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      What is the Israel lobby – and why is it so anxious?

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      Last May, on a trip to the United States, world-renowned Israeli–Jewish historian Ilan Pappe was detained by Homeland Security and held for two hours.

      Aged 69 at the time, he was, among other things, asked about his views on Hamas and whether Israel’s actions on the Gaza Strip amount to genocide (he said yes). He was then asked to provide phone numbers of his contacts in the Arab–American and Muslim–American communities.

      In December, months after his interrogation by Homeland Security in the US, Pappe was removed without explanation from the BBC podcast, The Conflict, about the Middle East on the day he was supposed to record his contribution.

      Review: Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic – Ilan Pappe (One World)

      Pappe is one of Israel’s “New Historians”, who look for the truth about the 1948 Israeli “war of independence”.

      The war began when Israel declared its independence following the partition of Palestine. Though it was quickly recognised by the US, the Soviet Union and other countries, it was immediately attacked by Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. When the war ended in July 1949, the new state controlled one-fifth more territory than the original partition plan, to which it refused to return.

      Palestinians mourn the 1948 war as the Nakba: their violent mass displacement and dispossession. (It created about 750,000 Palestinian refugees.)

      One of the world’s most prominent scholars of the entwined histories of Israel and Palestine, Pappe is an urgent advocate of Palestinian rights and author of a groundbreaking 2007 book on the formation of the state of Israel, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

      Jewish–Israeli historian Ilan Pappe is an urgent advocate of Palestinian rights.
      Hossam el-Hamalawy/Flickr, CC BY

      His latest book, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic, seeks to understand how a pro-Israel lobby has formed, both in his country of residence, the United Kingdom, and in Israel’s most powerful and ardent supporter, the US.

      Pappe’s book is worth heeding: he is both a scholar of the Israel lobby and a recent victim of its attempt to deplatform pro-Palestinian perspectives.

      An ‘aggressive’, anxious lobby

      This is the story of an “aggressive” lobby that eagerly seeks to stamp out narratives of Palestinian dispossession and suffering – in case they legitimise Palestinian claims for statehood, or attract sympathy for Palestinians’ lack of political and civil rights in the Occupied Territories.

      This lobbying force began in the 19th century and took on more concrete forms after 1948. Much of Pappe’s book is devoted to parliamentary lobby groups, such as Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) and Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) in the UK, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in the US. The latter spends considerable resources ensuring the US government aligns with Israeli objectives.

      Donald Trump at the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) Policy Conference, 2016.
      Shawn Thew/AAP

      In this book, Pappe argues the aggressive Israel lobby is beset by anxiety. Few other states are so keen to “convince the world and their own citizens that their existence is legitimate”.

      On the anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attacks, Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, whose mother was born in Israel, wrote:

      To most outsiders, Israel is a regional superpower, backed by a global superpower. It is strong and secure. But that is not how it looks from the inside. Israelis see their society as small – the size of New Jersey – besieged and vulnerable.

      Explaining this discrepancy, he wrote that while Israel is “a state with a daunting military”, on October 7, Israeli Jews felt “powerless as their ancestors in the shtetl”.

      When Pappe writes about the Israel lobby, he is not describing a monolithic entity, but multifaceted “groupings of ideas, individuals and organisations”. When he speaks of the Zionist lobby, he means individuals or groups spreading pro-Israeli propaganda, while seeking to discredit anyone “condemning or criticising Israel or Zionism”. But these groups change their composition, orientation and methods over time, Pappe writes.

      His book tells a story of organisations and “committed” individuals who, from the 19th century on, worked to convince policymakers and governments of the need for a Jewish homeland.

      Colonialism and apartheid

      From the early 20th century, Zionism has adapted to contemporary circumstances. It presented itself as a movement for national self-determination, fitting a “minority rights” model.

      Pappe draws on the work of Palestinian–American critic and activist Edward Said to argue Zionism increasingly allied itself to the story of Western modernity and progress. In doing so, he argues, it helped perpetuate Orientalism: a Western understanding of the Arab and Islamic Middle East as underdeveloped and backward.

      From the late 19th century, Palestinians were perceived as “at best, an exotic spectacle and, at worst, an ecological nuisance”, Pappe writes. Recently, US President Donald Trump has dismissed Palestinians’ connection to the land in Gaza, calling it a “big real estate site”.

      As antiracism has become a cultural norm in the West, Israel, like other nations, has become wary of comparisons to apartheid South Africa. However, those comparisons have existed for a long time. In recent decades, the Israel lobby has amplified claims of antisemitism as a defence against them, “weaponising anti-Semitism to procure public support for Israel”, Pappe argues.

      Israel had a close military alliance with apartheid-era South Africa, before the anti-apartheid African National Congress came to power in 1994. Last year, South Africa argued at the International Court of Justice in The Hague that Israel is responsible for apartheid against Palestinians.

      In a searing account, Pappe charts an intensive campaign by the Israel lobby against former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who called for the immediate recognition of a Palestinian state.

      The newspaper The Jewish Chronicle, for example, accused Corbyn of associating with “Holocaust deniers, terrorists and some outright anti-Semites”, he writes. Corbyn stepped down in 2019.

