Jonathan P. Baird

In his speech at the UN on September 24, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu downplayed claims of settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank saying it was the work of 150 “juvenile delinquents”. Nothing could be further from the truth.

For those who don’t know, the West Bank is a landlocked territory located west of the Jordan River. It is bordered by Israel to the west, north and south and by Jordan to the east. It is home to roughly 3 million Palestinians and 700,000 Israeli settlers. The international community widely regards the Israeli settlements in the West Bank as illegal.

Netanyahu’s UN speech entirely misrepresented Israel’s project in the West Bank. The Israeli human rights group, B’tselem, just released a devastating study that puts Israeli settler activity in a different light. B’tselem shows that Israel’s activities in the West Bank are not a collection of isolated activities. They are a single political project that is part of a comprehensive mechanism designed to dismantle Palestinian collective existence on the West Bank. The Executive Director of B’tselem, Yuli Novak writes:

“Communities are being expelled, the economy is being pushed toward collapse, and millions are living in constant fear of Israeli military or settler violence. These mechanisms work together to dismantle Palestinian collective life while entrenching a permanent system of Jewish supremacy across the West Bank. The world is watching and still failing to respond with anything close to the urgency this demands.”

To have a normal life, certain minimum prerequisites are required. People need to be able to go to work, take their children to school, attend university, go to the doctor and receive medical care, meet with family members and cultivate their land. When such activities are interfered with and blocked, life becomes difficult, if not impossible.

In assembling its report, B’tselem drew on 2000 testimonies it obtained from Palestinians since October 2023. B’tselem broke down Israel’s project into five domains.

Violence and intimidation are a central mechanism of control, displacement and dismantling. The violence is inflicted by the Israeli military, the police and armed settlers. They operate with almost complete immunity. The settler militias attack villages, farmland and grazing areas using weapons and off-road vehicles supplied by the state. The Israeli military is often present but they typically fail to prevent the violence. Between October 7, 2023 and June 30, 2026, Israel has killed 1,087 Palestinians in the West Bank.

Movement restrictions are a second mechanism of social control. People need to be able to reach their land, work, school or a hospital. Separation barriers, checkpoints, road restrictions and permit systems all restrict Palestinian movement. Settlers block roads, threaten drivers and attack Palestinians.

Economic strangulation is a third method used to dismantle Palestinian existence. Israel revoked almost all permits allowing West Bank Palestinians to work inside the Green Line. Unemployment, poverty and a decline in living standards is part of the Israeli design. Israel has prevented independent Palestinian development of infrastructure and energy development. The Israeli military bulldozed, uprooted and torched thousands of fruit-bearing trees in the occupied West Bank.

Israel has restricted every form of independent Palestinian political activity. They have imposed military rule over Palestinians on the West Bank restricting demonstrations and incarcerating activists.

A last mechanism of control is ethnic cleansing and territorial takeover. Israel and settler militias have seized huge swaths of Palestinian land. Demolition of homes and expulsion from homes are part of a project of displacement to reduce Palestinian presence and break up the continuity of Palestinian life.

B’tselem traces the elimination project to a 2017 plan developed by Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister and a member of the Defense Ministry who has powers over Israeli rule in the West Bank. Under the Smotrich plan, Palestinians have three options: abandon their national claims, accept life under Jewish supremacy, leave or face military force if they resist.

As an American Jew aware of the Jewish experience of holocaust, I am appalled to see the Zionist project degenerate into a form of extreme apartheid. There is massive denial in Israel about the crimes the Israeli state is committing on the West Bank.

The Jewish world consists of a vast array of religious and secular tendencies. The settler movement on the West Bank is largely a far right religious brand of Zionism led by fanatics who think Israel has an undisputed biblical claim to the land. Some of the most extremist factions like the Hilltop Youth advocate active displacement and exclusion of Palestinians. The idea that it is antisemitic to criticize such extremism is ludicrous.

Our media has largely failed to report the crimes Israel is committing in the West Bank. Israel has made it extremely dangerous to do reporting there. There have been many documented physical assaults on reporters by Israeli settlers and soldiers. Palestinian reporters have faced the most severe repression, getting detained and interrogated for their coverage. They risk imprisonment and worse for their reporting.

.During the Trump years, morality has atrophied in America. What is wrong is not just Israel’s elimination project, it is also the apathy displayed towards Israel’s crimes on the West Bank. These crimes need to be called out and resisted.

