

While it might sound nice to talk of building the “greatest dome of them all,” as Trump recently said, Jeffrey Lewis, a missile expert at the Middlebury’s James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, says such a plan is ridiculous.

“It’s dramatically unclear to me what any of this means,” Lewis said of the Iron Dome idea, “other than just treating it like the insane ramblings of a senile old person.”

It may be more useful to consider an American Iron Dome as a bombastic businessman’s branding exercise, rather than a viable policy position, said Lewis: “The Iron Dome here has just become a kind of brand name, like Xerox or Kleenex for missile defense.”

The Iron Dome, a short-range missile defense system created by Israeli state-owned company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and American weapons manufacturer Raytheon, has been a prized part of the country’s military arsenal since it became operational in 2011. It is not, as the name suggests, an impenetrable shield. It’s more mobile: when a short-range missile reaches Israel’s airspace, “interceptor missiles” are launched to blow them up before they can touch the ground.

The Iron Dome’s functionality depends on Israel’s comparatively miniscule size and proximity to enemies. This makes it particularly hard to imagine a similar setup in the US, which is over 400 times the geographical size of Israel. Such an apparatus, national security analyst Joseph Cirincione estimated, would cost about 2.5 trillion dollars. That’s over three times the country’s entire projected military budget for 2025.

Such a system would also be unnecessary. As of now, there are no armed groups sending missiles toward the United States from within a theoretical Iron Dome’s 40-mile interception range. Such a system “couldn’t even protect Mar-a-Lago from missiles fired from the Bahamas, some 80 miles away,” Cirincione wrote in late July. 

America’s pre-existent missile defense network, which has been in place since the Bush administration, is currently made up of 44 interceptors based in California and Alaska, geared towards longer-range missiles, such as those that could be fired from North Korea. But the system has performed abysmally in tests, despite Republicans generally claiming “it works,” said Lewis. (Groups like the right-wing Heritage Foundation have been calling for increased missile defense funding since at least the 1990s.)

“This is why it’s so hard to make heads or tails of what Trump is saying,” Lewis continued. “Is Trump saying the system in Alaska doesn’t work? Is Trump saying that Canada is going to develop artillery rockets to use against North Dakota?” 

This story was published first by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.

The US government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza.

The US Agency for International Development delivered its assessment to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the State Department’s refugees bureau made its stance known to top diplomats in late April. Their conclusion was explosive because US law requires the government to cut off weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of US-backed humanitarian aid. Israel has been largely dependent on American bombs and other weapons in Gaza since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks.

The memo described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots, and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.

But Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden did not accept either finding. Days later, on May 10, Blinken delivered a carefully worded statement to Congress that said, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance.”

Prior to his report, USAID had sent Blinken a detailed 17-page memo on Israel’s conduct. The memo described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots, and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.

Lifesaving food was stockpiled less than 30 miles across the border in an Israeli port, including enough flour to feed about 1.5 million Palestinians for five months, according to the memo. But in February the Israeli government had prohibited the transfer of flour, saying its recipient was the United Nations’ Palestinian branch that had been accused of having ties with Hamas.

Separately, the head of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration had also determined that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid and that the Foreign Assistance Act should be triggered to freeze almost $830 million in taxpayer dollars earmarked for weapons and bombs to Israel, according to emails obtained by ProPublica.

The U.N. has declared a famine in parts of Gaza. The world’s leading independent panel of aid experts found that nearly half of the Palestinians in the enclave are struggling with hunger. Many go days without eating. Local authorities say dozens of children have starved to death—likely a significant undercount. Health care workers are battling a lack of immunizations compounded by a sanitation crisis. Last month, a little boy became Gaza’s first confirmed case of polio in 25 years.

The USAID officials wrote that because of Israel’s behavior, the U.S. should pause additional arms sales to the country. ProPublica obtained a copy of the agency’s April memo along with the list of evidence that the officials cited to back up their findings.

USAID, which is led by longtime diplomat Samantha Power, said the looming famine in Gaza was the result of Israel’s “arbitrary denial, restriction, and impediments of U.S. humanitarian assistance,” according to the memo. It also acknowledged Hamas had played a role in the humanitarian crisis. USAID, which receives overall policy guidance from the secretary of state, is an independent agency responsible for international development and disaster relief. The agency had for months tried and failed to deliver enough food and medicine to a starving and desperate Palestinian population.

It is, USAID concluded, “one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in the world.”

In response to detailed questions for this story, the State Department said that it had pressured the Israelis to increase the flow of aid. “As we made clear in May when [our] report was released, the US had deep concerns during the period since October 7 about action and inaction by Israel that contributed to a lack of sustained delivery of needed humanitarian assistance,” a spokesperson wrote. “Israel subsequently took steps to facilitate increased humanitarian access and aid flow into Gaza.”

US Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew had been told repeatedly about instances of the Israelis blocking humanitarian assistance, according to four US officials familiar with the embassy operations.

Government experts and human rights advocates said while the State Department may have secured a number of important commitments from the Israelis, the level of aid going to Palestinians is as inadequate as when the two determinations were reached. “The implication that the humanitarian situation has markedly improved in Gaza is a farce,” said Scott Paul, an associate director at Oxfam. “The emergence of polio in the last couple months tells you all that you need to know.”

The USAID memo was an indication of a deep rift within the Biden administration on the issue of military aid to Israel. In March, the US ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, sent Blinken a cable arguing that Israel’s war cabinet, which includes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, should be trusted to facilitate aid shipments to the Palestinians.

Lew acknowledged that “other parts of the Israeli government have tried to impede the movement of [humanitarian assistance,]” according to a copy of his cable obtained by ProPublica. But he recommended continuing to provide military assistance because he had “assessed that Israel will not arbitrarily deny, restrict, or otherwise impede US provided or supported” shipments of food and medicine.

Lew said Israeli officials regularly cite “overwhelming negative Israeli public opinion against” allowing aid to the Palestinians, “especially when Hamas seizes portions of it and when hostages remain in Gaza.” The Israeli government did not respond to a request for comment but has said in the past that it follows the laws of war, unlike Hamas.

In the months leading up to that cable, Lew had been told repeatedly about instances of the Israelis blocking humanitarian assistance, according to four US officials familiar with the embassy operations but, like others quoted in this story, not authorized to speak about them. “No other nation has ever provided so much humanitarian assistance to their enemies,” Lew responded to subordinates at the time, according to two of the officials, who said the comments drew widespread consternation.

“That put people over the edge,” one of the officials told ProPublica. “He’d be a great spokesperson for the Israeli government.”

A second official said Lew had access to the same information as USAID leaders in Washington, in addition to evidence collected by the local State Department diplomats working in Jerusalem. “But his instincts are to defend Israel,” said a third official.

