Published date: 17 April 2025 20:35 BST | Last update:2 days 22 hours ago
The British government wanted to keep this visit quiet, and journalists in the country were only too keen to comply
Foreign Secretary David Lammy is pictured in London on 26 March 2025 (Benjamin Cremel/AFP)
In theory, the role of the media is to tell the truth and hold power to account. British newspapers and broadcasters have not fulfilled this function when it comes to Israel and the Gaza war.
On the contrary, British journalists have repeated the lies promoted by Israeli and British politicians. Some have produced fresh lies of their own, effectively acting as the propaganda arm of the Israeli state.
The latest case in point concerns this week’s visit of Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar with his British counterpart, David Lammy. There’s no question this was major news.
Saar was meeting the British foreign secretary just days after Israeli authorities detained and deported two Labour MPs – a month after Israel broke its ceasefire with Hamas, opening the way to a fresh round of atrocities; and almost two months into Israel’s latest illegal blockade of Gaza.
All this amid growing speculation that Israel is pressing for a new war on Iran.
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At the same time, Saar is one of the most senior members of a government on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The International Criminal Court has also put out an arrest warrant for his boss, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, accusing him of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Saar himself recently attempted to justify Israel’s decision to cut off aid to Gaza, which is an act of collective punishment and a war crime.
No follow-up
Most people would expect such an individual to be treated as a pariah by a British government that regularly waxes lyrical on the “rules-based international order”. Instead, Britain rolled out the red carpet, with one difference: Saar’s visit was kept secret, unannounced by either the Israeli or British governments.
On Tuesday, Middle East Eye revealed that Saar was due to visit the country imminently, thus making the trip public knowledge. No mainstream British newspaper followed up on the story.
It only emerged that Saar had met Lammy in London after the Israeli government confirmed later on Tuesday that the two had discussed Iran’s nuclear programme and ongoing negotiations to free Israeli captives in Gaza.
Israeli foreign minister meets David Lammy in London in unannounced trip
MEE reported on the meeting, as did the Scottish paper, The National. The story also appeared in Israeli media.
It would be reasonable to expect the British Foreign Office to release a statement on the meeting, as is normally the case, and especially because Israel had done so. But there was no formal statement on Tuesday, and the Foreign Office declined to comment on the record in response to multiple requests by MEE.
One might have expected the meeting between Saar and Lammy to be of interest to British journalists. A visit by the foreign minister of a state that is at war and on trial for genocide was surely massive news.
One would have thought that any decent reporter would have been keen to put questions to Saar and Lammy. But that was not so. Our mainstream media joined forces with the Foreign Office and treated the Saar visit as a state secret.
Not a single mainstream British newspaper or channel covered the meeting, other than a belated Guardian story on Wednesday.
‘Utterly disgraceful’
Let’s try a mental experiment and suppose that Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, had been quietly smuggled into Britain to meet our foreign secretary. It would have made front-page news everywhere.
The day after the meeting between Saar and Lammy, MEE published interviews with two independent MPs, Iqbal Mohamed and Ayoub Khan, and Green Party deputy leader Zack Polanski, in which they expressed concern over the affair.
Mohamed said Saar should not have been welcomed while Israel “continues its onslaught on the Palestinian people”. Khan described the meeting as “utterly disgraceful”. Polanski said it “shows more contempt for the huge concerns of a vast majority of people in the UK who want the killing to stop”.
The secrecy surrounding Saar’s visit … required the collaboration of the mainstream British media
On Wednesday evening, MEE reported that two legal groups had formally submitted a request to the UK’s attorney general and director of public prosecutions, seeking their consent to apply for an arrest warrant targeting the Israeli foreign minister.
The UK-based Global Legal Action Network and the Hind Rajab Foundation alleged that Saar had aided and abetted torture and grave breaches of international humanitarian law in Gaza, and that he was implicated in the detention and torture of Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan hospital, who was taken captive in late 2024.
But these serious allegations against a man who had just met the British foreign secretary were apparently of no interest to the ever-so-respectable British media.
Eventually, The Guardian published a story reporting on the visit, quoting the Foreign Office – which had finally gone on the record to describe Saar’s trip as “private”.
Whatever the purpose of Saar’s visit, which encompassed a long discussion with Lammy about a range of Middle Eastern issues, it was not to visit friends and family.
Deep unease
At the time of writing, the Foreign Office had still not published a news release about the trip. Apart from The Guardian, no major British paper – including the Telegraph, Times, Mail and Sun – had reported on Saar’s visit.
The BBC, which had not reported on the visit either, has instead suggested Saar was in Israel: an article on Thursday said the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews “visited Israel on Thursday, where he met” Saar. In fact, that meeting appears to have taken place in London.
Arrest warrant sought for Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar on visit to UK
It’s long past time that the BBC learned that behaving as the official state stenographer does huge damage to its once-glorious reputation.
It’s obvious why the Starmer government wanted the Saar visit kept quiet. There is deep unease inside the Labour Party about British complicity in what many experts view as an Israeli genocide in Gaza.
It’s much more helpful for Saar to be hustled in and out of Britain quietly, without any official word of his visit. No awkward questions, no news conferences – no need for Lammy to explain why Britain continues to provide arms and diplomatic support to Israel.
The secrecy surrounding Saar’s visit, which has conveniently come during Parliament’s Easter recess, required the collaboration of the mainstream British media. As so often during the murderous Gaza war, they cheerfully obliged.
In Palestine, Israel has been the executioner and the United States has been the executor of ethnic cleansing and genocide, though it is those who uphold international law that are blamed, writes M. Reza Behnam.
Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu with President Donald Trump in a White House press event on April 7. (White House/Flickr)
In the Orwellian world in which we now dwell, countries and groups that uphold international law are labeled terrorists or supporters of terrorism, while those that commit unspeakable crimes, flagrantly violating international and humanitarian laws, remain unlabeled and unpunished.
What the last year and a half in Gaza has glaringly demonstrated is how little the United States cares about upholding international law. And that its outpost, Israel, continues to operate lawlessly outside international rules and moral norms. In Palestine, Israel has been the executioner and the United States has been the executor of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Both the Biden and Trump administrations have been breaking the law for Israel.
Unlike his predecessor, however, who attempted to hide or disguise his breach of international and U.S. laws, the Trump White House overtly and brazenly violates both.
The United States continues to provide lethal weapons for Tel Aviv’s engineered humanitarian catastrophe despite the fact that it is a signatory to the 1948 “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” known as the Genocide Convention, a binding treaty which established a “responsibility to protect” obligation on state parties, whether they ratified it or not.
The Convention defined genocide and definitively recognized it as crime. It also criminalized complicity and established duties on state parties to take measures to prevent and to punish perpetrators.
In addition to the above treaty, the 1945 U.N. Charter, 1949 Geneva Conventions, as well as other binding U.N. documents established a collective “responsibility to protect” against genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The obligation was meant to insure that the international community never again, as it did during World War II, failed to act.
History will harshly and rightly judge those countries and officials who have failed to fulfill their moral as well as their legal obligations to end the genocide. And it will heap praise on those who did.
Unfortunately, no one has asked why the United States has been battering and mercilessly penalizing countries and groups that have been faithfully upholding their obligations under Article I of the Convention to “prevent and punish genocide.”
To counteract the Orwellian distortions that frame Israel’s ongoing atrocities it is important to give recognition to those who have acted on their moral and legal obligations under international law.
In a world where powerful nations act with impunity, some have acted to end the genocide: Ansar Allah (also known as Houthis) in Yemen; Hezbollah in Lebanon; the Islamic Republic of Iran and South Africa.
Resistance to oppression has been central to their identities and it is what has united them in solidarity with Palestinian resistance movements. They have paid a great price for carrying out the mandates of international and humanitarian laws.
The United States designates any country or group that struggles against and opposes Israel as terrorists.
Ansar Allah (Supporters of God) in Yemen
Satellite photo of Bab-el-Mandeb, the strait between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden where Ansar Allah has targeted certain commercial ships from pro-Israel countries. (WorldWind software/Wikimedia Commons/ Public Domain)
In response to Israel’s invasion and humanitarian blockade of Gaza, Ansar Allah entered the Gaza war on Oct. 31, 2023. It began missile/drone attacks on commercial and military vessels linked to Israel in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. The attacks were halted when the ceasefire agreement went into effect on Jan.19. When Israel violated the ceasefire in mid-March and restarted its genocidal campaign and blockade of food and medicine to Gaza, Ansar Allah resumed its attacks.
“We hope it is understood that the actions taken by the [Ansar Allah military]… stem from a deep sense of religious, humanitarian and moral responsibility toward the oppressed Palestinian people and aim to pressure the Israeli usurper entity to reopen the crossings to the Gaza Strip and allow the entry of aid, including food and medical supplies.”
The U.S. corporate media has disparagingly framed Ansar Allah as a regional proxy of Tehran. They have failed, however, to report on Yemen’s historical solidarity with Palestine.
In 1947, for example, Yemeni representatives to the United Nations opposed the partition of Palestine and during the 1973 October War, the Bab al-Mandab strait was closed to ships carrying fuel to Israel. Also, the Republic of Yemen, following unification in 1990, pushed for U.S. diplomatic recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization; and it extended the same rights and resources to Palestinian refugees as they did to their own citizens.
Hezbollah (Party of God) in Lebanon
Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon, May 2023. (Tasnim News Agency, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
Like Ansar Allah in Yemen, Hezbollah has been painted by the United States and the West as a terrorist organization. It is in reality a national political party and military force dedicated to the defense of Lebanon and Palestinians against Israeli expansion and aggression.
