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    How Trump’s walkaway diplomacy enabled Israel’s worst impulses

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    The Israeli plan to occupy and depopulate Gaza may not be identical to Donald Trump’s vision of a new riviera, but his inspiration and the US’s walkaway diplomacy have ushered Benjamin Netanyahu to the precipice of a dire new chapter in the Israel-Gaza war.The common perception in both Washington and Israel is that Trump has largely moved on, leaving an emboldened Netanyahu to his own devices, while his offhand proposals for turning Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East” have provided cover for rightwing Israeli politicians to enthusiastically support the forced resettlement of the Palestinian population.“Part of the tragedy is that the only one who can actually save us, Trump, is not even seriously interested in that,” said Amos Harel, a prominent military and defense correspondent for the Haaretz newspaper. “Our only hope to get out of this crazy situation is that Trump would force Netanyahu to reach a hostage deal. But [Trump] seems disinterested. He was enthusiastic when the Riviera [idea] was proposed, but now he has moved on to Greenland, Canada and Mexico instead.”Trump’s interventions – specifically envoy Steve Witkoff’s threats to Netanyahu during a tense Shabbat meeting – were instrumental in achieving a temporary ceasefire to the conflict in January. His influence on Netanyahu appeared to be greater than that of previous US presidents, including his rival Joe Biden.But since then the ceasefire has broken down, a two-month Israeli blockade on aid has sparked an even worse humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and, with few opportunities for a quick peace, the White House now appears uninterested and overstretched as Israel signals an offensive and occupation that critics have said will amount to a state policy of ethnic cleansing.It is a trend that has repeated with this White House: broad designs for a grand deal followed by frustration when diplomacy fails to yield instant results. Recently, the White House announced that it was also ready to walk away from negotiations over the Russia-Ukraine conflict if a quick deal was not achieved. That has incentivized Russia to wait out the Trump administration, observers have said, and bank on a policy of US non-engagement in the longer term. Netanyahu similarly appears to have been unleashed by the White House’s growing disinterest.The Israeli ultimatum comes as Trump is scheduled to tour the Middle East next week, with Israeli officials briefing that they will begin the operation only after he returns from a three-day visit to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Trump’s talks there are expected to focus on investment and a likely quixotic quest to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, but not on achieving a resolution to the war. On Tuesday, Maariv, an Israeli newspaper, reported that a Trump visit to Israel was not out of the question, but White House officials have not yet signaled that Trump is ready to go meet Netanyahu.Witkoff, the Trump envoy, still appears personally invested in a resolution to the conflict, but he is overstretched by attempting to mediate between Russia and Ukraine, and also negotiate an Iran nuclear deal simultaneously. The US has continued negotiations with Israel over an aid delivery scheme that would create a new mechanism for aid distribution to avoid Hamas, they have said. But the UN and all aid organizations working in Gaza have condemned the plan as an Israeli takeover. “It contravenes fundamental humanitarian principles and appears designed to reinforce control over life-sustaining items as a pressure tactic – as part of a military strategy,” the heads of all UN agencies and NGOs that operate in Gaza said in a joint statement on Sunday.The Trump administration’s budget and personnel cuts have also signaled a retreat from diplomacy. The state department was reportedly ready to cut the role of the security coordinator role for the West Bank and Gaza, a three-star general who was tasked with managing security crises between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, particularly with regards to growing tensions between settlers and local Palestinian communities.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMore importantly, Trump has given cover to Israeli officials who had sought more aggressive action in Gaza, including forced depopulations. Rightwingers in government have been particularly aggressive, with finance minister Bezalel Smotrich saying that within months Gaza would be “totally destroyed” and the Gazan population would be “concentrated” in a small strip of land. “The rest of the strip will be empty,” he said.But other ministers have also become more radical using Trump’s rhetoric for cover, said Harel.“Once Trump said that, you could see how not only the radicals, but also Likud ministers and so on, have an excuse,” said Harel. “‘It’s not us. It’s the world, the free world’s leader is saying that, so we have to play along.’” More

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      Denied, detained, deported: the people targeted in Trump’s immigration crackdown

