A far-right group that claimed credit for the arrest of a Palestinian activist and permanent US resident who the Trump administration is seeking to deport claims it has submitted “thousands of names” for similar treatment.

Betar US is one of a number of rightwing, pro-Israel groups that are supporting the administration’s efforts to deport international students involved in university pro-Palestinian protests, an effort that escalated this week with the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, an activist who recently completed his graduate studies at Columbia University.

This week, Donald Trump said Khalil’s arrest was just “the first of many to come”. Betar US quickly claimed credit on social media for providing Khalil’s name to the government.

Betar, which has been labelled an extremist group by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish advocacy group, said on Monday that it had “been working on deportations and will continue to do so”, and warned that the effort would extend beyond immigrants. “Expect naturalized citizens to start being picked up within the month,” the group’s post on X read. (It is very difficult to revoke US citizenship, though Trump has indicated an intention to try.)

The group has compiled a so-called “deportation list” naming individuals it believes are in the US on visas and have participated in pro-Palestinian protests, claiming these individuals “terrorize America”.

A Betar spokesperson, Daniel Levy, said in a statement to the Guardian that Betar submitted “thousands of names” of students and faculty they believe to be on visas from institutions like Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, Syracuse University and others to representatives of the Trump administration.

The group claims to have “documentation, including tapes, social media and more” to support their actions. It claims to be sharing names with several high-ranking officials, including the secretary of state, Marco Rubio; the White House homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller; and the attorney general, Pam Bondi, among others.

The White House and state department did not respond to questions about whether they are working with Betar or other groups to identify students for deportation.

Ross Glick, who was the executive director of the US chapter of Betar until last month, told the Guardian that the list began forming last fall. He noted that when they started compiling names, it was unclear who the next president would be, but that the change in administrations had been beneficial to their initiative.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly vowed to deport foreign students involved in pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses and frequently framed demonstrations against Israel’s actions in Gaza as expressions of support for Hamas. Last week, it was reported that the US state department plans to use AI to identify foreign students for deportation.

The arrest of Khalil last week, who served as a lead negotiator for the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University, aligned with Trump’s executive order aimed at combatting antisemitism. An accompanying fact sheet pledged the administration would cancel the student visas of those identified as “Hamas sympathizers” and deport those who participated in “pro-jihadist protests”.

After the election, Glick said he met with lawmakers on Capitol Hill, including the Democratic senator John Fetterman and aides to the Republican senators Ted Cruz and James Lankford, all of whom, he said, supported the efforts.

In a phone call this week, Glick said he discussed Khalil with Cruz in Washington DC just days before he was arrested.

Cruz’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the meeting with Glick.

View image in fullscreen Ted Cruz and Ross Glick. Photograph: Courtesy of Ross Glick

Glick said that the individuals on Betar’s list were identified through tips from students, faculty and staff on these campuses, along with social media research. He also claimed he had received support from “collaborators” who use “facial recognition AI-based technology” to help identify protesters that can even identify people wearing face coverings. He declined to elaborate on the specific technology used.

Glick mentioned that in recent months he had been inundated with messages from students, professors and university administrators across the country, all providing him with information on protesters’ identities. He said that he vetted the legitimacy of those tips and that he believed Khalil and other pro-Palestinian protesters were “promoting the eradication, the destruction and the devolution of western civilization”.

Glick described Khalil as an “operative”. When asked who he was an operative for, he responded: “Well, that has to be determined.”

Khalil is being held in a Louisiana detention center after being moved from New York. His detention is being challenged in a Manhattan federal court.

The arrest has sparked outrage and alarm from free-speech advocates who see the move to deport Khalil as a flagrant violation of his free speech rights and on Wednesday, protests erupted outside the Manhattan courthouse, where hundreds gathered demanding his freedom.

Betar is not alone in its efforts to support Trump’s deportation campaign, an effort that has divided American Jews in whose name the administration is purporting to act.

In the days leading up to his arrest, videos featuring Khalil and others at a sit-in at Barnard against the expulsion of two students who disrupted a class on Israel began circulating on social media.

Pro-Israel social-media accounts, including that of Shai Davidai, a vocal assistant professor at Columbia’s business school who was temporarily barred from campus last year after the school said he repeatedly intimidated and harassed university employees, identified Khalil and tagged Rubio in posts urging him to revoke his visa and deport him.

The video of Khalil that was circulating was first posted by Canary Mission, an online database that publishes the names and personal information of people that it considers to be anti-Israel or antisemitic, focusing mainly on those at universities across the US.

When Khalil was arrested, Canary Mission said that it was “delighted that our exposure of Mahmoud Khalil’s hatred has led to such deserved consequences”, adding that it had “more Columbia news on its way”.

On Monday afternoon, Canary Mission released a video naming five other students and faculty it believes should be deported.

It was revealed this week by Zeteo that Khalil had emailed Columbia University the day before his arrest, appealing for protection and telling the university’s interim president that he was being subjected to a “dehumanizing doxxing campaign” that week led by Davidai and David Lederer, a Columbia student.

“Their attacks have incited a wave of hate, including calls for my deportation and death threats,” Khalil said.

He added: “I haven’t been able to sleep, fearing that Ice or a dangerous individual might come to my home. I urgently need legal support, and I urge you to intervene and provide the necessary protections to prevent further harm.”

In another email, Khalil reportedly cited a threatening post by Betar, in which the group claimed he said: “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” Khalil “unequivocally” denied ever saying that.

In that post, Betar wrote that Ice⁩ was “aware of his home address and whereabouts” and said it had “provided all his information to multiple contacts”.

After the arrest, Karoline Leavitt, the spokesperson for the White House, said that Columbia University had been given the “names of other individuals who have engaged in pro-Hamas activity” but said that the school was “refusing to help DHS identify those individuals on campus”.

‘A moment of reckoning’

Khalil’s arrest has divided American Jews, many of whom have harshly condemned the activist’s arrest.

The ADL, a group that describes its focus as fighting antisemitism and all forms of hate and that is also known to view campus protests as antisemitic, welcomed the escalation and said it appreciated “the Trump administration’s broad, bold set of efforts to counter campus antisemitism.

