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On Nov. 5, just hours after the New York City mayoral election was called, CCTV captured a bicyclist gliding down a Brooklyn sidewalk, wearing a distinctive black fedora and coat.

He stopped partway down the street, still straddling his bike, and began painting red lines on the wall of a Jewish K-12 school—one swastika, then another.

Aside from his identity, one question remains. The vandal wore the hallmark dress of Orthodox Jewish men common in Brooklyn. Did a Jewish person commit an antisemitic hate crime? The police still haven’t identified him.

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Despite a billionaire-backed Zionist slander campaign, Mayor Zohran Mandani still beat Andrew Cuomo and gained one-third of the Jewish vote, in large part because of his pro-Palestinian position. Still, the Zionist moral panic persists in New York City, apparently in the form of two painted swastikas to frame Mamdani’s rise to mayoral office as antisemitic.

“There may be inadequate evidence to be certain in this specific instance, but the fact is it is a very common occurrence that Jewish people fake these hate crimes,” wrote Jenin Younes, legal director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, on X. She deleted the post soon after, clarifying that Zionist Jews often stage these crimes, and that it’s still uncertain who the vandal is. And she’s not wrong.

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“I would say that, broadly speaking, there is a general attempt by many people high up in sort of Zionist positions, like the Anti-Defamation League, the government of Israel, a lot of people in our government to make it seem as though antisemitism is a scourge in the United States and in the West that needs extreme measures to be eradicated,” Younes told No Frontiers.

But why would a Jewish Zionist person stage a hate crime that may induce a climate of fear for Jews?

These hoax incidents, Younes says, are “a mass attempt to make it seem as though Jews are simply not safe in the West, and that justifies Israel in its existence and everything that it does, and also justifies suppressing speech critical of Israel by conflating these notions.”

A deceptive 2025 survey by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an Israel lobby group disguised as a civil rights organization, asserts that nearly half the global population, an estimated 2.2 billion people, “harbor deeply entrenched antisemitic attitudes.” That’s nearly 1 in 2 people worldwide.

Western media widely considers the ADL a leading authority on antisemitism, despite being deemed a “generally unreliable” source by Wikipedia, its flagship antisemitism survey riddled with problematic methodology, and having admitted to counting criticism of Israel and pro-Palestinian activism as antisemitic hate1.

“The ADL reports these horrendous statistics in California schools, but then when you look at what counts as an antisemitic incident, and I’m not making this up, that’s one of a student wearing a Palestine flag on their t-shirt,” explained Younes. “A movie about the occupation in the West Bank being shown in class—these are reported as antisemitic incidents.”

While antisemitism certainly exists, it’s generally confined to the usual hate group suspects, like the alt-right, neo-Nazis, or QAnon, that Donald Trump mainstreamed in GOP politics since his 2015 presidential rise. Still, the perception of global antisemitism, when wielded, undermines civil rights causes and advances Israel’s colonial endeavors.

“Against this backdrop, there have been a lot of incidents where it turned out that once the perpetrator of the hate crime was found, it turned out that the person was a Jewish Zionist,” said Younes. “Not a Christian Zionist, a Jewish Zionist.”

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The data

From synagogue vandalism to Oct. 7 atrocity hoaxes, Zionists have a long history of manufacturing their own “antisemitic” hate crimes, moral panic, and even state-sponsored false flag operations.

In collaboration with Databases for Palestine, No Frontiers is releasing the first database of hoax antisemitic incidents from around the world.

Across the West, vigilante antisemitic hoaxes perpetrated by Zionist Jews have become commonplace, especially during the global rise in Palestinian solidarity after Oct. 7. These actions are aimed at stoking widespread racist fear and hatred of imaginary Arab and Muslim “extremism,” and galvanizing support for white Jewish supremacy, the Zionist settler colony of Israel, and the genocidal massacre of Palestinians.

A news and social media analysis by No Frontiers found scores of hoax antisemitic incidents from the last decade. Between 2016 and 2026, there were 65 antisemitic hoax incidents across 14 countries.

• 20 antisemitic hoax incidents were staged attacks.

• Incidents were spread across 14 countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, England, France, Germany, “Israel,” the Netherlands, New Zealand, occupied Palestine, Scotland, and the USA.

• 10+ incidents occurred at synagogues.

• 10 incidents occurred on university campuses.

• 9 incidents occurred at pro-Palestine protests.

• 9 are atrocity hoax Israeli propaganda narratives.

• 8 hoax incidents are incitements targeting specific Palestinians, Arab or Muslim individuals.

• 7 are suspected false-flag operations by Israel.

• 6 are false flags by individuals or groups, not sponsored by Israel.

• 2 Israeli Jews attempted a “suicide by cop” style attack at IOF checkpoints dressed like “Palestinians”—one succeeded in provoking their death.

Yet these documented hoaxes are likely just scratching the surface.

Inspect and download the data here or on Databases for Palestine’s site hoaxes.genocide.live.

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Some hoaxes are easily sniffed out—why would a pro-Palestine activist draw swastikas or perform a Nazi salute?

Caught on camera, several of the hoaxers staging attacks are unconvincing to a confounding degree—one phoning the police, two running to the police, and another screaming on the ground, feigning pain. Police found that a Jewish man staged a hate crime at his synagogue, where he worked, by stabbing himself and reporting an attack by an assailant screaming antisemitic slurs at him. In fact, many hoaxes are self-inflicted.

Yet hoax attacks can and do have life-altering consequences to the unsuspecting intended targets.

In 2016, an Israeli Jewish woman admitted to police that she and her family lied that a Palestinian minor raped her while another Palestinian teen filmed, when it was reportedly a consensual relationship (with a minor).

That’s damaging enough, but one person alone created a climate of sustained antisemitic fear across Europe, North America, and Oceania (Australia and New Zealand) for half a year.

In 2017, Israeli police arrested 19-year-old American-Israeli dual citizen Michael Kadar after his 6-month international bomb threat campaign against Jewish centers, synagogues, as well as hospitals, airlines, shopping malls, police stations, and schools. He was paid over $1 million in Bitcoin on the ‘dark web’ by sending thousands of hoax bomb threats across Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Denmark, Norway, and the United States. In the US, the Jewish teenager made some 2,000 bomb threats in at least 37 states, over and over, until he was finally tracked down in southern Israel. He served seven years in prison.

Then there are the Israeli atrocity hoaxes.

After Hamas’ Al-Aqsa Flood attack on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel’s propaganda machine spun sensational and grotesque narratives of “mass rape,” “beheaded babies,” and babies “in ovens” that were echoed by Western leaders and mainstream media alike. In light of these atrocity hoaxes, the West gave Israel an unlimited license to commit genocide and invade Palestine, Lebanon, and bomb Iran.

In the end, these hoaxes were quickly debunked by independent journalists, but the power of the Israel lobby was firmly entrenched in America and Europe.

The suspected Israeli false-flag operations in Europe and Australia served a similar purpose, as did the fake antisemitic targeting at pro-Palestine encampments on universities: to provoke a reaction from Israel, America, or other Western powers, crush dissent against Zionism, and affirm Jewish supremacy.

And the list goes on and on.

As this phenomenon becomes more recognizable, some social media users have even created their own video compilations, splicing together numerous reports and footage of hoax incidents.

But so far, no one has systematically studied these hoax antisemitic occurrences or made a thorough running tally of these incidents, yet it’s clear to Palestinians that these hoaxes contribute to vitriolic paranoia and unrelenting violence against Palestinians, and further legitimize Israeli domination through Western eyes.

Antisemitism, a global scourge?

The truth of the matter is: Aside from a few short-lived instances, rates of antisemitism have always been low in the United States and have never risen to systemic discrimination or segregation as Jews across medieval Europe experienced or during the Nazi Holocaust (which sought the extermination of several other peoples, not just Jews).

Incidence of hate, violence, imprisonment, and systemic discrimination toward Indigenous, Brown, Black, immigrant, undocumented, LGBTQ, trans, and women communities are realities American and Euro-descended Jews could hardly fathom, much less experience on a day-to-day basis.

“I would say there’s basically no antisemitism coming from the government, which is probably the most important thing, right?” Jenin Younes told No Frontiers. “But you see tons and tons of Islamophobia from high-up government officials, you know, calling for deporting all Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians and saying, ‘They’re not welcome here. They shouldn’t be here. They can’t assimilate.’”

She went on, “You don’t see any politicians saying that about Jews, as you know, should be the case, of course.”

As legal director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Younes is quite familiar with hoax antisemitic incidents because they are part of a larger pattern of First Amendment violations, like suppressing freedom of speech and protest. In her experience, institutions like universities or state governments censor, punish, or criminalize speech—not because they are stopping true antisemitism, but to suppress criticism of Israel.

Again, antisemitism is woefully conflated with anti-Zionism.

“Of course, Jews in the diaspora do face antisemitism, and thus their loyalty to Zionism and opposition to antisemitism are contradictions,” wrote Tony Greenstein, historian and Jewish anti-Zionist activist for The Palestine Chronicle. “However, given that antisemitism in the West has declined almost to the vanishing point, and arguably only exists because the Zionist movement associates Jews with Israel’s genocide, they can live with those contradictions.”

By creating a us-versus-them worldview, Jews versus Gentiles (non-Jews), Israel has given Zionist Jews only one available community to feel safety and security—even if the global antisemitic threat is almost entirely imagined. Instead, Western entrenched Zionism (white Jewish supremacy) has created a privileged minority of people across civil and political life. Now more than ever in the 21st century, this privileged class of people is bombarded with messaging saying ‘the whole world, especially Arabs, wants you dead.’

It’s about maintaining power, sustaining Jewish supremacy.

Six days after the ADL released its flagship global antisemitism survey, which found over 2.2 billion people harboring anti-Jewish hatred, Elon Musk gave back-to-back Nazi salutes, unmistakable to the casual observer. Yet the ADL defended Musk.

“It seems that [at]elonmusk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute, but again, we appreciate that people are on edge,” the ADL wrote on X.

“Thanks guys [laughing emoji],” Musk replied. [*]

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Leaflets. Thousands of leaflets were dropped in Beirut, Lebanon, from an Israeli jet in mid-March, drifting among apartment buildings like confetti. Residents poked out of their balconies, stopped in the street, to read the leaflets, which announced a “new reality” in Lebanon, ordered Lebanese to “disarm Hezbollah,” and to collaborate with Israel’s military.

Israel’s genocidal goal, according to an Israeli military pundit, “is to render these villages uninhabitable for civilian populations or terrorist activity.” It’s the “Gaza model.”

“What we need to do is to capture the area up to the Litani line, evacuate the entire Lebanese population northward, and hold that area. That will threaten them,” said Amichai Attali on Israel’s Channel 14.

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The Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) have attacked numerous villages, aerial bombed cities, and flattened entire apartment buildings in one strike. Yet, Israeli media have gawked at the IOF’s underestimation of Hezbollah’s resistance and rocket fire in combat and into Tel Aviv, Israel’s central city. Considered “decapitated and defeated,” the resistance has dominated ground operations, with dozens of Israeli tank “massacres” in just a few weeks.

Still, at least one million Lebanese are displaced by the Israeli genocidal invasion in southern Lebanon, where the IOF expanded its “evacuation orders” for over a hundred villages from the Litani River to north of the Zahrani River, about 40km (25 miles) north of the Israeli border—displacing at least 15% of Lebanon.

On March 23, Israel bombed the Qasmiya Bridge that crosses the Litani River, a key strategic spot separating Southern Lebanon from the rest of the country. The invading Israeli army seeks to create a “security zone” or “buffer zone” up to the Litani River, or what Databases for Palestine founder ZO has called a “designated kill zone” that Israelis use to shoot civilians in Gaza.

“Israel’s policy in Lebanon is clear: where there is terror and missiles - there are no homes and no residents - and the IDF will control the security zone up to the Litani,” tweeted Israeli defense minister Israel Katz on March 24, six days after announcing hundreds of thousands of fleeing residents “will not return to their homes south of the Litani, until the safety of the residents of [Israel’s] north is guarenteed.”

In the last 12 days, Israel has destroyed seven bridges that cross the Litani River and connect Southern Lebanon to the rest of the country, including the Qasmiya Bridge, which was aerial bombed on March 22.

As journalist Hala Jaber observed on Substack, “The Qasmiya Bridge is a key civilian artery linking southern Lebanon to the rest of the country,” she wrote. “Cut it, & you isolate entire communities, restricting movement of civilians, ambulances, aid, & daily life.”

Destroying the Qasmiya Bridge isolates food supply lines from Southern Lebanon, one of the country's main agricultural regions, and isolates communities from one another.

“This is how a buffer zone becomes a border,” wrote Jaber.

Residents from southern Lebanon are pouring onto the beaches, fleeing aerial bombings from Israeli drones and fighter jets.

If the “buffer zone” is established, America is set to help occupy Lebanon, according to a US proposal unveiled last September, securing the land for Israeli settlers to erect their white-ruled settlements.

This plan of American security for Israeli settlements is not discussed in the mainstream media, yet these details were presented to Lebanese President Joseph Aoun. America will help secure the Israeli kill zone, because it’s set to become the “Trump economic zone.”

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Deploying the Gaza model in Lebanon

The IDF seeks to create a “buffer zone” between the border and the Litani River or, as Databases for Palestine calls it, a “Designated Kill Zone.” Anyone caught in the kill zone, if spotted, is shot by the IOF.

Israeli forced displacement orders follow the familiar pattern that the IOF created for Palestinian Gazans during the heat of Israel’s post-Oct 7 genocide, and continue to use today as kill zones. Every military action Israel makes is dressed in “humanitarian camouflage,” disguising their extermination campaign with a veneer of compliance with International Humanitarian Law, the laws that govern lawful conduct in war.

“I believe that what Israel did in Gaza was the model and is the model for what we’re going to see in terms of Iran and in terms of Lebanon and elsewhere,” said Diana Buttu, lawyer and analyst at Al-Shabaka, during a panel. “We’re already seeing it.”

An October 2024 report from the Institute for Palestine Studies found Israel to be shepherding in a new “era of mass atrocities” by states unwilling to submit to international law. As a colonial power, Israel has determined that the international treaties enshrined to protect civilians and civilian infrastructure can be rewritten or reinterpreted to legitimize mass killing and wholesale destruction of Gaza.

No person is safe in a protected infrastructure. Hospitals, mosques, churches, schools, houses, universities, courts, municipal offices, parliament buildings, and entire neighborhoods are military targets, because terrorists “embed themselves among civilians” and use them as “human shields.”

In November 2023, early in Israel’s genocide, Israel portrayed the Al-Shifa Hospital as a “Hamas command center,” thus losing its protected status and justifying endless attacks on patients and medical workers, turning the hospital into a “death zone.”

“Proportionality,” a rule prohibiting attacks expected to produce “excessive” civilian harm, will never be an issue when Israel’s indiscriminate killing is portrayed as “proportionate” to Zionism’s military goals.

Yet the indefensible transformation of the ‘law of armed conflict’ to Israel’s “law of armed genocide” is possible solely because Western countries upholding these laws—Britain, France, Germany, and especially America—did nothing to stop the Zionist regime.

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***

Still, the most evident parallel between Israel’s 2023 invasion of Gaza and its renewed invasion of Lebanon is the “evacuation orders,” disguising a colonialist plan to “depopulate” and “transfer” the undesirable Native population of Palestinians and Lebanese out of their homeland in order to replace the Native population with white Jewish settlers.

A January 2025 report by Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq, “How to Hide a Genocide: The Role of Evacuation Orders and Safe Zones in Israel’s Genocidal Campaign in Gaza,” came to a similar conclusion as the Institute for Palestine Studies report.

Al-Haq found Israel’s use of evacuation orders is a “lethal tactic of disguising its mass forcible transfer and targeting of Palestinians in Gaza with humanitarian language, which misleadingly depicts these acts as preventative measures designed to protect civilians. In reality, the illegal evacuation orders and ensuing forced displacement of over 1.9 million Palestinians to areas that make up less than 20 per cent of Gaza’s territory only serve to facilitate and fuel its genocide.”

Since Israel restarted its invasion of Lebanon on Feb. 2, the Zionist regime has published at least 50 “evacuation orders,” effectively forced displacement orders, for over 100 villages and towns in southern Lebanon.

First, the IOF announces “evacuation orders” for specific neighborhoods, streets, or areas, and at a given time, residents should be gone from the site.

Second, IOF military operations follow, usually aerial bombings by drones or piloted aircraft, or ground operations by soldiers on foot.

And third, once areas are bombed, the IOF often demolishes the remaining buildings with bulldozers and more explosives.

These are the overly simplified steps to Israel’s genocide-by-flyer operation.

Israel’s “evacuation orders” give the Zionist regime a thinly veiled “humanitarian camouflage,” the appearance of reasonable notice before deadly military operations begin.

Instead, families have hours, even minutes, to gather their loved ones and necessary possessions before aerial bombs burst through the ceiling or walls, burying everyone under mountains of concrete.

Those left caught in the “evacuation zones,” or even many who flee to “safe zones,” are presumed to be terrorists. No infrastructure is protected under Israel’s interpretation of IHL.

If or when the “Designated Kill Zone” or “buffer zone” is established, America is set to help occupy Lebanon, securing the land for Israeli settlers to erect their white-ruled settlements.

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Planned from the beginning: A Trump “economic zone”

Hezbollah didn’t exist in 1981. The armed resistance group was established in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and had fired rockets at Israel in solidarity with Palestinians.

Israel has invaded Lebanon six times in the last 50 years: 1978, 1982, 1990, 2006, 2024, and 2026.

During a visit from the US delegation to Lebanon in September 2025, the US ambassador to Turkey, Tom Barrack, presented a proposal to the President of Lebanon, Joseph Aoun, for a new “zone” for southern Lebanon.

Details of the proposed Trump “economic zone,” according to Annahar, would be “under American security control and would operate without UNIFIL,” a UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon.

The plan:

Land will be seized from 27 towns. There are Shia villages and all Sunni towns in the western sector (Dhaira, Yarin, Al-Bustan, Marwahin, and Al-Zaloutieh), as well as Christian towns in the central sector (Qawzah, Rmeish, Debel, and Ain Ebel), whose residents will be displaced from their homes in exchange for attractive financial compensation.

Already, this plan sounds eerily similar to US President Donald Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner’s, “Master Plan” for colonizing the so-called Gaza Riviera, which Kushner would unveil a few months later at Davos, Switzerland, in January 2025.

This area will be under American security management. Between 1,500 and 2,000 soldiers will oversee its daily operations and communicate with Lebanese and Israeli security agencies. Israel will have the right to erect dozens of observation posts along the border to reassure settlers in the north. Israeli army units will be given the freedom to enter, when necessary.

In addition to being the US ambassador to Turkey, Tom Barrack is also a billionaire real estate investor, a member of the “Epstein class”, and is all for helping Israel redraw the map of West Asia in its own image: Greater Israel. No more pesky borders penciled in over a hundred years ago.

As Palestine Will be Free first reported, Barrack tweeted that America and Israel reject the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement that secretly divided West Asia between the French and British colonial powers. The message was clear: Israel should have it all.

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***

On Wednesday, Israel’s Channel 14 revealed new plans to redraw the regime’s border approximately 8km farther north. “The new border will be right next to the Tyre area,” according to the report, and include 18 military outposts among former Lebanese villages, all in service of securing their “buffer zone.”

“Does Israel have the capacity or the desire to really geographically take over Lebanon? Absolutely,” said Tom Barrack during an interview with a UAE-based influencer. “Probably in an afternoon.”

They were wrong.

In a now-deleted story reported in The Telegraph, a British Zionist rag, a Lebanese villager told the reporter some truths Western media didn’t want spread.

“We are at war with the Epstein people. The people eating, frying and raping kids. They are monsters, beasts. They are not humans. But the worst part is they are the ones that rule the world,” someone named Ahmad told The Telegraph.

The Lebanese, like the Palestinians, will never give up their land.

“How can we as Christians in this area not be with Hezbollah[?]” he said. “They protect our churches. They helped us fight ISIS. During Covid they gave us free care in their hospitals. When there was no electricity they gave us generators. They even put up a Christmas tree at Christmas. How can we not be with them now?” [**]

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As US President Donald Trump presides over his “Board of Peace” to rule over Palestine’s Gaza Strip, American businesses are flocking to cash in on lucrative contracts for this colonial venture, including the notorious company running the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida, a U.S. migrant concentration camp.

As often happens, the Trump administration’s “Master Plan” for Trump’s white-ruled Gaza Riviera echoes US settler colonization’s core driver (aside from supremacist ideologies): business.

The United Nations estimates that the reconstruction of Gaza will cost about $70 billion, which could be quite a lucrative windfall for companies. The world watched as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a private American evangelical-owned company infused with $35 million by the US and possibly more from Israel, unleashed terror and death upon starving and emaciated Palestinian aid seekers, suffering under Israel’s total blockade. Now they face further genocidal ethnic cleansing and Western powers descending upon their lands to colonize.

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In February 2024, four months into Israel’s genocide, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner was already eyeing Gaza as future real estate to exploit, musing, “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable.” The “Master Plan” was developed by Kushner, who reportedly commissioned the London-based Tony Blair Institute to draft plans for reconstruction and colonizing the Gaza Strip.

His counterpart and now U.S. special envoy, Steve Witkoff, is a real estate developer who, along with Kushner, negotiates with Israel on behalf of America, including in ceasefire talks.

While dozens of companies will place bids for Gaza reconstruction contracts, the Trump team is conducting business while preemptively laying claim to the Gaza Strip—a hallmark of European settler regimes, originating in 15th century Papal Bulls and the so-called Doctrine of Discovery.

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Emerging in the Christian Reformationist (now evangelical) reading of the Bible, land from the Egyptian Nile to the Euphrates River was given to the Jews by God, His “chosen” people. This colonial project would expand Israel’s “biblical borders” into at most seven countries: Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, and Turkey. “It would be fine if they took it all,” said Mike Huckabee, US ambassador to Israel, to Tucker Carlson in Tel Aviv. That is “essentially the entire Middle East,” observed Carlson.

For Indigenous peoples, like Indian Tribes, this colonial circumstance is all too familiar. Settler colonialism is not just about the replacement of Natives with white settlers, but about land speculation and ownership, resource extraction, and a full spectrum of business exploitation. In Palestine’s case, America and Israel covet the land, its “rare earth minerals,” and the development of vast housing projects.

“The coastline alone is $50 billion of value on a conservative basis,” said Marc Rowan, CEO of asset management company Apollo Global, during the inaugural meeting of Trump’s Board of Peace. “It just needs to be unlocked and financed.”

