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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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Israel’s Genocide Day 398: Israel admits it is depopulating north Gaza, says it will expand offensive to Beit Lahia
Casualties
· 43,391 + killed* and at least 102,347 wounded in the Gaza Strip, including 59% women, children, and elderly, as of October 21, 2024.*
· 779+ Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. This includes at least 146 children.**
· 3,103 Lebanese killed and more than 13,856 wounded by Israeli forces since October 8, 2023***
· Israel revised its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,189.
· The Israeli army recognizes the death of 890 Israeli soldiers 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 7, 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 7, 2024.
*** This figure was released by the Lebanese Health Ministry, updated on November 7, 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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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) Israeli or Palestinian, U.S. Voters in the West Bank Say Biden Let Them Down
Tens of thousands of U.S. citizens live in the Israeli-occupied territory, on opposing sides of an entrenched conflict, where neither Palestinians nor Israelis have much enthusiasm for Kamala Harris.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, Nov. 5, 2024
Eli Knoller, seated, at his son’s funeral in July in Karnei Shomron, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, with a government minister, Avi Dichter. Credit...Erik Marmor/Flash90
Like many Israelis, Bronx-born Eli Knoller, who has dual citizenship and lives in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, hopes the next American president allows Israel to “finish the job” against Hamas in Gaza, where his son was killed in battle.
Abduljabbar Alqam, a Palestinian American who lives just a few miles away, is horrified by what he calls U.S. complicity in the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza.
But they have at least one thing in common: Neither planned to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris. Mr. Alqam believes the Biden administration has been too supportive of Israel and the war in Gaza; Mr. Knoller believes it has not been supportive enough.
In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, tens of thousands of U.S. citizens live on opposing sides of one of the world’s most entrenched conflicts, and many are bitterly disappointed with the Biden administration’s approach to Israel’s war in Gaza, triggered by the deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel last October.
Opinion polls show that Israelis largely support former President Donald J. Trump, fondly recalling his near-unreserved support for a country now facing increasing international isolation, while many Palestinians are frustrated with President Biden’s backing for Israel and see little difference between the two candidates. Their frustrations reflect the wider discontent over the war in Gaza across the American political spectrum.
“The Democrats need to lose, and they need to know that one of the biggest reasons they lost is their stance on Israel,” said Mr. Alqam, 37, who planned to vote for the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein. “It’s about making a statement.”
The war in Gaza has confounded the final year of Mr. Biden’s presidency, creating a rift inside his party and exposing American weakness in the Middle East. His envoys have shuttled around the region for months trying in vain to clinch a cease-fire deal.
How his successor will affect the conflict is far from clear. Mr. Trump took staunch pro-Israel stances during his term, including a proposed peace plan that strongly favored Israeli demands over Palestinian ones. But he has also called on Israel to wind down the war.
Ms. Harris has mostly stuck to President Biden’s views: backing Israel’s right to self-defense while pressing for a deal to end the war and release the hostages held in Gaza. She has taken a stronger tone on Palestinian suffering, but has not signaled a markedly different approach if elected.
Estimates vary widely, but at least 150,000 Americans live in Israel, which has a population of roughly 10 million, according to the U.S. government. Roughly 60,000 live in Israeli settlements in the West Bank — which much of the international community deems illegal — making them roughly 15 percent of the settler population, according to Sara Yael Hirschhorn, a lecturer at Haifa University.
Thousands of Palestinian Americans also live in the West Bank, though there are no official statistics.
Generations of Palestinians have ferried back and forth between the United States, where they are equal citizens under the law, and the West Bank, where they are subject to Israel’s two-tiered system. Israeli law gives settlers all the rights of their neighbors in Israel proper, while Palestinians in the West Bank — U.S. citizens or not — live under Israeli military occupation, with far fewer rights.
Kory Bardash, the co-chairman of Republicans Overseas Israel, lives in Efrat, a settlement with many Americans, where he coached Little League baseball. Over the past year, the United States has projected impotence rather than decisiveness in the Middle East, which is bad for Israel, he said.
“Under the current administration, the players in this neighborhood sense weakness,” said Mr. Bardash, who canvassed for Mr. Trump.
A handful of settlers, pointing to Mr. Trump’s often unpredictable political zigzags, still support Ms. Harris, including Herzl Hefter, an American-born Orthodox rabbi who lives in Efrat. He said at least some of his neighbors shared his misgivings over what he called Mr. Trump’s “moral rot” but had nonetheless decided to “hold their nose and vote for Trump.”
“But it doesn’t mean that in this policy or that policy, maybe Trump would be better,” said Mr. Hefter, 67. “It’s really impossible to know, because he’s totally unreliable and crazy.”
A few miles north of Jerusalem, thousands of Palestinian Americans live in towns where many split their time between the Middle East and the United States. In Turmus Aya, a quiet, relatively prosperous village close to Ramallah, Americans make up a large part of the population, particularly in the summer, when expatriates pack into the town, towing their children for monthslong visits.
Mr. Alqam, who was born in New Jersey, spent several childhood years living in Turmus Aya. In 2023, he and his wife moved back from Louisiana so his three children would connect with their roots and learn Arabic — although many children in Turmus Aya prefer to chatter together in English.
Returning from abroad brought Mr. Alqam again face-to-face with the maze of Israeli restrictions on Palestinians across the West Bank, which Israel says are necessary to prevent further militant attacks. He sought to reassure his children that their U.S. passports might protect them regardless.
“In America, we would have equal rights. But in this country, they have superiority, more rights, more protection, more safety,” said Mr. Alqam, referring to Jewish Israelis.
Two weeks after their arrival, Jewish extremists stormed into their hometown, torching homes in retaliation for a Palestinian attack earlier that day that had killed four Israelis. One of the town’s residents was fatally shot during the clashes.
Mr. Alqam conceded that Israeli hard-liners might be further emboldened if Mr. Trump was elected, potentially moving to annex the West Bank. But he said the situation was rapidly getting worse either way — making it important to first change attitudes in the United States.
“I’m willing to take four years of a little bit more suffering in order to hopefully change something bigger,” Mr. Alqam said, referring to a potential Trump victory.
Some Palestinians do support Ms. Harris, while acknowledging frustration with her on Gaza. Hakeem Asheh, a Palestinian American living in the West Bank city of Nablus, said he was willing to “give Harris a chance.”
“The Democratic Party is changing its views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There’s a new vision,” said Mr. Asheh, who worked as a drugstore manager in Connecticut before returning to Nablus a decade ago. “I doubt Harris will implement it — but over time, that might change.”
But it is unclear how much either candidate would influence Israel, where many view the ongoing wars as existential conflicts.
Mr. Knoller, 60, moved to Karnei Shomron, a settlement in the northern West Bank which, like Efrat, was built up in part by American immigrants. In July, his son Nadav, 30, was killed while on a third tour of reserve duty in Gaza, leaving behind a wife and 18-month-old son.
For Mr. Knoller, the decision to vote for Mr. Trump was simple.
If Ms. Harris is elected, the United States will probably “pressure Israel to possibly reach a cease-fire and release thousands of Hamas terrorists” in exchange for Israeli hostages held in Gaza, he said. “That’s something I can’t support.”
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2) Gazans Fear Neither Candidate in U.S. Election Will Help Them
American politics have not been topmost in the minds of Gazans. “We only need one thing: for this war to come to an end,” one man said.
By Liam Stack, Bilal Shbair and Abu Bakr Bashir, Nov. 5, 2024
Liam Stack reported from Tel Aviv, and Bilal Shbair from Deir al Balah in central Gaza.
The rubble of a destroyed house in Khan Younis in southern Gaza on Monday. Credit...Mohammed Salem/Reuters
The Biden administration’s support for Israel in the war in Gaza has been divisive for left-leaning voters in the United States, including many Arab Americans, and some say it has soured them on Vice President Kamala Harris’s candidacy.
Many in Gaza share that anger over the United States’ willingness to keep shipping weapons to Israel to carry out its campaign against Hamas despite the death and devastation in Gaza. But in interviews across the territory, many said they were skeptical that either Ms. Harris or former President Donald J. Trump would do much to improve their situation.
“I am fearful that both candidates are for the same thing, which is no end in sight for the war in Gaza,” said Abdul Kareem al-Kahlout, 35, a math teacher in Deir al Balah.
The war began after the militant group Hamas led the Oct. 7 terror attack that Israeli authorities say killed about 1,200 people in Israel. Since then, the Israeli military’s bombardment and ground operations in Gaza have killed more than 43,000 people, according to local authorities, a figure that includes Hamas fighters. The war has pushed the remaining population to the brink of famine and left much of the territory in ruins.
Many people interviewed in Gaza said they were more focused on keeping themselves and their loved ones alive after more than a year of war. They have had little access to electricity or the internet, or to adequate food and medicine, so they have not had much time to follow American politics.
“I have no preference,” said Mohammed Owaida, 33, who is from Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip. “We only need one thing: for this war to come to an end. We are exhausted. Whoever wins and can do that, I support.”
Across the border, polls show that Israelis overwhelmingly view Mr. Trump as the candidate who best serves their country’s interests, an opinion based largely on the sense that his first term in office brought benefits to Israel. While a Harris win would offer a sense of continuity at a turbulent time, many Israelis assume it would come with more criticism of Israeli policies toward Palestinians.
Mr. Trump took staunch pro-Israel stances during his term, including a proposed peace plan that strongly favored Israeli demands over Palestinian ones. But he has also called on Israel to wind down the war. Ms. Harris has mostly stuck to President Biden’s views: backing Israel’s right to self-defense while pressing for a deal to end the war and release the hostages held in Gaza.
Israelis generally believe that whoever wins, there won’t be a serious change in relations with the United States, their most important ally. And many in Gaza agreed, saying it was unlikely that the United States would waver in its support for Israel.
Lina Rabah, 36, said she thought American leaders viewed the people of the Gaza Strip as little more than “a chess piece on their board.”
“All I want is for the United States to see us as humans, not just as numbers in a long conflict,” said Ms. Rabah, who has three children.
“If either Trump or Harris truly values human life and human rights, then they must use their power — not remarks or speeches to the media — to press for an immediate cease-fire,” she said.
Rima Swaisi, a journalist from Gaza City who works for Wafa, the official news agency of the Palestinian Authority, said she thought Ms. Harris was more likely to pursue an end to the war than Mr. Trump, who has been a strong supporter of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. She called Ms. Harris the “less worse” option, and said she would never forget that Mr. Trump “gave Jerusalem to Israel” by moving the U.S. Embassy to that city from Tel Aviv in 2017, in a break with decades of American policy.
