Gaza war: Israel is the big loser; Americans also lose; Iran as winner.
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.png00Kevin MacDonaldhttps://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.pngKevin MacDonald2024-05-25 11:30:072024-05-25 12:05:19John Mearsheimer: “The Truth about Israel”
Politically incorrect data blogger Steve Sailer has just released a new book of essays on a variety of taboo subjects which is well worth reading. Most pieces in this collection are already available from various outlets including VDARE and Taki’s Magazine. Unfortunately, Noticing: An Essential Reader 1973-2023 does not actually cover 50 years of essays as the subtitle implies. The earliest is from 1992, but any but the most obsessive fans will still find something here they have not seen before.
Before readers contact their lawyers I should mention that Sailer did in fact publish something in 1973, namely a brief letter to the editor of National Review which he reproduces in the introduction. However, this was before he finished high school, and he did not begin publishing for pay until around 1990. As he explains, he had an interest in data such as baseball statistics from a very young age. This initially led him to work in data analysis for a marketing research company, but he also noticed broader patterns in human affairs.
As a child he was very impressed by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a presidential advisor who hosted a seminar at Harvard covering the latest data on the question of school funding and school performance. A study commissioned by the Johnson administration known as the Coleman Report had come to a politically incorrect conclusion: when it came to doing well in school, money was far less important than other factors, whether cultural or genetic, on the part of the students themselves. Sailer’s writing career has largely followed similar lines, as he rejects the standard dogma that all people are equal. However, he also rejects the idea that, as he paraphrased a sociologist of the time, “people aren’t equal, and I just can’t stand it.” Instead he has made a career of calmly and politely noticing facts which the current elite brands as racist, sexist, and so on.
One of the less expected areas of human biodiversity covered here is cousin marriage, which is very common in the Muslim world but quite unusual in the West. His essay on the topic was written in the context of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which it was often claimed would bring the country freedom and democracy. There was some public skepticism of the idea that Iraq would become a “Jeffersonian democracy,” but few were willing to explain why, as that would be racist. Sailer explains that through the longstanding custom of inbreeding, Muslim countries have become especially unsuited to our system of government.
All people have a natural instinct to prefer those who are genetically similar to themselves, but how strong this instinct is varies depending on how similar they are. Due to high rates of inbreeding over many generations, Muslims tend to be more similar to their extended families than White people in the West are. Compared to their own families, even their neighbors are relatively alien to them. This leads to the highly clannish mindset reflected in the Arab expression “me against my brother, my brother and me against my cousin, my cousin and me against the world.”
Individualist Western societies, by contrast, have historically had relatively weak family ties apart from close relatives, and they have depended on a common national identity — “me and nation,” if not necessarily against the world, at least having their own distinct culture and shared interests. Without this, there is little basis for any sense of the common good, and thus for trust between the people and the government, or even between members of the same community. Instead there is constant conflict between different clans, tribes or sects.
In such an environment, what appeal can there be in concepts such as impartial justice or free and fair elections? They may have elections, but these will only be tribal warfare by other means. Why should the loser feel bound to respect the results? If one group has power, they will only use it to enrich themselves and abuse others. This is what we seen in many “nations” in the Middle East and Africa. Of course, there may be other reasons for this as well — the average IQ is significantly lower in these regions than in the West, and low IQ is correlated with corruption and nepotism, but Sailer leaves the subject of intelligence for other essays.
Another unexpected topic is golf course design. This is not a subject that appeals to mainstream journalists for several reasons. It would be hard to frame the sport as “inclusive”— not only do many golf courses cost over $10 million to construct, but many are the property of “exclusive clubs accused of racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism.” Golf players tend to be White, male, gentile, and straight, with the architects being largely Scotsmen.
There is also the question of aesthetics. Modern artists and architects often aim to be offensive, creating something deliberately unattractive to most viewers. Sailer argues that the appearance of golf courses, by contrast, reflects common human instincts. He refers to one study in which people from 14 countries were surveyed about what they would “like to see in a painting.” The two artists who commissioned the polls then produced the “most wanted painting” for each country based on the responses. Most of the resulting works were landscapes, and shared the common elements of lakes, grass, trees and hills or mountains. As Sailer puts it they “look remarkably like golf courses.” Other research has confirmed that people “respond strongly to landscapes with open, grassy vegetation, scattered strands of branchy trees, water, changes in elevation.” One theory is that this reflects the African savannah on which the first hominids evolved, to which we still have an instinctive attachment.
Speaking of Africa, Sailer covers Black-White differences in several essays. His writing on IQ mentions the 15-point difference between the Black and White averages, while other pieces cover Black advantages in athletics. His attitude toward Blacks may be jarring to some White readers. He effusively praises Black athletes and celebrates the desegregation of sports. Blacks are in some ways “superior” as he puts it, while Whites are merely more “nerdy.” Some of his comments endorsing interracial marriage are likely to raise the blood pressure of readers of any color. However, there is no reason to believe any of this is insincere, and it makes it difficult for the normie reader to dismiss his writing as motivated by “hate” or “White supremacism.”
The topic most likely to be already familiar to readers is the much higher crime rate among Blacks as compared to White Americans, but the author addresses this in a particularly original way in one essay. In 1999, a less politically correct time, the liberal magazine Slate published a debate between Sailer and economist Steven Levitt over the latter’s theory that the legalization of abortion had reduced crime. Levitt compared crime rates in 1985 and 1997 and concluded that abortion had prevented many future criminals from being born.
As Sailer explains, the theory was superficially plausible, as Blacks had three times the abortion rate of Whites while having eight times the murder rate. However, there was a major spike in crime in the intervening years in connection with the popularity of crack cocaine and the associated gang warfare. In 1993 the murder rate among 14-to-17-year-olds, who were born in the 1970s after Roe v. Wade, was 3.6 times the rate for the same demographic in 1984. The contrast was even higher for Black males in particular. Sailer argues that the same cohort had lower crime rates by 1997 partly because so many of them were already in jail or dead.
There is a surprisingly balanced section dealing with Jews included here. The first of this group of essays is a review of psychologist Richard Lynn’s The Chosen People, a book analyzing Jewish accomplishments in various fields in an admiring manner. Lynn found Jews dramatically overrepresented in Nobel Prizes and numerous professions, as well as in counts of prominent individuals. He attributed this to the high average IQ of the Ashkenazi, the majority ethnic group among Jews globally, which based on numerous studies he estimated at 110. However, he conceded that their intelligence alone would only account for them being overrepresented by about 2 to 1 in the professions, and yet the actual ratio is often much higher. Lynn attributes this to “strong motivational and work-ethic qualities,” and cites data suggesting Jewish students are more likely to aspire to both a high income and a high status in society.
The next essay however follows from the first in an unexpected way, although it was written earlier. If Jews have been so successful, why is it still taboo to say so? Sailer notes that the mainstream representation of Jews is still that of a vulnerable minority. He cites a 2006 article by Jewish commentator Noah Millman who was surprised to hear a rabbi admit in a sermon that Jews had a great deal of influence in the US. Millman was used to hearing Jewish leaders argue that Jews should identify with other supposed victim groups because they themselves are in a weak position — historical victims who might be persecuted again in the future. Yet as Sailer points out, Jews are only 2% of the US population and yet made up 35% of those on the 2009 Forbes 400 list of the country’s wealthiest individuals. Almost half of The Atlantic’s list of the 50 most important pundits were Jewish. Sailer credits this contradictory state of affairs to a Jewish elite who seem quite intolerant of criticism or even noticing on the part of gentiles, for reasons that are left to the imagination.
Another essay makes similar points while returning to the subject of golf. Sailer covers the common complaint that Jews were unfairly excluded from White Anglo-Saxon Protestant country golf clubs, and so were forced to establish their own organizations. He goes into depth on the subject and makes several interesting points. First, it is unlikely that many Jews would have preferred WASP country clubs to their own. Like most people of any ethnic group, they enjoyed being surrounded by their own kind. Their own clubs were exclusive as well, with a 1962 report by the Anti-Defamation League, of all people, coming to the conclusion that Jewish clubs actually discriminated against Christians more than vice versa. Jewish establishments reflected the cultural preferences of Jews— in comparison with their WASP counterparts they focused more on eating than drinking and clubhouses than golf courses. Many were even better funded than their gentile equivalents.
Second, although many Jews were indeed rejected from country clubs due to their origins, this often had nothing to do with gentiles. Many cities had two Jewish country clubs, one German and one Russian, with the German one generally being considered the superior one. German Jews for many years excluded Russian Jews, whom they considered crass and uncouth.
How, then, did the country club myth develop? Sailer argues that just as the Israeli government whips up public hostility towards neighboring countries as a means of distracting from domestic issues, Jewish elites in the US promote an exaggerated image of hostile gentiles in an attempt at “healing gaps within the Jewish community by castigating Christians.” Unfortunately neither the Anti-Defamation League nor the Southern Poverty Law Center has filed for bankruptcy in the time since these essays were written, so the basic dynamic remains unchanged.
Sailer ends the book with an interesting piece entitled “What If I’m Right.” Here he covers the implications of his observations in a typically modest manner. Many liberals claim that if noticing were to be normalized, this would justify drastic policies such as slavery or even genocide. Sailer finds this baffling, although he gives them the benefit of the doubt in assuming they are not projecting their own desire to commit such acts. Instead he posits that they feel a haughty sense of superiority to other Whites based on their own IQs, so they assume that recognition of such differences between races would mean similar contempt on the part of Whites toward Blacks.
As many of his essays clearly show, this is not the case. He is surprisingly sympathetic toward minorities even while being blunt about their shortcomings. Obviously he takes an interest in these issues because he would prefer to see less crime and fewer untimely deaths, not because he means to exalt Whites or vilify other races. If anything, he has embarrassingly little attachment to his own race. As Scott Greer has already pointed out, he would do better to take an interest in Whites as such, rather than the colorblind “citizenism” he currently advocates. The latter could further erode Whites’ ability to take their own side while being increasingly outnumbered and overwhelmed by other groups.
Steve Sailer has produced a well-written set of essays which can introduce a non-ideological reader to the facts we are not supposed to notice about human nature. Denial of these facts has been the basis of disastrous policies, as he has often pointed out. But even aside from policy, it is degrading to attempt to believe lies, particularly regarding critical facts of life. Sailer’s book should be uplifting and enlightening to anyone exposed to the modern mendacity around diversity and equality.
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.png00Howe Abbot-Hisshttps://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.pngHowe Abbot-Hiss2024-05-25 07:35:562024-05-25 07:35:56“Noticing” by Steve Sailer
The Left is addicted to identity politics and conservatives want to help their business allies (and don’t want to be seen as racist). Once again, they will enact a bill attempting to make up for lower Black and Latino IQ by mandating it.
More than two-thirds of Americans think the Supreme Court was rightto hold Harvard’s race-based admissions policy unlawful. But the minority who disagree have no doubt about their own moral authority, and there’s every reason to believe that they intend to undo the Court’s decision at the earliest opportunity.[D]isparate impacts are everywhere in the real world, and so is the temptation to solve the problem with quotas. The difficulty is that, as the polls about the Harvard decision reveal, most Americans don’t like the solution. They think it’s unfair. As Justice Scalia noted in 2009, the incentives for racial quotas set the stage for a “war between disparate impact and equal protection.” Ricci v. DeStefano, 557 U.S. 557, 594 (2009). …
In fact, undoing the Harvard admissions decision is the least of it. Republicans and Democrats in Congress have embraced a precooked “privacy” bill that will impose race and gender quotas not just on academic admissions but on practically every private and public decision that matters to ordinary Americans. The provision could be adopted without scrutiny in a matter of weeks; that’s because it is packaged as part of a bipartisan bill setting federal privacy standards—something that has been out of reach in Washington for decades. And it looks as though the bill breaks the deadlock by giving Republicans some of the federal preemption their business allies want while it gives Democrats and left-wing advocacy groups a provision that will quietly overrule the Supreme Court’s Harvard decision and impose identity-based quotas on a wide swath of American life. …
Not surprisingly, quota advocates don’t want to fight such a war in the light of day. That’s presumably why APRA obscures the mechanism by which it imposes quotas.
Here’s how it works. APRA’s quota provision, section 13 of APRA, says that any entity that “knowingly develops” an algorithm for its business must evaluate that algorithm “to reduce the risk of” harm. And it defines algorithmic “harm” to include causing a “disparate impact” on the basis of “race, color, religion, national origin, sex, or disability” (plus, weirdly, “political party registration status”). APRA Sec. 13(c)(1)(B)(vi)(IV)&(V).
At bottom, it’s as simple as that. If you use an algorithm for any important decision about people—to hire, promote, advertise, or otherwise allocate goods and services—you must ensure that you’ve reduced the risk of disparate impact.
The closer one looks, however, the worse it gets. At every turn, APRA expands the sweep of quotas. For example, APRA does not confine itself to hiring and promotion. It provides that, within two years of the bill’s enactment, institutions must reduce any disparate impact the algorithm causes in access to housing, education, employment, healthcare, insurance, or credit.
No one escapes. The quota mandate covers practically every business and nonprofit in the country, other than financial institutions. APRA sec. 2(10). And its regulatory sweep is not limited, as you might think, to sophisticated and mysterious artificial intelligence algorithms. A “covered algorithm” is broadly defined as any computational process that helps humans make a decision about providing goods or services or information. APRA, Section 2 (8). It covers everything from a ground-breaking AI model to an aging Chromebook running a spreadsheet. In order to call this a privacy provision, APRA says that a covered algorithm must process personal data, but that means pretty much every form of personal data that isn’t deidentified, with the exception of employee data. APRA, Section 2 (9).
Actually, it gets worse. Remember that some disparate impacts in the employment context can be justified by business necessity. Not under APRA, which doesn’t recognize any such defense. So if you use a spreadsheet to rank lifeguard applicants based on their swim test, and minorities do poorly on the test, your spreadsheet must be adjusted until the scores for minorities are the same as everyone else’s.
To see how APRA would work, let’s try it on Harvard. Is the university a covered entity? Sure, it’s a nonprofit. Do its decisions affect access to an important opportunity? Yes, education. Is it handling nonpublic personal data about applicants? For sure. Is it using a covered algorithm? Almost certainly, even if all it does is enter all the applicants’ data in a computer to make it easier to access and evaluate. Does the algorithm cause harm in the shape of disparate impact? Again, objective criteria will almost certainly result in underrepresentation of various racial, religious, gender, or disabled identity groups. To reduce the harm, Harvard will be forced to adopt admissions standards that boost black and Hispanic applicants past Asian and white students with comparable records. The sound of champagne corks popping in Cambridge will reach all the way to Capitol Hill.
Of course, Asian students could still take Harvard to court [Why not White people?]. There is a section of APRA that seems to make it unlawful to discriminate on the basis of race and ethnicity. APRA Sec. 13(a)(1). But in fact APRA offers the nondiscrimination mandate only to take it away. It carves out an explicit exception for any covered entity that engages in self-testing “to prevent or mitigate unlawful discrimination” or to” diversify an applicant, participant, or customer pool.” Harvard will no doubt say that it adopted its quotas after its “self-testing” revealed a failure to achieve diversity in its “participant pool,” otherwise known as its freshman class.
Even if the courts don’t agree, the Federal Trade Commission can ride to the rescue. APRA gives the Commission authority to issue guidance or regulations interpreting APRA – including issuing a report on best practices for reducing the harm of disparate impact. APRA Sec. 13(c)(5)&(6). What are the odds that a Washington bureaucracy won’t endorse race-based decisions as a “best practice”?
It’s worth noting that, while I’ve been dunking on Harvard, I could have said the same about AT&T or General Electric or Amazon. In fact, big companies with lots of personal data face added scrutiny under APRA; they must do a quasipublic “impact assessment” explaining how they are mitigating any disparate impact caused by their algorithms. That creates heavy pressure to announce publicly that they’ve eliminated all algorithmic harm. That will be an added incentive to implement quotas, but as with Harvard, many big companies don’t really need an added incentive. They all have active internal DEI bureaucracies that will be happy to inject even more race and gender consciousness into corporate life, as long the injection is immune from legal challenge.
And immune it will be. As we’ve seen, APRA provides strong legal cover for institutions that adopt quota systems. And I predict that, for those actually using artificial intelligence, there will be an added layer of obfuscation that will stop legal challenges before they get started. It seems likely that the burden of mitigating algorithmic harm will quickly be transferred from the companies buying and using algorithms to the companies that build and sell them. Algorithm vendors are already required by many buyers to certify that their products are bias-free. That will soon become standard practice. With APRA on the books, there won’t be any doubt that the easiest and safest way to “eliminate bias” will be to build quotas in.
That won’t be hard to do. Artificial intelligence and machine learning vendors can use their training and feedback protocols to achieve proportional representation of minorities, women, and the disabled.
During training, AI models are evaluated based on how often they serve up the “right” answers. Thus, a model designed to help promote engineers may be asked to evaluate the resumes of actual engineers who’ve gone through the corporate promotion process. Its initial guesses about which engineers should be promoted will be compared to actual corporate experience. If the machine picks candidates who performed badly, its recommendation will be marked wrong and it will have to try again. Eventually the machine will recognize the pattern of characteristics, some not at all obvious, that make for a promotable engineer.
