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      ‘Extraordinary’: Biden administration staffers’ growing dissent against Gaza policy

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      Dissent inside the Biden administration over the president’s Gaza policy is growing, with a public resignation this week of a Department of Education official, and a letter signed by more than a dozen Biden campaign staffers calling for a ceasefire and the conditioning of aid to Israel.“It’s pretty extraordinary levels of dissent,” said Josh Paul, a career official working on arms sales at the state department who resigned in protest in October, of the mounting signs of discontent. “I am hearing in recent weeks from people who are thinking more seriously about resigning.”Tariq Habash, the Department of Education official, also says that he has heard from many more officials than he had anticipated who are contemplating their own exits. “It speaks to the continued shift and concerns about our current policies,” he said. “I hope it resonates with the president and the people who are making policy decisions on this issue that is affecting millions of lives.”Habash, who is Palestinian American, is the first political appointee from the Biden administration to bring his resignation to the media and publish an open letter. “I cannot stay silent as this administration turns a blind eye to the atrocities committed against innocent Palestinian lives,” he wrote in announcing his resignation from his position as adviser to its policy planning office. In the letter, he objected to the president not pressuring Israel “to halt the abusive and ongoing collective punishment tactics” that have led to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. He also took issue with administration leaders’ repetition of “unverified claims that systemically dehumanize Palestinians”.A day before Habash quit, 17 current campaign staffers anonymously called for a ceasefire and conditioning military aid to Israel. Their letter urged Biden to take “concrete steps to end the conditions of apartheid, occupation, and ethnic cleansing that are the root causes of this conflict”. An organizer of the letter, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: “We know we’re not alone in this, and there is a very big coalition asking for the same thing.”These are just the latest internal criticisms of Biden. Last month, a group of administration officials hid their faces with masks and scarves and staged a vigil in front of the White House in support of a ceasefire. More than 500 alumni of Biden’s presidential campaign signed an open letter calling for a ceasefire in November, and congressional aides and USAid employees sent their own petitions this fall. Current state department officials who do not want to risk their jobs by speaking out have increasingly taken advantage of sanctioned routes to criticizing the president, by filing dissent memos to the secretary of state.The Guardian spoke to several current political appointees and career staffers from the state department who are critical of the administration’s approach but declined to speak on the record. Some say they are trying to create change from within. Others say that the president’s entire Middle East approach is being guided by the White House and in many sense the president himself, defying the recommendations of policy experts.Of Habash’s resignation, the White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said that “people have the right to voice their opinion”. She and the state department directed questions to the Department of Education, whose spokesperson wished Habash the “best in his future endeavors”.Biden’s advisers sought to diffuse internal dissatisfaction with a series of listening sessions at the White House and the state department in October and November. “It’s a sign of strength that an administration not only hears but welcomes dissent from within,” said Emily Horne, a former spokesperson for the Biden White House.Since the first days after Hamas’s 7 October attacks, the administration has shifted some of its rhetoric. Biden is now talking more about the humanitarian catastrophe than he was during the initial days of Israel’s ground incursion into Gaza and has repeatedly urged Israel to take steps to protect civilians. But the acute situation in Gaza caused by Israel’s ongoing operations, which have killed more than 22,000 Palestinians, along with risks of famine and severely restricted medical care, have overshadowed any purported shifts in US policy.This week, the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, will travel to the Middle East “to underscore the importance of protecting civilian lives in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza”. The state department criticized statements from Israeli ministers who have called for the relocation of Palestinians from Gaza. But even that condemnation came just days after the secretary of state bypassed Congress to rush arms to Israel.“There is a feeling among Arab Americans and Muslim Americans in government that the administration does’t take their opinions or dissent seriously,” said Jasmine El-Gamal, a former civil servant who worked on Middle East policy at the Department of Defense during the Obama years.Paul, the senior state department career official who resigned in protest in October, said he’s in contact with several people currently in government who are thinking about leaving over Biden’s handling of Israel. “If there was universal healthcare, there would be more people willing to resign,” he said, in reference to many government employees’ reliance on their jobs for medical care.Habash’s resignation, coupled with the 3 January letter from current campaign staff, comes amid fears that Biden could be losing important members of his base as the 2024 presidential election begins in earnest. Even former Obama administration officials now hosting popular podcasts like Pod Save America have become vocally critical of Biden. The campaigners’ letter said that re-election campaign “volunteers quit in droves, and people who have voted blue for decades feel uncertain about doing so for the first time ever, because of this conflict”.For now, the dissent does not seem to be affecting Biden’s approach or that of the close-knit circle of advisers around him. A former official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, downplayed the resignations and open letters. “Some of these criticisms resonate, but I don’t see them actually making a significant difference,” they said. “The times when it matters to this administration is when it starts to play into domestic politics and becomes a concern for the next election.”Habash says he remains aligned with much of Biden’s domestic policies, and hopes his departure pushes the president to change course on Gaza. “Our elected officials are not in touch with their base and their voters,” he warned. More

