Troops are trained for war, where they can shoot to kill. Asking troops to police is an invitation to brutality

This was the moment that Donald Trump was waiting for. A Democratic city, Los Angeles. A Democratic state, California. His most popular issue, immigration. And protests where occasional violence could be spotlighted endlessly on social media. What better time to summon the troops and burnish the president’s tough-guy image.

But Trump should be careful what he wishes for. The spectacle of needlessly calling in 4,000 national guard troops and 700 Marines may be red meat for his Maga base, but for most everyone else it is a bright warning sign of Trump’s autocratic tendencies. Rather than quell the protests, he is provoking more, not only in LA but in at least two dozen cities across the US. Even if this is not yet the mass mobilization that such repression has sparked in other countries, it is making Trump’s true colors clear.

Surrounded by sycophants, living in an echo chamber, Trump seems oblivious to his overreaching. Yes, immigration has been his strong suit, but the issue is more complex than he imagines. Many Americans were disturbed by the large number of immigrants streaming across the southern border, but there is an enormous difference between bolstering border enforcement and raiding immigrant neighborhoods and workplaces.

Trump officials want Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents to deport 3,000 people a day. But with Trump having largely stopped the border influx, the easy path to mass deportations – returning people who just arrived – is largely closed. His administration thus has pressured Ice agents to detain undocumented immigrants throughout the country. And because it is time-consuming to target one by one people who have a criminal record or a pending deportation order – the less controversial cases – Ice is turning to random raids on places where undocumented immigrants are assumed to congregate.

An estimated 14 million undocumented immigrants live in the US. A 2017 study estimated that two-thirds of such immigrants at the time had been in the US a decade or more. These people typically work jobs, pay taxes and build families, frequently with US-citizen spouses and children. They are Americans in all but legal status. Deporting them rips holes in households and communities.

If not for the polarized politics of Washington, these longtime residents would have long ago been given a path to regularize their immigration status. If we decline to prosecute most crimes after five years, in part out of recognition that at some point people should be able to move on with their lives despite what they have done in the past, why not have a similar statute of limitations for deportations?

But that is not the world we live in, even if the impulse behind it is broadly shared. Trump’s workplace and community raids are bumping up against public recognition that over time, the equities of immigration shift, that the manner of immigrants’ entry is overcome by the unfairness of disrupting the lives they have built. Even some Republican lawmakers are now warning that Trump has gone too far.

It is no wonder that these raids have sparked protests. And Trump has responded in the lawless way that is his wont. There was nothing extraordinary about the initial LA protests that local law enforcement authorities could not have handled on their own. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, accused Trump of choosing “theatrics over public safety”. The national guard, not to mention the marines, were not needed or wanted. Yet Trump, dying to flex his muscles, mobilized them anyway.

Not since 1965 has a US president deployed the national guard without a request from the state’s governor. Then, Lyndon Johnson ordered it to protect civil-rights marchers in Alabama from a segregationist governor, George Wallace. Now, in a sad parody of that historic moment, Trump called on it to trample people’s right to protest his cruel immigration policies.

As for the marines, US law prohibits deploying them or other troops for policing purposes absent an insurrection. Trump calls the protesters “insurrectionists”, his defense secretary claims a “rebellion”, but those assertions are farcical. Instead, Trump is invoking yet another fake “emergency” to justify handing himself extraordinary powers.

The ban on policing by the military is founded on good sense. Troops are trained for war, where they can shoot to kill opposing combatants. But police can use lethal force only as a last resort to meet an imminent lethal threat. Asking troops to police is an invitation to brutality. And Trump goads them on by dehumanizing the protesters as “animals” and “a foreign enemy”.

Having broken the taboo against deploying troops for law enforcement, there is every reason to fear that Trump will continue as protests inevitably spread. The next occasion may be this coming Saturday, when he has scheduled a big military parade in Washington to mark the 250th anniversary of the US army – which also falls on Trump’s 79th birthday. Army officials worry that the parade “could make it appear as if the military is celebrating a crackdown on Americans”. That is undoubtedly what Trump wants.

To make matters worse, Trump is already threatening people who might demonstrate against his military extravaganza: “For those people that want to protest, they’re going to be met with very big force.” Even a peaceful demonstration? What about the first amendment? For Trump in his flout-the-constitution mode, those are irrelevant details.

In his first term, the “grown-ups in the room” often were able to restrain Trump’s most dangerous tendencies. This time around, only die-hard loyalists are left. Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, defended the military deployment in LA. It is hard to imagine him resisting whatever outrage Trump might next try to commit.

Trump’s military posturing is another step in the autocrat’s playbook. Just as he has attacked judges, lawyers, journalists, universities, elected officials and other potential checks on his power, so he is now taking a stab at the public. Protests are an important way to rein in abusive leaders. In many countries, they have proved decisive. Trump’s military threats aim to limit that possibility.

Aspirations aside, Trump has not yet managed to build an autocracy. It is important not to exaggerate, because that can demoralize the resistance and obscure how much difference it is making. But it is essential that we keep in mind not only the wrongfulness of Trump’s conduct in LA but also the broader plan of which it is a part.

The danger is not the protesters. The danger is Trump.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: ‘Trump is already threatening people who might demonstrate against his military extravaganza.’ Photograph: Cpl Jaye Townsend/US Marines/Reuters

This article was written by Kenneth Roth and published by The Guardian on June 12, 2025. You can also read it here theguardian.com.

Since Trump returned to the White House, the checks and balances of US democracy have proved remarkably resilient

Have we reached peak Trump? Is it possible that we have arrived at a moment, a mere four months into his second term, when the president’s capacity to do harm is diminishing?

That is undeniably a provocative question. Like any US president, Donald Trump remains immensely powerful. It is early days; he can still cause plenty of damage – and certainly will.

But after an initial flurry of activity when the opposition often seemed deer-in-the-headlights stunned, Trump’s power to daze and paralyze may now be on a downward trajectory. Recognizing that possible shift is important to embolden resistance to his dangerous, would-be autocratic rule.

Trump’s notorious flood-the-zone strategy was initially effective. Before opposition could be mobilized to one outrage, there was another. Entire government agencies were ordered shut. Government employees were dispatched by the tens of thousands. Healthcare, scientific and medical research, foreign aid, government-funded independent media, the quest for a more equitable society were all stopped or stymied.

Many of Trump’s actions followed the classic autocrat’s playbook as he deliberately attacked the checks and balances on his power. Republicans in Congress, prioritizing their own political future over the welfare of the nation, toed the line for fear of a primary challenge. Judges who ruled against him were subjected to intimidation and threats of impeachment. Law firms that sued him, or pursued cases he disliked, faced retaliation. Business leaders sidled up to him hoping to curry favor and avoid retaliation. Some journalists who criticized him were met with defamation suits or restrictions at White House briefings. Universities, as centers of independent thought, saw draconian funding cuts. Plans proceeded to remove the tax-exempt status of some private foundations and civic groups.

Trump made a mark in his first few months in part because the brazenness and velocity of his actions encouraged a save-yourself mentality among many targets. Some law firms, universities and media outlets struck deals with him, hoping to protect themselves at the expense of the rule of law, academic freedom or freedom of the media.

Yet over time, the resistance regrouped. More than 180 judges have ruled against some element of Trump’s program, from his summary dismissal of government employees to his efforts to deport immigrants without due process.

The courts were undoubtedly emboldened by Trump’s tendency to overreach. His senior aides and officials, often chosen for loyalty over competence, have shown little inclination to rein him in. The blatant unconstitutionality of Trump’s resulting actions – rejecting birthright citizenship despite its constitutional foundation, using the power of the government to retaliate against critics despite the first amendment – seem to have encouraged judges to abandon any presumptive deference to executive good faith. Many conservative lawyers are turning on him.

