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Updated at 5:37 p.m. ET on March 27, 2025

“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence” in the federal government “and seize them,” Russ Vought told The New York Times in 2023. As the Trump administration’s first two months prove, he wasn’t bluffing.

Back then, Vought was a leading figure in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s effort to provide a blueprint for a Republican presidency. Now Vought is the head of the Office of Management and Budget—which he’s described as “a president’s air-­traffic control system”—and Donald Trump is following Project 2025’s plans to quash any part of the executive branch that doesn’t bend to his will. One key step in that plan is coaxing the Supreme Court to throw out a ruling that has shaped the government for 90 years.

Last week, Trump announced that he was firing two Democratic federal trade commissioners, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya. The FTC, which enforces antitrust law, has five seats, and no more than three may belong to any party. It is what’s known as an “independent agency” or “independent regulatory agency”—a part of the executive branch whose members are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate but, beyond that, are not directed by the White House.

As I write in my forthcoming book about Project 2025, that concept is anathema to the right-wing thinkers in Trumpism’s intellectual clique. They believe that a president should have full control over anyone in the executive branch. “The notion of an independent agency—­whether that’s a flat-­out independent agency” such as the Federal Communications Commission “or an agency that has parts of it that view itself as independent, like the Department of Justice—­we’re planting a flag and saying we reject that notion completely,” Vought told NPR in 2023.

This is not the first time that Trump has moved to fire an official whose job is supposed to be secure, save in cases of misconduct. This includes Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger, whose case I described earlier this month; Federal Election Commission Chair Ellen Weintraub, who is challenging her dismissal; and the National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox, who was reinstated by a court this month. All of these dismissals appear to plainly violate statutes, but the FTC firings are an even more direct provocation. That’s because the Supreme Court precedent that protects officials at independent agencies specifically refers to a president’s attempt to fire an FTC commissioner in 1933. (Today, the two fired FTC commissioners sued Trump, arguing that the dismissals violated federal law. A spokesperson for the White House said in a statement that “the Trump administration operated within its lawful authority” in firing the commissioners.)

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s power struggle with the Supreme Court is well known, but he also feuded with other officials who opposed his major overhaul of the government. One was William Humphrey, who’d been appointed to the FTC by Calvin Coolidge, a fierce small-government conservative. Roosevelt tried to pressure Humphrey to quit, but he refused, so Roosevelt attempted to fire him—not for any specific cause, but simply because they disagreed on policy.

Humphrey once again refused to acquiesce and sued. He died the following year, but his estate continued to fight the case, taking it to the Supreme Court. For this reason, the case is known as Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. (Certain officials at Columbia University and the law firm of Paul Weiss could learn from this persistence in the face of adversity and even death.) The court ruled 9–0 against the president in 1935. The justices found that although the FTC was housed in the executive branch, it also served some independent legislative and judicial functions. “Such a body cannot in any proper sense be characterized as an arm or an eye of the executive,” they wrote, adding, “It is quite evident that one who holds his office only during the pleasure of another cannot be depended upon to maintain an attitude of independence against the latter’s will.”

Roosevelt was furious—this was one of the Supreme Court decisions that led him to attempt to pack the court two years later—but Humphrey’s Executor became an important pillar of the federal government as we know it for decades. For most of that time, conservatives have viewed Roosevelt’s presidency as an example of the evils of a president with excessive power.

The right is no longer so skeptical about presidential power. Some right-wing thinkers have espoused the “unitary executive theory,” which holds (to oversimplify) that the president should have control over all executive-branch actions. The George W. Bush administration brought this theory into the mainstream. Yet even though the Supreme Court has somewhat narrowed the reach of its 1935 ruling over time, Humphrey’s Executor remains an important limitation on the president’s powers.

Now, however, Trump allies—frustrated by how the checks and balances of independent agencies (among other things) prevented him from enacting much of his agenda during his first presidency—are seeking greater control than any modern president has. For this reason, I argue in my book that Project 2025’s approach is not conservative but self-consciously radical. In Project 2025’s chapter on the FTC, Adam Candeub (now the general counsel of the FCC) writes, “The Supreme Court ruling in Humphrey’s Executor upholding agency independence seems ripe for revisiting—and perhaps sooner than later.” In another chapter, the former Justice Department official Gene Hamilton argues, “The next conservative Administration should formally take the position that Humphrey’s Executor violates the Constitution’s separation of powers.”

This may be the purpose the most recent firings serve for the White House. As the Trump administration lines up test cases for the courts, it would only be fitting to try to get the Supreme Court to overrule Humphrey’s with a case from the FTC. But if the precedent is overturned, much of the executive branch would be transformed from watchdogs or independent actors into the president’s foot soldiers, raising the risk of tyranny—either of the majority or of the president himself. Having established that independent agencies functioned as parts of the legislative and judicial branches, the unanimous majority in 1935 laid out the principle at work: “The fundamental necessity of maintaining each of the three general departments of government entirely free from the control or coercive influence, direct or indirect, of either of the others, has often been stressed and is hardly open to serious question.”

The court’s logic remains convincing, but its confident assertion that the need for balance is a given has not aged so well.

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Presidents may not unilaterally dismantle government agencies. The whistleblower for the whistleblowers

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By Arthur C. Brooks

As a professor, my primary vocation is to teach young adults skills that will prepare them to excel in their careers. The implicit assumption society makes is that professional excellence requires formal training, whereas excellence in the rest of life does not. There is no Harvard School of Leisure, after all. Work demands discipline and training; nonwork is easy and enjoyable and comes naturally.

Our higher-education system, including my university, operates on this assumption. But to me, it’s very questionable.

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Israel’s government reshapes judiciary, triggering renewed protests and amplifying concerns over democratic erosion.

When the National Archives and Records Administration released previously unseen documents relating to the assassination of John F. Kennedy last week, the world learned something interesting. It was not anything new about who killed the president, but rather how long it takes anti-Semites to pretend to read some 63,000 pages about his murder before going back to saying that the Jews did it. The answer: less than 24 hours.

Last Tuesday, following an executive order from President Donald Trump, the documents became publicly available. By Wednesday, anti-establishment influencers had figured out who did the deed. “So who killed JFK?” asked one user on X. “The jews,” retorted Stew Peters, a far-right extremist and Holocaust denier with 808,000 followers, who has claimed that Jews sank the Titanic and that “the Constitution is being replaced with the Talmud.” (He has also hosted now–FBI Director Kash Patel six times on his online show.)

