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      US distances itself from Gaza food delivery group amid questions over its leadership, funding

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      After a rollout trumpeted by US officials, the US- and Israeli-backed effort that claimed it would return large-scale food deliveries to Gaza was born an orphan, with questions growing over its leadership, sources of funding and ties to Israeli officials and private US security contractors.The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation had said it would securely provide food supplies to the Gaza Strip, ending an Israeli blockade that UN officials say have led to the brink of a famine.Instead, early reports and leaked video of its operations that began this week have depicted a scene of chaos, with crowds storming a distribution site and Israeli military officials confirming they had fired “warning shots” to restore order. Gaza health officials said at least one civilian had been killed and 48 injured in the incident.In a statement, GHF downplayed the episode, claimed there had been no casualties, and said it had distributed 14,550 food boxes, or 840,262 meals, according to its own calculations.But GHF had no experience distributing food in a famine zone, and as of Wednesday, its leadership remained opaque, if not deliberately obscure. A number of executives and board members have refuted links to the group or stepped down, including Jake Wood, the ex-Marine who previously headed the group. When he resigned on Sunday, he said that it “is not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which I will not abandon”. The group named John Acree, a former senior official at USAID, as its interim executive director.Both a Geneva-based company and a Delaware-based company tied to the organisation are reportedly being dissolved, a GHF spokesperson told an investigative Israeli media outlet, increasing speculation over its initiators and sources of funding. The New York Times has reported that the idea for the group came from “Israeli officials in the earliest weeks of the war” as a way to undermine Hamas.And the US state department has also distanced itself from GHF’s operations, with a spokesperson saying she could not speak to the group’s chaotic rollout or what plans could be made to extend aid to hundreds of thousands more people in Gaza who would not receive aid.“This is not a state department effort. We don’t have a plan,” Tammy Bruce, the state department spokesperson, said during a briefing on Tuesday when asked about plans to extend aid deliveries to those in the north of the Gaza Strip. “I’m not going to speculate or to say what they should or should not do.”She added that any questions about the group’s work should be addressed solely to the group.“The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has an email,” Bruce said. “You can – they should be reached out to, and that’s what I’d recommend regarding plans to expand, plans to make assessments of what’s worked and what hasn’t at this point and what changes they might make. And what the goal is – clearly the goal is to reach as many people as possible.”But when contacted by the Guardian, the group said it couldn’t provide a representative for an interview and did not immediately respond to inquiries about its current leadership, where it was registered or its links to US security contractors.The group did defend its food distribution, denying Palestinian crowds had been fired upon or that anyone had been injured at its distribution sites.A statement sent to the Guardian from GHF said that under its protocol “for a brief moment the GHF team intentionally relaxed its security protocols to safeguard against crowd reactions to finally receiving food”.The group in part blamed the “pressure” on the distribution site due to “acute hunger and Hamas-imposed blockades, which create dangerous conditions outside the gates”.The statement did not address Israel’s role in preventing deliveries of aid.“Unfortunately, there are many parties who wish to see GHF fail,” the group said.The UN and other humanitarian organisations have refused to work with GHF, arguing that doing so would compromise efforts to reach civilians in all conflict zones, and put at risk both their teams and local people.“Yesterday, we saw tens of thousands of desperate people under fire, storming a militarized distribution point established on the rubble of their homes,” said Jonathan Whittall, the head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.Others have described the effort as an attempt to use deliveries of aid as a political weapon.Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s top diplomat, said that the bloc opposed the “privatisation of the distribution of humanitarian aid. Humanitarian aid cannot be weaponized.” More

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      Judges thwart Trump effort to deport pro-Palestinian students – but their fight isn’t over