Because of Trump’s excesses, many of the setbacks have come even in the arena that was thought to be his strongest – immigration. The summary deportations of Venezuelan men to El Salvador’s nightmarish mega-prison, under the pretext of a nonexistent “war”, have been stopped. The Tufts University student threatened with deportation evidently because she co-authored an op-ed in a student newspaper that criticized Israel has been freed. So have other foreign students detained for similar pro-Palestinian views.

The former Columbia student and green card holder who led student protests against Israel is still in custody, but his case has highlighted the Trump administration’s absurd claim, needed to circumvent first amendment protection of non-citizens on US soil, that his actions undermined US foreign policy. About half of Americans believe his deportations have “gone too far”.

Trump’s disdain for the rule of law – his disparaging of judges who ruled against him, his refusal to conscientiously abide by judicial rulings – seems to have accomplished a remarkable transformation in the US supreme court, from a presumptive 6-3 majority in Trump’s favor to one that on occasion will rule against him, such as its pronouncement that immigrants cannot be deported without due process.

Many of the lower-court rulings are preliminary rather than decisions on the merits. Most are subject to appeal, and some have been reversed. But they have stymied many Trump initiatives. He has lost momentum.

Harvard, after unsuccessfully trying to placate Trump, responded to ensuing over-the-top demands by suing his administration. Seemingly recognizing that they had overplayed, Trump officials reportedly sought a settlement, evidently hoping to avoid an adverse judicial precedent, as has now occurred in several suits brought by law firms challenging unconstitutional retaliation against them. Trump has upped the ante against Harvard with huge cuts in government funding and a threat to its tax-exempt status, but the courts have at least temporarily stopped his effort to bar the university from enrolling foreign students.

Harvard’s belated, yet important, leadership – a stark contrast with Columbia’s unsuccessful appeasement – has galvanized other universities toward a collective defense. Law firms also have begun to band together, although many of the biggest ones still seem more concerned with preserving their considerable incomes than upholding their professional obligation to defend the rule of law. Private foundations are now consulting about how best to deter threats to their tax-exempt status.

Although public protests have been fewer than during Trump’s first presidential term, his public approval has plummeted. Elon Musk, once seemingly omnipresent as a Trump hatchet man, has retreated as people turn on Tesla and his other companies.

Trump’s foreign policy, a domain where presidential latitude is broad, has done no better at forcing acquiescence. Trump’s erratic and arbitrary tariff policies have managed to shake consumer confidence and threaten inflation while slowing the economy and panicking the bond market.

Trump’s instinct to trust Putin not to use a ceasefire to rearm and reinvade Ukraine has run aground on Putin’s persistent maximalist demands. Contrary to Trump’s real-estate instincts, Putin’s aim is not gaining a chunk of territory in eastern Ukraine but crushing its democracy so it will no longer serve as a model for Russians. That has led Trump, evidently more comfortable putting pressure on Ukrainian victims than his autocratic buddy in the Kremlin, to disengage from his mediating role. He has criticized Putin for continuing to bomb Ukrainian cities while imposing no consequences and refusing to authorize new US arms for Ukraine.

Trump’s initial proposal for ending the war in Gaza – “solving” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by expelling the Palestinians – was eagerly taken up by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, but stymied by the plan’s blatant criminality and the refusal of even aid-dependent Egypt and Jordan to go along. Even Trump has come to recognize that Netanyahu is now the main obstacle to peace because of his determination to continue the war to preserve his far-right governing coalition and avoid prison on pending corruption charges.

Successful resistance in places like Brazil and Poland provide Americans with certain lessons that they seem to be learning:

• Trump’s attacks on the restraints on his power should be viewed not in isolation, but as part of a deliberate scheme to build an autocracy. Each step matters. He is attacking not just big law or Ivy League universities but democracy.
• Early opposition is important because resistance becomes harder over time as checks on presidential authority weaken.
• The temptation to save one’s own skin should be resisted because it plays into the autocratic strategy of divide-and-conquer. A collective defense works best.
• Appeasement may seem like a way to calm the bully, but bullies see it as weakness, an invitation to demand more.

These lessons will be important because Trump will inevitably issue new executive orders designed to advance his agenda and provoke opposition despair. Project 2025, his unacknowledged guidebook, had about 900 pages of ideas. He undoubtedly will concoct new “emergencies” to justify extraordinary powers, having already declared eight. He could even spark a constitutional crisis by openly flouting a judicial order – a possibility that JD Vance has advanced.

But the deluge of wild ideas – invading Greenland, renaming the Gulf of Mexico, making Canada the 51st state – are losing their shock value, whether as assertions of executive power or diversions from Trump’s limited actual accomplishments. And Trump’s seeming belief that he can spin reality through endless repetition of falsehoods is bumping up against significant parts of the media that continue to spotlight facts and the public’s refusal to accept imposition of a post-truth world.

Trump can still cause significant damage by legislation, such as threatened limits to Medicaid and food stamps, reaffirmation of Musk’s slash-and-burn budgetary cuts, or large taxes on university endowments, but that route is more difficult than signing an executive order. The Republicans’ razor-thin congressional majority requires either holding together virtually the entire Republican caucus despite its limited but real ideological diversity or reaching out to Democrats who so far have maintained a united front of opposition. Both will, to some extent, be moderating influences.

And it won’t be long before Republican attention turns from legislation to the threat of an electoral drubbing in the 2026 midterm elections, hints of which were already apparent in the election of a Democratic Wisconsin supreme court justice and the diminished votes to fill two safe Republican seats in Congress.

I recognize it may be foolhardy to pronounce peak Trump. The president will never cease to amaze with his disdain for decency and democracy. But something real has happened in the time since he returned to the White House. The checks and balances of US democracy have proved remarkably resilient. The shock and awe of his early days has given way to a grinding of gears, a political program that, because of widespread resistance, is becoming more sound than fury.

This is no time for despair. Resignation is wrong. Resistance is working. We must keep it up.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: ‘I recognize it may be foolhardy to pronounce Peak Trump. The president will never cease to amaze with his disdain for decency and democracy.’ Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP

This article was written by Kenneth Roth and published by The Guardian on June 3, 2025. You can also read it here theguardian.com.

Critics of Israel’s atrocious conduct in Gaza should be clear that their focus is the authors of that violence – not Israeli civilians

Israel’s campaign of bombing and starving Palestinian civilians in Gaza is inexcusable. It reflects a massive war crime, as the international criminal court has already charged, and arguably genocide. But it in no sense justifies the murder of two young Israeli embassy workers in Washington by a man who then chanted: “Free, free Palestine”. Nothing justifies violence against civilians.

The killing of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim occurred on Wednesday evening outside the Capital Jewish Museum, where the American Jewish Committee was hosting a reception for young diplomats. The suspect, identified as Elias Rodriguez of Chicago, was detained shortly after the shooting. His social media accounts indicated that he had been involved in pro-Palestinian activism.

Beyond that, we don’t know exactly what motivated him, but he is likely to have acted in retaliation for Israeli atrocities in Gaza. That would be unequivocally wrong.

That is not to deny the severity of what Israel is doing in Gaza. As the news spread of the killings in Washington, Israeli strikes in Gaza killed at least 86 people, according to Gaza’s health ministry. After an 11-week total blockade of Gaza, Israel has begun to allow in a mere pittance of humanitarian aid. Even the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, described it as “minimal”, just enough to avoid problems with the US government. At least 29 children and elderly people have already died from “starvation-related” deaths in recent days, the Palestinian health minister said, warning that thousands more are at risk.