“Obviously, any deportation action or revocation of a Green Card or visa must be undertaken in alignment with required due process protections,” the group said. It added: “We also hope that this action serves as a deterrent to others who might consider breaking the law on college campuses or anywhere.”

But many mainstream, progressive and leftwing Jewish groups have condemned the administration’s actions as a dangerous violation of free speech.

“It is both possible and necessary to directly confront and address the crisis of antisemitism, on campus and across our communities, without abandoning the fundamental democratic values that have allowed Jews, and so many others, to thrive here,” said Amy Spitalnick, head of the liberal Jewish Council for Public Affairs.

In a letter on Thursday to the US Department of Homeland Security, several groups including the New York Jewish Agenda, Aleph: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, Habonim Dror North America and others, said that they were “deeply disturbed by the circumstances surrounding the apprehension and detention of Mahmoud Khalil”.

“Irrespective of the content of Mr Khalil’s speech, we firmly believe that his arrest does nothing to make Jews safer,” the groups said. “In the past, laws and policies that limit the right to free speech have often been wielded against the Jewish community, and we are worried that we are seeing signs that they are being wielded against Muslim, Arab, and other minority communities now.”

David Myers, a distinguished professor and the Sady and Ludwig Kahn chair in Jewish history at the University of California Los Angeles, told the Guardian he believed the Trump administration was instrumentalizing and weaponizing “antisemitism for political gain”.

“I think ultimately, [the administration] is interested in something larger than defending Jewish students, it’s really interested in bringing the university to its knees as a way of removing a key liberal, progressive actor from the American political game,” he said.

Myers described Betar’s decision to compile a list of people to be deported as “horrifying” but “not a total surprise”, he said, given what Betar has historically represented, which he called an “embrace of Jewish fascism”.

“I find it distasteful, un-Jewish and collaborationist to forge together lists of people who fail to meet a political litmus test,” Myers said.

He believes universities should resist pressure from the government and uphold the principles of fairness and democracy.

“It’s a moment of reckoning about where one’s values really lie,” he said.

“If universities submit, that’s removing an extraordinarily important site of free and open thinking from the American political conversation. I think that would be very ominous for this country, a further step in the move towards a fully authoritarian regime.”

Donald Trump was on his way to Camp David for a meeting with military leaders on Sunday when he was asked by reporters about possibly invoking the Insurrection Act, allowing direct military involvement in civilian law enforcement. Demonstrations against Trump’s draconian immigration arrests had been growing in Los Angeles, and some of them had turned violent. Trump’s answer? “We’re going to have troops everywhere,” he said.

I know Trump is “a delusional narcissist and an orange-faced windbag”, to borrow the words of the Republican senator Rand Paul, and that this president governs using misdirection, evasion and (especially) exaggeration, but we should still be worried by this prospect he raises of sending “troops everywhere”.

Already, Trump and his administration have taken the unprecedented steps of calling up thousands of national guard soldiers to Los Angeles against the wishes of the California governor, of deploying a battalion of hundreds of marines to “assist” law enforcement in Los Angeles, and of seeking to ban the use of masks by protesters while defending the use of masks for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents. Needless to say, none of this would be happening if these times were normal.

What makes this moment abnormal is not the fact that Los Angeles witnessed days of mostly peaceful protests against massive and destructive immigration arrests. We’ve seen such protests countless times before in this country. Nor is it the fact that pockets of such protests turned violent. That too is hardly an aberration in our national history. What makes these times abnormal is the administration’s deliberate escalation of the violence, a naked attempt to ratchet up conflict to justify the imposition of greater force and repression over the American people.

The Steady State, a non-partisan coalition of more than 280 former national security professionals, has issued a warning over these events. “The use of federal military force in the absence of local or state requests, paired with contradictory mandates targeting protestors, is a hallmark of authoritarian drift,” the statement reads. “Our members – many of whom have served in fragile democracies abroad – have seen this pattern before. What begins as provocative posturing can rapidly metastasize into something far more dangerous.”

The hypocrisy of this administration is simply unbearable. If you’re an actual insurrectionist, such as those who participated in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol by destroying federal property and attacking law enforcement officers, you’ll receive a pardon or a commutation of your sentence. But if you join the protests against Ice raids in Los Angeles, you face military opposition.

Then there’s Stephen Miller. The White House deputy chief of staff unironically posts on social media that “this is a fight to save civilization” with no apparent awareness that it is this administration that is destroying our way of life, only to replace it with something far more violent and sinister.

Are we about to see Trump invoke the Insurrection Act? It’s certainly possible. On the White House lawn on Monday, Trump explicitly called the protesters in Los Angeles “insurrectionists”, perhaps preparing the rhetorical groundwork for invoking the act. And by invoking the Insurrection Act, Trump would be able to use the US military as a law enforcement entity inside the borders of the US – a danger to American liberty.

The Insurrection Act has been used about 30 times throughout American history, with the last time being in Los Angeles in 1992. Then, the governor, Pete Wilson, asked the federal government for help as civil disturbances grew after the acquittal of four white police officers who brutally beat Rodney King, a Black man, during a traffic arrest. The only time a president has invoked the Insurrection Act against a governor’s wishes has been when Lyndon Johnson sent troops to Alabama in 1965. But Johnson used the troops to protect civil rights protesters. Now, Trump may use the same act to punish immigration rights protesters.

One part of the Insurrection Act allows the president to send troops to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” in a state that “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws”. According to Joseph Nunn at the Brennan Center, “[t]his provision is so bafflingly broad that it cannot possibly mean what it says, or else it authorizes the president to use the military against any two people conspiring to break federal law”.

No doubt, Trump finds that provision to be enticing. What we’re discovering during this administration is how much of American law is written with so little precision. Custom and the belief in the separation of powers have traditionally reigned in the practice of the executive branch. Not so with Trump, who is dead set on grabbing as much power as quickly as possible, and all for himself as the leader of the executive branch. To think that this power grab won’t include exercising his control of the military by deploying “troops everywhere”, whether now or at another point in the future, is naive.

Such a form of governance, with power concentrated in an individual, is certainly a form of tyranny. But tyranny, as Hannah Arendt reminds us in On Violence, is also “the most violent and least powerful of forms of government”. And while a government may have the means to inflict mass violence, it is ultimately the people who hold the power. These are the lessons we need to be studying, and implementing on our streets everywhere, while we still can.