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      Donald Trump retook the White House vowing to stage “the largest deportation operation in American history”. As previewed, the administration set about further militarizing the US-Mexico border and targeting people requesting asylum and refugees while conducting raids and deportations in undocumented communities, detaining and deporting immigrants and spreading fear.Critics are outraged, if not surprised. But few expected the new legal chapter that unfolded next: a multipronged crackdown on certain people seen as opponents of the US president’s ideological agenda. This extraordinary assault has come in the context of wider attacks on higher education, the courts and the constitution.Here are some of the most high-profile individual cases that have captured the world’s attention so far because of their extreme and legally dubious nature, mostly involving documented people targeted by the Trump administration in the course of its swift and unlawful power grab.Students and academics hunted and ‘disappeared’In recent weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) teams suddenly began arresting and detaining foreign-born students and academics on visas or green cards. In most cases the government has cited their roles in pro-Palestinian campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza following the 7 October 2023 attack. Claims that they “support Hamas” are invoked as justification for wanting to deport them, even though they have not been charged with any crimes. Those taken include:Mahmoud KhalilA recent graduate student of Columbia University in New York, Mahmoud Khalil, 30, is a Palestinian green-card holder who was a leader during protests last year. He was arrested without due process in front of his pregnant wife and has been in a detention center in Louisiana since mid-March, denied release to attend the birth. He told an immigration judge that he and hundreds of other detainees were being denied rights the court itself had claimed to prioritize: “Due process and fundamental fairness.”View image in fullscreenThe government is using obscure immigration law to make extraordinary claims in cases like Khalil’s that it can summarily detain and deport people for constitutionally protected free speech if they are deemed adverse to US foreign policy. A far-right group has claimed credit for flagging his and others’ names for scrutiny by the authorities.Rümeysa ÖztürkView image in fullscreenUS immigration officials encircled and grabbed the Tufts University PhD student near Boston and bustled her into an unmarked car, shown in onlooker video. Öztürk, a Fulbright scholar and Turkish national on a visa, had co-written an op-ed in the student newspaper, criticizing Tufts’ response to Israel’s military assault on Gaza and Palestinians. She was rushed into detention in Louisiana in apparent defiance of a court order. Öztürk, 30, says she has been neglected and abused there in “unsafe and inhumane conditions”.Mohsen MahdawiView image in fullscreenMahdawi, a Palestinian green-card holder and student at Columbia University, was apprehended by Ice in Colchester, Vermont, on 14 April, as first reported by the Intercept.He was prominent in the protests at Columbia last year. During his apprehension he was put into an unmarked car outside a federal office where he was attending an interview to become a naturalized US citizen. The administration’s arcane justification is that his activism could “potentially undermine” the Middle East peace process, citing a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). He is detained in Vermont. Democratic lawmakers have visited Khalil, Öztürk and Mahdawi but failed to secure their release.Yunseo ChungView image in fullscreenAnother Columbia student, Chung, 21, sued the administration for trying to deport her, and has gone into hiding. She is a pro-Palestinian campaigner and was arrested by the New York police in March while protesting, as first reported by the New York Times. She said a government official told her lawyer they wanted to remove her from the country and her residency status was being revoked. Chung was born in South Korea and has been in the US since she was seven.Alireza DoroudiView image in fullscreenThe Democrats on campus group at the University of Alabama said of the arrest of Doroudi, 32, an Iranian studying mechanical engineering: “Donald Trump, Tom Homan [Trump’s “border czar”], and Ice have struck a cold, vicious dagger through the heart of UA’s international community.”He was taken to the same Louisiana federal detention center as Khalil. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has said he was a threat to national security, without providing details, and the state department had revoked his visa, while an immigration judge refused to release him.Badar Khan SuriView image in fullscreenMore than 370 alumni of Washington DC-based Georgetown University joined 65 current students there in signing on to a letter opposing immigration authorities’ detention of Dr Badar Khan Suri, a senior postdoctoral fellow at the institution’s Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU).The authorities revoked his student visa, alleging the Indian citizen’s father-in-law was an adviser to Hamas officials more than a decade ago – and claiming he was “deportable” because of his posts on social media in support of Palestine. He was taken to Louisiana and then detention in Texas and was given court dates in May.View image in fullscreenKseniia PetrovaThe Harvard Medical School research scientist was stopped at Boston’s Logan airport by US authorities on her way back from France in February, over what appeared to be an irregularity in customs paperwork related to frog embryo samples. She was told her visa was being revoked and she was being deported to her native Russia.When Petrova, 30, said she feared political persecution there because she had criticized the invasion of Ukraine, she was taken away and also ended up in an overcrowded detention facility in Louisiana. Her colleagues say her expertise is “irreplaceable” and Petrova said foreign scientists like her “enrich” America.Student visas revoked, then restored amid chaosMore than 1,400 international students from at least 200 colleges across the US had their “legal status changed” by the state department, including the revoking of visas, in what the specialist publication Inside Higher Education called “an explosion of visa terminations”.Amid scant information and rising panic, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, lambasted protesters and campus activists as “lunatics”. Some were cited for pro-Palestinian views, others concluded they must have been targeted because of minor crimes or offenses, such as a speeding ticket. Some could find no explanation. Then in the face of multiple court challenges, the administration in late April reversed course and restored legal statuses that had been rescinded en masse, but said it was developing a new policy. Uncertainty prevails.The legal rollercoaster came too late for this high-profile case:Felipe Zapata VelásquezView image in fullscreenThe family of the University of Florida student Felipe Zapata Velásquez, 27, said he was “undergoing a physical and emotional recovery process” in his native Colombia after police arrested him in Gainesville in March for traffic offenses and turned him over to Ice. He agreed to be deported, to avoid lengthy detention and legal battles. The Democratic congressman Maxwell Frost accused authorities of “kidnapping” Velásquez.Removed by (admitted) mistakeKilmar Ábrego GarcíaView image in fullscreenThe Salvadorian man was removed to El Salvador by mistake, which the Trump administration admitted. But it is essentially defying a US supreme court order to “facilitate” his return to his home and family in Maryland. Ábrego García was undocumented but had protected status against being deported to El Salvador. He was flown there anyway, without a hearing, to a brutal mega-prison, then later transferred to another facility. The administration accuses him of being a violent gangster and has abandoned him, infuriating a federal judge repeatedly and prompting warnings of a constitutional crisis.He has not been charged with any crimes but was swept up with hundreds of Venezuelans deported there. He has begged to speak to his wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, who insists he is not a criminal. The sheet metalworkers union chief, Michael Coleman, described Ábrego García as an “apprentice working hard to pursue the American dream” and said he was not a gang member. Trump said he was eyeing Salvadorian prisons for US citizens.Deported to a third country, without due processThe US deported more than 230 Venezuelan men to the mega-prison in El Salvador without so much as a hearing in mid-March despite an infuriated federal judge trying to halt the flights, then blocking others. Donald Trump took extraordinary action to avoid due process by invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act (AEA), a law meant only to be used in wartime, prompting court challenges led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). John Roberts, the US chief justice, rebuked the president when he threatened the judge. The justices, by a majority, did not stop Trump from using the AEA but the bench unanimously reaffirmed the right to due process and said individuals must be able to bring habeas corpus challenges.Most of the men are reportedly not violent criminals or members of violent gangs, as the Trump administration asserts, according to a New York Times investigation.Many appear to have been accused of being members of the transnational Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua partly on the basis of their tattoos, with their families speaking out, including:Andry José Hernández RomeroView image in fullscreenHernández, a 31-year-old makeup artist and hairdresser, entered California last year to attend an asylum appointment, telling the authorities he was under threat in Venezuela as a gay man. But he was detained and accused of being in Tren de Aragua because of his tattoos, then suddenly deported under Trump, deemed a “security threat”.Jerce Reyes Barriosskip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe former professional footballer, 36, has been accused of gang membership by the DHS, seemingly because of his tattoos, including one of a crown sitting atop a soccer ball with a rosary and the word “dios”.“He chose this tattoo because it is similar to the logo for his favourite soccer team, Real Madrid,” his lawyer, Linette Tobin, said, adding that her client fled Venezuela after protesting against the government and being tortured.Francisco Javier García CasiqueView image in fullscreenRelatives were shocked when they spotted Francisco Javier García Casique, 24, in a propaganda video from El Salvador showing scores of Venezuelan prisoners being frog-marched off planes and into custody there. He is a barber in his home town of Maracay and is completely innocent of gang involvement, the family said, adding that Francisco and his brother Sebastián have matching tattoos quoting the Bible.Migrants seeking asylum removed to PanamaA US military plane took off from California in February carrying more than 100 immigrants from countries as far flung as Afghanistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, China, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Pakistan, dumping them in Panama. They were shackled and deported to a third country without due process because their countries of origin refuse to accept them back from the US. Shocking scenes unfolded of the people locked in a hotel in Panama City, signaling and writing on the windows pleading for help.The people, including children, were then moved and held at a facility deep in the dense jungle that separates Panama from Colombia. They were later reportedly freed and were seeking asylum from other countries, their futures uncertain. One of those deported from the US was:Artemis GhasemzadehView image in fullscreenGhasemzadeh, 27, a migrant from Iran, wrote “Help us” in lipstick on a window of the hotel in Panama City, as a desperate way of alerting New York Times reporters on the street to her and fellow detainees’ plight. She had thought that, especially as a convert from Islam to Christianity who faces danger in Iran as a result, that she would be offered freedom in the US, she told the newspaper while still in custody. She is possibly still in Panama trying to get a foothold.Americans questioned and threatenedAmir MakledView image in fullscreenMakled, a Detroit-born attorney, was questioned at the airport on returning from vacation. He was flagged to a terrorism response team, kept behind and pressured to hand over his phone, then give up some of its contents. The Lebanese American represents a pro-Palestinian student protester who was arrested at the University of Michigan. Experts said the incident was evidence of a weakening of fourth amendment constitutional protections at the border against “unreasonable search and seizure”.Nicole MicheroniView image in fullscreenThis Massachusetts immigration lawyer, a US-born American citizen, spoke out after receiving an email from the Trump administration telling her “it is time for you to leave the United States”. She said it was “probably, hopefully, sent to me in error. But it’s a little concerning these are going out to US citizens.” She told NBC she thought it was a scare tactic.Adam PeñaThis San Diego-based US citizen now carries his American passport and birth certificate everywhere with him and thinks he was sent one of the “time for you to leave” letters in error but because he represents clients in Ice detention locally. “I do believe this email was sent intentionally to immigration advocates around the country to instill fear and intimidation,” he told NBC news.Americans removedChildren who are seven, four and two and are US citizens were removed from the US in late April when their mothers were deported to Honduras. DHS said the two women chose to take their children with them but one of their lawyers told the Guardian that they were denied any opportunity to coordinate the care and custody of their children before being put on deportation flights from Louisiana. A federal judge said it was “illegal and unconstitutional” to thus remove a US citizen “with no meaningful process”.Visitors detainedJasmine Mooney, CanadaView image in fullscreenCanadian Jasmine Mooney was shackled and ended up in Ice detention in the US for two weeks over an alleged work visa irregularity while on one of her frequent visits to California. She spoke out about the harsh conditions and the information black hole and how outraged she was that so many other detainees she met, who helped her, are stranded without access to the kind of resources that ultimately got her out.Rebecca Burke, UKView image in fullscreenThe British graphic artist was stopped at the border when she headed from Seattle to Canada as a backpacker and, because of a visa mix-up, she became one of 32,809 people to be arrested by Ice during the first 50 days of Trump’s presidency. Almost three weeks of grueling detention conditions later, she smuggled out her poignant drawings of fellow detainees when she was released.Jessica Brösche, GermanyThe German tourist and tattoo artist, 29, from Berlin was detained by US immigration authorities and deported back to Germany after spending more than six weeks in US detention, including what she described as eight days in solitary confinement. Her family compared her ordeal to “a horror film”.Fabian Schmidt, GermanyView image in fullscreenThe 34-year-old German national and US green-card holder was apprehended and allegedly “violently interrogated” by US border officials as he was returning to New Hampshire from a trip to Luxembourg. His family said he was held for hours at Boston’s Logan airport, stripped naked and put in a cold shower, then later deprived of food and medicine, and collapsed. His case is being investigated and as of mid-April he was in Ice detention in Rhode Island.Sent back‘Jonathan’A man with a US work visa provided his anonymous account to the Guardian of being denied entry into the US after a trip to his native Australia to scatter his sister’s ashes. He was pulled aside on arrival in Houston, Texas, and accused, variously, of selling drugs and having improper paperwork. After being detained for over a day he was put on a flight back to Australia even though he has worked on the US east coast for five years, where he lived with his girlfriend.Denied entry – for criticizing Trump?Alvin Gibbs, Marc Carrey and Stefan Häublein of band UK SubsView image in fullscreenMembers of the punk rock band UK Subs said they were denied entry and detained in the US on their way to play a gig in Los Angeles, after being questioned about visas. Bassist Alvin Gibbs said: “I can’t help but wonder whether my frequent, and less than flattering, public comments regarding their president [Trump] and his administration played a role.” He and the two band mates were kept in harsh conditions for 24 hours then deported back to the UK.French scientistA French scientist, who has not been publicly named, was denied entry to the US after immigration officers at an airport searched his phone and found messages in which he had expressed criticism of the Trump administration, according to a French government minister. The researcher was on his way to a conference in Texas.“Freedom of opinion, free research, and academic freedom are values ​​that we will continue to proudly uphold,” Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister of higher education and research, told Le Monde. More