The Israeli invasions and siege of Lebanon in 1982 drove the resistance. Hezbollah officially announced its existence in 1985 in an “Open Letter to the Downtrodden in Lebanon and the World.” In the letter, they declared their intent to remove the Israeli occupiers from Lebanon, Palestine and Jerusalem. The manifesto was revised in 2009 to reflect the organization’s commitment to work within the multi-sectarian Lebanese state.
Hezbollah, in solidarity with the Palestinians, began a campaign of attacks against the Zionist regime one day after the Al-Aqsa Flood operation on Oct. 7. They began shelling Israeli forces in the occupied Shebaa Farms area, opening a front in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah refused to stop the attacks until Tel Aviv ended its genocide against the Palestinians. During the brief ceasefire, they paused fighting.
Israel has assassinated a number of Hezbollah leaders, including popular secretary-general, Sayeed Hassan Nasrallah in 2024, believing it could crush the resistance.
The concept of resistance has been a guiding ideology of Hezbollah. Its image in the Muslim world has been reinforced by its example of liberating Lebanese land in 2000 and 2006 through armed struggle against the Israeli occupiers, its unconditional support for the liberation of Palestine, and in its opposition to U.S.-Israeli regional hegemony.
The ideas and ideals of the 1979 Iranian Revolution have driven Hezbollah’s evolution, which Iran has supported since the group’s early days.
Islamic Republic of Iran
Protest in Tehran against Israel’s bombing of the Gaza Strip, Nov. 18, 2023. (Mostafa Tehrani/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 4.0)
Iran has, since 1979, come to be defined by its culture of resistance to U.S.-Israel hegemony and its commitment to Palestinian self-determination. Resistance has been central to its foreign policy. Article 152 of the December 1979 Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran declares that resolution:
“The foreign policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran is based upon the rejection of all forms of domination, both the exertion of it and submission to it, the preservation of the independence of the country…the defence of the rights of all Muslims, nonalignment with respect to the hegemonist superpowers, and the maintenance of mutually peaceful relations with all non-belligerent States.”
Additionally, Article 154, which states that Iran will refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of other nations, underscores the country’s support for “the just struggles of the mustad’affun [oppressed] against the mustakbirun [oppressors] in every corner of the globe.”
Iran has been fulfilling its responsibilities under international law to oppose Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine. Consequently, placing it at odds with U.S. administrations and under crippling economic sanctions since its history shifted from monarchy to an Islamic Republic.
Republic of South Africa
Lawyers for South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at The Hague during public hearings in January 2024. (International Court of Justice)
South Africa, on Dec. 29, 2023, filed an application to institute proceedings against Israel before the judicial organ of the United Nations, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. It brought the case by invoking its “obligation to prevent genocide” as a signatory to the UN Genocide Convention.
In “South Africa v. Israel,” lawyers for the High Court of South Africa argued that the “The intent to destroy Gaza has been nurtured at the highest levels of the state.”
Although the ICJ ordered (Jan. 26, 2024) Israel to take all measures to prevent acts of genocide, to punish those committing such acts and to enable the provision of humanitarian assistance and basic services, Israel has never complied with the Court’s legally binding ruling.
Since its initial application, South Africa has filed three other petitions to the ICJ for additional emergency protections for the Palestinians and 13 countries have filed declarations of support.
South Africa has, furthermore, refused to be bullied by the United States. Despite threats from the current administration, including cuts to financial aid, Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola emphasized South Africa’s principled commitment to the rule of law and refusal to withdraw its case before the ICJ.
Silence of So-Called Civilized World
Ironically, while protestors on U.S. university campuses are kidnapped, illegally detained by the government for opposing the genocide in Gaza, the American president, disregarding international law, welcomes, rather than arrests, indicted war criminal, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to the White House.
The obligation under customary international law to investigate and prosecute war criminals has been firmly established. It is found in a number of treaties, in numerous resolutions adopted by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, and reaffirmed on several occasions by the U.N. Security Council. In addition, the preamble to the Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has confirmed “the duty of every State to exercise its criminal jurisdiction over those responsible for international crimes.”
Non-party states to the ICC, like the United States, are obliged to cooperate with the court not only in cases referred by the Security Council but also under provisions in the 1949 Geneva Conventions whereby states must “respect and ensure” deference for international humanitarian law.
With regard to the actions of Palestinian resistance movements, it should be noted that the U.N. General Assembly has passed a number of resolutions recognizing the legitimacy of armed resistance as a means of oppressed peoples to achieve self-determination and independence.
The official silence of the so-called civilized world, particularly the United States, regarding Israel’s campaign of terror and barbarity in Gaza and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories has set a dangerous precedent. Rather than execute its obligations under the Genocide Convention to prevent and protect Palestinians from genocide, Washington has waged war against those who have.
The United States has, to its misfortune, invested heavily in its Zionist outpost, masquerading as a law-abiding moral country. Israel has no written constitution and no defined borders; with that, it has lived outside the rules and laws of international conventions.
As a colonial entity, Israel’s leaders have known that in order to complete their supremacist aims in Palestine, they would have to operate outside international and humanitarian laws. Unrestrained, that is what it has done for more than eight decades.
The fate of Gaza dictates the future not only for Palestinians but for Zionist Israelis and Americans as well. Most importantly, it asks the question will the new international order be one in which “might makes right” or “right makes right?”
M. Reza Behnam is a political scientist specializing in the history, politics and governments of the Middle East.
A senior Hamas official said on Monday that the Palestinian group is prepared to release all Israeli hostages in exchange for a “serious prisoner swap” and guarantees that Israel will end the war in Gaza.
Hamas is engaged in negotiations in Cairo with mediators from Egypt and Qatar — two nations working alongside the United States to broker a ceasefire in the besieged territory.
“We are ready to release all Israeli captives in exchange for a serious prisoner swap deal, an end to the war, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip and the entry of humanitarian aid,” Taher al-Nunu, a senior Hamas official, told AFP.
However, he accused Israel of obstructing progress towards a ceasefire.
“The issue is not the number of captives,” Nunu said, “but rather that the occupation is reneging on its commitments, blocking the implementation of the ceasefire agreement and continuing the war.”
“Hamas has therefore stressed the need for guarantees to compel the occupation (Israel) to uphold the agreement,” he added.
Hamas rebels. Photo: AFP
Israeli news website Ynet reported on Monday that a new proposal had been put to Hamas.
Under the deal, the group would release 10 living hostages in exchange for US guarantees that Israel would enter negotiations for a second phase of the ceasefire.
The first phase of the ceasefire, which began on January 19 and included multiple hostage-prisoner exchanges, lasted two months before disintegrating.
Efforts towards a new truce have stalled, reportedly over disputes regarding the number of hostages to be released by Hamas.
Meanwhile, Nunu said that Hamas would not disarm, a key condition that Israel has set for ending the war.
“The weapons of the resistance are not up for negotiation,” Nunu said.
The war in Gaza broke out after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. The attack resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.
Militants also took 251 hostages, 58 of whom are still held in Gaza, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.
Gaza’s health ministry said on Sunday that at least 1,574 Palestinians had been killed since March 18, when the ceasefire collapsed, taking the overall death toll since the war began to 50,944.
Thick smoke rises above buildings in Gaza City following Israel air strikes. Photo: Mahmud Hams | AFP
The Israeli killing of medical workers in Gaza is further proof of a lack of any restraint on the part of Israel’s Defense Forces (IDF). They have been accused of executing 15 handcuffed medics before burying them in a mass grave underneath their crushed ambulances in southern Gaza. As Middle East Eye reported on the medics: “They were found over the weekend in a mass grave with around 20 multiple gunshots in each one of them.” According to Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for the Palestinian Civil Defence in Gaza; “At least one of them had their legs bound, another was decapitated and a third topless,” he added.
Here are some of the reactions to the execution:
The top United Nations interim official for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Jonathan Whittall, told journalists: “What is happening here defies decency, it defies humanity, it defies the law. It really is a war without limits. It’s an endless loop of blood, pain, and death.”
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) was “outraged.” IFRC Secretary General Jagan Chapagain stated: “Even in the most complex conflict zones, there are rules. These rules of International Humanitarian Law could not be clearer – civilians must be protected; humanitarians must be protected. Health services must be protected.”
“Preliminary analysis suggests they were executed, not from a distant range,” a forensic consultant who examined the exhumed bodies told The Guardian, “since the locations of the bullet wounds were specific and intentional,” he said. “One observation is that the bullets were aimed at one person’s head, another at their heart, and a third person had been shot with six or seven bullets in the torso.”
What was Israel’s explanation? “When Hamas terrorists operate in active combat zones — while using humanitarian vehicles as cover, launching rockets from hospitals and stealing aid — Israel will do whatever it takes to protect its soldiers and citizens,” justified Jonathan Harounoff, a spokesman for Israel’s mission to the U.N.
The New York Times contradicted Israel’s version of what happened: “The video obtained by the Timesshows that the approaching ambulances and fire truck were clearly marked and had their emergency signal lights on when Israeli troops hit them with a barrage of gunfire.” The video was discovered on the cellphone of one of the dead paramedics.
After watching the video, Farnaz Fassihi and Christoph Koettl described what they saw and heard in the Times. It is worth repeating the gruesome details:
“Rescue workers, at least two of whom can be seen wearing uniforms, are seen exiting a fire truck and an ambulance marked with the emblem of the Red Crescent and approaching the ambulance derailed to the side. Then, sounds of intense gunfire break out. A barrage of gunshots is seen and heard in the video hitting the convoy. The camera shakes, the video goes dark. But the audio continues for five minutes, and the rat-a-tat of gunfire does not stop. A man says in Arabic that there are Israelis present.
