Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis during a news conference on March 20, 2024, where he signed a state law addressing homelessness. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

In the nearly two years since the Supreme Court sent abortion rights back to the states in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, state courts have become a hotbed of battles to criminalize, legalize, or expand access to abortion care.

States like Michigan prevented decades-old draconian bans from taking effect, while Arizona, Florida, Wisconsin, and others have challenges pending in state court to their criminal bans. Judges in Florida, Missouri, and Ohio have also become referees for when voters get to weigh in on abortion rights through ballot measures.

Beyond abortion, the Supreme Court’s supermajority conservative bloc has made the entire federal judiciary generally hostile to civil rights. State courts have therefore increasingly assumed center stage on a wide variety of issues: LGBTQ+ rights and gender-affirming care, criminal justice reform and police accountability, voting rights, and more. As state courts and the cases they handle continue to grow in importance, so have various efforts to rig who sits on those courts and who has power in the legal system.

If in the past legislative gerrymandering — or redrawing legislative districts in artificial ways — was used to entrench corporate and partisan power, we now see another branch of government being manipulated to rig the system toward the same aims: judicial gerrymandering.

Like its legislative counterpart, judicial gerrymandering threatens our democracy.

Judicial gerrymandering is the process of manipulating the rules for selecting, retaining, or replacing judges, prosecutors, and other judicial actors to evade voter accountability. It can look like state legislatures redrawing judicial districts to favor certain voters; judges evading the prescribed retirement process to prevent elections for open seats; or state officials creating new “tools” to remove elected judges and prosecutors as an end run around voters’ choices.

Like its legislative counterpart, judicial gerrymandering threatens our democracy.

In states where gerrymandering has already created severely partisan legislatures, the rigging of judicial positions — which are typically voted on at the local level — threatens to cut entire swaths of the population out of the political process.

Take Georgia, where conservatives have devised a scheme to prevent voters in more progressive parts of the state from exercising their power to elect their judges. As judges approach reelection, several have strategically retired before they would have to face voters, and the state has canceled elections for their seats, sending power to Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, to appoint their replacements and depriving voters of the opportunity to select new jurists according to state law.

The Georgia state legislature has also created a partisan oversight commission with the power to suspend and remove locally elected prosecutors, part of a national campaign of attacking the independence of district attorneys. The commission has been given broad authority to disqualify prosecutors for 10 years based on their charging decisions — often decisions aimed at reducing mass incarceration by not prosecuting low-level offenses like drug charges, or standing up for reproductive rights by taking public stances against criminal bans.

In Mississippi, state officials have executed a judicial takeover of majority-Black Jackson, depriving its mayor, also Black, and its residents of local control over police, prosecutors, and the courts. One attempt to dilute voting power over elected county judges failed, but the state has created a two-tiered system in which a Capitol district controlled by white conservatives has power to govern Jackson instead of the city’s own residents.

And in Florida , state officials considered judicial redistricting to attempt to kick out reform prosecutors, who are elected based on the district “circuit” lines for state courts. The Florida Supreme Court demurred last year, but that doesn’t stop the legislature from taking it up in 2024. These redistricting efforts come in tandem with moves by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to suspend prosecutors in both Orlando and Tampa , due to his disagreement with their approaches to prosecution.

These efforts come in various shapes and sizes, but they all add up to an end run around the democratic process, depriving voters of an opportunity to elect officials based on their priorities, and depriving officials of the ability to do the jobs they were elected to do.

The trend will continue to intensify in the coming years. The Supreme Court has made it clear it won’t get involved in issues of state and local power consolidation, no matter how egregious.

Across states, legislators and governors often follow one another, proposing “new ideas” to consolidate power along partisan lines. These attempts start not as bald-faced power grabs, but something more insidious. Early, small pushes set the precedent for actions that are bolder and more problematic — and often harder to reverse. It is up to all of us to stay vigilant and pay close attention to this new brand of subtle attempts to dilute community power.

There is also, however, a growing resistance. There’s a new playbook taking shape: a movement by elected officials, community organizations, nonprofit lawyers, and civil rights groups who are executing a range of legal and electoral strategies to fight back against judicial gerrymandering. In Georgia, for instance, we have worked with a bipartisan coalition of prosecutors to file litigation challenging their oversight commission .

The same system that can be rigged for political advantage can also be used for good, to protect civil rights.

This pushback also includes efforts to let voters weigh in on changes regarding judicial authority and redistricting. When people understand what’s at stake and are given a voice, they can make it harder for state officials to interfere with and take over local power.

Supporting government officials who push back is critical to resist those trying to rig the rules of democracy. The same system that can be rigged for political advantage can also be used for good, to protect civil rights. The effort for reform has won victories too, in even purple and red states like Wisconsin , Georgia , and Mississippi . The future of our democracy may depend on more of these wins.

The post How the Right Is Taking Over State Courts With Judicial Gerrymandering appeared first on The Intercept .

Palestinians receive bags of flour as they wait for aid supplies carried by trucks to enter from the border in Gaza Strip on Feb. 19, 2024. Photo: Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu via Getty Images

I have organized airlifts of women legislators, judges, and journalists out of Afghanistan as Kabul fell; delivered ongoing aid to Ukrainian front-line villages during Russia’s invasion; worked on efforts to build runways, roads, and highways to deliver aid to Rwandan refugees after the genocide; and delivered aid shipments to enclaves besieged and under attack by the Syrian army.

None of it prepared me for the challenges of trying to bring a few trucks of food and medicine per week into the Gaza Strip.

