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Israel’s Genocide Day 416: UNRWA says the amount of food aid being allowed into Gaza meets less than 6% of the need
Casualties
· 44,235 + killed* and at least 104,638 wounded in the Gaza Strip, 59% of whom are women, children and elderly, as of October 21, 2024.*
· 796+ Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. This includes at least 146 children.**
· 3,7678 Lebanese killed and more than 15,669 wounded by Israeli forces since October 8, 2023***
· Israel revised its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,189.
· Israel recognizes the death of 890 Israeli soldiers, policemen and intelligence officers and the injury of at least 5,065 others since October 7.****
* Gaza’s branch of the Palestinian Ministry of Health confirmed this figure in its daily report, published through its WhatsApp channel on November 25, 2024. Rights groups and public health experts estimate the death toll to be much higher.
** The death toll in the West Bank and Jerusalem is not updated regularly. This is the latest figure according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health as of November 24, 2024.
*** This figure was released by the Lebanese Health Ministry, updated on November 25, 2024. The counting is based on the Lebanese official date for the beginning of “the Israeli aggression on Lebanon,” when Israel began airstrikes on Lebanese territory after the beginning of Hezbollah’s “support front” for Gaza.
**** These figures are released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.” Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot reported on August 4, 2024, that some 10,000 Israeli soldiers and officers have been either killed or wounded since October 7. The head of the Israeli army’s wounded association told Israel’s Channel 12 that the number of wounded Israeli soldiers exceeds 20,000, including at least 8,000 who have been permanently handicapped as of June 1. Israel’s Channel 7 reported that according to the Israeli war ministry’s rehabilitation service numbers, 8,663 new wounded joined the army’s handicap rehabilitation system since October 7 and as of June 18.
Source: mondoweiss.net
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It’s Movement Time
It’s movement time.
As the Trump presidency take shape, there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. Disbelief meshes with despair, and some are quite frankly desolate.
Dry your tears, blow your noses, and join movements of resistance to this madness. Blacks in America have never known a time when resistance wasn’t necessary, including life under a Black president.
For centuries for generations, people have had to struggle for freedom, for respect, for justice. Why should this time be any different?
The ancestors, like the revered Frederick Douglass, lambasted Abraham Lincoln as a fool or coward who wouldn’t fight the civil war with thousands of willing Black troops. Said Douglass, “if there is no struggle, there is no progress.” Said Douglass, “Power concedes nothing without demand.”
So let us struggle. Let us build movements that lift our hearts. Let us remake our history with the brick and mortar of struggle.
—Prison Radio, November 21, 2016
https://www.prisonradio.org/commentary/it-is-movement-time/
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
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We need a united, independent, democratically organized mass movement for peace, justice and equality in solidarity with similar movements worldwide if we are to survive the death agony of capitalism and its inevitable descent into fascism and barbarism before it destroys the world altogether!
—Bonnie Weinstein
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On this Wrongful Conviction Day, Leonard Peltier, the longest-serving Indigenous political prisoner, is incarcerated in lockdown-modified operations conditions at USP Coleman I, operated by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP).
Yet, in this moment of silence, Leonard speaks.
To honor his birthday and all those who are unjustly convicted and incarcerated, the Leonard Peltier Official Ad Hoc Committee has released a video of Leonard Peltier that is going viral. Narrated by renowned scholar Ward Churchill and set to a video created by award-winning filmmaker Suzie Baer, the film most importantly centers Leonard’s personal reflection on his 80th year.
Jenipher Jones, Mr. Peltier's lead counsel, commented, "This powerfully moving film captures the essence of who I know Leonard to be. I am grateful to Professor Churchill and Suzie Baer for their work and longstanding advocacy of Leonard. As the recent execution of Marcellus Williams-Imam Khaliifah Williams shows us, we as a society bear a responsibility to uplift the cases of all those who are wrongfully convicted and also hold the government accountable to do that for which it professes to exist. We must challenge our impulses of blind blood-thirst for guilt and the use of our legal systems to carry out this malignant pathology. There is absolutely no lawful justification for Leonard's incarceration."
“Leonard Peltier is Native elder whose wrongful incarceration is shameful. His continued imprisonment exemplifies the historical cruelty of the US Government toward Native people. The US BOP's treatment of Leonard Peltier is unlawful, and he deserves his freedom.” —Suzie Baer
Leonard's Statement: Peltier 80th Statement.pdf:
https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21ABHSRNdyB8SKn0I&id=DFF2DD874157D44A%21118178&cid=DFF2DD874157D44A&parId=root&parQt=sharedby&o=OneUp
To view the film, please visit:
https://tinyurl.com/Peltier80thPresentation
We hope to have additional updates on Leonard soon. In the meantime, please engage our calls to action or donate to his defense efforts.
Miigwech.
Donate/ActNow:
Write to:
Leonard Peltier 89637-132
USP Coleman 1
P.O. Box 1033
Coleman, FL 33521
Note: Letters, address and return address must be in writing—no stickers—and on plain white paper.
Sign our petition urging President Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier:
https://www.freeleonardpeltier.com/petition
Email: contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info
Address: 116 W. Osborne Ave. Tampa, Florida 33603
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Beneath The Mountain: An Anti-Prison Reader (City Lights, 2024) is a collection of revolutionary essays, written by those who have been detained inside prison walls. Composed by the most structurally dispossessed people on earth, the prisoner class, these words illuminate the steps towards freedom.
Beneath the Mountain documents the struggle — beginning with slavery, genocide, and colonization up to our present day — and imagines a collective, anti-carceral future. These essays were handwritten first on scraps of paper, magazine covers, envelopes, toilet paper, or pages of bibles, scratched down with contraband pencils or the stubby cartridge of a ball-point pen; kites, careworn, copied and shared across tiers and now preserved in this collection for this and future generations. If they were dropped in the prison-controlled mail they were cloaked in prayers, navigating censorship and dustbins. They were very often smuggled out. These words mark resistance, fierce clarity, and speak to the hope of building the world we all deserve to live in.
"Beneath the Mountain reminds us that ancestors and rebels have resisted conquest and enslavement, building marronage against colonialism and genocide."
—Joy James, author of New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency
Who stands beneath the mountain but prisoners of war? Mumia Abu-Jamal and Jennifer Black have assembled a book of fire, each voice a flame in captivity...Whether writing from a place of fugivity, the prison camp, the city jail, the modern gulag or death row, these are our revolutionary thinkers, our critics and dreamers, our people. The people who move mountains. —Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Filled with insight and energy, this extraordinary book gifts us the opportunity to encounter people’s understanding of the fight for freedom from the inside out. —Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag and Abolition Geography
These are the words each writer dreamed as they sought freedom and they need to be studied by people inside and read in every control unit/hole in every prison in America. We can send this book for you to anyone who you know who is currently living, struggling, and fighting
Who better to tell these stories than those who have lived them? Don’t be surprised with what you find within these pages: hope, solidarity, full faith towards the future, and most importantly, love.
Excerpt from the book:
"Revolutionary love speaks to the ways we protect, respect, and empower each other while standing up to state terror. Its presence is affirmed through these texts as a necessary component to help chase away fear and to encourage the solidarity and unity essential for organizing in dangerous times and places. Its absence portends tragedy. Revolutionary love does not stop the state from wanting to kill us, nor is it effective without strategy and tactics, but it is the might that fuels us to stand shoulder to shoulder with others regardless. Perhaps it can move mountains." —Jennifer Black & Mumia Abu-Jamal from the introduction to Beneath The Mountain: An Anti Prison Reader
Get the book at:
https://www.prisonradiostore.com/shop-2/beneath-the-mountain-an-anti-prison-reader-edited-by-mumia-abu-jamal-jennifer-black-city-lights-2024
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Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky
In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.
Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin:
“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”
Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.
A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.
To sign the online petition at freeboris.info
—Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024
https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.
The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested.
On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release.
The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison.
The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences.
There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering.
Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course.
We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally.
We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
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*Major Announcement*
Claudia De la Cruz wins
Peace and Freedom Party primary in California!