To make matters worse, Netanyahu has expanded his war aims. No longer is he seeking only the release of Hamas’s hostages and its relinquishment of power. He now also says that Israel will not stop fighting until Donald Trump’s grotesque plan to expel all Palestinians from Gaza is implemented – a massive war crime and likely crime against humanity.

International humanitarian law, or the laws of war, do not apply to the gunman in Washington. That law is meant for governments and organized military forces. By all appearances the gunman was acting on his own. But the principles of international humanitarian law can help us to assess this crime.

A basic premise of that law is that war crimes by one side never justify war crimes by the other. The duty to comply with international humanitarian law is absolute, not reciprocal.

That same law mandates that civilians are never legitimate targets unless they take a direct part in hostilities. The two victims in Washington were doing no such thing. Lischinsky, was reported to be a research assistant in the political department at the Israeli embassy. Milgrim organized trips to Israel. Neither activity is remotely military in nature. These two young adults would be utterly inappropriate targets even in war, and needless to say, there is no war in Washington.

Frustration at Israeli atrocities in Gaza is understandable. There seems to be nothing that the Israeli government can do that would stop Trump from continuing to arm and fund it. But endorsing murder because of the other side’s atrocities is a sure path to a bloodbath. Indeed, it was that war-crime logic that seems to have led the Israeli government, responding to Hamas’s murder and abduction of civilians on 7 October 2023, to have pursued its war in Gaza with little regard for the lives of Palestinian civilians that it has killed in the tens of thousands.

Difficult as it may be to accept, the proper response to Israeli war crimes is condemnation, prosecution and halting the arming and funding of these atrocities, but not acts of violence against civilians who are somehow associated with Israel or its government.

But that is not a point the Israeli government seems to want to make. Having itself engaged in tit-for-tat killings, the Israeli government instead tried to profit from the disturbing episode by blaming its critics. Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, said: “The attack is the direct consequence of the virulent and toxic antisemitic rhetoric against Israel and Jewish communities around the world that has been going on since October 7.”

That is wrong on two counts. First, there is no evidence that the gunman acted because of Israel’s critics as opposed to Israel’s conduct. Second, it cheapens the concept of antisemitism to equate it with legitimate criticism of Israeli war crimes. Antisemitism is a real and growing problem, but if the concept is misused to deflect condemnation of Israeli atrocities, it weakens protection for Jews around the world.

There are lessons to be drawn from this tragedy. Critics of the Israeli government’s atrocious conduct in Gaza should be clear that their focus is the authors: Netanyahu, the generals directing the slaughter, and the soldiers carrying it out, but not the Israeli people, not people who happen to work as civilians for the Israeli government, and not Jews.

The Israeli government might also reconsider its policy of endless reprisals. Not that I am holding my breath in anticipation, but it is nice to think that the needless and unjustified killing of these two young embassy workers could prompt a rethinking of the government’s own callous treatment of Palestinian civilians, whose horrible and mounting death toll is also needless and unjustified.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: ‘A basic premise of that law is that war crimes by one side never justify war crimes by the other.’ Photograph: Will Oliver/EPA

This article was written by Kenneth Roth and published by The Guardian on May 22, 2025. You can also read it here theguardian.com.

History shows that if western governments mount a defense, the human rights movement will survive this rough patch

s Donald Trump abandons any pretense of promoting human rights abroad, he has sparked concern about the future of the human rights movement. The US government has never been a consistent promoter of human rights, but when it applied itself, it was certainly the most powerful. Yet this is not the first time that the human rights movement has faced a hostile administration in Washington. A collective defense by other governments has been the key to survival in the past. That remains true today.

Trump no doubt poses a serious threat. He is enamored of autocrats who rule without the checks and balances on executive power that he would shirk. He has stopped participating in the UN human rights council and censored the US state department’s annual human rights report. He has summarily sent immigrants to El Salvador’s nightmarish mega-prison, proposed the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza and threatened to abandon Ukraine’s democracy to Vladimir Putin’s invading forces.

Even when his government has occasionally issued a rights-related protest – regarding Thailand’s deportation of Uyghurs to China or Rwanda’s invasion of eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo via its cold-blooded M23 proxy force – the intervention has been half-hearted and not sustained.

Yet the human rights movement survived Trump’s hostility during his first term, as well as such challenges as the George W Bush administration’s systematic torture and arbitrary detention in Guantánamo Bay and the Ronald Reagan administration’s support for brutal cold war allies. The most effective response, as I describe in my recent book, Righting Wrongs, was always to build coalitions of governments willing to defend human rights. Together, they had the moral and political clout to hold the line despite US opposition.

In the first Trump administration, for example, the UN human rights council condemned Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorship in Venezuela and established a fact-finding mission to monitor and report on his repression. Had Trump led the effort, Maduro might have dismissed it as Yanqui imperialism, but Trump had withdrawn from the council. Instead, the effort was led by a group of Latin American democracies plus Canada, operating as the Lima Group. They offered a principled defense of human rights that prevailed.

Similarly, Trump played no role when my colleagues and I encouraged Germany, France and Turkey to pressure Vladimir Putin to stop Syrian-Russian bombing of hospitals and other civilian institutions in Syria’s north-western Idlib province. That initiative forced Putin to halt the bombing in March 2020, sparing 3 million civilians the constant threat of death from the skies. In December 2024, the HTS rebel group emerged from Idlib to overthrow Syria’s ruthless president, Bashar al-Assad.

Nor was the US supportive when, in September 2017, the Netherlands led a small group of governments that persuaded the council to investigate and report on the Saudi-led coalition’s bombing of civilians in Yemen. When that scrutiny was lifted four years later, Yemeni civilian casualties doubled, showing that the bombers had behaved better when watched.

When Trump withdrew from the council, the United States was replaced by tiny Iceland. Aided by the perception that it had no special interest other than a principled concern with human rights, it convinced the council to scrutinize the “drug war” summary executions by the former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte. Duterte is now in custody in the Hague on an international criminal court arrest warrant.

Even Democratic presidents have sometimes vehemently opposed human rights initiatives. Bill Clinton’s administration was dead set against the creation of an international criminal court that could ever prosecute a US citizen. It tried one ploy after another to secure an exemption.

A coalition of some 60 small and medium-sized governments from all parts of the world resisted. Their combined moral clout was enough to stand up to the superpower. When the final vote was held in Rome to establish the ICC in July 1998, the United States lost overwhelmingly, 120 to 7. A comparable coalition was behind the adoption of the treaty banning antipersonnel landmines, despite opposition by Washington and other major powers.

Similar coalitions are key to defending human rights today. We see that already as an array of European governments refuses to accept Trump’s inclination to sacrifice Ukraine’s democracy to Putin’s aggression. We see it as Arab states, despite jeopardizing substantial US military aid, reject Trump’s war-crime proposal to “solve” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza by expelling the Palestinians. We see it as the UN human rights council, despite the US absence, continues to play an essential role in defending rights in such countries as Myanmar, North Korea, Belarus and Iran.

But there is much more to be done.

For example, Trump shows little interest in the fate of the Uyghurs. He once reportedly told Xi Jinping that China’s detention of 1 million of them (of a population of 11 million) “was exactly the right thing to do”. But western governments have not yet matched US law, adopted under Joe Biden, that presumptively bars all imports from the Chinese region of Xinjiang, where most Uyghurs live, unless the imports can be proven not to have been made through forced labor.

That is an important way to avoid complicity when Beijing blocks efforts to investigate supply chains in China. If other western governments went beyond a theoretical opposition to Uyghur forced labor, which cannot be upheld amid China’s obfuscation, to adopt a similar presumption against all imports from Xinjiang, it would go a long way toward ending this despicable practice.

