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    The Guardian view on devastation in Gaza: the world wants to move on, but Palestinians can’t | Editorial

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    The declaration of a ceasefire in Gaza in October brought initial relief to its inhabitants. Yet officials there said Israeli strikes killed 33 people, including 12 children, on Wednesday; Israel said its troops had come under fire. Another five Palestinians were killed on Thursday. Hundreds have died since the ceasefire was declared. Even if the shelling stops, the destruction of Palestinian life will carry on as Israel continues to throttle aid, and the consequences of two years of war unfold. The World Health Organization warned last month that the health catastrophe would last for generations.Food remains in short supply. While displaced families shiver in flooded makeshift shelters, with many facing a third winter of homelessness, aid organisations say they cannot deliver stockpiles of tents and tarpaulins. Israel, which denies blocking aid, has designated tent poles as “dual-use” items that could potentially be used for a military purpose. Save the Children reports children sleeping on bare ground in sewage-soaked clothing.The Guardian last week revealed US plans for the long-term division of Gaza into a “green zone” under Israeli and international control, to be redeveloped, and a “red zone” left in ruins; a US official described reunion of the strip as “aspirational”. This vision – with international troops essentially propping up Israeli occupation, and Palestinians drawn to those areas to escape squalor and chaos elsewhere – echoes disastrous US policies in Iraq and Afghanistan.This is the grim underpinning of the UN security council resolution this week, endorsing Donald Trump’s peace proposals. The “board of peace” looks like a colonial authority overseen by Mr Trump, and perhaps anchored by Tony Blair. Palestinian technocrats, somehow both domestically credible and acceptable to the US and Israel – a notable feat – would work beneath it. All this would be possible thanks to an international stabilisation force that the US hopes to see deployed by January. That would be a stretch even if countries prove truly willing to commit troops.The resolution improved on a draft text and won backing from the Arab world – and angry rejection from the Israeli right – by including references to a Palestinian state and Israeli withdrawal. Yet those references are couched in the vaguest terms, as an unguaranteed reward for sufficiently good behaviour, rather than as a recognition of inalienable Palestinian rights. If all goes according to plan, “conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood”. Israeli withdrawal would be based on standards and timeframes agreed by the military itself as well as the US and others. Countries have backed not what this text does mean but what it might conceivably mean or become.Some believe that this is the best that can be salvaged from current circumstances, given Mr Trump’s presidency; others hope that it is just possible that this unpromising start could allow something better to be forged. But it is hard not to conclude that for some governments, this is more about conscience-salving and reputation-laundering than the best interests of Palestinians. Germany has already announced that it will resume weapons exports to Israel. For Palestinians, “what looked like a forever war may be metamorphizing into forever misery”, the political scientist Nathan  Brown has warned. Countries that were complicit in a genocidal war have all the more duty to demand better. More

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      White nationalist Nick Fuentes is exposing a civil war among US Republicans: ‘We look like clowns’