The paramedic filming is heard on the video reciting, over and over, the ‘shahada,’ or a Muslim declaration of faith, which people recite when facing death. ’There is no God but God, Muhammad is his messenger,’ the paramedic is heard saying. He asks God for forgiveness and says he knows he is going to die.
‘Forgive me, mother. This is the path I chose — to help people,’ he said.’”
After reports on the video went public, Israeli officials modified their initial justifications. “The Israeli military on Saturday [April 5] acknowledged that the initial accounts from troops involved in the killing last month of 15 people in southern Gaza — who the United Nations said were paramedics and rescue workers — had been partially ‘mistaken,’” journalist Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem. Israel now says the episode was “under thorough examination.” (The Times has interviewed several witnesses to the shootings Eyewitnesses Recount Deadly Israeli Attack on Medics in Gaza – The New York Times)
The outright assassination of medical workers is a new and different form of Israeli violations of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) in its continuing refusal to respect international norms. Over 50,000 people, including women, the elderly and children, have died in Gaza. An entire infrastructure has been destroyed. Millions have been displaced. IHL in all its complexities is only effective if it is respected by all parties to a conflict. Israel signed the Geneva Conventions on Dec. 8, 1949, and ratified them on July 6, 1951.
What happens if a party to a conflict like Israel continues to violate IHL in the most egregious manner? So far, very little. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visits Hungary and the United States as if they were normal diplomatic trips, ignoring the fact that the International Criminal Court has issued search warrants for his arrest. (The U.S. and has no obligation to arrest Netanyahu since is not party to the Rome Treaty.)
For years, my dear friend Eugene Schulman often wore a keffiyeh to honor the Palestinian people. He would regularly unfurl a Palestinian flag on his Geneva balcony in support of a Palestinian state. A non-practicing Jew, Gene was constantly outraged at how Palestinians were treated by Israel. Gene died five years ago next month – Matthew Stevenson movingly described him in CounterPunch (Our Friend Eugene Schulman – CounterPunch.org.). Gene would be beyond outrage today at what is happening to Palestinians.
Hunters have seasons to shoot. Their prey have respites. The IDF and Israeli military have shown it is an open season in Gaza. Nothing is out of bounds. There is no respite for anyone, including humanitarian workers and medics. Even the erudite Gene Schulman would not find words to describe what is taking place. He would be, as we all should be, beyond outrage.
The Israel Defense Forces is preparing to permanently seize the largely depopulated Palestinian city of Rafah—comprising about 20% of Gaza’s land area—and incorporate what was once the embattled enclave’s third-largest city into a borderland buffer that IDF troops have described as a “kill zone” rife with alleged war crimes.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretzreported Wednesday that “defense sources” said an area from the so-called Philadelphi corridor along Gaza’s border with Egypt and the Morag corridor—the name of a Jewish colony that once stood between Rafah and Khan Younis—will be incorporated into the buffer zone that runs along the entire length of the Israeli border.
The affected area includes the entire city of Rafah—which is thousands of years old—and surrounding neighborhoods, which were home to more than 250,000 people before Israeli launched what United Nations experts have called a genocidal assault on Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023.
As Haaretz‘s Yaniv Kubovitch reported:
Expanding the buffer zone to this extent carries significant implications. Not only does it cover a vast area—approximately 75 square kilometers (about 29 square miles), or roughly one-fifth of the Gaza Strip—but severing it would effectively turn Gaza into an enclave within Israeli-controlled territory, cutting it off from the Egyptian border. According to defense sources, this consideration played a central role in the decision to focus on Rafah…
It has yet to be decided whether the entire area will simply be designated a buffer zone that is off-limits to civilians—as has been done in other parts of the border area—or whether the area will be fully cleared and all buildings demolished, effectively wiping out the city of Rafah.
In recent weeks and for the second time during the war, IDF troops forcibly expelled hundreds of thousands residents from Rafah and other areas of southern Gaza in an ethnic cleansing campaign reminiscent of the 1948 Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic, through which the modern state of Israel was founded. Most Gaza residents today are Nakba survivors or descendants of Palestinians who fled or were expelled from other parts of Palestine in 1948.
Earlier this month, Israeli officials including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—a fugitive from the International Criminal Court wanted for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza—and Defense Minister Israel Katz announced plans to seize “large areas” of southern Gaza to be added to what Katz called “security zones” and “settlements.”
Jewish recolonization of Gaza is a major objective of many right-wing Israelis. Last month, Katz announced the creation of a new IDF directorate tasked with ethnically cleansing northern Gaza, which Israeli leaders euphemistically call “voluntary emigration.” Katz said the agency would be run “in accordance with the vision of U.S. President Donald Trump,” who in February said that the United States would “take over” Gaza after emptying the strip of its over 2 million Palestinians, and then transform the enclave into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” Trump subsequently attempted to walk back some of his comments.
Earlier this week, the Israeli human rights group Breaking the Silence published testimonies of IDF officers, soldiers, and veterans who took part in the creation of the buffer zone. Soldiers recounted orders to “deliberately, methodically, and systematically annihilate whatever was within the designated perimeter, including entire residential neighborhoods, public buildings, educational institutions, mosques, and cemeteries, with very few exceptions.”
Palestinians who dared enter the perimeter, even accidentally were targeted, including civilian men, women, children, and elders. One officer featured in the report toldThe Guardian: “We’re killing [men], we’re killing their wives, their children, their cats, their dogs. We’re destroying their houses and pissing on their graves.”
Most of Gaza’s more than 2 million residents have been forcibly displaced at least once since Israel launched the war, which has left more than 180,000 Palestinians dead, wounded, or missing, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Widespread starvation and disease have been fueled by a “complete siege” which, among other Israeli policies and actions, has been cited in the ongoing South Africa-led genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
Trump and Musk are on an unconstitutional rampage, aiming for virtually every corner of the federal government. These two right-wing billionaires are targeting nurses, scientists, teachers, daycare providers, judges, veterans, air traffic controllers, and nuclear safety inspectors. No one is safe. The food stamps program, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are next.
It’s an unprecedented disaster and a five-alarm fire, but there will be a reckoning. The people did not vote for this. The American people do not want this dystopian hellscape that hides behind claims of “efficiency.” Still, in reality, it is all a giveaway to corporate interests and the libertarian dreams of far-right oligarchs like Musk.
Common Dreams is playing a vital role by reporting day and night on this orgy of corruption and greed, as well as what everyday people can do to organize and fight back. As a people-powered nonprofit news outlet, we cover issues the corporate media never will, but we can only continue with our readers’ support.
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Yemen’s Red Sea blockade in defense of Palestinians is squarely supported by international law. But the country is being ruthlessly bombed by the U.S. to ensure Israeli impunity for its continued siege and genocide in Gaza.
An F-18 takes off from the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower to strike Houthi targets in Yemen, Feb. 3, 2024. (Photo: U.S. Central Command)
The U.S. is bombing Yemen because Yemen is acting, as required by international law, to stop the genocide and unlawful siege in Palestine.
This is not an editorial opinion. It is a statement of both law and fact.
Neither of these facts has been featured in the reporting or commentary of Western media corporations, let alone in the statements of perpetrator governments like the U.S.
Because to perpetrate a genocide in plain sight requires the suppression of the truth and the obscuring of the law.
But international law is clear. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has found, and the UN General Assembly (UNGA) has affirmed, that all states are obliged to cut off all military and economic support both for the Israeli regime’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including Jerusalem, and for its genocidal assault on the people of occupied Gaza.
These legal findings are rooted in the highest-level rules of international law (so-called jus cogens and erga omnes obligations), including the prohibition of genocide, of aggression, of the acquisition of territory by force, and of acts that violate the right to self-determination.
And these obligations bind all states. Yemen has acted concretely to meet them, by imposing a blockade on ships destined to resupply the Israeli regime at the Red Sea port of Eilat, and explicitly in response to the Israeli-imposed siege and genocide in Palestine.
In sum, Yemen is being ruthlessly bombed by the United States to ensure Israeli impunity for the continued commission of its international crimes in Palestine.
In doing so, the U.S. itself is in breach of the legal findings of the International Court of Justice, and guilty of two international crimes: the supreme crime of aggression, and the crime of complicity in genocide.
The Yemenis, on the other hand, have played the role of human rights defender and humanitarian intervener in this situation.
Clearly, the good guy-bad guy narrative of the U.S. government and its obsequious media corporations is a direct inversion of the truth.
An international call to action
The international alarm bells on genocide in Palestine began to ring in October of 2023 and became louder and louder as the genocide proceeded.
The 193 states of the world responded in various ways.
Some, including the U.S., UK, Germany, and other Western states, joined Israel in the active perpetration of the genocide.
Others, also mostly Western states, chose complicity in the genocide by supplying the genocide machine with fuel, spare parts, diplomatic cover, and other necessities.
A large number of states from all regions chose to simply remain silent and passive, which is also a breach of their international legal obligations to act affirmatively to prevent and stop genocide and to enforce international humanitarian law.
A fourth group of states have opposed the Israeli regime in public statements and in diplomatic action in the Security Council and in the UNGA, or by joining cases against the perpetrators in the ICJ and the International Criminal Court (ICC) but have done nothing to cut off material support to the offending regime or to defend the Palestinian people from the onslaught by Israel’s soldiers and settlers.
But there is another group, the smallest group of all, that has taken concrete steps to actively meet its obligations under international law.
Foremost among these have been South Africa, which brought Israel to trial for genocide in the ICJ, and, very significantly, Yemen.
Yemen (that is, the capital and most of the population which are under the de facto control of Ansar Allah, while the south is controlled by a rival group with UN recognition), announced in response to Israel’s genocide in Palestine that it would block shipping in the Red Sea that was heading to resupply the Israeli regime as long as that regime continues the siege and genocide in Gaza.
