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      Trump says he believes Ukraine can regain all land lost to Russia since 2022 invasion

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      Donald Trump has said he believes Ukraine can regain all the land that it has lost since the 2022 Russian invasion in one of the strongest statements of support he has given Kyiv.The US president delivered his upbeat assessment by claiming Russia was in big economic trouble in a post on Truth Social after meeting the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in New York.He wrote: “After getting to know and fully understand the Ukraine/Russia Military and Economic situation and, after seeing the Economic trouble it is causing Russia, I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.“With time, patience, and the financial support of Europe and, in particular, NATO, the original Borders from where this War started, is very much an option. Why not?”Trump added: “Russia has been fighting aimlessly for three and a half years, a war that should have taken a Real Military Power less than a week to win.”The US president said this was not making Russia look distinguished, but instead a paper tiger, pointing to the long queues for petrol inside the country. He added: “Putin and Russia are in BIG Economic trouble, and this is the time for Ukraine to act.” He also promised “to supply weapons to NATO for NATO to do what they want with them”.Earlier, Trump said that he planned to enforce his demand that Nato countries stop importing Russian oil – including Hungary, led by his close ally Viktor Orbán.In his speech to the UN general assembly the US president renewed his demand for Europe to end its “embarrassing” purchase of oil and gas from Russia, saying until it did so he would not impose his long-promised economic punishment on Moscow.Trump also said he believed Nato aircraft should shoot down Russian aircraft if they entered its airspace, but later qualified his remarks by saying it depended on the circumstances.He made his remarks alongside Zelenskyy, whom he described as a “brave man”. Asked if he still trusted the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, Trump said he would know in a month’s time.It came after the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, had given less wholehearted support for shooting down Russian planes in Nato airspace, saying this should only happen “if they’re attacking”.View image in fullscreenIn his speech to the UN Trump mocked Nato allies’ failure to curb oil imports, saying: “China and India are the primary funders of the ongoing war by continuing to purchase Russian oil. But inexcusably, even Nato countries have not cut off much Russian energy and Russian energy products … I found out about it two weeks ago, and I wasn’t happy.“They’re funding the war against themselves. Who the hell ever heard of that one? In the event that Russia is not ready to make a deal to end the war, then the United States is fully prepared to impose a very strong round of powerful tariffs.“But for those tariffs to be effective, European nations, all of you … gathered here right now, would have to join us in adopting the exact same measures.”Trump did not specify the measures, but he has been stalling on a package that includes tariffs against countries that do business with Russia, such as India and China. He has already imposed 50% tariffs on India, but is also in the middle of negotiations that could see those lifted.Regarding Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, Trump said: “He’s a friend of mine. I have not spoken to him [about importing Russian oil], but I have a feeling if I did, he might stop, and I think I’ll be doing that.”In response to Trump’s demands, the EU is trying to bring forward the date by which it ends the import of liquid natural gas imports from Russia to 2026 – a year earlier than planned. The EU is opposed to imposing vast tariffs on China or India, but is looking at more targeted measures against Indian and Chinese oil refineries.Trump said he would be discussing the issue with EU leaders, adding: “They can’t be doing what they’re doing. They’re buying oil and gas from Russia while they’re fighting Russia … They have to immediately cease all energy purchases from Russia. Otherwise, we are all wasting a lot of time.”The EU’s 19th sanctions package also proposes export controls on another 45 companies that are deemed to be cooperating on sanctions evasion. Those include 12 Chinese, two Thai and three Indian entities that have enabled Russia to circumvent the bloc’s sanctions.View image in fullscreenHungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, told the Guardian that Hungary could not wean itself off Russian energy supplies. He said: “We can’t ensure the safe supply [of energy products] for our country without Russian oil or gas sources,” while adding that he “understood” Trump’s approach.“For us, energy supplies are a purely physical question,” he said. “It can be nice to dream about buying oil and gas from somewhere [besides Russia] … but we can only buy from where we have infrastructure. And if you look at the physical infrastructure, it’s obvious that without the Russian supplies, it is impossible to ensure the safe supply of the country.”Budapest relies on the Druzhba oil pipeline and the TurkStream gas pipeline to receive Russian hydrocarbons.Slovakia, the second EU country still importing Russian oil, said it had already spoken to the US about the issue, and received a sympathetic response. “As long as we have an alternative route, and the transmission capacity is sufficient, Slovakia has no problem diversifying,” said the economy minister, Denisa Saková.Hungary and Slovakia are the two countries that have most frequently called for the EU to reduce its support for Ukraine. More

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      Seth Meyers: ‘Trump clearly has no answer to Putin’s aggression’