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      Trump 100 days: ‘unpredictable’ US alienates allies and disrupts global trade

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      For US foreign policy, Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office were the weeks when decades happened.In just over three months, the US president has frayed alliances that stood since the second world war and alienated the US’s closest friends, cut off aid to Ukrainians on the frontlines against Vladimir Putin, emboldened US rivals around the world, brokered and then lost a crucial ceasefire in Gaza, launched strikes on the Houthis in Yemen and seesawed on key foreign policy and economic questions to the point where the US has been termed the “unpredictable ally”.The tariffs Trump has unleashed will, if effected, disrupt global trade and lead to supply chain shocks in the United States, with China’s Xi Jinping seeking to recruit US trade allies in the region.The pace of the developments in the past 100 days makes them difficult to list. Operating mainly through executive action, the Trump administration has affected nearly all facets of US foreign policy: from military might to soft power, from trade to immigration, reimagining the US’s place in the world according to an isolationist America First program.“The shake-up has been revolutionary, extraordinary. It’s upended 80-some years of American foreign policy,” said Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a former ambassador to Nato.The Trump presidency has ended the relative peace in the western hemisphere since the end of the second world war underwritten by US economic, military and diplomatic influence, Daalder said.“The foundation of the Pax Americana was trust, and once you break trust, it’s extraordinarily difficult to restore,” he said. “And restoring trust – trust in America, trust in American institutions, trust in American voters – it takes a long time to rebuild.”The US’s key foreign policy and national security making institutions are in crisis. The Pentagon is mid-meltdown under the leadership of Pete Hegseth, whose erratic and unsteady leadership has been reflected in score-settling among his senior staff, while a leaked Signal chat embroiled the national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and others in scandal. The state department under Marco Rubio is undergoing a vast shake-up, and the US’s diplomats are being sidelined in favour of envoys such as Steve Witkoff with little background in foreign policy. Critics say the gutting of USAID will cut back on US soft power for generations.“There’s no better way to get us into a war, perhaps a catastrophic war, than essentially poking out your eyes and numbing your brain, and you’re left with Donald Trump and a few people sitting in the White House winging it, and they’re not competent to wing it,” said Steven Cash, a former intelligence officer for the CIA and Department of Homeland Security, and the executive director of the Steady State, an advocacy group of former national security professionals. “And so we’ve seen that with the tariffs. We’ve seen that with Nato. We’ve seen that with Ukraine, and we’re gonna see a lot more of it.”After assuming office in 2021, Joe Biden declared: “America is back.”“The world now knows America is not back,” Daalder said. “America is gone again.”In a recent interview with the Zeit newspaper, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, expressed similar sentiments, saying: “The west as we knew it no longer exists.”View image in fullscreenIn Munich, JD Vance delivered a landmark speech openly pandering to Europe’s far right, accusing European leaders of “running from their own voters” and saying: “America can do nothing to help you.”A backlash has begun. Last month the EU presented an €800bn ($913bn) plan on the future of European defense, a putative step in what would be a herculean task to overcome internal divisions and onshore European defense manufacturing. The UK and other US allies have considered other efforts, such as limiting intelligence-sharing with the US. “We still need America now, but there is a vision [of a time] when we won’t any more,” said one European diplomat.Meanwhile, the Trump effect is beginning to sway elections as well – though not as he might hope.In the western hemisphere, Trump has terrorised US neighbours and tacitly declared what some have compared to a new Monroe doctrine, saying the White House planned to “take back” the Panama canal and annex Greenland, while regularly calling Canada the future 51st state.In an extraordinary bit of election-day meddling, Trump wrote a social media post suggesting that he was on the ballot in Canada’s vote, repeating that Canada should become the 51st state in order to avoid tariffs and reap economic awards.Canadians responded by duly electing the liberal candidate Mark Carney, completing a 30% swing in polling that has largely been explained by opposition to Trump’s tariff war and territorial menaces.In Europe, populist parties seen as Trump’s ideological allies are also on the defensive. While Trump was popular in terms of his ideological and anti-woke agenda, the trade war has made him “quite toxic, just in the last month or two, with a lot of the populist voting bases”, said Jeremy Shapiro, the research director of the European Council on Foreign Relations and a former special adviser to the assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia.Nowhere has the shift in US foreign policy been felt more acutely than in Ukraine, where the sudden cutoff in US military and intelligence sharing confirmed the Trump administration’s goals of pressuring Ukraine to accept a deal with the Kremlin, rather than the other way around. Those frustrations boiled over into an Oval Office meltdown fueled by Vice-President JD Vance that one former US official close to the talks called “disgraceful”.Trump has swung wildly on the war, on certain days targeting Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a “dictator” and then quickly pivoting to call out Putin for continuing to rain down missiles on Ukrainian cities. His theatrics have produced symbolic moments, including a sudden recognition that “maybe [Putin] doesn’t want to stop the war” after speaking with Zelenskyy this weekend in the baptistry of St Peter’s Basilica. But in terms of hard results, Trump has not fulfilled a promise to end the war within 24 hours or produced a clear path to peace many months later.View image in fullscreenThe Russians have said they largely tune out what he says in public.“We hear many things coming from President Trump,” said Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, during a television appearance this weekend. “We concentrate, as I said, on the real negotiations which President Trump supports and instructed his people to continue to engage in these negotiations.”Key among those people is Witkoff, a neophyte diplomat who has spent hours in conversation with Putin, often with no other adviser present. One person close to the Kremlin said that Witkoff was viewed as a reliable negotiator in Moscow with “a chance to make an agreement”, but added: “There is a chance it will pass by.”Much of the burden of international diplomacy now rests on Witkoff, who is also running point on other key negotiations. Trump has tasked him with reaching a deal to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, in effect renegotiating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that he scuttled in 2018. Both the US and Iran have played up the talks, although “differences still exist both on major issues and on the details”, the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told state television this week.And then there is the Middle East, where the Trump administration scored its greatest early success by negotiating a ceasefire in Gaza but then failed to prevent its collapse, with Israel cutting off new aid to Gaza as the fighting continues.“There now seems to be less focus on ending the devastating conflict,” wrote Stefanie Hausheer Ali, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs. “Trump’s threat in February to Hamas to release the hostages or ‘all hell is going to break out’ has, in practice, meant Israel restarting the war and blocking humanitarian aid from entering Gaza. Without an alternative to Hamas rule, the militant group may hang on and continue to fight as an insurgency, replenishing its ranks by recruiting desperate people.”Trump’s most extreme remarks have turned out to be bluster: he stunned the world when he claimed that he would turn the Gaza Strip into beachfront condos and said that the local Palestinian population would be forcibly removed. Months later, the initiative is largely forgotten.While attempting to close three landmark negotiations at once, the Trump administration has also launched a trade war with the entire world, establishing sweeping tariffs on all foreign imports before abruptly reversing course and cutting tariffs to 10% save for those against China.With so many major efforts ongoing, observers say that the government is largely paralysed to deal with smaller but still crucial issues in foreign policy and national security. As part of a blanket ban on refugees, tens of thousands of Afghans who assisted US troops against the Taliban are left waiting for relocation to the United States, a promise that was extended by previous administrations.“The lack of clarity and the chaos are the things that are causing so much pain,” said Shawn VanDiver, the founder and president of #AfghanEvac, a group that works with the state department to help resettle Afghans.He said he was critical of both the Biden and Trump administrations for failing to relocate the tens of thousands of Afghans who were far enough along in the vetting program to be relocated before Trump came into office.“The truth is, is that when America makes a promise, you should be able to trust our word,” he said. “If our flag waving over an embassy in Tunisia or Baghdad or Kabul, or Kyiv doesn’t mean this is the place where there’s truth, where there’s justice … well, then what are we even doing here?” More

