Latest news with #StudentsForJusticeInPalestine
Fox News
22-07-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
NYC councilwoman warns Mamdani victory will drive away key voting bloc: 'Afraid to live here'
EXCLUSIVE: Inna Vernikov, a New York City Republican councilwoman, told Fox News Digital that voters in her heavily Jewish district are "petrified" about the prospect of socialist Zohran Mamdani becoming the city's next mayor. "This is a guy who wants to globalize the intifada," Vernikov told Fox News Digital. "We've never seen anything close to this in New York City. We have the largest Jewish population in America, and I'll tell you Jews are telling me they're going to run away from New York City, and Jews have contributed a lot to the city and to this country, and the idea that they are now afraid to live here it's unacceptable and unprecedented really, this has never happened here." Mamdani has been widely criticized for his anti-Israel positions dating back to his college days, when he founded his school's Students for Justice in Palestine chapter. In recent weeks, Mamdani has been criticized over a perceived reticence to condemn the phrase "globalize the intifada," which he now says he will not use and will discourage others from doing. Mamdani's father, Mahmood, has also faced scrutiny over his past writings and comments, which included a social media post celebrating a potential "third intifadah against settler colonialism" in Israel. "The intifada is a call for violence, we've seen what happened during two intifadas where people were murdered, innocent people lost their lives," Vernikov said, adding that "there's a lot of fear in the Jewish community if this guy becomes mayor." Vernikov, who is Jewish, told Fox News Digital people she has spoken to in her district are "petrified" of Mamdani becoming mayor. Numerous Jewish groups have come out in staunch opposition against Mamdani's candidacy. Brooke Goldstein, a human rights attorney, told Fox News Digital earlier this month that "Zohran Mamdani has built his political brand on the same radical, hate-filled and anti-American ideology his father, Mahmood Mamdani, has spent decades promoting—one that demonizes Jewish people and legitimizes anti-democratic violence." Fox News Digital reached out to Mamdani's campaign for comment. Vernikov took issue with Democrats who have started to endorse Mamdani, which experts say could cause problems for the Democratic Party if he wins in November, and criticized their excuse that "he's the Democratic nominee." "I'm curious, I have a question," Vernikov told Fox News Digital. "If this Democratic nominee would be like a KKK member or would call for annihilation of the black community, would they still you know, come behind him as hard as they are now, and I would think that the answer would be no, but when it comes to the Jews, that's okay." "So it's really hypocritical, unacceptable, and disgusting, and they've been endorsing him one by one. While Republicans are fighting antisemitism on behalf of Jewish Americans every day, the Democrats are supporting an antisemite."
Fox News
21-07-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Unearthed Mamdani clip reveals how his upbringing made him open to being called 'radical,' socialist
A resurfaced interview by New York City socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani shows him explaining that the family he grew up in made him "open" to being a "radical" and suggesting that socialism needs to be re-branded. "I think, honestly, growing up in the family that I grew up in, I was quite open to what would be considered being a radical from a very young age," Mamdani said on The Far Left Show in 2020. "I mean, from the beginning, my identities are already considered radical by a lot of mainstream American political thought. So being a Muslim, being an immigrant, these are things that already kind of put you in the box of 'other.' And so it's not that far of a jump because whenever you... stand up to speak up for the rights of others who share the same identity as you, then you're a radical, right? So often people in this country are considered radicals if they stand up for Palestinian human rights." Mamdani has faced criticism over some of his positions taken as a young man, including supporting an academic boycott of Israel and starting a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter during his college days, as well as the past writings of his father, Mahmood Mamdani. Mahmood Mamdani's social media presence is littered with anti-Israel positions referring to Israelis as "colonial settlers" and celebrating the idea of a "third intifada." Additionally, Mahmood Mamdani sits on the council of an openly anti-Israel tribunal and once wrote in a book that suicide bombers "stigmatized as a mark of barbarism." "Zohran Mamdani has built his political brand on the same radical, hate-filled and anti-American ideology his father, Mahmood Mamdani, has spent decades promoting—one that demonizes Jewish people and legitimizes anti-democratic violence," Brooke Goldstein, a human rights attorney who specializes in antisemitism, told Fox News Digital earlier this month. "The Jew-hatred the Mamdani family peddles is fundamentally anti-American and violates the core values our country was founded on—tolerance, equality, and liberty. Our nation's strength lies in its diversity and commitment to protecting minority rights. Antisemitic world views threaten the peace and security of our communities." In the interview, the younger Mamdani went on to lament the criticism that Democratic Socialists of America have faced for supporting BDS. BDS is described as "an international campaign to delegitimize the State of Israel as the expression of the Jewish