Trump's Attacks on the Human Rights of Palestinians Are Next Level
But Biden's policies toward a people that is suffering massively and needs help were flawed too
“The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too.” So declared U.S. President Donald Trump at a Feb. 4 news conference while standing next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the first leader to visit the White House following Trump’s inauguration. “This has been happening for years. It’s all death. If we can get a beautiful area to resettle people, permanently, in nice homes where they can be happy and not be shot and not be killed and not be knifed to death like what’s happening in Gaza.”
It is not a defense of Hamas, the designated terrorist organization currently in power in Gaza that carried out the brutal attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, to say that Trump’s plan would constitute forced displacement, given that he is on record saying that Palestinians wouldn’t be allowed to return to the shining, new city he plans to build.
This is hardly the only concerning step he’s taken toward Palestinians or the Middle East. Trump lifted sanctions on violent, extremist West Bank Israeli settlers during his first hours in office. And then there are those he has chosen to be part of his team: U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, a Christian Zionist who once said that Palestinians aren’t a real people and that annexation of the West Bank by Israel is “of course” possible during Trump’s new term; as well as his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, who appears to support the West Bank’s annexation by Israel.
The Trump administration’s disregard for the human rights and dignity of Palestinians extends to the institutions and international legal frameworks that provide them some modicum of support. He has again withdrawn the United States from the U.N. Human Rights Council and has cut future funding from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), a body created three quarters of a century ago specifically to provide aid to Palestinian refugees. And he sanctioned the International Criminal Court (ICC) for issuing arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant, describing the warrants as “illegitimate and baseless.” The point is not that the Trump administration disagreed with the court’s verdict. The point is that it retaliated and tried to totally quash the international body, one of the few that tries to deliver justice under international law.
Meanwhile, here at home, the Trump administration has gone after pro-Palestinian protesters and activists under the guise of fighting antisemitism. It was allegedly to fight antisemitism that last week it suspended $400 million in grants to Columbia University, home to some of the most high-profile protests against Israel and its war in Gaza. It was also allegedly to fight antisemitism that it announced it was deporting Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and green card holder whom the Department of Homeland Security accused, without presenting any evidence, of being “aligned to Hamas.”
Supporters of liberal democracy ought to be outraged by the assault on Palestinian rights in the Middle East and the United States and on international law and institutions. Trump’s foreign policy, both towards Palestinians and in general, is marked by cruelty and caprice. He vacillates between an isolationist abandonment of allies in one moment and talk of “taking over” Gaza in the next. He displays neither a sensible regard for long-term national interests nor a hopeful vision of America as a force for good in the world. His domestic policies likewise respect neither the Constitution nor rights like due process. In this sense his approach is markedly different from that of previous administrations.
But we should also consider the ways Trump’s predecessors helped pave the way for his actions through weak and inconsistent commitments to liberal-democratic norms and principles—and demand their consistent application moving forward.
Biden’s Inconsistent Treatment of Allies
Compare the Biden administration’s handling of Israel’s invasion of Gaza to its approach to Ukraine. The Israeli position, both before and after the horrific events of Oct. 7, has been that it is fighting an existential conflict with Iran, albeit conducted mostly through Iranian proxies like Hamas. Yet Biden was willing to place far stricter limitations on what Ukraine could do with U.S.-supplied weapons than what Israel could—even though Ukraine is facing a foe every bit as hostile towards its existence as Israel.
Indeed, Biden’s policy of supporting Netanyahu publicly while chastising him privately was ineffective in preventing Israel from crossing red line after red line. Despite that, the Biden administration continued to provide Netanyahu with military aid and diplomatic cover at the United Nations.
It’s possible that nothing Biden could have done would have fully prevented Trump from either betraying Ukraine or from giving up any attempt to defend the dignity and basic rights of the Palestinian people. Foreign policy is, of course, one of the legitimate prerogatives of the president. But stronger pressure on Israel to respect its moral and legal obligations would have sharpened the moral contrast with Trump.
Biden’s Vacillation on Human Rights
Sadly, many previous U.S. administrations have excused Israeli actions that have violated the human rights of Palestinians and caused great suffering. Consider the West Bank settlements: despite a 1978 legal opinion from the State Department declaring Israeli settlements inconsistent with international law, successive administrations have failed to apply the political pressure necessary to convince Israeli leaders to seriously address the problem. The Biden administration’s own State Department acknowledged that there were credible reports of a wide range of human rights abuses. But to acknowledge the abuses and not change policy is to effectively say that human rights abuses don’t matter. If they did, then it shouldn’t matter that Israel is an ally. Universal human rights are universal or they aren’t; the United States believes in their application or it doesn’t.
Biden’s posture towards international institutions represents another missed opportunity to defend liberal-democratic principles abroad. Biden had ordered U.S. agencies to share evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine with the International Criminal Court, even though the United States is not a member of the court. But when the court issued warrants for the arrests of Netanyahu and Gallant along with those for Hamas’ leaders, Biden blasted its action as “outrageous.” Biden proclaimed that, “whatever the ICC might imply, there is no equivalence— none—between Israel and Hamas. We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.” But the ICC’s arrest warrants for both Israeli and Hamas leadership do not claim a moral equivalence. They merely assert that the court found reasonable grounds to believe that the parties involved each violated international law.