Moustafa Bayoumi: ‘Between hate and nothing, hate won’

So, it will be Trump, after all. The very idea of another Trump presidency is devastating. His entire campaign consisted of unbridled race-baiting, woman-hating and fascist-in-waiting messaging, yet still he prevails. This is what succeeds in this country?

The answer, it’s now clear, is a resounding yes. Should I be surprised? There are long and painful histories of racism, misogyny and fascism in this country (the Nazis even studied the US when crafting their regime). But, unlike any other nation’s election, this American tragedy will reverberate around the world. We must do all that we can to prevent a Trump presidency turning into even more of a death sentence not just for American women seeking abortions, but also for Ukrainians, Lebanese people and especially Palestinians.

Hindsight is easy, of course, but some of us have been warning the Democrats for months about the limitations of the Harris campaign. The Democrats appeared more interested in courting disaffected Republicans, including war criminals such as Dick Cheney, than even merely dialoguing with their progressive flank. They refused to allow a Palestinian American to take the stage at their convention. Meanwhile, American bombs are dropped daily on Palestinians in what is widely considered a genocide, and Harris has had little to say.

In fact, Harris probably had little to say about a lot of issues, so much so that the news site Axios labeled her the “‘no comment’ candidate”. The Republicans ran their campaign as a party of hate; the Democrats ran as a party that stood for almost nothing. Between hate and nothing, hate won.

This must be the most profound wake-up call the Democratic party has ever heard. They must stop trying to be moderate Republicans and instead stand for equal justice, working people and human rights for everyone. Saying that they do just isn’t enough.

The Democrats thought all the hate emanating from the Trump campaign was simply an emotion that they could neutralize by their expressions of “joy”. But what if hate isn’t an emotion? What if it’s an ideology? The answer to that question is what we, and the rest of the world, are about to find out. Pray for us.

Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist

Ben Davis: ‘Harris was brought into a terrible situation’

American democracy has fallen apart. That an authoritarian rightwinger will take power is the symptom rather than the cause. What brought us to this point, is the cataclysmic, decades-long breakdown of working-class institutions and civil society. The only path forward is to rebuild somehow.

Trump gained or held steady with every demographic, even left-trending groups like white college-educated voters and women. He gained most with young, less politicized voters and voters of color of all stripes. How has this happened?

Working-class organization, civil society and the basic institutions that have held the country together have disintegrated. There are very few places where people talk to anyone outside their co-workers – during work – and a small number of friends. We don’t know our neighbors. We don’t have unions. This is a society where trust erodes to an extreme degree, and politics is practiced at the level of the individual rather than the community.

Kamala Harris did not run a terrible campaign. She was brought into a terrible situation. Joe Biden’s hubris cost her deeply. But she failed in two directions. She shed young voters, Arab and Muslim voters, and Latino voters who had previously favored the left by running an aggressively bipartisan, centrist campaign, ignoring the active genocide in Palestine supported by the United States.

But this didn’t work either. The median voter, the bipartisan moderate voter, rejected her.

Americans don’t have organization. And with that, they don’t have active solidarity or a structured worldview. They believe a man who played a businessman on TV can press a button and stop inflation. The voting patterns we have seen with young voters, voters of color and all sorts of voters left behind by our country are striking. Their grievances are real. And Democrats have been unable to offer a solution.

Ben Davis works in political data in Washington DC

Lloyd Green: ‘Biden racked up decades-high levels of inflation’

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris refused to internalize their limited mandate. On election day the US punished them, returning Donald Trump, a convicted felon, to the White House. And before the Democrats cast half the country as benighted, they ought to look closely in the mirror.

In office, Biden racked up decades-high levels of inflation at the same time as openly musing about being more consequential than Barack Obama – not the metric Americans were looking for. As much as Biden-Harris saw Dobbs and democracy as silver electoral bullets, voters without four-year degrees were unimpressed.

But it doesn’t end there. Despite Biden’s growing deterioration, he pursued re-election – until it was too late. Meanwhile, his team openly trashed Harris to anyone who would listen. All heard that bell’s peal.

On the campaign trail, Harris exhibited joy but failed to show sure-footedness. She clobbered Trump in debate but bobbed and weaved when confronted by interviewers. Her inability to separate herself from her boss coupled with her selection of Tim Walz as her running-mate probably doomed her bid. Think incredible lightness of being.

Culture remained a battleground. In 2020 and 2022, Democrats nearly destroyed themselves over “defund the police”. Fast forward to 2024: Harris declined to say where she stood on a Proposition 36, a California ballot measure supported by small businesses that sought to impose felony charges and stiffer sentences for certain theft and drug crimes. The proposition prevailed overwhelmingly; Harris did not.

Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992

Arwa Mahdawi: ‘Harris did not sufficiently break from Biden’

Joy will come in the morning, fired-up Democrats enthused at the Democratic national convention back in August. It did not. The unthinkable happened in the middle of the night. Trump is back and he’s back with a vengeance.

A Trump revenge tour will bring carnage at home and abroad. Netanyahu was already doing whatever he liked under the Biden administration – but we also know he was angling for a Trump victory. For over a year now Palestinians have been grieving; now it seems likely that the West Bank will be annexed and the misery in Gaza, already unbearable, will intensify.

And I don’t need to tell you what will happen with women’s rights at home. Overturning Roe v Wade was just the beginning. The right’s war on women is entering a terrifying new phase.

How did we get here? How did the US elect an adjudicated and alleged sexual predator over a woman again? This will be dissected for weeks but the bottom line is this: the US was desperate for change and the Harris campaign squandered their chance to meaningfully represent a new path for the country. Harris did not sufficiently break from Biden and Americans did not want a repeat of the last four years.

The Harris campaign tried to find a path to victory by moving to the right, ignoring progressives and courting Republicans by parading around Liz Cheney. It didn’t work. And yet the lesson one imagines the Democratic party will draw from this loss is that they must move even further to the right.

Things are bleak. But political change isn’t something that only happens every four years at the ballot box. The amount of organizational energy I’ve seen in the last couple of months has been astounding. We must keep this energy up. The fight isn’t over.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

Bhaskar Sunkara: ‘The Democrats must return to their populist New Deal roots’

Unlike in 2016, many of us were bracing ourselves for this outcome. But how exactly did Donald Trump manage to win the White House a second time?