The Biden administration imposed sanctions on seven United Arab Emirates companies for their role in arming the genocidal Rapid Support Forces in Sudan’s Darfur region, where one of the world’s worst atrocity-induced humanitarian crises is unfolding. Other western governments should match or extend those penalties.

Rwandan president Paul Kagame’s invasion of eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo via the M23 force also calls out for concerted resistance. In 2013, the Obama administration, working closely with the British government, forced Kagame to end his support of the M23 by threatening to suspend Rwanda’s aid. The M23 immediately collapsed. Now that Rwanda is again using the M23 to invade eastern DRC, similar pressure is needed – not just condemnation, which has happened, but the suspension of aid, which has only begun to occur.

The Trump administration, evidently seeking access to the region’s mineral wealth, has helped to negotiate a ceasefire between Rwanda and DRC but not the withdrawal of Rwandan forces or the M23 from DRC. That next step will come only with tougher economic pressure. But the European Union has done the opposite. In July 2024, it entered into a deal with Rwanda for minerals, a virtual invitation to export the proceeds of illegal mining in eastern DRC. Trump now seems to be doing the same.

Western governments have also been tepid in responding to Trump’s outrageous sanctions on the international criminal court prosecutor Karim Khan (freezing his assets and limiting his travel to the United States) for having quite properly charged Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli prime minister’s former defense minister Yoav Gallant for the war crime of starving and depriving Palestinian civilians in Gaza. All ICC members should support Khan if he in turn criminally charges Trump for obstruction of justice under article 70 of the Rome Statute, which prohibits threatening or intimidating court personnel for the performance of their official duties – exactly what Trump has done.

Despite Trump’s expressed interest in staying on as “king”, his reign will end. The question is what damage he will do to the human rights cause. Whether he leaves a global crisis or merely a discredited US government will depend in significant part on how other governments respond – whether they emulate or resist Trump’s indifference.

Today, many governments are understandably concerned with simply managing the turmoil that Trump has caused, from tariff increases to military abandonment, but the need is urgent for them also to keep their broader responsibilities in mind. History shows that if they mount a concerted defense, the human rights movement will survive this rough patch. The rights of people around the world depend on such a principled, collective commitment.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: ‘Despite Trump’s expressed interest in staying on as “king”, his reign will end.’ Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP

This article was written by Kenneth Roth and published by The Guardian on May 18, 2025. You can also read it here theguardian.com.

Dictators get an unlikely boost from the left’s identity politics.

Donald Trump’s victory in November has given rise to much soul-searching among progressives. How could a plurality of U.S. voters embrace a man who seems to relish the persecution of disfavored minorities, from transgender people to Black Americans to immigrants? As I reflect on this dangerous moment, I have come to appreciate that the identity politics of many progressives has made it easier for Trump to pursue his agenda of intolerance.

The common wisdom today holds that autocracy is ascendant, democracy in decline. The reality is more complicated. In country after country in recent years, people living under autocracy have taken to the streets, often at great risk, to demand accountable government. Turkey and Serbia are the latest examples, but we have seen similar popular uprisings from Hong Kong to Nicaragua. Ironically, it is in established democracies that the trend toward autocracy has been most pronounced.

That willingness to abandon democracy can be traced to two primary causes: the disillusionment of some people with the democratic system, and the demagoguery of autocratic politicians. The disenchantment is found in people who believe that democratic government is leaving them behind. They feel that they are stagnating economically amid growing inequality, that they are not served, heard, or even respected by governing officials. It only makes matters worse when democratic governance is paralyzed by today’s increasingly divisive politics. The answer to this politics of despair lies in part in better governance and in promoting policies that are seen to respond to, and serve, all members of society.

That is easier said than done, but it is not as if autocrats govern any better. As they undermine the checks and balances on their power, autocrats typically deliver for themselves (and their cronies) more than for the people of their country. But they avoid outrage from their supporters because they excel at covering up their self-serving policies—at changing the subject—by scapegoating disfavored minorities. The rhetoric, often couched in terms of restoring “traditional” values, varies from country to country, but the strategy is similar: A country’s problems are blamed on immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQ+ people, wokeism, feminism, or whatever excuse appeals to the conservative base and its autocratically inspired quest for the supposedly halcyon days of the past.

This is a cynical anti-rights strategy. Power is pursued by targeting for persecution the people who are often society’s most vulnerable.

The classic if reflexive response of human rights activists has been to stress that none of our rights are guaranteed unless all of our rights are secure. That was the insight of Pastor Martin Niemöller, who famously said, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a socialist…” It is the logic behind the Kantian injunction to treat others as you would want them to treat you.

But autocratic politicians do not accept that syllogism. By portraying segments of society as threats to the community rather than members of it, autocrats seek to justify depriving them of their rights, assuming not only that mistreating these supposed outsiders will not affect the rights of people still deemed on the inside, but that this mistreatment is necessary to protect them. The autocratic response reflects the often-neglected premise of the liberal vision—that is, its dependence on a shared sense of community.

Ironically, the identity politics that has come to define much of progressive thought these days has facilitated this autocratic sleight of hand by neglecting, or even undermining, the national community. Progressives have tended to promote the rights of interest groups, particularly people who are seen to have historically suffered discrimination and persecution.

The impulse to defend the downtrodden is admirable, but the way it has been carried out comes at a cost. If progressive politics can be reduced to the promotion of a collection of disfavored interest groups, it is easier for the autocrat to carve out selected groups for demonization. Autocrats simply portray their priority interest groups as the ones that progressives are neglecting—typically, members of a country’s working-class ethnic majority—and claim that the demonized groups are the cause of the priority group’s malaise. In the United States, white working class men were especially sympathetic to Trump’s appeal, although they were far from the only ones.

An alternative approach would be for progressives to speak in terms of a national community; to stress the rights of all people who live in the nation. This would not mean ignoring the rights of the downtrodden, but it would require a different rhetoric that promotes their rights as members of a national community rather than as mere interest groups among others.

To speak of a national community does not require nationalism. The aim is not to promote an aggressive pursuit of national interests against other nations. There is no need to invade Greenland. Rather, the point is to shift the public conversation away from identity politics. Progressives would speak less about a coalition of interest groups and more about a nation of rights bearers. In the United States, they would stress that the American dream should be available to everyone in the country, that no one should be left behind.

That is not to ignore the defense of rights abroad, where concern for a common humanity is often essential. But in the domestic context, that basic empathy can and should be supplemented by a shared understanding of the national community.

Depriving autocrats of the easy target of identity politics would make it easier to challenge their scapegoating as a ploy to divert attention from how poorly they usually govern. In the United States, Trump’s attacks on immigrants or transgender people have little if anything to do with the bread-and-butter issues that motivate many of the people who feel left behind, but he has greater success with this rhetorical deceit because progressives’ focus on identity politics is so easily caricatured. Trump’s notorious campaign ad—that his opponent, Kamala Harris, was for “they/them” while Trump was for “you”—illustrated the problem.

When I led Human Rights Watch, I saw this dilemma at a global level. On the one hand, I created a series of programs devoted to people who had traditionally been neglected by the human rights movement, such as LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities. I wanted them included. On the other hand, I bridled at the tendency of some staff members to talk about general rights issues by listing all of these disfavored groups rather than speaking simply of the rights of everyone. I erased the lists whenever I had the chance because I saw them as undermining the essential view that all people have rights by virtue simply of their humanity.