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Big business for racial empires

When the Homestead Act of 1862 was signed into law, opening up tens of millions of acres of Indian lands for sale and white settlement, the promise of land speculation and ownership in America had international appeal, particularly in Germany1.

America was awash in land lust for purchasing Indian lands. From individual settlers who wanted homesteads to corporate land speculators who wanted millions of acres at once to flip for resale, America truly experienced “land mania.” Others were traders, who developed trade networks with both settler townships and Indigenous nations. Yet to establish any legal basis for transferring Indian lands to US property, they needed to enter into treaty negotiations.

In order to gain leverage over tribes in treaty negotiations, the US used a familiar economic weapon: settler trade networks built Indigenous “dependence on trade goods” and trapped tribes in crippling debt. This dependence was exacerbated by settler overhunting, genocide, and disease, which decimated tribal populations. Many tribes were “reduced to a very small number” and were “virtually powerless” during treaty negotiations and were strongarmed to cede vast expanses of their homelands.

For example, a group of tribes known collectively as the Kaskaskia were ceded their lands, roughly one-third the size of present-day Illinois, after a massive population collapse and trade debt.

In a telling letter to future president and then territorial governor William Henry Harrison, Founding Father Thomas Jefferson described this debt-leverage treaty-making scheme.

“To promote this disposition to exchange lands which they have to spare and we want…we shall push our trading houses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by cession of lands,” wrote Jefferson in February 1803.

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In his groundbreaking book “The Relentless Business of Treaties: How Indigenous Land became U.S. Property,” historian Martin Case spent a decade producing an exhaustive analysis of the Euro-American treaty signers who negotiated land cession terms with Indian tribes, and created the US property system. This work expanded into the Treaty Signers Project, sponsored by the peerless Indian Land Tenure Foundation (ILTF), a Native land recovery organization based in Minnesota.

The American treaty signers and negotiators weren’t just diplomats for the US government—most signers had vested political, familial, or financial interests in expanding America’s frontier borders into “Indian Country”—sound familiar? Of the over 2,300 men (no women) who represented the United States between 1778 and 1871, Case found biographical information on about 1,300 of the treaty signers.

After the Supreme Court decision in Johnson v. McIntosh in 1823, the court decided that the “exclusive title” to land could only be claimed by European states that “discovered” Native lands. At the time, the court decided “Indian inhabitants are to be considered merely as occupants” and that they are “incapable of transferring absolute title.” This decision would lay the foundation for, as Case writes, the treaty signers to instigate “a corporate takeover of 170 million acres and of the government that would control it.”2

(For more, I wrote a feature for Sierra, “The Land Back Movement unravels Manifest Destiny,” on ILTF’s work in 20233.)

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Corporate interests are rife within treaty negotiations with Indigenous peoples, even today, especially when it comes to real estate and familial ties.

The ceasefire negotiations between the Zionist regime and Hamas were largely futile, but not for lack of tireless effort by Palestinian negotiators. The only leverage Hamas had was hundreds of Israeli hostages taken on Oct. 7, 2023, but as the Zionist regime bombed the Gaza Strip into the moonscape we see today, “Israel” had no interest in saving their citizens’ lives, nor making any deals such as leaving the Gaza Strip to save them. Instead, the bloodthirsty Zionists wanted land, and Oct. 7 was the ultimate excuse to conquer more Indigenous lands.

The ceasefire treaty negotiators included Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his business partner Steve Witkoff, both corporate millionaires dealing in real estate, pushed for disarmament of the Hamas resistance movement and relinquishing Palestinian land rights to the Gaza Strip, sealing a “legal” ethnic cleansing.

The colonial echoes of businessmen Kushner and Witkoff, and of other colonial figures participating in treaty negotiations, are common throughout history. All wanted a piece of Indian lands.

Indian treaty negotiations included individual settlers, owners of mining, timber, or trading companies, politicians climbing the political colonial ladders in occupied US territories, soldiers, frontiersmen, or militiamen, or even founding fathers like President George Washington, who signed several Indian treaties.

“Upon examination, these [signers] were not distinct subsets: military officers were land speculators, bureaucrats were business owners, settlers were militia officers,” wrote historian and author Martin Case. “And often enough to defy any expectations, these men were related to one another through family ties.”

On behalf of the US government, these men shaped and established the US property system and land ownership as it exists today, extinguishing “aboriginal title” to lands from Indigenous tribes and transferring hundreds of millions of acres into the American white-ruled settler regime.

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As tribes began to lose their homelands, they began to be marched to military-enforced Indian reservations, almost always arid, possibly uninhabitable, and on lands considered “worthless” by settlers, leaving tribes with little ability to cultivate, subsistence hunt, or perform their ceremonies at sacred sites on their ancestral territories.

Meanwhile, the thousands of Euro-American treaty signers, whose lust for land, gold, and silver mining, and power continued to fuel America’s colonial “expansion” westward.

After the Homestead Act, the Dawes Act of 1887 was the next major land-grab legislation to extinguish Indian land and transfer about 90 million acres to American ownership.

Over 178 years since the signing of the Dawes Act of 1887, the Native Land Information Systems (NLIS) calculated that white settlers reaped over $760.1 trillion from Native lands, while Native revenue totaled over $123.6 trillion. Remember, these are lands ostensibly under Native jurisdiction after they are confined to Indian reservations, not their full ancestral lands across the continent that are either in private, state, or federal ownership.

This study offers invaluable insight into the economic legacies of land loss, yet it still only offers a glimpse of the transformation of America's industrial natural resource extraction, generational wealth, corporate supremacy, and political and state power over time. The US is still a global hegemony, and it achieved worldwide influence first through continental colonization.

Business and treaty negotiations go hand-in-hand. These negotiators scheme to profit while securing white rule on Native lands. [END*]

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These are some ideas I’ve spitballed to see if you are interested in paid subscription posts from No Frontiers.

Starting now, I am writing, reporting, and publishing more regularly—at least once a week—and would like to know what will convince you to become a paid subscriber to No Frontiers.

I am implementing a paywall for articles older than 1 week. For the time being, articles will remain accessible to free subscribers for a week after publication, but thereafter they will be behind a paywall.

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Now, on to the story.

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“Look, there are two worlds: There is the Indigenous world, and there is the non-Indigenous world of the white people,” recites Lucas Manchineri of the Manxineru people. “You,” he went on. “You don’t depend on anything. You’re living peacefully. However, if you come out of the non-contact situation, there are going to be all sorts of things that you’re going to need.”

These are the words Manchineri uses if he encounters an uncontacted Indigenous person, someone whose tribe wishes to remain separate from the outside, industrial, and largely Western-dominated world.

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“You’re going to have the need for clothes, the need for money, the need for vehicles, transport—all this sort of thing,” he continued. “And what you have to understand is that in the world of the white people, you cannot live without money, and that’s a given. You can’t negotiate that.”

There are too few people like Lucas Artur Brasil Manchineri, an Indigenous land defender living in the Brazilian Amazon, and even fewer upholding his dire mission. Manchineri leads a team tasked with safeguarding a neighboring group of uncontacted Native people, known as the Mashco Piro people, that shares his people’s Indigenous territory. Illegal loggers and drug traffickers relentlessly invade the territory of his parentes desconfiados, or his uncontacted “Wary relatives” who are mistrustful of others, and violently threaten their homelands.

Most alarming are outsider’s ability to spread common diseases like the flu that aren’t especially harmful to us, but are deadly to uncontacted Indigenous groups. And they aren’t alone.

Nearly 200 uncontacted Indigenous groups, who choose total isolation from outsider societies, are under imminent existential threat. If nothing is done to protect them and their home territories, at least half will perish within 10 years, according to Survival International, an Indigenous human rights group that partners with local on-the-ground Indigenous organizations around the world.

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“One of the reasons we’re doing this for our uncontacted relatives is so that history is not repeated,” Manchineri told No Frontiers, “because when we came into contact, our territory was invaded and everything, all the natural resources, a lot of them, were stolen, taken from us, and these people did not regard us as human beings.”

In the first-of-its-kind report, Survival International found that at least 196 uncontacted Indigenous groups face extermination from illegal incursions into their territories by resource extractive industries like mining or logging, drug trafficking gangs, evangelical missionaries spreading christianity, and even social media influencers seeking “first contact”—all of which risk the spread of deadly communicable diseases. These groups survived hundreds of years of European colonialism: settler invasions, genocide, enslavement, disease epidemics, land theft, and industrial infractions. Now they want to live in peace without outside contact.

As Native societies, whose history pre-dates European invasion, they wish to maintain their cultural, linguistic, group identity, which are distinct from outside industrialized societies that were forever altered by Western colonialism. It’s about choice, their right to self-determine their own future on their ancestral territories—uncontacted. But without protection or respect for their isolation, the risk of annihilation by illegal land invaders is too great.

Whole Indigenous groups, contacted and uncontacted, have succumbed after forced contact with outsiders. And the stakes are inceasing as rivers and streams shrink or dry up, because of climate change, and illegal loggers or miners infiltrate throughout the rainforest to clear land for cattle ranching, or drug trafficker gangs encounter them.

“When we were first contacted, sometime ago,” said Manchineri, “we had nobody to defend us. That’s why we are defending out uncontacted, wary relatives, because we know what it’s like.”

Uncontacted Indigenous Peoples: At the Edge of Survival

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"Uncontacted Indigenous Peoples" is a global investigation by Survival International, the first-ever fully comprehensive report on uncontacted peoples worldwide. See their website here, https://uncontactedpeoples.org/.

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Threats from all sides

Lucas Manchineri lives in southwestern Brazil, near the intersection of Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia—what he calls the “triple frontier.” As president of Manxinerune Ptohi Phunputuru Poktshi Hajene, or MAPPHA, his job’s mandate is twofold: protect his Indigenous territory and the Mashco Piro people, who share the same land in the dense Amazonian forest and wish to remain undisturbed.

To keep them safe, Manchineri’s team at MAPPHA go on monitoring excursions into the rainforest, collecting GPS data, marking points where their uncontacted relatives are frequenting, paths they travel, all to serve as evidence to present to international advocacy groups. At the same time, his team also monitors and maps the movements of illegal agribusiness land invaders, drug runners, cattle ranchers, loggers, and miners—all of whom are often armed.

“Whenever we go on a trip or expedition or an operation, we’re always prepared to receive them [the uncontacted], just in case they make contact or an unexpected contact happens,” Manchineri told No Frontiers. “So we are vaccinated, all the people who've gone on the expedition have to be healthy, but more than that, the government needs to ensure that in all the territories where there are uncontacted, there is a health post in operation and medical teams on standby in case there are contacts.”

If an uncontacted tribe comes close or engages with Manchineri and his team, they explain the situation to them, the dangers of outside contact like disease transmission, but also how different industrial society is to theirs.

It’s difficult to overstate how vulnerable uncontacted tribes are to otherwise common diseases like the flu, measles, or diarrhea, which can exterminate them in a matter of days. In the 1980s, the Brazilian dictatorship’s policy of contacting previously uncontacted tribes was disastrous beyond measure. “If an uncontacted person comes into contact and gets flu and they go to their maloca, the big communal house, everyone in that maloca will catch the flu,” said Manchineri. “It will be transmitted to everyone, and 90% of them will be exterminated just by something small like the simple flu, and it’s our fault.”

Today, Brazil has laws supposedly guarenteeing the rights of uncontacted and contacted Indigenous peoples, and FUNAI (Brazil’s Indian Affairs Department), a government agency charged with safeguarding their rights. While this is an improvement, the government has little power and resources to enforce these laws, while many local to national politicians looking to get rich from agribusiness, like cattle ranching, are eyeing their ancestral lands.

Uncontacted Indigenous groups live across 10 countries in South America, Asia, and Pacific: Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, India, Indonesia, and West Papua. By far, the most live in South America, with 124 uncontacted groups—a vast majority—residing in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. Another 64 uncontacted groups live across six neighboring countries.

“That’s one of our big campaigns at the moment, is for the rights of the uncontacted peoples to determine their own futures, to be uncontacted,” said Fiona Watson, director of research and advocacy at Survival International, who’s worked for Survival for over 35 years. Headquartered in London, England, Survival International has been the only human rights organization campaigning worldwide to protecting the Indigneous right to remain uncontacted.

The work at MAPPHA is never ending, and needs continuous financial support, like many Indigneous organizations. They need to buy canoes, boats, gasoline, and more to monitor the forest.

“The government machinery works extremely slowly, and because it’s so slow, in the meantime, things just keep deteriorating,” said Machineri. “And I’m speaking to you, one Indigneous person to another. I think that you will understand what I mean by this message.”

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“Hidden genocides”

Fiona Watson saw firsthand how lonely life can be for Native uncontacted individuals, realing from underreported “hidden genocides” by violent invaders. During the mid-1990s, cattle ranchers began bulldozing the forest, clearing trees and communal houses built by the uncontacted Akuntsu people. Then the ranchers hired gunmen to massacre the Akuntsu, and claimed there were no Indigenous peoples residing on the land.

When outsiders made contact with the Akuntsu people in 1995, there were seven tribal members. After the massacre, it took about a decade and observations by a neighboring tribe, the Kanoê people, to find signs of any Akuntsu survivors and piece together what happened.

“The Kanoê eventually did make contact with them, but everything took a long time for the story to come out, and nobody has been tried for the killings,” said Watson. “People have a good idea of who was behind it, the intellectual authors, but it happened so long ago.”

Around 2005, the Kanoê people reported to FUNAI and Survival International of finding signs of a sole Akuntsu survivor, living a lonely, solitary life on his own in the Brazilian Amazon. He left behind traps, broken pottery, arrowheads, calabaches for storing water, nuts, and a garden of paw paw, manioc and corn. At the time, no one knew his name, the name of his tribe, or what language he spoke. They simply called him the “Last of his Tribe.”

It’s now known this man wasn’t completely alone, and had two other surviving companions from his tribe. They are still alive to this day. Yet, with only three Akuntsu people left, Survival International says, “Their genocide will likely soon be complete.”

Around 2000, Survival International estimated there were 70 uncontacted peoples worldwide. But after decades of research, Survival found there are at least 196 groups, based upon the most detailed and up-to-date survey of uncontacted groups.

Over 96% of uncontacted groups are imperiled by extractive industries, with logging as the most persistent threat, endangering 65% of groups, and often precedes more land exploitation, and is followed by mining, which threatens over 40% of uncontacted groups. About one-third face threats from criminal gangs, while one in six uncontacted peoples are threatened by missionaries attempting to convert them.

Unfortunately, several missionary groups are often just as hellbent on contacting remote Indigenous peoples as industries are for stealing their lands. The moneyed US-based Ethnos360 (formerly New Tribes Mission) is an evangelical Christian group expressly devoted to contacting and converting isolated Indigenous tribes.

In the 1980s, New Tribes Mission invaded the lands of the Zo’é people of northern Brazil, building a base and airstrip on their land to force contact—all without the knowledge of the Brazilian government, which had recently instituted its “no contact” policy for these groups.

By 1988, flu and malaria epidemics brought by New Tribes Mission raged through the community, killing about a quarter of the Zo’é people. The missionaries were kicked out of the country, but the Christian group continued to force contact. The Zo’é people aren’t the only uncontacted groups New Tribes Mission had devestated.

“There’s very heart rending testimonies about the Ayoreo [Totobiegosode] peoples in Paraguay of what the New Tribes Mission did to destroy tese people in the seventies and eighties,” said Watson. The New Tribes Mission organized “manhunts” to kidnap Ayoreo and convert them by forcing them to renounce their cultural and religious beliefs, and way of life.

To these missionaries, Watson explains, Indigenous lives don’t matter. “What matters is you make the contact, because you have to bring the Word of God to these people,” said Watson. “You have to convert them, and in the process, if they get diseases and die, it doesn’t appear to matter very much to them, because what it is is about saving, in their view, saving souls.”

The danger of evangelical missionaries, says Watson, is that they are fundamentalist. They can’t be reasoned with.

“No contact policy”

Survival International promotes a strict “no contact policy,” both within their organization and their campaigns, so they learn about the uncontacted groups from partnering with the contacted neighboring Indigneous groups, who are determined to protect their isolated relatives.

“What we most commonly hear is that these people are under threat and that they’re really facing a lot of dangers, but that when their territory is protected, they thrive,” said Callum Russell, Asia and Pacific researcher and advocacy officer for Survival International. “And the contacted Indigneous peoples remember what life was like before they had contact, and some of them tell us, you know, life in the forest was great.”

They say, “We wish this has never happened to us in the first place,” explained Russell. “So they are determined to stop that happening to their uncontacted neighbors.”

On the other side of the world, two uncontacted groups live in India, four groups live in Indonesia, and two more live in West Papua (but potentially up to 10 groups). Indigenous groups sharing land with uncontacted relatives are begining to advocate on their behalf, looking after them by leaving gardens in the forest to feed them. Many are lobbying their national governments to enforce their protection. In Indonesia, at least 19 nickel mining concessions overlap the territory of the uncontacted, spread across tens of thousands of hectares—home to the largest nickel mine in the world owned by Paris-based company Eramet.

“They are really threatened by that now, and the uncontacted are coming out of their forest and aiming arrows at the bulldozers,” said Russell.

Get too close, one may recieve an arrow shot overhead in warning, or even attacked. They will do what is necessary to defend their tribe from outsiders. In 2018, an American evangelical missionary traveled to India to make contact and convert the Sintinelese people and was killed. It’s illegal to even approach within five miles of the tribe’s island.

Before he died, the missionary wrote in his diary, “Lord, is this island Satan’s last stronghold where none have heard or even had the chance to hear your name?”

For those paying attention, these uncontacted groups want to be left alone. “And it’s very clear that’s what they want, and we can tell that all sorts of signs, of leaving crossed arrows or spears on their hunting trails, or firing arrows like that very iconic photo you might have seen of the Sentinelese man shooting at the Indian Coast Guard helicopter when they flew over to see if they’d survive the tsunami,” said Fiona Watson.

After decades of campaigning by local organizations and Survival International, the Indian government abandoned all attempts to contact the Sentinelese on their unique remote island. On paper, Russell says, India’s policy is to protect the Sentinelese and the uncontacted Shompen people, but recently the national government began to covet the Great Nicobar island for massive industrial development “on a terrifying scale” with plans to cut down millions of trees.

The contacted Nicobarese people of Great Nicobar, India are speaking out for the Shompen people, their hunter and gatherer uncontacted relatives in the forest, who are being threatened by a mega-infraestructure project by the Modi government aimed at transforming their small island into the so-called “Hong Kong of India.”

“The only way they will survive is for this project to be cancelled,” said Russell.

Often, Indigenous groups will plant vegetable gardens for the uncontacted, whose forests are being logged. They also recognize where isolated groups hunt or travel, so they keep their distance, give them space undisturbed, and safe from potentially contracting any outside illness. These Indigenous groups are on the front lines, protecting the lands for all Native peoples.

If the “Hong Kong of India” is realized, there will be hundreds of thousands of permanent settlers on the small island. The mega project’s own environmental impact statement basically admits the development and environmental destruction would have a high chance of wiping out the Shompen people.

Colonialism continues. It never ended. For the uncontacted, especially, this means resistance to colonialism continues. “They are often traumatized by what their ancestors experienced, by what neighboring Indigenous peoples experienced,” said Russell. “They’re traumatized because they see their forests being destroyed, because they feel the pollution in the water and quite possibly in the atmosphere.”

For many Indigenous peoples, forced contact was the most devastating moment in their tribal history. But that doesn’t have to persist.

“I want to say to all the people and peoples out there in the world is for you to put great value to the Amazon rainforest where the original peoples [live]—that is, the elders, the Wary People, the uncontacted people—to really appreciate and value them, because they have never had any contact and they really demand and deserve our respect,” said Manchineri.

“Don’t steal from them. Don’t invade their lands. Don’t take diseases to them. Respect and value these peoples, and also my people, the Manxineru people, because we live and share the same land.” [Fin]

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Read the report and more

Download the groundbreaking report “Uncontacted Indigenous Peoples: At the edge of survival,” a global investigation into the survival of uncontacted peoples, and visit Survival International’s uncontacted groups campaign site uncontactedpeoples.org.

Learn more about the Indigenous right to self-determination, a right rooted in global decolonial struggles in the 1970s, and now recognized internationally by groups like the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), as well as the right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent, a foundational Indigenous treaty norm.

And finally, read more about uncontacted peoples around the world, like the uncontacted Awá in the northern Brazilian Amazon who constantly flee from non-Indigenous invaders; how forced contact on the Nukak people in Colombia led to mass deaths from disease; and how nickel mining companies invade uncontacted Indigenous territories in Indonesia.

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In February 2025,

I sent an email requesting an interview, along with a list of questions, to Abdaljawad Omar, a widely sought professor and policy analyst based in Ramallah, Gaza Strip, Palestine. As a professor and analyst, Omar’s scholarship and writing focus on Palestinian resistance, settler-colonialism, and revolutionary politics.

At the time, I was still trying to gain a foothold in understanding Palestinian history and gathering sources. The interview was going to be part of my recent pivot to reporting on Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, but I never incorporated it into any stories.

Now, finally, I’m releasing the interview. And it doesn’t disappoint.

One year later, Omar’s answers turned out to be almost a prophetic analysis of US President Donald Trump’s neo-Monroe Doctrine venture, his erratic and colonial foreign policies, and the next looming catastrophe that is the “Gaza Riviera.”

The United Nations estimates that the reconstruction of Gaza will cost about $70 billion, which could be quite a lucrative windfall for companies, but with a Trump-Kushner-Netanyahu dark triad leading the helm.

Here, Omar observes a Trump “boomerang” effect. This renowned “imperial boomerang” theory was first posited in 1950 by Aimé Césaire, an Afro-Martinique French poet, author, and politician, who argued that the brutal techniques and strategies used by colonial powers to control foreign territories are eventually deployed against their own citizens at home.

(In the original French, Césaire called it “un formidable choc en retour,” which doesn’t mean ‘boomerang,’ but something more like “a formidable shock in return.” In an earlier English translation, it was called a “terrific reverse shock”)

As one contemporary scholar has argued, “the work of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon helps us better understand how colonialism creates the affective and psychological conditions for fascism.”

Colonialism begets fascism. Always has. After the Biden and then Trump administrations fully supported over two years of Israel’s unrestricted and unpunished genocidal rampage on Palestinians, some form of these colonial strategies was about to come home.

This interview is reproduced in full, with only minor edits for clarity.

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No Frontiers: What do you make of Trump’s desire to colonize Gaza as well as other sovereign lands?