But everything depends on the training, which can be constrained by arbitrary factors. A company that wanted to maximize two things—the skill of its senior engineers and their intramural softball prowess—could easily train its algorithm to downgrade engineers who can’t throw or hit. The algorithm would eventually produce the best set of senior managers consistent with winning the intramural softball tournament every year. Of course, the model could just as easily be trained to produce the best set of senior engineers consistent with meeting the company’s demographic quotas. And the beauty from the company’s point of view is that the demographic goals never need to be acknowledged once the training has been completed – probably in some remote facility owned by its vendor. That uncomfortable topic can be passed over in silence. Indeed, it may even be hidden from the company that purchases the product, and it will certainly be hidden from anyone the algorithm disadvantages.
To be fair, unlike its 2023 predecessor, APRA at least nods in the direction of helping the algorithm’s victims. A new Section 14 requires that institutions tell people if they are going to be judged by an algorithm, provide them with “meaningful information” about how the algorithm makes decisions, and give them an opportunity to opt out.
This is better than nothing, for sure. But not by much. Companies won’t have much difficulty providing a lot of information about how its algorithms work without ever quite explaining who gets the short end of the disparate-impact stick. Indeed, as we’ve seen, the company that’s supposed to provide the information may not even know how much race or gender preference has been built into its outcomes. More likely it will be told by its vendor, and will repeat, that the algorithm has been trained and certified to be bias-free.
What if a candidate suspects the algorithm is stacked against him? How does section 14’s assurance that he can opt out help? Going back to our Harvard example, suppose that an Asian student figures out that the algorithm is radically discounting his achievements because of his race. If he opts out, what will happen? He won’t be subjected to the algorithm. Instead, presumably, he’ll be put in a pool with other dissidents and evaluated by humans—who will almost certainly wonder about his choice and may well presume that he’s a racist. Certainly, opting out provides the applicant no protection, given the power and information imbalance between him and Harvard. Yet that is all that APRA offers.
Let’s be blunt; this is nuts. Overturning the Supreme Court’s Harvard admissions decision in such a sneaky way is bad enough, but imposing Harvard’s identity politics on practically every part of American life—housing, education, employment, healthcare, insurance, and credit for starters – is worse. APRA’s effort to legalize, if not mandate, quotas in all these fields has nothing to do with privacy. The bill deserves to be defeated or at least shorn of sections 13 and 14.
…
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.png00Kevin MacDonaldhttps://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.pngKevin MacDonald2024-05-24 08:39:102024-05-24 08:39:10Stewart Baker in Reason Magazine on Enacting Quotas in all Areas of American life
I’m no fan of Terry Gross of NPR but this interview with Gregg Carlstrom on the complexities of the Middle East is well worth listening to—conflicts among the Arab states and a lot on Iran and the Gaza war.
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.png00Kevin MacDonaldhttps://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.pngKevin MacDonald2024-05-24 08:37:522024-05-24 08:37:52Regional Complexities Of the Israel/Hamas War
Now that it looks like Trump is seriously going to be the Republican nominee for president, who should his vice president be?
If he’s headed for a catastrophic, 1964-style defeat, then he should definitely pick Nikki Haley or Kari Lake. Another four years of Joe Biden will be a disaster for the country, but at least we can accomplish something by ridding ourselves of these pestilences. (Nikki because the media will finally look at her, and Kari because the voters will.)
Come to think of it, let’s add the cast of “The View” to that list.
On the other hand, if there’s the remotest possibility that Trump could win, he ought to pick Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio. The two complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses, as running mates should. Vance is smart, Trump is not. Vance is not exciting, Trump is too exciting; Trump is from Florida, Vance is not.
There’s no chance of his overshadowing Trump. Only 200 people in the entire country will care that Vance is smart. Everyone else seems to want Trump’s razzamatazz. The ex-president can keep being Rodney Dangerfield, and Vance will be the accountant.
Vance’s one flaw is his slavish loyalty to Trump, but I feel Trump is magnanimous enough to overlook this shortcoming.
Moreover, Republicans could really use a boost in Ohio this year, where popular Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown is running for reelection in an increasingly red state. Having Vance on the presidential ticket might be enough to flip the seat. Let’s just hope Trump is not the sort of person who cares only about himself.
Because, boy, does he owe us. In the last few election cycles, he’s cost the GOP Senate seats in Alabama (Luther Strange), New Hampshire (Don Bolduc), and three (yes — three!) Senate seats in Georgia (David Perdue, Kelly Loeffler and Herschel Walker). I’m also counting Blake Masters in Arizona because of that asinine — and well-publicized! — call Trump made to him days before the election.
Trump’s only other potential running mate who isn’t completely preposterous is the all-new, anti-immigration Sen. Marco Rubio. But here, Vance has a razor-thin edge by virtue of not being constitutionally prohibited from being Trump’s vice president — at least not without sacrificing all 30 of Florida’s electoral votes.
While it was wildly helpful for The Washington Post to unfurl a lengthy exegesis this week on the reasons the Post thinks Rubio would make a terrible, awful vice president (on “Meet The Press,” he refused to pre-certify the 2024 election as fair, and he doesn’t agree with the Post that it is beyond all human capacity to deport illegal aliens), the paper can save its breath. Rubio can’t be Trump’s VP.
The 12th Amendment (or the 11th, if you’re a Democrat and you don’t believe the Second Amendment exists) provides:
“The Electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves[.]”
This provision is not incidental, archaic or easily evaded by a quick move to another state (as endless news outlets have claimed). If Trump is sworn in again, he can’t swear to preserve, protect and defend “quite a lot of the Constitution.”
Although the 12th Amendment made other changes to the Electoral College, the prohibition on the president and vice president being from the same state was in the original Constitution. It wasn’t an afterthought.
The framers were concerned about any one state gaining too much power. That’s why, for example, the district that houses the federal government can’t be a state. As James Madison explained in Federalist No. 10: “The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States.”
(Look at California for specific instances of loony contagions sweeping an entire state.)
And no, Rubio can’t just move to another state before the election to avoid the 12th Amendment problem. Dick Cheney is cited as the example of a quickie pre-election residence change because in 2000, he moved from Texas to Wyoming days before becoming George W. Bush’s running mate.
But that wasn’t an obvious scam.
Regarding Cheney’s inhabitance, a federal court found:
“It is undisputed that he was born, raised, educated and married in Wyoming and represented the state as a Member of Congress for six terms. After additional public service, he eventually moved to Dallas, Texas, to become the Chief Executive Officer of Halliburton Corporation.”
(Talk about your obscure Dick Cheney trivia! Who knew he ever worked for Halliburton? I’m surprised the Democrats never mentioned that.)
Even during his five brief years as Halliburton’s CEO, Cheney still received mail in Wyoming and maintained a registered vehicle there. When Bush chose him, Cheney resigned from Halliburton, sold his house in Texas and moved back to Wyoming. Then, just for good measure, Cheney shot a Texas friend in the face.
Except for his senatorial duties in Washington (which don’t count toward residency), Rubio has no conceivable connection to any place in the country except Florida.
Of course, if Fox News is telling the truth about Trump cruising to victory, possibly flipping New York and winning shockingly large percentages of the Black and Hispanic vote, then, sure, he can sacrifice Florida’s 30 electoral votes.
But if Fox is just whispering sweet nothings in right-wingers’ ears, there’s no way Trump can concede the third-largest state before the voting even starts.
Surely, we can trust Fox to tell viewers the truth.
— Reason magazine, April 18, 2023: “In a $788 Million Defamation Settlement, Fox News Admits That It Spread False Claims About Election Fraud”
— Associated Press, April 19, 2023: “Fox settlement part of flurry of lawsuits over election lies”
— VOX, April 18, 2023: “Fox pays $787 million for its 2020 election lies”
Back to the original question: Can Trump win? My calculation is, if the election is about Trump, he loses; if the election is about the media and the prosecutions, he wins. The one advantage we have this year is that liberals’ hatred for Trump has driven them out of their cotton-picking minds.
COPYRIGHT 2024 ANN COULTER
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.png00Ann Coulterhttps://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.pngAnn Coulter2024-05-23 08:43:542024-05-23 08:43:54Pick the Hillbilly, Trump
Tucker interviews Michael Waller. Be paranoid. Very paranoid. As the saying goes, just because you are paranoid does not mean they aren’t coming to get you. The Transition Integrity Project is basically a plan to seize the government in case the evil Orange Man gets elected. They are very good with names that imply the moral high ground while intending the opposite.
Besides the usual neocon suspects like Boot, Frum, and Kristol, Waller has quite a bit on the central role of Rosa Brooks (nee Ehrenreich [half Jewish on her father’s side]), described by Waller as a “red diaper baby,” implying that she is on the far left. Another key figure is Mary McCord who has sterling leftist anti-Trump credentials and is ironically “executive director of the [Georgetown University] Law Center’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection.”
No surprise that the big-name neocons are involved in what is fundamentally a project to save democracy by institutionalizing Leftist authoritarianism. They are quite prepared to nullify election results via military coup if necessary or at via least lawfare: McCord is running a “program to plan over 100 pieces of litigation without even knowing who they will be suing” because they are not in office yet.
As usual, the left is way ahead of the right in war-gaming the future, as in 2020 when swing states changed election laws to enable ballot harvesting and mail-in ballots despite their susceptibility to fraud.
These people are terrified that any hint of populism, anti-globalism or (god forbid!) the interests of White America having any real power in American politics.
Tucker [00:00:00] In the summer of 2020. Four years ago, a professor at Georgetown University called Rosa Brooks headed up a group that she called the Transition Integrity Project. Heard of it? Hey, you’re about to learn a lot more about it. So the goal of the Transition Integrity Project, this was before the last presidential election, of course, was to play out different outcomes from that election and see how the country would handle each one. Kind of a war game, a political war game. The project was made up from representatives from a bunch of different groups but similar groups law professors, political strategists, retired military officers, all from the left. Now, their stated goal was to focus on four possible outcomes of the 2020 election a narrow Biden win, a big Biden win, a Trump win, and a scenario with no immediate winner. Basically a tie confusion. So they spent four days doing this and they played out a bunch of different scenarios. Okay, now you should know if you want a flavor of what this look like, that Donald Trump was played by Bill Kristol. Joe Biden was played by former Democratic White House chief of Staff John Podesta, etc., etc. other members of the group included washed up neocon lunatic Matt Boot, Michael Steele, the MSNBC regular Jennifer Granholm, the failed governor, and David Frum, who’s some sort of loud Canadian. So you can kind of get a sense of what these were like, these meetings. So here was the assessment of what they found. This is Rosa Brooks describing it. We’re quoting a landslide for Joe Biden resulted in a relatively orderly transfer of power. Every other scenario we looked at involves street level violence and political crisis. That’s not a threat, though, she went on. And we’re quoting, with the exception of the big Biden win scenario, each of our exercises reached the brink of catastrophe, with massive disinformation campaigns, violence in the streets and a constitutional impasse. End quote. Again, not a threat at all. Elect our guy, or America falls apart and people die. That’s just a result of social science. That’s what we found. So they said the Transition Tech Group project said that their goal was to find out the very worst thing that could happen in a presidential election. And the assessment was clear. You could not allow Donald Trump to win or else America would end. So the Washington Post, owned by the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, dutifully printed these results in September 2020, two months before the election. Just to give you a sense of what this was really about. But what was it really about? And will this project and this kind of thinking and the people who pulled it off have any effect on the coming presidential election? Well, J. Michael Waller has thought a lot about this. He once worked for the CIA. He knows a lot about the Intel world having been part of it. He’s a senior analyst for strategy at the center for Security Policy, the author of a new book called Big Intel. And we’re happy to have him join us now to unpack the Transition Integrity Project. Thank you so much for.
Michael Waller[00:02:54] Great to be with you.
Tucker [00:02:55] So what is. I characterized it briefly, but if you could just give us an overview, the Transition Integrity Project, what was and is it and why does it matter?
Michael Waller[00:03:06]It it’s the opposite of what it says it is of course.
Tucker [00:03:10] Yeah. Of course it’s not here to bring integrity, integrity to political transitions.
Michael Waller[00:03:15] Maybe to their own, you know, fundamentally transforming the country. But no. So whenever you hear these words, they’re the opposite of what they mean. Yes. For these guys, it was to determine in 2020 that the transition from a Trump administration would be nice and orderly. And if it wasn’t orderly, the military should intervene to remove Donald Trump.
Tucker [00:03:37] Okay, so it was calling for a military coup.
Michael Waller[00:03:40]Right. And and the the the the head of the head of the of the project, the co-founder of the project, Rosa Brooks, had actually called for reconsidering and getting rid of civilian control of the military back in 2016.
Tucker [00:03:53] So if the this is maybe a a side road, but I think it’s important if the military is not controlled by elected officials, as it would be in a democracy, who would who would make decisions about military force?
Michael Waller[00:04:05]They’re not clear about that.
Tucker [00:04:06] Oh, they’re not clear about that.
Michael Waller[00:04:07]This is Banana Republic.
Tucker [00:04:09] Well, of course, by definition.
Michael Waller[00:04:11]Yeah. In the name of protecting our constitution.
Tucker [00:04:12] Yeah military hunta to save democracy. So Rosa Brooks is called for that.
Michael Waller[00:04:17]Yeah. So even when Trump was elected or inaugurated two weeks later, she wrote that we have to find a way to remove him from power.
Tucker [00:04:26] So would you say, just as just so we can define terms at the outset, that anyone who calls for a military coup against an elected official is, by definition, an enemy of democracy.
Michael Waller[00:04:35]Public enemy.
Tucker [00:04:36] Yeah, right. So that, of course, didn’t happen because in my view, I think it’s been demonstrated factually. They rigged the election and Joe Biden became the president. So did the election. The Transition Integrity Project continue?
Michael Waller[00:04:55]Well, they did the first part in semi secrecy.
Tucker [00:04:58] Yes.
Michael Waller[00:04:59]This time. They’re being more open about it. They’re inviting reporters to their war games.
Tucker [00:05:03] So same, same group.
Michael Waller[00:05:05]It seems to me they’re not fully, forthright about who the members are. Right. And they weren’t at all in 2020. But now you’ve got retired generals.
Tucker [00:05:16] So what would be the point of this?
Michael Waller[00:05:19]To make sure that their transition has integrity, meaning that even according to their latest war games, if Donald Trump wins a free and fair election, he still has to be removed.
Tucker [00:05:35] So if you have people again, just a definition of terms. If you have people who are calling for the removal by force of an elected official, that is I mean, that is insurrection, right?
Michael Waller[00:05:45]It’s yes, it’s legal insurrection because they’re doing this now through lawfare. Right? They’re doing it through Georgetown University Law Center. That’s the premier law school in Washington, DC, right? It’s a feeder school to the Justice Department. Yes, it’s a feeder school to Supreme Court clerks. Write it to the whole intelligence community. And this stuff is being planned there.
Tucker [00:06:08] So a country that cared about its own preservation, cared to, you know, set its own systems, continue for the benefit of its grandchildren, would immediately shut down Georgetown University Law Center, obviously, because it’s a, it’s an insurrectionist.
Michael Waller[00:06:20]Imagine if Hillsdale was doing this right.
Tucker [00:06:22] So, so, so but just for those of us who aren’t following it on a day to day basis, as you are, what are the mechanics of it? So there is a group of people who meet at Georgetown University Law School to think through how to seize power from Trump if he were elected in 2024. Is that what you’re saying?
Michael Waller[00:06:39]That’s what we know now from when they themselves talked about it to NBC. Yes. And then they invited a reporter from the Atlantic to actually attend the event. And he was so disturbed by it. He said, this is a real problematic issue for people who believe in the Constitution. So even the Atlantic is thinking this is dangerous.
Tucker [00:06:57] Yeah. Well, yeah, that which says a lot since the Atlantic has obviously taken a pretty strong position against the Constitution. Yeah. Over, over a period of time.
Michael Waller[00:07:06]You have these red diaper babies like Rosa Brooks, who, you know, comes from a household that was really on the Soviet side during the Cold War. [A polite way of saying she’s Jewish.] Yes. For sure. Who was then a, a senior Pentagon official selecting who the Obama generals would be writing about how we have to end civilian control or reconsider or do away with civilian control of the military, wargaming out military coups against a sitting president, first after a after a disputed election and now being being the host of an entire project to unseat a president who they agree would have been legally and clearly elected by a majority of the public and electoral votes. This is done now in the name of protecting the Constitution. So you have the Transition Integrity Project of 2020 and whatever its name is right now, being run under Rosa Brooks at Georgetown University.
Tucker [00:08:02] I think I’ll just say this is my opinion. I think Rosa Brooks is a violence fetishist who loves violence, obviously fantasizes about violence. So this should be I mean, obviously it’s a threat. Any anybody with power who fetishize violence domestically is scary, but there’s sort of no one to call about this, right?
Michael Waller[00:08:24]No, because what they’re doing is they’re manipulating the legal system. So she, the somebody under her, Mary McCord is sort of the Zelig of all of this. She’s been characterized as this in the, you know, American Spectator. She’s everywhere you look. So she is a counsel on the Trump impeachment committee, one impeachment committee to the January 6th committee. All of these other things, she is involved in all of these and more, and she’s running a program to plan over 100 pieces of litigation. They don’t even know who the defendants will be because they’re not even in office.
Tucker [00:09:00] Right?