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      As several late-night hosts take a break for the Emmys – which went to the Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Sunday night – Seth Meyers looked into Donald Trump’s lack of international leadership.Seth MeyersOn Monday’s Late Night, Meyers pointed out the hypocrisy behind the Trump’ administration’s foreign policy agenda. “Trump and the GOP spent years whining that Democrats were supposedly leading from behind, and have now declared that America will be setting the world’s agenda,” he explained. “No more waiting for other countries to act – America acts first and other countries follow us. You got that, world?”Except earlier this week, Trump announced on Truth Social that he was ready to enact sanctions against Russia for flying drones into Poland’s airspace … but not until all Nato nations had agreed to stop buying oil from Russia. As he put it: “I am ready to do major Sanctions on Russia when all NATO Nations have agreed, and started, to do the same thing.”Meyers had to laugh. “I thought America was back? And now you’ll only act if everyone else does it first?” he said. “Trump is using the same logic for American foreign policy that eighth graders use for smoking pot in the local school parking lot – ‘I’ll do it first if you do it first.’ ‘No way, man, you first!’ ‘OK, let’s do it at the same time. I’m ready to go when you are, just say when.’”Meyers also wondered: “Why does the president of the United States write with the uneven grammar and syntax of a scammer sending you a fake job listing?”The sanctions talk heated up because Russia invaded Poland’s airspace with drones, “a dangerous incursion”, Meyers explained, given that Poland is a Nato ally. “But don’t worry, the president reassured everyone and put our minds at ease.”Well … not quite. Asked last week what he thought about Russia’s actions, Trump answered: “It could’ve been a mistake. But regardless I’m not happy about anything having to do with that whole situation. But hopefully it’s going to come to an end.”“What do you mean ‘hopefully’? I thought you were going to end the war on day one and get the Nobel peace prize!” Meyers laughed. “Now you’re talking in vague generalities like a dad whose daughter is dating a biker who did doughnuts on your front lawn – ‘As for the doughnuts, it might have been a mistake, I don’t know. Also might’ve been a mistake when he was screaming fuck you old man and giving me the finger.’”It’s not that Meyers was against sanctions – “I would love it if we had a president who actually pursued serious diplomacy and got Putin himself to come out and reassure the world after encroaching on Nato airspace and threatening global conflict,” he said. “Instead, we have a president who’s less concerned with the boundaries of Nato than he is with the boundaries of the White House ballroom.”“Trump clearly has no answer to Putin’s aggression,” Meyers concluded. “Diplomacy is good, de-escalation is good, but you can’t have either without competence and leadership, and those are just not Trump’s strong suits.” More

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      When Trump comes to UK, normal rules of state visits will not apply

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      Donald Trump has repeatedly described Keir Starmer as a “good man”, distancing himself from the attacks on the UK prime minister mounted by other figures on the US far right such as Elon Musk.One of the many known unknowns, however, of a Trump state visit is what kind of Trump will show up when a microphone is placed in front of him.The US president is often a bundle of contradictions. During his first state visit in 2018 most UK diplomats said he was a picture of affability, yet he took it upon himself to conduct an interview with the Sun in which he insulted Theresa May, and said Boris Johnson would make a great prime minister. He seemed unaware he might have caused offence.Starmer as host will have to grin and bear whatever brickbats Trump sends his way about the state of free speech in the UK, recognition of the state of Palestine, immigration, or the possibility that Reform will lead the next government in the UK. The one thing the Foreign Office knows is that the normal rules of state visits do not apply.An added loose mooring will be the absence of the former UK ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson, who was dismissed for his connections to Jeffrey Epstein. Ambassadors are known to personally visit every site of every stop on a state visit. Their job is often quite literally to look round corners for what might be coming. Lord Mandelson, a stickler for detail, would have been poring over every angle of the state visit in conjunction with Buckingham Palace and the White House. Fortunately, most of it will have been battened down weeks ago. But his knowledge of the mood inside the Trump administration in the days before the visit will be missed.Behind the formal glamour, and pre-cooked agreements on tech and nuclear power cooperation, Starmer will have to choose how to spend his limited political capital. The two most pressing foreign policy issues are ones on which the UK and the US cannot agree: Israel’s future relationship with the Arab world, and the threat posed to Europe and Ukraine by Vladimir Putin. But it is the latter on which Starmer hopes to make progress.Speaking at the weekend in Kyiv, Jonathan Powell, the UK’s national security adviser, gave a glimpse of current Downing Street thinking. “Putin’s sport is judo. He likes to counterbalance the action with reaction. He likes having options. If we can close his options off and leave him with only one, he will take it,” Powell said.“The main message we should be sending is real pressure to convince [Putin] the war will go on for a long time if he doesn’t make peace. His summer campaign more or less has failed already, the Russian economic position is not good, the whole economy is a war economy. If we can apply the pressure the US president is talking about in terms of targeted sanctions, and tariffs that he put on India, we might bring him to the table.”But Powell skirted around whether Trump’s latest proposal for sanctions was serious or a smokescreen to avoid doing anything. After months and months of patience-sapping delay, Trump has set out in the past fortnight new preconditions that would need to be in place before the US would ever massively sanction Russia. He said he would only do so if every Nato country, including Turkey, stopped importing Russia energy and also punished China with 50%-100% tariffs for its imports of Russian energy. Trump has already put 25% tariffs on India, the other great importer of Russian energy.The Republican senator Lindsey Graham, who has spent a lot of time trying to blend the European and US approaches to Russia, explained on Sunday: “We have tried the red-carpet approach. It is not working … It is now time for the Europeans to follow President Trump’s lead to go after India and China – if China and India change their practices towards Putin, this war will end.”Starmer intends to test Trump on whether 50% tariffs on China, which would rupture China-Europe trade, is a deal-breaker. Concerted transatlantic sanctions might yet be possible if Trump demanded a ban on Russian crude imports by Hungary and Slovakia, or of imports of fuel made from Russian crude refined in third countries such as India. A ban on seaborne Russian crude oil has already cut the EU’s Russian oil imports by 90%, but Hungary and Slovakia still import it via a pipeline.Starmer’s task will be to steer Trump to more targeted sanctions on Chinese and Indian refineries, as well as yet more measures against the Russian shadow fleet. Trump’s Ukraine special envoy, Keith Kellogg, said: “If you look at the strength of sanctions from a scale of one to 10, we’re at a six. But we are at an enforcement level of three.”Starmer will also try to convince Trump the incursion of about 20 drones into Polish airspace by Russia was not the accident that Trump has suggested. Radosław Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, ridiculed the accident theory in Kyiv, saying: “We don’t believe in 20 mistakes at the same time.”Behind this argument is the fundamental discussion that Starmer tries to avoid in public – whether Trump knows Putin is stalling on a ceasefire but does not greatly care, since he believes Ukraine will lose the war and inevitably will have to cede large tracts of its territory.That requires going back to the very first principles about the victim and aggressor in Ukraine. More