[Read: What the JFK file dump actually revealed]

More savvy sorts avoided explicitly impugning Jews for Kennedy’s killing and instead attempted to pin his death on the Jewish state. “It’s PROVEN there was Israeli involvement,” declared the manosphere podcaster Myron Gaines, who subsequently did a six-hour stream for his hundreds of thousands of followers in which he blamed Jewish people and Israel for multiple American catastrophes, including the 9/11 attacks. “We’ve definitely seen enough in the documents to indicate that Israel was involved in some way,” the pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Ian Carroll told his 1.2 million followers on X, just a day after the files were released.

James Li, a correspondent on the popular anti-establishment podcast Breaking Points, winkingly claimed that the truly incriminating material was still being concealed “in Tel Aviv.” Other second-tier talkers attempted to ride this viral trend to greater notoriety, paying Elon Musk’s platform to promote their anti-Jewish fulminations to more users. “Why did Israel kill JFK? Why do they control America? Why do they want world domination? Why do they worship Satan?” read one representative promoted post.

In reality, the newly declassified documents have little to say about Israel at all, let alone Israeli complicity in the assassination. There is a very straightforward reason for this: Israel was not complicit. We know this not just from American investigations, but from previously private Israeli records.

In November 2013, Israel’s national archives released a trove of documents to mark the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination, including the candid reactions of Israel’s leaders to the event. The Hebrew minutes from an Israeli cabinet meeting at the time reveal that the country’s decision makers did not know who killed the American president—and that they had their own conspiracy theories about who did.

“In my opinion, there are some dark corners that I doubt will ever be cleared,” mused the foreign minister and future prime minister Golda Meir, just eight days after Kennedy’s murder. She suggested to her colleagues that Lee Harvey Oswald might have been a communist agent of the Cuban leader Fidel Castro. “If there’s a clandestine group of Castro sympathizers that murdered the president, and it’s organized in a way that they silence the murderer,” she said, “I would say this is as severe as Kennedy’s murder.” (Lyndon B. Johnson shared Meir’s suspicions, though he revealed this only years later.)

So where did the notion that Israel killed JFK come from? Declassified cables trace the allegation to the country’s adversaries in the Middle East. In 1963, the National Security Agency intercepted a diplomatic message sent by a Palestinian source to unknown recipients three days after the assassination, asking supporters of the Palestinian cause to “reveal the conspiracy to the supreme judgment of the world.” The plot in question? “The late President was likely to win the coming Presidency elections without supplicating the Zionist sympathy or seeking the Jews [sic] votes,” the message claimed. “Aware of the fact that their influence and power in the United States are based upon the Jews [sic] votes, the Zionists murdered the courageous President who was about to destroy that legend of theirs.”

Whether due to outside urging or their own initiative, Israel’s enemies took up this call. “The Syrian regime, always in search of new anti-Zionist arguments, has found, in the murder of President Kennedy, material for a rather unorthodox interpretation of the lamentable event,” reads a declassified cable from seven days after the assassination. “According to the Ba’thist organ, the murder [of Kennedy] must be attributed to Zionism, which is really responsible and trying to cover up the misdeed.”

To anyone remotely familiar with the history, none of this makes any sense. Kennedy was a Zionist and a steadfast supporter of the Jewish state. “We are in this country the youngest of people,” he told the Zionist Organization of America in a 1960 address. “But we are the oldest of republics. Now is our chance in this country to extend the hand of friendship to the oldest of People and the youngest of republics.” Although Kennedy periodically disagreed with Israel on policy, he also sold Israel its first major American weapons system, HAWK anti-aircraft batteries—kicking off a U.S.-Israel partnership in aerial defense that would produce today’s Iron Dome.

Like numerous American politicians before and since, and like the majority of Americans, Kennedy and his brother Robert F. Kennedy were pro-Israel not because of some international Jewish conspiracy, but for entirely non-Jewish, largely geopolitical and religious reasons. Indeed, the sympathies of the Kennedy brothers were so well known that Robert was later assassinated by a Palestinian nationalist during his 1968 presidential campaign. Perhaps all of this is why Oliver Stone, the gadfly movie director and longtime Israel critic, never mentioned the Jewish state in his award-winning conspiratorial film JFK.

Given its implausibility, the “Jews killed JFK” theory was for decades relegated to the rantings of neo-Nazis and Iranian state television. The formerly fringe falsehood didn’t find its way to sudden celebrity because it became more convincing. Rather, the online conduits through which people get their information have supercharged this sort of material.

Today, many Americans turn to TikTok, X, YouTube, and podcasts to get their news and make sense of the world. These platforms have enabled talented creators to reach wide audiences. But without quality control or standards of practice, they also tend to privilege virality over accuracy and conspiracy theorists over more careful content creators. After all, novel content is cheapest and easiest to produce if you just make it up. And that includes anti-Jewish content.

Anti-Semitism is a social prejudice like any other, directed against individual members of a group for their perceived difference—but it also functions as a conspiracy theory. In fact, it is one of the world’s oldest conspiracy theories, furnishing an all-encompassing explanation for how the world works by blaming the world’s political, economic, and social problems on a clandestine cabal of string-pulling Jews.

[Yair Rosenberg: Why so many people still don’t understand anti-Semitism]

A discourse dominated by conspiracy theories, then, is one that will be inevitably dominated by anti-Semitism. Once a person becomes convinced that an invisible hand is responsible for the world’s ills, they are just a few Google searches away from centuries of propaganda informing them that the hand belongs to an invisible Jew. The Kennedy assassination is perhaps the most salient subject for such theories in American culture—and this, combined with an online ecosystem optimized for conspiracy theories, practically guarantees the anti-Semitic agitprop we now see.

That agitprop has little to teach us about who actually killed Kennedy. But the prevalence of such unhinged ideas does tell us something disquieting about ourselves and the incentives of the digital discourse we now inhabit—revealing a threat to our republic far greater than any assassin’s bullet.

In  a little more than a week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has reignited the war in Gaza, dismissed the head of Israel’s internal security agency, and moved to fire its highest legal official—all while pushing toward a political takeover of the judicial branch.

That Netanyahu is taking all of these actions at once is not a coincidence: He knows he faces immediate threats to his hold on power, and so he is taking desperate measures, regardless of the cost in lives and the risk to Israeli democracy.

The sudden wave of Israeli bombing raids on Gaza last Tuesday marked the collapse of the cease-fire-and-hostage deal between Israel and Hamas. Under that agreement, the two sides were supposed to exploit the pause in fighting to negotiate the next stage of the deal, including a permanent cease-fire and the release of the remaining Israeli hostages.