Michael Waller[00:09:01]To sue to prevent the government from functioning if the election doesn’t go the way they want it to. And her husband, whose last name is Snook, he was one of these career anonymous bureaucrats working inside the Supreme Court. He’s outside now, but his job, as is she puts together the litigation with her team. He makes sure it’s not shopped to other jurisdictions where they won’t win. So they want to keep it in the Washington, DC circuit where they’re guaranteed a win.
Tucker [00:09:27] Right. So I would assume, that the Intel agencies are involved in this.
Michael Waller[00:09:36]We know retired. And of course, you’re not always retired when you retire. And then you have former officials who still have security clearances. So even if they retired, they still have access to classified information and a window inside the machine.
Tucker [00:09:50] Can I ask you a I mean, one of the great frustrations. There were so many frustrations in the Trump administration, you know, like refusing to act in America’s interest or even your own interest. But one of them was. Why would you let Brennan, someone like Brennan, who’s a liar and a force for violence and anti Americanism. Why would you allow that guy to continue to hold a security clearance? Why do any of these people still have their clearances? Why can’t anyone do. Why can’t E1 do anything about that?
Michael Waller[00:10:15]Well they can. A president can revoke somebody’s clearance or somebody acting in the president’s authority. It’s just it’s a it’s part of the big Intel industry in Washington where you leave government service. So you built your whole career at taxpayer expense, right? You have your security clearance. You go out then into the intelligence industrial complex to make a fortune as a contractor. And then you land university gigs and media gigs.
Tucker [00:10:38] And but you retain your clearance as you do this. Yeah. So that’s a massive advantage, correct?
Michael Waller[00:10:44]It’s huge because now you’re already cleared, you’re already in the system. You’re already accepted. You’re already one of them.
Tucker [00:10:50] Right.
Michael Waller[00:10:50]And so you’re part of a fraternity.
Tucker [00:10:52] So even though you’re not working for the government and therefore we’re not bound by it in the civil service rules, you can do whatever you want. You’re just a private contractor. There are very few limits on your behavior, but you still benefit from the knowledge of what the government is doing. You know a lot more about what the government is doing than the average taxpayer or voter. Correct. Right.
Michael Waller[00:11:10]And that’s the reason some should keep their clearances, because we need that kind of institutional knowledge once people leave. Right. But we don’t need it on this massive industrial scale like they have in Washington, D.C..
Tucker [00:11:21] So again, why wouldn’t if you were the incoming Republican president, you just cancel the security clearances of people who are political actors? I mean, that’s not hard, is it?
Michael Waller[00:11:33]No, because you’re abusing the it’s a privilege to have a clearance, right? It’s an economic order.
Tucker [00:11:37] I don’t have a clearance.
Michael Waller[00:11:38]No, I don’t have a clearance.
Tucker [00:11:40] Yeah.
Michael Waller[00:11:40]So, so so it’s a privilege to have it. And you’re doing it at the expense of the taxpayer. So you’re still, in effect, a public servant, even if you’re in the private sector. But this is just become one big club, one huge business, one big grift in many ways, but one big political war now, where you have a merger between hardcore political activists, violence fetishists and public enemy types and the people who are supposed to be inside our system to serve our country and protect our Constitution.
Tucker [00:12:10] So, how do you think this plays out? Let’s say Trump gets elected. What happens?
Michael Waller[00:12:17]They’ll have 100 pieces of litigation ready to go out the door during the presidential transition. To hamstring him. To hamstring all his appointees. They have their allies inside the government to slow walk security clearances to make sure that his appointees who don’t have clearances cannot get clearances. He’ll be a one term president. So the bureaucracy knows. Just ride it out. Just drag things as slowly as you can and make things as hard as you can. And then and then shop for the, the right judicial venues to make sure that you get a court circuit that will rule favorably in your case. So just think, when you’re a Washington insider at Georgetown Law School and your husband was on the Supreme Court staff, you’re networked across the Justice Department, your network, among the judges, you know everyone. They’re your friends, right? They’re your social circles. Of course they’re going to help you.
Tucker [00:13:10] It sounds like the swamp wasn’t trained. Not at all. Not at all. Has it gotten stronger?
Michael Waller[00:13:16]Yeah, because. Because President Trump came in saying he would drain it. He didn’t have any idea what he was up against. He didn’t have a team. Yeah. He didn’t have a strategy. He didn’t have blueprints. He just went ahead and thought he could do it. And then look what happened. So the swamp is stronger than ever.
Tucker [00:13:32] What is the opposing side, the Republican side, the campaign, the super PAC, the RNC, the, you know, the institutions of resistance to the Biden administration. What are they doing to prepare for this onslaught of lawsuits if and when Trump wins?
Michael Waller[00:13:47]I have no idea.
Tucker [00:13:49] What do you mean you have no idea?
Michael Waller[00:13:50]I am not aware of anything that’s being done at present. At all. At all? On the outside. Yeah. So Heritage Foundation has action plans. America First Policy Institute has action plans. Some other groups have action plans, or they’re putting them together now. But there’s nothing for the campaign or the party at all. No, no, the RNC is useless. They’re no good.
Tucker [00:14:12] What? But I thought, Ronna McDaniel I mean, I know she was flying private. What was she doing with her time?
Michael Waller[00:14:17]I don’t know, but she had a big, you know, florist bill and limousine bill. I don’t really know what she was doing to organize, to attack against the these corrupt, entrenched interests. No idea.
Tucker [00:14:31] What do retired military officers. I think a lot of people on the right. I’ll speak for myself, you know, always respected the military. And it’s no longer true in my case, for sure, because you sort of wake up and you realize a lot of the flag officers and the people in charge of the Pentagon are political actors, you know, how did that happen and how did we not notice it happening? I mean.
Michael Waller[00:14:53]Like people who don’t take care of their health.
Tucker [00:14:55] Yeah.
Michael Waller[00:14:56]They even know that something’s happening, but they don’t do anything about it until it’s too late. And then they wonder why they need amputations or chemo or whatever. That’s the state we’re in as a country right now. So if you look at the military, it’s a self-selecting elite. So senior officers select their underlings for promotion. Yes. And they unselect other ones to not be promoted. And then if you’re if you’re not promoted after a certain number of years as an officer, you have to leave the military. Yes. So you have the Obama generals in. And this is where when people say Donald Trump’s going to politicize the military and stage a coup, he never tried to politicize the military, right? It was Alabama.
Tucker [00:15:34] He believed in the military.
Michael Waller[00:15:35]As an institution, that they would do the right thing.
Tucker [00:15:38] Right.
Michael Waller[00:15:38]Thinking. Yeah, okay. They were appointed under Obama, but they’re not, quote, Obama generals. Well, so many of them were. He didn’t understand that people around him didn’t understand it. Or even if they did, it can’t be true, right? These guys look at the stars on their uniforms, look at their ribbons on their chests. They’re not politicians, but they are. They call themselves, you know, grade scale. It’s beyond my my, my pay grade rather. Right. So what’s your pay grade? Not what’s your rank? What have you done? It’s. What have you done to get ahead to Brown Nose your way up to the top.
Tucker [00:16:14] So of, you know, the the senior generals in among the branches of the armed services. What percentage do you think might actually sign on to the idea that we need to wrest control from Trump? If he becomes president, we need to stage a military coup.
Michael Waller[00:16:31]It’s hard to say because you just need a few, because then by law, everyone else must follow. Unless it’s an unjust order, but then you get stuck in a legal limbo. If you’re arguing that I’m not going to follow an unjust or an illegal order. But if the chairman of the Joint Chiefs or all of the Joint Chiefs order something, you’re bound to follow orders. And this is where we are today. We have a just following orders mentality in our military, like we do in the CIA, like we do in the FBI.
Tucker [00:17:00] But the military didn’t follow Trump’s orders. Of course. They defied him at every turn. He didn’t do anything about it. Right. Totally passive and weak. But, you know, they said we’re not going to protect the southern border, for example. Period. Okay. But they. But do you think it’s possible that they actually would move on the white House?
Michael Waller[00:17:20]It’s really hard to say. I mean, before I would have thought, this is crazy tinfoil hat conspiracy stuff. Even though I know the military well, I’ve worked as a civilian contractor with the military for a long time. Yes, I know the intelligence community and the FBI pretty well, and I would have thought a few years ago, this is just crazy talk, but it’s not.
Tucker [00:17:40] It’s not crazy talk. So it sounds like there are a lot of changes to our, at the state level, to our voting systems. Maine, for example, just voted to consolidate its two congressional districts and award its electoral votes on the basis of the national popular vote. So these are these are big, consequential changes that no one’s paying much attention to, but they bring us a lot closer to the possibility of a tie of a really, really messy election where it’s going to be extremely hard for Trump to just win outright. If that happens, if we get to, you know, basically tied or within two electoral votes in the popular, popular votes really closely, we have a 2000 replay. Trump v Gore, Bush v or rather, what role does the Election integrity project play in that?
Michael Waller[00:18:34]They have the lawyers.
Tucker [00:18:35] Yeah, the law professors.
Michael Waller[00:18:37]The networks of federal prosecutors, Justice Department attorneys, federal judges as their circle of friends. Yes. So they will make sure there’s integrity to this transition. They’ll make sure the votes are counted, right. They’ll make sure the processes are managed right, and then they will have a huge say. In. Who is our next president?
Tucker [00:19:02] Is it a little weird? Just the composition of the 2020 team? She had Bill Kristol, you had David Frum, and you had Max boot.
Michael Waller[00:19:12]Soviet import Max boot.
Tucker [00:19:14] And Canadian import David Frum. But all three of them, you know, no interest in United States, have contempt for United States, but all three of them became famous pushing more, you know, killing. So their foreign policy people, their neocons. What would they but their their business is promoting violence. And Rosa Brooks, I think is like some sort of like part time para cop or something carrying a gun around like a tough guy. These are all people whose day job and their obsession revolves around hurting other people physically. Kind of weird that they all wound up in the same in the same project. Like that suggests that their goal is hurting people physically. Yeah.
Michael Waller[00:19:57]And of course it’s bipartisan. So they can call themselves a bipartisan project. Yeah. And then Georgetown keeps its 501 C3 status because it’s doing it all bipartisan. It’s not out to get a Republican president because it’s a bipartisan, bipartisan effort with Max boot and Bill Kristol and your cast in one of their exercises also.
Tucker [00:20:16] I’m cast one of.
Michael Waller[00:20:17]You, according to The Atlantic, you were you were up there on the border raising militias to fight illegal aliens, to, cause state national guards to go to war with one another, essentially in this recent exercise.
Tucker [00:20:30] And what and I assume I go to jail for that or I’m killed or something.
Michael Waller[00:20:33]I don’t know what they decided to do with you.
Tucker [00:20:35] It’s just not a bad idea, by the way. But interesting. So are you worried about what’s going to happen in November? Yeah.
Michael Waller[00:20:46]Because again, you have the Democrat Party apparatus. They’re really well mobilized for this. They have great legal teams for this. Mean. Donald Trump is on trial now because of this. They have plans to make sure that the government will not function under under their transition integrity plan. So it’s going to be a terrible mess. And then when you have the same individuals like Mary McCord who runs the the this program out of Georgetown University Law Center. She’s on the UN with a Homeland Security connected program on extremism to decide who the extremists are.
Tucker [00:21:30] I don’t want to give people the impression that there’s no hope at all, but it does feel like it’s the majority of the population in the country against its power centers once again. And the power centers are even more powerful.
Michael Waller[00:21:42]We have a good opportunity right now because we have a lot better lay of the land back in 2020. Not much attention was paid to the Transition Integrity Project. It operated semi secretly. Now it’s come out of the closet and we know who more of the characters are. We’ve had four years to look at who these actors are and how they operate. We know a lot more about their game plan. They’ve gotten a lot of, they’ve gotten careless in a lot of areas. So we so if you do have an organized team and I and, you know, President Trump, now that he knows what he’s up against, he can focus on it more. And then other supporters of him. Some of them have been victims of this personally. They can focus on it more. So I think between now and transition time we’re going to be a lot wiser. Last time they were just blindsided. So that’s that’s one part. Second part is there are teams out there who have already writing action plans. And two of the last chapters in Big Intel show action plans. What do you do with the FBI? What do you do with the CIA? What can a president do with executive orders? And then what executive orders can be made into law so they can’t easily be reversed? Trump didn’t have that the first time around.
Tucker [00:22:52] Well, that’s good news.
Michael Waller[00:22:53]Yeah, it is good news. But then we also have something, at our local levels, especially in parts of the country where the county sheriffs are very strong. Yes, because the sheriff’s in the last line of defense, constitutionally between the central government and the local people, local jurisdictions. And since sheriffs are democratically elected from the local level, they can determine whether or not to help federal authorities if the feds come into an area and abuse their power. They depend on the sheriffs and the local cops. The sheriffs can put a stop to that. So it matters for us to be empowering our sheriffs in states where the sheriffs are strong, and then getting rid of sheriffs. So we’re going to be weak about it.
Tucker [00:23:33] It. So I want to ask you about the thesis of your book, Big Intel How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War heroes to deep state Villains. Since you’ve worked in and around this world, a lot of your life, summarize force, if you would, how that happened, how do you think that happened?
Michael Waller[00:23:51]It began. And this is something that J. Edgar Hoover warned about back when he was a 25 year old State Department or Justice Department lawyer. His job was to identify and round up foreign communists, anarchists, radical socialists and deport them back to Russia. That was a job, and this was at a time of anarchist terrorist violence, where they tried to assassinate the attorney general of the United States and so forth. So you’d had a president, McKinley previously assassinated.
Tucker [00:24:22] Killed the mayor of Chicago and killed a lot.
Michael Waller[00:24:24]Of people. Yeah. So this was all going on. So he was the number one person in the Justice Department to fight against this? Marxism and anarchism. Yeah, but not just the violent stuff, but the subversive parts. By infiltrating our institutions, our schools, our universities, our news media, Hollywood, legal professions, churches, you name it. He was warning his entire career. That’s why he was so reviled by the left. He was warning about this the whole time. So the FBI, as he created it, was not there simply to enforce federal laws and fight spies, but in Hoover’s idea to defend the American way of life. I gave that up a long time ago. Yeah. So the penetrations of our institutions that he warned about became fact because he saw them happening, but it wasn’t stopped. We just the US kept bringing them in from mainly from Europe, importing foreign communists from Europe who were being so-called, you know, victims or real and imagined victims of different types of totalitarian, whether they were escaping from Stalin because they didn’t like his cult of personality, or they were escaping from Hitler, who was going to wipe them out anyway. We brought them in here, but we didn’t require them to become real Americans. Instead, they were set up at Columbia University to teach the teachers to bring these Soviet created institutions, import them completely to American universities, to teach the teachers and to discipline the radicals. And then you have people like Angela Davis and other hardcore radicals who were taught and mentored by them. These guys gave the intellectual basis to New Left radicalism in the 60s, to bring us what we now call critical theory, critical race theory. This is where D comes from. So it all comes from these former Soviet operatives from a century ago.
Tucker [00:26:24] So. But how does you know the CIA abroad, FBI domestically were designed and, you know, consume enormous budgets every year in order to defend us from that stuff. How did they become captured by it?
Michael Waller[00:26:38]It was first the precursor to the CIA. So it was during World War II process with the Office of Strategic Services and Bill Donovan, who was a wonderful guy. His job was to fight the Nazis and their allies.
Tucker [00:26:50] Yeah.
Michael Waller[00:26:51]But he needed experts who spoke the languages and those occupied parts of Europe and elsewhere, who had motivations, who had academic expertise and linguistic expertise. And he brought in a whole lot of communists into the this, you know, German Communist Party members when a lot of others and when they came in their job was to settle World War two, not on American terms, but on Stalin’s term.
Tucker [00:27:14] Which they did.
Michael Waller[00:27:15]Which they did. So when, you know, with the Yalta Conference, with Roosevelt, that was all run by Stalin agents or Stalin supporters, and the anti-communist liberals like George Kennan were just kept out completely. And Stalin got his way on practically.
Tucker [00:27:30] Oh, I notice. Yeah, we we joined the fight against the Nazis because they invaded Poland and then handed Poland to the Soviets. Oh. What?
Michael Waller[00:27:39]Yeah. And this is the logic coming out of.
Tucker [00:27:41] Like, you.
Michael Waller[00:27:42]Had even the CIA, to this day says one of its, one of its original intellectuals from the U.S. was Herbert Marcuse.
Tucker [00:27:50] Yeah.
Michael Waller[00:27:50]And Marcuse was a Stalinist who then broke with Stalin, but he still became a communist. And America imported him to become a professor in the United States to teach generations of college students, including law students, including diplomats, including community organizers. He built the theory for a lot of this stuff, and we’re seeing it now with DEA, and that’s being imposed on has been imposed on the whole intelligence community and the FBI, just like we see at every place else.
Tucker [00:28:18] But I think for most of us who weren’t paying super close attention, even though I’ve been around it a lot, just living in Washington, knowing people who work there, I don’t think most people really understood that the Intel agencies play in domestic elections. They’re subverting elections around the world. They’re stopping democracy to save democracy in other countries, which is we probably should have paid more attention to that. But I don’t think most people I know ever imagined the CIA would have the brass to try to influence an American presidential election, or the FBI would ever do that.
Michael Waller[00:28:49]It’s a crime.
Tucker [00:28:50] Of course it’s a crime.
Michael Waller[00:28:51]That means a federal felony to do what they’re doing, and they’re doing it all the time. Every time they leak classified information to the press, someone in the apparatus is committing a felony. It’s almost never investigated.