It certainly wasn’t on the merits of his campaign. Trump was less coherent than in 2016, didn’t deliver the same potent appeals to workers, and embraced unpopular billionaires like Elon Musk.

But he seemed to have this election handed to him. To start with, there was Joe Biden. The headline features of “Biden’s economy” were strong as far as GDP growth and jobs went, but Biden was unable to effectively communicate his domestic successes and take advantage of his bully pulpit as president. As a result, 45% of voters, the highest number in decades, said they were financially worse off than they were four years ago.

Good policies don’t translate to good politics without an effective voice behind them and the president was unable to head off worries about inflation and immigration. The failures caused by his declining ability manifested itself most dramatically at the first presidential debate and Harris was forced to run from behind when she became the presumptive nominee.

Harris herself ran a competent campaign, but was limited by the very nature of today’s Democratic coalition: it’s increasingly the party (in both style and substance) of professional-class people. Even though Harris herself shied away from it, the Democrats as a whole are still associated with identitarian rhetoric and relied on cross-class issues like abortion – which turned out to be less salient than the economy – to drive turnout.

The type of majorities that can actually transform American politics won’t be found until Democrats return to their economic populist, New Deal roots. That means naming elites as enemies and avoiding cultural radicalism that appeals to very few and alienates working-class minority communities.

This isn’t Harris’s loss; it belongs to her whole party. And the whole country will pay the consequences.

View image in fullscreen ‘I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,’ writes Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Message. Photograph: Laurence Geai/MYOP/Redux

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book The Message could just as easily have been called Between the World and Me had that title not been taken by his own 2015 bestseller. In The Message, Coates travels to Senegal, South Carolina and Palestine, offering reflections along the way on the African diaspora, US book bans and Israeli apartheid. The result is a work that both digs into the ways that the powerful seek to monopolize storytelling to preserve their privileges and charges writers with the duty to fight back by writing back.

With the enormous success of his previous books; his many awards, including a MacArthur fellowship and a National Book award; and his celebrated career in journalism, Coates is known as perhaps the most perceptive critic of American racism and an eloquent chronicler of Black life in the United States today. The Message contains the same moral authority that we are accustomed to from him, but the vision and geography of this book are wider than his past work.

At more than half the book’s length, the chapter on Palestine is clearly the beating heart of The Message. In the summer of 2023, Coates spent 10 days in the West Bank and Israel, five days with the Palestinian Festival of Literature and much of the rest of the time with Breaking the Silence, a group composed of former Israeli soldiers who now oppose the occupation. He witnessed first-hand the daily humiliations Palestinians endure traveling on segregated roads or walking through checkpoints. In Hebron, an Israeli soldier stopped him on the street, repeatedly pressing Coates to state his religion, only allowing him to proceed when he told the soldier his grandparents were Christian. He saw how Israel controls the distribution of resources: “Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and the fountains, but the water itself.”

View image in fullscreen The Israeli army blocks all entrances and exits to the city of Hebron, West Bank, in October. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

“The Palestine I saw bore so little likeness to the stories I read, and so much resemblance to the systems I’ve known,” he writes. The intensity of his critique extends almost as much to American journalism as it does to Israel’s system of control.

Predictably, some American critics have pounced on Coates, faulting him for not speaking with more Israelis or, more bizarrely, questioning the value of a “celebrity writer” taking a moral stand on the question of Palestine. Recently, on CBS Mornings, he faced a particularly hostile interview in a segment that went viral and prompted the network to admonish the interviewer. The fallback position of Coates’s critics is that he doesn’t have the foreign policy expertise to weigh in on the question of Palestine, but what they fail to see is that he has enormous expertise on identifying racism.

“I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. After returning from the trip, Coates contacted the renowned Palestinian scholar Rashid Khalidi for a reading list, sought out Palestinian communities in the United States, and underwent an intense reckoning with the question: what can happen when victims become oppressors?

I caught up with Coates on a recent Friday afternoon to discuss his book, its reception and more.

MB: I’d like to ask you about that CBS Mornings interview, when Tony Dokoupil monopolized the segment and asked you hostile questions, and then the subsequent fallout at CBS. But I want to take the question in a slightly different direction.

One of the ways that white supremacy works in the United States is by keeping Black people out of global affairs as soon as they say anything internationalist in tone and critical of the USA. Paul Robeson had his passport revoked. WEB Du Bois’s anti-colonial politics resulted in his self-imposed exile to Ghana. Muhammad Ali refused to be drafted during the Vietnam war and lost his title. Do you think the system feels especially threatened when Black people seek and speak the truth about the world outside the United States and this country’s role in that world?

TNC: It’s possible. I don’t know whether it’s “especially”. It’s probably true. The thing that I’ve thought a lot more about is the fact that you have a class of low-information journalists, certainly when it comes to Palestine and Israel, and perhaps the world. And I say that as somebody who was among them. These people are not low-information because they’re bad people or even necessarily incurious people. But there is tremendous pressure not to have this conversation. And the pressure doesn’t even come in threats but by turning the terrain into a minefield and then telling people that they really aren’t qualified. And not only are you really not qualified; you shouldn’t bother to get qualified, whatever that would mean.

I think there’s appropriate sensitivity around the Holocaust. I think there is appropriate sensitivity around the lethal force and weight of antisemitism in western history. But that doesn’t give journalists a pass to not know [what is happening to the Palestinians]. And to the extent that I’ve been bothered by this conversation, it’s because it has gone into a kind of meta-conversation about CBS News, ethics, who is woke and who is not, and tough interviews. And that’s bullshit.

The topic is apartheid. Apartheid is the topic. And people who don’t want to talk about apartheid, because it’s uncomfortable, much like they did with the protests last year at colleges, try to turn this into a conversation about manners.

It is amazing to me that the debate is not: “Ta-Nehisi said Israel is perpetrating apartheid, and that is not true and here’s why.” Or “Ta-Nehisi said Israel is not a democracy. It is a democracy and here’s why.” Or “Ta-Nehisi said half the population that Israel rules are second-class citizens or worse. That is not true. Here’s why.” I didn’t even get challenged in that interview. And the reason why I’m not challenged is that these are facts. There is a mountain of citations to back up those conclusions.