It uses the choke point of the Bab al-Mandab (which means, appropriately, “Gate of Tears”), the narrow strait between Yemen and Djibouti at the opening of the Red Sea.
Yemen started this targeted, partial blockade in November 2023 with the boarding of an Israeli ship and then sustained the blockade until the announcement of the most recent ceasefire in Gaza, resuming it only when Israel broke the ceasefire and reinstituted the unlawful siege on Gaza.
Indeed, the Yemenis proved the pure humanitarian intent of the blockade by pausing it entirely during the January ceasefire in Gaza, and only announcing its resumption when Israel reimposed the siege and full-scale assault on Gaza in March.
Of course, ships supplying the regime could avoid the blockade by sailing around Africa, but that meant a considerable increase in shipping costs. Some ships destined for Israel tried to break the blockade and were warned, boarded, commandeered, or militarily engaged by the Yemini (Houthi) armed forces, as were Western military ships attacking the Yemenis or confronting the blockade
And the blockade worked, choking off over 80% of shipping to the Israeli regime, ultimately bankrupting the Israeli port of Eilat, and reducing supply through Ashdod (via the Suez Canal), thereby significantly obstructing the resupplying of the regime.
In turn, the U.S. initiated a massive bombing campaign to attack Yemen, the region’s poorest country, a country it has been bombing for over two decades now, violating international law in doing so, slaughtering civilians in the process, exacerbating the famine, the medical crisis, internal displacement, putting U.S. soldiers at risk, risking a broader regional war, spending billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money in the process, and lying to its own people about what’s happening, all for the sole purpose of assisting Israel’s genocide in Palestine.
The law is on Yemen’s side
International lawis clearly on Yemen’s side here.
First, the U.S. attacks on Yemen constitute the crime of aggression under international law.
They do not fall within the narrow requirements of self-defense under the UN Charter, they have not been authorized under the Charter, and they are not even claimed to be in defense of jus cogens rules, but rather to are intended to “protect commerce.”
Second, Both the ICJ and the UN General Assembly have found that all countries are legally obliged to cease any support for the Israeli occupation regime, to ban any products from the settlements, to cut off all military, diplomatic, economic, commercial, financial, investment, and trade relations with the Israeli occupation.
They affirmed as well that all states must respect the provisional orders of the ICJ in the Israel genocide case, and to respect their third-state obligations under the Genocide Convention to act to prevent and punish Genocide.
This includes the obligation of all third states to use all means at their disposal to influence the state potentially committing genocide and ensuring that their own actions don’t aid or abet such acts.
As noted above, these rules are jus cogens (the highest-level, peremptory norms from which there is no derogation) and erga omnes (meaning they bind all states, including Yemen and the United States).
Additionally, both Yemen and the U.S. are obliged under the Geneva Conventions of 1949 to do all in their power “to ensure respect” for their provisions by other parties, including Israel.
While Yemen has acted to meet these obligations, the U.S. has attacked it for doing so.
Circumventing U.S. obstruction of international law
Thus, recognizing that states are obliged to act both individually and collectively to stop Israel’s genocide and that grave breaches of international law (supplying a regime perpetrating genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, gross and systematic violations of human rights) are occurring in or near areas it controls, Yemen has moved to stop these violations.
Of course, defenders of the U.S. attacks will challenge the right of Yemen to intervene by claiming that (1) Ansar Allah in Yemen is not recognized as a state authority and (2) the Security Council has not authorized Yemen to use force.
Indeed, Yemen is a divided country, with competing forces controlling various sections. While the country has been divided for most of its post-colonial history, the current crisis in Yemen started with the Arab Spring protests in 2011. Much like in Syria, these protests were crushed and subsequently morphed into a civil war that has been raging since at least 2015.
The devastating effects of the conflict have been severely exacerbated by brutal U.S. and Saudi attacks and blockades, creating a situation in which, before the Palestine genocide spiked in 2023, Yemen was declared the worst humanitarian disaster on the planet by international agencies.
As a result, the south of the country is dominated by the UN-recognized Presidential Leadership Council, which is also supported by the West and the Gulf monarchies.
However, Ansar Allah’s Supreme Political Council controls the capital and largest city, Sanaa, all of Yemen’s northern territory, 80% of the country’s population, and the strategic region of the Bab al-Mandab.
As such, of the two, Houthi-controlled Yemen is, de facto, the most powerful entity. And it is the entity adjacent to the Bab al-Mandab and with the actual capacity to implement the humanitarian blockade.
This “capacity to influence” suggests a heightened responsibility to act, especially in the case of genocide, as has been recognized by the ICJ. Thus, as there is both a (heightened) duty to act and a capacity to act, the fact that the country is divided cannot reasonably be said to be determinative in a case where the stakes include genocide.
And even if the statehood of Ansar Allah-controlled Yemen were to be denied, non-state actors, including armed groups, are also recognized as having obligations under international law, not least the rules of international humanitarian law.
As for the lack of Security Council authorization, the UNSC has been entirely disabled by the U.S., as a party to the conflict, and as a result, is entirely inoperative for the purposes of the situation in Palestine. (Just one more example of how the U.S. is destroying the international legal order on behalf of this one oppressive foreign regime).
But because the UNSC gets its mandate from the UN Charter, a treaty that is itself part of international law, it is subject to international law, not above it. And both the prohibition of genocide and the right of self-determination are jus cogens and erga omnes rules. These are the highest international legal principles, peremptory norms, universal and non-derogable. The Security Council cannot supersede these rules of international law.
And if action by the UNSC cannot supersede jus cogens norms, then inaction or omissions by the UNSC cannot supersede (or erase) jus cogens norms, the force of which is ongoing in all circumstances.
Simply put, jus cogens and erga omnes rules of international law are not derived from, cannot be trumped by, nor do they depend upon the authority of the Security Council.
Furthermore, in this case, the international community of states has expressed its intentions by adopting the UNGA resolution on implementing the ICJ’s findings in Palestine.
And this was no ordinary resolution, but one adopted (1) with an overwhelming majority and (2) under the enhanced powers of an emergency special session convened under the so-called Uniting for Peace resolution, designed to overcome the obstruction of the veto in extraordinary circumstances such as these.
Needless to say, Yemen also has a right to self-defense against U.S. armed attacks, as do all countries under Article 51 of the UN Charter. And the U.S. attacks on Yemen have been ongoing for decades now.
Beyond that, for some of its actions,Yemen could argue that it is carrying out maritime law enforcement in its territorial waters, which generally does not require UNSC authorization. Indeed, the U.S. Coast Guard interdicts, boards, and seizes ships, even in international waters, for mere suspicion of much lesser offenses, including suspected drug smuggling. And what more important maritime law enforcement function could there be than stopping a genocide?
And, indeed, even if this were challenged under the rules of the law of the sea (the international treaty on which, by the way, Yemen has ratified, but the U.S. refuses to sign or ratify), the Yemenis are acting under the authority of international law, as pronounced by the ICJ, reinforced by the UNGA implementing resolution, and codified in treaties to which Yemen is a party (including the Convention on the Law of the Sea, the Genocide Convention, and the Geneva Conventions).
Lawlessness or the rule of law
Of course, if the U.S. disagrees, their lawful remedy is to seek a decision on the dispute in a contentious case at the ICJ, or, alternatively, to convince the UNGA to request an ICJ advisory opinion on the question. But it has no legal right to wage war against Yemen.
And what is clear in the law is that all states, including Yemen and the U.S., have a duty to respect the rulings of the ICJ, and its authoritative interpretations of international law. On this, the ICJ has already issued several clear conclusions on the law that binds all third states, first in the advisory opinion on Israel’s apartheid wall, then in a series of provisional measures ordered in the genocide case against Israel, and finally in its advisory opinion finding Israeli apartheid and illegal occupation in Palestine.
Supplying, facilitating the supply, or failing to act to stop the supply of the Israeli regime’s occupation of Palestine or of its genocide in Palestine, are serious violations of international law.
Yemen is meeting these obligations. The U.S. is violating them.
Published date: 1 April 2025 17:59 BST | Last update:1 day 3 hours ago
The use of Palestinian civilians as human shields has been an Israeli army policy during its war on Gaza, according to the testimony of a senior officer in a non-reservist brigade.
“In Gaza, human shields are used by Israeli soldiers at least six times a day,” the officer, who says he served with the Israeli army for nine months, wrote anonymously for Haaretz on Sunday.
According to the article, Israeli soldiers routinely force Palestinian civilians to enter Gaza homes ahead of military operations to ensure that no explosives or combatants are there.
This procedure is known with the codename “mosquito protocol”, which the officer first came across in December 2023, two months after Israel launched its devastating onslaught on Gaza.
The Israeli army normally uses dogs for these missions, the officer wrote, and there had not been a shortage of dogs at the time the use of Palestinian human shields first became known to the officer.
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The officer added that the lack of dogs was the “unofficial excuse” for the procedure.
The use of Palestinian human shields has become systematically used, and the individuals used in these procedures are referred to internally as “shawish”, the officer said.
“Today, almost every platoon keeps a ‘shawish,’ and no infantry force enters a house before a ‘shawish’ clears it,” he wrote. “This means there are four ‘shawishes’ in a company, twelve in a battalion, and at least 36 in a brigade. We operate a sub-army of slaves.”
‘I thought I was hallucinating’
The use of civilians as human shields is strictly prohibited under international humaitarian law and constitutes a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
The Israeli army last month launched six investigations into widely reported allegations that its soldiers use Palestinians as human shields.
The officer downplayed the seriousness of the Israeli investigation, saying that a serious effort would include “far more than a thousand investigations”.
