NAKBA II

‘Land without laws’: Israeli settlers force Bedouins from West Bank community


By AFP
December 4, 2025


AFP visited Ahmed Kaabneh weeks before he was forced to flee his home in the al-Hathrura area - Copyright AFP Menahem Kahana

Alice CHANCELLOR

As relentless harassment from Israeli settlers drove his brothers from their Bedouin community in the central occupied West Bank, Ahmed Kaabneh remained determined to stay on the land his family had lived on for generations.

But when a handful of young settlers constructed a shack around 100 metres above his home and started intimidating his children, 45-year-old Kaabneh said he had no choice but to flee too.

As with scores of Bedouin communities across the West Bank, the small cluster of wood and metal houses where Kaabneh’s father and grandfather had lived now lies empty.

“It is very difficult… because you leave an area where you lived for 45 years. Not a day or two or three, but nearly a lifetime,” Kaabneh told AFP at his family’s new makeshift house in the rocky hills north of Jericho.

“But what can you do? They are the strong ones and we are the weak, and we have no power.”

Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967, and violence there has soared since the Gaza war erupted in October 2023 following Hamas’s attack on Israel.

Some 3,200 Palestinians from dozens of Bedouin and herding communities have been forced from their homes by settler violence and movement restrictions since October 2023, the UN’s humanitarian agency OCHA reported in October.

The United Nations said this October was the worst month for settler violence since it began recording incidents in 2006.

Almost none of the perpetrators have been held to account by the Israeli authorities.



– ‘Terrifying’ –



Kaabneh, four of his brothers and their families, now live together some 13 kilometres (eight miles) northeast of their original homes, which sat in the al-Hathrura area.

Outside his freshly constructed metal house, boys kicked a football while washing hung from the line. But Kaabneh said the area didn’t feel like home.

“We are in a place we have never lived in before, and life here is hard,” he said.

Alongside surging violence, the number of settler outposts has exploded in the West Bank.

While all Israeli settlements are illegal under international law, outposts are also prohibited under Israeli law. But many end up being legalised by the Israeli authorities.

AFP had visited Kaabneh in the al-Hathrura area weeks before he was forced to flee.

On the dirt road to his family’s compound, caravans and an Israeli flag atop a hill marked an outpost established earlier this year — one of several to have sprung up in the area.

On the other side of the track, in the valley, lay the wreckage of another Bedouin compound whose residents had recently fled.

While in Kaabneh’s cluster of homes, AFP witnessed two settlers driving to the top of a hill to surveil the Bedouins below.

“The situation is terrifying,” Kaabneh said at the time, with life becoming almost untenable because of daily harassment and shrinking grazing land.

Less than three weeks later, the homes were deserted.

Kaabneh said the settlers “would shout all night, throw stones, and walk through the middle of the houses.”

“They didn’t allow us to sleep at night, nor move freely during the day.”



– ‘Thrive on chaos’ –



These days, only activists and the odd cat wander the remnants of Kaabneh’s former life — where upturned children’s bikes and discarded shoes reveal the chaotic departure.

“We are here to keep an eye on the property… because a lot of places that are abandoned are usually looted by the settlements,” said Sahar Kan-Tor, 29, an Israeli activist with the Israeli-Palestinian grassroots group Standing Together.

Meanwhile, settlers with a quadbike and digger were busy dismantling their hilltop shack and replacing it with a sofa and table.

“They thrive on chaos,” Kan-Tor explained.

“It is, in a way, a land without laws. There (are) authorities roaming around, but nothing is enforced, or very rarely enforced.”

A report by Israeli settlement watchdogs last December said settlers had used shepherding outposts to seize 14 percent of the West Bank in recent years.

NGOs Peace Now and Kerem Navot said settlers were acting “with the backing of the Israeli government and military”.

Some members of Israel’s right-wing government are settlers themselves, and far-right ministers have called for the West Bank’s annexation.

Kan-Tor said he believed settlers were targeting this stretch of the West Bank because of its significance for a contiguous Palestinian state.

But Kaabneh said the threat of attacks loomed even in his new location in the east of the territory.

He said settlers had already driven along the track leading to his family’s homes and watched them from the hill above.

“Even this area, which should be considered safe, is not truly safe,” Kaabneh lamented.

“They pursue us everywhere.”

The ongoing battle over Israel within the U.S. labor movement

The author of the new book, "No Neutrals There: U.S. Labor, Zionism, and the Struggle for Palestine," discusses how U.S. labor unions have played a key role in building and maintaining the state of Israel.