People don’t want to straightforwardly say: “I am defending apartheid because … ” Or “I think the apartheid is appropriate because … ” Or “I think a dictatorship over a group of people that began, conservatively, more than 50 years ago is appropriate because … ” Instead, you get this conversation about manners, man.

MB: Right. It becomes part of this almost enforced ignorance because we’re just misdirecting it over manners instead.

TNC: Yeah. Instead of “Hey, why don’t you read the Amnesty International report [finding Israel imposes a system of apartheid against all the Palestinians under its control]?” “Why don’t you go read the B’Tselem report [which found the same]?” “Why don’t you talk to some Palestinians?” “Why don’t you put more Palestinians on the air?” These are questions of power. Those of us who have fought this battle against white supremacy and racism, we understand, as Toni Morrison put it, that distraction is one [of racism’s] greatest weapons. And this is a distraction.

MB: If distraction is a weapon, silencing is another weapon. And we saw Palestinians silenced during the Democratic national convention (DNC).

TNC: Yes, although I would dispute that they were silenced. I actually think their voices were very well heard. Much to the chagrin of the conveners of the DNC and not through the help of the DNC. But I think they did a really good job of occupying the moral center out there and animating the moral energy. They were well covered in the media. That’s not a small thing.

View image in fullscreen The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Photograph: Penguin Random House

MB: I see that, but I came back recently from a national conference of Arab Americans and there was palpable hatred toward the Democratic party for their support of genocide in Gaza. What hope do you have for a Black president being able to disrupt the colonial system that the book so eloquently describes?

TNC: I don’t have much hope for a Harris presidency. I think more about systems. Abe Lincoln did not come into office wanting to smash slavery. Events dictated that that was what happened in politics. And not the least was the politics of Black people pushing in that direction.

So when I say I don’t really have hope for a Harris presidency disrupting that colonial system, it is not like I have hope for some other Democratic president doing it. I think these things are deeply, deeply entrenched.

Should Kamala Harris win this year and in 2028 run again and there’d be no change in the US’s Israel policy at all, the calculus will be roughly something like this: “I will continue to fund and support Israel’s right to apartheid. I will continue to be the arms provider for that. And that is the price of maintaining a woman’s right to choose.” Or something roughly like that. That’s a depressing prospect because Black people have been in that role that Palestinians would be in or are in right now. The New Deal was passed on our back, right? In order for it to happen, we had to be cut out of it.

My hope for Black politics is that it wouldn’t just mean someone [else] taking up the seat that we once occupied, without even questioning the seat itself. I feel the anti-apartheid cause is increasingly vibrant and that it matters in terms of political impact. I don’t think it will matter less in 2028. It’s not so much hope, but I do think something needs to change.

MB: There’s a role for writers here.

TNC: Yes, there very much is. Writing is part of raising consciousness. And one of the good things about [the book’s reception] is that it’s forced some ideas on to people or into the world of people that maybe they did not know before. That’s what we do. Our job is to expand the political imagination.

MB: You said you’ve felt “lied to” about Israel. How would you characterize this lie and how does this happen?

TNC: Part of it might be the makeup of the press corps. There are very few, if any, major media organizations where Palestinians, Palestinian Americans or maybe even Arab Americans have much power in terms of determining what the coverage looks like. Maybe this goes to your point, that there probably aren’t many Black journalists, either, doing that coverage. And I think that is important because a Black person whose paychecks don’t depend on it would have a hard time walking through Hebron [a West Bank city where Israeli controls on Palestinian life are particularly severe] and not seeing something that they know really well.

Here you have a state created to protect one of the most persecuted classes in western history that has now gone on to persecute, as a state. I just think that’s difficult. I don’t think that’s difficult because there’s something particular about being Jewish. This is not a particularly Jewish error. You look out in the world and you can see various versions of the oppressed becoming oppressors in different circumstances. It makes you question some of the underlying logic of our lives.

For instance, the idea that oppression is ennobling, that oppression begets wisdom, that there was some sort of natural alliance among oppressed peoples that just exists and doesn’t have to be tended or crafted or created or articulated. You can throw all of that out the window. I start the essay with the story that Yad Vashem [Israel’s Holocaust museum] tells, from the attempted destruction of a people to having their own state. Like, that is a nice bedtime story. You have to be a particular kind of motherfucker to want to disrupt that.

MB: Anyone who writes on Palestine knows the risks. And by risk, we usually mean the risk of losing something. But it strikes me that this book is mostly about gaining something.

TNC: Yes! People think they’re going to lose something by talking about Palestine. But they should think about what they lose by not talking about Palestine. For me it was a tremendous opportunity to understand the world. As a writer, I don’t know what I would be doing by ignoring this.

MB: Has it opened up new worlds to you?

TNC: Yes. Very much. When I think about it, this epic really began with Columbus stumbling upon these two continents and the associated islands, and the subsequent movement to wipe out large swaths of peoples, and then populate the islands with African slaves and European colonists, and Europe’s subsequent movements to colonize and plunder much of the world. You can see that all right there in Palestine. You can really see ghosts of it. And in some cases, not the ghosts of it. You can see it in the present, you know?

Sereen Haddad is a bright young woman. At 20 years old, she just finished a four-year degree in psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in only three years, earning the highest honors along the way. Yet, despite her accomplishments, she still can’t graduate. Her diploma is being withheld by the university, “not because I didn’t complete the requirements”, she told me, “but because I stood up for Palestinian life.”

View image in fullscreen Sereen Haddad. Photograph: Olivia Cunningham

Haddad, who is Palestinian American, had been raising awareness on her campus about the Palestinian fight for freedom as part of her university’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. The struggle is also personal for her. With roots in Gaza, she has lost more than 200 members of her extended family to Israel’s war.

She was part of a group of VCU students and supporters who attempted to set up an encampment in April 2024. The university called in the police that same night. Protestors were pepper sprayed and brutalized, and 13 were arrested. Haddad was not charged, but she was taken to the hospital “because of the head trauma that I endured”, she told me. “I was bleeding. I was bruised. Cuts everywhere. The police slammed me down on the concrete, like, six different times.”