He said that he attended a meeting where a brigade commander presented the use of human shields as a “necessary operational achievement to accomplish the mission”.
‘I don’t know which is worse: that they don’t know what’s going on in the army they command, or that they do know and continue regardless’
– Israeli officer
“It was so normalised that I thought I was hallucinating,” he wrote.
He referred to statements by a senior source to Haaretz in August 2024 that Israeli military commanders were aware of the procedure.
“I don’t know which is worse: that they don’t know what’s going on in the army they command, or that they do know and continue regardless.”
Despite multiple reports by Haaretz, the use of human shields has become increasingly “widespread and normalised”, he added.
Instead of stopping the procedure, a high-ranking member of the Israeli armed forces continued to condone the use of human shields and even present it as “an operational necessity”, he said.
Yet, the officer wrote that it was not necessary to use human shields while entering houses in Gaza. Instead, the army could’ve used robots, drones or dogs to achieve the same objective.
“In other words, we forced Palestinians to act as human shields not because it was safer for IDF troops, but because it was faster,” he said, using the acronym for the military.
Investigation reveals details of killing of elderly Palestinian couple used as human shields
“That’s why we risked the lives of Palestinians who were suspected of nothing other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Some soldiers, incuding the writer, resisted the procedure, he said.
“That’s what happens when you’re in an unending war that fails to bring the hostages back alive month after month. You lose moral judgment.”
The officer concluded by saying that he has no hope that the army would investigate itself the use of human shields.
“Only an independent State Commission of Inquiry could get to the bottom of this,” he wrote.
“Until then, we have every reason to worry about international courts in the Hague, because this procedure is a crime – a crime even the army now admits. It happens daily and is much more common than the public is being told.”
President Donald Trump is prayed over by Paula White-Cain (left shoulder) and other religious leaders. The official White House X account posted this photo on Feb. 8, along with the text: “As the Bible says, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers.’ And in that end, I hope my greatest legacy when it’s all finished, will be known as a peacemaker and a unifier.” —President Donald J. Trump Photo credit: @WhiteHouse on X
On October 12, 2024, tens of thousands of people thronged outside the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., for what organizers called the “A Million Women” rally. The event was staged by a clutch of leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a dynamic and fast-growing Christian Right movement that has influenced hundreds of millions of people around the world, including tens of millions in the United States.
Timed to coincide with the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, the themes of the gathering included winning Christian “dominion” over political institutions, mobilizing voters and — in keeping with the movement’s focus on the idea of spiritual warfare — exorcizing demons from the Capitol. But, although what limited media attention the event drew didn’t cover it, another major purpose was rallying support for Israel.
Rally organizer Lou Engle took to the stage, declaring, “You’ve got to align with the word of God! If we stand and bless Israel, He may save our nation!” Guiding the crowd in 10 hours of continuous worship on a stage bedecked with Israeli flags, rally leaders exhorted Congress to fulfill its “biblical mandate,” as one speaker put it, to “provide unequivocal support to Israel in the face of her enemies and our enemies.” At one point, the crowd sang the Israeli national anthem to rapturous applause.
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The far-flung networks of independent Pentecostal and charismatic churches and other institutions that comprise the NAR arguably represent the most significant religious movement in recent U.S. history. The movement was integral to Donald Trump’s three presidential campaigns dating back to his first run in 2015, and since his first victory, it has worked its way into the upper echelons of political power, with televangelist Paula White-Cain — also a spiritual advisor to Trump — recently installed as head of the new White House Faith Office.
The NAR is also at the cutting edge of Christian Zionism, a global movement of primarily evangelical, Pentecostal and charismatic Christians who believe that the Bible mandates unqualified support for the state of Israel.
As the U.S.-Israel “special relationship” enters a dangerous new phase, the New Apostolic Reformation will play a pivotal role.
As global outrage grows against Israel’s eliminationist, expansionist agenda, Trump’s second term seems to be shaping up as even more aggressively pro-Israel than his first. In his first weeks in office, Trump called for the ethnic cleansing of more than two million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and for U.S. occupation of the beleaguered territory, which remains devastated after nearly a year and a half of Israeli bombardment and invasion. Key Trump administration appointees have also pledged support for Israel’s annexation of the West Bank, including White-Cain, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who promised Trump will bring changes of “biblical proportions” to the Middle East.
Israeli leaders, for their part, know where their strongest support lies. During his February visit to Washington, D.C., Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t meet with any U.S. Jewish leaders, but made time for a 90-minute gathering with evangelical leaders. At least three of those leaders were key NAR figures, including White-Cain, who reportedly held a separate, lengthy meeting with Netanyahu and conducted an extensive interview with the prime minister for Israeli TV.
All of this makes clear that, as the U.S.-Israel “special relationship” enters a dangerous new phase, the NAR will play a pivotal role.
Apostles and prophets
The NAR isn’t just any religious movement, but, in the words of political scientist Paul Djupe, is one that represents a “fundamental shift” in U.S. Christianity, as its political vision has spread beyond the charismatic/Pentecostal camp it was born in to now dominate the far larger category of U.S. evangelicalism.
TheCall co-founder Lou Engle addresses a news conference on August 15, 2008, in Washington, D.C. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
As a cross-denominational movement that evolved from multiple roots over a century, NAR was identified and named in the mid-1990s by the late C. Peter Wagner, a professor at the evangelical Fuller Theological Seminary who observed that independent or nondenominational churches were growing the fastest in both the United States and worldwide. In their explosive growth, Wagner saw an emerging paradigm shift that he and his associates eventually sought to shape, organize and lead.
This broad paradigm features networks of NAR churches and ministries that reject many historic Christian doctrines, denominations and leadership roles while gradually restoring offices of the first century church as outlined in the biblical book of Ephesians. Among those offices are the movement titles of apostle and prophet, such that Lou Engle bears the title of an NAR prophet and Paula White-Cain is an NAR apostle.
During his February visit to Washington, Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t meet with any U.S. Jewish leaders, but made time for a 90-minute gathering with evangelical leaders, including at least three key New Apostolic Reformation figures.
NAR also embodies a dynamic vision of religious and political control known as the “Seven Mountain Mandate”: a metaphorical political blueprint that charges believers with establishing “dominion” over the “seven mountains” of societal power — government, religion, family, education, media, arts/entertainment and business.
Elements of the movement often envision themselves as an End Times army, destined to wage “spiritual warfare” in the heavens via prayer, but perhaps also through physical warfare against the “demonic” forces of liberalism, democracy, LGBTQ and reproductive rights and other enemies.
That’s no mere rhetorical excess. What makes NAR and its growing political clout particularly concerning is that normal political and religious differences are seen as demonic — the work of supernatural spirits creating problems at all levels, from quotidian daily life issues to international conflicts. Such demons, to the NAR, may control anything from individual people to entire nations and are seen as the principal opposition to advancing the Kingdom of God on Earth. For example, Apostles Ché Ahn and Lance Wallnau, among others, claim that former Vice President Kamala Harris is “a type of Jezebel” — literally a demonic spirit.
NAR’s worldview is spreading rapidly. According to a 2024 survey by Djupe, more than 60% of U.S. Christians agree that “there are modern-day apostles and prophets.” About half believe that “there are demonic ‘principalities’ and ‘powers’ who control physical territory” and that the church should “organize campaigns of spiritual warfare and prayer to displace high-level demons.” And 42% directly embrace NAR’s dominionist mandate in agreeing that “God wants Christians to stand atop the ‘7 Mountains of Society.’”
As a movement, NAR also helps rally the MAGA troops. NAR leaders like White-Cain and Wallnau were some of the earliest and most enthusiastic evangelical backers of Trump’s candidacy in 2015. The same leaders were also prominent in the 2020 election denial movement, with various apostles and prophets helping build momentum ahead of the Jan. 6 riots by holding prayer rallies outside the Capitol where they called on God to smite his enemies and blew shofars — the ram’s horn used as a battlefield instrument in ancient Israel and which has been widely appropriated by NAR-influenced Christians.
During the Biden administration, Wallnau and other NAR leaders were featured speakers during stops on the “ReAwaken America” tour — a series of rallies led by former Trump adviser and retired general Michael Flynn, which mixed calls for spiritual warfare with conspiracy theories about QAnon, the election, Covid-19 vaccination and more. This past September, then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance headlined a stop on the “Courage Tour,” another political roadshow and voter mobilization training organized by Wallnau in five swing states.
While NAR influence on U.S. public life has been growing for years, with Trump’s reelection, that influence is finally being recognized more widely, including through majormediacoverage of the movement’s domestic impact. But amid this new attention, the movement’s global impact, especially in the Middle East, still remains underreported.
Israel and the End Times
For decades, Christian Zionist leaders in the United States and worldwide have worked with the Israeli Right to deepen apartheid, ethnic cleansing and domination in Palestine. In recent years, the movement has advocated for increased U.S. aid to Israel, Israel’s annexation of the West Bank, belligerence against Iran, defunding Palestinian refugee relief, suppressing criticism of Israel and other far-right policies. Put simply, Christian Zionism is the backbone of U.S. and global support for Israel. If that sounds surprising, consider that the most prominent U.S. Christian Zionist organization, the Texas-based Christians United for Israel (CUFI), claims more than 10 million members — a constituency roughly 50% larger than the entire U.S. Jewish population.
To the extent that the broader public is aware of Christian Zionism, they may know about CUFI and its leader, Pastor John Hagee. This is partly because the high-profile annual CUFI conference draws leading political figures, but also because, in late 2005, Hagee infamously suggested that the Holocaust was part of God’s plan to bring the Jews to Israel, by sending Hitler as his divinely-appointed “hunter.” “Hitler’s Nazis,” Hagee claimed in his 2006 book Jerusalem Countdown, drove Jews out of Europe “back to the only home God ever intended for the Jews to have — Israel.”