By Michael Arria 

 November 20, 2025 
MONDOWEISS

UAW Labor for Palestine action in Albany, NY, March 2024. 

(Photo: UAW Labor for Palestine X Account)


LONG READ



This year, on the eve of International Workers’ Day, General Federation of Trade Unions in Gaza, published a call to the U.S. labor movement.

“This war would not have been possible without the unlimited U.S. support for the occupation, whether through military funding, political and diplomatic backing, or arms deals that kill our children, women, and elderly every day,” it read. “The U.S. administration under Trump has continued what the previous administration started, becoming a direct accomplice in genocide, ignoring the voices of millions inside and outside of the United States, and an overwhelming majority of the nation, who reject this brutal aggression.”

“Therefore, we call on you, the American labor unions, to translate your solidarity into effective actions that go beyond statements and speeches and create real pressure to stop this dirty war,” it continued

Over the years, many rank-and-file U.S. workers have engaged in such effective actions, but labor leadership has consistently backed Israel and even cracked down on organizers who have taken a stance on the issue.

Labor historian Jeff Schuhrke has published an important new book on this disconnect. No Neutrals There: U.S. Labor, Zionism, and the Struggle for Palestine details how U.S. labor unions have played a key role in building and maintaining the state of Israel.

Mondoweiss U.S. correspondent Michael Arria recently spoke with Schuhrke about the book.

How was Zionism originally perceived by the U.S. labor movement? How was it specifically perceived by Jewish union members?

Jeff Schruke: When Zionism first emerged as a deliberate political project in the 1890s and early 1900s, its main spokespeople and champions were primarily middle- and upper-class bourgeois Jews in Europe, such as Theodore Herzl. The participants were not working-class Jewish folks. They were not leftists.

Working-class Jews, particularly in Eastern Europe, had their own organization that was founded the same year as the Zionist organization, called the Jewish Labor Bund. It was a socialist group. It was working-class Jews, men and women, who were rebelling against the Tsarist regime and the Russian empire, and also fighting back against exploitative working conditions.

Many of them worked in the factories in newly industrializing cities across Eastern Europe. They regarded Zionism as a major distraction from class struggle. It was a nationalist movement, and as socialists, they rejected nationalism. They believed that the working class should unite worldwide, regardless of nationality.

They also viewed Zionism as something of a fantasy, the idea that Jews were going to go to Palestine, which was already populated and, at that time, part of the Ottoman Empire. The idea of creating your own state seemed absurd, and it seemed much more practical to the working-class socialist Jews to work on improving their lives and their conditions where they already were.

It wasn’t until around the 1910s that labor Zionism emerged as an attempt to fuse the nationalist and settler colonialist ideology of Zionism with the more socialistic, working-class-oriented politics of the Jewish Labor Bund.

The Labor Zionists, who were mostly working-class Jews, regarded the more bourgeois mainstream Zionists as having an inefficient way of going about settler colonialism. They thought the middle-class and upper-class Zionists were simply trying to appeal to major world powers like the British Empire, the U.S., or the Ottoman Empire and win a Jewish state through these diplomatic channels.

The Labor Zionists thought the best way to establish a Jewish state in Arab Palestine was to just literally go there and start colonizing the place. To start building their own economy, communal farms, cooperative villages, housing programs, schools, and industrial businesses. A transportation network, their own healthcare system, their own workers’ bank, and literally lay the foundations for a Jewish State.

They wanted to do the settler colonialism themselves as workers and have it all be centered on this ideology that sounded like socialism, but was actually premised on the exclusion, dispossession, and expulsion of the native Palestinian Arab population. They were consciously saying “Jews Only,” and they weren’t open to Palestinian workers.

If a Jewish employer was hiring native Arab workers, Zionists would go and try to literally force out those workers through direct physical force.

Slowly, this argument began to be made to working-class socialist Jews in Eastern Europe and in the United States that supporting Zionism was not so much about supporting nationalism; it was actually about working-class solidarity.

Starting in 1920, the primary instrument of this Zionism was the Histadrut, an organization often referred to as a trade union federation. In some ways, it was that, but it was so much more. The Histadrut was doing all the things I just mentioned. Setting up farms, healthcare networks, and a workers’ bank. It was a major employer and paved the way for the eventual establishment of the state of Israel.

They were enforcing this racial line, excluding Palestinians and pushing them off to the margins economically in the hopes that this would push them off the land altogether.