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      Conservatives fighting ‘antisemitism’ are actively targeting US Jews. Why? | Josh Schreier

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      The Trump administration claims that its moves to defund universities, arrest and deport students and force schools to demote or monitor professors are meant to combat antisemitism, protect Jewish students and remove “Hamas-supporting” foreign nationals from the country. American pro-Israel groups including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Hillel International, Aipac and the Heritage Foundation have united behind Republican measures to crack down on higher education and its putative antisemitism. Religiously identified groups such as the Orthodox Union and Christians United for Israel have joined the chorus, celebrating the punishment of supposedly antisemitic students and professors. Whatever their varied pasts, today’s pro-Israel groups are not about protecting American Jews. Instead, they are allies in Maga’s war on free speech, academic freedom and the US’s democratic society itself.To be clear: the pro-Israel campaign to “protect” Jews by punishing anti-Zionist speech often targets Jews. After a student complaint about a tenured Jewish professor’s Twitter post, Muhlenberg College fired her. The ADL has rewarded Muhlenberg by grading it “better than most” colleges for fighting “antisemitism”. The ADL also accused Jewish Voice for Peace, a large, anti-Zionist Jewish group with chapters on many American campuses, of “promot[ing] messaging” that can include “support for terrorists”. Under pressure from the Trump administration, Columbia University expelled a Jewish graduate student and United Auto Workers local president who demonstrated against the war in Gaza.Most chillingly, the Trump administration recently sent all staff at Barnard College a questionnaire inquiring if they were Jewish, ostensibly to gauge campus antisemitism. For many, the experience of being asked by the government to self-identify as a Jew was terrifying; as one historian put it: “We’ve seen this movie before, and it ends with yellow stars.”Canary Mission, a pro-Israel website that publishes information on students and professors who supposedly “promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews”, has been targeting an Israeli American scholar of the Holocaust along with many other Jews (including the author of this piece). Project Esther, an initiative launched by the conservative Heritage Foundation – the thinktank behind Project 2025 – blames the “American Jewish community’s complacency” for the “pro-Palestinian movement’s” ability to continue working for “the destruction of capitalism and democracy”. Maga’s pro-Israel partners do not protect Jews; they help Trump in his war on our academic freedom and open society more generally.Of course, unlike some pro-Israel groups, the Trump administration has a broader antipathy toward higher education. As JD Vance put it, “the professors are the enemy”. But the pro-Israel movement furnishes Maga with a crucial weapon in their war on this “enemy”: charges of antisemitism. The entire “US education system”, according to Project Esther, has been “infiltrated” by “Hamas-supporting organizations” that now “foster antisemitism under the guise of “‘pro-Palestinian,’ anti-Israel, anti-Zionist narratives … within the rubric of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and similar Marxist ideology”. Of course, by linking Palestinian solidarity with longstanding rightwing bogeymen like antiracism and communism, Project Esther gives away the game; their “antisemitic” charge is a tool to silence Maga’s left-leaning critics in higher education.Meanwhile, many pro-Israel groups seem to tolerate Maga’s proximity to antisemitism. If they didn’t, we might expect to hear more about Vance’s meeting with Germany’s neo-Nazi-linked AfD, Steve Bannon’s singling out of “American Jews that do not support Israel and do not support Maga” as “the number one enemy to the people in Israel”, or Trump’s claim that the Democratic senator Chuck Schumer is “not Jewish” but “Palestinian”.The ADL went so far as to defend Elon Musk’s apparent Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration. True, the ADL rightfully criticized some of these other incidents, as well as Trump’s antisemitic advertisements, and his meeting with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes. But these cases do not seem to merit breaking with Maga. Why? Because the pro-Israel movement advocates for Israel, not American Jews.For this reason, the American pro-Israel movement has been collaborating in the Trump administration’s campaign to roll back everyone’s constitutional rights. By now, most of us have seen the footage of Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, both students at American universities, being surrounded by groups of government agents and forced into the backs of unmarked vehicles. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, promised that hundreds of other students have been stripped of their visas. Neither Khalil nor Öztürk have any demonstrated ties to Hamas. Khalil even spoke out against antisemitism, declaring that “antisemitism and any form of racism has no place on this campus and in this movement”. Furthermore, as a permanent resident and a student visa holder, both Khalil and Öztürk are guaranteed first amendment protections. Yet Hillel International failed to condemn the arrests, and the ADL outright celebrated Khalil’s.Ultimately, Trump and many in the pro-Israel movement have allied against free speech in higher education because it is a pillar of an open society that threatens both of them. The right has long had it out for universities. The pro-Israel movement, meanwhile, saw the campus encampments with horror; a wide cross-section of students and professors from a variety of religious, racial and ethnic backgrounds came together to speak out against Israel’s killing of tens of thousands of people.Even more galling for the pro-Israel movement, Jews actively participated in the protests – even conducting Passover seders, as well as Kabbalat Shabbat and Havdalah services amid them. These young Jews are not alone; less than half of Americans now sympathize with Israel, and one-third believe Israel is committing genocide. These facts do not threaten American Jews, but they do threaten Maga and the heavily evangelical pro-Israel movement. As long as increasing numbers of students, professors and many others speak out for Palestinians’ humanity, the pro-Israel movement, armed with disingenuous accusations of antisemitism, will aid Maga’s war on American higher education and democracy itself.