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      US-Mexico border crossings in December set monthly record high

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      More than 300,000 people were on track to cross the US-Mexico border in December without authorization and are being processed by American immigration officials, a tally that sets the latest monthly record, according to government figures obtained by CBS.The number of crossings, averaging roughly 8,400 apprehensions a day by US border agents, comes amid urgent efforts by the Joe Biden White House to curb migrant flows that have become a domestic political liability for him as he seeks re-election in 2024.In the first 28 days of December, border agents processed nearly 235,000 people without permission crossed the southern border in between ports of entry, alongside 50,000 who entered the country under an appointment system. Included in that number were nearly 96,000 parents traveling together with their children.The previous monthly high in US-Mexico border crossings was in September, when the agency processed nearly 270,000.Earlier in December, the White House had hinted it may accept new limits on asylum seekers as well as an expansion of detention and deportation efforts – a potential reversal of immigration liberalizations announced early in Biden’s presidency.Mexico and Venezuela on Saturday announced that they had restarted repatriation flights of Venezuelans migrants in Mexico. That comes after a high-level meeting between US and Mexico officials aimed at curbing the flow while maintaining cross-border trade.Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador said last week that he had received a request from Biden to discuss the issue. “He was worried about the situation on the border because of the unprecedented number of migrants arriving at the border,” López Obrador later said, according to the Associated Press. “He called me, saying we had to look for a solution together.”A recent CBS poll found that immigration ranks second among concerns facing the country, behind inflation but ahead of concerns about the stability of the democratic system.According to government figures, most people who entered the US without permission are released with court notices, without any asylum screenings. The immigration court system, with fewer than 800 immigration judges, has a backlog of 3m pending cases – or 4,500 for each judge, and it may take three years to clear.A caravan of about 6,000 people was reportedly making its way north through Mexico toward the US, placing additional pressure on authorities. On Sunday’s political talkshows, the mayors of Chicago and Denver described the burden that the backlog of immigration cases was placing on their cities.Republican US senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told CBS’s Face the Nation that “expedited removal [of migrants] is on the table” amid negotiations with Democrats for approval of an aid deal for Ukraine. Graham said he looks “at the border problems as a national security nightmare for America”.Later, Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, a Democrat, told CBS: “This is clearly an international and federal crisis that local governments are being asked to subsidize, and this is clearly unsustainable.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe mayor placed blame on Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, whose administration is sending planes and buses of migrants to northern cities. Abbott, he said, “is determined to continue to sow seeds of chaos”.In the same conversation, the Denver mayor, Mike Johnston, said his city had received 35,000 migrants in December who had been successfully integrated. “What we don’t want is people arriving at two in the morning at a city and [at] county buildings with women and children outside in 10-degree weather and no support,” he said.Ohio congressman Mike Turner, chairman of the US House intelligence committee, told ABC’s This Week that White House action on the issue would have to come before he and his fellow Republicans moved on administration requests on Congress to approve a national security package that includes aid for Ukraine and Israel in their respective ongoing wars.“We have cities across the country who are having … huge impacts, who are calling on the administration to address it,” Turner added. More

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      Virginia senator Tim Kaine condemns Biden’s arms transfer to Israel