Histadrut officials would appeal to Jewish American labor leaders, many of whom had come from the Jewish Labor Bund and were socialists. They were traditionally anti-Zionists, but the Histadrut appealed to them on the grounds that this was a matter of worker solidarity. They were asking Jewish-led unions in the U.S. for financial contributions for all of their settler colonial projects that they were doing in Palestine.

Can you talk about the creation of Israel in 1948 and the role that unions played in that process?

Over the last two years of genocide, whenever unions in the U.S. or union members have put forward statements in support of a ceasefire, or an arms embargo, or a boycott, critics will jump in and ask, Why are unions talking about Palestine in the first place? Why are unions talking about Israel? This has nothing to do with the work of unions. They should just stay out of it.

The most basic argument of my book is that this position is completely ridiculous because unions in the U.S. have always been very much involved in this issue. They have never been neutral or silent on the question of Palestine.


Unions in the U.S. have always been very much involved in this issue. They have never been neutral or silent on the question of Palestine.

In 1948, the U.S. labor movement was at its peak in terms of historic strength, thanks to the New Deal, World War II, and numerous major organizing campaigns that occurred in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as general support from the federal government. One in three workers in the U.S. was unionized, and unions had considerable economic and political strength during this period, exerting significant influence.

U.S. labor support for Zionism began as early as 1917, during World War I. The American Federation of Labor endorsed the Balfour Declaration in 1917 as part of its broader support for U.S. entry into the war. Then, as I mentioned, in 1920, the Histadrut was convincing Jewish American labor leaders to donate some of their union funds to help projects on the ground in Palestine under the guise of worker solidarity.

By the 1940s, support for Zionism extended beyond Jewish American labor leaders. It was supported, really more significantly, it was the non-Jewish Christian labor leaders. People William Green, who was president of the AFL at the time, and Philip Murray, who was president of the CIO. Well-known, non-Jewish labor leaders like Walter Reuther, George Meany, and Jimmy Hoffa were strongly supporting Zionism by this point, partially because replacing class struggle with class collaboration in the service of nationalism was very similar to how the U.S. labor movement approached unionism at the time, but also because these high ranking U.S. labor officials very much invested in U.S. empire and showing how they were patriot loyal patriots supporting the U.S. government in the hopes of getting a seat at the table.

In terms of how they were supporting it, there were continued donations, with millions of dollars from union treasuries, union pension funds, strike funds, and healthcare funds going to these settler-colonial programs that were being established.

They were also lobbying President Harry Truman to immediately recognize Israel. The Truman government had actually imposed an arms embargo to try to reduce the bloodshed in the area, but U.S. unions were demanding that he lift that and send weapons to the Zionist militias like the Haganah, which became the IDF.

In 1948, approximately 30,000 members of the garment unions went on a half-day strike. They left work early and traveled to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx for a large pro-Zionist rally, demanding that Truman immediately recognize Israel, lift the embargo, and send weapons to these Israel militias that were carrying out an ethnic cleansing campaign. In some cases, the garment unions were even voluntarily stitching together uniforms and caps for Zionist soldiers.

Did the Red Scare and McCarthyism have an impact on U.S. union support for Israel? Would things have been any different if there hadn’t been a purge of Communists from unions and a wider crackdown on the left?

I think in the longer term, it could have gone a different way, but what’s particularly complicated about that moment is that the Soviet Union initially supported the creation of Israel.

Before 1948, the communist movement worldwide had been consistently anti-Zionist due to the belief that the entire working class needed to be united. So they saw labor Zionism as being basically just a nationalist, racist form of worker organizing and generally rejected it in favor of having Jewish and Arab workers organizing together in Palestine.

From about 1950 on, the Soviet Union’s official policy was anti-Zionist, and it was highly critical of the state of Israel, supporting the surrounding Arab countries and the Palestinian liberation movement, but in that brief period around 1948, in the aftermath of World War II, the official Soviet policy was supporting Israel and that trickled down to many communist groups across the world. The Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc states were the crucial votes at the UN General Assembly when the 1947 partition plan, which basically set the stage for the Nakba, was passed.

It was also the communist government of Czechoslovakia that provided weapons to the Zionist militias that carried out the Nakba, because, as I said, the U.S. and the U.K. were enforcing an arms embargo at that time.

So even communist trade unionists in the U.S. were supporting Zionism and Israel, and then by the 1950s, they kind of went back to being anti-Zionist. Maybe if communists hadn’t been systematically purged from the U.S. labor movement during the McCarthy period, then labor’s position might have been different, but in that moment, at least in 1948, everyone was basically on the same page, unfortunately.