It is hard to imagine how our time will be remembered 100 years from now. Maybe the January 6 coup attempt will be remembered. Possibly the hatred directed against immigrants and the vicious ICE detentions and deportations will make the history books. I think what will be remembered is something more ordinary. I think the blatant corruption of the Trump regime is what will be remembered. It makes previous corruption scandals like Teapot Dome under President Harding or Watergate under President Nixon look like the minor leagues.

Trump corruption is the gold medal variety. His presidency has been a continuing story of self-dealing that constantly surpasses itself like an escalator that keeps going up. The primary goal of the Trump regime has been making money for Donald Trump and his family. Forbes says he has become $2.7 billion richer since winning the 2024 election.

One aspect of this wealth generation is the pardon economy that was featured in a recent episode of 60 Minutes. While not the biggest money maker, it epitomizes the sleazy Trump underbelly. Pardon brokers are selling pardons for exorbitant prices. The brokers are charging people anywhere from $300,000 to $3 million to get results. They want money both to put in applications and additional money later if they are successful.

No matter how noxious their crimes, extremely wealthy people who have been convicted and who were doing time in prison are buying their freedom by paying off Trump.The brokers use their right wing ties to Trump and the people around him to sell him on their clients.

Selling a government benefit is the definition of corruption. The two lobbyists who appeared on 60 Minutes, Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl, acted like their behavior selling pardons was normal and some kind of standard practice. You would not know that for 150 years the Department of Justice has played a central role in the pardon process. There used to be a pardon attorney who went through a careful investigative vetting process that looked into the merits of a pardon.

That is completely gone now. It has been replaced by a scheme rooted in wealth and connections. Money gains access to the Trump orbit and the people who can then persuade the boss. There were egregious failings in the old system before Trump like Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich and Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon but 92% of all pardons are now outside the Department of Justice. It is 100% pay for play. The wealthy and well-connected get treated differently. If they have the dough, they purchase their freedom no matter their crimes.

The previous Pardon Attorney, Liz Oyer, has written about how the pardon process used to work. The Pardon Attorney sought the views of the U.S. Attorney’s Office who had prosecuted the case, the judge who imposed the sentence, and victims of the crime. If the candidate for a pardon appeared to meet pardon criteria, the Pardon Attorney’s office did a thorough background investigation through the FBI. The Pardon Attorney would then make a recommendation to the President. While the President has broad pardon authority under the Constitution, the process was key.

It was designed to insure only truly deserving people would get pardons. When Oyer was Pardon Attorney she said 90% of those seeking pardons did not have attorneys.

Trump fired Oyer when she opposed restoring gun rights to actor and Trump supporter Mel Gibson who had been convicted of domestic battery. The new pardon system is about rewarding Trump allies and those who can pay him big money regardless of the crimes they committed.

There are many examples to cite. Trump pardoned crypto felon Changpeng Zhao whose company Binance enriched Trump family cryptocurrency. He pardoned Paul Walczak, a former nursing home executive who cheated on his taxes to finance a lavish lifestyle that included purchase of a two million dollar yacht. This pardon came days after Walczak’s mother attended a $1 million-a-plate dinner at Mar-a-Lago. And then, of course, there was Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon.

Trump’s pardons have wiped away massive restitution payments owed to the victims of crimes. Oyer has tracked the price of Trump’s pardons that owed restitution and fines. As of July, the cost to taxpayers and crime victims is more than $1.3 billion.

Pardons are now shrouded in secrecy. Never have they been less transparent. Just a week ago, Trump granted pardons to 30 people. The White House made no announcement of the clemency action and no list of those pardoned was released. One Philadelphia union official who was serving six years for bribery and who had embezzled $600,000 from his union was announced. After protest and publicity the White House released the names. Ordinarily in the past before Trump, the White House did a press release announcing all pardoned with the rationale for the pardons.

We do not know if Trump has secretly pardoned people. Usually the end of a presidential term is when most pardons are announced but no one knows what bribes and deals have already been cut. Considering the rampant criminality around Trump, it is likely there will be many wanting to be on the pardon list.

It remains a federal offense to pay bribes to public officials for the purpose of getting a pardon. While the President himself can claim immunity under the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, that is not true for others around him. There is a need for legislation to insure more transparency and protection against bribery.

The tragedy is that the presidential pardon power was intended to be used for mercy and for earned second chances. Under Trump, it has been reduced to a racket where the worst rich people use their wealth to buy their way out of paying for heinous crimes.

Back when I was in law school, I took a course on international human rights and learned a word I never heard before. That word was refoulement. It is not a word you ever hear.