“If we have to choose between the two devils, then anyone but Trump,” she said. Of Ms. Harris, she said: “I just hope she wins and most importantly does something differently toward the Palestinian people.”
But some in Gaza said the election did not present Palestinians with a less bad option.
Hanin Ashour, 33, said she had lost four family members since the war began, including two young children: Mariam, 8 months, and Omar, 2. American officials have often talked about human rights, she said, but now she blames them for the deaths of her loved ones.
She has become so disgusted by U.S. policies, she said, that she will not even use humanitarian aid from American organizations. To her, the idea of pinning her hopes on an American politician is absurd.
“I cannot even eat anything that comes from the country that killed my innocent family members,” she said. “So what — am I supposed to wait to hear from U.S. presidents who support Israel with missiles? How am I supposed to listen to them?”
Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
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3) Netanyahu Faces Backlash for Firing Israel’s Defense Minister
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s dismissal of Yoav Gallant was seen as a risky step as Israel fights wars on two fronts. Opposition leaders said the move put national security at risk.
By Adam Rasgon and Patrick Kingsley, October 6, 2024
A highway in Tel Aviv blocked by a protest rally on Tuesday after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed his defense minister, Yoav Gallant. Credit...Oded Balilty/Associated Press
Here are the latest developments.
Israeli opposition leaders on Wednesday accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of risking national security for political purposes, echoing widespread public discontent over his decision to fire the defense minister.
Mr. Netanyahu’s surprise announcement on Tuesday night that he was dismissing the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, was seen as a risky step at a time when the country is fighting wars in Gaza and Lebanon while bracing for a possible Iranian retaliatory attack.
The men had repeatedly clashed over domestic issues as well as the conduct of the war. Mr. Gallant, a popular and experienced former general, was pushing for a cease-fire deal in Gaza that would secure the release of hostages held there. His firing removed the main proponent in the Israeli government for such an agreement.
But it quickly prompted accusations that Mr. Netanyahu was prioritizing personal goals over national ones by trying to appease the right wing of his coalition. Centrist columnists described it as an attack on democracy, and protesters blocked traffic and lit bonfires on a major Tel Aviv highway overnight.
Yair Lapid, a rival of Mr. Netanyahu, told a news conference on Wednesday that Gallant’s firing was “not normal.”
“There is no one left in the government,” he added. “The prime minister cannot be trusted, the cabinet cannot be trusted, the last person who could be trusted in this crazy government was fired yesterday.”
Mr. Netanyahu opted to replace Mr. Gallant with Israel Katz — a staunch ally who was serving as foreign minister and is viewed as unlikely to criticize or push back against his hard-line approach to cease-fire discussions. Unlike Mr. Gallant, a popular and experienced former general, Mr. Katz has never held a top military position.
Here’s what else to know:
U.S. election: Israel’s right-wing government celebrated Donald J. Trump’s victory effusively. Even before the race was officially called, Mr. Netanyahu spoke of “true friendship” in congratulating Mr. Trump on a “huge victory.” The sentiment reflects Mr. Trump’s record of strong support for Israel, even when that meant reversing decades of American policy. The results of the U.S. election could have major implications on the approach to the war in the Middle East.
Hezbollah rockets: The Israeli military said that Hezbollah had fired around 120 “projectiles” into Israel on Wednesday, the date marking the end of the formal grieving period in Islam for Hassan Nasrallah, the group’s leader. Mr. Nasrallah was killed by an Israeli airstrike in September.
Evacuation warnings: As Hezbollah’s new leader, Naim Qassem, commemorated Mr. Nasrallah in a televised address, Israel’s military issued new evacuation warnings for buildings in the Dahiya, the area near Beirut where Mr. Nasrallah was killed. About an hour later, a deafening explosion was heard throughout Beirut and smoke was seen rising above the Dahiya.
Syria strikes: Israel appears to be intensifying its focus on Syria. The Israeli military announced on Tuesday that it had struck targets in Syria for the second day in a row, attacks it said were aimed at cutting off the flow of weapons and intelligence between Hezbollah, the armed Lebanese group, and its sponsor, Iran. The announcement was the third time in a week that Israel made the rare admission of attacking inside Syria.
Euan Ward, Isabel Kershner and Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.
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4) How to End the Wars of the World
By Bonnie Weinstein
Socialist Viewpoint, Nov/Dec, Vol. 24, No. 6
The U.S. is occupying the world with over 750 military bases in 80 countries. 1
It is now undertaking a massive re-vamping of its already dominant world nuclear arsenal making it a more powerful and efficient killing machine. World peace is the furthest thing from its mind. The U.S. goal is to take control of the world by any means necessary—by brute military force, by assassination, mass destruction, starvation and/or occupation—whatever helps it win, even if what it wins is a wasteland.
If this were not true, then why are they willing to spend $108,000-per-minute of U.S. tax dollars for the next three decades to build a new, more streamlined and powerful nuclear arsenal?
According to an October 10, 2024, New York Times Opinion piece by W.J. Hennigan with photographs by An-My Lê titled, “The Price:”2
“…the United States is set to spend an estimated $1.7 trillion over 30 years to revamp its own arsenal. The spending spree, which the government began planning in 2010, is underway in at least 23 states—nearly 50 if you include subcontractors. It follows a decades-long freeze on designing, building or testing new nuclear weapons. Along with the subs, the military is paying for a new fleet of bomber jets, land-based missiles and thermonuclear warheads. Tally all that spending, and the bill comes to almost $57-billion-a-year, or $108,000-per-minute for three decades.”
The U.S. capitalist class has no intentions of planning for a peaceful future because war is a way of life for them, and the way of death for us, for we are their cannon fodder.
The political parties of the capitalist class have one thing in common—to preserve and strengthen U.S. military domination of the world.
Edward Wong, in a September 30, 2024, New York Times article titled, “U.S. and Allies Sound Alarm Over War Ties Among Axis of Adversaries,” outlines the current balance of power among U.S. partner nations and their adversaries in the world today:
“Leaders of U.S. partner nations are quick to point out the growing threats. In an interview with The New York Times at the United Nations last week, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine denounced the shipments of arms to Russia from North Korea and Iran. Sitting next to him, the prime minister of Denmark, Mette Frederiksen, said, ‘This is a global issue, because the closer cooperation between North Korea, Iran and Russia is a challenge for all of us, of course, including the U.S., and with China helping one way or the other.’
“… But coalitions are not as hardened as they appear, which the United States discovered in the sprawling conflicts of the 20th century, sometimes belatedly. And today they are based not so much on a shared ideology—communism was a unifying factor for much of the Cold War—as on opposition to U.S. power rooted in each autocratic nation’s specific interests. Analysts say the partnerships now are marriages of convenience or pragmatism. For instance, the theocratic leaders of Iran obviously have a different ideological perspective than do the leaders of Russia, China or North Korea, known formally as the D.P.R.K. [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] ...which all share a communist history.” 3
These alliances are precarious because no matter what,the U.S. has the most military power well-placed around the world, and they will make and break alliances any time it benefits them, just like they do in big businesses—and war is its biggest, most profitable business.4
Bourgeois democracy—maintaining capitalism’s power—the easy way
At this time, the U.S. government along with their allies, are trying to accomplish world military hegemony the easy way—by keeping the masses of workers everywhere convinced that capitalism U.S.-style is the pinnacle of human social evolution—that the socialist solution has been tried, and failed, and that the world would be much better off if the U.S. had control over the whole planet and all of its resources.
But for us, the masses of the world, the only road we are on, is the road to nuclear annihilation—and we’re the ones expected to build this road and pay for it!
It is we who get shot, bombed, and lose limbs—and ironically—it is we who do the shooting, bombing and the killing. Meanwhile the capitalists profit from the domination of as much “territory” (read natural resources) as possible.
Through war, they gain wealth at the expense, not only of our lives, but of our environment.
Fascism—maintaining capitalism’s power—the hard way
The U.S. capitalist class, if they feel the need to resort to fascism, will do so in the name of the Democratic or Republican Parties or any other of their political representatives. One bourgeois political party alone cannot immediately establish a fascist government through elections any more than we can win a socialist revolution through elections.
The fundamental nature of capitalism is a confrontation of a tiny minority against those who outnumber them on a massive scale and who produce the wealth the capitalists steal from the product of our labor. So, the capitalist class—to maintain their dictatorship over the working class and the wealth we produce—must convince us that our enemies are among us—not them.
If they keep us divided against each other and, looking to them (any one of them) for solutions, they will continue along their present and successful path of tricking us into thinking we are part of the decision-making process in a so-called democratic society, when we choose between capitalist politicians.
But if they feel they must, the capitalist class will resort to fascism and declare war against any workers who begin to resist them and their wars.
The capitalist politicians will change the laws they made previously and try to turn the military loose on any who resist their rule.
But that presents a profound problem for them because the military is made up of working-class people—it will be their own families resisting impoverishment and repression that the troops will have to confront. It will be their own spouses and kids in need of food and shelter as the economy pours more and more of our resources into wars that benefit only the wealthy.
Inevitably resistance to war and the toll it takes on the lives of the working class will grow.
What’s not inevitable is a worker’s victory over capitalism and its wars. That takes massive planning and organization in opposition to capitalism and for a socialist alternative.
We must do all we can to encourage this growing awareness of the capitalist trajectory of never-ending wars and how they are devastating the world—burying tens-of-thousands of poor and working-class people under rubble—just to increase profits for themselves.
That ultimate control will never be willingly forfeited by the capitalist class, and neither will they give up the class structure of society that enslaves us to the needs and wants of capital.
The single most important message of the struggle for a socialist world, is that we can’t expect the slaveholders to voluntarily turn over the wealth they have stolen from us. They are at war against us—against a united working class who are just beginning to realize the real power we hold over them—they are powerless without our willing cooperation.
There can be no partnership with capitalism
Capitalists don’t know how to build a single thing—they hire us—from unskilled labor to highly skilled scientists and engineers—to accomplish those tasks. Without our labor they are helpless—and they know it. That’s why they play this charade of differences between Democrats and Republicans. It’s orchestrated and designed intentionally to convince us that there is a real, meaningful difference between them, but there isn’t.