      Joshua Schreier is a professor of history and Jewish studies at Vassar College. More

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      They staged protests for Palestine. The consequences have been life-changing

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      EK was completing a take-home exam on 6 March when the dean of student conduct at Swarthmore College emailed her about an urgent Zoom meeting. On the video call, she said, the dean told her that she would be suspended for one semester for staging a protest at the college’s trustees’ dinner in December 2023. Using a bullhorn, EK had interrupted the event to demand that the school divest from products that fuel Israel’s war on Gaza.A panel of students and school employees had found her responsible for assault, among other code of conduct violations for the incident. EK, a final-semester senior who is using a pseudonym out of fear of retaliation, recalled being in shock: “I’ve been really distraught by all of this,” EK said. “I used to be unhoused before I came to Swarthmore, so to be put into this situation again is very disturbing.”She filed an appeal in mid-March and remained in campus housing until the school came to a decision on 10 April. A first-generation, low-income college student on financial aid, EK had been forbidden from campus housing pending the appeal decision, and lost crucial finances when she was let go from her school job. She said she also fears she may be vulnerable to attacks from the Trump administration, which has penalized pro-Palestinian protesters: “I’m worried that this is not the end, and only the beginning, especially now that it’s on my record. It could be the case that I could face further punitive measures from the federal government, and the college is not doing anything to protect students.”In March, the Trump administration listed Swarthmore College as one of 60 schools at risk of losing hundreds of millions of federal dollars for allowing what it considered antisemitic harassment on campus. Colleges and universities across the country were already quashing pro-Palestinian protests by suspending and arresting students, and several revised their policies to ban encampments prior to Trump’s inauguration. But some have gone even further to penalize students in light of the government’s threats to pull their funding.In some cases, those preventive measures have been for naught. Columbia announced that it expelled students who occupied a building last year and revoked alumnis’ diplomas at the same time the federal government still cancelled $400m worth of contracts and grants to the university. Harvard University placed the undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee on probation and temporarily banned the pro-Palestinian group from hosting events, only for the Trump administration to freeze $2.2bn in federal grants to the school two weeks later.Though Columbia and Harvard have received the most attention for their responses to activists, campus crackdowns have been widespread. The Guardian spoke to 1o student protesters in Pennsylvania, California, Wisconsin and New York who have faced disciplinary action from their colleges and universities. They said that the process is often arbitrary and marked by fear tactics aimed to discourage them from protesting in the future. Building a defense for disciplinary hearings, they said, distracted them from their studies and caused anxiety, as the processes can last months.In some cases, the disciplinary process has no conclusive end, causing students to languish while being banned from campus or otherwise limited from participating in student life. Following pushback from students and faculty, EK said, Swarthmore College agreed to pay for her off-campus housing until the end of the semester. She is taking virtual classes and will be allowed to graduate on time, but she is still barred from attending on-campus events or from walking with her peers during graduation.In a statement to the Guardian, Swarthmore College spokesperson Alisa Giardinelli said that the school repeatedly warned student protesters that their actions were in violation of the college’s code of conduct, and that they would face disciplinary action if found responsible. Despite the college’s efforts to discuss the students’ demands, including that the school divest from weapons manufacturers that fuel Israel’s war on Gaza, “some students chose to continue to engage in – and in some cases escalated – behaviors that violated the Code”, Giardinelli said.Guardian interviews with student activists, attorneys and researchers reveal an increased sense of hostility on campuses since 7 October 2023, which has stoked fear and anxiety and resulted in financial concerns for some pro-Palestinian student protesters. Some attorneys have said that Palestinians, Arab Muslims, and people of color have been universities’ primary targets when repressing pro-Palestinian free speech. In March, the federal government went even further in targeting pro-Palestinian scholars and students of color by arresting and detaining the Georgetown University professor Badar Khan Suri and the Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil.“A majority of students who are contacting us for support are either Palestinian, Arab Muslim or other students of color,” said the advocacy group Palestine Legal’s staff attorney, Tori Porell. Additionally, low-income students or those who rely on financial aid are hardest hit by disciplinary actions, she said: “Students who live on campus might rely on campus meal plans. If they are abruptly suspended, they are losing access to housing, to their food, to healthcare, and they might not have funds to just fly home the way some students with more resources would.”In 2024, Palestine Legal received more than 2,000 requests for legal assistance, with about two-thirds coming from students, staff or faculty on college campuses.While schools have long served as stages for mass protests including against the Vietnam war and South Africa’s apartheid, activists say that the universities’ actions toward them have had a chilling effect on civil disobedience this academic year. Still, students such as Dahlia Saba, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, see it as their duty to continue pushing universities to divest from Israel, whose war on Gaza has killed at least 62,000 Palestinians since October 2023.Saba was at a conference in Colorado last July when she received a concerning text message from her schoolmate Vignesh Ramachandran. The two were being investigated by the University of Wisconsin-Madison for a May 2024 op-ed that they had written in a local publication. The article criticized the university’s failure to respond to a student-led proposal around transparent and ethical investment, and demanded that it divest from arms-manufacturing companies fueling Israel’s war on Gaza.She pulled up an email from the university about the charges that she faced, which included allegedly refusing to comply with rules about no picnicking or camping. (Wisconsin state statute prohibits tents or camping on undesignated parts of university land.) Saba, a graduate student in electrical engineering, recalled her thoughts in that moment: would the charges jeopardize her career, or prevent her from being vocal about Palestinian rights in the future?“For me, it’s still important to speak up,” Saba, a Palestinian American, told the Guardian, “because the point of these repression tactics is to try to silence us. And so I think that makes it all the more imperative to refuse to be silenced.”A ‘Palestine exception’ to free speechSince October 2023, many schools have responded to pro-Palestinian campus protests in an outsized way compared with demonstrations going back several decades, say attorneys. In a Harvard Crimson series, 11 former student activists said that Harvard’s response to pro-Palestinian protesters had been more violent and punitive than the treatment they experienced for protesting against South Africa’s apartheid, against fossil fuel divestment, and for university workers to be paid living wages.Race and political views may account for universities’ stricter policies and punishments since last year. Pointing to the Orange county district attorney’s list of people who had been suspended and arrested, Thomas Harvey, a California attorney who represents pro-Palestinian students facing criminal charges, said: “It’s very rare that it’s anyone other than people of color.” Harvey said he knows many of the students on the district attorney’s list because he’s represented them or provided them pro bono legal support. “It seems very obvious that race, combined with political viewpoints about being pro-Palestinian, are the targets of the most severe punishment.”UT, a Muslim woman of color and Swarthmore College senior, said that she was alarmed to learn how closely the college surveilled her during pro-Palestinian protests. On 6 March 2025, UT, who is using her initials out of fear of being doxxed, received an email from the school that she would be on academic probation until she graduated for violating the college’s code of conduct during rallies between October 2023 and March 2024. Last spring, she received a packet from the university on the evidence they had against her, including CCTV footage of her walking on a path next to the woods on campus.“It was a real moment of realization that there is so much surveillance on this campus, and especially out of the students that were charged, very few were white students. Most students were students of color, and first-generation, low-income students. And to learn that the college is so meticulously tracking these students – it was a very scary moment.”Giardinelli of Swarthmore College told the Guardian that “sanctions are based solely on alleged misconduct, without regard to race, socioeconomic standing, or identity”. Of the surveillance, she said: “CCTV images are only used, when available, to verify involved parties and behaviors that are suspected to be, or are alleged violations of, the Student Code of Conduct or of state and federal law.”Schools’ crackdowns on pro-Palestinian student protesters are indicative of a “Palestine exception” to free speech, said Farah Afify, a research and advocacy coordinator at the civil rights group Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair). As the co-author of Cair’s analysis on how universities target pro-Palestinian protesters, Afify consolidated incidents found in newspaper reports and education-related complaints that Afify received from October 2023 to May 2024.“Students who support Palestinian rights,” Afify said, “tend to face harsher discipline, harsher criticism, more challenges by people who would otherwise encourage that kind of expression because it meets the standard principles of what we’d expect of our institutions of higher education.” Cair has since launched a website where students can report their campuses to be investigated and placed on the organization’s “institutions of particular concern” list for targeting pro-Palestinian protesters.‘There’s a genocide, and we need to be organizing against it’While Saba was found responsible for violating the University of Wisconsin’s policies by a student-conduct investigating officer last August, her charges were dropped in October after she appealed them before a committee consisting of a student and university employees. Palestine Legal also sent her school a letter demanding that they end disciplinary proceedings against students in September, which assisted in Saba and another unnamed student’s charges being dropped.In a statement to the Guardian, University of Wisconsin-Madison spokesperson Kelly Tyrrell said that the school “does not disclose details related to individual student conduct cases”, and weighs each case based on a person’s conduct history and the circumstances surrounding the offense. She said the university seeks to create a campus “where all students feel supported, can pursue their educational goals without disruption, and are free to express themselves and engage across difference on complex topics, whether in their local community or around the world”.Despite the intimidation and disciplinary action that student protesters say they faced by their universities, they remain resolute in their fight to speak against their schools’ ties to Israel.Saba said she feels vindicated that her charges were dropped, though she thinks that the university’s system was flawed for finding her co-author, Ramachandran, culpable on the same limited evidence. Still, she holds onto hope that her school will eventually disclose its investments to the public and divest from companies that contribute to or profit from Israel’s war on Gaza.“This university, like many other universities, has lost its sense as a moral institution, an institution of ethics and an institution that aspires to do good in the world,” Saba said. “I want to see a university that actually responds to the demands of its students, rather than restricting their rights, and that prioritizes acting as a force of justice in the world, rather than just a machine that takes in money and spits out degrees.”Additional reporting by Adria R Walker More