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      Virginia senator Tim Kaine has added his voice to a rising chorus within the Democratic party questioning the Biden administration’s legislatively unconstrained transfer of US munitions to Israel.In a news release on Saturday, the Democratic senator – a member of the Senate armed services committee – said weapons transfers must come under congressional oversight.“Just as Congress has a crucial role to play in all matters of war and peace, Congress should have full visibility over the weapons we transfer to any other nation. Unnecessarily bypassing Congress means keeping the American people in the dark,” Kaine wrote.“We need a public explanation of the rationale behind this decision – the second such decision this month,” he added.On Friday, the US Defense Security Cooperation Agency said the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, had approved the sale of 155mm projectiles and related equipment valued at $147.5m, an increase from an earlier approved order for tens of thousands of rounds of the heavy artillery munitions.It said that Blinken had “determined and provided detailed justification to Congress that an emergency exists that requires the immediate sale to the Government of Israel” and that the sale was “in the national security interests of the United States” and thereby exempt from congressional review under arms-export control laws.“The United States is committed to the security of Israel, and it is vital to US national interests to assist Israel to develop and maintain a strong and ready self defense capability,” the statement added.Kaine said in his statement that he “strongly condemned” Hamas’s 7 October attacks on Israeli civilians, which killed about 1,200 people, and had been vocal about the need to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.At least 21,672 people have been killed in Gaza and 56,165 wounded since the war began, according to the most recent numbers from the Gaza health ministry.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionKaine’s statement added to administration concerns that its policy of military transfers to Israel, including a $14.3bn package announced in November that Biden called “an unprecedented support package for Israel’s defense”, is out of step with US domestic and international public opinion.On Friday, South Africa called on the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to find that Israel’s war in Gaza is a violation of the Genocide Convention of 1948. The filing accused Israel of engaging “in genocidal acts against the Palestinian people in Gaza”.Separately, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said that soldiers with the IDF fired on a UN aid convoy returning from a delivery in northern Gaza, an incident the UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths condemned as “unlawful”. More

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      US threatens to sue Texas over law allowing state police to arrest migrants

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      The US Department of Justice has threatened to sue the state of Texas if it implements a law that would allow state police to arrest any person deemed suspicious of crossing the border illegally.The law, called Senate Bill 4, is scheduled to go into effect on 5 March. One of the strictest immigration laws ever passed in American history, SB4 seeks to “prohibit ‘sanctuary city’ policies, that prohibit local law enforcement from inquiring about a person’s immigration status and complying with detainer requests”.The law would include “improper border entry” as a new criminal offense, placing undocumented Texas residents and migrants within the grips of the state’s criminal justice system.Immigration and border enforcement is a function of the federal government, the justice department argues: since the US supreme court ruled so in the landmark United States v Arizona case in 2012, immigration policy has long been under the purview of the US federal government – not individual states.In a letter addressed to the Republican Texas governor, Greg Abbott, the Biden administration has given the Lone Star state a deadline of 3 January to reverse course.The letter says, in part: “SB 4 is preempted and violates the United States constitution. Accordingly, the United States intends to file suit to enjoin the enforcement of SB 4 unless Texas agrees to refrain from enforcing the law. The United States is committed to both securing the border and ensuring the processing of noncitizens consistent with the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). SB 4 is contrary to those goals.”On X, Abbott wrote: “The Biden Admin. not only refuses to enforce current U.S. immigration laws, they now want to stop Texas from enforcing laws against illegal immigration. I’ve never seen such hostility to the rule of law in America.”He added: “Biden is destroying America. Texas is trying to save it.”The move is one of several attempts by Texas at enforcing border security, all a part of Operation Lone Star, a joint operation between the Texas department of public safety and the Texas military department with the mission of countering illegal immigration.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEarlier this year, in July, Abbott and his administration were condemned as inhumane by immigrant and civil rights groups for deploying razor wire and a large floating buoy in the Rio Grande to deter illegal migration – another issue on which the US Department of Justice pursued legal action against Texas.In May, shortly after the Biden administration ended the pandemic-era policy Title 42, which had given US officials authority to turn away people who had come to the US-Mexico border claiming asylum in order to prevent the spread of Covid-19, Abbott deployed a security unit called the Texas tactical border force to the US-Mexico border. The force is equipped with aircrafts, boats, night vision devices and riot gear.In recent years, Texas has also joined Republican-led Florida in bussing undocumented immigrants from their states to “sanctuary” cities such as Chicago, New York and Boston. More

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      Biden poised to loosen restrictions on marijuana, but some say it’s not enough

