#domestic lawyers core

[toby-howll]

👬

[its-all-stardust]

Safe

So this is kind of based on a request that I received over six months ago at this point (rip me and my writing capabilities) that I mixed with my own idea in an attempt to make it more realistic than what the request originally called for. Because I feel like I changed the core of what the person wanted, I decided not to include it here.

Masterlist

Matt Murdock/GN!Reader, though it's more platonic and really kind of Matt, Karen, and Foggy being buds with Reader. Sorry not sorry.

Word count: 7.1k

Summary: You love your boyfriend even though he kicked you out of your, really his, apartment. He'll let you back in soon enough. But a cold breeze and falling night don't mix with a thin T-shirt, causing you to seek warmth in an office labeled Nelson Murdock Page.

Content warning for domestic abuse/intimate partner violence. Descriptions are few and not overly detailed.

The sun was just starting to set, but you already felt the chill of the impending night air. The streets felt darker than they should, the tall buildings casting deep shadows, a false night before the true one.

It was the one thing you never liked about the city, especially since you were left wandering the streets alone, at a loss for what to do or where to go. You weren’t worried, though. Dean had done this before. Soon, you were sure, he’d call you and let you back into the apartment.

He had locked you out, something he usually did whenever you made a mistake or got into a ridiculous fight. He was within his rights to kick you out and take the key—it was his apartment, after all. He paid the rent, his name was on the lease.

Once Dean slowed down and thought things through, when he saw the situation from your perspective and understood why you thought what you did, he’d call. You would tell him you were sorry, he’d forgive you and tell you he loved you, and then the two of you would fall into bed, and all would be forgotten.

A gust of wind blew through the street, freezing you to the spot for a moment. Fall was settling in, and the nights were getting colder. Your t-shirt, lounge pants, and flip-flops didn’t provide much warmth.

But it was okay. Dean would call soon. Your phone was clutched in your hand, waiting for it to come through.

You told a friend about these fights once, and she looked more than a little perturbed. She tried telling you that if Dead actually loved you, he wouldn’t do that to you. You knew she was wrong. If Dean didn’t love you, he wouldn’t have given you your phone on the way out the door. You needed it so he could call and find you using the tracking app he set up.

New York City could be dangerous—aliens falling from the sky, vigilantes roaming the streets, people who could fly—and he didn’t want to take any chances. Even when you were fighting, Dean always made sure you weren’t hurt. It was also why you couldn’t stop walking until you found somewhere safe or until Dean called you. If your phone stopped moving for too long, Dean would worry that something had happened to you.

The wind blew again, the sun dipping even lower. It was getting colder. 

Reaching up, you rub the slight bump on your forehead. Dean tried tossing you your phone, but you missed—you were never good at playing catch—and the corner smacked you above your left eye. It ached and started a headache that hadn’t let up yet.

You couldn’t wait for Dean to call so you could go home and find where he tucked away the painkillers this time. He never liked keeping things in one spot for too long.

A light in the gathering dark caught your eye. An office window, still lit hours after their normal closing time. On closer inspection, you saw their sign:

Nelson, Murdock, Page - Attorneys at Law.

It made you pause.

You didn’t need a lawyer, but maybe, since they were around anyway, they’d let you sit in their lobby for a bit. Just long enough to warm up and for Dean to call. And if Dean checked where you were, he’d know you were safe. After all, what thief could run to a lawyer after stealing a phone?

Your heart pounded nervously in your chest as you touched the door handle. You hoped they were nice, that they’d let you inside without expecting anything. Surely, they wouldn’t charge you for waiting in their lobby, right?

Finding your courage, you pulled the door open, only to pause as the people inside turned to stare at you. Two men and a woman.

“I’m sorry,” you said immediately, losing your nerve. “This was a bad idea.” You let the door go and turned to leave.

“Wait!” the woman called. Her voice was loud, and you couldn’t help but obey, your shoulders tensing, your body filling with nerves. She stood and met you at the door.

“Are you okay? Do you need help?” Her eyes scanned you up and down, lines forming between her brows the longer she stared.

“I’m fine. I was just…” you trailed off with a shrug. But the woman and the two men behind her waited for you to finish. You smiled and gave an awkward laugh. “I got locked out of my apartment. I’m just waiting for my boyfriend to call to let me know I can go back inside. I was hoping I could hang around for a bit just to warm up. You guys are the only ones still open this time of day.”

You felt like you were rambling but couldn’t help yourself. 

“Of course! Please come in.” The woman stepped back to let you in, flashing a bright smile.

You cautiously entered, hyper-aware of your flip-flops smacking against the bottom of your feet in the silent office.

You glanced between the woman and the men again. They were all gathered in the lobby, the other lights in the office turned off.

“I’m sorry, were you about to leave? I can—” You stepped back, not wanting to keep them. They would likely rather be on their way home than babysitting you.

“Please, we practically live here. Stay!” one of the men said. He had blond hair and a charmingly boyish smile.

Not seeing how to get out of the situation—and not sure if you wanted to—you carefully sat down in the chair the blond man pulled out for you from the few lined against one wall.

“I’m Foggy,” the man said, holding out his hand to you. Smiling politely, you shook it, introducing yourself. The others followed; the woman was Karen, and the other man, with dark hair and circular red glasses, was Matt.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” Matt started slowly, as if afraid to startle you. “If you’re waiting to get back into your apartment, why not just wait in the lobby of your building?”

You froze for less than a second before the tension faded away with practiced ease. 

“I figured I’d get some fresh air,” you lied. “Still not used to the changing weather and was too stubborn to go back when I realized how cold it was.” You laughed, hoping your tale of personal failing would make Matt drop the subject.

The truth was you tried staying in the lobby before, the first time Dean locked you out after you moved in with him. He’d checked the tracker on your phone and came stomping out of the elevator fifteen minutes later, saying you needed to leave the building entirely. He couldn’t think knowing you were still around, saying he could practically hear you breathing. If you wanted him to forgive you, you needed to leave. Otherwise, he would just stay mad, and who knows, maybe you’d have to spend the night sleeping on the floor of the lobby of your apartment building, hoping no one saw you.

Now you knew to leave whenever you’d done something to make Dean mad. You would go to a friend’s place if you could, but ever since you’d moved in with Dean, you’d lost contact with them.

Matt gave a small smile as if he were indulging you. “And now?”

“And now I figured I’d be better off waiting for a phone call. The halls in my place are barely better than outside.” You laughed again. “I’d rather stay here where it’s cozy. As long as that’s okay with you guys.”

“Of course it’s okay,” Karen jumped in to say, shooting a look at Matt, which, the more you studied him, you were unsure if he could even see.

“Do you want some coffee?” Foggy offered, trying to ease the tension between his friends. You rubbed your hands together, the chill from the autumnal air still clinging to them.

“That would be really nice. Thank you.” You almost wanted to say no, but a cup of hot coffee sounded so nice, and it would buy you a little more time in their office.

Foggy left for the kitchen, turning lights on along the way, leaving you, Matt, and Karen in awkward silence.

“I’m sorry, but do you need ice? For your forehead?” Karen blurted out, touching her own forehead above her left eye sympathetically.

Heat rose to your face. “This?” you said, touching the bump, attempting to cover it even though Karen had clearly already seen it. “It’s nothing. Just banged my head off the counter earlier after I dropped something.”

“Are you sure?” Matt asked, drawing your attention to him and the tense grip he had on his cane. “It doesn’t hurt at all?” 

His face was turned toward you, but his eyes didn’t match where yours were. Adding in the cane, you figured he was more than likely blind. At least that was one person you didn’t have to worry about altering your appearance for.

“I barely even notice it,” you lied again. Truthfully, the bump still throbbed, and while ice would be a relief, you weren’t about to let these people, these strangers, know things that could get you and Dean into trouble. Dean always said other people wouldn’t understand the dynamics of your relationship, and you had always trusted him about that.

You could trust these people for a moment of respite and nothing more.

Foggy came back into the lobby with a paper cup in his hand, hopefully saving you from any further interrogation.

They told you about themselves, about their work, and you did the same. Thankfully, no further probing questions were asked. And if they noticed how often you checked your phone for an incoming call or a text, they didn’t say anything.

Not until an hour had passed anyway.

“Still haven’t heard anything?” Matt asked just as you checked the service on your phone for the umpteenth time, almost convinced that was why Dean hadn’t called. It was a little eerie how Matt seemed to know what you were doing, but you brushed it off as simply caused by a lull in conversation.

“Not yet,” you answered, releasing your thoroughly chewed lip. “It’s probably just taking longer than usual. I’ll go, though. I don’t want to keep you guys.” You forced a levity you didn’t feel to your voice. You had hoped Dean would have called by now, but it wasn’t the longest he left you out of the apartment.

You stood, about to run off and leave these very nice people to their night, and missed the shared look between them.

“Have you eaten yet?” Matt asked suddenly, stopping you in your tracks.

“No, but I was just going to grab something on my way back home.” Another lie. You couldn’t go back to the apartment without Dean’s say so. 

“Oh, you have your wallet with you?” Matt asked, his surprise not sounding entirely genuine.

But he was blind. He would have no idea you didn’t have pockets, let alone what may or may not have been in them.

“Yep!” you said, voice pitched a little too high. You moved toward the door.

“Why don’t you come with us?” Karen suggested, “We were just about to grab dinner ourselves.”

“We’ll even be nice and not take you to our favorite bar. Pretty sure you can’t eat anything there without getting some kind of food poisoning,” Foggy chimed in.

It was like they were all telepathically communicating, working together to get you to go with them.

It would have been concerning if you hadn’t felt so at ease with them. Warnings of not letting strangers take you to a secondary location were easily brushed from your mind, not given the chance to linger.

These people weren’t strangers in the usual sense. They were well-known lawyers with their names plastered on a sign right outside their door. Not to mention you practically accosted them, and they were too kind to turn you away.

Plus…it was nice spending time with other people again. You’d lost contact with so many people in the last year you’d forgotten what it was like to spend time with someone other than Dean.

You weren’t ready for it to end. Not yet.

The ache of loneliness and a growl from your stomach had you saying, “Okay.”

The restaurant they picked wasn’t anything fancy, but it wasn’t one you’d ever been to before. You had passed by it on several occasions, but Dean had never been interested whenever you brought it up. He never gave you a reason why, and you never understood his reluctance. 

Now that you finally tried it, you can firmly say you weren’t missing out on much—it was more like any other family dining place—but the food was good. Great for your empty stomach—and the company was even better.

Matt—a sort of gentleman, you came to find out—offered to pay for everyone. You were sure it was more for your benefit than anything, the man somehow knowing you didn’t have any way to pay.

You almost said no, but you were already in too deep. Not to mention, there still hadn’t been any word from Dean.

When the bill was paid and the four of you headed for the door, your demeanor shifted.

It was getting late, and Dean never told you that you could return to the apartment.

He’d never left you out all night before. What if he never called? Did he expect you to sleep on the street, or would you be allowed to go back to his building?

You could call him. You weren’t supposed to during these lock-outs, but you didn’t have much choice, not if you needed to know what was going on.

A light touch to your elbow made you jump.

“Is something wrong?” Matt asked. You must have been so lost in thought you hadn’t noticed him get so close. 

“No.” The lie slipped through automatically, and you prayed you were convincing. “Just thinking that I might finally convince my boyfriend to come here now that I’ve tried it.”

Matt nodded. “Have you heard from him yet?” he asked cautiously. 

You glanced away, glad he couldn’t see your nervous shifting, but then you caught Karen and Foggy watching your exchange from a few feet away. 

“He probably just got caught up bullshitting with the maintenance guy,” you said instead of giving a direct answer.

You pulled up Dean’s contact in your phone. You had to risk calling him, not wanting to look like a fool in front of your almost-friends.

The call rang just once before he answered. Like he had been waiting for you.

You were about to speak, a term of endearment on your lips, when Dean beat you to it.

“Who are you with?” he asked, the words low and full of venom.

You froze for a moment, too familiar with the tone and what it meant. You turned around and stepped away from the others, not wanting them to see your face. You didn’t properly register the newly formed scowl on Matt’s face.

Dean continued. “I saw where you were. A lawyer? Are you lying to him about me?” The anger in him rose with every word.

“No, that’s not it at all!” you quietly cried, trying desperately not to alert anyone. There was nothing you could do when Dean got like this, in this argumentative state that got you pushed out of the apartment in the first place. 

You shouldn’t have called. It just made Dean angrier. You should have waited. You knew better, but you wanted to look normal in front of such friendly people.

“They were just being nice, making sure I stayed warm. That’s it,” you insisted.

“Oh, so, now you think I don’t take care of you,” he snarked back.

The next words spilled out before you could stop them. Years of pent-up frustrations and fear, and, most importantly, anger coming to a head.

“You’re the one who kicked me out!” you hissed before gasping.

You shouldn’t have said that; you didn’t mean it. You needed to say something, do something quickly before—

Dean chuckled, low and deep, without any hint of genuine amusement. “If that’s what you think happened, that this isn’t all your fault, then you’re not coming back.”

“Dean, please, no—” you tried to say, but the line cut out before you could even think of how to start your apology.

You stood there, numb, unsure of what to do.

Where do you go? Do you go back to Dean’s anyway? You’ve been living with him for so long. All your stuff is at his place. Surely he wouldn’t break up with you because of one small misunderstanding? Maybe if you go and explain in person—

Someone softly called your name.

You finally lowered your phone, but you still didn’t turn around, trying to calm your breathing and blink away the tears that threatened to spill.

“What happened?” the voice asked, close this time. Glancing out of the corner of your eye, you saw Matt, now standing beside you.

“I um…” You didn’t know what to say. Could you tell them the truth? Would they care? Would they even help you? “It’s nothing. I’m fine,” you said, trying to keep your voice even.

No, you couldn’t tell them. You wouldn’t put your troubles on these people, kind as they were. And chances were, Dean would call you the very next morning, begging your forgiveness. He would tell you how he shouldn’t have said that to you and ask you to come back.

It would be like every other time; you just knew, and the two of you would go back to normal and be happy.

“I need to get back,” you continued, trying to step around Matt, only for him to reach out, his hand hovering by your arm, making you stop.

“You said he kicked you out,” Matt said softly, brow furrowed in concern.

You had hoped he and Foggy and Karen hadn’t heard you. Clearly, you weren’t as quiet as you thought. Knowing your luck, the volume on your phone was likely so loud they probably heard everything Dean said.

You ran a hand over your face, trying to force down your embarrassment and anxiety.

It didn’t work.

You released a sharp, stuttering gasp, still unable to find the words when Matt asked, “Has he done this before?”

You hadn’t meant for it to be an answer, but Matt and the others took it as one nonetheless.

With a gentle hand on your shoulder, you let them lead you out of the cold.

At Matt’s apartment, you didn’t get the half-expected lecture/pep-talk combo that usually came in these situations.

None of the you deserve better, you shouldn’t let him treat you like that, don’t go back to him nonsense.

Instead, Matt, Foggy, and Karen hustled you into Matt’s place—the nicest of the three of them, and completely wasted on a blind man, according to Foggy.

“He should at least have a hole in the wall. Maybe two,” he complained to you.

They only asked if you were okay. If they could get you anything. You thought you saw Karen looking something up on her phone and sharing it with Foggy, but Matt distracted you by handing over a pair of socks to keep your feet warm and the softest blanket you had ever felt.

They spent the night acting as if everything was normal, like you belonged and this was something you had all done before.

You felt…completely at ease for the first time in a long time.

But even still, tears threatened to spill throughout the night, and you kept your phone clutched tightly in your hand, hoping for a call or text.

It was hedging past midnight. Foggy and Karen said their goodbyes an hour earlier and nothing from Dean appeared on your phone. You kept waiting, though. Watching the battery slowly deplete and afraid to ask for a charger. It would have been nothing compared to what Matt has already given you—even offering his own bed—but you didn’t want to add one more burden to the ever-growing list.

Even with the late hour, you and Matt kept talking. At first, about nothing and everything, simply whatever topic came to mind as had been the way since you met him earlier that evening. But then, after a lull, things changed.

Matt shifted on the couch across from you and licked his lips. His glasses were still on, but even so, you were still able to pick up on his nerves. 

“I had this girlfriend once,” he started, and you tensed, afraid of what was coming. As if he could sense you, he raised a hand, a gesture meant to calm, but from Matt, you weren’t sure.

“And…I was in love with her. I met her while I was in college, and from that first night, I was gone,” Matt recounted with a faint, somewhat bittersweet smile. But then he sobered, and his smile faded. “I almost gave up everything for her. More than once.”

A beat of silence passed.

“Why didn’t you? Give up everything?” you couldn’t help but ask. From your limited information, it sounded like it could have been incredibly romantic.

“Because I would have had to give up myself to be with her,” Matt answered, his voice soft, distracted by far-off thoughts.

His reasoning didn’t make any sense to you. You told him so.

Matt leaned back with a sigh. He reached for his tie—already loosened earlier in the night—and tugged on it as if it was still restricting him.

“I almost failed out of school after I met her. She’d ask me to meet her at odd hours—during the day, in the middle of the night. Whenever the urge struck her. I skipped class, missed assignments. The place I’d worked so hard to get to, and I just…” Matt shrugged like he didn’t understand his own actions. “None of it mattered when I was with her. And then she asked me to do something I couldn’t do. Said it would be good for me. I said no, and she left.” If you knew where Matt kept his liquor, you’d pour him a glass. He looked like he could use it.

You wondered what the point of the story was, why he was telling it to you. You toyed with the idea of calling it a night when Matt started up again.

“Years later, she came back. No matter how much I told myself it wouldn’t be like the last time, it still was. I followed her around, did what she asked. It was exciting. That time, though, I had the first with Foggy. He and Karen and I were working on a case I asked them to take, one they didn’t want anything to do with. I thought I could handle her and the case, but I just fucked everything up, and Foggy and Karen left. And then my ex…left again. The only thing I was left with was the mess I made.”

“Did she come back after that?” you asked. The tension in Matt’s shoulders, the way his fingers kept twitching, told you the answer before he did.

Matt nodded but didn’t say anything.

“What happened that time?” you prompted. If he started this story, he might as well finish it.

Matt gave you another smile, this one holding a touch of disgust. “Same thing all over again. I got pulled in and I thought, no matter what happened before, this time, I was going to save her. But I couldn’t, and I almost died because of it.”

“You’re joking,” you said, taken aback. You’ve heard stories about things ending badly between couples, but as far as you knew, you hadn’t met someone like that.

Matt shook his head, looking almost exhausted by the telling. “Couple of broken ribs, a good knock to the head. Lost most of my hearing for a while. And worst of all, I was alone. I’d driven everyone away.”

Though Matt was sitting in front of you, whole and healthy, you needed to know the ending now. What happened to Matt was horrible, but…

“Did you love her?” you asked.

Matt seemed shocked, hands frozen on his tie and brow furrowed.

“I did.”

“And if she comes back, will you forgive her?” That’s all that matters to you in the end—love and forgiveness. “Will you go back to her?”

Matt took a sharp breath and then shifted uncomfortably. “It… wouldn’t be good if I did,” he said.

“Why not? If you love her and can forgive her, then what’s stopping you from being together,” you asked, confused. It’s how you and Dean made it through all your rough patches. You were sure it was how you’d make it through this one.

Matt sighed, rubbing a hand over his face, dislodging his glasses but still keeping them on.

“She wasn’t…” Matt started slowly,  sounding frustrated. “She wasn’t always a good person. I lost myself when she was around. I couldn’t see anything beyond her. Her attention was...intoxicating. And poisonous.”

“She could change. If she promised to do better, be better—” Matt stopped you before you could argue further. You weren’t sure why you tried to in the first place.

“No,” he said, his voice wavering ever so slightly. “I wouldn’t go back to her. And it doesn’t matter. She died.”

You flinched, the answer and the revelation striking you harder than it should have. It wasn’t the outcome you…wanted to hear, you supposed.

“Oh,” you offered, your reaction stilted. What was the proper way to respond to something like that? “I’m so sorry.”

Matt nodded and rubbed his face again, looking defeated. Whatever energy he had earlier in the evening was completely gone. “I should let you go to bed.”

That night was awful. You tossed and turned, hardly finding sleep and plagued by nightmares. Every time you woke up, you checked your phone. The lack of any communication from Dean only made you feel worse.

The sun was just starting to kiss the horizon when you finally gave up on sleep. Not long after, you heard Matt rise from the couch and start puttering around the kitchen. He tried to be quiet, but the sounds echoed throughout the space anyway.

“Morning,” you called softly as you left the bedroom.

“Morning,” Matt greeted in return. “Coffee or tea?”

He had his glasses on. They almost seemed out of place with his t-shirt and sweatpants. You had only seen him in his work suit. He still looked good, though, you decided.

“Tea.” You sat at the small table and watched Matt deftly move around his kitchen to prepare your cup.

“I only have black tea,” he said apologetically.

“Good.” You preferred it anyway.

Silence fell between the two of you again, even as Matt handed you your mug and joined you at the table.

After a while, Matt shifted in his seat. “What…do you want to do?”

You knew he wasn’t asking about a stroll in the park.

You leaned forward onto the table, both hands clutching the mug as you stared unseeing into the last dregs of your tea. If only there were leaves to tell you what to do.

Rubbing your lips together, you played with the dead skin there, trying to put off answering. If you didn’t say anything, you could stay in this moment forever.

Matt said your name, drawing your attention, needing your answer.