Abdaljawad Omar: One of the more striking features of the current geopolitical landscape is the contradictory nature of U.S. foreign policy under Trump. His rhetoric reflects a fusion of nationalist populism and transactional diplomacy, exacerbating tensions between competing strategic imperatives. On the one hand, the United States increasingly resembles a revisionist power—redefining its global posture through a modernized Monroe Doctrine, favoring ad hoc deals over institutional commitments, and demonstrating a willingness to pressure both allies and adversaries. This shift is evident in Washington’s erratic overtures toward Ukraine and Greenland, as well as its open disdain for traditional partners like Canada.

However, the real significance of this moment extends beyond the dangers of populism or the resurgence of a 19th-century colonial mindset repackaged in the language of 21st-century business deals. While these moves project disruption, strength, and a willingness to unravel established rules—both explicit and implicit—they also accelerate a broader shift away from American primacy. U.S. hegemony was not merely sustained through raw power but also through policies that provided incentives for allies and, at least superficially, upheld the principle of sovereignty. By undermining these mechanisms, the United States risks not only alienating key partners but also hastening the erosion of the very global order that once cemented its dominance.

Like Trump, Israel is also engaging in and advancing a form of revisionism—not only in its assertion of unrestrained power but also in its reliance on ethnic cleansing and genocide as colonial solutions to its inability to legitimize itself or extinguish the struggle over Palestine. Trump’s rhetoric is useful in this sense; it sets the real agenda that Israel seeks and desires, an agenda where war crimes and crimes against humanity become a practical solution celebrated on the pages of think-tanks and mainstream media.

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NF: Trump’s desire to “own” Gaza and build a “Riviera”, where did this come from? Do you feel Trump, along with other private interests, was looking to get a slice of Gaza (and the West Bank) through Israel’s assault on Palestinians in Gaza after Oct. 7? Were parties in the US and Israel imagining carving up the Gaza Strip?

Abdaljawad Omar: Trump appears to be viewing Israel’s policies through the lens of a business deal—one that Netanyahu has strategically framed to secure American buy-in for ethnic cleansing. By presenting this as a transactional arrangement, Netanyahu has leveraged Trump’s instincts for deal-making to normalize policies of settler-colonial expansion and demographic engineering. In many ways, Trump is being manipulated into aligning with messianic fascist movements that seek to capture political attention and reshape the discourse around U.S. support for Israel.

Beyond this political alignment, there is also a clear element of economic opportunism at play. Gaza, in this framework, is being transformed into a commodified space—one whose destruction and potential reconstruction can serve both Trump’s economic interests and Israel’s long-term strategic goals. What is being sold is not merely a policy of ethnic cleansing but a vision in which Palestinian dispossession is repackaged as an opportunity for profit and geopolitical consolidation in the months and years to come.

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NF: What do you make of Trump’s executive order to build America’s own “Iron Dome”? What is he trying to accomplish with this military move to emulate Israel’s Iron Dome?

Abdaljawad Omar: The concept of the Iron Dome, and more broadly, the replication of military technologies that Israel has developed through its dependence on the U.S. military-industrial complex, exemplifies the boomerang effect inherent in Israel’s role as an advanced colonial outpost. This dynamic underscores how Israel is not merely a recipient of Western military support but an active participant in shaping the global architecture of war-making and technological militarization. The continuous circulation of weaponry, surveillance tools, and asymmetric warfare strategies between Israel and its Western backers reinforces a broader system in which colonial violence is both refined and exported under the guise of security and defense.

Among the most fervent supporters of Israel’s genocidal war over the past 15 months are those deeply embedded in the world of military affairs. While the notion of an “Iron Dome for America” is not necessarily feasible, the broader agenda of securing the U.S. from missile threats remains a long-standing priority for the American military. This preoccupation has historically driven extensive investments in missile defense systems, shaping both U.S. strategic doctrine and its military-industrial entanglements. In this context, Israel’s Iron Dome serves not only as a model but as a political and technological reference point, reinforcing the militarization of security discourse in both countries.

Moreover, a key aspect of Trump’s rhetoric is his attempt to market the Iron Dome, reframing Israel’s military capabilities in a way that commands admiration and reverence. This effort comes at a crucial moment for Israel, as its war on Gaza has been defined not by awe-inspiring military operations but by sheer horror, shock, and the totality of destruction inflicted upon a largely civilian population. Unlike past wars, which Israel sought to frame through narratives of strategic brilliance, this campaign has left little room for the kind of spectacle that generates admiration. As a result, Israel finds itself in dire need of brand redemption—particularly in the realm of military technology. Trump, ever the salesman, eagerly serves as a walking, talking “Hasbara” apparatus, repackaging Israel’s war machine for Western audiences.

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NF: Is America feeling “colonial envy” of Israel and its goals of invading several countries to annex a “Greater Israel”? Is this possibly why Trump is looking abroad and wanting to conquer other countries for American expansion?

Abdaljawad Omar: Any psychological analysis of the link between Trump’s rhetoric and Israel’s actions opens multiple avenues of inquiry. At its core, there is an undeniable sense of solidarity—a resonance shaped by the historical and ideological affinities between settler-colonial outposts like Israel and the United States. Both nations emerged through frontier expansion, predicated on the systematic killing and erasure of Indigenous populations. This shared history creates a feedback loop, or a “boomerang effect,” in which strategies of domination, militarization, and exclusion reinforce one another across different contexts. Trump’s alignment with Israel, then, is not merely a matter of political expediency but a deeper ideological affinity rooted in the settler-colonial logic that underpins both projects.

As for the idea of envy toward Israel, I would argue that the United States—under its current political class—is not so much envious as it is jealous. The distinction is important: envy arises from a sense of lacking, a desire for what another possesses, while jealousy is more possessive and defensive, driven by the fear of losing power or status. Unlike envy, which acknowledges difference, jealousy carries an impulse toward mimicry, a compulsion to replicate the conditions that grant the other its power. The U.S. political class does not merely admire Israel’s policies—it is jealous of Israel’s ability to act with impunity, to bypass legal and moral constraints in its exercise of sovereign violence. This jealousy manifests in the way U.S. politicians and military strategists seek to internalize Israeli security doctrines, adapting its methods of militarization, surveillance, and repression to American borders and policing. It is not passive admiration but an active drive to reproduce Israel’s model, reinforcing a deeper convergence in governance where both states sustain and legitimize each other’s strategies of control.

Israel—as a solution, a model, and an object of jealousy to be mimicked—is also a symptom of a slow yet intensifying perception among Americans of the decline of U.S. power and the erosion of American primacy. However, this turn toward Israel as a model is likely to accelerate that very decline. While a more aggressive, self-interested, and revisionist stance may yield immediate tactical gains for the United States, it will come at the cost of long-term strategic stability—eroding soft power, weakening alliances, and diminishing global confidence in American leadership. In other words, America will slowly become a site for opportunistic allies selling deals, and more generally a problem to be managed.* [Fin]

For further reading, please check out “Two Years of Genocide: Gaza and the Unraveling World Order,” a piece Omar co-authored, as well as a podcast roundtable he paneled, “Gaza Ceasefire Challenges & Future Scenarios in Palestine,” convened by Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network and Mondoweiss.

And here is a PDF of an English translation of Aimé Césaire’s essay-turned-book “Discourse on Colonialism.”

"Discourse on Colonialism" by Aimé Césaire, translated by Joan Pinkham

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In late December 2025, the Zionist colonial regime unveiled its so-called “Iron Beam” military weapons system, which is designed to intercept rockets, mortars, and drones with a laser. The system was created after Iran had handily slipped dozens of ballistic missiles past the supposedly impenetrable Israeli Iron Dome missile defense system during Israel’s unprovoked 12-day war in June 2025.

It’s hard to overstate how entrenched military culture is in Israeli governance and society—military service has been required by law nearly since Israel’s founding. Yet few know that American displacement and extermination of Indigenous peoples played a key role in Zionist Jewish colonization.

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From the early beginnings of Zionism, its founders and acolytes used the model of Euro-American genocide of countless Indigenous groups and the conquest of their Native lands in Turtle Island to justify the Zionist settler colonial project to establish “Israel.” Every territory had a Native population that would not simply hand over their lands, so they developed a policy of Palestinian removal and replacement with a majority of white Jewish settlers.

The philosophy of militarized defense behind Israel’s Iron Beam and Iron Dome originated from the founder of modern Zionism, Theodore Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian Jew who envisioned a future Jewish State in Palestine as a European military fort defending the West against the savage “Arab” Natives. “We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism,” he wrote in his 1917 book “The Jewish State.”

This fortress mentality was further established by Zionism’s “Revisionist” founding father, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, whose writings alarmed his fellow Jewish supremacist settlers about the inevitable Native resistance to colonization, particularly his infamous “The Iron Wall” essay of 1923.

Jabotinsky’s “The Iron Wall” encapsulated the Zionist-style of settler colonialism, and essentially argued for offensive means for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to take their lands—the goal at the heart of all Zionism. But to ensure Jewish colonization progresses, the Jewish majority population must be guarded “behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.”

This, Jabotinsky says, is Zionism’s “Arab policy” for the Palestinians.

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By looking to Spanish (Cortez and Pizzaro) and American (Pilgrim Fathers) colonization, Jabotinsky recognized that the “Aztecs” and “Red Indians” would never let the pioneer “Pale faces” take their lands without a fight, so why would the Natives in Palestine? After all, there is not enough room on the “prairies” or “ancient Mexico” for the pilgrims and the “Redskin”—as per his brilliant understanding of history.

By 1900, a couple of decades before he wrote “The Iron Wall,” tribal nations were decimated by American settler colonialism’s genocidal policies, a bloody demographic collapse that established American white domination from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans. White rule over the continent.

Tribal populations were often reduced by half or more in just a matter of years due to disease, genocidal war by American settlers, displacement, and starvation. Many tribes were completely annihilated.

My Mandan tribe in the western plains was reduced 209 people from several thousand. Only 547 members of my Hidatsa tribe survived from several thousand. My Diné tribe had just over 22,000, after having just lost thousands during the “Navajo” Long Walk, and hundreds before that during a war of extermination waged by US cavalry general Kit Carson, widely considered an American hero.

Across the whole country, a US census found there were just over 247,000 Native peoples left in 1910, a decline from an estimated 18 million. Yet the demographic collapse began hundreds of years ago.

A study found between 1492 and 1600—a span of 108 years—an estimated 56 million Native peoples died after European imposed contact, disease, slavery, and warfare, from around 60 million total Indigenous population pre-Columbus. This “Great Dying” was so monumental that the global climate’s surface temperature dropped by 0.15 degrees Celsius.

By 1910, the white population was nearly 82 million, 89% of the population in America, who expropriated 99% of Native territories. After the Great Dying, one could argue that there was no more successful extermination campaign and land grab than the American “Great Replacement.”

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Each successive Israeli administration since 1967, historian Avi Schlaim argues, has followed the model of Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall: forcing the separation of settler Jews from Palestinians by ethnic cleansing and genocide, and through an ever-increasing accumulation of military might.

As Israel evolved over the years, the extremist Likud party took up Jabotinsky’s vision for an Iron Wall policy toward Palestinians and expanding Israel’s borders through genocidal conquest. A Likudnik himself, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is just the latest expression of Israel’s colonial ambitions through merciless and unrestrained military force.

The American-inspired anti-Indian fantasy of a militarized Israeli outpost protecting European civilization and the Iron Wall “guard” mentality shielding white Jews directly shaped the raison d’être of Israel’s missile defense system and genocidal invasions across West Asia.

Since Oct. 7, 2023, the Gaza Health Ministry reports a conservative estimate of at least 70,000 Palestinians killed by Israel, though the true death toll is likely in the hundreds of thousands. In contrast, about 2000 Israelis have been killed since Oct. 7.

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One day after No Frontiers published its investigation into the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and its downplaying of Israel’s targeting of journalists, a group of anonymous CPJ whistleblowers came forward to accuse the organization and its CEO of appeasing its pro-Israel donors by minimizing Israel’s targeting of journalists.

A late-November No Frontiers’ investigation found CPJ downplayed Israel’s targeted killing campaign against Palestinian journalists in Gaza by proclaiming 85-88% of journalist killings by Israel as “dangerous assignment” deaths, rather than “murder” or targeted killings. It’s now known that “dangerous assignment” is CPJ’s “default classification” for journalists killed in Gaza, citing fog-of-war challenges in reporting.

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The next day, whistleblowers echoed these same concerns to the Electronic Intifada, pointing a finger at Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of CPJ, claiming she has been interfering with research and advocacy to hide Israel’s targeting of Palestinian journalists in Gaza from public view over the past two years of Israeli genocide. They even claim one employee was fired in retaliation for arguing with Ginsberg when she wouldn’t classify the Israeli killing of journalists as targeted murders (and instead are classified as “dangerous assignment” deaths).

“The whistleblowers confirmed what we already knew,” said ZO (pseudonym for Zionist Observer), founder of archival and research group Databases for Palestine, and who has championed this issue throughout Israel’s genocide. “I want CPJ to correct the historical record.”

For ZO, there are still numerous questions for CPJ as the prestigious press freedom organization, and its role in shielding Israeli targeting of journalists in Gaza from global scrutiny.

No Frontiers, ZO, and Electronic Intifada contributor Abubaker Abed convened for a panel discussion about CPJ on X’s Spaces platform. Listen to the panel here.

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Per a statement by Jodie Ginsberg to No Frontiers, it’s now known that CPJ uses ‘dangerous assignment’ as a “default classification” for journalists killed by Israel, because CPJ says there is not enough information to conclude whether the journalist was indeed targeted. However, to include them in its database, CPJ imposes its own presuppositions, assuming the journalist was on a news-gathering assignment; otherwise, its methodology strictly excludes journalists killed while off duty. (Being off duty shouldn’t matter when an assassination is involved.)

“Despite damning evidence of war crimes committed by Israel, Jodie Ginsberg’s clever capping of what CPJ can do or say on Gaza is effectively dissipating our evidentiary power, which could easily be admissible evidence before the ICC,” the whistleblowers told Electronic Intifada.

Palestinian journalists were killed in the hundreds, and continue to be killed and jailed amidst Israel’s ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing. Yet CPJ still only acknowledges 21 targeted journalist killings in Gaza—those who Israel publicly smeared as terrorist bombing targets.

“I want CPJ to fix their database, which they haven’t done to this day,” said ZO. ZO went on, "They are writing the historical record, and I want them to explain themselves and to correct their database.”

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“Attempts to portray CPJ’s process as a ‘cover-up’ or as aligned with any state’s narrative fundamentally misrepresents both our work and our track record of confronting the perpetrators and parties—including Israel—responsible for killing, harming or obstructing journalists.”

In response to No Frontiers’ email outlining reported findings, data, and statements made by Palestinian journalists, journalist advocates, and activists, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) provided a statement that it “rejects any suggestion that its documentation or advocacy is designed to minimize, obscure, or justify Israel’s killing of journalists and media workers.” CPJ outlined its own advocacy work across the Israeli genocide as well as clarified its methodology for investigating the killing of journalists.

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CPJ did not challenge any data-based findings that were the crux of No Frontiers’ investigation: 85-88% of journalists killed in Gaza are classified as “dangerous assignment” deaths by CPJ since Oct. 7, including over 60 journalists who were killed in their homes by aerial bombings.

CPJ also did not explain why they steer clear of recognizing or acknowledging the pattern of at-home aerial bombings, which not only kill journalists, but also several and even dozens of family members. This was crucial to the investigation and is central to understanding the experience of Palestinian journalists in their home communities under Israeli genocidal assault.

No Frontiers

SCOOP: Committee to Protect Journalists undercounts journalists "murdered" by Israel, is it by design?

Tal al-Hawa, Gaza, Palestine—Shrouq Al Aila and Roshdi Sarraj, two married Palestinian journalists, and their infant daughter sat down to breakfast. An hour late, Sarraj was trying to hurry for hi…

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5 months ago · 15 likes · 3 comments · Kalen Goodluck

What remains clear is that CPJ is doubling down on its “longstanding, rigorous and highly-respected methodology,” all while completely ignoring reports that AI targeting systems were at full use to launch aerial bombings to kill Palestinians in their homes, as well as the later IOF development of journalist targeting units like the “Legitimisation cell.”

As AI war systems continue to be used to kill civilians en masse, CPJ must update and expand its methodologies for greater pattern recognition if it hopes to still be trustworthy to the public and journalists it claims to advocate for.

Below is their complete statement:

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Statement to No Frontiers from Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists:

November 18, 2025

For over two years, Israel has engaged in the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill journalists and media workers that the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has ever documented.

Since October 7, 2023, CPJ representatives have given more than 200 media interviews in which we have made clear Israel is wholly responsible for these deaths – and that the deliberate killing of journalists, as well as the disproportionate and indiscriminate killing of any civilian, is a war crime. The perpetrators of these war crimes must be held to account and CPJ is committed to pursuing that accountability.

CPJ’s position is that Israel is killing the press at an unprecedented rate to silence critical reporting of what human rights experts agree is genocide—and we were one of the first, and remain one of the most outspoken, international organizations to explicitly highlight the disproportionate rate of journalist killings by Israel.

CPJ strongly rejects any suggestion that its documentation or advocacy is designed to minimize, obscure, or justify Israel’s killing of journalists and media workers. Our organization does not dismiss or disregard the reports of Palestinian journalists, human rights organizations, or local press-freedom groups; quite the opposite, their testimony and documentation are primary sources for our investigations.

Attempts to portray CPJ’s process as a “cover-up” or as aligned with any state’s narrative fundamentally misrepresents both our work and our track record of confronting the perpetrators and parties—including Israel—responsible for killing, harming or obstructing journalists.

The organizations tracking the violations and atrocities against journalists in Gaza each have different methodologies and definitions. CPJ is applying its longstanding, rigorous and highly-respected methodology, which has been widely cited by United Nations bodies, government officials, and human rights organizations. We recognize that different approaches produce different numbers. One thing is clear amongst all the methodologies: Israel is killing journalists at an unprecedented rate and must be held to account.

Some specific notes on our definitions and methodology in respect of Gaza:

• CPJ uses the term “murder” to describe the killing of a journalist if we are able to establish with reasonable certainty that the killing was in direct reprisal for the journalist’s work. One of our key considerations is whether the attackers singled out someone they knew, or should have known, was a journalist e.g. if they had press insignia on their clothing or a vehicle. We consider all of the evidence in each individual case before designating a killing as a murder, including whether a journalist had previously been threatened for their work. Under international law, such killings, when conducted during armed conflict, are war crimes. However, we recognize that there are many other types of war crimes that can be committed against civilians, including journalists. For example, if Israel deliberately or recklessly–as defined by international law–attacked a housing complex, resulting in a journalist being killed in their home, this would be an apparent war crime. For CPJ to classify such a case as murder would require verifying the attack was in direct reprisal for the journalist’s work.

• CPJ uses the terms “dangerous assignment” classification, which CPJ defines as a killing while covering a demonstration, riot, clash between rival groups, mob situation, etc.; this includes assignments (including travel to and from reporting) that are not expected to entail physical risk but turn violent unexpectedly. This is our default classification, given the difficulties of confirming information when a war is raging, we work on the assumption that any journalist killed in an area of hostilities during the Israel-Gaza war was involved in trying to provide some form of coverage.

• Our database and documentation is dynamic and will continue to be updated as investigations continue. Amid the extreme constraints imposed on Gaza—including a ban on foreign press access, destroyed communications infrastructure, mass displacement, and widespread loss of life—confirming motive is extraordinarily difficult. To this end, we recognise that the total number of journalists deliberately targeted for being journalists is likely an undercount in our database. CPJ continues to investigate at least 20 other cases that show signs of possible targeting. As a result, we anticipate that individual classifications will change as more information becomes available, but for now our focus is on getting as complete a record of all the deaths as possible. We maintained this same process for the Russia-Ukraine war.

• The use of other designations (such as “Dangerous Assignment”) should not be interpreted to mean that CPJ considers such deaths lawful. It simply means that CPJ has not yet been able to establish whether an individual was deliberately killed for being a journalist.

• In all cases, CPJ researchers independently investigate and verify the circumstances behind each death. CPJ requires a minimum of at least two sources of information for any case we publish. CPJ uses a range of sources, including family members, colleagues, eye witnesses, journalism and civil society groups, and governmental authorities. All cases must align with our definition of who is a journalist and who is a media worker and our methodology.

CPJ’s role is to ensure that every journalist killed is named, recorded, and investigated to the highest standard so that their deaths cannot be erased, denied, or politically instrumentalized.

CPJ’s May 2023 report “Deadly Pattern” found that Israel delivered no accountability for 22 journalists killed by the Israeli military over the preceding two decades. To date, there has been no accountability for any of the killings of journalists and media workers in Gaza by Israel since October 7, 2023. Given its longstanding failure to hold its forces to account, any investigation into Israeli forces targeting the press must be undertaken independently of Israeli authorities.

Our focus remains on documenting every case we can verify, protecting the safety and credibility of Palestinian journalists who continue to report under extraordinary threat, and advancing accountability through accurate, defensible data. To do this in accordance with CPJ’s rigorous, longstanding methodology will require a long-term commitment of time, resources. CPJ is committed to this effort. [*]

No Frontiers

SCOOP: Committee to Protect Journalists undercounts journalists "murdered" by Israel, is it by design?

Tal al-Hawa, Gaza, Palestine—Shrouq Al Aila and Roshdi Sarraj, two married Palestinian journalists, and their infant daughter sat down to breakfast. An hour late, Sarraj was trying to hurry for hi…

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5 months ago · 15 likes · 3 comments · Kalen Goodluck

Tal al-Hawa, Gaza, Palestine—Shrouq Al Aila and Roshdi Sarraj, two married Palestinian journalists, and their infant daughter sat down to breakfast. An hour late, Sarraj was trying to hurry for his assignment, filming medics transferring the injured to hospitals, but had insisted on having breakfast with his family. “Maybe because he felt that this is the last meal together, the last family gathering,” said Al Aila.

In an instant, one explosion and then another rocked their home, injuring Al Aila and her child. Sarraj wouldn’t make it.

On Oct. 22, 2023, Sarraj was the 23rd journalist killed in the first two weeks of Israel’s genocidal siege. Israel killed more than one journalist a day, on average, for the last few months of 2023—killing nearly eight percent of all journalists in Gaza by late-December.

“They targeted us before going to this job, to this assignment,” said Al Aila. Two rockets and near-certain death. “I don’t know how to tell you, but there is no escaping this attack.”

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The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), renowned in the West for its press freedom advocacy, classified his ‘type of death,’ confusingly, as “dangerous assignment.” But he was eating breakfast at home, not out on assignment. After two years of tracking Israel’s journalist killings, this was CPJ’s rule, not the exception: 85-88% of journalists killed in Gaza are classified as “dangerous assignment” deaths1.