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      View image in fullscreenFive days a week, thousands of fans gather online to watch Nick Fuentes hold court about the dangers of non-white immigration, feminism and “organized Jewry”. Usually dressed in a dark suit and tie, he lectures to his far-right followers, known as “Groypers”, about what he argues is the insufficient radicalism of Donald Trump’s Republican party and what he describes as the perfidies of the state of Israel and its American supporters.Fuentes’s fixation with Israel is not rooted in concern about the war in Gaza but a belief, in his telling, that Jews are responsible for most of society’s problems. Fuentes, who is 27 and lives in Illinois, has called Adolf Hitler “really fucking cool” and compared the Holocaust to the baking of cookies.Despite that – and despite having said that the Republican vice-president, JD Vance, is a “race traitor” for marrying an Indian American woman – Fuentes has ascended in recent weeks from the influential but unacknowledged outer dark of the American right to a position within striking distance of the mainstream Republican party. He has been interviewed on several major platforms in rapid succession, culminating in a friendly, two-hour chat last month on Tucker Carlson’s popular online talkshow. He and Carlson discussed a variety of subjects, including their shared dislike of Christian Zionists. Fuentes also said, casually, that he was a fan of Joseph Stalin.The result of that interview has been a bitter and widening civil war within the American right that has exposed longstanding fissures – between conservatives and populists, Zionists and Israel skeptics, mainstream Maga right and far right – as well as revealed the extent to which a Republican party that has been flooded in recent years by extremists now seems unable to contain them, or even agree if it should. A power struggle already under way inside many rightwing organizations, people familiar told me, has now spilled into the open.After Carlson interviewed Fuentes, some Republican politicians, including the senators Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz, condemned his decision to do so. Pressure also built on the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank with personal and commercial ties to Carlson, to distance itself from him. Instead, the foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, issued a video statement which noted that while antisemitism “should be condemned”, “conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class”. A “venomous coalition”, he said, was trying to “cancel” Carlson.This delighted Fuentes. The Heritage Foundation was “the brain of the conservative movement”, he correctly told his viewers on a recent evening, whose policy ideas and talking points are “sort of like gospel for [Republicans] in the US Congress. It’s a big deal.” Staff from the Heritage Foundation often go on to work for Republican legislators and draft federal law; Groyperism, he argued, was now “inside the institutions”.View image in fullscreenRoberts soon backtracked. He issued a second statement more explicitly condemning Fuentes. He has also apologized for using the terms “venomous coalition” and “globalist class”, saying he did not realize their antisemitic connotations.But a civil war broke out at the organization, in the form of information leaks, anguished meetings, and fighting on social media. Many current or former employees expressed horror at Roberts’s seeming initial reluctance to distance Heritage from the far right. “I gave my soul to that place …” someone told me, choking up. (Like some others I spoke to, this person asked for anonymity to speak freely and to avoid drawing online harassment.)Not everyone sees it that way, however. Under the slogan “No enemies to the right”, some populists have fiercely defended Carlson, or argued that the controversy is being exploited by “BoomerCons”, “Reagan zombies” and “right liberals” trying to protect a dying conservative establishment from a new right populist tide.The turmoil has engulfed more and more of the right. Earlier this month, two board members of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), another influential conservative group, resigned; in a public letter, they alleged that a “cadre” hostile to liberal democracy – with an agenda different from, and more radical than, Trump’s – have “worked together, behind the scenes, to wrest control of conservative institutions from actual conservatives”, in the process infiltrating “white supremacy, antisemitism, eugenics, and bigotry”.They noted that ISI recently unveiled a new podcast whose first guest, Curtis Yarvin, has defended slavery, said that white people have inherently higher IQs than black people and called for the American republic to be replaced with a dictatorship. Conservatism, they argued, was in an “existential” crisis.Coming shortly after Politico revealed that a number of prominent young Maga activists had a racist and antisemitic group chat, and in the aftermath of a poor Republican election showing and rising Maga disappointment in Trump’s second term, this internecine battle has become a referendum on the future of the right – as well as a vivid illustration of how conservative institutions anxious to prove themselves radical enough for the age of Trump are now squeezed between a strident Maga mainstream and a naked far right.No one wants responsibility for creating the monster. Yet everyone I spoke to, when pressed, agreed on at least one thing: that the Fuentes-Carlson-Heritage scandal has exposed a deep schism in the right that will explode open when Trump departs the White House. So far, the person most pleased about that is Fuentes.If you are young, male and spend a lot of time online, you have probably encountered clips of Fuentes – somehow square-jawed and baby-faced simultaneously, and usually either grinning wolfishly or leaning at the viewer with a news anchor’s seriousness.Although Fuentes is banned from YouTube and other platforms for violating hate-speech policies, Elon Musk allowed him back on X last year on freedom-of-expression grounds. Since then, Fuentes’s posts and video clips seem to have become algorithmically turbocharged; on election night, 2024, he took to social media to deride pro-choice women: “Your body, my choice. Forever.” His post was viewed more than 90m times; some schools reported boys taunting female classmates with the phrase. (Fuentes could not be reached for comment.)In October, before it was removed, his podcast briefly became the highest-trending on Spotify, ahead of the podcasts of Joe Rogan, Amy Poehler and Carlson himself. In recent months, Fuentes has appeared on popular shows including Red Scare, the PBD Podcast and System Update with Glenn Greenwald.Fuentes grew up in a middle-class, mostly white, suburb of Chicago, in a Catholic family. Neither of his parents attended college. (His father is of Mexican American descent, hence his Hispanic surname.) He was a debating star in high school and the student body president. His parents – though not his twin sister – may partly share his racist views, according to Patch and Mother Jones.As a teenager, Fuentes adored talk radio, particularly Mark Levin, a rightwing and staunchly Zionist commentator known for his outraged tone and for arguing with callers. Fuentes listened to him “every day” in high school, he told Carlson: “I actually liked how he was kind of obnoxious and mean to his callers, vicious … I thought that was funny. But I’ll never forget one show … he says: ‘America is becoming a majority non-white country. Does anybody think that’s a good idea?’ And I was thinking to myself, yeah, that actually doesn’t sound so good.”When he arrived at Boston University, in 2016, he shocked liberal classmates by wearing a Maga hat and telling a video interviewer that he was voting for Trump. “People were threatening to find him and beat him up,” a student who led a libertarian group at BU at the time told me.The libertarian group decided to hold a public debate between Fuentes and a leftwing student, two days before the presidential election; 400 students turned up. Fuentes attacked multiculturalism, according to a campus newspaper, but denied he was racist. “It has nothing to do with race, everything to do with culture,” he said. “Asia has taken our culture and done well for themselves. The Middle East? Not so much.”View image in fullscreenDespite a hostile crowd, Fuentes was “articulate and confident, and had that air of somebody good at public speaking”, the libertarian-group leader recalled. Fuentes’s politics at that time seemed to be “standard Maga. I mean, there was nothing that Trump himself hadn’t said.”Impressed by his debate performance, some fellow young conservatives got Fuentes a slot on Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN), a startup that aspired to be unapologetically Maga at a time when Trump was still polarizing within the right. This would be a pattern: seeing Fuentes’s oratorical gifts, conservatives would elevate him, then regret it.Fuentes soon alienated his new friends by bucking the pro-Israel line standard at many conservative publications. He also exhibited more unsettling behavior. RSBN was forced to apologize when Fuentes, during an anti-Islam rant, called for the “globalists … that run CNN” to be “deported or hanged”. Soon after, a conservative social media account leaked a candid video in which Fuentes described interracial sex as “degenerate” and said that he was harmed in daily life by Jews.The leaker hoped to discredit Fuentes, but only half succeeded. Drummed out of the Maga mainstream, he embraced a new and potent audience. After he was seen in 2017 at the notorious Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, he dropped out of college and became a full-time white nationalist.Fuentes cultivated himself as a suited-and-tied pundit dedicated to the Maga-adjacent slogan “America first”. In 2021, he held the inaugural America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC) as a far-right response to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which he is barred from attending. He was also present at the 2021 riot at the US Capitol, though he did not enter the building.Fuentes also began embracing the rhetoric of Christian nationalism, casting himself as a traditionalist Catholic, decrying feminism and using crucifixes as props – although a rival white nationalist who lived with Fuentes for a time has said that he rarely attended mass and loved HBO shows such as Euphoria and The Sex Lives of College Girls. Fuentes has also argued that many