We have an exciting announcement. The votes are still being counted in California, but the Claudia-Karina “Vote Socialist” campaign has achieved a clear and irreversible lead in the Peace and Freedom Party primary. Based on the current count, Claudia has 46% of the vote compared to 40% for Cornel West. A significant majority of PFP’s newly elected Central Committee, which will formally choose the nominee at its August convention, have also pledged their support to the Claudia-Karina campaign.
We are excited to campaign in California now and expect Claudia De la Cruz to be the candidate on the ballot of the Peace and Freedom Party in November.
We achieved another big accomplishment this week - we’re officially on the ballot in Hawai’i! This comes after also petitioning to successfully gain ballot access in Utah. We are already petitioning in many other states. Each of these achievements is powered by the tremendous effort of our volunteers and grassroots organizers across the country. When we’re organized, people power can move mountains!
We need your help to keep the momentum going. Building a campaign like this takes time, energy, and money. We know that our class enemies — the billionaires, bankers, and CEO’s — put huge sums toward loyal politicians and other henchmen who defend their interests. They will use all the money and power at their disposal to stop movements like ours. As an independent, socialist party, our campaign is relying on contributions from the working class and people like you.
We call on each and every one of our supporters to set up a monthly or one-time donation to support this campaign to help it keep growing and reaching more people. A new socialist movement, independent of the Democrats and Republicans, is being built but it will only happen when we all pitch in.
The Claudia-Karina campaign calls to end all U.S. aid to Israel. End this government’s endless wars. We want jobs for all, with union representation and wages that let us live with dignity. Housing, healthcare, and education for all - without the lifelong debt. End the ruthless attacks on women, Black people, immigrants, and LGBTQ people. These are just some of the demands that are resonating across the country. Help us take the next step:
Volunteer: https://votesocialist2024.com/volunteer
Donate: https://votesocialist2024.com/donate
See you in the streets,
Claudia & Karina
Don't Forget! Join our telegram channel for regular updates: https://t.me/+KtYBAKgX51JhNjMx
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) In West Bank Raids, Palestinians See Echoes of Israel’s Gaza War
West Bank residents say Israeli forces are adopting tactics similar to the ones they are deploying in Gaza, including airstrikes and the use of Palestinians as human shields.
By Raja Abdulrahim and Azmat Khan, Photographs by Sergey Ponomarev, Nov. 24, 2024
Raja Abdulrahim reported from Jenin; Azmat Khan from Tubas, Faraa, Tulkarm, Jenin and Ramallah; and Sergey Ponomarev from Jenin and Tulkarm, all in the occupied West Bank.
Nasir Damaj at his house in Jenin, West Bank, in September. He recalled being used as a human shield by Israeli soldiers.
The Israeli soldiers grabbed his arms on each side, Nasir Damaj recalled, marching him through the streets to the blown-out shell of a mosque.
A shaft led to an old underground cave. As they ordered him to climb down, Mr. Damaj said he realized why: He was being used as a human shield.
“They wanted me to scout what was downstairs, to protect them,” Mr. Damaj said.
He said he protested, but the three soldiers and their commander, assault rifles in hand, forced him to investigate what the Israelis later called “an underground combat facility.”
“Be careful,” Mr. Damaj recalled the commander telling him as the soldiers handed him a drone so they could survey the cave. “Don’t break it. It’s expensive.”
The episode, which was corroborated by witnesses, did not take place in Gaza, where Israeli forces have illegally forced Palestinians to carry out dangerous missions to avoid risking the lives of Israeli soldiers in the war there.
It happened in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where, residents say, Israeli forces are adopting tactics similar to the ones they are deploying in Gaza, including airstrikes and the use of Palestinians as human shields.
The 10-day Israeli raid in Mr. Damaj’s densely packed hometown, Jenin, was part of a broader military offensive into Palestinian areas that began in late August and signaled an intensification of Israeli offensives in the West Bank.
Before Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Israeli airstrikes on the West Bank were relatively rare, experts said, with only a few confirmed cases.
But during the raids in Jenin and other Palestinian areas beginning in August, the Israeli military reported carrying out about 50 airstrikes on the West Bank.
More than 180 people have been killed in airstrikes on the territory in the past year, including dozens of children, according to the United Nations and the Palestinian human rights group Al Haq. The Israeli military declined to provide a death toll, but contended that “98 percent” of the people killed in airstrikes were “involved in terrorist activities.”
The strikes have caused extensive damage to roads, electricity networks and water and sewage lines. Local, international and United Nations humanitarian workers say Israel has disrupted their relief efforts, while videos verified by The New York Times appear to show Israeli bulldozers blocking emergency vehicles from passing. (The Israeli military said it operated in accordance with international law.)
Instead of calling them raids, residents, aid workers and some experts have likened what is happening in the West Bank to a war.
“We call Jenin a small Gaza,” said Saleem Al-Sade, a member of a local neighborhood council.
As he walked through a neighborhood known as Jenin camp, which started as a refugee camp for Palestinians displaced from their homes in what is now Israel, he pointed out the constant sound overhead of Israeli drones that carry out surveillance and airstrikes.
“It’s a Gazafication of the northern part of the West Bank,” said Nadav Weiman, the director of Breaking the Silence, an advocacy group made up of former Israeli soldiers who say they are collecting testimonies from soldiers who took part in the raids in Jenin and another city, Tulkarm.
Raids into Palestinian areas of the West Bank have become common since the Oct. 7 attacks last year. Beyond the armed drones, bulldozers have ripped up the roads, which the Israeli military says is to unearth explosives buried beneath the pavement.
But the strikes in the past few months were some of the most extensive and deadly in the West Bank in two decades.
The Israeli military described the raids as a “counterterrorism operation” to crack down on Palestinian armed groups and to combat rising attacks against Israelis, including shootings and attempts to set off car bombs. The violence has accompanied a surge in attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank by Israeli settlers who often operate with impunity.
In its operations in the West Bank, the Israeli military said it had killed or detained dozens of fighters, confiscated explosives and destroyed command and control centers. It added that it carried out airstrikes “in situations where arrests cannot be made due to real risk to the forces.”
The military’s actions in the West Bank were long shrouded in secrecy, but experts said Israel had largely refrained from conducting airstrikes on the territory since the end of the second intifada, nearly 20 years ago. At times, Israel used attack helicopters in select operations, but experts said that happened in only a few cases that they knew of over the two decades.
The Israeli military’s deployment of armed drones appeared to have been exceedingly rare. Palestinian reports of it emerged in 2022, but only a few cases were confirmed before Oct. 7, 2023.
Since then, Israeli forces have carried out dozens of strikes in northern areas of the West Bank, largely concentrated in the cities and towns of Jenin, Tulkarm, Nablus and Tubas.
In visits to Jenin, Tubas and Tulkarm, The Times encountered multiple accounts of Palestinians being forced to perform potentially dangerous missions for Israeli soldiers. The destruction from blasts was widespread, leaving families grappling with the losses of their loved ones in rapid succession.
Israeli forces conducted an airstrike on Aug. 26 in the Nur Shams refugee camp in Tulkarm on what it described as an “operations room,” killing five people, including a 15-year-old, Adnan Jaber, whom Israel accused of manufacturing explosives.
“Immediately, the Israeli news announced they had killed a terrorist,” said Aysar Jaber, Adnan’s father. “But he was a young kid, not a terrorist.”
His son had been taking classes to become a barber, Mr. Jaber said. “He had about two weeks left, and he was killed.”
On Aug. 28, an Israeli aircraft struck what the military said were militants in an alleyway in the Faraa refugee camp. Residents recounted how a home was hit, as well, killing two brothers, Muhammad Masoud Muhammad Naja, 17, and Murad Masoud Muhammad Naja, 13, and critically injuring a third brother and the boys’ father.
In September, the Israeli military said its aircraft had struck “terrorists who hurled explosives and shot at the security forces” and had “eliminated” a person “armed with an explosive device.”
Residents said that Israeli soldiers had shot Majed Fida Abu Zeina, 17, and had fired upon ambulances that tried to rescue him, ultimately using a bulldozer to dump his body outside the camp.