Why the failure to reach the second stage? To solely blame the huge gap between the negotiating positions of Israel and Hamas is tempting, but mistaken. The abyss was real—but negotiations to bridge it never began. Had Netanyahu actually been interested in reaching an agreement, he could have considered—or sought to improve—the proposal for Gaza’s future that Egypt and other Arab states put forward. That plan laid out a path, however uncertain, toward rebuilding Gaza and creating an alternative Palestinian government there.

But Netanyahu was most likely concerned less with resolving the conflict in Gaza than with preserving his government past March 31. Under Israeli law, if the current year’s budget isn’t approved by that date, Parliament’s term automatically ends and new elections must be held within 90 days. And polls consistently suggest that Netanyahu stands very little chance of reelection, as the parties that make up his coalition appear to fall far short of winning a majority again.

As of mid-March, however, Netanyahu couldn’t count on passing a budget in the 120-member Knesset. One of his partners, the far-right Jewish Power party, had bolted from the coalition after the hostage-and-cease-fire deal was signed in mid-January—with the party’s leader, Itamar Ben-Gvir, declaring that it would return to the government only “if the war is resumed, with might” to bring a decisive victory. That left Netanyahu with a 62-member coalition—and two of those members were threatening to vote against the budget unless the government first passed an intensely unpopular law to restore a draft exemption for ultra-Orthodox men.

[Read: Why Netanyahu fired his defense minister]

The stance of another extreme nationalist party, Religious Zionism, made the coalition even more fragile. When the hostage deal was reached, the party’s leader, Bezalel Smotrich, said that Religious Zionism was staying in the government only because Netanyahu had promised to resume intensive fighting “to achieve absolute victory” by “taking control over all of the Gaza Strip.” If Israel proceeded to the second stage of the deal, Smotrich’s party would leave, and the coalition would lose its parliamentary majority.

The first air attacks on Gaza last Tuesday took place before dawn. By the same evening, Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir had agreed on Jewish Power’s return to the government. The coalition appears safe. But some two dozen Israeli hostages who were reportedly still alive in the tunnels of Gaza are in immediate danger from their captors and from Israeli fire.

Meanwhile, hundreds of Gazans have reportedly been killed in the past week of Israeli attacks, with the proportion of civilians and combatants unknown. Sporadic missile attacks from Gaza, Yemen, and Lebanon again have Israelis dashing for shelter. The government hasn’t explained how it expects to reach the “absolute victory” that has so far eluded it. Hebrew-language media reports suggest that the goal is to restore an Israeli military government over much of the Strip. That’s a recipe for a war of attrition and Israeli casualties, as General Herzi Halevi—the recently replaced chief of staff—reportedly argued.  

But the hard right will be satisfied, and the coalition succeeded in passing the budget this week, preventing new elections. No wonder that the former head of the Mossad, Tamir Pardo, declared at a huge anti-government rally in Tel Aviv the night after the fighting resumed, “The War for the Welfare of Netanyahu has begun.”

Yet Netanyahu faces another, potentially greater threat, in what’s known as Qatargate: The Shin Bet internal security agency and police are investigating an alleged financial connection between several of the prime minister’s closest aides and the government of Qatar, a key backer of Hamas. Netanyahu’s critics charge that he may well have fired Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar last week in an effort to shut down that investigation. It stands to reason that the cabinet vote this week to dismiss the attorney general, Gali Baharav-Miara, could be similarly motivated.

Qatargate emerged in late November, when Haaretz reported that the Netanyahu associates Yonatan Urich and Yisrael (Srulik) Einhorn had conducted a public-relations campaign for Qatar in the lead-up to the 2022 World Cup in that country. The goal was to transform Qatar’s image from a backer of terror to a contributor to Middle East peace. Einhorn had been a consultant on five of Netanyahu’s election campaigns. In 2022, Urich was the spokesperson of Netanyahu’s Likud party, which was then briefly in the opposition. Today he is media adviser to the prime minister. (Urich denied the report; Einhorn’s PR firm called it “fake news.”)

The revelations about Urich and Einhorn’s work for Qatar did not immediately imply criminal activity. It resonated, though, because the two aides were already suspects in the leaking of a top-secret intelligence document to the German newspaper Bild, allegedly to deflect criticism of Netanyahu’s stonewalling of a hostage deal. Another Netanyahu spokesperson, Eli Feldstein, is under indictment for his alleged role in that leak.

Moreover, the Haaretz report suggested that two men with Netanyahu’s ear—one working daily with the prime minister—had financial ties to Qatar. And until October 7, 2023, Netanyahu was allowing Qatar to send suitcases of cash to Gaza to prop up the Hamas government there. The unanswered question was whether the two facts were connected.

Then, in early February, Israel’s Channel 12 reported that Feldstein himself had done PR work for a foreign firm on behalf of Qatar, while serving as a spokesperson for Netanyahu. At the end of that month, Baharav-Miara announced a joint Shin Bet–police investigation of the affair.

Because of a gag order, little more is known of the inquiry, except this: Last Wednesday evening, Urich and Feldstein were taken in for interrogation. They are reportedly suspected of bribery, money laundering, and contact with a foreign agent. (Einhorn has been living in Serbia, beyond the reach of Israeli investigators.)

Nothing so far reported ties Netanyahu directly to the affair—except for his furious reaction. The night his aides were questioned, Netanyahu posted on X, “In America and in Israel, when a strong right wing leader wins an election, the leftist Deep State weaponizes the justice system to thwart the people’s will.”

The next night, the cabinet unanimously approved Netanyahu’s request to fire Bar, the Shin Bet chief. Several groups appealed the legality of this decision, and Baharav-Miara ruled that the dismissal must first be submitted to the same independent committee that originally approved Bar for the position. The cabinet ignored the attorney general’s ruling—and on Sunday voted no confidence in her as well, initiating her dismissal.

The timing of Bar’s firing suggests a possible connection to Qatargate. Bar had already acknowledged that he shared responsibility for the intelligence failure that allowed Hamas to attack on October 7. He had said that he planned to resign before the end of his term in 2026. But the investigation of Qatargate looked to be moving on a faster track than Bar’s plans, and Netanyahu may wish to appoint a replacement whose loyalty will belong to the prime minister, not the law.