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      Trump says military carried out strike on alleged Venezuelan drug cartel vessel

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      Donald Trump said on Monday that the United States had carried out a strike on a second Venezuelan boat and killed three alleged terrorists he claimed were transporting drugs, expanding his administration’s war against drug cartels and the scope of lethal military force to stop them.The US president gave few details about the strike, saying in a social media post that the action was on his orders and that it had happened earlier in the morning. The post was accompanied by a video clip showing the boat, which appeared to be stationary, erupting into a fireball.“The strike occurred while these confirmed narco-terroists from Venezuela were in International Waters transporting illegal narcotics (A DEADLY WEAPON POISONING AMERICANS!) headed to the US,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.Trump’s announcement of the strike appeared to be worded in a way to suggest there was a valid legal basis for the strike – an issue that became a source of heavy criticism in Washington after the operation against the first alleged Venezuelan drug boat earlier this month, which killed 11 people.According to people familiar with the matter, the administration briefed Congress last week that the first strike was legal under the president’s article 2 powers because it involved a boat connected to the Tren de Aragua gang, which Trump designated a foreign terrorist organization.The administration has provided little evidence that the first boat was carrying illegal drugs beyond asserting they had tracked the drugs being loaded on to the boat in order to be distributed in the United States, even if the boat at one point was said to have turned around.Asked on Sunday about that first strike and claims it was a fishing vessel, Trump said in response to questions from the Guardian: “You saw the bags of white. It’s nonsense. So we knew it before they even left. We knew exactly where that boat, where it came from, where the drugs came from and where it was heading.”By claiming, for the strike on the second boat, that the drugs were a threat to the United States and asserting that the boat’s crew were “terrorists”, Trump appeared to be preemptively setting the groundwork to make the same Article II legal claim to order a missile strike against the second boat.The latest strike comes as the US continues a massive buildup of forces around Venezuela. Over the weekend, five F-35 fighter jets arrived in Puerto Rico to join about half a dozen US navy destroyers already moved to the US territory recently, and support assets the administration said had been deployed to disrupt the flow of illegal drugs.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump demurred on whether the US would conduct operations inside Venezuela against drug cartels there. He also deflected a question from the Guardian about its president, Nicholás Maduro, accusing Trump of acting illegally. “What’s illegal are the drugs that were on the boat,” he said.The Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group – including the USS San Antonio, the USS Iwo Jima and the USS Fort Lauderdale, carrying 4,500 sailors – and the 22nd marine expeditionary unit, with 2,200 marines, were deployed to the region ahead of the first strike this month. The US also deployed several P-8 surveillance planes and submarines, officials said. More

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      How to burst the Israeli bubble | Noam Sheizaf