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      The Trump administration suffered yet another blow this past week to its efforts to deport international students over their pro-Palestinian speech, when a third federal judge threw a wrench into a government campaign widely criticized as a political witch hunt with little historical precedent.On Wednesday, a federal judge in Virginia ordered immigration authorities to release Georgetown University postdoctoral fellow Badar Khan Suri from custody. The Indian scholar’s release followed that of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University student from Turkey, and Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian permanent resident and Columbia University student. The administration is seeking to deport all of them on the grounds that their presence in the US is harmful to the country’s foreign policy, part of a crackdown on political dissent that has sent shockwaves through US campuses.Only the first foreign student to be detained by the administration over his activism, Mahmoud Khalil, a US permanent resident of Palestinian descent, remains in detention more than two months after being taken from his Columbia University residential building. Yunseo Chung, another Columbia student and green card holder, went into hiding and sued the administration in March before authorities could detain her; others have left the country rather than risk detention.A federal judge in New Jersey is expected to rule soon on a request to release Khalil pending further resolution of his case – but his attorneys are hopeful the other releases are a good sign. The green card holder, who is married to a US citizen, was known on Columbia’s campus as a steady mediator between the university administration and student protesters. He was recently denied a request to attend the birth of his son.“These decisions reflect a simple truth – the constitution forbids the government from locking up anyone, including noncitizens, just because it doesn’t like what they have to say,” said Brian Hauss, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the groups representing Khalil and the others. “We will not rest until Mahmoud Khalil is free, along with everyone else in detention for their political beliefs.”Diala Shamas, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is also involved in Khalil’s defense, said that “we’re seeing wins in all of these cases”, but added that “every single day that Mahmoud Khalil spends in detention is a day too long and adds to the chilling effect that his continued detention has on other people”.The arrests have prompted widespread anxiety among international students and scholars and significantly contributed to a climate of fear and repression on US campuses. Despite occasional efforts to revive it, last year’s mass campus protest movement has been significantly dampened, even as Israel’s war in Gaza – the focus of the protests – is only escalating.But while the Trump administration seems to be getting clobbered in court, the fundamental question at the heart of the cases – whether the government has the authority to detain and deport noncitizens over their political speech – is far from settled.‘Times of excess’Khan Suri, Öztürk and Mahdawi have all been released pending a resolution to federal court cases over the government’s authority to detain them. Separately, the government’s effort to deport them is moving through the immigration court system, a different process.Advocates warn of a long legal battle that is likely to end up before the US supreme court. But they are hopeful. The releases, which required clearing substantial legal thresholds, are a welcome sign, they say, that the courts are skeptical of the government’s broader case: that it has the authority to use an obscure immigration provision to deport anyone the secretary of state deems a foreign policy problem.The government hasn’t clearly defended its position. In an appeal hearing this month in Öztürk and Mahdawi’s cases, one of the judges on the panel asked the government’s lawyers whether the administration believed the students’ speech to be protected by the first amendment’s guarantees of free speech and expression“We have not taken a position on that,” one of the attorneys, Drew Ensign, responded. “I don’t have the authority to take a position on that.”Instead, the legal proceedings thus far have largely focused on jurisdictional and other technical arguments. In Khalil’s case, for example, a New Jersey judge recently issued a 108-page decision dealing exclusively with his authority to hear the case. The judge hasn’t yet signaled his position on the constitutional questions.US district court judge Geoffrey Crawford, who ordered Mahdawi’s release, compared the current political moment with the red scare and Palmer raids of the early 20th century, when US officials detained and deported hundreds of foreign nationals suspected of holding leftist views, as well as the McCarthyism of the 1950s.“The wheel of history has come around again,” Crawford wrote, “but as before these times of excess will pass.”In her ruling in Khan Suri’s case this week, US district judge Patricia Giles said that his release was “in the public interest to disrupt the chilling effect on protected speech”, and that she believed the broader challenge against the government had a substantial likelihood of success.Chip Gibbons, the policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, a civil rights group, noted that while challenging immigration detention is often an “uphill battle” given the deference typically shown by judges to the government, the rulings might suggest otherwise.“Three separate federal judges, in three separate cases, have found that victims of the Trump-Rubio campaign of politically motivated immigration enforcement raise substantial constitutional claims challenging their detention,” he added. “Even a federal judiciary all too often deferential to executive claims of national security or foreign policy powers has clearly seen that the administration’s actions are likely retaliatory against political speech.”But even if the government ultimately loses its bid to deport students whose views it does not like, the free speech climate in the US has changed. The administration continues to pursue coercive investigations into universities under the guise of fighting antisemitism, dangling billions of dollars in funding as a threat, and universities have been surprisingly compliant in order to prevent a revival of last year’s protests.But some voices remain defiant. “We will not fear anyone because our fight is a fight for love, is a fight for democracy, is a fight for humanity,” Mahdawi said at a press conference upon his release. “This system of democracy [has] checks and balances, and discord is part of it.” More