Pastor John Hagee attends a Christian United For Israel (CUFI) summit in Jerusalem on March 8, 2010. GALI TIBBON/AFP via Getty Images
Since its launch in 2006, CUFI has become the evangelical counterpart to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a key pro-Israel lobbying organization frequently associated — though often misleadingly—with the U.S. Jewish community. CUFI aggressively lobbies Congress for a range of policies favored by the Israeli Right, and Israeli leaders regularly lavish praise upon Hagee for his steadfast support.
But Hagee represents an earlier form of Christian Zionism epitomized by white evangelicals like Jerry Falwell and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind novels. This older form of Christian Zionism held to a “dispensationalist” vision of the End Times, wherein faithful Christians would escape apocalypse via an event called “the Rapture” while Israel and the world are engulfed in the fiery wars of Tribulation.
But with the rise of the NAR, amid the broader growth of the Pentecostal and charismatic population, the dominant Christian Right End Times theology is shifting. Rather than waiting to be raptured to heaven, many evangelicals have become more invested in building their vision of God’s kingdom on earth. This includes seeking to reclaim “territory” from demons via a form of prayer they call “spiritual warfare” as well as engaging in nuts-and-bolts electoral politics.
Christian Zionism is the backbone of U.S. and global support for Israel, with the most prominent U.S. Christian Zionist organization claiming a constituency 50% larger than the entire U.S. Jewish population.
It also involves an intensified emphasis on the role the NAR envisions Israel playing in their vision of the End Times — which they believe is currently underway. The NAR believes it can bring about the millennial utopia — 1,000 years of perfect Christian rule — by expanding Israel’s sovereignty over “biblical” land, supporting the immigration of Jews to Israel and converting Jews to faith in Jesus. Citing Genesis 12:3, where God tells Abraham, “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse,” the NAR believes that only by “blessing Israel” can nations secure God’s favor.
Thus, although the NAR is often lumped in with broad notions of U.S. Christian nationalism, the central nation in their religious and political vision is actually Israel. If the United States doesn’t sufficiently back Israel, they believe, America will be doomed, whereas, if they succeed in aligning U.S. and global support behind Israel, that will — somewhat paradoxically — help realize their broader project of establishing Christian dominion worldwide. Like older forms of Christian Zionism, this tends to cast Jews and Israel as what scholar S. Jonathan O’Donnell calls theologically “overdetermined …fetish objects invested with supernatural power” — that is, ultimately mere instruments in an overarching narrative of Christian redemption.
A new Christian Zionism
The influence of NAR is evident across the U.S. pro-Israel movement. NAR pastors and congregations regularly organize and attend pro-Israel rallies and conferences and join state and federal lobbying efforts arranged by groups like CUFI. As In These Times previously reported, in the spring of 2024, NAR leaders staged impassioned protests against supposed campus antisemitism outside several universities, with protesters scaling the gates of Columbia University and hurling epithets at students. At these rallies, evocations of the End Times mixed with demonization of Muslims and calls for the conversion of Jews, highlighting the intertwined antisemitism, anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim bigotry animating the NAR’s support for Israel.
When the Heritage Foundation released its “Project Esther” plan to crush the Palestine solidarity movement, most reporting missed the influence of NAR and Christian Zionism.
This past October, the Heritage Foundation’s Antisemitism Task Force released a 33-page plan, entitled “Project Esther,” to use lawsuits, surveillance and other repression tactics to crush the Palestine solidarity movement and the broader Left. Most reporting on Project Esther framed it as a Republican or Christian nationalist effort, missing the influence of NAR and Christian Zionism.
One leader of Heritage’s Antisemitism Task Force is Apostle Mario Bramnick, a Cuban-born pastor of a small church in Florida and president of the Latino Coalition for Israel, which calls itself the “largest Hispanic Pro-Israel organization in America.” Bramnick is also part of the Supernatural Global Network led by Apostle Guillermo Maldonado, a native of Honduras who hosted the 2020 launch event for Evangelicals for Trump at his Miami megachurch El Rey Jesús.
Apostle Guillermo Maldonado (far left) prays over Donald Trump, with Apostle Paula White-Cain at Trump’s right, at the launch of Evangelicals for Trump at his church, El Rey Jesus, on January 3, 2000, in Miami. Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images
“We know that a lot of the efforts of the task force that we launched are now being implemented by the Trump White House,” Bramnick announced on a prayer call with other NAR leaders this February, celebrating Trump’s recent executive orders and other moves by the administration to pressure universities to deport students, stifle speech and more. (Organizers of the video prayer call initially declared it off-limits for the media, but subsequently uploaded it to YouTube.)
Bramnick’s activism in what NAR calls the “mountain” of government is extensive, and he uses his government influence primarily to lobby for increased support for Israel. A key evangelical adviser to Trump since 2016, as well as a special envoy for the White House’s Faith and Opportunity Initiative during Trump’s first term, Bramnick also often meets with Benjamin Netanyahu, including during his most recent visit this February. Following that visit, Bramnick told supporters that Trump and Netanyahu had “been called and commissioned by God” to establish the “prophetic destiny of nations.”
In 2018, after Trump fulfilled a major Christian Zionist policy goal by moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, Bramnick claims to have met with at least eight other heads of state, including far-right leaders Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, attempting to convince them to follow suit.
In 2018, after Trump moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, NAR Apostle Mario Bramnick met with at least eight other heads of state, attempting to convince them to follow suit.
During a celebration of the embassy move in 2019, Bramnick declared, “it is a miracle that God appointed Donald Trump to be a modern Cyrus,” invoking the popular NAR idea that God is using the immoral Trump to carry out his purposes, just as God once used the pagan king Cyrus to bring the biblical Israelites out of exile.
But speaking at the Jerusalem Prayer Breakfast — a gathering of influential Christian Zionist, Israeli and U.S. Jewish leaders held at Mar-A-Lago this January — Bramnick updated the biblical lens through which he views Trump’s role. Trump, he claims, has now taken on “a new mantle”: that of Cyrus’ successor, Darius. According to Bramnick, this represents a “finishing anointing” to further Israeli expansion and dominance.
“For the first time since the Six Day War, IDF is beyond enemy lines in Gaza, Southern Lebanon and Syria, supernaturally,” Bramnick declared. “We’re in a tipping point moment,” in which what God started in the first Trump administration will now be completed.
Donald Trump with Apostles Paula White-Cain (right shoulder), Guillermo Maldonado of Florida (left shoulder) and Harry Jackson of Maryland (behind Maldonado), on Oct. 29, 2019. Joyce Boghosian/White House
This March, Bramnick went further, declaring during a gathering in Jerusalem that “God has given Israel a blank check with the election of Trump.” Bramnick was speaking at the Israeli launch of the Conference of Presidents of Christian Organizations in Support of Israel, a group he cofounded with other Christian Right leaders last September in order to advance pro-Israel policy and grassroots mobilization at the federal, legislative and state levels. During March’s event, also attended by Wallnau, Israeli annexation of the West Bank was a top demand.
Bramnick isn’t the only influential NAR leader in the orbit of the new Trump administration. Not only is Paula White-Cain leading Trump’s new White House Faith Office, but two other leading apostles, Cindy Jacobs and Jim Garlow, spoke at the Jerusalem Prayer Breakfast.
“God has given Israel a blank check with the election of Trump,” Bramnick declared during a Christian Right gathering in Jerusalem this March.
“When we try to divide up the land of Israel, the land given by God, it doesn’t make God happy!” Jacobs declared, granting theological justification for Israeli annexation of occupied territory and the expansion of regional war. “Over and over we have handcuffed Israel, just when they could have gone on and finished the task.”
Meanwhile, Lou Engle, best known for leading a years-long, multi-national series of NAR gatherings named “The Call,” plans to take his new “A Million Women” campaign on the road both around the United States and the world. “A Million Women wasn’t just an event,” Engle recently declared on his website, “it was the starting line. Now it’s time to mobilize.” To that end, he has announced a major rally in São Paulo, Brazil, this October “as we go global with this Esthers movement!”
And in February, prominent Apostle Tim Sheets said in a livestream appearance that NAR prophets are visiting Trump at the White House, where they “pray over him, prophecy over him.”
“There are others in his Cabinet that are the same way. So, thank God that we have someone that’s paying attention to what the church has to say,” Sheets continued. “Miracles [are] taking place every day.”
A global movement
The strongest influence of NAR on Christian Zionism may be across the Global South, where many countries have long been critical of Israel in international forums like the United Nations but where the rapid growth of non-denominational forms of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity in recent decades has created new, millions-strong movements of people who “bless Israel.”
“You can really see the Global South is awakening regarding Israel,” said Jurgen Buhler, a leading NAR apostle and president of the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem (ICEJ), in a 2022 interview. With branch offices and representatives in more than 90 countries and claiming to represent tens of millions of Christians, ICEJ is the largest Christian Zionist organization in the world. In addition to coordinating extensive global church outreach, lobbying and fundraising in support of Israel, ICEJ also hosts a massive Christian pilgrimage, the Feast of Tabernacles, bringing thousands of tourists to Jerusalem during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.
The strongest influence of NAR on Christian Zionism may be across the Global South, where many countries long critical of Israel now have new, millions-strong movements of people who “bless Israel.”
Apostle Rene Terra Nova, ICEJ’s Brazilian director and head of a global apostolic network of more than seven million members, has held massive pro-Israel rallies in Brazil — a country where researchers estimate there will soon be more Pentecostals and charismatics than Catholics — as well as helping lead thousands on Feast of Tabernacles pilgrimages to Israel.