It’s easy to point the finger at Israel, the country that is implementing the blockade of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, half of whom are children. Yet trying to work the issue from every angle on a daily basis to get urgent medical and food aid in, I’ve come to the conclusion that President Joe Biden, for whom I hosted fundraisers and worked to elect in 2020, has signed on to Israel’s end goal of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza.

The Biden administration isn’t just complicit by refusing to condemn Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid — an absurd situation leading the U.S. to incur significant costs and unnecessary risks for symbolic airdrops. He’s actively supporting Israel’s oft-stated but ill-defined war aim of eradicating Hamas, a military effort with little concern for Palestinian lives or the fate of Israel’s hostages held in Gaza.

MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell got an honest, if muddled, answer from Secretary of State Antony Blinken last week . She asked him to explain the “incompatible policy” of being “the leading supplier of weapons to Israel” while, at the same time, “leading an international rescue effort” being impeded by Israeli government officials. Her question laid bare the ugly reality of Biden’s complicity in Israel’s campaign resulting in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

Blinken looked into the camera and attempted to make the incompatible compatible. “These two objectives are not in conflict,” he insisted, defending the ongoing flow of no-strings-attached aid to Israel, Washington’s biggest foreign aid recipient . “The question is whether Israel, on the one hand, is and can effectively deal with its security needs in defending the country, while at the same time maximizing every possible effort to ensure that civilians are not harmed and that assistance gets to those who need it.”

Blinken has since ratcheted up that rhetoric, promising a United Nations resolution urging “an immediate ceasefire” — while at the same time sending endless arms to Israel.

Biden Sends Weapons, Not Aid

Israel’s war has already cost the lives of over 31,000 Palestinians and brought Biden closer to electoral peril, with 364,000 Michigan and Super Tuesday voters choosing “uncommitted” on their primary ballots, largely a result of grassroots efforts to generate a political cost for the White House’s support for the Israeli war.

Biden and his advisers’ refusal to change policy on aid to Israel or rethink the diplomatic cover it provides for Israel at the United Nations reveals a U.S. presidency with little regard for civilians in Gaza. There’s nothing beyond a steady trickle of statements of concern about Palestinian civilians and anonymous West Wing officials suggesting ongoing frustration with the execution of the war.

Israel’s devastating bombardment of Gaza wouldn’t be possible without tens of thousands of bombs and guided munitions sent by the U.S. since October 7. The Biden administration organized more than 100 arms transfers but only notified Congress of two , utilizing a variety of mechanisms to mask the scale and frequency of weapons transfers.

While he provided a steady flow of weapons to Israel, Biden withheld funding from the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, which provides aid to Palestinian refugees. The largest humanitarian aid body in Gaza, UNRWA was targeted by Israel with unfounded claims — that its employees participated in the October 7 attack in Israel.

Biden’s aid efforts implicitly accept Israel’s decision to deny the passage of food into Gaza through more efficient land crossings.

Israel has yet to provide any evidence to back up its allegations — Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., called the claims “ flat-out lies ” — and Australia, Canada, Sweden, and the European Commission have all resumed their funding. The Biden administration, however, continues to withhold financial support, even as UNRWA faces a $450 million budget shortfall. Instead, Biden chose to engage in humanitarian aid theater, endorsing costly, dangerous, and impractical methods for transporting aid into Gaza that won’t require forcing Israel to end its blockade of food and medicine.

In the short term, Biden’s aid policies won’t deliver any meaningful relief for the humanitarian disaster in Gaza. The latest effort involves the U.S. military constructing a causeway off the coast of Gaza to deliver as many as 2 million meals per day. The process implicitly accepts Israel’s decision to deny the passage of food into Gaza through more efficient land crossings. The causeway is expected to take two months to implement, a timeline guaranteeing famine for Gaza’s most vulnerable populations.

Israel, to its credit, has been more honest about its goals in Gaza. Internally, the country has made its goals clear: A leaked October 13 concept paper from the Israeli Intelligence Ministry explored the possibility of mass population transfers from Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

In public, the same agenda is stated more crudely . Statements by senior Israeli politicians in the wake of October 7 include calls for mass depopulation of Gaza and exhibited consistent disregard for any distinction between Hamas militants and innocent civilians. One government minister spoke openly of removing up to 90 percent of the Palestinians. Another said Israel was “fighting human animals.” A third said there were no civilians in Gaza and suggested using a nuclear weapon. A top parliamentarian from Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party said Israel’s goal is “erasing the Gaza strip from the face of the earth.”

The statements were used in a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice at the Hague, where a preliminary ruling found enough merit to the allegations to let the case go forward.

By imposing food scarcity on Gaza, and bombing refugee camps, apartment buildings, hospitals, universities , and aid distribution centers, it’s clear that Israel is following through on the words of its political leadership.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s occasional expressions of concern with the civilian death toll in Gaza while enabling the war raises a disturbing question: Is the Biden administration knowingly complicit in maximizing civilian killing in one of the most deadly military campaigns in recent history — or stunningly naive and incompetent?

Either way, hundreds of thousands of Democratic Party voters already came to the same conclusion as Andrea Mitchell: It is incompatible to claim concern for Palestinian lives while actively participating in their extermination.

The post Organizing Aid to Gaza Led Me to a Harsh Truth: Biden Is on Board for Ethnic Cleansing appeared first on The Intercept .