Tucker [00:29:03] What’s so interesting, though, is I had a long conversation with the CIA director about this, under Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, and he’s outraged that, you know, the people be telling the truth about the CIA is doing and actually threaten me over it. Through his lawyer. And I remember saying, but wait a second. First of all, you’re the one committing the crime a be you leak against your domestic political opponents all the time. And I thought that was a fair point, actually. And I’ve said it on television. And yet Mike Pompeo was treated like a non criminal by everyone I know. Like, how does this. No one seems to care. I guess that’s the point I’m making.
Michael Waller[00:29:40]Yeah. It’s and people are afraid of it. They’re afraid to touch it. Why I’ve been writing this book. They’re saying have you are are they going to get you. They really think the FBI is going to somehow, you know, get me in a car accident or, you know, make me drink polonium tea or something.
Tucker [00:29:52] But does that happen?
Michael Waller[00:29:55]Who knows?
Tucker [00:29:56] What do you think?
Michael Waller[00:29:58]I honestly don’t know what to think anymore. I used to think it was crazy talk.
Tucker [00:30:02] Yeah. Me too.
Michael Waller[00:30:04]But if you think you know, why does. Why does the whole intelligence community still have the Kennedy assassination files classified? They’ve declassified almost all, but there’s still over 1000 pages that are not declassified. Why, after all this time, has it not been fully declassified? I don’t know. I’m not saying the CIA was behind it. I don’t think that you can get a marine who becomes a communist, who who defected to the Soviet Union, who marries a Soviet wife and is allowed to shoot at a Soviet rifle range to come back to agitate for Fidel Castro. I don’t think the CIA was ever clever enough to pull off something like that. Right? And Kennedy really gave the CIA a lot of free rein. Both Kennedy brothers did. But. But why? Why is the intelligence apparatus still keeping those secrets? There’s no reason to protect.
Tucker [00:30:50] So it’s only been 61 years. Yeah. Every source is dead. Yeah. Well, of course. But do you think so? I’ll just speak for myself. I didn’t realize that this was happening until 2016. You’re saying that these agencies were corrupted ideologically in the 1940s? So do you believe that between. Let’s just say CIA was founded in 47 ish 46? Something like that, I think. Right. Do you think between then in 2006. They were trying to influence domestic politics. Sure.
Michael Waller[00:31:27]They were doing it originally in the name of fighting the Soviets and fighting communism by leaking to the media and by co-opting American reporters. But when you’re doing that, you’re influencing how Americans think, you’re influencing public opinion.
Tucker [00:31:40] And therefore influencing election outcomes.
Michael Waller[00:31:43]Exactly right. But it wasn’t make it like this. I mean, FBI Director Hoover gathered intelligence for four political opponents of whatever president wanted him to do, Democrat or Republican. That was Roosevelt, FDR, and the Kennedys who really wanted him to work for them against political opponents and Lyndon Johnson. To a lesser degree, Nixon. But, you know, FBI got the best of Nixon after Hoover’s death.
Tucker [00:32:08] Yeah, I noticed.
Michael Waller[00:32:08]So, so but the FBI wasn’t infiltrated by this cultural Marxism that has penetrated everyplace else because Hoover had defended against that infiltration. FBI was a hard target after really after in the Clinton administration when attitudes began to change. That’s when you saw the just cultural byproducts of American education and American popular culture and critical law theory being taught now in almost all American universities. So this is Herbert Marcuse and the communist interpretation of using the law as a weapon at manipulating the Constitution as a weapon for a different end. This all started happening now, when these lawyers start populating the Justice Department in large numbers, and then the rest of the bureaucracy by the 90s. But they didn’t have a critical mass to get together, because our intelligence community was divided up into many different agencies, so it could never abuse its power effectively until after nine over 11, when President George W Bush centralized everything and created an FBI with a super management of 60 new management positions at the top, and an office of the Director of National Intelligence to coordinate what we’re now 18 different intelligence agencies. So he set up a vertically powerful centralized apparatus. Notice that a revolutionary like Obama could come in and politicize.
Tucker [00:33:33] So I would you know, I was there for all that in Washington covering this stuff. I knew the people and they used 911, of course, to achieve this. And they told us in the weeks and months after 911 that the main problem, the the error that allowed nine over 11 to happen was lack of communication between different federal agencies. CIA is not talking to FBI. They’re siloed. And that’s how nine over 11 happened. That, in retrospect, seems like one of countless lies they’ve told. But also it seems like a calculated lie in order to increase their power over American society.
Michael Waller[00:34:10]Yeah, it was a combination of lies and distortions and then certain truths. Well, the FBI had, of course, the CIA had information, but they didn’t share it, so they couldn’t connect all the dots.
Tucker [00:34:20] I mean, I think that’s proven.
Michael Waller[00:34:22]So so you take, let’s say that the good people who are or at least were in there, they were trying to do their jobs, but they couldn’t do their jobs and they weren’t allowed to talk to people in other. Right. There was no mechanism. Then you get the cynics in there who are the power grabbers? You centralized the FBI now with 60 new management positions. That means you’re incentivizing the brown nose’s in the system to fight their way to the top. Right. It didn’t happen that way before.
Tucker [00:34:49] So so you’re saying and this is what I think people who know a lot about the system conclude after a while. The structure matters. The nature of the bureaucracy drives the policy in the end. Yeah. Yeah.
Michael Waller[00:35:03]And now you have an incentive system where if you don’t subscribe to all the tenets of diversity, equity and inclusion and whatever other things they’re adding on to this, you don’t have to just go along with it to be a good professional or a decent colleague. You have to actively live it. And if you don’t, that’s a mark against you in your promotion.
Tucker [00:35:24] Right? So you got to buy the trans thing 100% or you’re just not going to get a raise.
Michael Waller[00:35:29]Yeah. And not just buy it. You have to be what they call an advocate now.
Tucker [00:35:32] An ally.
Michael Waller[00:35:33]Yeah. Ally. You know advocate. Ally. There you go. You got it. Yeah. And, and if you’re not an ally, that’s a count against you. But what if you have moral qualms about it? Of course. Because that’s what the whole thing. That’s what made the FBI one of the better of the American federal institutions, was that it tried to recruit people of character. It’s not. It gave up on that a long time ago.
Tucker [00:35:54] Well, right. It’s recruiting people with no character. So what about Chris Wray? What is that? You look at Chris Wray, and he doesn’t have a background that suggests evil, but he’s obviously doing evil. It’s like how.
Michael Waller[00:36:05]He he’s just your typical weaselly Washington attorney who makes a lot of money through the Washington game. Yeah, it’s all ultimately at taxpayer expense, even if the client isn’t necessarily the taxpayer. Then he gets a fancy government position. He parlays that into a bigger interest in his law firm, and now he’s got added prestige. And then boom, he becomes a new sort of nonpolitical. Chris Christie recommended FBI Director.
Tucker [00:36:30] Chris Christie recommended him. Yeah. But you look at Chris Wray and you think. You know. How can he allow this?
Michael Waller[00:36:39]He’s just weak. When you have the whole nerve center taken over by militant crazies. Yeah, the management system. And then you have one very loud mouth person with a few advocates inside the apparatus to say, we need now a senior leader for diversity, equity and inclusion. And this must be incorporated in every single aspect of FBI life.
Tucker [00:36:59] Right.
Michael Waller[00:37:01]He goes along with all of this stuff.
Tucker [00:37:03] And it’s a short hop or maybe an inevitable hop from there to, hey, let’s control the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. Yeah.
Michael Waller[00:37:11]Because their biggest case in FBI history is rounding up people who are being charged with nothing more than misdemeanors. Forget the felons being charged. Right on misdemeanor counts. You don’t. That’s not what the FBI was for, to hunt down people for misdemeanors. But you’re now raiding people’s homes for what, you know, unauthorized assembly and, you know, unlawful parading and trespassing, and you’re running Swat teams against them, and you’re wrecking their families, and you’re wrecking their reputations and their lives over Mr. Mike. Misdemeanors. This is the FBI’s biggest case, and it’s January 6th in its entire history. So you have agents, and you had some of them here with you who have who have been pulled off, you know, child sex trafficking cases and counterintelligence cases going after foreign spies. Know now to round up misdemeanor people.
Tucker [00:38:01] Yeah, 65 year old people with diabetes who live in trailer parks who like Donald Trump. Yeah. Yeah. The weakest, most vulnerable people in our society.
Michael Waller[00:38:09]Yeah. And it’s to set an example and to make people afraid, to make people feel isolated and then depressed and helpless.
Tucker [00:38:17] But if if January 6th is going to be your biggest case, why would you ignore the pipe attempted pipe bombings on Capitol Hill that day? What is that?
Michael Waller[00:38:28]I don’t know, they just had a FBI just put out a statement the other day about the Unabomber being busted 29 years ago. So they’re bragging about one single case from a generation ago, and they can’t even find someone who was caught on camera supposedly putting, you know, pipe bombs at the RNC.
Tucker [00:38:45] And it seems pretty clear that was the intelligence’s doing that. Yeah. Do you think that’s possible?
Michael Waller[00:38:51]I would have thought it was crazy. I was I was at the Capitol that day. I was on the Senate side. So I live on Capitol Hill. And I thought, well, I’m just going to walk over. And I was kind of bummed because, you know, our country is going to change forever now. And we thought, well, let’s just go one last time and see real Americans, you know, and yeah, so we just went because I’d been to tons of these different protests. And I know the Capitol Police really well because they’re my neighbors. Yes. And we were three blocks behind the leaders of the group because we just happened to walk into it on, on Constitution Avenue. And I heard something’s wrong. The hurricane fence is gone. There are no canine units for the Capitol Police. There’s no Capitol Police visibility at all. And just follow the crowd right up to the Capitol. And it was a pro-police crowd, and there was no trouble until it was either the Capitol Police or the DC Metro police who started firing tear gas and flashbangs into the crowd, you know, 50, 60, 80ft away from where there was trouble. And we didn’t know there was trouble up in the front.
Tucker [00:39:49] What do you think that was? Why? Why was there no, on the day of a planned protest, that every law enforcement and Intel agency in the United States had conference calls about for weeks? Why was it no hurricane fencing or K-9 units?
Michael Waller[00:40:04]I can’t speak about the K-9 units, but the hurricane fencing, it turns out, was taken down. But there was no police presence at all. There was no manpower. In fact, on the way to to the to the march. I walked past Capitol Police headquarters, had a chat with a Capitol policeman who was putting on his shin guards. Any other Billy club and I was admiring is Billy Club because it was an old school kind and, they were really relaxed. Even the Capitol Police were relaxed. They were not prepared.
Tucker [00:40:31] Yeah. They had no idea. No.
Michael Waller[00:40:34]Now, some of the Capitol Police, I think, did have an idea. Yeah. Yogananda Pittman, who was in charge of intelligence for the Capitol Police. But the Capitol Police doesn’t have an intelligence unit. They get their stuff from the FBI and the Secret Service and Homeland Security. So she got what was being, supplied by the federal executive branch agencies. But she didn’t tell her, chief.
Tucker [00:40:56] No, no, I’ve talked to him at a great length. And then she was rewarded by Nancy Pelosi with a very high paying job, apparently. And the University of California system. Yeah. So, yes. So if you were just to end with the big picture question, if you were to guess on the basis of deep knowledge. Is this system ever reformed? It doesn’t seem like you can have a democracy in a country where the big decisions are made by unelected people whose budgets you don’t know and who operate in secrecy.
Michael Waller[00:41:27]Right. And with with even a House of Representatives that will vote for continuing resolutions to continue to pump cash into this machine.
Tucker [00:41:36] Well, they’re because they’re afraid of the machine. Yeah. You know, if you’re committee chairman, if you’re Mike Rogers, maybe you’ve got some things to hide. You’re afraid of them. I mean, I witnessed it personally.
Michael Waller[00:41:46]Yeah. Oh, I have to. I’m not going to mess with the FBI, the CIA and congressman tell you that. Of course. Although, you know, now you’ve got Congressman Pete Sessions. Yes. He’s chairman of a subcommittee that has jurisdiction over what’s going on at Georgetown University, because Georgetown University Law School is they get a ton of federal money, of course, Mary Records program or her law school here gets not only federal money, but Chinese money. They just got a $30 million grant last year from a Taiwanese businessman who made his fortune as a financier of the Chinese Communist Party on the mainland. Yeah. So he puts $30 million into this, Georgetown’s biggest gift in its history since it was founded in the 1700s. So you have all this happening. So, anyway, Congressman Sessions is investigating this. He had a very fast response to that Atlantic article and to the other, articles, American Spectator, RedState coming out about Mary McCord and what she’s doing, and the federal, the federally paid people or groups that are part of this plan to actively discuss how to stage a coup against our constitutional government. And beyond that, you have retired generals. They’re not civilians. They’re subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. And they’re here as coconspirators in these gaming events about overthrowing our government. Yes, this is deep stuff. Sonny sessions is leading the charge on that.
Tucker [00:43:13] And do you think he’s got a shot of making meaningful reform?
Michael Waller[00:43:18]That remains to be seen in terms of exposing things. Yes, in terms of making any meaningful reform. You need a president to do it. Armed with executive orders, like when Obama came in, he had an army of executive people writing his executive orders during his transition, so that his first days and weeks as president, he was fundamentally transforming the government by fiat.
Tucker [00:43:38] Yeah.
Michael Waller[00:43:39]Trump didn’t do that. Biden has done it. And then it withdrew Trump’s executive orders and then imposed more of its own, even on the first day. A lot of the censorship, of course, and, and, weaponization of intelligence was first order of business stuff in Biden’s first hours is in office. And it came. As a straight continuum from the Obama team beforehand. So, you know, it’s all the same people. And he appointed a lot of the same people. So we know this in public. Now you have that type of apparatus working with Georgetown University Law Center to overthrow all this. So so does can Congress change it? No, not with a one vote majority in the House right now. And Chuck Schumer running the Senate. Schumer is fine with this. And in some ways, Schumer seems to agree with this. Remember what he warned Trump in 1917 when he 1970 2017, when he was talking with Rachel Maddow? He said, if Trump messes with the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday, from coming to come after you. And he wasn’t just talking about a Republican president, he was talking about any elected officials.
Tucker [00:44:47] So, I mean, maybe everyone should stop pretending it’s a democracy. Maybe everyone you know who uses that term unironically should have it burn on his lips like this. That’s not a democracy.
Michael Waller[00:44:57]Or even a constitutional republic, right? You can’t have it this way. So you have. So, I mean, Congress is funding things that they know are unconstitutional. The Justice Department is enforcing things that its lawyers know are unconstitutional. And now you have Mary McCord in her group at Georgetown Law. Writing the whole orchestra for the transition after November of this year. To rip the constitution to shreds.
Tucker [00:45:26] Well, on that happy note, J. Michael Waller, big Intel how the CIA and FBI went from Cold War heroes to deep state villains. Thank you very much.
Michael Waller[00:45:34]Great to be with you. And thanks for your interest in the book. There’s a familiar name on the cover. Thank you.—
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.png00Kevin MacDonaldhttps://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.pngKevin MacDonald2024-05-21 07:56:462024-05-25 12:07:14Michael Waller: The Transition Integrity Project, AKA the Trump-Will-Never-Be President Project
One of my theories about Judaism is that the most radical, most ethnocentric Jews tend to provide the direction for the entire Jewish community in the long run: “Zionism and the Internal Dynamics of Judaism.” This has happened once again in contemporary Israel and is supported enthusiastically by the mainstream Jewish community in the U.S. as epitomized by the ADL, AIPAC, etc. See also the section “American Friends” below; the Trump administration has been the worst U.S. administration: Mideast policy was formulated by Orthodox Jew Jared Kushner and epitomized by pro-settlement fanatic Ambassador David Friedman. For example, “With its overwhelming victory in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, Israel more than doubled the amount of land it controlled, seizing new territory in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem. Now it faced a choice: Would the new land become part of Israel or be bargained away as part of a future Palestinian state? To a cadre of young Israelis imbued with messianic zeal, the answer was obvious. The acquisition of the animated a religious political movement — Gush Emunim, or “Bloc of the Faithful” — that was determined to settle the newly conquered lands.” And yet my critic Nathan Cofnas claims that Jews are not particularly ethnocentric.
There are also several examples of Jewish martyrs discussed here. I discuss Jewish martyrdom briefly in this paper from 2001 as an example of extreme ethnocentrism. How many of us would be willing to do the same? Of course, in the cases discussed here, they knew they had a lot of support in the government and would have their sentences shortened to basically slaps on the wrist. They believed correctly that they were on “the right side of history,” so that their death or prison sentences would likely aid their cause. The same cannot be said at this point for the West.
This is a very long read but well worth it. You can listen to thearticle by clicking on this link and scrolling down.
This story is told in three parts. The first documents the unequal system of justice that grew around Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. The second shows how extremists targeted not only Palestinians but also Israeli officials trying to make peace. The third explores how this movement gained control of the state itself. Taken together, they tell the story of how a radical ideology moved from the fringes to the heart of Israeli political power.
PART I. IMPUNITY
By the end of October, it was clear that no one was going to help the villagers of Khirbet Zanuta. A tiny Palestinian community, some 150 people perched on a windswept hill in the West Bank near Hebron, it had long faced threats from the Jewish settlers who had steadily encircled it. But occasional harassment and vandalism, in the days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, escalated into beatings and murder threats. The villagers made appeal after appeal to the Israeli police and to the ever-present Israeli military, but their calls for protection went largely unheeded, and the attacks continued with no consequences. So one day the villagers packed what they could, loaded their families into trucks and disappeared.
