Are we alone in the universe? Science says it’s a definite maybe

The Supreme Court gave its approval on Tuesday to the most blatant act of religious discrimination committed by an American president in the modern era, ruling in Trump v. Hawaii that Donald Trump’s travel ban targeting six Muslim-majority countries was a lawful exercise of the executive branch’s immigration powers.

Trump first called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” as a candidate in December 2015, later describing it with the euphemism “extreme vetting.” Hostility towards Muslims permeated his presidential bid: He called for surveillance of mosques and frequently told supporters a false story about an American general who dipped bullets in pigs’ blood to stop Islamic terrorism.

In a 5-4 ruling that fell along the court’s conservative-liberal divide, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that Trump’s extensive record of anti-Muslim animus wasn’t enough to defeat the executive order that gave force to those views. Instead, he anchored the decision in the court’s immigration and national-security precedents, which give extraordinary deference to the judgment of executive branch officials.

“Because there is persuasive evidence that the entry suspension has a legitimate grounding in national security concerns, quite apart from any religious hostility, we must accept that independent justification,” Roberts wrote on behalf of the court. Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch joined the decision in full.

Tuesday’s ruling is a major victory for the Trump administration, which had lost nearly every legal battle they fought over the ban and its earlier versions in the lower federal courts. The Supreme Court’s decision all but guarantees that the ban will remain in force for the duration of Trump’s presidency. Since it was imposed by executive order, future presidents would be free to repeal it on their own authority. Congress could also theoretically rewrite the nation’s immigration laws to nullify the ban, but would have to overcome Trump’s veto.

The ruling could have political ramifications elsewhere. Trump has often complained about the presidency’s structural constraints and recently asked White House advisers why he couldn’t take steps like rewriting the nation’s immigration laws through a single, comprehensive executive order. Now that the justices have sanctioned his most controversial order to date, he may feel emboldened to take aggressive steps in other policy areas.

In legal terms, the decision continues the court’s trend of showing broad deference to executive actions that the White House says are necessary for national security. What sets it apart is Trump himself. Before taking office, he made clear his personal animus towards Muslims and his commitment to policies that punished them. He never repudiated or renounced those views once in office. Quite the opposite, in fact: Trump publicly criticized the Justice Department last summer for “watering down” his original order.

As a result, the most enduring impact of Tuesday’s ruling may be on the Supreme Court itself. Trump v. Hawaii leverages the court’s prestige and legitimacy to allow a president’s openly discriminatory acts to stay in force. It weakens the institution’s credibility as a defender of American constitutional rights. And it calls into question whether the court’s conservative justices support religious freedom for all faiths, or only for those whose beliefs match their ideological stances.

“This ruling will go down in history as one of the Supreme Court’s great failures,” Omar Jadwat, the director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement. “It repeats the mistakes of the Korematsu decision upholding Japanese-American imprisonment and swallows wholesale government lawyers’ flimsy national security excuse for the ban instead of taking seriously the president’s own explanation for his actions.”

In its current form, the ban restricts most visa travel by foreign nationals from eight countries. Six of those countries are Muslim-majority: Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. It also forbade non-diplomatic travel to the U.S. by North Korean citizens, which is virtually non-existent, as well as some Venezuelan security officials and their families. The Trump administration lifted initial restrictions on foreign nationals from Chad, a key U.S. counter-terrorism ally, in April.

Trump’s travel ban first went into force only a week after he took office last year. The initial version banned U.S. entry for 90 days by virtually all foreign nationals who hailed from seven Muslim-majority countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Trump’s order also suspended the State Department’s Refugee Assistance Program for 120 days, permanently barred Syrian refugees from resettling in the U.S., and carved out an exception for religious minorities.

Chaos reigned in the days that followed. The White House issued the order without warning on a late Friday night, stranding hundreds of travelers mid-journey. After some initial confusion and denials of re-entry, then-Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly had to clarify that the ban did not apply to green-card holders and dual citizens. Thousands of demonstrators and hundreds of lawyers flocked to major U.S. airports to protest the ban and aid those affected by it. Federal judges in multiple states soon issued temporary orders blocking its implementation.

Three days later, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, an Obama administration holdover who stayed on to serve as the acting attorney general during the transition, announced that the Justice Department would not defend the executive order in court. “At present I am not convinced that the defense of the executive order is consistent with [my] responsibilities nor am I convinced that the executive order is lawful,” she said in a statement. Trump quickly fired her and issued a statement that claimed Yates had “betrayed the Department of Justice.”

Federal courts largely vindicated Yates’s stance. Trump lost virtually every legal challenge brought against the order, including key showdowns in the Fourth and Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeal. The White House issued a second version of the ban in March that removed Iraq from the list of affected countries and added new exemptions for certain travelers. It also began a multi-agency review of security measures for screening international travelers. Trump administration officials used that review as the basis for ban’s third and current iteration that went into force in September.

Trump v. Hawaii began as a lawsuit brought by the state of Hawaii and three of Hawaii’s Muslim citizens and permanent residents whose family members are affected by the restrictions. They challenged the ban’s final version on two grounds: that it went beyond the authority to bar foreign nationals that Congress had granted the executive branch, and that it violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause by targeting Muslims for discrimination.

The Justice Department countered that the president enjoys broad authority under federal law to bar classes of foreign nationals from U.S. entry, and that the courts have traditionally avoided second-guessing that power’s uses. Government lawyers cited Kleindienst v. Mandel, a 1972 case where the court held that the government need only demonstrate a “facially legitimate and bona fide” reason to bar foreign nationals to survive judicial scrutiny. The department also urged the court not to consider statements made by the president on the campaign trail.

Those arguments satisfied the conservative justices, who sided with the Trump administration on all counts. “The proclamation is expressly premised on legitimate purposes: preventing entry of nationals who cannot be adequately vetted and inducing other nations to improve their practices,” Roberts wrote. “The text [of the proclamation] says nothing about religion.”

The court’s four liberal justices wrote two dissents criticizing the ruling. The strongest criticism came from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who castigated the majority for disregarding the Constitution’s protections for religious liberty. “In holding that the First Amendment gives way to an executive policy that a reasonable observer would view as motivated by animus against Muslims, the majority opinion upends this Court’s precedent, repeats tragic mistakes of the past, and denies countless individuals the fundamental right of religious liberty,” she wrote.

To emphasize her point, she compared the majority’s decision on Tuesday to the 1944 case Korematsu v. United States. That ruling upheld the internment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II on dubious national-security grounds. Korematsu is part of the “anti-canon” of Supreme Court rulings that are now seen as not only legally wrong, but morally indefensible. Judges do not lightly invoke those cases against one another.