Ultimately, they all agree that capitalism must be preserved at all costs—hence the build-up of the most powerful military complex in the world, and in the history of humanity.
The power of the working class united
We, the workers of the world, are the only ones who can transform society into one that turns capitalism on its head by producing for the needs and wants of people based upon equality and justice for all—not profit for the few. A world where there is no need for weapons of mass destruction—a world that can bring an end to war.
The evils of capitalism are so expansive and so terrifying in their potential of universal annihilation that we can’t see the forest for the trees—we can’t see the power of unity and solidarity among the “makers”—the working class and our allies—to create a world of universal democratic decision-making and cooperation which will enable a rational and carefully planned economy that leaves no one hungry and, yet, maintains a vibrant and healthy, non-toxic environment to benefit all life on earth. A world where each one of us can develop to our full potential free of poverty and strife—with a universe of possibilities to explore.
This is not idealism. This is the natural, instinctive, collective road to human cooperation and social organization—it is natural social evolution. It is what capitalism tries to beat out of us from cradle to grave—and to the grave capitalism leads the world—and to the grave it needs to go.
1 The United States has around 750 military bases in at least 80 countries: Japan has 120 bases; Germany has 119; South Korea has 73.
https://globalaffairs.org/bluemarble/us-sending-more-troops-middle-east-where-world-are-us-military-
2 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/10/opinion/nuclear-weapons-us-price.html
3 References to Communism were removed in the North Korean 1992 and 1998 constitutional revisions to make way for the personality cult of Kim’s family dictatorship and the (admittedly reluctant) North Korean market economy reform.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism_in_Korea#:~:text=Due%20to%20the%20end%20of,uphold%20Communism%2C%20but%20has%20replaced
4 Read “Stop Profiting Off Genocide,” “50+ U.S. Lawmakers Hold Military Stock,” and “Israel’s Economy Fueled by Genocide” elsewhere in this magazine.
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5) Trump has a history of strong support for Israel.
By Liam Stack Reporting from Tel Aviv, October 6, 2024
Israeli officials were some of the first foreign leaders to congratulate Donald J. Trump on his election victory on Wednesday, with some hailing it as a win for their country. The sentiment reflects Mr. Trump’s record of strong support for Israel, even when that meant reversing decades of American policy in the Middle East.
Here’s a look at Mr. Trump’s policies on Israel during his first term as president.
The Abraham Accords
Under the first Trump administration, the number of Arab states that had diplomatic relations with Israel went from two to six. New agreements with Morocco, Sudan, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates expanded a list that for decades had only been comprised of Egypt and Jordan.
The most prominent of those agreements was the Abraham Accords in 2020, which brought Bahrain and the U.A.E. into the fold — both Persian Gulf monarchies eager to shore up alliances with the West against their neighbor and longtime rival to the north, Iran.
Separate agreements with Morocco and Sudan were made weeks after the Abraham Accords were struck.
Jerusalem
Soon after he took office, Mr. Trump reversed decades of careful diplomacy when in 2017 he recognized Jerusalem as the Israeli capital of Israel and said the United States would move its embassy to the city. The embassy was relocated from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem the following year.
Israel declared West Jerusalem its capital in 1949, when the city was divided and East Jerusalem and its Arab residents were ruled by neighboring Jordan. But the position of the U.S. and most other countries had been that the city’s status should be determined through negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, who have long wanted East Jerusalem to be the capital of a future Palestinian state.
The issue of whether to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital grew more complex when Israel captured East Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East war and subsequently annexed it. The annexation was not widely recognized by the international community.
Congress passed a law requiring the U.S. embassy to move to Jerusalem in 1995, but successive presidential administrations deferred implementing the law out of concerns it could increase instability in the Middle East.
The Golan Heights
The United States, under the first Trump administration, became the first country in the world to recognize Israel’s authority over the long-disputed Golan Heights.
In 2019, Mr. Trump signed a presidential proclamation declaring the territory part of Israel. That move was also a reversal of longstanding U.S. policy on the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria during the 1967 Middle East war and subsequently annexed.
The annexation of the Golan Heights has never been recognized by the United Nations, which condemned it at the time. Mr. Trump’s decision was criticized internationally and carried primarily symbolic weight.
The population of the Golan Heights is roughly evenly divided between Israelis and Arabs who lived there before 1967.
In honor of Mr. Trump’s decision, the Israeli government planned a new settlement in the Golan that now bears his name: Trump Heights.
UNRWA
The Trump administration cut off all American funding to the United Nations agency that provides assistance to millions of Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, in 2018.
The year before, the U.S. had contributed about $360 million to the agency, which provides health care, education and other humanitarian services to stateless Palestinians.
The decision was widely denounced by world leaders. It was described at the time as political tactic to pressure Palestinian leaders to give up the right of Palestinian refugees under international law to return to property taken from their ancestors during the creation of Israel in 1948.
UNRWA has been in focus in recent months since the war in Gaza began. Israeli officials claimed that a small number of UNRWA employees were connected to the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel last year — an assertion that prompted several countries to suspend funding and for which Israel failed to provide evidence. Last week, the Knesset passed a law banning the agency from operating in Israel.
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6) What We Just Went Through Wasn’t an Election. It Was a Hostage Situation.
By Tyler Austin Harper, Nov. 6, 2024
Mr. Harper is an assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College.
Sam Whitney/The New York Times
Heading into Tuesday’s vote, a large majority of voters said that the country was on the wrong track and that they were disappointed with the candidates on offer. A plurality of voters said that regardless of who was elected, the next president would make things worse. Nearly 80 percent said the presidential campaigns did not make them proud of America.
The blame for this grievous state of affairs lies with the Democratic and Republican Parties, both of which played a game of chicken with the electorate, relying on apocalyptic threats about the end of democracy to convince people that they had no choice but to vote as instructed. Both candidates offered up policies that were unpopular even among their supporters, serving a banquet for their donor classes while doling out junk food to their bases. For one candidate, that contemptuous strategy succeeded. But it fails the American people.
For all his populist posturing, Mr. Trump put forward tax breaks that favor the wealthy, championed tariffs that would almost certainly raise grocery prices, bad-mouthed overtime pay, praised firing striking workers and largely stayed mum while his allies discussed destroying the Affordable Care Act. He insisted abortion be left up to the states even though most Americans, including many Republicans, think it should be legal everywhere, and pledged to oppose any new gun restrictions even though an overwhelming majority of Americans say they should be stricter.
And what were Trump acolytes to be given in return for greenlighting this unpopular agenda? Elon Musk promised a period of economic pain. Tucker Carlson said Mr. Trump would bend the country over his knee and give it a “spanking.” Why would any sign on? Because it was either that, they were told, or nuclear war under Ms. Harris. Some choice.
Meanwhile, Mr. Biden and his enablers disregarded the public’s belief that he was too old to serve another term. When he finally did step aside — only after a televised disaster that set his floundering campaign on fire — the Democratic Party circumvented democracy by simply crowning his replacement. On some policies — most notably reproductive rights — Ms. Harris was in alignment with voters. But she quickly began sending signals that she wouldn’t go too far with the progressive economic policies that Mr. Biden had wrenched from the stifling neoliberal norm.
She refused to say she would keep Lina Khan, the trustbusting Federal Trade Commission chair, who is wildly popular with Democrats and even some Republicans (but not, crucially, with her money men). She refused to support an arms embargo against Israel even though a June poll found that 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of Independents want it. And all the while she gave badly needed Arab and Muslim voters the cold shoulder, cozied up to the sleazy crypto industry and touted her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a man who left office with a 13 percent approval rating. Ms. Harris made a high-risk bet that — because Mr. Trump truly did pose a threat to democracy — when push came to shove, most Americans would overcome their frustration with her.
For the better part of a decade, American discourse has been consumed by emergency politics: a collective insistence that we are teetering on the knife’s edge of collapse, an anxiety that both parties were all too happy to exploit in order to hold their voters captive. This year that impulse reached its apotheosis.
What we just went through was not an election; it was a hostage situation. Our major parties represent the interests of streaming magnates, the arms industry, oil barons, Bitcoin ghouls and Big Tobacco, often without even pretending to heed the needs of voters. A political system like that is fundamentally broken.
A poll from this spring found that about half of voters 30 or younger believe that it doesn’t matter who wins elections. Describing the burgeoning nihilism of this generation, one pollster told Semafor, “Young voters do not look at our politics and see any good guys. They see a dying empire led by bad people.”
The cultural theorist Lauren Berlant once observed that “intensely political seasons spawn reveries,” fleeting periods of high romance when sudden change feels possible. Those reveries turn not on true hope, but on a kind of “cruel optimism” that political figures, parties and processes inevitably betray. One way to understand the country’s mood today — and the cynicism of those who came to political adulthood post-2008 — is as one long hangover from the cruel optimism of the Obama Era: the highs of a “hope” and “change” campaign that cashed out as, and crashed into, more of the same, chased by three straight presidential elections of take it or leave it. Yet this decade of despair may be, in its own way, a kind of opportunity.
“The cure might come from the same source with the distemper,” the philosopher Edmund Burke once wrote, reflecting on political dysfunction in his own time. If we are ever to exit the emergency spiral we are trapped in — in which Republicans and Democrats accuse each other of Book of Revelation horrors while each shoehorns policies that cater only to their respective elites — then we need to be willing to demand better.
A threat to democracy does not exempt leaders from giving voters a plan for the future, one that speaks to their concerns and that reflects the America they want to live in. Indeed, the greater the threat, the more important it is to do the work of winning voters over, rather than just giving them an ultimatum.
If we want out of our decade-long impasse, we need to stop letting candidates skate by on alarmist excuses. When candidates don’t even have the decency to sell us magic beans, when they tell us we simply have no choice but to vote for them, we need to run in the other direction. And at the extremes of frustration, more of us need to run for office — against the anointed, against incumbents, as independents if necessary — even if defeat is certain, even if they yell that you are “spoiling” a race that was spoiled before anyone ever cast a ballot.
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7) Dozens Killed as Israeli Strikes Pound Lebanon, Health Ministry Says
The deadliest strikes hit the Bekaa Valley, in and around the historic city of Baalbek, overnight.
By Liam Stack and Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Reporting from Tel Aviv and London, Nov. 7, 2024
Damaged cars and debris near the ancient Roman temple in Baalbek on Thursday. Credit...Ed Ram/Getty Images
The Israeli military said Thursday that it had struck dozens of sites overnight in the north and south of Lebanon, part of its widening offensive against Hezbollah, a bombardment that Lebanese officials said had killed dozens of people.