Certainly, after the post-World War II Red Scare and the onset of the Cold War, U.S. labor officials shifted significantly to the right, including those who had traditionally been more progressive, and this included many Jewish American labor leaders who had emerged from the Jewish labor movement.

They embraced anti-communism, in part because they believed in it ideologically, but it was also a political calculation. They were reacting to McCarthyism and Red Scare tactics that were always trying to paint unions as some kind of Soviet conspiracy. So they tried to distance themselves from any left-wing radicalism. Many U.S. labor officials really became full-throated cold warriors.

Then you had the Vietnam War and AFL-CIO’s, a formal partnership with the CIA and the State Department. They were trying to undermine any kind of left-wing type of labor movement all around the world, not just actual communists, but anyone, any type of union that was oppositional to the power of imperialism. The AFL-CIO worked with the U.S. government to try to undermine those unions. The more radical and left-wing elements of the labor movement had already been marginalized and sidelined, so all this went largely unchallenged.

We’ve been discussing union leadership, and there’s obviously been a long history of solidarity efforts among rank-and-file workers that defy the reality you’re detailing. Your book details important organizing efforts from the 1970s and 1980s, such as the Detroit autoworkers’ strike for Palestine in 1973.

Can you talk about some of that organizing and the reaction from union leadership?

I always try to make it clear when I talk about U.S. labor support for imperialism, Zionism, and colonialism that it’s not the labor movement writ large, it’s the labor officialdom. It’s the high-ranking leaders, union presidents, and so on. The rank-and-file members might have different ideas. This is why union democracy is so vital in all these questions.

Throughout all this history, there have been various examples of rank-and-file union members protesting against their own union leaders’ support for Israel.

A great example, like you said, is 1973 when 2,000 Arab-American auto workers in Detroit who were members of the United Auto Workers, led a wildcat strike for one day at the main Dodge assembly plant and shut down production to protest not just constant the racial discrimination and harassment that they were facing from their employers and union representatives, who were pretty much all white, but also the fact the UAW had invested about $780,000 into the state of Israel.

They did it through Israel Bonds. They were using union members’ dues money to invest in the oppression of Palestinians, and many of these Arab-American auto workers were understandably upset that their own dues money was being used for this purpose.

One of the workers’ demands was for union leadership to divest its bond holdings from Israel. They formed an Arab workers caucus within the UAW to try to assert their voices, not only around Palestine and the bond issue, but also to demand more representation in the union itself, more democracy in the union, and the direct election of union.

That’s something that only, finally, happened in 2022 with the election of Shawn Fain. That was the first time the union had a direct election, with members voting directly for the union’s top officers. That was something that these Arab workers had proposed back in the 1970s.

“Photo dated 28 November 1973 of Arab auto workers and their supporters in Detroit protest, published in Revolution, January 1974.” 

(Photo via the University of Michigan Library Digital Collections)

Then, moving ahead to the 1980s during the First Intifada, there was a growing number of rank-and-file union members trying to educate and organize within their unions about Palestine and making the direct comparison to apartheid South Africa.

Many U.S. labor leaders were, to their credit, enthusiastically supporting boycotting and divesting from apartheid South Africa. They were supporting black South African trade unionists who were facing repression and pressuring the Reagan administration to impose sanctions on South Africa until apartheid was ended.

Many rank-and-file union members were clearly supporting those efforts, including many African American workers, so it was natural to make the comparison to say, Look what Israel is doing to Palestinians, especially in the West Bank and Gaza, while the Intifada was happening.

So for the first time, there started to be a more coordinated effort from rank-and-file union members to show solidarity with Palestine and to challenge the labor officialdom’s traditional support for Israel. In 1988, there was the first delegation of U.S. Unionists going to the West Bank to see what conditions were like for Palestinian workers living under the military occupation. Such incidents were beginning to occur.

If we fast-forward to the Second Intifada, when the BDS movement was first officially launched in 2005. Around the same time, in 2004, a group of rank-and-file union members and local union leaders around the country founded Labor for Palestine as a permanent network of organizing within the U.S. labor movement that stands in solidarity with Palestine and tries to push unions to support the boycott movement.

This prompted a crackdown from high-ranking union officials who were trying to make sure that their unions would not embrace BDS and would not become too critical of Israel.

That’s pretty much been the story for the last twenty years. Whenever UAW members or a union graduate student workers pass BDS resolution democratically, the high-ranking national union officials will overturn that decision.