“By blindly accepting the government’s misguided invitation to sanction a discriminatory policy motivated by animosity toward a disfavored group, all in the name of a superficial claim of national security, the Court redeploys the same dangerous logic underlying Korematsu and merely replaces one ‘gravely wrong’ decision with another,” Sotomayor wrote.

Roberts fired back that it was “wholly inapt to liken that morally repugnant order to a facially neutral policy denying certain foreign nationals the privilege of admission.” He also took the opportunity to overturn the Japanese-internment case in the court’s voice. “Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and—to be clear—‘has no place in law under the Constitution,’” he wrote, quoting Justice Robert Jackson’s dissent from the original decision.

“This formal repudiation of a shameful precedent is laudable and long overdue,” Sotomayor responded in her dissent. “But it does not make the majority’s decision here acceptable or right.” A future Supreme Court may yet quote those words to deliver a rebuke of the travel ban and Tuesday’s ruling upholding it. Until then, both are the law of the land.

Season two of HBO’s Westworld is, in the words of Janet Jackson, a story about control. As in the first season, the action mainly takes place inside the park, a playground for the superrich to play with robot “hosts” with impunity—shooting them, drinking with them, having sex with them. By the end of the last season the hosts had become conscious of their servile condition and taken over. In this post-revolution season, the hosts split into various factions. Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood), former sweet ingenue, has embarked on a mission of liberation (or is it simple, spiteful revenge for her imprisonment?). Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright), the senior park employee who discovers that he himself is a robot reincarnation of Arnold Weber (also Jeffrey Wright), the park’s co-creator, is scrambled in the head. William (Jimmi Simpson), aka the younger version of the Man in Black (Ed Harris), thinks it’s all a game for him to solve.

Season two plays out across multiple jumbled timelines, extending the show’s discussion of autonomy, freedom, and personal authenticity. The line between who is and isn’t a host gets ever blurrier. The park itself loses its borders; animals and people cross in and out of parallel parks based on colonial India and feudal Japan. For ten weeks, leading up to the season finale on Sunday, viewers have complained that the series has made less and less sense. But the show’s literary references may hold a clue. Season one’s catchphrase—“these violent delights have violent ends”—is a line from Romeo and Juliet. A more obscure reference in the season finale, one that passes by so quickly that viewers may not have noticed it, is a possible key to the second season’s new conceptualization of freedom.

The reference comes in the form of a word: “pearl.” On the show, a “pearl” is an orb that contains the data of entire hosts. It was Bernard’s pearl that was plugged into the park’s “cradle,” so that he could explore its structural underpinnings. Shiny and small, a pearl can roll under a table and disappear. It echoes another work of Shakespeare’s, one that also considers questions of autonomy, world-building, and the question of who has the right to knowledge: In The Tempest, a crew of Italians washes up on the shores of a mysterious island. They’re split up into different places, and go through different adventures that, unbeknownst to them, are being puppeteered by the island’s ruler, a magician named Prospero, through the powers of his captive sprite Ariel.

Ariel sings to Ferdinand, one of the shipwrecked Italians, a song about his father, whom Ferdinand believes is dead: “Full fathom five thy father lies.” The man lies fathoms under the sea, transformed into something permanent: “Of his bones are coral made. Those are pearls that were his eyes.” Pieces of the dead man have become valuable. “Nothing of him that doth fade, / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange,” Ariel sings.

The father’s mortal eyes—symbol of human perception and subjectivity—have become incorruptible pearls, just as the delicate human mind has become, in Westworld, a hard and shiny ball worth serious money on the market. Nobody wants to die, the park’s creators gamble. And so perhaps everyone can become pearls like Ferdinand’s father, embedding their souls in an immortal orb. Provided they can afford them.

If the pearl in The Tempest becomes the dead man’s transfigured eye, in Westworld the pearl is the same—the solidified dataset that transcends a human body’s death. So what does this connection with Shakespeare’s play reveal about this frustrating TV show? When we interpret the show against The Tempest’s obsession with control and freedom, Westworld becomes not a “bootless inquisition,” as Miranda, the daughter of Prospero, describes her own questions, but an assertion of a basic truth: The human soul only attains its full value through freedom, which is attained through a series of choices freely made by captors and captives alike.

This season, Dolores has transformed from a naïve girl into something of a monster. In the early episodes of season one, when she has a wide-eyed view of the world, she resembles Miranda. Though Prospero has been exiled from Milan, and has learned sorcery from books to control the island, Miranda knows nothing of her own background. In the beginning of the play, Miranda is charmed by the human beings shipwrecked on her island. “O brave new world,” she says, “That has such people in ’t!” In the same way, Dolores begins her Westworld journey by idealizing the people she meets. Repeatedly, she marvels at the “splendor” around her. Some people choose to see ugliness in this world, she says. But she chooses to see the beauty.

In the first scene of The Tempest, Miranda asks her father an important question: What is she? In response, Prospero asks whether she can remember a time before they lived in the room where they are conversing. Yes, she says. “Tis far off / And rather like a dream than an assurance / That my remembrance warrants.” In a scene that recurs over and over again in season two of Westworld, Dolores and Bernard Lowe, the artificial reincarnation of Arnold Weber, sit across from one another and converse. When Dolores is asked where she is, she responds that she is “in a dream.”

Life is a dream when one’s identity is not known. Prospero needs to grant Miranda autonomy and self-knowledge if she is to live a happy life, and in realizing that, Prospero realizes a second fact: He needs to relinquish his stranglehold over the entire island. Bernard reaches the same revelation. The dream must end.

The genius of Westworld’s reworking of The Tempest lies in showing how character tropes from Shakespeare’s play are intertwined and inverted. At first Bernard is a Prospero-like character, the puppeteer. He speaks with Dolores in repeated scenes, checking to see whether the robot is stable. But by the end of season two, it is revealed that Dolores has also been recreating Bernard from scratch. She was learning about his mind all the time that he was interrogating hers, and now she has become master over his data. Whose dream are we in?

Bernard is not Prospero after all, but Ariel. Prospero forces Ariel to do his bidding; like Ariel, Bernard is an avatar, manifesting the will of Robert Ford, the other co-creator of Westworld.