Who bulldozed the village after that is a matter of dispute. The Israeli Army says it was the settlers; a senior Israeli police officer says it was the army. Either way, soon after the villagers left, little remained of Khirbet Zanuta besides the ruins of a clinic and an elementary school. One wall of the clinic, leaning sideways, bore a sign saying that it had been funded by an agency of the European Union providing “humanitarian support for Palestinians at risk of forcible transfer in the West Bank.” Near the school, someone had planted the flag of Israel as another kind of announcement: This is Jewish land now.
Such violence over the decades in places like Khirbet Zanuta is well documented. But protecting the people who carry out that violence is the dark secret of Israeli justice. The long arc of harassment, assault and murder of Palestinians by Jewish settlers is twinned with a shadow history, one of silence, avoidance and abetment by Israeli officials. For many of those officials, it is Palestinian terrorism that most threatens Israel. But in interviews with more than 100 people — current and former officers of the Israeli military, the National Israeli Police and the Shin Bet domestic security service; high-ranking Israeli political officials, including four former prime ministers; Palestinian leaders and activists; Israeli human rights lawyers; American officials charged with supporting the Israeli-Palestinian partnership — we found a different and perhaps even more destabilizing threat. A long history of crime without punishment, many of those officials now say, threatens not only Palestinians living in the occupied territories but also the State of Israel itself.
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After Oct. 7, some settler reservists began manning unauthorized roadblocks in full I.D.F. uniform, an open but usually unpunished violation of orders.Credit…Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times
Many of the people we interviewed, some speaking anonymously, some speaking publicly for the first time, offered an account not only of Jewish violence against Palestinians dating back decades but also of an Israeli state that has systematically and increasingly ignored that violence. It is an account of a sometimes criminal nationalistic movement that has been allowed to operate with impunity and gradually move from the fringes to the mainstream of Israeli society. It is an account of how voices within the government that objected to the condoning of settler violence were silenced and discredited. And it is a blunt account, told for the first time by Israeli officials themselves, of how the occupation came to threaten the integrity of their country’s democracy. …
The interviews, along with classified documents written in recent months, reveal a government at war with itself. One document describes a meeting in March, when Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, the head of Israel’s Central Command, responsible for the West Bank, gave a withering account of the efforts by Bezalel Smotrich — an ultraright leader and the official in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government with oversight over the West Bank — to undermine law enforcement in the occupied territory. Since Smotrich took office, Fox wrote, the effort to clamp down on illegal settlement construction has dwindled “to the point where it has disappeared.” Moreover, Fox said, Smotrich and his allies were thwarting the very measures to enforce the law that the government had promised Israeli courts it would take.
This is a story, pieced together and told in full for the first time, that leads to the heart of Israel. But it begins in the West Bank, in places like Khirbet Zanuta. From within the village’s empty ruins, there is a clear view across the valley to a tiny Jewish outpost called Meitarim Farm. Built in 2021, the farm has become a base of operations for settler attacks led by Yinon Levi, the farm’s owner. Like so many of the Israeli outposts that have been set up throughout the West Bank in recent years, Meitarim Farm is illegal. It is illegal under international law, which most experts say doesn’t recognize Israeli settlements in occupied land. It is illegal under Israeli law, like most settlements built since the 1990s.
Few efforts are made to stop the building of these outposts or the violence emanating from them. Indeed, one of Levi’s day jobs was running an earthworks company, and he has worked with the Israel Defense Forces to bulldoze at least one Palestinian village in the West Bank. As for the victims of that violence, they face a confounding and defeating system when trying to get relief. Villagers seeking help from the police typically have to file a report in person at an Israeli police station, which in the West Bank are almost exclusively located inside the settlements themselves. After getting through security and to the station, they sometimes wait for hours for an Arabic translator, only to be told they don’t have the right paperwork or sufficient evidence to submit a report. As one senior Israeli military official told us, the police “exhaust Palestinians so they won’t file complaints.”
And yet in November, with no protection from the police or the military, the former residents of Khirbet Zanuta and five nearby villages chose to test whether justice was still possible by appealing directly to Israel’s Supreme Court. In a petition, lawyers for the villagers, from Haqel, an Israeli human rights organization, argued that days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, a raiding party that included settlers and Israeli soldiers assaulted village residents, threatened murder and destroyed property throughout the village. They stated that the raid was part of “a mass transfer of ancient Palestinian communities,” one in which settlers working hand in hand with soldiers are taking advantage of the current war in Gaza to achieve the longer-standing goal of “cleansing” parts of the West Bank, aided by the “sweeping and unprecedented disregard” of the state and its “de facto consent to the massive acts of deportation.”
The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, and the relief the villagers are seeking — that the law be enforced — might seem modest. But our reporting reveals the degree to which decades of history are stacked against them: After 50 years of crime without punishment, in many ways the violent settlers and the state have become one.
Iskhak Jabarin near his home in Shab al Butum. He is part of a petition to Israel’s Supreme Court seeking protection from settlers, including those from Avigayil, the settlement behind him at right.Credit…Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times
SEPARATE AND UNEQUAL
The devastating Hamas attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, the ongoing crisis of Israeli hostages and the grinding Israeli invasion and bombardment of the Gaza Strip that followed may have refocused the world’s attention on Israel’s ongoing inability to address the question of Palestinian autonomy. But it is in the West Bank where the corrosive long-term effects of the occupation on Israeli law and democracy are most apparent.
A sample of three dozen cases in the months since Oct. 7 shows the startling degree to which the legal system has decayed. In all the cases, involving misdeeds as diverse as stealing livestock and assault and arson, not a single suspect was charged with a crime; in one case, a settler shot a Palestinian in the stomach while an Israel Defense Forces soldier looked on, yet the police questioned the shooter for only 20 minutes, and never as a criminal suspect, according to an internal Israeli military memo. During our review of the cases, we listened to recordings of Israeli human rights activists calling the police to report various crimes against Palestinians. In some of the recordings, the police refused to come to the scene, claiming they didn’t know where the villages were; in one case, they mocked the activists as “anarchists.” A spokesman for the Israeli National Police declined to respond to repeated queries about our findings.
Takeaways From the Times Investigation Into ‘The Unpunished’
May 16, 2024
The violence and impunity that these cases demonstrate existed long before Oct. 7. In nearly every month before October, the rate of violent incidents was higher than during the same month in the previous year. And Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group, looking at more than 1,600 cases of settler violence in the West Bank between 2005 and 2023, found that just 3 percent ended in a conviction. Ami Ayalon, the head of Shin Bet from 1996 to 2000 — speaking out now because of his concern about Israel’s systemic failure to enforce the law — says this singular lack of consequences reflects the indifference of the Israeli leadership going back years. “The cabinet, the prime minister,” he says, “they signal to the Shin Bet that if a Jew is killed, that’s terrible. If an Arab is killed, that’s not good, but it’s not the end of the world.”
Ayalon’s assessment was echoed by many other officials we interviewed. Mark Schwartz, a retired American three-star general, was the top military official working at the United States Embassy in Jerusalem from 2019 to 2021, overseeing international support efforts for the partnership between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. “There’s no accountability,” he says now of the long history of settler crimes and heavy-handed Israeli operations in the West Bank. “These things eat away at trust and ultimately the stability and security of Israel and the Palestinian territories. It’s undeniable.”
After the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, Israel controlled new territory in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem. In 1979, it agreed to return the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt.Credit…The New York Times
How did a young nation turn so quickly on its own democratic ideals, and at what price? Any meaningful answer to these questions has to take into account how a half-century of lawless behavior that went largely unpunished propelled a radical form of ultranationalism to the center of Israeli politics. This is the history that is told here in three parts. In Part I, we describe the origins of a religious movement that established Jewish settlements in the newly won territories of Gaza and the West Bank during the 1970s. In Part II, we recount how the most extreme elements of the settler movement began targeting not only Palestinians but also Israeli leaders who tried to make peace with them. And in Part III, we show how the most established members of Israel’s ultraright, unpunished for their crimes, gained political power in Israel, even as a more radical generation of settlers vowed to eliminate the Israeli state altogether.
Many Israelis who moved to the West Bank did so for reasons other than ideology, and among the settlers, there is a large majority who aren’t involved in violence or other illegal acts against Palestinians. And many within the Israeli government fought to expand the rule of law into the territories, with some success. But they also faced harsh pushback, with sometimes grave personal consequences. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s efforts in the 1990s, on the heels of the First Intifada, to make peace with Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, gave rise to a new generation of Jewish terrorists, and they ultimately cost him his life.
The disagreement over how to handle the occupied territories and their residents has bred a complex and sometimes opaque system of law enforcement. At its heart are two separate and unequal systems of justice: one for Jews and another for Palestinians [but the Israeli apologists claim Israel is not an apartheid state].
The West Bank is under the command of the I.D.F., which means that Palestinians are subject to a military law that gives the I.D.F. and the Shin Bet considerable authority. They can hold suspects for extended periods without trial or access to either a lawyer or the evidence against them. They can wiretap, conduct secret surveillance, hack into databases and gather intelligence on any Arab living in the occupied territory with few restrictions. Palestinians are subject to military — not civilian — courts, which are far more punitive when it comes to accusations of terrorism and less transparent to outside scrutiny. (In a statement, the I.D.F. said, “The use of administrative detention measures is only carried out in situations where the security authorities have reliable and credible information indicating a real danger posed by the detainee to the region’s security, and in the absence of other alternatives to remove the risk.” It declined to respond to multiple specific queries, in some cases saying “the events are too old to address.”)
According to a senior Israeli defense official, since Oct. 7, some 7,000 settler reservists were called back by the I.D.F., put in uniform, armed and ordered to protect the settlements. They were given specific orders: Do not leave the settlements, do not cover your faces, do not initiate unauthorized roadblocks. But in reality many of them have left the settlements in uniform, wearing masks, setting up roadblocks and harassing Palestinians.
All West Bank settlers are in theory subject to the same military law that applies to Palestinian residents. But in practice, they are treated according to the civil law of the State of Israel, which formally applies only to territory within the state’s borders. This means that Shin Bet might probe two similar acts of terrorism in the West Bank — one committed by Jewish settlers and one committed by Palestinians — and use wholly different investigative tools.
In this system, even the question of what behavior is being investigated as an act of terror is different for Jews and Arabs. For a Palestinian, the simple admission of identifying with Hamas counts as an act of terrorism that permits Israeli authorities to use severe interrogation methods and long detention. Moreover, most acts of violence by Arabs against Jews are categorized as a “terror” attack — giving Shin Bet and other services license to use the harshest methods at their disposal.
The job of investigating Jewish terrorism falls to a division of Shin Bet called the Department for Counterintelligence and Prevention of Subversion in the Jewish Sector, known more commonly as the Jewish Department. It is dwarfed both in size and prestige by Shin Bet’s Arab Department, the division charged mostly with combating Palestinian terrorism. And in the event, most incidents of settler violence — torching vehicles, cutting down olive groves — fall under the jurisdiction of the police, who tend to ignore them. When the Jewish Department investigates more serious terrorist threats, it is often stymied from the outset, and even its successes have sometimes been undermined by judges and politicians sympathetic to the settler cause. This system, with its gaps and obstructions, allowed the founders of groups advocating extreme violence during the 1970s and 1980s to act without consequences, and today it has built a protective cocoon around their ideological descendants.
Some of these people now run Israel. In 2022, just 18 months after losing the prime ministership, Benjamin Netanyahu regained power by forming an alliance with ultraright leaders of both the Religious Zionism Party and the Jewish Power party. It was an act of political desperation on Netanyahu’s part, and it ushered into power some truly radical figures, people — like Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir — who had spent decades pledging to wrest the West Bank and Gaza from Arab hands. Just two months earlier, according to news reports at the time, Netanyahu refused to share a stage with Ben-Gvir, who had been convicted multiple times for supporting terrorist organizations and, in front of television cameras in 1995, vaguely threatened the life of Rabin, who was murdered weeks later by an Israeli student named Yigal Amir [who has never expressed regret.]
Now Ben-Gvir was Israel’s national security minister and Smotrich was Israel’s finance minister, charged additionally with overseeing much of the Israeli government’s activities in the West Bank. In December 2022, a day before the new government was sworn in, Netanyahu issued a list of goals and priorities for his new cabinet, including a clear statement that the nationalistic ideology of his new allies was now the government’s guiding star. “The Jewish people,” it said, “have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the land of Israel.”
Two months after that, two Israeli settlers were murdered in an attack by Hamas gunmen near Huwara, a village in the West Bank. The widespread calls for revenge, common after Palestinian terror attacks, were now coming from within Netanyahu’s new government. Smotrich declared that “the village of Huwara needs to be wiped out.” And, he added, “I think the State of Israel needs to do it.”
In 2005, Israeli authorities arrested Bezalel Smotrich after hearing of a plot to slow the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Smotrich was later released without charges. One Shin Bet officer who questioned him said he remained “silent as a fish” throughout.Credit…Moti Kimchi
BIRTH OF A MOVEMENT
With its overwhelming victory in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, Israel more than doubled the amount of land it controlled, seizing new territory in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem. Now it faced a choice: Would the new land become part of Israel or be bargained away as part of a future Palestinian state? To a cadre of young Israelis imbued with messianic zeal, the answer was obvious. The acquisition of the territories animated a religious political movement — Gush Emunim, or “Bloc of the Faithful” — that was determined to settle the newly conquered lands.
Gush Emunim followers believed that the coming of the messiah would be hastened if, rather than studying holy books from morning to night, Jews settled the newly occupied territories. This was the land of “Greater Israel,” they believed, and there was a pioneer spirit among the early settlers. They saw themselves as direct descendants of the earliest Zionists, who built farms and kibbutzim near Palestinian villages during the first part of the 20th century, when the land was under British control. But while the Zionism of the earlier period was largely secular and socialist, the new settlers believed they were advancing God’s agenda.
The legality of that agenda was an open question. The Geneva Conventions, to which Israel was a signatory, forbade occupying powers to deport or transfer “parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” But the status of the territory was, in the view of many within and outside the Israeli government, more complex. The settlers sought to create what some of them called “facts on the ground.” This put them into conflict with both the Palestinians and, at least putatively, the Israeli authorities responsible for preventing the spread of illegal settlements.
whether or not the government would prove flexible on these matters became clear in April 1975 at Ein Yabrud, an abandoned Jordanian military base near Ofra, in the West Bank. A group of workers had been making the short commute from Israel most days for months to work on rebuilding the base, and one evening they decided to stay. They were aiming to establish a Jewish foothold in Judea and Samaria, the Israeli designation for the territories that make up the West Bank, and they had found a back door that required only the slightest push. Their leader met that same night with Shimon Peres, then Israel’s defense minister, who told the I.D.F. to stand down. Peres would treat the nascent settlement not as a community but as a “work camp” — and the I.D.F. would do nothing to hinder their work.
A clothesline in Ofra in 1979.Credit…Micha Bar-Am/Magnum Photos
Peres’s maneuver was partly a sign of the weakness of Israel’s ruling Labor party, which had dominated Israeli politics since the country’s founding. The residual trauma of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 — when Israel was caught completely by surprise by Egyptian and Syrian forces before eventually beating back the invading armies — had shaken citizens’ belief in their leaders, and movements like Gush Emunim, directly challenging the authority of the Israeli state, had gained momentum amid Labor’s decline. This, in turn, energized Israel’s political right.
By the late 1970s, the settlers, bolstered in part by growing political support, were expanding in number. Carmi Gillon, who joined Shin Bet in 1972 and rose by the mid-1990s to become its director, recalls the evolving internal debates. Whose responsibility was it to deal with settlers? Should Israel’s vaunted domestic security service enforce the law in the face of clearly illegal acts of settlement? “When we realized that Gush Emunim had the backing of so many politicians, we knew we shouldn’t touch them,” he said in his first interview for this article in 2016.
One leader of the ultraright movement would prove hard to ignore, however. Meir Kahane, an ultraright rabbi from Flatbush, Brooklyn, had founded the militant Jewish Defense League in 1968 in New York. He made no secret of his belief that violence was sometimes necessary to fulfill his dream of Greater Israel, and he even spoke of plans to buy .22 caliber rifles for Jews to defend themselves. “Our campaign motto will be, ‘Every Jew a .22,’” he declared. In 1971, he received a suspended sentence on bomb-making charges, and at the age of 39 he moved to Israel to start a new life. From a hotel on Zion Square in Jerusalem, he started a school and a political party, what would become Kach, and drew followers with his fiery rhetoric.
Meir Kahane, the militant rabbi from Brooklyn, in 1984, just after his election to the Knesset.Credit…Benami Neumann/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty Images
Kahane said he wanted to rewrite the stereotype of Jews as victims, and he argued, in often vivid terms, that Zionism and democracy are in fundamental tension. “Zionism came into being to create a Jewish state,” Kahane said in an interview with The Times in 1985, five years before he was assassinated by a gunman in New York. “Zionism declares that there is going to be a Jewish state with a majority of Jews, come what may. Democracy says, ‘No, if the Arabs are the majority then they have the right to decide their own fate.’ So Zionism and democracy are at odds. I say clearly that I stand with Zionism.”