Some people do indeed face historical discrimination, and a targeted response is required. But progressives cannot allow themselves to be reduced to the defenders of a series of special interests, however disadvantaged. The best antidote to the autocratic dodge is for progressives to recapture the defense of everyone in a nation—to embrace and defend a national community of rights bearers.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: ‘Justice is always better if it can be provided locally, but for the time being, the Syrian judicial system cannot deliver.’ Photograph: Hassan Ammar/AP

This article was written by Kenneth Roth and published by Foreign Policy on May 9, 2025. You can also read it here foreignpolicy.com.

For the foreseeable future, international courts provide the only realistic prospect of justice for Syrians

There are few regimes as cruel as the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. There was seemingly no limit to what it would do to sustain his grasp on power, including dropping chemical weapons and barrel bombs on civilians in territory held by the armed opposition, and starving, torturing, “disappearing” and executing perceived opponents. The victims numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

Since December, Assad is gone, toppled by the HTS rebel group that now controls the interim government in Damascus. The leader of the interim authorities, Ahmed al-Sharaa, has promised a far more inclusive and rights-respecting rule. The jury is still out on whether he will live up to those vows, but one place where he has fallen short is in satisfying the Syrian people’s quest for justice. Both he and international courts could play a role.

Assad’s flight to Moscow has not diminished the desire for justice, nor should it. Vladimir Putin is much older than Assad and will not be Russia’s president forever. Just as in 2001 the Serbian government sent former president Slobodan Milošević to The Hague in return for the easing of sanctions, so a future Russian government may be persuaded to surrender Assad and his henchmen who joined him in exile as the price for, say, lifting sanctions or even maintaining Russia’s military bases in Syria.

Justice is always better if it can be provided locally, but for the time being, the Syrian judicial system cannot deliver. Under Assad, Syria’s courts mainly facilitated his extraordinary repression. They currently offer little hope of the fair and transparent trials that are essential for justice. Railroading people to conviction would only compound the Assad regime’s injustice, not remedy it. Most of Syria’s judicial system needs to be rebuilt from scratch.

For the foreseeable future, international courts provide the only realistic prospect of justice. One possible route would be for national courts to exercise universal or extraterritorial jurisdiction. That is possible because Assad’s crimes are so heinous that they fall within the category of crimes that are subject to global prosecution.

There already have been modest steps in this direction. Most involve Syrian perpetrators who happen to have fled abroad and been discovered. The most noteworthy was brought by German prosecutors in Koblenz against a Syrian intelligence officer who had run a torture center. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity. Yet so far the most senior perpetrators have not been detained, even though, since Assad’s fall, they are more vulnerable.

One government – France – has gone a step further and charged Assad himself for a particularly heinous crime, the use of a nerve agent, sarin, to kill more than 1,000 people in 2013 in Syria’s Ghouta region near Damascus. Trials in absentia are best avoided because, without the suspect present to defend himself, they do little to advance justice. But charges in absentia, with the aim of generating pressure for arrest, are laudable. More governments should follow in France’s footsteps.

But national prosecutions require a major investment by the prosecuting country, even assuming assistance from the body established by the UN general assembly to assemble evidence in support of such prosecutions, the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism. A more logical forum would be the international criminal court (ICC), where governments could pool resources in support of prosecution.

The ICC was absent in Syria during Assad’s reign. An effort by the UN security council to confer jurisdiction in 2014 was blocked by the Russian and Chinese vetoes. And with little prospect of securing custody of the most culpable officials while Assad retained power, the ICC prosecutor showed no discernible interest in pursuing other possible routes to jurisdiction.

Assad’s overthrow has changed that. Karim Khan, the current ICC chief prosecutor, has already visited the interim authorities in Damascus. But despite Assad’s litany of atrocities, no further progress is known to have been made. The fault lies in part with the new interim Syrian authorities, in part with Khan.

The easiest way for the ICC to secure jurisdiction would be for the new authorities to join the court and grant it retroactive jurisdiction. Acceptance of the court would be an important signal that they intend to respect Syrians’ rights, but al-Shara has not taken that step or indicated that he will. His reasons are not entirely clear.

One factor may be that he fears the ICC would prosecute him or fellow HTS commanders for human rights violations they committed in north-western Syria, which they controlled since 2017. This is not a trivial fear, but those abuses paled in comparison to the Assad regime’s atrocities, so it is hard to imagine they would be Khan’s priority.

Another reason may be that some of the foreign forces operating in Syria have signaled their displeasure with the prospect of ICC jurisdiction. Turkey, the principal backer of the interim authorities, may not want oversight of the territory it has seized in northern Syria. The United States, whose decision to maintain Assad-era sanctions presents the principal impediment to economic and hence political stability in Syria, undoubtedly doesn’t want scrutiny of its forces fighting the Islamic State in the northeastern part of the country.

Israel, whose officials already face ICC charges for starving and depriving Palestinian civilians in Gaza, clearly doesn’t want additional vulnerability for its ongoing operations in Syria. Even Russia undoubtedly opposes ICC jurisdiction, given the vulnerability of its commanders and even president Vladimir Putin to charges of bombing hospitals and other civilian infrastructure in north-western Syrian. They, too, already face ICC charges for their conduct in Ukraine.

Given these competing factors, there may be no overcoming the interim authorities’ reluctance to join the ICC, but that is not the end of the story. The ICC prosecutor on his own could establish jurisdiction over an important subset of the Assad regime’s crimes.

The key would be to follow the same strategy pursued in Myanmar. It has never joined the court, but adjacent Bangladesh has, which gives the court jurisdiction over any crime committed on the neighbor’s territory.

Although the ICC had no direct jurisdiction over the mass atrocities – murder, rape and arson – committed in 2017 against the Rohingya of Myanmar’s western Rakhine state, it did have jurisdiction over the crime of forced deportation because that crime was not completed until Rohingya stepped into Bangladesh. That became a backdoor method of addressing the atrocities that drove more than 750,000 Rohingya to flee. The court has approved that jurisdictional theory and is now considering the prosecutor’s request for an arrest warrant for the Myanmar army leader, Min Aung Hlaing.

Khan could do the same thing in Syria. Jordan is an ICC member and the Assad regime’s atrocities drove more than 700,000 Syrians to flee there. Charging Assad-era officials with this crime of forced deportation would be a way of addressing many of that regime’s atrocities. That partial justice would be far better than no justice at all.

This approach to jurisdiction would pose little threat to the interim authorities, whose cooperation Khan would need at least to conduct on-site investigations. Whatever their misdeeds in north-western Syria before seizing Damascus, they would have had little if anything to do with why people on the other side of the country fled to Jordan. Nor do any of the current international actors in Syria seem to be contributing to any exodus to Jordan.

Maybe Khan is secretly advancing this plan, but I doubt it. In the case of Myanmar, the ICC prosecutor’s office, beginning under Khan’s predecessor, Fatou Bensouda, publicly signaled that it was pursuing this approach. Khan has given no such indication for Syria.

He should. I am a strong backer of the ICC, but when I have defended it publicly, detractors commonly note its lack of action on Syria. For years, I defended the court by arguing that its lack of jurisdiction over Assad’s atrocities was not its fault. But with the forced-deportation route to jurisdiction now approved by the court for Myanmar, the decision whether to pursue it for Syria lies mainly with Khan. Assuming that the interim authorities continue to eschew court membership, Khan should exercise that option for jurisdiction. The people of Syria deserve it.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: ‘Justice is always better if it can be provided locally, but for the time being, the Syrian judicial system cannot deliver.’ Photograph: Hassan Ammar/AP

This article was written by Kenneth Roth and published by The Guardian on April 27, 2025. You can also read it here theguardian.com.

Coerced Uyghur workers are still part of the export chain.

