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Opinion
How Trump Cynically Uses Fighting Antisemitism to Justify Fascism
Trump’s urge to suppress free speech may be about Israel today, but count on one thing: It will be about something else tomorrow.
Nov 21, 2025
Rooting out terrorism and antisemitism was the supposed reason that plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement 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 US-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 mountaintop 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 7 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.
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.
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 United Nations 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 6 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 US government gives Israel billions of dollars annually in military aid, which that country spends mostly on purchases made through the US “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 cochair and State Rep. Simon Cataldo (D-14) 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 Sen. and Commission Cochair John Velis (D-2) 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 American Civil Liberties Union, 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, Gov. 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 cowriting 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 7, 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 1. 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.
There are those who believe that Mamdani’s victory cannot be replicated outside New York City. But given that free speech itself may hang in the balance, it’s at least worth a try.
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Who Is Ready to Die for Trump’s Gaza Plan? So Far, Nobody
We shall see in the coming days whether the corrupt governments that hope to profit from the genocide in Gaza will send their own troops to fight the Palestinian Resistance and perpetuate the Israeli occupation.
Nov 21, 2025
On November 17, 2025, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution to endorse President Donald Trump’s plan for Gaza, including a transitional government headed by Trump himself and an International Stabilization Force, or ISF, that is expected, among other tasks, to disarm Hamas, a task that Israel has failed to do through two years of genocide and mass destruction.
The ISF will be tasked with securing the borders in a way that confines Palestinians, stabilizing Gaza’s security environment by suppressing resistance, demilitarizing Gaza while leaving the Israeli regime untouched, and training the Palestinian police to control the population. Yes, the force is also mandated to “protect civilians” and assist humanitarian aid. But under US supervision, can anyone honestly expect it to restrain Israel when Israel simply refuses to comply—as we see with the current so-called “ceasefire”?
Hamas and other factions in Gaza have issued a joint statement that unequivocally rejects Trump’s plan and the Security Council resolution, saying it “will turn into a type of imposed guardianship or administration—reproducing a reality that restricts the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and to managing their own affairs.”
As for the foreign military force, the Hamas statement says, “Assigning the international force with tasks and roles inside the Gaza Strip, including disarming the resistance, strips it of its neutrality, and turns it into a party to the conflict in favor of the occupation.”
This is not the time to give up on the real solutions to this crisis: justice and freedom for Palestine, and accountability for Israel.
The joint statement reserves its strongest condemnation for the Arab rulers who support Trump’s plan, calling their support “a form of deep international partnership in the war of extermination waged by the occupation against our people.”
Trump has claimed that all sides agreed to his peace plan, but Hamas only agreed to the first stage of it, which involved returning the remaining Israeli prisoners in Gaza to Israel under a permanent ceasefire and resumption of humanitarian aid that Israel has still not complied with.
Hamas always said clearly that it has no authority to negotiate over other parts of Trump’s plan, since they involve the future government of all of Palestine and require the input of many different groups in Gaza and the other occupied territories. Hamas said it would only disarm once a Palestinian state is fully established, at which time it will hand over its weapons to the new armed forces of the state of Palestine.
In October, a number of countries told US officials that they would consider sending their troops to participate in the proposed International Stabilization Force in Gaza. They included Egypt, Indonesia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Malaysia, and Pakistan, as well as Australia, Canada, and Cyprus.
On the other hand, Jordan, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia have all rejected sending troops to join the ISF. Azerbaijan has said it could only send troops once all fighting has ended, and Egypt has flip-flopped on taking part. As it became clear that Trump and his “peace board” might order the ISF to use force to disarm Hamas fighters, the UAE said its forces would not take part either.
In fact, not a single country has so far committed to join the force, while Israel has said it would not allow Turkish forces to enter Gaza, and claims the right to approve or refuse any country’s participation. Israel has also been escalating its ceasefire violations since the Security Council resolution was passed, a sure way to deter countries from joining the ISF.
Hamas and the resistance groups are not alone in rejecting Trump’s plan. Al Jazeera asked people in Gaza City for comments, and they were just as critical. “I completely reject this decision,” said Moamen Abdul-Malek. “Our people… are able to rule ourselves. We don’t need forces from Arab or foreign countries to rule us. We are the people of this country, and we will bear responsibility for it.”
Another man in Gaza City told Al Jazeera that the plan violates the Palestinians’ right to armed resistance. “It would strip the resistance of its weapons,” said Mohammed Hamdan, “despite the fact that resistance is a legitimate right of peoples under occupation.”