Refoulement is the act of deporting a refugee or an asylum seeker to places where their life or freedom are threatened. Non-refoulement is a principle under international human rights law. The idea is that no one should be sent to a country where they might face torture, cruel inhuman or degrading treatment, or other harm.

Since the beginning of the Trump second term, the U.S. government has blatantly disregarded the principle of non-refoulement, maximizing harm to those caught in its grip. Since January 2025, 23,000 people, a staggering number, have been sent to 26 countries. These are people being sent to countries where they have no citizenship, no family ties and often no common language.

The people deported have no legal status, often no identity documents and no way to provide for their basic needs. No effort has been made to insure their personal safety in the new location where they have been transported. The Trump regime has been holding people in detention for months and then deporting them with little or no notice and without a meaningful chance to contest the deportation.

Refugees and asylum seekers have legal cases to present but they are not given the opportunity to make their case. Instead, they are fast-tracked out of the United States to places unknown and unchosen. These places can be and often are horrendously dangerous like CECOT prison in El Salvador where people face indefinite imprisonment and torture at the hands of vicious guards.

Third country removals are taking cruelty to the next level. They leave those victimized in a state of legal limbo, statelessness and precarity. They make a mockery of any notion of due process. The best that deported people might hope for is to get back to their original country which they had previously tried to escape.

These deportations represent a moral and legal collapse of our justice system into fascism. In the past, refugees and asylum seekers at least had a chance to get before a judge. Now, if there is any legal process at all, it is a rubber stamp ruling with a preordained result dictated by Stephen Miller. I would submit that one difference between democracy and fascism is that democracy maintains a legitimate judiciary. That disappears under fascism where assembly line injustice is the norm.

The principle of non-refoulement is explicitly included in the Convention Against Torture as well as the 1951 Refugee Convention and an accompanying 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. The U.S. is a party to the Convention Against Torture. While it is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, it did accede to the 1967 Protocol. Such treaties are considered the supreme law of the land under our Constitution but they are also treated as non-self-executing treaties. Enforcement relies on U.S. federal acts passed by Congress. Such laws exist for both Conventions.

The U.S. government has made agreements with 35 countries to take those deported. The receiving countries get cash in return. It is like the government is dangling large amounts of money in front of many of the most corrupt countries on earth to gain participation inn their Faustian scheme. For the victims, the third country deportations exist as a scare tactic to promote self-deportation.

The New York Times has reported on some of the stories of those deported to third countries. Leonardo Tellez-Sanchez, a deportee from Venezuala, was deported to Liberia. He had lived in Dallas for five years after a judge granted an order protecting him from being sent to Venezuela. He worked at a car dealership and he was looking forward to the birth of his son. On a routine visit to renew his work permit, ICE arrested him.

Tellez-Sanchez got a lawyer and tried to make a legal challenge to what had happened to him. ICE held him for 8 months, moving his location more than 6 times before he was deported to Liberia. About his deportation to Africa, Tellez-Sanchez said:

“They didn’t treat us like people, like human beings. They can say or do anything to you and there’s nothing you can do.”

In August, the Times reported on the deportation of a 24 year old Afghan man whose father, brother and sister had worked alongside U.S. forces during the 20 year long war. This broke a longstanding commitment previously made to protect wartime allies. The Afghan man, Khalil, (no last name at the request of his lawyer) left Kabul with his family in August 2021 when the country fell to the Taliban. The family fled to Pakistan but they again had to leave when the Taliban raided their home, seeking them. One of Khalil’s brothers had been killed fighting the Taliban in 2020.

Khalil traveled to the U.S. and got detained crossing the border. He applied for asylum. He had been granted withholding of removal last year by an immigration judge who found his fear of persecution credible. The government deported Khalil to the Central African Republic, a country the State Department advises people not to travel to. Khalil never got a real day in court.

Deportations like this are allowed to happen because of a shadow docket decision issued by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2025. In a stinging dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the majority ignored law that required due process. The majority have never explained their rationale.

During the George W. Bush years, we heard about black sites where the government disappeared suspected terrorists to secret locations outside the U.S. to be tortured. The Trump regime has created a black site variant. They take immigrants with valid unresolved legal claims to places where they have outsourced the cruelty. Imagine being in an entirely unfamiliar country where you know no one, cannot speak the language and you have no way to support yourself. Whether or not you face torture, you have been placed in an untenable situation with no way to make a living and no future.

If fascism is defeated in the United States and our legal system is rehabilitated, the architects of third country deportations deserve trials and punishment for their crimes against humanity.