This includes over 60 journalists killed in their homes alongside their families. And despite Israel’s killing of hundreds of journalists, CPJ has only classified 21 journalist deaths as “murder,” or targeted killings.

“They differentiate between the types of killing and they refuse to call it murder when Israel targets a journalist in their home, which is how most of the journalists were targeted in Gaza,” said ZO (pseudonym for Zionist Observer), founder of Databases for Palestine, which also tracks journalist killings by Israel.

Palestinian journalists and journalist advocates have raised frustration and alarm over CPJ’s methods for collecting and classifying data on journalists killed by Israel, and discounting their desperate assertions that the Zionist regime is deliberately killing hundreds of their colleagues.

“For at least the first year and a half of the genocide, for CPJ to consider a journalist to be murdered, Israel has to come out and smear them, and say they targeted them for this reason or in that context,” said Anan Quzmar, a former volunteer with Palestine Journalist Syndicate (PJS), a trade union based in Gaza that was in frequent contact with CPJ. “In any other case, CPJ chooses to ignore the reports of their journalist colleagues in Gaza.”

The American and European media establishment has placed the Committee on a pedestal as the final word on press freedom worldwide. Yet, CPJ’s “meticulous research” and “reliable data” have helped minimize the full scope of Israel’s campaign to kill Palestinian journalists rather than expose it.

Recently, No Frontiers broke revelatory data from Databases for Palestine (D4P): Out of 312 journalists and media workers killed by Israel in Gaza, 154 journalists were killed at home, making up 49.4% or roughly half. Findings from the Palestinian Journalist Syndicate (PJS) and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) support this, which found evidence of Israel’s “systematic pattern” of targeting journalists at home. D4P says this pattern of targeting by mostly aerial bombings suggests a strong possible link to Israel’s infamous AI-assisted military targeting systems.

In contrast, a program coordinator at the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) found CPJ’s in-house devised ‘type of death’ classifications “aren’t very useful.” And as Palestinian journalists are painfully aware, Israel’s journalist targeting strategy goes far beyond bombing those they smear. Databases for Palestine, one of CPJ’s sharpest critics, calls their efforts a “cover-up.”

Words, terms, and contextual framing matter deeply in press coverage, especially when newsroom giants like The New York Times favor Israeli narratives and explicitly suppress words like “Palestine,” “refugee camp,” “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and more in their reporting. Data is no different.

Data tells a story, and CPJ’s data on Israel’s killing of journalists in Gaza is continuously distributed worldwide, informing world leaders and international organizations, used in national and international courts by human rights advocates, and echoed across all major Western news outlets, those who ‘manufactured consent’2 for Israel’s genocide: BBC, CNN, The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and beyond.

For days and years to come, the Committee’s data will help shape the historical narrative of Israel’s “mediacide,” which may herald the genocide as predominantly a “dangerous assignment” for the brave journalists killed in the line of duty. But so far, CPJ hasn’t even mentioned “genocide” once on its website in relation to Israel’s endless siege, nor as a condition Palestinian reporters worked under for two years.

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Madness to their method?

In December 2024, for her brave reporting and sacrifice during Israel’s first year of genocide, the Committee to Protect Journalists bestowed Shrouq Al Aila with the International Press Freedom Award at their annual award ceremony in New York City, which she could not attend.

Al Aila is appreciative of CPJ, their kind recognition of her work, professionalism in contacting her about Roshdi Sarraj’s killing, how they continued to check in on her and her daughter, their tireless work documenting journalist deaths, and their awareness campaign for Palestinian journalists. She only wished her husband were still there to share in her award.

“There’s always a place to grieve during the beautiful occasions,” Al Aila told No Frontiers. “That is because of the missing ones, so I was so devastated by not having him by my side and, you know, celebrating me.”

At first, Al Aila felt CPJ’s “dangerous assignment” classification was reasonable. Sarraj was preparing to leave after breakfast for a treacherous assignment, filming paramedics. However, CPJ’s “dangerous assignment” rules out an intended journalist killing by Israel, which Al Aila is adamant that she and Sarraj were deliberately targeted as journalists while at home.

“Having my husband killed while at his home or on assignment, it is still murder, because according to GPS, mobiles, etc., [Israel] can easily recognize where this person is,” said Al Aila. “My husband was not killed by mistake.”

“It doesn’t make sense, like, he was preparing to go on assignment, and in the previous days, he was on assignment every day,” said Al Aila. “But what happened that day is that he insisted on getting breakfast.” She wondered about his insistence on gathering everyone to eat instead of leaving for work. “He tried as much as he could to give time for our daughter, to give time for me, and also to have [breakfast together].”

CPJ knows Sarraj was eating breakfast at home and not out on assignment, but if they agreed that Israel targeted Al Aila and Sarraj, they would have classified his death as “murder.” A vast majority of journalist deaths somehow don’t meet their in-house devised standard for targeted killing:

• Murder: “The targeted killing of a journalist, whether premeditated or spontaneous, in direct reprisal for the journalist’s work.”

• Dangerous assignment: “deaths while covering a demonstration, riot, clashes between rival groups, mob situations; this includes assignments which are not expected to entail physical risk but turn violent unexpectedly.”

Since Oct. 7, CPJ claims at least 85% of journalists killed by Israel in Gaza died by “dangerous assignment.” By their count, CPJ declares 21 journalists in Gaza were deliberately targeted for murder, 158 killed by “dangerous assignment,” and 16 media workers’ deaths are puzzlingly unclassified.

“So, all organizations have different ways of calculating these kinds of things,” said Jodie Ginsburg, CEO of CPJ, to Newzroom Afrika in mid-August, explaining they “do our own research in-house.”

Of the 21 journalists CPJ counted as murdered, all of whom were smeared as terrorists in official Israeli statements, admitting to their targeting, and forcing a response from Western press freedom groups. But what about the hundreds of journalists killed by Israel who weren’t publicly smeared? Palestinian journalists, Gaza-based human rights groups, and Databases for Palestine have noticed a damning pattern of targeting that CPJ overlooks. By claiming 85% or more journalists died under faultless and non-targeted circumstances, CPJ vastly minimizes the true extent of Israel’s journalist assassination campaign and downplays its role in hundreds of Palestinian journalist murders.

After the deadliest period of Israel’s genocide for journalists, CPJ boasted about its data collection in a 2023 tax filing, writing, “CPJ’s meticulous research has allowed the organization to emerge as a leading authority on the plight of journalists attacked or jailed during the Israel-Gaza war.”

“Now the situation is Gaza is far more complicated, and because of the intensity of the attacks and the rapid killings of journalists, you just find yourself at several points that you are really unable to collect enough data and enough information,” said Monir Zaarour, MENA programs director for the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), a global trade union that keeps in close contact with its local Gaza-affilliate, the Palestinian Journalist Syndicate (PJS), and also closely tracks journalist killings.

Zaarour has sympathy for organizations, like CPJ, investigating journalist deaths because of the sheer enormity of Israel’s killings, especially if killings have to fit within these narrowly defined classifications as CPJ created. In these circumstances, these categories could be somewhat impractical, especially if they lack sufficient information. The situation in Gaza, he says, probably forced IFJ “to relax our methodology of how we collect and register data.”

However, Zaarour is firm on this fact: “We know Israel targeted journalists at their homes and killed them with their families, there’s no doubt about that. We know these killings were targeted killings.”

“I assume some organization didn’t want to say this because they say, ‘We don’t have enough information to substantiate if we want to make this claim,’ said Zaarour. “Now, we don’t have the information ourselves. We don’t have documents from the Israeli army saying, ‘Yeah, go and kill them,’ but we know this is happening and it’s enough from our point [of view].”

In a January 2024 interview with David Remnick, editor-in-chief of The New Yorker and CPJ board member, CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg acknowledged the killing of journalists in their homes and emphasized the lack of evidence for their targeting by Israel.

“There have been cases where journalists have also been killed in their homes, or their homes have been attacked after they’ve received warnings to stop reporting or to leave,” said Ginsberg. “Those are the cases where it’s still unclear whether they were deliberately targeted for being journalists or they happen to be in a place that was under bombardment. Those are things that we are looking into to try to understand.”

To compensate for the lack of certainty on individual cases, says Anan Quzmar, it’s necessary to draw patterns. “It’s what you should be doing anyway, you know,” said Quzmar. “So, have there been patterns that can be highlighted while at the same time maintaining the documentation standards? For sure.”

Five months before Oct. 7, CPJ published a damning report highlighting the Israeli military’s systematic impunity for killing 20 journalists over 22 years, entitled “Deadly Pattern,” a title that Quzmar said is “not pulling any punches.”

Now, to Quzmar, CPJ appeared to ignore these basic patterns and focus too much on the lack of certainty, so he stopped paying attention to their data.

“Lack of evidence” over Palestinian journalists

In an April 2024 letter from Palestinian Journalist Syndicate (PJS) president Naser Abu Baker to CPJ, Baker pointed to the Western media’s routine obfuscation of Israel’s role in killing journalists by downplaying the deliberate nature of their targeting and the number of reporters killed. Instead, outlets focus on “lack of evidence” and call for “independent investigations.” By taking a hard stance on Israel’s expansive pattern of targeted killings, Baker hoped that CPJ could set a standard for the Western media to follow suit.

CPJ’s acknowledgement of this targeting, Quzmar argued, could have saved lives. Now, Israel may have upended all norms of protecting journalists. “If a regime wants to kill journalists,” says Quzmar, “They should do like Israel and get the Israel treatment—just don’t let us investigate and we’ll call for investigations from abroad in this story.”

Acting as the West’s de facto ombudsman for press freedom, CPJ effectively sidelined publicizing Israel’s expansive pattern of journalist killings, a pattern Palestinian journalists have been clamoring to get recognized across the West.

In a statement to No Frontiers, CPJ disclosed its use of the “dangerous assignment” classification. “This is our default classification, given the difficulties of confirming information when a war is raging, we work on the assumption that any journalist killed in an area of hostilities during the Israel-Gaza war was involved in trying to provide some form of coverage.”

In September, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) released the “Assassination of Truth: Killing of Journalists amid Genocide in Gaza,” a report detailing an extraordinary breadth of Israeli military targeting of Palestinian journalists. PCHR documented 42 deliberate killings of journalists by Israel, both in the field, at home, and in civilian settings, twice as many as CPJ has counted.

For at-home killings, the PJS helped PCHR establish that the IOF engaged in “systematic pattern rather than random targeting, aimed at eliminating those reporting on Gaza to the world and sending a broader message of intimidation to all journalists in the field: that no place within the Gaza Strip is safe for them or their families.” PJS found that between October 2023 and April 2025, the IOF bombed 152 houses linked to journalists, resulting in the death of a total of 665 family members and relatives.

“I believe the most consistent pattern is the targeting of Palestinian journalists alongside whole families, not by coincidence, but by design,” said Quzmar. “To choose the moment and place where they are surrounded by their families in order to eliminate the whole family as a form of collective punishment.”

The Committee isn’t the only Western press freedom organization whose database has minimized Israel’s journalist assassination campaign. In mid-December 2023, PJS accused the Paris-headquartered Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans frontières or RSF) of “whitewashing the image of the occupation” of “shielding Israel from any responsibility before international justice”, of “bias in favour of the occupation” and of “lack of professionalism” by publishing a low count of 56 journalists killed by Israel in its annual RSF 2023 Round-Up report.

In a letter to PJS, the RSF’s secretary-general explained it was their “methodology,” including lack of information, that created the vast gulf between their tallies of killed journalists. As RSF noted, PJS counts all journalists killed in Gaza by Israel and “does not distinguish between the number killed in the line of duty and the overall number killed,” distinctions that RSF does make.

“These accusations indicate, at best, a misunderstanding of RSF positions,” wrote RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire. “These attempts to impugn our motives and these quarrels over numbers make no sense.”

What CPJ and RSF’s rigid data collection methodologies expose is the inflexibility of these press freedom organizations, as well as their inability to accept and adjust to critical feedback from local Palestinian journalists on the ground, whose deaths make up these “numbers.”

“CPJ strongly rejects any suggestion that its documentation or advocacy is designed to minimize, obscure, or justify Israel’s killing of journalists and media workers,” wrote Ginsberg in a statement to No Frontiers. “Our organization does not dismiss or disregard the reports of Palestinian journalists, human rights organizations, or local press-freedom groups; quite the opposite, their testimony and documentation are primary sources for our investigations.”

She continues, “Attempts to portray CPJ’s process as a ‘cover-up’ or as aligned with any state’s narrative fundamentally misrepresents both our work and our track record of confronting the perpetrators and parties—including Israel—responsible for killing, harming or obstructing journalists.”

CPJ declined an interview. In response, Ginsberg sent No Frontiers a statement. Read CPJ’s complete statement here.

In just the last three months of 2023, Roshdi Sarraj was killed during the deadliest period for journalists in history, more than any previous armed conflict. Throughout that period, CPJ hasn’t counted a single murder of journalists killed in Gaza.

But that can change, if only the group would acknowledge Israel’s deadly pattern of at-home aerial bombings and set aside its rigid classification system. Otherwise, “dangerous assignment” doesn’t begin to account for the sacrifice that hundreds of Palestinian journalists have made to report under the shadow of a belligerent and genocidal Zionist regime.

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In her heart, Shrouq Al Aila knows the IOF meant to kill two journalists that morning. Two rockets, one after another. Their high-tech surveillance, low-altitude drones hovering overhead. No one was meant to escape the attack.

“The issue that the CPJ classified what happened as [dangerous assignment] is that he was not on duty,” said Al Aila. “He was preparing himself to go on assignment, but he was not on duty.”

“But still, it is murder. It is a crime.” Acknowledgement or not, Al Aila continues to report—a journalist and mother with a target on her back. [*]

“This is my will, my final message,” reads journalist Anas Al-Sharif’s last words for this world. “If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice.”

On Aug. 10, an Israeli aerial bomb crashed down on an Al Jazeera media tent, killing Al-Sharif, his cousin, and journalists Muhammed Qraiqea, Ibrahim Daher, Momen Aliwa, Mohammed Nofal, and Muhammad Al-Khalidi. As part of its genocidal siege, starvation, and scorched earth strategy against all Palestinian civilians, Israel has established a systematic targeting of journalists for assassination in the field and at home.

While reporting on Israeli aerial bombings on refugee camps, Anas Al-Sharif and his Al Jazeera colleagues were directly targeted by Israeli aircraft while residing in their media tent near al-Shifa Hospital. “Allah knows I gave every effort and all my strength to be a support and a voice for my people, ever since I opened my eyes to life in the alleys and streets of the Jabalia refugee camp.”

Two weeks later, Israel massacred 22 civilians at Nasser Hospital, including five journalists, in a double-strike bombing in Khan Yunis. One other journalist was killed by Israeli gunfire in his displacement tent that day.

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Since their deaths, global outrage at Israel’s annihilation campaign of journalists has peaked, with prominent Western outlets finally voicing some amount of sympathy for their murdered and martyred non-white Palestinian journalism colleagues. After 24 months, 2 years, of Israeli genocide, mainstream outlets are only now beginning to acknowledge Israel’s role in journalist killings.

And thanks to one small volunteer-run organization, Databases for Palestine, a broader picture of Israel’s journalist assassination campaign may come into focus.

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As of publication, Israel has killed at least 311 journalists and media workers in Gaza since Oct. 7, according to Databases for Palestine, including 154 who were killed at home, primarily through aerial bombings. Those killed at home by Israel make up 49.5% of all journalists killed in Gaza, many killed in bombings throughout the night and early morning.

Just as heartbreaking, at least 756 family members of the journalists martyred at home were killed in the same attack by Israel. For every journalist killed at home, 4.9 or roughly 5 family members are also killed.

The archival group Databases for Palestine is organized and operated by a growing roster of anonymous volunteers and is among a handful of similar groups that are archiving videos, images, and posts published on social media by Palestinians surviving the Israeli Holocaust. Their project “Stop Murding Journalists” documents all of the journalists killed in Gaza by Israel, memorializing their names, the date they were killed, the method and location of their killing, who they were, and the reports they filed. The group has compiled its database from several Arabic and English-language sources, as well as original research.

The group also appears to have “the most comprehensive database” of journalists killed by Israel since Oct. 7, though they say their figures are likely an undercount.

“It feels weird to say it as ‘archiving,’ but we’re building out memorials to journalists that Israel murdered,” said ZO (a pseudonym, short for Zionism Observer), founder of Databases for Palestine, over voice call on Aug. 8. “And the reason we’re doing that is because we don’t believe there’s an honest database in the English language.”

A few of the leading independent sources tracking the journalists martyred by Israel’s genocide include the Shireen Observatory, named after the Israeli-assassinated Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate based in Gaza, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), and Genocide in Gaza (GiG).

(The Palestinian and international journalism organizations could not be reached for comment.)

“We let patterns speak for themselves,” writes Databases for Palestine, of some data collection and classification methods. “The sheer amount and rapid pace in which Israel kills Palestinian journalists—more than in any other documented military campaign ever recorded—indicates intent in the context of genocide.”

As the genocide has raged on, the footage coming out of Gaza has slowed.

“As Israel continues on its journalist mass murder spree, they’re killing the journalists who we’ve gotten to know really well and have come to depend on,” said ZO.

They continued,

It used to be that if there was a bombing in a certain part of Gaza, we could very easily know which journalist to go to, check their twitter account or their instagram account because they cover that area. And there used to be videos of the bombing itself. There used to be videos of the rescue effort and then the funerals, the hospitals. There used to be so many videos and that’s reduced to just a trickle with all of the murdering of journalists.

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AI-assisted assassination campaign?

At dawn on May 13, freelance journalist Hassan Esleih lay on a hospital bed inside the burn unit at Nasser Medical Complex, recovering from an aerial bombing that killed two journalist colleagues and left him severely injured and burned on April 7. Above, an Israeli drone hovered, locked on target, and fired a missile. Esleih was killed instantly.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) condemned Esleih’s “assassination” by Israel, stating “the ongoing, escalating targeting and killing of journalists leaves no doubt that these acts are deliberate, intended to intimidate and silence journalists and prevent them from conveying the truth to the world.”

For Databases for Palestine, Israel’s killing of 154 Palestinian journalists in their homes suggests a strong link to its AI/machine-learning military targeting software, particularly the infamous “Where’s Daddy” program. For a group relying on journalists on the ground to publish footage in order to archive and preserve documentation of the Israeli Holocaust, Israel’s campaign to kill every journalist in Gaza is a campaign to coverup the witnesses to their genocide.

“The massive use of the ‘Where’s Daddy’ system, programmed to alert the army to assassinate a target as they enter their home, often carried out with a 1-or 2-ton bomb, wiping out their whole family, also indicates intent—both to target journalists and also to commit genocide,” their site reads. “Half of the journalists that we memorialized (as of 3 April 2025) have been killed in their homes or tents of refuge along with their families.”

At this point, it’s impossible to know for sure how the Zionist AI-war machine is being used at any given moment or for any given decision to bomb a target.

Aside from continuous genocidal statements from Israeli officials and populace, such as “There are no innocent people” in Gaza, used to justify any-and-all bombing of Palestinian noncombatants and civilian infrastructure, it’s unclear how the IOF determines each specific target for bombing. This murkiness is primarily due to Israel’s untouchable impunity bestowed by its American, British, German, French, and European Union allies and funders—but mostly America.

Yet journalists, activists, and human rights organizations do have some clues and patterns to assess, given the Zionist rogue state’s militarized digital tools, which earned it the title of “a mass assassination factory.” Because of extensive reporting on Israel’s AI targeting software like The Gospel, Lavender, and “Where’s Daddy?” since April 2024, it’s widely known that the Israeli military puts Palestinians on AI-generated kill lists en masse, with no vetting or thought required, as The Guardian and +927 Magazine have both reported. The program Lavender, reportedly, assesses the likelihood of an individual’s suspected membership in armed resistance movements and marks suspected militants as bombing targets.

The Israeli military purports to track Palestinians—roughly 1:3 Palestinians—by collecting all signal traffic to and from the Gaza Strip. This includes using real-time approximate cell phone location data to inform military attack decisions. The AI program “Where’s Daddy” informs military operators when an individual marked as a bombing target enters a specific location, usually their family home, after the day’s activities or work. Hence, Israel’s cruel and sadistic ‘joke’ of a software name, “Where’s Daddy”—Dad arrived home, then disappeared in an explosion.

“Families were killed together in unprecedented numbers, and in their homes,” according to an Airwars report on Israel’s civilian targeting from December 2024. “On average, when civilians were killed alongside family members, at least 15 family members were killed.” This pattern has only continued to horrific degrees.

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“We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” an intelligence officer told +972 and Local Call in April 2024. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly branded journalists “Hamas Affiliates” and hospitals as “terrorist infrastructure” to legitimize bombing these targets, all crimes under international law. Sometimes officials will pre-name journalists as “Hamas” targets and invent lies about their connection to terrorism. Otherwise, Israel entirely denies that it targets journalists, only Hamas militants.

Yet most recently, according to reporting from +972 Magazine, the Israeli military created a so-called “Legitimization Cell” that’s tasked with identifying Gaza-based journalists and portraying them as undercover Hamas agents to weaken the rising global outrage about Israel’s assassination campaign.

Unfortunately, the most prestigious Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) regularly emphasizes certain Palestinian journalists killed by Israel as having worked for “Hamas-” or “Hezbollah-affiliated” Arabic-language news outlets within their datasets and individual profiles for slain journalists, echoing Zionist propaganda as if they were legitimate military targets.

What most Western audiences don’t understand—and what the Western media doesn’t say—is that Hamas is an elected government with civilian government officials that provide services to the Palestinian public, just like any democratic government. Al-Qassam is the military wing of the elected government. The government is made up of noncombatants and combatants, civilians and soldiers, illegitimate targets and legitimate ones.

Through this context, no journalistic institution can ethically, morally, and factually adopt the propaganda of a settler colonial racial state that has sought to reduce an entire population into “Hamas” terrorists, Hamas-affiliates, or future Hamas terrorists (in the case of children). Yet without making these distinctions or granting this context, Western journalistic institutions continue to dehumanize the Palestinian civilian population as military targets to be wiped off the map.

In the first year of the Israeli Holocaust, Palestinian journalists were ignored by Western media. Now, many are branded as legitimate “Hamas-Affiliates” by the most respected Western press freedom organization, CPJ, and by the lead génocidaire himself, Netanyahu.

Still, since December 2023, Databases for Palestine has continued to track the Palestinian journalists killed, preserving their names, their photos, and samples of their work. Among their other projects, this one seems the most somber, yet heartfelt for the group. This archival project, ZO tells me, is about building memory. Then, hopefully, it can lead to accountability.