Israel’s campaign initially focused on southern Lebanon, where it said it sought to cripple Hezbollah’s ability to fire rockets across the border into Israel. But the military operations have expanded in recent weeks to include cities and towns across the country, including some far from that border.
The Israeli military said that Hezbollah had launched more than 40 “projectiles” across the border on Thursday. It said one Israeli soldier was killed in a battle in northern Lebanon, where Israel has ramped up military operations over the last week.
Israeli strikes in and around the ancient city of Baalbek, in northeastern Lebanon, killed at least 40 people, the Lebanese health ministry said. Attacks in other parts of the country, which is about half the size of Vermont, killed another 36 people on Wednesday, the ministry added. It was not clear how many were affiliated with Hezbollah.
Israel’s military said it had struck 20 sites in the area of Baalbek. It did not mention Sidon, a city on the southern coast where Lebanon’s health ministry said that a strike on Thursday had killed at least three people. The United Nations peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, also said that five of its peacekeepers were “lightly injured” by a drone strike near Sidon on Thursday.
Baalbek, famed for its Roman ruins, was home to around 80,000 people before Israel stepped up its aerial assault in late September and launched a ground invasion aimed at crippling Hezbollah.
While the city, near the Syrian border in the Bekaa Valley, was largely spared during the early weeks of the campaign, Israeli military warnings in late October prompted much of its population to flee. Since then, Israel’s military has repeatedly struck Baalbek.
The Israeli military also said that it had struck Hezbollah “command centers and terrorist infrastructure sites” near Beirut overnight. Residents reported hearing at least four large airstrikes near the Lebanese capital, with smoke rising over the Dahiya, an area south of Beirut where Hezbollah holds sway.
One hit so close to Beirut’s international airport that stones fell on a runway, according to local news reports. Lebanon’s transport minister, Ali Hamieh, said on Thursday that the airport was operating normally.
More than 3,000 people have been killed in Lebanon since October of last year, most in the weeks since Israel ramped up its campaign against Hezbollah. More than 1.2 million people — a fifth of the country’s population — have fled their homes, according to the Lebanese government.
As the fighting in Lebanon has intensified, Israel’s military has been pressing a renewed offensive against Hamas in the northern Gaza Strip. It said on Thursday that it was expanding ground operations there to include Beit Lahia, an agricultural area on the Israeli border that has been targeted by repeated airstrikes.
Ground operations were also continuing in Jabaliya, a large town that has been the focus of the northern offensive.
The United Nations has warned of a humanitarian crisis that threatens hundreds of thousands of people trapped by the fighting in the north. The Palestinian Civil Defense, an emergency rescue organization, said on Thursday that it had been unable to operate in the north for the last 16 days due to the fighting.
The Gaza health ministry said on Thursday that Israeli military operations had killed at least 78 people in Gaza over the last two days.
Here’s what else is happening in the Middle East:
· Polio vaccinations: The United Nations said it completed the second round of its polio vaccination campaign in Gaza on Wednesday. The second dose of the vaccine was given to more than 556,774 children under the age of ten, about 94 percent of the campaign’s goal, according to the United Nations. It called the vaccination rate “a remarkable achievement given the extremely difficult circumstances” created by the war.
· Medical evacuations: The World Health Organization said on Thursday that it had carried out the largest medical evacuation from Gaza since the war began, with 229 patients and their escorts traveling from the enclave to Romania and the United Arab Emirates for treatment. The patients, who left Gaza on Wednesday, included 38 children and 52 adults, including 37 people with cancer.
· Israeli deportations: Israel’s Parliament passed a law on Wednesday allowing the deportation of parents, children, and spouses of convicted terrorists if they are believed to have known about an attack in advance without informing the authorities. The law authorizes the Interior Minister to deport those relatives to Gaza or another “specified destination.” Widely seen as targeting Israel’s Palestinian minority, the law was condemned as discriminatory by Rawhi Fattouh, a Palestinian leader in the West Bank.
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8) Democrats Ignored Gaza and Brought Down Their Party
By Peter Beinart, Nov. 7, 2024
Mr. Beinart is a contributing Opinion writer at The Times. His book “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza” is forthcoming.
Illustration by Shoshana Schultz/The New York Times
During the presidential campaign, journalists trying to assess the electoral impact of Israel's war in Gaza often focused on Arab and Muslim voters, particularly in Michigan. That’s understandable. In the heavily Arab American city of Dearborn, Mich., which supported Joe Biden in 2020, results show that Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris by about six percentage points.
But viewing Gaza’s political repercussions merely through the lens of identity misses something fundamental. Over the past year, Israel’s slaughter and starvation of Palestinians — funded by U.S. taxpayers and live-streamed on social media — has triggered one of the greatest surges in progressive activism in a generation. Many Americans roused to action by their government’s complicity in Gaza’s destruction have no personal connection to Palestine or Israel. Like many Americans who protested South African apartheid or the Vietnam War, their motive is not ethnic or religious. It is moral.
The outrage has been particularly intense among Black Americans and the young. This spring, encampments expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people rose on more than 100 college campuses. In February, the Council of Bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the nation’s most prominent Black congregations, called the war in Gaza a “mass genocide” and demanded that the Biden-Harris administration stop funding it. In June, the NAACP urged an end to weapons shipments as well. A June CBS News poll found that while most voters over the age of 65 supported arms sales to Israel, voters under the age of 30 opposed them by a ratio of more than three to one. And while only 56 percent of white voters favored cutting off weapons, among Black voters the figure was 75 percent.
Those pre-election polling numbers may explain some of what we saw Tuesday night. Kamala Harris is far more youthful than Joe Biden. Yet, early exit polls — from CNN, The Washington Post and Fox News and The Associated Press — suggest she suffered a sharp decline among voters under the age of 29 compared with Mr. Biden’s result in 2020. Ms. Harris is Black, yet according to CNN and The Washington Post, she did slightly worse than Mr. Biden among Black voters. One exit poll, from Fox News and The Associated Press, suggests she did significantly worse.
Surely, many young and Black voters were dissatisfied with the economy. Some may have been attracted to Mr. Trump’s message on immigration. Others may have been reluctant to vote for a woman.
But these broader dynamics do not fully explain Ms. Harris’s underperformance, because she appears to have lost far less ground among voters who are older and white. Her share of white voters equaled Mr. Biden’s. Among voters over age 65, she actually gained ground.
Which brings us back to Ms. Harris’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza.
Despite overwhelming evidence that the Democratic Party’s most devoted constituents wanted to end sales of weapons to Israel, the Biden administration kept sending them, even after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel expanded the war into Lebanon. And not only did Ms. Harris not break with Mr. Biden’s policy, she went out of her way to make voters who care about Palestinian rights feel unwelcome. When antiwar activists interrupted a speech of hers in August, Ms. Harris snapped, “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that.” At the Democratic National Convention, her campaign rebuffed a plea from activists to let a Palestinian American speak from the main stage. And just days before the election, the Harris surrogate Bill Clinton told a Michigan crowd that Hamas had “force[d]” Israel to kill Palestinian civilians by using them as human shields.
All this provided Mr. Trump an opportunity. According to The Times, his campaign found that undecided voters in swing states were about six times as likely as other swing-state voters to be motivated by the war in Gaza. Mr. Trump wooed them. He pledged to help “the Middle East return to real peace” and lambasted former Representative Liz Cheney, a Republican with whom Ms. Harris had chosen to campaign, as a “radical war hawk.” Like Richard Nixon, who in 1968 appealed to antiwar voters by promising “an honorable end to the war in Vietnam,” Mr. Trump portrayed himself — however insincerely — as the candidate of peace.
For months now, commentators close to the Palestinian rights movement have feared exactly this scenario. In August, the Palestinian American analyst Yousef Munayyer warned that “Unless Harris takes some steps to break from Biden’s Israel policy, the same issue that helped tank an already vulnerable Joe Biden with his base could put major obstacles in her path to victory.”
But people who are passionate about Palestinian rights rarely occupy influential positions in Democratic campaigns. For decades, the party’s politicians and operatives have treated the struggle for Palestinian freedom as a taboo. They’ve grown so accustomed to sequestering it from their stated commitment to human rights that, even amid what prominent scholars call a genocide, Ms. Harris thought it wiser to campaign with Ms. Cheney than, say, Representative Rashida Tlaib. Despite overwhelming evidence, her campaign could not see that among progressive voters, the Palestine exception no longer applies.
There is only one path forward. Although it will require a fierce intraparty brawl, Democrats — who claim to respect human equality and international law — must begin to align their policies on Israel and Palestine with these broader principles. In this new era, in which supporting Palestinian freedom has become central to what it means to be progressive, the Palestinian exception is not just immoral. It’s politically disastrous.
For a long time, Palestinians in Gaza and beyond have been paying for that exception with their lives. Now Americans are paying too. It may cost us our freedom.
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9) I Study Guys Like Trump. There’s a Reason They Keep Winning.
By Ben Rhodes, Nov. 8, 2024
Mr. Rhodes was deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama.
Mark Peterson for The New York Times
In December 2019, I traveled to Hong Kong, where a heavy unease hung in the air. For months, young people had taken to the streets to protest the encroachment of the Chinese Communist Party on what was supposed to be a self-governing, democratic system. On walls they’d scrawled: “Save Hong Kong! If we burn you burn with us!” All the protesters I spoke to knew their movement would fail; it was a last assertion of democratic identity before it was extinguished by a new order which saw democracy as the enemy within.
I met with a government official preparing to resign and told him I was writing a book about the rise of authoritarian nationalism. “The nationalism in the U.S. and Europe is somewhat different,” he told me. “Yours started with the financial crisis in 2008. That’s when liberalism started to lose its appeal, when people saw this wasn’t working. The narrative of liberalism and democracy collapsed. This spilled over into China, too. This is when China started to think — should we really follow a Western model?” We were sitting in a hotel lounge, the invisible forces he described surrounding us: capitalism, but not democracy; cultural elites cloistered away from the working class. “The nationalist movements in East and West were both a response to the collapse of the Western model,” he added.