Nigerian Apostle Enoch Adeboye, named by Newsweek as one of the 50 most influential people in the world, oversees a sprawling church network that they claim reaches more than five million people in Nigeria and which works to influence millions more worldwide, with outposts in more than 110 countries. Adeboye pledged his network in support of Israel after October 7 and is a regular speaker at ICEJ assemblies.
Other NAR leaders and organizations, like the Missouri-based International House of Prayer, organize coordinated global days of Israel-focused prayer and fasting, like the Isaiah 62 Fast and Global Esther Fast, which mobilize millions across Pentecostal and charismatic networks in Uganda, Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, India and more.
These NAR networks represent what Rutgers professor Joseph Williams has called the “Pentecostalization” of Christian Zionism across the Global South, where the growing “international appeal” of “experience-oriented, Jewish-themed practices and identities…tied to distinctive views of Jews and Israel” helps bolster both the Israeli and transnational far Right.
The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, the movement founded by Brazilian NAR affiliate Edir Macedo in 1977, inaugurated its São Paulo, Brazil, replica of Solomon’s Temple on July 31, 2014. Photo by MIGUEL SCHINCARIOL/AFP via Getty Images
In São Paulo in 2014, for example, the Pentecostal Universal Church of the Kingdom of God — founded by Bishop Edir Macedo, who, as part of the wider NAR movement, has described himself as a “prophet” and has called for “apostolic governance” in Brazil — opened a new $300 million megachurch complex, which they claim is a full-size replica of Solomon’s Temple, the ancient Israelite temple in Jerusalem which, according to prophecy, will be rebuilt in the End Times. With seating for 10,000, the floor and walls of the megachurch are covered in stone brought from Jerusalem.
“We wanted to help people turn to Israel, support its existence and give them an opportunity to touch Jerusalem stones, which for them is a big deal,” explained a representative of the church at the time.
Macedo’s “Temple of Solomon” was one ostentatious manifestation of a broader rightward evangelical shift with significant political implications. While in 2014, the year the temple was opened, Brazil condemned Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip and recalled its ambassador to Tel Aviv, by 2018 Macedo helped marshall evangelical support for the election of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, a staunch supporter of Israel.
Global vision
From the Temple of Solomon to the “A Million Women” rally, the NAR’s growth exemplifies how the Right’s popular adage that “politics is downstream from culture” applies to religion as well. Indeed, religion is often at the center of culture — so much so that Pat Buchanan, the hard-right politician who launched the term “culture wars” into our political lexicon, described it as nearly interchangeable with the idea of a “religious war.”
Today, the same war continues, even if the players and the battlefield have evolved and expanded, with the Global South emerging as a major part of the fight. NAR leaders certainly understand it this way.
And as NAR continues to grow as a major religious and political global force, we can expect the Christian Zionist movement to become even more militant, aggressive and bent on what they call “world transformation.” Progressives can’t afford to lose sight of this in order to adapt our own strategies to defend democracy and transform U.S. foreign policy.
BEN LORBER works as senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, a progressive think tank monitoring right-wing movements, where he focuses on white nationalism and antisemitism. His book Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism was released in 2024.
Published date: 24 March 2025 12:34 GMT | Last update:2 days 5 hours ago
The wide-ranging crackdown on political speech is being framed as a means of combatting antisemitism
Donald Trump is pictured during his presidential campaign in Traverse City, Michigan, on 25 October 2024 (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images/AFP)
The virus of fascism only ever lay dormant in the West after its apparent destruction during the Second World War.
Early indicators are everywhere that fascism – an ideology that espouses racist hierarchies of human value, of who should have rights and who must not – is reasserting itself in the United States and across large parts of Europe.
There is an intensifying distrust and fear of foreigners. Immigrants are seen as destroying the West from within – irreconcilable with, and antagonistic to, a “superior” civilisation and culture. In the US, a permanent resident – apparently the first of many – has been disappeared into the US prison system, pending his deportation.
Political speech in opposition to western governments and their crimes is being stigmatised and crushed with old laws and new. Supposedly liberal academic institutions are rolling over as they are menaced with legal and financial sanctions. There is little reason to assume that judicial systems will provide any meaningful check on executive power.
The West is taking the first formal steps down a different political path – one whose final destination we know from our own relatively recent history.
The far right is now setting the agenda with the same Cheshire Cat grin, whether it’s billionaire TV star Donald Trump in the US, or Westminster’s glorified used-car salesman Nigel Farage in the UK.
There are fascist-leaning parties inside the governments of Italy, Hungary, Finland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the Netherlands and Croatia. Openly far-right parties are jostling for power in France, Germany, Austria, Sweden and, for the first time, Britain. That trend was reflected in a surge of ultra-nationalist delegates elected to the European Parliament last year.
The only available bulwarks are bloodless technocrats like Prime Minister Keir Starmer in Britain, President Emmanuel Macron in France, and former Vice President Kamala Harris in the US, offering more of the same failed policies that opened the door to the fascists in the first place.
Hiding in plain sight
These developments have not come out of the blue. They have been decades in the making.
This should come as no surprise, because the main repository for the West’s fascist ideas since the Second World War has been hiding in plain sight: Israel.
The West’s undisguised crackdown on the most fundamental of rights, such as political speech and academic freedom, is being carried out in the name of protecting Israel and those western Jews who cheerlead its crimes.
Fascism is stepping out of the shadows in the US and Europe as Israel ostentatiously commits a genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, armed and given diplomatic cover by its western patrons.
Fascism was never going to return to Europe or the US dressed in Nazi garb. It was never going to arrive wearing jackboots and brandishing swastikas
Israel has continued, with the West’s conspicuous backing, to do the very things that western states themselves found it impossible to justify in the wake of the Second World War.
When the West was reluctantly forced into decolonisation processes in Africa and Asia, Israel was given licence and endless support to grow a violent ethno-nationalist project on another people’s homeland.
Jewish supremacism was respectable, even as white supremacism fell out of favour. Israel became ever bolder in its expulsions and segregationist policies. It herded Palestinians into ever-smaller enclaves, where they were stripped of rights and subjected to constant military abuses.
All of this continued even as, in the mid-1960s, the civil rights movement in the US finally overturned the Deep South’s segregationist Jim Crow laws. And it continued as, in the 1990s, the white leaders of apartheid South Africa, another western colonial project, were forced into a truth and reconciliation process with the black majority.
Israel remained the West’s most favoured ally, even as it pushed firmly against what was presented elsewhere as the inexorable tide of progressive change.
Monstrous behaviour
Fascism’s ascendancy across much of Europe through the 1930s and early 1940s was a wakeup call that led western leaderships to bolster international institutions, whose watchword was human rights.
The United Nations, created in 1945, was supposed to embody these values, issuing its Universal Declaration of Human Rights three years later, and spawning legal bodies such as the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court to hold rogue regimes to account.
The aim was to prevent a return to the horrors of the Second World War, from the Nazi death camps to the Allies’ fire-bombings of German and Japanese cities.
That was why Israel’s ethnic project to colonise Palestine – by removing or killing Palestinians to replace them with Jews – found itself in continuous confrontation with the new watchdog bodies, violating dozens of UN resolutions. Washington was always ready to protect it from repercussions.
It was not that other countries did not commit terrible crimes too. After all, in its struggle to remain as the global top dog during the Cold War, the US destroyed swathes of Southeast Asia in bombing campaigns related to the Vietnam War.
Trump and Netanyahu want Palestinians to capitulate. They never will
But unlike western states, Israel did not even pay lip service to the supposed principles of the post-Second World War international order. Its organising principle was directly opposed to the UN declaration. Israel explicitly rejected universal human rights, and its Basic Laws, amounting to a constitution, excluded the principle of equality.
Meanwhile, Israel’s constant military oppression of the Palestinian people was in flagrant violation of the Geneva Conventions. Similar to South Africa’s apartheid era, there has not been a day since Israel’s founding in 1948 when it was not committing structural violence against the native people it seeks to replace.
There was not a day when it was not segregating Palestinians, destroying their communities, forcing them off their lands, eradicating their crops, blocking their roads, putting them in torture camps, isolating them from the world – or killing them.
It would have carried out this eradication process earlier, faster and even more shamelessly, had it not been for the restraining hand of international law and the difficult optics for the US and Europe of supporting this monstrous behaviour.
But even those restraints have all but evaporated. The current genocide in Gaza, all too visibly sponsored by the West, can only happen in a political climate where the idea of universal human rights has been hollowed out; where the idea that human life is sacrosanct has lost its meaning.
Stretched and warped
Israeli politics has ostentatiously divided itself between a so-called “liberal” faction and rightwing Zionism, as if there was some grand ideological struggle going on. But in truth, all Israeli politics is fascist in nature.
Both wings of Zionism are premised on the notion that Israeli Jews – most of them recent immigrants – have superior rights over the Palestinian natives, and that any Palestinian who refuses to submit to permanent servitude should be punished.
The debate within Zionism is not about whether this should happen. It is about where fine lines should be drawn. What is the extent of the territory in which Jews unquestionably enjoy superior rights, and how extreme should the punishments be for Palestinians who disobey?
These arguments have largely reflected secular and religious splits within Israel, with parts of society prioritising western concerns about Israel’s reputation on the international stage.
Over decades, confronted by the fact that Palestinians refuse to cooperate with its organising principle – submit or be punished – the Israeli majority shifted from a liberal Zionism obsessed with appearances to an unapologetic, triumphalist, far-right Zionism. That is why self-declared fascists proudly sit in the current government.
