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      Rightwing settlers in Israel welcome ‘dream team’ of Trump and his hardline appointments

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      Rightwing settlers and extremist nationalist Zionists in Israel have described top officials in Donald Trump’s new administration as a “dream team” which will offer a “unique and special opportunity” to expand Israel’s hold on occupied territory and permanently end any prospect of a Palestinian state.Palestinian groups and leftwing NGOs in Israel have been shocked by Trump’s appointment of outspoken supporters of the projects of far-right Israeli activists and say the government of Benjamin Netanyahu has been emboldened by Trump’s victory.“The series of appointments announced by US president-elect Donald Trump should worry everyone who cares about Israel’s future,” an editorial in the leftwing newspaper Haaretz warned.Since the US election, authorities have pushed ahead with demolishing Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which were occupied in 1967.Last week, Palestinian residents of al-Bustan in East Jerusalem were sifting through debris caused by the recent demolition of nine houses by municipal authorities after an Israeli court ruled their construction illegal.Fakhri Abu Diab, a veteran activist who for years has led resistance to efforts to demolish the homes of Palestinian families in al-Bustan, said bulldozers had returned on the day of the US elections to destroy the part of his house left standing by municipal demolition teams earlier this year.Abu Diab, 62, said 40 people, including children, had been left homeless and that 115 homes were now threatened.“Israel has wanted to demolish here for 20 years and are now seizing the opportunity. This is just a way to punish us and make us leave. I am here, where my parents and grandparents were, and will stay here,” Abu Diab said. His wife, Amina, said that with Trump in power there was “nothing to restrain Israel”.The Jerusalem municipality said the buildings were located on land designated as an open public area.The Israeli rights group Ir Amim argued that the true aim of the demolitions was to connect Israeli settler pockets implanted in Palestinian ­neighbourhoods to west Jerusalem and said local authorities had been emboldened by Trump’s win. The demolitions in al-Bustan “could serve as a portent of what is to come”, Ir Amim said.Also last week, a Bedouin village in the Negev desert was demolished to make way for a new Orthodox Jewish community on the orders of Itamar Ben Gvir, the far-right national security minister, and 25 Palestinian structures in the West Bank were knocked down, according to the UN.Trump’s picks have surprised even hardliners. The nominee for secretary of state, Republican senator Marco Rubio, has said he opposes a ceasefire in Gaza and believes Israel should destroy “every element” of Hamas, whom he described as “vicious animals”, while Elise Stefanik, proposed as ambassador to the United Nations, has called the UN a “cesspool of antisemitism” for its condemnation of deaths in Gaza.The new US ambassador to Israel is set to be Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian who backs the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and has called a two-state solution in Palestine “unworkable”. During a visit to Israel in 2017, Huckabee said: “There is no such thing as a West Bank. There’s no such thing as a settlement – they are communities, they’re neighbourhoods, they’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.”Pete Hegseth, the likely defence secretary, is another evangelical Christian who has tattoos of Christian symbols and slogans often associated with the Crusades and the far right.“Israel could never have asked for anything more than this,” said Daniel Luria, a director who speaks for Ateret Cohanim – an NGO which describes its aims as reclaiming and rebuilding a united Jerusalem for the Jewish people, and is behind a number of controversial projects in the city, including the eviction of Palestinian families from their homes to make way for Jewish families or religious students.“There’s no such thing as an Arab country on the land of Israel. The fact that there’s been many attempts over the years to do something different is irrelevant,” Luria said. “So we’ve got a very unique situation now … to really have literally a new Middle East, and readjust everything.”Some rightwing radicals have compared Trump to the Persian king Cyrus the Great, who conquered Babylon in 539BC, allowing exiled Jews to return to Jerusalem.Pro-settler parties hold key posts in Israel’s coalition government, the most rightwing the country has known. Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister and an outspoken advocate of expanded settlements, last week said that 2025 would be “the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria”, referring to the West Bank in the biblical terms used by rightwing Israelis and their US supporters, and signalling a hope of annexing the occupied territories.