people's right to national self-determination by isolating the country economically through consumer boycotts, business and government withdrawal of investment, and legal sanctions," according to Influence Watch. Mamdani also explained in the interview his evolution as a "socialist." "I think I've been a socialist for quite a while, but I don't think I understood myself within the terms of that label," Mamdani said. "And I think that that is something that I not only internalized, but also became comfortable expressing when I became an active member of New York City DSA, which is an organization that I've been a member of. I attended my first meeting in early 2017, but I've been a much more active member since 2018." Mamdani added that he hopes to rebrand the word socialism to be more appetizing for the general public. "I think, for me, a lot of times people try and scare you into never embracing the word, and I think that there's a lot of work that we have to do to change our branding, because socialism in and of itself, the way I understand it, is a fight for the state to provide all that is necessary to live a dignified life for each and every person in our state," Mamdani explained. "That is something that when you explain it in that way, and when you talk about the way in which it is applied, when you're talking about typically housing, healthcare, education, but I would argue we must expand that beyond and talk about public transit and talk about the internet and talk childcare. People are receptive to that." Fox News Digital reached out to the Mamdani campaign for comment.
Fox News
16-07-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Will Zohran Mamdani protect all New Yorkers? He owes the Jewish community an answer
As New York City faces an unprecedented surge in antisemitism, with Jewish residents experiencing the highest levels of hatred and violence in decades, every elected official and candidate should be held accountable for their commitment to protecting all constituents. This includes Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, whose past statements and associations raise serious questions about his dedication to Jewish safety and security. The data paints a stark picture. New York State experienced a record 1,437 antisemitic incidents in 2024—an 18 percent increase from 2023, and the highest number of any state in the nation. Even more alarming, antisemitic assaults in New York jumped by 52 percent in 2024, accounting for nearly one-third of all antisemitic assaults nationwide. This isn't just about statistics—it's about real people living in fear. This is a 12-year-old being bullied at a middle school in Queens, or an Orthodox couple harassed in broad daylight in Brooklyn. It's a group of Jewish college students trapped in a library with a mob screaming at them, banging on the windows. Jewish New Yorkers are being harassed and targeted at synagogues, schools, universities, businesses and on the street. Against this backdrop, Mamdani's past embrace of inflammatory rhetoric and support for radical anti-Israel groups make understanding his commitment to Jewish safety even more important. As a student, he founded the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter at Bowdoin College. It is one of the most radical groups on college campuses in America. As an assemblymember, he sponsored the "Not on our Dime Act" that attempted to stop New York registered charitable organizations from sending donations to Israel to "fund war crimes." This included needs like ambulance services, emergency response, food security, and more. Most recently, Mamdani's failure to condemn chants of "Globalize the Intifada"—a slogan that is nothing less than a call for indiscriminate violence against Israel, Jews and Jewish communities worldwide—raises fundamental questions about his commitment to Jewish safety. He was given multiple opportunities over the last several weeks, including with Meet the Press host Kristen Welker, to clarify his stance. Mamdani did not swing and miss; he refused to even take the bat off his shoulder and try to hit the pitch. But the concerns now have evolved far beyond simply calling out a clear statement of violence. Any candidate for mayor needs to explain to the Jewish community and to all New York City residents what specific steps they will take to curb surging antisemitism and hate — and what measures they will not take so as not to endanger the embattled Jewish community in a moment when it is already reeling. We should be asking some key questions and demanding public answers from the candidates rather than private reassurances. For example: To be clear, these aren't unreasonable requests – they're basic expectations for any public servant but relevant based on past associations, positions and statements. At the same time, the onus is not just on Mamdani. There are many candidates in this mayoral race. We expect all of them to support the Jewish community. Antisemitism is not an abstraction – it is a clear and present danger to Jewish Americans. In the past few months, we have seen it manifest in very threatening ways in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., and Boulder, Colorado. In light of these very real acts of violence, we need a mayor who demonstrates in deed, not just in word, how they will prevent the bedlam from spreading to New York and how they will protect Jewish New Yorkers, considering their singular set of challenges and do so with the same degree of care and respect shown to all other New Yorkers. The Jewish community—and all New Yorkers who value tolerance and safety—deserve clear, unambiguous answers. *As a 501(c)(3) organization, ADL takes no position in support of or in opposition to any candidate for elected office.