U.S. President Donald Trump is notoriously indifferent to human rights, and he makes no exception for China. Rather, Trump’s dominant concern with Beijing has been America’s trade deficit—prompting the full-blown trade war that now consumes headlines. In his last term, he secured a largely unfulfilled pledge from Chinese leader Xi Jinping to buy more American goods. But a greater focus on Beijing’s abysmal human rights record would have positive trade effects.

Today, Beijing’s most severe repression is directed at China’s Uyghurs, a Turkic-speaking ethnic group of 11 million people, mostly Muslim, who live primarily in the northwestern Xinjiang region. Beginning in 2017, the Chinese government detained some 1 million Uyghurs.

Even when Chinese officials decide that detained Uyghurs are sufficiently loyal to Beijing, many are “freed” only to be placed in forced labor. No one knows the precise numbers, but Uyghur forced labor is said to be pervasive in Xinjiang, with an estimated 2.5 million at risk. Some 80,000 Uyghurs are estimated to have been forced to work in other parts of China as well.

Under focus of the highly intrusive surveillance regime that Beijing has established in Xinjiang, Uyghurs have been detained for as little as traveling abroad or communicating with people overseas, donating to mosques, or preaching the Quran without authorization. Beijing claims to be fighting terrorism, but the sweeping nature of the detention belies that pretext.

Many Uyghurs are still in custody, held at least until their jailers think they have sufficiently abandoned their religion, culture, and language. Hundreds of thousands of families have had Han Chinese “guests” imposed upon them to monitor their behavior. Some Uyghurs, especially intellectuals, have now been charged with trumped-up crimes and given long prison sentences.

The persecution has been so severe that human rights groups concluded that it constitutes a crime against humanity. A plummeting birthrate among Uyghurs—caused by the widespread detention as well as the use of forced birth control—led the first Trump administration and others to find that Beijing was committing genocide.

In his last term, Trump seemed as if he couldn’t care less. He reportedly told Xi that the mass detention of Uyghurs “was exactly the right thing to do.”

Since then, the U.S. government’s response has been tougher. In 2021, it adopted the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. Sponsored by then-Sen. Marco Rubio, who is now Trump’s secretary of state, the legislation presumptively bars all imports from Xinjiang unless the importing company can demonstrate that forced labor was not used. Given the opacity of supply chains in Xinjiang, that is difficult if not impossible to show.

Unfair Chinese competitive practices are typically thought of in terms of government subsidies or concessional loans, but the use of forced labor, apart from being a serious human rights abuse, is also one way for Chinese producers to unfairly undercut competitors’ prices. People subject to forced labor have no capacity to insist on a fair wage or to switch jobs if wages are too low.

A growing list of industries is affected, including cotton (about 20 percent of the world’s cotton comes from Xinjiang, creating a major problem for the apparel industry), tomatoes (representing some 15 percent of the world’s tomato paste), and aluminum (10 percent). But the affected industry of the greatest strategic importance is polysilicon, which is used to make solar panels, one of the green products for which Beijing hopes to corner the global market. Some 45 percent of the world’s polysilicon is produced in Xinjiang.

Beyond his infatuation with tariffs, Trump should address China’s unfair competitive practice of using Uyghur forced labor. Some steps are straightforward. He should augment the number and expertise of U.S. customs agents assigned to examine Chinese imports to determine which came from Xinjiang.

That is especially needed to ensure there are sufficient agents to support Trump’s announced plan as of May 2 to end the exemption from customs inspections for packages worth less than $800 that importers can use to evade the ban on goods using Uyghur forced labor. Trump’s attempt in February to close that loophole was quickly stymied by the insufficient number of inspectors that caused serious delays.

Customs inspectors need added resources because they must do more than simply examine certificates of origin. Why should any customs official believe Chinese shipping documents when Beijing has already tried to cover up the detention facilities for Uyghurs by claiming that they were merely “vocational training centers,” as if no one would notice the walls, barbed-wire fences, and guards?

But Trump sees himself as a disruptor, and there are certain disruptive steps that would be productive to take. The European Union has a policy against importing goods that are made from forced labor, but it has not adopted a presumption against imports from Xinjiang.

Given the difficulty of identifying any particular good as the product of forced labor, the EU blocks few imports. While exports from Xinjiang to the United States have plummeted, exports to the EU in 2022 increased by a third. As part of resolving his trade war, Trump should press the EU, as well as Britain, Canada, and Australia, to adopt a similar presumption against any import from Xinjiang.

Chinese businesses are also evading the presumption by quietly shipping goods from Xinjiang to the United States via other parts of China or third countries such as Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand. The high tariffs that Trump has threatened to impose on these countries do not preclude their ongoing use to evade the ban on imports of the product of Uyghur forced labor. Greater customs scrutiny is needed.

To make matters worse, Beijing has imposed hefty fines on the people conducting the private due diligence that the U.S. government recommends importers undertake to ensure that a supply chain is free of forced labor. Some local employees of major firms conducting due diligence have been detained, although one group was released in March.

Unless Beijing opens up and allows free investigation of supply chains throughout the country to ensure they are not tainted by Uyghur forced labor, Trump should threaten to apply the presumption against imports to all goods from China. In addition, Trump should impose sanctions on Chinese subsidiaries in third countries that facilitate evasion of the presumption and add more companies to the “Entity List” from which imports are presumptively banned.

A focus on forced labor has potentially wider appeal than the use of tariffs. Trump’s tariffs have prompted global anger and retaliatory measures. But no government can afford to show indifference to forced labor. International law has banned forced labor since 1930.

In short, a trade policy that includes attention to China’s use of Uyghur forced labor could be a win-win. Regardless of what one thinks about Trump’s war against global trade, there is no question that China’s use of Uyghur forced labor is an unfair trade practice that should be stopped. It would undercut a major unfair competitive advantage for Chinese businesses, helping to whittle down the trade deficit, while addressing a serious human rights violation. Rubio gets it. Trump should, too.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Farmers pick cotton in a field in Hami in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region, on Oct. 14, 2018. STR/AFP via Getty Images

This article was written by Kenneth Roth and published by Foreign Policy on April 22, 2025. You can also read it here foreinpolicy.com.

We must persuade Trump to do the right thing – securing peace in the Middle East – for the wrong reason

Donald Trump’s instinctive deference to the Israeli government is at odds with his self-image as an expert dealmaker. Much as it may seem laughable that the president wants the Nobel peace prize, his quest may be the best chance we have for securing any US government regard for the rights and lives of Palestinians in Gaza.

Trump currently seems to endorse the strategy of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, of trying to pummel Hamas into accepting defeat. To force Hamas to release its remaining hostages and to disband its diminished military force, Netanyahu has resumed Israel’s strategy of starving and bombing Palestinian civilians. In less than a week, about 600 Palestinians have already been killed.

The second phase of the ceasefire was supposed to have led to the release of Hamas’s last hostages in return for the freeing of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, and a permanent end to the fighting. Instead, the Israeli government has unilaterally changed the terms. It wants the hostages released and Hamas dismantled without committing to end the war. Hamas has rejected that one-sided ultimatum, evidently worried that Netanyahu would then resume attacking Palestinian civilians unimpeded.

This is not an idle fear. The point of the renewed attacks may not be simply to wrest concessions from Hamas. The vast majority of the hostages freed so far have been released after negotiations rather than by military action, and most families of the hostages, prioritizing survival of their loved ones, want a negotiated solution.

Rather, Israel’s aim may be to advance the project of expelling Palestinian civilians from Gaza, the longtime dream of the Israeli far right. Already the defense minister, Israel Katz, is threatening to seize and annex parts of Gaza, and Netanyahu is reportedly planning a new and larger ground invasion. Now that Trump has endorsed the forced permanent deportation of 2 million Palestinians from Gaza – a massive war crime and crime against humanity – Netanyahu may feel he has a green light to pursue that callous strategy.