Everything I’d experienced told me he was right. Eight years serving in the Obama White House after the financial crisis felt like swimming upstream, against the currents of global politics. A radicalized Republican Party rejected liberal democracy at home, mirroring far-right leaders like Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary who spoke about installing “illiberal democracy” (a polite term for “blood and soil” nationalism) across Europe. In Russia, Vladimir Putin set out to undermine — if not dismantle — the liberal order helmed by the United States. In China, Xi Jinping began to shift Beijing’s strategy from rising within that order to building a separate one, drained of democratic values. Barack Obama’s political skills and cultural appeal allowed him to navigate those currents, but they didn’t always transfer to other Democrats.
Donald Trump’s first victory challenged my liberal assumptions about the inevitability of a certain kind of progress: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” For eight years outside of government, I have talked to opposition figures around the world and heard versions of the same story everywhere. After the Cold War, globalization chipped away at people’s sense of security and identity.
In the West, neoliberalism — that blend of free trade, deregulation and deference to financial markets — hollowed-out communities while enriching a global oligarchy. Meanwhile, a homogenized and often crass popular culture eroded traditional national and religious identities. After 9/11, the war on terror was embraced by autocrats such as Mr. Putin, who used it as a frame to justify power grabs while forever wars fueled mass migration. The financial crisis came through like a hurricane, wrecking the lives of people already struggling to get by while the rich profited on the back end. Then social media’s explosion offered a vehicle to spread grievance and conspiracy theories, allowing populist leaders to radicalize their followers with the precision of an algorithm.
The playbook for transforming a democracy into a soft autocracy was clear: Win power with a populist message against elites. Redraw parliamentary districts. Change voting laws. Harass civil society. Pack courts with judges willing to support power grabs. Enrich cronies through corruption. Buy up newspapers and television stations and turn them into right-wing propaganda. Use social media to energize supporters. Wrap it up in an Us versus Them message: Us, the “real” Russians or Hungarians or Americans, against a rotating cast of Them: the migrants, the Muslims, the liberals, the gays, George Soros and on and on.
The persistent anti-incumbent mood was so strong that it even (narrowly) swept Mr. Trump out of office in 2020, aided by his bungling of a pandemic. But even after the shock of Jan. 6, heavy unease hung over American politics: There was no return to pre-Trump normalcy.
As president, Joe Biden embraced protectionism, organized labor and industrial policy, and his administration made investments in hollowed out communities through executive orders and legislation. Democrats relentlessly communicated the threat Mr. Trump posed to democracy, with the removal of abortion rights as proof. When they fought a mediocre collection of Republican candidates to a draw in the 2022 midterm elections, many in the party — including Mr. Biden — drew the lesson that this approach was working.
Yet now Mr. Trump has decisively won back the presidency. I would never claim to have all the answers about what went wrong, but I do worry that Democrats walked into the trap of defending the very institutions — the “establishment” — that most Americans distrust. As a party interested in competent technocracy, we lost touch with the anger people feel at government. As a party that prizes data, we seized on indicators of growth and job creation as proof that the economy was booming, even though people felt crushed by rising costs. As a party motivated by social justice, we let revulsion at white Christian nationalism bait us into identity politics on their terms — whether it was debates about transgender athletes, the busing of migrants to cities, or shaming racist MAGA personalities who can’t be shamed. As a party committed to American leadership of a “rules-based international order,” we defended a national security enterprise that has failed repeatedly in the 21st century, and made ourselves hypocrites through unconditional military support for Israel’s bombardment of civilians in Gaza.
Democrats told true stories about Mr. Trump’s unfitness, about the legislative achievements of the Biden-Harris administration, about bodily autonomy for women. But when talking about middle-class economics, it was often in the familiar poll-tested language of the consultant class.
As a former speechwriter, I am sympathetic to the challenge of weaving these threads together. But for all his many strengths, over the last four years, Mr. Biden — in part because of his age, in part because of social media — could not fill that intangible presidential role of narrating what was happening in our nation and world. Democratic leaders in Congress tended to be old hands who’d spent decades in Washington, making them imperfect messengers for an electorate demanding change. It is no coincidence that two outsiders as different as Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump have dominated politics for 20 years.
Kamala Harris brought new energy and remarkable discipline to the campaign’s final months, revitalizing the collaborative joy essential to Democratic politics. But her ties to an unpopular incumbent — and a global post-pandemic backlash against any incumbent — held her back. Democrats understandably have a hard time fathoming why Americans would put our democracy at risk, but we miss the reality that our democracy is part of what angers them. Many voters have come to associate democracy with globalization, corruption, financial capitalism, migration, forever wars and elites (like me) who talk about it as an end in itself rather than a means to redressing inequality, reining in capitalist systems that are rigged, responding to global conflict and fostering a sense of shared national identity.
Yes, this is unfair: Republican policies from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush did far more than Democrats to create this mess. But Mr. Trump’s crusade against the past elites of his own party — from the Bush family to Mitch McConnell — credentialed him with a public hungry for accountability, while the Harris campaign’s embrace of Dick Cheney conveyed the opposite message.
Donald Trump has won the presidency, but I don’t believe he will deliver on his promises. Like other self-interested autocrats, his remedies are designed to exploit problems instead of solving them, and he’s surrounded by oligarchs who want to loot the system instead of reforming it. Mass deportation and tariffs are recipes for inflation. Tax cuts and deregulation will exacerbate inequality. America First impulses will fuel global conflict, technological disruption and climate conflagration. Mr. Trump is the new establishment in this country and globally, and we should emphasize that instead of painting him as an outlier or interloper.
Out of the wreckage of this election, Democrats must reject the impulse to simply be a resistance that condemns whatever outrageous thing Mr. Trump says. While confronting Mr. Trump when we must, we must also focus on ourselves — what we stand for, and how we tell our story. That means acknowledging — as my Hong Kong interlocutor said — that “the narrative of liberalism and democracy collapsed.” Instead of defending a system that has been rejected, we need to articulate an alternative vision for what kind of democracy comes next.
We should merge our commitment to the moral, social and demographic necessity of an inclusive America with a populist critique of the system that Mr. Trump now runs; a focus more on reform than just redistribution. We must reform the corruption endemic to American capitalism, corporate malfeasance, profiteering in politics, unregulated technologies transforming our lives, an immigration system broken by Washington, the cabal of autocrats pushing the world to the brink of war and climate catastrophe.
After he lost an election in 2002, Mr. Orban spent years holding “civic circles” around Hungary — grass-roots meetings, often around churches, which built an agenda and sense of belonging that propelled him back into power. In their own way, the next generation of Democratic leaders should fan out across the country. Learn from mayors innovating at the local level. Listen to communities that feel alienated. Find places where multiracial democracy is working better than it is in the rest of the country. Tell those stories when pitching policies. Foster a sense of belonging to something bigger, so democracy doesn’t feel like the pablum of a ruling elite, but rather the remedy for fixing what is broken in Washington and our body politic.
We are not living in Hong Kong, where a democratic movement could be extinguished. A midterm election looms. Mr. Trump is term-limited. The next four years will be trying and dangerous — especially for the more vulnerable among us. But if we understand the global trends that got us here, we can swing the political pendulum back in our direction and seize that moment with a new vision of liberalism and democracy.
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10) Gazans Are Living Through a Yearlong Blackout
Israel cut off electricity in the first days of the war, leaving Palestinians to light the dark with cellphones and to cook over open flames.
By Liam Stack and Bilal Shbair, Nov. 9, 2024
Liam Stack reported from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and Bilal Shbair reported from al-Maghazi and Deir al-Balah, Gaza.
A Palestinian family gathering around a fire on the roof of their destroyed house in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, in September. Credit...Haitham Imad/EPA, via Shutterstock
Mariam Abu Amra’s six children panic when the sun goes down.
They are afraid of the dark, and ever since the war in Gaza began, their home is pitch-black by bedtime. The neighborhood outside is dark, too, illuminated only by cellphone screens that use up precious battery life.
The power has been out for more than one year in the Gaza Strip, and Gazans have had to make do with alternatives that fall far short of their basic needs.
“Every night is a struggle for us,” said Ms. Abu Amra, 36, who lives in Deir al Balah, in central Gaza. “Sometimes my children ask me when the electricity will be back again, but I have no answer.”
Electricity is a fundamental building block of modern life, and Gaza has had very little of it since Israel took measures to cut off its supply in the first days of the war in what it said was an effort to weaken Hamas. That yearlong blackout undergirds almost every deprivation imposed by the war, and has turned bare necessities — from functioning medical equipment to bedroom night lights — into luxuries.
“I never knew how much all the people and the families here, including myself, relied on electricity,” said Ms. Abu Amra, who now cooks over a fire and does laundry by hand before the sun sets. “I have to wake up early now so I don’t miss a single minute of daylight.”
Before the war, years of conflict and an Israeli and Egyptian economic blockade imposed to weaken Hamas had left Gaza’s electrical grid able to provide only limited hours of power each day.
Cutting off Gaza’s access to Israeli electricity was one of the first things Israeli authorities did after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack. Some Palestinians have been able to turn to generators or solar power, but Israel has severely restricted the ability to bring new solar panels, or the fuel to run generators, into the territory, arguing that Hamas has stockpiled fuel intended for civilians to use for rocket attacks.
Those measures have remained in place throughout the war, even where some of the territory’s few functioning power lines still connect Israel’s electric grid to critical Gazan infrastructure, including a major water desalination plant that sits idle.
“In some cases, the power lines are live, they just need to turn them on, and that is a political decision,” said Georgios Petropoulos, an official with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Gaza. “A lot of these issues are not technical or supply problems anymore, they are political issues.”
Since the start of the war, humanitarian groups have criticized the decision to cut off Gaza’s power. In response, Israel Katz, who served as energy minister at the time and was appointed defense minister this past week, implicitly put the blame on Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza for holding hostages abducted during their attack.
“Humanitarian aid to Gaza?” Mr. Katz said after the attacks last fall. “No electric switch will be turned on, no water tap will be opened and no fuel truck will enter until the Israeli abductees are returned home.”
Israel has allowed some aid into Gaza after an international outcry, but last month, the Biden administration warned Israel that if it did not allow more humanitarian supplies into Gaza that could trigger a cutoff of American military aid.
The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, the branch of Israel’s Defense Ministry that manages affairs in the West Bank and Gaza, said it “actively facilitates the entry and transport of fuel to humanitarian facilities, including hospitals, bakeries, and other essential infrastructure.” It said the military had permitted 30 million liters, or roughly eight million gallons, of fuel to enter Gaza since the war began, as well as 50 solar panels in the last few months. Israel’s Energy Ministry did not respond to requests for comment.