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      An American has become pope. Will he be the moral leader we desperately need? | Arwa Mahdawi

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      America is back, baby. Not only has the Gulf of Mexico been successfully Americanized, the Vatican is now officially US territory. OK, fine, not officially, but, on Thursday, the Chicago-born Robert Francis Prevost was announced as pope. The 69-year-old, who has taken the papal name Leo XIV, is the first clergyman from the United States to lead the Roman Catholic church.While Prevost was a frontrunner for the papacy, his victory seems to have taken many experts by surprise. There has long been resistance to an American pope for a number of reasons, including the fact that it might make it appear as if the Vatican is aligned with the world’s strongest economic and military power.“If the Catholic church were also run by an American, the global dominance of the US would be simply pervasive and overwhelming,” Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, a watchdog group that tracks clergy child abuse cases in the Catholic church worldwide, told ABC News recently.I’ll tell you who doesn’t seem particularly overwhelmed by the first American pope: Donald Trump. The president has spent the last few days posting AI-generated pictures of himself as the pope and generally mocking the Catholic church. Still, Trump was on his best behaviour when the official announcement came through, and posted a fairly restrained message on Truth Social, congratulating the pope and saying it was a “Great Honor for our Country”.Just give it a few days, though, and I’m sure Trump will be on Fox News taking credit for the new pope and announcing that the Vatican is going to get rid of all their dusty old Bibles and replace them with the Trump God Bless the USA Bible. Only $99.99 for the platinum edition and a bargain $74.99 for the pink and gold edition!Vice-President JD Vance, one of the last people to see Pope Francis alive, also posted a diplomatic message of congratulations, saying he was “sure millions of American Catholics and other Christians will pray for [Pope Leo’s] successful work leading the Church”.I am not an American Catholic. Nor am I Protestant, Episcopalian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist or anything else. I am an atheist, although not a terribly devout one. But I am certainly praying as hard as I can that Pope Leo will be the moral leader that the world so desperately needs at this moment.For most of my life I have not been particularly interested in who the pope is. And I have had very little faith that the Vatican, which covered up systemic sexual abuse, could ever be a real force for good. But – and I know I am not alone when I say this – the past 19 months has fundamentally changed how I see the world. I used to believe in things like international human rights law. I used to believe that while the arc of the moral universe may be extremely long, it bends toward justice. I used to believe that universities would stand up for free speech. And I used to believe that no matter how craven western world leaders might be, they wouldn’t go so far as to enable the livestreamed genocide unfolding in Gaza. That western leaders wouldn’t stand by and cheer as Israel, whose total blockade on Gaza has entered its third month, starves children to death.During a time when international law has been dealt a deadly blow, when might is right and decades of progress seem to be unravelling, the late Pope Francis made an impression on non-Catholics like me for his moral clarity towards many marginalized groups and his advocacy for peace everywhere from “martyred Ukraine” to Gaza. Of course, his legacy is not perfect: many abuse victims have questioned whether he went far enough in acknowledging children sexually abused by clergy. But Pope Francis undoubtedly fought for the most vulnerable in society.Pope Francis also understood what many newspaper editors and politicians don’t seem to be able to comprehend: that there is no “both-sidesing” atrocities. That there are times where you must take sides because, as Desmond Tutu said, “if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”In 2023, for example, Pope Francis went on a historic trip to South Sudan and told churches in the region that they “cannot remain neutral” but must speak up against injustice and abuse of power.Pope Francis also visited the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2023, where he criticized the “poison of greed” driving conflict in the region. “Hands off the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Hands off Africa. Stop choking Africa: it is not a mine to be stripped or a terrain to be plundered,” Francis said.When it came to Gaza, Pope Francis spoke clearly and powerfully. He would call the only Roman Catholic church in Gaza almost nightly after this iteration of the conflict broke out. When so much of the world seems to have turned away from Gaza’s suffering, Pope Francis let anguished civilians know he cared. One of his last wishes was that his popemobile be turned into a mobile health clinic for children in the Gaza Strip.And Pope Francis was not shy about criticizing the US – consistently speaking up for immigrants and refugees. “We must not be taken aback by their numbers, but rather view them as persons, seeing their faces and listening to their stories,” he told the US Congress in September 2015.We do not yet know how Pope Leo will undertake his duties but he is widely considered a centrist who was aligned with Francis on a number of social issues. Notably, in February Leo tweeted an article that disagreed with Vance’s views on immigration, headlined “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others”. In April, he also retweeted commentary criticizing Trump deporting a US resident to El Salvador.Whether Pope Leo will remain outspoken, whether he will continue Francis’s demands for a ceasefire in Gaza, remains to be seen. But the world desperately needs strong moral leadership at the moment. May Leo be the light we need in the current darkness. And, for his own sake, may he stay away from Vance.