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionExpansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem has surged throughout the war that followed the Hamas attacks into Israel on 7 October, which killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians. More than 43,000 have died in Israel’s offensive in Gaza, also mostly civilians.Several Israeli ministers, including Smotrich, were present at a conference last month which called for the return of Jewish settlements in Gaza.View image in fullscreenHuckabee, who has refused to use any terms other than Judea and Samaria to describe the West Bank, is an enthusiastic supporter of the City of David Foundation, a government-funded archeological park in a Palestinian neighbourhood in Jerusalem. It is run by Elad, an Israeli settler group accused of displacing Palestinian families from Jerusalem by buying Palestinian houses and using controversial laws that let the state take over Palestinian property.An EU report in 2018 said Elad’s projects in parts of East Jerusalem were being used “as a political tool to modify the historical narrative and to support, legitimise and expand settlements”.The foundation refused to discuss the projects’ support from the Israeli government and overseas.Last week, tourists sat under the olive trees and heard lectures at the City of David information centre, just outside Jerusalem’s Old City walls.Jack Holford, a 62-year-old retired software engineer visiting Jerusalem with his wife, Debbie, said: “We believe that … God has a plan for Israel and that God said they own the land. We consider ourselves believers and we are part of God’s plan revealed through Israel for the whole world. There are Arabs, Palestinians and Jews and they are all Israelis.”Trump’s first term saw unprecedented steps to support Israel’s territorial claims, including recognising Jerusalem as its capital and moving the US embassy there, and recognising Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights.Pro-settlement activists believe Trump’s picks mean the new administration will go much further.“They’ve spoken about Jews having the right to live everywhere, that it’s impossible to divide [Jerusalem] into two, that you can’t allow hatred and evil on your back doorstep and terror … and that comes from a biblical background … Just like I see King David and Abraham, they see them also,” Luria said. More

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      Biden now has his best opening to end Israel’s war on Gaza – and won’t use it | Mohamad Bazzi

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      When the histories of his administration are written, it will be clear that Joe Biden held on to his callous disregard for Palestinians until the end of his presidency. How else to explain why Biden would refuse a final chance to stop Israel’s brutal war on Gaza and save Palestinian lives, when he has nothing to lose?On Tuesday, the Biden administration quietly ignored its own deadline for Israel to increase the minuscule amount of humanitarian aid it allows to enter Gaza. The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, imposed the 30-day deadline in a letter sent to Israeli officials on 13 October, which warned that they must take “concrete measures” to ensure that Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza have access to food, medicine and other necessities. The administration said it could suspend US military support to Israel if conditions did not improve. Despite the US ultimatum, the amount of aid reaching the besieged territory in October had dropped to its lowest level in 11 months.As the deadline passed, the Biden administration did what it has done for more than a year: it caved and continued sending weapons to the government of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, despite the devastation and famine Israel has inflicted on Gaza. And Washington sheepishly told the world that it would not impose any consequences on Israel, even though the US is legally bound to stop arming an ally that blocks humanitarian aid in a conflict zone.It’s the latest in a long series of decisions by Biden over the past 13 months that show his disdain for Palestinian lives. But his lack of action this week is especially egregious because Biden is politically unrestrained: the presidential election is over, and Donald Trump won. Biden can do whatever he wants without incurring a political cost. He doesn’t even have to worry about a transition to his fellow Democrat and vice-president, Kamala Harris. If there was ever a time for Biden to use his considerable power to save Palestinians, this was it. Yet he squandered this final opportunity to make the right and moral choice – and help end the Gaza war before leaving office.Biden’s decision