But last year’s attempted encampment wasn’t even the reason Haddad’s degree is being withheld. This year’s peaceful memorial of it was. And how that scenario played out, with the university and campus police constantly changing the rules, illustrates something worrisome far beyond the leafy confines of an American campus.

Israel’s war in Gaza is chipping away at so much of what we – in the United States but also internationally – had agreed upon as acceptable, from the rules governing our freedom of speech to the very laws of armed conflict. It seems no exaggeration to say that the foundation of the international order of the last 77 years is threatened by this change in the obligations governing our legal and political responsibilities to each other.

We are ignoring the collapse of the international system that has defined our lives for generations at our own collective peril

This collapse began with the liberal world’s lack of resolve to rein in Israel’s war in Gaza. It escalated when no one lifted a finger to stop hospitals being bombed. It expanded when mass starvation became a weapon of war. And it is peaking at a time when total war is no longer viewed as a human abhorrence but is instead the deliberate policy of the state of Israel.

The implications of this collapse are profound for international, regional and even domestic politics. Political dissent is repressed, political language is policed, and traditionally liberal societies are increasingly militarized against their own citizens.

Many of us disregard how much has shifted in the last 20 months. But we are ignoring the collapse of the international system that has defined our lives for generations at our own collective peril.

On 29 April 2025, a group of VCU students met on a campus lawn to remember the forcible dismantling of an encampment briefly erected on the same space the year prior. The gathering was not a protest. It was more akin to a picnic, with some students using banners from past demonstrations as blankets. Others brought actual blankets. Students sat on the grass and studied for their finals, tinkered with their laptops, and played cards or chess. A handful of the 40-odd students sported keffiyehs.

It turned out the blankets were a problem.

Almost two hours into their picnic, a university administrator confronted the students over a social media post that had advertised the gathering. (“Come be in community with one another to commemorate 1 Year since VCU’s brutal response to the G4Z4 Solidarity Encampment. Bring picnic blankets, homework/finals, art supplies, snacks, music, games,” a local Palestinian solidarity group had posted.) Because of this post, the university considered the picnic an “organized event”, and since the students hadn’t registered the event, it was deemed a violation of the rules.

The rules at VCU had been changing because of protests for Gaza since February 2024.

The administrator told the students they could relocate to the campus free-speech zone, an area that had been established in August 2024 because of the protests of that year. “An amphitheater next to four dumpsters” is how Haddad described the area to me.

When students expose the violence of Israel’s occupation and genocide, institutions […] become fearful Sereen Haddad

The campus free-speech organization Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire) is critical of free-speech zones because they “function more like free speech quarantines, banishing student and faculty speakers to outposts that may be tiny, on the fringes of campus, or (frequently) both”.

Rather than move, the students announced a formal end to their gathering, and they remained quietly on their campus lawn. But since the banners they were sitting on expressed a political point of view, the administrator told the students they would have to take them to the free-speech zone, according to Haddad. The lawn should be for everybody, the students countered. Several different conversations with campus police officers and different administrators ensued, with the students being told different rules each time.

Over a dozen campus police officers appeared later that afternoon (as seen in this video). “You’ve been asked not to have any blankets in the park. You have one minute to collect the blankets and to leave the park. Otherwise, you will be arrested for trespassing,” an officer told them.

But the police continued to change the rules. First the students were told they would have to roll up the blankets and leave. Minutes later, police said they could stay if the blankets were gone. The students removed the blankets and, as the officers were leaving, the students began chanting: “Free, free Palestine!” One raised a sign, referencing last year’s protestors being pepper sprayed by police, that read: “Gonna gas us again, you fucking monsters.” He was arrested. The others became angry and frustrated.

“You know what made this a demonstration?” a student yelled at the police. “When you bring fucking cops to a picnic! That’s what turns it into a fucking demonstration!”

Eight days later, Haddad and another student, identified by the university as leaders, were served notice of policy violations due to the unauthorized gathering. Their degrees were being withheld.

View image in fullscreen Stills from a video showing police at Virginia Commonwealth University cracking down on a student picnic marking the one-year anniversary of when the university dismantled their pro-Palestinian encampment in Richmond, Virginia, on 29 April 2025. Composite: sjpvcu/Instagram

“When students expose the violence of Israel’s occupation and genocide, institutions like VCU, which are deeply entangled with weapon manufacturers and corporate donors, become fearful,” Haddad said. “So they twist the rules, they rewrite the policies, and they try to silence us … But it’s all about power. Our demands for justice are a threat to their complicity.”

The strategic rewriting of the rules isn’t unique to VCU. It’s taking place across the United States as university administrators clamp down on protests supporting Palestinian rights. In one of many other examples, dozens of faculty members and students were temporarily suspended from Harvard’s library in late 2024 after they sat quietly reading in the library with signs that either supported free speech or opposed the war in Gaza, though a similar protest in December 2023 carried no such sanction.

Had any of these students been protesting Russia’s war on Ukraine, you can be sure these administrations would have responded with adulation. Universities, after all, pride themselves on being the testing grounds for society’s collective values. As sites of contemplation and exploration, they function as incubators for future leaders.

But when it comes to the question of Palestine, a different pattern begins to emerge. Rather than listen to students who want to hold Israel accountable for its actions, those in positions of power in the university are opting to change the rules instead.

Such dubious rule changes are not just for our students. In a damning report published in January, ProPublica dissected the many ways that the Biden administration kept shifting the goalposts in Israel’s favor after 7 October 2023. Remember the threats of sanctions against Israel for invading Rafah? (It’s a “red line,” Biden said.) Or the 30-day ultimatum placed on Israel to dramatically increase the food aid? But nothing happened. Outside briefly pausing a shipment of 2,000lb (0.9 tonne) bombs, the military hardware kept on coming.

View image in fullscreen People make their way past the rubble of houses in Rafah on 20 January 2025, a day after a ceasefire deal in the war between Israel and Hamas came into effect. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

The Leahy law requires restricting assistance to military units of foreign governments engaged in gross human rights violations. It has never been applied to Israel. In April 2024, it looked like secretary of state Antony Blinken was about to sanction Netzah Yehuda, a notorious battalion in the Israeli Defense Forces, under the Leahy law. In the end, he punted, and the battalion not only escaped US sanctions, but according to CNN, its commanders were even assigned to train ground troops and run operations in Gaza.