“The soldiers are doing whatever they want,” said his mother, Amal Abu Zeina.
The raids in Jenin and other cities over 10 days killed 51 people, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians. Seven children were among those killed, according to the United Nations.
On the morning of Aug. 28, when Israeli forces launched their raids into Jenin, Tulkarm and Tubas, Israel’s foreign minister at the time, Israel Katz, posted on social media, “We must deal with the threat just as we deal with the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza.”
Human rights groups and aid workers are warning about what they call the dangerous parallels.
“We all have this sense that the pattern of Gaza, the modus operandi, is being applied in the West Bank, and it’s very worrisome,” said Allegra Pacheco, who leads a consortium of Western-backed aid groups in the West Bank.
“The current Israeli government’s objectives in the West Bank aim to force Palestinians out of targeted areas using the same Gaza type of massive force, weaponry and destruction,” she added.
U.N. officials, warning of “lethal warlike tactics” in the West Bank, tried to get into Jenin to carry out an assessment but were denied access by the Israeli authorities, the U.N. spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said in September.
During the raids, Mr. Damaj’s mother, Amal Damaj, 48, said, “I was so afraid.”
She added, “These are the most intense raids I’ve ever seen, I’ve ever experienced.”
Once in the cave, Mr. Damaj recounted how the only light came from the drone in his hands.
From above, the commander watched the live feed on an iPad and yelled out instructions on where to go and what to approach, Mr. Damaj said.
Seemingly satisfied that it was safe, the three soldiers and the commander joined Mr. Damaj in the cave and interrogated him, demanding to know the location of members of armed Palestinian groups.
“I don’t know; I don’t get involved,” Mr. Damaj said he told them.
“‘You’re a liar; you’re living in the neighborhood of the terrorists,’” he said the commander yelled at him. “‘Speak the truth or I’m going to shoot you in the legs.’”
After more than two hours, he said, they let him go. The next day, the Israeli military returned and blew up the cave.
In response to questions about two cases involving the use of human shields in Jenin, including Mr. Damaj, the Israeli military said, “The incidents mentioned in the inquiry appear to contradict I.D.F. orders.” It added that it did not have enough information to confirm or deny whether the episodes took place.
It did confirm an action involving the cave, however, saying “an underground combat facility located beneath a mosque was destroyed.”
In 2005, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that the military’s use of civilians as human shields violated international law and banned the practice.
“You cannot exploit the civilian population for the army’s military needs, and you cannot force them to collaborate with the army,” Ahron Barak, then chief justice, wrote in the ruling.
But Palestinians in the West Bank say the practice never stopped.
Ahmed Bilalo said Israeli forces had given him a lighter and ordered him to torch the strings holding up the curtained tarps above the narrow alleyways of Jenin camp, which fighters often use to obscure themselves from view.
“If I said, ‘No,’ I knew they would beat me up,” he said.
Mr. Weiman, who leads Breaking the Silence, the advocacy group of former Israeli soldiers, said the overall military approach being used in the West Bank was known as the “Dahiya doctrine,” a reference to Israel’s flattening of the Dahiya, the collection of neighborhoods in southern Beirut that is a Hezbollah stronghold, during its 34-day war in Lebanon in 2006.
The tactic creates disproportionate damage to civilian infrastructure and is aimed at trying to cause so much damage and destruction that civilians turn against armed groups in their areas, he said.
“That kind of pressure wasn’t imposed on villages and towns in the West Bank until very recently,” he said.
The Israeli military rejected his assessment, saying, “The claim that the I.D.F. deliberately causes harm to civilian infrastructure is false.” Instead, it has long accused Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups of embedding themselves in civilian areas.
The day after the Israeli military forced Mr. Damaj into the cave, it returned and ordered Khalid Salih, 59, a school attendant, and his wife to leave their home before it was blown up, the couple said.
The mosque above the cave had already been destroyed by an airstrike, killing four people, according to residents. Israel’s military said at the time that it was targeting an underground “terror compound” beneath the mosque being used by Hamas and Islamic Jihad to organize an imminent attack.
Aseel Mustafa Salih, who is married to Mr. Salih’s nephew and lived in an adjacent apartment, was asleep at home with her husband and two young children when the mosque was struck.
“I woke up and thought our house was the one that was struck,” she said, adding that the airstrike broke some of their windows.
Downstairs, Mr. Salih and his wife were thrown from their beds and across the room from the blast, he said.
Half an hour after the Oct. 22 strike, Ms. Salih said, she received a text message from the Israeli military instructing her to leave the area: “You are in a place that is not safe.”
Hiba Yazbek and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.
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2) Donald Trump’s Theory of Power Is More Power for Donald Trump
By David French, Opinion Columnist, Nov. 24, 2024
These are the times that try a constitutional conservative’s soul.
Donald Trump and his allies have proposed two legal maneuvers that could have profound consequences for the function of the federal government. He has proposed confirming presidential appointments through an abuse of his power to make recess appointments, and his allies have proposed reviving a mostly banned practice called impoundment, under which the president can refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress.
These proposals together would gut core constitutional functions of Congress and could make Trump our nation’s most imperial peacetime president.
You can’t fully comprehend how pernicious these proposals are without knowing Congress’s intended role in our republic. If you read the Constitution carefully, you see that the United States was not intended to have coequal branches of government. Instead, it is clear that the branch of government closest to the people, Congress, was given more power than any other.
While other branches can check Congress’s power — the president can veto bills and the Supreme Court can use the power of judicial review to invalidate statutes passed by Congress, to give the most obvious examples — Congress’s enumerated powers surpass those of both the president and the court.
Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution says, “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.” This constitutional provision is particularly important, given that in the original Constitution the House was the only part of the federal government chosen directly by the people. The power of the purse is inseparable from democratic rule.
Congress has the sole constitutional power to declare war, even if presidents frequently usurp that authority. It can fire the president, executive officers and judges through impeachment and conviction. It can override presidential vetoes, and the Senate can reject presidential appointees.
But if Trump gets his way, he will have the power to nullify congressional enactments, even if they’re passed with veto-proof majorities. He’ll destroy the Senate’s advice and consent authority. He’ll make the executive the most powerful branch of government by far, creating a version of monarchical government that the founders despised.
In Federalist No. 1, Alexander Hamilton warned that “of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.” A similar pattern is playing out here — claiming a popular mandate, Trump is now threatening to further diminish American democracy.
In one version of a Trump recess plan, Trump could pressure the Republican majority in the Senate to agree with the House to adjourn, granting Trump the ability to make immediate recess appointments. This is the clear message of Trump’s post on the subject on Truth Social. He wants the Republican leader to agree to an adjournment, thus forfeiting the Senate’s constitutional role.
But if the Senate holds firm, Trump theoretically has another option. He could conspire with the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, to request that Congress enter into a recess. If the Senate refuses a recess, then he’ll rely on Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution — which provides that the president can adjourn Congress “to such time as he shall think proper” if the two chambers disagree about the timing of a recess — and then use his constitutional power to make recess appointments without the Senate‘s advice or consent.
The recess appointments wouldn’t be permanent. They’d lapse at the beginning of the next congressional term, but he could have his handpicked team for up to two years, and there is nothing the Senate could do about it, at least according to Trump’s theory.
The founders never intended for Article II, Section 3 to permit the president to shut down Congress and name his cabinet without Senate approval. Recess appointments were created to permit presidents to fill vacancies when Congress was out of session in a large nation, when travel was often slow and difficult.
When legislators were traveling by horseback to Washington, permitting recess appointments made a degree of sense. It could be weeks before Congress could assemble. But now it takes hours, less when they assemble online.
There is no meaningful question about whether Trump’s scheme violates the spirit of the Constitution. Advice and consent exists precisely because the founders believed that a president should not possess unchecked power to name his team.
In Federalist No. 76, Hamilton wrote that the advice and consent power is “an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the president, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from state prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity.”
In fact, a key purpose of the power is to prevent the confirmation of exactly the kind of obsequious yes men with whom Trump surrounds himself. Hamilton warned against the selection of nominees who have “no other merit” than “being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.”