to keep supplying weapons to Israel reinforces his legacy as the primary enabler of the slaughter in Gaza, and Netanyahu’s campaign to expand the war into Lebanon. While Biden and his allies have done a lot of hand-wringing about Trump’s disregard for the rule of law, the Biden administration failed to uphold US law and its own policies – and it has undermined US credibility around the world even before Trump takes office once again.Biden has been fully complicit in Israel’s destruction of Gaza, in which more than 43,000 Palestinians have been killed, although the true figure is probably much higher. One estimate published by researchers in the Lancet, a medical journal, found that the death toll could eventually reach 186,000. That accounts for “indirect casualties” of war, such as widespread hunger, a cholera epidemic, unsanitary conditions and the destruction of Gaza’s health system.Following a relentless Israeli military assault that started after the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, nearly all of Gaza’s 2.1 million people have been displaced at least once, and are now living in makeshift tents or in the ruins of bombed-out buildings. Last week, a UN-affiliated group of experts warned that famine is imminent, or may already be unfolding, in northern Gaza – and that the enclave’s entire population faces acute food insecurity, which is one step below a full-blown famine.Days after Biden decided to continue arming Israel into the twilight of his presidency, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a devastating 154-page report that contradicted most US and Israeli assurances that Israel is not violating international law. The report, issued on Thursday, concluded: “Israeli authorities have caused the massive, deliberate forced displacement of Palestinian civilians in Gaza since October 2023 and are responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity.” HRW urged western governments to impose sanctions and suspend their arms shipments to Israel.The US has provided Israel with nearly $18bn in weapons and other military assistance since October 2023, according to a report released last month by Brown University. Washington spent another $4.8bn on its own military activities in the Middle East due to the conflict. Overall, the Biden administration spent at least $22.7bn in US taxpayer funds to enable Netanyahu and his government to prolong the Gaza war.But the US administration did not have to become so deeply complicit in Israel’s war crimes. Biden and his aides had the leverage, policy tools and legal mechanisms to restrain Israel, end the conflict, and save thousands of Palestinian lives. For months, Biden, along with his secretary of state, squandered any influence they could have exerted over Netanyahu by refusing to enforce US law and their own administration’s policies on weapons transfers.In February, as Biden faced pressure from a handful of Democrats in Congress critical of his unwavering support for Israel, he issued a new national security memo which required the state department to certify that recipients of US weapons would allow the delivery of humanitarian aid during active conflicts and abide by international law. Biden’s memo did not set new policies for arms transfers to foreign countries, but instead used provisions of existing US laws, especially under the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWashington can suspend shipments if it suspects that a foreign military will use US weapons to carry out violations of international law, or to countries that block the delivery of humanitarian aid – as Israel has done throughout its war in Gaza. By May, the state department sent a 46-page report to Congress full of bureaucratic double-speak to justify Biden’s decision to flout US and international laws to protect Netanyahu.Long before the administration’s report, the UN and human rights groups had amply documented that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war – a violation of international law – and deliberately blocking food and other supplies from entering Gaza.Yet the report avoided concluding that the Israeli military had obstructed humanitarian aid, or violated international law while using US weapons. Such findings would have forced Biden to suspend most weapons shipments to Israel under the policies outlined in his own national security memo. But instead of upholding US law and using the suspension of military support to force Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire, Biden sat by and enabled Israel to kill thousands of Palestinians since May.Back then, Biden was still running for re-election and could have feared political repercussions for breaking with Netanyahu. But this week, the US president was as free from politics as he’s ever been in his entire career. He simply decided that Palestinians don’t matter – and sealed his legacy as the enabler of Israel’s war crimes.

      Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian center for Near Eastern studies, and a journalism professor at New York University More

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      Elizabeth Warren denounces Biden administration over Gaza humanitarian situation

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      Elizabeth Warren, a leading progressive voice in the US Senate, has denounced the Biden administration’s failure to punish Israel over the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza and endorsed a joint resolution of disapproval in Congress.The amount of aid reaching the territory has dropped to the lowest level in 11 months, official Israeli figures show. The White House last month gave Israel an ultimatum of 30 days to improve conditions or risk losing military support. As the deadline expired on Tuesday, international aid groups said Israel had fallen far short.But the US state department announced it would not take any punitive action, insisting that Israel was making limited progress and was not blocking aid and therefore not violating US law. Warren condemned the Biden administration’s decision to continue supplying arms to its ally.“On October 13, the Biden administration told Prime Minister Netanyahu that his government had 30 days to increase humanitarian aid into Gaza or face the consequences under US law, which would include cutting off military assistance,” the Massachusetts senator said in a statement shared with the Guardian.“Thirty days later, the Biden administration acknowledged that Israel’s actions had not significantly expanded food, water and basic necessities for desperate Palestinian civilians. Despite Netanyahu’s failure to meet the United States’ demands, the Biden administration has taken no action to restrict the flow of offensive weapons.”For the first time on the issue, Warren threw her weight behind a joint resolution of disapproval, a legislative tool that enables Congress to overturn actions taken by the executive branch. Such a resolution must pass both the House of Representatives and the Senate.She added: “The failure by the Biden administration to follow US law and to suspend arms shipments is a grave mistake that undermines American credibility worldwide. If this administration will not act, Congress must step up to enforce US law and hold the Netanyahu government accountable through a joint resolution of disapproval.”Eight international aid groups have said that Israel failed to meet the US demands to improve access for assistance, while food security experts have said it is likely that famine is imminent in parts of Gaza.Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, told reporters on Wednesday that Israel had taken some steps to improve aid but they needed to be sustained to take effect. He called on Israel to rescind evacuation orders to allow those displaced by its operations to return home and to resume commercial trucking deliveries into Gaza.Biden has backed Israel since Hamas-led gunmen attacked the country in October 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking 250 hostages. Since then, more than 43,500 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed in Gaza, with 2 million displaced people and much of the strip reduced to rubble.The president, whose term ends in January and who will be replaced by his predecessor Donald Trump, is facing growing dissent from Democrats over his handling of the war. Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland told Zeteo this week: “President Biden’s inaction, given the suffering in Gaza, is shameful. I mean, there’s no other word for it.”Bernie Sanders, an independent senator for Vermont, announced that next week he will bring joint resolutions of disapproval that would block the sale of certain weapons to Israel. “There is no longer any doubt that Netanyahu’s extremist government is in clear violation of US and international law as it wages a barbaric war against the Palestinian people in Gaza,” he said.And on Thursday, 15 members of the Senate and 69 members of the House announced efforts to press the Biden administration to hold members of the Netanyahu government – specifically, the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, and the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir – and others accountable for the rise in settler violence, settlement expansion and destabilising activity in the West Bank. More

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      Not changing course on Gaza was a colossal mistake by Kamala Harris | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      Could Kamala Harris have won the election if she had promised to change course in Gaza? It’s impossible to know, of course, but there’s reason to think so. Instead, Harris hewed far too closely to Biden’s position, alienating large numbers of voters along the way. The result? We can expect the catastrophe for the Palestinian people to continue, while we learn to live with a much more dangerous Donald Trump, a man whose far-right agenda threatens many of us in and out of the United States.What seems to have doomed Harris most was not so much traditional Democrats casting votes for the Republican Trump, though there was some of that. In fact, party loyalty, at around 95% for both parties, was basically the same as in 2020. Rather, Harris’s shortcomings point to the rank-and-file of the Democratic party not coming out to vote