“Ambassador Lew has been at the forefront of the United States’ work to increase the flow of humanitarian assistance to Gaza, as well as diplomatic efforts to reach a ceasefire agreement that would secure the release of hostages, alleviate the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, and bring an end to the conflict,” the State Department spokesperson wrote.

The question of whether Israel was impeding humanitarian aid has garnered widespread attention. Before Blinken’s statement to Congress, Reuters reported concerns from USAID about the death toll in Gaza, which now stands at about 42,000, and that some officials inside the State Department, including the refugees bureau, had warned him that the Israelis’ assurances were not credible. The existence of USAID’s memo and its broad conclusion was also previously reported by the global development publication Devex.

But the full accounting of USAID’s evidence, the determination of the refugees bureau in April and the statements from experts at the embassy—along with Lew’s decision to undermine them—reveal new aspects of the striking split within the Biden administration and how the highest-ranking American diplomats have justified his policy of continuing to flood Israel with arms over the objections of their own experts.

Stacy Gilbert, a former senior civil military adviser in the refugees bureau who had been working on drafts of Blinken’s report to Congress, resigned over the language in the final version. “There is abundant evidence showing Israel is responsible for blocking aid,” she wrote in a statement shortly after leaving, which The Washington Post and other outlets reported on. “To deny this is absurd and shameful.

“That report and its flagrant untruths will haunt us.”

The State Department’s headquarters in Washington did not always welcome that kind of information from U.S. experts on the ground, according to a person familiar with the embassy operations. That was especially true when experts reported the small number of aid trucks being allowed in.

“A lot of times they would not accept it because it was lower than what the Israelis said,” the person told ProPublica. “The sentiment from Washington was, ‘We want to see the aid increasing because Israel told us it would.’”

While Israel has its own arms industry, the country relies heavily on American jets, bombs and other weapons in Gaza. Since October, the U.S. has shipped more than 50,000 tons of weaponry, which the Israeli military says has been “crucial for sustaining” the Israel Defense Forces’ “operational capabilities during the ongoing war.”

The US gives the Israeli government about $3.8 billion every year as a baseline and significantly more during wartime—money the Israelis use to buy American-made bombs and equipment. Congress and the executive branch have imposed legal guardrails on how Israel and other partners can use that money.

One of them is the Foreign Assistance Act. The humanitarian aid portion of the law is known as 620I, which dates back to Turkey’s embargo of Armenia during the 1990s. That part of the law has never been widely implemented. But this year, advocacy groups and some Democrats in Congress brought it out of obscurity and called for Biden to use 620I to pressure the Israelis to allow aid freely into Gaza.

In response, the Biden administration announced a policy called the National Security Memorandum, or NSM-20, to require the State Department to vet Israel’s assurances about whether it was blocking aid and then report its findings to lawmakers. If Blinken determined the Israelis were not facilitating aid and were instead arbitrarily restricting it, then the government would be required by the law to halt military assistance.

Blinken submitted the agency’s official position on May 10, siding with Lew, which meant that the military support would continue.

In a statement that same day, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., criticized the administration for choosing “to disregard the requirements of NSM-20.”

“Whether or not Israel is at this moment complying with international standards with respect to facilitating humanitarian assistance to desperate, starving citizens may be debatable,” Van Hollen said. “What is undeniable — for those who don’t look the other way — is that it has repeatedly violated those standards over the last 7 months.”

As of early March, at least 930 trucks full of food, medicine and other supplies were stuck in Egypt awaiting approval from the Israelis, according to USAID’s memo.

The officials wrote that the Israeli government frequently blocks aid by imposing bureaucratic delays. The Israelis took weeks or months to respond to humanitarian groups that had submitted specific items to be approved for passage past government checkpoints. Israel would then often deny those submissions outright or accept them some days but not others. The Israeli government “doesn’t provide justification, issues blanket rejections, or cites arbitrary factors for the denial of certain items,” the memo said.

Israeli officials told State Department attorneys that the Israeli government has “scaled up its security check capacity and asserted that it imposes no limits on the number of trucks that can be inspected and enter Gaza,” according to a separate memo sent to Blinken and obtained by ProPublica. Those officials blamed most of the holdups on the humanitarian groups for not having enough capacity to get food and medicine in. USAID and State Department experts who work directly with those groups say that is not true.

In separate emails obtained by ProPublica, aid officials identified items in trucks that were banned by the Israelis, including emergency shelter gear, solar lamps, cooking stoves and desalination kits, because they were deemed “dual use,” which means Hamas could co-opt the materials. Some of the trucks that were turned away had also been carrying American-funded items like hygiene kits, the emails show.

In its memo to Blinken, USAID also cited numerous publicly reported incidents in which aid facilities and workers were hit by Israeli airstrikes even sometimes after they had shared their locations with the IDF and received approval, a process known as “deconfliction.” The Israeli government has maintained that most of those incidents were mistakes.

USAID found the Israelis often promised to take adequate measures to prevent such incidents but frequently failed to follow through. On Nov. 18, for instance, a convoy of aid workers was trying to evacuate along a route assigned to them by the IDF. The convoy was denied permission to cross a military checkpoint — despite previous IDF authorization.

Then, while en route back to their facility, the IDF opened fire on the aid workers, killing two of them.

Inside the State Department and ahead of Blinken’s report to Congress, some of the agency’s highest-ranking officials had a separate exchange about whether Israel was blocking humanitarian aid. ProPublica obtained an email thread documenting the episode.

On April 17, a Department of Defense official reached out to Mira Resnick, a deputy assistant secretary at the State Department who has been described as the agency’s driving force behind arms sales to Israel and other partners this year. The official alerted Resnick to the fact that there was about $827 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars sitting in limbo.

Resnick turned to the Counselor of the State Department and said, “We need to be able to move the rest of the” financing so that Israel could pay off bills for past weapons purchases. The financing she referenced came from American tax dollars.

The counselor, one of the highest posts at the agency, agreed with Resnick. “I think we need to move these funds,” he wrote.

But there was a hurdle, according to the agency’s top attorney: All the relevant bureaus inside the State Department would need to sign off on and agree that Israel was not preventing humanitarian aid shipments. “The principal thing we would need to see is that no bureau currently assesses that the restriction in 620i is triggered,” Richard Visek, the agency’s acting legal adviser, wrote.

The bureaus started to fall in line. The Middle East and human rights divisions agreed and determined the law hadn’t been triggered, “in light of Netanyahu’s commitments and the steps Israel has announced so far,” while noting that they still have “significant concerns about Israeli actions.”

By April 25, all had signed off but one. The Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration was the holdout. That was notable because the bureau had among the most firsthand knowledge of the situation after months of working closely with USAID and humanitarian groups to try to get food and medicine to the Palestinians.

“While we agree there have been positive steps on some commitments related to humanitarian assistance, we continue to assess that the facts on the ground indicate U.S. humanitarian assistance is being restricted,” an official in the bureau wrote to the group.