“Without memory,” said ZO, “there can be no justice.”

“Do not forget Gaza… And do not forget me in your sincere prayers for forgiveness and acceptance,” wrote Anas Al-Sharif. [*]

Correction: this story was updated to reflect that ZO founded Databases for Palestine alone, not as a co-founder with anyone else.

Update: this story was updated to add the number of journalists’ family members killed in the same attacks by Israel.

When Marc James Carpenter began digging into United States pioneer history in the Pacific Northwest, he found many early territorial leaders who self-identified as “friends of the Indian” were hardly advocates for a shared humanity with Indigenous peoples—in fact, many called for their extermination by mass murder to take their lands.

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While addressing Congress, the longtime Indian killer and first territorial governor of the Oregon Territory, Joseph Lane, proclaimed that “the Injuns should be skulped [sic].”

Very few people in the mid-1800s, Carpenter found, took issue with annihilating Natives from the face of the earth. Many saw it as their destiny to “disappear.”

In his upcoming book, “The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest” (publishing Oct. 28), author and historian Marc James Carpenter has shed light on the depraved depths of America’s historical origins, the settler invasion into the Indigenous Pacific Northwest, and genocidal wars the early pioneers and modern historians tried to keep hidden.

The everyday violence of living in US-occupied Indigenous territories was ubiquitous and terrifying. For many tribes, giving up their lands through treaties was the only way to survive the ongoing siege of white settlers. “If you do not accept the terms offered and sign this paper,” a white negotiator recalled in June 1855, quoting the territorial governor who threatened Yakama leaders and held up the treaty, “you will walk in blood knee deep.”

A professor of American history at the University of Jamestown in North Dakota, Carpenter found that the continuous war and invasion against all Native peoples was consistently ignored or “prettied up” by the “Indian war veterans” and their regional historiographers. These historians had covered up decades of genocide, forced treaties, and land theft of the whole region through lies of omission, cleaning up US officials’ reputations, blaming Native tribes for “inciting” wars with settlers, and ultimately justifying the American invasion of Native lands. And Carpenter had the receipts.

While writing “The War on Illahee,” Carpenter let tens of thousands of pages of archival evidence speak for itself; that is, he let US officials and volunteer settler soldiers’ own words and actions shine through—often to a gruesome effect.

The bands of “volunteer” soldiers who roamed Indian territories regularly mutilated the bodies of Indigenous peoples they killed, often scalping their victims to collect a US bounty payout, and even mutilating various body parts as trophies to decorate their homesteads or even wear. In 1855, after committing a massacre of up to 75 Walla Walla/Walúulapam people, white men began stripping the tribe’s leader, Pio-pio-mox-mox, of his scalp and dividing up his body parts.

“Every man wanted a scalp of his head, there was not enough to go around so [doctor] Mack Shaw cut his ears off,” wrote one of the company’s volunteer soldiers.

“The War on Illahee” is a tale of white settler invasion, insatiable land hunger, sadistic bloodlust, and an unending string of genocidal massacres—and the historians and perpetrators who tried to cover it up. The story of America’s war on Illahee, Carpenter writes, begins with the so-called Cayuse War in 1847, a war that nationalist historians say began after Indians massacred whites at a mission, yet that is only part of the whole account.

And as Carpenter is adamant to express, this chronicle of the War on Illahee only scratches the surface.

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“The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest” will be released on Oct. 28.

This interview is excerpted, lightly edited, and condensed for brevity and clarity by PBS standards.

Interview with Marc James Carpenter:

No Frontiers: I’m thrilled to get the chance to talk with you about your fantastic upcoming book. How did you come to research “The War on Illahee”?

Marc James Carpenter: I started to do some original research on a few major Oregonian figures who were supposedly Native rights advocates. I found some who were, right? Some who did talk to tribal peoples at a time when that was not normal. And I found some who claimed to be, quote unquote, “friends of the Indian,” but who were actually horrific people, who were murderers, who were rapists, who were in favor of genocide, and who nonetheless were remembered as quote unquote, “friends of the Indian.”

And it turned out it was a broader story. And the more I dug, the more I saw records that other historians had played a role in, kind of covering up the depth and the horror of those wars. I found that the wars didn’t really correspond to the frames that non-native historians had put on them.

It spiraled into this larger project. I realized that, according to both the Native people of Oregon and Washington in the 1850s and 1860s and to the American invaders, it essentially had been one long war.

What we’d remembered as a few individual wars that, frankly, we often don’t remember very well in American culture, things like the Cayuse War, the Yakima War, the Walla Walla War, to the people who were fighting and those who were defending in those wars. It was all the same war, right? It was the war for the land, the ‘war on Indians,’ as people put it.

And eventually, I decided to call the book “The War on Illahee,” a word for ‘homeland’ in the Chinook trade language, which was there before Europeans and then shared with them, a term most tribes would have recognized. And so it seemed like a useful name for a war for land that everybody involved would have recognized.

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NF: Reading your book, it made me think a lot about broader American military history, or how military history was first conceptualized: It didn’t include these volunteer soldiers and irregular types of groups or armies, groups that maybe form to commit a “skirmish” or a massacre, but then disband because the war is over. They got their bounties or their pay. Could you elaborate on who the volunteer soldiers were who fought these “Indian wars” in the Pacific Northwest?

MJC: I think generally, military history, one of the places where it needs to go is taking more account of less regular troops, vigilante bands, right? of people who are not regulars in the US Army. And again, regulars in the US Army definitely took their share of horrors in this period. I don’t want to excuse them, but there’s also a broader American norm throughout most of the 1800s where it’s not unusual for a bunch of Americans to collect themselves together, call themselves volunteers, grab some weapons, and go shoot at people, usually native people.

This is an established norm in this period.

One of the points I try to make is that there is a transition from these self-declared volunteer soldiers in the 1850s gathering together, calling themselves a unit of the army, and killing people, and the lynch mobs that were much more common than is typically remembered in the same region in the 1870s and 1880s. Sometimes it’s the same guys doing that sort of thing. I worry about trying to parse how many people are volunteer soldiers, right? Most of the people whom we remember as volunteer soldiers, we remember that way because they successfully lobbied to get paid by the government for the violence that they did.

One of the illustrative and more famous matters that I write about essentially started with a local territorial government official, [James Lupton], getting down to the bar, telling everybody in town that he’d lied to the local native communities, [promising peace]. They’d be “off their guard,” he told them, and getting a bunch of guys with guns to go murder them. This is a bunch of murderers at a bar, but after the fact, they were declared volunteers by the government in some cases, because [Indian killing] is popular among a key part of their voters.

It’s harder to see that difference between how formal a soldier is in a period before you have kind of the more regimented, strict requirements for who is and isn’t a soldier. That’s more of a 1900s phenomenon.

NF: One of the themes that you talk about is that when history is written, there’s an emphasis on what the inciting incidents are to the “Indian wars.” What are the presented justifications for initiating a volunteer settler war on Native tribes or a village? And why do you feel there is too much emphasis by historians on these “inciting incidents” that start “Indian wars”?

MJC: So I think [when volunteer soldiers are talking] to the federal government, trying to get money in the 1850s and 1860s, or the kind of first generation of historians trying to pretty up the narrative—often the overwhelming focus when they’re trying to tell the story of a given war between Americans and a Native nation is to find an incident where Native people did violence to white people and call that the starting incident of the war, right?

A famous “inciting incident” for a war is the killing of adult men and a woman at the Whitman mission by a handful of Cayuse/Liksiyu warriors known as the Whitman Massacre, which is often cited as the beginning of the Cayuse War. There are also similar stories for the Yakama tribal killing of a federal agent named [Andrew] Bolon [in September 1855] as the supposed inciting incident of the Yakima War. And there are sort of two interventions I want to make in stories like that.

And I want to be clear, I’m not the only one who’s making this. I’m drawing from modern-day Native scholars. When I’m doing this, I don’t want to claim I’m the only one out here in this space.

One of them is to ensure we tell the story before that point. So in the case of the Yakima War, Bolon had been threatening to bring troops to murder everybody. He’d gone up there in the first place because the Yakima had executed a couple of trespassing would-be rapists, right?

In the case of the Cayuse, there seems to have been a trial where a Cayuse man found the Whitmans guilty of several capital crimes before attacking the Whitman mission. I think those stories are important. And I do dig into those. I think that even though sometimes we get too focused on the weeds and miss the bigger story, there are tens of thousands of Americans in this period who are pouring into the land and who are planning to kill Native people to take it, right?

And so, yes, we can trace the specifics of the conflict, right? We can trace wars to crimes the Whitmans were accused of, and whether or not they were guilty, but also, if none of that had happened, there still would have been “Indian wars.”

If there had not been the quote-unquote “Whitman massacre” or “Whitman incident”, there still would have been some war to take land from local Native communities. And we know that in part because the war was not fought solely against the Cayuse. It’s fought mostly against other local Native people whose land the pioneers wanted. And the pioneers themselves, at least in private, admitted that as much, right? They talked about the purpose [of the Cayuse war] as getting them off the land.

We need to disrupt narratives that falsely claim a start. Still, we also need to remember that at the end of the day, the core inciting incident is thousands upon thousands upon thousands of invaders who are coming into the land and are willing to kill to take it.

NF: When people look at history and are presented with settlers meeting with Natives, they will come upon the phrase “friend of the Indians”, but you pick that historical phrase apart. Can you describe what it actually means?

MJC: This phrase “friend of the Indian,” which again, if you’re in this historical space, you see this phrase all the time. I think many people, probably including me, have a sort of hunger for finding exceptions. Finding those pioneers—or to use my preferred phrase, “invaders”—in the period who are sympathetic to Native people and who have basic notions of shared humanity.

And there are a few, right? But I think in that hunger, people sometimes see that phrase “friend of the Indian” and take it to mean, “oh, good. This means this person is an ally,” and miss what they actually do.

So in the 1800s into the early 1900s, typically when somebody claimed to be a “friend of the Indian,” if they weren't lying, often what they meant was that Native people trusted me, right?

So I researched multiple people who identified as “friends of the Indian” who were supportive of genocide and took part in it, which is, I think we could all agree, an unfriendly act, right? And often the notion of “friend of the Indian” was projected onto them backwards, right? Either by themselves or by historians.

After fifty years, after the horrific violence of the War on Illahee, there was a notion that a “friend of the Indians” was one of the people who were friendly [to Natives], who knew the language, who was different from the people who came later. And so that got turned into “friend of the Indian”. But frequently that’s referring to something highly specific: It’s mostly a way of claiming you were there before other white people, or it’s a way of saying, “I knew their [Native] culture. I knew their language.” They usually didn’t, but it’s a way of claiming legitimacy.

[In documents] you’ll have people like Joseph Lane or Joseph Twogood who will say, ‘I was a friend of the Indian’ on one page and then on the next page, talk about how it was necessary to kill all of these Native people. And then their private writings are much, much worse, right? If you look at what they were writing privately in the 1850s, they’re fully in favor of mass killing and rape.

If somebody identifies as a friend of the Indian, that’s interesting and important, right? You do need to know that about them, but don’t assume that they’re telling the truth. And don’t assume that that means what we would think it means.

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NF: In chapter four, you describe this kill/capture campaign. And just saying those two words, I think about how those campaigns are still waged by the US, right? Could you explain what exactly that campaign was, which you write was all over the Pacific Northwest Territory? Um, what? Yeah. What exactly was that campaign and why was it instituted?

MJC: So I don’t forget, I want to put in a minor plug for the book, “Indian Wars Everywhere,” which I think does a really great job connecting that. First of all, it was useful for me and did a great job connecting the shadow policies that were normal in the quote-unquote “Indian wars” in the 1800s, with some later US military policies from the 1900s to the 2000s.

When I talk about the War on Illahee, there’s sort of a point where it reaches a height in 1855-1856. It seems to have been a somewhat organized, but decentralized attempt to try and seize Native lands—I think they hoped all of the land in Oregon and Washington [Territories] by means of direct violence and by means of internment. It seems to have been this broad-based campaign again, uh, endorsed indirectly by the governors, uh, of those territories, uh, to send out volunteer troops and eventually to draw in what regular troops there were, uh, in, uh, suppressing Native peoples and trying to get them all pushed onto what we could call reservations. But again, seen in the period as prison camps, as internment camps, and attempting to get every [Native] into those, and everybody disarmed.

You see this in Oregon Territory, where there’s word from an official named Joel Palmer saying essentially, you know, ‘we are going to force all Native people into these camps. And if you see somebody not in the camps, you can take whatever steps you need to get them there.’

There was a similar move in Washington, and I’d say I’ve probably only scratched the surface of the stories of internment in either place, where there’s this attempt to move people onto the islands of the Puget Sound. There’s a mass attempt to disarm Natives.

And there’s good reason to believe that at least some of those attempts to disarm were intended as disarm and then exterminate, to kill, and to commit genocide.

I was particularly struck to find, in a relatively easy-to-find document, the initial plans for a genocide of the Chehalis people by the governor of Washington, which he decided not to go with because the disarmament efforts hadn’t been successful. And so the tribe would be able to fight back more than he was comfortable with.

On the ground, uh, this was often a military campaign of terror. So it would be the norm of a military, um, either responding to some supposed incident of violence of a Native against a white person, real or imagined, going into towns and demanding that people execute, right, as a means of attempting to establish violent supremacy. “Give us some murderers, or we will kill all of you, right?” And then trying to move from that to pushing Native people out to specific places. But they didn’t fully achieve their ends, right?

Today, many Native spaces are still in Native hands in the Pacific Northwest. Still, during this period, it was a genuine bottom-up attempt to constrain all Native people into prison camps and to reduce the number of Native people in those prison camps really rapidly. It’s not unreasonable to call that a genocide by the very technical legal definition of the term.

The US military’s a bit trickier because the federal push during that period was to keep costs down. So they thought that would be expensive and didn’t necessarily [monetarily] support it at the federal level, but at the local and state levels, the support was absolutely there.

I think one of the things I often notice that doesn’t appear in military histories, which tend to be top-down by just looking at the kind of orders from above, is the level of everyday violence from below, especially in these periods of heightened military action where I have people reminiscing the time they were young teenagers and recalling ‘oh yeah, during that time I saw a Native person and I shot him, and that’s when I became a man,’ right? These are major figures. That’s part of their reminiscence. That’s part of their self-identity.

One of the points I try to make is that we only have a narrow slice of the actual horror written down. We know it from Native communities that have oral histories and memories. Some of which are to be shared and some of which very much are not, right? There are stories that I couldn’t share in this book that aren’t for me. We know it from individual records. We know it from reminiscences. But we will probably never get to the full scope.

Any attempt at the number of deaths is going to be such a severe undercount that I didn’t attempt to count the number of deaths as a figure in the book because it would have been so radically below the actual breadth of the violence for Native land that was waged in the 1850s.

NF: We live in a fraught time for historical scholarship and a fraught time in general. How do you want people to connect with this book or understand this period in the Indigenous Pacific Northwest?

MJC: One of the things I’m really hoping is that we can move away from this valorization of the pioneer past. I think, specifically in the northwest and generally, we should recognize the horrific reality of it and try to build a better world than the one created by those pioneers, right? Move away from this valorization of one of the worst periods of the American past and build something new, build a world and a nation that is less involved in that kind of violence, one that perhaps moves towards justice.

I’d certainly say, if I’m dreaming, I would hope that this can play some small role in the longer-term truth, reconciliation, and reparations for the affected Native communities. At the very least, I hope that amplifying Indigenous voices, past and present, who have been frankly telling broader society this history since it happened, right? And that hasn’t always gotten through.

Part of the way that “The War on Illahee” is written and the way that I’ve underlined, again, evidence from perpetrators, the way that I draw on lots of indigenous evidence.

Overall, it’s both sides of the same story. There’s not really a debate among the people who were there about the broad shape of what happened. And I have a hope that proving the cover-up is part of how you get people to accept the crime.

I hope this isn’t just a book for people who are already ready to hear about it, though I hope it’s useful to those communities that are already well familiar with it. I hope it’s also a way of convincing a broader public that this happened in part by showing them what they don’t already know.

I think there is something useful in this regional lens, which demonstrates that this was planned, right? It was a somewhat coherent attempt to take Native land, not just by individual groups, and it weighs on the balance of evidence.

One of the stories that you see in a lot of Pacific Northwest history is when Native people are murdered by agents of the state or by volunteers because they were “killed while trying to escape.” And of course, you’ll see that in many other spaces, too, right? That’s kind of a classic thing of police, carceral violence, violence of the armed forces. And I think showing how often that was a somewhat deliberate lie. How often? Because I’ve got pioneers writing ‘Oh, yeah. We say that when we want to kill somebody,’ Right? ‘We said, oh, yeah, he died while trying to escape.’ And I think showing that can weigh on the evidence in individual cases.

When Indigenous communities are making the case that somebody from their community was actually murdered, who was not killed while trying to escape, the fact that we have evidence that people all over the region were actually murdered will help weigh on the balance of the evidence, even when we don’t have a specific pioneer saying that, ‘yeah, we were lying,’ right? Once you highlight a particular norm of pioneer lies, it allows you to reconfigure how you think about that history and recognize how often pioneer lies are part of the story. [*]

UPDATE: An earlier version of the story had a photo caption claiming Joseph Lane campaigned to be the first territorial governor of the Oregon Territory when he was actually appointed to this position, and later campaigned to be a territorial delegate in the 1950s. No Frontiers regrets this error.

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Title: The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest | Author: Marc James Carpenter | Price: $38 USD | ISBN: 978-0-300-27573-5 Hardcover *eBook ISBN: 978-0-300-28576-5 | Pages: 400 | Yale University Press, publication date: 28 October 2025

You can also read Carpenter’s essay “They Bloody Origins of the Word ‘Pioneer’” here.

• (1) Medical Campaign, (2) Central and South (tents, food, water), (3) Refaat Alareer Camp, (4) North Gaza (food, water, other supplies)

• Follow The Sameer Project on X and Instagram, and follow Translating Falasteen (Palestine) on X

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U.S., Jordan—Last Thursday, aid workers for The Sameer Project were overjoyed when they found rice. Weighing approximately 400 kilograms, it meant one more day of food for about five hundred people. Finding food in the markets is getting more difficult—to impossible—with each passing hour since Israel imposed a total blockade in March. Thousands of Palestinians in Gaza haven’t eaten a single meal for days. Emaciated, starving infants and children are wasting away in their mothers’ arms.

In the last two months, at least 1,200 elderly Palestinians were killed by Israel’s starvation policy. And while aid seekers raced to retrieve meager food boxes at US-backed aid sites, over 5,300 were injured and over 1100 were murdered by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) and American private mercenaries.

“The last five days are the worst days since the genocide started,” said Hala Sabah, a co-founder of The Sameer Project. “I would definitely highlight that because we can't even give some medication to kids because they need to have a full stomach and a lot of these kids don't have food, so we can't give them medication without food.” The Sameer Project has about 1,500 children on a medical evacuation list.

“These are kids who are actively dying, so if they don't leave soon, they're going to die.”

All these deaths are preventable. There are supposedly over 950 UN aid trucks carrying food and lifesaving aid parked outside the border. But Israel has chosen a slow agonizing death for over 2.1 million Palestinians.

Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, has called on states to intervene to stop Israel’s genocide, as well as sanction Israel, impose a total arms embargo, break the Israeli siege and blockade with naval forces, suspend all trade agreements with Israel till the end of the genocide, occupation, and apartheid, and finally investigate and prosecute individuals and organizations that have committed crimes. “The absolute incapacity of Western leaders to enforce [international] law when it comes to Israel is EPIC.”

The Sameer Project began in April 2024, led by three Palestinians living abroad. Leaders Hala Sabah, Lena Djani, and Translating Falasteen (a pseudonym and social media account) are in constant contact with their ground team, which comprises approximately 85 full-time aid workers, including two doctors and five nurses spread across camps. Conditions on the ground are constantly changing—Israeli evacuation orders or airstrikes, looting or killing from Israeli-backed armed gangs, complications transferring money into Gaza, wounds and disease, or any other multitude of life-altering scenarios.

“Today [Thursday] we managed to get them rice, so that's, like, a big achievement, but it was really, really hard to obtain,” Sabah told No Frontiers over the phone from Jordan, just east of Gaza and Israel.

Costing around $18.50 per 800-gram rice meal, 120 meals were given to patients at the Refaat Alareer Camp (with 15 meals given to aid workers), and 366 rice meals were delivered to Al Aqsa Hospital to feed patients. In total, 500 rice meals cost $9,250 with 10% commission. Perhaps most importantly, each meal consisted of about 1,040 calories.

“All three of us, well, our days are full of trying to first source food, plan the water, handle the medical points, handle all the medical cases that we get,” said Sabah. Then they distribute aid across dozens of refugee camps in Gaza.

Each day, when The Sameer Project distributes a meal, it’s because their aid workers have worked tirelessly fundraising to cover the exorbitant food prices or have swept through bombed-out building wreckage to find provisions. They supply fellow Palestinian refugees with food, water, shelter, beds, medicine, clothes, and relative safety. Named after the beloved Palestinian poet and professor, the Refaat Alareer camp in central Gaza is setup especially for families with critical medical issues, like war injuries, special needs, or disabilities, and also acts as a recovery wing for patients after surgery. There’s a therapy tent for mental health care, a woman’s tent, a recreational area with a volleyball net, an education tent, and of course, the medical tent. Currently, approximately 35 families reside in the Refaar Alareer camp.

In recent days, there’s often no food left for sale in the markets, leaving aid workers with few options other than rationing. One lifeline has been connecting with the few remaining farmers in Gaza (who haven’t had their fields bombed, bulldozed, or stolen by the IOF) to purchase bulk loads of vegetables.

A couple of weeks ago, people were able to eat at community kitchens, where The Sameer Project would purchase several pots of lentils and rice daily. The medical team would call pharmacies to source Cerelac (infant cereal) and baby formula, while others would search the markets and call their network of traders and farmers to check their food stock and prices.

“‘How do you get food into Gaza?’ is a question we get every single day and the answer to that is we don’t!” said Sabah. “We purchase vegetables from farmers and we get water from desalination plants, and anything else we buy is from the markets at high prices.”

Dozens of aid workers constantly risk their lives to deliver food and water, transport supplies across Gaza, and make deliveries to numerous camps. Recently, one aid worker travelled from central Gaza to the North, where the IOF is actively obliterating with bombs and armored bulldozers to retrieve a box filled with canned tuna.

Perhaps most miraculously, The Sameer Project has welcomed three babies into the world since they began sheltering and feeding families displaced by Israel’s relentless aerial bombings, forced evacuation orders, and genocide. But what should be a celebration has only brought anguish and torment as mothers try to feed their newborn babies.