Trump’s potential scheme violates the letter of the Constitution as well. In a 2014 case called National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected President Barack Obama’s recess appointment of three members of the National Labor Relations Board. A majority of the court held that even when the Senate was in a mere “pro forma” session — when no formal business was conducted — it was not technically “in recess,” and thus the recess appointment power wasn’t available to the president.
Four members of the court, however, went further. In a persuasive concurrence, Justice Antonin Scalia argued that the recess appointments clause covered only the space between congressional sessions, not breaks within the session. Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas all joined with Scalia.
According to this reasoning, even if Trump engineered a disagreement between the House and the Senate and forced a recess, his recess appointment power wouldn’t attach because the recess occurred after the congressional term started.
Yes, that’s a concurrence — and concurrences aren’t binding law — but the current court’s jurisprudence is far more aligned with Scalia’s than it is with that of Justice Stephen Breyer, the author of the Canning majority. It is highly unlikely that a Roberts-led court would abandon Scalia’s logic and rubber-stamp an obvious end-run around one of the Senate’s core constitutional powers.
Now let’s talk about impoundment. During earlier periods of American history, presidents would sometimes refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress. This process, which came to be called impoundment, could give presidents the ability to nullify acts of Congress, even if the act passed with a veto-proof majority.
Imagine that Congress passed a statute mandating the construction of a new bridge across the Potomac, at a cost of $200 million. If impoundment were a real option, the president could simply choose not to spend the money, block construction of the bridge and frustrate the will of Congress.
American presidents periodically used impoundment to block the use of appropriated funds until 1974, when Congress largely banned the practice through the Impoundment Control Act. The act was passed after Richard Nixon frustrated Congress by impounding funds more than his predecessors, blocking spending for multiple programs across several federal agencies.
The constitutional justification is obvious. It prevents the president from exercising an unconstitutional version of a veto. Nonetheless, in a Wall Street Journal essay last week, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy — the two men Trump named to lead his new Department of Government Efficiency — raised the prospect of reviving impoundment. They suggested it was the Impoundment Control Act itself that was unconstitutional.
Russ Vought, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget (and the man Trump has chosen to choose to lead the O.M.B. again), is an enthusiastic supporter of impoundment. The Center for Renewing America, which Vought founded in 2021, has published a raft of materials attacking the constitutionality of the Impoundment Control Act.
I very much want to limit the growth of government spending, but not at the expense of our constitutional structure. There is no authority for impoundment in the text of the Constitution. The president’s principal check on Congress is the veto, and the process for vetoes (and for overriding them) is plainly detailed in the text.
One of the reasons American democracy is under duress is that Congress has spent decades abdicating its power to the president. Congressional inaction has created a power vacuum that presidents and courts have been only too eager to fill.
Unilateral executive action elevates the power of the presidency, increases the stakes of each presidential election and sidelines our nation’s most democratic branch of government. According to Trump and his team, however, Congress has not abdicated enough power. They want the president to get the yes men (and women) he wants in government, no matter how corrupt or unqualified. They want the president to block government spending, no matter if Congress has mandated the expenditure.
Trump isn’t in office yet. We don’t know whether he’ll follow through on his threats and try to engineer a recess or impound funds. But his threats are still destructive. He’s trying to cow Congress into becoming an extension of his own will and desires. And if the Republican-led Congress capitulates, the party that long prided itself on constitutional fidelity will become an instrument of its decline.
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3) Immigrants Across U.S. Rush to Prepare for Trump Crackdown
Donald Trump’s promise to carry out mass deportations has driven fearful immigrants to seek protections and advice.
By Miriam Jordan, Nov. 24, 2024
Farmworkers in Riverside County, Calif., who are worried about the immigration crackdown promised by President-elect Trump, met with legal advocates. Credit...Alex Welsh for The New York Times
President-elect Donald J. Trump has vowed to slash immigration — both legal and illegal — and ramp up deportations on Day 1.
Immigrants are racing to get ahead of the crackdown.
Foreign-born residents have been jamming the phone lines of immigration lawyers. They’re packing information meetings organized by nonprofits. And they’re taking whatever steps they can to inoculate themselves from the sweeping measures Mr. Trump has promised to undertake after he is inaugurated on Jan. 20.
“People that should be scared are coming in, and people that are fine with a green card are rushing in,” said Inna Simakovsky, an immigration lawyer in Columbus, Ohio, who added that her team has been overwhelmed with consultations. “Everyone is scared,” she said.
People with green cards want to become citizens as soon as possible. People who have a tenuous legal status or who entered the country illegally are scrambling to file for asylum, because even if the claim is thin, having a pending case would — under current protocols — protect them from deportation. People in relationships with U.S. citizens are fast-tracking marriage, which makes them eligible to apply for a green card.
In total there are about 13 million who have legal permanent residency. And there were an estimated 11.3 million undocumented people in 2022, the latest figure available.
“The election result put me in a state of panic that propelled me to immediately find a permanent solution,” said Yaneth Campuzano, 30, a software engineer in Houston.
Brought to the United States from Mexico when she was 2 months old, she was eligible for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, the Obama-era program that has allowed hundreds of thousands of immigrants who entered the country as children to remain in the country with work permits.
But DACA was a target of Mr. Trump’s during his first term and is being challenged in a lawsuit that could help him end it. Given the program’s precarious state, Ms. Campuzano and her fiancé, an American neuroscientist, have expedited plans to marry. They will wed next month — before Mr. Trump takes office. “Only after my status is secure will I be able to breathe again,” she said.
Voters of both parties were frustrated by chaos at the border under President Biden. Mr. Trump campaigned on a promise of mass deportations, and last week said that he intended to declare a national emergency and use the U.S. military to accomplish his goal. His top immigration policy adviser, Stephen Miller, has said that “vast holding facilities” would serve as “staging centers” for the operation. This week, the state land commissioner in Texas offered the federal government more than 1,000 acres near the border to erect detention centers.
Deportations are not uncommon. Mr. Trump deported about 1.5 million people during his first term, according to analysis by the Migration Policy Institute. President Biden has removed about as many. President Obama removed 3 million in his first term.
But not since the 1950s has the United States sought to deport people en masse, and it has not previously created a vast detention apparatus to facilitate expulsions.
Sergio Teran of Venezuela has legal permanent residency. After five years as a green-card holder, Mr. Teran, 36, who lives in Lakeland, Fla., became eligible for U.S. citizenship in late July. The uncertainty surrounding the election was one of the factors that pushed him to recently apply. “I wanted to do it quickly,” Mr. Teran said.
“I am an upstanding community member,” he said, “but with a green card you can still be deported. I feel much more secure knowing my citizenship is in process.”
In addition to Mr. Miller, the president-elect has tapped other immigration hawks for key roles, including Thomas Homan, a veteran of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to be “border czar.”
Mr. Homan has said that the administration will prioritize the removal of criminals and people with outstanding deportation orders. But he has also said that workplace raids and other tools will be deployed to round up undocumented immigrants, many of whom have lived in the country for decades.
Even in California, whose leaders restricted cooperation with immigration authorities during Mr. Trump’s first term and have pledged to do so again, immigrants are worried about enforcement going into overdrive.
“This time we are more afraid, because of everything Trump says that he will do when he regains power,” said Silvia Campos, an undocumented Mexican farmworker who lives with her husband and three children, two of them U.S. citizens, in Riverside County.
Everywhere she turns, on Spanish-language radio, TV and social media, she said she is slammed with information about his intentions.
“It’s all everyone talks about,” said Ms. Campos, 42, who crossed the border with her husband 18 years ago. “We have to prepare for the worst.”
That is why she asked her manager for the day off from harvesting vegetables to attend a “know-your-rights” session last Tuesday at a nonprofit.
Among the tips: You have the right to remain silent. Only open the door to immigration agents who produce a search warrant from a judge. Do not sign anything without a lawyer. Make a family plan, in case you are detained and separated from your children.