Fox News
09-07-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Unearthed Mamdani college newspaper writings promote anti-Israel boycott, rail against 'white privilege'
FIRST ON FOX: College newspaper articles written by New York City socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani shed light on the surging candidate's early views on a variety of topics, including his promotion of an anti-Israel boycott and concerns about "white privilege," a Fox News Digital review found. Mamdani wrote 32 articles for the Bowdoin Orient during his four years studying at Maine's presitigous Bowdoin College from 2010 to 2014, including an article his senior year promoting an academic boycott of Israel. "This academic and cultural boycott aims to bring under scrutiny the actions of the Israeli government and to put pressure on Israeli institutions to end the oppressive occupation and racist policies within both Israel and occupied Palestine," wrote Mamdani, who co-founded his college's Students for Justice in Palestine organization. Students for Justice in Palestine has become one of the biggest drivers of anti-Israel protests on college campuses since the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre, with some going so far as to celebrate the attack. Mamdani was taking issue in his article with Bowdoin College's president, Barry Mills, opposing the boycott. "Lastly, Mills regrettably makes no mention of Palestinians or Palestine," Mamdani wrote. "The call for the boycott comes in response to more than 60 years of Israeli colonial occupation of Palestine. When Mills speaks of the 'free exchange of knowledge, ideas, and research, and open discourse' in academia, he does so while privileging partnerships with Israeli institutions over basic freedoms for Palestinians, including the rights to food, water, shelter and education, which many Palestinians are denied under Israeli rule." In a 2013 op-ed, Mamdani responded to a White student who took issue with criticism of the school's editorial page being too White by accusing him of holding "white privilege." "White males are privileged in their near-to-exclusive featuring as figures of authority in print, on television and around us in our daily realities," Mamdani wrote. "We, the consumers of these media, internalize this and so believe in the innate authority of a white male's argument and the need for its publication. So, white privilege is both a structural and an individual phenomenon, the former propelling the latter. Therefore, even when the individual is silent, the structures continue to exist and frame our society through their existence." Mamdani said the "pervasive male whiteness" of the school's opinion pages "builds on the sadly still-present white male monopolization of both discourse and understanding." Mamdani explained, "While whiteness is not homogenous, white privilege is. This privilege is clear in not having to face institutional racism in access to housing subsidies, college grants, financial institutions, or civil rights. It allows a white person to universalize his own experiences. It restricts society's ability to understand its flaws, and projects a false image of meritocracy upon a nation built on institutional racism." In another post, titled "Bearded in Cairo," Mamdani discussed his time studying abroad in Egypt as the Muslim Brotherhood was violently toppling President Morsi's regime. He explained that before arriving he had grown a beard "mostly as a symbolic middle finger" to the stereotype that "pervades America" that brown individuals with beards are a "terrorist." Mamdani discussed privilege again, saying that he had "arrived in a society where privilege was a different color." "Gone was the image of the white Christian male that I had grown accustomed to, and in its place was a darker, more familiar picture – one that, for the first time, I fit: brown skin, black hair, and a Muslim name," Mamdani wrote. "With the right clothing, some took me for an Egyptian and most thought I was Syrian – either identity allowed me unrestricted access to exploring Cairo." In a 2014 article titled "On the 50th anniversary of MLK's visit to campus, let's acknowledge what we still need to achieve," Mamdani lamented that his school, which doubled its diversity student population over the previous 13 years, was still behind where it should be. He wrote that the school had prematurely achieved a "satisfaction with the level of diversity." "I have been forced to personally grapple with these inconsistencies during my time here," Mamdani wrote. "I sit in class not knowing whether to correct everyone's mispronunciation of an Indian woman's name. I usually do, but today I'm tired. I'm tired of being one of a few non-white students in a classroom, if not the only one. I bring up race in discussions only to see the thought flicker in my peers eyes and on their tongues. They sigh without a sound. I've brought up race again. I've sidetracked the discussion. I've chosen to make an issue out of it." In the same post, Mamdani, who was born in Uganda to Indian parents, outlined his struggles feeling uncomfortable being a non-white student. "I grow a