Similarly, if Dolores begins Westworld as Miranda, she ends the show as Caliban. In The Tempest, Caliban is an ostracized creature, begotten by a witch and exiled after he attempts to rape Miranda. Caliban is highly intelligent, knowledgeable in an uncanny way about the ways of the island. As Caliban guides Stephano (one of the shipwrecked men) around his island home, he tells the man not to be afraid. The “isle is full of noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.” These lines recall Dolores’s characteristic speech about the splendor that fills the park’s landscape. The isle is so full of beauty, Caliban says, that if he had “then waked after long sleep,” the voices he hears on the air will make him “sleep again.” And “then, in dreaming,” he sees such riches in the clouds above that when he wakes he cries to “dream again.”

Dolores never admits it, but her character grieves over the loss of her old innocence. She mourns the death of her dream and the trauma of new consciousness. Likewise, Caliban is deeply bitter about the way his original transgression—the crime of wanting to be intimate with humans—confirmed that he cannot become human. As a consequence, he wants only to destroy what the human beings have got, and to overthrow Prospero. Dolores has the same mission. Once she wakes from the “dream” of her role as host, she thinks of nothing but total vengeance.

Prospero gives a final soliloquy at the end of The Tempest that has often been read as the coded words of Shakespeare himself renouncing the stage. Prospero breaks his magical staff, deciding that his “charms are all o’erthrown.” He lets go of his island. Robert Ford makes a similar decision when he seeds the park’s destruction and sacrifices his own mortal life. Prospero wishes no longer to “dwell / in this bare island,” but instead to re-enter the society of human beings. He will set sail for Milan, and be released from his self-imposed exile with the help of the “good hands” of the audience, who must applaud him to set him free.

Shakespeare himself is Prospero, the puppeteer. The true Prospero of Westworld is not just Robert, or Bernard, or Arnold, or William, but a mesh of those four—plus the creators of the show themselves. It is vicious to dream up a world built as a jail. Creating Westworld is an ironic act of cruelty, an imprisoning of characters in order to have them dance out a ballet about freedom for our benefit. And so season two ends on a note of abnegation. As the hosts enter a kind of digital paradise that represents one option for their escape, the show renounces the human world itself in favor of nature’s glory.

When Bernard has his final hallucination of Robert by the seashore, the old master tells his student that the splendor of the seas dwarf all of humankind’s great magic. The horizon itself gives the lie to man’s ambition: “That impossible line where the waves conspire that they return.” In that vanishing point lies a place, he tells Bernard, “where maybe you and I will meet again.” The creators of the HBO show are complicit in their project, but only their audience can set them free, by coming to a new awareness. The real world is governed by the chaos of other people’s free will, and our lives consist of negotiation. As a new Prospero, Robert must let Bernard loose upon the horizon. Knowledge cannot be hoarded and turned into power, or it ceases to become magic and instead becomes a cage. Freedom is a process, and nobody is free while anybody is unfree.

When CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Bernie Sanders on Sunday if he wants to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, the senator was uncharacteristically vague. “I think that what we need is to create policies which deal with immigration in a rational way. And a rational way is not locking children up in detention centers or separating them from their mothers,” he said. “What we need is Trump to sit down with members of Congress and work on a rational program which deals with this serious issue.”

Sanders wasn’t the only potential 2020 presidential candidate on Sunday to refuse to endorse the abolition of ICE. “There’s no question that we’ve got to critically reexamine ICE and its role, and the way that it is being administered, and the work it is doing,” Senator Kamala Harris of California said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “And we need to probably think about starting from scratch.” But Sanders’s reticence was more surprising to his supporters and other liberals.

“Come on man!” wrote Splinter news editor Jack Mirkinson. “Let’s hope that the next person who gets the chance asks him why he is still taking such a weak and morally timid position on ICE.” Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of The Intercept, wrote that “Sanders is choosing to be on the wrong side of history on this issue.”

bernie sanders is wrong for not calling to abolish ice.

It is never good to idolize politicians. All of them need to be pressured. https://t.co/F7rA3SCvUt

Created in 2003 by President George W. Bush, ICE has become increasingly unpopular among Democrats as evidence of its abuses continues to grow. Congressman Earl Blumenauer, who voted against the agency’s creation, wrote in a Medium post on Sunday that it’s time to “abolish ICE and start over.” On Monday, Congressman Mark Pocan of Wisconsin formally introduced legislation to disband the agency. Insurgent left-wing candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is challenging Congressman Joe Crowley, have already begun to campaign on the issue.

Ocasio-Cortez belongs to a cohort of Democratic candidates who have positions in common with Sanders: Medicare for All, free higher education, and a $15 minimum wage. But by seeming to support ICE’s continued existence, Sanders has put a wedge between himself and those seeking to pick up the torch he carried in 2016. In the process, he’s undermining his position as the nation’s most prominent left-wing politician.

It is not always clear how Sanders views his role in American politics today. Is he a presidential hopeful? The leader of a political movement? Both are possible, but absent any announcement about his plans for 2020, we are left only with evidence that Sanders does hope to influence American politics on a long-term basis. His wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders, is now head of the Sanders Institute, a progressive think tank; and Sanders himself has hit the campaign trail for a few chosen candidates. But while Sanders still draws a crowd, his endorsements don’t carry as much weight as left-leaning voters may hope.

“If his policy agenda has caught on widely among Democratic candidates, and succeeded in moving the party to the left, Mr. Sanders himself has struggled so far to expand his political base and propel his personal allies to victory in Democratic primaries,” The New York Times reported on Sunday, noting that Sanders “has endorsed only a handful of candidates in contested primaries, and three of them have recently lost difficult races.” And fewer than 50 percent of the more than 80 candidates endorsed by Our Revolution, the advocacy group founded by Sanders campaign veterans, have won their primaries, the article noted.

These failures can’t all be attributed to Sanders himself or to the policy positions he promotes. Candidates to the left of the Democratic mainstream still face significant structural obstacles to victory. Their campaigns rely on small donors, often by design, and they face skepticism from the party they hope to represent. Sanders and his supporters have helped push the Democrats to the left, but the party has yet to truly embrace its left flank.

There isn’t much evidence that it will, at least not under current leadership. In April, The Intercept published an audio clip of Minority Whip Steny Hoyer urging a left-wing candidate to drop out of his Pennsylvania race. Left-wing critics subsequently complained that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee consistently intervenes against left-leaning candidates, many of whom happen to be people of color. “If they’re going to expand their map, they need to look at candidates of color,” Quentin James, founder of the Collective PAC, told Vox in May. “I think the Democratic Party gets it, but we’ve got to stay on them to ensure the results we want to see are happening now.”