Again, it comes down to union democracy. The rank-and-file are democratically and collectively saying, we don’t wanna continue our union support for the state of Israel, and the leadership is rejecting that

Polling shows that support for Israel has dropped among the U.S. population, particularly among Democratic voters. The Democrats are still associated with the labor movement to some extent, and I’m wondering if you believe that’s shifted the unions in any capacity.

I think if we’re just talking about rank-and-file union members, there’s definitely been a shift.

For example, every year, Labor Notes hosts a large conference of rank-and-file union activists in Chicago. I was at last year’s conference, and you saw people wearing keffiyehs everywhere. There were at least four or five panels about Palestine. All pro-Palestine. Panels about how the labor movement can show more solidarity with Palestinians mainly.

Each of those panels was jam-packed. It was standing room only. That anecdote shows you the prevailing attitude among union activists.

In the last couple of years, there have been multiple efforts at the grassroots level, where union members are demanding a ceasefire, demanding an arms embargo, and pushing for BDS.

At the University of California, graduate workers, postdoctoral scholars, and other academic staff, represented by UAW Local 4811, went on strike for several weeks in the spring of 2024 in solidarity with the Gaza solidarity student encampments. So that’s all very significant. I think we’ve seen more Palestine solidarity in the U.S. labor movement in the last two years than at any other time in history.

You even had high-ranking union leaders and labor union presidents call for a ceasefire. Last summer, 7 unions, including two of the largest unions in the country, the National Education Association and the Service Employees International Union, sent a letter to Joe Biden demanding an arms embargo on Israel.

This is all significant. However, the problem is that all that has come from high-ranking union officials have just been statements and resolutions. There hasn’t been much actual action.

Take the UAW, for example. They called for an immediate ceasefire and then turned around to endorse Joe Biden in the presidential race without attempting to secure any concessions from him on the issue. At least there were no efforts we could see publicly.

So there’s been a shift in language, but not enough action.

What are some concrete things unions could do to wield their power on this issue?

The divestment of union pension money from BDS targets. Having that be an official policy and then actually doing it.

A boycott on products moving to or from Israel. That’s especially relevant for logistics workers, dock workers and railroad workers, and warehouse workers.

We’ve seen tech workers take a lot of action on this issue, even though they’re not unionized. Microsoft workers have pressured the company as part of the f No Azure for Apartheid campaign.

You have university workers and engineering students whose research at the academic level supports the technology of the Israeli war machine and the U.S. military industrial complex. I think the unions that represent those workers need to provide more political education and clearly explain the realities of the labor they’re doing and the destruction it’s contributing to.

One idea that was popular in the 1980s, which I think should make a comeback within the labor movement, is what was called “economic conversion” for workers in the weapons industry. Today, we might call it a just transition, but discussing how workers in the weapons industry can produce products that are not weapons, bombs, or missiles. Socially useful civilian products, like medical equipment, green energy components, public transit vehicles, and things like that.

The companies these workers work for, these executives at these companies are the ones who are making huge profits off of death and destruction, and the U.S. government is that’s giving them through contracts. That’s who the real enemy is.

There has to be a discussion of what happens to these workers’ livelihoods. There has to be a transition to a more humane, rational kind of economy that isn’t premised on death and destruction. So having those kinds of conversations, doing that kind of political education, that’s something unions really can and should be taking the lead on.

Democrats also rely on unions, not just for donations to their campaigns, but especially for get-out-the-vote efforts, where union members go door-to-door and canvass for political candidates.

So it’s important for unions to have a policy that says we’re not going to support candidates who are blindly pro-genocide and who will just stand by Israel no matter what. They’re going to have to say, we will only support and lend our resources, time, and energy to supporting candidates who are in favor of Palestinian liberation and are not going to be just blindly backing Israel.

NAKBA II

Settlers continue to target Palestinian farmland in occupied West Bank



Israeli forces, who arrived at the scene, expell the Palestinians from their land and declare the area a “military closed zone,” after an Israeli settler attempted to run over Palestinian farmers heading to their fields in the Ras al-Qadi area, north of Halhul town near Hebron in West Bank on November 13, 2025. [Wisam Hashlamoun – Anadolu Agency]

November 28, 2025 

Middle East Monitor 

Israeli settlers stole two cows belonging to a Palestinian man on Thursday evening in the Wadi Qana area, part of the land of Deir Istiya town, north-west of Salfit in the occupied West Bank.

The owner said a group of settlers entered the area where the cows were kept, took them, and then fled towards nearby settlement outposts.