U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on Sept. 1, 1975.
Photo: David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Palestinians in Gaza displaced due to Israeli attacks move toward the southern Gaza Strip on Nov. 28, 2023.
Photo: Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu via Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Beginning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Israeli forces attack the Arab village of Sassa in Galilee during the Arab–Israeli War on Oct. 1, 1948.
Photo: Pictures from History/Universal

The Early Years

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

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

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

The Emergence of the PLO

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

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

Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, addresses the United Nations General Assembly on Nov. 14, 1974.
Photo: Bettmann Archive

Bill Clinton’s Catastrophic Failure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Arab Peace Plan

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

The Olmert Offer

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

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

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

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

Lost Opportunities With Hamas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hamas rockets are intercepted by the Iron Dome over the skies of Ashkelon, Israel, on Oct. 10, 2023.
Photo: Los Angeles Times via Getty Imag

Where Things Stand Now

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

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

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

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

Palestinians reunite with their relatives as they are released from Israel’s Ofer prison as a part of a prisoner swap, in Al Bireh, West Bank, on Nov. 26, 2023.
Photo: Issam Rimawi/Anadolu via Getty Images

The Israeli government narrative surrounding the Palestinian prisoners being released during this temporary ceasefire is both insidious and dishonest. Interior Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has banned Palestinians from celebrating their release. “My instructions are clear: there are to be no expressions of joy,” he said. “Expressions of joy are equivalent to backing terrorism, victory celebrations give backing to those human scum, for those Nazis.” He told Israeli police to deploy an “iron fist” to enforce his edict.

The Netanyahu government and its supporters have promoted a narrative that these prisoners are all hardened terrorists who committed violent crimes. This assertion relies on a farcical “Alice in Wonderland”-inspired logic of convicting them by fiat in public before any trial, even the sham trials to which Palestinians are routinely subjected. Israel released a list of the names with alleged crimes they committed. And who is making these allegations? A military that acts as a brutal occupation force against Palestinians in the West Bank.

The vast majority of the 300 Palestinian prisoners proposed for release by Israel are teenage boys. According to the list, 124 of the prisoners are under the age of 18, including a 15-year-old girl, and many of the 146 who are 18 years old turned so in Israeli prisons. According to the definitions laid out in the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child , these Palestinians were children when they were arrested by Israel.

Of the 300 names Israel proposed for potential release, 233 of them have not been convicted of any crimes; they are categorized simply as “under arrest.” Police and prosecutors all over the world make allegations later proven false during a fair trial. The Israeli narrative promotes the fiction that these Palestinians are in the middle of some sort of fair judicial proceeding in which they will eventually be tried in a fair and impartial process. This is a complete, verifiable farce. Palestinians are not prosecuted in civil courts; they are tried in military courts. They often are denied access to lawyers and to purported evidence against them, and are regularly held in isolation for extreme periods and subjected to other forms of abuse . Israel is the only “developed” country in the world that routinely tries children in military courts and its system has been repeatedly criticized and denounced by major international human rights organizations and institutions .

If, as Israel alleges, these people have committed violent crimes, particularly against civilians, then Israel should give them full rights to due process, to see the alleged evidenced against them, and they should be tried in civilian courts with the same rights afforded Israeli defendants. That would also mean allowing Palestinians who do commit acts of political violence, particularly against the military forces of a violent occupation, to raise the context and legality of the Israeli occupation as part of their defense. Israel is asking the world to believe that these 300 people are all dangerous terrorists, yet it has built a kangaroo military court system for Palestinians that magically churns out a nearly 100 percent conviction rate. All of this from a country that constantly promotes itself as the only democracy in the Middle East.

To pretend that the context of this violence is irrelevant is as absurd as it is unjust.

Palestinians on this list are from the occupied West Bank and have lived their entire lives under an apartheid regime . Palestinians taken by Israel, including some on the list of prisoners proposed for release, have certainly committed violent acts. But to pretend that the context of this violence is irrelevant is as absurd as it is unjust given the appalling conditions Palestinians have lived under for decades. Contrast this to the widespread impunity that governs the actions of violent Israeli settlers who mercilessly target Palestinians in an effort to expel them from their homes.

All nations should be judged by how they treat the least powerful, not the most powerful or only those from a certain religion or ethnicity. This is why many leading civil liberties lawyers in the U.S. opposed the use of Guantánamo Bay prison and military tribunals and continue to oppose U.S. laws or rules that deny the accused a fundamental right to a proper defense.

The post Israel’s Insidious Narrative About Palestinian Prisoners appeared first on The Intercept .

This month, Ohio reproductive freedom advocates delivered 42 boxes of petitions — over 700,000 signatures — to state officials to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot. The proposed amendment guarantees every individual the right “to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to decisions on contraception, fertility treatment, continuing one’s own pregnancy, miscarriage care, and abortion,” until fetal viability. It also prohibits the state from interfering with or penalizing “a person or entity that assists an individual exercising this right.” Both clauses contain exceptions for medical necessity. And neither limits these rights to adults.

Protect Women Ohio, an anti-abortion coalition that includes Ohio Right to Life and the Center for Christian Virtue, calls the proposal an “extreme anti-parent amendment” that will “permit minors to undergo sex change operations without their parents’ knowledge or consent and allow painful abortion on demand through all nine months.” A video in PWO’s multimillion-dollar ad campaign opens with a shot of a troubled-looking white girl. “Your daughter is young, vulnerable, online,” it begins. She could be “pushed to change her sex or get an abortion” and “you” — the parent — “could be cut out of the biggest decision of her life.” The Republican-dominated Ohio legislature has done everything it can to head off the reproductive freedom initiative, including calling a special election on a measure that would make it harder to amend the constitution.