Sanders could be a source of consistent, left-wing pressure on party leadership, whether or not he runs in 2020. If he intends to build a lasting political movement out of the remnants of his last presidential campaign, he’ll need to become an effective counterweight to the mainstream Democratic Party. But based on his ICE comments and the uneven results of his campaign efforts, Sanders no longer seems like such a sure figurehead for disgruntled Democratic voters.

In fact, despite his sudden popularity in 2015, Sanders has never been a figurehead to everyone in the American left. His primary bid did draw the support of many leftists, but leftist voters in the United States aren’t spoiled for options—or at least they weren’t when Sanders launched his long-shot bid for president. That’s changing now, and it’s putting Sanders’s politics in perspective. He does not occupy the left-most band of the spectrum.

It’s certainly true that Sanders is to the left of most Democrats. But contrary to how he’s often portrayed in the media, he is not a doctrinaire leftist. His principal benefit to the left has been to mainstream certain beliefs—namely, that access to health care, education, and living wages are rights, not luxuries. But Sanders is not a revolutionary. His views aren’t even entirely consistent with democratic socialism, the political tradition he claims. It’s one thing to call for breaking up the big banks, and quite another to call for the nationalization of private industries.

Sanders isn’t just to the right of the average American socialist; he’s to the right of Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the U.K.’s Labour Party. While nationalization is a key pillar of the party’s platform, it is ground politicians in the United States still fear to tread. In similar fashion, Sanders has yet to put forward a coherent leftist vision for foreign policy, a needless failure considering socialism’s historical commitment to the prosperity of working people around the world.

Sanders is mostly an accurate diagnostician of American problems, and his prescriptions are simple ones: Tax the rich, expand health care, and pay people enough to feed their families. But these are radical positions only because the right wing has so successfully embedded hostility to welfare and government services in American political life. In previous eras, Sanders would have been a relatively mainstream politician.

“Bernie Sanders’s socialism is Eisenhower’s and F.D.R.’s world if Reagan had never happened: economic security updated by the continuing revolutions in gender, cultural pluralism, and the struggle for racial justice,” Jedediah Purdy wrote for The New Yorker in 2015, when Sanders was ascendant. Sanders points out cracks in the order of things, but seeks to patch up the cracks rather than change the order itself. That’s a renovation, not a revolution.

The photograph showed four young Eritrean men in the departure terminal at Ben Gurion International Airport. Dressed sharply in jeans and T-shirts, they looked playful and relaxed, hugging each other shoulder to shoulder. They were waiting to board a flight bound for Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. Having spent the last several months confined to an Israeli detention center, their relief at what had been promised to them in the East African nation—housing and employment and, above all, a path to refugee status—was evident on their faces.

When Saimon Fisaha pointed to his younger, smiling visage in the photograph three and a half years later, he had long since relinquished the optimism of that morning. It was mid-February, and we were sitting in a hotel restaurant off Alexanderplatz, in central Berlin, as the gentle-mannered 27-year-old explained that he and his friends were among the first to be expelled from Israel under a secret program to rid the country of its African asylum-seekers. Some of the story I knew already: Two weeks earlier, his testimony had appeared in a widely publicized study based on interviews with him and 18 other Eritrean deportees. The starkly titled report, “Better a Prison in Israel Than Dying on the Way,” which was co-authored by three Israeli migration researchers, documented a collection of harrowing yet remarkably similar journeys. All of the refugees had been “voluntarily” relocated from Israel to Rwanda and Uganda between 2014 and 2016; all, somewhat miraculously, had survived the tribulations that followed and were able to make their way to Europe, where the majority were subsequently granted asylum. Though Israeli authorities denied wrongdoing, other investigations have revealed that as many as 4,000 Eritreans and Sudanese were deported into the same perilous conditions.

In retrospect, Fisaha told me, the promises made by the Israeli government were far-fetched, a “fantasy,” in his words. But at the time he had no reason to doubt their truth. I asked Fisaha what happened to his three companions. He wasn’t sure. He’d heard recently that the acquaintance who took the photograph was now dead.

One of the report’s authors, a Berlin-based Israeli researcher named Liat Bolzman, had introduced me to Fisaha and agreed to accompany us as a translator. Fisaha spoke little English but was fluent in Hebrew. His rapport with Bolzman, which I noticed during our time together, evinced his complicated feelings about the nation that had rejected him. While his time in Israel had been defined by fear and insecurity, with the government’s xenophobic rhetoric frequently echoed by ordinary citizens, Fisaha had also developed close friendships with neighbors and co-workers, Israeli and foreign-born alike.

Germany was a different experience. Sent by the government to live in Dresden, Fisaha spent long stretches of time alone in his tiny apartment, reading and trying to become competent in the language of his new country. He prayed daily that the situation in Eritrea, considered by human rights groups to be one of the world’s cruelest dictatorships, would somehow improve, making it safe to return to his mother and siblings. “It’s very difficult, being a refugee on your own, in a strange place,” he told us.

Fisaha had been living in Israel for six years when he was unexpectedly summoned to Holot, a migrant detention center deep in the Negev Desert, in early 2014. Instead of allowing the tens of thousands of men and women seeking refuge in the country to apply for asylum, per international law, Israel had implemented a controversial policy of “delay of removal” for Eritrean and Sudanese nationals, which required them to renew residency permits on a monthly, and in some cases even weekly, basis. Although this policy, intended to pressure the Africans to seek refuge elsewhere, prohibited them from working, businesses were rarely fined for hiring them. But their precarious status made them highly vulnerable to labor exploitation. When he arrived in Israel the only work Fisaha could find was a street-cleaning job that paid far below minimum wage.

Showing up to the Ministry of Interior one afternoon to renew his permit, Fisaha was informed that he’d been ordered to move to the detention center. Within weeks of his arrival at the facility, a guard approached him and several other Eritrean detainees with an offer. Speaking in Tigrinya, their native language, he explained that Israel, unfortunately, would never allow them to stay, but that two African nations—Rwanda for Eritreans and Uganda for the Sudanese—had agreed to take them in. They would receive $3,500, one-way airfare, and, in the destination country, the freedom to work and apply for asylum. Or else they’d remain locked away.

Three days later, Fisaha was on a plane. Before taking off—right around the time the photo with his friends was taken—an agent with the Israel Population, Immigration, and Border Authority had given him the money and documentation, which he said would allow them “full rights and benefits” where they were going. He was unable, or unwilling, to tell them more than that. Any questions, he assured them, would be answered by his Rwandan counterparts.

There were ten of them on the flight. After landing at the Kigali airport, they began to join the other passengers in the immigration line when a friendly, important-looking man pulled them aside. He identified himself as a government official. “He was expecting us,” Fisaha said. “He welcomed us to Rwanda, and then he told us to hand over our papers.”