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      The US government appears poised to announce next year the most sweeping changes in decades to how it handles marijuana, the psychoactive drug dozens of states allow to be sold from storefronts, but which federal law considers among the most dangerous substances.Evidence suggests that Joe Biden’s administration, responding to a policy the president announced last year, is working on moving marijuana to schedule III of the Controlled Substance Act (CSA), a change from its current listing on the maximally restrictive schedule I. That would lessen the tax burden on businesses selling the drug in states where it is legal, and potentially change how police agencies view enforcement of marijuana laws.“If it’s going to be finalized at schedule III, it’s going to be the moment that the industry really is able to turn the corner and we begin to see the growth in the cannabis space amongst the legal operators that we’ve been waiting on for so long,” said David Culver, senior vice-president of public affairs for the US Cannabis Council, a trade group.But other marijuana legalization advocates regard changing its classification as a half-measure that would do nothing to resolve conflicts between state and federal laws that emerged after weed legalization picked up speed a decade ago.Marijuana faces the same federal restrictions as drugs like heroin and ecstasy under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), but 38 states have approved its use for medical conditions, and 24 states and the District of Columbia allow adults to also consume it recreationally. That conflict has complicated the marijuana industry in states where it is legal, particularly when it comes to access to banking services, and Paul Armentano, deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (Norml), said rescheduling the drug would not resolve that.“Classifying it as schedule III would make every existing state cannabis law that’s currently inconsistent with federal law as equally inconsistent going forward. So, it doesn’t solve any of the problems before it,” he told the Guardian.“It needs to be descheduled for logistical reasons, for practical reasons, because we have a system right now where the majority of states are choosing to regulate marijuana as a legal commodity through their own state-specific systems, and that act is not permitted for any substance that is in the CSA. That is only permitted for substances that are not scheduled.”Last month, Gallup released a survey that found 70% of Americans think marijuana use should be legal, a record number.Biden does not appear ready to go that far. In his statement announcing marijuana reform, which was released about a month before last year’s midterm elections, the president pardoned all people convicted of simple marijuana possession federally, and also kicked off the review of the drug’s classification under the CSA.That process is typically a bureaucratic affair, in which the Department of Health and Human Services reviews the substance and sends its findings to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which then decides whether to change its classification. Yet signs have already emerged that marijuana is being treated like no drug before it.On 30 August, the US health and human services secretary, Xavier Becerra, announced on X that his department had completed its review, an unusual public status update for a process that is typically opaque. And his account made the post at 4.20pm, a number of great significance in cannabis culture.Becerra did not specify what his department had recommended, but Bloomberg News obtained a letter from HHS to the DEA that recommended marijuana be put on schedule III, alongside drugs like ketamine and anabolic steroids.Tahir Johnson, a board member at Minority Cannabis Business Association who is planning to open a dispensary in New Jersey next month, said rescheduling would help his business by lessening its tax burden. Federal law currently prohibits marijuana businesses from deducting their expenses from their income, meaning they sometimes pay tax rates upwards of 80%.“It will help all cannabis businesses. But, I think especially for minority businesses, where capital and finances are tight, being able to alleviate that is certainly meaningful,” said Johnson.Armentano also expects a rescheduling could help Biden’s reputation with the voters who make up the Democratic coalition, as well as people outside his base. Gallup found 87% of Democrats think marijuana should be legal, along with 55% of Republicans and 64% of people older than 55.“It behooves the president to have this core base passionate about something that he’s doing to try to address the enthusiasm gap that he seems to have now,” he said.Kevin Sabet, president of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, which opposes legalizing the drug, argued dropping pot to a lower CSA schedule would harm public health.“It’s going to ramp up commercialization, it’s going to ramp up the marketing and the glamorization of marijuana,” Sabet said. “It’s going to do that both in a practical way with this deducting expenses, and it’s going to do so in a global way, by just sending the message that this is harmless.”Until marijuana is legalized federally, it will still be up to Congress to resolve the conflicts between state and federal law, and progress there has been slow. A bill to allow cannabis businesses access to more financial services, known as the Safer Banking Act, has been passed by the House of Representatives six times, and is currently working its way through the Senate.Starting in 1972, groups including Norml have petitioned the DEA and HHS to reschedule marijuana, to no avail. Armentano said the stage appears to be set for political considerations to finally get federal agencies to back down, at least partially.“Frankly, if this petition is successful, and the DEA reverses 50 years of precedent, then it just speaks to the fact that all along this process has simply been a political one,” he said. More

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      Biden officials decry Trump’s anti-migrant xenophobia – yet quietly copy his stance| Moustafa Bayoumi