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      View image in fullscreenThroughout the two years of the Gaza war, Israeli bombing has been so intense that, in certain weather conditions, its echoes can be heard here in Tel Aviv, 70km away. The mass starvation is quieter. Even images of dead children rarely pierce Israel’s media bubble. The war appears in protests over the hostages, political debates, stickers with the faces of fallen soldiers on walls and bus stops. Palestinian suffering – by contrast – remains distant, abstract, unmoving.After two years, Israeli society is adapting: the army has developed a practice of not calling reservists who are likely to dodge the draft; instead, it turns to former soldiers in need of cash or employment, offering them to fill the ranks of its combat units. At times, special arrangements are made so that reservists can keep working in their old jobs, practically doubling their income. Civilian contractors are hired to systematically raze whole neighborhoods in the Strip; they are paid by the house. The IDF is becoming a new military, adjusted for permanent operations in Gaza, the West Bank and the northern borders. The rest of the public goes on with their lives. War is the new normal.In early August, Israel’s security cabinet ordered the military to occupy Gaza City, where some of Hamas’s leadership is supposedly hiding. The assault began with the toppling of high-rise buildings last week. Yet the term “occupation” is misleading: Israel has no intention of ruling over the more than 1 million Palestinians sheltering in the city. Emboldened by US support, the military has ordered residents to move to a so-called “humanitarian city” in the south, while Gaza City will be leveled to the ground. This would mark another step toward realizing the far-right fantasy of removing Palestinians from the territory altogether. Until then, they will remain crammed into a corner of the Strip, given only the bare minimum to keep them alive – and at times, not even that.This week, several countries – among them France, the UK and Australia – intend to recognize the state of Palestine during the UN general assembly. Many people have long deemed the two-state solution dead, and nothing could seem further away from it than the dystopian reality on the ground. But the recognition is a sign of international engagement and a much-needed message for Israelis, who have moved into a creepy fantasy land: a recently leaked American-Israeli presentation, reportedly debated in the White House, imagines a new Gaza as a kind of futuristic theme park placed under US trusteeship and refashioned by international corporations into a glossy “Riviera of the Middle East” of smart cities, tourism and tech hubs.Yet the real danger in Israel today is that nobody imagines a future at all: the society is locked in a permanent present. The war is unpopular, but enough are willing to serve it and only few are actively protesting against it. The liberal opposition movement and the protests over the hostages have morphed into each other, along with the pre-war domestic fights over the government’s plans to weaken the judiciary. Together, they have created a sense of never-ending crisis that Netanyahu and his coalition have managed to turn into an asset.View image in fullscreenA recent poll found most people are not interested in getting more news from Gaza. The major networks broadcast cooking shows, reality TV and sports. Big Brother just had one of its most watched seasons, interrupted only for a brief moment when three anti-war protesters managed to storm the studio stage. “Everything is fine,” said the host. “Keep those votes coming in!”At times, it seems as if confusion and frustration lie beneath the acceptance of the atrocities carried out in our name: a society that lost its way, is unsure how to end the war, fearful of the reckoning that awaits, and resorts to violent tantrums instead.At other moments, a backward-looking narrative takes hold, one that is more coherent but also more perilous: what used to be political discourse on the conflict is giving way to a mythical language of victimization. It is a story in which 7 October 2023 is the continuation of the Holocaust, Hamas are the new Nazis, and the current war is our biblical retribution.Signs for this old-new vocabulary are everywhere. It is common among Jews, for example, to add the initials for “blessed his memory” next to the name of the dead – but in this war, almost every soldier or civilian victim is memorialized with the phrase “Hashem yikom damo” (God will avenge his blood). Verses and quotes such as “I have pursued mine enemies and destroyed them” (2 Samuel 22:38) appear in military headquarters and battle orders; a calendar distributed by the military rabbinate early in the war placed the Gaza campaign on a mythical timeline that included David’s victory over Goliath and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967.This turn toward mythical thinking – the idea that Jews and Palestinians are locked in an eternal, zero-sum battle for the same land ֹ– dominates not just Israeli society, but much of the political thinking abroad. It obscures the more mundane reality that has enabled today’s carnage: a political system where one people rules and the other is ruled. It also narrows our political imagination, reducing the range of what is possible and fostering passivity precisely when action is most urgently needed.Tomorrow Is Yesterday is the fitting title for a new book by two former negotiators and experts on the conflict. Hussein Agha and Robert Malley observe that the current war is not just a regression to a pre-peace process era decades ago. Nor is the systematic destruction of Gaza just a repetition of the Nakba, the Palestinian mass expulsion during Israel’s war of independence. There is something fundamental in both societies that looks into the past for political meaning, a core of their identity that surfaces now.Malley, a key member of Bill Clinton’s Middle East negotiating team, is the son of an anti-Zionist Egyptian Jew who sympathized with the Palestinian cause and knew the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. As