The bid to dismiss Baharav-Miara would also be less surprising but for the timing. Baharav-Miara has been in constant conflict with the cabinet—not because she has stepped out of line, but because she has stood against the Netanyahu government’s moves to concentrate power in its hands. And yet, until now, Netanyahu has ignored ministers’ calls to dismiss her, apparently because he faces corruption charges and does not want to invite court intervention by firing the chief prosecutor. With Qatargate before him, however, he gave Justice Minister Yariv Levin the go-ahead to bring the no-confidence vote in the cabinet.

To all of that, add the continuing push for “judicial reform”: Tomorrow the Knesset is set to vote on legislation to change how judges are appointed in Israel and give greater power to politicians, especially those in the ruling coalition. This has been one of the government’s central goals since early 2023.

[Read: Netanyahu’s other war]

The timing of that parliamentary vote is not directly linked to Qatargate or the war. But it does have the effect of flooding the zone—of overwhelming the parliamentary opposition and the popular protest movement while they are focused on the war, the hostages, and the attacks on Bar and Baharav-Miara.

The next chapters of this story will play out partly in the courts and partly on the streets. The supreme court has already issued a temporary order freezing Bar’s dismissal. Cabinet ministers have declared that the government should ignore the court. Major business leaders have threatened a national shutdown in response. Street protests—against the war, for saving the hostages, for democracy—have swelled again, with massive rallies in Tel Aviv and near-constant demonstrations outside Netanyahu’s house in Jerusalem. What has become clear to many Israelis is that for the sake of his political survival, Netanyahu is prepared to make his country pay almost any price.

Early in American history, James Madison, the chief architect of the Constitution, warned that when the federal government seizes new powers to target foreign nationals, the rights of American citizens are at risk. The year was 1798, a time of tension with France. President John Adams was about to sign the Alien and Sedition Acts, including the Alien Enemies Act––the law the Trump administration is now citing to justify deporting hundreds of people to a brutal prison in El Salvador without due process.

Madison summed up his concerns in a letter to Thomas Jefferson. “The management of foreign relations appears to be the most susceptible of abuse of all the trusts committed to a Government,” he wrote, noting the state’s ability to conceal facts in that realm or to share them selectively. “Perhaps it is a universal truth,” he continued, “that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger real or pretended from abroad.”

His concern would prove to be justified on many different occasions in ensuing centuries. And it is newly relevant today, thanks to the Trump administration’s capricious, spectacle-driven treatment of foreign nationals, some here legally, others illegally. The White House has assured the public that individuals it is deporting or trying to deport are terrible people––vicious criminals or even terrorists. But in many of those cases, it has presented little or no evidence to back up its claims, and appears to be denying due process to contest or disprove them. The administration is also targeting some people for mere speech, which it casts as evidence of terrorist sympathies.

[Read: The ultimate Trump story]

These moves don’t just hurt foreigners; as Madison warned, they threaten Americans too, eroding the very foundations of our liberty. The Constitution imposes limits on the state in order to guard against rights violations and restrain would-be tyrants. The most important limits on state power include the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition on denying due process to anyone and the First Amendment’s prohibition on any law abridging free speech. If the legitimacy of Trump’s actions is ceded because his targets are unsympathetic foreigners, those powers will be deployed against citizens eventually.

What’s more, when the legality of the administration’s deportations has been challenged, Trump, his appointees, and some of his most powerful supporters have seemingly defied judicial orders or urged the impeachment of judges, risking a constitutional crisis that threatens another core protection against tyranny: the separation of government powers into coequal branches.

[Read: Stephen Miller has a plan]

Immigration enforcement needn’t be this way. Trump was reelected with a popular mandate to deport immigrants here illegally. He could easily do so without threatening our open society. President Barack Obama deported more than 3 million people without incurring that cost. Yet, for all Trump’s “America First” rhetoric, he is choosing to target foreigners in ways that imperil the rights of Americans and the rule of law.

Two particular administration actions are illustrative.

First is Trump’s recent invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to deport 238 Venezuelans. The act says that during war or when an “invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened,” aliens from the enemy country can be removed. Madison used the law during the war of 1812, Woodrow Wilson used it against German nationals during World War I, and Franklin D. Roosevelt invoked it during World War II, prior to the forced internment of American citizens, the quintessential vindication of Madison’s warning. Today, the United States confronts nothing so dangerous as the Axis powers. The Trump administration is invoking this fraught law to target Venezuelans at a time when the United States is not even at war with Venezuela; it claims that the Venezuelan gang in question “is perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion” against the United States.

By the administration’s own admission, many of the 238 people swept up by federal agents had no criminal record here. Despite this, the Trump administration detained the individuals and put them on planes. Even after an order from a federal judge to stop the flights, U.S. officials turned the Venezuelans over to authorities in El Salvador. The deportees had no chance to argue that they weren’t in the gang in question, as lawyers and members of some of their families claim, or to challenge their removal in court. The United States isn’t even sending these deportees back to their country of origin; it is paying El Salvador to hold them for at least a year in a prison known for harsh treatment. In terms of due process, “Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act,” another federal judge who reviewed the matter said on Monday. (Yesterday, a federal appeals court upheld a block on the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to summarily deport alleged members of the Venezuelan gang.)

If legal residents who broke no laws are among the deported, or if American citizens are swept up in a future deportation carried out in the same take-our-word-for-it way, how would anyone know? This is not a speculative worry: The Government Accountability Office has found that from 2015 to 2020, “ICE arrested 674, detained 121, and removed 70 potential U.S. citizens.” Allowing due-process-free deportations of mere suspects sets a precedent that risks an American one day winding up in a foreign prison cell.

Second, Trump administration officials are targeting foreigners who came here legally—with student visas, H1-B visas, or green cards—because of their speech supporting Palestine and criticizing Israel. The most prominent target so far is Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder and recent graduate student at Columbia University who participated in pro-Palestinian activism and was a lead negotiator on behalf of student protesters. The Trump administration alleges that he is a supporter of Hamas, a charge that his attorney has denied, and many of his critics allege that his activism at Columbia included unlawful actions. If that is accurate, Khalil could be charged with a crime, convicted, and removed on that basis without the First Amendment being undermined. Instead the Trump administration detained him without charging him criminally or presenting any evidence connecting him to Hamas. (This week, it added new arguments for deportation: that on his green-card application, Khalil allegedly failed to disclose his work for or membership in a group at Columbia that favors divestment from Israel, the British embassy in Beirut, and the United Nations refugee agency for Palestinians; lawyers for Khalil are challenging his detention.)