women “want to be raped” and has claimed, perhaps facetiously, that “the only really straight heterosexual position is to be an asexual incel”.Around 2022, Fuentes became friendly with the rapper Kanye West, whose own views had grown antisemitic and conspiratorial. That relationship climaxed, that year, with Fuentes and West dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. (Trump later said he did not know who Fuentes was.) Trump’s agreement to meet them was widely criticized, but did not incite nearly the outrage on the right that Carlson’s interview has now.That is because Trump is “he-who-must-not-be-critiqued”, David French, the conservative New York Times columnist, told me. “We’ve seen this a lot in the second Trump term. People feel free to get angry at Pam Bondi over the Epstein files, or at Pete Hegseth, or at Robert F Kennedy Jr, but Trump is always left out of it.”Yet Fuentes’s mainstreaming is forcing open a bloody ideological divide that only Trump’s cult of personality has so far kept scabbed over. “This anger,” French said, “is a preview of the fractiousness we’re going to see when Trump is no longer the superhero of the new right.”Today, Fuentes’s main media outlet is his nightly live stream on Rumble, an online broadcasting platform. He is often hours late to his own show. While they wait for “Nicker”, fans with usernames such as “CruiseBasher”, “ShekelSnatcher” and “BadGoy74” argue with each other and trade racist jokes. Sometimes users spam the chat with false information that the evening’s program has been cancelled, leading others to wonder if they are spies of the Mossad.Once he’s on air, Fuentes’s show is much the same each night. He attacks the Maga right from the further right – forcing mainstream populists to either engage with him, thereby letting Groyperism into the tent, or refuse and be painted as centrist sellouts. The late Maga activist Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, was one of his biggest quarries; in 2019 Groypers began harassing Turning Point events and heckling Kirk for supporting Israel.“My job,” Fuentes said in 2021, “is to keep pushing things further … We’re going to get called racist, sexist, antisemitic, bigoted, whatever. When the party is where we are, two years later, we’re not going to get the credit.” But “that’s OK … We are the rightwing flank of the Republican party.”Part of Fuentes’s power is that he is also a free agent – an enfant terrible who can react to events in a way that others on the right cannot. He can criticize Trump (“tired”, with an administration that “is cooked”), or Vance (“a dork”), or mock Maga conspiracy theories that others are reluctant to acknowledge are silly. And he can attack what was until recently one of the right’s last true sacred cows: Israel.For years modern conservatism was defined by rules set down by its intellectual architect, William F Buckley. Starting in the second half of the 20th century, the right “fused” three seemingly unrelated tenets – social conservatism, foreign policy hawkishness and free-market libertarianism – into the united front of the Reagan revolution.That coalition endured for decades. It also came to adopt a reflexively pro-Israel stance, particularly as evangelical Protestants, some of whom believe that Christians are biblically required to support modern Israel, became a key Republican voting bloc. Rightwing Israelis also cultivated a close relationship with the American right because they believed that conservative evangelicals would prove more reliable Zionists than liberal Jewish Americans.In the eyes of many conservatives, Buckley’s equally important legacy was practicing “hygiene” by ejecting cranks and bigots from the movement. He exiled a number of writers – such as Peter Brimelow, Sam Francis, John Derbyshire and Joseph Sobran – for racist or fringe thinking, and in 1991, he accused the conservative writer and politician Pat Buchanan, who was known for fulminating against Israel and its US supporters in terms that seemed to single out Jews, of rhetoric “amount[ing] to antisemitism”.Buchanan was also a hardline immigration restrictionist, isolationist and advocate for tariffs to protect American workers – views that were out of step with the right of the 1990s, but which now look like an uncanny prediction of Maga populism.Today a critical mass of people at conservative organizations, including many younger staff, are more sympathetic to Buchanan’s vision than to Buckley’s or Reagan’s. Many view US institutions as irredeemably decadent and corrupt, and are less interested in “conserving” them than burning them to the ground. In some cases they are hostile not just to progressivism, but to liberal democracy itself.This turn has been more radical than many older conservatives “have been willing to admit to themselves, and a lot more radical than I think the American electorate really understands”, Laura K Field, a political theorist and the author of Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, told me. Her book charts how the ideas of a small group of reactionary intellectuals influenced the Trumpian right.In the process of this turn, she said, Buckley’s cordon sanitaire against the far right – which some skeptics say was overstated to begin with – ha “completely broken down”. Parts of the new right are eager to rehabilitate Buchanan and others expelled from conservatism decades ago, as well as mainstream newer figures such as Fuentes and Yarvin.At the same time, populist Maga views that were once controversial in the Republican party – on tariffs or immigration, for example – have become standard positions, meaning that firebrand pundits who like to frame themselves as radical outsiders (Carlson, Steve Bannon) are keen for new ways to differentiate themselves from the establishment.“There’s a constant yearning for something more and more radical,” Field said. “Rightwing support for Israel is almost like the last thing standing.”And cracks are showing in that support. The most radical and influential rightwing intellectuals today tend to be Catholic, not Protestant, without older evangelical Protestants’ historical investment in Israel. At the same time, younger evangelical Protestants increasingly regard Christian Zionism as a bizarre and embarrassingly dated tic of their boomer parents.Those demographic changes coincide with rising public anger, across the political spectrum, at the US’s role in a grinding foreign war that has killed thousands of civilians to no apparent end, and with the rise of a Christian nationalism that has replaced the earnest philosemitism of older Christian conservatives with a religious fervor that views Jews with polite distance or even suspicion.All of which contributed to the Heritage Foundation – caught between a historically pro-Israel, hawkish older right and a radical new one – walking right into disaster. Founded in 1973, the thinktank is a fundraising powerhouse with a staff of 400 and a budget of $100m. Among the major right-of-center thinktanks, it is known as the most political and perhaps least intellectual, and as a wobbly weather vane that has often, in recent years, seemed to be trying to “catch up” to Maga populism and prove a slavish loyalty to Trump.In 2023, the Heritage Foundation released Project 2025, a 900-page manifesto for the incoming second Trump administration that proposed, among other things, criminalizing pornography and loyalty-testing civil servants. Democrats successfully seized on the document as a talking point. Angry at the fallout, and at Heritage’s presumptuousness, Trump temporarily distanced himself from the organization.In 2021, Kevin Roberts became the new president of the Heritage Foundation – taking over from Kay Cole James, a black woman and former George W Bush official whom Carlson had attacked on Fox for being too sympathetic to the George Floyd protests.In contrast, Roberts is an ardent culture warrior who wears cowboy boots, drives a diesel Ford F-150 with a “Don’t Tread on Me” license plate, and idolizes Buchanan. He was previously the president of a tiny conservative Catholic college in Wyoming whose students learn Latin and horseback riding and can attend Byzantine mass. The stageplay Heroes of the Fourth Turning, shortlisted for a 2020 Pulitzer, is set at a thinly fictionalized version of the college. (Roberts and Heritage did not respond to requests for comment.)Roberts is part of a circle of radical new right intellectuals who call themselves “post-liberals”, Catholic integralists or “national conservatives”. Many are traditionalist Catholics (or Eastern Orthodox), often converts, and, like Roberts, have ties to Opus Dei, the ultraconservative Catholic order. They believe that the consensus that Buckley upheld was not true conservatism, but merely a right-leaning liberal capitalism that sacrificed America to globalization, mass immigration, consumerism, foreign misadventure and secular decadence. The group are close to Vance, who has described himself as post-liberal. (Vance did not respond to a request for comment.)“I think you’ll never get on the board of Heritage, ISI, or whatever unless you’re part of this true believer circle – a real post-liberal, and a hardcore traditionalist Catholic or Orthodox,” someone close to those organizations told me.View image in fullscreenRoberts is indulgent of friends and allies. In 2022, the Dispatch exposed a young conservative writer who had previously criticized Groyperism, Nate Hochman, for participating in a private online debate with Fuentes in which he had criticized Fuentes’s tactics but told him: “I respect some of what you’re doing.” (“In an attempt to get him to engage,” Hochman said at the time, “I said some really stupid things, which I don’t actually believe.”) Roberts later had Hochman on his podcast, in what seemed like an effort to rehabilitate someone he considered unfairly treated. Hochman then got a job with the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, before being fired in 2023 after creating an unauthorized campaign video containing Nazi symbolism. (Hochman, who now works for Senator Eric Schmitt, could not be reached for comment.)Despite Roberts’s bona fides, some observers told me, he has a fatal flaw common to leaders on the new right: he is ideologically insecure, and anxious to be perceived as sufficiently hardcore in a movement where moderation is viewed as cowardice and transgression signals that one is strong enough to battle for civilization.