      In 2020, a report by the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) found the culture within the Labour Party under Corbyn “at best, did not do enough to prevent anti-Semitism and, at worst, could be seen to accept it”.

      Antisemitism in the UK Conservative Party gets much lighter treatment, Pappe argues. For example, former frontbencher Jacob Rees-Mogg described Jewish members of his party as “illuminati who are taking power to themselves”. Pappe believes the reason for this discrepancy in treatment is that Corbyn was in a position of power “that could affect British policy towards Israel”.

      The Israel lobby intensively campaigned against former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn (pictured with now prime minister Keir Starmer), Pappe writes.
      Matt Dunham/AAP

      The lobby and the US

      In the book’s second half, Pappe shifts his attention to the US, now Israel’s major geopolitical sponsor. He argues the US is intent on exempting Israel from any reckoning with international law.

      He details the emergence of the American Zionist Emergency Council, a forerunner of AIPAC that emerged in the 1950s. These organisations’ early successes included US recognition in 1947 of the UN’s Assembly Resolution 181, which called for the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, with Jerusalem as a separate, internationally governed entity.

      This led to the 1948 Arab–Israeli war, which ended with an enlarged and consolidated state of Israel. Rapid US recognition of the new state was another early success for the lobby. Signature achievements include the constant flow of arms and aid to Israel. Another is the US using its position on the United Nations Security Council (and its power and influence more generally) to enable Israel to avoid complying with numerous UN resolutions.

      Refugees stream from what was then Palestine on the road to Lebanon, fleeing fighting in the Galilee region in the Arab Israeli war, 1948.
      AAP

      However, Pappe shows the lobby has by no means always had its way. Since its inception, it has come up against the more sceptical, “pro-Arab” US State Department, which employs Middle East experts who are more sympathetic to its various populations. There have been periods of friction with Israel, including in the 1950s, when the US temporarily suspended economic aid.

      Lobbying strategies developed since the 1950s are noteworthy. If the US executive branch of government wavers on unconditional support, the Israel lobby cultivates the Congress. In the UK, the lobby curries favour with MPs in the Labour and Conservative parties, including organising trips to Israel through allied groups, such as Labour Friends of Israel and Conservative Friends of Israel.

      In the US, AIPAC funds the campaign of pro-Israel candidates and holds lavish conferences, high on pomp and display, at which legislators and politicians (including Trump, former president Joe Biden and former vice president Mike Pence) profess their identification with Israel.

      Mike Pence addresses the annual American Israel Public Affairs Conference in Washington DC, in 2020.
      Erik S. Lesseri/AAP

      The lobby vs civil society

      Pappe argues that the lobby’s cultivation of political elites threatens to widen the gap between political and media elites on one side, and global civil society (trade unions, churches, academic associations, non-government organisations, and activist groups) on the other. We can certainly see this happening today against the backdrop of the current war in Gaza.

      In recent decades, dissent over Israel’s actions has also increased within the US Jewish community. A significant segment of the Jewish diaspora is reasserting itself and its progressive values, derived from the Jewish experience of victimisation and statelessness, in relation to Israel.

      Pappe draws attention to the emergence in 1996 of Jewish Voice for Peace, which calls itself “the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world”, and the liberal Zionist lobby J Street, which works towards a democratic Jewish homeland in Israel, with a negotiated resolution, agreed to by Israelis and Palestinians.

      J Street wants to normalise Israel as a democratic Jewish state committed to a two-state solution, and is uncomfortable with Israel as an occupying power. In its own words, it “rejects any proposal to have Israel and the United States forcibly displace the people of Gaza and/or occupy the Strip”.

      Demonstrators from the group Jewish Voice for Peace protest inside Trump Tower in support of Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, in March 2025.
      Yuki Iwamura/AAP

      Pappe notes that active support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement is strong in UK civil society. Perhaps this is due to Britain’s postcolonial guilt, after enabling the creation of the state of Israel before then largely vacating the diplomatic field. The UK Israel lobby, which is frequently given voice in the Murdoch media in particular, consistently attempts to align antisemitism and criticism of Israel in the public consciousness.

      Disenchanted up close

      Despite its current influence, Pappe does not think the lobby’s future as a political force is necessarily guaranteed.

      Throughout the book, he insists the Israel lobby is driven, at its heart, by his country’s lack of ethical foundations. As a careful historian, he tellingly believes most of the lobby’s efforts are at war with truth itself.

      The Israel lobby, for example, likes to present supporters of the rights of Palestinians as antisemitic. But in fact, they are typically driven by a sense of injustice at the Palestinians’ occupation, and an understanding of their struggle for civil and political rights.

      Of course, that’s not to say antisemitism doesn’t exist. And it can exist alongside criticisms of Israel. As Dennis Altman wrote last year, “the passions aroused by Israel’s escalating response to the Hamas attacks have revived centuries-old stereotypes of Jews as both alien and all-powerful” and sometimes “the distinction between opposition to Israel and hatred of Jews becomes blurred”.