After the session, Ms. Campos completed an affidavit authorizing her children to receive medical attention, if necessary, and to be cared for by her sister, a U.S. citizen, in her absence. She had three copies notarized, and on her return home, she sat down her children, 11, 14 and 17.
“We don’t want to create more fear, but we want them to be ready for anything,” said Luz Gallegos, executive director of TODEC Legal Center, which began holding the sessions, many of them standing room only, after its hotline was clogged with calls following the election.
The organization has been sending teams to brief workers on farms in Southern California’s agriculture-rich corridor that relies on immigrant labor, much of it undocumented. On Thursday morning, all 30 laborers at a farm in Lakeview took a break from picking and packing leafy greens to go to a presentation, the fourth held that day.
In Dallas, Vinchenzo Marinero, 30, a DACA beneficiary, has been frantically exploring avenues to remain in the country lawfully.
Stripped of DACA, he would lose his job, his driver’s license and, perhaps, his three-bedroom house. He has started a family with a fellow DACA beneficiary, and they have a 7-month-old baby.
“Without DACA, I wouldn’t be able to provide for my family,” said Mr. Marinero, who works for a faith-based broadcaster as a systems engineer.
He hopes the company will sponsor him for a skilled-worker visa, but that could not occur until next year. In the meantime, his lawyer advised him to renew his DACA for another two years, even though it expires in June 2025.
“By the time Trump takes office, I hope mine gets renewed so I have two more years,” Mr. Marinero said. “That gives me more time to plan.”
While few university leaders have spoken out about the Trump administration’s immigration strategy, many campuses have been quietly weighing steps to protect their international and undocumented students.
More than 1,700 university administrators and staff attended a webinar on Nov. 15 about how to support them.
“Our message is that the time to act is now,” said Miriam Feldblum, executive director of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, a nonpartisan group of private and public colleges and universities that hosted the event.
Many institutions are considering sponsoring DACA beneficiaries for work visas, she said, which would give them a temporary solution that could eventually put them on the path to permanent legal status. They are seeking to take advantage of new guidance under the Biden administration that has provided faster processing for those who qualify.
A particular concern is the upcoming winter break when many international students may visit their homelands. On his first day in the White House in 2017, Mr. Trump banned people from predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States, creating chaos at airports. It was challenged in court, but a subsequent version of it survived.
The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has issued a travel advisory to all international students, faculty and staff, urging them to “strongly consider” returning to the United States before Inauguration Day, and said that students could move into their dorms early.
Wesleyan University, a private university in Middletown, Conn., emailed its international students on Nov. 18 with similar advice. It said that being in the country around Jan. 19 was “the safest way to avoid difficulty re-entering the country.”
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4) I Starred in ‘Cabaret.’ We Need to Heed Its Warning.
By Joel Grey, Mr. Grey played the Emcee in the original Broadway production of “Cabaret” and in the motion picture version, for which he won a Tony Award and an Academy Award, Nov. 24, 2024
Archive Photos/Getty Images
This past week marked 58 years since the opening night for the Broadway premiere of “Cabaret” in 1966. At the time, the country was in deep turmoil. Overseas, the Vietnam War was escalating, and at home, our most regressive forces were counterpunching against the progress demanded by the civil rights movement. The composer John Kander, the lyricist Fred Ebb and the playwright Joe Masteroff wrote “Cabaret” in collaboration with the director Harold Prince as a response to the era. The parallels between the rise of fascism in 1930s Berlin as depicted in the show and the mounting tensions of the 1960s in America were both obvious and ominous.
I played the Emcee — the Kit Kat Club’s master of distraction, keeping Berlin mesmerized while Nazism slipped in through the back door. Night after night, I witnessed audiences grappling with the raw, unsettling reflection that “Cabaret” held up to them. Some material was simply too much for the audience to handle. “If You Could See Her,” which has the Emcee singing of his love for a gorilla — a thinly veiled commentary on antisemitic attitudes — ended with the lyric: “If you could see her through my eyes, she wouldn’t look Jewish at all.”
When we first performed it, in Boston, audiences gasped and recoiled. It was too offensive, too raw, too cruel. Producers fretted and the line was changed to “She isn’t a meeskite at all,” softening the blow, yes, but also the impact. I resented the change and would often, to the chagrin of stage management, “forget” to make the swap throughout that pre-Broadway run.
I’m hearing from friends in the current Broadway production of “Cabaret” that the line is once again getting an audible response, but of a different sort. On more than one occasion in the past two weeks — since the election — a small number of audience members have squealed with laughter at “She wouldn’t look Jewish at all.” In the late 1960s, we softened the line because the truth was too hard to hear. Today, it seems the line is playing exactly as the Nazi-sympathizing Emcee would have intended.
My initial assessment, when word first reached me about this unusual reaction, was that these must be the triumphant laughs of the complicit, suddenly drunk on power and unafraid to let their bigotry be known. Now I find myself considering other hypotheses. Are these the hollow, uneasy laughs of an audience that has retreated into the comfort of irony and detachment? Are these vocalized signals of acceptance? Audible white flags of surrender to the state of things? A collective shrug of indifference?
I honestly don’t know which of these versions I find most ominous, but all of them should serve as a glaring reminder of how dangerously easy it is to accept bigotry when we are emotionally exhausted and politically overwhelmed.
The 1960s were a time of social upheaval, but also a time of hope. There was a sense that as a society, we were striving toward progress — that the fight for civil rights, for peace, for equality was a fight we could win. “Cabaret,” with its portrayal of a decadent society willfully ignorant of its own demise, provided a stark counterpoint to that hope. It was a warning against the seductive power of distraction, the dangers of apathy and the perils of looking away when history demands that we look closer.
Now, in 2024, we find ourselves in a different, far more precarious moment. The recent election of Donald Trump to a second term has left many Americans, particularly those who fought so hard against the forces of authoritarianism and hate, feeling drained and disillusioned. There’s a sense that we have seen this show before, that we know how it ends, and that we’re powerless to stop it. Or worse, a sense that even though we are facing dark times they won’t really affect our own day-to-day lives — echoing the tragically shortsighted assessment of so many European Jews in the 1920s and ’30s.
“Cabaret,” with all its humor, spectacle and tunefulness, has always been both the peanut butter and the pill hidden within. It’s an entertainment that seduces us into distraction. “Leave your troubles outside,” the Emcee implores in his opening number. “In here, life is beautiful.” It’s also a cautionary tale that forces us to confront the perils of falling prey to such distractions.
The current revival cleverly ramps up the seduction, staging the show in a fully immersive, champagne-soaked party environment constructed to beguile its audience. Only when the Nazis finally show up do we see how false our velvet-enrobed sense of security has been. We too have chosen not to see what has been directly in front of us.
The democratic election of an authoritarian figure, the normalization of bigotry, the complicity of the frightened masses — none of these are new themes. We have indeed seen this show before, and I fear we do know how it ends. It’s understandable to want to retreat, to find solace where we can, but we cannot afford to look away.
History is giving us another chance to confront the forces that “Cabaret” warned us about. The question is: Will we listen this time, or will we keep laughing until the music stops?
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5) How Universities Cracked Down on Pro-Palestinian Activism
Stricter rules and punishments over campus protests seem to be working. Universities have seen just under 950 protest events this semester, compared to 3,000 in the spring.
By Isabelle Taft, Nov. 25, 2024
Students gathered on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin for a pro-Palestinian protest in October. There have been fewer protests around the country this semester, according to one count. Credit...Charlotte Keene/The Daily Texan
Colleges and universities have tightened rules around protests, locked campus gates and handed down stricter punishments after the disruptions of pro-Palestinian demonstrations and encampments last spring.
The efforts seem to be working.
Universities have seen just under 950 protest events this semester so far, compared to 3,000 last semester, according to a log at the Nonviolent Action Lab at Harvard University’s Ash Center. About 50 people have been arrested so far this school year at protests on higher education campuses, according to numbers gathered by The New York Times, compared to over 3,000 last semester.
When students have protested this fall, administrators have often enforced — to the letter — new rules created in response to last spring’s unrest. The moves have created scenes that would have been hard to imagine previously, particularly at universities that once celebrated their history of student activism.