Another person federal officers have tried to detain is Yunseo Chung, a Columbia student. “The Trump administration is arguing that her presence in the United States hinders the administration’s foreign policy agenda of halting the spread of antisemitism,” The New York Times reported. According to the Times, Chung, who left South Korea for the United States when she was 7 and was valedictorian of her high school, joined in but did not lead campus pro-Palestine demonstrations. Chung has filed a lawsuit challenging the attempt to arrest and deport her, arguing that the First Amendment protects her speech. The lawsuit states that earlier this month she attended a demonstration outside a campus building to protest what she saw as excessive punishments for student protesters. “Ms. Chung was arrested and given a Desk Appearance Ticket,” it adds, “a common citation issued by the police at protests.” That ticket has not yet been adjudicated.

The administration is targeting these legal residents and others, it appears, only because of their pro-Palestine, anti-Israel viewpoint—a viewpoint that the government conflates with support for Hamas and therefore for terrorism. While campaigning in New York last year, Trump declared, in reference to contemporaneous campus protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza, “One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country.” If Trump, as president, can violate the First Amendment’s prohibition on viewpoint discrimination when it comes to foreign students, Americans lose that limit on state power too. Even the anti-immigrant firebrand Ann Coulter objected to the administration’s actions. “There’s almost no one I don’t want to deport,” she wrote on X, “but, unless they’ve committed a crime, isn’t this a violation of the first amendment?”

[Graeme Wood: The kind of thing dictators do]

In all of this, Trump is prioritizing what is bad for foreigners over what’s good for Americans. Partisans are cheering him on, arguing that the foreigners in question are bad people who are receiving harsh treatment because they “deserve” it. A more patriotic approach would focus on what American citizens deserve.

Americans deserve immigration officials who are transparent about what they do and why, not officials who offer no explanation, or conflicting explanations, for detentions and deportations. Americans deserve Homeland Security officials who are focused more on terrorists than on searching dorm rooms. And Americans deserve a president who supports a free-speech culture, obeys court orders, and fulfills rather than violates his oath by offering due process before depriving anyone of liberty. As the historian Timothy Snyder recently wrote, “If you are a citizen and you are casting doubt on the importance of due process, remember this: you need due process in order to prove that you are a citizen.”

To focus on what Americans deserve is not to imply that foreigners don’t deserve just and lawful treatment as an end in itself. Nor is it to imagine that their lives can be cleanly disentangled from those of citizens. Americans work for and hire foreigners. We date and marry them, as Trump himself did. Mistreatment of them affects us too.

Still, a president has no higher duty than to protect and defend the Constitution, that most indispensable guarantor of our rights and ability to self-govern, and to serve the citizens he represents. The current president is derelict in that highest duty; he is spending more energy undermining the rights of foreigners than conserving the rights of his countrymen.

The demonstration in London was like so many others in the past year and a half. A swell of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, tens of thousands of them, banged drums and chanted against Israel. Although this march in early October observed the one-year anniversary of the day Hamas militants broke a cease-fire by invading Israeli territory, the marchers paid no heed to the civilians who were murdered or kidnapped.

The U.K. chapter of the world’s largest human-rights organization, Amnesty International, echoed the marchers’ point of view. The official Amnesty UK account on X promoted a video of an unnamed young female protester clad in a red shirt and a keffiyeh. She peered into the camera and said: “Don’t let anyone tell you this all started on the seventh of October, 2023.”

The video showed a demonstrator’s placard: It’s been 76 years & 364 days—a reference to events that culminated in the founding of Israel in the late 1940s. The implication: Israel, a member state of the United Nations, has no right to exist. The clip, which Amnesty UK captioned “It didn’t start one year ago,” drew 9.7 million views. Amnesty employees around the world shared it.

The social-media promotion of this march marked an astonishing shift for one of the world’s most prominent human-rights organizations. Amnesty’s handbook declares that it is “independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion. It does not support or oppose any government or political system, nor does it necessarily support the views of the victims whose rights it seeks to protect.”

Amnesty’s goal was to serve as an advocate for victims and prisoners of conscience, and to stand apart from the polarized politics of the Cold War. The same ethos influenced the founders of Human Rights Watch and Doctors Without Borders. As the latter group proclaims on its website: “We are independent, impartial, and neutral.”

More recently, though, human-rights leaders have grown accustomed to looking at the complicated stew of politics and culture in Israel and Palestine and blaming Israel foremost. As the cultural and political left has come to dominate the human-rights community, young staffers with passionate ideological commitments have helped rewrite the agendas of the best-known organizations. Critical theories of social justice, built on binaries that categorize Palestinians as oppressed and Israel as the oppressor, now dominate many conversations about the Jewish state, which a constellation of groups casts as uniquely illegitimate—a regressive, racist ethnic “Western” state in an Arab sea.

[Dara Horn: Why the most educated people in America fall for anti-Semitic lies]

Rasha Khoury, the president of the board of Doctors Without Borders USA and a surgeon who has worked courageously in war zones, might be seen as the embodiment of this new tendency in the human-rights establishment. She was born in the occupied Palestinian territories. A month after the Hamas attack and the beginning of the Israeli counterattack, she posted an essay on the organization’s digital bulletin board, known as the Souk, the Arabic word for “market.” “We must decolonize our minds,” she wrote. “The mainstream discourse around the unhinged bombardment and massacre of Palestinians in Gaza by Israeli forces for the last 33 days continues to affirm the colonizer’s world view, one rooted in white supremacist logic.”

Not long after October 7, Khoury was among the co-authors of “Violence in Palestine Demands Immediate Resolution of Its Settler Colonial Root Causes”—an article in the journal BMJ Global Health that, subsequent commentators argued, ignored Hamas’s role in triggering the Israeli invasion and incorrectly blamed the Jewish state for a deadly missile strike. In a follow-up article, Khoury and her co-authors responded to the criticism with scorn. “Demands for ‘corrections,’” they declared, “are almost always demands to acquiesce to Israeli state propaganda.”

In a similar spirit, Doctors Without Borders seemed to minimize the egregiousness of the Hamas attack from the start, describing it on X that very day as “the escalation between Israel and Gaza.” Other human-rights groups have more forthrightly condemned the Hamas offensive but primarily faulted the Jewish state for the underlying conflict. On the day of the attack, Amnesty’s secretary general, Agnès Callamard, posted on X that she was dismayed by the mounting Palestinian and Israeli civilian deaths. She also called for addressing “the root causes of these escalating cycles of violence.” Doing so, she went on, “requires upholding international law and ending Israel’s 16-year-long illegal blockade on Gaza, and all other aspects of Israel’s system of apartheid imposed on all Palestinians.”