and to more first-time voters casting Republican ballots. We don’t have the final voter tally yet, but so far Harris has amassed just over 68m votes, compared with Trump’s 72m. Biden, by contrast, earned over 81m votes in 2020. By the time the final numbers are in, it’s likely that Trump will have won more than the 74m votes he had in 2020, and Harris will have been the first Democrat to lose the popular vote in 20 years.Some of those lost votes surely must be attributable to Harris’s weak position on Palestine. A significant majority of young people sympathize with Palestinian rights, according to the Pew Research Center, and young people are also highly critical of Biden’s policies on Palestine. Meanwhile, reporting from around the nation indicates that voter turnout among young people in this election was low. The Chicago board of elections noted that 53% of registered voters between the ages of 18 and 24 cast a ballot, well below the city’s average turnout of 58%. And compared with the 2020 election, Trump doubled his support from first-time voters there.In Dearborn, Michigan, where 55% of the population is of Middle Eastern descent, Trump scored a victory over Harris, an upset considering Biden won Dearborn with almost 70% of the vote in 2020. And while Black voters continued to overwhelmingly support Harris, their numbers also dropped, reflecting a lack of excitement for the vice-president. Christopher Shell, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Foreign Policy magazine that “it’s hard to ignore the impact of US war-making under the Biden-Harris administration and the administration’s inconsistent stance on issues like the Israel-Palestine conflict, which likely deflated enthusiasm for Harris among the influential Black voting bloc”.If you’re wondering what such inconsistencies regarding Gaza could be, you can watch a report by CNN that aired on 1 November, which showed how the Harris campaign aired two completely different ads about their position. One ad, aimed at Arab American voters in Michigan, shows Harris speaking from a podium. “What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating,” she says. “We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering, and I will not be silent.” Meanwhile, in another ad, this time aimed at Jewish voters in Pennsylvania, she says: “Let me be clear. I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself, because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that a terrorist organization called Hamas caused on October 7.”It gets worse. In the Pennsylvania ad, the campaign also spliced together two parts of a Harris speech, which enabled them to cut out the part where Harris talks about ending the suffering in Gaza so that “the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination”. CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski sums this all up understatedly. “Here you have two entirely different constituencies,” he says, “and they are getting two entirely different messages.”I realize I sound like I’m Monday-morning quarterbacking, but many thousands of people – myself included – had been warning the Democrats for months that they had to take a stand against the wholesale slaughter of innocent people if they wanted to earn our trust, let alone earn our vote. Instead, not only did the Harris campaign refuse to let a Palestinian American on stage during their national convention in August and not only did they remove an Arab Muslim Democrat from a rally in late October, but they also decided in their wisdom to trot out two different messages to two different communities, thinking no one would notice. It seems they believed that Democrats would not vote for Trump in any large number, but how did they not realize that if you are repeatedly ignored, insulted and slighted by your party, then you just might not come out to vote.Obviously, Gaza was not the only issue in this campaign, and voters had multiple reasons for their choices, including the economy and concerns over asylum policies, among others. But conventional wisdom already seems to be lining up to say that Gaza played no discernible role in Harris’s defeat, pointing out that the margins in Trump’s victories in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia appear to be greater than any measurable voter discontent over a largely US-funded genocide, the term, incidentally, that prominent experts increasingly use to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza.But much of that post-election analysis is based on exit polling, and exit polling, as far as I know, does not aim to capture why people did not come out to vote in the first place. Why Democratic voters didn’t show up is the crucial question that must be posed. And the answer, I suspect, is abundantly clear. Not changing course on Gaza was a colossal mistake on the part of the Harris campaign, a fatal error certainly for Palestinians and quite likely, as we now see, for Americans, too.

      Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More

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      ‘They blew it’: Democrats lost 22,000 votes in Michigan’s heavily Arab American cities