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      At a campaign rally in New Hampshire last Saturday, the former president Donald Trump repeated a claim he made back in September: immigrants coming to the United States, he said, are “poisoning the blood of our country”. The phrase is particularly disturbing as it evokes Nazi language about blood and nation.The last time Trump uttered this “poisoning the blood of our country” phrase, criticism from historians and civil libertarians was swift. This time, Joe Biden’s re-election campaign saw an opportunity and pounced. “Donald Trump channeled his role models as he parroted Adolf Hitler,” a Biden-Harris 2024 spokesperson wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, adding that “Trump is not shying away from his promise to lock up millions of people in detention camps.”Yes, that’s true, but while Trump’s rhetoric and promises are odious and must be rejected, the Biden campaign is also talking out of both sides of its mouth.First, to Trump. By now, only a visitor from another planet (who would certainly be locked up by Trump for illegal entry) would be surprised by the ex-president’s rhetoric. Trump’s jingoistic ability to sow fear of foreigners and hatred of others is a large part of his rightwing populist appeal. Over the weekend, Trump also claimed that “drugs, criminals, gang members and terrorists are pouring into our country”. He said the United States was facing something “like a military invasion” from would-be immigrants and asylum seekers and promised to implement “the largest deportation operation in American history”.Even the cadence of his speech is reminiscent of a reel highlighting the Greatest Worst Things Trump Ever Said. Remember what he said about Mexico in 2015? “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems to us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”Today, even the “good people” are gone. Now, Trump describes those crossing the border this way: “They come from prisons. They come from mental institutions and insane asylums. Many are terrorists.” (It’s a 2024 remix!) He also makes a point to say: “They’re coming from all over the world. They’re coming from Africa, from Asia,” as if we should be afraid of Latinos, Africans and Asians, leaving me to wonder whom we shouldn’t be afraid of. I’m not really wondering. The answer is as plain as vanilla.But far more troubling than Trump’s putrid but predictable xenophobia is hearing the Biden campaign trumpet how morally opposed it is to Trump’s border policies at precisely the same time that the White House is negotiating with Republicans to adopt immigration policies that look suspiciously and horribly Trump-like. There is a word for such a stance: hypocrisy.The reason for the negotiations is no secret. The Biden administration has been seeking to send US military assistance to both Ukraine and Israel, but the funding bills have stalled in Congress. To vote for the money, Republicans are demanding the administration overhaul its immigration policy to align more closely with theirs, and – disturbingly – the Democrats seem poised to do so.Put another way, the Democrats are ready sell out immigration for foreign policy, even though the impact on immigration could be substantial and long-lasting, while Democratic foreign policy goals are both unclear and increasingly unpopular.Joe Biden entered office with an immigration reform agenda, one that sought to reverse many of the inhuman positions of his predecessor, such as the family separation policy that the Trump administration cruelly deployed. Biden didn’t always succeed, but the aspiration was clear. Early on in his term, he proposed the US Citizenship Act of 2021, which would have offered a path to citizenship for undocumented people, brought Dreamers – undocumented people brought to the United States as children – immigration relief, set up refugee processing centers in Central America and funded more immigration judges, among other things.It never passed.Instead of convincing the other side of the aisle of the need for immigration reform, the Biden administration has slowly given up on reform over the years. It’s been happening piecemeal for a while now (such as Biden funding the construction of 20 miles of Trump’s border wall), but reports of the latest negotiations read like a major capitulation to the Republican worldview.The Biden administration is reportedly discussing rolling back its historical commitments to asylum seekers in exchange for aid to Ukraine and Israel and inducting a new system to apprehend undocumented immigrants already in the country. Being discussed is expanding “expedited removal” of migrants at the border without a hearing, significantly raising the criteria for asylum, making permanent pandemic-era border restrictions (like the public health provision known as Title 42) and mandating immigration detention for some immigrants who are awaiting a court date.“A return to Trump-era policies is not the fix,” is how Alex Padilla, a Democratic senator from California, has responded. Padilla is the first Latino chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on immigration, citizenship and border safety. “In fact, it will make the problem worse,” he said. “Mass detention, gutting our asylum system, Title 42 on steroids. It is unconscionable.”Trump’s racist comments about “poisoning the blood of the nation” are typical of Trump’s bigotry, but Biden’s immigration approach reads more like a betrayal. Biden’s willingness to trade away American traditions of asylum protection and meaningful immigration reform for an Israeli military campaign on Gaza that is widely acknowledged – even by Biden himself – as unacceptably dangerous to civilian life, having killed upwards of 20,000 people, makes Biden’s calculation here seem not only cynical but disastrous, both for Gaza’s civilians and for Biden’s prospects for re-election. (Meanwhile, why wouldn’t Israel’s leaders continue to ignore Biden’s pleas to limit their military assault? Ignoring Biden makes him look weak, as they too would almost certainly prefer a Trump presidency.)The Biden administration wants to have it both ways. Biden officials want to believe they can criticize Trump’s positions but adopt positions close to Trump’s when it’s expedient. To answer this fundamental contradiction, they seem to be throwing their weight behind the appeal of a “lesser of two evils” argument for Democratic voters.What they don’t seem to realize, or want to acknowledge, is that every time someone asks you to choose between a lesser of two evils, they’re still asking you to choose evil. And that’s a choice some voters simply aren’t willing to make.
      Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Joe Biden plans to ban logging in US old-growth forests in 2025

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      Joe Biden’s administration on Tuesday announced a new proposal aimed at banning logging in old-growth forests, a move meant to protect millions of trees that play a key role in fighting the climate crisis.The proposal comes from an executive order signed by the president on Earth Day in 2022 that directed the US Forest Service and the land management bureau to conduct an inventory of old-growth and mature forest groves as well as to develop policies that protect them.“We think this will allow us to respond effectively and strategically to the biggest threats that face old growth,” the US agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, told the Washington Post. “At the end of the day, it will protect not just the forests but also the culture and heritage connected to the forests.”The US Forest Service oversees 193m acres of forests and grasslands, 144m of which are forests. In its inventory conducted after Biden’s executive order, the agency found that the vast majority of forests it oversees, about 80%, are either old-growth or mature forests. It found more than 32m acres of old-growth forests and 80m acres of mature forests on federal land.The land management bureau defines old-growth forests as those with trees that are in later stages of stand development, which typically means at least 120 years of growth, depending on species. The giant sequoias in California, for example, are old-growth trees. Mature forests, meanwhile, have trees that are in the development stage immediately before old growth.Advocates for years have been pushing the Biden administration to explicitly ban logging in old-growth and mature forests. Trees that are in their old-growth stage are able to store more carbon than younger trees, making them a natural solution to fighting the climate crisis.In 2022, shortly before Biden announced his executive order, a group of more than 130 scientists wrote a letter to Biden advocating a ban on logging in old-growth forests.“Older forests provide the most above-ground carbon storage potential on Earth, with mature forests and larger trees driving most accumulation of forest carbon in the critical next few decades,” the letter read. “Left vulnerable to logging, though, they cannot fulfill these vital functions.”The ban will come into effect in early 2025, allowing time for the forest service to finalize rules that will protect old-growth forests from logging. Because it comes under an executive order, its existence depends on the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, making advocates worried about the protections’ vulnerability to the country’s political climate.But federal agencies have also been under pressure from the timber industry, which argues that logging creates economic activity and helps to fight wildfires. The proposal focuses on most old-growth forests, leaving mature forests still vulnerable to logging, which is a middle ground between environmentalists and the timber industry.Chris Wood, the president of Trout Unlimited and a former official with the US Forest Service, told the Associated Press the policy “is a step in the right direction”.“This is the first time the Forest Service has said its national policy will be to protect old growth,” Wood said.Other advocates are emphasizing that this is just Biden’s first step toward fulfilling his executive order.“Protecting our old-growth trees from logging is an important first step to ensure these giants continue to store vast amounts of carbon, but other older forests also need protection,” Randi Spivak, public lands policy director with the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a press release. “To fulfill President Biden’s executive order and address the magnitude of the climate crisis, the Forest Service also needs to protect our mature forests, which if allowed to grow will become the old growth of tomorrow.” More

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      Israel-Gaza war sets Biden at odds with youth of America

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      Since the start of Israel’s war in Gaza nearly two months ago, outraged young Americans have been at the forefront of a growing Palestinian solidarity movement.They have led protests in Washington and across the country to demand a permanent ceasefire and to voice their disapproval of Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s military campaign, which has killed thousands of Palestinians, mostly women and children, and plunged Gaza into a humanitarian catastrophe.A generational divide on the conflict is shifting the terms of the foreign policy debate in Washington, where support for Israel has long been bipartisan and near-unanimous. And, ahead of an already contentious election year, there are signs the issue could pose a threat to Biden’s prospects of winning re-election in 2024.“There’s something profound taking place in the way young Americans, particularly Democrats, think about the issue,” said Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat professor for peace and development at the University of Maryland, who has studied American public sentiment on the Israeli-Palestine conflict for decades.Shifting attitudesThere was a surge of support for Israel in the wake of the 7 October attack, when gunmen killed at least 1,200 people, roughly two-thirds of whom were civilians, and seized as many as 240 hostages, more than 100 of whom have been freed so far. But attitudes have evolved in the two months since, especially among young Americans, thousands of whom have taken to the streets in protest of Israel’s air and ground offensive, which has killed at least 17,000 Palestinians and displaced more than three-quarters of the enclave’s 2.3 million residents.Americans overall continue to sympathize with Israel, but surveys show stark divides by party affiliation and age. Young Americans are far more likely than older Americans to express sympathy for Palestinians and to disagree with Biden’s response and strategy, a trend that is especially pronounced among Democrats.A pair of University of Maryland Critical Issues Polls, the first taken shortly after 7 October and the second taken four weeks after the attack, found that the number of young Democrats who said Biden was “too pro-Israeli” had doubled while the percentage who said they were less likely to support him in 2024 based on his stance on the Israeli-Palestinian issue more than doubled.