While seeking entry to Palestine, foreign doctors are prevented from bringing baby formula to Gaza at checkpoints by Israeli soldiers. “They confiscated every single carton of baby formula,” a British surgeon recently told Good Morning Britain. While many campaign for Israel to open its borders, the Sameer Project has represented the grassroots model of aid distribution sorely needed in global humanitarianism.

“They need to trust the people, and they need to allow us to provide the aid, the way we find most suitable, and we hold of ourselves accountable by spending every second of every single day, doing these updates, posting the videos, talking to the hospitals, getting doctors to tell us who needs this, the most,” said Sabah. “So people just need to not impose Western frameworks on the way we work and how we do things. And if they want to provide solidarity, then they need to provide solidarity the way we want it, not the way they want it.”

Since 2007, Israel has had a complete stranglehold over the borders of Gaza as part of their genocidal siege strategy to exterminate the lives of Palestinians and steal their remaining lands in the West Bank and Gaza. The previous UN-led humanitarian network operated about 400 aid sites. Now there are only three militarized aid sites to feed Gaza’s 2.1 million population. Any aid that has crossed into Gaza has been paltry and doesn’t begin to reverse the genocidal famine, and was, apparently, solely to quell international outrage. And the West won’t do enough.

If Israel isn’t forced to allow aid, how many more days can families survive?

“No incidents”

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Leaders at The Sameer Project are trying their hardest to provide as much food, shelter, and medical care as they can to Palestinian refugees, because the only other alternative aid organization has turned humanitarian aid distribution into a deadly, humiliating game to reach a meager supply of food.

The U.S. and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has been at the center of daily aid massacres since it began distributing aid on May 26, 2025. Before then, Israel had not let food into Gaza for over three months. Many Palestinians describe Israel’s aid scheme as a lure to the south—an ethnic cleansing of Northern Gaza—just to be shredded under surrounding machine gun fire, obliterated by aerial bombings, assaulted by tank fire, and even deadly amounts of pepper spray and stun grenades from both IOF soldiers and private American mercenaries.

“Fathers go to the GHF, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, and risk their lives, basically, or risk getting shot just to get a little bit of flour,” said Sabah. So far, none from their camp have been killed or shot while seeking aid from GHF.

Each day, the GHF claims to deliver over 1 million meals and that there is no killing by aid site security forces or nearby IOF soldiers, while blaming Hamas and the UN for Israel’s engineered famine. With the southernmost aid site closed (SDS1), only two sites remain in Rafah, while a third site is open near Gaza City in the north.

But each day, a new genocidal GHF aid massacre is documented by survivors’ video footage and testimony to journalists and medical workers. It streams endlessly on Telegram, X, WhatsApp, Instagram, and TikTok channels.

The three so-called “Safe Distribution Sites” (SDS) operated by GHF are essentially “death traps,” several kilometers of desolate killing fields to reach the aid sites. Principled news outlets like Al Jazeera and Mondoweiss, two GHF site whistleblowers, as well as independent war crime researchers such as Databases for Palestine, Israel Exposed, and Gaza Maps, have helped piece together some of the deadly journey to retrieve GHF rations.

Most won’t receive any aid. Dozens will die trying. Palestinians have called it the real-life “Squid Game.”

First, to reach SDS3 in Rafah, aid seekers gather at a designated queue area (marked by a green dot) near Khan Younis. They then begin to walk 2.5 km along a designated route (orange path) between bulldozer-created hill mounds on either side. For their safety, they must walk this path and can’t stray from it, or else the IOF will likely open fire.

After trekking 2.5 km, aid seekers reach what the GHF calls their “waiting area” (orange dot). Here, a red flag is raised, indicating the aid site is closed. This is where people are concentrated, waiting for the site to open. To have any chance at retrieving food, one must be here when it opens. Everyone is forced to fight to be first in line.

Second, when the flag changes from red to green, aid seekers rush to the aid site, located 1.5 km away. And they have to run, because not only are there few boxes of rations, but they only have a few minutes before the site closes and surrounding IOF soldiers and American private mercenaries descend upon them with gunfire.

Once they reach the aid site, they are corralled through a narrow fence that looks like a cattle chute, topped with surveillance cameras equipped with facial recognition software. The ration boxes are usually scattered about the sand and are directly below armed guards. There are no tables or organization to them; they are laid out to be fought over. They have 10 minutes.

While they are fighting over the boxes, mercenaries from UG Solutions, Safe Reach Solutions (SRS), and Sentinel Foundation are firing stun grenades, pepper spray, and machine gun fire at them. And there are reports of IOF aerial bombing, tank fire, and mortar fire upon aid seekers.

After 10 minutes (or less) of racing to the site, fighting over food, dodging munitions from mercenaries and IOF soldiers, a yellow flag appears at the site. This is the five-minute warning.

And finally, when the five minutes are over, everyone needs to leave the way they came, back down the 1.4 km corridor past the “waiting area” and through the first 2.5 km path entrenched by sand dunes. Then they will have reached relative safety from the militarized aid zone.

However, to make everyone leave the aid site, mercenaries and IOF soldiers fire “warning shots” into the crowd, indiscriminately killing men, women, and children until the desperate aid seekers run to safety with whatever food rations they could carry. Most will leave with nothing to feed their families. Some have to carry back the injured or the dead who were shot.

Recently, there was an “engineered stampede” at the Khan Younis SDS3 “waiting area,” when instead of throwing up the green flag and opening the gate, an IOF soldier used either a stun grenade or pepper spray on the crowd, causing panic. Chaos ensued, and aid seekers began rushing forward. In the panic and confusion, many were trampled and killed in the stampede. And new horrific details keep unfolding.

“I witnessed the Israeli defense forces firing a main gun tank round from the Macabre Tank into a crowd of people, destroying a car of civilians who were simply driving away from the site,” said ex-Green Beret Anthony Aguilar, who worked security for GHF, to the BBC in late July. He reported seeing IOF soldiers firing guns and mortar rounds into an “unarmed, starving civilian population.” One child kissed his hand, thanking him for the food, and was immediately shot and killed by an IOF soldier.

At aid site two, a July 14 video (below) showed a group that ran too soon and was immediately fired upon, causing hundreds to take cover in the sand. And while attempting to retrieve aid, Palestinian youth report being abducted by IOF soldiers, thrown in prison, and tortured for a month before being released. There are approximately 42 Palestinians abducted at GHF aid sites. The list of atrocities goes on.

The day after I spoke with Hala Sabah, the GHF hosted a “Women’s Day” ration distribution for women and children only. They still beat, terrorized, and shot at the women and children who came, killing two women.

“Today’s GHF operation update,” wrote the GHF’s X account. “Nearly 92 million meals distributed to date. Nearly 1.5 million meals delivered today. No incidents”

Aid organizations like the World Health Organization, various branches of the UN, and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) are being stopped by Israel from their regular entry into the genocidal war zone.

“We have always said that we cannot do this alone, and this is why we have called on the [at]UN to let us help them deliver food to the desperate families in Gaza,” wrote GHF’s spokesperson on X. “At the end of the day, it is about empathy. It is about helping people in need. We are trying to help the Gazan people get food.”

Despite the death and destruction, grief and pain, the Palestinian mutual aid workers at The Sameer Project and elsewhere continue the exhausting work of feeding and caring for their people. For them, this isn’t a business. It’s survival.

“I think what I want people to understand is that they need to decolonize their solidarity, because people think they know better than us on how to handle things like this,” said Sabah.

It's very problematic when people in the West tell us that we need to be the perfect victims, where we are constantly thanking and begging and have a certain image, whereas when we have agency and power that makes them feel uncomfortable. And on top of that, they want us to be pacifist and not talk about violence or any kind of armed resistance when our children are being blown into pieces. So I think we're all, as Palestinians, sick of the bullshit conversation around democracy and human rights and the UN and the West, where they tell us what to do and how to handle things during a genocide, when in reality, they are the ones funding the genocide that we're in, especially the United States.

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On Wednesday, a federal judge in the Maryland District Court barred Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from immediately detaining Salvadoran asylum seeker Kilmar Ábrego García upon release. This opinion was issued the same day a Tennessee District Court judge ruled Ábrego García eligible for release on bond with conditions, stating that the U.S. government had failed to provide evidence that he posed a danger or flight risk.

Part of the Maryland District Court’s order demands that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) provide 72 business hours’ notice to Ábrego García and his counsel if they “initiate third-country removal proceedings,” along with the name of the intended third country.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, attorney at the non-profit American Immigration Council, answered a question over X about the remaining possibility that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may still initiate so-called “third-country” removal for Abrego Garcia.

“Looks like DHS can still initiate third-country removal of Garcia,” wrote No Frontiers. “Is that not something the judge can bar?”

“Yes, that’s correct,” Reichlin-Melnick wrote. “But [the judge] can require them to provide him due process and not be able to shove [him] onto a plane with no warning.”

[Read Judge Paula Xinis’ full memorandum opinion here and the order here; and read Judge Waverly Crenshaw’s memorandum opinion here]

The Trump administration argued Ábrego García was an “MS-13 leader” based on alleged tattoos and, thus, detained him on March 12 and deported him to the nightmarish gulag known as the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador a few days later, where he says he was “tortured and threatened,” according to an amended complaint.

While incarcerated at CECOT, Ábrego García says he experienced “severe mistreatment upon arrival at CECOT, including but not limited to severe beatings, severe sleep deprivation, inadequate nutrition, and psychological torture.”

The Tennessee federal judge who granted Ábrego García’s release on bail appeared frustrated with the U.S. government’s “poor attempts to tie Abrego to MS-13," noting the government produced no evidence of markings or tattoos that connected him to the El Salvador gang, nor any other evidence, despite having months to do so. This is the fourth federal judge to find the U.S. government failed to produce sufficient proof tying migrants to gangs.

One week into his imprisonment at CECOT, Salvadoran authorities noticed Ábrego García had no gang affiliation nor gang tattoos. While examining his tattoos, a prison official told him, “Your tattoos are fine.” Thus, he and eight other Salvadorans without gang affiliations were moved to a separate cell, apart from the 12 others they arrived with who did have recognizable gang tattoos.

The Maryland judge noted that ICE, led by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, “forcibly expelled Abrego Garcia from the United States to the one country they were prohibited from removing him to—El Salvador,” anticipating he would be imprisoned at CECOT, “a facility widely regarded as one of the most dangerous and violent prisons in the world.” In court filings, Ábrego García says he was “threatened and tortured” during his two and a half month unlawful incarceration in CECOT.

On April 10, while Ábrego García was in CECOT, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered DHS to “‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador” (bolded text in original filing).

When asked if the U.S. president could secure Ábrego García’s release through a phone call to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, President Donald Trump said, “I could. If he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that. But he’s not.”

Under the leadership of Secretary Noem, as well as Trump, the government defied the Supreme Court's and subsequent Fourth Circuit court orders, refusing to comply for 53 days. As the Maryland judge wrote in her opinion, “Eventually, on June 6, 2025, Defendants returned Abrego Garcia much the same way they had removed him—in secret and with no advance notice.”

No Frontiers previously reached out to Ábrego García’s attorneys to speak on his condition and experience in CECOT, but his counsel has declined interviews until the case is fully settled.

At this time, it’s unclear whether DHS will initiate third-country deportation proceedings, whether ICE will comply with the judge’s orders to refrain from detaining Ábrego García without due process a second time, and send him back to CECOT.

What’s just as uncertain are the secretive agreements the Trump administration has made with third countries to accept deported migrants and asylum seekers. MIGRANT INSIDER has just reported on lawmakers demanding answers and transparency from the U.S. government regarding their third-country deportation program. How is it being funded? And what exactly are the agreements? Read below:

Migrant Insider

The Case of the Missing CECOT Contract

WASHINGTON — Members of Congress are demanding answers from the Trump administration about a series of undisclosed agreements with foreign governments to accept deported migrants and asylum seekers—d…

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9 months ago · 6 likes · Nicolae Viorel Butler

And in case you missed it, The Intercept reported in late June that the Trump administration is growing its network of “global gulag” prisons to accept deported migrants, pursuing deals with at least 53 countries by threatening them with travel ban restrictions if they don’t comply.

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On Sunday, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social, demanding that the Washington Commanders and the Cleveland Guardians change their names back to their racist brand names, while claiming that Indians want this change, too. Tribal nations, tribal advocacy organizations, Native politicians and activists have long battled to remove Indigenous racial slurs and caricatures from public life.

“The Washington ‘Whatever’s’ should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team. There is a big clamoring for this,” Trump wrote. He continues:

Likewise, the Cleveland Indians, one of the six original baseball teams, with a storied past. Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them. Times are different now than they were three or four years ago. We are a Country of passion and common sense. OWNERS, GET IT DONE!!!

“These remarks are a distraction from the real harm this administration continues to inflict on Native Peoples,” a spokesperson for the Association on American Indian Affairs (“Association”) wrote in a statement to No Frontiers. “There is no genuine respect for Native Nations here — only empty gestures and political theater. Claiming that ‘Indians are being treated very unfairly’ while simultaneously gutting Native programs is hypocrisy at its worst.”

(Read their full statement below this story.)

Trump’s slur-riddled post comes at a time when DOGE (Project 2025’s governmental proponent) and the MAGA-dominated congress pass dictatorial-styled budget cuts to the Indian Health Service, Bureau of Indian Education, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Medicaid, and much more—while unconditionally supporting Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of non-whites through his domestic mass deportation policies.

As the Association further notes, the Trump administration has defunded tribal colleges, fired or sidelined federal staff working on Native issues, dismantled environmental protections, accelerated natural resource extraction on public lands, and opened sacred sites to industry.

“This is not about restoring ‘heritage and prestige.’ It’s about erasure—cultural, political, and literal.”

In a statement to No Frontiers, the Native American Rights Fund (NARF) deputy director, Matthew Campbell, wrote:

It’s been twenty years since the American Psychological Association called for Native mascots to be retired because of the harm that they cause young Native people. The harm to Native youth has been long known, and Tribal Nations and others have worked hard to get rid of these disrespectful portrayals. Tribal Nations are not calling for these names and mascots to be reinstated. In fact, the National Congress of American Indians, which is the largest organization representing Native American interests, has passed multiple resolutions calling to end Native mascots.

Trump’s racist demand also comes in the wake of white supremacist pundit Ann Coulter posting, “We didn’t kill enough Indians,” on X about three weeks ago. No Frontiers dug into her X post history and found Coulter made racist posts about Indigenous peoples, mostly Native Americans, at least 57 times since 2012.

The Native campaign to end the widespread American misuse and appropriation of Indigenous identity, names or themes, spiritual and religious practices, and iconography has a long history and continues today.

In 2009, after a decades-long campaign, then-Montana State Senator Carol Juneau (the author’s great aunt) sponsored and successfully passed a law removing the racist and derogatory word "squaw" from the names of 76 streams, buttes, and mountains across Montana.

The word was perfectly innocent and originated from the Algonquin tribal language, meaning “woman,” but was used and stripped by American settlers, mostly white men, to describe Native women, often in a sexually explicit sense. (Some dispute this claim, arguing the slur originated from American settler use of a Mohawk word, though this doesn’t change its racist use in history or today.)

In 2022, the Department of Interior continued this work by replacing over 650 place names across the country with racist connotations to Native peoples.

As research shows, racist names have a severely negative psychological impact on Indigenous peoples, especially Native youth, and undermine mental health and encourage abusive behavior by others.

In 2019, the author reported for High Country News on the ongoing racism Native athletes and fans face at sporting events, documenting 52 racist incidents between 2008 and 2018.

These incidents ranged from racist vandalism and tweets to banners that read, “Hey Indians, get ready for a Trail of Tears Part 2,” a reference to the 19th-century death march endured by tribal citizens who were illegally and forcibly relocated to Oklahoma by the U.S. government. Other instances include players being called names like “prairie nigger,” “wagon burners” and “dirty Indians.”

Nearly all 52 reported incidents involved high school sports, but there were also four university game cases and even a fast food restaurant sign that read, “‘KC Chiefs’ Will Scalp the Redskins Feed Them Whiskey Send – 2 – Reservation.”

If Trump’s call for restoring racist team names wasn’t enough, in April, he posted on Trust Social his goal to restore Columbus Day over Indigenous Peoples Day. Columbus, of course, was a genocidal maniac (just read his diary and record of massacres) and never set foot on the continental United States, which didn’t even exist at the time. Still, America had long fetishized Christopher Columbus as conqueror before Trump began defending racist statues and holidays.

Native peoples will likely still celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day in October, yet this year they will have to bear America’s reestablishment of Columbus Day, which they fought so hard to abolish.

I’m bringing Columbus Day back from the ashes. The Democrats did everything possible to destroy Christopher Columbus, his reputation, and all of the Italians that love him so much. They tore down his Statues, and put up nothing but “WOKE,” or even worse, nothing at all! Well, you’ll be happy to know, Christopher is going to make a major comeback. I am hereby reinstating Columbus Day under the same rules, dates, and locations, as it has had for all of the many decades before!

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The Association on American Indian Affairs

Complete statement:

The Association on American Indian Affairs condemns the President's recent social media posts calling for a return to harmful Native “themed” names.

These remarks are a distraction from the real harm this administration continues to inflict on Native Peoples. There is no genuine respect for Native Nations here — only empty gestures and political theater. Claiming that “Indians are being treated very unfairly” while simultaneously gutting Native programs is hypocrisy at its worst. Under his leadership, federal support for Native Nations has been slashed: healthcare funding has been cut, Medicaid access for Native children threatened, Tribal colleges defunded, and staff working on Native issues have been fired or sidelined. His administration has worked to dismantle environmental protections, fast-track extraction on public lands, and open Sacred sites to industry. This is not about restoring “heritage and prestige.” It’s about erasure — cultural, political, and literal.

The idea that Native Nations broadly support the use of these mascots is false. Hundreds, if not thousands of Native Nations, Native organizations, scholars, and youth leaders have repeatedly and clearly expressed that Native “themed” mascots are offensive and dehumanizing.

A 2022 scoping review, Twenty Years of Research Into the Health Impacts of Native-Themed Mascots, published in American Indian and Alaska Native Mental Health Research found that Native-themed mascots are consistently associated with negative health outcomes for Native Peoples, especially Native youth, including lower self-esteem, increased psychological distress, and harm to community well-being.

These mascots and names do not honor Native Peoples — they reduce us to caricatures. Our diverse Peoples and cultures are not relics of the past or mascots for entertainment. Native Nations are sovereign, contemporary cultures who deserve respect and self-determination, not misrepresentation.

The Association urges all media outlets and political leaders to reject misinformation and amplify the voices of Native Nations and their citizens who have been fighting for cultural dignity and truth in public representation for generations.

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Last week on Monday, far-right pundit Ann Coulter posted on X “We didn’t kill enough Indians” above a video of University of Minnesota professor Melanie Yazzie, a prominent Indigenous scholar and activist, speaking on decolonization of the United States. Her post sparked widespread outrage and denunciations across Indian Country and Indian rights organizations.

“Suggesting that Native Americans—whose communities and cultures persist and thrive despite the American government having systematically taken Native lands, children, religions, and lives—deserve to die or were not persecuted enough, is ignorant and immoral,” wrote John Echohawk, executive director of the Native American Rights Fund, in a statement. However, this is far from the first racist post Coulter has published.

An analysis by No Frontiers found that, since 2012, Ann Coulter has posted about Indigenous peoples, mostly Native Americans, at least 57 times.

“If Trump wants an Indian Sec of State, how about Tonto?” she posted on X in November 2016. In the comments, someone wrote, "Wrong type of Indian, you racist douche bag."

In July 2020, Coulter posted a USAToday article about rates of rape for Native women on tribal lands, writing: “Sorry, Oklahoma gals. You're living on Indian land now!”

Coulter has posted nearly 20 times about Elizabeth Warren’s mistaken claim to tribal identity. In 2018, she wrote, “So basically, Elizabeth Warren has the same percentage of Indian blood as Custer.” In 2020, she wrote, “Elizabeth Warren no doubt heading off to the nearest sweat lodge to rethink her strategy.”

A more recent post in June 2024, Coulter commented on a NYT article on archaeological genome research on Mayan ritual sacrifice: “NYT on Mayan sacrifice: ‘Indigenous people...can now say: 'Look, we’re related to the ones who made these pyramids. So maybe stop being racist toward us.' Alternative conclusion: ‘Look, we’re related to the ones who sacrificed 250,000 humans a year. So maybe you should be more racist toward us.’”

On Indigenous Peoples Day in 2022, she wrote: “Fondly remembering a continent without a language, moveable type, the wheel, trial by jury and so on …”

Native peoples are usually glossed over by conservatives (and everyone, for that matter), but if you’re familiar with Coulter and her past controversial statements, you know she has a bigoted opinion about all non-whites.

In an October 2022 X post, she linked to a Substack article she wrote called, “Happy Indigenous Peoples Day! The day liberals celebrate cannibals, slavery and oppression.” The rest of the article contains copy-pasted excerpts from history books highlighting Native violence.

Unsafe

HAPPY INDIGENOUS PEOPLE’S DAY!

On Indigenous People’s Day we mourn that America is no longer a warring, scalping, cannibalistic, slave-owning people, for whom “making people scream in pain was interesting and rewarding.” (S.C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon…

Read more

4 years ago · 113 likes · 28 comments · Ann Coulter

And this doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of her endless vitriol of stated views on non-whites. Her whole persona was built as a hatemonger who triggers the libs and garners controversy for clicks.

A scroll through Ann Coulter’s X feed shows a stream of posts about American Indians all the way back to 2012. In fact, Coulter’s X posts approach a near-constant obsession with Indigenous peoples and people of the non-white race, portraying them as violent criminals, foreign invaders, and white-job-stealers. As for foreign lands, she advocates for colonialism and expanding the American empire.

“We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity,” wrote Coulter shortly after 9/11, speaking about invading and warring with Iraq. “We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.”

Coulter didn’t respond to interview or comment requests. (Her website lists media interviews with “reporters who are allowed to interview Ann again”).

At the time of publication, she has not apologized, addressed, or retracted her genocidal statement.

Given that Coulter’s X and Substack feed is a hate cesspool, it’s unsurprising to find out she is very unhappy. When then-senator Marco Rubio argued for a larger child care tax credit in a GOP spending bill in 2017, Coulter went to Twitter to lament her misery.

"We singles live empty lives of quiet desperation and will die alone," she tweeted. "Now Rubio is demanding that we also fund happy families with children who fill their days with joy."

Download the Excel file below or view the Google Sheets document to read all 57 of Ann Coulter’s posts on Indigenous peoples.