“I want to go to Dean’s place,” you finally said, trying to sound confident and sure of yourself. If he wasn’t going to talk to you, try to figure things out, then you needed to step up. You didn’t want to be like Matt and his ex; you understood, eventually, what he was trying to tell you, but you wanted to fight for your relationship, no matter how hard it was at times. You loved each other, so it had to be worth it.

Matt’s hands were clutched together in a white-knuckle grip on the tabletop. The muscle in his jaw twitched, but otherwise, his expression was blank.

“Do you want to go back to him?” His voice was low, an emotion you couldn’t decipher tinged the edges. Nothing like Dean, where you would know you did something wrong by the tone of his voice alone.

“I do.” You kept your back straight and your eyes on his face, steeling yourself for whatever Matt might say next.

He and his friends hadn’t given you a lecture about your relationship last night. Maybe Matt would try now.

But all he said was, “Okay.”

He insisted on walking you to your apartment. You had tried to tell him it was far, that he surely had work, you were fine, really—all manner of things. Matt remained steadfast through it all. He didn’t get angry. Didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t say anything about you at all.

“I would feel better knowing you got home safe.”

Well. You couldn’t find a way to argue with that.

The walk to your building was much nicer than your wandering around the city the previous night. The air was still chilled, but the rising sun was able to peek through some of the buildings and cast a warm glow over you. Matt’s borrowed jacket also helped keep you warm, but all you could think of was how you’d have to give it back before Dean saw.

“This is me,” you told Matt, stopping in front of your building. You expected him to let go of your arm—you’d been guiding him the whole walk after you asked if it would be easier—but he didn’t. You only felt his fingers twitch.

“Do you mind if I go up with you?” he asked.

All you could think of was Dean. “I don’t—”

“Please. Dean won’t even see me.” It was like he could read your thoughts.

You chewed on your lip. “Alright,” you sighed. “But you have to take this back.”

You slipped the jacket off and handed it to Matt, the comfortable warmth leaving you all too soon.

You led Matt through the building, your steps slowing the closer you got to the door. When it finally came into view a few floors up, you touched Matt’s arm.

“Wait here,” you said, barely hearing yourself over the pounding of your heart. You told yourself it was just excitement at reconciling with Dean.

Only after your second tentative knock did you finally hear heavy footsteps inside. They stopped at the door, Dean likely looking through the peephole. You didn’t look up at it; he would see you clearly, and you knew to keep your head down when apologizing.

The hinges squeaked when he finally opened the door.

Neither of you spoke.

“I was wondering when you were coming over,” Dean said, his voice light, almost happy. You would have been happy—he seemed to have forgiven you—but your mind stuck on “coming over.” He said it like you were visiting. Like you weren’t living with him and just a new partner with their own apartment in another part of the city.

You risked a glance up at him anyway, a tentative smile on your lips. He looked at ease, and the roiling in your stomach started to ease.

Dean placed a hand on your shoulder, fingers digging into your skin, and pulled you through the door. 

“I’m so sorry about yesterday,” you started, ready to go over the speech you had prepared last night during your bouts of restlessness. Dean hummed, the sound rumbling deep in his chest.

Suddenly, your head slammed against the wall.

Dean had used the hand on your shoulder to shove you against the wall next to the door.

Wincing, dazed, you tried to raise a hand to the back of your head as if touching it would ease the pain, but Dean shook you, making your hand drop.

“What did I tell you about disrespecting me, hm?” Dean growled, his face so close to yours that the heat of his breath fanned over your face. He didn’t leave you room to answer before pulling you forward by your shoulder, only to slam you into the wall again. “And then running to some other guy? You thought you could get away with that?”

“I’m sorry,” you whimpered. Your heart started to pound, fear filling you. Dean had never hurt you before. The wall, sure. Occasionally, he got so upset that he’d break whatever item was on hand. But he’d never done anything to you. 

He wasn’t really hurting you, though. You tried justifying it. You weren’t bleeding; nothing was broken. You were sure you’d barely even have a bruise from his grip.

Dean has always been possessive of you. You’d always considered it a part of his charm. A guy who saw no one else and wanted no one else but you, and willing to stake his claim and not back down. It was all very romantic. Sure, it made it hard to keep in touch with family and friends, but you didn’t regret it.

At least, you didn’t think you did until you spent last night with Matt and his friends.

Someone called your name. It wasn’t until Dean whipped his head around that you realized it wasn’t him but someone from the hall.

Dean hadn’t closed the door.

Matt was standing in the doorway, his cane held down at his side, gripping it so tightly you swore you heard it creaking from the strain.

Dean changed instantly. His hands left you as he moved to fill the doorway with his body.

“What’s up, man? Need help with something?” Dean asked, sounding completely at ease and friendly as he eyed Matt up and down.

“I heard you,” Matt said, voice deadly quiet.

Dean acted confused. “Not sure I know what you’re talking about.” He gripped the door tighter, ready to slam it in Matt’s face.

“I think you do.” Matt tilted his head, turning his head like he knew where you were, and said your name. “Do you want to leave?”

Dean turned to you, a sneer on his face. “This is the guy you were with last night, babe?” he asked. How he managed to keep his voice sounding so amicable while his expression was anything but, you’ll never know.

You didn’t answer Dean, but he didn’t need you to.

“Appreciate the concern, but we’re good here.” Matt’s hand was on the door before Dean could slam it.

“I wasn’t asking you.”

Dean huffed a breath through his nose, sounding much like an agitated animal. “Go on, answer your friend.”

“I’m fine, Matt,” you said quietly.

“Everything’s fine, Matt,” Dean said with a triumphant grin. He tried closing the door, but Matt’s hand didn’t budge.

“Do you often slam people into walls for fun, or was this a special occasion?” Matt asked, and embarrassment flooded through you. You didn’t like that he knew what had happened to you.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dean said.

“Sure you do.” Matt pushed on the door and attempted to step forward.

Either Dean wasn’t expecting it, or Matt was stronger because Dean jerked back as the door moved before putting his full weight behind it.

“Who the hell do you think you are trying to come into my place?” Dean spat, trying to force Matt back.

“A concerned friend. And between everything I heard last night and right now, I have every right to be.”

The battle of wills against the door hadn’t even caused Matt to break out in a sweat, meanwhile, Dean was struggling. You wanted to tell them to stop, to ask Matt to leave. You didn’t even understand why he was acting like this in the first place. After last night, you thought he wouldn’t try to interfere.

Matt turned back to you. “I’ll do whatever you say, but I need to know: do you want to leave this apartment?” It was as if the words pained him to say.

You were about to tell him, no, you were fine, that he was making things worse when Dean spoke.

“Stop talking.” He released the door, and Matt stumbled forward a step before catching himself. Before he could do anything else, Dean grabbed the front of Matt’s shirt.

You didn’t know what he was planning, whether he would hit Matt or shove him; you just knew you had to stop Dean.

Reacting blindly, you lunged forward, grabbing Dean’s arm, and tried to pull it back away from Matt. 

“Don’t—” was the only word you could get out before Dean thrust his arm back, shoving you and knocking you off balance.

Falling backward, you had no chance to catch yourself. You hit the floor hard, head banging on the vinyl tile, adding to the damage Dean did mere minutes ago.

Dazed, you laid there for a you didn’t know how long. When you finally came to enough, you heard Dean yelling and Matt calling your name.

Matt had Dean pressed against the wall, one arm braced across his chest to hold him in place. Even though Dean was spitting obscenities, he was still more composed than on his bad days. You didn’t understand it.

Matt wasn’t paying any attention to Dean; instead solely focused on you. 

You could finally make out his words.

“Are you alright?”

You nodded, hand holding the back of your head like it would ease the pain. You didn’t think about how Matt wouldn’t be able to see you.

“Grab your things,” Matt said over Dean’s venom, and you realized perhaps he saw more than you initially thought. “We’re leaving.”

You want to say you didn’t hesitate, but you did.

How could you leave Dean, especially when he was so angry? It would be even worse when you eventually came back.

And then you finally realized: it would get worse. Today was already bad, and even if Dean apologized, he still tried to hurt Matt. It took you even longer still to realize you didn’t want to lose another friend to Dean. He never treated his own friends like this, so why was he like that with yours?

Matt called your name again so softly you almost didn’t hear him.

“Okay,” you said and left to grab what little you could carry.

You went back to your parents’ place outside the city after that day. Matt took you back to his apartment after leaving Dean’s. He sat with you as you called your parents, who you haven’t had more than short and—you understand now—supervised conversations with in months.

You spent longer than you meant to with them. If you were being honest, you didn’t want to leave. You were afraid to.

Living without a roommate in the city was practically impossible unless you had a shitty apartment or an extremely well-paying job—the first you didn’t want and the second you didn’t have.

Slowly, though, you relearned what it was like being around other people again. You’d been isolated for long enough that the presence of other people at first left you nervous and twitchy, constantly looking over your shoulder for fear of being caught doing something you shouldn’t. The feeling subsided, and you remembered what it was like not to be alone. You were even able to move in with a friend and their boyfriend. You reconnected with some old friends and spoke to your parents so often that you were almost sick of it.

You’ve never been more thankful or felt more loved.

You hadn’t seen Matt or his friends in months. 

You didn’t know if it was entirely appropriate to reach out to them, even after all they did to help.

You had thought that, perhaps, they had forgotten about you. They helped so many people, surely one night with you wouldn’t have lodged itself into their memory like it did yours. They might have thought nothing of you, but you wouldn’t forget them.

The door to the restaurant slams closed behind you, the wind forcing it shut. You’re happy you didn’t flinch this time, though it’s at least partially because you’ve been hearing the sound all day. The weather is warming up, but the chill is persistent, a wind storm sent to remind everyone that winter won’t go easily.

You glance at the time on your phone again, praying your takeout arrives soon. You had called ahead, but the weekend left the staff busy. Typical for a Friday night. Despite the protestations of your stomach, however, you were willing to wait.

It’s the restaurant Matt, Foggy, and Karen took you to that night. You hadn’t been since, but you couldn’t help but crave the meal you had that night, wondering if the freedom to choose your own food would make it taste better.

“Hey!” someone calls from behind you, whoever threw the door open a moment ago. Probably someone jackass upset that a server hasn’t come to seat them yet. The thought makes you roll your eyes as you swipe between apps on your phone.

And then someone says your name.

As if summoned by your very thoughts, Matt, Foggy, and Karen are standing behind you, smiling at you like old friends. 

“Hi,” you say, at a loss for words despite the grin spreading across your face.

“It’s been a while. How are you?” Karen asks carefully. She looks you over, likely taking note of your weather-appropriate outfit. You’re sure Matt would have told them what happened, but none of them would know what became of you afterward.

“I’m—” you cut yourself off, forcing yourself not to give the same polite ‘I’m good’ you give everyone. “I’m doing a lot better now. Thank you.” 

Thanking her for asking, thanking all of them for helping you.

“How’s Dean?” Matt asks next, making Foggy elbow him in the side. 

“Don’t know,” you shrug. “Haven’t seen him in a while.” Matt tries to hide a smile, but it still forces its way through. 

“Good,” he says unabashedly. Foggy elbows him again with a scolding Matt! under his breath.

“It’s fine,” you laugh. “It’s… it’s a good thing.”

“You should eat with us,” Foggy suggests. “We should catch up.”

Warmth filled you, and you were about to jump at the chance to say yes when the server finally arrived.

“I’m so sorry about your wait. Here’s your order,” the young woman says to you, crushing your excitement.

You offer your thanks and take your bag before turning back to your almost-friends.

“Another time,” you say apologetically, gesturing with your bag. 

“What’s your number,” Matt says before you can make your way to the door. “We can set something up for another time.”

You bite your lip, trying to hide your grin. “I’d like that.”

[smoothestjazz]

In the wake of the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol by a riotous mob of the then-president’s supporters, Woodward writes that Milley insisted on securing a meeting with the then-newly-minted attorney general, Merrick Garland, to urge him to investigate domestic violent extremism and far-right militia movements.

According to Woodward, a senior Department of Justice lawyer said at the time that Milley’s sit-down with Garland might have been the first-ever meeting between a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the country’s top civilian law enforcement official. He writes that the general asked for the meeting because he was “deeply convinced” that Trump remained “a danger to the country” even though he had been forced from office after Biden’s election win.

But the Army veteran expressed even more strident concerns to Woodward himself at a March 2023 meeting at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC.

Woodward writes that when he approached Milley at a reception, the general spoke first and told him: “We gotta talk.”

He told the journalist that “no one has ever been as dangerous to this country” as the former president.

He asked: “Do you realize, do you see what this man is?”

“He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country,” he said.

“A fascist to the core,” Milley repeated.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Harry Davies, Bethan McKernan, Yuval Abraham, and Meron Rapoport at The Guardian:

When the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC) announced he was seeking arrest warrants against Israeli and Hamas leaders, he issued a cryptic warning: “I insist that all attempts to impede, intimidate or improperly influence the officials of this court must cease immediately.” Karim Khan did not provide specific details of attempts to interfere in the ICC’s work, but he noted a clause in the court’s foundational treaty that made any such interference a criminal offence. If the conduct continued, he added, “my office will not hesitate to act”. The prosecutor did not say who had attempted to intervene in the administration of justice, or how exactly they had done so. Now, an investigation by the Guardian and the Israeli-based magazines +972 and Local Call can reveal how Israel has run an almost decade-long secret “war” against the court. The country deployed its intelligence agencies to surveil, hack, pressure, smear and allegedly threaten senior ICC staff in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries.

Israeli intelligence captured the communications of numerous ICC officials, including Khan and his predecessor as prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, intercepting phone calls, messages, emails and documents. The surveillance was ongoing in recent months, providing Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, with advance knowledge of the prosecutor’s intentions. A recent intercepted communication suggested that Khan wanted to issue arrest warrants against Israelis but was under “tremendous pressure from the United States”, according to a source familiar with its contents. Bensouda, who as chief prosecutor opened the ICC’s investigation in 2021, paving the way for last week’s announcement, was also spied on and allegedly threatened. Netanyahu has taken a close interest in the intelligence operations against the ICC, and was described by one intelligence source as being “obsessed” with intercepts about the case. Overseen by his national security advisers, the efforts involved the domestic spy agency, the Shin Bet, as well as the military’s intelligence directorate, Aman, and cyber-intelligence division, Unit 8200. Intelligence gleaned from intercepts was, sources said, disseminated to government ministries of justice, foreign affairs and strategic affairs.

A covert operation against Bensouda, revealed on Tuesday by the Guardian, was run personally by Netanyahu’s close ally Yossi Cohen, who was at the time the director of Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad. At one stage, the spy chief even enlisted the help of the then president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Joseph Kabila. Details of Israel’s nine-year campaign to thwart the ICC’s inquiry have been uncovered by the Guardian, an Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Local Call, a Hebrew-language outlet. The joint investigation draws on interviews with more than two dozen current and former Israeli intelligence officers and government officials, senior ICC figures, diplomats and lawyers familiar with the ICC case and Israel’s efforts to undermine it. Contacted by the Guardian, a spokesperson for the ICC said it was aware of “proactive intelligence-gathering activities being undertaken by a number of national agencies hostile towards the court”. They said the ICC was continually implementing countermeasures against such activity, and that “none of the recent attacks against it by national intelligence agencies” had penetrated the court’s core evidence holdings, which had remained secure.

A spokesperson for Israel’s prime minister’s office said: “The questions forwarded to us are replete with many false and unfounded allegations meant to hurt the state of Israel.” A military spokesperson added: “The IDF [Israel Defense Forces] did not and does not conduct surveillance or other intelligence operations against the ICC.” Since it was established in 2002, the ICC has served as a permanent court of last resort for the prosecution of individuals accused of some of the world’s worst atrocities. It has charged the former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, the late Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi and most recently, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Khan’s decision to seek warrants against Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, along with Hamas leaders implicated in the 7 October attack, marks the first time an ICC prosecutor has sought arrest warrants against the leader of a close western ally.

[...] That “war” commenced in January 2015, when it was confirmed that Palestine would join the court after it was recognised as a state by the UN general assembly. Its accession was condemned by Israeli officials as a form of “diplomatic terrorism”. One former defence official familiar with Israel’s counter-ICC effort said joining the court had been “perceived as the crossing of a red line” and “perhaps the most aggressive” diplomatic move taken by the Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank. “To be recognised as a state in the UN is nice,” they added. “But the ICC is a mechanism with teeth.” [...] Israel, like the US, Russia and China, is not a member. After Palestine’s acceptance as an ICC member, any alleged war crimes – committed by those of any nationality – in occupied Palestinian territories now fell under Bensouda’s jurisdiction.

The Guardian's report on how Israel led a 9-year intimidation war campaign against the ICC is a must-read.

[filmmakerdreamst]

“Life with Derek” is Back Again!

Life with Luca is a hour and a half spin-off movie based on the 2000’s Canadian Sitcom Life with Derek, set eighteen years after its predecessor. The story follows two step-siblings, Casey McDonald (Ashley Leggat), now a court lawyer and mother of three. And Derek Venturi (Michael Seater), now a successful musician in Paris and a single dad. As history repeats itself, they both have rebellious fourteen year old teenagers, pushing their buttons. So in order to get a break, they both have the idea of dropping them off with their grandparents for their anniversary, and to their surprise, they end up meeting each other instead. With help, they figure out how to co-parent their kids together for a weekend, and hijinks naturally ensue.

The original show Life with Derek was all about a blended family. In which two teenage step-siblings, Casey and Derek (the eldest children in the household and equally self absorbed), clash; fighting each other to take control of the house, their younger siblings, their school and their world.

The episodes consisted of simple, domestic family antics, containing smart jokes that would make adults and children alike laugh. The storylines were mature enough for teenagers to be interested but not so mature that it would put children off from watching.

Life with Derek was a show that prided itself in being character driven and more realistic than some of the family shows that was airing around that time, especially on networks such as Disney Channel.

However, it became well known and successful to this day for the slow burning subtextual “love affair” between the two step-siblings, Casey and Derek which undoubtedly acted as the backbone of the series. And the reason why it got picked up for a reboot fifteen years after the final episode aired.

When I first read the premise of Life with Luca (when the announcement came out that they were going to make a Life with Derek reboot in 2020), I was immediately judgemental as often reboots can erase character growth. It just seemed like another manufactured money making remake (a copy for the next generation) rather than an actual continuation of the original show.

And while the movie does have alot of tropes repeated from the original i.e. Casey and Derek’s kids Skyler and Luca clash from the beginning, two families not really knowing each other previously merging for the first time etc. The writers had the ability to make these tropes most importantly character driven and natural so the audience didn’t notice the similarities so much. And when they did, it’s treated as a familiar nod rather than a direct copy.

Luca and Skyler

Part of the fun of the original was the ongoing romantic tension between Casey and Derek, and I was worried we were going to have a repeat of that with their kids, Luca and Skyler but thankfully the casting and writing department was alot more thorough. And while they do clash at the beginning, its presented more of a culture clash because of how they were raised, and it evolved into a familial relationship quite quickly. I loved watching their bonding moments.

They managed to keep the core message from the original ‘of family and building a family even when you hate your situation at the beginning’. I felt they did a good job of mirroring that message with Luca and Skyler.

Out of the two, I felt like Skyler was the more fleshed out. The casting for her was amazing, she looks just like Derek’s daughter. I loved how, even though she was clearly meant to be the ‘Casey character’ — organised and dramatic — she still had her own vibe. She had the carefree attitude and style from Derek’s parenting, but still was able to be responsible as she essentially raised herself.

Luca, (the ‘Derek’ character) the more rebellious counterpart, is suggested to be acting out due to his chaotic home life, rather than that’s just “how he is” unlike Derek who was labelled as the bad guy from the start. He’s still very much Casey’s son as he doesn’t have some of the toxic masculinity that Derek possessed in the original show. And he has a few neurotic tendencies from her style of parenting as well. But I almost feel we didn’t get enough of him.

If and when Life with Luca does get picked up as a TV Series later on, it would be nice to flesh out his character alot more (and hers), because there was clearly alot of conflict that the two of them both had, his dad working overseas and her mum having a bran new family, that can’t really be fleshed out thoroughly in a hour and a half film.

George and Nora

George and Nora’s plot was by far the most ridiculous (hint, jewel thief car chase), but I loved seeing them on screen again. It was nice to see how their relationship was still going strong after all this time. Along with their cameo, there were some other great ones such as Sam and Mr Lassiter. It was a shame we didn’t get to see the rest of the blended family such as Edwin and Lizzie and Marti, even for a second at the anniversary party at the end. But I understand the screenwriters wanted to save that for a TV Series later on, so they could be fully explored more.

Simon

Simon, the youngest of the McDonald-Venturi’s (that was a storyline for the last two episodes of the original) was by far my favourite addition to the film. This was surprising, since that storyline in Life with Derek wasn’t exactly my favourite around the time of watching because I don’t necessarily agree that the step-family gaining a shared child made them “a proper family”. Thankfully, Life with Luca proved me wrong as he was so lovable. I loved how he was a perfect mix of both of the McDonalds and the Venturi’s, but mostly the Venturi’s as he was so clumsy.

Casey and Derek

As always, the strongest parts of the movie, were when they were focusing on Casey and Derek, individually and together. I loved how they went with careers that naturally meshed with their personalities. Casey being a married lawyer in Toronto and Derek being a travelling musician in Paris with his daughter as a best friend. Watching Derek be a parent was amazing, especially since he was shown to be really good with kids in the original.