And it is why last month, Israel’s ruling party, Likud, became an observer member of Patriots for Europe – an alliance of Europe’s far-right parties, often with Nazi and neo-Nazi ties. At an inaugural conference in Madrid, Likud was warmly welcomed, with alliance leaders highlighting their “shared values”.
None of this happened discreetly. Israel is the West’s last major colonial outpost. It is the place where the West’s military industries test their might on Palestinians, who serve as lab rats.
It is where the strength of international law is stress-tested, its principles stretched and warped by endless abuse, and then flagrantly disobeyed.
And it is where a narrative of victimhood, of Jewish and Christian “civilisation”, has been crafted to justify a war on the Palestinian people and, more generally, Muslims.
Perfect cover story
All of this is supposed to carry on, immune from criticism or objection. The West has developed a perfect cover story for cocooning its fascist offspring: those who oppose the subjugation and brutalisation of the Palestinian people are denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination. They are thus “antisemites”.
In parallel, any Palestinian who resists subjugation and brutalisation is a terrorist. Ergo, those who ally with Palestinians are in league with terrorists.
In a further leap, because the West has cast Palestinians as part of the Muslim masses of the Arab world – even though there are many Palestinian Christians and Druze – Palestinian resistance to Israeli oppression can be presented as an adjunct of a supposed Islamist threat to the West.
In truth, no Palestinian group is fighting to conquer the West, or to impose sharia law on Europe and the US. Palestinian resistance groups are seeking only to liberate their homeland from decades of colonial oppression and ethnic cleansing.
Free speech, the right to protest and academic freedom – the fundamental tenets of liberal democracy – are being hastily jettisoned
Predictably, the longer that oppression has continued, with extravagant western backing, the more Palestinians facing Israel’s abuses have been drawn to less accommodationist militant groups, like Hamas, which is proscribed as a terrorist organisation in the UK and other countries.
No matter. Israel is presented as a small, heroic nation defending the West from the Muslim hordes. In a narrative that utterly inverts reality, Israel serves as the humanist rampart against Palestinian – and by extension, Muslim – barbarism.
It is this premise that makes it possible for Michael Gove, a former British government minister, to write an article in the midst of Israel’s genocide headlined: “The IDF [Israeli army] should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize”.
It is this premise that allows a respected writer, Howard Jacobson, to demand silence at the killing and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza, because speaking in their defence supposedly amounts to a “blood libel” against the Jewish people.
It is this premise that means Melanie Phillips, a journalistic staple of BBC panel shows, can get away with writing: “If you support the Palestinian Arab cause today, you are facilitating deranged and murderous Jew-hatred.”
These are self-pitying, delusional narratives that our European forefathers – plundering Africa of its wealth, enslaving its “savage” peoples or killing millions who refused to accept the West’s civilisational “superiority” – would be only too comfortable espousing.
Arriving in disguise
Fascism was never going to return to Europe or the US dressed in Nazi garb. It was never going to arrive wearing jackboots and brandishing swastikas.
In fact, it was all too predictable that it would arrive in disguise, dressed in suits, telegenic, and characterising its opponents, not itself, as the Nazis.
Columbia crackdown exposes universities as tools of imperial power
That is where Israel has been so helpful once again, for it has not just served as a template for fascism, preserving and rejuvenating ideas of racial superiority, colonisation and genocide. For decades, it has also allowed western states to invest Israeli fascism with a moral legitimacy. Support for Israel’s racial hierarchies, in which Palestinian lives are entirely expendable, has been sold as necessary to “protect Jews”.
That premise has, in turn, allowed genocide to become a respectable, moral cause. It is precisely why Starmer felt able to say that Israel had a “right” to deny more than two million Palestinian men, women and children all food, water and fuel. A genocide that he would have rejected in other circumstances – indeed, has rejected – was apparently okay so long as Israel was doing it.
This is why a UN report earlier this month on Israel’s “genocidal acts” received barely any traction in western media. The report shows how Israel has routinised sexual assault and rape against the Palestinians it arbitrarily detains as bargaining chips for the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.
And it is why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a wanted war criminal and fugitive from justice, is still welcome in western capitals, as are his generals who have been carrying out the genocide in Gaza.
Warped calculus
The West’s endless indulgence of Israel’s variety of fascism – Zionism – has allowed its ideas to quietly seep back into our own societies, where Zionism is still treated with near-reverential respect.
If racial hierarchies are a good thing in Israel, why are they not a good thing in the US and Europe too? This is why a large section of Trump’s base proudly call themselves “white Zionists”. They see a Jewish fortress state of Israel as a model for the US as a white fortress state against their “Great Replacement” fears.
If “protecting Jews” in Israel can justify any crime by the Israeli state against Palestinians, why can “protecting Jews” not also justify illegal behaviour by western states towards their own populations?
“Protecting Jews” means that speech critical of Israel must be outlawed, even as Israel commits war crimes and genocide, because that criticism risks offending domestic Jewish organisations that cheerlead Israel.
A protester calls for the release of Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, during a rally outside the White House on 18 March 2025 (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images/AFP)
Academic freedom must be crushed too, to protect the feelings of those Jewish students and professors who think the mass slaughter of Palestinian children is an acceptable price to pay for Israel reasserting its military deterrence.
And with a self-rationalising logic, any western Jews who do not prostrate themselves before Israel enthusiastically enough are deemed to be “the wrong sort of Jews” – or “Palestinian”, in the new slur Trump has levelled against Chuck Schumer, the Jewish US Senate minority leader.
In this warped, self-serving calculus of human rights, the sensitivities of Zionist Jews are placed at the apex, and the right of Palestinians not to be murdered at the bottom.
This is precisely why US federal authorities are seeking to set a precedent by abducting and deporting a permanent resident, Mahmoud Khalil, for helping to lead student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. He is being accused, without any evidence, of being “aligned with Hamas”, “supporting terrorism”, holding antisemitic views, and desiring the destruction of the West by Islamic extremism.
Responsibility for 18 months of genocide in Gaza stops with us. This is our genocide. And before it’s even complete, it is coming back to bite us
Just as Israel recruited AI to select its targets in Gaza for execution, using the broadest categories it could devise as algorithmic prompts, the White House is using AI to select as broadly as it can who is aligned with Hamas, who is a terrorist, who is an antisemite.
At the same time, US academic institutions are having their federal grants revoked on the grounds that they are supposedly not doing enough to tackle “antisemitism” by crushing the anti-genocide protests. Obedient universities are hurrying to join the government crackdown.
The Trump administration is framing these moves, and more are doubtless to come, as part of a “war on antisemitism” – the sequel to the “war on terror”.
In the process, Washington is creating grounds to demonise vast swathes of the US student population and large sections of the Jewish community, especially young Jews unwilling to let a genocide be committed in their name. All now face being vilified as having “aligned with terrorism”.
The Trump administration is far from alone. Starmer’s government in the UK, like its predecessor, has carefully cultivated a political climate in which journalists, scholars, students, protest organisers, politicians and activists – many of them Jewish – are being smeared as Jew haters, and their protests against genocide as antisemitic.
The British government has wheeled out draconian, vaguely worded terrorism legislation to investigate and charge those it accuses of expressing opinions, or stating facts, too critical of Israel – criticisms it suggests might thereby “encourage support” for Hamas.
Free speech, the right to protest and academic freedom – the fundamental tenets of liberal democracy – are being hastily jettisoned, now supposedly a threat to democracy.
Hierarchy of human worth
There is a pattern whose outline is coming ever more sharply into focus.
The Trump administration has resurrected the Alien Enemies Act, an obscure, 18th-century bit of legislation designed to give extraordinary powers to the executive to disappear foreigners during wartime without any due process.
It has only ever been invoked in three periods of history – the last time to imprison without trial tens of thousands of people of Japanese descent during the Second World War.
Trump first tested out this law on a group he assumes no one will seek to defend: people his officials are characterising as Venezuelan criminals. But one can be sure the administration is keen to stretch the legislation’s applicability far wider.
In Trump’s new order, anyone can become Palestinian
Trump’s previous administration dug out another arcane law, the 1917 Espionage Act, to use against a non-citizen, Julian Assange, treating his journalism exposing US and British war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan as “espionage”. The Act was hurriedly passed during the First World War.
Washington’s goal in targeting Assange was to set a legal precedent in which it could grab anyone, anywhere in the world, and lock them away indefinitely as a spy.
One can be sure Trump’s officials are rifling through dusty statute books looking for more long-overlooked laws that can be repurposed to repress dissent and imprison those who stand in its way. But the darkest of precedents already exists, supplied by Israel.
If Israel can exterminate the Palestinian people it has been oppressing for decades to prevent what it implausibly claims to be a future existential threat from a small armed group, while receiving vigorous western support, why can the US and Europe not do likewise? They can resort to similar claims of an existential threat to normalise internment camps, deportations, or even extermination programmes.
German Jews viewed themselves as German citizens until Adolf Hitler’s government decided they were an alien element to whom different rules would apply.
That did not happen overnight. It was a gradual, cumulative slippage in legal norms that eroded the ability of targeted groups to resist their scapegoating, and of their supporters to protest, while the majority blindly followed along.
In reality, fascism never went away. The West simply outsourced it to a client state whose job was, on the West’s behalf, to advance in the Middle East the same ugly ideas of a hierarchy of human worth.
We identify with Israel because we are told it represents us, our values and our civilisation. And the truth is, it does – which is why responsibility for 18 months of genocide in Gaza stops with us. This is our genocide. And before it’s even complete, it is coming back to bite us.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at http://www.jonathan-cook.net
An F-18 takes off from the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower to strike Houthi targets in Yemen, Feb. 3, 2024. (Photo: U.S. Central Command)
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