Anti-settlement activist Nazmi Al-Salman told the Palestinian News Agency, Wafa, that the theft was part of a systematic policy aimed at pressuring farmers and pushing them to leave their land.

He noted that such actions have increased in Wadi Qana in an effort to impose new conditions that support settlement expansion in the area.

Wadi Qana is one of the main agricultural zones in Salfit and continues to face repeated settler attacks targeting farmers and their property.

The occupied West Bank has seen an unprecedented rise in settlement activity and settler assaults since the start of the genocide war on Gaza on 7 October 2023, alongside direct army protection and clear government support.

32,000 Palestinians displaced by Israeli assault in northern West Bank: UN agency

November 27, 2025 

Middle East Monitor 

The Israeli army, which launched large-scale attacks, continues its raids for a second day in the city of Tubas in the northern part of the West Bank on November 27, 2025. [Issam Rimawi – Anadolu Agency]

More than 32,000 Palestinians have been displaced by an ongoing Israeli offensive in refugee camps in the northern West Bank, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said Thursday, Anadolu reports.

The Israeli army launched a large-scale military offensive in the Jenin refugee camp on Jan. 21, which later spread to the Tulkarem and Nur Shams camps and other areas in the northern West Bank.

Rolan Friedrich, Director of UNRWA Affairs for the West Bank, said the Israeli assault emptied the Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nur Shams refugee camps, displacing some 32,000 residents.

“And yet, even in these ghost towns that were once vibrant camps, Israeli forces still see the need to order demolitions for the sake of so-called ‘military purposes,” Friedrich added in a statement.

He noted that the Israeli authorities issued two mass demolition orders for over 190 buildings in the Jenin refugee camp, while 12 more buildings will be demolished in the upcoming days, which marks “the newest episode in continued efforts to re-engineer the topography of refugee camps in the northern West Bank.”

The UNRWA official said Israel’s systematic destruction violates the basic principles of international law and expands the army’s control over the refugee camps in the long term.

Friedrich called for the rebuilding of the refugee camps and the return of the displaced residents.

“They must not be trapped in interminable displacement,” he added.

On Wednesday, the Israeli army began another military campaign in the Tubas governorate in the northern West Bank, arresting over 60 Palestinians and injuring 10 others.

Alongside the two-year war in Gaza, where nearly 70,000 people have been killed, assaults by the army and illegal settlers in the West Bank have killed at least 1,083 Palestinians and injured about 11,000, while more than 20,500 have been detained, according to official Palestinian figures.

In a landmark opinion last July, the International Court of Justice declared Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory illegal and called for the evacuation of all settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

 

An Unexpected Con To End Free Speech

How Trump Uses Jews

by Mattea Kramer and Tom Engelhardt | Nov 27, 2025 

Rooting out terrorism and antisemitism was the supposed reason that plainclothed ICE agents arrested doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk on a street in Somerville, Massachusetts, after she coauthored an op-ed calling on Tufts University to divest from companies with ties to Israel due to the killing and starvation of Palestinian civilians. There is an international movement to boycott, sanction, and divest from Israel, but in the United States, President Donald Trump is imperiling the freedom even to publicly discuss such ideas, which should, in effect, be considered a test case for his larger attack on free speech. So far, the test is going well for Trump.

In what seems a long time ago, in 2024, the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, released a blueprint for what it called “a national strategy to combat antisemitism” by addressing what it described as “America’s virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American ‘pro-Palestinian movement.’” In essence, and in what’s amounted to an extraordinarily effective work of political theater that has been sold to my own state, Massachusetts, among other places, that foundation dubbed its political opponents “supporters of terrorism.” It also labeled organizations working in opposition to its agenda a “terrorist support network,” and claimed for itself the noble mantle of “combating antisemitism” — even as it deftly redefined antisemitism from hatred of Jewish people to criticism of the U.S.-Israel alliance. President Trump has put the Heritage Foundation strategy into action and gone even further.

It may be his most original idea. As political scientist Barnett Rubin put it in September, “President Trump always says he’s very creative and accomplishes things no one has ever done before. And now he is building a fascist regime which is legitimized by the fight against antisemitism. Nobody ever thought of doing that before.”

How the Defense Department (Oops, Sorry, the War Department) Promotes World Peace

I attended Hebrew school as a child, and today, when I try to recall what I learned there about Israel and Palestine, I find in my memory an image of a desert, replete with flowers, and the pleasant recollection that the State of Israel was founded in that empty landscape. In 1998, I visited Israel with my family. My brother had his bar mitzvah at the mountain-top fortress of Masada overlooking the Dead Sea. Though I enjoyed an enviable private school education, I didn’t hear the word Nakba until adulthood. That Arabic word for catastrophe refers to the displacement of 700,000 Palestinian people for Israel’s founding in 1948. A majority of the population of the modern-day Gaza Strip descended from refugees of the Nakba.