Aid groups say far more is needed to restore electricity and address the territory’s humanitarian crisis.
The blackout has prompted hospitals to repeatedly plead for fuel to run their generators, while electrical current flows freely in Israeli towns a few miles away. Alaa al-Din Abu Odeh, the director of engineering and maintenance at the Gaza Ministry of Health, said the territory’s hospitals were “running on God’s kindness and mercy.”
Unrepaired damage from repeated conflicts between Hamas and Israel had already left the enclave’s electrical infrastructure “in deplorable condition” even before the war began, according to a report by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, an Israeli think tank at Bar-Ilan University.
People in the territory got by under a cobbled-together system in which half of their electricity was generated in Israel and half in Gaza, according to the report. The power from Gaza came from a mix of sources, including a power plant fueled by diesel from Israel and Egypt, private generators also fueled by diesel, and solar panels on the roofs of homes and businesses.
So many used solar panels that Gaza had one of the world’s highest densities of rooftop solar systems, according to a report published in November 2023 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington.
Those that have survived through the last year have been too small to power anything much larger than a cellphone, but they have nevertheless been a lifeline. Many of their owners have become wartime electricity vendors.
Mohammed Samra, 23, bought solar panels last December when he realized the war would not end anytime soon, and since then has turned them into a family business in Al Maghazi, in central Gaza.
“All the people here, both the local residents and the displaced people, have benefited from these solar panels,” Mr. Samra said on a recent day at his shop, where he charges one shekel, or about 25 cents, to charge one cellphone.
The solar power business has helped his family afford necessities, like food, amid rapid wartime inflation, he said. The price of panels has jumped, too: Mr. Samra bought eight solar panels, four batteries and one control panel for $2,800, but estimated that today they would cost $16,000.
For Rasha Majed al-Attar, 20, the sun in Gaza has been “a blessing” amid the chaos around her in Deir al-Balah, where her family fled from Gaza City.
Several times a week, she walks to a nearby charging station and charges 10 phones from a solar panel. She said her family mostly uses them as night lights for their children who cry in the dark.
Things were different before. She was a university student. Her home had a refrigerator, a TV and internet. Her mother did the laundry in a washing machine and cooked meals in an oven.
Now, they do laundry by hand and cook over an open flame, she said, as she waited for her phone to charge. Sometimes they burn their meals because cooking over a fire is not at all like cooking on a stove at home.
“I cannot imagine that we are living in the 21st century,” Ms. al-Attar said, “while we are struggling so much to get the easiest things.”
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11) Israel Keeps Attacking Journalists. When Will the U.S. Intervene?
By Kavitha Chekuru, Nov. 10, 2024
Ms. Chekuru is a journalist and a producer of a documentary investigation into the killings of civilians in Israeli military attacks in Gaza.
“Decades of what rights groups have called a pattern of Israeli impunity in the killings of journalists, combined with its accusations of reporters of being fighters, compromises the world’s ability to know what’s happening in Gaza. And Washington’s anemic response tells the Israeli military there will be no consequences.”
Mohammed Abed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Hunted.
That is how Hossam Shabat recently described his life as a journalist in northern Gaza.
Just days earlier, the Israeli military accused him and five other Al Jazeera journalists of being fighters in Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The accusations, which the network has said are “baseless” and which Mr. Shabat and the others have denied, effectively put targets on these journalists and come amid a horrific recent Israeli offensive in northern Gaza. In the past month, this small group of journalists has provided important documentation of what the United Nations human rights chief has said are possible “crimes against humanity.”
At least 129 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed since the war in Gaza started last year, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists; the Gaza media office puts that number much higher, at 188. This has been the deadliest year for journalists since the C.P.J. began recording the numbers in 1992. The group has said that in the first 10 weeks of the war, more journalists were killed than had been killed in any country over an entire year.
The C.P.J. has also determined that five journalists who were killed, including one in Lebanon, were “directly targeted” by Israeli forces, and the organization is investigating more than 20 others. (The Israel Defense Forces has repeatedly denied targeting journalists.)
The record number of journalists killed has been met with little response from Israel’s most important ally, the United States. The Biden administration has powerful tools to help pursue accountability for these killings. It could ensure independent investigations, enforce the Leahy law, which prohibits the United States from assisting foreign military units suspected of having committed human rights abuses, or even impose sanctions, which it did for far less just a few months ago in response to a Georgian law that could limit press freedoms.
Decades of what rights groups have called a pattern of Israeli impunity in the killings of journalists, combined with its accusations of reporters of being fighters, compromises the world’s ability to know what’s happening in Gaza. And Washington’s anemic response tells the Israeli military there will be no consequences.
Two weeks before Israeli authorities accused the six journalists of having ties to militant groups in Gaza, Mr. Shabat and one of the other journalists, Anas al-Sharif, survived what they said was a harrowing attack by Israeli forces. One of their colleagues, a cameraman named Fadi al-Wahidi, was shot in the neck as the group tried to flee a quadcopter that chased and then fired on them, according to Mr. al-Sharif. After Mr. al-Wahidi was shot, his colleagues began to film. In the footage, he can be seen lying facedown on a sidewalk. His navy blue press jacket is stark against his white shirt, starker still for how little protection it offered him.
The image of Mr. al-Wahidi lying prone as his colleagues cried out to him is a haunting echo of the shooting of another journalist, the Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed in the occupied West Bank in May 2022. In video of that attack, Ms. Abu Akleh was also shown facedown in the street, motionless, the “Press” label on her flak jacket large and clearly visible. Several investigations found that Ms. Abu Akleh and the other journalists she was with were most likely targeted. A few months after her killing, the Israeli military said that there was a “high possibility” that she was shot by an Israeli soldier but that she was not targeted and that no soldier would be charged.
In 2022 my colleagues and I investigated her killing for Al Jazeera English, where I was previously a documentary producer. We interviewed her brother, Anton, in his home in East Jerusalem, where he was surrounded by photos of her, his only sibling. He told us not just about who she was and why journalism was important to her but also about his family’s near-impossible search for justice. “If no one is held accountable,” he told us, “it will just go on and on.”
Her family is still waiting. Although Ms. Abu Akleh was an American citizen, the Biden administration issued a cursory summary of the killing based on reports from the Israeli military and the Palestinian Authority, in addition to an inconclusive ballistics analysis. Two years ago, there were reports of an F.B.I. investigation opened independently of the White House, but it has yet to release any concrete findings.
In the two decades before Ms. Abu Akleh’s death, the C.P.J. found that at least 19 other journalists were killed by Israeli forces in the occupied territories. No one was charged in any of those attacks, either. A May 2023 report by the C.P.J. found a pattern of Israeli response “that appears designed to evade responsibility” and said that Israeli authorities regularly accused journalists of being terrorists without providing credible evidence. Israeli forces have admitted they have killed Palestinian journalists, both during and before the current war. In some instances they said the reporters were caught in the crossfire; in others they justified the killings by claiming the journalists were combatants or had ties to militant groups, releasing documents they said they had found as proof. Watchdog and human rights groups that looked at some of the allegations found them to be unproven or not credible.
An Al Jazeera correspondent, Ismail al-Ghoul, was killed on July 31, along with a cameraman, Rami al-Rifi. After their killings, the Israeli military released a document it said supported several claims, including that Mr. al-Ghoul received a military ranking from Hamas in 2007 — when he was 10 years old. Mr. al-Ghoul and Mr. al-Rifi were two of the five journalists the C.P.J. has determined died in targeted killings.
The most recent accusations against the six men are brazen and chilling. It’s difficult to see the list of names as anything short of a hit list. The military claims its intelligence backs up its accusations, but the head of the C.P.J. said the documents did not appear credible. She also said she was concerned the accusations were an attempt “to excuse any potential future attack on these six journalists. It makes them extremely vulnerable, and they were already extremely vulnerable.”
The timing of the accusations against the six is impossible to ignore, coming during one of the most intense and devastating phases of Israel’s war in Gaza yet. Israeli officials have ordered about 400,000 people to leave their homes in the north, with no true guarantee of safety or return. The entire population is at risk of starvation, and each new statement from U.N. officials and the few remaining doctors there is increasingly dire. With Israel continuing to bar foreign media from entering Gaza independently, the burden of documenting this war has fallen almost entirely to Palestinian journalists. With every journalist killed, another voice is silenced, and the world’s window on Gaza becomes even smaller.
According to an Al Jazeera spokesperson, Mr. al-Wahidi, the Al Jazeera cameraman who was shot on Oct. 9, was paralyzed as a result of his injuries and is in a coma in a hospital in Gaza. With Gaza’s health system destroyed, he, along with Ali al-Attar, another Al Jazeera journalist injured in a separate attack, are in need of immediate medical evacuation that Israeli authorities have, as of yet, not allowed.
“For an entire year, we have been sharing the same scenes — the same displacement, the same massacres and the same bombings over the heads of civilians,” Mr. Shabat recently said in a livestream. “All we need is for you not to leave us alone, screaming until our voices go hoarse, with no one to hear us.”
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12) Immigration Lawyers Prepare to Battle Trump in Court Again
Nearly eight years after the first challenges to his immigration policies, Donald Trump is returning to the White House promising a more aggressive crackdown.
By Miriam Jordan and Jazmine Ulloa, Nov. 10, 2024
Donald Trump, shown visiting the U.S.-Mexico border in California in 2019, has vowed to undertake the largest deportation effort in the nation’s history. Credit...Al Drago for The New York Times
It was just days into his first term when President Trump issued an order banning the entry of people from several predominantly Muslim countries. An SOS went out to immigration lawyers across New York to head to Kennedy Airport, where arriving passengers were already being detained.
By noon, hundreds of lawyers were interviewing relatives and friends of travelers who were being held, challenging their detention and drafting petitions for their release.
The mobilization that morning in 2017 spawned a network of hundreds of lawyers who are now ready to fight the crackdown on immigrants that Mr. Trump promised to carry out in a second term in office.
After his decisive victory over Kamala Harris, Mr. Trump is expected to name key cabinet choices in the coming days and weeks, including his nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security. And in the coming four years, a harsher crackdown on migrants is expected, something immigration lawyers have prepared for months.
The Supreme Court upheld a version of the ban on travelers from several predominantly Muslim countries, which the Biden administration eliminated in 2021. But earlier this fall, Mr. Trump said he would “bring back the travel ban.”