beard only to be called a terrorist," Mamdani wrote. "I pronounce the 'h' in my name only to hear muffled laughs. Clothing becomes exotic once it clads my body. Cotton shirts are called dashikis and sandals ethnic." Mamdani continued, "While I am now comfortable in my own skin, I can remember wishing for whiteness my first year when I thought certain types of girls were impossible to talk to due to my skin being more kiwi than peach. Months later, I remember thinking that attraction might only be possible when a girl had 'a thing for brown guys.'" Mamdani explained that he has found "solidarity" with some students on campus but that "still, too few people acknowledge that race is an issue on our campus, or that it has ever been one." "But if people say they are color blind, do they even see me?" Mamdani wrote. Fox News Digital reached out to Mamdani's campaign for comment. Mamdani burst onto the national political scene last month when he won a surprising victory in New York City's Democratic mayoral primary despite facing criticism for his far-left policies, which included city-run grocery stores, defunding police, safe injection sites and raising the minimum wage to $30. Mamdani's victory has sparked a civil war of sorts within the Democratic Party between those pushing to moderate since VP Kamala Harris's defeat in November and those embracing a progressive shift toward the mold of Rep. Alexandria-Cortez, D-N.Y., who endorsed Mamdani. Mamdani, thanks to his primary victory, is the clear frontrunner in the general election in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by a roughly six-to-one margin.
The Guardian
06-07-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
The destruction of Palestine is breaking the world
Sereen Haddad is a bright young woman. At 20 years old, she just finished a four-year degree in psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in only three years, earning the highest honors along the way. Yet, despite her accomplishments, she still can't graduate. Her diploma is being withheld by the university, 'not because I didn't complete the requirements', she told me, 'but because I stood up for Palestinian life.' Haddad, who is Palestinian American, had been raising awareness on her campus about the Palestinian fight for freedom as part of her university's chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. The struggle is also personal for her. With roots in Gaza, she has lost more than 200 members of her extended family to Israel's war. She was part of a group of VCU students and supporters who attempted to set up an encampment in April 2024. The university called in the police that same night. Protestors were pepper sprayed and brutalized, and 13 were arrested. Haddad was not charged, but she was taken to the hospital 'because of the head trauma that I endured', she told me. 'I was bleeding. I was bruised. Cuts everywhere. The police slammed me down on the concrete, like, six different times.' But last year's attempted encampment wasn't even the reason Haddad's degree is being withheld. This year's peaceful memorial of it was. And how that scenario played out, with the university and campus police constantly changing the rules, illustrates something worrisome far beyond the leafy confines of an American campus. Israel's war in Gaza is chipping away at so much of what we – in the United States but also internationally – had agreed upon as acceptable, from the rules governing our freedom of speech to the very laws of armed conflict. It seems no exaggeration to say that the foundation of the international order of the last 77 years is threatened by this change in the obligations governing our legal and political responsibilities to each other. This collapse began with the liberal world's lack of resolve to rein in Israel's war in Gaza. It escalated when no one lifted a finger to stop hospitals being bombed. It expanded when mass starvation became a weapon of war. And it is peaking at a time when total war is no longer viewed as a human abhorrence but is instead the deliberate policy of the state of Israel. The implications of this collapse are profound for international, regional and even domestic politics. Political dissent is repressed, political language is policed, and traditionally liberal societies are increasingly militarized against their own citizens. Many of us disregard how much has shifted in the last 20 months. But we are ignoring the collapse of the international system that has defined our lives for generations at our own collective peril. On 29 April 2025, a group of VCU students met on a campus lawn to remember the forcible dismantling of an encampment briefly erected on the same space the year prior. The gathering was not a protest. It was more akin to a picnic, with some students using banners from past demonstrations as blankets. Others brought actual blankets. Students sat on the grass and studied for their finals, tinkered with their laptops, and played cards or chess. A handful of the 40-odd students sported keffiyehs. It turned out the blankets were a problem. Almost two hours into their picnic, a university administrator confronted the students over a social media post that had advertised the gathering. ('Come be in community with one another to commemorate 1 Year since VCU's brutal response to the G4Z4 Solidarity Encampment. Bring picnic blankets, homework/finals, art supplies, snacks, music, games,' a local Palestinian solidarity group had posted.) Because of this post, the university considered the picnic an 'organized event', and since the students hadn't registered the event, it was deemed a violation of the rules. The rules at VCU had been changing because of protests for Gaza since February 2024. The administrator told the students they could relocate to the campus free-speech zone, an area that had been established in August 2024 because of the protests of that year. 