      Ta Nehisi Coates.
      Nina Subin

      But the ranks of the disenchanted have included former US President Jimmy Carter and John Lyons, global affairs editor of the ABC and a former Middle East foreign correspondent. Lyons reflected in his book, Balcony Over Jerusalem, on once being “exposed to all the myths pushed by Israel’s lobby groups”. Now, he is a vocal advocate for the rights of Palestinian people, after covering the conflict at close quarters.

      For African American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, a May 2023 trip to Palestine opened his eyes to a system he compared to both apartheid and America’s Jim Crow South.

      No more plucky underdog

      There can be no more talk, Pappe suggests in the final chapter, of an Israeli plucky underdog David, fighting for its life against an Arab Middle Eastern Goliath. Of course, this talk has sustained many of Israel’s supporters since the Holocaust. It relies on a conception of Jewish people as actual or potential victims, regardless of evolving power dynamics.

      One of the world’s most respected Holocaust historians, Israeli-American Omer Bartov, warned in November 2023 of “genocidal intent” increased by dehumanising political rhetoric, in Israel’s actions in Gaza.

      South Africa’s prosecution of the case of genocide against Israel and recent initiatives by the International Criminal Court to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are further signs the international “shield” that protects Israel from its “violations of justice and humanitarian law” has serious cracks in it, as Pappe argues in the book’s afterword.

      In a January interview with Al Jazeera, Pappe described events of the past 15 months as “an attempt by a new leadership of Zionism to complete the work that they started in 1948, namely of taking over officially the whole of historical Palestine and getting rid of as many Palestinians as possible”.

      He believes Israel’s military supremacy will increasingly rely on the “extreme right of the Global North”, including the Trump administration, as well as authoritarian and dictatorial regimes in the Global South.

      As Israeli colonialism, suppression of the Palestinians and military activity to depopulate Palestinian areas intensifies, Pappe believes Israel will be almost entirely abandoned by what remains of progressive civil society and the educated intelligentsia, including renowned scholars of genocide whose reflections and warnings we should heed. I agree.

      It is important Pappe’s book is not ignored, and that we clearly see the Israel lobby’s challenge to free expression and solidarity with the oppressed. More

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      US supreme court blocks ruling that 16,000 fired federal workers must be rehired

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      The US supreme court has handed Donald Trump a reprieve from a judge’s ruling that his administration must rehire 16,000 probationary workers fired in its purge of the federal bureaucracy.A day after ruling in the White House’s favor to allow the continued deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members, the court gave the White House a less clear-cut victory in halting the order by a California court that dismissed workers from six government agencies must be rehired.The court struck down by a 7-2 majority last month’s ruling by US district court judge William Alsup because non-profit groups who had sued on behalf of the fired workers had no legal standing.It did not rule on the firings themselves, which affected probationary workers in the Pentagon, the treasury, and the departments of energy, agriculture, interior and veterans affairs.“The district court’s injunction was based solely on the allegations of the nine non-profit-organization plaintiffs in this case,” the unsigned ruling read. “But under established law, those allegations are presently insufficient to support the organizations’ standing. This order does not address the claims of the other plaintiffs, which did not form the basis of the district court’s preliminary injunction.”Two of the court’s three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented.The victory, though limited, is likely to embolden the Trump administration in the belief that the spate of legal reverses it has faced since taking office can be eventually overturned in the supreme court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, due largely to three rightwing judges Trump nominated to the bench during his first presidency.The extent of Tuesday’s victory was qualified by the fact that it does not affect a separate order by a judge in Maryland applying to the same agencies plus several others. Judge James Bredar of the Maryland federal district court ordered the administration to reinstate workers in response to a case brought by 19 states and the government of Washington DC.In the California ruling, the court heard how staff were informed by a templated email from the office of personnel management that they were losing their jobs for performance-related reasons. “The Agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest,” the email said.While accepting that workforce reductions were acceptable if carried out “correctly under the law”, Alsup said workers had been fired for bogus reasons.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It is sad, a sad day when our government would fire some good employee, and say it was based on performance, when they know good and well, that’s a lie,” he said.In filings to the supreme court, the acting solicitor general, Sarah Harris, argued that Alsup had exceeded his powers.“The court’s extraordinary reinstatement order violates the separation of powers, arrogating to a single district court the executive branch’s powers of personnel management on the flimsiest of grounds and the hastiest of timelines,” she wrote. “That is no way to run a government. This court should stop the ongoing assault on the constitutional structure before further damage is wrought.” More

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      To my husband, Mahmoud Khalil: I can’t wait to tell our son of his father’s bravery | Noor Abdalla