      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist More

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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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      ‘What is left of our democracy?’: freed Palestinian human rights advocate warns of US authoritarian rule

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      Mohsen Mahdawi, the Palestinian green-card holder and Columbia University student freed on Wednesday after more than two weeks in immigration detention, has issued a stark warning about the US’s descent into authoritarianism.“Once the repression of dissent, in the name of security, becomes a key objective of a government, authoritarian rule and even martial law are not far off. When they look at my case, all Americans should ask themselves: what is left of our democracy, and who will be targeted next?” said Mahddawi in an op-ed for the New York Times.Mahdawi, a Palestinian human rights advocate based in Vermont, was detained and ordered deported by the Trump administration on 14 April despite not being prosecuted of any crime – and without due process. The philosophy student was arrested by masked Ice agents in Colchester, Vermont, during what should have been his citizenship naturalization interview.He is among a growing number of international students who have been ordered deported for their Palestinian rights advocacy by the Trump administration, which is using an obscure law to accuse these individuals of posing a threat to US foreign policy interests. Unlike the others, Mahdawi avoided being sent to a Louisiana detention facility after the Ice agents narrowly missed the flight, allowing his attorneys to challenge the deportation order in Vermont.“Despite spending 16 nights in a jail cell, I never lost hope in the inevitability of justice and the principles of democracy. I wanted to become a citizen of this country because I believe in the principles that it enshrines,” writes Mahdawi.“The American government accuses me of undermining US foreign policy, a patently absurd pretext for deportation for political speech that the Trump administration dislikes. The government is scraping the bottom of the barrel in its attempts to smear me. My only ‘crime’ is refusing to accept the slaughter of Palestinians, opposing war and promoting peace. I have simply insisted that international law must be respected. I believe the way to a just and long-lasting peace for Palestinians and Israelis is through diplomacy and restorative justice.”Mahdawi was born and raised in a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, where as a child he bore witness to the death of his brother after he was denied access to medical care, and the detention and imprisonment of multiple close relatives including his grandfather and father by Israeli forces.Moving to the US in 2014 was his first experience of freedom, he said.“Ultimately, I sought American citizenship not only because I did not want to lose the freedom I enjoyed as a permanent resident but even more so because I believe in the principles and values of democracy, which this country stipulates in its founding documents,” he wrote in the Times.“These very freedoms are under attack today, both for me and for others like me. The Trump administration is hewing to Israel’s playbook: Under the thinly veiled guise of security, rights are being denied and due process eliminated.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“By seeking to deport me, the Trump administration is sending a clear message: There is no room for dissent, free speech be damned. It seems willing to shield an extremist Israeli government from criticism at the expense of constitutional rights, all while suppressing the possibility of a peaceful future for both Palestinians and Israelis, a future free of trauma and fear.”Israel’s war on Gaza since the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack has killed at least 52,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to Palestinian health authorities. Thousands more people are missing and feared dead, while tens of thousands have suffered injuries and preventable diseases including acute malnutrition.In the ruling ordering Mahdawi’s release on bail on Wednesday, Judge Geoffrey W Crawford wrote: “Legal residents not charged with crimes or misconduct are being arrested and threatened with deportation for stating their views on the political issues of the day.” He likened the Trump administration’s crackdown on students and free speech to the red scare and the McCarthy era.Upon his release, Mahdawi told supporters and the media: “I am saying it clear and loud. To President Trump and his cabinet: I am not afraid of you.” 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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      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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      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