When the two finally meet up again, the audience can see that their friendship has definitely progressed; they have finally learnt to respect one another even though they haven’t spoken one on one for a long time. But they still maintained their comedic banter. It was refreshing to see that character growth. It was nice that it hadn’t backtracked in typical reboot fashion for the sake of drama/entertainment since that relationship was the core of why the original worked.

Now in the original show, Life with Derek, it was never confirmed that Casey and Derek had romantic feelings for each other, but there was alot of speculation by the fans, because of all the subtext going on throughout the series.

The actors, Michael Seater and Ashley Leggat, put a rest to some of the speculation in 2016 and confirmed in a article by MTV that because ‘the fans were so into Casey and Derek being a couple, [they] would find subtext in their lines to give the fans what they desire’

Life with Derek was primarily about the first four years that they [Casey and Derek] lived together. Their relationship mostly consisted of an antagonistic push and pull/tug of war even though at the end of the day, they were always there for each other when it really counted. Even though Casey and Derek claimed to dislike each other, it was very clear that the two had developed a deep bond over the course of the series.

However, Casey and Derek’s relationship in Life with Luca is interesting in a way that they’re no longer in a “sibling dynamic” in which they were previously forced into. Mostly because they’re no longer teenagers and the fact that they’ve barely interacted or lived together in eighteen years since life both took them in very different directions. Which creates a paradox in itself.

It’s this incredibly grey area throughout the movie where they’re adjusting to each other again, slipping into their old bickering, confiding in each other about parenthood, all while transitioning into a mum and dad dynamic while they’re co-parenting the children they had with other people.

Before the movie came out, I was positive, because of the criticisms and hype surrounding the show and the pairing, that the writers were going to diminish the potential of a romance between the characters in fear of backlash. For example, have Casey in a happy marriage, Derek dating around and eventually gain a love interest at the end of the film. Also, trying to make their relationship as “Sibling- Esque” as possible.

Even though I knew from the premise of the reboot, that they were going to move in together, and there would be a few romantic undertones scattered in for the fans, I’d thought they’d play it off more as an “aunt and uncle babysitting the kids”.

But the opposite ended up happening. Casey has an absent husband who continuously leaves her and her kids alone while he plays hockey over seas — breaking his promises that he was going to retire before their kids were teenagers. Derek supposedly hasn’t dated anyone in fourteen years nor mentions flirting with other women. He even has a distant relationship with his daughters mum.

The moment Derek comes, he almost takes ‘the role of her husband’ as he sees Casey isn’t doing so well. He does the cooking for their kids — Casey even mentions that her husband does all the cooking while Derek is preparing dinner — babysits her little ones, attempts to calm Casey down when she’s getting too stressed, helps arrange an anniversary party for their parents so she’s able to get on with her work. And even though, they are referred as “Aunt” and “Uncle” in the movie, it’s also made apparent that they’re essentially “Mum and Dad” to their children as well.

One of Casey’s little ones, Molly even makes a “catch it or you’ll miss it” comment to Derek’s kid in one scene “I wish we were cousins AND sisters.”

Their last scene together at the end of the movie, Casey comes up to Derek saying ‘You’re gonna come home again soon, before the kids go to university?’ in which Derek heavily implies that he wants to move into her guest house to potentially raise their kids together, making a direct parallel to her husband not retiring from hockey and coming home from Europe, even after their kids grew up.

That moment is possibly why I came out from watching the movie thinking ‘If Casey and Derek don’t get together after this; then it’s bad writing’ because their scenes in the reboot didn’t feel like random “fanservice moments” like in the original; it felt like a genuine setup for a romance. Even if it can’t be written explicitly, due to the network, it is the most logical ending for their characters and the movie just made that ending seem even more inevitable.

Despite my enjoyment of Life with Luca, and overall it being a Great Comeback of a 2000’s Classic — it’s not a movie that can really work on its own. Finishing it left me feeling unsatisfied and wanting more. It felt very much like an introduction than a complete product. Its very apparent they made this movie so it could be picked up as a TV series later on, since there is alot of plot threads that are unexplored, unfinished or left open.

Life with Luca is not a reunion movie. It’s only page one.

“Life with Derek” is Back Again! by Ellie Hersey

[robfinancialtip]

Join Paul Tally in a captivating conversation with Luz Castro, a passionate policy advocate based in Bell Gardens, California, dedicated to championing the rights of undocumented and newly arrived immigrants. Luz's journey is deeply inspired by her mother, an undocumented domestic helper who tirelessly supported her family.

Luz takes us through her educational path, from high school to college, where her interests in labor organizing and environmental justice blossomed. She delves into the disparities in resource access across different socioeconomic groups, with a particular focus on education and employment.

Furthermore, Luz shares her experiences working in Washington, D.C., where she tirelessly represents the voices of immigrants in federal policymaking. The interviewer underscores the vital role she plays in bridging resource gaps and highlighting the concerns of immigrant communities. Luz highlights a critical issue: the unequal access to instructors and resources for test preparation, a factor that can significantly impact success in various trades and careers. The conversation shifts to Luz's role as a field deputy for a member of Congress. She discusses her responsibilities, including staying abreast of local politics and events and representing the Congresswoman at meetings when needed. Community outreach efforts are also part of her mandate.

Next, the discussion centers on Luz's policy efforts, particularly in immigration. She elaborates on her involvement in crafting legislation to provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants in the United States. Luz underscores the importance of research, collaboration, and consultation with those directly affected by immigration regulations. She emphasizes the urgent need for updated immigration policies, citing the lack of meaningful reform since 1986.

Luz addresses the challenges undocumented immigrants face in the U.S. and advocates for comprehensive immigration reform, especially for those who have lived there for many years without a clear path to citizenship.

Expressing concern about the large number of unauthorized immigrants and asylum seekers, Luz points out the outdated nature of the immigration system, making it cumbersome to navigate. She recommends leveraging existing rules, such as the immigration registry, to provide relief to long-term immigrants.

Luz also highlights the legality of street vending in Los Angeles County, where there are no specific prohibited vending zones. She discusses the potential conflicts between street vendors and brick-and-mortar businesses, emphasizing the importance of understanding the legal rights and complexities involved in balancing their interests.

In this engaging conversation, Luz emphasizes the value of internships for aspiring advocates, lawyers, and public servants. She encourages students to seek internships aligned with their passions, as these experiences offer valuable insights into professionals' daily work in their fields. Moreover, she notes the positive trend of paid internships, which can be invaluable when transitioning into full-time employment after college.

Luz advises students to tap into the resources provided by their college's career centers, cultural centers, and relevant departments. Seeking guidance from mentors is equally important, as they can offer support and insights into the interview process and professional growth. In summary, this conversation is a powerful reminder to actively pursue opportunities, seek assistance when needed, and gain real-world experience through internships and mentorship to prepare for a fulfilling career in advocacy and related disciplines.

DISCLAIMER: The following program contains material, situations, and/or themes that may disturb some viewers. Viewer discretion is advised.

A National CORE Production supporting the Hope Through Housing Foundation. Join us to uncover the art of turning dreams into reality.

[bbc2pastmidnight]

So obsessed with the variability of valid readings of Edgeworth’s relationship with sex / sexuality. This is slightly long so I’ll put it under the cut.

He’s a virgin; he’s a whore. He’s trans (both ways, depending who you ask or what mood they’re in); he’s the most unbearable rich cis gay man to ever walk the earth (you know the type). He’s aromantic; he falls in love with anyone who’s nice to him, even if he knows that outward “niceness” is just their personality. He can’t love anyone whom he can’t respect, so he likes to be put in his place (roughly); he finds comfort in his own projection of superiority, and feels his best standing and gloating over someone he’s defeated (in any sense). He revels in the simplicity of taking a physical beating; he just wants to be held. He can’t stand to give up control, and will do anything to anyone to maintain it; having control entirely seized from him is the best thing he can imagine. He’s a sadist, he’s a masochist, or he’s too tired, so tired of perfectly fulfilling every role in his life already. He just wants a hand to squeeze quietly under the table, to have a reason to learn how to cook; domesticity repels and terrifies him, who grew up in a cold house and expects to die in the familiar comfort of a frigid one (where the spotless kitchen is never used and the cushions are always arranged just-so, where he can let his guard down, focus on work till the wee hours of the morning and shuffle to a cool, silent bedroom: numb, but not painful).

He’s a top; he’s a bottom. He typically finds sex repulsive and awkward and alarming; or he doesn’t view it as anything personal at all, the same as going out for a drink after work to try and unwind. He’s dying to submit to something; he’ll fight tooth and claw before someone sees him so vulnerable. He knows he’s handsome and how to use this to get what he wants (and has done since an alarmingly young age); he’s so buttoned-up and stiff that the impropriety of attempting such a thing is unthinkable.

I honestly feel that there’s text to support one, both, or a mixture of any of these readings, and seeing other peoples’ interpretations rarely feels entirely wrong because he’s such a self-contradictory character. He often seems to know what he wants, and he sometimes seems to know what’s good for him, yet he rarely seems to desire what would be good for him at all. Even as his character develops and grows older and seems to accept himself more and grow back into the person he always seems to have been at his core, there’s still this stubborn sense of self-loathing that’s been hammered into him for so long. It’s nowhere near as bad as when he was young, like in the first game or in flashback cases, and he’s clearly doing better and is a lot more comfortable, but even if he’s attained some level of not-hurting, it doesn’t mean that he’s good, you know ? And this seems to hold him back from…something. I think from what depends on your reading of him, ultimately. But some young, vindictive part of him still doesn’t want to lose, somehow, I think. And this presents as very contradictory actions and reactions over time. This can be said of his whole character, not just his sexuality, obviously, but I think that since there is so much writing and speculation about his (and other characters’s) sexual preferences among fans etc, it is a useful vessel for communicating this important aspect of his character, this push and pull of his own psyche.

I’ll definitely cringe to look back on this someday and I haven’t even proofread it now, but I do have brain worms that I wanted to release into the ether. Now that they have seen the open air (the worms, I mean) I will retreat back into the hole from whence i came.

PS. I can’t believe this is the pink guy from gay lawyer game

[wheretheharekissesthefox]

The hand that feeds is the hand that's loved

Chapter 2: Meat and Greet

Astarion's an aspiring lawyer, who's running from his past and suffers from a long list of food allergies. Gale's a former culinary prodigy, who's going through a nasty divorce and suffers from cooking fatigue. They meet in the snack aisle.

Trigger Waring (18+): Alternate Universe: Modern Setting, No Magic, No Vampire, No Wizard, Lawyer Astarion, Cook Gale, Astarion Has Food Allergies, Gale Is Depressed, Astarion Everything Is A Transaction Ancunin, POV Astarion, Emotional Rollercoaster, Feelings, Overthinking, PTSD, Dissociation, Past Domestic Abuse, Past Non-Con/Rape, Slow Burn (but not too slow),

Additional trigger warning: This chapter discusses rape/non-con, meaning of consent, age of consent, and paedophilia/underage sex

Read on AO3

Astarion stared at the message again that he'd received at 3 a.m. two days ago. Gale Dekarios. That name had rang a bell, so he'd looked him up on the internet. Of course, Dekarios turned out to be that hyped up, fancy culinary prodigy, who'd been dragged across every newspaper, magazine, and morning show in Faerûn. As the youngest head chef in history, he'd worked at the luxury chain restaurant WEAVE in Waterdeep until some kind of scandal regarding plagiarised cooking recipes had occurred. During said shitshow, it was discovered that Gale was married to Mystra Weave, the owner of the restaurant chain and his boss, which led to scepsis regarding Dekarios' creditability.

Despite not being interested in the topic, Astarion had heard about it. After all, he wasn't living under a rock.

"Stop staring at your phone and do your work," growled his colleague, Minthara Baenre, when she walked past him to get her fifth black coffee this morning. That woman was hard-core and incredibly scary.

"I'm scheduling a date with a new client," Astarion defended his action, which, technically, wasn't a lie. He was just procrastinating it a little.

Taking on the Dekarios/Weave case would be rather interesting, but on the flipside, it would attract attention, which would inform HIM of his whereabouts. Astarion was biting his nails, pondering the dilemma.

"Oy, silver fox! Pull your finger out!" snarled Minthara. Astarion stared daggers at her as he pointedly lifted the phone to his ear.

"Hello, Mister Ancunín?"

"Yes. Good morning, Mister Dekarios. I'm calling because of your message."

"Ah, I apologise about the unprofessionalism of my writing. See, I was rather drunk that night."

Gale sounded incredibly embarrassed, and Astarion remembered how cutely the cook had blushed in the snack aisle.

"I don't mind, darling, and I'd love to take your case."

The pet name just slipped, as it so often did. Way to go, Ancunín. Very professional.

"Oh, hm, thank you very much. I'm looking forward to work with you," Gale replied, sounding giddy with excitement. "Shall we schedule a meeting, so that I can bring you all the documents and we can have a conversation."

"We shall," smirked Astarion. "I'd be free this afternoon, if you'd be up for something spontaneous."

"Yes, that's perfect. What time?"

"How about at two?"

"That works for me, yes. Thank you so much, Mister Ancunín. I appreciate your efforts."

"Don't thank me yet, Mister Dekarios. I haven't done anything yet."

"Actually, you have. You offered me your help, and that's more that I could have asked for, so, thank you."

Astarion was stunned into silence. Nobody had ever been so sweet about it before.

"Well, it's my job," he finally got out.

"Still, thank you, Mister Ancunín. See you soon."

"Yes. Goodbye."

"Goodbye, Astarion."

Why did his name sound like poetry on Gale's tongue? Astarion stared at the ceiling. He was fucked.

As planned, they met up at Astarion's office in the afternoon. Gale arrived with a bag full of documents and material from his last lawyer. Astarion could barely hold back a disgusted snort when he'd heard who it had been. Bongle was an utter moron who couldn't tell apart left from right. Thank fuck, Gale was smart enough to change lawyers. With a hum, Astarion scanned all the papers, looking for clues where he could start best and pin down Mystra.

"Alright, Mister Dekarios. I know I'm not your therapist, but I need to know everything about your relationship, even the uncomfortable parts. It's the only way we'll win the case."

The statement made Gale visibly uncomfortable. Interesting. Most clients loved to rant about their shitty partners, except if – Astarion's jaw tightened and the now familiar feeling of nausea opened up its maw in the pit of his stomach.

"I... I don't know where to start," muttered Gale, playing with the hem of his dress shirt.

"Literally anywhere, darling," Astarion coaxed.

"Well, the art of cooking runs in my blood, you see. My mother's a fantastic cook and worked with my uncle, who was the owner of Elminster's Tower."

Aha, a nepo baby then.

"The former fast food chain?" Astarion asked and Gale nodded. "When I was a teen, I met up with my friends there sometimes. They always served the best fries and drumsticks. That was before I was aware of my food allergies, of course."

"Yes, the chain belonged to my uncle until it... well..."

"Until it went bankrupt?"

"Yes. Ahem, how much do you know about that event?"

"Nothing, only that there's no more Elminster's Tower," Astarion answered honestly.

"Mmh, well..." Gale fidgeted on the sofa. "I was what one might call a culinary prodigy, who, from an early age, could create art with food. Because of my family's history, it was kind of logical that I'd step into their footsteps. They never told me that I have to do so, but I still felt pressured to become one of Faerûn's best chefs. Thus, I applied to Waterdeep's Culinary School and worked – pardon my Rashemi – my arse off. The school operates on a point system instead of grades, and the more points you have, the more established the restaurant is in which you absolve your internship. Since I was one of the top five students, I was assigned to a WEAVE restaurant. That's where I've met Mystra, and she was my teacher. In time, she became my muse, and later on, even my lover and wife."

Astarion's lawyer senses were tingling and he wanted to know: "How old where you when your relationship with Mystra started?"

"We started dating when I was eighteen."

"And before?"

"We were not dating before."

"That wasn't my question."

"Must you know about such private matters?"

"I'm your lawyer, Mister Dekarios. I need to know everything that has to do with your wife and your relationship with her."

Gale started fidgeting even more now, visibly uncomfortable. Astarion's stomach clenched.

"Did you have sex with Mystra before you were of legal age?"

"No. – Not really."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Silence.

"Gale, what do you mean?"

The addressed looked at him with pleading eyes.

"I..."

"Gale! Tell me!"

"I might have gone down on her. Before. When I was sixteen."

Astarion wanted to retch.

"Fucking hell, Gale!"

"But it - it wasn't real sex. It doesn't count."

"Is that what she told you?"

The brunet stared at the floor.

"Gale."

"Yes."

"Fuck. God."

"But we only had sex when I was eighteen," Gale repeated stoically. Astarion felt the urge to scream and rip his hair out. He took a deep breath and tried a different tactic to hammer some sense into the other man.

"If, for example, an employer forces his employee to suck his dick, can they report it as sexual assault?"

"Of course."

"So, you agree that oral sex counts as sex. Because otherwise, it couldn't be classified as 'sexual' assault, right?"

Gale swallowed thickly, eyes still fixed on the floor.

"Right," he finally muttered.

"In other words, you were in a sexual relationship with an adult while you were still a minor," Astarion summarised.

"It wasn't that way," Gale tried to defend himself. "I didn't feel any different about it when I turned eighteen, so, why was I labelled immature before?"

"Because that's the law," Astarion gritted out. "Your feelings might have been the same, but, legally speaking, you were still a minor. And Mystra knew it."

"That's why we waited and only had sex when I was officially an adult."

"Just because you waited to have penetrative sex, doesn't mean you didn't have sex."

"It didn't count." God, this man would be the death of him! Astarion took another deep breath. "We kept our relationship a secret, for both our sakes. It would have been bad for our images and would have looked unprofessional."

"Of course," Astarion got pass his clenched teeth. He felt his eye twitch. "Please, continue."

Gale nodded.

"I became the head chef of the WEAVE restaurant here in Waterdeep when I was twenty, and therefore, I'm the youngest chef in history."

"Congratulations."

Astarion couldn't keep the mocking tone from his voice, but Gale didn't seem offended at all. Or rather, it went right over his head.

"Thanks, but I'm not telling you this to fish for compliments. I owe my success to my considerable talent and hard work, not my family history or romantic relationship, and I want people to know that."

"And then the scandal happened and all went up in flames," Astarion remarked. "Now, everyone seems to think you only got all your achievements due to nepotism and fucking your way to the top."

Gale seemed to simultaneously blush and go pale. It was an interesting phenomenon to witness.

"Yes, well... what can I say..." he mumbled. "It was all rather unfortunate. – Ahem, how much do you know about the..."

"The shitshow?"

Gale nodded sheepishly, and Astarion considered his answer.

"To be honest, I only caught the headlines," the latter admitted, "so, I'm not sure how much of it is true. If I remember correctly, your wife accused you of stealing and plagiarising her unfinished cooking recipes and taking credit for them. That's what started the court case, but then, some overzealous journalist did some digging and found your marriage contract. And now, where here."

"Unfortunately," Gale replied with an unexpected bitterness. "It's a lie though. A cover-up – all of it."

"Oh? How so?" Interested, Astarion leaned forward. He never shunned good gossip.

"I - I didn't steal anything from her. All the recipes Mystra claims I've stolen are my own creations," Gale explained, suddenly livid. "But that wasn't even the reason why we got into an argument. It was because I defied her orders." Gale straightened up and looked at Astarion. Those amber eyes were big, soulful, expressive, and so full of rebellious passion it made Astarion dizzy. Depending on the incidence of light, they almost seemed green sometimes. Astarion could drown in those pools of forest colours. "Do you know what the Karsite cuisine is?" The lawyer shook his head, and the brunet's eyes sparkled with fervour. It was utterly enticing. "Karsus Netheril, a famous cook from Evereska, invented a very special type of molecular cooking. Do you know what that is?" Again, Astarion shook his head. "Molecular gastronomy is a scientific way of cooking. Chemistry basically. It allows you to create the most extravagant dishes with the help of liquid nitrogen, thermal immersion circulators, dehydrators, emulsifiers, spherification, and so on. I think it's utterly fascinating despite its downsides, but Mystra cannot stand it and wants nothing to do with it in her kitchens. We had a lot of arguments about it and I tried to convince her to give me a chance to create a single Karsite-inspired menu to surprise the guests with something new and original. I pouted, pleaded, swore my ambition was only to serve her better. But she only smiled patronisingly like I'm still a child, and told me to stay in my line. Mystra keeps everyone in check, but I sought to cross her boundaries. I sought to prove myself worthy to her, and that we're equals. I surely paid the price for my folly." For a moment, Gale remained silent, then he added: "I started experimenting at night when she was busy otherwise and I had the kitchen for myself, and I was so close to success, but then..." He turned his head, grimaced, and squeezed his eyes shut as his hand rubbed his chest, seemingly on impulse. "One of the glass measuring cups exploded over an open flame, sending shards of glass everywhere and set the nearby oil on fire. I almost burned down the kitchen. And the bottom of the exploded cup... It - it hit me right in the chest and almost pierced my heart. I'll forever bear the scars of my folly."

"Oh, Gale..." Astarion's heart ached in sympathy.

"Mystra was furious," the brunet continued, much quieter than before. "To keep face, she had to fire me, and then came the divorce and accusation of copyright theft. Mystra, she... She wants to destroy me." Gale rubbed at his chest again, looking sad and forlorn. "I never knew she hates me so much."