“It is the deepest shift in a short period of time that I’ve seen,” said Telhami, who is the director of the Critical Issues Poll. While public attitudes often evolve during the course of a war, he said such a significant swing suggests “this isn’t episodic”.Among voters 18-34, a majority – 52% – said they were more sympathetic to Palestinians than Israelis, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released in mid-November. It marked a sharp reversal from the survey taken the previous month, after the 7 October assault, when 41% of young people said their sympathies lay with the Israelis, compared with 26% who said the Palestinians.The poll also found young people were about equally divided between those who believe supporting Israel is in the US’s national interest – 47% – and those who don’t – 45% – compared with older cohorts who overwhelmingly said it was.According to a recent NBC poll, a striking 70% of voters ages 18 to 34 say they disapprove of Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war. A Pew poll published this week charted a similar trend, with just 19% of Americans under 30 approving of the president’s response.Watching a young, multiracial coalition champion Palestinian rights has been a glimmer of hope amid the horrors of war in Gaza and a rise in Islamophobia in the US, said Nihad Awad, executive director and co-founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair).“We hope to see a break with the past,” said Awad, who is Palestinian American, “and a shift not only in the public opinion among young people but hopefully among the general public, ultimately towards a policy that reflects universal values of justice and freedom for all.”‘What moral standing is there?’Many Americans of Biden’s generation can remember Israel as a young, left-leaning democracy founded in the aftermath of the Holocaust – a vulnerable country in a hostile region and a place the 81-year-old president has described as an indispensable haven for Jews. Biden, who was five at the time of Israel’s founding, has said: “If there weren’t an Israel, we’d have to invent one.”Younger Democrats, by contrast, have mostly known Israel as a military power led by the rightwing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has aligned himself closely with Republicans in the United States and is accused of undermining democratic institutions in Israel.Those generational tensions have roiled the party, pitting young staffers against their bosses at the White House and at agencies across the administration, on Capitol Hill and at the Democratic National Committee. In letters, cables and in some cases, resignations, they have expressed their concern over the administration’s policy toward Israel.Polling shows Biden’s support deteriorating among the nation’s youngest voters, considered a key part of the Democrats’ electoral coalition. In 2020, Biden won voters under 30 by more than 20 percentage points, according to exit polls. Recent surveys show the president competitive with or in some cases trailing Donald Trump, the Republican frontrunner, among young people.Last month, a coalition of youth-centered progressive organizations signed an open letter calling on Biden to support a ceasefire, which he has resisted, and warning that his approach to the war in Gaza “risks millions of young voters staying home or voting third party next year”. Unless he changes course, they cautioned that Democrats would probably struggle to recruit the often young volunteers, organizers and staffers to work on Democratic campaigns.“Biden ran on a promise to restore America’s moral standing in the world. What moral standing is there when you allow for more than 6,000 children to be killed?” said Zohran Mamdani, a 32-year-old Democratic state lawmaker from New York who staged a five-day hunger strike outside of the White House to protest against Biden’s handling of the war. “If the fabric of your coalition was built on promises that you are betraying, you cannot be surprised if that coalition cannot be reactivated once more.”In the days after 7 October, Biden condemned Hamas’s attack on Israel as “sheer evil” and offered his administration’s unwavering support for Israel. The White House has argued that Biden’s strategy of standing by Israel as it wages war in Gaza has allowed his administration to push for diplomatic breakthroughs. The president has earned some praise for his administration’s efforts to restart the flow of desperately needed aid into the besieged region and to secure a week-long truce last month that saw the release of more than a hundred hostages held by Hamas.Amid global outrage at the scale of the death and destruction in Gaza, the president and his administration have become more blunt in expressing their concern over Israel’s military campaign as well as Israeli settler violence in the West Bank.