Anncoulter Tweets Nofrontiers 7 13 25

24.1KB ∙ XLSX file

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20 of Coulter’s X posts on Indigenous peoples (7/06/2025 - 7/09/2020):

1. We didn’t kill enough Indians; 7/6/25, X post

2. Because it’s DEI BS — as if “the indigenous” had anything to do with creating the United States of America. The only supporters for changing “Mount McKinley” to an Indian name were white “activists.”; 1/22/25, X post

3. Find the quote where Kamala says she no longer believes America is on land "Europeans" stole from "Indigenous People." (She just re-affirmed that one a week ago.); 10/21/24, X post

4. NYT on Mayan sacrifice: "Indigenous people...can now say: 'Look, we’re related to the ones who made these pyramids. So maybe stop being racist toward us.'” Alternative conclusion: "Look, we’re related to the ones who sacrificed 250,000 humans a year. So maybe you should be more racist toward us.” [POSTING NYT article entitled "Ancient Genomes Reveal Which Children the Maya Selected for Sacrifice"]; 6/12/24, X post

5. The logic of BLM, Diversity, love of criminals, the "Indigenous" (they weren't "indigenous" to America!), mass 3rd world immigration, etc. REQUIRES the left to support Hamas.My intvu with Victor Davis Hanson; 1/7/24, X post

6. Oh how awful to be seen as brave and macho! American Indians like Elizabeth Warren must HATE the Tomahawk Chop; 2/9/23, X post

7. Fondly remembering a continent without a written language, movable type, the wheel, trial by jury and so on …; 10/10/22, X post

8. Good news, Minnesota! After a criminal released by AG Keith Ellison shoots you, at least MN hospitals will provide top-notch "Indigenous healing." [REPOSTING CHRISTOPHER F. RUFO: Medical students at the University of Minnesota must now take an oath to "honor all Indigenous ways of healing that have been historically marginalized by Western medicine" and fight "white supremacy, colonialism, [and] the gender binary."]; 10/9/22, X post

9. Just like the mighty Igorots did it! Case decided by The Hon. Karen May Bacdayan, "born in the Philippines and descends from the Igorot Tribe." [POSTING link from WowCordillera news site about a Bronx judge from the Philipines and descends from the Ingorot Tribe, who ruled in favor of polyamorous relationships.]; 10/2/22, X post

10. Thank God for the New York Times. Because one simply cannot get this news elsewhere. [POSTING a NYT article on queer Indigenous artists]; 2/19/22, X post

11. I wonder if there are any federal laws about discrimination on the basis of race and sex ...Morgan Stanley internship is open ONLY to "Black, Hispanic, Native American, and/or LGBTQ+ freshman undergraduate student[s]." [POSTING FreeBeacon article entitled "Morgan Stanley Under Fire for Minority-Only Intern Program"]; 2/17/22, X post

12. The monumentally stupid Australian MP's "indigenous elder translator" broadcast yesterday brought to mind this classic SNL sketch, 'New for the Hard of Hearing'; 1/13/22, X post

13. "Canada’s top 'indigenous health expert,' was also exposed as a fraud last week...Her story began to unravel after she did a TEDx talk dressed like an extra from F Troop." [POSTING a link to “The Week That Perished” link to racist outlet Taki Magazine, reporting, “Last week was a bad one for fake Injuns” about a a fraudulent so-called “Big Chief Skinnyjeans” who was caught selling fake Native American crafts; 1/13/22, X post

14. So great. [POSTING New York Post article entitled "Canada’s indigenous health expert Carrie Bourassa loses job when ancestry claims prove false"]; 11/30/21, X post

15. "It started to unravel in 2019, when she appeared in full tribal regalia ...with a feather in her partially braided hair... “'My name is Morning Star Bear,' she said tearfully as the crowd cheered"; 11/30/21, X post

16. "White privilege" is so powerful that white people are constantly denying being white. "a series of white people ... had been masquerading in their fields over the years as Black, Latino or Indigenous — six in academia alone ..."; 5/26/21, X post

17. God forbid. "Kauanui was sure that at least some of those women would have felt differently if they had known they were talking to a white woman." [POSTING NYT article titled "The Native Scholar who wasn't" about a woman fraudulently claiming Indigenous identity]; 5/26/21, X post

18. "America used to celebrate its proud Indian heritage, but now we appear to be embarrassed by them." [POSTING a link to UNZ Review article entitled “The Erasure of American Indians”]; 12/15/20, X post

19. I guess the sacred duty of judges to respect precedent only applies to pro-abortion rulings. [POSTING a USAToday article entitled "Supreme Court says eastern Oklahoma remains Native American territory"]; 7/9/20, X post

20. This is the case Trump should have been tweeting about, if he cared about anything other than himself. Neil Gorsuch Gives Half of Oklahoma to the Indians. [POSTING a USAToday article entitled "Supreme Court says eastern Oklahoma remains Native American territory" (Again)]; 7/9/20, X post

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A lot has happened in the last two days: Israel “preemptively” striking Iran to drag the US into war and, today, the assassination of Minnesota State Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, as well as the shooting of a second MN state rep. and his wife. In an hour or so, President Donald Trump will enjoy a costly government-funded Nazi homage for a birthday celebration.

While thousands of National Guard troops and hundreds of active duty marines assemble to violently put down a popular anti-mass deportation protest in Los Angeles, a migrant “sanctuary city,” thousands of troops and hundreds of tanks, howitzers, and army vehicles will march in Washington DC for a military parade celebrating President Donald Trump’s 79th birthday—not-so-subtly echoing Adolf Hitler’s military parade for his 50th birthday.

“I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler,” Vice-President JD Vance wrote in a message to a friend in 2016, before he went full-on MAGA. “How’s that for discouraging?”

As mainstream media as parroted, a military parade birthday is indeed a dictatorial move—numerous despots and tyrants use militarized strongman gestures to project their power. But few authoritarian leaders have ever held a military parade for their birthday, including Hitler.

In recent years, the Republican Party has ramped up its flirtation with Nazi aesthetics, symbols, and gestures, from several Hitler salutes to hidden Nordic runes to Madison Square Garden rallies and now this birthday military parade.

Media literacy teaches us to read between the lines, especially for politicians and the far-right. Pay attention to their actions, not just their messages. The symbolic meaning of their actions may say more than their words ever would.

Corporate media has repeated the official narrative that Trump got the idea for a military parade in 2017 after attending Bastille Day in France and has wanted one ever since. Totally not a Nazi parade to trigger the libs. But militarized mass deportations targeting the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the US, as well as immigrants with permanent residence or other legal statuses, including pro-Palestine students who are considered terrorists, all the while adopting “Remigration” policy from the Nazi-esque Alternative for Germany (AfD) by opening an Office of Remigration—all adds up to a Nazi-adjacent agenda of state-sponsored ethnic cleansing.

Nationalism isn’t just aggressive patriotism or the simple unity of national identity. It comes from the European desire to organize the countries of the world by “race” or “nation,” which rose widely in the mid-19th and 20th century when race was thought of as biologically inherent and hierarchical. After Charles Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, popularizing the theory of “survival of the fittest,” it didn’t take long to apply that same idea to the people and races of the world. Some races were more civilized and fit (Western) and others were more primitive and unfit (everyone else).

The white nations need to protect their race, culture, and civilizations safe from “mass migration,” in today’s parlance. Nations (races) need to be “homogenous,” separate, “undiluted.” This is why Trump and Elon Musk are punishing post-Apartheid South Africa for its “white genocide” policies, remediating unfair land distribution from their decades under white rule.

It’s only in recent decades when “multiculturalism” or “diversity” was considered a positive trait, while nationalism has long kept its tradition of exclusionary ideas, practices, and policies. People of color, LGBTQ, and women didn’t get far in national acceptance or equality without a quick backlash to reverse course.

This is where nationalism originates and where it’s headed today in Trump’s America and Western Europe. And for the most part, Trump’s agenda has gone according to plan.

Now, rolling tanks and hundreds of soldiers are rumbling down Pennsylvania Avenue to pay homage to the great leader. He helped Israel launch a war with Iran. The now-besieged West Bank and decimated Gaza are once again out of the mainstream media coverage while millions of Palestinians are starving, fleeing for their lives while reaching the little aid they are given. And democrats are more fearful than before because of Christian nationalist violence after the political assassination of a MN state rep by alleged shooter Vance Boelter.

What a Big Beautiful Birthday it’s been.

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In late February, weeks after Donald Trump’s second Presidential inauguration, officials from his new administration were greeted in the White House by Afrikaner lobbyists from AfriForum and Solidarity Movement, two white South African supremacist groups. They came to ask the Trump administration for support, alleging a “white genocide” and unjust land grabs that rural white Afrikaner farmers are facing. Earlier that month, Trump declared a crisis in South Africa and quickly raised tariffs and shut off aid to the country, including life-saving HIV medication, and began an Afrikaner “refugee” resettlement program in America. Three weeks ago, the U.S. welcomed dozens of Afrikaner “refugees.”

“We Afrikaners are a proud, hard working tribe with strong Christian values. I speak for myself, and thousands of my tribe,” wrote Sebastiaan Jooste on his influential X account @twatterbaas a day after Trump created the Afrikaner refugee program. Jooste is followed and often re-posted by Elon Musk, who was born in Apartheid South Africa. “I want to say a MASSIVE thank you to President Trump and his administration for recognising the problems we are facing here in South Africa.”

In mid-May, during a visit to “reset” diplomatic and trade relations between the two countries, Trump ambushed South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, berating him about the false “white genocide” of Afrikaners.

“They want us to believe that white people are somehow not native or indigenous to any place on Earth,” wrote Daily Caller’s Matt Walsh on X and re-posted by Musk. And posting, “Also they've been in South Africa for like 400 years but they're still viewed as ‘invaders’ and ‘colonizers.’”

Across America, South Africa, Germany, and Israel, No Frontiers has found a rising tide of aggrieved settlers, settler descendants, and white supremacists who are claiming Indigenous roots to lands their ancestors violently colonized or lands they feel under siege from migrants.

As I first reported for High Country News in 2019, white nationalists—including mass shooters in Norway and El Paso, Texas—have long appropriated Native identity for their blood and soil ideologies, beginning in Nazi Germany.

If no “Indigenous” connection to land exists, they fear, then they have no legitimate claim to land. But if their white settler ancestors conquered the land and the Native people hundreds of years ago, doesn’t that endow them with a Native identity?

Of course not. But that never stopped white nationalists, whose propaganda is laden with implicit violence to reclaim white-rule.

“Rhetoric related to ‘indigenous rights’ is an untapped goldmine which has currently been deluded and sidetracked due to ‘rhetorical contamination’ from the US,” wrote Anders Breivik, a Norwegian white supremacist who massacred 76 people (mostly teens) in 2011, in his 1,500-page manifesto entitled “The Great Replacement.” “If you use ‘white nationalist’ rhetoric you are instantly placed in the same category as Hitler.”

Breivik goes on:

We are no more terrorists than Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse or Chief Gall who fought for their people against the imperialist General Armstrong Custer. Our struggle will be a lot easier if European nationalist (indigenous rights activists) use smart and defusing arguments instead of using supremacist arguments which can be efficiently squashed through psychological warfare propaganda or by anti-Nazi policies. Yes, we are fighting the imperialistic Marxist doctrines. The only difference is now, WE are the Sitting Bulls, Crazy Horses and Chief Galls and the imperialistic Custer’s of our time is called Barroso, Blair, Brown, Merkel and Sarkozy.

During his parole hearing in January 2022, he made a Nazi salute and carried a sign reading “Stop your genocide against our white nations.”

America

Many Germans have a peculiar fascination with Native Americans, dating back to the 18th century, which German scholars have called “Indianthusiasm.” This Indian fascination was widespread throughout Germany, then Nazi Germany, and continues to this day.

The Nazis tried to claim a common racial lineage with Native tribes as both a way to claim settler ties to America as well as construct a pseudo-Indigenous identity as part of their völkisch blood and soil ideology, which tends to idealize the myth of the “original nation.” Violent American neo-Nazis like Blood Tribe and Patriot Front have since taken up this tradition of claiming a frontier identity—one of neo-pagan “tribal” roots and the other of settler American revolutionary war. Blood Tribe, with their brand of spiritual “Wotanism,” believe a kind of occult set of “Indigenous mythos” and revisionist American history that claims that European pagans were among the first to settle the North American continent by “evidence” of prehistoric “European burial mounds,” underground stone temples, and remnants of standing stone circles across the east coast and as far as Arkansas. This is a clear echo of early Nazi scholars’ claims to America.

“Recently in 1996, a 9,000 year old Aryan corpse, coined ‘the Kennewick Man,’ was found buried on the banks of the Columbia river near Yakima, Washington,” reads the Temple of Wotan: The Holy Book of Aryan Tribes.

With scant and shaky evidence, scientists and journalists speculated that Kennewick Man was not descended from ancient Indigenous peoples from the region, but was possibly a human from Europe based on the discredited and racist pseudoscience of skull shape. (According to forensic anthropologist James Chatters, Kennewick Man had a “caucasoid” shaped skull, not a Native American “mongoloid” skull.) Eight archeologists filed a lawsuit opposing the return of Kennewick Man to a descendant Northwest tribe required under federal law, arguing the skeletal remains weren’t ancestrally Native American and should be studied. In 2015, modern genome research confirmed that Kennewick Man is indeed closely related to tribes in the Pacific Northwest.

In response to an AI-generated image of white ‘trad’ women forming a hidden swastika, Matt Walsh argued white people are Native to America. “People who look like that [white] have been living in the Americas for five centuries. If five centuries is not long enough to qualify as native, then how long do you need?” wrote Walsh on X.

Unfortunately, the neo-Nazis took the name of an actual First Nations band called Blood Tribe, or Kainai Nation, located in southern Alberta, Canada.

Germany

In their 2017 English language party manifesto, the politically ascendant Alternative für Deutchland (AfD) party calls for dominance of German Christian “indigenous culture” over “degrading” multiculturalism (namely immigrant, Arab, Muslim), while several violent Reichsbürger groups banned by Germany proclaim ‘Native’ sovereignty, two of which demand “special rights” and call themselves Indigenes Volk der Germaniten (Indigenous Germanite People) and the Geeinte deutsche Völker und Stämme (United German Peoples and Tribes). Of the estimated 25,000 Reichsbürger members, about 10 percent or 2,500 are considered violence-oriented. Their Nazi-esque politics are especially concerning given the Trump administration’s adoption of the AfD’s “remigration” policy of mass deportation—what critics have called “ethnic cleansing”—and his recent plans for creating an Office of Remigration.

Israel

As historians Shlomo Sand and Zeev Sternhell have demonstrated, the myth that all Jews are Indigenous to Palestine (now called Israel) began around the mid-18th century in Europe with non-Jews, mostly Christians, and anti-semites, but is now widely accepted in the West—yet this facade began to crack after Oct. 7.

Just months after Oct. 7, Israel opened the so-called Indigenous Embassy in Jerusalem and invited Native peoples (mostly Christians) from around the world to fight critics of Israel’s settler colonial regime and to claim all Jews are Indigenous to Israel.

"We believe this is the right time to launch the embassy in order to send a strong message of solidarity from indigenous [sic] peoples around the world, that we recognise the Jews as indigenous to Israel and stand with her in her struggle against forces that seek her annihilation,” wrote Sheree Trotter, embassy director and co-founder of Indigenous Coalition for Israel, in a press statement. Trotter is Maori and an evangelical Christian from New Zealand.

The New Zealand Jewish Council praised Trotter’s work to “counter the narrative that Jews are white colonisers in Israel.” And she has done just that, writing an op-ed for the Jerusalem Post attempting to discredit UN reports of famine in Gaza. In another, she argued that “Jews have indigenous rights to the Temple Mount” (an “end times” goal for an extremist Jewish and Christian messianic movement), writing that Jews fulfill the UN’s criteria of Indigenous peoples.

Gaining the Indigenous stamp of approval from Indigenous Christian Zionists has been indispensable. Self-Indigenization has grown in popular discourse for Zionists, including from Hollywood actress and former IDF soldier Gal Gadot, who declared to Variety in March, “I’m an indigenous person of Israel,” despite her lineage originating from Poland, Austria, Germany, and Czechoslovakia.

“Jewish identity is not rooted in land, language, or culture,” wrote the anti-Zionist Voice of Rabbis on X. “It is the Torah, and only the Torah, that defines us as a people.”

South Africa

This anxiety of “anti-white” violence has been brewing over the past decade in post-Apartheid South Africa, with white settler descendants feeling vulnerable after losing their minority white-ruled state in the mid-1990s to the majority black South Africans who elected Nelson Mandela in their first free election. Three decades later, South Africa is still considered the most unequal country in the world, with most black South Africans living in poverty and 80% of the wealth held by 10% of the population.

Not long ago, road signs reading “Caution, Beware of Natives” and “Europeans Only” were commonplace in South Africa. Today, Afrikaner white supremacists are gaining the spotlight in Europe and America, with AfriForum’s invite to the 2025 CPAC Hungary event in May to speak about white genocide and rub elbows with autocratic Prime Minister Victor Orbán and the Netherlands’ far-right politician Geert Wilders, or have their propaganda video played in Belgium’s Flemish Parliament.

Non-Native peoples often confuse Indigenous identity with general cultural uniqueness or language, which can easily apply across cultural communities. In 2020, AfriForum lobbyist Ernst Roets posted on X:

“I’m Afrikaans, Afrikaner and an African. Afrikaans people are a language community. Afrikaners (some call us Boers) are a cultural community. Africans are home and indigneous to Africa. Afrikaners never existed prior to being in Africa. As a people, we were born here.”

Self-Indigenizing has a long history, but has only amplified in the past decade, fed by the nationalist desire to organize the states of the world by “race” and “nation.” This self-Indigenizing tactic is an attempt to de-legitimize rights and claims by all non-whites, especially Arab and Latino migrants, and actual Indigenous peoples.

These white nationalists are exploiting Indigenous rights language, what Norwegian mass shooter and white supremacist Anders Breivik called an “untapped goldmine” to shake off the neo-Nazi label society shuns.

“There has been a giant psy op conducted for years to convince white people that they aren't native to their own homeland,” posted Walsh.

He goes on:

“White South Africans have been there for 15 generations and yet somehow they still don't count as native. White people have been in the Americas for 500 years and yet somehow we aren't allowed to call this our native land. It doesn't matter if your great great great great great great great great great great great grandfather built a cabin on this land with his own hands, it still isn't your land.”

It’s no surprise Walsh has no concept of what legally qualifies as Indigenous or Indian identity or their U.S. federally recognized tribal status—most people don’t know. But what remains troubling is the mainstreaming of white nationalist “Indigenous” claims to a “homeland” their ancestors colonized in place of actual and existing tribal nations.

Keeping up with the news be like that.

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First off,

Michael Woestehoff, the single Indigenous person who signed on to Project 2025 as an advisor, is celebrating Trump’s first 100 days back in office: “Trump’s First 100 Days – Native Americans Celebrate Renewed Respect to Sovereignty and De-Colonization.” Cringe, to say the least. You can read about him and Project 2025’s anti-Indian agenda below:

Secondly, OMG did you hear? Gal Gadot is Indigenous!

To where?

Israel, duh.

Her family?

Oh, her mother's roots are Czech and Polish, while her father's are Austrian, Russian, and German.

Did she serve in the IDF?

Yes, for two years.

Did she kill Palestinians?

Um, not sure, but also who cares? Her young co-star in the live-action Snow White is trying to sabotage the movie with her pro-Palestine views. Why is no one talking about that?

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Thirdly, apologies for my absence from No Frontiers for a few weeks.

I’ve been steeped in writing a pitch for an investigative series on rising nationalism in the West (America, Israel, Germany, France, ex-apartheid South Africa, etc), which originates from their days as settler colonial European powers, as conquerors longing for restoring white-rule.

Arguably, what has been called “fascism” and “totalitarianism” is really settler colonialism happening to white people! The precedents were already established and well at work: extermination campaigns, land grabs, mythic origins and ‘totalizing’ ideologies have long justified European Christian monarchical empires to spread overseas and impose their will on Indigenous civilizations.

Bread-Tuber Chill Goblin has a great summary on this issue:

(More on this later, if my pitch is accepted.)

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So what have I been doing lately? Lots, but here is one inside scoop on my reporting:

I’ve been following a group called the Indigenous Coalition for Israel, which opened an Indigenous Embassy in Jerusalem within the Friends of Zion Museum. It appears like a two-person operation led by an evangelical Maori Zionist named Sheree Trotter, essentially making this “coalition” a front group to legitimize Israel’s claim that all Jewish people are Indigenous to Israel.

Indubitably, some Indigenous peoples support a Jewish State, but they are vastly outnumbered by the global Native peoples who support Palestinians. Just look at this “Indigenous solidarity with Palestine letter” published Oct. 26, 2023, signed by Natives across Turtle Island and beyond.

It appears that much of their Native support comes from a network of evangelical Native groups and Native missionaries—historically speaking, a result of European assimilation practices.

I’m reporting on this story now, so you’ll hear much more about the so-called Indigenous Coalition for Israel.

If you’re following news on Israel/Palestine, then you’ve probably seen posts on Louis Theroux’s new BBC documentary “The Settlers.” I sat down and watched it this morning while researching for a couple stories and—goddamn—it’s fantastic, even if it fills you will utter disgust for Israeli settlers’ genocidal contempt for Palestinians. It’s essential viewing to understand the settler movement in the West Bank and their fanatical longing to settle Gaza if Palestinians are annihilated or expelled.

Watch it here where it is being shared on X posts (X doesn’t allow embeds of posts).