Human-rights groups fairly argue that disagreeing with Israel’s actions and policies is not anti-Semitic, but they have become more and more averse even to considering Israel’s side. “There’s clearly a leftist perspective that would like to do away with Israel,” the longtime Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth told me. Roth led the group for decades before stepping down in 2022 and maintained that his former employer did not share this perspective. Some other former employees of the group disagreed. “The trend is to substitute ideology and personal belief for the principles of the human-rights movement,” Danielle Haas, who left her job as a senior editor at Human Rights Watch, told me.

Earlier this year, Amnesty International took the extraordinary step of suspending its Israel chapter, after that chapter criticized a report accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. In an internal email to colleagues in Europe, Amnesty Israel deputy director Yariv Mohar suggested that the broader organization was playing into “a zero-sum victimhood game, as if any attention or acknowledgment to the victimhood of one side comes at the expense of the other.”

Major human-rights groups’ shift toward overt opposition to Israel has had the unusual effect of sidelining many of Israel’s own activists, who historically are among the sharpest critics of the Israeli government’s behavior in Gaza and the West Bank. These activists—along with many Jewish counterparts around the world—object to the reflexive condemnation of Israel and wrestle with questions they find vexing: How can the country protect itself from Hamas? What would a proportionate, defensible response to October 7 look like?

Roy Yellin is a longtime left-wing human-rights activist in Israel who has worked closely with the big international groups in Europe and the United States over the years. “Human-rights organizations earned their prestige because they described reality as it was,” he said. “But too often now I’ve seen lots of colleagues in the international community who I thought of as partners who are in complete denial about what Hamas did in Israel.”

Within human-rights organizations, anger toward Israel has been simmering for decades, particularly as the country’s politics have shifted rightward and its settlements have expanded in the West Bank. On October 7, the divide within the human-rights movement over Israel began to seem unbridgeable, in particular to many Jewish employees. That morning, Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters viciously attacked Israel, slaughtering civilians before retreating back into Gaza, where they gathered their armaments and hid in tunnels, using the dense civilian population aboveground as human shields. Hospitals, schools, and universities—all became hiding spots for Hamas militants.

Israel responded with a relentless, at times brutal, invasion of Gaza, in which many thousands of Palestinian civilians, including children, were killed. This has given rise to a heated debate about whether such actions can be justified. Many critics have argued that Israel, as a democracy that professes to follow modern rules of war, has an obligation to minimize civilian casualties, and they point to abundant evidence that Israel chose to drop bombs on Hamas militants and headquarters even when aware that these sites were crowded with civilians. Even some Israelis have objected to the duration of the war and felt that it was too driven by feelings of rage and revenge. The international human-rights movement has gone further. Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and Doctors Without Borders have all accused Israel of crimes against humanity and acts of genocide. Some human-rights leaders have openly questioned Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

Over the past six months, I’ve reviewed internal emails and hundreds of social-media posts by leaders of prominent human-rights organizations. I’ve also spoken with more than two dozen Jewish employees of these groups, nearly all of whom described a pervasive and growing estrangement from the organizations where they had worked, in some cases, for decades. None of these staffers would pass for an apologist for Israel’s right-wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Their politics are left of center and many are deeply critical of Israel’s invasion and of actions that they categorize as war crimes. But, they said, talk of taking a nuanced view of the conflict drew contempt from colleagues and supervisors.

These Jewish employees argued internally that Israel had waged a brutal war, but also that Israelis were badly scarred by the slaughter of October 7 and that Hamas had committed terrible war crimes and acts of terrorism. Yet to take these positions was to risk being labeled as a propagandist for a settler-colonialist regime. Many of these employees are particularly galled by the frequent claim that Israel is a white-supremacist state. More than half of Israeli Jews are descendants of those who lived in Arab countries, Iran, and Ethiopia; a great many others have ancestors who were driven from Europe by the Nazis.

A former top executive with a well-known human-rights organization noted the frustration inherent in trying to draw evenhanded distinctions that were once elementary in the human-rights world. “Hamas has an obligation under international law not to use human shields and to distinguish between military and civilian targets,” this person, who asked not to be identified to avoid further alienating former colleagues, said. “But if you bring this up internally, it’s framed as a distraction, an Israeli talking point.”

The leaders of the world’s most prominent human-rights groups have displayed little appetite for acknowledging the uncertainty and moral murk of the Gaza war. On October 17, 2023, the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry reported that Israel had bombed the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital and killed close to 500 Palestinians. Amnesty and Doctors Without Borders immediately picked up on that claim: The leaders of the latter group posted about the Israeli “massacre” on their social-media feeds. And Human Rights Watch’s director of Israel and Palestine issues, Omar Shakir, amplified a post blaming Israel for the attack. He added: “Abject horror. THIS MUST END.”

Shakir backed off a few hours later, saying that his organization was investigating. And to its credit, Human Rights Watch did so judiciously. A month later, it reported that the explosion likely was caused by a misfired Palestinian missile, which hit a paved area next to a parking lot and not the hospital itself. It also faulted the Gaza Health Ministry for reporting a death toll that is “significantly higher than other estimates, displays an unusually high killed-to-injured ratio, and appears out of proportion with the damage visible on site.” (Unlike Amnesty and Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch has also released a report that researched and documented Hamas’s war crimes on October 7.)

[Read: The case for Palestinian pragmatism]

To this day, Doctors Without Borders has not removed its debunked claims of Israeli malfeasance from its social-media feed.

Doug Sandok worked with Doctors Without Borders in Rwanda, Chechnya, and Sri Lanka in the 1990s. He has charted the curdling of the group’s rhetoric regarding Israel. “I went to an organization-wide meeting in November 2023, and the discourse shocked me, all about anti-settler-colonialism and racism,” he told me. “A number of us asked, ‘Is it really a foregone conclusion that Israel has committed genocide?’ It feels like one more institution captured by the ideological left.”

For Dan Balson, working for Amnesty International was a longtime dream. He and his parents got out of the Soviet Union in 1988, as part of a wave of Jewish émigrés. Amnesty, he told me, played a key role in pressuring Moscow to release families like his. “It was a household name in my world,” Balson, who is 40, said.

He became Amnesty’s advocacy director for Europe and Central Asia, covering territory that stretched from Russia to Afghanistan to Ukraine. He admired the courage and creativity that his colleagues showed in documenting human-rights abuses. One used a fragment of an exploded shell that killed civilians to track down and publicly identify the armaments manufacturer; another donned a niqab and traveled through a war zone, documenting the crimes of a government and its secret police.