a young diplomat, Malley had been present at the Camp David summit in 2000, which was supposed to bring about a lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, but ended up catalyzing the start of the second intifada 25 years ago this month. Later he served as Obama’s Middle East coordinator and as an envoy to the Iran nuclear talks. Agha, an intellectual of Iranian, Iraqi and Lebanese heritage who teaches at Oxford, was a longtime adviser to Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, often operating as their envoy in formal and informal negotiations channels.Their unique backgrounds – Hussein, who was viewed as Palestinian by choice rather than by heritage, and Malley’s anti-imperialist upbringing – often made the two a dissenting voice in diplomatic circles, insiders and outsiders at the same time. After the Camp David failure they challenged the dominant view, expressed by President Clinton and the senior members of his peace team, which placed all the blame for the failure on Arafat and the Palestinian side for not accepting “Israel’s generous offer”.View image in fullscreenA year after the summit, in a much debated piece in the New York Review of Books, Malley and Agha pointed to the ways in which a deep-rooted American bias toward Israel led to poor preparation for the summit, unrealistic expectations and fundamental misunderstandings on all sides. To blame Palestinians alone, they warned, was not only unjust, but a recipe for disaster.More than two decades later, the two have returned with a more radical diagnosis, shaped also by their experiences in subsequent talks. In Tomorrow Is Yesterday they argue the peace process was doomed from the start – not by tactical missteps or bad faith, though these existed in abundance, but because it fundamentally misunderstood the conflict itself.The negotiations, Malley and Agha now write, attempted to suppress history itself, since what drives Israelis and Palestinians are not just tangible interests but existential longings rooted in history. For Jews, these flow from centuries of displacement and persecution, culminating in the Holocaust, and from what they call “the long, frustrated quest for a normal, recognized, and accepted homeland”. For many religious Israelis, this translates into a sacred claim over the entire land: Kol Israel (roughly, “all of Israel are responsible for one another”). These, rather than the liberal peace camp, are the deep, authentic voices driving the society.For Palestinians, the core demands are equally elemental: to redress a history of dispossession and massacres, expulsion and dispersal, discrimination and denied dignity. Accepting Israel as a Jewish state is not, in this view, a pragmatic compromise but an intolerable “affront” – a move that would legitimize the very catastrophe that created their exile and retroactively criminalize their decades of struggle. Israelis seek something close to eternal security, which easily becomes eternal dominance; Palestinians want a return to a pre-Israel life that no longer exists.View image in fullscreenThe two-state solution, concludes the duo who devoted much of their life to reaching it, “is not the natural resting place for either Israelis or Palestinians [as] it runs counter to the essence of their national identities and aspirations”. The attempt to reach it was doomed because “both groups cannot accept a definitive closure”, since “neither is prepared to relinquish otherworldly dreams for the sake of an earthly understanding”.What emerged was an artificial process, sustained through bias and denial. By privileging Israel and suppressing Palestinian claims, ignoring more radical or religious stakeholders, and prioritizing security over justice, US-led diplomacy built not peace but a pressure cooker. It blew up on 7 October.Malley and Agha’s account is clear-eyed and unsparing, rejecting the very conventions that upheld the imbalance at the heart of the process. It reads like the work of people who have burned their bridges – and it fits the gravity of the moment.Hamas’s murderous attack, they say, was not an aberration but “Palestinian through and through” – an explosion of grievances over decades of displacement and humiliation that the peace process never addressed. Israel’s brutal response, in turn, was equally revealing: less the product of Netanyahu’s extremism than of a longstanding pattern, in which Palestinian resistance is met with overwhelming force designed to restore deterrence, dominance and territorial control.Now both sides are resorting to familiar roles: Israelis to triumphalist violence, Palestinians to resistance and survival.Once the cloud of grief over 7 October began lifting, something vile and wicked entered the Israeli public discourse: a certain enjoyment of the humiliation of Palestinians and their sympathizers that in the past was only found on the political margins.The minister for interior security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has made it a habit of posting images of bent, blindfolded and handcuffed prisoners, and supporting cutting down their food rations or banning Red Cross and family visits (according to Israel’s own records, only one-fourth of the people arrested in Gaza are fighters, but all detainees are portrayed as terrorists in the media). Hanoch Daum, a popular commentator and writer, recently drew massive social media engagement with an AI-generated image mocking Palestinian hunger as a hoax. The climate activist Greta Thunberg, who leads flotillas to Gaza, is another favorite target for ridicule. Expelled after her first attempt to reach the Strip, authorities made a point of seating her on the worst seat on the plane, passengers hurled insults at her, and the pilot announced his support for the IDF on the speakers.Every criticism of Israel, any sympathy for the Palestinians, any pressure to end the war, is seen today as a form of antisemitism – even endorsement of Hamas. Over 60% of Israelis, according to recent polls, believe “nobody in Gaza is innocent.” Along with Israel’s sense of impunity, this popular notion explains how this war has turned into a genocide.The core of Palestinian identity, most Israelis