"Greed changes people," Astarion told him. "It corrupts their minds, and they turn into completely different characters."

"What do you mean?" Gale looked at him, confused. "Mystra's brilliant, she's Faerûn's number one chef and has five Michelin stars."

"And still, she envies you," Astarion replied. The brunet blinked at him.

"Envies me? Why?"

"Because, Gale –" Astarion leaned forward in his chair to minimise the distance between them, "– you're brilliant too, and not just that; you're also innovative and not afraid to try new things and challenge yourself. With your ambition and talents, you could easily dethrone her – and she knows it." Now, Astarion grinned at the cook. "You're her biggest rival, Gale, her biggest enemy. You're the only one who could outdo her."

The addressed's eyes widened in shocked surprise as realisation dawned on him.

"You're right... Heavens, you're right, Mister Ancunín!"

"Of course I am," quipped the lawyer, smirking. "Comes with the territory, I'm afraid."

At that, Gale laughed for the first time, and it was the most beautiful sound Astarion had ever heard. It saddened him that he had to ask a question that would definitely stop his client from laughing.

"Did your family know about the marriage before the scandal?"

"Of course! They weren't happy though."

"Care to explain why?"

"Well, ahem..." Gale glanced at him, with a crooked, sheepish smile. "I don't know if you're aware of this, but the one who bought Elminster's Tower after its bankruptcy was, ahem, Mystra."

Astarion burst into laughter.

"That surely made for some good, juicy family drama!"

"Please, let's not talk about that," groaned Gale. "Family dinners were always a nightmare! Four trained chefs in one place, and everyone saw it as a cooking challenge to outdo each other!" Astarion tried to stifle his snickering to no avail. Gale grinned too. "My uncle still holds a grudge that she bought the rights to his recipes along with all the restaurant properties."

Astarion perked up his ears.

"Come again?"

"Huh? My uncle still holds ���"

"No, no, darling, the part about what the purchase included."

"Ah... Elminster's recipes?"

"That's the one." Thoughtfully, Astarion leaned back in his comfy office chair. "Doesn't that look suspiciously familiar to you?"

"I know what you mean," laughed Gale, "but that's not the same."

"Isn't it?" Astarion looked at the brunet with deadly seriousness. "You don't think it's suspicious that Mystra bought the rights to your uncle's recipes, and now, she tries to steal yours? Do you truly believe that's a coincidence?" Gale stayed quiet and Astarion huffed. "Don't be stupid, darling. I know you're smarter than this."

"But she doesn’t need to steal the ideas of others. She’s a genius," Gale tried to reason, weakly.

"You think so? Maybe, after decades in the culinary scene, she's running out of ideas and is getting desperate."

"I think that's impossible," mumbled Gale, quietly.

"Maybe for you, but not everyone's the same," Astarion replied. "I think it's exactly happening what we think is happening; Mystra steals other people's recipes because she cannot come up with new creations herself."

The cook was chewing on his bottom lip. His worldview had just been turned upside down. The delusional image of his ex-wife came crashing down.

"Maybe, you're right," he muttered. "It's just... just really difficult to believe that her genius would ever come to an end. What if it happens to me one day?"

"Then, you'll figure something out," Astarion assured him.

"Alright." Gale nodded to himself. "Alright, let's do this. What's your plan, Mister Ancunín?"

"Well, now starts the fun part of my profession; finding enough evidence to pin your ex-wife down like a butterfly for display. I'll do my very best until our next meeting," the addressed promised. Gale looked relieved.

"Thank you. You have no idea what this means to me."

"I can imagine," smiled Astarion.

They scheduled a new date, stood up, and shook hands. Before Gale reached the door, Astarion held him back.

"One last question, Mister Dekarios. Is your family aware of when your relationship with Mystra started? Really started, not the polished version for the public eye?"

"No." Suddenly, Gale looked panicked. "You won't tell my mothers, will you?"

"No, I'm bound to maintain confidentiality, after all."

Gale sighed a breath of relief and Astarion's stomach roiled with nausea.

"I don't want to worry them unnecessarily."

"Of course."

"Thank you, I appreciate your professionalism," smiled Gale. "Goodbye, Mister Ancunín. Until next Monday."

"Goodbye, Mister Dekarios."

As soon as Gale had left the office, Astarion had to sit down to keep his legs from buckling. His hands were trembling and the blood was rushing in his ears as his heart hammered against his ribcage. Mystra Weave was a fucking groomer, and Gale was too sweet to deserve such an awful fate. Astarion tried to calm his breathing, counting slowly. Mystra reminded him of HIM. Astarion was glad that that bastard was rotting in jail, and he was hell-bent on putting Mystra behind bars too.

[lazilyhereandhazilyclear]

this is wild. the most damning deep dive i've ever read about the rot that infects israel to the core. (and the most astonishing article i've read in ages)

(like, the other day the governor of texas pardoned a murderer of a BLM protester. now, if that protester went on to run for office and won in a trump-led america (and trump talks about pardoning all those convicted for their roles in the january 6th coup attempt), that'd be analogous to what's happened, and been happening, in israel, for decades.)

(click the link above, and you can listen to the story. warning: this is looong; the audio is more than an hour and a half.)

for those who don't subscribe and have exceeded their limit for the month or whatever, i've copied and pasted in full:

The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel

by Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti

This story is told in three parts. The first documents the unequal system of justice that grew around Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. The second shows how extremists targeted not only Palestinians but also Israeli officials trying to make peace. The third explores how this movement gained control of the state itself. Taken together, they tell the story of how a radical ideology moved from the fringes to the heart of Israeli political power.

PART I.

IMPUNITY

By the end of October, it was clear that no one was going to help the villagers of Khirbet Zanuta. A tiny Palestinian community, some 150 people perched on a windswept hill in the West Bank near Hebron, it had long faced threats from the Jewish settlers who had steadily encircled it. But occasional harassment and vandalism, in the days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, escalated into beatings and murder threats. The villagers made appeal after appeal to the Israeli police and to the ever-present Israeli military, but their calls for protection went largely unheeded, and the attacks continued with no consequences. So one day the villagers packed what they could, loaded their families into trucks and disappeared.

Who bulldozed the village after that is a matter of dispute. The Israeli Army says it was the settlers; a senior Israeli police officer says it was the army. Either way, soon after the villagers left, little remained of Khirbet Zanuta besides the ruins of a clinic and an elementary school. One wall of the clinic, leaning sideways, bore a sign saying that it had been funded by an agency of the European Union providing “humanitarian support for Palestinians at risk of forcible transfer in the West Bank.” Near the school, someone had planted the flag of Israel as another kind of announcement: This is Jewish land now.

Such violence over the decades in places like Khirbet Zanuta is well documented. But protecting the people who carry out that violence is the dark secret of Israeli justice. The long arc of harassment, assault and murder of Palestinians by Jewish settlers is twinned with a shadow history, one of silence, avoidance and abetment by Israeli officials. For many of those officials, it is Palestinian terrorism that most threatens Israel. But in interviews with more than 100 people — current and former officers of the Israeli military, the National Israeli Police and the Shin Bet domestic security service; high-ranking Israeli political officials, including four former prime ministers; Palestinian leaders and activists; Israeli human rights lawyers; American officials charged with supporting the Israeli-Palestinian partnership — we found a different and perhaps even more destabilizing threat. A long history of crime without punishment, many of those officials now say, threatens not only Palestinians living in the occupied territories but also the State of Israel itself.

Many of the people we interviewed, some speaking anonymously, some speaking publicly for the first time, offered an account not only of Jewish violence against Palestinians dating back decades but also of an Israeli state that has systematically and increasingly ignored that violence. It is an account of a sometimes criminal nationalistic movement that has been allowed to operate with impunity and gradually move from the fringes to the mainstream of Israeli society. It is an account of how voices within the government that objected to the condoning of settler violence were silenced and discredited. And it is a blunt account, told for the first time by Israeli officials themselves, of how the occupation came to threaten the integrity of their country’s democracy.

The interviews, along with classified documents written in recent months, reveal a government at war with itself. One document describes a meeting in March, when Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, the head of Israel’s Central Command, responsible for the West Bank, gave a withering account of the efforts by Bezalel Smotrich — an ultraright leader and the official in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government with oversight over the West Bank — to undermine law enforcement in the occupied territory. Since Smotrich took office, Fox wrote, the effort to clamp down on illegal settlement construction has dwindled “to the point where it has disappeared.” Moreover, Fox said, Smotrich and his allies were thwarting the very measures to enforce the law that the government had promised Israeli courts it would take.

This is a story, pieced together and told in full for the first time, that leads to the heart of Israel. But it begins in the West Bank, in places like Khirbet Zanuta. From within the village’s empty ruins, there is a clear view across the valley to a tiny Jewish outpost called Meitarim Farm. Built in 2021, the farm has become a base of operations for settler attacks led by Yinon Levi, the farm’s owner. Like so many of the Israeli outposts that have been set up throughout the West Bank in recent years, Meitarim Farm is illegal. It is illegal under international law, which most experts say doesn’t recognize Israeli settlements in occupied land. It is illegal under Israeli law, like most settlements built since the 1990s.

Few efforts are made to stop the building of these outposts or the violence emanating from them. Indeed, one of Levi’s day jobs was running an earthworks company, and he has worked with the Israel Defense Forces to bulldoze at least one Palestinian village in the West Bank. As for the victims of that violence, they face a confounding and defeating system when trying to get relief. Villagers seeking help from the police typically have to file a report in person at an Israeli police station, which in the West Bank are almost exclusively located inside the settlements themselves. After getting through security and to the station, they sometimes wait for hours for an Arabic translator, only to be told they don’t have the right paperwork or sufficient evidence to submit a report. As one senior Israeli military official told us, the police “exhaust Palestinians so they won’t file complaints.”

And yet in November, with no protection from the police or the military, the former residents of Khirbet Zanuta and five nearby villages chose to test whether justice was still possible by appealing directly to Israel’s Supreme Court. In a petition, lawyers for the villagers, from Haqel, an Israeli human rights organization, argued that days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, a raiding party that included settlers and Israeli soldiers assaulted village residents, threatened murder and destroyed property throughout the village. They stated that the raid was part of “a mass transfer of ancient Palestinian communities,” one in which settlers working hand in hand with soldiers are taking advantage of the current war in Gaza to achieve the longer-standing goal of “cleansing” parts of the West Bank, aided by the “sweeping and unprecedented disregard” of the state and its “de facto consent to the massive acts of deportation.”

The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, and the relief the villagers are seeking — that the law be enforced — might seem modest. But our reporting reveals the degree to which decades of history are stacked against them: After 50 years of crime without punishment, in many ways the violent settlers and the state have become one.

Separate and Unequal

The devastating Hamas attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, the ongoing crisis of Israeli hostages and the grinding Israeli invasion and bombardment of the Gaza Strip that followed may have refocused the world’s attention on Israel’s ongoing inability to address the question of Palestinian autonomy. But it is in the West Bank where the corrosive long-term effects of the occupation on Israeli law and democracy are most apparent.

A sample of three dozen cases in the months since Oct. 7 shows the startling degree to which the legal system has decayed. In all the cases, involving misdeeds as diverse as stealing livestock and assault and arson, not a single suspect was charged with a crime; in one case, a settler shot a Palestinian in the stomach while an Israel Defense Forces soldier looked on, yet the police questioned the shooter for only 20 minutes, and never as a criminal suspect, according to an internal Israeli military memo. During our review of the cases, we listened to recordings of Israeli human rights activists calling the police to report various crimes against Palestinians. In some of the recordings, the police refused to come to the scene, claiming they didn’t know where the villages were; in one case, they mocked the activists as “anarchists.” A spokesman for the Israeli National Police declined to respond to repeated queries about our findings.

The violence and impunity that these cases demonstrate existed long before Oct. 7. In nearly every month before October, the rate of violent incidents was higher than during the same month in the previous year. And Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group, looking at more than 1,600 cases of settler violence in the West Bank between 2005 and 2023, found that just 3 percent ended in a conviction. Ami Ayalon, the head of Shin Bet from 1996 to 2000 — speaking out now because of his concern about Israel’s systemic failure to enforce the law — says this singular lack of consequences reflects the indifference of the Israeli leadership going back years. “The cabinet, the prime minister,” he says, “they signal to the Shin Bet that if a Jew is killed, that’s terrible. If an Arab is killed, that’s not good, but it’s not the end of the world.”

Ayalon’s assessment was echoed by many other officials we interviewed. Mark Schwartz, a retired American three-star general, was the top military official working at the United States Embassy in Jerusalem from 2019 to 2021, overseeing international support efforts for the partnership between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. “There’s no accountability,” he says now of the long history of settler crimes and heavy-handed Israeli operations in the West Bank. “These things eat away at trust and ultimately the stability and security of Israel and the Palestinian territories. It’s undeniable.”

How did a young nation turn so quickly on its own democratic ideals, and at what price? Any meaningful answer to these questions has to take into account how a half-century of lawless behavior that went largely unpunished propelled a radical form of ultranationalism to the center of Israeli politics. This is the history that is told here in three parts. In Part I, we describe the origins of a religious movement that established Jewish settlements in the newly won territories of Gaza and the West Bank during the 1970s. In Part II, we recount how the most extreme elements of the settler movement began targeting not only Palestinians but also Israeli leaders who tried to make peace with them. And in Part III, we show how the most established members of Israel’s ultraright, unpunished for their crimes, gained political power in Israel, even as a more radical generation of settlers vowed to eliminate the Israeli state altogether.

Many Israelis who moved to the West Bank did so for reasons other than ideology, and among the settlers, there is a large majority who aren’t involved in violence or other illegal acts against Palestinians. And many within the Israeli government fought to expand the rule of law into the territories, with some success. But they also faced harsh pushback, with sometimes grave personal consequences. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s efforts in the 1990s, on the heels of the First Intifada, to make peace with Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, gave rise to a new generation of Jewish terrorists, and they ultimately cost him his life.

The disagreement over how to handle the occupied territories and their residents has bred a complex and sometimes opaque system of law enforcement. At its heart are two separate and unequal systems of justice: one for Jews and another for Palestinians.

The West Bank is under the command of the I.D.F., which means that Palestinians are subject to a military law that gives the I.D.F. and the Shin Bet considerable authority. They can hold suspects for extended periods without trial or access to either a lawyer or the evidence against them. They can wiretap, conduct secret surveillance, hack into databases and gather intelligence on any Arab living in the occupied territory with few restrictions. Palestinians are subject to military — not civilian — courts, which are far more punitive when it comes to accusations of terrorism and less transparent to outside scrutiny. (In a statement, the I.D.F. said, “The use of administrative detention measures is only carried out in situations where the security authorities have reliable and credible information indicating a real danger posed by the detainee to the region’s security, and in the absence of other alternatives to remove the risk.” It declined to respond to multiple specific queries, in some cases saying “the events are too old to address.”)

According to a senior Israeli defense official, since Oct. 7, some 7,000 settler reservists were called back by the I.D.F., put in uniform, armed and ordered to protect the settlements. They were given specific orders: Do not leave the settlements, do not cover your faces, do not initiate unauthorized roadblocks. But in reality many of them have left the settlements in uniform, wearing masks, setting up roadblocks and harassing Palestinians.

All West Bank settlers are in theory subject to the same military law that applies to Palestinian residents. But in practice, they are treated according to the civil law of the State of Israel, which formally applies only to territory within the state’s borders. This means that Shin Bet might probe two similar acts of terrorism in the West Bank — one committed by Jewish settlers and one committed by Palestinians — and use wholly different investigative tools.

In this system, even the question of what behavior is being investigated as an act of terror is different for Jews and Arabs. For a Palestinian, the simple admission of identifying with Hamas counts as an act of terrorism that permits Israeli authorities to use severe interrogation methods and long detention. Moreover, most acts of violence by Arabs against Jews are categorized as a “terror” attack — giving Shin Bet and other services license to use the harshest methods at their disposal.

The job of investigating Jewish terrorism falls to a division of Shin Bet called the Department for Counterintelligence and Prevention of Subversion in the Jewish Sector, known more commonly as the Jewish Department. It is dwarfed both in size and prestige by Shin Bet’s Arab Department, the division charged mostly with combating Palestinian terrorism. And in the event, most incidents of settler violence — torching vehicles, cutting down olive groves — fall under the jurisdiction of the police, who tend to ignore them. When the Jewish Department investigates more serious terrorist threats, it is often stymied from the outset, and even its successes have sometimes been undermined by judges and politicians sympathetic to the settler cause. This system, with its gaps and obstructions, allowed the founders of groups advocating extreme violence during the 1970s and 1980s to act without consequences, and today it has built a protective cocoon around their ideological descendants.

Some of these people now run Israel. In 2022, just 18 months after losing the prime ministership, Benjamin Netanyahu regained power by forming an alliance with ultraright leaders of both the Religious Zionism Party and the Jewish Power party. It was an act of political desperation on Netanyahu’s part, and it ushered into power some truly radical figures, people — like Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir — who had spent decades pledging to wrest the West Bank and Gaza from Arab hands. Just two months earlier, according to news reports at the time, Netanyahu refused to share a stage with Ben-Gvir, who had been convicted multiple times for supporting terrorist organizations and, in front of television cameras in 1995, vaguely threatened the life of Rabin, who was murdered weeks later by an Israeli student named Yigal Amir.

Now Ben-Gvir was Israel’s national security minister and Smotrich was Israel’s finance minister, charged additionally with overseeing much of the Israeli government’s activities in the West Bank. In December 2022, a day before the new government was sworn in, Netanyahu issued a list of goals and priorities for his new cabinet, including a clear statement that the nationalistic ideology of his new allies was now the government’s guiding star. “The Jewish people,” it said, “have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the land of Israel.”

Two months after that, two Israeli settlers were murdered in an attack by Hamas gunmen near Huwara, a village in the West Bank. The widespread calls for revenge, common after Palestinian terror attacks, were now coming from within Netanyahu’s new government. Smotrich declared that “the village of Huwara needs to be wiped out.”

And, he added, “I think the State of Israel needs to do it.”

Birth of a Movement

With its overwhelming victory in the Arab-​Israeli War of 1967, Israel more than doubled the amount of land it controlled, seizing new territory in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem. Now it faced a choice: Would the new land become part of Israel or be bargained away as part of a future Palestinian state? To a cadre of young Israelis imbued with messianic zeal, the answer was obvious. The acquisition of the territories animated a religious political movement — Gush Emunim, or “Bloc of the Faithful” — that was determined to settle the newly conquered lands.

Gush Emunim followers believed that the coming of the messiah would be hastened if, rather than studying holy books from morning to night, Jews settled the newly occupied territories. This was the land of “Greater Israel,” they believed, and there was a pioneer spirit among the early settlers. They saw themselves as direct descendants of the earliest Zionists, who built farms and kibbutzim near Palestinian villages during the first part of the 20th century, when the land was under British control. But while the Zionism of the earlier period was largely secular and socialist, the new settlers believed they were advancing God’s agenda.

The legality of that agenda was an open question. The Geneva Conventions, to which Israel was a signatory, forbade occupying powers to deport or transfer “parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” But the status of the territory was, in the view of many within and outside the Israeli government, more complex. The settlers sought to create what some of them called “facts on the ground.” This put them into conflict with both the Palestinians and, at least putatively, the Israeli authorities responsible for preventing the spread of illegal settlements.

Whether or not the government would prove flexible on these matters became clear in April 1975 at Ein Yabrud, an abandoned Jordanian military base near Ofra, in the West Bank. A group of workers had been making the short commute from Israel most days for months to work on rebuilding the base, and one evening they decided to stay. They were aiming to establish a Jewish foothold in Judea and Samaria, the Israeli designation for the territories that make up the West Bank, and they had found a back door that required only the slightest push. Their leader met that same night with Shimon Peres, then Israel’s defense minister, who told the I.D.F. to stand down. Peres would treat the nascent settlement not as a community but as a “work camp” — and the I.D.F. would do nothing to hinder their work.

Peres’s maneuver was partly a sign of the weakness of Israel’s ruling Labor party, which had dominated Israeli politics since the country’s founding. The residual trauma of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 — when Israel was caught completely by surprise by Egyptian and Syrian forces before eventually beating back the invading armies — had shaken citizens’ belief in their leaders, and movements like Gush Emunim, directly challenging the authority of the Israeli state, had gained momentum amid Labor’s decline. This, in turn, energized Israel’s political right.

By the late 1970s, the settlers, bolstered in part by growing political support, were expanding in number. Carmi Gillon, who joined Shin Bet in 1972 and rose by the mid-1990s to become its director, recalls the evolving internal debates. Whose responsibility was it to deal with settlers? Should Israel’s vaunted domestic security service enforce the law in the face of clearly illegal acts of settlement? “When we realized that Gush Emunim had the backing of so many politicians, we knew we shouldn’t touch them,” he said in his first interview for this article in 2016.

One leader of the ultraright movement would prove hard to ignore, however. Meir Kahane, an ultraright rabbi from Flatbush, Brooklyn, had founded the militant Jewish Defense League in 1968 in New York. He made no secret of his belief that violence was sometimes necessary to fulfill his dream of Greater Israel, and he even spoke of plans to buy .22 caliber rifles for Jews to defend themselves. “Our campaign motto will be, ‘Every Jew a .22,’” he declared. In 1971, he received a suspended sentence on bomb-making charges, and at the age of 39 he moved to Israel to start a new life. From a hotel on Zion Square in Jerusalem, he started a school and a political party, what would become Kach, and drew followers with his fiery rhetoric. 