The fact that we are watching a people being entirely stripped of its human dignity should really shock our collective conscience Mirjana Spoljaric Egger

“It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the red lines have all just been a smokescreen,” Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School, told ProPublica. “The Biden administration decided to be all in and merely pretended that it was trying to do something about it.”

Leahy isn’t the only US law that Israeli impunity is pushing to a breaking point. In late April 2024, the US government’s leading agencies on humanitarian assistance concluded that Israel was deliberately blocking entry of food and medicine into Gaza. The US Foreign Assistance Act requires the government to suspend military assistance to any country that “restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance”. Blinken just ignored the evidence provided by his own government. “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance,” he informed Congress.

View image in fullscreen Palestinians trying to receive food from a charity distribution point in Khan Younis, Gaza, on 5 June 2025. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

The rules bend like reeds when it comes to Israel, which in March 2025 also broke the ceasefire that the Trump administration had helped negotiate in January. And now we are witnessing a new level of cruelty: the use of starvation as a weapon of war. Meanwhile Israeli politicians openly call for ethnic cleansing. Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister, bragged that Israel is “destroying everything that’s left of the Gaza Strip” and that “the army is leaving no stone unturned.” He added: “We are conquering, cleansing and remaining in Gaza until Hamas is destroyed.” And his idea of Hamas is expansive. “We’re eliminating ministers, bureaucrats, money handlers – everyone who holds up Hamas’s civilian rule,” he explained. Killing civilian members of government (as they are not combatants) is a war crime.

The US and the international community, again, do nothing.

Every day, the previously unheard of is not just spoken aloud but also acted upon – precisely because it elicits little reaction. Two retired Israeli air force pilots wrote in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz’s Hebrew edition that “a member of the Knesset even boasted that one of the [Israeli] government’s achievements is the ability to kill 100 people a day in Gaza without anyone being shocked” (an excerpt of the Haaretz article was quoted by columnist Thomas Friedman in the New York Times.)

View image in fullscreen A Palestinian child suffering from malnutrition is treated by a nurse at the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on 10 July 2024. Photograph: Eyad Baba/AFP/Getty Images

This steady shift of the acceptable has resulted in criminal policies and practices of forcible displacement, mass suffering and genocide, all conducted under passive acquiescence or active complicity of powerful countries. Even the normally reticent Red Cross is speaking out in horror. “Humanity is failing in Gaza,” Mirjana Spoljaric Egger, president of the International Committee for the Red Cross, told the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen recently. “The fact that we are watching a people being entirely stripped of its human dignity should really shock our collective conscience,” she lamented.

Yet, official outrage is at best muted as all that was once considered institutionally solid melts into air.

What is it about Israel that enables it to get away with murder? The United States has long shielded Israel from international criticism and supported it militarily. The reasons offered for that support usually range from the “unbreakable” bond shared between the two countries to the power of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) in Washington. One could reasonably argue that the only thing different about this current war is the scale.

But it’s not just Washington. Israel and the question of Palestine produce incredibly fraught divisions throughout much of the western world. Denmark recently banned children gearing up to vote in a nationwide youth election from debating Palestinian sovereignty. Why?

In a conversation with the New York Times’ Ezra Klein, professor of international human rights law Aslı Bâli offered one explanation for what’s different about Palestine. In 1948, she notes, Palestine was “the only territory that had been slated to be decolonized at the creation of the United Nations … that has [still] not been decolonized”.

Israel, in short, is an anachronism Tony Judt

South Africa was once in that category. For decades, Palestine and South Africa were “understood as ongoing examples of incomplete decolonization that continued long after the rest of the world had been fully decolonized”. Today, Palestine is the last exception to that historical process – a holdover plainly clear to the people who were once subject to colonization, but that the western world refuses to acknowledge as an aberration.

In other words, for many in the US and much of the western world, the creation of the state of Israel is understood as the fulfillment of Jewish national aspirations. For the rest of the world, the same fulfillment of Jewish national aspirations has rendered the decolonization of Palestine incomplete.

In 2003, the historian Tony Judt wrote that the “problem with Israel [is] … that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-19th-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a ‘Jewish state’ – a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded – is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.”

Judt’s idea that Israel is a relic of another era requires understanding how the global push for decolonization significantly accelerated after 1945. The result was a new world – but one that forsook the Palestinians, leaving them abandoned in refugee camps in 1948. This new world, emerging out of the ashes of the second world war, became what we today call “the rules-based international order”, of which international law is a key component.

International law became much more codified in this time as well. The year 1948 was not only the date of the Palestinian Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe:) and Israel’s independence. It was also the year that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was passed. Along with the UN Charter of 1945, the UDHR serves as the principal basis of international human rights law.

But what good is a “rules-based international order” if the rules keep shifting?

The truth is that we’ve never really lived in a “rules-based international order”, or at least not the one that most people imagine when they hear the phrase. The idea that international law establishes limits on the actions of states did not prevent the Rwandan genocide. The “rules-based international order” didn’t stop the US’s “illegal” invasion of Iraq in 2003. Long before 2023, Israel routinely violated Security Council resolutions. It didn’t stop Hamas from committing its war crimes on 7 October.

The problem with international law is not just the lack of an enforcement mechanism to compel compliance of rogue states. The problem with international law is that “it is more likely to serve as a tool of the strong than of the weak,” the legal theorist Ian Hurd writes in his 2017 book, How to Do Things with International Law.

We tend to think of the law as an agreed-upon limit on our actions. As Dwight D Eisenhower famously said: “The world no longer has a choice between force and law. If civilization is to survive, it must choose the rule of law.”

But what if law is better understood as a system that, yes, restricts behavior but more importantly validates what’s possible? Whoever gets to define the limits gets to define what’s acceptable. As such, the powerful are far more likely to shift the ground of what’s acceptable to their advantage. As Hurd explains, international law “facilitates empire in the traditional sense because strong states … shape the meaning of international rules and obligations through interpretation and practice”.

Though international law generally bans warfare, it carves out an exception for self-defense, and powerful states are the ones that can shift the line on what constitutes legitimate self-defense. (Israel broadly claims self-defense for its aggression on Iran, for example, as Russia explicitly claims self-defense for attacking Ukraine.) In his book, Hurd examines how the US has justified its use of drone warfare and even torture by appealing to international law. International law, for Hurd, is not a system that rests above politics. It is politics.