In fact, the Ohio ballot initiative does not allow abortion up to the day of birth, and it does not mention trans care. Still, the opponents’ characterization is not entirely wrong. By recognizing a right — a fundamental, universal right — to reproductive autonomy, initiatives like Ohio’s do rein in the prerogative of parents, particularly hostile ones, to control their children’s decisions. The demotion of parental prerogative implies the assertion of young people’s bodily autonomy. And if youth have autonomy in reproductive matters, it follows that they are free to do other things with their bodies, such as bring their genders into concordance with how they feel. Blue-state politics have conformed to this logic. All the states that have safeguarded reproductive rights legislatively or constitutionally have also passed laws protecting LGBTQ+ youth.

That any lawmakers are venturing to eliminate the age of consent for abortion or gender-affirming care is a radical, and welcome, development. It’s unlikely they would have had the courage absent the abortion crisis created by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and the trans panic manufactured by Ron DeSantis & Co.

In the ensuing legislative battles, both sides are charging the other with illogic or hypocrisy — or, as the Heritage Foundation put it , “utter madness” — regarding child welfare. But to focus on inconsistency is to miss the coherent worldviews the policies embody. These worldviews suggest answers to the more important questions: How do we balance children’s health with their bodily autonomy? How do we reconcile child protection with children’s rights?

When Maine Democrats approved a bill that permits trans minors to get treatment without parental consent, Republicans cried hypocrisy: The state requires parental permission to use a tanning bed or get a tattoo. Why not these “potentially life-changing decisions”?

Washington Senate Republican Leader John Braun released a statement with a similar message during debate over Senate Bill 5599 , enacted this year to provide sanctuary and confidential gender-affirming care to homeless trans kids estranged from their parents. “Right now, [Democrats] are sponsoring a juvenile offender sentencing bill based on ‘the expansive body of scientific research on brain development, which shows that adolescents’ perception, judgment, and decision-making skills differs significantly from that of adults,’” he wrote. “It’s revealing how brain research matters to them when juveniles break the law, but not when they seek life-altering, potentially irreversible health care.” * Braun added that S.B. 5599 would “cause harm by driving a wedge between vulnerable kids and their parents.” As if the wedge had not already been driven.

The left can point a finger too. In Iowa, the governor signed a “fetal heartbeat” law protecting 6-week-old embryos and a law prohibiting “gender transition procedures” for minors. During the same session, a bill supported by multiple industry associations was introduced to lift restrictions on 14- and 15-year-olds working in meat coolers, industrial laundries, and factories. Arkansas passed one law requiring parental consent for “gender transition” and another eliminating parental permission for work.

Oregon’s Republican state representatives walked out for six weeks , preventing the quorum necessary to pass bills, over two Democratic proposals. House Bill 2002 guaranteed “every individual” — not every adult — “a fundamental right to make decisions about [their] reproductive health.” In that spirit, it eliminated parental consent for abortion at any age. The Republicans’ other bête noire was H.B. 2005, which, among other things, raised the age to buy a firearm from 18 to 21.

To end the impasse, the Democrats amended H.B. 2002 to stipulate that before prescribing abortion pills or performing a termination on a minor under 15, a health care provider had to get the approval of a second provider (there’s still no parental consent for anyone). The legislators also dropped the age requirement in the gun safety bill, scaling it back only to ban “ghost guns.” Both bills passed.

The Republicans were morally hypocritical — or bankrupt. As long as “Second Amendment rights” were secure, these child-savers were apparently OK risking first-graders being mowed down by mass shooters, most of whom are men under 21. But the Democrats didn’t exactly stick to their principles either. As parental surrogates, health care professionals are presumably less biased than the old white guys who’ve been dictating pregnant minors’ fate in judicial-bypass states. The second-provider rule might be excused as medically prudent or practically inconsequential. But it’s neither.

The regulation is what abortion advocates litigate against as TRAP laws: targeted restrictions on abortion providers. TRAP laws have nothing to do with protecting the patient and everything to do with harassing the provider — and, by extension, the patient . Dems claim to uphold the fundamental right of bodily autonomy. But they’re not averse to negotiating bits of it away when the body in question is under a certain age.

When it comes to getting legislation passed, it’s hard to avoid appearing like a hypocrite. But if you look more closely at the proposals from each side, a cohesive worldview begins to take shape.

The left’s efforts to expand reproductive autonomy and trans rights while restricting youth incarceration represent a libertarian progressive worldview: promoting freedom and opposing punishment. Policies like parental permission for tattoos, meanwhile, represent the sort of busybody statism the right legitimately derides — and liberals should desist from.

On the right, repressive “child protective” statutes controlling everything from drag performance s to lessons about slavery would seem at odds with the deregulation of child labor. But as the feminist legal scholar Nan Hunter forcefully argues in The Nation , the two are interlocking elements of an anti-democratic, kleptocratic “new confederacy,” which could soon govern 140 million Americans. A third of the 24 states that have passed the worst anti-trans laws are also among the most boldly gerrymandered, she notes. “Parental rights” is shorthand for the attack on public schools , which is part of a concerted transfer of public money into private, often religious, hands. Anti-abortion, anti-trans, and “don’t say gay” laws and their vigilante enforcement mechanisms smuggle in “new surveillance techniques in local jurisdictions.” Retaliation against teachers’ unions for defending their own and students’ speech rights undermines unions, destroying the most reliable institution of workers’ economic advancement and hastening the upward distribution of wealth. “It is urgent to defeat extremist legislation,” Hunter concludes. “But it is no less urgent to build a longer-term political framework that fully integrates sexuality and gender issues with efforts to redistribute wealth downward, reversing the trickle-up effects of a half-century of neoliberal policies.”