Kahane said he wanted to rewrite the stereotype of Jews as victims, and he argued, in often vivid terms, that Zionism and democracy are in fundamental tension. “Zionism came into being to create a Jewish state,” Kahane said in an interview with The Times in 1985, five years before he was assassinated by a gunman in New York. “Zionism declares that there is going to be a Jewish state with a majority of Jews, come what may. Democracy says, ‘No, if the Arabs are the majority then they have the right to decide their own fate.’ So Zionism and democracy are at odds. I say clearly that I stand with Zionism.”

A Buried Report

In 1977, the Likud party led a coalition that, for the first time in Israeli history, secured a right-wing majority in the country’s Parliament, the Knesset. The party was headed by Menachem Begin, a veteran of the Irgun, a paramilitary organization that carried out attacks against Arabs and British authorities in Mandatory Palestine, the British colonial entity that preceded the creation of Israel. Likud — Hebrew for “the alliance” — was itself an amalgam of several political parties. Kach itself was still on the outside and would always remain so. But its radical ideas and ambitions were moving closer to the mainstream.

Likud’s victory came 10 years after the war that brought Israel vast amounts of new land, but the issue of what to do with the occupied territories had yet to be resolved. As the new prime minister, Begin knew that addressing that question would mean addressing the settlements. Could there be a legal basis for taking the land? Something that would allow the settlements to expand with the full support of the state?

It was Plia Albeck, then a largely unknown bureaucrat in the Israeli Justice Ministry, who found Begin’s answer. Searching through the regulations of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled Palestine in the years preceding the British Mandate, she lit upon the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, a major effort at land reform. Among other provisions, the law enabled the sultan to seize any land that had not been cultivated by its owners for a number of years and that was not “within shouting distance” of the last house in the village. It did little to address the provisions of the Geneva Convention, but it was, for her department, precedent enough. Soon Albeck was riding in an army helicopter, mapping the West Bank and identifying plots of land that might meet the criteria of the Ottoman law. The Israeli state had replaced the sultan, but the effect was the same. Albeck’s creative legal interpretation led to the creation of more than 100 new Jewish settlements, which she referred to as “my children.”

At the same time, Begin was quietly brokering a peace deal with President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in the United States at Camp David. The pact they eventually negotiated gave the Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt and promised greater autonomy to Palestinians in the occupied territories in return for normalized relations with Israel. It would eventually win the two leaders a joint Nobel Peace Prize. But Gush Emunim and other right-wing groups saw the accords as a shocking reversal. From this well of anger sprang a new campaign of intimidation. Rabbi Moshe Levinger, one of the leaders of Gush Emunim and the founder of the settlement in the heart of Hebron, declared the movement’s purposes on Israeli television. The Arabs, he said, “must not be allowed to raise their heads.”

Leading this effort would be a militarized offshoot of Gush Emunim called the Jewish Underground. The first taste of what was to come arrived on June 2, 1980. Car bombs exploded as part of a complex assassination plot against prominent Palestinian political figures in the West Bank. The attack blew the legs off Bassam Shaka, the mayor of Nablus; Karim Khalaf, the mayor of Ramallah, was forced to have his foot amputated. Kahane, who in the days before the attack said at a news conference that the Israeli government should form a “Jewish terrorist group” that would “throw bombs and grenades to kill Arabs,” applauded the attacks, as did Rabbi Haim Druckman, a leader of Gush Emunim then serving in the Knesset, and many others within and outside the movement. Brig. Gen. Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, then the top I.D.F. commander in the West Bank, noting the injuries suffered by the Palestinian mayors under his watch, said simply, “It’s a shame they didn’t hit them a bit higher.” An investigation began, but it would be years before it achieved any results. Ben-Eliezer went on to become a leader of the Labor party and defense minister.

The threat that the unchecked attacks posed to the institutions and guardrails of Jewish democracy wasn’t lost on some members of the Israeli elite. As the violence spread, a group of professors at Tel Aviv University and Hebrew University in Jerusalem sent a letter to Yitzhak Zamir, Israel’s attorney general. They were concerned, they wrote, that illegal “private policing activity” against the Palestinians living in the occupied territories presented a “threat to the rule of law in the country.” The professors saw possible collusion between the settlers and the authorities. “There is a suspicion that similar crimes are not being handled in the same manner and some criminals are receiving preferential treatment over others,” the signatories to the letter said. “This suspicion requires fundamental examination.”

The letter shook Zamir, who knew some of the professors well. He was also well aware that evidence of selective law enforcement — one law for the Palestinians and another for the settlers — would rebut the Israeli government’s claim that the law was enforced equally and could become both a domestic scandal and an international one. Zamir asked Judith Karp, then Israel’s deputy attorney general for special duties, to lead a committee looking into the issue. Karp was responsible for handling the most delicate issues facing the Justice Ministry, but this would require even greater discretion than usual.

As her team investigated, Karp says, “it very quickly became clear to me that what was described in the letter was nothing compared to the actual reality on the ground.” She and her investigative committee found case after case of trespassing, extortion, assault and murder, even as the military authorities and the police did nothing or performed notional investigations that went nowhere. “The police and the I.D.F. in both action and inaction were really cooperating with the settler vandals,” Karp says. “They operated as if they had no interest in investigating when there were complaints, and generally did everything they could to deter the Palestinians from even submitting them.”

In May 1982, Karp and her committee submitted a 33-page report, determining that dozens of offenses were investigated insufficiently. The committee also noted that, in their research, the police had provided them with information that was incomplete, contradictory and in part false. They concluded that nearly half the investigations opened against settlers were closed without the police conducting even a rudimentary investigation. In the few cases in which they did investigate, the committee found “profound flaws.” In some cases, the police witnessed the crimes and did nothing. In others, soldiers were willing to testify against the settlers, but their testimonies and other evidence were buried.

It soon became clear to Karp that the government was going to bury the report. “We were very naïve,” she now recalls. Zamir had been assured, she says, that the cabinet would discuss the grave findings and had in fact demanded total confidentiality. The minister of the interior at the time, Yosef Burg, invited Karp to his home for what she recalls him describing as “a personal conversation.” Burg, a leader of the pro-settler National Religious Party, had by then served as a government minister in one office or another for more than 30 years. Karp assumed he wanted to learn more about her work, which could in theory have important repercussions for the religious right. “But, to my astonishment,” she says, “he simply began to scold me in harsh language about what we were doing. I understood that he wanted us to drop it.”

Karp announced she was quitting the investigative committee. “The situation we discovered was one of complete helplessness,” she says. When the existence of the report (but not its contents) leaked to the public, Burg denied having ever seen such an investigation. When the full contents of the report were finally made public in 1984, a spokesman for the Justice Ministry said only that the committee had been dissolved and that the ministry was no longer monitoring the problem.

A Wave of Violence

On April 11, 1982, a uniformed I.D.F. soldier named Alan Harry Goodman shot his way into the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem, one of the most sacred sites for Muslims around the world. Carrying an M16 rifle, standard issue in the Israeli Army, he killed two Arabs and wounded many more. When investigators searched Goodman’s apartment, they found fliers for Kach, but a spokesman for the group said that it did not condone the attack. Prime Minister Begin condemned the attack, but he also chastised Islamic leaders calling for a general strike in response, which he saw as an attempt to “exploit the tragedy.”

The next year, masked Jewish Underground terrorists opened fire on students at the Islamic College in Hebron, killing three people and injuring 33 more. Israeli authorities condemned the massacre but were less clear about who would be held to account. Gen. Ori Orr, commander of Israeli forces in the region, said on the radio that all avenues would be pursued. But, he added, “we don’t have any description, and we don’t know who we are looking for.”

The Jewish Department found itself continually behind in its efforts to address the onslaught. In April 1984, it had a major breakthrough: Its agents foiled a Jewish Underground plan to blow up five buses full of Palestinians, and they arrested around two dozen Jewish Underground members who had also played roles in the Islamic College attack and the bombings of the Palestinian mayors in 1980. But only after weeks of interrogating the suspects did Shin Bet learn that the Jewish Underground had been developing a scheme to blow up the Dome of the Rock mosque. The planning involved dozens of intelligence-gathering trips to the Temple Mount and an assessment of the exact amount of explosives that would be needed and where to place them. The goal was nothing less than to drag the entire Middle East into a war, which the Jewish Underground saw as a precondition for the coming of the messiah.

Carmi Gillon, who was head of Shin Bet’s Jewish Department at the time, says the fact that Shin Bet hadn’t learned about a plot involving so many people and such ambitious planning earlier was an “egregious intelligence failure.” And it was not the Shin Bet, he notes, who prevented the plot from coming to fruition. It was the Jewish Underground itself. “Fortunately for all of us, they decided to forgo the plan because they felt the Jewish people were not yet ready.”

PART II. 

WARNINGS

“You have to understand why all this is important now,” Ami Ayalon said, leaning in for emphasis. The sun shining into the backyard of the former Shin Bet director was gleaming off his bald scalp, illuminating a face that looked as if it were sculpted by a dull kitchen knife. “We are not discussing Jewish terrorism. We are discussing the failure of Israel.”

Ayalon was protective of his former service, insisting that Shin Bet, despite some failures, usually has the intelligence and resources to deter and prosecute right-wing terrorism in Israel. And, he said, they usually have the will. “The question is why they are not doing anything about it,” he said. “And the answer is very simple. They cannot confront our courts. And the legal community finds it almost impossible to face the political community, which is supported by the street. So everything starts with the street.”

By the early 1980s, the settler movement had begun to gain some traction within the Knesset, but it remained far from the mainstream. When Kahane himself was elected to the Knesset in 1984, the members of the other parties, including Likud, would turn and leave the room when he stood up to deliver speeches. One issue was that the continual expansion of the settlements was becoming an irritant in U.S.-Israel relations. During a 1982 trip by Begin to Washington, the prime minister had a closed-door meeting with the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to discuss Israel’s invasion of Lebanon that year, an effort to force out the P.L.O. that had been heavy with civilian casualties. According to The Times’s coverage of the session, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, then in his second term, had an angry exchange with Begin about the West Bank, telling him that Israel was losing support in this country because of the settlements policy.

But Israeli officials came to understand that the Americans were generally content to vent their anger about the issue without taking more forceful action — like restricting military aid to Israel, which was then, as now, central to the country’s security arrangements. After the Jewish Underground plotters of the bombings targeting the West Bank mayors and other attacks were finally brought to trial in 1984, they were found guilty and given sentences ranging from a few months to life in prison. The plotters showed little remorse, though, and a public campaign swelled to have them pardoned. Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir also made the case for pardoning them, saying they were “excellent, good people who have erred in their path and actions.” Clemency, Shamir suggested, would prevent a recurrence of Jewish terrorism.

In the end, President Chaim Herzog, against the recommendations of Shin Bet and the Justice Ministry, signed an extraordinary series of pardons and commutations for the plotters. They were released and greeted as heroes by the settler community, and some rose to prominent positions in government and the Israeli media. One of them, Uzi Sharbav, now a leader in the settlement movement, was a speaker at a recent conference promoting the return of settlers to Gaza.

In fact, nearly all the Jews involved in terror attacks against Arabs over the past decades have received substantial reductions in prison time. Gillon, the head of the Jewish Department when some of these people were arrested, recalls the “profound sense of injustice” that he felt when they were released. But even more important, he says, was “the question of what message the pardons convey to the public and to anyone who ever thinks about carrying out acts of terror against Arabs.”

Operational Failures

In 1987, a series of conflicts in Gaza led to a sustained Palestinian uprising throughout the occupied territories and Israel. The First Intifada, as it became known, was driven by anger over the occupation, which was then entering its third decade. It would simmer for the next six years, as Palestinians attacked Israelis with stones and Molotov cocktails and launched a series of strikes and boycotts. Israel deployed thousands of soldiers to quell the uprising.

In the occupied territories, reprisal attacks between settlers and Palestinians were an increasing problem. The Gush Emunim movement had spread and fractured into different groups, making it difficult for Shin Bet to embed enough informants with the settlers. But the service had one key informant — a man given the code name Shaul. He was a trusted figure among the settlers and rose to become a close assistant to Rabbi Moshe Levinger, the Gush Emunim leader who founded the settlement in Hebron.

Levinger had been questioned many times under suspicion of having a role in multiple violent attacks, but Shaul told Shin Bet operatives that they were seeing only a fraction of the whole picture. He told them about raids past and planned; about the settlers tearing through Arab villages, vandalizing homes, burning dozens of cars. The operatives ordered him to participate in these raids to strengthen his cover. One newspaper photographer in Hebron in 1985 captured Shaul smashing the wall of an Arab marketplace with a sledgehammer. As was standard policy, Shin Bet had ordered him to participate in any activity that didn’t involve harm to human life, but figuring out which of the activities wouldn’t cross that line became increasingly difficult. “The majority of the activists were lunatics, riffraff, and it was very difficult to be sure they wouldn’t hurt people and would harm only property,” Shaul said. (Shaul, whose true identity remains secret, provided these quotes in a 2015 interview with Bergman for the Israeli Hebrew-language paper Yedioth Ahronoth. Some of his account is published here for the first time.)

In September 1988, Rabbi Levinger, Shaul’s patron, was driving through Hebron when, he later said in court, Palestinians began throwing stones at his car and surrounding him. Levinger flashed a pistol and began firing wildly at nearby shops. Investigators said he killed a 42-year-old shopkeeper, Khayed Salah, who had been closing the steel shutter of his shoe store, and injured a second man. Levinger claimed self-defense, but he was hardly remorseful. “I know that I am innocent,” he said at the trial, “and that I didn’t have the honor of killing the Arab.”

Prosecutors cut a deal with Levinger. He was convicted of criminally negligent homicide, sentenced to five months in prison and released after only three.

Shin Bet faced the classic intelligence agency’s dilemma: how and when to let its informants participate in the very violent acts the service was supposed to be stopping. There was some logic in Shin Bet’s approach with Shaul, but it certainly didn’t help deter acts of terror in the West Bank, especially with little police presence in the occupied territories and a powerful interest group ensuring that whoever was charged for the violence was released with a light sentence.

Over his many years as a Shin Bet mole, Shaul said, he saw numerous intelligence and operational failures by the agency. One of the worst, he said, was the December 1993 murder of three Palestinians in an act of vengeance after the murder of a settler leader and his son. Driving home from a day of work in Israel, the three Palestinians, who had no connection to the deaths of the settlers, were pulled from their car and killed near the West Bank town Tarqumiyah.

Shaul recalled how one settler activist proudly told him that he and two friends committed the murders. He contacted his Shin Bet handlers to tell them what he had heard. “And suddenly I saw they were losing interest,” Shaul said. It was only later that he learned why: Two of the shooters were Shin Bet informants. The service didn’t want to blow their cover, or worse, to suffer the scandal that two of its operatives were involved in a murder and a cover-up.

In a statement, Shin Bet said that Shaul’s version of events is “rife with incorrect details” but refused to specify which details were incorrect. Neither the state prosecutor nor the attorney general responded to requests for comment, which included Shaul’s full version of events and additional evidence gathered over the years.

Shaul said he also gave numerous reports to his handlers about the activities of yet another Brooklyn-born follower of Meir Kahane and the Jewish Defense League: Dr. Baruch Goldstein. He earned his medical degree at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and in 1983 immigrated to Israel, where he worked first as a physician in the I.D.F., then as an emergency doctor at Kiryat Arba, a settlement near Hebron.

In the years that passed, he gained the attention of Shin Bet with his eliminationist views, calling Arabs “latter-day Nazis” and making a point to visit the Jewish terrorist Ami Popper in prison, where he was serving a sentence for the 1990 murder of seven Palestinians in the Tel Aviv suburb Rishon LeZion. Shaul said he regarded Goldstein at the time as a “charismatic and highly dangerous figure” and repeatedly urged the Shin Bet to monitor him. “They told me it was none of my business,” he said.

‘Clean Hands’

On Feb. 24, 1994, Goldstein abruptly fired his personal driver. According to Shaul, Goldstein told the driver that he knew he was a Shin Bet informer. Terrified at having been found out, the driver fled the West Bank immediately. Now Goldstein was moving unobserved.

That evening marked the beginning of Purim, the festive commemoration of the victory of the Jews over Haman the Agagite, a court official in the Persian Empire and the nemesis of the Jews in the Old Testament’s Book of Esther. Right-wing Israelis have often drawn parallels between Haman and Arabs — enemies who seek the annihilation of Jews. Goldstein woke early the next day and put on his I.D.F. uniform, and at 5:20 a.m. he entered the Cave of the Patriarchs, an ancient complex in Hebron that serves as a place of worship for both Jews and Muslims. Goldstein carried with him his I.D.F.-issued Galil rifle. It was also the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and on that morning hundreds of Muslims crowded the hall in prayer. Goldstein faced the worshipers and began shooting, firing 108 rounds before he was dragged down and beaten to death. The massacre killed 29 Muslim worshipers and injured more than 100.

The killings shocked Israel, and the government responded with a crackdown on extremism. Kach and Kahane Chai, the two political organizations most closely affiliated with the Kahanist movement, were outlawed and labeled terrorist groups, as was any other party that called for “the establishment of a theocracy in the biblical Land of Israel and the violent expulsion of Arabs from that land.” Rabin, in an address to the Knesset, spoke directly to the followers of Goldstein and Kahane, who he said were the product of a malicious foreign influence on Israel. “You are not part of the community of Israel,” he said. “You are not partners in the Zionist enterprise. You are a foreign implant. You are an errant weed. Sensible Judaism spits you out. You placed yourself outside the wall of Jewish law.”

Following the massacre, a state commission of inquiry was appointed, headed by Judge Meir Shamgar, the president of the Supreme Court. The commission’s report, made public in June 1994, strongly criticized the security arrangements at the Cave of the Patriarchs and examined law-enforcement practices regarding settlers and the extreme right in general. A secret appendix to the report, containing material deemed too sensitive for public consumption, included a December 1992 letter from the Israeli commissioner of police, essentially admitting that the police could not enforce the law. “The situation in the districts is extremely bleak,” he wrote, using the administrative nomenclature for the occupied territories. “The ability of the police to function is far from the required minimum. This is as a result of the lack of essential resources.”

In its conclusions, the commission, tracing the lines of the previous decade’s Karp report, confirmed claims that human rights organizations had made for years but that had been ignored by the Israeli establishment. The commission found that Israeli law enforcement was “ineffective in handling complaints,” that it delayed the filing of indictments and that restraining orders against “chronic” criminals among the “hard core” of the settlers were rarely issued.

The I.D.F. refused to allow Goldstein to be buried in the Jewish cemetery in Hebron. He was buried instead in the Kiryat Arba settlement, in a park named for Meir Kahane, and his gravesite has become an enduring place of pilgrimage for Jews who wanted to celebrate, as his epitaph reads, the “saint” who died for Israel with “clean hands and a pure heart.”

A Curse of Death

One ultranationalist settler who went regularly to Goldstein’s grave was a teenage radical named Itamar Ben-Gvir, who would sometimes gather other followers there on Purim to celebrate the slain killer. Purim revelers often dress in costume, and on one such occasion, caught on video, Ben-Gvir even wore a Goldstein costume, complete with a fake beard and a stethoscope. By then, Ben-Gvir had already come to the attention of the Jewish Department, and investigators interrogated him several times. The military declined to enlist him into the service expected of most Israeli citizens.

After the massacre at the Cave of the Patriarchs, a new generation of Kahanists directed their anger squarely at Rabin for his signing of the Oslo agreement and for depriving them, in their view, of their birthright. “From my standpoint, Goldstein’s action was a wake-up call,” says Hezi Kalo, a longtime senior Shin Bet official who oversaw the division that included the Jewish Department at that time. “I realized that this was going to be a very big story, that the diplomatic moves by the Rabin government would simply not pass by without the shedding of blood.”

The government of Israel was finally paying attention to the threat, and parts of the government acted to deal with it. Shin Bet increased the size of the Jewish Department, and it began to issue a new kind of warning: Jewish terrorists no longer threatened only Arabs. They threatened Jews.

The warnings noted that rabbis in West Bank settlements, along with some politicians on the right, were now openly advocating violence against Israeli public officials, especially Rabin. Extremist rabbis issued rulings of Jewish law against Rabin — imposing a curse of death, a Pulsa Dinura, and providing justification for killing him, a din rodef.

Carmi Gillon by then had moved on from running the Jewish Department and now had the top job at Shin Bet. “Discussing and acknowledging such halakhic laws was tantamount to a license to kill,” he says now, looking back. He was particularly concerned about Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, who were stoking the fury of the right-wing rabbis and settler leaders in their battles with Rabin.

Shin Bet wanted to prosecute rabbis who approved the religiously motivated death sentences against Rabin, but the state attorney’s office refused. “They didn’t give enough importance back then to the link between incitement and legitimacy for terrorism,” says one former prosecutor who worked in the state attorney’s office in the mid-1990s.

Shin Bet issued warning after warning in 1995. “This was no longer a matter of mere incitement, but rather concrete information on the intention to kill top political figures, including Rabin,” Kalo now recalls. In October of that year, Ben-Gvir spoke to Israeli television cameras holding up a Cadillac hood ornament, which he boasted he had broken off the prime minister’s official car during chaotic anti-Oslo demonstrations in front of the Knesset. “We got to his car,” he said, “and we’ll get to him, too.” The following month, Rabin was dead.