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      Kamala Harris received at least 22,000 fewer votes than Joe Biden did four years ago in Michigan’s most heavily Arab American and Muslim cities, a Guardian analysis of raw vote data in the critical swing state finds.The numbers also show Trump made small gains – about 9,000 votes – across those areas, suggesting Harris’s loss there is more attributable to Arab Americans either not voting or casting ballots for third-party candidates.Support for Democrats also fell in seven precincts around the country with significant Arab American or Muslim populations, according to data compiled by the Arab American Institute. It found a combined drop in the seven precincts, from about 4,900 votes in 2020 to just 3,400 this election.Another analysis, based on nationwide exit polling by the Council on American Islamic Relations, found 53% of Muslim Americans voted for Jill Stein. The same poll showed 21% of Muslims cast a ballot for Trump and 20.3% for Harris.The drop in Democratic support in Hamtramck, Dearborn and Dearborn Heights – three Michigan cities with the nation’s largest Arab American and Muslim populations per capita – represent nearly 27% of the 81,000-vote difference between Harris and Donald Trump’s tallies in the state.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      The number of votes Harris lost in Michigan over the White House’s Israel policy is almost certainly higher. The analysis only looked at the three population centers, not the large Arab American population scattered throughout the region. Some estimated before the election that Harris could lose as many as 90,000 votes in the state.In Dearborn, a Detroit suburb that is nearly 60% Arab American, Biden received about 31,000 votes in 2020, while Harris received just over 15,000. Trump, who campaigned in Dearborn in the election’s waning days, received about 18,000 votes, up from 13,000 last election. Meanwhile, Stein picked up about 7,600 Dearborn votes this year.Stein and Cornell West, third-party candidates who made inroads with voters frustrated with Harris but unwilling to vote for Trump, combined for about 50,000 votes statewide.Michigan is virtually a must-win swing state, and frustration here with the Biden administration’s Gaza policy was viewed as a major Harris liability. Though the issue accounts for a significant portion of Harris’s loss in the state, she also underperformed with Michigan voters across multiple demographics, and inflation was a top issue for many.But Arab American and Muslim voters who defected from the Democratic party made a “key difference” across upper midwest swing states, said the Muslims for Trump founder Rabiul Chowdhury. He said Trump and his surrogates worked in heavily Arab American areas to make amends for his past anti-Muslim record, and promised peace in Gaza and the Middle East. Harris did not, he said.“Everyone’s ultimate goal was to punish Harris and the best way to do this was to vote for Trump,” Chowdhury said.Representative Rashida Tlaib, who is Palestinian American and Congress’s most vocal critic of US-Israel policy, received more than 24,000 votes in Dearborn, doubling Harris’s total. However, she only slightly outran Harris in neighboring Dearborn Heights.In Hamtramck, a city neighboring Detroit that is about 60% Muslim or Arab American, Biden received about 6,500 votes in 2020, while Harris dropped to 3,200. Meanwhile, Trump’s vote total in the city increased by about 2,000, while Stein received just over 600 votes.Trump increasing his votes in Hamtramck but not Dearborn may reflect that Yemeni and Bangladeshi American immigrants in Hamtramck are broadly considered to be more conservative than Dearborn’s largely Lebanese population, observers say. Dearborn heavily backed Bernie Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 primaries, and its mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, was once among the most progressive representatives in the statehouse.Hamtramck’s mayor, Amer Ghalib, is deeply socially conservative. He endorsed Trump for the presidential election, and on Monday spoke at Trump’s final campaign rally in the state.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn Dearborn Heights, a city that is about half Arab American, Biden won with more than 12,000 votes in 2020; this election, Trump won the city with 11,000 votes, and Harris received 9,000.Meanwhile, in a Houston precinct with a significant Arab American population, Democratic support fell from 520 votes to 300 votes. Democratic support in a Minneapolis precinct where Muslim or Arab Americans comprise a majority of voters fell from about 2,100 votes to 1,100 votes.Arab American pollster and Democratic National Committee member James Zogby noted the Harris campaign was repeatedly warned of the votes she would lose if she did not change course on Gaza or meet with key community leaders.“They blew it,” Zogby said. “We gave [the Harris campaign] multiple opportunities and ideas as to how to do this, and they finally started with three days out, but it was way too late in the game.”Mohamed Gula, director of Emgage, a Muslim political advocacy group, said “a lot has to change and there’s a lot Democrats would have to do” to win back Arab and Muslim voters.“There wasn’t a full belief that Trump was better than Harris – it was that the situation was not acceptable and there needs to be change, and we will take whatever comes from that and do what we need to,” he said.Chowdury said Muslim voters in 2028 will support the party that most promotes peace.“We don’t know what the future holds,” he said. “Today it’s a matter of ending the war and supporting the guy who is giving us the assurance of ending the war.”Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      US diplomats brace as Trump plans foreign policy shake-up in wider purge of government