'An amphitheater next to four dumpsters' is how Haddad described the area to me. The campus free-speech organization Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire) is critical of free-speech zones because they 'function more like free speech quarantines, banishing student and faculty speakers to outposts that may be tiny, on the fringes of campus, or (frequently) both'. Rather than move, the students announced a formal end to their gathering, and they remained quietly on their campus lawn. But since the banners they were sitting on expressed a political point of view, the administrator told the students they would have to take them to the free-speech zone, according to Haddad. The lawn should be for everybody, the students countered. Several different conversations with campus police officers and different administrators ensued, with the students being told different rules each time. Over a dozen campus police officers appeared later that afternoon (as seen in this video). 'You've been asked not to have any blankets in the park. You have one minute to collect the blankets and to leave the park. Otherwise, you will be arrested for trespassing,' an officer told them. But the police continued to change the rules. First the students were told they would have to roll up the blankets and leave. Minutes later, police said they could stay if the blankets were gone. The students removed the blankets and, as the officers were leaving, the students began chanting: 'Free, free Palestine!' One raised a sign, referencing last year's protestors being pepper sprayed by police, that read: 'Gonna gas us again, you fucking monsters.' He was arrested. The others became angry and frustrated. 'You know what made this a demonstration?' a student yelled at the police. 'When you bring fucking cops to a picnic! That's what turns it into a fucking demonstration!' Eight days later, Haddad and another student, identified by the university as leaders, were served notice of policy violations due to the unauthorized gathering. Their degrees were being withheld. 'When students expose the violence of Israel's occupation and genocide, institutions like VCU, which are deeply entangled with weapon manufacturers and corporate donors, become fearful,' Haddad said. 'So they twist the rules, they rewrite the policies, and they try to silence us … But it's all about power. Our demands for justice are a threat to their complicity.' The strategic rewriting of the rules isn't unique to VCU. It's taking place across the United States as university administrators clamp down on protests supporting Palestinian rights. In one of many other examples, dozens of faculty members and students were temporarily suspended from Harvard's library in late 2024 after they sat quietly reading in the library with signs that either supported free speech or opposed the war in Gaza, though a similar protest in December 2023 carried no such sanction. Had any of these students been protesting Russia's war on Ukraine, you can be sure these administrations would have responded with adulation. Universities, after all, pride themselves on being the testing grounds for society's collective values. As sites of contemplation and exploration, they function as incubators for future leaders. But when it comes to the question of Palestine, a different pattern begins to emerge. Rather than listen to students who want to hold Israel accountable for its actions, those in positions of power in the university are opting to change the rules instead. Such dubious rule changes are not just for our students. In a damning report published in January, ProPublica dissected the many ways that the Biden administration kept shifting the goalposts in Israel's favor after 7 October 2023. Remember the threats of sanctions against Israel for invading Rafah? (It's a 'red line,' Biden said.) Or the 30-day ultimatum placed on Israel to dramatically increase the food aid? But nothing happened. Outside briefly pausing a shipment of 2,000lb (0.9 tonne) bombs, the military hardware kept on coming. The Leahy law requires restricting assistance to military units of foreign governments engaged in gross human rights violations. It has never been applied to Israel. In April 2024, it looked like secretary of state Antony Blinken was about to sanction Netzah Yehuda, a notorious battalion in the Israeli Defense Forces, under the Leahy law. In the end, he punted, and the battalion not only escaped US sanctions, but according to CNN, its commanders were even assigned to train ground troops and run operations in Gaza. 