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      Ukraine, Gaza and Iran: can Witkoff secure any wins for Trump?

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      Donald Trump’s version of Pax Americana, the idea that the US can through coercion impose order on the world, is facing its moment of truth in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran.In the words of the former CIA director William Burns, it is in “one of those plastic moments” in international relations that come along maybe twice a century where the future could take many possible forms.The US’s aim has been to keep the three era-defining simultaneous sets of negotiations entirely separate, and to – as much as possible – shape their outcome alone. The approach is similar to the trade talks, where the intention is for supplicant countries to come to Washington individually bearing gifts in return for access to US markets.The administration may have felt it had little choice given the urgency, but whether it was wise to launch three such ambitious peace missions, and a global trade war, at the same time is debatable.It is true each of the three conflicts are discrete in that they have distinctive causes, contexts and dynamics, but they are becoming more intertwined than seemed apparent at the outset, in part because there is so much resistance building in Europe and elsewhere about the world order Donald Trump envisages, and his chosen methods.In diplomacy nothing is hermetically sealed – everything is inter-connected, especially since there is a common thread between the three talks in the personality of the property developer Steven Witkoff, Trump’s great friend who is leading the US talks in each case, flitting from Moscow to Muscat.View image in fullscreenTo solve these three conflicts simultaneously would be a daunting task for anyone, but it is especially for a man entirely new to diplomacy and, judging by some of his remarks, also equally new to history.Witkoff has strengths, not least that he is trusted by Trump. He also knows the president’s mind – and what should be taken at face value. He is loyal, so much so that he admits he worshipped Trump in New York so profoundly that he wanted to become him. He will not be pursuing any other agenda but the president’s.But he is also stretched, and there are basic issues of competence. Diplomats are reeling from big cuts to the state department budget and there is still an absence of experienced staffers. Witkoff simply does not have the institutional memory available to his opposite numbers in Iran, Israel and Russia. For instance, most of the Iranian negotiating team, led by the foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, are veterans of the 2013-15 talks that led to the original Iran nuclear deal.Yuri Ushakov, Vladimir Putin’s chief foreign policy adviser, who attended the first Russian-US talks this year in Saudi Arabia, spent 10 years in the US as Russian ambassador. He was accompanied by Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund who then visited the US on 2 April.In the follow-up talks in Istanbul on 10 April, Aleksandr Darchiev, who has spent 33 years in the Russian foreign ministry and is Russian ambassador to the US, was pitted against a team led by Sonata Coulter, the new deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, who does not share Trump’s benign view of Russia.View image in fullscreenAs to the Gaza issue, Benjamin Netanyahu has lived the Palestinian conflict since he became Israel’s ambassador to the UN in 1984.Richard Nephew, a former US Iran negotiator, says the cuts to state department means the US “is at risk of losing a generation of expertise … It’s beyond tragedy. It’s an absolutely devastating national security blow with the evisceration of these folks. The damage could be permanent, we have to acknowledge this.”One withering European diplomat says: “It is as if Witkoff is trying to play three dimensional chess with chess grandmasters on three chessboards simultaneously, not having played the game before.”Bluntly, Witkoff knows he needs to secure a diplomatic win for his impatient boss. But the longer the three conflicts continue, the more entangled they become with one another, the more Trump’s credibility is questioned. Already, according to a Reuters Ipsos poll published this month, 59% of Americans think Trump is costing their country its credibility on the global stage.The risk for Trump is that the decision to address so much so quickly ends up not being a show of American strength but the opposite – the public erosion of a super power.In the hurry to seal a deal with Iran inside two months, Trump, unlike in all previous nuclear talks with Tehran, has barred complicating European interests from the negotiation room.To Iran’s relief, Witkoff has not tabled an agenda that strays beyond stopping Iran acquiring a nuclear bomb. He has not raised Iran’s supply of drones to Russia for use in Ukraine. Nor has he tabled demands that Iran end arms supplies to its proxies fighting Israel.That has alarmed Israel, and to a lesser extent Europe, which sees Iran’s desire to have sanctions lifted as a rare opportunity to extract concessions from Tehran. Israel’s strategic affairs minister, Ron Dermer, and Mossad’s head, David Barnea, met Witkoff last Friday in Paris to try to persuade him that when he met the Iran negotiating team the next day in Rome, he had to demand the dismantling of Tehran’s civil nuclear programme.Witkoff refused, and amid many contradictory statements the administration has reverted to insisting that Iran import the necessary enriched uranium for its civil nuclear programme, rather than enrich it domestically.Russia, in a sign of Trump’s trust, might again become the repository of Iran’s stocks of highly enriched uranium, as it was after the 2015 deal.Israel is also wary of Trump’s aggrandisement of Russia. The Israeli thinktank INSS published a report this week detailing how Russia, in search of anti-western allies in the global south for its Ukraine war, has shown opportunistic political support not just to Iran but to Hamas. Israel will also be uneasy if Russia maintains its role in Syria.But if Trump has upset Netanyahu over Iran, he is keeping him sweet by giving him all he asks on Gaza.Initially, Witkoff received glowing accolades about how tough he had been with Netanyahu in his initial meeting in January. It was claimed that Witkoff ordered the Israeli president to meet him on a Saturday breaking the Sabbath and directed him to agree a ceasefire that he had refused to give to Joe Biden’s team for months.As a result, as Trump entered the White House on 19 January, he hailed the “EPIC ceasefire agreement could have only happened as a result of our Historic Victory in November, as it signalled to the entire World that my Administration would seek Peace and negotiate deals to ensure the safety of all Americans, and our Allies”.But Netanyahu, as was widely predicted in the region, found a reason not to open talks on the second phase of the ceasefire deal – the release of the remaining hostages held in Gaza in exchange for a permanent end to the fighting.Witkoff came up with compromises to extend the ceasefire but Netanyahu rejected them, resuming the assault on Hamas on 19 March. The US envoy merely described Israel’s decision as “unfortunate, in some respects, but also falls into the had-to-be bucket”.View image in fullscreenNow Trump’s refusal to put any pressure on Israel to lift its six-week-old ban on aid entering Gaza is informing Europe’s rift with Trump. Marking 50 days of the ban this week, France, Germany and the UK issued a strongly worded statement describing the denial of aid as intolerable.The French president, Emmanuel Macron, is calling for a coordinated European recognition of the state of Palestine, and Saudi Arabia is insisting the US does not attack Iran’s nuclear sites.Witkoff, by contrast, has been silent about Gaza’s fate and the collapse of the “EPIC ceasefire”.But if European diplomats think Witkoff was naive in dealing with Netanyahu, it is nothing to the scorn they hold for his handling of Putin.The anger is partly because Europeans had thought that, after the Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s public row with Trump in the Oval Office, they had restored Ukraine’s standing in Washington by persuading Kyiv to back the full ceasefire that the US first proposed on 11 March.View image in fullscreenThe talks in Paris last week between Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, and European leaders also gave Europe a chance to point out it was Putin that was stalling over a ceasefire.But instead of putting any countervailing pressure on Russia to accept a ceasefire, Witkoff switched strategy. In the words of Bruno Tertrais, a non-resident fellow at the Institut of Montaigne, Witkoff is “is now presenting a final peace plan, very favourable to the aggressor, even before the start of the negotiations, which had been due to take place after a ceasefire”.No European government has yet criticised Trump’s lopsided plan in public since, with few cards to play, the immediate necessity is to try to prevent Trump acting on his threat to walk away. At the very least, Europe will argue that if Trump wants Ukraine’s resources, he has to back up a European force patrolling a ceasefire, an issue that receives only sketchy reference in the US peace plan.The Polish foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, addressing the country’s parliament on Wednesday, pointed to the necessity of these security guarantees. “Any arrangement with the Kremlin will only last so long as the Russian elite dreads the consequences of its breach,” he said.View image in fullscreenBut in a sense, Trump and Putin, according to Fiona Hill at the Brookings Institution, a Russia specialist in Trump’s first administration, may already have moved beyond the details of their Ukrainian settlement as they focus on their wider plan to restore the Russian-US relationship.It would be an era of great power collusion, not great power competition in which Gaza, Iran and Ukraine would be sites from which the US and Russia could profit.Writing on Truth Social about a phone call with Putin in February, Trump reported” “We both reflected on the Great History of our Nations, and the fact that we fought so successfully together in World War II … We each talked about the strengths of our respective Nations, and the great benefit that we will someday have in working together.”Witkoff has also mused about what form this cooperation might take. “Shared sea lanes, maybe send [liquefied natural] gas into Europe together, maybe collaborate on AI together,” he said, adding: “Who doesn’t want to see a world like that?” More