Slowly, however, Balson noticed a harshness creeping in whenever the subject of Israel arose. In particular, when he visited Amnesty’s global headquarters in London, he sensed an antipathy toward Israel and anyone who identified as a Zionist.

On the morning of October 7, Balson checked and rechecked his messages to see if Israeli friends had been harmed. Then he scrolled the Amnesty International website, which issued a statement that day deploring that “civilians on both sides” were “paying the price of unprecedented escalation in hostilities between Israel and Gaza.” That statement just once referred to Hamas, which controls the government of Gaza, preferring the term “Palestinian armed groups.”

Balson turned to X and saw that his colleague Rasha Abdul-Rahim, then the director of technical services for Amnesty, had claimed that although she was distressed by reports of Palestinian fighters dancing on Israeli bodies, Palestinians had suffered worse for decades. She added:“To be truly anti racist and decolonial is to recognise that resistance against oppression is sometimes ugly.”

That night Balson wrote his resignation letter. Amnesty International’s time-honored approach, he wrote to his supervisors, was to decode the motivations, anxieties, and limitations of a nation and its leaders, even when those are disagreeable. None of that seemed to apply to Israel. Amnesty’s approach, he wrote, “has shown such disdain for Israelis’ existential fears that it seems deliberately calculated to repel rather than attract and persuade.”

Even Amnesty’s sparing acknowledgment of Hamas’s role on October 7 had proved too pro-Israeli for some staffers, who insisted that Amnesty’s statement was too understanding of Israel. As debate grew within the organization, and some Jewish staffers argued for measured tones, other Amnesty employees complained that such arguments were “triggering” and accused Jewish colleagues of Islamophobia, multiple staffers told me.

I asked Amnesty International USA’s director, Paul O’Brien, about these tensions. He replied that most conversations within Amnesty USA were respectful but “not pain-free.” Might unbridled passions and angry social-media positings, I asked, interfere with Amnesty’s work? “I have seen social-media publications that I wish we had not sent,” he acknowledged.

O’Brien’s critics see his own conduct as at times emblematic of the movement’s growing opposition to Israel’s entire reason for being. In March 2022, he backhandedly endorsed the disestablishment of Israel in its current form. “We are opposed to the idea—and this, I think, is an existential part of the debate—that Israel should be preserved as a state for the Jewish people,” he said at a luncheon of the Woman’s National Democratic Club in Washington, D.C. He subsequently expressed regret for his remarks and said that Amnesty “takes no position on the legitimacy or existence of any state, including Israel.” (Israel’s 2 million Arab citizens vote and are represented in the country’s Parliament and on its supreme court.)

But making stridently anti-Israel remarks, whether in person or online, is not a barrier to gaining a prominent role at Amnesty. In April 2022, a Palestinian gunman killed three Israeli civilians in Tel Aviv. Rasha Abdel Latif, a human-rights activist in D.C., reposted a social-media statement written in Arabic that stated: “This land is our land … The occupation has no choice but to leave.”

Four days later, Amnesty USA appointed Latif to its board. Two people told me that angry Jewish employees demanded a meeting with O’Brien and management, during which O’Brien conceded that, yes, Latif’s social-media post could be read as anti-Jewish. But he said that she had learned her lesson and that the board would not censure her so as to avoid giving comfort to the organization’s critics. Latif’s critics accused Amnesty of treating her as a victim. “The only reason she was not removed from the board is that the victims of her bias were Jewish,” Balson told me.

Writing inflammatory social-media posts has become common among Amnesty officials. On the first day of 2024, Abdul-Rahim, the former technical-services director, posted on X, “Happy new year to everyone except the #israeli apartheid state.” Even Amnesty USA’s official website features dubious statements. In May, Amnesty put up a collage of footage from its “Solidarity With Gaza” conference, accompanied by music from the hip-hop artist Macklemore. “Who gets the right to defend and who gets the right of resistance has always been about dollars and the color of your pigment, but white supremacy is finally on blast,” Macklemore said in his rap about Israel.

I asked O’Brien about that post, which at a minimum seemed ignorant of Israel’s actual demographics. O’Brien said he was unfamiliar with it (though it had been on Amnesty USA’s site for half a year, even after employees had complained about it to senior managers). I sent him a link, and he replied the next day: “Thanks for flagging that post. We have removed it as it did not follow our internal guidelines.”

This past fall, on the anniversary of the October 7 attack, an extraordinary anonymous statement purporting to represent more than 40 current and former Doctors Without Borders staffers appeared on the Souk. It angrily protested how the Geneva-based organization, which has 69,000 employees and an annual budget well over $1 billion, tended to characterize the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

The statement accused Doctors Without Borders of remaining silent about Hamas’s “ferocious barbarity” and sexual violence and of ignoring Israelis taken hostage, some of whom died in captivity, including infants. “This version” of the organization, the statement declared, “does not represent us. It barely represents itself.”

French physicians founded Doctors Without Borders in the aftermath of a civil war and famine in Nigeria. Its charter committed to providing medical care without regard to politics, race, or nationality. But five staffers, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of endangering their jobs, described an environment in which their colleagues refused to entertain any nuance about the Jewish state. In November, for example, Javid Abdelmoneim, the former president of Doctors Without Borders UK, endorsed a full boycott of Israel, writing on X: “Invest no other time on Israel other than to cut it out of your life.”

Michael Goldfarb, a former longtime communications director for Doctors Without Borders, had worked in desolate and dangerous corners of the world. But his patience for his former employer eventually reached an end. He posted last year on the Souk, writing of his frustration with the “blatantly hate filled and, yes, anti-Semitic responses” within the organization to the anonymous Souk statement. “Fear of retaliation, silencing, and ostracism grips many MSF colleagues,” he wrote, using the French abbreviation for Doctors Without Borders, “who nonetheless courageously endorsed the publication of the post.” (Goldfarb declined my request for further comment.)

As if to underline his statement about organizational intolerance, Doctors Without Borders employees let loose on the Souk, going after Goldfarb and all those who signed the statement. “I leave you with your hatred, your racism and your victimization (We’re used to it!),” one rank-and-file staffer wrote. Another employee, Olivier Falhun, of the press office in Paris, responded to the dissenters, “At the risk of offending your principles-based catechism, I can’t resist sharing with you a self-evident solution … ‘We’ll have to give the land back. It’s as simple as that.’”