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      Exactly a month ago, you were taken from me. This is the longest we have been apart since we got married. I miss you more and more every day and as the days draw us closer to the arrival of our child, I am haunted by the uncertainty that looms over me – the possibility that you might not be there for this monumental moment. Every kick, every cramp, every small flutter I feel inside me serves as an inescapable reminder of the family we’ve dreamed of building together. Yet, I am left to navigate this profound journey alone, while you endure the cruel and unjust confines of a detention center.I could not be more proud of you, Mahmoud. You embody everything I ever hoped for in a partner and the father of my children. What more could I ask for as a role model for our children than a man who, with unwavering conviction, stands up for the liberation of his people, fully cognizant of the consequences of speaking truth to power? Your courage is boundless, and now more than ever, I am in awe of your strength and determination. Your voice, your belief in justice, and your refusal to be silenced are the very qualities that make you the man I love and admire.We will not forget those who have orchestrated this injustice, the government officials and university administrators who have targeted you without cause, without any shred of evidence to justify their actions. They sit in their ivory towers, scrambling to fabricate lies and distort the truth, throwing accusations like stones in the hope that something will stick. What they fail to realize is that their efforts are futile. Their wrongful detention of you is a testament to the fact that you have struck a nerve. You’ve disrupted the false narratives they’ve worked so hard to maintain, and spoken a truth that they are too terrified to acknowledge. What more do we have than our fundamental right to free speech, when they constantly attempt to strip us of our dignity, telling us we are unworthy of life, of respect, of voice? Now, they seek to punish that very speech, to silence the words that challenge their corrupt and oppressive systems.They are trying to silence you. They are trying to silence anyone who dares to speak out against the atrocities happening in Palestine. But they will fail. We will not be silenced. We will persist, with even greater resolve, and we will pass that strength on to our children and our children’s children – until Palestine is free. I eagerly await the day when I can tell our son the stories of his father’s bravery, of the courage that courses through his veins, and of the pride he should feel to carry Palestinian blood … your blood. And, more than anything, I pray that he will not have to grow up fighting the same fight for our basic freedoms.We will be reunited soon. Until then, I will continue to fight for you, for us and for our family. Your resilience and your courage will guide us through the storm. You are my best friend, my comrade, the very air that sustains me when it feels as though there is none left. I know your spirit is unwavering, that they cannot break you, and that you will emerge from this stronger than ever. I have no doubt that, when you are finally released, you will raise your hands in the air, chanting: “Free Palestine.”

      Dr Noor Abdalla is a dentist and a soon-to-be mother. She is the wife of Mahmoud Khalil More

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      The Guardian view on the US immigration crackdown: what began with foreign nationals won’t end there | Editorial

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      While running for president, Donald Trump promised voters “the largest deportation operation in American history”. Now he wants to deliver. Thousands of undocumented migrants have been rounded up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials since he returned to the White House. On Monday, the US supreme court lifted a judge’s ban on deporting alleged gang members to Venezuela under an 18th-century law, though it said deportees had a right to judicial review. Even the Trump-backing podcaster Joe Rogan has described as “horrific” the removal of an asylum seeker – identified as a criminal because he had tattoos – under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act.What’s truly new is that the administration is also targeting those who arrived and remained in the US with official approval, such as the Palestinian activist and student Mahmoud Khalil. Normally, green card holders would be stripped of their status if convicted of a crime; he has not even been accused of one. But Mr Trump had pledged to deport international students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests that his administration has deemed antisemitic, and Mr Khalil was a leading figure in the movement at Columbia University. The president crowed that his arrest last month was “the first of many”. Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish student at Tufts, was detained by masked agents in the street, reportedly for an opinion piece she co-wrote with other students. Unrelated to the protests, dozens if not hundreds more students have had visas revoked, often for minor or non-criminal offences.This crackdown is exploiting legislation in ways that were never intended. The Alien Enemies Act was previously invoked only in wartime – but Mr Trump casts mass migration as an “invasion”. Mr Khalil and others are targeted under a rarely used provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows deportations when the secretary of state determines that a foreign national’s presence “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”. And while this campaign is indiscriminate in many regards, Mr Trump’s offer of asylum to white Afrikaners facing “unjust racial discrimination” in South Africa speaks volumes about who is and is not wanted in his America.The current fear among migrants, with all its social costs, is not a byproduct of this drive, but the desired result. The Trump administration is trying to push undocumented individuals into “self-deporting”, which is cheaper and easier than using agents to hunt people down. It reportedly plans to levy fines of up to $998 a day if those under deportation orders do not leave – applying the penalties retroactively for up to five years. Fairness, never mind mercy, is not relevant. The administration admits an “administrative error” led to the expulsion to El Salvador of Kilmar Abrego Garcia – who is married to a US citizen and was working legally in the US – but fights against righting that wrong.This crackdown should frighten US nationals too, both for what it says about their nation’s character and for what it may mean for their own rights. The Trump administration wants to remove birthright citizenship and is ramping up denaturalisation efforts. “I love it,” said Mr Trump, when asked about El Salvador’s offer to jail US citizens in its infamous mega-prisons – though at least he conceded that he might have to check the law first. The chilling effect of Mr Khalil’s arrest on dissent is already being felt by US nationals too: the first amendment’s protection of free speech is not exclusive to citizens.“The friendless alien has indeed been selected as the safest subject of a first experiment; but the citizen will soon follow,” Thomas Jefferson wrote when the alien and sedition laws were passed. That warning now looks more prescient than ever.