“We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Roberts said last year. On another occasion, he said: “The future won’t belong to soft men chasing comfort. It will belong to those who risk safety to defend their homeland, their families, and their faith.” (Roberts has denied that his views are extreme, suggesting elsewhere that international elites who “erase borders, criminalize faith, and preach globalism” are the extremists.)In a scathing essay, Oren Cass, a policy commentator whose economic ideas have been popular in some Maga circles, recently described Roberts as someone who had tried to hold a day job as a “credible conservative leader” while moonlighting as a “cheerleader for fever-swamp extremism”.Roberts plays with “divisive, nonsensical gasoline, aimed at impressing a narrow constituency”, Cass argued – and last month that gasoline finally met “a sufficiently hot and prominent surface that it blew up in his face”.Since being fired from Fox News in 2023, Carlson has started an independent online talkshow that has quickly become one of the most popular in America. Embracing a longform conversational format similar to Joe Rogan’s, he has interviewed a variety of guests that would have been outre at Fox, including the podcaster Darryl Cooper, who argued that Winston Churchill, not Hitler, was the “chief villain” of the second world war. As a source for his claims, Cooper later cited the work of the Holocaust denier David Irving.Carlson’s show has also devoted an extraordinary amount of coverage to the US’s relationship with Israel – raising legitimate concerns about US foreign policy and the war in Gaza, but with a fervor and unevenhandedness that made some conservatives uneasy.When Carlson’s Fuentes interview debuted, on 27 October, it hit the conservative world like a meteor. Speaking on Megyn Kelly’s show, Carlson said that he was trying to gently moderate Fuentes’s views. A piece in the Federalist argued, similarly, that Carlson was trying to “offer Fuentes some fatherly correction and redirection”. (Carlson declined to comment for this article, saying in a text message that he gave his “full views” to Kelly.)Many conservatives were less persuaded – and the Heritage Foundation was in the meteor’s blast radius. Roberts was well-known friends with Carlson, and until earlier this year Heritage sponsored episodes of Carlson’s show. Soon after the Fuentes interview, a blurb from Carlson disappeared from the Heritage website. Staff wondered if Roberts would do anything to draw further distance, or simply take the prudent course of saying nothing. Instead, he issued the video defending Carlson.The situation exploded. Angry staffers began posting the phrase “NAZIS ARE BAD” on social media. Robert George, a Princeton legal scholar on Heritage’s board of trustees, tried to build a board majority to oust Roberts, according to the New York Post, and has since resigned. A number of conservatives on a Heritage antisemitism taskforce also quit in protest.“Any tent that’s big enough to include Groypers and neo-Nazis shouldn’t be called conservative,” Mark Goldfeder, who resigned, told me. “It’s something else entirely.”On 5 November, Heritage had a long, emotional, all-hands meeting, footage of which leaked online. Roberts apologized for his handling of the controversy. “I made a mistake,” he told staff, adding: “You can say you’re not going to participate in canceling someone … while also being clear you’re not endorsing everything they’ve said, you’re not endorsing softball interviews.”Roberts also said that he had not understood who Fuentes was. Although he is the leader of one of the most important political thinktanks in the US, and paid more than $800,000 a year, he said that he mainly watched “sports”, and did not “consume a lot of news”.After he spoke, staff gave questions and remarks. These exchanges illuminate a fascinating generational divide at the organization; at times the meeting seemed like a rightwing answer to the kinds of confrontations that swept left-leaning institutions around five years ago, when older liberals at newsrooms, non-profits and educational organizations seemed to speak a different language from their more radical younger colleagues.Many of the most veteran employees spoke first, some with voices trembling with emotion, to decry antisemitism and white nationalism. Asking why now would be any different, a staffer who had worked at Heritage for 47 years invoked Buckley’s purging of the far right: “Did we ‘cancel’ David Duke? Yes. Did we ‘cancel’ the John Birch Society? Yes … Because they were harmful. Because if they’re in your movement, you look like clowns.”On the other hand, “a handful of young colleagues and I had no issue with the points you made in the original video,” a young female staffer said. “Gen Z has an [increasingly] unfavorable view of Israel, and it’s not because millions of Americans are antisemitic. It’s because we are Catholic and Orthodox and believe that Christian Zionism is a modern heresy.”Referring to a proposal by some Jewish conservatives to host Shabbat dinners for Heritage staff as an intercultural exercise, Evan Myers, an adviser to Roberts, said: “For many Christians, Friday is a special day of prayer and abstinence to commemorate the death of Christ … I assume that no staff will be required to attend the Shabbat dinners.” He was concerned, he said, that the dinners might be a “litmus test”.During the meeting, Roberts said that his chief of staff, Ryan Neuhaus, had ghostwritten the video defending Carlson, and implied that Neuhaus had misled him into thinking that other staff had approved it. (Neuhaus, who has since resigned, could not be reached for comment.)Around the time of the video, Neuhaus also began retweeting posts on X defending Carlson and arguing that the right would be better off today if conservatives had never “cancelled” Pat Buchanan, John Derbyshire and Sam Francis. One was a photo of Buchanan holding an antique revolver, captioned: “Slowly but surely he will be vindicated.”On 7 November, two days after the Heritage Foundation meeting, the board of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) convened for its own tense meeting.In August, ISI unveiled a new podcast, Project Cosmos, whose first guests were Patrick Deneen, a post-liberal political theorist, and Yarvin, the neo-monarchist. Although there had been two ISI board meetings since Project Cosmos entered production, two members of the board, Christopher Long and Thomas Lynch, have alleged that they were never told the podcast existed.At the meeting, they confronted the other members with things Yarvin has said – such as, “If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator-phobia” and “Although I am not a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff” – and argued against platforming him.They were overruled. When they called a vote of no confidence in John Burtka, ISI’s president, they lost 13-2. Lynch and Long then resigned. They were replaced on the spot by Jordan Teti, a Los Angeles attorney, and Susan Hanssen, a professor of history at the University of Dallas. (Hanssen’s father appears to be the FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who pleaded guilty in 2001 to spying for the Soviet Union and Russia.)“This group … don’t care about the law, and don’t believe in restraints on power,” a person familiar with ISI said. Some “are self-proclaimed ‘neo-monarchists’. It’s hard to believe, right? But that’s what they say they are.”ISI and Burtka did not respond to interview requests, though some activists and intellectuals on the new right have disputed the characterization of recent events. They argue that Reaganite conservatives unhappy at the direction of the right are trying to use the Carlson controversy to smear isolationism and Israel skepticism by associating them with Fuentes’s antisemitism – thereby hindering Vance, who is considered sympathetic to the new right, from succeeding Trump as the leader of the Republican party.The old right are “panicking [about] losing their once total monopoly on conservative institutions”, Chad “CC” Pecknold, a professor of theology at the Catholic University of America, said in an email. They “want to demonstrate that they still have power, and have chosen the run-up to the midterms as the time to do maximum damage on new right opponents. They are looking for scalps, and will take any opportunity to smear leaders who have usurped what they regard as their rightful place.”Even conservatives on the other side acknowledge that they do not represent the zeitgeist. People like Fuentes and Yarvin, French said, “are extraordinarily popular – far more popular, in many ways, than the people critiquing them”.View image in fullscreenTrump and Vance have mostly remained out of the fray so far, though Trump told a reporter on Sunday that “you can’t tell [Carlson] who to interview” and on 5 November Vance wrote on X that “infighting is stupid.” Vance is in a difficult spot: Carlson helped get him selected as Trump’s running mate, and Carlson’s son, Buckley Carlson, works for Vance.Vance spoke at a Turning Point event in Mississippi, two weeks ago, where a man in the audience had a question for him: “I’m a Christian man, and I’m just confused,” the man said. “There’s this notion that we … owe Israel something, or that they’re our greatest ally, or that we have to support this [foreign aid package] to Israel to cover … ethnic cleansing in Gaza. I’m just confused why this idea has come around, considering the fact that not only does their religion not agree with ours, but also openly supports the prosecution of ours.”The man’s reference to “prosecution”, or persecution, may have been describing recent attacks on Palestinian Christians, but Vance’s answer was also odd; he seemed to discuss Judaism with the conciliatory tact with which an American vice-president might normally describe a foreign nation: “Jews do not believe that Jesus Christ is the messiah; obviously, Christians do believe that,” he said. “There are some significant theological disagreements between Christians and Jews. My attitude is, let’s have those conversations.”Some of the conservatives I spoke to seemed like they were grappling with a dissonance – that they had spent so long in political battle with the left that they were having trouble, psychically, coming to terms with the idea that the call might be coming from inside their own house.“Perhaps Roberts made a bad leadership decision – he shouldn’t have released the video, or they shouldn’t have had a relationship with Tucker,” someone tied to Heritage said despairingly. “But if we look at the root, underlying thing, is it really about Tucker? About Fuentes? About the video? Or is it about this” – the speaker searched for the right word – “undercurrent that’s pushing all of this?” More

