The Violence That Surrounds the ‘No Other Land’ Detention

Earlier this month, Hamdan Ballal, a Palestinian filmmaker, won an Oscar for best documentary feature for “No Other Land,” an exploration of repression in the West Bank.

Now back from the red carpet and in his home village of Susya in the West Bank, Ballal was detained overnight by Israeli troops on Monday after, he said, he was beaten by an Israeli attacker. The events seemed to underscore the systematic injustice highlighted in his documentary.

The were disputes about what precisely had unfolded, as there often are; the Israeli military said Ballal had been detained on suspicion of throwing stones, which his lawyer denied, and it released him on Tuesday.

But what is indisputable is that the United Nations has reported that attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians — often with Israeli troops standing by — have increased substantially. The U.N. documented an average of almost four violent settler attacks a day in 2024, reportedly in which five Palestinians, including a child, were killed. It is also true, of course, that Palestinians periodically attack settlers and troops, mostly by rock throwing.

“No Other Land,” a joint project of Israelis and Palestinians, highlighted the destruction of Palestinian homes in the West Bank and unequal justice there. It received rave reviews in addition to the Oscar but was unable to get distribution in the United States, making it difficult for Americans to see it.

Ballal was set upon by people wearing masks and armed with rocks, sticks and knives, according to an account cited in The Times from a witness who is part of a volunteer effort to protect Palestinian areas from settler violence.

The Times reviewed video footage of part of the event, in which a masked man attacks several peace activists who had responded to Palestinian appeals for help. When the activists retreated to their car, attackers smashed the windshield with a rock.

All this reflects the impunity that violent settlers have largely enjoyed as they attack Palestinians, vandalize their property and in some cases try to drive them off their land. President Trump added to the impunity by rescinding sanctions imposed by the Biden administration last year on dozens of far-right Israeli individuals and settler groups accused of violence against Palestinians. Trump made the move right after assuming office, even as Israeli arsonists set fire to Palestinian vehicles and properties.

Trump’s nominee for ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has said that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian” and suggested that the West Bank belongs to Israel. His confirmation hearing was held on Tuesday, and he’s very likely to be confirmed soon.

The United States historically tried, not very hard and not very successfully, to dampen tensions and settlement construction on the West Bank. But now it’s difficult to avoid the impression that the Trump administration is exacerbating a dangerous situation by promoting impunity on one side, making everything both more unjust and more explosive.

I don’t know how Pete Hegseth can look service members in the eye. He’s just blown his credibility as a military leader.

On Monday, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg published one of the most extraordinary stories I’ve ever read. President Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, apparently inadvertently invited Goldberg to join a Signal group chat (Signal is an encrypted messaging app) that seemed to include several senior Trump officials, including Stephen Miller, JD Vance, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth.

A National Security Council spokesman told The Atlantic that the chat “appears to be authentic.”

No one apparently noticed Goldberg’s presence, and he had a front-row seat as they debated Trump’s decision to attack the Houthi rebels, an Iran-backed militia that had been firing on civilian shipping in the Red Sea.

Then, at 11:44 a.m. on March 15, the account labeled “Pete Hegseth” sent a message that contained “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying and attack sequencing.”

This would be a stunning breach of security. I’m a former Army JAG officer (an Army lawyer). I’ve helped investigate numerous allegations of classified information spillages, and I’ve never even heard of anything this egregious — a secretary of defense intentionally using a civilian messaging app to share sensitive war plans without even apparently noticing a journalist was in the chat.

There is not an officer alive whose career would survive a security breach like that. It would normally result in instant consequences (relief from command, for example) followed by a comprehensive investigation and, potentially, criminal charges.

Federal law makes it a crime when a person — through gross negligence — removes information “relating to the national defense” from “its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted or destroyed.”

It’s way too soon to say whether Hegseth’s incompetence is also criminal, but I raise the possibility to demonstrate the sheer magnitude of the reported mistake. A security breach that significant requires a thorough investigation.