During his campaign, Mr. Trump vowed to undertake the largest deportation effort in the nation’s history, though he skirted questions about whether the sweeps would target undocumented immigrants who had long lived in the country, people who had more recently crossed at the southern border or both. About 11 million undocumented people resided in the United States as of 2022, according to the Pew Research Center, with nearly two-thirds having been in the country for at least a decade.
While deporting millions of people would be all but impossible with current enforcement resources, Mr. Trump has said he would consider stationing American troops at the border with Mexico and working with governors to deploy the National Guard into the interior of the country.
In his victory speech early on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said that voters had handed him “an unprecedented and powerful mandate” to pursue his agenda.
Indeed, the immigrant advocacy community will face a very different political landscape when Mr. Trump returns to the White House in January. Voter sentiment has shifted markedly, with far more Americans expressing concerns about immigration and a willingness to support tougher policies.
Unlike in 2016, when he won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote, Mr. Trump won both in this election, the first Republican to prevail in the national vote in two decades, after campaigning on harsh immigration policies. And he will enter office with a Supreme Court that counts three of his first-term nominees among the nine justices.
“We’re going to fix our borders, we’re going to fix everything about our country and we’ve made history for a reason tonight, and the reason is going to be just that,” he said on Wednesday.
Lawyers for immigrants said they have been preparing for months for the possibility of large-scale workplace raids, roundups in immigrant enclaves, new restrictions on asylum, the expansion of detention and the termination of programs temporarily shielding some people from deportation.
“The Trump team might think they are ready,” said Camille Mackler, chief executive of Immigrant ARC, who sent an SOS email that brought hundreds of lawyers to Kennedy Airport that day in 2017. “But so are we.”
Becca Heller, founder of the International Refugee Assistance Project, which sued the government over the Muslim ban, said that winning the popular vote was not a license to ignore the law. “He can’t act outside the bounds of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights,” she said.
Having battled one Trump administration, she and her allies are ready for a second, Ms. Heller said. “We literally have a blueprint of what they are planning to do, and so we had months and months to figure out how to protect people,” she said.
“Trump has told us what to expect — hate and persecution and concentration camps,” she said, referring to his team’s plans to use military funds to build “vast holding facilities.” “None of us have any illusions about what we are up against this time.”
The new president’s immigration agenda will have battle-tested allies in some of the country’s state capitals. A coalition of Republican attorneys general, led by Ken Paxton of Texas, have systematically challenged the Biden administration on key immigration policies.
The results have been mixed, with some challenges temporarily blocking President Biden’s efforts but others being turned back by the courts. The challenges have kept the fight over immigration in the news and on voters’ minds, and given the Biden administration even more to worry about.
While the states that have been mounting those legal fights are not likely to be challenging the incoming Trump administration, they could play a crucial role in carrying out some of the expected federal efforts on immigration, said Lenni Benson, a professor of immigration law at New York Law School.
After extensive civil rights litigation, Arizona’s attorney general opined in 2016 that sheriffs could enforce “a show-me-your-papers law,” as long as they asked for documents from every person arrested.
Mr. Trump, who made immigration his calling card again this campaign, is expected to issue a spate of executive orders on his first day in office, such as to seal the border and arrest undocumented immigrants, including ones in the interior of the country.
Mr. Trump’s immigration advisers have said that, while criminals would be prioritized in making arrests, no one unlawfully in the country would be spared, a shift from Mr. Biden and other presidents, who focused resources on targeting serious criminals.
Lawsuits are expected to pile up.
“We have spent the last nine months planning for this, and are prepared to go to court as often as necessary, just like the first time,” said Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who argued many immigration cases, including one to halt the policy of separating migrant families at the border.
The A.C.L.U. filed many legal challenges against Trump policies during his first administration. It defeated his attempt to include a citizenship question in the 2020 census at the Supreme Court and won a settlement for the families split up at the border. In a full-page ad published in The Times’s print paper on Friday, the organization wrote an open letter to Mr. Trump, saying it planned to defend people’s rights “in the courts, at state legislatures and in the streets.”
Tom Homan, a senior immigration official in the last Trump administration who is expected to return to government, said on CBS’s “60 Minutes” last month that large-scale worksite raids would resume. Such operations, which can lead to the arrest of hundreds of unauthorized workers, are costly and complex, and have not been conducted under Mr. Biden.
Bruna Bouhid-Sollod, senior political director for United We Dream Action, a national group led by young immigrant activists, said the organization has been crafting plans for a second Trump presidency.
Those strategies include “know-your-rights” training, letter writing campaigns to encourage elected officials and public art and vigils to show support for undocumented immigrants.
One of the biggest concerns is the fate of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the program known as DACA, which has shielded from deportation and granted work authorization to hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children.
Ms. Bouhid-Sollod said she was among many DACA recipients who joined United We Dream after Mr. Trump’s election in 2016, out of fear that Mr. Trump would kill the program. He tried to, but the Supreme Court kept the program in place in a 5-4 ruling, saying the Trump administration hadn’t followed proper procedures for ending it.
Since then, Texas and several other states have sued to end DACA, and a federal court ruling in their favor is under review by an appeals court that has several Trump-nominated judges and has embraced some of the most aggressive conservative arguments in American law.
And of course, the incoming Trump administration itself could try again to end DACA.
“We are cleareyed about the challenges ahead,” Ms. Bouhid-Sollod said. “That is the big difference between 2016 and 2024.”
Benjamin Johnson, the executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the organization has long been analyzing Mr. Trump’s immigration promises, preparing litigation to challenge policies they believe would violate their clients’ rights to have their cases heard and fairly processed under the law.
In his campaign, Mr. Trump spoke of using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to carry out mass deportations, a law under which people of Japanese descent were held in internment camps during World War II.
Mr. Trump also has said the deportations would be modeled after those under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose administration used sweeps, raids and blunt forms of racial profiling in the 1950s to round up and expel mostly Mexican and Mexican American laborers.
“He has threatened to use powers — some that haven’t been used in a century, since World War II — to arrest, detain and imprison people without any judicial review,” Mr. Johnson said, referring to Mr. Trump. “We are going to have to find ways to meet the moment.”
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13) Israeli Strike Kills 23 People North of Beirut, Lebanon Says
The strike in the Jbeil district of Lebanon came amid an apparent diplomatic push for a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah.
By Matthew Mpoke Bigg and Isabel Kershner, Nov. 10, 2024
Rescuers searching for survivors after an airstrike in the Lebanese village of Almat on Sunday. Credit...Hassan Ammar/Associated Press
An Israeli strike on a village north of Beirut killed at least 23 people and wounded six others on Sunday, Lebanon’s health ministry said, amid what appeared to be a new diplomatic push for a potential cease-fire there between Israel and Hezbollah.
Ron Dermer, Israel’s minister of strategic affairs and a close confidant of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is expected to visit Washington in the coming days and was in Russia last week for discussions regarding the possibility of a Russian role in enforcing a potential cease-fire in Lebanon, according to an official familiar with the matter.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, said significant efforts were underway to reach at least a temporary cease-fire in the coming days or weeks.
Mr. Netanyahu said on Sunday that he had spoken three times in recent days with President-elect Donald J. Trump to tighten the alliance between Israel and the United States.
Many former Israeli officials and analysts have warned that the final weeks of the Biden administration could prove challenging for Israel and its ongoing wars in Gaza and Lebanon against Iranian-backed groups. For example, a U.S. threat that it could cut off military support to Israel if the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza does not dramatically improve could be fueling Israel’s motivation to show good-will and readiness for a truce on the Lebanon front, they say, though there is no guarantee the efforts will succeed.
Hours after the strike in Almat, in the Jbeil district on the Lebanese coast, rescue workers were still searching the rubble, the Lebanese authorities said, adding that three children were among the dead.
Photographs from the scene showed a bulldozer on a steep hillside scooping piles of debris from at least one building that appeared to have been destroyed, while emergency workers also picked through the wreckage. The twisted remains of several vehicles also stood nearby.
There was no immediate comment from Israel’s military about the strike in the Jbeil district, which is around 18 miles northeast of the Lebanese capital, Beirut.
The Israeli military has been widening its campaign against Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group, across Lebanon in recent weeks. On Sunday, Syria’s state news agency reported explosions near Damascus, which the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said were from an Israeli strike on buildings that housed Hezbollah members. The observatory, a British-based group that monitors violence in Syria, said that three people were killed. Israel’s military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But even as Israel’s military said it was pounding “dozens” of Hezbollah targets in Lebanon on Sunday and Hezbollah fired more rockets across the border, Israel’s new defense minister added to the sense that Israel might be signaling readiness to wrap up the fighting when he declared in a speech on Sunday that the military had essentially “defeated Hezbollah.”
The defense minister, Israel Katz said, the military needed “to keep up the pressure” and “realize the fruits of that victory” by ensuring a new security situation in southern Lebanon and preventing the rearmament of Israel’s adversaries.
Mr. Netanyahu said his talks with Mr. Trump were “very good and important.”
“We see eye-to-eye on the Iranian threat in all its aspects, and on the dangers they reflect,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a video statement, adding, “We also see the great opportunities facing Israel, in the area of peace and its expansion, and in other areas.”
Mr. Trump has said that he wants to end wars, not start them.
Israel’s operations against Hezbollah were initially focused on southern Lebanon, with the stated aim of crippling the militant group’s ability to fire rockets across the border into Israel. But they have expanded to include cities and towns across Lebanon, including places far from that border — like the Jbeil district.
Another target of the widening campaign has been the Bekaa Valley in northeastern Lebanon, which is home to the historic city of Baalbek. Israeli strikes killed 20 people in Baalbek and the towns around it on Saturday, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.
Baalbek has been hit repeatedly in recent weeks. Dozens of people have been killed and most of the city’s population has fled. The Israeli military said it had struck “Hezbollah terrorist infrastructure sites” near Baalbek and the port city of Tyre on Saturday.
Lebanon’s health ministry cited five separate deadly incidents in Baalbek and the surrounding area on Saturday, including one in which 11 people were killed. In a statement on Saturday night, it added that 14 people were wounded. The ministry gave few details of the attacks and did not say whether the casualties were civilians or Hezbollah fighters.
Hezbollah’s cross-border attacks have persisted even as Israel’s campaign has intensified. The group fired 70 projectiles — likely missiles or drones — across the frontier on Saturday and at least 20 on Sunday, according to Israel’s military. Many were intercepted by Israel’s air defenses or fell in open areas, it said.