“I have consistently pressed for a pause in the fighting for two reasons: to accelerate and expand the humanitarian assistance going into Gaza and, two, to facilitate the release of hostages,” Biden said recently.Many young activists, especially young Arab and Muslim Americans, say the president’s support for Israel is abetting a war that is already outpacing the bloodiest conflicts of the 21st century. They have been alarmed by some of his rhetoric, particularly his comments questioning the veracity of the casualty figures kept by health officials in the Hamas-run enclave, which struck many as dehumanizing. And they say the fatal stabbing of a six-year-old Palestinian boy and the shooting of three Palestinian students in Vermont underscore the threat facing Arab and Muslim American communities.“No amount of time will erase the last two months from our memory,” said Munir Atalla, 30, of the Palestinian Youth Movement.Why it’s happeningPolitical scientists, activists and lawmakers on both sides of the debate say a range of factors are shaping the way young people perceive Israel’s war against Hamas. Social media, where young people have watched the horror of war unfold in real time on their cellphones, is one.About a third of American adults under 30 say they regularly get their news from TikTok, where videos discussing the war have racked up billions of views.Nerdeen Kiswani, 29, co-founder and leader of Within Our Lifetime, a Palestinian-led community organization that staged a peace protest near the Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Times Square, New York, last month, said young people distrust traditional media. Instead, she said they rely on social media to hear directly from Palestinian civilians and journalists in Gaza.“They can see with their own eyes,” she said. “Social media now has really democratized what news comes out there.”But young people’s interest in Israel-Palestine – and the US’s approach to the conflict – is not new and the conversation is not only happening online, said Rachel Janfaza, the founder of the Up and Up newsletter that explores gen Z political culture.“While social media is one element of where young people are getting their news and information about what’s going on between Israel and Hamas,” she said, “there’s also a robust campus conversation about the conflict that predates the existence of TikTok.”Many leftwing activists have embraced the Palestinian cause as an extension of the racial justice movement that mobilized following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. For them, the fight for Palestinian rights is linked to domestic causes like police brutality and climate justice.“When I go to marches, when I go to rallies, when I go on hunger strike and I look around, these are the same people that I was marching with for Black Lives Matter,” said Mamdani. “That solidarity is at the crux of why so many young people are able to stand up for justice wherever it applies.”A searing conversation over Palestinian rights has swept college campuses and even high schools, where educators are struggling to foster civil discourse as they confront a rise in bias attacks against Arab, Muslim and Jewish students.At protests, pro-Palestinian activists describe Israel as a “colonial” power and an oppressive, occupying force. Behind claims of anti-Israel bias, they see an effort to silence any criticism of the Israeli government, which many activists now charge with perpetrating a “genocide” against the Palestinian people.Supporters of Israel have argued that viewing the Israel-Palestinian conflict through a lens of power and privilege often flattens the complex roots of the Israel-Palestine conflict and ignores Jewish people’s history of persecution. They say some of the slogans and rhetoric used by pro-Palestinian activists cross a line into antisemitism and denialism of the atrocities of the 7 October attacks.“It’s one thing to criticize Netanyahu, his policies,” said Tyler Gregory, 35, CEO of the Bay Area’s Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC). “It’s another thing to demonize Israel in the same way that Jews have been demonized for millennia, as being the source of the world’s problems.”Young Jewish peopleIsrael’s military campaign in Gaza has also divided young American Jews, a group that tends to be politically liberal and secular.A survey by the Jewish Electorate Institute conducted a month after the war began revealed a significant generational split among American Jews that mirrored the US population as a whole.While nearly three-quarters of American Jews said they approve of Biden’s response to the conflict, it found that Jewish voters aged 18 to 35 were far more likely than their older counterparts to disapprove.With chants of “not in our name”, young progressive Jewish activists have led several of the major ceasefire protests, some of which have drawn rebukes from prominent Jewish advocacy groups.Meanwhile, young Jews were among the tens of thousands of demonstrators who gathered in Washington last month to show solidarity with Israel and voice support for its war against Hamas as calls for a ceasefire grow.Joe Vogel, a 26-year-old Maryland state delegate running for Congress, said it had been deeply worrying to see attempts from some on the left to “justify” the violence on 7 October.“The only way that we’re really going to secure peace and justice for everyone in Israel and Palestine is if we move away from the binary thinking,” said Vogel, who is Jewish and describes himself as a “pro-Israel progressive”. “We have to be both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian. We have to be pro-Jewish and pro-Muslim.”In 2020, Eva Borgwardt worked as a Democratic field director to help elect Biden in Arizona. Now the 27-year-old is helping to lead protests against him as the national spokesperson of IfNotNow, a leftwing Jewish group demanding the president back a permanent ceasefire.“We know that the only way this horrific violence will end is with a ceasefire. You cannot bomb your way to peace,” she said. “That’s what young people are saying in the streets right now.”Audra Heinrichs contributed to this report from New York More