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      This Palestinian human rights group was sanctioned by Trump. Its chief wishes US allies would take a stand

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      Al-Haq, a leading Palestinian human rights organization based in the West Bank, is not new to adversity. But since the group was sanctioned by the Trump administration in September, its world has shrunk.Today, staff work without pay because their banks closed their accounts. US-based funders have pulled away. YouTube has pulled hundreds of the group’s videos documenting Israeli forces’ human rights abuses against Palestinians. Perhaps most upsetting, US-based groups that had long collaborated have gone quiet, fearful that communications with Al-Haq may draw the attention of an administration that has made clear they are a target.“I feel a deep, deep pain in my heart,” said Shawan Jabarin, Al-Haq’s director, of the silence from US-based organizations in the human rights and social justice sector. “Most of them – if not all – they stopped working with us or engaging with us formally and openly.”Speaking to the Guardian, Jabarin called on US-based rights groups to take a more defiant stance against the Trump administration. “Standing on the side of human rights and justice doesn’t mean that you have to respect draconian orders or laws,” he said. “You have to fight back with all means.”The Trump administration announced sanctions against Al-Haq over the group’s support for investigation of Israeli crimes in Palestine by the international criminal court (ICC). The sanctions marked an early strike in a broader campaign against civil society, a campaign disproportionately focused on groups championing Palestinian rights that also threatens to sweep up climate, democracy and racial justice groups.View image in fullscreenIn a statement announcing the sanctions, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said that “the United States will continue to respond with significant and tangible consequences to protect our troops, our sovereignty, and our allies from the ICC’s disregard for sovereignty, and to punish entities that are complicit in its overreach”.Israel and the US – which are not members of the ICC – have long attacked the court and maintain that it has no jurisdiction over them. But the Trump administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian groups is hardly limited to their connection to the ICC.Last month, the administration instructed US attorneys across the country to investigate the Open Society Foundations (OSF), the philanthropic network founded by liberal billionaire George Soros, over unfounded allegations that it has sponsored groups promoting political unrest and suggesting charges as severe as material support for “terrorism”. In a presidential memorandum signed in September, Trump also instructed law enforcement to “disband and uproot” organizations and networks that the administration says promote “domestic terrorism” and “organized political violence”.Groups and individuals critical of Israel, both in the US and abroad, are under particular scrutiny. The Trump administration has also detained foreign nationals for pro-Palestinian speech and sanctioned the UN special rapporteur for the occupied territories and senior ICC officials.Palestine-based groups like Al-Haq, which do not enjoy the constitutional protections their US-based peers do, are among the easiest targets. But as a Palestinian, Jabarin said, he knows something about standing in defiance of a repressive regime.“Maybe it’s our nature and our essence as Palestinians, because we are fighting for every aspect of our life,” he said. “Our culture is not to give up, and to continue fighting for justice. Maybe other societies haven’t reached this point yet.”But the group’s continued advocacy has come at a steep price.Since the sanctions were announced, Al-Haq and its roughly 45 staffers have lost access to their bank accounts as three banks the group works with dissolved their accounts in October. (Even banks overseas not explicitly affected by sanctions are often jittery about working with people and groups sanctioned by the US.) The group is currently unable to receive donations or pay its employees, and two American funders have stopped their donations. US staff had to resign. Other staff have continued to work for free, Jabarin said, aided by former colleagues and supporters abroad. In addition to YouTube, Meta and Mailchimp have restricted or pulled their services. (The three companies did not immediately respond to request for comment.)Al-Haq has lost allies, too.Among the organizations now fearing Trump’s crackdown are scores of US-based non-profits. While more draconian efforts to silence civil society with so-called “non-profit killer” legislation have so far failed, and experts say Trump’s efforts against Soros will struggle to stand up in court, such groups have for months been on high alert, fearing attacks on their tax-exempt status and the prospect of costly litigation.US-based human rights and Palestinian advocacy groups that have collaborated with Al-Haq in the past are now afraid to do so. (Jabarin declined to name them.) The sanctions the US imposed on Palestinian rights groups – one of the only measures available to the administration in the absence of congressional action – make working with them a liability for their US peers. US-based organizations that worked with Al-Haq in the past declined to speak on the record about their relationship with the group when contacted by the Guardian, but some noted that maintaining professional communications with a sanctioned organization exposed them to significant risk.Coordinated advocacy with sanctioned organizations could expose US groups to civil and criminal enforcement, some noted, with possible consequences ranging from loss of fiscal benefits to jail time. Some US non-profits are so risk-averse they avoided public criticism of the sanctions altogether.Leena Barakat, a co-founder of the Block and Build Funder Coalition, a network of funders she described as “committed to resisting authoritarianism”, said that US-based groups and donors who support the work of sanctioned Palestinian organizations find themselves in a “devastating” position.“We should be fighting back and I think right now there’s absolutely the desire and the will to do it. The question on the table is what is the best and the most strategic fight,” she said. “We’re thinking about that every day.”Al-Haq has documented Israel’s human rights abuses in Palestine for half a century. Alongside other organizations that the US has also sanctioned – Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, and Addameer, which is focused on the rights of Palestinian prisoners and detainees – the group played a key role in demanding and later supporting the ICC’s investigation.In 2021, Israel designated Al-Haq and five other Palestinian rights groups as “terrorist organizations”, alleging links between the groups and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a leftwing political party the US and other countries consider a terrorist organization. Reporting at the time revealed that Israel had no concrete evidence to back the designations, and the CIA was unable to corroborate Israel’s claims about the groups. Months later, Israeli soldiers raided Al-Haq’s office.View image in fullscreenThe designations and raids were widely condemned by international rights groups and the Biden administration distanced itself from them. But Jabarin always feared the possibility the US might at some point follow Israel’s lead and seek to punish the group.Jabarin dismissed the latest US sanctions as a “political attack” and pledged that Al-Haq would continue its documentation of human rights violations and its work with the ICC.“They want to silence any voice calling for accountability, calling for ending the culture of impunity, anyone speaking about the rights of Palestinians and justice for Palestine,” he said. “We will continue doing our work, we will continue fighting for justice and for human rights, and we will continue going after the criminals and holding the criminals accountable.” Al-Haq’s submissions to the court, he added, are “legal” and “peaceful”.Jabarin says he understands the constraints imposed on his US colleagues but is frustrated by what he views as a reluctance to more openly defy Trump beyond issuing statements. What Trump wants is for organizations to comply without putting up a fight, and how global civil society responds to this moment will have lasting implications, Jabarin added.“Palestine is the test” for all people of conscience, he said.“The US administration, they are supporting the rule of the jungle, not the rule of law,” he said. “And what’s going on, globally speaking, is a war between the rule of the jungle and the rule of law.” More