The point I take from Hurd is not that international law doesn’t exist or that it’s not valuable. Clearly, there’s a need for rules to protect civilians and prevent war. International humanitarian law is also a living and breathing thing that adapts and expands. Additional protocols to the Geneva conventions were adopted in 1977. The Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court was passed in 1998.

Gaza […] is a test of the American public’s tolerance for the levels of death and destruction that such kinds of warfare entail Colin Jones

But international law is also repeatedly put under stress, routinely violated, and consistently pushed into the service of strong states. As such, international law in practice is better understood as a constantly shifting line of acceptable behavior. We may now be reaching the point where that line has shifted so far from the founding intentions of international law that the system itself is on the brink of collapse.

Israel’s campaign in Gaza carries the terrifying possibility of such a radical shifting of the line of acceptability that it makes genocide a lawful weapon of war. If you think I’m being hyperbolic, consider what Colin Jones wrote in the New Yorker earlier this year. Jones consulted key lawyers in the American military establishment about their views on Israel’s campaign in Gaza. What he found was a US military that is deeply concerned about being hobbled by international law when prosecuting a future war against a major power such as China – so much so that Israel’s “loosened restraints on civilian casualties” usefully shifts the goalposts for future US conduct.

To the US military, Jones writes: “Gaza not only looks like a dress rehearsal for the kind of combat US soldiers may face. It is a test of the American public’s tolerance for the levels of death and destruction that such kinds of warfare entail.”

What future hell are we currently living in?

In his book, Hurd also illustrates a fundamental difference between domestic and international legal regimes. The expectation we have of domestic law, he says, is that it is “clear, stable, and known in advance”, whereas international law is up to the consent of states.

Trump’s contempt for institutions of international law couldn’t be clearer. He placed sanctions on judges and jurists of the International Criminal Court after arrest warrants were issued against Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and former defense minister Yoav Gallant. (He issued similar sanctions in 2020.) He defied the UN Charter by bombing Iran, a sovereign nation not posing an imminent risk to the United States. The global response? A mild rebuke from the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and full-throated support from Nato secretary general Mark Rutte.

What Trump and leaders like him seek is not so much to destroy the law as to colonize it

His disdain for domestic institutions of law is just as visible. He has invoked phony emergencies to claim “emergency powers” like no president before him, enabling him to get around Congress and, essentially, rule by decree. He deployed military troops in California, against the wishes of its governor, and an appeals court has even authorized his decision. He is walking the line of open defiance of various judicial orders.

View image in fullscreen From left, Jade Chan and Zoe O’Brien protest Donald Trump on 17 February 2025 in Austin, Texas. Photograph: Brandon Bell/Getty Images

What is happening? It’s tempting to think that we are living in a new era of lawlessness, but that would fail to capture the change staring us in the face. This is not about the lack of law. It’s about the remaking of the law. What Trump and leaders like him seek is not so much to destroy the law as to colonize it, to possess the law by determining its parameters to serve their interests. For them, the law exists to bend to their will, to destroy their adversaries, and to provide an alibi for behavior which, in a better version of our world, would be punished as criminal.

Maybe it’s not surprising that something as vulnerable as international law could crack under today’s pressures. What may be surprising is how we’re also losing our domestic sense of stability, peace and security along with it and how connected the struggle for Palestine is to this domestic dismantling, especially when it comes to free expression. Just ask Sereen Haddad or Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian rights activist who spent 104 days in detention for his constitutionally protected political speech and still faces the prospect of deportation.

The convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide was, like the UDHR, approved in the fateful year of 1948. Its arrival was urgent and necessary after the Nazi Holocaust of the Jewish people, and modern international law was constructed on the understanding that together we in the international community would work together to prevent future genocides. While we have failed to live up to that promise in the past, today it is Israel’s acts of extermination and genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, funded and enabled at every turn by a complicit west, that has contributed the most to the demise of the global, rules-based order. The way it looks today, the system won’t make it to 100 years.

If there’s a glimmer of hope […] it can be found in the growing number of people around the world who refuse to be intimidated into silence

And its collapse can be directly attributed to the hypocrisy with which the world has treated the Palestinians. No other group has been subjected to such a prolonged state of loss in the post-1945 liberal order. Palestinian refugees constitute “the world’s oldest and largest protracted refugee situation” in the modern world. And the demands placed on Palestinians simply to survive get more barbaric by the hour. In Gaza, desperate Palestinians are gunned down by snipers and drones daily as they wait for food. A drought is imminent because Israel’s attacks have destroyed most of the strip’s wastewater treatment plants, sewage systems, reservoirs and pipes. Up to 98% of Gaza’s farmland has been destroyed by Israel. This is a form of total war the modern world should never see, let alone condone.

View image in fullscreen People carrying sacks of flour walk in western Jabalia on 17 June 2025, after humanitarian aid trucks reportedly entered the northern Gaza Strip through the Israeli-controlled Zikim border crossing. Photograph: Bashar Taleb/AFP/Getty Images

No one knows what will come to replace the international system that is currently collapsing around us, but any political system that prioritizes punishing those who protest genocide rather than stopping the killing has clearly exhausted itself.

If there’s a glimmer of hope in all this rage-inducing misery, it can be found in the growing number of people around the world who refuse to be intimidated into silence. We may have seen a small example of that courage in New York City recently, and I’m not talking only about Zohran Mamdani winning the Democratic party nomination for mayor. That same day, two of Brooklyn’s progressive politicians, Alexa Avilés and Shahana Hanif, were running for renomination. Both supported Palestine, both were relentlessly attacked for their positions on Gaza, and both refused to change their views. Pro-Israel donors poured money into their opponents’ campaigns. Yet both handily won their races.

Multiple factors go into winning any political campaign, but any expressed support for Palestine used to be a death knell. Could it be that we’re on the cusp of change? Maybe Palestinian freedom is no longer a liability but is now a real winning position in politics?

Palestine is perhaps the clearest expression today, as Haddad told me, of how “power feels threatened by the truth.” She continued: “If they are so afraid of a student with a sign or a chalked message or a demand for justice, then we are stronger than they want us to believe.” She better be right. For all our sakes.