[Gershom Gorenberg: Netanyahu takes desperate measures]

These and similar statements have remained on the organization-wide site for many months. (I sought to talk with senior leaders at Doctors Without Borders USA about this atmosphere and other questions regarding Israel. A press officer, Brienne Prusak, wrote back that “we are respectfully going to decline.”)

The organization’s one-sided view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict goes beyond incendiary sentiments on message boards and social media. The fact is that the hospitals they worked in were often home to Hamas gunmen and armaments.

In November 2023, the Israeli army announced plans to root out Hamas operatives that it said were hiding in Al-Shifa Hospital, a major medical facility in Gaza City. A large contingent of Doctors Without Borders staff worked there, and its leaders took offense at the Israeli claim. The president of its Australian chapter, Katrina Penney, told a newspaper that she had “seen no evidence that the hospital buildings or the compounds are being used by Hamas as a military base.”

I asked two Doctors Without Borders employees who had worked in East Jerusalem and Gaza about such claims. These staffers frowned. The presence of Hamas gunmen in that hospital and in others was an open secret. “You knew Hamas was there; I went to meetings where this was made very clear,” the staffer, who asked for anonymity out of a desire to continue to work in the human-rights field, told me. “Doors were hidden. There were units you did not get into, that had armed guards at the door.”

Laws of war require soldiers to act with great care when fighting around hospitals, and none of this testimony would justify Israeli brutality. Likewise, however, humanitarian groups such as Doctors Without Borders claim to observe the principle of bearing witness to abuses—an obligation that includes challenging armed groups such as Hamas that risk civilian lives by using hospitals as bases and hiding spots.

Months after that Israeli operation at Al-Shifa, Hamas’s subterfuge was exposed—as was the willful ignorance of Doctors Without Borders. A New York Times investigation strongly suggested that Hamas used Al-Shifa for cover and to store weapons. U.S. spy agencies went further, saying that Hamas used Al-Shifa as a command center and that it held hostages there. That would be a war crime.

Last June, Doctors Without Borders accused Israel of killing one of its staff physiotherapists, Fadi Al-Wadiya, as he biked to work. Organization officials portrayed this as a war crime, an innocent family man slaughtered. An official statement said, “There is no justification for this; it is unacceptable.”

Doctors Without Borders posted a photo of Al-Wadiya’s fractured bicycle. Word circulated that he had been a fighter with Islamic Jihad, a radical group that allied with Hamas on October 7. The organization vigorously denied this. Then the Israeli army released photos of Al-Wadiya, who it said was a rocket specialist, wearing an Islamic Jihad uniform. Doctors Without Borders ultimately conceded that it was “deeply concerned by these allegations” and said it would “never knowingly employ” a fighter.

A staffer involved in hiring for Doctors Without Borders spoke of great organizational pressure to expand hiring in Gaza. “We were told not to check backgrounds,” this employee told me, adding that one office in Gaza had two known Hamas militants. “Our Arab staff was greatly concerned because to be in the same room with operatives put all at risk.”

This staffer paused. “Look, I’m truly not defending Israel; there is a lot in its actions to criticize,” this person said, adding that Doctors Without Borders had been “blindly pro-Palestinian to an extent that was destructive. And if you were Jewish and questioned it, you were just waved off.”

Amid the terrible losses and savage fighting that have marked the war in Gaza, human-rights groups have demonstrated far greater urgency in documenting and denouncing Israel’s conduct than that of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. In December, Amnesty International released its much anticipated and publicized report accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza. Amnesty, however, has yet to complete a long-promised report examining the Hamas-driven murder and rape of Israeli civilians on October 7. O’Brien said the staff is hard at work on this. “The documentation has been extraordinarily difficult,” he told me. “Investigating sexual violence in an ethical and sensitive manner can take many months.”

Amnesty has moved with far more dispatch to stamp out dissent within its ranks. Amnesty’s Israeli chapter is known for feisty independence, taking on Netanyahu’s government and at times its own international parent group. The Israeli branch has maintained that, although it was not downplaying “the many horrific atrocities made by Israel in Gaza, which, according to the information we have, seems, on the surface, to have crossed the threshold of crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing,” it viewed Amnesty’s accusation of genocide as poorly reasoned. The genocide claim, the chapter argued, seemed designed to “support a popular narrative among Amnesty International’s target audience.” The Israeli branch, frustrated with the broader organization’s silence on such questions, also began what it called a “pro-human campaign” to condemn both what it saw as anti-Semitism in some worldwide protests and the Islamophobia inside Israel, and to point out that extremists on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict promote ideologies of annihilation.

[Read: The left’s self-defeating Israel obsession]

The campaign announcement angered top Amnesty officials in the United States and Europe. Last May, Erika Guevara-Rosas, the senior director of global research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns, ordered the Israeli chapter to end its campaign. “Given the serious reputational and legitimacy risk, I am asking you to take this document down from all your platforms immediately,” she wrote in an email that I obtained.

The right-wing Israeli government and its supporters frequently clash with the country’s Amnesty chapter. For their part, Amnesty International leaders view the Israeli branch as rogue and disloyal, and in January, not long after the criticism of the genocide report, they suspended the chapter for two years. Amnesty emails suggest that this could turn into a full expulsion. Tiumalu Lauvale Peter Fa’afiu, the New Zealand–born chair of Amnesty’s international board, wrote to his team that it must decide “whether Amnesty International Israel has a future within the Amnesty Movement.”

These emails revealed that Amnesty leaders planned in advance to deflect the Israeli chapter’s criticism of their genocide report by accusing it of “endemic anti-Palestinian racism.” A Fa’afiu email underlined the real grievance: The Israeli branch had tried to “publicly discredit Amnesty’s human rights research and positions.”

After leaving Amnesty, Dan Balson has found himself adrift. He has begun, with reluctance and disappointment, to wonder about the assumptions of so many in the human-rights movement. “Within Amnesty, the phrase ‘Criticism of Israeli policy is not anti-Semitism’ has taken on a kind of mystical significance,” he told me. “It is repeated frequently and forcefully, in private and in public. Amnesty’s leadership appears to believe that, if said with the proper zeal and elocution, the phrase will magically ward off deeper scrutiny.”

Yellin, the left-wing Israeli activist who has collaborated with major international groups, is even more disillusioned. “They think if they just scream ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid,’ maybe we will go back to Europe.”

He exhaled. “Some days I feel like I’ve just been a useful idiot.”

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