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      US to send 200 troops to Israel to support and monitor ceasefire deal, reports say

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      US troops have been sent to Israel as part of the peace deal approved on Thursday to support and help monitor the ceasefire, according to multiple news reports.Senior US officials told reporters that 200 troops will initially be on the ground with a “civil-military coordination center” operated by US Central Command to help facilitate the flow of humanitarian aid as well as logistical and security assistance into the territory wracked by two years of war, the Associated Press reported, citing two officials who confirmed the report on the condition of anonymity to discuss details not authorized for release.Reuters and ABC News also reported on military troops being sent to Israel.The troops are part of a broader team that also includes partner nations, non-governmental organizations and private-sector entities there to help monitor the peace deal and the transition to a civilian government in Gaza, US officials said.US service members have already begun arriving in the region from around the globe, according to one of the officials, and will continue to travel to the region over the weekend to begin planning and establishing the center. American troops will not be sent into Gaza, they said, and the coordination center will be staffed by about 200 US service members who have expertise in transportation, planning, security, logistics and engineering.Israel and Hamas agreed to pause hostilities in Gaza on Thursday, a deal Donald Trump announced on his Truth Social network, saying it was the first step to “Strong, Durable, and Everlasting Peace”. Many questions remain on next steps, including Hamas disarmament, a withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, and a future government in the territory.Both sides agreed to a hostage-prisoner exchange that would free about 20 Israeli hostages believed to still be alive and the remains of others who have died, and roughly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners being held in Israeli jails.Israeli bombs continued to land in Gaza, killing a reported 30 people after the deal was announced on Wednesday, but Palestinians celebrated in the rubble-strewn streets left devastated by the war, even as strikes continued.More than 2 million people have been displaced in Gaza, and humanitarian officials eagerly awaited permission from Israel to deliver badly needed aid there. From March to May this year, Israel imposed a total blockade of supplies into the area, and famine was declared in parts of Gaza in August. Only 20% of the aid needed has been delivered over the last several months, according to the UN, which said roughly 170,000 metric tons of food, medicine and other supplies is ready for distribution.After the announcement on Wednesday, the UN humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, called for all of Gaza’s entry points to open so aid could be delivered at “a much, much greater scale”.“Given the level of needs, the level of starvation, the level of misery and despair, will require a massive collective effort, and that’s what we’re mobilized for,” Fletcher told AP. “We are absolutely ready to roll and deliver at scale.”More than 67,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli attacks since the war began, most of them civilians. Roughly another 169,000 have been injured. The collapse of health systems, schools and access to food has also taken a severe toll, with at least 400 additional deaths related to malnutrition, according to the UN, including more than 100 children. Only 1.5% of cropland in Gaza has been left able to be farmed, with water and soil left polluted by munitions and fires.As Israel’s forces withdraw, part of the agreed-upon process that will leave them 53% of the territory, according to an Israeli government spokesperson, questions remain about how the next steps to provide stabilization and reconstruction will unfold.The remarks from US officials provide some of the first details on how the ceasefire deal would be monitored and how the US military would have a role in that effort.Jason Burke and the Associated Press contributed to this story More

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      ‘Trump is like a juggernaut’: how the Gaza ceasefire deal was done