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      The US foreign policy establishment is set for one of the biggest shake-ups in years as Donald Trump has vowed to both revamp US policy abroad and to root out the so-called “deep state” by firing thousands of government workers – including those among the ranks of America’s diplomatic corps.Trump’s electoral victory is also likely to push the Biden administration to speed up efforts to support Ukraine before Trump can cut off military aid, hamper the already-modest efforts to restrain Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza and Lebanon and lead to a fresh effort to slash and burn through major parts of US bureaucracy including the state department.Trump backers have said he will be more organised during his second term, often dubbed “Trump 2.0”, and on the day after election day US media reported that Trump had already chosen Brian Hook, a hawkish State Department official during the first Trump administration, to lead the transition for America’s diplomats.And yet analysts, serving and former US diplomats and foreign officials said that it remained difficult to separate Trump’s bluster from his actual plans when he takes power in January. What is clear is that his priority is to bin many of the policies put in place by his predecessor.“I’m skeptical that the transition process will be super-impactful since the natural instinct of the new team will be to toss all of Biden’s foreign policy in the dumpster,” one former senior diplomat said.“If you go back to 2016, Mexico didn’t pay for the wall. And, you know, it doesn’t look like there was a secret plan to defeat Isis,” said Richard Fontaine, the CEO of the Center for a New American Security thinktank. “Some of these things didn’t turn out the way that they were talked about on that campaign trail and we go into this without really knowing what the president’s proposal will be for all of this – and what he will do.”One clear priority, however, is to target many of those involved in crafting US foreign policy as part of a broader purge of the US government.Trump has vowed to revive Schedule F, a designation that would strip tens of thousands of federal employees of their protections as civil servants and define them instead as political appointees, giving Trump immense powers to fire “rogue bureaucrats”, as he called them in a campaign statement.Within the State Department, there are concerns that Trump could target the bureaus that focus specifically on issues that he has attacked during his reelection campaign such as immigration. In particular, he could slash entire bureaus of the State Department, including the bureau of population, refugees and migration (PRM, which resettled 125,000 refugees to the US in 2022 alone), as well as the bureau of democracy, human rights and labor, which has focused on the violation of the rights of Palestinians by Israel.Project 2025, a policy memo released by the conservative Heritage Foundation, suggested that Trump would merely reassign PRM to shift resources to “challenges stemming from the current immigration situation until the crisis can be contained” and said it would demand “indefinite curtailment of the number of USRAP [United States refugee admissions program] refugee admissions”.But the blueprint, authored by Kiron Skinner, a former director of policy planning at the State Department during the first Trump administration, went further, suggesting that Trump could simply freeze the agency’s work for a complete reevaluation of its earlier policy.“Before inauguration, the president-elect’s department transition team should assess every aspect of State Department negotiations and funding commitments,” a section of the memo said. After inauguration, Skinner wrote, the secretary of state should “order an immediate freeze on all efforts to implement unratified treaties and international agreements, allocation of resources, foreign assistance disbursements, domestic and international contracts and payments, hiring and recruiting decisions, etc” pending a review by a political appointee.“Everyone is bracing [themselves],” said one diplomat stationed abroad. “Some [diplomats] may choose to leave before he even arrives.”Trump has also vowed to “overhaul federal departments and agencies, firing all of the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus”.As Joe Biden enters his lame duck period, the administration will focus on trying to push through $6bn in aid that has already been approved for Ukraine, as well as exerting whatever leverage remains in his administration to find an unlikely ceasefire in Gaza.At the same time, they will have to calm a nervous world waiting to see what Trump has planned for his second term.“I think they’re going to do everything they can to make the case that the United States needs to continue to aid Ukraine, and they’ll have to spend a lot of time, I’m sure, dealing with nervous Ukrainians and nervous Europeans,” said Fontaine. At an upcoming G20 summit in Rio, the current administration was “going to try to reassure the rest of the world that a lot of the things that they have done over the past four years are going to stick into the future rather than just be kind of undone”.“And,” he added, “we’ll see what the reaction to that is.” More