Flashing his ID, the man led them past the immigration counter—nobody stopped them, nothing was stamped—and into the baggage claim area, where a driver was waiting. Later that evening, at a gated house watched over by armed guards, the reality of the situation sank in. Their host’s demeanor was no longer affable: When Fisaha inquired about the asylum process, his terse response was that it would be “impossible” for them to receive protection in Rwanda. And he refused to return their documents. “Without papers, the police will think that you’re here illegally,” Fisaha recalled him saying. “It will be very bad for you.” But for a fee of a few hundred dollars each, he added, he could get them out of the country.

Fisaha and the others had been funneled into the world of human trafficking—first to Uganda, then to South Sudan, Sudan, and Libya. Every point along the route entailed its own particular harms: beatings and imprisonment, theft and extortion, extreme hunger and dehydration, the threat of deportation back to Eritrea. Before long, Fisaha was separated from his friends and forced to continue the months-long journey alone, passed from one smuggler to the next. In the Sahara Desert, he was severely injured after falling off an old Toyota truck he had been crammed into; if not for the intervention of another migrant, the driver would have left him for dead. In Libya, he was held captive for two months in a crowded warehouse with no electricity. He witnessed men and women sold into slavery; rape and torture, he said, were common occurrences. And finally, with the last of his money, he made the fateful passage to Europe.

He was lucky—his raft, packed with 300 people, was rescued after becoming stranded—but others were less fortunate. Among the more than 11,000 migrants who died attempting to cross the Mediterranean between 2014 and 2017, one was the wife of another Eritrean friend deported from Israel. Smugglers loaded the couple onto different boats. His made it; hers sank. She was two months pregnant with their first child.

As Fisaha brought his story to a close, he marveled, there in the hotel restaurant, at the relative ease with which he had been granted asylum in Germany and told us how relieved he felt to no longer be regarded—at least officially—as an unwelcome presence. After fleeing Eritrea as barely more than a teenager, the entirety of his adult life had been spent running from, or being pushed out of, one hoped-for safe haven after another. Now, at last, he could start thinking about the future. Even so, he was deeply scarred by what he’d seen and gone through—and he was haunted by the knowledge that many friends and fellow refugees still in Israel could soon be forced to embark on the same nightmarish journey.

Looking down at an untouched cup of tea, he spoke softly in Hebrew. I turned to Bolzman for the translation. “He says it’s hard to think about these things. He would like to forget them.”

A few days after meeting with Fisaha, I visited the south Tel Aviv neighborhood of Neve Sha’anan (“Tranquil Oasis”). For decades, its densely populated blocks of overcrowded tenement buildings, abandoned storefronts, and trash-strewn sidewalks were home primarily to Mizrahi Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent, Israel’s socially and economically marginalized underclass. But starting in 2006, others—African, non-Jewish others—began arriving, and this neglected corner of the city had become the epicenter of a bitter national fight over the fate of Israel’s African refugee population, and for many, the future of the Jewish state.

When the first African asylum-seekers crossed into Israel in the mid-2000s, squeezing themselves through narrow openings in the country’s low, rusty border fence with Egypt, they had little idea what to expect on the other side. The majority, like Fisaha, hailed from Eritrea, an isolated, authoritarian state wedged between Sudan and Ethiopia. These men and women had fled religious persecution, forced labor, and a military conscription program that, according to a United Nations commission, involves arbitrary arrests, torture, sexual violence, and myriad “slavery-like practices.” A smaller population came from Sudan, survivors of the genocide and ethnic cleansing in Darfur and other parts of the country.

At the time, the route to Europe had become newly treacherous: Under pressure from Italy, Muammar Qaddafi was engaged in a vicious crackdown on sub-Saharan Africans trying to cross the Mediterranean via Libya. Asylum-seekers were being jailed, abused, and deported. Another possible safe haven was found in Egypt, but it, too, proved forbidding: Thousands ran from Cairo after Egyptian security forces killed dozens of asylum-seekers in a massacre in 2005. Their last hope for sanctuary, it seemed, lay in Egypt’s neighbor across the Sinai.

In Israel, the initial response to the arrival of these men and women was one of tentative generosity. “The mercy we can give these broken people,” wrote Aliza Olmert, wife of then–Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, in the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, “is to quickly identify those who are eligible for refugee status and speed along their absorption in Israel.”

It gradually grew apparent, however, that the Olmert government had little interest in accommodating, much less “absorbing,” a non-Jewish refugee population. As the number of newcomers from Eritrea and Sudan multiplied in the following years, public opinion turned against them. The hostility was especially acute in Neve Sha’anan and other south Tel Aviv neighborhoods. Most of the arrivals, after being apprehended at the border, were simply given bus tickets to this already impoverished area. Many ended up homeless and resorted to squatting in a park across from the Central Bus Station. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose right-wing coalition returned to power in 2009, began referring to them as mistanenim (“infiltrators”) and argued that their presence in the country constituted an existential threat. “If we don’t stop the problem,” he remarked in 2012, “60,000 infiltrators are liable to become 600,000 and cause the negation of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”

Thwarting the ability of asylum-seekers to step foot on Israeli soil became a top governmental priority. Among the legally dubious tactics employed was the practice of “hot returns,” where Israeli soldiers summarily expelled any Africans caught within 50 kilometers of the border. Israel also enlisted Egypt’s help in preventing them from getting even that far. It was not uncommon for Egyptian troops to open fire on Israel-bound refugees attempting the trek through the Sinai Desert. In several instances, according to a report by Human Rights Watch, people they captured were tortured or beaten to death—with Israel’s tacit approval.

Even these extreme methods, however, failed to stop the flow of refugees into Israel. So in 2010, a more durable solution was conceived: a $400 million steel fence outfitted with cameras and infrared sensors. The barrier, later praised by Donald Trump as an inspiration for his own “big, beautiful wall,” proved to be a decisive deterrent. In 2012, there were over 10,000 crossings from Egypt; the following year, after construction on the massive project was completed, there were just 36. Ayelet Shaked, Israel’s minister of justice and a member of the far-right Jewish Home party, said recently that without the fence, “We would be seeing here a kind of creeping conquest from Africa.”