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      It is a well-known adage in politics that success has many parents, but failure is an orphan. Except when Donald Trump is involved, in which case there is only one parent.Nevertheless, many countries and individuals have a right to step forward to claim an authorial role in the deal that it is hoped will bring an end to the two-year war in Gaza.But it is a sign of the collective nature of the effort of the past few months that so many can credibly claim a role, including the US president, who after many false starts was finally persuaded to focus, end the fantasy of driving tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland and instead spell out to Benjamin Netanyahu the versions of victory the Israeli prime minister could and could not have.The turning point was a meeting in New York on the sidelines of the UN general assembly chaired by Trump, soon after his baroque speech to the gathering. Trump described the sidelines chat as his most important meeting at the UN. In the encounter organised by the United Arab Emirates, he set out for the first time his then 20-point plan for peace in front of a group of Arab and Muslim states that could form the backbone of any stabilisation force that entered Gaza in the event of a ceasefire.By then Trump, with the help of his son-in-law Jared Kushner and the former British prime minister Tony Blair, had been convinced to change his mind on two critical issues. First, Palestinians should not be driven from Gaza and Israel should not rule the territory. “Gaza should be for Gazans,” one said.That meant Trump dropping the displacement rhetoric he deployed earlier in the year, when he triggered widespread alarm by speaking of plans to develop a “Gaza Riviera”.View image in fullscreenSecondly, Trump was persuaded a “day after” plan for the future of Gaza would not complicate the negotiations on a ceasefire-hostage release agreement by adding new contested ingredients, but was the precondition for success. A UK diplomat explained Blair’s thinking: “Hamas was not going to give up unless it knew the Israelis were going to get out and the Israelis were not going to get out and stop occupying Gaza unless they knew Hamas were not going to be in government. Unless you resolved the question of who governs Gaza you cannot bring the thing to an end.”That in turn made it easier for the Arab states to put political pressure on Hamas to negotiate since they could point to a route towards Palestinian statehood, something that has always been their precondition for reconciliation with Israel. The Arab states had also put their names to demands that Hamas stand aside and disarm.One of those involved in persuading the US president said: “People don’t want to hear this but the advantage of Trump is that once he decides to do something he is like a juggernaut. And he really did put pressure on the Israelis.”Trump’s mood towards Israel was clouded by Netanyahu’s unilateral decision to bomb Doha on 9 September in the hope of wiping out Hamas negotiators. Trump had not been consulted, but the US assurances were met with scepticism. As a result Netanyahu, not a man prone to contrition, was ordered to apologise and say he would respect Qatar’s sovereignty in future.View image in fullscreenTo repair relations fully with Qatar, the host of main US airbase in the Middle East, Trump issued an extraordinary executive order saying any future attack on the emirate would be treated as an attack on the US. All this meant the US leader was better disposed to the Gulf states’ vision of a new Middle East. In a sign he was prepared to push the Israeli government hard, in a way Joe Biden had not, Trump told Israel there would be no further annexations in the West Bank.From the very start of the sidelines meeting at the UN in September, the aim of the Arab states was to bind Trump personally into the process. Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, said: “We count on you and your leadership … to end this war and to help the people of Gaza.” He said Israel’s real objective was “to destroy Gaza, to render housing, livelihoods, education, and medical care impossible, stripping away the very foundations of human life”.The concept that Trump personally was central to a solution – indeed its guarantor – flattered the US president who offered himself up as the chair of the peace board, the body that would oversee the reconstruction of Gaza.In one sense, he would be just a name plate, but to the extent he has a hinterland, it is construction. That means there is a possibility he will remain engaged, for the moment at least.Those observing him said Trump began to feel he had a serious opportunity to solve a conflict he variously said had lasted 3,000 or 600 years, in contrast to his failed attempt in Ukraine. The prospect of winning the Nobel peace prize, Trump’s obsession, hovered once more into view.View image in fullscreenThat meant that once his plan was published Trump did not let go, but kept the pressure up on Hamas, warning of the group’s annihilation if it did not release the hostages in return for 250 Palestinians. But neither did Trump let Israel backtrack. Speed and momentum became of the essence.It was the seniority of the negotiators who went to the talks in Egypt that revealed the stars were finally aligning and Hamas would be forced into releasing all the hostages it held, even though Israel would not immediately leave all of Gaza. The scenes were extraordinary enough in that the Hamas negotiators were – albeit through mediators – holding talks with a government that had tried to assassinate them a month earlier. By the time they started the participants sensed a deal was unavoidable.The arrival of Kushner, the head of the intelligence office of the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, İbrahim Kalın, and the prime minister of Qatar, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, confirmed a breakthrough was imminent.During the talks, Hamas negotiators led by its leader Khalil al-Hayya, Mohammad al-Hindi, the deputy secretary general of Islamic Jihad, and Jamil Mezher, the deputy secretary general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, sought to clarify the names of the Palestinians to be released, the mechanism of the release of the Israeli hostages and the “day after” aspects of the agreement, poring over the maps showing a withdrawal of Israel’s forces.But Hamas was told while the critical “day after” principles stood, the details would have to wait for a second linked negotiation. The risk for Hamas now is that it loses its leverage upon handing over the hostages – and that fears Israel will then refuse to engage with the plans for Gaza’s future or find a pretext to restart the fighting will be realised. The domestic brake on Netanyahu resuming the fighting – the demand to save the hostages – would have gone.Here Trump’s continued willingness to keep up the pressure on Netanyahu was critical, and is acknowledged by Hamas in its statements referring to the US president as guarantor of the plan. On Fox News, Trump said he had told Netanyahu that “Israel cannot fight the world”, adding: “And he understands that very well.” He said: “You will see people coexisting and Gaza will be rebuilt.”By contrast Amit Segal, a journalist close to Netanyahu, said: “There’s no phase two. That’s clear to everyone, right? Phase two might happen someday, but it’s unrelated to what’s just been signed.”Many elements of Trump’s 20-point plan are being addressed by diplomats from the US, Europe and Arab states at a separate gathering in Paris on Wednesday.View image in fullscreenOn the agenda are issues such as the Hamas handover of weapons; its exclusion from future administrations; the mandate of an international peacekeeping force; the delivery of resumed aid flows; and the future relationship between Gaza and the West Bank as the nucleus of a future Palestinian state. On almost all these, there have been deep differences between Israel on the one hand, and Europe and the Arab states on the other.But in a promising sign, US officials will attend this meeting, suggesting Washington does not favour an armed status quo.At the centre of these discussions is Blair, who is to sit on the peace board or interim government that will oversee the Palestinian technocrats that help implement reconstruction plans. Blair will have to convince the Palestinian Authority that he is not offering a colonial-esque arrangement, as the former prime minister says it fears. But he is unlikely to do the job unless he has real powers, something he feels was not given when he was Middle East special envoy to the quartet.Arab leaders are seeking assurances that the international stabilisation force that eventually enters Gaza has a UN security council mandate, and that there is a clear plan to treat Gaza and the West Bank as one political entity.One of the most difficult issues unresolved in the rushed talks in Egypt is the timing of the Hamas weapons handover. The group may be willing to deliver its arms to an Arab-run authority, or a Palestinian civil police force, but not to Israel. Some diplomats even believe Hamas may feel the need to take a new political course, something it has been close to doing before. “Gazans are going to demand to know what the past two years were about,” one diplomat said.One diplomat involved in the talks said: “The tragedy is that this could have all been agreed 20 months ago, all the elements were there. The key Israeli objective – which is why it is a tragedy this war has gone on so long – was the removal of Hamas from future rule, and that was obtainable a long time ago.” More

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      Why Tony Blair just can’t kick the habit of imperial interference in the Middle East | Oliver Eagleton