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Far-right activist Laura Loomer cements her influence after White House firings

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      The US president, Donald Trump, met with far-right activist Laura Loomer in the Oval Office last week. Loomer is a figure so extreme that she is shunned by many, even in Trump’s “make America great again” (Maga) movement.

      Hours after their meeting, Trump fired a string of national security officials, including General Timothy D. Haugh, the head of the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command, apparently at Loomer’s request. Trump has said Loomer was not involved in the firings, but also praised her judgment.

      Even for a president who has always listened to – and, indeed, echoed – fringe voices, the incident stood out. It served as a reminder that Trump is less constrained than ever before, and that his White House is responsive to his personal whims rather than any deliberative policy-making process.

      Gone are the days of Trump’s first administration, when aides would at least try to block the most extreme conspiracy theorists from having access to the president. Now, apparently, even a four-star general (the highest officer rank) like Haugh serves only at the pleasure of figures such as Loomer.

      So, who exactly is Loomer? She is, first and foremost, a media influencer – someone who made her name in far-right circles by spreading hate and conspiracy theories.

      She calls herself a “proud Islamophobe” and “pro-white nationalism”. She has endorsed claims that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an “inside job”, alleged that the “deep state” manipulates the weather to influence elections, and spread conspiracy theories implying that the FBI let school shootings happen in election years to help the Democrats push gun control.

      Loomer’s claims, and her open racism, have sometimes proven too much even for other prominent Maga figures, who prefer to be slightly more subtle in their messaging.

      When Loomer said in 2024 that if Kamala Harris won the election, the White House “will smell like curry” and speeches will be “facilitated via a call centre,” she drew push-back from the now vice-president, J.D. Vance, and far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.

      Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has previously called Loomer ‘mentally unstable’ and a ‘documented liar’.
      Michael Reynolds / EPA

      But Trump seems to have appreciated Loomer’s commentary all the same. The president has repeatedly praised her in public and backed her unsuccessful run as a Republican candidate for a US House of Representatives seat in Florida in 2020.

      Like many other Maga media figures, Loomer has realised that her antics give her direct exposure to a television-obsessed president, and that this exposure can be transformed into access and, ultimately, political power.

      Loomer, who is only 31, is entirely a product of the Trump era. As an adult, practically the only conservatism she has known is the conservatism of Maga – openly prejudiced, vindictive, and more a stew of grievance and hatred than a coherent political platform.

      Insofar as Loomer advocates for particular policies, they are a crude channeling of these impulses. She has campaigned for a ten-year immigration moratorium and has called for the death penalty for Democrats who oppose Trump.

      On a podcast in June 2024 about whether Democrats should be prosecuted and jailed if Trump wins the election over alleged “unscrupulous behaviour,” Loomer said: “Not just jailed, they should get the death penalty. You know, we actually used to have the punishment for treason in this country.”

      But the chief way in which Loomer personifies modern American conservatism is her single-minded loyalty to the president. Loyalty to Trump, and fury at the disloyalty of others, is the central component of her identity.

      Deep loyalty

      This loyalty seems to be both a deeply felt emotion and also a shrewd way of recommending herself to the president. And, more than anything else, it was what landed her in the Oval Office last week.

      Loomer’s apparent recommendation that Trump fire a slew of national security officials had its roots in this obsession with loyalty. Many people serving in national security positions in the Trump administration are not card-carrying members of the Maga movement.

      This reflects the fact that such positions require deep expertise developed over long apolitical careers in the civil service or military. As the product of a movement that disdains expertise and rationality, few Maga die-hards have the requisite knowledge to do these jobs.

      For Loomer, such figures pose a threat. It ought to be emphasised that this is not because people like General Haugh have ever shown open disloyalty to Trump. It is merely that they are not, like Loomer, his fanatical adherents. In her worldview, anything less is unacceptable.

      General Haugh was dismissed after Loomer had accused him and his deputy of disloyalty.
      Jim Lo Scalzo / EPA

      Trump seems to agree, which opens the way to more firings in the future. Sensing her opening, Loomer has declared that she will establish an organisation dedicated to investigating executive branch officials for suspected disloyalty to the president.

      Government officials will have to live in fear of being targeted, creating a chilling atmosphere in which pushing back against Trump’s whims becomes impossible.

      Loomer’s growing influence also suggests that the Trump White House is becoming more chaotic and unpredictable.

      The president’s aides have long claimed that the White House would be run in a controlled fashion this time around, with clear chains of command and questionable outsiders kept away. Loomer’s presence in the Oval Office – at Trump’s personal request – blows that story away.