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      Over 100 US university presidents sign letter decrying Trump administration

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      More than 100 presidents of US colleges and universities have signed a statement denouncing the Trump administration’s “unprecedented government overreach and political interference” with higher education – the strongest sign yet that US educational institutions are forming a unified front against the government’s extraordinary attack on their independence.The statement, published early on Tuesday by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, comes weeks into the administration’s mounting campaign against higher education, and hours after Harvard University became the first school to sue the government over threats to its funding. Harvard is one of several institutions hit in recent weeks with huge funding cuts and demands they relinquish significant institutional autonomy.The signatories come from large state schools, small liberal arts colleges and Ivy League institutions, including the presidents of Harvard, Princeton and Brown.In the statement, the university presidents, as well as the leaders of several scholarly societies say they speak with “one voice” and call for “constructive engagement” with the administration.“We are open to constructive reform and do not oppose legitimate government oversight,” they write. “However, we must oppose undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live, and work on our campuses.”Harvard’s lawsuit comes after the administration announced it would freeze $2.3bn in federal funds, and Donald Trump threatened to revoke its tax-exempt status, over claims the university failed to protect Jewish students from pro-Palestinian protests. The suit and the statement, taken together, mark an increasingly muscular response from universities following what initially appeared to be a tepid approach.While some university leaders have in recent weeks criticised the administration and indicated they will not abide by its demands, the statement marks the first time presidents have spoken out collectively on the matter. The joint condemnation followed a convening of more than 100 university leaders called by the AAC&U and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences last week to “come together to speak out at this moment of enormity”, said Lynn Pasquarella, the president of the AAC&U.Pasquarella said that there was “widespread agreement” across a variety of academic institutions about the need to take a collective stand.“Much has been written about this flood-the-zone strategy that’s being used in the current attacks on higher education, and it’s a strategy designed to overwhelm campus leaders with a constant barrage of directives, executive orders, and policy announcements that make it impossible to respond to everything all at once,” she said, explaining why it has taken until now for a joint response. “Campus leaders have had a lot to deal with over the past few months, and I think that’s part of the reason, but it’s also the case that they are constrained by boards, by multiple constituencies who are often asking them to do things that are at odds with one another.”The Trump administration has issued a barrage of measures aimed at universities the right has described as “the enemy” – some under the guise of fighting alleged antisemitism on campuses and others in an explicit effort to eradicate diversity and inclusion initiatives. Billions in federal funds are under threat unless universities comply with extreme demands, such as removing academic departments from faculty control, “auditing” the viewpoints of students and faculty, and collaborating with federal authorities as they target international students for detention and deportation. Along with its actions against Harvard, it has threatened and in some cases withheld millions more from Cornell, Northwestern, Brown, Columbia, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania.Columbia has largely accepted the administration’s requirements to restore funding, including placing an academic department under outside oversight. Its president did not sign the collective statement.The measures against the schools, which are already upending academic research, undermine longstanding partnerships between the federal government and universities, and are contributing to an atmosphere of repression, the statement’s signatories note.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Our colleges and universities share a commitment to serve as centers of open inquiry where, in their pursuit of truth, faculty, students, and staff are free to exchange ideas and opinions across a full range of viewpoints without fear of retribution, censorship, or deportation,” they write.Last week, Harvard University issued the strongest rebuke yet of the administration’s demands, with president Alan Garber setting off a showdown with the White House by saying that the university would not “surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights”.While Harvard’s lawsuit was the first by a university, higher education associations and organisations representing faculty have filed other legal challenges over the cuts.Faculty at some universities are also organising to protect one another, with several members of the Big Ten Academic Alliance, a consortium of some of the country’s largest state universities, signing on to a resolution to establish a “mutual defence compact”.At a second convening by the AAC&U on Monday some 120 university leaders also discussed what steps they may take next, including efforts to engage their broader communities and the business world to defend academic freedom.The joint statement, Pasquarella added, was just the beginning, and intended “to signal to the public and to affirm to ourselves what’s at stake here, what’s at risk if this continual infringement on the academy is allowed to continue”. More

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      Mahmoud Khalil’s wife Noor Abdalla gives birth as Ice denies his request to attend