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      “There are two types of politician,” Tony Blair observed in 2012. “Reality creators and reality managers.” While postwar politics was generally a matter of steady management, he claimed, the emerging order called for more creativity, “both in the economy and foreign policy”. Only a particular type of visionary leader was fit for the task.More than a decade later, Blair has now joined forces with the pre-eminent reality-creator, Donald Trump, to draft a hallucinatory 20-point plan for Gaza. It aims to turn the devastated Strip into what seems to resemble a colonial protectorate: cleansed of armed conflict, buzzing with development projects and a “special economic zone” through which foreign capital can flow, and overseen by an international “board of peace” with Trump himself as chair.The authors of the programme have not explained how they intend to impose it on a resistant population, or how they will persuade Hamas to disarm and concede defeat. So there is a high likelihood that the Blair-Trump fantasy will remain just that. Whatever its fortunes, though, it is a clear reflection of our historical moment, representing the most recent mutation of an imperial worldview that has already left a trail of destruction across the Middle East.For Blair, “the economy and foreign policy” have long been entwined. His military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan tried to spread the virtues of the market to supposedly backward nations. The privatisation of resources created new investment opportunities, while a wide range of profiteers, from weapons dealers to security contractors, made a killing off the wars themselves.Upon leaving office in 2007, Blair immediately took up a post as Middle East envoy for the so-called Quartet: the United Nations, European Union, United States and Russia. His work in Palestine displayed the same unerring faith in free enterprise. He proposed a series of “industrial parks” to attract foreign investment, advocated eccentric agribusiness and tourism schemes, and promoted other ventures that raised questions about possible conflicts of interest: while being paid £2m per year as a JP Morgan adviser, for example, he was accused of using his Quartet role to advance the interests of JP Morgan clients. (Blair denied the claims, insisting he did not know about the links between the bank he worked for and the companies it served.)As envoy, Blair often bypassed or rejected political solutions – fighting vigorously against Palestinian attempts to win statehood at the UN – and instead treated economics as the route to progress. His diplomatic activities seemed to be based on the notion that peace would naturally follow prosperity. If securing the latter was the task of the intrepid statesman, then strong ties to the business sector could perhaps be framed as an asset.Yet Blair’s tenure in the Middle East brought no diminution of the conflict. In 2012, a senior Palestinian official gave a succinct assessment of his record: “Useless, useless, useless.” Still, undeterred by failure and fond of dramatic political comebacks, the former prime minister now appears to be seeking to apply the same logic to Gaza. Since the early months of the war, he has reportedly been crafting his plan for the “day after”.Staff from his thinktank, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), participated in a project that appeared to endorse ethnic cleansing in the territory and outlined what could be built atop its mass graves: a “Trump riviera”, an “Elon Musk smart manufacturing zone”, “regional datacentres”. Although Blair’s organisation claimed it had no meaningful involvement in the plan, and rejected the idea of displacing Palestinians, there are a number of continuities with his own blueprint, details of which were soon leaked to the press.Drawn up with the help of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, the 21-page document suggests reconstructing Gaza through “public-private partnerships”, forged by a “commercially driven authority, led by business professionals and tasked with generating investable projects with real financial returns”. Hamas would be demobilised and a small unelected executive would be installed. This would include Blair himself in a prominent role, plus “leading international figures with executive and financial expertise” and “at least one qualified Palestinian representative (potentially from the business or security sector)”. An international stabilisation force would meanwhile put down “threats to public order”.View image in fullscreenBlair met Kushner and Trump in the White House on 27 August and his proposals got a warm welcome from the president. They have since been refined and repackaged as the Trump “peace plan”. As with previous versions of the initiative, the emphasis is on creating a Gaza that is “conducive to attracting investment”, and in which Israel will continue to reign supreme. Blair is primed to take charge of governing the Strip until some unspecified future point when day-to-day administration may be returned to a “reformed” Palestinian Authority.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe practical issues are glaring. Which states would be irresponsible enough to send troops to serve this novel dictatorship? How can it hope to sustain itself with no mandate nor legitimacy? Even more striking, however, is the extent to which the plan signals the overlap between Blair’s ethos and Trump’s.It is not unreasonable to suggest that Blair might see a business opportunity beneath the rubble of Gaza. To figure out who may benefit, we can look at his network of paymasters. Since 2021, Larry Ellison, founder of the tech company Oracle, has donated or pledged £257m to the TBI. The thinktank has, in turn, transformed into what one commentator has called an “Oracle dealership”: promoting the company’s software around the globe, including in impoverished countries where it has been criticised for potentially “trapping” and “indebting” users. Ellison is also a prominent supporter of Israel who has given millions to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces and, according to Haaretz, once offered Benjamin Netanyahu a seat on the Oracle board. Were Blair to rule over Gaza – perhaps establishing “regional datacentres” in line with the TBI-linked plan – it is possible that Ellison could wield major influence.The TBI has also received huge sums from the authoritarian regimes of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, while Blair has been given a lucrative advisory contract by the UAE state-owned investment firm Mubadala. All three states have readily endorsed the plan for Gaza. Once the besieged enclave is opened for investment, they may well be first in line. Blair’s work for these petro-monarchies tallies with his involvement in the fossil fuel industry, having taken cash from a BP-led consortium, the oil company PetroSaudi and the South Korean UI Energy Corporation, which has interests in the Middle East. Given that Israel has recently granted new licences to explore for oil and gas off the Mediterranean coast, such connections could prove significant later down the line.In one sense, then, this “peace plan” could simply be read as an extension of Blair’s belief in market-led development. Yet this chapter in the annals of colonialism also has a uniquely Trumpian twist. Visions of a new world order that underpinned earlier regime-change projects are gone. Here politics is reduced to dealmaking, grand strategy to crude self-interest. The fusion of public power and private profit is complete. Blair may be creating new realities, but few would want to inhabit them.

      Oliver Eagleton is an associate editor at the New Left Review and author of The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right

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      Mamdani attends Israelis for Peace vigil after his 7 October statement draws ire from Israel

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      The New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday evening attended a vigil in Manhattan convened by Israelis for Peace, an anti-occupation group of Israelis in New York who have rallied weekly since 2023 to call for a ceasefire and the release of Israeli hostages.Sitting in Union Square alongside New York City comptroller Brad Lander, his one-time rival for the Democratic nomination who has been campaigning for him, Mamdani listened as speakers at the event – which marked the two-year anniversary of the 7 October Hamas attacks on Israel – called for an end to the killing and to Israel’s occupation, and for equal rights for Palestinians.Earlier in the day, Mamdani drew ire from Israel over his statement on the anniversary in which he commemorated both the Israeli victims from that day and Palestinian victims from Israel’s ensuing war on Gaza.“Two years ago today, Hamas carried out a horrific war crime, killing more than 1,100 Israelis and kidnapping 250 more. I mourn these lives and pray for the safe return of every hostage still held and for every family whose lives were torn apart by these atrocities,” Mamdani said in the statement on Tuesday.He denounced Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his government for launching a “genocidal war” in Gaza as well. He also accused the US government of being “complicit”.“A death toll that now far exceeds 67,000; with the Israeli military bombing homes, hospitals, and schools into rubble,” Mamdani wrote. “Every day in Gaza has become a place where grief itself has run out of language. I mourn these lives and pray for the families that have been shattered.”He said the last two years had “demonstrated the very worst of humanity” and called for an end to Israeli “occupation and apartheid”.Mamdani’s statement prompted a sharp rebuke from the Israeli foreign ministry on X, accusing him of “acting as a mouthpiece for Hamas propaganda” and “spreading Hamas’s fake genocide campaign”.“By repeating Hamas’s lies, he excuses terror and normalizes antisemitism. He stands with Jews only when they are dead. Shameful,” the post said.Israel stands widely accused of committing genocide in Gaza, where its ongoing military assault has killed tens of thousands of civilians, some 20,000 of them children, caused famine and mass starvation, and razed much of the Palestinian territory. Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant are wanted by the international criminal court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.Mamdani is no stranger to criticism for his views on the Israeli government and its war in Gaza, and the issue has proved a major flashpoint in the mayoral race.He has won significant support from certain segments of the Jewish community particularly among younger and more progressive voters, and faces stronger opposition from more conservative groups. A recent Marist poll found 35% of Jewish voters supported Mamdani, as does the same proportion supporting Cuomo. (The poll was taken before Eric Adams dropped out of the race.)The democratic socialist has faced criticism over his past refusal to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada”, which some view as a call to violence. He has since said he would discourage use of the phrase. He also recently reiterated his intention to order the NYPD to arrest Netanyahu should he travel to New York.His October 7 statement on Tuesday attracted pushback from other pro-Israel voices. David Frum, a writer at the Atlantic and former speechwriter for George W Bush, wrote on X: “The chilly formulaic language about the 10/7 atrocity … the intense angry passion of the denunciation of Israel’s self-defense … together they arrestingly reveal what the author cares about and what/who he does not care about.”Fox News anchor David Asman called the statement “obscene”. He wrote on X: “The ‘very worst of mankind’ is what Mamdani supporters are on the streets today celebrating…‘honoring’ the beasts responsible for Oct 7. He supports a ‘global intifada,’ responsible for 9/11 and Oct 7. He should not be mayor of a city hit so hard by Jihadists.”Noa Yachot contributed reporting More

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      in Elections

      We Tried to Reach Gazans We Interviewed Over Two Years of War. Here’s What Happened to Them.

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      <!–> [–><!–> [–><!–>We’ve interviewed more than 700 people in Gaza over the past two years. Their stories stayed with us.–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> [–><!–>No single experience can fully contain the agony of Gaza, the near-obliteration of a society and a place.–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–>Of […] More