      For her part, Loomer seems to have what she has always wanted: the president’s attention. Where might she direct it next? More

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      ‘No guidance and no leadership’: chaos and confusion at CDC after mass firings

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      For the past two months, members of the Elon Musk-led “department of government efficiency” (Doge) have stalked the halls of the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) Atlanta headquarters.Several employees told the Guardian that if a Doge staffer walked through their offices and saw a badge at an untended workstation, its owner would be fired promptly. Firing someone for a security violation gave Doge an excuse to circumvent the defenses of civil service protection, or performance reviews, or seniority.Loose badge. Gone.If being fired for leaving a badge at a bathroom break seemed arbitrary to those working at the CDC – some for decades – then the mass firings on 1 April made it brutally so. On that day thousands of federal workers at the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) all of its branches and related agencies across the country were let go in a culling indicative of Donald Trump’s second term.Roughly 10,000 people lost their jobs at agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health in a continuation of one of the largest mass firings in American history.Among the cuts to the CDC: the entire Freedom of Information Act team, the Division of Violence Prevention, laboratories that test antibiotic resistance and a team that determines recalls for dangerous baby products.“There’s been no guidance and no leadership,” said one CDC scientist who still has a job, speaking on condition of anonymity. “This week has just been looking through the wreckage for survivors.”A week of chaos and confusionThe scope of the cuts remains a mystery to federal health workers, including it seems the Department of Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, who said as much as 20% of the cuts may be mistakes, and moved to reinstate some staff fired in error. Kennedy said that “was always the plan”.In the hours after the cuts, an aqua-green dry erase board in a library at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta tallied the losses Tuesday morning like a casualty board for earthquake victims.View image in fullscreenThe words “DO NOT ERASE” topped a constellation of acronyms like NCCDPHP for the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, or NCICP for the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. Under each top line followed a second set of acronyms showing the branches of each department that had been pruned, like the Women’s Health and Fertility Branch (WHFB) of the Division of Reproductive Health, or the Violence Prevention Practice and Translation Branch (VPTB) in the Division of Violence Prevention.No real warning had been given about who would keep their job and who could expect to be fired. Right up until Doge sent reduction-in-force notices to inboxes early Tuesday morning, even supervisors had no idea who would be left.People gathered around the board for updates as word drifted in from colleagues about cuts, as it was the only planning document staff leaders had. Health workers circulated updated pictures of it through informal group chats and Discord servers.Scientists began breaking down in tears in the library stacks.An inquiry to the CDC about the scope of the cuts and its plan was routed to HHS.“All statutorily required positions and offices will remain intact, and as a result of the reorganization, will be better positioned to execute on Congress’s statutory intent,” said Emily G Hilliard, a deputy press secretary for the department. Hilliard claimed the “collaborative” process “included three rounds of feedback from each division”, and that “HHS leaders focused personnel cuts on redundant or unnecessary administrative positions”.The fact sheet Hilliard provided contained no references to the scientific functions lost in the purge.Heartbreak and warnings of dangerShelby Hutton, a biologist working on HIV research, learned she had been fired on 1 April. “We had until the end of the day to pack up our personal belongings before we lost all access,” she said at a press conference with Nikema Williams, the Democratic congresswoman representing Atlanta, on Friday.“We were given no time to conduct an orderly shutdown of the laboratories to ensure that our sensitive equipment and priceless biohazardous specimens were protected and stored properly.”Fired staffers like Hutton found themselves mourning not just for their lost jobs, but because they are acutely aware that without their research some people will die who would have otherwise lived, but for the research they had been conducting.View image in fullscreenLaboratories around the world submit biological samples and testing data to the CDC, which maintains a repository of historical information for research references.In critical areas like antibiotic-resistant infection surveillance, no one is left at the labs to take those samples, one scientist said.Hospitals also ask the CDC for advice when seeing a novel illness. But the process of examining those requests and answering them has been disrupted, said Kevin Pettus, a 30-year-old veteran scientist at the agency who lost his job last week.“I think when they decided to cut our branch, they didn’t think this through,” he said. “If the agenda was to make America healthy again, all Elon Musk and 47 have done is make this country in a worse position than it already was.“What has occurred has put everybody in danger, not just our families, but their families as well. Some of this needs to be addressed and addressed immediately and reversed.”Kennedy, the US health secretary, said at a press availability Wednesday that administrative roles, not research, was the Doge target. But as healthcare workers piece together the scope of the cuts, it’s clear that the cuts struck bone, not fat.“The US had incredible research infrastructure and was doing incredible research to identify the next cure, to prevent the next disease, and that’s what’s being cut,” said Carmen Marsit, executive associate dean at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health.“I mean, the government has made enormous investments in many of these drugs, in many of the programs that have been developed, and now we’re ready to move them over the finish line and really get them to act. And that’s being stopped.”Widespread cuts impact health and safetyAs federal workers learn of the work that has been stalled and teams have been cut, the impact is slowly becoming clear.Among the cuts are almost everyone at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which among other things, monitors air quality around fracking drill sites, tests personal protective technology and provides injury data to government agencies for recalling consumer products like defective baby cribs.The office of Smoking and Health at the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion saw its public health work disrupted. As did the division of violence prevention, injury prevention and informatics at the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. Among other things, the division researches gun violence and domestic violence, which both spiked during the pandemic, with the goal of reducing sexual assault and gun deaths.Cuts hit the laboratories researching viral hepatitis and sexually transmitted diseases at National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention, as well as the Division of HIV Prevention’s communication, surveillance and research branches.The Global Health Center at the CDC saw health informatics, scientific integrity and special initiatives for HIV and tuberculosis decimated.View image in fullscreenAnd amid a larger effort to dismantle environmental protection, workers were cut at the asthma and air quality monitoring and childhood lead prevention teams in the CDC’s environmental health division.Other CDC reductions include the technology branch of the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, housing the software engineers and computer scientists supporting a new center created amid the Covid-19 pandemic to help predict disease outbreaks.CDC staff had already been navigating the impact of a deluge of executive orders raining from Trump’s pen since January. At one point, research databases had been taken off line to comply with an order to replace all references to “gender” with “sex,” even in scientific research documentation.But at least then, the CDC had staff ready to fix a problem. Now workers say the problems will emerge and the people who understand how to solve those problems are gone.Insiders say only a skeleton staff remains in dozens of departments and branches, capable only of performative gestures toward the work mandated by law and congressional budgets.Looking forwardStanding across the street from the CDC headquarters on a busy street near Emory University, Atlanta drivers honked in support as congresswoman Williams stood with fired CDC workers at a press conference.Williams called the CDC the “pride of the fighting fifth”, a reference to Trump’s disrespect for the city that began with his conflict with the late congressman John Lewis and Georgia’s fifth congressional district.“It is in these moments of public transgressions against our communities that our reaction in the name of justice and prosperity must be loud and clear,” she said, describing the firings as illegal and unconstitutional. “We fight for the health and decency of our country.“We fight in our communities.” More