It was a potentially explosive stance to take. One of Resnick’s subordinates in the arms transfer bureau replied and asked for clarification: “Is PRM saying 620I has been triggered for Israel?”

Yes, replied Julieta Valls Noyes, its assistant secretary, that was indeed the bureau’s view. In her email, she cited a meeting from the previous day between Blinken’s deputy secretary and other top aides in the administration. All the bureaus on the email thread had provided talking points to the deputy secretary, including one that said Israel had “failed to meet most of its commitments to the president.” (None of these officials responded to a request for comment.)

But, after a series of in-person conversations, Valls Noyes backed down, according to a person familiar with the episode. When asked during a staff meeting later why she had punted on the issue, Valls Noyes replied, “There will be other opportunities,” the person said.

The financing appears to have ultimately gone through.

Less than two weeks later, Blinken delivered his report to Congress.

Do you have information about how the U.S. arms foreign partners? Contact Brett Murphy on Signal at 508-523-5195 or by email at brett.murphy@propublica.org.

Mariam Elba contributed research.

This story was published first by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.

The US government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza.

The US Agency for International Development delivered its assessment to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the State Department’s refugees bureau made its stance known to top diplomats in late April. Their conclusion was explosive because US law requires the government to cut off weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of US-backed humanitarian aid. Israel has been largely dependent on American bombs and other weapons in Gaza since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks.

The memo described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots, and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.

But Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden did not accept either finding. Days later, on May 10, Blinken delivered a carefully worded statement to Congress that said, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance.”

Prior to his report, USAID had sent Blinken a detailed 17-page memo on Israel’s conduct. The memo described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots, and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.

Lifesaving food was stockpiled less than 30 miles across the border in an Israeli port, including enough flour to feed about 1.5 million Palestinians for five months, according to the memo. But in February the Israeli government had prohibited the transfer of flour, saying its recipient was the United Nations’ Palestinian branch that had been accused of having ties with Hamas.

Separately, the head of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration had also determined that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid and that the Foreign Assistance Act should be triggered to freeze almost $830 million in taxpayer dollars earmarked for weapons and bombs to Israel, according to emails obtained by ProPublica.

The U.N. has declared a famine in parts of Gaza. The world’s leading independent panel of aid experts found that nearly half of the Palestinians in the enclave are struggling with hunger. Many go days without eating. Local authorities say dozens of children have starved to death—likely a significant undercount. Health care workers are battling a lack of immunizations compounded by a sanitation crisis. Last month, a little boy became Gaza’s first confirmed case of polio in 25 years.

The USAID officials wrote that because of Israel’s behavior, the U.S. should pause additional arms sales to the country. ProPublica obtained a copy of the agency’s April memo along with the list of evidence that the officials cited to back up their findings.

USAID, which is led by longtime diplomat Samantha Power, said the looming famine in Gaza was the result of Israel’s “arbitrary denial, restriction, and impediments of U.S. humanitarian assistance,” according to the memo. It also acknowledged Hamas had played a role in the humanitarian crisis. USAID, which receives overall policy guidance from the secretary of state, is an independent agency responsible for international development and disaster relief. The agency had for months tried and failed to deliver enough food and medicine to a starving and desperate Palestinian population.

It is, USAID concluded, “one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in the world.”

In response to detailed questions for this story, the State Department said that it had pressured the Israelis to increase the flow of aid. “As we made clear in May when [our] report was released, the US had deep concerns during the period since October 7 about action and inaction by Israel that contributed to a lack of sustained delivery of needed humanitarian assistance,” a spokesperson wrote. “Israel subsequently took steps to facilitate increased humanitarian access and aid flow into Gaza.”

US Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew had been told repeatedly about instances of the Israelis blocking humanitarian assistance, according to four US officials familiar with the embassy operations.

Government experts and human rights advocates said while the State Department may have secured a number of important commitments from the Israelis, the level of aid going to Palestinians is as inadequate as when the two determinations were reached. “The implication that the humanitarian situation has markedly improved in Gaza is a farce,” said Scott Paul, an associate director at Oxfam. “The emergence of polio in the last couple months tells you all that you need to know.”

The USAID memo was an indication of a deep rift within the Biden administration on the issue of military aid to Israel. In March, the US ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, sent Blinken a cable arguing that Israel’s war cabinet, which includes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, should be trusted to facilitate aid shipments to the Palestinians.

Lew acknowledged that “other parts of the Israeli government have tried to impede the movement of [humanitarian assistance,]” according to a copy of his cable obtained by ProPublica. But he recommended continuing to provide military assistance because he had “assessed that Israel will not arbitrarily deny, restrict, or otherwise impede US provided or supported” shipments of food and medicine.

Lew said Israeli officials regularly cite “overwhelming negative Israeli public opinion against” allowing aid to the Palestinians, “especially when Hamas seizes portions of it and when hostages remain in Gaza.” The Israeli government did not respond to a request for comment but has said in the past that it follows the laws of war, unlike Hamas.

In the months leading up to that cable, Lew had been told repeatedly about instances of the Israelis blocking humanitarian assistance, according to four US officials familiar with the embassy operations but, like others quoted in this story, not authorized to speak about them. “No other nation has ever provided so much humanitarian assistance to their enemies,” Lew responded to subordinates at the time, according to two of the officials, who said the comments drew widespread consternation.

“That put people over the edge,” one of the officials told ProPublica. “He’d be a great spokesperson for the Israeli government.”

A second official said Lew had access to the same information as USAID leaders in Washington, in addition to evidence collected by the local State Department diplomats working in Jerusalem. “But his instincts are to defend Israel,” said a third official.

“Ambassador Lew has been at the forefront of the United States’ work to increase the flow of humanitarian assistance to Gaza, as well as diplomatic efforts to reach a ceasefire agreement that would secure the release of hostages, alleviate the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, and bring an end to the conflict,” the State Department spokesperson wrote.

The question of whether Israel was impeding humanitarian aid has garnered widespread attention. Before Blinken’s statement to Congress, Reuters reported concerns from USAID about the death toll in Gaza, which now stands at about 42,000, and that some officials inside the State Department, including the refugees bureau, had warned him that the Israelis’ assurances were not credible. The existence of USAID’s memo and its broad conclusion was also previously reported by the global development publication Devex.

But the full accounting of USAID’s evidence, the determination of the refugees bureau in April and the statements from experts at the embassy—along with Lew’s decision to undermine them—reveal new aspects of the striking split within the Biden administration and how the highest-ranking American diplomats have justified his policy of continuing to flood Israel with arms over the objections of their own experts.

Stacy Gilbert, a former senior civil military adviser in the refugees bureau who had been working on drafts of Blinken’s report to Congress, resigned over the language in the final version. “There is abundant evidence showing Israel is responsible for blocking aid,” she wrote in a statement shortly after leaving, which The Washington Post and other outlets reported on. “To deny this is absurd and shameful.

“That report and its flagrant untruths will haunt us.”

The State Department’s headquarters in Washington did not always welcome that kind of information from U.S. experts on the ground, according to a person familiar with the embassy operations. That was especially true when experts reported the small number of aid trucks being allowed in.

“A lot of times they would not accept it because it was lower than what the Israelis said,” the person told ProPublica. “The sentiment from Washington was, ‘We want to see the aid increasing because Israel told us it would.’”

While Israel has its own arms industry, the country relies heavily on American jets, bombs and other weapons in Gaza. Since October, the U.S. has shipped more than 50,000 tons of weaponry, which the Israeli military says has been “crucial for sustaining” the Israel Defense Forces’ “operational capabilities during the ongoing war.”

The US gives the Israeli government about $3.8 billion every year as a baseline and significantly more during wartime—money the Israelis use to buy American-made bombs and equipment. Congress and the executive branch have imposed legal guardrails on how Israel and other partners can use that money.

One of them is the Foreign Assistance Act. The humanitarian aid portion of the law is known as 620I, which dates back to Turkey’s embargo of Armenia during the 1990s. That part of the law has never been widely implemented. But this year, advocacy groups and some Democrats in Congress brought it out of obscurity and called for Biden to use 620I to pressure the Israelis to allow aid freely into Gaza.

In response, the Biden administration announced a policy called the National Security Memorandum, or NSM-20, to require the State Department to vet Israel’s assurances about whether it was blocking aid and then report its findings to lawmakers. If Blinken determined the Israelis were not facilitating aid and were instead arbitrarily restricting it, then the government would be required by the law to halt military assistance.

Blinken submitted the agency’s official position on May 10, siding with Lew, which meant that the military support would continue.

In a statement that same day, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., criticized the administration for choosing “to disregard the requirements of NSM-20.”

“Whether or not Israel is at this moment complying with international standards with respect to facilitating humanitarian assistance to desperate, starving citizens may be debatable,” Van Hollen said. “What is undeniable — for those who don’t look the other way — is that it has repeatedly violated those standards over the last 7 months.”

As of early March, at least 930 trucks full of food, medicine and other supplies were stuck in Egypt awaiting approval from the Israelis, according to USAID’s memo.

The officials wrote that the Israeli government frequently blocks aid by imposing bureaucratic delays. The Israelis took weeks or months to respond to humanitarian groups that had submitted specific items to be approved for passage past government checkpoints. Israel would then often deny those submissions outright or accept them some days but not others. The Israeli government “doesn’t provide justification, issues blanket rejections, or cites arbitrary factors for the denial of certain items,” the memo said.

Israeli officials told State Department attorneys that the Israeli government has “scaled up its security check capacity and asserted that it imposes no limits on the number of trucks that can be inspected and enter Gaza,” according to a separate memo sent to Blinken and obtained by ProPublica. Those officials blamed most of the holdups on the humanitarian groups for not having enough capacity to get food and medicine in. USAID and State Department experts who work directly with those groups say that is not true.

In separate emails obtained by ProPublica, aid officials identified items in trucks that were banned by the Israelis, including emergency shelter gear, solar lamps, cooking stoves and desalination kits, because they were deemed “dual use,” which means Hamas could co-opt the materials. Some of the trucks that were turned away had also been carrying American-funded items like hygiene kits, the emails show.

In its memo to Blinken, USAID also cited numerous publicly reported incidents in which aid facilities and workers were hit by Israeli airstrikes even sometimes after they had shared their locations with the IDF and received approval, a process known as “deconfliction.” The Israeli government has maintained that most of those incidents were mistakes.

USAID found the Israelis often promised to take adequate measures to prevent such incidents but frequently failed to follow through. On Nov. 18, for instance, a convoy of aid workers was trying to evacuate along a route assigned to them by the IDF. The convoy was denied permission to cross a military checkpoint — despite previous IDF authorization.

Then, while en route back to their facility, the IDF opened fire on the aid workers, killing two of them.

Inside the State Department and ahead of Blinken’s report to Congress, some of the agency’s highest-ranking officials had a separate exchange about whether Israel was blocking humanitarian aid. ProPublica obtained an email thread documenting the episode.

On April 17, a Department of Defense official reached out to Mira Resnick, a deputy assistant secretary at the State Department who has been described as the agency’s driving force behind arms sales to Israel and other partners this year. The official alerted Resnick to the fact that there was about $827 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars sitting in limbo.

Resnick turned to the Counselor of the State Department and said, “We need to be able to move the rest of the” financing so that Israel could pay off bills for past weapons purchases. The financing she referenced came from American tax dollars.

The counselor, one of the highest posts at the agency, agreed with Resnick. “I think we need to move these funds,” he wrote.

But there was a hurdle, according to the agency’s top attorney: All the relevant bureaus inside the State Department would need to sign off on and agree that Israel was not preventing humanitarian aid shipments. “The principal thing we would need to see is that no bureau currently assesses that the restriction in 620i is triggered,” Richard Visek, the agency’s acting legal adviser, wrote.

The bureaus started to fall in line. The Middle East and human rights divisions agreed and determined the law hadn’t been triggered, “in light of Netanyahu’s commitments and the steps Israel has announced so far,” while noting that they still have “significant concerns about Israeli actions.”

By April 25, all had signed off but one. The Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration was the holdout. That was notable because the bureau had among the most firsthand knowledge of the situation after months of working closely with USAID and humanitarian groups to try to get food and medicine to the Palestinians.

“While we agree there have been positive steps on some commitments related to humanitarian assistance, we continue to assess that the facts on the ground indicate U.S. humanitarian assistance is being restricted,” an official in the bureau wrote to the group.

It was a potentially explosive stance to take. One of Resnick’s subordinates in the arms transfer bureau replied and asked for clarification: “Is PRM saying 620I has been triggered for Israel?”

Yes, replied Julieta Valls Noyes, its assistant secretary, that was indeed the bureau’s view. In her email, she cited a meeting from the previous day between Blinken’s deputy secretary and other top aides in the administration. All the bureaus on the email thread had provided talking points to the deputy secretary, including one that said Israel had “failed to meet most of its commitments to the president.” (None of these officials responded to a request for comment.)

But, after a series of in-person conversations, Valls Noyes backed down, according to a person familiar with the episode. When asked during a staff meeting later why she had punted on the issue, Valls Noyes replied, “There will be other opportunities,” the person said.

The financing appears to have ultimately gone through.

Less than two weeks later, Blinken delivered his report to Congress.

Do you have information about how the U.S. arms foreign partners? Contact Brett Murphy on Signal at 508-523-5195 or by email at brett.murphy@propublica.org.

Mariam Elba contributed research.