A BURIED REPORT
In 1977, the Likud party led a coalition that, for the first time in Israeli history, secured a right-wing majority in the country’s Parliament, the Knesset. The party was headed by Menachem Begin, a veteran of the Irgun, a paramilitary organization that carried out attacks against Arabs and British authorities in Mandatory Palestine, the British colonial entity that preceded the creation of Israel. Likud — Hebrew for “the alliance” — was itself an amalgam of several political parties. Kach itself was still on the outside and would always remain so. But its radical ideas and ambitions were moving closer to the mainstream.
Likud’s victory came 10 years after the war that brought Israel vast amounts of new land, but the issue of what to do with the occupied territories had yet to be resolved. As the new prime minister, Begin knew that addressing that question would mean addressing the settlements. Could there be a legal basis for taking the land? Something that would allow the settlements to expand with the full support of the state?
It was Plia Albeck, then a largely unknown bureaucrat in the Israeli Justice Ministry, who found Begin’s answer. Searching through the regulations of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled Palestine in the years preceding the British Mandate, she lit upon the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, a major effort at land reform. Among other provisions, the law enabled the sultan to seize any land that had not been cultivated by its owners for a number of years and that was not “within shouting distance” of the last house in the village. It did little to address the provisions of the Geneva Convention, but it was, for her department, precedent enough. Soon Albeck was riding in an army helicopter, mapping the West Bank and identifying plots of land that might meet the criteria of the Ottoman law. The Israeli state had replaced the sultan, but the effect was the same. Albeck’s creative legal interpretation led to the creation of more than 100 new Jewish settlements, which she referred to as “my children.”
Plia Albeck in 1987. Working from the Israeli Justice Ministry, she used the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 as a precedent to establish more than 100 new Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Credit…HaOlam HaZeh
At the same time, Begin was quietly brokering a peace deal with President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in the United States at Camp David. The pact they eventually negotiated gave the Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt and promised greater autonomy to Palestinians in the occupied territories in return for normalized relations with Israel. It would eventually win the two leaders a joint Nobel Peace Prize. But Gush Emunim and other right-wing groups saw the accords as a shocking reversal. From this well of anger sprang a new campaign of intimidation. Rabbi Moshe Levinger, one of the leaders of Gush Emunim and the founder of the settlement in the heart of Hebron, declared the movement’s purposes on Israeli television. The Arabs, he said, “must not be allowed to raise their heads.”
Leading this effort would be a militarized offshoot of Gush Emunim called the Jewish Underground. The first taste of what was to come arrived on June 2, 1980. Car bombs exploded as part of a complex assassination plot against prominent Palestinian political figures in the West Bank. The attack blew the legs off Bassam Shaka, the mayor of Nablus; Karim Khalaf, the mayor of Ramallah, was forced to have his foot amputated. Kahane, who in the days before the attack said at a news conference that the Israeli government should form a “Jewish terrorist group” that would “throw bombs and grenades to kill Arabs,” applauded the attacks, as did Rabbi Haim Druckman, a leader of Gush Emunim then serving in the Knesset, and many others within and outside the movement. Brig. Gen. Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, then the top I.D.F. commander in the West Bank, noting the injuries suffered by the Palestinian mayors under his watch, said simply, “It’s a shame they didn’t hit them a bit higher.” An investigation began, but it would be years before it achieved any results. Ben-Eliezer went on to become a leader of the Labor party and defense minister.
Bassam Shaka, the mayor of Nablus, in the hospital after a bomb attack by Jewish terrorists in 1980 blew off both of his legs.Credit…David Rubinger, via Getty Images
The threat that the unchecked attacks posed to the institutions and guardrails of Jewish democracy wasn’t lost on some members of the Israeli elite. As the violence spread, a group of professors at Tel Aviv University and Hebrew University in Jerusalem sent a letter to Yitzhak Zamir, Israel’s attorney general. They were concerned, they wrote, that illegal “private policing activity” against the Palestinians living in the occupied territories presented a “threat to the rule of law in the country.” The professors saw possible collusion between the settlers and the authorities. “There is a suspicion that similar crimes are not being handled in the same manner and some criminals are receiving preferential treatment over others,” the signatories to the letter said. “This suspicion requires fundamental examination.”
The letter shook Zamir, who knew some of the professors well. He was also well aware that evidence of selective law enforcement — one law for the Palestinians and another for the settlers — would rebut the Israeli government’s claim that the law was enforced equally and could become both a domestic scandal and an international one. Zamir asked Judith Karp, then Israel’s deputy attorney general for special duties, to lead a committee looking into the issue. Karp was responsible for handling the most delicate issues facing the Justice Ministry, but this would require even greater discretion than usual.
As her team investigated, Karp says, “it very quickly became clear to me that what was described in the letter was nothing compared to the actual reality on the ground.” She and her investigative committee found case after case of trespassing, extortion, assault and murder, even as the military authorities and the police did nothing or performed notional investigations that went nowhere. “The police and the I.D.F. in both action and inaction were really cooperating with the settler vandals,” Karp says. “They operated as if they had no interest in investigating when there were complaints, and generally did everything they could to deter the Palestinians from even submitting them.”
In May 1982, Karp and her committee submitted a 33-page report, determining that dozens of offenses were investigated insufficiently. The committee also noted that, in their research, the police had provided them with information that was incomplete, contradictory and in part false. They concluded that nearly half the investigations opened against settlers were closed without the police conducting even a rudimentary investigation. In the few cases in which they did investigate, the committee found “profound flaws.” In some cases, the police witnessed the crimes and did nothing. In others, soldiers were willing to testify against the settlers, but their testimonies and other evidence were buried.
Judith Karp led a 1982 internal government investigation that found Israeli authorities unwilling or unable to confront settler crimes. “We were very naïve,” she now recalls. Credit…Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times
It soon became clear to Karp that the government was going to bury the report. “We were very naïve,” she now recalls. Zamir had been assured, she says, that the cabinet would discuss the grave findings and had in fact demanded total confidentiality. The minister of the interior at the time, Yosef Burg, invited Karp to his home for what she recalls him describing as “a personal conversation.” Burg, a leader of the pro-settler National Religious Party, had by then served as a government minister in one office or another for more than 30 years. Karp assumed he wanted to learn more about her work, which could in theory have important repercussions for the religious right. “But, to my astonishment,” she says, “he simply began to scold me in harsh language about what we were doing. I understood that he wanted us to drop it.”
Karp announced she was quitting the investigative committee. “The situation we discovered was one of complete helplessness,” she says. When the existence of the report (but not its contents) leaked to the public, Burg denied having ever seen such an investigation. When the full contents of the report were finally made public in 1984, a spokesman for the Justice Ministry said only that the committee had been dissolved and that the ministry was no longer monitoring the problem.
A WAVE OF VIOLENCE
On April 11, 1982, a uniformed I.D.F. soldier named Alan Harry Goodman shot his way into the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem, one of the most sacred sites for Muslims around the world. Carrying an M16 rifle, standard issue in the Israeli Army, he killed two Arabs and wounded many more. When investigators searched Goodman’s apartment, they found fliers for Kach, but a spokesman for the group said that it did not condone the attack. Prime Minister Begin condemned the attack, but he also chastised Islamic leaders calling for a general strike in response, which he saw as an attempt to “exploit the tragedy.”
A riot outside the Dome of the Rock mosque in 1982, after Alan Harry Goodman killed two Arabs and wounded many others. Credit…Bettmann/Getty Images
The next year, masked Jewish Underground terrorists opened fire on students at the Islamic College in Hebron, killing three people and injuring 33 more. Israeli authorities condemned the massacre but were less clear about who would be held to account. Gen. Ori Orr, commander of Israeli forces in the region, said on the radio that all avenues would be pursued. But, he added, “we don’t have any description, and we don’t know who we are looking for.”
The Jewish Department found itself continually behind in its efforts to address the onslaught. In April 1984, it had a major breakthrough: Its agents foiled a Jewish Underground plan to blow up five buses full of Palestinians, and they arrested around two dozen Jewish Underground members who had also played roles in the Islamic College attack and the bombings of the Palestinian mayors in 1980. But only after weeks of interrogating the suspects did Shin Bet learn that the Jewish Underground had been developing a scheme to blow up the Dome of the Rock mosque. The planning involved dozens of intelligence-gathering trips to the Temple Mount and an assessment of the exact amount of explosives that would be needed and where to place them. The goal was nothing less than to drag the entire Middle East into a war, which the Jewish Underground saw as a precondition for the coming of the messiah.
Carmi Gillon, who was head of Shin Bet’s Jewish Department at the time, says the fact that Shin Bet hadn’t learned about a plot involving so many people and such ambitious planning earlier was an “egregious intelligence failure.” And it was not the Shin Bet, he notes, who prevented the plot from coming to fruition. It was the Jewish Underground itself. “Fortunately for all of us, they decided to forgo the plan because they felt the Jewish people were not yet ready.”
A home in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. Since Oct. 7, some 7,000 settler reservists were called back by the I.D.F., put in uniform, armed and ordered to protect the settlements. Credit…Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times
PART II. WARNINGS
“You have to understand why all this is important now,” Ami Ayalon said, leaning in for emphasis. The sun shining into the backyard of the former Shin Bet director was gleaming off his bald scalp, illuminating a face that looked as if it were sculpted by a dull kitchen knife. “We are not discussing Jewish terrorism. We are discussing the failure of Israel.”
Ayalon was protective of his former service, insisting that Shin Bet, despite some failures, usually has the intelligence and resources to deter and prosecute right-wing terrorism in Israel. And, he said, they usually have the will. “The question is why they are not doing anything about it,” he said. “And the answer is very simple. They cannot confront our courts. And the legal community finds it almost impossible to face the political community, which is supported by the street. So everything starts with the street.”
By the early 1980s, the settler movement had begun to gain some traction within the Knesset, but it remained far from the mainstream. When Kahane himself was elected to the Knesset in 1984, the members of the other parties, including Likud, would turn and leave the room when he stood up to deliver speeches. One issue was that the continual expansion of the settlements was becoming an irritant in U.S.-Israel relations. During a 1982 trip by Begin to Washington, the prime minister had a closed-door meeting with the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to discuss Israel’s invasion of Lebanon that year, an effort to force out the P.L.O. that had been heavy with civilian casualties. According to The Times’s coverage of the session, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, then in his second term, had an angry exchange with Begin about the West Bank, telling him that Israel was losing support in this country because of the settlements policy.
But Israeli officials came to understand that the Americans were generally content to vent their anger about the issue without taking more forceful action — like restricting military aid to Israel, which was then, as now, central to the country’s security arrangements. After the Jewish Underground plotters of the bombings targeting the West Bank mayors and other attacks were finally brought to trial in 1984, they were found guilty and given sentences ranging from a few months to life in prison. The plotters showed little remorse, though, and a public campaign swelled to have them pardoned. Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir also made the case for pardoning them, saying they were “excellent, good people who have erred in their path and actions.” Clemency, Shamir suggested, would prevent a recurrence of Jewish terrorism.
In the end, President Chaim Herzog, against the recommendations of Shin Bet and the Justice Ministry, signed an extraordinary series of pardons and commutations for the plotters. They were released and greeted as heroes by the settler community, and some rose to prominent positions in government and the Israeli media. One of them, Uzi Sharbav, now a leader in the settlement movement, was a speaker at a recent conference promoting the return of settlers to Gaza.
In fact, nearly all the Jews involved in terror attacks against Arabs over the past decades have received substantial reductions in prison time. Gillon, the head of the Jewish Department when some of these people were arrested, recalls the “profound sense of injustice” that he felt when they were released. But even more important, he says, was “the question of what message the pardons convey to the public and to anyone who ever thinks about carrying out acts of terror against Arabs.”
OPERATIONAL FAILURES
In 1987, a series of conflicts in Gaza led to a sustained Palestinian uprising throughout the occupied territories and Israel. The First Intifada, as it became known, was driven by anger over the occupation, which was then entering its third decade. It would simmer for the next six years, as Palestinians attacked Israelis with stones and Molotov cocktails and launched a series of strikes and boycotts. Israel deployed thousands of soldiers to quell the uprising.
In the occupied territories, reprisal attacks between settlers and Palestinians were an increasing problem. The Gush Emunim movement had spread and fractured into different groups, making it difficult for Shin Bet to embed enough informants with the settlers. But the service had one key informant — a man given the code name Shaul. He was a trusted figure among the settlers and rose to become a close assistant to Rabbi Moshe Levinger, the Gush Emunim leader who founded the settlement in Hebron.
Levinger had been questioned many times under suspicion of having a role in multiple violent attacks, but Shaul told Shin Bet operatives that they were seeing only a fraction of the whole picture. He told them about raids past and planned; about the settlers tearing through Arab villages, vandalizing homes, burning dozens of cars. The operatives ordered him to participate in these raids to strengthen his cover. One newspaper photographer in Hebron in 1985 captured Shaul smashing the wall of an Arab marketplace with a sledgehammer. As was standard policy, Shin Bet had ordered him to participate in any activity that didn’t involve harm to human life, but figuring out which of the activities wouldn’t cross that line became increasingly difficult. “The majority of the activists were lunatics, riffraff, and it was very difficult to be sure they wouldn’t hurt people and would harm only property,” Shaul said. (Shaul, whose true identity remains secret, provided these quotes in a 2015 interview with Bergman for the Israeli Hebrew-language paper Yedioth Ahronoth. Some of his account is published here for the first time.)
In September 1988, Rabbi Levinger, Shaul’s patron, was driving through Hebron when, he later said in court, Palestinians began throwing stones at his car and surrounding him. Levinger flashed a pistol and began firing wildly at nearby shops. Investigators said he killed a 42-year-old shopkeeper, Khayed Salah, who had been closing the steel shutter of his shoe store, and injured a second man. Levinger claimed self-defense, but he was hardly remorseful. “I know that I am innocent,” he said at the trial, “and that I didn’t have the honor of killing the Arab.”
Prosecutors cut a deal with Levinger. He was convicted of criminally negligent homicide, sentenced to five months in prison and released after only three.
Rabbi Moshe Levinger (left) with followers in 1975. A leader of Gush Emunim, he declared the movement’s purposes on Israeli television. The Arabs, he said, “must not be allowed to raise their heads.” Credit…Moshe Milner/GPO, via Getty Images
Shin Bet faced the classic intelligence agency’s dilemma: how and when to let its informants participate in the very violent acts the service was supposed to be stopping. There was some logic in Shin Bet’s approach with Shaul, but it certainly didn’t help deter acts of terror in the West Bank, especially with little police presence in the occupied territories and a powerful interest group ensuring that whoever was charged for the violence was released with a light sentence.
Over his many years as a Shin Bet mole, Shaul said, he saw numerous intelligence and operational failures by the agency. One of the worst, he said, was the December 1993 murder of three Palestinians in an act of vengeance after the murder of a settler leader and his son. Driving home from a day of work in Israel, the three Palestinians, who had no connection to the deaths of the settlers, were pulled from their car and killed near the West Bank town Tarqumiyah.
Shaul recalled how one settler activist proudly told him that he and two friends committed the murders. He contacted his Shin Bet handlers to tell them what he had heard. “And suddenly I saw they were losing interest,” Shaul said. It was only later that he learned why: Two of the shooters were Shin Bet informants. The service didn’t want to blow their cover, or worse, to suffer the scandal that two of its operatives were involved in a murder and a cover-up.
In a statement, Shin Bet said that Shaul’s version of events is “rife with incorrect details” but refused to specify which details were incorrect. Neither the state prosecutor nor the attorney general responded to requests for comment, which included Shaul’s full version of events and additional evidence gathered over the years.
Shaul said he also gave numerous reports to his handlers about the activities of yet another Brooklyn-born follower of Meir Kahane and the Jewish Defense League: Dr. Baruch Goldstein. He earned his medical degree at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and in 1983 immigrated to Israel, where he worked first as a physician in the I.D.F., then as an emergency doctor at Kiryat Arba, a settlement near Hebron.
In the years that passed, he gained the attention of Shin Bet with his eliminationist views, calling Arabs “latter-day Nazis” and making a point to visit the Jewish terrorist Ami Popper in prison, where he was serving a sentence for the 1990 murder of seven Palestinians in the Tel Aviv suburb Rishon LeZion. Shaul said he regarded Goldstein at the time as a “charismatic and highly dangerous figure” and repeatedly urged the Shin Bet to monitor him. “They told me it was none of my business,” he said.
‘CLEAN HANDS’
On Feb. 24, 1994, Goldstein abruptly fired his personal driver. According to Shaul, Goldstein told the driver that he knew he was a Shin Bet informer. Terrified at having been found out, the driver fled the West Bank immediately. Now Goldstein was moving unobserved.
That evening marked the beginning of Purim, the festive commemoration of the victory of the Jews over Haman the Agagite, a court official in the Persian Empire and the nemesis of the Jews in the Old Testament’s Book of Esther. Right-wing Israelis have often drawn parallels between Haman and Arabs — enemies who seek the annihilation of Jews. Goldstein woke early the next day and put on his I.D.F. uniform, and at 5:20 a.m. he entered the Cave of the Patriarchs, an ancient complex in Hebron that serves as a place of worship for both Jews and Muslims. Goldstein carried with him his I.D.F.-issued Galil rifle. It was also the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and on that morning hundreds of Muslims crowded the hall in prayer. Goldstein faced the worshipers and began shooting, firing 108 rounds before he was dragged down and beaten to death. The massacre killed 29 Muslim worshipers and injured more than 100.