believe, is the physical destruction of their state, as manifested in the 7 October attack. “It was each and every Palestinian, for nearly eight decades, who wished, believed and acted to bring this exact moment,” wrote Einat Wilf, a former member of the Knesset for the Independence and Labor parties, in a new book she co-authored about the right of return. ”Hamas was the one who fulfilled their dream.” Her conclusion: There is no solution at hand; Israel must be willing to fight Palestinians “for generations”.Oddly enough, these words echo Malley and Agha’s observations, and their view of the conflict as a clash of narratives. “[It] is not essentially about territory,” they recently wrote in the New Yorker. “It is not about roads and dunes and hills. It is about people, their lives, emotions, anger, grief, attachments, and history.”View image in fullscreenYet the reality is not of two sides arguing over myths but one sovereign power ruling over millions of people without rights. It is not just a conflict, but a problem inherent to a regime. The most important local dynamic is a de facto one-state condition in which half the population – namely, the Palestinians – is excluded from the political system.Israel controls every border, every checkpoint, every natural resource, every aspect of the economy. It decides where Palestinians can work, travel, or build; it denies them legal protection, allows their property to be vandalized or taken and leaves them exposed to violence.Racism and ethnic hatred, even the endorsement of old myths – these are not intrinsic to Jews or Palestinians, but are byproducts of this system of segregation and dominance. This is what Ta-Nehisi Coates observed when he visited the West Bank on the eve of 7 October. “What my eyes now saw … was a world where separate and unequal was alive and well, where rule by the ballot for some and the bullet for others was policy,” he wrote in his recent book, The Message. “I was seeking a world beyond plunder – but my proof of concept was just more plunder.” Yet, he writes elsewhere, “even plunderers are human beings whose violent ambitions must contend with the guilt that gnaws at them when they meet the eyes of their victims. And so a story must be told.” In Israel, Coates recognized the colonizer’s sense of “fragile triumphalism”.It is Palestinians’ lack of rights, their existence in a political no-man’s land, that makes them expendable to a system that largely conditions protection on political rights. It allows the US and Israel to toy with ideas of mass deportation and real estate ventures. This is a conflict about hills and territory: Palestinians have been pushed outside the system that governs people and nations, so now they can be pushed (again) out of their land. The besieged Gaza – a territory belonging to nobody, governed for decades by an unrecognized militant group – was the physical embodiment of the Palestinian condition.The danger now is surrendering to fatalism: the idea that ancient hatreds or religious attachments make the current trajectory inevitable.Whether held by outside observers such as Malley and Agha or rightwing Israelis, this view misreads how religion and identity work in politics. These doctrines may claim to be eternal, but they shift according to the needs of the moment. Orthodox Jews once rejected Zionism as sacrilege; they became the most rightwing Israelis as their dependence on the state grew. Israeli rabbis banned prayer on the Temple Mount; since its fate became an object in peace talks, they began endorsing it. The Likud’s original symbol included the kingdom of Jordan within the Jewish state, now even the most rightwing Jew imagines the entire land of Israel without it. Interests and circumstances, not ancient beliefs, construct political imagination.More importantly, the idea of clashing identities easily becomes another justification for murder, as is happening in Israel today. Instead, we must recognize that violent instability is baked into any system where one side has power and rights and the other has none.Since the Oslo process in the 1990s, much of the world has accepted the Israeli framing: Palestinian rights would be recognized only after a peace process was completed. In other words, rights were treated as conditional on Israeli interests – a prize to be granted at the end rather than a foundation to guide negotiations. This is the root of past failures. But if rights become the starting point, then the two peoples could finally choose their political future: one state, two, or some in-between like a federation. No choice would need to be final; states can divide or unite, agreements can evolve. The very idea of a definite end point is an illusion.Recently, there are signs that the west is opening its eyes to the horror in Gaza, mainly due to sustained civil society activism. It is not surprising that the United States is mounting unprecedented opposition to the countries deciding to recognize Palestine, including by withholding visas from Palestinian officials seeking to travel to the UN. For Washington too, Palestinians exist only on Israel’s terms. So far, the countries leading the recognition effort are not deterred; pushing against American hegemony over diplomacy is another positive byproduct of recognition.As limited as the recognition of Palestine – a state with no territory or sovereignty – is, it is a step in the right direction, because it re-establishes the existence and the rights of Palestinians as individuals and as a collective. It finally moves up the end goal, which should have been a precondition to the talks all along. More urgently, it strengthens the Palestinian case in international institutions and further justifies the demand for sanctions that could end the war.Steps against Israeli ministers who advocate ethnic cleansing and genocide, as some countries are considering, are another positive development. More should follow, and more rapidly; as the destruction of Gaza is happening now. We need more political engagement and risk-taking, and a willingness to break old taboos.History’s myths may feel eternal, but like the violence they sustain, they are choices – and choices can be remade.