The Uncommitted movement announced on Thursday that it will not be endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris. The decision comes in response to Harris declining to break with the Biden administration over its response to the war in Israel and Palestine and after a tumultuous Democratic National Convention in which Palestinian voices were largely shut out from speaking about the horrors happening in Gaza.

The group, which represents the hundreds of thousands of Democrats who voted “uncommitted” during the primaries in protest of Biden’s Gaza policy, said in a statement released Thursday that “Vice President Harris’s unwillingness to shift on unconditional weapons policy or to even make a clear campaign statement in support of upholding existing US and international human rights law has made it impossible for us to endorse her.”

At the same time, the movement’s leaders stressed that they oppose Donald Trump and are not recommending that supporters vote for a third-party candidate because doing so could help elect Trump.

“I told VP Harris through the tears that Michigan voters want to vote for her, but we need a policy change that is going to save lives.”

“We must block Donald Trump, which is why we urge Uncommitted voters to vote against him and avoid third-party candidates that could inadvertently boost his chances, as Trump openly boasts that third parties will help his candidacy,” the group said in a statement released on Thursday. “We urge Uncommitted voters to register anti-Trump votes and vote up and down the ballot.”

Uncommitted leaders, throughout the past months, have been eager to endorse Harris and organize on her behalf if she were willing to move more aggressively towards ending the war. In early August, when organizer Layla Elabed briefly met the vice president, she told her as much. “I told VP Harris through the tears that Michigan voters want to vote for her,” Elabed said at the time, “but we need a policy change that is going to save lives.” Elabed stressed that “pro-war forces like AIPAC may want to drive us out of the Democratic Party, but we’re here to stay.”

Uncommitted had asked Vice President Harris to respond by September 15 to a request to meet with Palestinian Americans in Michigan whose family members have been killed during the war. That meeting has not happened and the Harris campaign has not committed to making it happen.

“The Vice President is committed to work to earn every vote, unite our country, and to be a President for all Americans,” the Harris campaign said in a statement. “She will continue working to bring the war in Gaza to an end in a way where Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.”

The latest announcement from Uncommitted comes one month after the group made news with a sit-in at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Uncommitted made two main policy asks at the convention: an immediate ceasefire and a US arms embargo on Israel to help bring one about. But Uncommitted delegates also made much smaller demands in the lead up to and during the convention.

Most notably, they asked that an American doctor who has volunteered in Gaza, or a Palestinian American, be given a brief speaking slot from the convention’s main stage. After convention organizers rejected Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care doctor, the group eventually began pushing for a speaking slot for Georgia state Rep. Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian American Democrat.

Lexis Zeidan, an organizer with the Uncommitted national movement, said that in their refusal to allow even one Palestinian American speaker, “the DNC and the vice president’s campaign fumbled even a small gesture.”

“Now, the vice president’s team is courting people like Dick Cheney, while sidelining these incredibly important anti-war voices,” she said. Some leaders within Uncommitted are voting for Harris—and others will not be voting at the top of the ticket at all. Zeidan, who is Palestinian American, said that on a personal level, she “simply cannot go to the ballot box and cast a vote for a candidate that is not hearing the demands of her people.” Her fellow organizer, Abbas Alawieh, will be voting for Harris, a choice he describes as a “chess move” against Donald Trump.

“If you’re willing to get some satisfaction out of feeling like you punished Harris, and that’ll help you sleep at night, I can respect that,” Alawieh said. But, he added, “In order for me to try and start sleeping at night, I need to know that I’m blocking Donald Trump because his plans are very clearly to enable Netanyahu to do more murdering.”

Mother Jones reported during the convention that Romman, who was not an Uncommitted delegate, planned to explicitly endorse Harris from the main stage. Nevertheless, national Democrats denied her and any other Palestinian American Democrat a speaking slot without asking to see their remarks. Uncommitted had made clear that any speech would be vetted and pre-approved by convention planners. As we reported:

By denying someone of Palestinian descent the chance to speak, the Harris campaign missed an easy opportunity to create distance between itself and President Biden’s failing and highly unpopular response to the war. A June poll by CBS News and YouGov found that 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents believe that the United States should not send weapons and supplies to Israel, despite the Biden administration’s support for continuing to do so. Only 23 percent of Democrats, compared with 76 percent of Republicans, told Gallup in June that they support Israel’s military actions in Gaza. 

More than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed and nearly 100,000 have been injured in Gaza, according to the local health ministry. Public health experts fear that the full death toll may be far higher. Nearly a year into the war, the chances for a ceasefire in the near future still appear low.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears committed to prolonging the war—even if it means the death of more hostages—to appease far-right cabinet members and remain in power. President Biden has largely refused to use the United States’ extensive leverage to push Netanyahu toward a ceasefire.

In last week’s debate, Harris reiterated her support for Israel and once again called for the US to have the “most lethal fighting force in the world.” 

“Our organizing around the presidential election was never about endorsing a specific candidate,” Alawieh, the Uncommitted cofounder, made clear on Thursday. “It has always been about building a movement that saves lives.”

Update, September 19: This post has been updated with a statement from the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris.

Salma Hamamy wasn’t even watching the presidential debate when former President Donald Trump attempted a familiar verbal jab against Vice President Kamala Harris.

“I’m talking now if you don’t mind,” said Trump, as Harris grinned. “Does that sound familiar?”

The line hearkens back to a moment in the 2020 vice presidential debate, when Harris responded to an interruption from Mike Pence with the curt retort “I’m speaking.” The catchphrase, since then, has become a calling card for Harris; an indication of her toughness as the first female vice president.

But it has not always been completely effective. Earlier this summer, when Harris had just become the de facto Democratic nominee, she gave one of her first addresses on the trail in Detroit. Moments into her speech, she was heckled by Hamamy—a recent graduate from the University of Michigan—and other protesters clamoring for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and end to weapon shipments to Israel.

The vice president responded to the demonstrators with a version of the same catchphrase she once used against Pence: “If you want Donald Trump to win, say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.”

The July exchange instantly became another viral moment. Many ardent Harris fans cheered on social media while others, more sympathetic to the protesters, objected to Harris’ dismissal of not only the demonstrators but the topic that they were there to address—US support of Israeli military operations in Gaza. 

Shortly after Trump landed his attack Tuesday night, curious what Hamamy thought, we texted her to ask whether she had seen the moment. She had not. “I’m watching a debate amongst our central student government right now regarding divestment,” Hamamy replied. She was referring to her alma matter’s student government debate over withholding more than half a million dollars for campus groups until the school would divest from all business with ties to Israel and weapons manufacturers. (Once Hamamy got a chance to watch the debate clip, she said it sounded familiar.)

Other than this tiny moment, in the 90-plus-minute debate, the topic of Gaza, Palestine, and Israel was the subject of only two questions—one directed to each candidate. When asked how she’d push Netanyahu to “break through the stalemate” and sign onto a ceasefire deal, Harris’s response didn’t stray far from what she said at the Democratic National Convention.