Conspiracies

Yigal Amir, the man who shot and killed Rabin in Tel Aviv after a rally in support of the Oslo Accords on Nov. 4, 1995, was not unknown to the Jewish Department. A 25-year-old studying law, computer science and the Torah at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, he had been radicalized by Rabin’s efforts to make peace with Palestinian leaders and had connections to Avishai Raviv, the leader of Eyal, a new far-right group loosely affiliated with the Kach movement. In fact, Raviv was a Shin Bet informant, code-named Champagne. He had heard Amir talking about the justice of the din rodef judgments, but he did not identify him to his handlers as an immediate danger. “No one took Yigal seriously,” he said later in a court proceeding. “It’s common in our circles to talk about attacking public figures.”

Lior Akerman was the first Shin Bet investigator to interrogate Amir at the detention center where he was being held after the assassination. There was of course no question about his guilt. But there was the broader question of conspiracy. Did Amir have accomplices? Did they have further plans? Akerman now recalls asking Amir how he could reconcile his belief in God with his decision to murder the prime minister of Israel. Amir, he says, told him that rabbis had justified harming the prime minister in order to protect Israel.

Amir was smug, Akerman recalls, and he did not respond directly to the question of accomplices. “‘Listen,” he said, according to Akerman, “I succeeded. I was able to do something that many people wanted but no one dared to do. I fired a gun that many Jews held, but I squeezed the trigger because no one else had the courage to do it.”

The Shin Bet investigators demanded to know the identities of the rabbis. Amir was coy at first, but eventually the interrogators drew enough out of him to identify at least two of them. Kalo, the head of the division that oversaw the Jewish Department, went to the attorney general to argue that the rabbis should be detained immediately and prosecuted for incitement to murder. But the attorney general disagreed, saying the rabbis’ encouragement was protected speech and couldn’t be directly linked to the murder. No rabbis were arrested.

Days later, however, the police brought Raviv — the Shin Bet operative known as Champagne — into custody in a Tel Aviv Magistrate Court, on charges that he had conspired to kill Rabin, but he was released shortly after. Raviv’s role as an informant later came to light, and in 1999, he was arrested for his failure to act on previous knowledge of the assassination. He was acquitted on all charges, but he has since become a fixture of extremist conspiracy theories that pose his failure to ring the alarm as evidence that the murder of the prime minister was due not to the violent rhetoric of the settler right, or the death sentences from the rabbis, or the incitement by the leaders of the opposition, but to the all-too-successful efforts of a Shin Bet agent provocateur. A more complicated and insidious conspiracy theory, but no less false, was that it was Shin Bet itself that assassinated Rabin or allowed the assassination to happen.

Gillon, the head of the service at the time, resigned, and ongoing inquiries, charges and countercharges would continue for years. Until Oct. 7, 2023, the killing of the prime minister was considered the greatest failure in the history of Shin Bet. Kalo tried to sum up what went wrong with Israeli security. “The only answer my friends and I could give for the failure was complacency,” he wrote in his 2021 memoir. “They simply couldn’t believe that such a thing could happen, definitely not at the hands of another Jew.”

The Sasson Report

In 2001, as the Second Intifada unleashed a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, Ariel Sharon took office as prime minister. The struggling peace process had come to a complete halt amid the violence, and Sharon’s rise at first appeared to mark another victory for the settlers. But in 2003, in one of the more surprising reversals in Israeli political history, Sharon announced what he called Israel’s “disengagement” from Gaza, with a plan to remove settlers — forcibly if necessary — over the next two years.

The motivations were complex and the subject of considerable debate. For Sharon, at least, it appeared to be a tactical move. “The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process,” his senior adviser Dov Weisglass told Haaretz at the time. “And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.” But Sharon was also facing considerable pressure from President George W. Bush to do something about the ever-expanding illegal settlements in the West Bank, which were a growing impediment to any regional security deals. In July 2004, he asked Talia Sasson, who had recently retired as the head of the special tasks division in the state attorney’s office, to draw up a legal opinion on the subject of “unauthorized outposts” in the West Bank. His instructions were clear: Investigate which Israeli government agencies and authorities were secretly involved in building the outposts. “Sharon never interfered in my work, and neither was he surprised by the conclusions,” Sasson said in an interview two decades later. “After all, he knew better than anyone what the situation was on the ground, and he was expecting only grave conclusions.”

It was a simple enough question: Just how had it happened that hundreds of outposts had been built in the decade since Yitzhak Rabin ordered a halt in most new settlements? But Sasson’s effort to find an answer was met with delays, avoidance and outright lies. Her final report used careful but pointed language: “Not everyone I turned to agreed to talk with me. One claimed he was too busy to meet, while another came to the meeting but refused to meaningfully engage with most of my questions.”

Sasson found that between January 2000 and June 2003, a division of Israel’s Construction and Housing Ministry issued 77 contracts for the establishment of 33 sites in the West Bank, all of which were illegal. In some cases, the ministry even paid for the paving of roads and the construction of buildings at settlements for which the Defense Ministry had issued demolition orders.

Several government ministries concealed the fact that funds were being diverted to the West Bank, reporting them under budgetary clauses such as “miscellaneous general development.” Just as in the case of the Karp Report two decades earlier, Sasson and her Justice Ministry colleagues discovered that the West Bank was being administered under completely separate laws, and those laws, she says, “appeared to me utterly insane.”

Sasson’s report took special note of Avi Maoz, who ran the Construction and Housing Ministry during most of this period. A political activist who early in his career spoke openly of pushing all Arabs out of the West Bank, Maoz helped found a settlement south of Jerusalem during the 1990s and began building a professional alliance with Benjamin Netanyahu, who was then the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and would soon go on to his first term as prime minister. Years later, Maoz would be instrumental in ensuring Netanyahu’s political survival.

“The picture that emerges in the eye of the beholder is severe,” Sasson wrote in her report. “Instead of the government of Israel deciding on the establishment of settlements in the territories of Judea and Samaria, its place has been taken, from the mid-1990s and onward, by others.” The settlers, she wrote, were “the moving force,” but they could not have succeeded without the assistance of “various ministers of construction and housing in the relevant periods, some of them with a blind eye, and some of them with support and encouragement.”

This clandestine network was operating, Sasson wrote, “with massive funding from the State of Israel, without appropriate public transparency, without obligatory criteria. The erection of the unauthorized outposts is being done with violation of the proper procedures and general administrative rules, and in particular, flagrant and ongoing violation of the law.” These violations, Sasson warned, were coming from the government: “It was state and public agencies that broke the law, the rules, the procedures that the state itself had determined.” It was a conflict, she argued, that effectively neutered Israel’s internal checks and balances and posed a grave threat to the nation’s integrity. “The law-enforcement agencies are unable to act against government departments that are themselves breaking the law.”

But, in an echo of Judith Karp’s secret report decades earlier, the Sasson Report, made publicly available in March 2005, had almost no impact. Because she had a mandate directly from the prime minister, Sasson could have believed that her investigation might lead to the dismantling of the illegal outposts that had metastasized throughout the Palestinian territories. But even Sharon, with his high office, found himself powerless against the machine now in place to protect and expand the settlements in the West Bank — the very machine he had helped to build.

All of this was against the backdrop of the Gaza pullout. Sharon, who began overseeing the removal of settlements from Gaza in August 2005, was the third Israeli prime minister to threaten the settler dream of a Greater Israel, and the effort drew bitter opposition not only from the settlers but also from a growing part of the political establishment. Netanyahu, who had served his first term as prime minister from 1996 to 1999, and who previously voted in favor of a pullout, resigned his position as finance minister in Sharon’s cabinet in protest — and in anticipation of another run for the top job.

The settlers themselves took more active measures. In 2005, the Jewish Department of Shin Bet received intelligence about a plot to slow the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza by using 700 liters of gasoline to blow up vehicles on a major highway. Acting on the tip, officers arrested six men in central Israel. One of them was Bezalel Smotrich, the future minister overseeing civilian affairs in the West Bank.

Smotrich, then 25, was detained and questioned for weeks. Yitzhak Ilan, one of the Shin Bet officers present at the interrogation, says he remained “silent as a fish” throughout — “like an experienced criminal.” He was released without charges, Ilan says, in part because Shin Bet knew putting him on trial might expose the service’s agents inside Jewish extremist groups, and in part because they believed Smotrich was likely to receive little punishment in any case. Shin Bet was very comfortable with the courts when we fought Palestinian terrorism and we got the heavy punishments we wanted, he says. With the Jewish terrorists it was exactly the opposite.

When Netanyahu made his triumphant return as prime minister in 2009, he set out to undermine Talia Sasson’s report, which he and his allies saw as an obstacle to accelerating the settlement campaign. He appointed his own investigative committee, led by Judge Edmond Levy of the Supreme Court, who was known to support the settler cause. But the Levy report, completed in 2012, did not undermine the findings in the Sasson Report — in some ways, it reinforced them. Senior Israeli officials, the committee found, were fully aware of what was happening in the territories, and they were simply denying it for the sake of political expediency. The behavior, they wrote, was not befitting of “a country that has proclaimed the rule of law as a goal.” Netanyahu moved on.

PART III. 

A NEW GENERATION

The ascent of a far-right prime minister did little to prevent the virulent, anti-government strain inside the settler movement from spreading. A new generation of Kahanists was taking an even more radical turn, not only against Israeli politicians who might oppose or insufficiently abet them but against the very notion of a democratic Israeli state. A group calling itself Hilltop Youth advocated for the total destruction of the Zionist state. Meir Ettinger, named for his grandfather Meir Kahane, was one of the Hilltop Youth leaders, and he made his grandfather’s views seem moderate.

Their objective was to tear down Israel’s institutions and to establish “Jewish rule”: anointing a king, building a temple in place of the Jerusalem mosques sacred to Muslims worldwide, imposing a religious regime on all Jews. Ehud Olmert, who served as Israeli prime minister from 2006 to 2009, said in an interview that Hilltop Youth “genuinely, deeply, emotionally believe that this is the right thing to do for Israel. This is a salvation. This is the guarantee for Israel’s future.”

A former member of Hilltop Youth, who has asked to remain anonymous because she fears speaking out could endanger her, recalls how she and her friends used an illegal outpost on a hilltop in the West Bank as a base to lob stones at Palestinian cars. “The Palestinians would call the police, and we would know that we have at least 30 minutes before they arrive, if they arrive. And if they do arrive, they won’t arrest anyone. We did this tens of times.” The West Bank police, she says, couldn’t have been less interested in investigating the violence. “When I was young, I thought that I was outsmarting the police because I was clever. Later, I found out that they are either not trying or very stupid.”

The former Hilltop Youth member says she began pulling away from the group as their tactics became more extreme and once Ettinger began speaking openly about murdering Palestinians. She offered to become a police informant, and during a meeting with police intelligence officers in 2015, she described the group’s plans to commit murder — and to harm any Jews that stood in their way. By her account, she told the police about efforts to scout the homes of Palestinians before settling on a target. The police could have begun an investigation, she says, but they weren’t even curious enough to ask her the names of the people plotting the attack.

In 2013, Ettinger and other members of Hilltop Youth formed a secret cell calling itself the Revolt, designed to instigate an insurrection against a government that “prevents us from building the temple, which blocks our way to true and complete redemption.”

During a search of one of the group’s safe houses, Shin Bet investigators discovered the Revolt’s founding documents. “The State of Israel has no right to exist, and therefore we are not bound by the rules of the game,” one declared. The documents called for an end to the State of Israel and made it clear that in the new state that would rise in its place, there would be absolutely no room for non-Jews and for Arabs in particular: “If those non-Jews don’t leave, it will be permissible to kill them, without distinguishing between women, men and children.”

This wasn’t just idle talk. Ettinger and his comrades organized a plan that included timetables and steps to be taken at each stage. One member even composed a training manual with instructions on how to form terror cells and burn down houses. “In order to prevent the residents from escaping,” the manual advised, “you can leave burning tires in the entrance to the house.”

The Revolt carried out an early attack in February 2014, firebombing an uninhabited home in a small Arab village in the West Bank called Silwad, and followed with more arson attacks, the uprooting of olive groves and the destruction of Palestinian granaries. Members of the group torched mosques, monasteries and churches, including the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes on the banks of the Sea of Galilee. A police officer spotted Ettinger himself attacking a herd of sheep belonging to an Arab shepherd. He stoned a sheep and then slaughtered it in front of the shepherd, the officer later testified. “It was shocking,” he said. “There was a sort of insanity in it.”

Shin Bet defined the Revolt as an organization that aimed “to undermine the stability of the State of Israel through terror and violence, including bodily harm and bloodshed,” according to an internal Shin Bet memo, and sought to place several of its members, including Ettinger, under administrative detention — a measure applied frequently against Arabs. 

The state attorney, however, did not approve the request. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) documented 323 incidents of violence by settlers against Palestinians in 2014; Palestinians were injured in 107 of these incidents. By the following year, the Revolt escalated the violence by openly advocating the murder of Arabs.

The Shin Bet and the police identified one of the prominent members of the Revolt, Amiram Ben-Uliel, making him a target of surveillance. But the service failed to prevent the wave of violence that he unleashed. On the night of July 31, 2015, Ben-Uliel set out on a killing spree in a central West Bank village called Duma. Ben-Uliel prepared a bag with two bottles of incendiary liquid, rags, a lighter, a box of matches, gloves and black spray paint. According to the indictment against him, Ben-Uliel sought a home with clear signs of life to ensure that the house he torched was not abandoned. He eventually found the home of Reham and Sa’ad Dawabsheh, a young mother and father. He opened a window and threw a Molotov cocktail into the home. He fled, and in the blaze that followed, the parents suffered injuries that eventually killed them. Their older son, Ahmad, survived the attack, but their 18-month-old toddler, Ali, was burned to death.

It was always clear, says Akerman, the former Shin Bet official, “that those wild groups would move from bullying Arabs to damaging property and trees and eventually would murder people.” He is still furious about how the service has handled Jewish terrorism. “Shin Bet knows how to deal with such groups, using emergency orders, administrative detention and special methods in interrogation until they break,” he says. But although it was perfectly willing to apply those methods to investigating Arab terrorism, the service was more restrained when it came to Jews. “It allowed them to incite, and then they moved on to the next stage and began to torch mosques and churches. Still undeterred, they entered Duma and burned a family.”

Shin Bet at first claimed to have difficulty locating the killers, even though they were all supposed to be under constant surveillance. When Ben-Uliel and other perpetrators were finally arrested, right-wing politicians gave fiery speeches against Shin Bet and met with the families of the perpetrators to show their support. Ben-Uliel was sentenced to life in prison, and Ettinger was finally put in administrative detention, but a fracture was spreading. In December 2015, Hilltop Youth members circulated a video clip showing members of the Revolt ecstatically dancing with rifles and pistols, belting out songs of hatred for Arabs, with one of them stabbing and burning a photograph of the murdered toddler, Ali Dawabsheh. Netanyahu, for his part, denounced the video, which, he said, exposed “the real face of a group that poses danger to Israeli society and security.”

American Friends

The expansion of the settlements had long been an irritant in Israel’s relationship with the United States, with American officials spending years dutifully warning Netanyahu both in public and in private meetings about his support for the enterprise. But the election of Donald Trump in 2016 ended all that. His new administration’s Israel policy was led mostly by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who had a long personal relationship with Netanyahu, a friend of his father’s who had stayed at their family home in New Jersey. Trump, in a broader regional agenda that lined up perfectly with Netanyahu’s own plans, also hoped to scuttle the nuclear deal with Iran that Barack Obama had negotiated and broker diplomatic pacts between Israel and Arab nations that left the matter of a Palestinian state unresolved and off the table.

If there were any questions about the new administration’s position on settlements, they were answered once Trump picked his ambassador to Israel. His choice, David Friedman, was a bankruptcy lawyer who for years had helped run an American nonprofit that raised millions of dollars for Beit El, one of the early Gush Emunim settlements in the West Bank and the place where Bezalel Smotrich was raised and educated. The organization, which was also supported by the Trump family, had helped fund schools and other institutions inside Beit El. On the heels of the Trump transition, Friedman referred to Israel’s “alleged occupation” of Palestinian territories and broke with longstanding U.S. policy by saying “the settlements are part of Israel.”

This didn’t make Friedman a particularly friendly recipient of the warnings regularly delivered by Lt. Gen. Mark Schwartz, the three-star general who in 2019 arrived at the embassy in Jerusalem to coordinate security between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. A career Green Beret who had combat deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq and served as deputy commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, the military task force with authority over U.S. counterterrorism special missions units, Schwartz wasn’t short on Middle East experience.

But he was immediately shocked by the landscape of the West Bank: settlers acting with impunity, a police force that was essentially nonexistent outside the settlements and the Israeli Army fanning the tensions with its own operations. Schwartz recalls how angry he was about what he called the army’s “collective punishment” tactics, including the razing of Palestinian homes, which he viewed as gratuitous and counterproductive. “I said, ‘Guys, this isn’t how professional militaries act.’” As Schwartz saw it, the West Bank was in some ways the American South of the 1960s. But at any moment the situation could become even more volatile, resulting in the next intifada.

Schwartz is diplomatic when recalling his interactions with Friedman, his former boss. He was a “good listener,” Schwartz says, but when he raised concerns about the settlements, Friedman would often deflect by noting “the lack of appreciation by the Palestinian people about what the Americans are doing for them.” Schwartz also discussed his concerns about settler violence directly with Shin Bet and I.D.F. officials, he says, but as far as he could tell, Friedman didn’t follow up with the political leadership. “I never got the sense he went to Netanyahu to discuss it.”

Friedman sees things differently. “I think I had a far broader perspective on acts of violence in Judea and Samaria” than Schwartz, he says now. “And it was clear that the violence coming from Palestinians against Israelis overwhelmingly was more prevalent.” He says he “wasn’t concerned about ‘appreciation’ from the Palestinians; I was concerned by their leadership’s embrace of terror and unwillingness to control violence.” He declined to discuss any conversations he had with Israeli officials.

Weeks after Trump lost the 2020 election, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled to Israel for a trip that delivered a number of gifts to Netanyahu and the settler cause. He announced new guidelines requiring that goods imported to the United States from parts of the West Bank be labeled “Made in Israel.” And he flew by helicopter to Psagot, a winery in the West Bank, making him the first American secretary of state to visit a settlement. One of the winery’s large shareholders, the Florida-based Falic family, have donated millions to various projects in the settlements.

During his lunchtime visit, Pompeo paused to write a note in the winery’s guest book. “May I not be the last secretary of state to visit this beautiful land,” he wrote.

A Settler Coalition

Benjamin Netanyahu’s determination to become prime minister for an unprecedented sixth term came with a price: an alliance with a movement that he once shunned, but that had been brought into the political mainstream by Israel’s steady drift to the right. Netanyahu, who is now on trial for bribery and other corruption charges, repeatedly failed in his attempts to form a coalition after most of the parties announced that they were no longer willing to join him. He personally involved himself in negotiations to ally Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party and Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism Party, making them kingmakers for anyone trying to form a coalition government. In November 2022, the bet paid off: With the now-critical support of the extreme right, Netanyahu returned to office. 

The two men ushered into power by this arrangement were some of the most extreme figures ever to hold such high positions in an Israeli cabinet. Shin Bet had monitored Ben-Gvir in the years after Yitzhak Rabin’s murder, and he was arrested on multiple charges including inciting racism and supporting a terrorist organization. He won acquittals or dismissals in some of the cases, but he was also convicted several times and served time in prison. During the Second Intifada, he led protests calling for extreme measures against Arabs and harassed Israeli politicians he believed were insufficiently hawkish.

Then Ben-Gvir made a radical change: He went to law school. He also took a job as an aide to Michael Ben-Ari, a Knesset member from the National Union party, which had picked up many followers of the Kach movement. In 2011, after considerable legal wrangling around his criminal record, he was admitted to the bar. He changed his hairstyle and clothing to appear more mainstream and began working from the inside, once saying he represented the “soldiers and civilians who find themselves in legal entanglements due to the security situation in Israel.” Netanyahu made him minister of national security, with authority over the police.

Smotrich also moved into public life after his 2005 arrest by Shin Bet for plotting road blockages to halt the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. He made Shin Bet’s Jewish Department a frequent target of criticism, complaining that it was wasting time and money investigating crimes carried out by Jews, when the real terrorists were Palestinians. His ultraright allies sometimes referred to the Jewish Department as Hamakhlaka Hayehudit — the Hebrew phrase for the Gestapo unit that executed Hitler’s Final Solution. 

In 2015, while campaigning for a seat in the Knesset, Smotrich said that “every shekel invested in this department is one less shekel invested in real terrorism and saving lives.” Seven years later, Netanyahu made him both minister of finance and a minister in the Ministry of Defense, in charge of overseeing civilian affairs in the West Bank, and he has steadily pushed to seize authority over the territory from the military. As part of the coalition deal with Netanyahu, Smotrich now has the authority to appoint one of the senior administrative figures in the West Bank, who helps oversee the building of roads and the enforcement of construction laws. The 2022 election also brought Avi Maoz to the Knesset — the former housing-ministry official whom Talia Sasson once marked as a hidden hand of Israeli government support for illegal settlements. Since then, Maoz had joined the far-right Noam party, using it as a platform to advance racist and homophobic policies. And he never forgot, or forgave, Sasson. On “International Anti-Corruption Day” in 2022, Maoz took to the lectern of the Knesset and denounced Sasson’s report of nearly two decades earlier, saying it was written “with a hatred of the settlements and a desire to harm them.” This, he said, was “public corruption of the highest order, for which people like Talia Sasson should be prosecuted.”

Days after assuming his own new position, Ben-Gvir ordered the police to remove Palestinian flags from public spaces in Israel, saying they “incite and encourage terrorism.” Smotrich, for his part, ordered drastic cuts in payments to the Palestinian Authority — a move that led the Shin Bet and the I.D.F. intelligence division to raise concerns that the cuts would interfere with the Palestinian Authority’s own efforts to police and prevent Palestinian terrorism.

Weeks after the new cabinet was sworn in, the Judea and Samaria division of the I.D.F. distributed an instructional video to the soldiers of a ground unit about to be deployed in the West Bank. Titled “Operational Challenge: The Farms,” the video depicts settlers as peaceful farmers living pastoral lives, feeding goats and herding sheep and cows, in dangerous circumstances. The illegal outposts multiplying around the West Bank are “small and isolated places of settlement, each with a handful of residents, a few of them — or none at all — bearing arms, the means of defense meager or nonexistent.”

It is the settlers, according to the video, who are under constant threat of attack, whether it be “penetration of the farm by a terrorist, an attack against a shepherd in the pastures, arson” or “destruction of property” — threats from which the soldiers of the I.D.F. must protect them. The commander of each army company guarding each farm must, the video says, “link up with the person in charge of security and to maintain communications”; soldiers and officers are encouraged to cultivate a close and intimate relationship with the settlers. “The informal,” viewers are told, “is much more important than the formal.”

The video addresses many matters of security, but it never addresses the question of law. When we asked the commander of the division that produced the video, Brig. Gen. Avi Bluth, why the I.D.F. was promoting the military support of settlements that are illegal under Israeli law, he directly asserted that the farms were indeed legal and offered to arrange for us to tour some of them. Later, a spokesman for the army apologized for the general’s remarks, acknowledged that the farms were illegal and announced that the I.D.F. would no longer be promoting the video. This May, Bluth was nonetheless subsequently promoted to head Israel’s Central Command, responsible for all Israeli troops in central Israel and the West Bank.

In August, Bluth will replace Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, who during his final months in charge of the West Bank has seen a near-total breakdown of law enforcement in his area of command. In late October, Fox wrote a letter to his boss, the chief of Israel’s military staff, saying that the surge of Jewish terrorism carried out in revenge for the Oct. 7 attacks “could set the West Bank on fire.” The I.D.F. is the highest security authority in the West Bank, but the military’s top commander put the blame squarely on the police — who ultimately answer to Ben-Gvir. Fox said he had established a special task force to deal with Jewish terrorism, but investigating and arresting the perpetrators is “entirely in the hands of the Israeli police.”

And, he wrote, they aren’t doing their jobs. 

‘Only One Way Forward’

When the day came early this January for the Supreme Court to hear the case brought by the people of Khirbet Zanuta, the displaced villagers arrived an hour late. They had received entry permits from the District Coordination Office to attend the hearing but were delayed by security forces before reaching the checkpoint separating Israel from the West Bank. Their lawyer, Quamar Mishirqi-Assad, noting that their struggle to attend their own hearing spoke to the essence of their petition, insisted that the hearing couldn’t proceed without them. The judges agreed to wait.

The villagers finally were led into the courtroom, and Mishirqi-Assad began presenting the case. The proceedings were in Hebrew, so most of the villagers were unable to follow the arguments that described the daily terrors inflicted by settlers and the glaring absence of any law-enforcement efforts to stop them.

The lawyers representing the military and the police denied the claims of abuse and failure to enforce the law. When a judge asked what operational steps would be in place if villagers wanted to return, one of the lawyers for the state said they could already — there was no order preventing them from doing so.

The next to speak was Col. Roi Zweig-Lavi, the Central Command’s Operations Directorate officer. He said that many of these incidents involved false claims. In fact, he said, some of the villagers had probably destroyed their own homes, because of an “internal issue.” Now they were blaming the settlers to escape the consequences of their own actions.

Colonel Zweig-Lavi’s own views about the settlements, and his role in protecting them, were well known. In a 2022 speech, he told a group of yeshiva students in the West Bank that “the army and the settlements are one and the same.”

In early May, the court ordered the state to explain why the police failed to stop the attacks and declared that the villagers have a right to return to their homes. The court also ordered the state to provide details for how they would ensure the safe return of the villagers. It is now the state’s turn to decide how it will comply. Or if it will comply.

By the time the Supreme Court issued its rulings, the United States had finally taken action to directly pressure the Netanyahu government about the violent settlers. On Feb. 1, the White House issued an executive order imposing sanctions on four settlers for “engaging in terrorist activity,” among other things, in the West Bank. One of the four was Yinon Levi, the owner of Meitarim Farm near Hebron and the man American and Israeli officials believe orchestrated the campaign of violence and intimidation against the villagers of Khirbet Zanuta. The British government issued its own sanctions shortly after, saying in a statement that Israel’s government had created “an environment of near-total impunity for settler extremists in the West Bank.”

The White House’s move against individual settlers, a first by an American administration, was met with a combination of anger and ridicule by ministers in Netanyahu’s government. Smotrich called the Biden administration’s allegations against Levi and others “utterly specious” and said he would work with Israeli banks to resist complying with the sanctions. One message that circulated in an open Hilltop Youth WhatsApp channel said that Levi and his family would not be abandoned. “The people of Israel are mobilizing for them,” it said.

American officials bristle when confronted with the question of whether the government’s actions are just token measures taken by an embattled American president hemorrhaging support at home for his Israel policy. They won’t end the violence, they say, but they are a signal to the Netanyahu government about the position of the United States: that the West Bank could boil over, and it could soon be the latest front of an expanding regional Middle East war since Oct. 7.

But war might just be the goal. Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, said he believes that many members of the ultraright in Israel “want war.” They “want intifada,” he says, “because it is the ultimate proof that there is no way of making peace with the Palestinians and there is only one way forward — to destroy them.”

[pilawturkey]

Formation of Liaison Offices in Turkey

Formation of Liaison Offices in Turkey

Leave a Comment / Investment, Law, Tax / By pi_legal_consultancy

Formation of liaison offices in Turkey produces several advantages for particularly foreign investors. However, emerging challenges particularly in terms of taxation must be carefully analyzed before any decision. 

Table of Contents

Introduction 

Is Turkey good for business through the formation of liaison offices in Turkey?

What are the main legal instruments applicable to commercial activities in Turkey in terms of Tax? 

Who may be a taxpayer under Corporate Tax Law? 

What is the difference between liaison office and branch office for a foreign company? 

What are the rules applicable to the formation of liaison offices in Turkey? 

What type of activities can be performed by liaison offices in Turkey? 

Conclusion

Introduction 

Overall, the available article is dedicated to providing a full-fledged guide in formation of liaison office in Turkey and|or, in other words, the formation of a liaison office in Turkey. Undoubtedly, Turkey encourages foreign-centric investment projects by taking business-friendly policies at the nexus of Europe, Asia and Africa.

For our work and all legal services on the matter of investment, please click on our “Practice Areas”, titled “Investment Advice”.

Is Turkey good for business through the formation of liaison offices in Turkey?

Turkey represents one of the most safe and investment-friendly countries around the globe. Considering the strengthening rates of foreign currencies, cost-effective opportunities and government support for foreign direct investments, Turkey is becoming a more popular investment area for alien investors. Additionally, several Turkish companies are keen on growing their business in Turkey. Investment advice by Turkish business lawyers in Istanbul and in Ankara play a crucial role in supporting their investment projects for foreign and local investors.

What are the main legal instruments applicable to commercial activities in Turkey in terms of Tax? 

There are three core legal instruments particularly applicable to tax-oriented issues in Turkey:

firstly, Income Tax Code (Numbered 193),

secondly,  Corporate Tax Code (Numbered 5520),

thirdly, Value Added Tax Code (Numbered 3065).

 In addition to law-centric regulations, it is noteworthy emphasizing that communiqués play an essential role in articulating specific rights and tax obligations into line with relevant legislation. 

For more information, take a look at our practice areas titled “Tax”

Commercial activities for foreign or domestic companies in Turkey will have direct consequences upon the taxation of relevant investment projects.

Who may be a taxpayer under Corporate Tax Law? 

Article 1 of Corporate Tax Law stipulates that following legal entities are responsible for paying taxes:  

-Capital companies

-Cooperatives

-Public economic enterprises

-Economic enterprises owned by associations and foundations​

-Joint ventures.

What is the difference between liaison office and branch office for a foreign company? 

Contrary to liaison offices, branch offices are completely free to engage in commercial activities in Turkey. Fundamental idea behind this difference is that the liaison office is not seen as a separate entity from the business or legal center of foreign company. 

What are the rules applicable to the formation of liaison offices in Turkey? 

Pursuant to Article 3 of Foreign Direct Investment Law (Numbered 4875), the permit for the formation of liaison offices is only granted provided that they do not engage in commercial activities in Turkey. Article 6 and 7 of the Regulation on the Implementation of Foreign Direct Investment Law reiterates the same principle by underlining the need for the commitment of relevant companies for non-commercial activity in Turkey.   It necessarily follows that a foreign company cannot carry out commercial activity through formation of liaison offices in Turkey, but the same company is completely free to engage in commercial activity through all other methods in Turkey.

What type of activities can be performed by liaison offices in Turkey? 

As clearly observed, liaison offices of a foreign company in Turkey can perform very limited activities including: 

 Representation and Hosting,

Control, Inspection and Provision of Local Suppliers,

Technical support,

Communication and Transfer of Information,

Regional Management Headquarter.

It necessarily means that the relevant liaison office will not be able to carry out any commercial activity or not be able to invoice to anybody on behalf of the Client. The violation of non-commercial activity of foreign companies through liaison offices is subject to severe sanctions by national authorities.   

Conclusion

In the light of the foregoing consideration, this article concludes that foreign companies have limited opportunities in Turkey for business activities through formation of liaison offices in Turkey. Reviewing and understanding the rationale behind investment rules applicable to foreign companies is a required step for the beginning. A full-fledged legal guidance represents such a significant component of proceeding safely for foreign direct investments through formation of liaison offices in Turkey. 

[homoerotisch]

Exclusive: Investigation reveals how intelligence agencies tried to derail war crimes prosecution, with Netanyahu ‘obsessed’ with intercepts

When the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC) announced he was seeking arrest warrants against Israeli and Hamas leaders, he issued a cryptic warning: “I insist that all attempts to impede, intimidate or improperly influence the officials of this court must cease immediately.”

Karim Khan did not provide specific details of attempts to interfere in the ICC’s work, but he noted a clause in the court’s foundational treaty that made any such interference a criminal offence. If the conduct continued, he added, “my office will not hesitate to act”.

The prosecutor did not say who had attempted to intervene in the administration of justice, or how exactly they had done so.

Now, an investigation by the Guardian and the Israeli-based magazines +972 and Local Call can reveal how Israel has run an almost decade-long secret “war” against the court. The country deployed its intelligence agencies to surveil, hack, pressure, smear and allegedly threaten senior ICC staff in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries.

Israeli intelligence captured the communications of numerous ICC officials, including Khan and his predecessor as prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, intercepting phone calls, messages, emails and documents.

The surveillance was ongoing in recent months, providing Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, with advance knowledge of the prosecutor’s intentions. A recent intercepted communication suggested that Khan wanted to issue arrest warrants against Israelis but was under “tremendous pressure from the United States”, according to a source familiar with its contents.

Bensouda, who as chief prosecutor opened the ICC’s investigation in 2021, paving the way for last week’s announcement, was also spied on and allegedly threatened.

Netanyahu has taken a close interest in the intelligence operations against the ICC, and was described by one intelligence source as being “obsessed” with intercepts about the case. Overseen by his national security advisers, the efforts involved the domestic spy agency, the Shin Bet, as well as the military’s intelligence directorate, Aman, and cyber-intelligence division, Unit 8200. Intelligence gleaned from intercepts was, sources said, disseminated to government ministries of justice, foreign affairs and strategic affairs.

A covert operation against Bensouda, revealed on Tuesday by the Guardian, was run personally by Netanyahu’s close ally Yossi Cohen, who was at the time the director of Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad. At one stage, the spy chief even enlisted the help of the then president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Joseph Kabila.

Details of Israel’s nine-year campaign to thwart the ICC’s inquiry have been uncovered by the Guardian, an Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Local Call, a Hebrew-language outlet.

The joint investigation draws on interviews with more than two dozen current and former Israeli intelligence officers and government officials, senior ICC figures, diplomats and lawyers familiar with the ICC case and Israel’s efforts to undermine it.

Contacted by the Guardian, a spokesperson for the ICC said it was aware of “proactive intelligence-gathering activities being undertaken by a number of national agencies hostile towards the court”. They said the ICC was continually implementing countermeasures against such activity, and that “none of the recent attacks against it by national intelligence agencies” had penetrated the court’s core evidence holdings, which had remained secure.

A spokesperson for Israel’s prime minister’s office said: “The questions forwarded to us are replete with many false and unfounded allegations meant to hurt the state of Israel.” A military spokesperson added: “The IDF [Israel Defense Forces] did not and does not conduct surveillance or other intelligence operations against the ICC.”

Since it was established in 2002, the ICC has served as a permanent court of last resort for the prosecution of individuals accused of some of the world’s worst atrocities. It has charged the former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, the late Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi and most recently, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

Khan’s decision to seek warrants against Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, along with Hamas leaders implicated in the 7 October attack, marks the first time an ICC prosecutor has sought arrest warrants against the leader of a close western ally.

The allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity that Khan has levelled against Netanyahu and Gallant all relate to Israel’s eight-month war in Gaza, which according to the territory’s health authority has killed more than 35,000 people.

But the ICC case has been a decade in the making, inching forward amid rising alarm among Israeli officials at the possibility of arrest warrants, which would prevent those accused from travelling to any of the court’s 124 member states for fear of arrest.

It is this spectre of prosecutions in The Hague that one former Israeli intelligence official said had led the “entire military and political establishment” to regard the counteroffensive against the ICC “as a war that had to be waged, and one that Israel needed to be defended against. It was described in military terms.”

That “war” commenced in January 2015, when it was confirmed that Palestine would join the court after it was recognised as a state by the UN general assembly. Its accession was condemned by Israeli officials as a form of “diplomatic terrorism”.

One former defence official familiar with Israel’s counter-ICC effort said joining the court had been “perceived as the crossing of a red line” and “perhaps the most aggressive” diplomatic move taken by the Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank. “To be recognised as a state in the UN is nice,” they added. “But the ICC is a mechanism with teeth.” A hand-delivered threat

For Fatou Bensouda, a respected Gambian lawyer who was elected the ICC’s chief prosecutor in 2012, the accession of Palestine to the court brought with it a momentous decision. Under the Rome statute, the treaty that established the court, the ICC can exercise its jurisdiction only over crimes within member states or by nationals of those states.

Israel, like the US, Russia and China, is not a member. After Palestine’s acceptance as an ICC member, any alleged war crimes – committed by those of any nationality – in occupied Palestinian territories now fell under Bensouda’s jurisdiction.

On 16 January 2015, within weeks of Palestine joining, Bensouda opened a preliminary examination into what in the legalese of the court was called “the situation in Palestine”. The following month, two men who had managed to obtain the prosecutor’s private address turned up at her home in The Hague.

Sources familiar with the incident said the men declined to identify themselves when they arrived, but said they wanted to hand-deliver a letter to Bensouda on behalf of an unknown German woman who wanted to thank her. The envelope contained hundreds of dollars in cash and a note with an Israeli phone number.

Sources with knowledge of an ICC review into the incident said that while it was not possible to identify the men, or fully establish their motives, it was concluded that Israel was likely to be signalling to the prosecutor that it knew where she lived. The ICC reported the incident to Dutch authorities and put in place additional security, installing CCTV cameras at her home.

The ICC’s preliminary inquiry in the Palestinian territories was one of several such fact-finding exercises the court was undertaking at the time, as a precursor to a possible full investigation. Bensouda’s caseload also included nine full investigations, including into events in DRC, Kenya and the Darfur region of Sudan.

Officials in the prosecutor’s office believed the court was vulnerable to espionage activity and introduced countersurveillance measures to protect their confidential inquiries.

In Israel, the prime minister’s national security council (NSC) had mobilised a response involving its intelligence agencies. Netanyahu and some of the generals and spy chiefs who authorised the operation had a personal stake in its outcome.

Unlike the international court of justice (ICJ), a UN body that deals with the legal responsibility of nation states, the ICC is a criminal court that prosecutes individuals, targeting those deemed most responsible for atrocities.

Multiple Israeli sources said the leadership of the IDF wanted military intelligence to join the effort, which was being led by other spy agencies, to ensure senior officers could be protected from charges. “We were told that senior officers are afraid to accept positions in the West Bank because they are afraid of being prosecuted in The Hague,” one source recalled.

Two intelligence officials involved in procuring intercepts about the ICC said the prime minister’s office took a keen interest in their work. Netanyahu’s office, one said, would send “areas of interests” and “instructions” in relation to the monitoring of court officials. Another described the prime minister as “obsessed” with intercepts shedding light on the activities of the ICC.

Hacked emails and monitored calls

Five sources familiar with Israel’s intelligence activities said it routinely spied on the phone calls made by Bensouda and her staff with Palestinians. Blocked by Israel from accessing Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the ICC was forced to conduct much of its research by telephone, which made it more susceptible to surveillance.

Thanks to their comprehensive access to Palestinian telecoms infrastructure, the sources said, intelligence operatives could capture the calls without installing spyware on the ICC official’s devices.

“If Fatou Bensouda spoke to any person in the West Bank or Gaza, then that phone call would enter [intercept] systems,” one source said. Another said there was no hesitation internally over spying on the prosecutor, adding: “With Bensouda, she’s black and African, so who cares?”

The surveillance system did not capture calls between ICC officials and anyone outside Palestine. However, multiple sources said the system required the active selection of the overseas phone numbers of ICC officials whose calls Israeli intelligence agencies decided to listen to.

According to one Israeli source, a large whiteboard in an Israeli intelligence department contained the names of about 60 people under surveillance – half of them Palestinians and half from other countries, including UN officials and ICC personnel.

In The Hague, Bensouda and her senior staff were alerted by security advisers and via diplomatic channels that Israel was monitoring their work. A former senior ICC official recalled: “We were made aware they were trying to get information on where we were with the preliminary examination.”

Officials also became aware of specific threats against a prominent Palestinian NGO, Al-Haq, which was one of several Palestinian human rights groups that frequently submitted information to the ICC inquiry, often in lengthy documents detailing incidents it wanted the prosecutor to consider. The Palestinian Authority submitted similar dossiers.

Such documents often contained sensitive information such as testimony from potential witnesses. Al-Haq’s submissions are also understood to have linked specific allegations of Rome statute crimes to senior officials, including chiefs of the IDF, directors of the Shin Bet, and defence ministers such as Benny Gantz.

Years later, after the ICC had opened a full investigation into the Palestine case, Gantz designated Al-Haq and five other Palestinian rights groups as “terrorist organisations”, a label that was rejected by multiple European states and later found by the CIA to be unsupported by evidence. The organisations said the designations were a “targeted assault” against those most actively engaging with the ICC.

According to multiple current and former intelligence officials, military cyber-offensive teams and the Shin Bet both systematically monitored the employees of Palestinian NGOs and the Palestinian Authority who were engaging with the ICC. Two intelligence sources described how Israeli operatives hacked into the emails of Al-Haq and other groups communicating with Bensouda’s office.

One of the sources said the Shin Bet even installed Pegasus spyware, developed by the private-sector NSO Group, on the phones of multiple Palestinian NGO employees, as well as two senior Palestinian Authority officials.

Keeping tabs on the Palestinian submissions to the ICC’s inquiry was viewed as part of the Shin Bet’s mandate, but some army officials were concerned that spying on a foreign civilian entity crossed a line, as it had little to do with military operations.

“It has nothing to do with Hamas, it has nothing to do with stability in the West Bank,” one military source said of the ICC surveillance. Another added: “We used our resources to spy on Fatou Bensouda – this isn’t something legitimate to do as military intelligence.”

Secret meetings with the ICC

Legitimate or otherwise, the surveillance of the ICC and Palestinians making the case for prosecutions against Israelis provided the Israeli government with an advantage in a secret back channel it had opened with the prosecutor’s office.

Israel’s meetings with the ICC were highly sensitive: if made public, they had the potential to undermine the government’s official position that it did not recognise the court’s authority.

According to six sources familiar with the meetings, they consisted of a delegation of top government lawyers and diplomats who travelled to The Hague. Two of the sources said the meetings were authorised by Netanyahu.

The Israeli delegation was drawn from the justice ministry, foreign ministry and the military advocate general’s office. The meetings took place between 2017 and 2019, and were led by the prominent Israeli lawyer and diplomat Tal Becker.

“In the beginning it was tense,” recalled a former ICC official. “We would get into details of specific incidents. We’d say: ‘We’re receiving allegations about these attacks, these killings,’ and they would provide us with information.”

A person with direct knowledge of Israel’s preparation for the back-channel meetings said officials in the justice ministry were furnished with intelligence that had been gleaned from Israeli surveillance intercepts before delegations arrived at The Hague. “The lawyers who dealt with the issue at the justice ministry had a big thirst for intelligence information,” they said.

For the Israelis, the back-channel meetings, while sensitive, presented a unique opportunity to directly present legal arguments challenging the prosecutor’s jurisdiction over the Palestinian territories.

They also sought to convince the prosecutor that, despite the Israeli military’s highly questionable record of investigating wrongdoing in its ranks, it had robust procedures for holding its armed forces to account.

This was a critical issue for Israel. A core ICC principle, known as complementarity, prevents the prosecutor from investigating or trying individuals if they are the subject of credible state-level investigations or criminal proceedings.

Israeli surveillance operatives were asked to find out which specific incidents might form part of a future ICC prosecution, multiple sources said, in order to enable Israeli investigative bodies to “open investigations retroactively” in the same cases.

“If materials were transferred to the ICC, we had to understand exactly what they were, to ensure that the IDF investigated them independently and sufficiently so that they could claim complementarity,” one source explained.

Israel’s back-channel meetings with the ICC ended in December 2019, when Bensouda, announcing the end of her preliminary examination, said she believed there was a “reasonable basis” to conclude that Israel and Palestinian armed groups had both committed war crimes in the occupied territories. Bensouda speaking in The Hague in December 2019, with numerous national flags behind her.

It was a significant setback for Israel’s leaders, although it could have been worse. In a move that some in the government regarded as a partial vindication of Israel’s lobbying efforts, Bensouda stopped short of launching a formal investigation.

Instead, she announced she would ask a panel of ICC judges to rule on the contentious question of the court’s jurisdiction over the Palestinian territories, due to “unique and highly contested legal and factual issues”.

Yet Bensouda had made clear she was minded to open a full investigation if the judges gave her the green light. It was against this backdrop that Israel ramped up its campaign against the ICC and turned to its top spy chief to turn up the heat on Bensouda personally.

Personal threats and a ‘smear campaign’

Between late 2019 and early 2021, as the pre-trial chamber considered the jurisdictional questions, the director of the Mossad, Yossi Cohen, intensified his efforts to persuade Bensouda not to proceed with the investigation.

Cohen’s contacts with Bensouda – which were described to the Guardian by four people familiar with the prosecutor’s contemporaneous accounts of the interactions, as well as sources briefed on the Mossad operation – had begun several years earlier.

In one of the earliest encounters, Cohen surprised Bensouda when he made an unexpected appearance at an official meeting the prosecutor was holding with the then DRC president, Joseph Kabila, in a New York hotel suite.

Sources familiar with the meeting said that after Bensouda’s staff were asked to leave the room, the director of the Mossad suddenly appeared from behind a door in a carefully choreographed “ambush”.

After the incident in New York, Cohen persisted in contacting the prosecutor, turning up unannounced and subjecting her to unwanted calls. While initially amicable, the sources said, Cohen’s behaviour became increasingly threatening and intimidating.

A close ally of Netanyahu at the time, Cohen was a veteran Mossad spymaster and had gained a reputation within the service as a skilled recruiter of agents with experience cultivating high-level officials in foreign governments.

Accounts of his secret meetings with Bensouda paint a picture in which he sought to “build a relationship” with the prosecutor as he attempted to dissuade her from pursuing an investigation that, if it went ahead, could embroil senior Israeli officials.

Three sources briefed on Cohen’s activities said they understood the spy chief had tried to recruit Bensouda into complying with Israel’s demands during the period in which she was waiting for a ruling from the pre-trial chamber.

They said he became more threatening after he began to realise the prosecutor would not be persuaded to abandon the investigation. At one stage, Cohen is said to have made comments about Bensouda’s security and thinly veiled threats about the consequences for her career if she proceeded. Contacted by the Guardian, Cohen and Kabila did not respond to requests for comment. Bensouda declined to comment.

When she was prosecutor, Bensouda formally disclosed her encounters with Cohen to a small group within the ICC, with the intention of putting on record her belief that she had been “personally threatened”, sources familiar with the disclosures said.

This was not the only way Israel sought to place pressure on the prosecutor. At around the same time, ICC officials discovered details of what sources described as a diplomatic “smear campaign”, relating in part to a close family member.

According to multiple sources, the Mossad had obtained a cache of material including transcripts of an apparent sting operation against Bensouda’s husband. The origins of the material – and whether it was genuine – remain unclear.

However, elements of the information were circulated by Israel among western diplomatic officials, sources said, in a failed attempt to discredit the chief prosecutor. A person briefed on the campaign said it gained little traction among diplomats and amounted to a desperate attempt to “besmirch” Bensouda’s reputation. Trump’s campaign against the ICC

In March 2020, three months after Bensouda referred the Palestine case to the pre-trial chamber, an Israeli government delegation reportedly held discussions in Washington with senior US officials about “a joint Israeli-American struggle” against the ICC.

One Israeli intelligence official said they regarded Donald Trump’s administration as more cooperative than that of his Democratic predecessor. The Israelis felt sufficiently comfortable to ask for information from US intelligence about Bensouda, a request the source said would have been “impossible” during Barack Obama’s tenure.

Days before the meetings in Washington, Bensouda had received authorisation from the ICC’s judges to pursue a separate investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan committed by the Taliban and both Afghan and US military personnel.

Fearing US armed forces would be prosecuted, the Trump administration was engaged in its own aggressive campaign against the ICC, culminating in the summer of 2020 with the imposition of US economic sanctions on Bensouda and one of her top officials.

Among ICC officials, the US-led financial and visa restrictions on court personnel were believed to relate as much to the Palestine investigation as to the Afghanistan case. Two former ICC officials said senior Israeli officials had expressly indicated to them that Israel and the US were working together.

At a press conference in June that year, senior Trump administration figures signalled their intention to impose sanctions on ICC officials, announcing they had received unspecified information about “financial corruption and malfeasance at the highest levels of the office of the prosecutor”.

As well as referring to the Afghanistan case, Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state, linked the US measures to the Palestine case. “It’s clear the ICC is only putting Israel in [its] crosshairs for nakedly political purposes,” he said. Months later, Pompeo accused Bensouda of having “engaged in corrupt acts for her personal benefit”. The US has never publicly provided any information to substantiate that charge, and Joe Biden lifted the sanctions months after he entered the White House.

But at the time Bensouda faced increasing pressure from an apparently concerted effort behind the scenes by the two powerful allies. As a Gambian national, she did not enjoy the political protection that other ICC colleagues from western countries had by virtue of their citizenship. A former ICC source said this left her “vulnerable and isolated”.

Cohen’s activities, sources said, were particularly concerning for the prosecutor and led her to fear for her personal safety. When the pre-trial chamber finally confirmed the ICC had jurisdiction in Palestine in February 2021, some at the ICC even believed Bensouda should leave the final decision to open a full investigation to her successor.

On 3 March, however, months before the end of her nine-year term, Bensouda announced a full investigation in the Palestine case, setting in motion a process that could lead to criminal charges, though she cautioned the next phase could take time.

“Any investigation undertaken by the office will be conducted independently, impartially and objectively, without fear or favour,” she said. “To both Palestinian and Israeli victims and affected communities, we urge patience.” Khan announces arrest warrants

When Khan took the helm at the ICC prosecutor’s office in June 2021, he inherited an investigation he later said “lies on the San Andreas fault of international politics and strategic interests”.

As he took office, other investigations – including on events in the Philippines, DRC, Afghanistan and Bangladesh – competed for his attention, and in March 2022, days after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, he opened a high-profile investigation into alleged Russian war crimes.

Initially, the politically sensitive Palestine inquiry was not treated as a priority by the British prosecutor’s team, sources familiar with the case said. One said it was in effect “on the shelf” – but Khan’s office disputes this and says it established a dedicated investigative team to take the inquiry forward.

In Israel, the government’s top lawyers regarded Khan – who had previously defended warlords such as the former Liberian president Charles Taylor – as a more cautious prosecutor than Bensouda. One former senior Israeli official said there was “lots of respect” for Khan, unlike for his predecessor. His appointment to the court was viewed as a “reason for optimism”, they said, but they added that the 7 October attack “changed that reality”.

The Hamas assault on southern Israel, in which Palestinian militants killed nearly 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped about 250 people, clearly involved brazen war crimes. So, too, in the view of many legal experts, has Israel’s subsequent onslaught on Gaza, which is estimated to have killed more than 35,000 people and brought the territory to the brink of famine through Israel’s obstruction of humanitarian aid.

By the end of the third week of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, Khan was on the ground at the Rafah border crossing. He subsequently made visits to the West Bank and southern Israel, where he was invited to meet survivors of the 7 October attack and the relatives of people who had been killed.

In February 2024, Khan issued a strongly worded statement that Netanyahu’s legal advisers interpreted as an ominous sign. In the post on X, he in effect warned Israel against launching an assault on Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, where more than 1 million displaced people were sheltering at the time.

“I am deeply concerned by the reported bombardment and potential ground incursion by Israeli forces in Rafah,” he wrote. “Those who do not comply with the law should not complain later when my office takes action.”

The comments stirred alarm within the Israeli government as they appeared to deviate from his previous statements about the war, which officials had viewed as reassuringly cautious. “That tweet surprised us a lot,” a senior official said.

Concerns in Israel over Khan’s intentions escalated last month when the government briefed the media that it believed the prosecutor was contemplating arrest warrants against Netanyahu and other senior officials such as Yoav Gallant.

Israeli intelligence had intercepted emails, attachments and text messages from Khan and other officials in his office. “The subject of the ICC climbed the ladder of priorities for Israeli intelligence,” one intelligence source said.

It was via intercepted communications that Israel established that Khan was at one stage considering entering Gaza through Egypt and wanted urgent assistance doing so “without Israel’s permission”.

Another Israeli intelligence assessment, circulated widely in the intelligence community, drew on surveillance of a call between two Palestinian politicians. One of them said Khan had indicated that a request for arrest warrants of Israeli leaders could be imminent, but warned he was “under tremendous pressure from the United States”.

It was against this backdrop that Netanyahu made a series of public statements warning a request for arrest warrants could be imminent. He called on “the leaders of the free world to stand firmly against the ICC” and “use all the means at their disposal to stop this dangerous move”.

He added: “Branding Israel’s leaders and soldiers as war criminals will pour jet fuel on the fires of antisemitism.” In Washington, a group of senior US Republican senators had already sent a threatening letter to Khan with a clear warning: “Target Israel and we will target you.”

The ICC, meanwhile, has strengthened its security with regular sweeps of the prosecutor’s offices, security checks on devices, phone-free areas, weekly threat assessments and the introduction of specialist equipment. An ICC spokesperson said Khan’s office had been subjected to “several forms of threats and communications that could be viewed as attempts to unduly influence its activities”.

Khan recently disclosed in an interview with CNN that some elected leaders had been “very blunt” with him as he prepared to issue arrest warrants. “‘This court is built for Africa and for thugs like Putin,’ is was what a senior leader told me.”

Despite the pressure, Khan, like his predecessor in the prosecutor’s office, chose to press ahead. Last week, Khan announced he was seeking arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant alongside three Hamas leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

He said Israel’s prime minister and defence minister stood accused of responsibility for extermination, starvation, the denial of humanitarian relief supplies and deliberate targeting of civilians.

Standing at a lectern with two of his top prosecutors – one American, the other British – at his side, Khan said he had repeatedly told Israel to take urgent action to comply with humanitarian law.

“I specifically underlined that starvation as a method of war and the denial of humanitarian relief constitute Rome statute offences. I could not have been clearer,” he said. “As I also repeatedly underlined in my public statements, those who do not comply with the law should not complain later when my office takes action. That day has come.”

[kingdomoftyto]

While I'm gushing about NaruMitsu fics I may as well mention I also read Legal Partners recently and it's pretty freakin' excellent. Considering it's got more kudos than any other fic in the entire ship tag, I'm sure it needs no introduction, but in case anyone out there hasn't read it: Miles and Klavier make a bet over who can show their chosen defense attorney counterpart the most appreciation. Totally platonically, of course. Yep, super platonic. Definitely won't result in anyone making out on balconies or cultivating heartwarming domestic lives together or anything, no way.

(And the bet? Totally won't result in a huge misunderstanding late in the story which causes an avalanche of drama and angst that has to be resolved before a happy ending can be reached. Definitely not.)

Aside from the obvious Wrightworth fluff (of which there is a LOT and it is wonderful--WAA Trivial Pursuit nights are canon to me), the one other thing I would want to single out as a highlight of the fic is actually its characterization of Klavier! I've admittedly not read a ton of fic focusing on him, but the way this fic portrays him is way different from any other takes on him I've seen. He's a little more aloof, a little less socially savvy, and he's driven by a deep-seated distrust of others. No matter how lonely he feels, how much he wants to connect with Apollo and Ema, he struggles to break his habit of keeping people at arm's length. And... idk! I think it's neat! Feels more fitting for him than the relatively emotionally intelligent version of him I see more often.

But that was a tangent. All you need to know is this is an ensemble fic with lots of different character POVs, a casefic subplot (involving drag queens and puppies!!), and even some dramatic hospital scenes (!), but at its core it's that same old found family and schmoopy gay lawyer romance we all know and love.

[penig]

I wish more people engaged with Great Expectations, not only because I could then read them reacting to it on days when writing about it myself is simply not in the cards even if I'm having Thoughts and Feels, but because I would love to see a general online freakout about the second Big Reveal we got yesterday, and all the subtext Jaggers drops all around it.

You thought Pip's convict being the source of his Expectations was the biggest shock you were getting in this book, didn't you? Oh no no no! Estella's mother a murderer, now demurely working for Jaggers, revealed in conjunction with his conversation (conducted in front of her!) about Estella's marriage to the inferior Drummle and how it's even odds who will rule the roost, depending entirely on Drummle's willingness to beat his wife!? That's the stuff to leave you reeling and deeply uneasy!

And there Pip and Wemmick sit, as impassive as they can make themselves (Wemmick of course excels at this; I wonder how well Pip succeeds? Or does Jaggers see exactly what effect he's having as he taps experimentally on the wound in Pip's heart?), for all intents and purposes conspiring together in opposition to their host, who undoubtedly would prefer to be left in the dark about proceedings anyway. The tightrope Wemmick walk each day between home and office is never more vivid than here, the essential conflict between the two never more clearly expressed than in this indirect exhibition.

I don't think Jaggers wants Pip to know his housekeeper's history in the depth Wemmick explains it. I think Wemmick explains it partly in rebellion against the part he must play every day in this man's service. But of course I am Wemmick's partisan.

Dickens was weird about women, and - even as aloof and unknowable as Estella is - I honestly think that Great Expectations is where he comes closest to writing a young woman who is a human being, not cluttered up with all his own baggage. The best time to discuss this would have been after Pip went to see Estella and Miss Havisham after Magwitch reappeared, when I couldn't write anything for Reasons. But here we are at Estella again.

In the Dickens universe, where domestic love is the supreme good and women the source of all domestic blessings, Estella's professed inability to love at all, in any form, is a gigantic scar upon the landscape - and yet, how natural, raised as she is. Even if she were not innately aromantic in her temperament, how could she have grown up romantic or filial or agapic or erotic in that house? How could she have learned to love, adopted as she was to be used and paraded and thrown like an Apple of Discord at Men, and at Miss Havisham's greedy relations to boot? Yet, Miss Havisham is devastated to find that the child she never taught to love feels no love at all for her. If Miss Havisham is mad rather than grossly self-indulgent due to being rich and entitled beyond reason, this is the core of it - she craves love, which she seems to have not been given as a child; but resents early rejection and disappointment so much that she kills all love that might have been hers in later life. Estella is coping as best she can with everybody else's issues; she, at least, will not manipulate Pip or lie to her surrogate mother, and that is all the virtue she can muster and all the revenge she can exact.

And now we find that she, the obligate ice princess to whom self control is survival, is the offspring of passion and violence; and that her innocent and desperate self-control is likely to end in a course parallel to that of her mother's guilty and desperate frenzy - beaten down as any poor woman on the tramp.

In a different story, Pip would save her from that; in another, equally different story, she would save herself. But in this world of convicts and lawyers and children lost in the marshes, can anyone save anyone?

[swagkingcowboy]

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Introduction

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[top-law-firms-in-delhi]

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A Testament to Excellence: Aayati Legal Among the Best

Being recognized as one of the best legal firms in Delhi is no small feat, but Aayati Legal achieves this through consistency and an unrelenting pursuit of excellence. Their success stems from their ability to address diverse legal challenges while maintaining a focus on innovation, precision, and client-first solutions.

Aayati Legal continues to set benchmarks in Delhi’s legal landscape. Whether you are seeking assistance in corporate law, tax compliance, or other legal matters, Aayati Legal stands as a trusted partner committed to delivering excellence.

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Divorce lawyer in Delhi: Navigating Divorce with Expertise and Compassion

Divorce is a journey where difficulties are in the next step. Finding the right lawyer is sufficient here for the starters. Individuals in  Delhi going through this challenge of separation must know about the divorce laws and the empathy that comes with that. It protects the personal interest of the person. In this guide, we will discuss the importance of hiring an experienced divorce lawyer in Delhi, how they help, and what to expect from them.

Why do you need a divorce lawyer in Delhi?

Divorce cases in Delhi are on the rise. The complexity of the cases often includes dissolution of marriage but also includes some serious issues like alimony, child custody, division of property, and matters relating to domestic violence. The right divorce lawyer in Delhi makes your case strong and has a strong understanding of the Indian family. They also help clients achieve favorable outcomes with sensitivity and legal acumen.

The role of a lawyer

A divorce lawyer’s role is more than just a legal representative. They offer crucial support during the most stressful periods. They will present a clear understanding of the rights and duties. Divorce lawyers also handle the documentation, provide legal advice and negotiate settlements on your behalf. Moreover, they can also provide advice on post-divorce matters like child support adjustments and property settlements.

Types of Divorces in India

Before consulting a divorce lawyer in Delhi, it is necessary to understand the type of divorce you are into. The divorces are of two types:

Mutual consent divorce: When both the partners agree to bring their marriage an end. In such a case mutual consent divorce is filed. It is quick process, less expensive, and allows for a more amicable separation. The divorce lawyer’s role is to ensure fair agreements on important issues like child custody, alimony, and property division while facilitating a smooth legal process.

Contested Divorce: In the cases where one spouse doesn’t consent, the contested person divorce can be filed on grounds specified by the Indian law. The grounds will be based on cruelty, adultery, desertion, conversion, mental disorder and other factors. A divorce lawyer is particulary important here to build the strong case, gather evidence and represent the case in the client court.

Key Services Offered by Divorce Lawyers in Delhi

Hiring a divorce lawyer in Delhi is like having the access to a variety of specialized legal services. Some of their core services include:

Legal consultation- Many divorce lawyers provide initial consultation to understand the specifics of the client’s situation. They also provide advice on the possible course of action. This is crucial for setting the realistic expectations.

Documentation- Filing the divorce involves numerous legal documents like petitions, financial statements and affidavits. A skilled divorce lawyer ensures all paperwork is accurately prepared and submitted on time.

Negotiation- Divorce lawyers help mediate and negotiate with the opposing party’s lawyer. Striving the agreement on key issues without the need for a court trial. This is especially beneficial for mutual consent divorces.

Court Representation- In case of the contested divorces, a divorce lawyer provide representation in the court. They communicate on your behalf, do cross-examination of the witness and present evidence to support the case.

Post-divorce legal assistance- Some very crucial issues like child custody modifications or alimony adjustments will come up during and after the case. It can assist in these post-divorce legal matters, allowing that clients to continue to receive fair treatment.

Choosing the right divorce lawyers in Delhi for your case

Selection of the right divorce lawyer makes the process smooth. Some of the factors to consider:

Experience: Divorce law is cross-jointed and choosing a lawyer who is an expert in the family law is right. He must have a good experience in handling divorce cases in  Delhi.

Understanding: Divorce is emotionally challenging for some of them and a good lawyer will be understanding in this case. He will make the client feel comfortable while guiding through the legal process.

Strong negotiation: A skilled negotiator is the one who will bring the case in your favorable terms without drawing out court battle. He will save your time and reduce the stress.

Transparent fees: Divorce can be costly. It will be important to understand the fee structure of the lawyer and the complexity of the case.

Positive client reviews: Researching online reviews or asking client testimonials give insights about the lawyer’s expertise and approach.

What to expect during a divorce process in Delhi?

During the divorce proceedings, keep in mind that it will be lengthy and full of emotion taxing. The simplified process of working with a divorce lawyer:

Initial consultation- The lawyer will discuss the client current situation. He will provide the advice on divorce grounds and explain the potential outcome based on the circumstances.

Filing the petition- For the mutual divorce, the lawyer will file the joint petition. However in the contested cases, they will file a petition on behalf of the client with the relevant court.

Court hearing- Contested divorce may require multiple court hearings. Here the lawyer has to be present in the case and counter the opposition’s arguments.

Final decree- Once the court heard both the side of arrangements, it will issue divorce decree and legally end the marriage.

Conclusion

Divorce path is not easy and gives a traumatic experience. Having the support of a skilled and professional divorce lawyer in Delhi makes the process smoother, faster and less emotional. Taking help from the right will represent you case in the court in the processed manner and will also provide the essential support at every stage possible.

If you are considering divorce or facing legal issues related to family law, connect with your experienced divorce lawyer.