Again, it is not a defense of Hamas, a designated terrorist organization, to say that Israel too is not exempt from international law. The Biden administration could have argued that the ICC had not presented sufficient evidence of war crimes to justify the arrests of the Israeli leaders. Instead, its statement suggested that it believed that international law should simply not apply to Israel. In other words, it is appropriate to hold some parties accountable to it, but not others.
The same double standard was evident in the Biden administration’s handling of campus protests. It could have stressed that, though all students had the right to learn with safety and dignity, free assembly and protesting government policy were cherished rights that needed to be protected. Instead, it stressed that “order must prevail” and blasted the protests as antisemitic. There have been protesters who have crossed the line into antisemitism, violence, and violent antisemitism. But to concede that protests against Israeli actions are inherently antisemitic or motivated by antisemitism is bad-faith politics.
Missed Opportunities
This was all particularly galling given that the Biden administration must have known that there was a real chance that Trump would be back in office, and that he would immediately attack international law and the bodies that enforce it abroad along with the First Amendment and other rights of protesters here at home.
Biden and company didn’t need to guess: When Trump was in office before, he had used his power to go after the ICC, withdraw from the U.N. Human Rights Council, and cut UNRWA funding. He also mused about shooting protesters in the legs.
And so, facing the prospect of Trump’s return, a leader like Biden who professed support for liberal democracy and international law should have been working to shore up, not tear down, the legitimacy of the bodies that promote those things. Instead, the Biden administration decided not to seek a second term at the U.N. Human Rights Council and suspended aid to UNRWA, albeit during the war rather than indefinitely, and accepted a right-wing framing on campus protests.
Now Trump is back in office, posting “Shalom Hamas” and an AI video of a Trump-developed Gaza in lieu of putting forth an actual plan for peace, or even exploring solutions for how people can live there with dignity. He’s attacking and delegitimizing the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, bodies that can only be as strong as the commitments of their major member states and the international community, such as it is. He’s also declared a war on universities.
Would Trump be doing exactly what he is currently doing had Biden taken a more principled and committed stance on human rights, international institutions, and the rights of free speech and assembly? Maybe. Still, the rhetorical road to his excesses was half-paved by an administration that professed to be the rights-respecting alternative to Trump’s authoritarianism.
Moving forward, as liberal-democratic advocates of human rights oppose Trump, they would do well to remember that there’s no such thing as universal human dignity but not for some groups—or respect for international law only when it aligns with national interest. These aren’t things that make sense if we only half believe in them. There’s rule of law for everyone or rule of law for no one. Either everyone has the right to free speech, or there is no such right. If Mahmoud Khalil’s due process rights aren’t respected, we do not have due process.
Half-supported, these principles become shallow shells of what they could and should be, sitting there waiting for someone to come along and scoop out the rest. And Trump is doing just that.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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Let’s call a spade a spade. The GOP is engaging in political correctness and cancel culture.
Censoring free speech by attaching the label “anti-Semitic” to any policy of the Israeli state is idiotic. But it is Trump’s idiot genius at work again. Brand the other side as “racist” when they want to have a real dialogue about race and culture. Brand them as anti-semites when they want to discuss policy.
It’s the Roy Cohn double-speak education he excelled at learning.
This is not convincing, at all.
Russia launched a completely unprovoked assault on Ukraine to extinguish its sovereignty. Israel was responding to an absolutely insane act of mass murder by Hamas that was intended to be, and was correctly interpreted as, an existential attack on Israel’s existence. One can critique Israel’s response but it’s arguing in bad faith to compare the reactions of cold hearted imperialists waging a war of aggression with that of a people responding to a pogrom and mass hostage taking.
Russia also has nuclear weapons. We shouldn’t have restrained Ukraine, but we did so out of an understandable if overblown fear of escalation. Hamas does not have nuclear weapons, and Hezbollah was exposed early on as a paper tiger. Arguing as if our different approaches here are simply moral or legal questions again verges on bad faith.
As to the broader point, it’s pretty sad to be making a “oh no, Trump is bad, but whatabout Biden” after prominent Arab Americans and “friends of the Palestinians” did everything they could to get Trump elected, and succeeded. Trump one key Arab areas in Michigan because of Jill Stein voters and Trump voters “for Palestine”. I’d hazard a guess none of the loudmouths who disrupted our universities and provided endless footage for Fox to rile up their base voted for the hated Kamala, because “both parties are the same, man”.
Well they aren’t. Not on foreign policy, or anything else, so keep taking shots even after the fact at Biden all you want. Those type of shots already did the damage they are going to do. People who made them own the Trump era just as much as the Evangelicals do.
I’ve never seen in my lifetime a more alienating political movement than the Hamas apologists (active or implicit) in the US, and they played a non-trivial role in getting Trump elected.
Lots of people around the world are going to suffer because of that election. I will save my tears for the Ukrainians forced to bend the knee after a heroic struggle in part due to the antics of Arab Americans before I shed a single one for the Palestinians. I will save my tears for the Haitians and Salvadorans about to be deported over anyone in Dearborn.
“At least they won’t take us for granted anymore”. Perhaps — but if they are smart, the democrats should just write off the Hamas fellow travelers instead,