Baruch Goldstein, a doctor from Brooklyn who moved to Israel in 1983. He opened fire in a mosque in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron in 1994, killing 29 Muslim worshipers before he was dragged down and beaten to death. His gravesite is now a place of pilgrimage for ultraright settlers. Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The killings shocked Israel, and the government responded with a crackdown on extremism. Kach and Kahane Chai, the two political organizations most closely affiliated with the Kahanist movement, were outlawed and labeled terrorist groups, as was any other party that called for “the establishment of a theocracy in the biblical Land of Israel and the violent expulsion of Arabs from that land.” Rabin, in an address to the Knesset, spoke directly to the followers of Goldstein and Kahane, who he said were the product of a malicious foreign influence on Israel. “You are not part of the community of Israel,” he said. “You are not partners in the Zionist enterprise. You are a foreign implant. You are an errant weed. Sensible Judaism spits you out. You placed yourself outside the wall of Jewish law.”
Following the massacre, a state commission of inquiry was appointed, headed by Judge Meir Shamgar, the president of the Supreme Court. The commission’s report, made public in June 1994, strongly criticized the security arrangements at the Cave of the Patriarchs and examined law-enforcement practices regarding settlers and the extreme right in general. A secret appendix to the report, containing material deemed too sensitive for public consumption, included a December 1992 letter from the Israeli commissioner of police, essentially admitting that the police could not enforce the law. “The situation in the districts is extremely bleak,” he wrote, using the administrative nomenclature for the occupied territories. “The ability of the police to function is far from the required minimum. This is as a result of the lack of essential resources.”
In its conclusions, the commission, tracing the lines of the previous decade’s Karp report, confirmed claims that human rights organizations had made for years but that had been ignored by the Israeli establishment. The commission found that Israeli law enforcement was “ineffective in handling complaints,” that it delayed the filing of indictments and that restraining orders against “chronic” criminals among the “hard core” of the settlers were rarely issued.
The I.D.F. refused to allow Goldstein to be buried in the Jewish cemetery in Hebron. He was buried instead in the Kiryat Arba settlement, in a park named for Meir Kahane, and his gravesite has become an enduring place of pilgrimage for Jews who wanted to celebrate, as his epitaph reads, the “saint” who died for Israel with “clean hands and a pure heart.”
Two men studying next to the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Behind them, Israeli border police trainees on an educational trip entered the cave. Credit…Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times
A CURSE OF DEATH
One ultranationalist settler who went regularly to Goldstein’s grave was a teenage radical named Itamar Ben-Gvir, who would sometimes gather other followers there on Purim to celebrate the slain killer. Purim revelers often dress in costume, and on one such occasion, caught on video, Ben-Gvir even wore a Goldstein costume, complete with a fake beard and a stethoscope. By then, Ben-Gvir had already come to the attention of the Jewish Department, and investigators interrogated him several times. The military declined to enlist him into the service expected of most Israeli citizens.
After the massacre at the Cave of the Patriarchs, a new generation of Kahanists directed their anger squarely at Rabin for his signing of the Oslo agreement and for depriving them, in their view, of their birthright. “From my standpoint, Goldstein’s action was a wake-up call,” says Hezi Kalo, a longtime senior Shin Bet official who oversaw the division that included the Jewish Department at that time. “I realized that this was going to be a very big story, that the diplomatic moves by the Rabin government would simply not pass by without the shedding of blood.”
The government of Israel was finally paying attention to the threat, and parts of the government acted to deal with it. Shin Bet increased the size of the Jewish Department, and it began to issue a new kind of warning: Jewish terrorists no longer threatened only Arabs. They threatened Jews.
The warnings noted that rabbis in West Bank settlements, along with some politicians on the right, were now openly advocating violence against Israeli public officials, especially Rabin. Extremist rabbis issued rulings of Jewish law against Rabin — imposing a curse of death, a Pulsa Dinura, and providing justification for killing him, a din rodef.
Carmi Gillon by then had moved on from running the Jewish Department and now had the top job at Shin Bet. “Discussing and acknowledging such halakhic laws was tantamount to a license to kill,” he says now, looking back. He was particularly concerned about Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, who were stoking the fury of the right-wing rabbis and settler leaders in their battles with Rabin.
Shin Bet wanted to prosecute rabbis who approved the religiously motivated death sentences against Rabin, but the state attorney’s office refused. “They didn’t give enough importance back then to the link between incitement and legitimacy for terrorism,” says one former prosecutor who worked in the state attorney’s office in the mid-1990s.
Shin Bet issued warning after warning in 1995. “This was no longer a matter of mere incitement, but rather concrete information on the intention to kill top political figures, including Rabin,” Kalo now recalls. In October of that year, Ben-Gvir spoke to Israeli television cameras holding up a Cadillac hood ornament, which he boasted he had broken off the prime minister’s official car during chaotic anti-Oslo demonstrations in front of the Knesset. “We got to his car,” he said, “and we’ll get to him, too.” The following month, Rabin was dead.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, now Israel’s minister of national security, during a protest in 2009. Credit…Moti Milrod/Associated Press
CONSPIRACIES
Yigal Amir, the man who shot and killed Rabin in Tel Aviv after a rally in support of the Oslo Accords on Nov. 4, 1995, was not unknown to the Jewish Department. A 25-year-old studying law, computer science and the Torah at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, he had been radicalized by Rabin’s efforts to make peace with Palestinian leaders and had connections to Avishai Raviv, the leader of Eyal, a new far-right group loosely affiliated with the Kach movement. In fact, Raviv was a Shin Bet informant, code-named Champagne. He had heard Amir talking about the justice of the din rodef judgments, but he did not identify him to his handlers as an immediate danger. “No one took Yigal seriously,” he said later in a court proceeding. “It’s common in our circles to talk about attacking public figures.”
Lior Akerman was the first Shin Bet investigator to interrogate Amir at the detention center where he was being held after the assassination. There was of course no question about his guilt. But there was the broader question of conspiracy. Did Amir have accomplices? Did they have further plans? Akerman now recalls asking Amir how he could reconcile his belief in God with his decision to murder the prime minister of Israel. Amir, he says, told him that rabbis had justified harming the prime minister in order to protect Israel.
Amir was smug, Akerman recalls, and he did not respond directly to the question of accomplices. “‘Listen,” he said, according to Akerman, “I succeeded. I was able to do something that many people wanted but no one dared to do. I fired a gun that many Jews held, but I squeezed the trigger because no one else had the courage to do it.”
Yigal Amir, who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, at a court appearance in 2004. Credit…Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images
The Shin Bet investigators demanded to know the identities of the rabbis. Amir was coy at first, but eventually the interrogators drew enough out of him to identify at least two of them. Kalo, the head of the division that oversaw the Jewish Department, went to the attorney general to argue that the rabbis should be detained immediately and prosecuted for incitement to murder. But the attorney general disagreed, saying the rabbis’ encouragement was protected speech and couldn’t be directly linked to the murder. No rabbis were arrested.
Days later, however, the police brought Raviv — the Shin Bet operative known as Champagne — into custody in a Tel Aviv Magistrate Court, on charges that he had conspired to kill Rabin, but he was released shortly after. Raviv’s role as an informant later came to light, and in 1999, he was arrested for his failure to act on previous knowledge of the assassination. He was acquitted on all charges, but he has since become a fixture of extremist conspiracy theories that pose his failure to ring the alarm as evidence that the murder of the prime minister was due not to the violent rhetoric of the settler right, or the death sentences from the rabbis, or the incitement by the leaders of the opposition, but to the all-too-successful efforts of a Shin Bet agent provocateur. A more complicated and insidious conspiracy theory, but no less false, was that it was Shin Bet itself that assassinated Rabin or allowed the assassination to happen.
Avishai Raviv (right), the Shin Bet operative known as Champagne, in 1987. Raviv was charged in 1999 with not preventing Rabin’s assassination. He was later acquitted.Credit…Moshe Shai/Flash90
Gillon, the head of the service at the time, resigned, and ongoing inquiries, charges and countercharges would continue for years. Until Oct. 7, 2023, the killing of the prime minister was considered the greatest failure in the history of Shin Bet. Kalo tried to sum up what went wrong with Israeli security. “The only answer my friends and I could give for the failure was complacency,” he wrote in his 2021 memoir. “They simply couldn’t believe that such a thing could happen, definitely not at the hands of another Jew.”
THE SASSON REPORT
In 2001, as the Second Intifada unleashed a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, Ariel Sharon took office as prime minister. The struggling peace process had come to a complete halt amid the violence, and Sharon’s rise at first appeared to mark another victory for the settlers. But in 2003, in one of the more surprising reversals in Israeli political history, Sharon announced what he called Israel’s “disengagement” from Gaza, with a plan to remove settlers — forcibly if necessary — over the next two years.
The motivations were complex and the subject of considerable debate. For Sharon, at least, it appeared to be a tactical move. “The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process,” his senior adviser Dov Weisglass told Haaretz at the time. “And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.” But Sharon was also facing considerable pressure from President George W. Bush to do something about the ever-expanding illegal settlements in the West Bank, which were a growing impediment to any regional security deals. In July 2004, he asked Talia Sasson, who had recently retired as the head of the special tasks division in the state attorney’s office, to draw up a legal opinion on the subject of “unauthorized outposts” in the West Bank. His instructions were clear: Investigate which Israeli government agencies and authorities were secretly involved in building the outposts. “Sharon never interfered in my work, and neither was he surprised by the conclusions,” Sasson said in an interview two decades later. “After all, he knew better than anyone what the situation was on the ground, and he was expecting only grave conclusions.”
It was a simple enough question: Just how had it happened that hundreds of outposts had been built in the decade since Yitzhak Rabin ordered a halt in most new settlements? But Sasson’s effort to find an answer was met with delays, avoidance and outright lies. Her final report used careful but pointed language: “Not everyone I turned to agreed to talk with me. One claimed he was too busy to meet, while another came to the meeting but refused to meaningfully engage with most of my questions.”
Sasson found that between January 2000 and June 2003, a division of Israel’s Construction and Housing Ministry issued 77 contracts for the establishment of 33 sites in the West Bank, all of which were illegal. In some cases, the ministry even paid for the paving of roads and the construction of buildings at settlements for which the Defense Ministry had issued demolition orders.
Several government ministries concealed the fact that funds were being diverted to the West Bank, reporting them under budgetary clauses such as “miscellaneous general development.” Just as in the case of the Karp Report two decades earlier, Sasson and her Justice Ministry colleagues discovered that the West Bank was being administered under completely separate laws, and those laws, she says, “appeared to me utterly insane.”
Talia Sasson delivering a report on unauthorized Jewish settlements in 2005. Her report found that it “was state and public agencies that broke the law, the rules, the procedures that the state itself had determined.” Credit…Flash90/EPA
Sasson’s report took special note of Avi Maoz, who ran the Construction and Housing Ministry during most of this period. A political activist who early in his career spoke openly of pushing all Arabs out of the West Bank, Maoz helped found a settlement south of Jerusalem during the 1990s and began building a professional alliance with Benjamin Netanyahu, who was then the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and would soon go on to his first term as prime minister. Years later, Maoz would be instrumental in ensuring Netanyahu’s political survival.
“The picture that emerges in the eye of the beholder is severe,” Sasson wrote in her report. “Instead of the government of Israel deciding on the establishment of settlements in the territories of Judea and Samaria, its place has been taken, from the mid-1990s and onward, by others.” The settlers, she wrote, were “the moving force,” but they could not have succeeded without the assistance of “various ministers of construction and housing in the relevant periods, some of them with a blind eye, and some of them with support and encouragement.”
This clandestine network was operating, Sasson wrote, “with massive funding from the State of Israel, without appropriate public transparency, without obligatory criteria. The erection of the unauthorized outposts is being done with violation of the proper procedures and general administrative rules, and in particular, flagrant and ongoing violation of the law.” These violations, Sasson warned, were coming from the government: “It was state and public agencies that broke the law, the rules, the procedures that the state itself had determined.” It was a conflict, she argued, that effectively neutered Israel’s internal checks and balances and posed a grave threat to the nation’s integrity. “The law-enforcement agencies are unable to act against government departments that are themselves breaking the law.”
But, in an echo of Judith Karp’s secret report decades earlier, the Sasson Report, made publicly available in March 2005, had almost no impact. Because she had a mandate directly from the prime minister, Sasson could have believed that her investigation might lead to the dismantling of the illegal outposts that had metastasized throughout the Palestinian territories. But even Sharon, with his high office, found himself powerless against the machine now in place to protect and expand the settlements in the West Bank — the very machine he had helped to build.
All of this was against the backdrop of the Gaza pullout. Sharon, who began overseeing the removal of settlements from Gaza in August 2005, was the third Israeli prime minister to threaten the settler dream of a Greater Israel, and the effort drew bitter opposition not only from the settlers but also from a growing part of the political establishment. Netanyahu, who had served his first term as prime minister from 1996 to 1999, and who previously voted in favor of a pullout, resigned his position as finance minister in Sharon’s cabinet in protest — and in anticipation of another run for the top job.
Avi Maoz helped found a settlement south of Jerusalem during the 1990s and began building a professional alliance with Benjamin Netanyahu. Years later, Maoz would be instrumental in ensuring Netanyahu’s political survival.Credit…Amir Cohen/EPA, via Shutterstock
The settlers themselves took more active measures. In 2005, the Jewish Department of Shin Bet received intelligence about a plot to slow the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza by using 700 liters of gasoline to blow up vehicles on a major highway. Acting on the tip, officers arrested six men in central Israel. One of them was Bezalel Smotrich, the future minister overseeing civilian affairs in the West Bank.
Smotrich, then 25, was detained and questioned for weeks. Yitzhak Ilan, one of the Shin Bet officers present at the interrogation, says he remained “silent as a fish” throughout — “like an experienced criminal.” He was released without charges, Ilan says, in part because Shin Bet knew putting him on trial might expose the service’s agents inside Jewish extremist groups, and in part because they believed Smotrich was likely to receive little punishment in any case. Shin Bet was very comfortable with the courts when we fought Palestinian terrorism and we got the heavy punishments we wanted, he says. With the Jewish terrorists it was exactly the opposite.
When Netanyahu made his triumphant return as prime minister in 2009, he set out to undermine Talia Sasson’s report, which he and his allies saw as an obstacle to accelerating the settlement campaign. He appointed his own investigative committee, led by Judge Edmond Levy of the Supreme Court, who was known to support the settler cause. But the Levy report, completed in 2012, did not undermine the findings in the Sasson Report — in some ways, it reinforced them. Senior Israeli officials, the committee found, were fully aware of what was happening in the territories, and they were simply denying it for the sake of political expediency. The behavior, they wrote, was not befitting of “a country that has proclaimed the rule of law as a goal.” Netanyahu moved on.
Settlers planting trees near an illegal settlement called Mitzpe Yair, in the South Hebron hills, as a way of claiming territory.Credit…Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times
PART III. A NEW GENERATION
The ascent of a far-right prime minister did little to prevent the virulent, anti-government strain inside the settler movement from spreading. A new generation of Kahanists was taking an even more radical turn, not only against Israeli politicians who might oppose or insufficiently abet them but against the very notion of a democratic Israeli state. A group calling itself Hilltop Youth advocated for the total destruction of the Zionist state. Meir Ettinger, named for his grandfather Meir Kahane, was one of the Hilltop Youth leaders, and he made his grandfather’s views seem moderate.
Their objective was to tear down Israel’s institutions and to establish “Jewish rule”: anointing a king, building a temple in place of the Jerusalem mosques sacred to Muslims worldwide, imposing a religious regime on all Jews. Ehud Olmert, who served as Israeli prime minister from 2006 to 2009, said in an interview that Hilltop Youth “genuinely, deeply, emotionally believe that this is the right thing to do for Israel. This is a salvation. This is the guarantee for Israel’s future.”
A former member of Hilltop Youth, who has asked to remain anonymous because she fears speaking out could endanger her, recalls how she and her friends used an illegal outpost on a hilltop in the West Bank as a base to lob stones at Palestinian cars. “The Palestinians would call the police, and we would know that we have at least 30 minutes before they arrive, if they arrive. And if they do arrive, they won’t arrest anyone. We did this tens of times.” The West Bank police, she says, couldn’t have been less interested in investigating the violence. “When I was young, I thought that I was outsmarting the police because I was clever. Later, I found out that they are either not trying or very stupid.”
The former Hilltop Youth member says she began pulling away from the group as their tactics became more extreme and once Ettinger began speaking openly about murdering Palestinians. She offered to become a police informant, and during a meeting with police intelligence officers in 2015, she described the group’s plans to commit murder — and to harm any Jews that stood in their way. By her account, she told the police about efforts to scout the homes of Palestinians before settling on a target. The police could have begun an investigation, she says, but they weren’t even curious enough to ask her the names of the people plotting the attack.
In 2013, Ettinger and other members of Hilltop Youth formed a secret cell calling itself the Revolt, designed to instigate an insurrection against a government that “prevents us from building the temple, which blocks our way to true and complete redemption.”
During a search of one of the group’s safe houses, Shin Bet investigators discovered the Revolt’s founding documents. “The State of Israel has no right to exist, and therefore we are not bound by the rules of the game,” one declared. The documents called for an end to the State of Israel and made it clear that in the new state that would rise in its place, there would be absolutely no room for non-Jews and for Arabs in particular: “If those non-Jews don’t leave, it will be permissible to kill them, without distinguishing between women, men and children.”