And Sanaa Mahmoud Kaheel said she doesn’t trust Trump, who previously threatened to ethnically cleanse Gaza and steal its land to build a US-Israeli beach resort. “Things will be unclear with the international forces, and we do not know what might happen tomorrow or the day after tomorrow with them being in Gaza,” she said. “This could help Trump tighten his grip on Gaza and work towards establishing a ‘riviera’ there, as he himself said before. Nothing is guaranteed.”
Are they really ready to sacrifice their own young people’s blood to mix with the blood of innocent Palestinians in the rubble of Gaza?
The Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy (PIPD), based in Al-Bireh in the West Bank, rejects the false choice that the United States has presented to the world: “Either accept their plan with all its flaws and non-guarantees, or accept going back to a live-streamed genocide.”
Instead, PIPD and the global Palestinian solidarity movement are working to end the Israeli occupation and the impunity that sustains it, and to hold Israel accountable for its illegal occupation and crimes against humanity. On its Global Accountability Map, PIPD charts the progress of “concrete and approved actions by governments, local authorities, civil society, the private sector, courts, and academia to hold Israeli colonial entities and interests accountable.”
More and more of the world is supporting the Palestinian struggle and the movement to hold Israel accountable for its decades of illegal occupation and ever-escalating international crimes. While the US uses its veto to corrupt the UN Security Council, people and governments have come together to hold Israel accountable in the UN General Assembly, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Instead of passively accepting subservience to the Security Council, the General Assembly asked the ICJ to rule on the legality of the Israeli occupation and its legal consequences, and the ICJ ruled in 2024 that the occupation is illegal and must therefore be ended as quickly as possible.
Instead of making further demands on the occupation’s long-suffering victims, as the US-controlled Security Council does in its Trump plan resolution, the ICJ and the General Assembly have flipped the US script to make demands on the perpetrator, Israel, including the demand, in September 2024, that Israel must end the occupation within a year.
The ICJ issued a new ruling on October 22, 2025 that Israel must allow all humanitarian aid into Gaza and allow UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East) to reenter Gaza and do its work there without obstruction.
The UN General Assembly can and should respond to Israel’s failure to comply with any of these rulings and resolutions by meeting in an Emergency Special Session to organize a UN-backed arms embargo, trade boycott, and other steps to enforce them, until Israel ends its illegal occupation and starts complying with international law and UN resolutions.
More and more countries are cutting trade and military ties with Israel, and 157 countries now recognize Palestine as an independent nation with the same rights as others. People in many countries are rising up to protest Israel’s genocide and occupation, and to boycott Israeli products and companies that are complicit in its crimes.
The Israeli and US governments are feeling the pinch. If the world was passively accepting Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Trump would not have felt compelled to conjure up his fake peace plan. It is a victory for people of conscience everywhere that he felt he had to try to change the narrative. So this is not the time to give up on the real solutions to this crisis: justice and freedom for Palestine, and accountability for Israel.
We shall see in the coming days whether the corrupt governments that hope to profit from the genocide in Gaza will send their own troops to fight the Palestinian Resistance and perpetuate the Israeli occupation. Are they really ready to sacrifice their own young people’s blood to mix with the blood of innocent Palestinians in the rubble of Gaza?
We hope that they will instead make common cause with the people of Gaza and insist that Israel must comply with the demands of the ICJ and the UN General Assembly and immediately end its obscene, decades-long, illegal occupation of Palestine.
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Trump, Violence, and 'Hubris Syndrome'
People who gain a significant amount of power over others lose the ability to empathize with people in general, isolating the powerful into their own stereotypes and egotistical certainties, which lessens their ability to make good, or even rational, decisions.
Nov 21, 2025
What is power?
I dedicate this question, which is at the core of the book with which I am struggling, to Donald Trump.
When we think of power, the word itself commands that we carve the concept into something isolated and wieldable: a sword, a gun, a scepter. Power means power over. There is no basic concept of power—no word for power in the English language—that also means collaboration, collective participation: people working together, individually empowered at the same time that they are part of a larger whole.
Even when we examine the dark side of power—as in, power corrupts—the examination seems to hover as a warning rather than open up to larger awareness. Some years ago, Jerry Useem wrote an article in The Atlantic titled (fasten your seatbelts!) “Power Causes Brain Damage,” which discusses the concept he calls “hubris syndrome.”
Collective hubris syndrome still dominates global politics.
The essential point the article makes is that people who gain a significant amount of power over others lose the ability to empathize with—or mime, as the article puts it—people in general, the lesser mortals who must follow the boss’ orders. This inability, it turns out, is serious. It isolates the powerful into their own stereotypes and egotistical certainties, which lessens their ability to make good, or even rational, decisions. And hubris syndrome isn’t merely psychological; it’s also physiological.