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The Muslim Vote in Britain did a great thread on X of the documentary’s findings:

Louis Theroux just met the woman colonising Gaza. In this viral interview, she confessed: • Her network seizes Palestinian homes • How she controls the Israeli government • Being the architect behind every illegal settlement built Here's her chilling plan (it's sick):

Louis Theroux just interviewed a prominent settler leader in Israel. Daniella Weiss looks like everyone's grandmother. But her views on Palestinians are despicable. The revelations in this BBC documentary should horrify everyone:

Meet Daniella Weiss, a significant figure in the settlement movement. For decades, she's been involved in establishing settlements across the West Bank. She speaks openly about her influence on government decisions... ...and her connections to figures in Netanyahu's cabinet:

What's notable is her frankness about settlement expansion processes. Weiss discusses the network of settlement organisations she works with. They often don't wait for official permits when illegally settling. Her settlement strategy has multiple components that she discusses:

First: Strategic location selection. Weiss takes Theroux to hilltops overlooking Palestinian villages. She explains the positioning of settlements, discussing visibility and location advantages. Locations are chosen with consideration of the surrounding landscape:

Second: The process of establishing new outposts. She describes how settlers move quickly to establish new outposts. The documentary includes footage of settlement construction. Weiss describes how quickly settlements can be established:

The documentary includes a stunning hilltop view. Theroux joins Weiss as she points to areas in the distance. She discusses her vision for future settlement expansion. When Theroux asks about Palestinians living in these areas:

She expresses views that Palestinians don't have permanent rights to the land. The documentary shows Weiss's network coordinating between settlers, supporters, and political allies. It includes scenes of her making arrangements for settlement infrastructure:

What makes this documentary significant is its portrayal of settlement expansion mechanics. Weiss describes how settlements are often established first and formalised later. She outlines their long-term strategy for establishing settlements:

The West Bank settler population has grown substantially over the decades. When Theroux raises questions about international law, Weiss dismisses these concerns. She frames her position in religious terms. This religious perspective is central to her advocacy:

The documentary also explores the financial support behind settlements. Weiss introduces Theroux to American supporters who fund settlement activities. She discusses the financial contributions from international donors. The funding operates through various organisations:

For viewers, the documentary offers insight into a process not often visible to the public. Louis Theroux's interviewing approach allows Weiss to express her views openly. It provides a window into Zionist ideology. And how it's completely dehumanised Palestinians.

Thanks for reading. We're building a grassroots movement to inform the public. No big party donors pulling the strings or corporations setting our agenda. All we really need is YOU. Help us keep exposing using the link below: https://paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=DF8V5PJ4RFMS8

Anyway, I hope you like this loose style. These link/recommendation posts will be a bit more personal and casual, not too serious, but will supplement the reporting I’m doing for this publication. I’ll be writing these more regularly between reporting stories for this substack and beyond. In the meantime, these posts will be free, but at some point, I will put them behind a paywall for subscribers. Please consider becoming a paid supporter of No Frontiers!

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In mid-March, hundreds of tribal leaders and Indigenous school principals, teachers, and parents across Turtle Island voiced their objection to President Donald Trump’s ill-defined “school choice” executive order (EO) for Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) schools during a nationwide tribal consultation. Speaking from their school offices or classrooms, they almost all uniformly rejected Trump’s EO that aspires to remove Native students from rural BIE schools to “private, faith-based, or public charter schools” in so-called nearby areas, ostensibly by diverting funds from BIE-funded schools.

“If you start tearing up tribally controlled grant schools and BIE schools, you’re tearing up communities,” said Hector Serna, superintendent and high school principle of Mandaree School District in Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. In mid-February, Trump’s large-scale staff reductions terminated about a quarter of staff at Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas and the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in New Mexico, prompting Haskell students and three tribal nations to sue the Department of Interior and Office of Indian Affairs to challenge the layoffs in early March.

Trump’s dumbfounding EO inflicts immense uncertainty for tribes and over 47,000 Native students at over 180 elementary and secondary schools. These BIE schools, two-thirds of which are tribally-controlled, offer culturally-specific education like Indigenous language classes as well as employment opportunities for local Native teachers and administrators—markedly different from non-BIE schools.

Nevertheless Trump’s crusading MAGA republicans are eyeing the BIE to carryout Project 2025 and DOGE’s incompetent and ineffective witch hunt for U.S. government “fraud, waste, and abuse.” Tribal leaders and Indian education advocates have repeatedly called on lawmakers to fully-fund the BIE to meet tribal and student needs. But just as Trump demolishes the Department of Education (as planned by Project 2025) to return education authority to states, Indian BIE schooling may whither too. Project 2025 proposes an “Overhaul” of BIE, ostensibly by stripping crucial dollars needed to operate schools and diverting funds to a “federal education savings account” for each Native BIE student, modeled after an Arizona Indian voucher program.

“It is imperative that any effort to fund an Indian school choice initiative must not divert funds away from BIE-funded schools like ours,” said Joe Benally, principal of Piñon Community School in western Navajo Nation, northern Arizona. Unfortunately, Trump’s Project 2025 education proposals are entrenched in this misguided so-called ’school choice’ scheme to divert federal funding to private entities, and explains his executive orders “sunsetting” the Education Department and “helping children” at BIE.

The EO “Expanding Educational Freedom and Opportunity for Families” impacting BIE directs the Interior secretary to review and submit a plan detailing “educational options” nearby existing BIE-funded schools and identify what “mechanisms” are available for families of BIE-eligible students to use ‘their’ federal funding to attend alternative schools, including private, faith-based, or public charter schools.

“We have to remember that in Arizona, as they looked at vouchers, they created a deficit within their state,” said Ronalda Tome-Warito, Diné and Albuquerque Public School board member, during the tribal consultation. “And I think that with our [tribal] communities, we are going to create a great deficit for our children,” adding “Vouchers are—sometimes I think they are an easy fix that this administration would like to use.”

The EO is based upon Project 2025’s proposal calling for a voucher program modeled after Arizona’s state-funded Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program: “Federal officials should design a federal education savings account option for all children attending BIE schools,” (pg. 348-349). In 2024, as a result of Arizona’s ESA voucher spending, the state incurred a $1.4 billion budget deficit, while ESA voucher accounts had $360 million unspent. The mounting “budget meltdown” costs taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and has caused AZ lawmakers to slash critical state programs, like water infrastructure projects, according to ProPublica.

The unsound ESA program provides parents with a private bank account and debit card and allows them to use 90% of the funds that would typically go to the child’s public school to pay for an education of their “choice,” including tuition fees. Public school advocates say the voucher program takes vital funds from public schools and is a “handout to the wealthy,” subsidizing the private school education they could already afford. According to the Brookings Institute, families in the poorest communities are the least likely to obtain ESA funds.

Even if families wished to use these funds, what private schools are available and affordable to use diverted education funds? And would students meet the requirements of private schools? “Our school serves very rural parts of the Navajo Nation and we are often the only accessible school in the area for our families,” said David Nez, superintendent and principal at Pine Hill Schools, located in a satellite Navajo Nation reservation. “If a portion of all our funds were converted into vouchers, it is highly doubtful that these vouchers meaningfully make a difference to our students’ educational options,” adding “Vouchers do not adequately account for the admission requirements of private and sectarian schools such as grade point average or testing requirements.” The Pine Hills Schools are in a mountainous rural area in eastern New Mexico with the two nearest towns 60 miles away.

The Indian School Equalization Program (ISEP) funds the core budget of BIE elementary and secondary schools, covering sales for teachers, aids, principles, and other personnel as well as student transportation. Unfortunately, these funds are often reallocated to cover program cuts in different areas of education. BIE schools receive ISEP funding based on a formula calculating their average school attendance, weighted amounts based on school size and accessibility, and past attendance data—adding up to approximately $7,250 per student for 2024-2025. (In BIE jargon, ‘funding dollars per student’ is called the Weighted Student Unit). According to most recent data, the average public school spending per student reached $15,633 in 2022—over double the funding Native BIE students received.

“We are grossly underfunded compared to public schools,” said Nez.

According to the 2024 BIE budget report from the Department of the Interior, ISEP accounts for 43% of BIE’s budget, which is certainly a majority of funds facilitating teaching for students. The second most significant funding source comes from the Department of Education (DOE), which accounts for 20% of BIE’s budget and funds student education and services at BIE-funded elementary and secondary schools. These schools receive competitive grants from DOE and other federal agencies, like the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Free and Reduced Meals programs.

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“Tribal leaders and members of Congress have testified that current Weighted Student Unit [WSU] allocations are already insufficient and further cuts would force school closures within the reservations,” said Peter Lengkeek, chairman of the Crow Creek Tribe in Fort Thompson, South Dakota.

At this rate, BIE students would have fewer alternatives if forced to use the paltry ISEP funds that are half the allocation a public school student is ‘worth.’ If the Arizona voucher school system had $360 million of unspent funds because families still couldn’t afford to make up the difference for private school tuition or there weren’t alternative school options, then how could the Trump administration expect an Indian “school choice” program to succeed? And what about students whose only options are 30, 60, or 100 miles from their tribal communities?

“You will probably have to match the tuition of parochial, private, public schools, which are much higher than Native education,” said Salabye. “We do not have access to these alternatives,” adding “That should be clear to our leaders at the federal level.”

Of the nearly four dozen who spoke, tribal leaders and Native educators have overwhelmingly rejected Trump’s EO to create a ‘school choice’ voucher program for BIE, voicing it would “financially cripple” and “dismantle” Indian education, and that a voucher program would “require more, not less funding” for Native students. Thora Padilla, president of the Mescalero Apache Tribe, said, “No other school is capable of providing a culturally-relevant education.” Only two tribal leaders who spoke during the consultation supported the executive order if “school choice” means funding is increased for their schools or if funding isn’t diverted from their programs.

As No Frontiers continues to report, Donald Trump, Musk, and Vought’s promise to “dismantle the administrative state” and “expanding school choice” has threatened the foundation of the federal Indian trust responsibility—a legally enforceable fiduciary obligation to protect tribal trust lands, trust assets, as well as provide essential services across all departments. Many tribal leaders and educators also voiced their frustration with the “inadequate” and unlawful tribal consultation, which was scheduled after Trump signed an executive order to alter BIE funding and programing without prior informed consent and consultation with tribes. Most also firmly voiced that “no mechanisms exist” in law, regulation, or authority to divert funding from BIE schools to create an Indian ‘school choice’ program, arguing the creation of such a program would violate the federal Indian trust responsibility and tribal treaty rights.

“This voucher program is just another form of assimilation,” said Harvey Whitford (Blackfeet Indian Nation), superintendent and principal at Wa He Lut Indian School, whose mother was taken from her parents to an Indian boarding school. “This attempt of sending our Indian children to non-Indian schools is just a new modern day form of assimilating our Indian children into a real of non-Indian educational institutions.”

First and foremost, Project 2025 seeks to dismantle the federal government and institute a Christian Nationalist agenda in all sectors of American life, a kind of assimilation tribal nations and Indigenous citizens are all too familiar with. While some of Project 2025’s policy proposals seem vague, broad, and unlimited, the goals are plainly written: defund all aspects of federal Indian administration, hand power to states, and deregulate tribal lands to easily access fossil fuel development, even on sacred sites and treaty lands. According to three Indian law and policy experts No Frontiers interviewed, the Heritage Foundation’s policy playbook would functionally sever the U.S. government’s obligations to provide essential federal programs and services.

While federal agencies remain indispensable partners for tribes, the federal Indian trust responsibility is often fulfilled when the federal government contracts with tribes to provide federal services owed to their citizens, including education and health care. The federal Indian trust responsibility is incompatible with so-called “state’s rights” supremacy, the end-game of Trump’s dismantling of DOE and other agencies and handing federal authority to states to govern a citizen’s most important constitutional rights and civil liberties. Tribes derive their sovereignty and authority from the federal government. If states are given that authority, they may seek to undermine tribal sovereignty in any aspect of governance imaginable.

“In places like South Dakota, where race—where state-tribal relations are at an all time low, this would have a very, very negative impact on our students,” said Lengkeek, adding “The race relations in this stage such as South Dakota would not provide a culturally responsive education to out students or provide the opportunity to engage in language, culture, or traditional teachings that we provide here within a reservation.”

Indian Country’s federal administration may seem isolated to the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs and Bureau of Indian Education, but that is not the case. Each department and agency has federal Indian trust responsibilities, legislation, or rules and regulations that must square with tribal nations and Native citizens. An overhaul of the federal government at the magnitude of Project 2025 will inevitably impact tribal nations, whether or not it was written or intended.

In a letter sent in late-January to Interior Secretary Doug Bergum, the National Indian Education Association (NIEA) argues that ‘school choice’ already exists for Native students through the passage of the Tribally Controlled Schools Act of 1988, signed by President Ronald Reagan. The Act empowers tribes to receive federal funds from BIE to operate their own schools and teach Native children in their communities and was hailed as a success in the U.S. government fulfilling its treaty and federal Indian trust responsibility to provide education for tribal nations. In contrast, handing states the authority to and discretion over Indian education funds from the Department of Education is, NIEA argues, a breach of the federal Indian trust responsibility.

Some of the most significant challenges facing Indian Country are social and economic disparities, which are aggravated by federal programs that have remained “chronically underfunded and sometimes inefficiently structured,” according to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights’ December 2018 budgetary report, estimating billions of dollars in unmet need. Project 2025 appears to have no awareness of the billions of dollars in unmet federal funding and no sincere plans to address basic tribal nation disparities plaguing Indian Country. Project 2025 seemingly ignores well-documented policy shortfalls and recommendations to alleviate Indian Country’s billions of dollars in unmet needs and services entrusted to federal departments and agencies.

While Native students at BIE schools consistently fall behind Native students attending public schools, massive systemic issues like long-standing funding shortfalls and underinvestment are primarily to blame. From investments in curriculum and education materials, teacher salaries, and maintenance of deteriorating school facilities, tribal nations and educators are left with stretched federal dollars and years of deferred maintenance for repairing deteriorating school facilities.

If the answer to an equal and adequate education for Native students was less federal funding for BIE schools, then there would be no graduation disparities between BIE students and public school students, or private school students for that matter.

As hundreds of tribal leaders and educators listened to each other’s statements to BIE leadership, more and more echoed common concerns toward Trump’s EO. It felt like unity within a diverse consultation from hundreds of tribal backgrounds. Casey Velasquez, chairman of the White Mountain Apache Tribe, said, “We, the White Mountain Apache Tribe, welcome improvements in Indian education, but we will not see it being torn down.”

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Drawing on economic lessons from the Covid pandemic emergency, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation just east of Oklahoma City has frozen tribal spending and hiring until the pandemonium settles from President Donald Trump’s bloodless purge of federal workers, programs, and spending.

“We just want to make sure that none of our programs are affected as they sort of continue to identify programs and in areas of actual waste,” Jason Salsman, press secretary for Muscogee (Creek) Nation, told me days after HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rescinded Trump’s mass employee cuts at the Indian Health Service (IHS).

While President Trump, the world’s richest man Elon Musk, and chief architect of Project 2025 Russell Vought wreak havoc upon the federal government, day-to-day life goes on as normal for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. So far, no one has been fired or furloughed and the nation’s departments that receive federal funding are still fully operational. Salsman said the tribe is deliberate in its measured, non-reactionary approach to Trump’s polarized political environment. But while the tribe is confident in its ability to govern through this crisis, much of Indian Country is bracing for impact—especially upon the government’s federal Indian trust responsibility, a pillar in Indian-Federal relations, which has the grim potential to degenerate into something close to its original “guardianship” responsibility: A “Christian nation’s duty is to civilize and Christianize the backward people of the New World” while opening access to tribal lands and resources for exploitation.

“No matter if there’s a DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency] or any political climate, or any sort of agenda that’s out there, we’re always concerned that [federal Indian] trust is being upheld and that things are being done right,” said Salsman. No presidential administration perfectly fulfills its trust obligations to tribes: the U.S. duty to protect tribal treaty rights, lands, assets, resources, and federal legislative mandates, like providing healthcare and education. (The U.S. regularly fails to live up to its responsibilities, according to a 2018 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights). Yet this administration may have other plans for the “chronically underfunded” federal programs designed to support tribal governance and cultural survival.

The unholy Trinity that is Trump, Musk of DOGE, and Vought are united in fulfilling Project 2025’s “promise” to dismantle the administrative state and in re-making the government, no matter the cost to tribal nations or U.S. federal Indian trust obligations. According to Vought’s April 2021 Newsweek article “Is there anything actually wrong with ‘Christian Nationalism?’”, the U.S. government should impose an “America First” political program with “Christian Nationalism” as a guiding force in government and in “maintaining the cohesiveness of a particular people and a cultural inheritance.” It’s not hard to deduce Native Americans are at odds in Vought’s fevered vision of this “country’s Judeo-Christian heritage.” Under a paternal or authoritarian U.S. government, tribal nations and Indian people are in an especially vulnerable position because their reservation trust lands, health care, education, individual Indian trust accounts and more are managed by the federal government. Tribal nations and organizations are alarmed that decades of progress made in Indian-Federal relations could be illegally upended in a matter of weeks.

“Tribes are a different entity: They are a political entity and they should be shielded away from just massive blanket cuts,” said Salsman, adding that the tribe’s hiring and spending freeze “was basically a move to buy some time, but do our due diligence while this was happening.”

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Indians are often considered the “invisible minority” in both congressional and federal affairs, but much more so in mainstream public life. Yet U.S federal Indian trust obligations rely on healthy Indian-federal relations. A 1977 congressional report by the American Indian Policy Review Commission wrote that:

“The purpose behind the trust is and always has been to ensure the survival and welfare of Indian tribes and people. This includes an obligation to provide those services required to protect and enhance Indian lands, resources, and self-government, and also includes those economic and social programs that are necessary to raise the standard of living and social wellbeing of the Indian people to a level comparable to the non-Indian society.”

Each year, Congress appropriates billions of dollars to fund essential tribal programs and services, including over 20 federal agencies that serve tribes and urban Native Americans. Much of this budget is rooted in federal Indian laws meant to empower tribes and remedy dire health, education, social and economic outcomes. But as Trump, Musk’s DOGE, and Vought’s Project 2025 authoritarian playbook slash through the federal government, they do so without the advance notice, consultation, and prior informed consent of tribal nations as required under federal law, executive order, and international law.

“All of this has been done without any communication or even notice to Native Nations, though the law requires it and that’s extremely alarming,” said Shannon O’Loughlin (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma), chief executive and attorney for the Association on American Indian Affairs. She added, “The federal government is not properly consulting under federal law before it’s taking these actions that have desperate effects on our nations and our people.”

Federally recognized tribes, for the most part, are constitutional governments and maintain sovereignty over reservation territory. To serve their tribal citizens, they have their governmental agencies, court systems, police and fire departments, mental health and addiction treatment centers, food distribution, social services, child support enforcement, elder care, housing development, clothing programs, Head Start programs, K-12 and higher education schools, forestry and agricultural managers, environmental regulators, disaster relief programs, sanitation, and much more. (When fires broke out in Los Angeles earlier this year, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation sent out three semi-trucks of supplies to those who lost homes.) In one way or another, tribes are at least partially dependent on federal funding to run their governments, programs, and services.

Dozens of tribal nations and Indian organizations have signed letters to the White House and congressional lawmakers to protect federal funding and employees serving Indian Country amid Trump’s flurry of executive orders and federal memorandum, while clarifying that tribal funding and employees should not be targeted by the administration’s purge of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and environmental justice (EJ) programs.

No Frontiers reached out to several leading American Indian governmental organizations that advocate for tribal sovereignty and the federal Indian trust responsibility, but has received little to no response. The Native American Rights Fund (NARF) and National Council of Urban Indian Health (NCUIH) declined interviews to discuss Trump’s Indian Country agenda, while the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), National Indian Education Foundation (NIEF), and National Indian Health Board (NIHB) also did not respond to interview requests. A former Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs declined to comment, not wanting to be in a story about Trump and DOGE’s dismantling of the federal government.

“We’re doing our best to stay out of a very politically charged climate,” said Salsman. “Make sure that there are no interruptions.”

In an interview days before the Presidential election, University of Richmond and Indian law expert David Wilkins told No Frontiers “I’m convinced that if Trump gets reelected, he will find ways to further shrink the trust relationship, even though they use the phrase a lot [in Project 2025]. I could see him also try to attack the fundamental essence of treaty rights themselves, because in the 1970s after a series of federal court cases that went our way, like the Indian Child Welfare Act, Indian Religious Freedom Act, and other positive pieces of legislation, there was a huge push in congress to end treaties—to terminate and abrogate all treaties.”

The man behind the federal funding freeze and workforce layoffs, Russell Vought, has issued a memo from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in late-February instructing “agency heads” to work with DOGE to submit a plan for “large-scale” layoffs due by March 13, 2025. This of course means more mass layoffs and funding cuts are yet to come in addition to his goal of infusing white Christian Nationalism into U.S. governance and American society.

So far:

• DOGE has identified over 200 essential Indian federal funding programs and grants, listing them on its government website as “waste” to cut, (Mvskoke Media)

• Federal workers in the Office of Indian Tribal Governments charged with working with tribal nations at the IRS was reduced by 50%, diminishing tribal tax expertise and guidance for tribes, (Tribal Business News)

• DOGE includes Native-serving contracts in massive cancellation of 7,500 leases under the General Services Administration (GSA), (Tribal Business News)

• Haskell Indian Nations University, a Bureau of Indian Education-funded school, is reeling from DOGE’s 35 faculty layoffs (ICTNews)

• About two-thirds of tribal governments rely on direct or indirect federal funding to operate their programs and services (ICTNews)

• Before the layoff memo was rescinded, the Indian Health Service (IHS) was expected to lose 950 employees (including 90 physicians, 350 nurses, at least 25 nurse practitioners, about 20 dentists, 43 dental assistants, over 85 pharmacists, 45 lab technicians, and more than 15 service area chief executives or their deputies; Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) was expected to lose 118 employees, 40 Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) employees, two positions in the secretary of Indian affairs office, social workers, firefighters, and police (ICTNews)

“We’ve survived every government administration since the beginning of this republican democracy and we will survive this one,” said O’Loughlin. “As always it’s important that Native Nations assert their sovereignty and utilize it to protect themselves as well as build coalitions together and protect our relatives.” In the past, Indian people have sued the federal government for mismanagement of billions of dollars of tribal money, including funds from leasing tribal lands. These were known as “breach of trust” lawsuits. If federal Indian trust reaches egregious decline as it did for half a century already, tribes may turn toward the courts again, where justice is just as elusive as anticipating Trump’s next move.

For Salsman, there is reason to be optimistic. On Friday February 14, the day Indian Health Service was set to lose 950 employees, tribal nations and organizations sprang into action, pressuring the federal government to protect IHS workers, including the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. “The whole day a lot of tribal organizations were burning up the phones, really being able to unite and get together and have a voice,” said Salsman.

The IHS public affairs provided this widely shared statement from HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr:

“The Indian Health Service has always been treated as the redheaded stepchild at HHS. My father often complained that IHS was chronically understaffed and underfunded. President Trump wants me to rectify this sad history. Indians suffer the highest level of chronic disease of any demographic. IHS will be a priority over the next four years. President Trump wants me to end the chronic disease epidemic beginning in Indian country.”

“Unity is extremely important for all of us right now, so we need within Indian Country: transparency, discussion, you know, opportunities to learn from each other about how different nations are protecting themselves from the onslaught or what they are doing to amend their budgets to protect their people,”O’Loughlin told No Frontiers. “I think we have to stand up to the administration, including potentially with litigation in order to protect our rights.”

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