Tellingly, the far-right Israeli politician Itamar Ben-Gvir has rejoined Netanyahu’s governing coalition as police minister now that the temporary ceasefire, which he opposed, has ended. Head of the pro-settler, nationalist-religious Jewish Power party, Ben-Gvir has long been unabashed about his desire to “solve” the conflict in Gaza by getting rid of the Palestinians. And we should recognize that Gaza would most likely be just a prelude to the occupied West Bank.

In these circumstances, a deal with Hamas seems unlikely. Why would Hamas capitulate if that would permanently separate the Palestinian people from their homeland?

Netanyahu and Trump may calculate that overwhelming military force, if applied with sufficient brutality, would force Hamas’s hand. That has long been the Israeli strategy. Trump has even resumed delivery of the enormous 2,000lb bombs that Joe Biden had suspended because Israel was using them to indiscriminately decimate entire Palestinian neighborhoods.

The international criminal court prosecutor has already hinted that this indiscriminate bombardment may be the next focus of his war-crime charges. Trump himself would be at risk of being charged for aiding and abetting these atrocities – an eventuality that would not lead to his immediate jailing but would severely limit his ability to travel to the 125 governments that as members of the ICC would have an obligation to arrest him. (Trump might ask Vladimir Putin about how it felt not to be able to attend the August 2023 Brics summit in South Africa for fear of arrest.)

Hamas has so far shown no inclination to succumb to this war-crime strategy, and the surrounding Arab states have rejected becoming a party to another Nakba, the catastrophic forced displacement of Palestinians in 1948. The big question is whether Trump comes to recognize that a deal, not forced surrender, is the most likely way out of the current horrors in Gaza that he had vowed to end.

For now, Trump’s deference to Israel seems firm, but one should never take anything for granted with Trump. If there is any constant to his rule, it is that his self-interest overcomes concern for others.

That’s where the Nobel prize comes in. If Trump wants to be known as the master of the deal, it won’t be by underwriting more Israeli war crimes.

Trump alone has the capacity to force Netanyahu to adopt a different approach. Despite Israel’s dependence on US military assistance, Netanyahu got away with ignoring Biden’s entreaties to curb the starvation and slaughter of Palestinian civilians because the Israeli leader knew that the Republican party had his back. But Trump has become the Republican party. If he pressures Israel, Netanyahu has nowhere to the right to turn.

That is how Trump played a decisive role in securing the temporary ceasefire that began shortly before his 20 January inauguration. He could do the same thing now to force Netanyahu toward a more productive, less inhumane path.

What might that look like? The best option remains a two-state solution – an Israeli and Palestinian state living in peace side-by-side. The main alternatives would be rejected by Israel (recognition of the “one-state reality” with equal rights for all) or most everyone else (the apartheid of endless occupation).

The Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has said that he will not normalize relations with Israel, which Trump craves, without a Palestinian state. Both the Saudis and the Emiratis have also insisted on a state as a condition for financing the rebuilding of Gaza.

But wouldn’t a Nobel peace prize for Trump be preposterous? No more so than the one granted, however controversially, to Henry Kissinger. He had directed or approved war crimes or mass atrocities in Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor, Bangladesh and Chile, but the Nobel committee honored him nonetheless for concluding a peace deal with Vietnam and withdrawing US forces. A Trump pivot away from Netanyahu’s endless war would be no more surprising than Kissinger’s about-face.

Admittedly, it would be foolhardy to bet on Trump becoming an advocate for a Palestinian state, but it is worth recognizing that his personal ambitions could lead him in that direction. It speaks to the topsy-turvy world of Trump that the Palestinians’ best hope in the face of an Israeli government that respects no legal bounds is to play up what it would take for Trump to secure his coveted Nobel. We must persuade Trump to do the right thing for the wrong reason.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: ‘Israel’s aim may be to advance the project of expelling Palestinian civilians from Gaza, the longtime dream of the Israeli far right.’ Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

This article was written by Kenneth Roth and published by The Guardian on March 26, 2025. You can also read it here theguardian.com.

Trump should reverse his misguided effort to deport Mahmoud Khalil

The Trump administration’s threatened deportation of Mahmoud Khalil seems to reflect a dangerous disregard for freedom of expression – a blatant example of official censorship to curb criticism of Israel.

Khalil was a recent graduate of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He holds a green card, giving him permanent residence status, and is married to a US citizen. They are expecting their first child soon. Immigration agents arrested him last week in his university housing and sent him for detention from New York City to Louisiana. He had been a leader of protests against Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

Beyond that, the facts are contested. His friends called him “kind, expressive and gentle”. A Columbia professor described him as “someone who seeks mediated resolutions through speech and dialogue. This is not someone who engages in violence, or gets people riled up to do dangerous things.”

But Donald Trump, hailing his arrest, suggested Khalil was among students “who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity”. The administration has presented no facts to back up these assertions, but even were it to do so, the suggestion that permissible speech can be a basis for deportation is deeply troubling. Trump vowed more such deportation efforts.

Ordinarily, the first amendment protects even offensive speech. Although the government retains greater latitude to deport non-citizens, Trump’s rhetoric suggests an intention to step way over the line of propriety. What does it mean to be “anti-American”? As we saw during the McCarthy era, people can face that accusation for a wide range of legitimate political views. Such campaigns are the antithesis of the free debate that is essential for US democracy.

As for the charge of “antisemitism”, Trump seems to be fueling a disturbing tendency to use claims of antisemitism to silence criticism of the Israeli government. Antisemitism is a serious problem that threatens Jews around the world. But if people see accusations of antisemitism as mere efforts to censor critics of Israel, it would cheapen the concept at a time when the defense against real antisemitism is urgently needed.

Even Trump’s unsupported suggestion that Khalil is “pro-terrorist” needs unpacking. To begin with, opposing Israel’s indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks on Palestinian civilians, as well as its starvation of them, does not make anyone pro-terrorist. Israel is required to carry out its military response to Hamas’s appalling murders and abductions of 7 October 2023 in accordance with international humanitarian law. War crimes by one side never support war crimes by the other. Pointing that out, if that’s what Khalil did, does not make him “pro-terrorist”; it makes him pro-civilian.

The Trump administration’s retaliation against Khalil is part of its larger attack on campus protests against Israeli war crimes in Gaza. Just days earlier, the administration announced the withdrawal of $400m in federal funding from Columbia for supposedly failing to protect Jewish students and faculty during anti-Israel protests, the vast majority of which were entirely peaceful. Other universities have now been threatened with a similar suspension of their funding.

Coincidentally, I spoke on the Columbia campus days before Khalil’s detention. As a Jew, I did not feel the least bit threatened. Indeed, many of the protesters against Israeli atrocities have been Jewish. Again, Trump’s pretext for censoring critics of Israel is transparently thin.

If we tolerate an Israel exception to our rights of free speech, we can be sure that other exceptions will follow. Trump likes to half-jokingly refer to himself as a “king”. Are we heading toward a Thailand-style lèse majesté under which criticism of the king is criminalized?

But censoring criticism of Israel is a poor strategy even for protecting Israel. Trump’s plan to “solve” Israel’s Palestinian problem by forcibly deporting millions of Palestinians would be a huge war crime; it has been rightly rejected by the Arab states that Trump envisioned receiving the refugees or later paying to rebuild Gaza.

Failing that plan, the Israeli government would prefer the status quo – endless occupation – but the world increasingly rejects that option as apartheid, as did the international court of justice in July. Another option would be to recognize the “one-state reality” created by Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, but the Israeli government refuses to provide equal rights to all residents. Roughly the same number of Jews and Arabs like between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, so Israel would lose its Jewish majority.