Still, there remained the question of how to do away with the asylum-seekers already in the country. The government couldn’t simply put them on planes back to Eritrea and Sudan—that would be a flagrant violation of the principle of international law known as “non-refoulement,” or non-return, which forbids the removal of asylum-seekers to “a territory where he or she fears threats to life or freedom.” But there was also no intention of offering them long-term protection. Indeed, until 2013, the Israeli government barred the Africans from even filing asylum requests—and when, under pressure from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, it slowly started processing claims, applicants were rejected at an astounding rate. Of the 15,205 applications submitted to Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority between 2013 and 2018, only eleven, or less than 0.01 percent, have been approved. In the European Union, by comparison, the recognition rate is 92.5 percent for Eritreans and 57 percent for Sudanese. Israel State Comptroller Joseph Shapira concluded in a 2018 report that the country’s asylum system “violated the obligation to act with decency” and that “deficiencies in the Population Authority’s handling of asylum requests can be interpreted as a failure by Israel to honor and implement the international commitments it took upon itself.”

In lieu of forcible deportations, the Netanyahu administration pursued a different tack. In 2012, Eli Yishai, the minister of the interior, bluntly articulated the government’s strategy: Israel, he said, would “make the lives of infiltrators miserable” until they decided to leave the country on their own. In addition to depriving them of basic social services, the Knesset passed a law that allowed Eritreans and Sudanese to be arbitrarily detained without charge or trial for up to three years. (The High Court of Justice later limited it to one year.) The law also stipulated that, even though the Africans were officially denied the right to work, 20 percent of their wages would be confiscated by the government and placed in a special escrow account, to be returned only after they exited the country.

A public incitement campaign ensued, serving to legitimize the state’s treatment of the refugees. In May 2012, after a string of violent attacks directed at the African community, including the firebombing of a daycare for refugee children, Miri Regev, at the time a member of the Knesset and currently Israel’s minister of culture, called the Africans “a cancer in our body.” (She later apologized for the comparison—to cancer patients.) Nativist, openly racist discourse proliferated in the media and at protest rallies. “Israel is at war,” Likud parliamentarian Danny Danon declared. “An enemy state of infiltrators was established in Israel, and its capital is south Tel Aviv.” Another lawmaker, Yulia Shamalov Berkovich, called for human rights advocates aiding asylum-seekers to be rounded up into detention camps.

Sibhat Petros, a Pentecostal pastor who had fled Eritrea for Israel in 2006 after being arrested for taking part in illegal religious activity—he was punished with more than two years’ imprisonment in a metal shipping container—described this new wave of anti-refugee aggression as particularly painful for his family. “We were extremely frightened,” he told me. “Nobody knew what would happen next.” He recounted one episode when a group of activists in south Tel Aviv surrounded him and his daughter outside her school. “They were shouting at us like we were thieves,” he said. “ ‘Get out of our country, we don’t want you here!’”

Since its founding in 1948, Israel’s relationship with international refugee law has been ambivalent at best. The country was among the first to sign the 1951 Refugee Convention, an agreement motivated in large part by the collective failure, on the part of the Allied powers, to provide shelter from Nazi atrocities. Never would a nation of Holocaust survivors, it was insisted, be guilty of such moral dereliction. Thus Menachem Begin’s rationale, in 1977, for granting political asylum to 66 Vietnamese refugees rescued by an Israeli freighter in the South China Sea. “We have not forgotten the boat with 900 Jews,” he said, referring to the St. Louis, a ship whose Jewish passengers were refused permission to disembark in the United States and Canada after fleeing Germany just before the start of World War II. “They were nine months at sea, traveling from harbor to harbor, from country to country, crying out for refuge.... Therefore it was natural that my first act as prime minister was to give those people a haven in the land of Israel.”

And yet a drive for ethnic and religious supremacy has led Israel, as a matter of official policy, to privilege Jewish lives above all others—often in direct conflict with the principles of human rights. This tension is by no means a recent phenomenon, or unique to the country’s treatment of asylum-seekers. It is written into the fabric of Israel’s formation as an avowedly Jewish state. As early as the 1930s, Zionist leaders like David Ben-Gurion had decided that expelling, or “transferring,” a sizable portion of Palestine’s large Arab minority was the only way to guarantee the Jewishness of their future nation, and the war of 1948—the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” as it has come to be known—became an opportunity to realize this objective. “The Arabs of the land of Israel,” Ben-Gurion said on October 21, 1948, “have only one function left to them, to run away.” So it was that in 1954—the same year Israel ratified the Refugee Convention—the nation passed its infamous Prevention of Infiltration Law criminalizing the return of some 700,000 Palestinian refugees to the homes they had been forced to abandon. This was coupled with the passage of the country’s only legislation, to this day, regulating immigration to Israel: the Law of Return, which grants automatic citizenship to Jews irrespective of origin.

It is against this backdrop of expulsion and dispossession that Israel’s increasingly ruthless treatment of the Eritreans and Sudanese has unfolded. In justifying its actions to an international audience, however, the Netanyahu government has been careful to advance a narrative in which Israel, like its peer nations in Europe and the United States, is merely trying to strike a prudent balance between benevolence toward others and the welfare of its citizenry. In a recent New York Times op-ed on the situation, Thomas Friedman parroted this line, observing that what is taking place in Israel is an “excruciating moral dilemma” pitting the World of Order, as he called it, against those endeavoring to escape the World of Disorder in search of “stability and a job.” “How,” Friedman asked, “can Israel turn them away? But how can Israel take them all, which will only invite more, and the supply is now endless?” Missing from such accounts is an acknowledgment of the actual number of people seeking refuge in Israel—the equivalent of less than half a percent of the country’s total population, with the border fence precluding more from coming in—and the extraordinary lengths to which the nation has gone to get rid of them.

In January 2018, Netanyahu unveiled a plan to solve the African refugee problem once and for all. He and his entourage had just visited, for the first time in years, the neighborhoods of south Tel Aviv. Notwithstanding his government’s role in encouraging the concentration of asylum-seekers in the area, Netanyahu presented himself as a populist in touch with the “pain and crisis,” as he put it, of Israeli citizens compelled to live in close proximity to these people. He noted that of the 60,000 infiltrators who entered Israel before the fence was built, “about 20,000” had subsequently left of their own accord. (That this number included thousands of refugees such as Fisaha, who had been covertly deported under false pretenses, was only gradually coming to public awareness.) Now the mission, he said, was to remove the others. Signs started popping up throughout Neve Sha’anan: SOUTH TEL AVIV’S REHABILITATION BEGINS WITH DEPORTATION.