'It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the red lines have all just been a smokescreen,' Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School, told ProPublica. 'The Biden administration decided to be all in and merely pretended that it was trying to do something about it.' Leahy isn't the only US law that Israeli impunity is pushing to a breaking point. In late April 2024, the US government's leading agencies on humanitarian assistance concluded that Israel was deliberately blocking entry of food and medicine into Gaza. The US Foreign Assistance Act requires the government to suspend military assistance to any country that 'restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance'. Blinken just ignored the evidence provided by his own government. 'We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance,' he informed Congress. The rules bend like reeds when it comes to Israel, which in March 2025 also broke the ceasefire that the Trump administration had helped negotiate in January. And now we are witnessing a new level of cruelty: the use of starvation as a weapon of war. Meanwhile Israeli politicians openly call for ethnic cleansing. Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister, bragged that Israel is 'destroying everything that's left of the Gaza Strip' and that 'the army is leaving no stone unturned.' He added: 'We are conquering, cleansing and remaining in Gaza until Hamas is destroyed.' And his idea of Hamas is expansive. 'We're eliminating ministers, bureaucrats, money handlers – everyone who holds up Hamas's civilian rule,' he explained. Killing civilian members of government (as they are not combatants) is a war crime. The US and the international community, again, do nothing. Every day, the previously unheard of is not just spoken aloud but also acted upon – precisely because it elicits little reaction. Two retired Israeli air force pilots wrote in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz's Hebrew edition that 'a member of the Knesset even boasted that one of the [Israeli] government's achievements is the ability to kill 100 people a day in Gaza without anyone being shocked' (an excerpt of the Haaretz article was quoted by columnist Thomas Friedman in the New York Times.) This steady shift of the acceptable has resulted in criminal policies and practices of forcible displacement, mass suffering and genocide, all conducted under passive acquiescence or active complicity of powerful countries. Even the normally reticent Red Cross is speaking out in horror. 'Humanity is failing in Gaza,' Mirjana Spoljaric Egger, president of the International Committee for the Red Cross, told the BBC's Jeremy Bowen recently. 'The fact that we are watching a people being entirely stripped of its human dignity should really shock our collective conscience,' she lamented. Yet, official outrage is at best muted as all that was once considered institutionally solid melts into air. What is it about Israel that enables it to get away with murder? The United States has long shielded Israel from international criticism and supported it militarily. The reasons offered for that support usually range from the 'unbreakable' bond shared between the two countries to the power of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) in Washington. One could reasonably argue that the only thing different about this current war is the scale. But it's not just Washington. Israel and the question of Palestine produce incredibly fraught divisions throughout much of the western world. Denmark recently banned children gearing up to vote in a nationwide youth election from debating Palestinian sovereignty. Why? In a conversation with the New York Times' Ezra Klein, professor of international human rights law Aslı Bâli offered one explanation for what's different about Palestine. In 1948, she notes, Palestine was 'the only territory that had been slated to be decolonized at the creation of the United Nations … that has [still] not been decolonized'. South Africa was once in that category. For decades, Palestine and South Africa were 'understood as ongoing examples of incomplete decolonization that continued long after the rest of the world had been fully decolonized'. Today, Palestine is the last exception to that historical process – a holdover plainly clear to the people who were once subject to colonization, but that the western world refuses to acknowledge as an aberration. In other words, for many in the US and much of the western world, the creation of the state of Israel is understood as the fulfillment of Jewish national aspirations. For the rest of the world, the same fulfillment of Jewish national aspirations has rendered the decolonization of Palestine incomplete. In 2003, the historian Tony Judt wrote that the 'problem with Israel [is] … that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-19th-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a 'Jewish state' – a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded – is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.' Judt's idea that Israel is a relic of another era requires understanding how the global push for decolonization significantly accelerated after 1945. The result was a new world – but one that forsook the Palestinians, leaving them abandoned in refugee camps in 1948. This new world, emerging out of the ashes of the second world war, became what we today call 'the rules-based international order', of which international law is a key component. International law became much more codified in this time as well. The year 1948 was not only the date of the Palestinian Nakba (Arabic for 'catastrophe:) and Israel's independence. It was also the year that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was passed. Along with the UN Charter of 1945, the UDHR serves as the principal basis of international human rights law. But what good is a 'rules-based international order' if the rules keep shifting? The truth is that we've never really lived in a 'rules-based international order', or at least not the one that most people imagine when they hear the phrase. The idea that international law establishes limits on the actions of states did not prevent the Rwandan genocide. The 'rules-based international order' didn't stop the US's 'illegal' invasion of Iraq in 2003. Long before 2023, Israel routinely violated Security Council resolutions. It didn't stop Hamas from committing its war crimes on 7 October. The problem with international law is not just the lack of an enforcement mechanism to compel compliance of rogue states. The problem with international law is that 'it is more likely to serve as a tool of the strong than of the weak,' the legal theorist Ian Hurd writes in his 2017 book, How to Do Things with International Law. We tend to think of the law as an agreed-upon limit on our actions. As Dwight D Eisenhower famously said: 'The world no longer has a choice between force and law. If civilization is to survive, it must choose the rule of law.' But what if law is better understood as a system that, yes, restricts behavior but more importantly validates what's possible? Whoever gets to define the limits gets to define what's acceptable. As such, the powerful are far more likely to shift the ground of what's acceptable to their advantage. As Hurd explains, international law 'facilitates empire in the traditional sense because strong states … shape the meaning of international rules and obligations through interpretation and practice'. Though international law generally bans warfare, it carves out an exception for self-defense, and powerful states are the ones that can shift the line on what constitutes legitimate self-defense. (Israel broadly claims self-defense for its aggression on Iran, for example, as Russia explicitly claims self-defense for attacking Ukraine.) In his book, Hurd examines how the US has justified its use of drone warfare and even torture by appealing to international law. International law, for Hurd, is not a system that rests above politics. It is politics. The point I take from Hurd is not that international law doesn't exist or that it's not valuable. Clearly, there's a need for rules to protect civilians and prevent war. International humanitarian law is also a living and breathing thing that adapts and expands. Additional protocols to the Geneva conventions were adopted in 1977. The Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court was passed in 1998. But international law is also repeatedly put under stress, routinely violated, and consistently pushed into the service of strong states. As such, international law in practice is better understood as a constantly shifting line of acceptable behavior. We may now be reaching the point where that line has shifted so far from the founding intentions of international law that the system itself is on the brink of collapse. Israel's campaign in Gaza carries the terrifying possibility of such a radical shifting of the line of acceptability that it makes genocide a lawful weapon of war. If you think I'm being hyperbolic, consider what Colin Jones wrote in the New Yorker earlier this year. Jones consulted key lawyers in the American military establishment about their views on Israel's campaign in Gaza. What he found was a US military that is deeply concerned about being hobbled by international law when prosecuting a future war against a major power such as China – so much so that Israel's 'loosened restraints on civilian casualties' usefully shifts the goalposts for future US conduct. To the US military, Jones writes: 'Gaza not only looks like a dress rehearsal for the kind of combat US soldiers may face. It is a test of the American public's tolerance for the levels of death and destruction that such kinds of warfare entail.' What future hell are we currently living in? In his book, Hurd also illustrates a fundamental difference between domestic and international legal regimes. The expectation we have of domestic law, he says, is that it is 'clear, stable, and known in advance', whereas international law is up to the consent of states. Trump's contempt for institutions of