In truth, everybody, including those who most cynically use children as political props, wants to protect children. From what, by whom, and by what means — there lies the rub. For conservatives, children need protection, but they don’t have rights; “parental rights” are paramount (except if the parents support their queer kids, don’t worship a Christian god, or are otherwise “woke”). Liberals and progressives proclaim the rights of the child. But while they want to protect children’s safety, they are ambivalent about defending children’s rights.

Democrats are not unanimous on the issue of parental notification for medical care. Like Oregon’s second-provider workaround for abortion, the Maine statute now allows trans kids to get treatment without notifying their parents or guardians but empowers medicine as the gatekeeper in their stead. Along with fearing harm from unsupportive parents, the minor must be diagnosed with gender dysphoria and undergo psychological counseling. Adults seeking gender-affirming care in Maine do not have to check these boxes.

And even while progressives grapple with the extent of minors’ right to bodily autonomy for abortion or trans care, there’s one bodily function that’s off limits: Nobody but nobody will risk political capital lowering the age of consent for sex. The result is ridiculous. In many states, a person legally exercising their right to end a pregnancy has broken the law getting pregnant. In Washington, where you can have an abortion at 15 without parental notification, the age of consent for sex is 16. In Oregon, where the age of sexual consent is 18, 15-year-olds can choose to be sterilized.

Roe did not predicate the constitutional right to abortion on the age of the pregnant person. The 14th Amendment — the one that should have undergirded Roe — guarantees equal protection under law to all persons, not all persons over the age of 12, 15, or 18. Bodily autonomy is a universal human right. It belongs to everyone.

Injustice to children often opens the door to injustice to adults.

Practically speaking, most things that are unhealthy for children are also unhealthy for adults. If tanning beds cause skin cancer, they should be outlawed to protect public, not just children’s, health. What is unjust for adults is also unjust for children, and injustice to children often opens the door to injustice to adults. Minors were the first — along with people dependent on government-funded medical care — to lose the rights won in Roe. Once parental consent was adopted around the country, other restrictions more easily followed suit. Recently, attacks on trans students and student athletes — couched as parental rights to protect their own kids — have metastasized into bans on gender-affirming care for all minors, and then for trans adults too . And, just as after Roe, a common instrument of restriction is the denial of Medicaid coverage for treatment.

But universality is an ideal, which resides in the real. Just as equity-promoting policies like affirmative action are needed to achieve the vision of racial equality, we cannot realize the vision of a universal human right of bodily autonomy without attending to the disproportionate risks and harms certain groups of people , both adults and children, face in trying to exercise it.

What endangers these adults also endangers their children. Children, moreover, are even more powerless than the least powerful adults. The institutionalized, people of color, and people with disabilities have long been subject to involuntary medical experimentation and eugenic sterilization. Given the histories of bodily coercion, a policy like Oregon’s allowing 15-year-olds to “elect” sterilization with “informed” consent seems naïve at best. (It’s ironic too, as reproductive justice, the basis of recent legislation, includes freedom from forced sterilization.) Progressive libertarianism is a defense of freedoms with progressive values intact, including the obligations to racial and gender justice and care of the vulnerable. Children are only as safe as the world around them.

The next battle will be over the oral contraceptive norgestrel, approved this month by the Food and Drug Administration for nonprescription sale in drugstores without age restrictions. Although the progestin-only “mini-pill” is safe and effective for almost everyone of reproductive age, its over-the-counter sale to everyone of reproductive age is all but certain to be challenged by anti-abortion forces.

Will the left defend teenagers’ freedom to purchase birth control without being carded? To protect minors from real, not manufactured, harms, we must fight for their right to bodily autonomy.

* It’s important to note that gender-affirming care, while life-altering, is usually reversible. Genital surgery on minors is vanishingly rare. Top surgery is more common, but on teens, not children, and among those teens, research finds that almost none experience regret. The most common treatment for younger kids, puberty-postponing medication, ceases to work if the person stops taking it and has no lasting effects.

The post Defending Bodily Autonomy Is Real Child Protection appeared first on The Intercept .

This July 4, Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley got on Twitter and quoted founding father Patrick Henry. According to Hawley, Henry told the world that “[i]t cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

This immediately generated vast Twitter unhappiness because Henry, while a devout Anglican, never said this.

You might hope Hawley would have absorbed this reality and graciously acknowledged his error. After all, he’s a human being and so presumably can feel shame. He was a history major at Stanford and then got a law degree at Yale. He just wrote a book called “Manhood,” which tells us that to be a man is “to live the truth, to speak the truth, and to live by the truth, always.” The first word in his Twitter bio is “Christian,” and the Ninth Commandment is “thou shalt not bear false witness.”

But you’d hope for this in vain. Expecting basic honesty from Hawley is like expecting an armadillo to fly an F-14. You’re invariably going to be disappointed.

Let’s take a quick cruise through the basic facts here and then speculate about their significance.

Seth Cotlar, a professor of U.S. history at Willamette University, dug up the origins of the spurious Henry quote. The words first appeared in 1956 in a magazine called The Virginian — not attributed to Henry, but as the publication’s own gloss on “the spoken and written words of our noble founders.” To give you a sense of where The Virginian was coming from, Cotlar points out that it dared politicians to speak the plain truth “that the mainspring of the conspiracy to mongrelize white America lies in the powerful, wealthy Jewish organizations.”

How the words of The Virginian transmogrified into the words of Henry and then made the journey into Hawley’s mind is unclear. They appeared in a 1989 book called “The Myth of Separation.” Then, in 2001, a GOP representative from Maryland entered “a sermon given by Dr. Richard Fredericks of the Damascus Road Community Church” into the congressional record , and the sermon attributed the words to Henry. That sermon seems to have subsequently spread widely via email and now appears in many nooks and crannies of the internet.