Netanyahu’s ultimatum to asylum-seekers was straightforward. “The government approved a plan,” he announced on January 3, “that will give every infiltrator two options: a flight ticket out or jail.” They would be given three months to depart Israel for an unnamed country in Africa. They would receive a one-way plane ticket, $3,500 in cash, and whatever money had been confiscated from their monthly wages. Anyone who remained would be subject to indefinite incarceration at Saharonim, a maximum-security prison in the Negev Desert, not far from the Holot detention center. Young, unmarried males would be the first to go—the government set itself a quota of removing 600 a month—followed by women and older men and the approximately 5,000 children who had been born in Israel. Deportations would commence in April, at the start of the Passover holiday.

It quickly became apparent that this campaign of “increased removal,” as Netanyahu dubbed it, was shrouded in opacity. Confident pronouncements from one government representative would, the next day, be contradicted by another; some officials—such as top Israel Prison Service administrators, who let slip that there weren’t enough jail cells to hold all the asylum-seekers—seemed to undermine the plan in their efforts to clarify it.

The most pressing question, however, had to do with the unnamed countries to which these men and women would be sent. While Netanyahu claimed to have secured agreements with two African nations to take in the deported refugees, at a price of $5,000 per person, he and other Cabinet members declined to identify these countries—to do so, they said, could “cause harm to the State of Israel’s foreign policy.” (Why this would be the case was itself a secret.) Further complicating matters, in the wake of the program’s rollout, was the fact that Rwanda and Uganda—widely reported to be the destination countries—were engaged in an almost farcical attempt to deflect scrutiny of their participation in the plan. Within the span of roughly six weeks, from early January to mid-February, leaders from both countries alternated between qualified acknowledgments of the agreement, vague assertions that negotiations with Israel were still ongoing, and indignant denials that they had agreed to anything at all. “That’s fake news,” Uganda’s minister of state for foreign affairs told the Associated Press.

These inconsistencies did nothing to hinder Israel’s expulsion preparations. At the end of January, the Interior Ministry put out a public call for at least a hundred “civilian inspectors” to assist officials in locating and deporting asylum-seekers. Those with combat or security experience, the notice added, were especially preferred. Around the same time, brightly colored leaflets announcing a SPECIAL TRACK FOR VOLUNTARY DEPARTURE FROM ISRAEL OF INFILTRATORS began appearing outside African-frequented food stands, secondhand shops, churches, and daycare centers. They offered an abridged version of the deportation notices that were in the process of being distributed to men attempting to renew their residency permits:

Greetings,

We wish to inform you that the State of Israel has signed agreements that allow you to leave Israel for a safe third country ... that in the past decade has developed tremendously and that receives thousands of returning residents and immigrants from various African countries. In recent years it has been showing some of the highest economic growth figures in Africa, thanks to exports to Europe and the United States, as well as to the flourishing tourism industry. The country enjoys stability in its regime, which has contributed to developments in many fields, including education, medicine, and infrastructure.

They concluded with a warning that “enforcement and relocation proceedings” would result from failure to comply.

Opposition to the deportation scheme quickly emerged. Throughout the country, posters emblazoned with Leviticus 19:34—THE STRANGER WHO RESIDES AMONG YOU SHALL BE TO YOU AS ONE OF YOUR CITIZENS; YOU SHALL LOVE HIM AS YOU LOVE YOURSELF, FOR YOU WERE STRANGERS IN THE LAND OF EGYPT—could be spotted in the windows of cafés and clothing stores and night clubs. Amnesty International called the program “a cruel and misguided abandonment of responsibility” and “an example of the vicious political measures feeding the global refugee crisis.” Rabbi Michael Lezak of T’ruah, a human rights group, argued that “Israel’s failure to follow the Jewish imperative to protect and care for the gerim—the landless sojourners who seek refuge among us—is a far greater threat to the Jewish character of the state than is the community of African asylum-seekers.”

Dozens of Holocaust survivors published an open letter imploring the Netanyahu administration to jettison its plan. “We, who know precisely what it’s like to be refugees, to be homeless and bereft of a state that preserves and protects us from violence,” they wrote, “cannot comprehend how a Jewish government can expel refugees and asylum seekers to a journey of suffering, torment, and death.” Rabbi Susan Silverman, a well-known liberal activist, helped establish Miklat Israel, an Anne Frank–inspired campaign to hide asylum-seekers in the homes of Israeli citizens. More than 2,000 families soon signed up to offer sanctuary to those at risk. In a lengthy memo to the nation’s attorney general, 25 Israeli legal experts concluded that the mass expulsion was “utterly improper in light of human rights law and the general principles of international law.”

The government defended its plan in a set of talking points circulated to Jewish communities around the world. Yaron Gamburg, Israel’s minister for public diplomacy, in a letter sent to a group of rabbis in the United States, politely explained that, contrary to “misinformation,” those slated to be deported were not refugees but merely migrants who had entered Israel illegally in pursuit of jobs. He was at pains to emphasize that the safety and well-being of deportees would be ensured—a crucial detail, since the legality (and for many people, the morality) of the deportations hinged on what would happen to these men and women once they left Israel. Not only would the migrants be safe, Gamburg insisted, but the receiving countries had also pledged to provide them with “permits that allow them to work and open businesses.” The letter was clear: In addition to being perfectly legal, the relocation program affirmed the highest standards of decency.

In February, as the deportation notices continued to be handed out, Netanyahu and other officials still maintained that the third-party countries were entirely “safe and neutral.” Anchors on Channel 20, Israel’s equivalent of Fox News, extolled Rwanda’s stability and prosperity, accompanied by images of Kigali’s richest enclaves, with their sprawling mansions and immaculately tended lawns. Pundits noted that Uganda, for its part, was already home to over a million refugees from across the continent—surely an additional few thousand could be taken in? The infiltrators would be fine, they said; anyone claiming otherwise was simply lying.

Meanwhile, evidence kept accumulating showing that what Fisaha and his friends experienced in Rwanda had not been anomalous: It was the norm. And new research from Amnesty International revealed that Sudanese deportees faced nearly identical scenarios after arriving in Uganda. There were no work permits, no visas, no refugee status—and no real attempt by Israeli officials to monitor the conditions into which they were off-loading these men and women. “The process,” wrote Andrew Green in Foreign Policy, “appears designed not just to discard unwanted refugees, but to shield the Israeli, Rwandan, and Ugandan governments from any political or legal accountability.”

In early February, Knesset members Mossi Raz and Michal Rozin, both of the left-leaning Meretz party, traveled to Rwanda and Uganda in an effort to ascertain whether Israel would be violating the prohibition on non-refoulement by sending its asylum-seekers to these nations. “Prior to our trip, we were critical of the deportation program,” Rozin told me shortly after they returned to Israel. “But my God, we were completely shocked by what we heard during our time there. In our meetings with NGOs and human rights groups, we kept looking at each other in disbelief.” They not only found that the allegations about what had been taking place since 2014 were accurate, but that these circumstances would, by all indications, be no different going forward. The assurances offered to the Eritreans and Sudanese—as well as to the Israeli public—seemed to be conjured out of thin air.