international law couldn't be clearer. He placed sanctions on judges and jurists of the International Criminal Court after arrest warrants were issued against Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and former defense minister Yoav Gallant. (He issued similar sanctions in 2020.) He defied the UN Charter by bombing Iran, a sovereign nation not posing an imminent risk to the United States. The global response? A mild rebuke from the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and full-throated support from Nato secretary general Mark Rutte. His disdain for domestic institutions of law is just as visible. He has invoked phony emergencies to claim 'emergency powers' like no president before him, enabling him to get around Congress and, essentially, rule by decree. He deployed military troops in California, against the wishes of its governor, and an appeals court has even authorized his decision. He is walking the line of open defiance of various judicial orders. What is happening? It's tempting to think that we are living in a new era of lawlessness, but that would fail to capture the change staring us in the face. This is not about the lack of law. It's about the remaking of the law. What Trump and leaders like him seek is not so much to destroy the law as to colonize it, to possess the law by determining its parameters to serve their interests. For them, the law exists to bend to their will, to destroy their adversaries, and to provide an alibi for behavior which, in a better version of our world, would be punished as criminal. Maybe it's not surprising that something as vulnerable as international law could crack under today's pressures. What may be surprising is how we're also losing our domestic sense of stability, peace and security along with it and how connected the struggle for Palestine is to this domestic dismantling, especially when it comes to free expression. Just ask Sereen Haddad or Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian rights activist who spent 104 days in detention for his constitutionally protected political speech and still faces the prospect of deportation. The convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide was, like the UDHR, approved in the fateful year of 1948. Its arrival was urgent and necessary after the Nazi Holocaust of the Jewish people, and modern international law was constructed on the understanding that together we in the international community would work together to prevent future genocides. While we have failed to live up to that promise in the past, today it is Israel's acts of extermination and genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, funded and enabled at every turn by a complicit west, that has contributed the most to the demise of the global, rules-based order. The way it looks today, the system won't make it to 100 years. And its collapse can be directly attributed to the hypocrisy with which the world has treated the Palestinians. No other group has been subjected to such a prolonged state of loss in the post-1945 liberal order. Palestinian refugees constitute 'the world's oldest and largest protracted refugee situation' in the modern world. And the demands placed on Palestinians simply to survive get more barbaric by the hour. In Gaza, desperate Palestinians are gunned down by snipers and drones daily as they wait for food. A drought is imminent because Israel's attacks have destroyed most of the strip's wastewater treatment plants, sewage systems, reservoirs and pipes. Up to 98% of Gaza's farmland has been destroyed by Israel. This is a form of total war the modern world should never see, let alone condone. No one knows what will come to replace the international system that is currently collapsing around us, but any political system that prioritizes punishing those who protest genocide rather than stopping the killing has clearly exhausted itself. If there's a glimmer of hope in all this rage-inducing misery, it can be found in the growing number of people around the world who refuse to be intimidated into silence. We may have seen a small example of that courage in New York City recently, and I'm not talking only about Zohran Mamdani winning the Democratic party nomination for mayor. That same day, two of Brooklyn's progressive politicians, Alexa Avilés and Shahana Hanif, were running for renomination. Both supported Palestine, both were relentlessly attacked for their positions on Gaza, and both refused to change their views. Pro-Israel donors poured money into their opponents' campaigns. Yet both handily won their races. Multiple factors go into winning any political campaign, but any expressed support for Palestine used to be a death knell. Could it be that we're on the cusp of change? Maybe Palestinian freedom is no longer a liability but is now a real winning position in politics? Palestine is perhaps the clearest expression today, as Haddad told me, of how 'power feels threatened by the truth.' She continued: 'If they are so afraid of a student with a sign or a chalked message or a demand for justice, then we are stronger than they want us to believe.' She better be right. For all our sakes.