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14) Israeli Strike in Gaza Kills Over 30 Palestinians, Emergency Services Say
The strike hit a house in Jabaliya, a city that has repeatedly come under attack as the Israeli military has pressed an offensive in northern Gaza.
By Hiba Yazbek, Reporting from Jerusalem, Nov. 10, 2024
Israel’s military struck a house in northern Gaza where displaced families were sheltering on Sunday, killing at least 34 people, according to the Palestinian Civil Defense, the main emergency service in the territory.
Dr. Mohammed Al Moghayer, a spokesman for the group, said that 14 children were among the dead after the strike in the city of Jabaliya on Sunday morning. People were still trapped under the rubble, he added, warning that the death toll was likely to rise.
Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s news agency, reported that the house, which was “crowded with residents and displaced people,” was destroyed. It said that a “large number” of wounded people were taken to the nearby Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City.
In response to questions about the strike on Sunday, Israel’s military said that it had hit “a terrorist infrastructure site” in Jabaliya where militants who posed a threat to troops had been operating and that it had taken “numerous steps to mitigate the risk of harming civilians.” The military, which said that the details of the episode were under review, did not provide evidence for its assertions.
Ahmed Radwan lives next to the house that was struck in Jabaliya and said its residents were all civilians. He said he heard the explosion as he was about to begin his dawn prayer.
“It was terrifying,” he said in a voice message on Sunday, adding that his home was severely damaged by the strike.
“When I went outside to see what happened, I found my neighbors, the Allush family, scattered in the street from the intensity of the blast,” Mr. Radwan said.
“Some were missing a leg, others an arm, and many were dead,” he added.
Hours after the strike, a number of bodies were still under the rubble of the multistory family home, Mr. Radwan said.
“We don’t know how to get them out,” he said. “All we have is a shovel and a grub hoe.”
Dr. Hussam Abu Safyia, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Jabaliya, said that his hospital had received “distressing calls about people trapped under the rubble” on Sunday but was unable to help. Kamal Adwan is one of the last semi-functional hospitals in northern Gaza but has been damaged by Israeli attacks and a raid over the last weeks.
Jabaliya has come under repeated attack as the Israeli military has stepped up an offensive in areas of northern Gaza over the past month, saying it was trying to eliminate a regrouped Hamas presence there. Israel’s military has issued widespread evacuation orders for parts of northern Gaza, and Israeli troops, tanks and armed drones have bombarded the area almost daily.
The United Nations, aid groups and the Gazan health authorities have warned that the Israeli offensive in the northern part of the enclave is causing widespread devastation and has killed hundreds of civilians.
The Israeli military’s evacuation orders have displaced nearly 100,000 people from areas of northern Gaza to Gaza City over the last month, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. It said that 75,000 to 95,000 people were estimated to remain in northern Gaza.
Some people have refused to evacuate out of fear of being permanently displaced from their homes. Some worry that they would face greater threats from destroyed roads or frequent bombardment if they were to move elsewhere, while others lack the financial means to relocate.
People who remain in northern Gaza are facing “an imminent and substantial likelihood of famine,” a U.N.-backed panel warned on Friday. The panel, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, said that action was needed “within days, not weeks” to alleviate the immense suffering in the enclave.
A separate strike on a residential building in Gaza City killed five Palestinians on Sunday, the Palestinian Civil Defense said in a statement, adding that the search for survivors was continuing.
But the emergency service added that its teams were “forcibly disabled” from working in all areas of northern Gaza because of the “ongoing targeting and Israeli aggression,” leaving thousands there “without humanitarian and medical care.”
Ameera Harouda contributed reporting.
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15) Once China’s ‘Worst Nightmare,’ Labor Activist Refuses to Back Down
Neither jail nor exile to Hong Kong has stopped Han Dongfang, a former Tiananmen Square protest leader, from championing workers’ rights. “If you’re born stubborn, you go everywhere stubborn.”
By Alexandra Stevenson, Reporting from Hong Kong, Nov. 10, 2024
“‘Democracy is about who decides our salaries,’ Mr. Han, now 61, recalled shouting out to the crowd from the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Beijing. ‘Workers should be able to take part in the decision.’”
Han Dongfang is one of China’s last remaining labor rights activists not in hiding. Credit...Anthony Kwan for The New York Times
Han Dongfang was just another dot in a sea of agitated university students during the mass protests in Tiananmen Square 35 years ago when he suddenly jumped onto a monument to speak.
“Democracy is about who decides our salaries,” Mr. Han, now 61, recalled shouting out to the crowd from the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Beijing. “Workers should be able to take part in the decision.”
It was one of the first times during the protests that anyone had mentioned workers. And it marked the beginning of Mr. Han’s three-decade fight for their rights in China, a struggle that was almost brought to an immediate halt.
On June 4, 1989, just weeks after Mr. Han began his speeches, the People’s Liberation Army fired on pro-democracy protesters in the square, putting a bloody end to the democracy movement and free speech in China.
The crushing response also disbanded the labor union he had helped to create during the protests — the first and only independent union since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. After Mr. Han was placed on a “most wanted” list, he turned himself in to face prison, where he served 22 months.
Today, Mr. Han is one of China’s last remaining labor rights activists not in hiding. Stripped of his Chinese passport and kicked out of mainland China in 1993, he does his work from Hong Kong.
“I prefer to be open rather than to hide,” he said from the windowless meeting room in the office of China Labor Bulletin, a nongovernmental organization that Mr. Han started in 1994.
His faith in the power of transparency has kept Mr. Han in Hong Kong, even though nearly all other China-focused civil society organizations have left since 2020, when Beijing imposed a national security law and dismantled the protections that gave the city its semiautonomous status.
Where his peers have essentially surrendered in the face of the crackdown, Mr. Han has pushed ahead, telling colleagues to operate as though everything they do and say is being monitored by the authorities.
“I’m sure that the Chinese state security turned this organization’s records upside down and inside out 50 times,” Mr. Han said. “And Hong Kong’s national security police, too.”
After high school, the Beijing-born Mr. Han in 1980 joined the military, where he remembers being disillusioned by the fact that officers were fed chicken, while soldiers like him got bread so dry “it could kill someone.”
He then took a relatively well-paid job as an engineer for the state railways, where he was working in April 1989 as students started protesting in Tiananmen Square near where he lived. Mr. Han joined them.
It was done mostly out of curiosity, he said. But as he listened to the students quote thinkers he had never read, and as he tried to relate their visions of democracy to his own life, he realized that workers could have a say outside of the Communist Party’s system.
“It was a completely new idea that directly contradicted many years of propaganda about the working class being the leading class,” he said.
Mr. Han took a leading role in an unofficial union that had begun to organize in the square called the Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation.
After the Tiananmen massacre, the union was quickly declared illegal, and nothing like it has been allowed again. Ever since, Mr. Han, who is understated but not easily deterred, has been propelled by one goal: empowering workers to take collective action.
“That’s my character,” he said. “If you’re born stubborn, you go everywhere stubborn.”
His fervor led The New York Times to call him “the Chinese government’s worst nightmare: a man who is less afraid of it than it is of him.” At the time of that article, in 1992, he was still able to live in mainland China. He was expelled the following year, resettling in Hong Kong.
Under China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, groups like his have been shut down and other labor activists jailed. But Mr. Han has stayed active — and optimistic. He continues to believe it is possible to advance Chinese workers’ rights through unions.
On paper, China has one of the strictest sets of labor protections in the world. Every worker has the right to join or start a trade union. In practice, every union must be associated with what is effectively a state-sponsored union: the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, a government body that typically works with companies when setting up unions. The employees have little power.
Mr. Han has tried to work within this stifling system, focusing on convincing branches of the All-China Federation to negotiate on behalf of workers instead of siding with management.
He has also tried to gain an assist from an unlikely source: Mr. Xi.
Worried about social unrest amid an economic slowdown, China’s leader has called for the official labor union to do more to help low-paid workers.
“You can say that I’m helping Xi Jinping to hold officials accountable,” Mr. Han said with a faint smile.
In the China Labor Bulletin office, bookshelves and tables are piled with books and brochures about Chinese labor law. Mr. Han and his team of a dozen employees meet once a week to talk about strikes and protests that surface on Chinese social media. They also use state media stories, police reports and images with clues like street signs to try to identify the names and locations of companies where the labor unrest is occurring.
Once they have identified a company whose workers need help, Mr. Han will call local union officials to try to get them to take action.
Mr. Han, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of China’s labor laws, will remind the officials of their duty to make sure workers’ needs are being represented.
The conversation can be heated because officials with the All-China Federation tend to look the other way when worker violations occur. Often, they are complicit when company bosses do things like bring in private security to beat striking workers.
“When we call, we say, ‘The law says this,’” said Mr. Han. “In some cases they would say, ‘If you really follow the law, all the factories in China should be closed.’”
His approach has achieved some successes, and over the years, China Labor Bulletin has been involved in some of the biggest labor disputes in China.
Last year, when a 20-year-old employee of an electronics factory was found dead in his dorm room after working for 33 days with little rest, the local authorities made a “humanitarian” payment to the family.
Mr. Han contacted the local official union and the factory and warned them that the company, which had foreign customers, could be held responsible under a German law requiring companies to identify and fix human rights abuses in their supply chains. Eventually, the worker’s family was paid an additional amount that was double the first payment.
To describe Mr. Han as willful would be an understatement.
During his almost two years in jail, prison wardens tortured him and placed him in a ward with tuberculosis patients even though he was healthy. He called it “hell” and “unbearable,” but also “an achievement.”
When Beijing released him because he had contracted tuberculosis and was near death, he traveled to the United States for treatment. He lost a lung. When he recovered, the Chinese authorities told him to stay away; instead he tried to sneak back in, more than once.
On his last attempt in 1993, he made it to Guangzhou, a city 80 miles from Hong Kong, then still a British colony. Eventually, the police dragged him back to Hong Kong.
He responded to the ordeal by setting up China Labor Bulletin.
Despite the past successes he can point to, Mr. Han said he feels powerless to help the victims of Beijing’s current clampdown on China’s decades-long property boom: the construction workers, painters, landscapers and others who have not been paid as companies went bankrupt.
Many workers are suffering, and some are protesting and speaking out, but there is little he can do. “We don’t see any hope because the root of the finance is dry,” he said, “there is no more water coming out.”
“The scale is beyond anyone’s imagination,” Mr. Han said. “It’s huge.”
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