Beyond Twitter, Hawley was criticized by HuffPost , Talking Points Memo , the New Republic , and Religion News Service . Most significantly, the Kansas City Star editorial board ran an editorial headlined “Josh Hawley Rings in July 4 With Fake Quote With Antisemitic, White Nationalist Roots.”

I did my part by asking Hawley’s communications director whether he was going to correct the false quote. Her only response was, “Relevant tweet thread here to include in your story:”

“I’m told the libs are major triggered by the connection between the Bible and the American Founding,” wrote Hawley on Twitter. “For example: ‘The Declaration of Independence first organized the social compact on the foundation of the Redeemer’s mission on earth.’ – John Quincy Adams.”

I politely repeated my initial question and got no response.

In other words, all our efforts have had no effect. On the contrary, Hawley has doubled down. His new efforts have the advantage of using real quotes, though with the disadvantage of quoting non-Founding Fathers speaking long after the American Revolution.

This is distressing, if you’re the kind of person who still has some faint hope that powerful people might care about reality. It’s worth going through some of the reasons that Hawley’s lack of interest in the truth is especially funny and/or horrifying.

First, take a look at Hawley’s book, “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs.” (This is just a figure of speech; I wrote a review of “Manhood” and do not recommend that you take a look at it.) As mentioned above, “Manhood” informs us that real men must “speak the truth” (Page 192). It also says:

“Today’s popular culture … tells you to find ‘your truth’ … Modern liberals say there are no permanent truths, only ‘constructs.’” (Page 28)

“For those of an Epicurean persuasion, [masculinity] impinged on the treasured Epicurean right to define your own truth.” (Page 51)

“Self-regard … will consume your life … You won’t risk incurring the wrath of the powers that be by speaking the truth.” (Page 121)

“I am thankful for the opportunity [as a U.S. senator] — to learn, to serve, and to hold fast to the truth.” (Page 126)

“We don’t tell the truth as we ought to. We disappoint others and ourselves.” (Page 162)

There’s a lot more, but you get the gist. Maybe “Manhood” was ghostwritten and Hawley hasn’t gotten around to reading it.

Then there’s the motto of Yale, Hawley’s law school alma mater. It’s “lux et veritas,” meaning “light and truth.” Clearly, this didn’t make much of an impression on him.

Last but hopefully not least, there’s the Bible. Matthew 19:16-19 reads, “One came and said unto him, ‘Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life?’ … Jesus said, ‘Thou shalt do no murder, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness.’”

Of course, what kind of Christian has time for that nonsense? Especially when there are so many important things to tweet.

The significance of all this is suggestive and quite disturbing. On the one hand, attributing made-up quotes to illustrious figures of the past is a hallowed tradition in American politics. Al Gore and Ronald Reagan have done it enthusiastically , along with many, many others .

But on the other, there’s something that feels new about Hawley’s adamantine refusal to recognize facts, combined with his ridicule of “the libs” for caring about them. The internet has enabled the teeming millions to fact-check falsehoods like this instantly, something that could never be done in the past. If it had been possible decades ago, institutions and cultural norms would probably have forced Hawley to correct himself. But the internet and the self-sustaining cult-like bubbles it creates have also obliterated the power of those institutions and norms. Donald Trump has exploited this most of all, but many ambitious creatures like Hawley are eagerly exploring the trail he blazed.

As George Washington said, “If America ever gets to this point, you guys better watch the fuck out.”

The post This Week, America Failed to Get Josh Hawley to Feel Shame appeared first on The Intercept .

I may have let out a weird animalistic hoot of joy when the news broke that former President Donald Trump had been indicted on federal charges . There’s something about Trump’s essence that maddens all former children who long ago always did the assigned reading, only to see their lazy bully classmate bloviate their way into the Ivy League thanks to their rich dad. “At long last he’s paying the price for not following the rules,” we think.

And yet, there’s something discordant about hearing from the New York Times that this is “the first time a former U.S. president has faced federal charges.” The Washington Post made the same point, with a subheadline saying, “Political earthquake as GOP frontrunner is now first ex-president indicted by the DOJ.”

Your disquiet may grow if you truly consider that no U.S. president has ever been impeached, convicted, and removed from office. Richard Nixon was impeached but resigned before he could be tried by the Senate. Bill Clinton was impeached, and Trump was impeached (twice), but both were acquitted in their Senate trials.

How can this be? Trump is extremely bad, and honestly, I’m still smiling today as I imagine him screaming, “UNFAIR!” at the squirrels on his New Jersey golf course. But it makes no sense to believe he’s the only president in American history who’s ever acted so maliciously that he deserves to face potential consequences.

To understand this, you might want to read “Murder on the Orient Express,” the 1934 mystery by Agatha Christie.

In the novel, detective Hercule Poirot boards the famous train in Istanbul. There are only 14 other passengers in first and second class. On the second night, the train is forced to stop in Croatia due to a huge snowdrift, and the next morning, a businessperson named Samuel Ratchett is discovered dead in his cabin, indicating that the killer must still be on board.

The evidence is peculiar. Ratchett has been stabbed 12 times, but some of the wounds appear to have been inflicted by someone who’s right-handed, and some appear to be from someone left-handed. Some came from someone extremely strong, some from someone weak. And a fusillade of other clues all point to different suspects on the train.