The most realistic, legal and enduring option remains a two-state solution, an Israeli and Palestinian state living side by side in peace. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has devoted his political career to avoiding a Palestinian state, but it is the best prospect for lasting peace.

In pressing Netanyahu to agree to the current temporary ceasefire in Gaza, Trump showed his capacity to exert pressure on the Israeli government to take steps toward peace that it resists. He could do the same for a two-state solution.

But to build a political support for this important step, we need free debate in the United States. Trump’s efforts to censor criticism of Israeli misconduct is a recipe for endless war and atrocities. Free speech is required if we hope to do better. Trump should reverse his misguided effort to deport Khalil.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: ‘If we tolerate an Israel exception to our rights of free speech, we can be sure that other exceptions will follow.’ Photograph: Jeenah Moon/Reuters

This article was written by Kenneth Roth and published by The Guardian on March 14, 2025. You can also read it here theguardian.com.

JD Vance says Europe should not shun far-right parties. He seems to have forgotten 1933, but hits a key conundrum

In his speech last week at the Munich Security Conference, JD Vance pressed European leaders to stop excluding extremist parties from government. Alluding in particular to Germany’s neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany, or AfD, he accused European leaders of “running in fear of your own voters”. The US vice-president underscored the point by then meeting with the AfD candidate for chancellor.

In his view, these extremist parties should be welcomed into the mainstream because they reflect voters’ concern about migration. He evidently was not troubled that the AfD also has a history of using Nazi rhetoric, making racist and antisemitic comments and plotting to overthrow the German government.

What could go wrong with simply trusting the people? Germans evidently have a more acute memory than Vance of 1933, when voter preferences led to Adolf Hitler becoming chancellor and shutting down Germany’s democracy. It was all the more shocking that Vance made his comments just after visiting the site of the Nazi concentration camp in Dachau, the culmination of Hitler’s Third Reich.

Yet Vance did hit on a conundrum – how to respect the freedom of speech that is essential for democracy without unleashing popular forces that would shred the rights at democracy’s core?

As a career human rights lawyer who grew up with the first amendment and attended Yale Law School, as Vance did, I understand his free-speech absolutism. But since then, I have worked around the world and come to appreciate a more qualified approach to free speech. Notably, the leading human rights treaty on the subject, the international covenant on civil and political rights of 1966, allows limitations on speech to protect national security, public order, or public health or morals. It also provides that “any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law”. Most democratic governments prefer this more limited conception of free speech because they recognize the fragility of democracy and want license to defend it.

But to resurrect the adage that constitutional rights should not be “a suicide pact” does not explain how democracy should be defended. The danger of creating exceptions to free speech is that it risks unwarranted government censorship and can lead to autocracy.

The US has tended to avoid the problem by delegating the regulation of public speech to the private media, but that solution is no longer viable. For decades, Americans received most news through a handful of established media outlets that kept discourse within mainstream parameters. Even as growing numbers of people received their news through social media, we relied on private platforms to use content moderation to limit extremism.

There was always something perverse about democracy entrusting such an existential issue to a handful of private institutions, but in any event, those days are now gone. The traditional media have become just one of many avenues for the dissemination of information. The major social-media platforms have largely abandoned content moderation. And X, formerly Twitter, still the most important platform for news and politics, is tainted by the rightwing and often bizarre missives of its owner, Elon Musk, whose algorithm forces his opinions to the top of everyone’s content feed. The need for a governmental role is increasingly recognized.

But how can we trust governments to protect democracy – to limit censorship to genuine hate speech or dangerous disinformation – rather than silence views that are simply critical or inconvenient? Autocrats such as the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have found pretexts to shut down independent media and, at times, arrest journalists and civic leaders whose views were deemed too critical. These governments now produce managed elections on a playing field that is sharply tilted toward the ruling party.

Even a well-established democracy is capable of unwarranted censorship. Germany has suppressed legitimate criticism of Israel. Vance is right that we must not allow dislike of certain controversial views, such as limiting immigration, to exclude those views from the political domain. Such censorship reinforces the sense of some people that the democratic system is leaving them behind, which makes them ripe for autocratic appeals. Only positions that undermine core rights and democratic values should be viewed with suspicion.

One option has been to entrust the policing of permissible speech to governmental institutions with some independence from the ruling party. Germany, for example, has a panoply of institutions devoted to blocking the emergence of extremist political parties. But Trump has shown that institutional checks on executive power are not immune to tampering.

Ignoring the problem – saying, as Vance seems to advocate, that government has no role in policing speech – may not yield a level electoral playing field either. In today’s world of bots fueled by artificial intelligence, Russian propagandists and others are quite capable of using social media to flood the public with disinformation. Romania illustrated the threat in December when an obscure far-right pro-Vladimir Putin candidate emerged as the leader of the first round of elections for president after 25,000 newly activated accounts inundated the information space. At the same time, the Trump administration is shutting down an important antidote – USAid’s support for human rights defenders, democracy promoters and independent journalists.

Ultimately, we must recognize the limited capacity of law. There is no way to write laws that enable only censorship of threats to democracy without also opening the door to censorship of merely disfavored views. The traditional American answer is to avoid any governmental role – as Vance advocates – to assume that the risk of tyranny by the people is less severe than the risk of tyranny by the government – but in today’s world of populist autocrats, that distinction is less clear.

I see no alternative but to recognize that, beyond laws, we need leaders of integrity to apply those laws. Integrity is a pliable word. I’m sure every autocrat thinks of himself as having that attribute. But there are certain virtues that are necessary for the defense of democracy.

We must seek leaders who accept responsibility not only for advancing particular political programs but also for reinforcing democratic values. We need leaders of restraint who do not grasp for power by whatever means necessary but respect constitutional injunctions, legal rules, and customary limits. We need leaders who promote a national community where the rights of everyone deserve respect rather than pushing an us-v-them agenda that excludes demonized segments of society from that community.

In today’s sharply divided societies, it may seem anachronistic to seek politicians with virtues of restraint and integrity rather than ones dedicated to a no-holds-barred quest for power, but I see no other option if we are to preserve our democracy. Trump lacks that temperament and relishes jettisoning taboos and flouting democratic norms. But just because democratic virtues can be breached does not mean they are elusive. For much of US history, Americans demanded leaders of such character. Trump is an anomaly who must not be taken as the norm.

Vance is right that in the end we must look to voters to elect such leaders. But elections do not happen in a vacuum. They are influenced by, among other things, the campaigns that candidates wage. In the United States, Democrats seem to have concluded that the defense of democracy doesn’t poll well compared with more bread-and-butter issues. But given the severity of the autocratic threat, proponents of democracy need to find more persuasive ways to elevate the issue. Regardless of the rules that govern free speech, electing leaders with the temperament to respect the laws and traditions that underwrite democracy is essential if our system of self-governance is to survive.

With four more years before the next presidential election, the public also needs to find ways to make itself heard now. Although the Republican party seems to have accepted his outrages, Trump is sensitive to public opinion. The key is to speak out, to let him know that his steps to undermine democracy are beyond the pale – that they are not why he was elected and will not be countenanced.

COVER IMAGE DESCRIPTION: ‘How to respect the freedom of speech that is essential for democracy without unleashing popular forces that would shred the rights at democracy’s core?’ Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

IMAGE 2 DESCRIPTION: ‘Trump is sensitive to public opinion. The key is to speak out, to let him know that his steps to undermine democracy are beyond the pale.’ Photograph: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

This article was written by Kenneth Roth and published by The Guardian on February 21 2025. You can also read it here theguardian.com.