“On October 7, Hamas, a terrorist organization, slaughtered 1,200 Israelis, many of them young people who were simply attending a concert,” Harris said. 

“Israel has a right to defend itself, and how it does so matters because it is also true far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed: children, mothers,” she added. “What we know is that this war must end.”

But in contrast to Harris’ enumeration of Israeli deaths, she made little effort to explain the scale of the death and carnage in Gaza beyond the vague qualifier “too many.” 

According to the official numbers from Gaza’s Ministry of Health, more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 7. A July letter published in the Lancet, one of the most famous medical journals in the world, estimated the total death toll may be closer to 186,000. (The study factored in the difficulty of accurately collecting data under crumbling infrastructure, and the indirect deaths caused by lack of access to health care, food, and aid.) Another letter published by international medics later that same month estimated that 92,000 Palestinians have been killed. 

The Israeli military, which has received more than $6 billion in US funding since October 7, has also killed Americans in both the West Bank and Gaza: US peace activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, was shot and killed by an IDF soldier at a demonstration in the West Bank village of Beita last Friday. President Joe Biden initially called the death an accident. 

“She was fatally shot in the head by a bullet that came from an Israeli sniper positioned 200 meters away,” wrote Hamid Ali, Eygi’s partner. “This was no accident, and her killers must be held accountable.”

Harris issued a statement a day after the debate, saying “No one should be killed for participating in a peaceful protest. The shooting that led to her death is unacceptable and raises legitimate questions about the conduct of IDF personnel in the West Bank. Israel must do more to ensure that incidents like this never happen again.”

Trump was asked on the debate stage how he would negotiate with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas on a hostage deal and prevent more civilians from being killed.

“If I were president, it would have never started,” said Trump, before attacking Harris for skipping Netanyahu’s address to Congress and falsely claiming that she didn’t meet with the Israeli prime minister on his July visit to the US. 

“She hates Israel,” Trump said. “At the same time, in her own way, she hates the Arab population because the whole place is going to get blown up: Arabs, Jewish people, Israel. Israel will be gone. It would have never happened.”

Harris replied, “That’s absolutely not true. I have my entire career and life supported Israel and the Israeli people.”

The short back-and-forth on Gaza probably didn’t do too much to move the political needle as far as activists for Palestinian human rights are concerned.

“Harris’s comments on Gaza continue to offend voters appalled by Netanyahu’s US-funded killing campaign,” wrote Abbas Alawieh, an organizer of the Uncommitted movement, after the debate. Alawieh had personally spoken with Harris in Detroit at a VIP greeting line. “They offer nothing new & perpetuate the murderous status quo. It’s simple: to stop the war, our government must stop sending the weapons fueling the war.”

According to a CBS/YouGov poll in April, nearly 70 percent of Democratic voters want the US to stop sending weapons to Israel. Neither candidate acknowledged an arms embargo as an option Tuesday night. Polls released the day before the debate show Harris leading Trump by only one point in the critical swing state of Michigan, which has been a center of anti-war organizing since October 2023.

The debate moved on, and shortly after it ended, Taylor Swift shared a post on Instagram endorsing Kamala Harris. On the same day, the Israeli military hit a crowded tent camp that it had designated as a humanitarian zone with an airstrike that left deep craters in the ground, killed at least 19 Palestinians, and wounded many more.

Salma Hamamy and Zainab Hakim are no strangers to disruption. 

Over the last few months at the University of Michigan, the two have loudly called for the school to officially divest from Israel and its ongoing military offensive in Gaza. They were involved in their school’s Gaza solidarity encampment and briefly took over their campus administration building for about eight hours (before the police department pepper sprayed, removed, and arrested them). 

But they never expected their action at Vice President Kamala Harris’ Detroit rally this week—in which they loudly yelled for a ceasefire, prompting Harris’ scorn—would gain so much attention. 

Related
Uncommitted Voters Had Hope for Harris’ Gaza Policy. It’s Fading.

The two shouted, “Kamala, you need to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. We demand an arms embargo and a free Palestine.” Then, they chanted: “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide, we won’t vote for genocide.” (Such actions have been common at President Joe Biden’s events for months.)

The vice president was both stern and direct in her response. “If you want Donald Trump to win, say that,” Harris commanded from the stage. “Otherwise, I’m speaking.” 

Her supporters at the rally roared in applause, drowning out both Hamamy and Hakim, who were escorted out of the rally.

Following the Hamamy and Hakim protest, Phil Gordon, an adviser to Vice President Harris posted on social media that her position has been clear. “She will always ensure Israel is able to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups. She does not support an arms embargo on Israel,” Gordon wrote. “She will continue to work to protect civilians in Gaza and to uphold international humanitarian law.” (The Harris campaign did not respond to questions in time for publication.)

The two activists spoke with Mother Jones about their protest, what they make of the vice president’s response, and the implications it has for the upcoming election.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Why did you interrupt Vice President Kamala Harris’ speech, and what were you hoping to achieve?

Hamamy: If she is expecting to come to Michigan—because it is such a crucial swing state in the election—she must understand that there is a primary issue for Michigan voters. And it is the entire reason as to why we are in this predicament in the very first place and to why she’s actually running and why Biden dropped: It is because of the approach to Palestine. 

And if she’s not going to take any crucial steps forward—or at least take a moral position—then there will be a movement that she must face. And she will face it through the protesters attending and disrupting and making it very clear where we stand.

How did you think she would react?

Hakim: I guess the closest thing that I had imagined is that we we would be told we weren’t interested in dialog and we were just interested yelling and that’s maybe what I imagined she would say.

And what do you make of the vice president’s retort? “If you want Donald Trump to win say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.” Do you want Donald Trump to win?

Hamamy: No, of course not. 

I think it’s a really interesting response. And a questionable response to people who are saying, we want an end to the genocide. The fact that her first response is: Oh, so you want Donald Trump to win. It just shows her inability to understand what constituents are saying. 

“That is not a good way to act with people who have directly lost family members due to the ongoing genocide.”

When people are demanding a ceasefire and arms embargo and an end to the genocide and you say that we want Donald Trump to step in—it just shows a lack of accountability. It shows a lack of leadership, a lack of responsibility, and a lack of ownership.

There was a mix of reactions to her response online. I think some were applauding the vice president for being so direct—and shutting all of it down (like there was the head nod, the stare). And there were others who were far more skeptical, kind of realizing the Harris campaign is jeopardizing a win in Michigan by potentially alienating the large Arab-American community with that kind of response.

What did you make of how everyone reacted?

Hamamy: For the people who were applauding her body language or saying, “Oh, she shut those protesters up.” I was disturbed by them thinking that that was a good stance to take when someone is calling for a ceasefire. When someone’s calling for an end to weaponry shipments being sent overseas, that is not a good way to interact with constituents. That is not a good way to act with people who have directly lost family members due to the ongoing genocide.