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      Harris vows at Michigan rally to ‘do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza’

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      Kamala Harris pledged to “do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza” in her final rally in Michigan on Sunday, as she attempted to appeal to the state’s large Arab American and Muslim American population two days out from the election.Michigan is home to about 240,000 registered Muslim voters, a majority of whom voted for Biden in 2020, helping him to a narrow victory over Donald Trump. But Arab Americans and Muslim Americans in the state have expressed dissatisfaction over the vice-president’s stance on Israel’s war on Gaza, and polling suggests that these voters are gravitating towards Jill Stein, the Green party candidate.With Harris and the former president essentially tied in Michigan, a drop in voting numbers for either could be critical, and Harris made a clear appeal at the beginning of her speech.“We are joined today by leaders of the Arab American community, which has deep and proud roots here in Michigan, and I want to say this year has been difficult, given the scale of death and destruction in Gaza and given the civilian casualties and displacement in Lebanon,” Harris said.“It is devastating, and as president, I will do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza, to bring home the hostages, end the suffering in Gaza, ensure Israel is secure and ensure the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, freedom, security and self-determination.”Speaking at the Michigan State University campus, Harris repeated her campaign promise to “turn the page on a decade of politics driven by fear and division”. Harris did not mention Trump by name in East Lansing, as she gave an address that struck a hopeful tone for the future.“America is ready for a fresh start, ready for a new way forward, where we see our fellow American not as an enemy, but as a neighbor,” she said.“We are ready for a president who knows that the true measure of a leader is not based on who you beat down, it is based on who you lift up.”

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      Harris was making her fourth stop of the day in Michigan, having earlier spoken at a church in Detroit and stopped by a barber shop in Pontiac. The state is key to her chances of success, but the result is likely to be close. Trump won Michigan by about 10,000 votes in 2016 as he demolished Democrats’ “blue wall”, and Biden also carried the state by a narrow margin in 2020. Trump is holding his final rally of the campaign in Michigan on Monday night, but Harris was defiant.“We need to finish strong. So for the next two days we still have a lot of work to do but here’s the thing: we like hard work. Hard work is good work. Hard work is joyful work,” she said.“And make no mistake, we will win.”It was a raucous atmosphere at the rally, Harris’s final stop in Michigan before Tuesday’s vote. She repeatedly had to pause for loud chants of “Kamala, Kamala” from a diverse crowd who seemed enthusiastic about voting for her“I feel more energized and more excited in this election than I have in a while,” said Latonya Demps, 40, a small business owner and a Michigan State alumna.“I’m very excited to vote for Harris. As a woman she speaks for my rights and the rights of women that we have fought for for a very, very long time: the right to choose, the right to have equity and access, also freedom for all of us in terms of climate change, in terms of our economy, the type of neighbors we want to have, the families that we want to raise, I think she represents the values that are really important to me.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis week Democrats have fought to counter the gains made by Stein among Arab American and Muslim American voters in Michigan, with the Democratic National Committee launching a series of ads on Instagram and YouTube aiming to discourage people from voting for Stein and Cornel West, who is running as an independent and is also a critic of Israel.The ads highlight recent comments by Trump that he likes Stein “very much”, because: “She takes 100% from [Democrats].” The pro-Democrat organization MoveOn has also been running a “seven-figure” ad campaign this week, which it said was designed to appeal to people who are yet to decide on a candidate and “third-party curious voters”.Polling on the issue has yielded inconsistent results. Last week a national survey of Arab Americans, conducted by the Arab News Research and Studies Unit, found 43% supporting Trump compared with 41% for Harris, and 4% backing Stein, while a survey of Muslim Americans, by the Council on American-Islamic Relations of American Muslims, found that 42.3% plan to vote for Stein, 41% for Harris and 9.8% for Trump.Despite that uncertainty, Harris supporters left buoyant on Sunday night.“She’s going to be the first Black woman president that we’ve had. She’s actually going to fight for our rights. She’s fighting for women’s reproductive rights, she’s also fighting for the middle class, for entrepreneurs, and business owners like myself,” said Zay Worthey, 19.Worthey said he was “100%” confident that Harris will win the White House on Tuesday.“Because she has something that Donald Trump doesn’t: community,” Worthey said.“She’s really working and fighting for the people of America, and Donald Trump is just only working for the people of the rich.” More