Citing the research of neuroscientist Sukhvinder Obhi, Useem writes: “And when he put the heads of the powerful and the not-so-powerful under a transcranial-magnetic-stimulation machine, he found that power, in fact, impairs a specific neural process, ‘mirroring,’ that may be a cornerstone of empathy. Which gives a neurological basis to what [psychologist Dacher] Keltner has termed the ‘power paradox’: Once we have power, we lose some of the capacities we needed to gain it in the first place.”
Useem quotes authors David Owen and Jonathan Davidson, who define hubris syndrome as “a disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader.” Its 14 clinical features, he adds, include: “manifest contempt for others, loss of contact with reality, restless or reckless actions, and displays of incompetence.” (Remind you of anyone, Donald?)
The idea is that we’re naturally connected and subconsciously “mimic” others: We laugh when others laugh, tense up when others grow tense. It’s not faking an emotion to fit in; it’s participating in, feeling, the collective emotion that fills the room. “It helps trigger the same feelings those others are experiencing and provides a window into where they are coming from,” Useem writes. But: Powerful people “stop simulating the experience of others,” leading to what the psychologist calls an “empathy deficit,” which saps the powerful of most, or maybe all, of their social skill, leaving them, even as they generate endless obeisance, socially isolated souls.
The conclusion to be drawn here is that what is commonly thought of as power—power over others, aka, dominance—isn’t power at all. It’s an illusion of power that weakens, and perhaps destroys, those who hold it. Consider the rise and fall of dictators, the toppling of empires, the comeuppance of kings and queens. Let them eat cake.
The article does an excellent job pointing all this out, but at a certain point it falls into a linguistic trap. Useem writes despairingly: “This is a depressing finding. Knowledge is supposed to be power. But what good is knowing that power deprives you of knowledge?”
Knowledge in all its basic innocence is, indeed, power, but rarely is this “power over” someone. Knowledge of how to walk, how to read... this is a child claiming her life. And the entire family is empowered. As the child learns how to function independently, Mom and Dad learn how to parent. Yes, knowledge—power—can be used to further the interests of our darkest impulses. We can use what we learn to blackmail, extort, cheat, bully, win, etc., etc. But let’s break the automatic linguistic link right now between power and dominance. True power enlarges the whole; it doesn’t isolate.
No one says it better than Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: “Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being.”
The fragments of the world! This makes me think immediately of the world’s, or at least the state’s, social outcasts, for whom there are also many other names: from bums and losers to criminals and gangbangers. They are expelled into the category of Other, joining all our various enemies: terrorists, commies, savages, whatever. They are out to get us. We must be ready to defend ourselves against them, and here on the home front be ever in control of them. This requires the massing of counterviolence and stern directives.
We all know how well this has worked over the centuries. Violence has won! Our geopolitics are organized around the inevitability of violence: the good kind (ours) vs. the bad kind (theirs). Military spending and its domestic equivalents utterly blitz more constructive forms of social spending and even more troubling, we define ourselves, at least at the state and national levels, primarily by our enemies. The worse they are, the better we are. It’s called projection. It eliminates the need for self-reflection: What matters is the skill to strike back, not look within, change, and grow.
It’s so easy to sink at this point into the quicksand of cynicism. We’re stuck. Nothing’s going to change. Read the following quote and you might believe this even more intensely. In February 1945, President Franklin Roosevelt, on his return from the Yalta Conference with Great Britain and the Soviet Union, and two months before he died, said these words to Congress:
The Crimea Conference was a successful effort by the three leading nations to find a common ground for peace. It ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and have always failed. We propose to substitute for all these a universal organization in which all peace-loving nations will finally have a chance to join. I am confident that the Congress and the American people will accept the results of this conference as the beginning of a permanent structure of peace.
He was talking, of course, about the agreement the three powers had just reached on the creation of the United Nations: “the beginning of a permanent structure of peace.”
Yes, the cynicism ignites. Six months after Roosevelt’s words, the United States leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs. World War II ended but the Cold War—and the nuclear arms race—began. The UN has hardly created peace over the last 80 years. Collective hubris syndrome still dominates global politics.
But if you listen deeply, you can hear the heart of peace still beating beneath the rubble. Step one: Do not give up.
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Beyond the Yellow Line: Israel's New Gaza Kill Zone
In practice, this ceasefire amounts to a one-sided truce, where Israel can carry out a relentless, low-grade war on Gaza, while Palestinians are systematically denied the right to respond or defend themselves.
Nov 21, 2025
The so-called Gaza ceasefire was not a genuine cessation of hostility, but a strategic, cynical shift in the Israeli genocide and ongoing campaign of destruction.
Starting on October 10, the first day of the announced ceasefire, Israel transitioned tactics: moving from indiscriminate aerial bombardment to the calculated, engineered demolishing of homes and vital infrastructure. Satellite images, corroborated by almost hourly media and ground reports, confirmed this methodical change.
As direct combat forces seemingly withdrew to the adjacent "Gaza envelope" region, a new vanguard of Israeli soldiers advanced into the area east of the so-called Yellow Line, to systematically dismantle whatever semblance of life, rootedness, and civilization remained standing following the Israeli genocide. Between October 10 and November 2, Israel demolished 1,500 buildings, utilizing its specialized military engineering units.
The ceasefire agreement divided Gaza into two halves: one west of the Yellow Line, where the survivors of the Israeli genocide were confined, and a larger one, east of the line, where the Israeli army maintained an active military presence and continued to operate with impunity.
Gaza's new Yellow Line is but the latest, most egregious military demarcation in a long, cruel history of lines intended to make the lives of the Palestinians impossible.
If Israel truly harbored the intention of, indeed, evacuating the area following the agreed-upon second phase of the ceasefire, it would not be actively pursuing the systematic, structural destruction of this already devastated region. Clearly, Israel’s motives are far more insidious, centered on rendering the region perpetually uninhabitable.
Aside from leveling infrastructure, Israel is also carrying out a continuous campaign of airstrikes and naval attacks, relentlessly targeting Rafah and Khan Younis in the south. Later, and with greater intensity, Israel also began carrying out attacks in areas that were, in theory, meant to be under the control of Gazans.
According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, 260 Palestinians have been killed and 632 wounded since the commencement of the so-called ceasefire.
In practice, this ceasefire amounts to a one-sided truce, where Israel can carry out a relentless, low-grade war on Gaza, while Palestinians are systematically denied the right to respond or defend themselves. Gaza is thus condemned to relive the same tragic cycle of violent history: a defenseless, impoverished region trapped under the boot of Israel's military calculations, which consistently operate outside the periphery of international law.
Before the existence of Israel atop the ruins of historic Palestine in 1948, the demarcation of Gaza's borders was not driven by military calculations. The Gaza region, one of the world's most ancient civilizations, was always seamlessly incorporated into a larger geographical socioeconomic space.
Before the British named it the Gaza District (1920-1948), the Ottomans considered it a sub-district (Kaza) within the larger Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem—the Jerusalem Independent District.
But even the British designation of Gaza did not isolate it from the rest of the Palestinian geography, as the borders of the new district reached Al-Majdal (today's Ashkelon) in the north, Bir al-Saba’ (Beersheba) in the east, and the Rafah line at the Egyptian border.
Following the 1949 Armistice Agreements, which codified the post-Nakba lines, the collective torment of Gaza, as illustrated in its shrinking boundaries, began in earnest. The expansive Gaza District was brutally reduced to the Gaza Strip, a mere 1.3% of the overall size of historic Palestine. Its population, due to the Nakba, had explosively grown with over 200,000 desperate refugees who, along with several generations of their descendants, have been trapped and confined in this tiny strip of land for over 77 years.
When Israel permanently occupied Gaza in June 1967, the lines separating it from the rest of the Palestinian and Arab geography became an integral, permanent part of Gaza itself. Soon after its occupation of the strip, Israel began restricting the movement of Palestinians further, sectionalizing Gaza into several regions. The size and location of these internal lines were largely determined by two paramount motives: to fragment Palestinian society to ensure its subjugation, and to create military "buffer zones" around Israeli military encampments and illegal settlements.
Between 1967 and Israel's so-called "disengagement" from Gaza, Israel had built 21 illegal settlements and numerous military corridors and checkpoints, effectively bisecting the strip and confiscating nearly 40% of its land mass.
Following the redeployment, Israel retained absolute, unilateral control over Gaza’s borders, sea access, airspace, and even the population registry. Additionally, Israel created another internal border within Gaza, a heavily fortified "buffer zone" snaking across the northern and eastern borders. This new area has witnessed the cold-blooded killing of hundreds of unarmed protesters and the wounding of thousands who dared to approach what was often referred to as the "kill zone."
Even the Gaza sea was effectively outlawed. Fishermen were inhumanely confined to tiny spaces, at times less than three nautical miles, while simultaneously surrounded by the Israeli navy, which routinely shot fishermen, sank boats, and detained crews at will.
Gaza's new Yellow Line is but the latest, most egregious military demarcation in a long, cruel history of lines intended to make the lives of the Palestinians impossible. The current line, however, is worse than any before it, as it completely suffocates the displaced population in a fully destroyed area, without functioning hospitals and with only trickles of lifesaving aid.
For Palestinians, who have been battling confinements and fragmentation for generations, this new arrangement is the intolerable and inevitable culmination of their protracted, multigenerational dispossession.
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