Hakim: Obviously, I knew that this was going to be important. But I definitely did not process nearly how much attention it was going to get. 

I think that the genre of response that was most surprising to me is the people who are like: Oh, well, this has changed people’s mind; and this is showing people who Kamala Harris really is—and she’s losing Michigan because of this.

I think what was most surprising to me is the idea that this one sentence of hers—as opposed to her consistent, decades-long support for Israel—could be the thing for someone to feel like, yeah, maybe Kamala Harris isn’t a good person.

There was even some discourse around this idea of interrupting a woman of color, particularly a woman of color in this case, and there’s a lot to unpack there. But do you think that’s a fair critique of your particular protest?

Hakim: I thought that was just bullshit, the whole interrupting a woman of color thing.

It’s important to remember that this disruption was obviously about Harris and about election-related stuff. But that’s not the message to take from this. The message isn’t that this is going to have consequences on the election. The message is that Kamala is a bad person for supporting the genocide of Palestinians.

Anyone reading this might ask, okay, but when the other candidate in this race is Donald Trump, who has used the term Palestinian as an insult, does this not hurt the cause that you are advocating for in the long term?

Hamamy: In the long term, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party have basically taken the same approach and same stance on the issue of Palestine. They are both pro-Israel in the same way. Primaries are both bought by AIPAC; they are both taking money from Zionist organizations. The only difference is just how they try to appeal to their voters, to make it seem like they care about human life. 

Related
How We’ve Failed the Promise of Making “Genocide” a Crime

So to me, as someone who keeps track of the ongoing issues in Palestine, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are one and the same on this. And for them to constantly keep saying that we need to vote a Democratic member in and not the Republican Party, because they’re the lesser of two evils—and because one just has a less intense version of genocide (which I actually don’t find that to be true considering that the genocide is being aided by the Democratic Party right now). They just seem so concerned about a hypothetical genocide when there is an actual genocide that is happening in the current moment.

Often, people do not realize there are different strains of those protesting. That this is a diverse group of people who have internal disagreements, too, about how to push for a change. It’s not all one movement. Are you part of the Abandon Biden camp? Are you part of the Uncommitted movement? Like, where do you and the broader student protest movement stand across Michigan—are you all in one camp versus the other?

Hamamy: I am not in the Abandon Biden movement or the Uncommitted campaign, both of them have done amazing work. I do think there are some differences in approach at times in comparison to the student movement. The student movement is primarily focused on the fact that these politicians will never save us. 

Communication is never going to get through their head. Us, you know, praying and hoping that they’re going to implement a ceasefire simply because we say that we have family members being killed—that is never going to happen. If the scenes and the video footage and the literal depiction of actual death, murder and slaughter—at one of the highest rates ever—coming out is not going to shake them enough to call for a ceasefire, then our words will never do that.

So what needs to happen is us withholding our vote and withholding any positive affiliation that we would give to the Democratic Party or to the Republican Party—or to whoever is perpetuating this genocide. And that is one of the main ways that I think the student movement goes forward. It is through continuous disruption and creating a social crisis throughout; to say that we will not operate as business as usual, so long as our tax dollars are funding a genocide that is killing so many people in Palestine.

Leaders of the Uncommitted Movement met with Vice President Harris before the rally and asked for another meeting—hoping to discuss an arms embargo and a permanent ceasefire. And we reported that she expressed openness to a meeting. Then, at the rally, there was the retort to you all. Is this a one-step forward, one-step back situation for the Harris campaign, or considering the ongoing Israeli offensive in both Gaza and the suffering currently in the West Bank, do you see it as no movement at all?

Hamamy: Kamala very clearly shared her words of sympathy with leaders of the Uncommitted campaign because of her worry about them not mobilizing the community to vote for her. She says one thing to one person and changes the moment she gets on stage, and there are several cameras around—it was very clear. And to me, what I’m going to prioritize is what her policies stand for, and what she said to the entire crowd and to the entire audience when she was challenged and when we said we’re not going to vote for genocide, as opposed to what her response would be to people on the side in private. So, to us, her response was one step forward in making the general population understand that she’s no different.

“The message isn’t that this is going to have consequences on the election. The message is that Kamala is a bad person for supporting the genocide of Palestinians.”

Hakim: In regards to Uncommitted: I definitely appreciate them for making clear the fact that Arab Americans and Muslim Americans are a significant voting bloc—and have power to sway the election whichever way, and I think that’s really important work that the committee did. But I also think that it’s important for all of us to remember that none of these options are gonna free Palestine or end the genocide and that appealing to Kamala Harris is not a solution in any way, shape, or form. 

What people seem to be forgetting is that she’s not just like some random person who decided to run for president. She has been the vice president for all 300-plus days of this genocide, and could have said something in all of that time. She deliberately chose not to do that.

If the Harris campaign called and tried to hash this out and have a conversation, would you take that call?

Hamamy:  If she wanted to hash this out, she needs to go to the Israeli government and say: We’re cutting off all military funding. There’s nothing to hash out with the voters. What needs to be hashed out is with the people who are committing genocide right now.

Salma Hamamy and Zainab Hakim are no strangers to disruption. 

Over the last few months at the University of Michigan, the two have loudly called for the school to officially divest from Israel and its ongoing military offensive in Gaza. They were involved in their school’s Gaza solidarity encampment and briefly took over their campus administration building for about eight hours (before the police department pepper sprayed, removed, and arrested them). 

But they never expected their action at Vice President Kamala Harris’ Detroit rally this week—in which they loudly yelled for a ceasefire, prompting Harris’ scorn—would gain so much attention. 

Related
Uncommitted Voters Had Hope for Harris’ Gaza Policy. It’s Fading.

The two shouted, “Kamala, you need to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. We demand an arms embargo and a free Palestine.” Then, they chanted: “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide, we won’t vote for genocide.” (Such actions have been common at President Joe Biden’s events for months.)

The vice president was both stern and direct in her response. “If you want Donald Trump to win, say that,” Harris commanded from the stage. “Otherwise, I’m speaking.” 

Her supporters at the rally roared in applause, drowning out both Hamamy and Hakim, who were escorted out of the rally.

Following the Hamamy and Hakim protest, Phil Gordon, an adviser to Vice President Harris posted on social media that her position has been clear. “She will always ensure Israel is able to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups. She does not support an arms embargo on Israel,” Gordon wrote. “She will continue to work to protect civilians in Gaza and to uphold international humanitarian law.” (The Harris campaign did not respond to questions in time for publication.)

The two activists spoke with Mother Jones about their protest, what they make of the vice president’s response, and the implications it has for the upcoming election.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Why did you interrupt Vice President Kamala Harris’ speech, and what were you hoping to achieve?