Poirot considers it all and then gathers all the possible suspects together, along with his friendd who’s a top executive of the railroad line. He suggests two theories of the case:

1. The victim was murdered by someone who’s no longer on the train, who somehow got on board and then escaped unnoticed.

2. Ratchett was murdered by everyone. All the passengers had a motive to kill him, each one stabbed him, and no individual can rationally be held responsible separate from the others.

Poirot says he’ll let his friend decide which theory makes the most sense. After pondering it briefly, his friend says it must have been the unknown stranger and that’s what he’ll tell the police.

This is American politics — and politics generally — in miniature and why it’s nearly impossible for societies to punish the perpetrators of great crimes: Anything terrible on a large scale demands broad elite endorsement and participation. When it comes to major evils, most people at the top must be guilty for it to happen in the first place. And so everyone gets away with it.

Think about the Vietnam War. Lyndon Johnson and Nixon were most responsible for it, murdering perhaps two to four million people across Indochina. (We don’t have a more exact number because we’ve never cared enough to make a serious effort to find out.)

But achieving this body count, far greater than any serial killer could ever dream of, obviously required buy-in from far more people than just these two presidents. How could any legitimate justice process convict just Johnson and Nixon? The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed in the House of Representatives 416-0 and in the Senate 88-2. Congress affirmatively voted to fund the war for years.

Or take the war on terror, which appears to have caused 4.5 million deaths . The post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force flew through Congress with only a lone House member voting against it. Even Bernie Sanders voted yes. 296 members of the House and 77 senators voted for war with Iraq. As in “Murder on the Orient Express,” there was a lot of stabbing by a lot of people.

This dynamic holds true to an extent even when a society is conquered. The Nuremberg trial process included prosecutions beyond the most famous Nazi officials. But of over 3,000 potential cases, most were dropped, and by the 1950s, those sentenced to prison had almost all been released — because the U.S. needed German elites to help us run Germany. The trials of Japanese war criminals were even less consequential for the same reasons, with Emperor Hirohito explicitly excluded from any responsibility.

However, it is occasionally possible for societies to address minor crimes that major figures commit by themselves or with a small circle of cronies. Probably Trump’s most significant crime was his support for the Saudi war on Yemen, which has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. But Trump shares his guilt with a large chunk of the U.S. political system, so that’s fine. It’s the hush money for Stormy Daniels and mishandling of classified documents that have tripped him up.

I hate taking away from anyone’s enjoyment of Trump’s troubles, especially given the shameless delight that they’ve brought me. I understand the temptation to look at what’s happening and believe that the system works. The problem is that this is correct: The system is working — it’s just not anything resembling a system of justice.

The post Trump’s Mistake Was Committing Small Crimes by Himself appeared first on The Intercept .

The man who crashed into a group of mostly Venezuelan migrants in Brownsville, Texas, on Sunday — killing eight of them — sounds in the media like a cipher, if not a monster. A video of the collision shows his vehicle knocking people down like matchsticks. A reporter I know told me that human gore and bone lay in the grass for hours afterward, putrefying in the heat and reeking. On Democracy Now! , a human rights activist called the killings a hate crime.

The driver was identified as George Alvarez. The police charged him with manslaughter, and they are investigating whether he committed hate crimes or acted intentionally. During a press conference, Brownsville Police Chief Felix Sauceda pointed to a list of Alvarez’s numerous criminal priors. One was “assaulting a public servant.”

Sauceda failed to clarify that it was Brownsville police who assaulted Alvarez years ago, not the other way around. For contesting that false claim in court, Alvarez was once considered a civil rights hero. (More about this later.) Meanwhile, the narrative around the killings has ignored details about history and current conditions in Brownsville — about animus against people like Alvarez that spans generations. That hostility may bode badly in the coming weeks and months, in Texas and throughout the country as we reach the end of Title 42.

Title 42 is an obscure regulation that allows the U.S. to turn back people at borders during public health emergencies. Former President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant Rasputin, Stephen Miller, revived it in 2020 during the Covid crisis, to keep people from applying for asylum. President Joe Biden has since used it to excuse his administration’s fear of aggressively crafting policy to help millions of asylum-seekers from South and Central America to move north to safety. On Thursday night, the rule expired. With its end and without robust federal assistance to help settle an anticipated wave of refugees, local communities are susceptible at worst to murderous hostility fueled by the right, and at best to pathological indifference.

The canary in the coal mine for these risks might be the chokehold. We’ve heard much about it lately in New York City, following the fatal strangulation of Black subway entertainer Jordan Neely , who had a history of mental illness, by white former Marine Daniel Penny, assisted by other riders. We’ve heard less about the chokehold’s use against people like Alvarez, in Texas.

Brownsville is an antique city. Downtown, it looks Caribbean the way New Orleans does, with French Quarter-style architecture dating from the 19th century. True to its appearance, the city’s history is Southern. It served as a cotton-smuggling port for the Confederacy during the Civil War, and a monument to Jefferson Davis stood in a park until 2020 .

The city is 94 percent Latino, mostly Mexican American. Its poverty rate is over twice the national average. It is filled with Border Patrol and ICE agents, who take these jobs because they pay well over twice the local per capita income. In Brownsville, almost every Mexican American has a relative who is an immigration agent.

I lived there during the Trump administration. I reported on endemic dehumanization of poor people by law enforcement, and not just against immigrants. In the whirlpool of my nice gym in a nice part of town, I used to hear muscled men and well-coiffed women joke about this injustice, particularly when it came to migrants. A small crew of local rights activists resisted this generalized nastiness, but they barely made a dent.