According to Amnesty International and the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, Israel has imposed a system of oppression on Palestinians across Israel and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories through an enforced system of segregation that constitutes apartheid. For decades, Israel has controlled who could enter or exit the Gaza Strip and, from 2007 on, that 25-mile strip of land functioned as what Human Rights Watch called an “open-air prison.” As of 2022, the unemployment rate in Gaza had hit 45%, and 65% of the people there were living in poverty. On October 7th of the following year, an armed group broke out of Gaza and waged attacks on Israel that killed 1,195 people, 815 of whom were civilians.

In the two years since then, Israel has responded by killing more than 67,000 Palestinians in Gaza in a military campaign of such horror that, as the head of Doctors Without Borders reported to the U.N. Security Council, children as young as five said that they preferred to die rather than continue living in fear while witnessing the slaughter of their family members. A girl named Sham was born in Gaza in November 2023 and survived smoke poisoning as an infant. As a toddler, she was diagnosed with acute malnutrition, before being killed on May 6th of this year when Israel dropped explosives on the shelter where she was living with her family. The United Nations and prominent experts, including Israeli-American professor of Holocaust and genocide studies Omer Bartov, have concluded that Israel’s war on Gaza is a genocide. The current ceasefire has slowed, not stopped, the death toll.

By 2024, the International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, had ruled that Israel’s occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem was illegal; that Israel needed to halt all settlement construction, evacuate its settlers, pay restitution to Palestinians, and allow them the right of return. It also indicated that all states and international organizations have a legal obligation not to assist Israel’s further occupation of the area.

However, since October 2023, according to the Israeli Defense Ministry and the Council on Foreign Relations, using 800 transport planes and 140 ships, my own country has delivered 90,000 tons of arms and equipment to Israel, including tanks, artillery shells, bombs, and rockets. The U.S. government gives Israel billions of dollars annually in military aid, which that country spends mostly on purchases made through the U.S. “Foreign Military Sales” program. According to a Defense Department website, that program sells “articles and services [that] will strengthen the security of the United States and promote world peace.”

Despite how, as Israeli historian Lee Mordechai described it, Israel has limited the flow of information out of Gaza and campaigned to discredit critical voices, a July Gallup poll found that 60% of Americans disapprove of Israel’s military actions there. Even more strikingly, a September Washington Post poll found that nearly half (48%) of Jewish Americans disapprove (and only 46% approve).

But according to recommendations issued by the Massachusetts Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism, a group created by state law in 2024, a teacher discussing such polling in a classroom could precipitate an anonymous complaint filed with the state police on the grounds that the educator has rendered the learning environment in my state hostile to Jewish students.

School Teachers Are the Problem!

Last February, Special Commission co-chair and State Representative Simon Cataldo conducted an inquisition — yes, an inquisition — into the president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association (who is himself Jewish), including presenting a series of materials on Israel/Palestine that Cataldo had obtained from a database of educator resources. He displayed a graphic called “Born Unequal Abroad,” which lists the different rights afforded to an American Jewish child and the child of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. The former can visit Israel and even become an Israeli citizen at any time, while the latter is barred from visiting and has no pathway to citizenship (even through marriage). Cataldo seemed to regard that graphic (and others like it) as self-evidently antisemitic and displayed it as a smoking gun that revealed the supposed antisemitism festering within the Massachusetts Teachers Association.

In other words, in my home state today, “combating antisemitism” means a governor- and legislature-appointed commission conducting an inquisition of a (Jewish) union leader for the offense of failing to suppress critical discussion of a foreign nation that the world’s leading human rights organizations have found to be upholding a system of apartheid and committing genocide. At the same time, actual antisemitism — that is, the hatred of Jewish people by xenophobic nationalists — has gone largely unexamined by the Commission in the midst of its campaign to shut down criticism of Israel. (I imagine President Trump and the Heritage Foundation applauding in the background.)

Indeed, over the course of a year of hearings, the Special Commission has perhaps irreparably merged the concept of antisemitism with criticism of Israel, which seems to have been the point. State Senator and Commission Co-Chair John Velis actually uses the terms “anti-Israel” and “antisemitic” interchangeably, though they do have different meanings and anyone charged with the responsibility of leading a state panel on antisemitism should know that. Velis, who is not Jewish, has taken multiple trips to Israel paid for by the Israeli government as well as a charity affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the lobby group known as AIPAC.