Hamamy: If she is expecting to come to Michigan—because it is such a crucial swing state in the election—she must understand that there is a primary issue for Michigan voters. And it is the entire reason as to why we are in this predicament in the very first place and to why she’s actually running and why Biden dropped: It is because of the approach to Palestine. 

And if she’s not going to take any crucial steps forward—or at least take a moral position—then there will be a movement that she must face. And she will face it through the protesters attending and disrupting and making it very clear where we stand.

How did you think she would react?

Hakim: I guess the closest thing that I had imagined is that we we would be told we weren’t interested in dialog and we were just interested yelling and that’s maybe what I imagined she would say.

And what do you make of the vice president’s retort? “If you want Donald Trump to win say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.” Do you want Donald Trump to win?

Hamamy: No, of course not. 

I think it’s a really interesting response. And a questionable response to people who are saying, we want an end to the genocide. The fact that her first response is: Oh, so you want Donald Trump to win. It just shows her inability to understand what constituents are saying. 

“That is not a good way to act with people who have directly lost family members due to the ongoing genocide.”

When people are demanding a ceasefire and arms embargo and an end to the genocide and you say that we want Donald Trump to step in—it just shows a lack of accountability. It shows a lack of leadership, a lack of responsibility, and a lack of ownership.

There was a mix of reactions to her response online. I think some were applauding the vice president for being so direct—and shutting all of it down (like there was the head nod, the stare). And there were others who were far more skeptical, kind of realizing the Harris campaign is jeopardizing a win in Michigan by potentially alienating the large Arab-American community with that kind of response.

What did you make of how everyone reacted?

Hamamy: For the people who were applauding her body language or saying, “Oh, she shut those protesters up.” I was disturbed by them thinking that that was a good stance to take when someone is calling for a ceasefire. When someone’s calling for an end to weaponry shipments being sent overseas, that is not a good way to interact with constituents. That is not a good way to act with people who have directly lost family members due to the ongoing genocide.

Hakim: Obviously, I knew that this was going to be important. But I definitely did not process nearly how much attention it was going to get. 

I think that the genre of response that was most surprising to me is the people who are like: Oh, well, this has changed people’s mind; and this is showing people who Kamala Harris really is—and she’s losing Michigan because of this.

I think what was most surprising to me is the idea that this one sentence of hers—as opposed to her consistent, decades-long support for Israel—could be the thing for someone to feel like, yeah, maybe Kamala Harris isn’t a good person.

There was even some discourse around this idea of interrupting a woman of color, particularly a woman of color in this case, and there’s a lot to unpack there. But do you think that’s a fair critique of your particular protest?

Hakim: I thought that was just bullshit, the whole interrupting a woman of color thing.

It’s important to remember that this disruption was obviously about Harris and about election-related stuff. But that’s not the message to take from this. The message isn’t that this is going to have consequences on the election. The message is that Kamala is a bad person for supporting the genocide of Palestinians.

Anyone reading this might ask, okay, but when the other candidate in this race is Donald Trump, who has used the term Palestinian as an insult, does this not hurt the cause that you are advocating for in the long term?

Hamamy: In the long term, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party have basically taken the same approach and same stance on the issue of Palestine. They are both pro-Israel in the same way. Primaries are both bought by AIPAC; they are both taking money from Zionist organizations. The only difference is just how they try to appeal to their voters, to make it seem like they care about human life. 

Related
How We’ve Failed the Promise of Making “Genocide” a Crime

So to me, as someone who keeps track of the ongoing issues in Palestine, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are one and the same on this. And for them to constantly keep saying that we need to vote a Democratic member in and not the Republican Party, because they’re the lesser of two evils—and because one just has a less intense version of genocide (which I actually don’t find that to be true considering that the genocide is being aided by the Democratic Party right now). They just seem so concerned about a hypothetical genocide when there is an actual genocide that is happening in the current moment.

Often, people do not realize there are different strains of those protesting. That this is a diverse group of people who have internal disagreements, too, about how to push for a change. It’s not all one movement. Are you part of the Abandon Biden camp? Are you part of the Uncommitted movement? Like, where do you and the broader student protest movement stand across Michigan—are you all in one camp versus the other?

Hamamy: I am not in the Abandon Biden movement or the Uncommitted campaign, both of them have done amazing work. I do think there are some differences in approach at times in comparison to the student movement. The student movement is primarily focused on the fact that these politicians will never save us. 

Communication is never going to get through their head. Us, you know, praying and hoping that they’re going to implement a ceasefire simply because we say that we have family members being killed—that is never going to happen. If the scenes and the video footage and the literal depiction of actual death, murder and slaughter—at one of the highest rates ever—coming out is not going to shake them enough to call for a ceasefire, then our words will never do that.

So what needs to happen is us withholding our vote and withholding any positive affiliation that we would give to the Democratic Party or to the Republican Party—or to whoever is perpetuating this genocide. And that is one of the main ways that I think the student movement goes forward. It is through continuous disruption and creating a social crisis throughout; to say that we will not operate as business as usual, so long as our tax dollars are funding a genocide that is killing so many people in Palestine.

Leaders of the Uncommitted Movement met with Vice President Harris before the rally and asked for another meeting—hoping to discuss an arms embargo and a permanent ceasefire. And we reported that she expressed openness to a meeting. Then, at the rally, there was the retort to you all. Is this a one-step forward, one-step back situation for the Harris campaign, or considering the ongoing Israeli offensive in both Gaza and the suffering currently in the West Bank, do you see it as no movement at all?

Hamamy: Kamala very clearly shared her words of sympathy with leaders of the Uncommitted campaign because of her worry about them not mobilizing the community to vote for her. She says one thing to one person and changes the moment she gets on stage, and there are several cameras around—it was very clear. And to me, what I’m going to prioritize is what her policies stand for, and what she said to the entire crowd and to the entire audience when she was challenged and when we said we’re not going to vote for genocide, as opposed to what her response would be to people on the side in private. So, to us, her response was one step forward in making the general population understand that she’s no different.

“The message isn’t that this is going to have consequences on the election. The message is that Kamala is a bad person for supporting the genocide of Palestinians.”

Hakim: In regards to Uncommitted: I definitely appreciate them for making clear the fact that Arab Americans and Muslim Americans are a significant voting bloc—and have power to sway the election whichever way, and I think that’s really important work that the committee did. But I also think that it’s important for all of us to remember that none of these options are gonna free Palestine or end the genocide and that appealing to Kamala Harris is not a solution in any way, shape, or form. 

What people seem to be forgetting is that she’s not just like some random person who decided to run for president. She has been the vice president for all 300-plus days of this genocide, and could have said something in all of that time. She deliberately chose not to do that.

If the Harris campaign called and tried to hash this out and have a conversation, would you take that call?

Hamamy:  If she wanted to hash this out, she needs to go to the Israeli government and say: We’re cutting off all military funding. There’s nothing to hash out with the voters. What needs to be hashed out is with the people who are committing genocide right now.