I knew about the Ozanam Center , a nonprofit shelter for unhoused people and the site of Sunday’s tragedy. The eight migrants were staying there before they were killed. It’s been operating for decades. When I first moved to Brownsville to do reporting on immigration, an activist suggested that I go to Ozanam and offer some Hondurans $20 an hour plus lunch to help unload the moving van. I did so. After that, I heard nothing about the place. It was low key and out of the way.

Ozanam lies on the corner of Houston Road, which, along with nearby Travis and Crockett roads, are named after leaders of the 1835 Texas independence war with Mexico. Historians now concur that the rebellion was started by U.S. Southerners eager to import their Black chattel into Texas — where importation was illegal because Mexico owned Texas, and Mexico outlawed slavery.

Crossing Houston Road is Minnesota Avenue, not far from Iowa, Indiana, and North Dakota avenues. Midwestern whites migrated to Brownsville in the early 20th century and leveled the Latino ranching economy, replacing it with agribusiness fruit and vegetable farms. Along with their crops, they institutionalized the segregation of Mexican Americans, whom they derided as mixed-race “ mongrels .”

Today, Alvarez lives in this neighborhood, where the houses near Ozanam are cramped and run-down. A friend who knows the area calls it “a very sad place.”

As a ninth-grade special-education student in 2005, Alvarez was arrested on suspicion of burglarizing a vehicle. He’d just turned 17 and, according to a later court filing, already was having problems with substance abuse. In his cell, he became frustrated about a broken phone and banged it. An officer who weighed 200 pounds threw 135-pound Alvarez to the ground and put him in a chokehold, with other officers assisting, the filing states. Alvarez was then charged with assaulting a public official, a major felony.

The incident had been captured on video, but the recording was never given to internal investigators. In a legal complaint he filed years later, Alvarez said he had feared that if he went to trial he would be convicted on the officer’s word and given a long sentence. Still a minor, he pleaded guilty and agreed to eight years of probation. Within months, he’d lapsed into drug addiction and violated probation. He was sent to state prison for eight years.

A few years later, according to court documents, another man, accused of the same crime by the same officer, found the recording of his own stay in detention, which proved the officer had lied and perpetrated the assault himself. Alerted that recordings existed, Alvarez demanded and received his and discovered the same lie. A judge ordered him freed after four years of hard time. He sued the city of Brownsville in federal court, a jury awarded him $2.3 million, and his case was listed in the University of Michigan’s National Registry of Exonerations .

But Brownsville appealed the decision, and the case went to the notoriously conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in New Orleans. Judges there overturned the jury’s verdict, reasoning that prosecutors do not have to reveal exculpatory evidence if a defendant pleads guilty. Alvarez’s lawyer went to the Supreme Court, which in 2019 declined to consider the case. Alvarez was denied a financial win that might have changed his life.

According to his lawyer , he now works at an industrial sandblasting company and has six children. But he is covered with tattoos that mark a brown man on the border as a lumpen, a pariah. He’s had additional arrests for driving while intoxicated and for assaulting other people, though most charges have been misdemeanors and most have been dismissed. He seems angry if not broken.

On Tuesday the Brownsville police said that toxicology tests were still being done on Alvarez, but early findings documented cocaine and marijuana in his system, as well as benzodiazepines — the ingredient in Valium, Xanax, Ativan, and Klonopin. These are highly addictive sedatives used to treat conditions including anxiety, panic attacks, insomnial, and bipolar disorder. They alter reflexes and can make driving dangerous. High doses of cocaine can cause agitation, paranoia, aggression, and dizziness.

At about 8:29 on Sunday morning, Alvarez was driving a mile from his home. He ran a red light and barreled into the migrants. He himself was injured, and witnesses said he seemed disoriented. Some survivors kicked and beat him as he yelled anti-immigrant epithets. In subsequent interviews, some migrants cited these slurs as evidence that Alvarez committed a hate crime, and the press has pushed that narrative. Yet police have presented no evidence that Alvarez was motivated by hate, and none of his insults surpass the border shit talking I used to hear from the good citizens of Brownsville in the whirlpool.

Alvarez’s carnage may well turn out to have been an accident, and its location by a migrant shelter simply a horrible coincidence. Even so, publicity surrounding the crimes has suddenly turned Ozanam into a hate magnet. According to management, some people have blamed the organization’s sheltering of migrants for the killings. Earlier this week a young man tried to enter the parking lot while brandishing a handgun . Police charged him with reckless driving and drug possession.

Meanwhile, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott warns of a migrant “ invasion ” and is sending 450 National Guard members to the border. Biden is sending 1,500 troops, even as he announced this week that migrants will not be allowed to apply for asylum if they traversed another country first and did not apply there. Several border cities have issued disaster declarations .

In the north, New York City Mayor Eric Adams this week suspended “right to shelter” entitlement for asylum seekers. He has said New York City has no more resources for migrants. Until a few weeks ago, he’d averred that they were welcome. In the face of his new coolness, will ordinary New Yorkers cool too? Will they grow hateful?

Such questions bring us back to chokeholds. The mayor has lately scared straphangers about subway passengers with mental illness and argued that increased policing is necessary to control them. A civilian fatally choked Neely. But despite strong evidence that the killer acted as a vigilante, the district attorney’s office did not announce until 10 days later that he would be criminally charged — and only for manslaughter.

Across the country, anti-immigrant rhetoric is hardening into policy. Policy is churning out more rhetoric. Both are pushing people to the brink who are already addled and enraged. Under such pressure, will we be able distinguish anymore between hate crimes and accidents? Is there even a difference?

The post A Hate Crime Narrative Takes Hold Around a Tragedy in Texas appeared first on The Intercept .