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      Cory Booker spoke for 25 hours and didn’t mention Gaza once. That’s no surprise | Judith Levine

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      Seven and three-quarters hours into his 25-hour speech on the Senate floor, the New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker uttered the word “Gaza”. He was not talking about the war. He stepped nowhere near the 50,000 Palestinians killed by the Israeli armed forces since 8 October 2023, or the US’s military and political support of the genocide.Rather, Booker was searching for a particularly ludicrous lie from a presidential administration that has told thousands. “There are lies about USAID, like, I don’t know, 5 million condoms going to Gaza or something outrageous,” he said. Considering the other outrageous things Trump has said about Gaza – such as his plan to “clean out” the strip to make room for luxury resorts – the remark felt trivializing.The word “Gaza” came up once more, when the senator mentioned his “humanitarian and peace-building work” with the UN there.It was not until hour 13, more than halfway through his oratorial marathon, that Booker engaged at any length with the subject of Israel and Palestine. This time it was not about the war, either. Instead, he was condemning the Trump administration’s attacks on free speech at universities and its summary deportation of legally resident foreign students who “espouse certain views on topics like Israel and Palestine”.The senator recounted the abduction of Rumeysa Ozturk, the Turkish Tufts University graduate student who was surrounded on the street by masked plainclothes agents, handcuffed and hustled into an unmarked vehicle, then shipped to a hellish Louisiana detention center, where she faces deportation – all apparently because she co-wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper urging the college to divest from Israel. “Her arrest,” said Booker, “looks like a kidnapping that you might expect to see in Moscow rather than in the streets of Boston.” True.Denouncing censorship, the senator self-censored. “Certain views on topics”: he neglected to specify which views. He didn’t say that punishment is being meted out exclusively to critics of Israel and never to its supporters, or that those supporters are supplying homeland security with the names of the critics – in other words, collaborating in the very violations of constitutional rights that he decries.The atrocities Israel has been committing in Gaza since the temporary ceasefire collapsed are arguably the worst yet. Trump is cheering Bibi on like a fan at a wrestling match. His support of Israel’s policies is not only unconsciously racist, like Biden’s, but blatantly racist. Yet few Democrats are saying – or, more importantly, doing – anything to stop him. In fact, a few days after the speech, Booker voted against Bernie Sanders’ resolutions to block $8.8bn in arms sales to the Netanyahu government. Only 14 of his colleagues voted in favor.Perhaps senators are hoping their constituents won’t notice their inaction. Indeed, as the mudslide of executive orders buries immigrants, federal workers, transgender people, science, regulation, the economy, the rule of law and US democracy, it is hard for the press, or anyone else, to take their eyes off what is going on at home. Even when horrors are taking place abroad. Especially if they’re taking place in Palestine.For example: senior national security officials discussed classified military operations on the commercial message app Signal and inadvertently included a reporter on the call. The super-blunder got a name, and Signalgate was all over the news. But on the subject of that discussion – US airstrikes on Houthi militants in Yemen – virtual silence.Only the most tuned-in of US news hounds know who the Houthis are, let alone why we might bomb them: their attacks on ships in the Red Sea, perpetrated in support of the Palestinians. Was the US strike a good idea? Was it consonant with the US’s Middle East strategy – if there is a Middle East strategy? Do the Houthis pose a threat to national security? Is the Yemen bombing an escalation of US involvement in the Gaza war? Don’t ask the mainstream media. Fixated on the incompetence of Trump’s cabinet and the president’s laid-back attitude toward classified information, Signalgate turned a military aggression in a country against which we have not declared war into a domestic story – about Trump.As in Booker’s speech, as last spring, when university administrators called in the police to break up student Palestine-solidarity encampments, the press focused narrowly on individual Americans’ acts in relation to a response to the war in Gaza, rather than on the war itself.Antiwar activists are having a hard time catching anyone’s eyes – including the eyes of those who are sympathetic to their cause. This Saturday, at opposite ends of the National Mall in Washington, two demonstrations occurred simultaneously: the Emergency March for Palestine and the much larger Hands Off rally, one of about 1,500 taking place nationwide.At the former event, a ribbon-like white banner inscribed with the names of the Palestinian dead flowed from hand to hand above the heads of the participants, drawing the crowd together like a seam stretching into the distance. Solemn, elegant, a symbol of the interminable war and the immensity of its damage, it was the kind of mediagenic political spectacle that deserved to be broadcast widely, at least at the end of the newscast. But it can be viewed only on social media.Why did these two events happen at the same time anyway? Was there no communication between Indivisible and the other Hands Off organizers and the groups, including Jewish Voice for Peace and the Palestinian Youth Movement, that planned the Palestine action? Did Indivisible consider the war too divisive for an action seeking to attract everyone from socialists to Republicans worried about their 401ks? Or was Trump’s stance on Israel not on the bill of indictments against him?What the Trump administration is doing to the US and what he is eagerly helping Netanyahu to do to the Palestinians are of a piece. Both are criminal, immoral campaigns against domestic and international law, causing immense suffering. Yes, it’s exhausting to contend with two major catastrophes at once. But we don’t have the time or the privilege to put either one aside.

      Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept and the author of five books. Her Substack, Today in Fascism, is at judithlevine.substack.com More

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      Trump’s very beautiful tariffs will fix America, masculinity and the family. It said so on Fox News | Arwa Mahdawi

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      There’s been a lot of doom-mongering about tariffs recently, hasn’t there? Oh no, my life savings are going to get wiped out and I’m never going to be able to retire! Oh no, grocery prices are going to triple! Oh no, it looks suspiciously as if Donald Trump has used ChatGPT to guide his fiscal policy and now we’re going to see another Great Depression! Moan, moan, moan.While it might be true that much of these predictions are coming from highly credentialed economists and people who tend to know what they’re talking about, I’d like to remind you that there are two sides to every story – and it’s always worth looking at both of them. You’ve already heard from voices who reckon Trump’s tariffs are misguided and dangerous. Now it’s time to focus on the people who support the president’s assessment that tariffs are a “very beautiful thing” that will usher in a new golden age.Where do we find such people? Fox News, of course. The place where up is down, left is right, and Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia if King Trump says that’s the case. As the stock market plunges, Fox News has wheeled out a bunch of pundits and anchors to explain how your savings getting obliterated is a good thing, actually.First, there’s Fox News host Jesse Watters, who is known for making thoughtful and nuanced statements such as: “When a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman”; and announcing that men shouldn’t eat soup in public because it isn’t “manly”. In a recent segment, Watters said that these tariffs – which will make life more expensive – are actually “going to make it easier for people to start families”. He added: “These tariffs are for the children.” I polled my own child, who is three, on this, and she would rather have an Elsa doll than a tariff, but what does she know, eh?While Watters believes the children are our future, and tariffs will help them lead the way, Free Press columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon reckons Trump’s economic policy is going to fix the “crisis of masculinity”. On Sunday, Ungar-Sargon told Fox News that the US had “shipped jobs that gave men who work with their hands for a living, and rely on brawn and physicality, off to other countries … and imported millions and millions of illegals to work in construction, manufacturing, landscaping, janitorial services – jobs that used to give men access to the American dream.”Ah yes, as the old adage goes: if you’ve got nothing intelligent to say, go on Fox News and demonise immigrants. There are in fact plenty of jobs available in the US that rely on “brawn and physicality”; the problem is many of them wreck your body and don’t pay a living wage. You know the workers who cut quartz slabs for kitchen countertops, for example? They’re predominantly young Latino men who are said to be suffering from lung disease because of the silica dust created by cutting said slabs. Meanwhile, construction workers are more likely to die of a drug overdose than those in any other occupation because the physical nature of the work results in an increased likelihood of injury and the subsequent prescription of addictive opioids. Romanticising these sorts of jobs – particularly when your own job consists of typing on a computer – does absolutely nothing to help men.As I said, it’s always important to look at both sides, even if one side of an argument appears completely demented. Still, I’m squinting very hard and I’m afraid that, despite Ungar-Sagon and Watters’s very persuasive arguments, I can’t see an upside to tariffs. Let’s say that more manufacturing jobs do open up in the US (a process that would take years). It seems unlikely Trump would fight for them to come with decent wages – he recently rescinded one of Joe Biden’s executive orders that raised the minimum wage for federal contractors. I’m not sure doing hard labour for a low salary gives you access to the American dream, unless your dream is going bankrupt from medical bills.But look at me: moan, moan, moan. You know what I’ve just realised my problem is? I think I need to watch more Fox News. And, if you’re feeling down about the state of the world, then you may need to, too. Now that Trump has started posturing over Iran, I can’t wait for Fox pundits to explain how accidentally inviting a nuclear war is going to be great, actually. Nothing like a little bit of radiation poisoning to fix the crisis of masculinity. More