Nothing destroys a leader’s credibility with soldiers more thoroughly than hypocrisy or double standards. When leaders break the rules that they impose on soldiers, they break the bond of trust between soldiers and commanders. The best commanders I knew did not ask a soldier to comply with a rule that didn’t also apply to them. The best commanders led by example.

What example has Hegseth set? That he’s careless, and when you’re careless in the military, people can die. If he had any honor at all, he would resign.

I’ll admit that I was sympathetic to Donald Trump’s heresy on trade, during his first term. His tariffs on China and his bid to renegotiate NAFTA prompted much pearl clutching from economists and pundits, but I knew from my reporting how many people in factory towns across America wanted him to do those things. The renegotiation of NAFTA was, ultimately, a bipartisan success story. It passed overwhelmingly. By the end of his first term, many people — including Democrats — acknowledged quietly that tariffs on China and updating NAFTA were necessary. President Joe Biden didn’t reverse them. He built on them. But now Trump seems to have lost the plot.

He is tearing up that deal that he himself created by imposing 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada, our largest trading partners. What gives?

In the case of Mexico, there have been legitimate concerns that China is getting around U.S. tariffs by building or taking over factories in Mexico. That’s one of a few reasons the U.S. trade deficit with China has declined — to $295 billion last year from $418 billion in 2018 — at the same time the trade deficit with Mexico ballooned to $172 billion last year from roughly $78 billion in 2018, according to Census Bureau data.

If you worry about chronic trade deficits, as Trump does, that’s a problem. But Trump’s ire at Canada is a mystery. The U.S. trade deficit with Canada is one of the smallest that we have — it was about $19 billion in 2018 and $63 billion last year. Virtually all of it can be explained by U.S. purchases of oil, gas and electricity, a reminder that Canada is critical to U.S. energy security.

Without energy, the United States actually runs a trade surplus with Canada. Canada is the top export market for 34 states — or at least it was.

Trump’s targeting of Canada has bewildered even his own political allies on trade. “On Canada, he’s just wrong,” one told me. I can’t pretend to understand what goes on in Trump’s brain. But this much is clear: It ain’t about trade.

If you listen to his words, Trump is declaring economic war on Canada, our loyal and peaceful neighbor, because he wants to bring it to its knees and take it over as a 51st state. He’s wielding tariffs as a weapon, not to defend American workers, but to execute a hostile takeover of a country. It is a move so bizarre and shocking that nobody can quite believe it is happening.

I was in Indiana this week, which is full of factory towns that supported Trump. Canada is the state’s largest trading partner by far. I didn’t meet a soul who thinks beating up on Canada is a good idea.

For now, at least, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has returned to war in Gaza. Israeli airstrikes across Gaza have claimed more than 400 lives, including those of children, according to Gaza’s health authorities, and it seems more clear than ever that Netanyahu doesn’t have a plausible day-after plan for Gaza.

The cease-fire between Israel and Hamas was already on life support, and I’m afraid we’re now tumbling back into the savagery of a particularly brutal war that has left Gaza with the highest population of child amputees per capita in the world.

Negotiations on continuing the cease-fire were stalled, and Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Saar, said that his country had “no alternative but to give the order to reopen fire.” But, of course, Israel had alternatives, as the main advocacy group for family members of Israeli hostages in Gaza noted, albeit alternatives that were not particularly palatable to Israel’s leaders. The hostage families group denounced the airstrikes, saying, “We are shocked, outraged and deeply concerned by the deliberate destruction of the process to bring back our loved ones.”

Ever since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, Netanyahu has brilliantly advanced his own interests while proceeding without any obvious strategy that would advantage Israel. At this point, Israel has leveled much of Gaza, killing some 47,000 Palestinians, including 13,000 children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Some think those numbers are inflated, others an undercount: The medical journal The Lancet estimated 64,000 dead.