      Noam Sheizaf is a journalist and documentary film-maker based in Tel Aviv. His latest film, H2: The Occupation Lab, dealt with the history of military control and settlement in the Palestinian city of Hebron More

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      Rubio heads to Israel amid tensions over strike on Hamas leaders in Qatar

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      The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has arrived in Israel seeking to mend a rift with Washington’s other allies in the region over Israel’s attempted assassination of Hamas leaders in Qatar and the accelerated expansion of settlements on the occupied West Bank.In talks with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Rubio will try to balance criticism of the Israeli airstrike on a Doha building, which killed aides to a Hamas leader and a Qatari security officer, with a message of overall support for Israel before the expected formal recognition of Palestine by a number of other US allies, including the UK, France, Canada, Australia and Belgium.Rubio, before his departure on Sunday, told reporters: “Obviously, we’re not happy about it. The president was not happy about it. Now we need to move forward and figure out what comes next.” He stressed the incident was “not going to change the nature of our relationship with the Israelis”.The Netanyahu government is seeking to play down any rift with the Trump administration over the Doha strike, while remaining defiant over the attack.“We have a very close dialogue with the administration. We’re coordinated with them and, relatively speaking, the American reaction was reasonable,” the Israeli ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, said on Israeli army radio. “At the UN security council they expressed reservations, but the reservations were minor. We took into account that this would have a price.“The Qataris are trying to ride on this. From their perspective, they are leveraging this incident. From our perspective, we delivered the clear message that we will pursue the terrorists everywhere.”Asked if he was concerned about threats by Israeli officials to carry out further strikes in Qatar, Rubio said: “We’re going to meet with them. We’re going to talk about what the future holds. I’m going to get a much better understanding of what their plans are moving forward.After Israel, Rubio is due to join Trump’s planned visit to Britain this week, which will reportedly soon receive its first group of injured and sick children from Gaza for treatment.While in Jerusalem on Sunday, Rubio will visit the Western Wall with Benjamin Netanyahu, according to the Israeli prime minister’s office.The unprecedented attack by Israel against Hamas leaders in an upmarket neighbourhood of Doha on Tuesday marked Israel’s first such strike against US ally Qatar, putting renewed strain on diplomatic efforts to bring about a truce in war-ravaged Gaza and drawing international criticism.Trump has openly chided Netanyahu over the attack, which targeted Hamas leaders gathering to discuss a new ceasefire proposal put forward by the US.Netanyahu has defended the operation, saying on Saturday that killing senior Hamas officials would remove the “main obstacle” to ending the war.The talk of a ceasefire, still out of reach after months of failed negotiations, came as Israel has been intensifying its campaign in the Gaza Strip.In recent days, it has ramped up efforts to seize control of Gaza City, the territory’s largest urban area, telling residents to evacuate and blowing up numerous high-rise buildings it said were being used by Hamas.While thousands of people have evacuated the city, according to the Israeli military and Hamas, many more remain.Gaza’s civil defence agency said 32 people were killed by Israeli fire on Saturday.Netanyahu and his government have defied international criticism throughout the nearly two-year war, but it continued to mount this week.On Friday, the UN general assembly voted to back a revival of the two-state solution, in open defiance of Israeli opposition.Israeli allies Britain and France, alongside several other western countries, are preparing to recognise Palestinian statehood at a UN gathering this month out of exasperation at Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war and in the occupied West Bank.London and Paris, joined by Berlin, also called for an immediate halt to Israel’s offensive in Gaza City. Nevertheless, Israel retains the backing of its most powerful ally and biggest arms supplier, the US.Before Rubio’s visit, the state department spokesperson Tommy Pigott said the US’s top diplomat would show “our commitment to fight anti-Israel actions including unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state that rewards Hamas terrorism”.“He will also emphasise our shared goals: ensuring Hamas never rules over Gaza again and bringing all the hostages home.”In Israel, opponents of the Netanyahu government have sought to put pressure on ministers to end the war in return for the release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza.On Saturday, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, the main campaign group, accused the Israeli prime minister of being the “one obstacle” to freeing the hostages and accused him of repeatedly sabotaging ceasefire efforts.Of the 251 people taken hostage by Hamas militants in October 2023, 47 remain in Gaza, including 25 whom the Israeli military says are dead.The war was sparked by Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, mostly civilians, according to an Agence France-Presse tally of official figures.Israel’s retaliatory campaign in Gaza has killed at least 64,803 people, also mostly civilians, according to figures from Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, which the UN considers reliable.With Agence France-Presse and Reuters More

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      Rubio calls Russian drones over Poland ‘unacceptable’ but declines to say it was intentional

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      The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, on Saturday said the incursion of Russian drones into Polish airspace this week was unacceptable but that it remained unclear whether Russia had deliberately sent the drones into Polish territory. Nato announced plans to beef up the defense of Europe’s eastern flank on Friday, after Poland shot down the drones that had violated its airspace, the first known shots fired by a member of the western alliance during Russia’s war in Ukraine.“We think it’s an unacceptable and unfortunate and dangerous development,” Rubio told reporters before departing on a trip to Israel and Britain.“No doubt about it: the drones were intentionally launched. The question is whether the drones were targeted to go into Poland specifically.“Rubio said that if the drones had been targeted at Poland, “if the evidence leads us there, then obviously that’ll be a highly escalatory move”.“There are a number of other possibilities as well, but I think we’d like to have all the facts and consult with our allies before we make specific determinations,” he added. On Friday, Poland rejected Donald Trump’s suggestion that the incursions could have been a mistake, a rare contradiction of the US president from one of Washington’s closest European allies. Its foreign minister told Reuters that Poland hoped Washington would take action to show solidarity with Warsaw. At the United Nations on Friday, the US called the airspace violations “alarming” and vowed to “defend every inch of NATO territory”.Russia has said its forces had been attacking Ukraine at the time of the drone incursions and that it had not intended to hit targets in Poland. More