This wasn’t just idle talk. Ettinger and his comrades organized a plan that included timetables and steps to be taken at each stage. One member even composed a training manual with instructions on how to form terror cells and burn down houses. “In order to prevent the residents from escaping,” the manual advised, “you can leave burning tires in the entrance to the house.”
The Revolt carried out an early attack in February 2014, firebombing an uninhabited home in a small Arab village in the West Bank called Silwad, and followed with more arson attacks, the uprooting of olive groves and the destruction of Palestinian granaries. Members of the group torched mosques, monasteries and churches, including the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes on the banks of the Sea of Galilee. A police officer spotted Ettinger himself attacking a herd of sheep belonging to an Arab shepherd. He stoned a sheep and then slaughtered it in front of the shepherd, the officer later testified. “It was shocking,” he said. “There was a sort of insanity in it.”
Meir Ettinger, grandson of Meir Kahane and a Hilltop Youth leader, after his arrest in 2015. He was released from administrative detention, with some restrictions, after 10 months.Credit…Ariel Schalit/Associated Press
Shin Bet defined the Revolt as an organization that aimed “to undermine the stability of the State of Israel through terror and violence, including bodily harm and bloodshed,” according to an internal Shin Bet memo, and sought to place several of its members, including Ettinger, under administrative detention — a measure applied frequently against Arabs.
The state attorney, however, did not approve the request. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) documented 323 incidents of violence by settlers against Palestinians in 2014; Palestinians were injured in 107 of these incidents. By the following year, the Revolt escalated the violence by openly advocating the murder of Arabs.
The Shin Bet and the police identified one of the prominent members of the Revolt, Amiram Ben-Uliel, making him a target of surveillance. But the service failed to prevent the wave of violence that he unleashed. On the night of July 31, 2015, Ben-Uliel set out on a killing spree in a central West Bank village called Duma. Ben-Uliel prepared a bag with two bottles of incendiary liquid, rags, a lighter, a box of matches, gloves and black spray paint. According to the indictment against him, Ben-Uliel sought a home with clear signs of life to ensure that the house he torched was not abandoned. He eventually found the home of Reham and Sa’ad Dawabsheh, a young mother and father. He opened a window and threw a Molotov cocktail into the home. He fled, and in the blaze that followed, the parents suffered injuries that eventually killed them. Their older son, Ahmad, survived the attack, but their 18-month-old toddler, Ali, was burned to death.
It was always clear, says Akerman, the former Shin Bet official, “that those wild groups would move from bullying Arabs to damaging property and trees and eventually would murder people.” He is still furious about how the service has handled Jewish terrorism. “Shin Bet knows how to deal with such groups, using emergency orders, administrative detention and special methods in interrogation until they break,” he says. But although it was perfectly willing to apply those methods to investigating Arab terrorism, the service was more restrained when it came to Jews. “It allowed them to incite, and then they moved on to the next stage and began to torch mosques and churches. Still undeterred, they entered Duma and burned a family.”
Ahmad Dawabsheh, the sole survivor of the arson attack by Amiram Ben-Uliel that killed his parents and younger brother, at the house in Duma where the murders occurred, which has been left untouched.Credit…Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times
Shin Bet at first claimed to have difficulty locating the killers, even though they were all supposed to be under constant surveillance. When Ben-Uliel and other perpetrators were finally arrested, right-wing politicians gave fiery speeches against Shin Bet and met with the families of the perpetrators to show their support. Ben-Uliel was sentenced to life in prison, and Ettinger was finally put in administrative detention, but a fracture was spreading. In December 2015, Hilltop Youth members circulated a video clip showing members of the Revolt ecstatically dancing with rifles and pistols, belting out songs of hatred for Arabs, with one of them stabbing and burning a photograph of the murdered toddler, Ali Dawabsheh. Netanyahu, for his part, denounced the video, which, he said, exposed “the real face of a group that poses danger to Israeli society and security.”
Amiram Ben-Uliel speaking to his wife from behind a glass pane during a hearing in Israel in 2020. He is currently serving multiple life sentences.Credit…Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
AMERICAN FRIENDS
The expansion of the settlements had long been an irritant in Israel’s relationship with the United States, with American officials spending years dutifully warning Netanyahu both in public and in private meetings about his support for the enterprise. But the election of Donald Trump in 2016 ended all that. His new administration’s Israel policy was led mostly by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who had a long personal relationship with Netanyahu, a friend of his father’s who had stayed at their family home in New Jersey. Trump, in a broader regional agenda that lined up perfectly with Netanyahu’s own plans, also hoped to scuttle the nuclear deal with Iran that Barack Obama had negotiated and broker diplomatic pacts between Israel and Arab nations that left the matter of a Palestinian state unresolved and off the table.
If there were any questions about the new administration’s position on settlements, they were answered once Trump picked his ambassador to Israel. His choice, David Friedman, was a bankruptcy lawyer who for years had helped run an American nonprofit that raised millions of dollars for Beit El, one of the early Gush Emunim settlements in the West Bank and the place where Bezalel Smotrich was raised and educated. The organization, which was also supported by the Trump family, had helped fund schools and other institutions inside Beit El. On the heels of the Trump transition, Friedman referred to Israel’s “alleged occupation” of Palestinian territories and broke with longstanding U.S. policy by saying “the settlements are part of Israel.”
This didn’t make Friedman a particularly friendly recipient of the warnings regularly delivered by Lt. Gen. Mark Schwartz, the three-star general who in 2019 arrived at the embassy in Jerusalem to coordinate security between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. A career Green Beret who had combat deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq and served as deputy commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, the military task force with authority over U.S. counterterrorism special missions units, Schwartz wasn’t short on Middle East experience.
But he was immediately shocked by the landscape of the West Bank: settlers acting with impunity, a police force that was essentially nonexistent outside the settlements and the Israeli Army fanning the tensions with its own operations. Schwartz recalls how angry he was about what he called the army’s “collective punishment” tactics, including the razing of Palestinian homes, which he viewed as gratuitous and counterproductive. “I said, ‘Guys, this isn’t how professional militaries act.’” As Schwartz saw it, the West Bank was in some ways the American South of the 1960s. But at any moment the situation could become even more volatile, resulting in the next intifada.
Schwartz is diplomatic when recalling his interactions with Friedman, his former boss. He was a “good listener,” Schwartz says, but when he raised concerns about the settlements, Friedman would often deflect by noting “the lack of appreciation by the Palestinian people about what the Americans are doing for them.” Schwartz also discussed his concerns about settler violence directly with Shin Bet and I.D.F. officials, he says, but as far as he could tell, Friedman didn’t follow up with the political leadership. “I never got the sense he went to Netanyahu to discuss it.”
Friedman sees things differently. “I think I had a far broader perspective on acts of violence in Judea and Samaria” than Schwartz, he says now. “And it was clear that the violence coming from Palestinians against Israelis overwhelmingly was more prevalent.” He says he “wasn’t concerned about ‘appreciation’ from the Palestinians; I was concerned by their leadership’s embrace of terror and unwillingness to control violence.” He declined to discuss any conversations he had with Israeli officials.
Weeks after Trump lost the 2020 election, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled to Israel for a trip that delivered a number of gifts to Netanyahu and the settler cause. He announced new guidelines requiring that goods imported to the United States from parts of the West Bank be labeled “Made in Israel.” And he flew by helicopter to Psagot, a winery in the West Bank, making him the first American secretary of state to visit a settlement. One of the winery’s large shareholders, the Florida-based Falic family, have donated millions to various projects in the settlements.
During his lunchtime visit, Pompeo paused to write a note in the winery’s guest book. “May I not be the last secretary of state to visit this beautiful land,” he wrote.
A SETTLER COALITION
Benjamin Netanyahu’s determination to become prime minister for an unprecedented sixth term came with a price: an alliance with a movement that he once shunned, but that had been brought into the political mainstream by Israel’s steady drift to the right. Netanyahu, who is now on trial for bribery and other corruption charges, repeatedly failed in his attempts to form a coalition after most of the parties announced that they were no longer willing to join him. He personally involved himself in negotiations to ally Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party and Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism Party, making them kingmakers for anyone trying to form a coalition government. In November 2022, the bet paid off: With the now-critical support of the extreme right, Netanyahu returned to office.
The two men ushered into power by this arrangement were some of the most extreme figures ever to hold such high positions in an Israeli cabinet. Shin Bet had monitored Ben-Gvir in the years after Yitzhak Rabin’s murder, and he was arrested on multiple charges including inciting racism and supporting a terrorist organization. He won acquittals or dismissals in some of the cases, but he was also convicted several times and served time in prison. During the Second Intifada, he led protests calling for extreme measures against Arabs and harassed Israeli politicians he believed were insufficiently hawkish.
Then Ben-Gvir made a radical change: He went to law school. He also took a job as an aide to Michael Ben-Ari, a Knesset member from the National Union party, which had picked up many followers of the Kach movement. In 2011, after considerable legal wrangling around his criminal record, he was admitted to the bar. He changed his hairstyle and clothing to appear more mainstream and began working from the inside, once saying he represented the “soldiers and civilians who find themselves in legal entanglements due to the security situation in Israel.” Netanyahu made him minister of national security, with authority over the police.
Smotrich also moved into public life after his 2005 arrest by Shin Bet for plotting road blockages to halt the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. He made Shin Bet’s Jewish Department a frequent target of criticism, complaining that it was wasting time and money investigating crimes carried out by Jews, when the real terrorists were Palestinians. His ultraright allies sometimes referred to the Jewish Department as Hamakhlaka Hayehudit — the Hebrew phrase for the Gestapo unit that executed Hitler’s Final Solution.
Ben-Gvir (left) and Smotrich attending a special session at the Knesset to swear in a new right-wing government in 2022.Credit…Amir Cohen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In 2015, while campaigning for a seat in the Knesset, Smotrich said that “every shekel invested in this department is one less shekel invested in real terrorism and saving lives.” Seven years later, Netanyahu made him both minister of finance and a minister in the Ministry of Defense, in charge of overseeing civilian affairs in the West Bank, and he has steadily pushed to seize authority over the territory from the military. As part of the coalition deal with Netanyahu, Smotrich now has the authority to appoint one of the senior administrative figures in the West Bank, who helps oversee the building of roads and the enforcement of construction laws. The 2022 election also brought Avi Maoz to the Knesset — the former housing-ministry official whom Talia Sasson once marked as a hidden hand of Israeli government support for illegal settlements. Since then, Maoz had joined the far-right Noam party, using it as a platform to advance racist and homophobic policies. And he never forgot, or forgave, Sasson. On “International Anti-Corruption Day” in 2022, Maoz took to the lectern of the Knesset and denounced Sasson’s report of nearly two decades earlier, saying it was written “with a hatred of the settlements and a desire to harm them.” This, he said, was “public corruption of the highest order, for which people like Talia Sasson should be prosecuted.”
Days after assuming his own new position, Ben-Gvir ordered the police to remove Palestinian flags from public spaces in Israel, saying they “incite and encourage terrorism.” Smotrich, for his part, ordered drastic cuts in payments to the Palestinian Authority — a move that led the Shin Bet and the I.D.F. intelligence division to raise concerns that the cuts would interfere with the Palestinian Authority’s own efforts to police and prevent Palestinian terrorism.
Weeks after the new cabinet was sworn in, the Judea and Samaria division of the I.D.F. distributed an instructional video to the soldiers of a ground unit about to be deployed in the West Bank. Titled “Operational Challenge: The Farms,” the video depicts settlers as peaceful farmers living pastoral lives, feeding goats and herding sheep and cows, in dangerous circumstances. The illegal outposts multiplying around the West Bank are “small and isolated places of settlement, each with a handful of residents, a few of them — or none at all — bearing arms, the means of defense meager or nonexistent.”
It is the settlers, according to the video, who are under constant threat of attack, whether it be “penetration of the farm by a terrorist, an attack against a shepherd in the pastures, arson” or “destruction of property” — threats from which the soldiers of the I.D.F. must protect them. The commander of each army company guarding each farm must, the video says, “link up with the person in charge of security and to maintain communications”; soldiers and officers are encouraged to cultivate a close and intimate relationship with the settlers. “The informal,” viewers are told, “is much more important than the formal.”
The video addresses many matters of security, but it never addresses the question of law. When we asked the commander of the division that produced the video, Brig. Gen. Avi Bluth, why the I.D.F. was promoting the military support of settlements that are illegal under Israeli law, he directly asserted that the farms were indeed legal and offered to arrange for us to tour some of them. Later, a spokesman for the army apologized for the general’s remarks, acknowledged that the farms were illegal and announced that the I.D.F. would no longer be promoting the video. This May, Bluth was nonetheless subsequently promoted to head Israel’s Central Command, responsible for all Israeli troops in central Israel and the West Bank.
In August, Bluth will replace Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, who during his final months in charge of the West Bank has seen a near-total breakdown of law enforcement in his area of command. In late October, Fox wrote a letter to his boss, the chief of Israel’s military staff, saying that the surge of Jewish terrorism carried out in revenge for the Oct. 7 attacks “could set the West Bank on fire.” The I.D.F. is the highest security authority in the West Bank, but the military’s top commander put the blame squarely on the police — who ultimately answer to Ben-Gvir. Fox said he had established a special task force to deal with Jewish terrorism, but investigating and arresting the perpetrators is “entirely in the hands of the Israeli police.”
And, he wrote, they aren’t doing their jobs.
‘ONLY ONE WAY FORWARD’
When the day came early this January for the Supreme Court to hear the case brought by the people of Khirbet Zanuta, the displaced villagers arrived an hour late. They had received entry permits from the District Coordination Office to attend the hearing but were delayed by security forces before reaching the checkpoint separating Israel from the West Bank. Their lawyer, Quamar Mishirqi-Assad, noting that their struggle to attend their own hearing spoke to the essence of their petition, insisted that the hearing couldn’t proceed without them. The judges agreed to wait.
The villagers finally were led into the courtroom, and Mishirqi-Assad began presenting the case. The proceedings were in Hebrew, so most of the villagers were unable to follow the arguments that described the daily terrors inflicted by settlers and the glaring absence of any law-enforcement efforts to stop them.
Palestinian villagers at the Israeli Supreme Court in January. They are among the residents of six villages in the West Bank asking the Israeli government to enforce the law there. Credit…Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times
The lawyers representing the military and the police denied the claims of abuse and failure to enforce the law. When a judge asked what operational steps would be in place if villagers wanted to return, one of the lawyers for the state said they could already — there was no order preventing them from doing so.
The next to speak was Col. Roi Zweig-Lavi, the Central Command’s Operations Directorate officer. He said that many of these incidents involved false claims. In fact, he said, some of the villagers had probably destroyed their own homes, because of an “internal issue.” Now they were blaming the settlers to escape the consequences of their own actions.
Colonel Zweig-Lavi’s own views about the settlements, and his role in protecting them, were well known. In a 2022 speech, he told a group of yeshiva students in the West Bank that “the army and the settlements are one and the same.”
In early May, the court ordered the state to explain why the police failed to stop the attacks and declared that the villagers have a right to return to their homes. The court also ordered the state to provide details for how they would ensure the safe return of the villagers. It is now the state’s turn to decide how it will comply. Or if it will comply.
By the time the Supreme Court issued its rulings, the United States had finally taken action to directly pressure the Netanyahu government about the violent settlers. On Feb. 1, the White House issued an executive order imposing sanctions on four settlers for “engaging in terrorist activity,” among other things, in the West Bank. One of the four was Yinon Levi, the owner of Meitarim Farm near Hebron and the man American and Israeli officials believe orchestrated the campaign of violence and intimidation against the villagers of Khirbet Zanuta. The British government issued its own sanctions shortly after, saying in a statement that Israel’s government had created “an environment of near-total impunity for settler extremists in the West Bank.”
Yinon Levi in a meeting at the Knesset in February, shortly after the United States imposed sanctions against him in connection to “escalating violence against civilians in the West Bank.”Credit…Yonatan Sindel/Flash90
The White House’s move against individual settlers, a first by an American administration, was met with a combination of anger and ridicule by ministers in Netanyahu’s government. Smotrich called the Biden administration’s allegations against Levi and others “utterly specious” and said he would work with Israeli banks to resist complying with the sanctions. One message that circulated in an open Hilltop Youth WhatsApp channel said that Levi and his family would not be abandoned. “The people of Israel are mobilizing for them,” it said.
American officials bristle when confronted with the question of whether the government’s actions are just token measures taken by an embattled American president hemorrhaging support at home for his Israel policy. They won’t end the violence, they say, but they are a signal to the Netanyahu government about the position of the United States: that the West Bank could boil over, and it could soon be the latest front of an expanding regional Middle East war since Oct. 7.
But war might just be the goal. Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, said he believes that many members of the ultraright in Israel “want war.” They “want intifada,” he says, “because it is the ultimate proof that there is no way of making peace with the Palestinians and there is only one way forward — to destroy them.”
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.png00Kevin MacDonaldhttps://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TOO-Full-Logo-660x156-1.pngKevin MacDonald2024-05-19 12:03:462024-05-23 07:39:33The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel After 50 years of failure to stop violence and terrorism against Palestinians by Jewish ultranationalists, lawlessness has become the law.
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