The Special Commission has unveiled recommendations for Massachusetts schools that include utilizing a definition of antisemitism that, according to the ACLU, will have the effect of chilling free speech. It has also recommended launching a statewide reporting system in which anonymous allegations of antisemitism in schools would be collected by the state police.

Following the initial release of those recommendations, Governor Maura Healey issued a statement applauding the Commission’s work. Organizations like the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston have also sent out emails to their membership commending the Commission.

Perhaps in response to the hours of dissenting public testimony that (mostly Jewish) people as well as scholars and education experts have offered, the commissioners wrote in their most recent report, “We should listen to and respect people who say that they have been harmed by antisemitism; we should not gaslight them or tell them that their experience is invalid.”

Who could argue?

A Federal Judge Weighs In

After Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk was abducted from the street by ICE agents for the offense of co-writing an op-ed in the school paper asking the school to divest from companies with ties to Israel, a federal judge found that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem had violated the First Amendment through a policy of targeting for deportation noncitizens who criticized Israel or voiced support for Palestinians. The judge also found that executive orders issued by President Trump had relied on a definition of antisemitism that encompassed First Amendment-protected speech (the same definition recommended by the Massachusetts Commission!).

But will that federal court ruling even matter? According to the same judge, “The effect of these targeted deportation proceedings continues unconstitutionally to chill freedom of speech to this day.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Benjamin Moser has noted that, after October 7th, some American Jewish institutions not only supported Israel’s reign of terror over Palestinian civilians but also applauded the clampdown on free speech in order to sustain the killing. “The younger generations, people who have seen with their own eyes the crimes of the so-called Jewish state, and who feel the sacrilege, the impious desecration, of the values they thought were Jewish,” he wrote, “will never return to these institutions.”

But will it matter? Surely, it won’t stop Donald Trump from using his version of Jewish identity as a moral shield for his attack on free speech.

In Massachusetts, a coalition of organizations has publicly opposed the Special Commission’s recommendations and, in the western part of the state where I live, a group of residents has resorted to putting out yard signs with QR codes on them to call attention to this travesty. I’m part of that effort, but does it matter?

In California, a new law, ostensibly intended to protect Jewish students from discrimination, goes into effect on January 1st. It has, however, put educators on alert that they may be accused of antisemitism if they share information deemed critical of Israel.

Meanwhile, the leaders of civil society organizations appear ill-suited to resist such suppression of free speech and, in some cases, seem to embrace it. In January, members of the American Historical Association voted 428 to 88 in favor of declaring their opposition to “scholasticide” (the deliberate destruction of an education system) in Gaza. But the Association’s leadership council vetoed that vote. A similar episode occurred at the Modern Language Association.

Amy Hagopian, a professor emeritus of global health at the University of Washington, who for years taught a class on war and health, recently wrote about how she was expelled from the American Public Health Association after publicly protesting a decision by its executive board to halt consideration of a resolution on Palestinian health justice. (An anonymous complaint had alleged that the protest was antisemitic.)

An Alternative Could Look Like This

The usual line-toeing of politicians in both major parties has involved reciting statements of support for Israel, whatever it does. By contrast, Zohran Mamdani was clear during his victorious campaign to become mayor of New York City that he supports an end to apartheid for Palestinians and opposes the crimes against humanity committed by Israel. In American politics, that represented a fresh playbook. He focused successfully on his city’s absurdly high cost of living and did so as part of a coalition that included people of the Jewish faith and other faiths, even as powerful moneyed interests lined up against him. And he won.

Keep in mind that a clear majority of Americans do indeed disapprove of Israel’s actions in Gaza, so it makes sense that there was an electorate for a candidate who would tell the truth about the oppression of Palestinians, while rejecting claims that it’s antisemitic to do so. Mamdani won a third of voters who specified Judaism as their religion (just as he won a third of Catholics). He also overwhelmingly won among those with no religious affiliation (a quarter of the electorate) and those whose religious affiliation was described as “Other,” which is where exit pollsters put people who are Muslim.

Trump’s urge to suppress free speech may be about Israel today, but count on one thing: it will be about something else tomorrow. The real question is whether Americans will accept his violations of the First Amendment or fight to protect free speech even when they dislike things other people have to say.

Copyright 2025 Mattea Kramer

Mattea Kramer, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of the award-winning novel The Untended about capitalism and the American opioid crisis.

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