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      Senators say US is complicit in Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza

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      Two Democratic senators claim they have reached the “inescapable conclusion” that Israel is acting on a systematic plan to destroy and ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza to force locals to leave, and they say the US is complicit.Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Jeff Merkley of Oregon, both members of the Senate foreign relations committee, released their findings in a report on Thursday after returning from a congressional delegation to the Middle East where, they note, the destruction goes beyond bombs and bullets. They say they also found a systematic campaign to strangle humanitarian aid, which they call “using food as a weapon of war”.“The Netanyahu government has gone far beyond targeting Hamas to imposing collective punishment on all the people of Gaza,” Van Hollen said at a Thursday press conference. “What they’re doing, and what we witnessed, is putting those goals into action.”At least one hundred people have died from famine in Gaza, the United Nations said this week, citing the Gaza health ministry.View image in fullscreenThe senators, who visited Egypt, Israel, the occupied West Bank and Jordan, argue that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute a deliberate strategy to ethnically cleanse the local population rather than collateral damage from the war against Hamas. Their report is titled The Netanyahu Government Is Implementing a Plan to Ethnically Cleanse Gaza of Palestinians. America is Complicit. The World Must Stop It.During their visit to the Egyptian-Gaza border, they observed Rafah, the southern Gaza city – once home to 270,000 Palestinians – reduced to rubble. Van Hollen described how both lawmakers climbed an outside fire escape from the Egyptian side of the border to get a clear view of the destruction.The lawmakers also met with former Israel Defense Forces soldiers who described participating in “systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure”. Their report noted first-hand accounts of “how this was a part of an intentional pattern of using explosives to blow up whole city blocks, houses, schools and other civilian sites”.The senators documented arbitrary restrictions that have left aid groups unable to predict what will be denied entry. Jordanian officials told them that peanut butter, honey and dates had been suddenly banned from convoys, with entire trucks turned away for carrying a single restricted item. Each truck, the report says, is subject to a new $400 customs processing fee, and when the truck is not able to make it through the screening process, the $400 has to be paid again to join a later convoy. Because of those and other restrictions by the Israeli government, humanitarian aid coming in from Jordan was currently operating under 10% of its capacity, according to the report.In Egypt, the senators report, the UN’s fleet of trucks have “sustained severe damage”, with United Nations organizations showing the senators video of their convoys coming under fire from the IDF, “a regular occurrence”. The senators also toured a warehouse run by the Egyptian Red Crescent and the UN World Food Programme (WFP) with goods that had been banned by Israel, including solar-powered water pumps, tents, wheelchairs and even spare parts for trucks under “dual-use” restrictions, according to the report.At the Israeli port of Ashdod, WFP officials told the senators that 2,200 shipping containers of food – enough to feed everyone in Gaza for three weeks – sit delayed by screening procedures requiring each pallet to be checked individually.Merkley described the strategy’s two components: “One is to destroy homes so that they cannot be returned to … That second strategy is to deprive Palestinians of essentials to live, food, water, medicine.”Israel replaced the UN’s hundreds of distribution sites with just four aid points for 2 million people, three located only in southern Gaza. The senators heard accounts of malnourished mothers unable to walk miles to distribution sites while carrying children and then lift 40lb food boxes for the return journey. From 22 May to 31 July, 1,373 people were killed in the vicinity of these sites, according to the UN.That Israel and the United States are calling plans for the mass displacement of Palestinians in Gaza a “voluntary exodus” is one of the “most fraudulent, sinister, and twisted cover stories ever told”, the report reads.“There is nothing voluntary about wanting to depart when your home is gone, when your agricultural fields are no longer accessible,” Van Hollen said at the press conference.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenBoth senators accused the US government of enabling the described ethnic cleansing. “We, the United States, are complicit in all of this,” Van Hollen said. “Because we’re providing taxpayer dollar support to the Netanyahu government to use weapons in Gaza.”Sentiment in Congress with regards to longstanding US support for Israel has been slow moving, but it has been shifting. A recent Senate vote on arms sales to Israel saw 27 Democratic senators – more than half the caucus – oppose weapons transfers.“The same values that made me a champion for Israel compel me to say what they are doing to the Palestinians, both in West Bank and in Gaza, is absolutely wrong,” said Merkley.Both lawmakers called for immediate action to secure a ceasefire, noting that Israeli hostage families had told them Netanyahu “has prioritized his political survival over the survival of our loved ones”.“The world has a moral and legal obligation to stop the ongoing ethnic cleansing,” their report concludes. “Strong words alone will not be sufficient. The world must impose penalties and costs on those carrying out this plan.” More