What has all this carnage achieved? Hamas’s fighting capacity is badly degraded, the planners of the Oct. 7 attacks have been killed, and Israel has re-established a measure of deterrence: One senior Hamas official said recently that he would have opposed the attack if he had known of the consequences for the territory. On the other hand, neither of Israel’s two fundamental aims of the war — freeing all its hostages and destroying Hamas — has been achieved.

The United States has assessed that Hamas has recruited almost as many militants as it has lost, and the group remains in control of Gaza and appears more popular in the West Bank and around the world. Meanwhile, much of global opinion that was sympathetic to Israel in 2023 has turned decisively against it, and fairly or not, the word “genocide” is often associated with it. And the lives of the remaining Israeli hostages are again in peril.

The United States bears special responsibility for the tragedy unfolding in Gaza, because it is American 2,000-pound bombs that have destroyed entire neighborhoods; such monstrous munitions cannot distinguish between militants and infants. President Joe Biden refused to use his leverage to press for an end to the war during his term, and President Trump has already shipped an additional 1,800 of the 2,000-pound bombs to Israel and blithely proposed clearing Gaza of Gazans in what would amount to ethnic cleansing.

With Netanyahu concerned only with his own career, with the United States adding fuel to the fire, with neither Washington nor Jerusalem showing much concern for what civilians are enduring in Gaza, I’m afraid we should brace ourselves for continued bloodshed and suffering that serve no strategic purpose.

Are we seeing the slow-motion collapse of the rule of law in the United States and Israel at the same time? It is too early to answer that question, but it is no longer too early to ask it.

As readers of my column know, I pay close attention to political trends in Israel because a lot of things happen there in miniature. It’s my Off Broadway to Broadway. Well, what is playing Off Broadway today is chilling. Is it also our future?

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — Israel’s carbon copy of President Donald Trump — announced Sunday his intention to fire the widely respected chief of Israel’s equivalent of the F.B.I., the Shin Bet director, Ronen Bar. It is Netanyahu’s latest move in an effort he began soon after taking power in early 2023 “to neuter the judiciary and to concentrate control of all branches of government in his own hands,” as David Horovitz put it in a Times of Israel editorial.

No head of the Shin Bet has ever been sacked by a prime minister in Israel’s 77-year history — and certainly not in the middle of an ongoing war, in which Bar was one of Israel’s most senior hostage negotiators.

So why now? Netanyahu said that he lost “trust” in Bar, who helped command Israel’s hostage rescues in Gaza and hundreds of other operations. Nonsense.

“A few weeks ago,” wrote Yossi Melman, an intelligence expert at Haaretz, with the help of the Shin Bet, “the Israel Police decided to launch an investigation into two of Netanyahu’s spokespeople and a former strategic adviser over serious suspicions of dubious ties and financial transactions with Qatar, a country that supports terrorist organizations including Hamas — including deals made during the war. ‘Qatar-gate,’ as the scandal has been dubbed, has the potential to lead to charges of behavior bordering on treason.”

Unlike in today’s America, though, Israel has an independent attorney general — Gali Baharav-Miara — with both legal power and moral integrity, who declared late Sunday that Bibi can’t oust Bar “until the factual and legal basis underlying your decision is fully examined, as well as your authority to address the matter at this time.” That’s because Bibi himself is on trial for corruption and should absent himself from making any appointments in law enforcement agencies that might be involved in his own trials.

This is setting up a constitutional crisis unlike anything Israel has ever seen. Sound familiar? As The Times reported, the Trump administration is heading to a “constitutional showdown with the judicial branch of government” as a result of “airplane loads of Venezuelan detainees deplaned in El Salvador even though a federal judge had ordered that the planes reverse course and return the detainees to the United States.”

Time to stop kidding ourselves, folks. The rule of law is in danger in both America and Israel if some red lines are not drawn and defended right now.