Harvard temporarily banned dozens of students and faculty members from libraries after they participated in silent “study-ins” — where protesters sit at library tables with signs opposing the war in Gaza — though a similar protest did not lead to discipline in December 2023. At Indiana University Bloomington, some students and faculty members who attended candlelight vigils were referred for discipline under a new prohibition on expressive activity after 11 p.m. University of Pennsylvania administrators and campus police officers holding zip ties told vigil attendees to move because they had not reserved the space in compliance with new rules.
And at Montclair State University in New Jersey, police officers often outnumber participants in a weekly demonstration where protesters hold placards with photos of children killed in Gaza and the words “We mourn.”
“They say it’s to keep us safe, but I think it’s more to keep us under control,” said Tasneem Abdulazeez, a student in the teaching program.
The changes follow federal civil rights complaints, lawsuits and withering congressional scrutiny accusing universities of tolerating antisemitism, after some protesters praised Hamas and called for violence against Israelis.
Some students and faculty have welcomed calmer campuses. Others see the relative quiet as the bitter fruit of a crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech. They worry President-elect Donald J. Trump, who as a candidate called for universities to “vanquish the radicals,” could ratchet up the pressure.
In many cases, universities are enforcing rules they adopted before the school year began. While the specifics vary, they generally impose limits on where and when protests can occur and what form they can take.
Todd Wolfson, the president of the American Association of University Professors and an associate professor of media studies at Rutgers, said the restrictions have made people afraid.
“They feel like they’re being watched and surveilled,” he said. “I think there’s a strong degree of self-censorship that’s taking place.”
But Jewish students who felt targeted by protesters have praised the rules — and the speed at which universities are enforcing them — for helping to restore order and safety. Naomi Lamb, the director of Hillel at the Ohio State University, said the school’s new protest policies seem to be working well.
“I appreciate the response of administrators to ensure that there is as little antisemitic action and rhetoric as possible,” she said.
Some of the tactics protesters used last semester have been met with stringent responses this school year. At the University of Minnesota, 11 people were arrested after they occupied a campus building. Last school year, some universities let protesters occupy buildings overnight and even for days at a time.
At Pomona College, the president invoked “extraordinary authority” to bypass the standard disciplinary process and immediately suspend or ban some pro-Palestinian protesters who took over a building on Oct. 7 of this year. A college spokeswoman said the unusual move was justified because the occupation had destroyed property, threatened safety and disrupted classes, and noted that students were given opportunities to respond to the allegations against them.
At some campuses, protesters have taken up new tactics to challenge the new restrictions.
Study-ins like those at Harvard have also taken place at Ohio State, Tulane University and the University of Texas at Austin. Students typically wear kaffiyehs and tape signs to their laptops with messages like “Our tuition funds genocide.”
“It’s kind of designed to put the administration in this bind of either you ignore it, or you enforce rules but you look like kind of a jerk,” said Jay Ulfelder, research project manager at Harvard’s Nonviolent Action Lab.
A Harvard spokesman said that a January 2024 statement from university leadership made clear that demonstrations are not permitted in libraries or other campus areas used for academic activities.
During Sukkot, the Jewish holiday that celebrates the harvest, members of the anti-Zionist organization Jewish Voice for Peace set up “solidarity sukkahs” at about 20 schools including Northwestern and the University of California, Los Angeles. The sukkahs, or huts, commemorate the structures the Israelites lived in while wandering in the desert for 40 years and are often decorated with gourds, fruit and lights. JVP members added signs saying “Stop Arming Israel.”
The sukkahs were removed at nine universities, according to JVP, with administrators citing new rules prohibiting unauthorized structures.
When facilities workers arrived with power tools to tear down the sukkah at Northwestern, JVP members told them it was wrong to do so before the end of the weeklong holiday, said Paz Baum, a senior.
“They do not care about our ability or right to practice our religion,” Ms. Baum said. “They only care about limiting Palestinian speech.”
The new restrictions may not be the only factor behind diminished protest activity this semester. Some protest groups have embraced more violent rhetoric — praising Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, for example — alienating some students who had sympathized with their cause.
Some things have not changed, however: There is still little consensus about what it means for a campus to be safe and when speech critical of Israel crosses the line into antisemitism.
At Montclair State, where pro-Palestinian demonstrators have criticized the number of police officers and administrators at their events, President Jonathan Koppell said he was trying to strike a balance between “competing priorities.”
In an interview, Dr. Koppell said the officers stationed at protests are necessary to protect everyone on campus, including the protesters. He noted that demonstrations on campus have been peaceful and people have “engaged responsibly.”
He added that some community members want him to prohibit the pro-Palestinian gatherings altogether, something he has resisted.
“You have a desire for some people to be able to say whatever they what, wherever they want, whenever they want,” Dr. Koppell said. “And you have some people who would like to see an environment where there’s an absolute limitation on people’s ability to protest.”
“Anybody who wants an absolute in either direction is going to be unhappy,” he added.
Even as universities crack down, administrators and faculty say the federal government under Mr. Trump could try to force further changes at institutions.
Still, much remains unclear about what could happen. His pick to lead the Department of Education, Linda McMahon, has less education experience than is typical of education secretaries in the past and has publicly said little about campus protests.
Abed A. Ayoub, the executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said he did not think Mr. Trump could make campuses more hostile to pro-Palestinian protests than they already are.
“Are they going to continue with their crackdown on anti-Israel speech? I think they will,” he said, referring to universities. “That’s not because Trump is in office. They started this. It’s been happening.”
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6) On the Outskirts of Beirut, a Crowd Watches the War, and Waits for Its End
Every night, dozens gather at the hillside to watch airstrikes rain down on the city’s southern suburbs. The ritual offers a window into the war — and proof that the once unimaginable is really happening.
By Christina Goldbaum, Reporting from Baabda, Lebanon, Nov. 25, 2024
Watching an airstrike on the cluster of Lebanese neighborhoods known as Dahiya. Crowds of civilians and news reporters gather on a hillside with phones and cameras to observe from a distance. Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
The crowds gather every evening on a scenic hillside on the outskirts of Beirut. Young men, old couples and local journalists, all drawn by the unobstructed view of the Dahiya, the cluster of neighborhoods south of Beirut that has been pummeled by Israeli airstrikes over the past two months.
As dusk settles, people seated on motorcycles and atop cement barriers anxiously wait for the war to unfold in front of them. When there is a thunderous boom of an Israeli airstrike, they quickly scan the skyline for a plume of white smoke curling into the air — the first clue as to what may have been hit.
“Look, look at the balcony, there. Do you see it?” Osama Assaf, 43, said one recent evening, pointing into the distance.
“Where? By the highway?” a young man standing beside him replied.
As the war between Hezbollah and Israel has escalated, the gathering at the escarpment has become a nightly ritual in Baabda, a mountainous suburb on the southeastern outskirts of Beirut, Lebanon’s capital. In peacetime, the area is a picnic spot, where old friends and young lovers smoke fruit-flavored tobacco through water pipes and watch a deep red sun melt into the Mediterranean Sea. These days, the hillside offers a window into the war that has decimated the enclave south of the city in the Dahiya.
A cramped patch of high-rise apartments, office buildings and narrow one-way roads, the Dahiya is home mostly to Shiite Muslims and is effectively governed by Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group and Shiite political movement in Lebanon. Airstrikes that Israeli officials say are targeting Hezbollah military facilities in the Dahiya have transformed the area into a bombed-out ghost town coated in gray ash and littered with rubble.
The hillside overlooking the Dahiya first drew local TV reporters who offered grim updates about the war. Soon, Dahiya residents who had fled the area began converging there as well. Some are desperate to know firsthand if their neighborhood will survive another day. Others are bored, their usually busy lives upended by the war. Occasionally, young Christian men who live nearby come to cheer on the destruction of the mostly Shiite neighborhoods — a glimpse of the sectarian tensions always simmering Lebanon.
But mostly people are drawn by a morbid fascination — an urge to hear the rattling booms and see the billowing smoke, if only to make real the horrors of the war.