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      Noor Abdalla, the wife of detained Columbia university graduate and Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, has announced the birth of their son.In a statement released on Monday evening, Abdalla wrote: “I welcomed our son into the world earlier today without Mahmoud by my side. Despite our request for ICE to allow Mahmoud to attend the birth, they denied his temporary release to meet our son. This was a purposeful decision by ICE to make me, Mahmoud, and our son suffer.”The Department of Homeland Security denied Khalil the opportunity to attend the birth of his first child, which he was only able to experience via a telephone call. Khalil is being held in a Louisiana detention facility more than 1,000 miles away from the New York hospital where his son was delivered.Abdalla, a 28-year-old dentist who lives in New York, and her son, who was born early Monday morning, are both in good health.Abdalla is a US citizen who was born and raised in Michigan. Her parents immigrated to the US from Syria about 40 years ago.According to emails reviewed by the New York Times, Khalil’s lawyers suggested several ways in which he could have attended the birth, including allowing him a two-week furlough while wearing an ankle monitor and requiring scheduled check-ins.“A two-week furlough in this civil detention matter would be both reasonable and humane so that both parents can be present for the birth of their first child,” the lawyers wrote.The request was denied by the New Orleans field office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.Khalil was arrested on 8 March on grounds that he is considered to be a threat to US foreign policy. Earlier this month, an immigration judge ruled that Khalil is eligible to be deported from the United States.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAbdalla has fought for her husband’s release since the day of his arrest, maintaining that the Trump administration is “trying to silence” anyone who speaks up for Palestinian rights.“We will not be silenced. We will persist, with even greater resolve, and we will pass that strength on to our children and our children’s children – until Palestine is free,” she wrote on 8 April.In her statement shortly after her son’s birth, Abdalla vowed to continue to fight for Khalil’s release. “I will continue to fight every day for Mahmoud to come home to us. I know when Mahmoud is freed, he will show our son how to be brave, thoughtful, and compassionate, just like his dad.” More

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      Sci-fi Musk is brainstorming ways to breed his ‘legion’ more efficiently | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Elon Musk’s never-ending daddy issuesI regret to inform you that, once again, we are all being forced to think about Elon Musk’s gonads. Musk, who has had at least 14 children with four women, hasn’t officially launched a new mini-Musk for a while, but the Wall Street Journal has just dropped some disturbing details about the billionaire’s well-publicized breeding fetish.You’ll be familiar with some of these details already. By now we all know that Musk seems to think that the only way to save western civilization is if people like him have as many children as possible. And you’ve probably read the New York Times report which alleges that Musk, who likes preaching what he practices in regards to populating the world, has a habit of wandering around offering his sperm to strangers.What you might not know, however, is that Musk is so committed to this idea of himself as a superhero saving the universe that, even in private conversations, he apparently speaks like he is a character in a poorly written sci-fi novel. According to the Journal, Musk reportedly refers to his children as a “legion” and has been brainstorming ways to breed more efficiently.“To reach legion-level before the apocalypse we will need to use surrogates,” he reportedly said to Ashley St Clair, the mother of one of his children, in a text message seen by the newspaper.Surrogacy can often be a complex ethical issue. Not in this case. Musk appears to view women as nothing more than walking wombs he can use to further his own narcissistic agenda. Ethics aside for a moment, one has to wonder why a man who styles himself as a tech guru can’t figure out a faster way to pop out offspring than surrogacy. At the very least, I’m surprised that Musk hasn’t yet followed the lead of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who reportedly had visions of using his ranch in New Mexico as a base where women would be inseminated with his sperm and give birth to his babies. But that may come later I suppose. All the money that Doge, Musk’s pet government project, has cut from libraries and medical research might, at this very moment, be getting funneled into an Official Institute of Accelerated Insemination.While Musk may not have a birthing ranch (yet), he does own a very expensive social network which, according to the Journal, he’s been using to solicit more baby mamas. Musk has apparently been engaging with the cryptocurrency influencer Tiffany Fong on X, sending so many followers her way that she earned $21,000 over a two-week period from the revenue-sharing programs for creators on the platform. Once she was enjoying how lucrative it was to be on his good side, the billionaire asked Fong if she was interested in birthing his child. You know, as you do. Fong politely declined and Musk swiftly unfollowed her, causing her X-related income to drop.We all know that Musk has very thin skin. How has he responded to the Journal’s embarrassing reporting? Honestly, in an unusually restrained fashion. Nobody has been sent to El Salvador (yet), no reporters have been doxed. Musk has just dismissed the piece as scurrilous gossip. On Tuesday he tweeted “TMZ > > WSJ”. And, in normal circumstances, Musk would be correct that, as long as all parties involved are consenting adults, his private life is no one else’s business. But Musk is not your run-of-the-mill rich guy, is he? I don’t think Donald Trump or JD Vance believe in very much other than their own advancement. But Musk is an ideologue: he’s inserted himself into the top levels of government and is busy rearranging the US according to his worldview. Understanding all the ins and outs of this worldview is now very much a matter of public interest.It’s also illuminating, I think, to look at the sort of coverage Musk’s shenanigans get, particularly in the conservative press. While people love gawking at Musk, he’s still widely seen as an eccentric genius. Even the headline of the Wall Street Journal piece: “The tactics Elon Musk uses to manage his ‘Legion’ of babies – and their mothers”, seemed to suggest admiration for his multitasking. I’ve offered up this thought experiment before, but just humor me again and imagine a world where a woman acted like Musk. You can’t, can you? She’d be eviscerated on Fox News. There’d be a million thought pieces about what a terrible mother she was. Absolutely nobody would consider her a genius and she certainly wouldn’t be advising the president. There is perhaps no better embodiment of gendered double standards than Musk. And now he’s set on exporting those double standards to Mars.Give Fatima Hassouna a ‘loud death’Being a journalist in Gaza is a death sentence, with Israel apparently set on ensuring a complete media blackout of the ongoing genocide. On Wednesday, days before her wedding, Fatima Hassouna, a young photojournalist who is the subject of a new documentary, became one of the latest journalists to be killed by Israel. A strike on her home killed her along with 10 members of her family, including her pregnant sister. “If I die, I want a loud death,” Hassouna had written on social media. “I don’t want to be just breaking news, or a number in a group, I want a death that the world will hear.”This is what it means to be Palestinian: to have to beg the world to care about you. To have cowards avert your eyes as you are massacred. To have the architects of your annihilation trot around the world being treated as VIPs by countries that once pretended to care about human rights.Self-identifying ‘hot girls’ are mobilizing to elect a progressive as New York City mayorI fully endorse this.Young women now binge drink more than young menWhile gen Z may drink less than previous generations, the gender gap in risky drinking has been narrowing. A new study finds that women aged 18-25 are now actually drinking slightly more than men the same age.Sudan: two years of war and shameful international neglect“Last week, Amnesty International released a new investigation finding the Rapid Support Forces committed widespread sexual violence, including rape, gang rape and sexual slavery, amounting to possible crimes against humanity,” Amnesty International’s Erika Guevara Rosas said in a statement marking the two-year anniversary of the outbreak of Sudan’s civil war. “Despite these atrocities, the world has largely chosen to remain passive. Alarmingly, the UN Security Council has failed to implement a comprehensive arms embargo on Sudan to halt the constant flow of weapons fueling these heinous crimes.”A crack in the manosphere: Joe Rogan’s guests are revoltingI chuckled a lot at this headline.Everyone is making fun of Katy Perry for her little space trip, even Wendy’sThe fast-food chain is refusing to apologize to the singer for a tweet suggesting she should be sent back to space. The Blue Origin flight has been widely panned, with the model and actor Emily Ratajkowski saying she was “disgusted” by the 11-minute space flight. “That’s end time shit,” Ratajkowski said. “Like, this is beyond parody.”The week in pawtriarchyRemember when Trump got attacked by an angry bald eagle during a photoshoot in 2015? Unfortunately, the bird kingdom did not properly organize to stop his presidency back then but it seems that some of our feathered friends have decided to fight the Maga powers that be. Last Friday a pigeon landed on Fox News’s Peter Doocy’s head while the White House correspondent was wrapping up a segment on tariffs. Not the first time that a Fox News correspondent has looked bird-brained.

      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist More