to my reality: not dust and not fire. What

will I do without roses from Samarkand? What

will I do in a theater that burnishes the singers with its lunar

stones? Our weight has become light like our houses

in the faraway winds. We have become two friends of the strange

creatures in the clouds … and we are now loosened

from the gravity of identity’s land. What will we do … what

will we do without exile, and a long night

that stares at the water?   — Mahmoud Darwish

Newark, Del. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Ebrahimi Nabavi was an Iranian satirist.  On January 15, 2025,   he took his life at the age of sixty four in Silver Spring, Md.   He never felt at home, whether in Brussels or in the vicinity of Washington, D.C.  He always wanted to go back to Iran. He was one of the reformists who took on the mantle to criticize the Islamic Republic.   He was imprisoned.  He shared the same block with other famous prisoners. 

He did stand-up comedy.  He wrote satirical views on different media outlets, first in Iran and later in Europe and in the U.S.  

I didn’t always agree with him.  He wrote an article to which I felt the need to reply.  I wish I had known him better. 

But what happens to luminaries who die in exile, either naturally or by taking their own lives?

In 1942, Stefan Zweig took his life in Brazil.   He had seen the devastation of his homeland Austria and, later Germany, by the Nazis.  He could not tolerate it. 

Such people tend to be more sensitive than others.  They are not weak but more emotional perhaps.  Or this world of ours is too much for them to handle. 

Gholamhossein Saedi, a renowned playwright, a physician from Tabriz was one of them.  He immigrated to Paris. He never liked the city, even though he tried.   He wrote his essays and tried very hard to become part of Parisian intellectual life.  He said, I can relate to Paris, but Paris is not Tehran.  My pen does not write well in Paris.  

Gholamhossein Saedi; h/t Wikimedia

“All the buildings in Paris are like a theatre décor.   I feel as if I am living in a post card,” he wrote.

In a way he also committed suicide.  He died at the age of 49. 

I met him in Tehran after the Revolution at his house and then, much later, in Paris.  He was not the same man.

He was laid to rest in Père Lachaise where many famous people are buried.   A few weeks ago, his tombstone was desecrated in a terrible way. Someone urinated on it.

Saedi was a famous person; he had been incarcerated by the Shah and then by the Islamic Republic.  A few of his plays were turned into films, among them the Cow by the famous film maker, Dariush Mehrjoui. 

Ebrahim Nabavi took his life perhaps because he could not stand to be away from his homeland.

Who knows?

What drives some people to suicide?   

They both shared one thing:   A long-lasting love for Iran.  An Iran they could neither live in nor leave behind.

New York (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Early in the year, State Department officials briefed Joel Rayburn from the Trump transition team there could be a humanitarian “catastrophe” in Gaza when a new Israeli law barring contact with the UN refugee agency for Palestinians takes effect at the end of the month.

The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is the primary aid agency operating in the Gaza Strip. After more than a year of war, the UN and other aid organizations warn Gaza is close to uninhabitable. Tens of thousands of houses have been destroyed. More than 46,000 Palestinians have been killed and over 107,000 injured. In the future, these numbers are likely to prove three to four times higher. And still worse could be ahead.

During President Trump’s first term, his administration gradually cut all U.S. assistance to UNRWA. The Biden administration later resumed U.S. aid to the agency. Last March, Congress passed a law that bans the U.S. from funding UNRWA until at least 2025.

Why should the horrific policy errors of the past be compounded with monstrous new policy mistakes?           

The origins             

The fate of UNRWA is one of the many dilemmas I scrutinized while working on The Fall of Israel (2025). After achieving an initial truce in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish diplomat, used it to lay the groundwork for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.

Bernadotte tried to balance the different interests of the Israelis and Palestinians, the major powers in the region and the UN Partition Plan. Having witnessed the horrible outcome of the Jewish Holocaust in Europe and hoping to avert a catastrophe in Palestine, he also proposed that the UN should establish a Palestine conciliation commission and Arab refugees would have a full right to return to their homes in Jewish-controlled territory.

Just hours after his proposal, Bernadotte was assassinated in Jerusalem by the Jewish paramilitary Stern group, while pursuing his official duties. One of those who planned the killing was Yitzhak Shamir, the future prime minister of Israel, and the predecessor and onetime mentor of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s current PM.

Ever since then, UNRWA has been a lifeline to generations of Palestinians in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the adjacent Arab countries. Created as a purely temporary measure, UNRWA’s mandate has been subject to renewal every three years ever since.

Dan Steinbock, The Fall of Israel: The Degradation of Israel’s Politics, Economy & Military. Clarity Press, 2025. Click here to buy.

Historically, the United States has been UNRWA’s largest financial contributor, with more than $7.3 billion since 1950. From the start, these contributions have been subject to a variety of legislative conditions and oversight measures, however.

Funding threats     

Decades of U.S. policy toward Israel and the occupied territories, however ambiguous, was reversed almost overnight, when the Trump administration executed a series of dramatic policy changes in 2018 and canceled nearly all U.S. aid to the West Bank and Gaza, plus $360 million in annual aid previously given to the UNRWA. Subsequently, the Biden administration restored much of the funding, yet provided Israel weapons and financing for the mass atrocities of those the UNRWA funding was supposed to help.

After allegations surfaced connecting a few of the 30,000 UNRWA employees with the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks against Israel, the Agency fired nine staff members following a UN investigation. While it denied allegations that the agency has widespread links to Hamas, Congress enacted a March 2024 prohibition on U.S. funding to UNRWA (P.L. 118-47), which is set to last until late March, 2025.

To put things into context: The Empire State Building is said to have 21,000 employees. Imagine what would happen if six of them would be suspected of terrorism and therefore the entire building would have to be dismantled and all employees fired? It would be an absurd collective punishment for the alleged crimes of a few.

Worse, the Israeli laws passed on October 28, 2024 and scheduled to take effect 90 days later, would endanger the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem.

Millions of lives threatened                    

The new U.S. and Israeli legal measures emboldened Jewish settlers, particularly the Messianic far-right. In May 2024 they launched several attacks on the UNRWA headquarters, setting fire to the perimeter of the building in East Jerusalem. The attacks against UNRWA came after months of far-right settler protests outside of the building, following Israeli claims of UNRWA-Hamas links; accusations that lacked verification, according to U.S. intelligence.

Among the protesters was Aryeh King, a deputy mayor of Jerusalem and a prominent advocate for settlements, who called Palestinian Gazans “Muslim Nazis,” described them as “sub-human” calling for captured Palestinians to be “buried alive” in December 2023.

By the year-end of 2024, some 265 UNRWA staff had been killed in hostilities since October 7, 2023. Despite a record-high number that suggests intentional targeting, those behind the Israeli strikes have not been prosecuted.

More than 5.9 million Palestinians, including three of four in Gaza, are registered with UNRWA as refugees.

The stakes

In Gaza, nearly two million Palestinians are displaced and dependent on aid for food, water and medical services. U.S. officials say there’s no serious backup plan for providing humanitarian supplies and services to Palestinians. With the new U.S.-Israeli laws, senior UNRWA emergency officers presage social order in the Strip could collapse.

Here are some ways to preempt such disasters:

• The White House should pressure Israel to suspend and nullify the impending adverse acts against UNRWA
• S. Congress should lift current prohibition on UNRWA funding through March 2025
• UNRWA’s funding should be broadened by the U.S. and internationally in light of the devastation and genocidal atrocities caused in Gaza
• The Agency’s existence should be premised on the implementation of all relevant and existing UN resolutions both the U.S. and the international community have voted for.

How probable are such measures in the conceivable future? Highly unlikely.

What’s the alternative? Far worse, far worse.

by Brett Murphy

( ProPublica ) – Empty Threats: Since Oct. 7, 2023, Biden has repeatedly issued threats that Israel ignored. U.S. officials tried to enforce consequences — but they couldn’t.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

In early November, a small group of senior U.S. human rights diplomats met with a top official in President Joe Biden’s State Department to make one final, emphatic plea: We must keep our word.

Weeks before, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the administration delivered their most explicit ultimatum yet to Israel, demanding the Israel Defense Forces allow hundreds more trucksloads of food and medicine into Gaza every day — or else. American law and Biden’s own policies prohibit arms sales to countries that restrict humanitarian aid. Israel had 30 days to comply.

In the month that followed, the IDF was accused of roundly defying the U.S., its most important ally. The Israeli military tightened its grip, continued to restrict desperately needed aid trucks and displaced 100,000 Palestinians from North Gaza, humanitarian groups found, exacerbating what was already a dire crisis “to its worst point since the war began.”

Several attendees at the November meeting — officials who help lead the State Department’s efforts to promote racial equity, religious freedom and other high-minded principles of democracy — said the United States’ international credibility had been severely damaged by Biden’s unstinting support of Israel. If there was ever a time to hold Israel accountable, one ambassador at the meeting told Tom Sullivan, the State Department’s counselor and a senior policy adviser to Blinken, it was now.

But the decision had already been made. Sullivan said the deadline would likely pass without action and Biden would continue sending shipments of bombs uninterrupted, according to two people who were in the meeting.

Those in the room deflated. “Don’t our law, policy and morals demand it?” an attendee told me later, reflecting on the decision to once again capitulate. “What is the rationale of this approach? There is no explanation they can articulate.”

Soon after, when the 30-day deadline was up, Blinken made it official and said that Israelis had begun implementing most of the steps he had laid out in his letter — all thanks to the pressure the U.S. had applied.

That choice was immediately called into question. On Nov. 14, a U.N. committee said that Israel’s methods in Gaza, including its use of starvation as a weapon, was “consistent with genocide.” Amnesty International went further and concluded a genocide was underway. The International Criminal Court also issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister for the war crime of deliberately starving civilians, among other allegations. (The U.S. and Israeli governments have rejected the genocide determination as well as the warrants.)

The October red line was the last one Biden laid down, but it wasn’t the first. His administration issued multiple threats, warnings and admonishments to Israel about its conduct after Oct. 7, 2023, when the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel, killed some 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages.

Government officials worry Biden’s record of empty threats have given the Israelis a sense of impunity.

Trump, who has made a raft of pro-Israel nominations, made it clear he wanted the war in Gaza to end before he took office and threatened that “all hell will break out” if Hamas did not release its hostages by then.

On Wednesday, after months of negotiations, Israel and Hamas reached a ceasefire deal. While it will become clear over the next days and months exactly what the contours of the agreement are, why it happened now and who deserves the most credit, it’s plausible that Trump’s imminent ascension to the White House was its own form of a red line. Early reports suggest the deal looks similar to what has been on the table for months, raising the possibility that if the Biden administration had followed through on its tough words, a deal could have been reached earlier, saving lives.

“Netanyahu’s conclusion was that Biden doesn’t have enough oomph to make him pay a price, so he was willing to ignore him,” said Ghaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute who’s focused on U.S.-Israel relations and a former official with the Palestinian Authority who helped advise on prior peace talks. “Part of it is that Netanyahu learned there is no cost to saying ‘no’ to the current president.”

So-called red lines have long been a prominent foreign policy tool for the world’s most powerful nations. They are communicated publicly in pronouncements by senior officials and privately by emissaries. They amount to rules of the road for friends and adversaries — you can go this far but no further.

The failure to enforce those lines in recent years has had consequences, current and former U.S. officials said. One frequently cited example arose in 2012 when President Barack Obama told the Syrian government that using chemical weapons against its own people would change his calculus about directly intervening. When Syria’s then-President Bashar al-Assad launched rockets with chemical gas and killed hundreds of civilians anyway, Obama backpedaled and ultimately chose not to invade, a move critics say allowed the civil war to spiral further while extremist groups took advantage by recruiting locals.

Authorities in and outside government said the acquiescence to Israel as it prosecuted a brutal war will likely be regarded as one the most consequential foreign policy decisions of the Biden presidency. They say it undermines America’s ability to influence events in the Middle East while “destroying the entire edifice of international law that was put into place after WWII,” as Omer Bartov, a renowned Israeli-American scholar of genocide, put it. Jeffrey Feltman, the former assistant secretary of the State Department’s Middle East bureau, told me he fears much of the Muslim world now sees the U.S. as “ineffective at best or complicit at worst in the large-scale civilian destruction and death.”

Biden’s warnings over the past year have also been explicit. Last spring, the president vowed to stop supplying offensive bombs to Israel if it launched a major invasion into the southern city of Rafah. He also told Netanyahu the U.S. was going to rethink support for the war unless he took new steps to protect civilians and aid workers after the IDF blew up a World Central Kitchen caravan. And Blinken signaled that he would blacklist a notorious IDF unit for the death of a Palestinian-American in the West Bank if the soldiers involved were not brought to justice.

Time and again, Israel crossed the Biden administration’s red lines without changing course in a meaningful way, according to interviews with government officials and outside experts. Each time, the U.S. yielded and continued to send Israel’s military deadly weapons of war, approving more than $17.9 billion in military assistance since late 2023, by some estimates. The State Department recently told Congress about another $8 billion proposed deal to sell Israel munitions and artillery shells.

“It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the red lines have all just been a smokescreen,” said Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and a preeminent authority on U.S. policy in the region. “The Biden administration decided to be all in and merely pretended that it was trying to do something about it.”

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Blinken disagreed and said Netanyahu has listened to him by softening Israel’s most aggressive tactics, including in Rafah. He also argued there was a cost to even questioning the IDF openly. “Whenever there has been public daylight between the United States and Israel and the perception that pressure was growing on Israel,” Blinken said, “Hamas has pulled back from agreeing to a ceasefire and the release of hostages.”

He acknowledged that not enough humanitarian assistance has been reaching civilians and said the Israelis initially resisted the idea of allowing any food and medicine into Gaza — which would be a war crime — but Netanyahu relented in response to U.S. pressure behind the scenes. Blinken backtracked later in the interview and suggested that the blocking of aid was not Israeli policy. “There’s a very different question about what was the intent,” he told the Times.

For this story, ProPublica spoke with scores of current and former officials throughout the year and read through government memos, cables and emails, many of which have not been reported previously. The records and interviews shed light on why Biden and his top advisers refused to adjust his policy even as new evidence of Israeli abuses emerged.

Throughout the contentious year inside the State Department, senior leaders repeatedly disregarded their own experts. They cracked down on leaks by threatening criminal investigations and classifying material that was critical of Israel. Some of the agency’s top Middle East diplomats complained in private that they were sidelined by Biden’s National Security Council. The council also distributed a list of banned phrases, including any version of “State of Palestine” that didn’t have the word “future” first. Two human rights officials said they were prevented from pursuing evidence of abuses in Gaza and the West Bank.

The State Department did not make Blinken available for an interview, but the agency’s top spokesperson, Matthew Miller, said in a statement that Blinken welcomes internal dissent and has incorporated it into his policymaking. “The Department continues to encourage individuals to make their opinions known through appropriate channels,” he added. Miller denied that the agency has classified material for any reason other than national security.

Over the past year, reports have documented physical and sexual abuse in Israeli prisons, using Palestinians as human shields and razing residential buildings and hospitals. At one point early in the conflict, UNICEF said more than 10 children required amputations every day on average. Israeli soldiers have videotaped themselves burning food supplies and ransacking homes. One IDF group reportedly said, “Our job is to flatten Gaza.”

Israel’s defenders, including those on the National Security Council, acknowledge the devastating human toll but contend that American arms have helped Israel advance western interests in the region and protect itself from other enemies. Indeed, Netanyahu has significantly diminished Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, killing many of the groups’ leaders. Then Iran’s “axis of resistance” received its most consequential blow late last year when rebel groups ousted Assad from Syria.

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew told the Times of Israel he worried that a generation of young Americans will harbor anti-Israel sentiments into the future. He said he wished that Israel had done a better job at communicating how carefully it undertook combat decisions and calling attention to its humanitarian successes to counter a narrative in the American press that he considers biased.

“The media that is presenting a pro-Hamas perspective is out instantaneously telling a story,” Lew said. “It tells a story that is, over time, shown not to be completely accurate. ‘Thirty-five children were killed.’ Well, it wasn’t 35 children. It was many fewer.”

“You can Stand under my Umbrella,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / IbisPaint, Clip2Comic, 2024

“The children who were killed,” he added, “turned out to have been the children of Hamas fighters.”

The repercussions for the United States and the region will play out for years. Protests have erupted outside the American embassies in Muslim-majority countries like Indonesia, the world’s third-largest democracy, while polls show Arab Americans grew increasingly hostile to their own government stateside. Russia, before its black eye in Syria, and China have both sought to capitalize by entering business and defense deals with Arab nations. By the summer, State Department analysts in the Middle East sent cables to Washington expressing concerns that the IDF’s conduct would only inflame tensions in the West Bank and galvanize young Palestinians to take up arms against Israel. Intelligence officials warn that terrorist groups are recruiting on the anti-American sentiment throughout the region, which they say is at its highest levels in years.

The Israeli government did not answer detailed questions, but a spokesperson for the embassy in Washington, D.C., broadly defended Israel’s relationship with the U.S., “two allies who have been working together to push back against extremist, destabilizing actors.” Israel is a country of laws, the spokesperson added, and its actions over the past 15 months “benefit the interests of the free world and the United States, creating an opportunity for a better future for the Middle East amid the tragedy of the war started by Hamas.”

Next week, Trump will inherit a demoralized State Department, part of the federal bureaucracy from which he has pledged to cull disloyal employees. Grappling with the near-daily images of carnage in Gaza, many across the U.S. government have become disenchanted with the lofty ideas they thought they represented.

“This is the human rights atrocity of our time,” one senior diplomat told me. “I work for the department that’s responsible for this policy. I signed up for this. … I don’t deserve sympathy for it.”

The southern city of Rafah was supposed to be a safe haven for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who the IDF had forced from their homes in the north at the start of the war. When Biden learned that Netanyahu intended to invade the city this spring, he warned that the U.S. will stop sending offensive arms if the Israelis went through with it.

“It is a red line,” Biden had said, marking the first high-profile warning from the U.S.

Netanyahu invaded in May anyway. Israeli tanks rolled into the city and the IDF dropped bombs on Hamas targets, including a refugee camp, killing dozens of civilians. Biden responded by pausing a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs but otherwise resumed military support.

In late May, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to stop its assault on the city, citing the Geneva Conventions. Behind the scenes, State Department lawyers scrambled to come up with a legal basis on which Israel could continue smaller attacks in Rafah. “There is room to argue that more scaled back/targeted operations, combined with better humanitarian efforts, would not meet that threshold,” the lawyers said in a May 24 email. While it’s not unreasonable for government lawyers to defend a close ally, critics say the cable illustrates the extreme deference the U.S. affords Israel.

“The State Department has a whole raft of highly paid, very good lawyers to explain, ‘Actually this is not illegal,’ when in fact it is,” said Ari Tolany, an arms trade authority and director at the Center for International Policy, a Washington-based think tank. “Rules for thee and not for me.”

The administration says that it restrained Israel’s attack in Rafah. In a recent interview, Lew told the Times of Israel the operation ultimately resulted in relatively few civilian casualties. “It was done in a way that limited or really eliminated the friction between the United States and Israel,” he added, “but also led to a much better outcome.”

Several experts told me international law is effectively discretionary for some countries. “American policy ignores it when it’s inconvenient and adheres to it when it is convenient,” said Aaron Miller, a career State Department diplomat who worked for decades under both Democratic and Republican presidents as an adviser on Arab-Israeli negotiations. “The U.S. does not leverage or bring sustainable, credible, serious pressure to bear on any of its allies and partners,” he added, “not just Israel.”

Miller and others note that the barbarity of Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, galvanized domestic support for Israel and made it significantly easier for Biden to avoid holding the Israelis accountable as they retaliated.

There are other likely reasons for Biden’s unwillingness to impose any realistic limitations on Israel’s use of American weaponry since Oct. 7. For one, his career-long affinity for Israel — its security, people and the idea of a friendly democracy in the Middle East — is shared by many of the most powerful people in the country. (“If this Capitol crumbles to the ground, the one thing that would remain is our commitment to our aid — I don’t even call it aid, our cooperation — with Israel,” Nancy Pelosi said in 2018, weeks before resuming her role as House speaker.) That rationale aligned with the Democrats’ political goals during an election when they were wary of taking risks and upsetting large portions of the electorate, including the immensely powerful Israel lobby.

Immediately after the ICJ’s order about the Rafah invasion, officials in the State Department’s Middle East and communications divisions drafted a list of proposed public statements to acknowledge the importance of the court and express concern over civilians in the city. But Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesperson, nixed almost all of them. He told the officials in a May 24 email that those on the White House’s National Security Council “aren’t going to clear” any recognition of the ruling or criticism of Israel.

That was an early sign that the State Department was taking a back seat in shaping war policy. In its place, the NSC — largely led by Jake Sullivan, Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein — assumed a larger role. While the NSC has grown significantly in size and influence over the decades, State Department officials repeatedly told me they felt marginalized this past year.

“The NSC has final say over our messaging,” one diplomat said. “All any of us can do is what they’ll allow us to do.”

The NSC did not make its senior leaders available for an interview or respond to questions from ProPublica. Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser and brother to the State Department’s counselor, said recently it was difficult, for much of the past year, “to get the Israeli government to align with a lot of what President Biden publicly has been saying” about Gaza.

Sullivan said too many civilians have died there and the U.S. was frequently required to publicly and privately pressure Israel to improve the flow of humanitarian aid. “We believe Israel has a responsibility — as a democracy, as a country committed to the basic principle of the value of innocent life, and as a member of the international community that has obligations under international humanitarian law — that it do the utmost to protect and minimize harm to civilians.”

During another internal State Department meeting in March, top regional diplomats voiced their frustrations about messaging and appearances. Hady Amr, one of the government’s highest-ranking authorities on Palestinian affairs, said he was reluctant to address large groups about the administration’s Israel policy and he took issue with much of it, according to notes of the conversation. He warned colleagues that the sentiment in Muslim communities was turning. From a public diplomacy perspective, Amr told them, the war has been “catastrophically bad for the U.S.” (Amr did not respond to requests for comment.)

Another attendee at the meeting said they had been effectively sidelined by the NSC. A third said it was a huge amount of effort to even get permission to use the word “condemn” when talking about Israeli settlers demolishing Palestinians’ homes in the West Bank.

Such sanitizing language became common. Alex Smith, a former contractor with the U.S. Agency for International Development, said that at one point the State Department distributed NSC’s list of phrases that he and others weren’t allowed to use on internal presentations. Instead of “Palestinian residents of Jerusalem,” for example, they were meant to say “non-Israeli residents of Jerusalem.” Another official told Smith in an email, “I would recommend not discussing [international humanitarian law] at all without extensive clearances.”

A USAID spokesperson said in an email that the agency couldn’t discuss personnel matters, but the list of terms was given to the agency by the State Department as early as 2022, before the war in Gaza. The list, the spokesperson added, includes the “suggested terms that are in line with U.S. diplomatic protocol.”

Deference to Israel is not new. For decades, the U.S. has repeatedly looked the other way when Israel is accused of human rights abuses.

One of the most conspicuous paper tigers in American foreign policy is the Leahy Law, experts say. Passed more than 25 years ago, the law’s authors intended to force foreign governments to hold their own accountable for violations like torture or extrajudicial killings — or their military assistance would be restricted. The law allowed precision targeting of individual units that faced credible allegations, so that the U.S. didn’t need to cut off entire countries from U.S.-funded weapons and training. It’s essentially a blacklist.

Almost immediately, Israel got special treatment, records show. In March 1998, IDF soldiers fired on journalists covering demonstrations in the West Bank city of Hebron. Congress asked the State Department, then led by Madeleine Albright, to take action under the new law. “An Israeli official informed the U.S. Embassy that the soldiers were disciplined after the incident, but was unable to provide further information,” State Department officials responded in a letter — more than two years later — to Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the law’s namesake. “It is the Department’s conclusion that there are insufficient grounds on which to conclude that the units involved committed gross violations of human rights.”

While the country took action across the globe in South America, the Pacific Rim and elsewhere, the U.S. government has never disqualified an Israeli military unit under the law — despite voluminous evidence presented to the State Department.

In 2020, the agency even set up a special council, called the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum, to assess accusations against the country’s military and police units. The forum is composed of State Department officials with expertise in human rights, arms transfers and the Middle East who review public allegations of human rights abuses before making referrals to the Secretary of State. While it had ambitious goals to finally hold Israeli units accountable, the forum became widely known as just another layer of bureaucracy that slowed down the process and protected Israel.

Current and former diplomats told me that U.S. leaders are fundamentally unwilling to follow through on the law and cut off units from American-funded weapons. Instead, they have created multiple processes that give the appearance of accountability while simultaneously undermining any potential results, the experts said.

“It’s like walking toward the horizon,” said Charles Blaha, a former director at the State Department who served on the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum. “You can always walk toward it but you will never ever get there.”

“I really believed in the Israeli military justice system and I really believed that the State Department was acting in good faith,” he added. “But both of those things were wrong.”

A review of the vetting forum’s emails and meeting minutes from 2021 through 2022 shows even the most high-profile and seemingly egregious cases fall into a bureaucratic black hole.

After the IDF was accused of killing Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in May 2022, videos circulated on the internet of Israeli police units beating pallbearers at her funeral. “It is indeed very difficult to watch,” a deputy assistant secretary wrote in an email to a member of the forum. Another member told colleagues, “I think this would be what is actionable for the funeral procession itself as we wait for more info on circumstances of death and whether this would trigger Leahy ineligibility.”

Neither Akleh’s killing, nor the funeral beatings, led to Leahy determinations against Israel.

For years, lawmakers pushed the U.S. government to take action on Akleh’s case. Tim Rieser, a senior foreign policy aide who helped draft the Leahy Law, recently held a meeting with State Department officials to discuss the case again. The officials in the meeting again punted. “We’re talking about an American journalist who was killed by an Israeli soldier and nothing happened,” he said. “They are walking out the door on Jan. 20th and they haven’t implemented the law.”

In another case considered by the forum, a 15-year-old boy from the West Bank said he was tortured and raped in the Israeli detention facility Al-Mascobiyya, or Russian Compound. For years, the State Department had been told about widespread abuses in that facility and others like it.

Military Court Watch, a local nonprofit organization of attorneys, collected testimony from more than 1,100 minors who had been detained between 2013 and 2023. Most said they were strip searched and many said they were beaten. Some teens tried to kill themselves in solitary confinement. IDF soldiers recalled children so scared that they peed themselves during arrests.

At the Russian Compound, a 14-year-old said his interrogator shocked and beat him in the legs with sticks to elicit information about a car fire. A 15-year-old said he was handcuffed with another boy. “An Israeli policeman then walked into the room and beat the hell out of me and the other boy,” he said. A 12-year-old girl said she was put into a small cell with cockroaches.

Military Court Watch routinely shared its information with the State Department, according to Gerard Horton, one of the group’s co-founders. But nothing ever came of it. “They receive all our reports and we name the facilities,” he told me. “It goes up the food chain and it gets political. Everyone knows what’s going on and obviously no action is taken.”

Even the State Department’s own public human rights reports acknowledge widespread allegations of abuse in Israeli prisons. Citing nonprofits, prisoner testimony and media reports, the agency wrote last year that “detainees held by Israel were subjected to physical and sexual violence, threats, intimidation, severely restricted access to food and water.”

In the summer of 2021, the State Department reached out to the Israeli government and asked about the 15-year-old who said he was raped at the Russian Compound. The next day, the Israeli government raided the nonprofit that had originally documented the allegation, Defense for Children International — Palestine, and then designated the group a terrorist organization.

As a result, U.S. human rights officials said they were prohibited from speaking to DCIP. “A large part of the frustration was that we were unable to access Palestinian civil society because most NGOs” — nongovernmental organizations — “were considered terrorist organizations,” said Mike Casey, a former U.S. diplomat in Jerusalem who resigned last year. “All these groups were essentially the premier human rights organizations, and we were not able to meet with them.”

Miller, the State Department spokesperson, said in his statement that the agency has not “blanketly prohibited” officials from speaking with groups that document allegations of human rights abuses and they continue to work with organizations in Israel and the West Bank.

After the raid on DCIP, a member of the forum emailed his superior at the State Department and said the U.S. should push to get an explanation for the raid from the Israelis and “re-raise our original request for info on the underlying allegation.”

But almost two years went by and there were no arrests, while those on the forum struggled to get basic information about the case. Then, in the early months of the Israel war on Hamas, another State Department official reached out to DCIP and tried to reengage, according to a recording of the conversation.

“As you can imagine, it’s been a bit touchy here,” the official said on the call, explaining the months without correspondence. “The Israeli government’s not going to dictate to me who I can talk to, but my superiors can.”

The IDF eventually told the State Department it did not find evidence of a sexual assault but reprimanded the guard for kicking a chair during the teenager’s interrogation. To date, the U.S. has not cut off the Russian Compound on Leahy grounds.

In late April, there was surprising news: Blinken was reportedly set to take action against Netzah Yehuda, a notorious ultraorthodox IDF battalion, under the Leahy law.

The Leahy forum had recommended several cases to him. But for months, he sat on the recommendations. One of them was the case of Omar Assad.

On a cold night in January 2022, Netzah Yehuda soldiers pulled over Assad, an elderly Palestinian American who was on his way home from playing cards in the West Bank. They bound, blindfolded and gagged him and led him into a construction site, according to local investigators. He was found dead shortly after.

After the killing, DAWN, an advocacy group founded by the slain Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, compiled a dossier of evidence on the case, including testimony from family and witnesses, as well as a medical examiner’s report. The report found Assad had traumatic injuries to the head and other injuries that caused a stress-induced heart attack. The group delivered the dossier to the State Department’s Leahy forum.

The dossier also included information about other incidents. For years, Netzah Yehuda has been accused of violent crimes in the West Bank, including killing unarmed Palestinians. They have also been convicted of torturing and abusing detainees in custody.

By late 2023, after the Oct. 7 attacks, the experts on the forum decided that Assad’s case met all the conditions of the Leahy law: a human rights violation had occurred and the soldiers responsible had not been adequately punished. The forum recommended that the battalion should no longer receive any American-funded weapons or training until the perpetrators are brought to justice.

ProPublica published an article in the spring of 2024 about Blinken sitting on the recommendations. But when he signaled his intention to take action shortly after, the Israelis responded with fury. “Sanctions must not be imposed on the Israel Defense Forces!” Netanyahu posted on X. “The intention to impose a sanction on a unit in the IDF is the height of absurdity and a moral low.”

The pressure campaign, which also reportedly came from Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. and Lew, the ambassador, appears to have worked. For months, Blinken punted on an official decision. Then, in August, the State Department announced that Netzah Yehuda would not be cut off from military aid after all because the U.S. had received new information that the IDF had effectively “remediated” the case. Two soldiers involved were removed from active duty and made ineligible to serve in the reserve, but there is no indication that anyone was charged with a crime.

Miller, the spokesperson, said the IDF also took steps to avoid similar incidents in the future, like enhanced screening and a two-week educational seminar for Netzah Yehuda recruits.

“In seven and a half years as director of the State Department office that implements the Leahy law worldwide,” Blaha wrote shortly after the announcement, “I have never seen a single case in which mere administrative measures constituted sufficient remediation.”

In its statement to ProPublica, the Israeli government did not address individual cases, but said, “All of the incidents in question were thoroughly examined by the American administration, which concluded that Israel took remedial measures when necessary.”

Last summer, CNN documented how commanders in the battalion have been promoted to senior positions in the IDF, where they train ground troops and run operations in Gaza. A weapons expert told me the guns that Netzah Yehuda soldiers have been photographed holding were likely made in the U.S.

Later in the year, Younis Tirawi, a Palestinian journalist who runs a popular account on X, posted videos showing IDF soldiers who recorded themselves rummaging through children’s clothing inside a home and demolishing a mosque’s minaret. Tirawi said the soldiers were in Netzah Yehuda. (ProPublica could not independently verify the soldiers’ units.)

Hebrew text added to one of the videos said, “We won’t leave a trace of them.”

On Nov. 14, more than a year after the war started, Human Rights Watch released a report and said that Israel’s forced displacement of Palestinians is widespread, systematic and intentional. It accused the Israelis of a crime against humanity, writing, “Israel’s actions appear to also meet the definition of ethnic cleansing.” (A former Israeli defense minister has also made that allegation.)

During a news briefing later that day, reporters pressed a State Department spokesperson, Vedant Patel, on the report’s findings.

Patel said the U.S. government disagrees and has not seen evidence of forced displacement in Gaza.

“That,” he said, “certainly would be a red line.”

ProPublica

Brett Murphy has been a reporter on ProPublica’s national desk since 2022. That year, he published a series of articles uncovering a new junk science in the justice system known as 911 call analysis. The reporting won a George Polk Award, among other honors.

In 2023, he and colleagues revealed how a set of politically connected billionaires provided lavish gifts and travel to Supreme Court justices over many years. Those stories won the Pulitzer Prize gold medal for public service.

Murphy joined ProPublica after working as an investigative reporter at USA Today, where he covered labor, criminal justice and the federal government. There, Murphy won several journalism awards, including the International Livingston Award for his investigation into a U.S. military attack on its own security forces in Afghanistan, which killed dozens of civilians, including as many as 60 children. Murphy’s stories on widespread labor abuses in California’s port trucking industry was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize and spurred a raft of reforms. Before USA Today, Murphy covered courts and hurricanes for the Naples Daily News and other Gannett newspapers. He also co-founded the “Local Matters” newsletter, a weekly roundup of the best investigative and watchdog reporting from local newsrooms around the country.

Murphy is based in Brooklyn.

A small, hardworking contingent of elected officials is indeed trying to roll back the nuclear arms race and make it harder for such world-ending weaponry ever to be used again, including stalwarts like Senator Ed Markey (D-MA), Representative John Garamendi (D-CA), and other members of the Congressional Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control Working Group. But they face ever stiffer headwinds from a resurgent network of nuclear hawks who want to build more kinds of nuclear weapons and ever more of them. And mind you, that would all be in addition to the Pentagon’s current plans for spending up to $2 trillion over the next three decades to create a whole new generation of nuclear weapons, stoking a dangerous new nuclear arms race.

There are many drivers of this push for a larger, more dangerous arsenal — from the misguided notion that more nuclear weapons will make us safer to an entrenched network of companies, governmental institutions, members of Congress, and policy pundits who will profit (directly or indirectly) from an accelerated nuclear arms race. One indicator of the current state of affairs is the resurgence of former Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, who spent 18 years in Congress opposing even the most modest efforts to control nuclear weapons before he went on to work as a lobbyist and policy advocate for the nuclear weapons complex.

His continuing prominence in debates over nuclear policy — evidenced most recently by his position as vice-chair of a congressionally-appointed commission that sought to legitimize an across-the-board nuclear buildup — is a testament to our historical amnesia about the risks posed by nuclear weapons.

Senator Strangelove

Republican Jon Kyl was elected to the Senate from Arizona in 1995 and served in that body until 2013, plus a brief stint in late 2018 to fill out the term of the late Senator John McCain.

One of Kyl’s signature accomplishments in his early years in office was his role in lobbying fellow Republican senators to vote against ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which went down to a 51 to 48 Senate defeat in October 1999. That treaty banned explosive nuclear testing and included monitoring and verification procedures meant to ensure that its members met their obligations. Had it been widely adopted, it might have slowed the spread of nuclear weapons, now possessed by nine countries, and prevented a return to the days when aboveground testing spread cancer-causing radiation to downwind communities.

The defeat of the CTBT marked the beginning of a decades-long process of dismantling the global nuclear arms control system, launched by the December 2001 withdrawal of President George W. Bush’s administration from the Nixon-era Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty. That treaty was designed to prevent a “defense-offense” nuclear arms race in which one side’s pursuit of anti-missile defenses sparks the other side to build more — and ever more capable — nuclear-armed missiles. James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace called the withdrawal from the ABM Treaty an “epic mistake” that fueled a new nuclear arms race. Kyl argued otherwise, claiming the withdrawal removed “a straightjacket from our national security.”

The end of the ABM treaty created the worst of both worlds — an incentive for adversaries to build up their nuclear arsenals coupled with an abject failure to develop weaponry that could actually defend the United States in the event of a real-world nuclear attack.

Then, in August 2019, during the first Trump administration, the U.S. withdrew from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which prohibited the deployment of medium-range missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers. That treaty had been particularly important because it eliminated the danger of having missiles in Europe that could reach their targets in a very brief time frame, a situation that could shorten the trigger on a possible nuclear confrontation.

Then-Senator Kyl also used the eventual pullout from the INF treaty as a reason to exit yet another nuclear agreement, the New START treaty, co-signing a letter with 24 of his colleagues urging the Trump administration to reject New START. He was basically suggesting that lifting one set of safeguards against a possible nuclear confrontation was somehow a reason to junk a separate treaty that had ensured some stability in the U.S.-Russian strategic nuclear balance.

Finally, in November 2023, NATO suspended its observance of a treaty that had limited the number of troops the Western alliance and Russia could deploy in Europe after the government of Vladimir Putin withdrew from the treaty earlier that year in the midst of his ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

The last U.S.-Russian arms control agreement, New START, caps the strategic nuclear warheads of the two countries at 1,550 each and has monitoring mechanisms to make sure each side is holding up its obligations. That treaty is currently hanging by a thread. It expires in 2026 and there is no indication that Russia is inclined to negotiate an extension in the context of its current state of relations with Washington.

As early as December 2020, Kyl was angling to get the government to abandon any plans to extend New START, coauthoring an op-ed on the subject for the Fox News website. He naturally ignored the benefits of an agreement aimed at reducing the chance of an accidental nuclear conflict, even as he made misleading statements about it being unbalanced in favor of Russia.

Back in 2010, when New START was first under consideration in the Senate, Kyl played a key role in extracting a pledge from the Obama administration to throw an extra $80 billion at the nuclear warhead complex in exchange for Republican support of the treaty. Even after that concession was made, Kyl continued to work tirelessly to build opposition to the treaty. If, in the end, he failed to block its Senate ratification, he did help steer billions in additional funding to the nuclear weapons complex.

Our Man from Northrop Grumman

In 2017, between stints in the Senate, Kyl worked as a lobbyist with the law firm Covington and Burling, where one of his clients was Northrop Grumman, the largest beneficiary of the Pentagon’s nuclear weapons spending binge. That company is the lead contractor on both the future B-21 nuclear bomber and Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). The Sentinel program drew widespread attention recently when it was revealed that, in just a few years, its estimated cost had jumped by an astonishing 81%, pushing the price for building those future missiles to more than $140 billion (with tens of billions more needed to operate them in their years of “service” to come).

That stunning cost spike for the Sentinel triggered a Pentagon review that could have led to a cancellation or major restructuring of the program. Instead, the Pentagon opted to stay the course despite the enormous price tag, asserting that the missile is “essential to U.S. national security and is the best option to meet the needs of our warfighters.”

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Independent experts disagree. Former Secretary of Defense William Perry, for instance, has pointed out that such ICBMs are “some of the most dangerous weapons we have” because a president, warned of a possible nuclear attack by an enemy power, would have only minutes to decide whether to launch them, greatly increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear war triggered by a false alarm. Perry is hardly alone. In July 2024, 716 scientists, including 10 Nobel laureates and 23 members of the National Academies, called for the Sentinel to be canceled, describing the system as “expensive, dangerous, and unnecessary.”

Meanwhile, as vice-chair of a congressionally mandated commission on the future of U.S. nuclear weapons policy, Kyl has been pushing a worst-case scenario regarding the current nuclear balance that could set the stage for producing even larger numbers of (Northrop Grumman-built) nuclear bombers, putting multiple warheads on (Northrop Grumman-built) Sentinel missiles, expanding the size of the nuclear warhead complex, and emplacing yet more tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. His is a call, in other words, to return to the days of the Cold War nuclear arms race at a moment when the lack of regular communication between Washington and Moscow can only increase the risk of a nuclear confrontation.

Kyl does seem to truly believe that building yet more nuclear weapons will indeed bolster this country’s security and he’s hardly alone when it comes to Congress or, for that matter, the next Trump administration. Consider that a clear sign that reining in the nuclear arms race will involve not only making the construction of nuclear weapons far less lucrative, but also confronting the distinctly outmoded and unbearably dangerous arguments about their alleged strategic value.

The Advocate

In October 2023, when the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on a report from the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission, it had an opportunity for a serious discussion of nuclear strategy and spending, and how best to prevent a nuclear war. Given the stakes for all of us should a nuclear war between the United States and Russia break out — up to an estimated 90 million of us dead within the first few days of such a conflict and up to five billion lives lost once radiation sickness and reduced food production from the resulting planetary “nuclear winter” kick in — you might have hoped for a wide-ranging debate on the implications of the commission’s proposals.

Unfortunately, much of the discussion during the hearing involved senators touting weapons systems or facilities producing them located in their states, with little or no analysis of what would best protect Americans and our allies. For example, Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) stressed the importance of Raytheon’s SM-6 missile — produced in Arizona, of course — and commended the commission for proposing to spend more on that program. Senator Jackie Rosen (R-NV) praised the role of the Nevada National Security Site, formerly known as the Nevada Test Site, for making sure such warheads were reliable and would explode as intended in a nuclear conflict. You undoubtedly won’t be shocked to learn that she then called for more funding to address what she described as “significant delays” in upgrading that Nevada facility. Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) proudly pointed to the billions in military work being done in his state: “In Alabama we build submarines, ships, airplanes, missiles. You name it, we build it.” Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) requested that witnesses confirm how absolutely essential the Kansas City Plant, which makes non-nuclear parts for nuclear weapons, remains for American security.

And so it went until Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) asked what the nuclear buildup recommended by the commission would cost. She suggested that, if past history is any guide, much of the funding proposed by the commission would be wasted: “I’m willing to spend what it takes to keep America safe, but I’m certainly not comfortable with a blank check for programs that already have a history of gross mismanagement.”

The answer from Kyl and his co-chair Marilyn Creedon was that the commission had not even bothered to estimate the costs of any of what it was suggesting and that its recommendations should be considered regardless of the price. This, of course, was good news for nuclear weapons contractors like Northrop Grumman, but bad news for taxpayers.

The Brink of Armageddon?

Nuclear hardliners frequently suggest that anyone advocating the reduction or elimination of nuclear arsenals is outrageously naive and thoroughly out of touch with the realities of great power politics. As it happens though, the truly naive ones are the nuclear hawks who insist on clinging to the dubious notion that vast (and still spreading) stores of nuclear weaponry can be kept around indefinitely without ever being used again, by accident or design.

There is another way. Even as Washington, Moscow, and Beijing continue the production of a new generation of nuclear weapons — such weaponry is also possessed by France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom — a growing number of nations have gone on record against any further nuclear arms race and in favor of eliminating such weapons altogether. In fact, the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has now been ratified by 73 countries.

As Beatrice Fihn, former director of the Nobel-prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or ICAN, pointed out in a recent essay in the New York Times, there are numerous examples of how collective action has transformed “seemingly impossible situations.” She cited the impact of the antinuclear movement of the 1980s in reversing a superpower nuclear arms race and setting the stage for sharp reductions in the numbers of such weapons, as well as a successful international effort to bring the nuclear ban treaty into existence. She noted that a crucial first step in bringing the potentially catastrophic nuclear arms race under control would involve changing the way we talk about such weapons, especially debunking the myth that they are somehow “magical tools” that make us all more secure. She also emphasized the importance of driving home that this planet’s growing nuclear arsenals are evidence that all too many of those in power are acquiescing in a reckless strategy “based on threatening to commit global collective suicide.”

The next few years will be crucial in determining whether ever growing numbers of nuclear weapons remain entrenched in this country’s budgets and its global strategy for decades to come or whether common sense can carry the day and spark the reduction and eventual elimination of such instruments of mass devastation. A vigorous public debate on the risks of an accelerated nuclear arms race would be a necessary first step toward pulling the world back from the brink of Armageddon.

Copyright 2025 William D. Hartung