“Look, there’s more smoke rising from where it hit,” Hussein Qazem, 56, said one recent evening, pointing to where an Israeli airstrike had landed minutes earlier. Pulling out his phone, he checked the two maps issued with the most recent Israeli evacuation orders warning of imminent airstrikes in two Dahiya neighborhoods. “This must be the al-Hawraa strike,” he muttered.
An hour earlier, Mr. Qazem was eating a late lunch with his family in an apartment they had rented after fleeing the Dahiya when they saw the evacuation warnings flash across their phones. The warnings had become a near daily occurrence since the war escalated, but this time, one of the maps included the apartment he had spent 30 years working in Saudi Arabia running an import-export business to purchase.
His 17-year-old nephew, Wael Wahab, said they should go back quickly — one final visit to say goodbye. The pair jumped on Mr. Wahab’s motorcycle and made a mad dash into the neighborhood, whizzing past the shops they once frequented, the storefront windows now only jagged edges of glass, he said. It was only a few minutes — they didn’t know how long they had until the strikes would hit — but it was something.
From the Dahiya, they came to the hillside as a bluish haze was settling over the city. “A plane’s coming,” Mr. Wahab said, nodding at a commercial flight as it landed on the runway of Beirut’s international airport — a surreal reminder of life carrying on despite the war. A few minutes later, an Israeli warplane roared overhead, followed by the thundering boom of another airstrike.
“That must be the one targeting our street,” Mr. Wahab said.
They paused for a second. “OK, it’s gone,” Mr. Qazem said.
Farther up the escarpment, a gaggle of local television crews had set up shop, lining the curb with their tripods and the thrumming generators that powered satellite dishes. The sidewalk was littered with cigarette butts and empty bottles of water and energy drinks — the fuel of their long nights.
Mohammad Farhat, a 68-year-old resident of the Dahiya, paced behind the reporters, flipping his car keys in his hand. A retired employee of Lebanon’s Education Ministry, he and his wife, Leila Farhat, 65, come here most nights — it’s the best way to get the most up-to-date news on the war, directly from the journalists gathered there, they explained.
“Here we survive on hope — and information,” Mr. Farhat said.
As he spoke, Ms. Farhat rummaged around in the trunk of their car until she found a plastic bag of mixed nuts and liter of 7-Up. She handed him the nuts, poured the soda into clear plastic cups and passed them to others who had gathered there. “It’s like the new Corniche here,” she said jokingly, referring to the city’s popular seaside promenade.
The pair have been married for nearly 50 years, since Ms. Farhat fled her hometown in the south during the country’s bloody civil war and went to the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon, where she met Mr. Farhat. “I saved her the drive back to her village,” Mr. Fahat joked.
They moved to the Dahiya two decades ago and saw it destroyed once before during the monthlong war between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006. Hezbollah rebuilt it then with millions of dollars in aid from Iran and Qatar. The group emerged from that war with an aura of invincibility that helped assure people that the Dahiya would never be destroyed again. Mr. Farhat said he was confident that once the war ends, Hezbollah would rebuild the area again. But that would most likely be a long and arduous process — and his resolve to weather yet more hardship in a country plagued by crises was waning.
“We’re retired now, we’re supposed to be relaxing. It’s our time to rest,” Mr. Farhat said. “I’ve been to Germany, to the Netherlands, I saw retired people like us there, how they go on vacations. They aren’t thinking about these drones,” he added, nodding up to the sky at the incessant hum overhead.
“The drone never stops, it never gets tired,” Ms. Farhat interjected wryly. “It stays in the sky for 30 hours straight.”
As the sun sank below the skyline and darkness fell, the outlines of the Dahiya became clear: The cluster of neighborhoods turned into a swath of darkness, its buildings mostly empty and its electrical lines damaged in the strikes. The Dahiya’s de facto borders were illuminated by the lights of Beirut proper. Behind it were the fluorescent white lines of the airport’s runway and the warm yellow specks of apartment buildings in the city, which has remained mostly untouched.
Down the road from the pack of reporters, Iman Assaf, 46, unloaded a foam mattress from the back of her family’s car onto the sidewalk, where she planned to spend the night with her husband and son.
They were among the tens of thousands of Shiite Muslims who fled the Dahiya as the strikes intensified and spilled into other parts of Beirut. The influx transformed the demographic map of a city often defined along sectarian lines, where neighborhoods are synonymous with a religion and sect.
Ms. Assaf said she had felt welcome for the most part in Baabda, a mostly Christian town. Though, occasionally, young men on motorcycles with Christian crosses around their necks and alcoholic drinks in their hands will stop at the outlook and yell, as if encouraging the strikes on the mostly Shiite Muslim neighborhoods.
“Yalla, yalla, yalla!” — “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” — they yell, offering a crude reminder of the sectarian tensions. Ms. Assaf brushed those tensions aside, as if describing them as fleeting might help bury them for good.
“The people are united — it’s war on all of us,” Ms. Assaf said.
Then she took her seat on the dusty mattress. She placed a kettle on her small, portable stove and looked out over the view of the Dahiya, watching the war and praying for its end.
Hwaida Saad and Jacob Roubai contributed reporting.
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7) I’ll Never Forget What Kennedy Did During Samoa’s Measles Outbreak
By Brian Deer, Mr. Deer is a journalist and the author of “The Doctor Who Fooled the World,” about the anti-vaccine movement, Nov. 25, 2024
Hokyoung Kim
In November 2019, when an epidemic of measles was killing children and babies in Samoa, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who in recent days became Donald Trump’s pick to lead the department of Health and Human Services — sent the prime minister of Samoa at the time a four-page letter. In it, he suggested the measles vaccine itself may have caused the outbreak.
He claimed that the vaccine might have “failed to produce antibodies” in vaccinated mothers sufficient to provide infants with immunity, that it perhaps provoked “the evolution of more virulent measles strains” and that children who received the vaccine may have inadvertently spread the virus to other children. “Please do not hesitate to contact me if I can be of any assistance,” he added, writing in his role as the chairman of Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group.
At the time of his letter, 16 people, many of them younger than 2, were already reported dead. Measles, which is among the most contagious diseases, can sometimes lead to brain swelling, pneumonia and death. For months, families grieved over heartbreaking little coffins, until a door-to-door vaccination campaign brought the calamity to a close. The final number of fatalities topped 80.
I was in Samoa during that outbreak as part of my more than 16 years of reporting on the anti-vaccine movement. The cause of the outbreak was not the vaccine, but most likely an infected traveler who brought the virus from New Zealand, which that year had seen the biggest measles outbreaks in decades, especially among that country’s Indigenous and Pacific Islander communities. Migration and poverty were likely factors in a sudden spread of measles in Samoa and New Zealand. But, as an editorial in the New Zealand Medical Journal reported, so too was a factor that Mr. Kennedy specializes in: “Increasing circulation of misinformation leading to distrust and reduced vaccination uptake.” Samoa’s vaccination rates had fallen to less than a third of eligible 1-year-olds.
Vaccine skepticism has ballooned worldwide, and Mr. Kennedy and others who back him have encouraged it. Americans may be well aware that their possible future health leader holds dangerous beliefs about vaccines. The consequences of his views — and those of his orbit — are not merely absurd but tragic.
In my reporting, parents have mentioned fearing vaccines after watching “Vaxxed,” a 90-minute documentary, which had also toured countries such as New Zealand. The film, focused on unproven allegations, was released more than three years before the Samoa measles outbreak. Among much else, it claimed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had committed fraud.
Two of the filmmakers — Del Bigtree and Andrew Wakefield — are buddies of Mr. Kennedy. The director, Mr. Wakefield, is a former doctor whose medical license was revoked in his native Britain in 2010 amid charges of ethical violations. One of the producers, Mr. Bigtree, became Mr. Kennedy’s presidential campaign communications chief.
In the years before the documentary was released, I revealed, in a series of articles, evidence that Mr. Wakefield’s research in the 1990s had been rigged at a London hospital to make it look as if the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine was linked to autism. This research was retracted in 2010. Mr. Kennedy certainly didn’t seem fazed by Mr. Wakefield’s professional downfall. “In any just society, we would be building statues to Andy Wakefield,” he yelled, for instance, from a platform he and Mr. Wakefield shared at an event in Washington, D.C., a few days before he sent his letter to Samoa.
Reports say Mr. Kennedy is reviewing résumés for his possible Health and Human Services empire. He’s reportedly eyeing Joseph Ladapo, a Florida health official who has questioned the safety of Covid vaccines. I’d say Mr. Bigtree may get a role; Mr. Wakefield is trickier, given how discredited he is, even in the United States. But there are plenty of others in Mr. Kennedy’s circle whose claims ought to concern everyone.
Consider Sherri Tenpenny, a doctor who has been declared by Mr. Kennedy as “one of the great leaders” of the anti-vaccine movement. She has falsely claimed that a “metal” attached to a protein in the Covid shots was making their recipients magnetic. “They can put a key on their forehead and it sticks,” she told Ohio state lawmakers in June 2021. “They can put spoons and forks all over them and they can stick.” I could pluck plenty more outrageous characters from Mr. Kennedy’s circle over the years, including veteran AIDS denialists.
In recent days, Mr. Kennedy appears to have tried to change the conversation around his vaccine views to focus on America’s junk food diets. But his views on vaccines shouldn’t be forgotten. In January 2021, speaking to a gathering of loyalists in Ohio, he outlined a three-point checklist that had to be met for him to consider a Covid vaccine. First, he said, “you take one shot, you get lifetime immunity.” Second, side effects are only “one in a million.” Third, “herd immunity” is achieved at 70 percent public uptake — after which, he stipulated, “nobody in this society” ever gets the disease again.
“If they came up with that product,” he said, “I’d be happy to look at it.”
His audience laughed. But it’s not funny.
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8) Israeli Strikes Threaten Lebanon’s Archaeological Treasures
The country is home to thousands of years’ worth of antiquities. Some have already been damaged or destroyed in the war, alarming the conservationists trying to protect them.
By Euan Ward, Published Nov. 25, 2024, Updated Nov. 26, 2024
Euan Ward reported from Beirut, Lebanon, and an army base near Bsous. He spoke to more than a dozen archaeologists, conservationists, military officials and people living near the sites for this article.
The ruins of a building close to the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Baalbek. The hotel and shops were destroyed in an Israeli airstrike earlier this month. Credit...Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times
For Mohammad Kanso, the ancient Roman temples of Baalbek felt like home.
The 2,000-year-old ruins, the pride of Lebanon and considered some of the grandest of their kind in the world, were his childhood playground. When he grew up, he got the same job his father had, running the lights that illuminate the towering columns at night.
But as Israeli airstrikes crept closer to the site, his family was forced to flee earlier this month. Days later, a missile landed yards away from the temple complex, obliterating a centuries-old Ottoman-era building.
“My entire world went black,” said Mr. Kanso.
Israel’s offensive against Hezbollah has triggered a humanitarian crisis. Almost a quarter of Lebanon’s population of about five million has been displaced and more than 3,700 people have been killed, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. But it has also gravely threatened the tiny Mediterranean nation’s antiquities, a shared source of pride in a country long divided by sectarian strife.
The temple complex of Baalbek, which is listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site, is just one of the sites that are at risk. Archaeologists, conservationists and even the Lebanese military are now racing to protect thousands of years worth of Phoenician, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman treasures.
Last week, UNESCO placed 34 cultural sites in Lebanon under what it calls “enhanced protection,” a measure that defines an attack on them as a serious violation of the 1954 Hague Convention and “potential grounds for prosecution.” But many antiquities are not on the list, and some have already been damaged or destroyed by Israeli strikes, according to Lebanese officials and the United Nations, including historic churches and cemeteries, centuries-old markets and castles from the Crusades.
Even as cautious optimism mounts around a potential cease-fire deal, much of Lebanon’s heritage has already been irrevocably lost, and the sheer scale of the destruction remains unclear. Lebanon’s cash-strapped government would be forced to juggle the extensive cost of restoration with a deepening humanitarian crisis, and there remains uncertainty over whether a truce could hold and how restoration of these sites would fit in.
“They are destroying memory,” said Joanne Farchakh Bajjaly, a Lebanese archaeologist who runs Biladi, an organization focused on preserving the country’s heritage. She compared the damage from Israeli strikes to that carried out by the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic State in Iraq.
When asked whether Israel deliberately targets cultural sites, the Israeli military said in a statement that it strikes in Lebanon only when necessary, adding that sensitive sites are taken into account during military planning and that each “goes through a rigorous approval process.”
Israel has accused Hezbollah of embedding in civilian areas, including near cultural heritage sites. The Israeli military did not respond when asked to provide specific evidence of this claim, which archaeologists and Lebanese officials dispute.
The Lebanese military, which is not a part of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, has another mission: protecting the country’s treasures.
Gen. Youssef Haydar is spearheading these efforts. He leads a specialist regiment that has been transporting artifacts out of the country’s hard-hit south, including some dating back to the Roman and Byzantine civilizations.
At the regiment’s base, a few miles outside Beirut, General Haydar’s troops conducted drills in which they piled sandbags on top of real-life artifacts, including a sarcophagus, a strategy designed to protect them from shrapnel or the shock waves of nearby blasts.
“The more you sweat,” General Haydar said, as he watched his troops, “the less you bleed in war.”
There has been wide-scale destruction in dozens of historic border towns, archaeologists said, that has damaged or destroyed entire areas. Strikes have also expanded to include the centers of big cities, including in Baalbek and Tyre, where Hezbollah enjoys considerable support.
The large-scale destruction of towns and cities has even disturbed the dead. Historic cemeteries in Lebanon also have been damaged or destroyed amid Israel’s offensive, many of them considered heritage sites by archaeologists. The Israeli military said in at least one case that a Hezbollah tunnel compound had been built underneath a cemetery in southern Lebanon.
“It’s not collateral damage,” General Haydar said. “Why the cemeteries? This is heritage. This is history.”
Before the war, about 125,000 people lived in Tyre, about 10 miles from the Israeli border and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. But most have fled amid evacuation orders covering city blocks, and Israeli airstrikes targeting Hezbollah have pounded the area in recent weeks.
Much of the city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that includes such marvels as the Tyre Hippodrome, a chariot-racing arena that was one of the largest in the ancient Roman world. The bombardment has already leveled modern buildings within the site, according to the U.N. agency.
Although no visible damage to the ruins has so far been detected, archaeologists say they can only conduct field inspections once the war ends, because of the risks to their lives.
Lebanon has endured myriad wars and crises that have tested conservationists. But it was Beirut’s deadly port explosion in 2020, which destroyed large parts of the capital, including historic buildings and artifacts, that proved most destructive. It was an especially hard-learned lesson for Beirut’s museums and galleries, some of which are now shielding their collections amid the war.
The Sursock Museum, which was heavily damaged in the blast, has in recent weeks moved its entire collection, which includes works by prominent Lebanese artists, into its basement, about 80 feet underground.
In the closed gallery recently, the walls and glass cabinets were stripped bare, and the building’s stained glass windows propped open to protect against sonic booms from the Israeli fighter jets circling overhead.
“We’ve learned one thing from the Beirut explosion,” said Rowina Bou-Harb, the museum’s chief archivist. “Save the heritage.”
Khalid Rifai, who leads government conservation efforts and recently fled his home in Baalbek, recalled how his unit struggled in the wake of the port blast.
“We didn’t have any materials, money, architects, and staff,” he said. “Right now, we’re facing the same crisis on a much wider scale.”
In Baalbek, the Israeli airstrike near the ruins earlier this month left stones and twisted rebar strewed in front of the temples. A burned-out bus lay abandoned in the empty parking lot where tourists once entered the site.
Although the temples remain intact, Mr. Kanso fears they will not survive.
“I hope they remain standing tall for all the coming generations to witness,” he said.
Reporting contributed by Jacob Roubai and Gabby Sobelman.
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