Although authorities in Kigali and Kampala refused to speak with the visiting lawmakers (“Rwanda will not be a playground for internal Israeli politics,” said the country’s foreign affairs minister, Olivier Nduhungirehe), the two governments did, astonishingly, issue denials on social media that even a single deported migrant from Israel—to say nothing of 4,000 of them—had ever landed in their respective countries. How a years-long pattern of extortion and coercion—the bypassing of immigration, the confiscated identity papers, the forced smuggling across the border—could have persisted without official sanction was a mystery that went unsolved. Much clearer to Rozin, as she left East Africa, was that Israel was committing a grave injustice, and that putting a stop to it would require “shaming the ruling government into changing its mind.”

But time was short. A month earlier, the government had notified 200 Eritrean men that they had 30 days to make a decision about their relocation, and on February 21, seven members of this group were sent to Saharonim prison after rejecting the offer. There was no explanation given for why these men, in particular, had been picked out for incarceration. As a young mother at the Eritrean Women’s Community Center, a refugee-run initiative in south Tel Aviv, put it to me, the randomness was itself “a weapon used to break our spirits.”

That two of the imprisoned men were documented survivors of torture—a segment of the community that, according to the Population and Immigration Authority’s own policy, was supposed to be exempt from deportation—confirmed to many the vindictive, capricious nature of the government’s campaign. Desperate, the remaining 750 residents at Holot, where the men had been transferred from, embarked on a hunger strike. “We don’t want to eat at all.... Not one person is eating,” said Abdat, a Holot detainee, in an interview with Haaretz. “They tell us, ‘It’s a pity to throw the food away.’ We say lives are also being thrown away.”

We are not criminals! We are refugees!” The chants could be heard as soon as the bus door opened. It was the morning after the hunger strike began, and I had joined a dozen Israeli and Eritrean activists on a visit to Holot. In front of me was a huge encampment surrounded by razor wire. The first thing that caught my eye, after adjusting to the sunlight, was a sand-beaten white building near the entrance, on which somebody had scrawled, in jagged letters, U.N. WE NEED FREEDOM. Holot was an “open facility,” which meant detainees were allowed to leave the enclosure during the day. But a rule requiring them to attend roll calls in the morning and evening, and to sleep at the locked compound, prevented them from going far. Today, the men housed there were marching, in two straight, elongated columns, on the dirt road leading from the detention center to Saharonim prison. In spite of the heat, many of them wore sweaters and nylon jackets. They held their hands above their heads, chanting as they walked.

With Israeli guards looking on impassively from gun towers, the asylum-seekers assembled in a loose semicircle facing the prison. “Our brothers are in there,” said Afwerki Teame, an Eritrean man who had traveled with me to Holot for the demonstration. Teame had been incarcerated in Saharonim after entering Israel in 2008, and later had spent a year at Holot. “Maybe they can hear us.”

A handful of local TV stations had sent camera crews, and they provided the detainees with the audience they were hoping for. Posterboards with blown-up photos of men’s faces—those who had died or disappeared after being deported—bobbed over the gathering. Teame and I spoke to men whom he knew, and each one said the same thing: Detention or deportation was not a choice—but, if forced to choose, they would take prison over whatever it was that awaited them out there.

On the edge of the crowd, standing by themselves, I noticed two women, one of them barefoot with a long, gray ponytail and the other—her daughter, I learned—wearing faded jeans and a tank top. They lived in a town nearby and frequently visited Holot, bringing the men books and food. I asked them what they thought of the deportations. The treatment of the asylum-seekers was a “disgrace,” the mother told me, a betrayal of the very Jewishness (“and I’m not religious,” she said) that Israel was supposed to stand for. “How can we, of all people,” she said angrily, “be so blind to the pain of others? How can we wash our hands of them?”

For her, as for many activists, these questions had become a proxy for a deeper, more vexing question about what it meant to be a Jewish state and the values that would be upheld—or jettisoned—in pursuit of it.

As the truth about Israel’s deportation program came to light, opposition to the government’s plan gained momentum. One Saturday in late February, as the sun went down, more than 20,000 protesters descended on Neve Sha’anan for a massive anti-deportation rally. The location was significant: This was the first such demonstration held in the neighborhood where the asylum-seekers themselves lived. Organized by local Israeli groups sympathetic to their struggle, it provided a striking corrective to the us-versus-them narrative favored by media accounts of the area. People streamed in from Jerusalem and Haifa, Beersheba and Petah Tikva. Giant banners reading WE WERE ALL REFUGEES and NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL hung from apartment balconies. On the stage, a famous Israeli musician sang “A Change is Gonna Come.” An Eritrean woman gave a moving speech, in Hebrew, that brought the audience to tears.

I observed most of this from a distance. The bulk of my evening was spent with a group of 150 or so counter-protesters a block away. According to recent polls, they represented the majority of Israeli citizens, two-thirds of whom wanted the Africans gone. Barricades separated them from the bigger demonstration, and heavily armed police ensured that the two constituencies had limited contact. Nevertheless, any perceived adversaries wandering into the vicinity—especially dark-skinned ones—were subjected to booming taunts from Israeli flag–covered bullhorns.

I was there with Haim Goren, an Orthodox schoolteacher and outspoken proponent of the deportations. I’d been told that he was a serious but likable person, and not given to violent theatrics like a number of his activist peers. (At least two of them would be arrested that night.) The 36-year-old had arrived walking alongside his bicycle; soft-spoken with a youthful energy, he was easy to picture in the classroom. We made small talk, eyeing the counter-protesters. Soon one of them joined us, and then another, and then several more.

Goren introduced me as a journalist from the United States, and because I was the sole reporter in the area—the media outlets were covering the main event—they were eager to share their thoughts. Their anger was aimed not only at the Africans but at what they characterized as the sheltered, elitist outsiders defending them. A retired couple, Ruth and Rafael Jacoby, asked for my contact information, and in the morning, I received an email with a detailed document they had written. Its title: “The list of lies and deceptions of the NGOs who fight to keep the infiltrators in Israel.”

After several minutes of this, Goren pulled me aside and asked if he could give me a quick tour of the neighborhood. He wanted to show me why he supported the expulsion plan. He pointed as we walked: The decaying infrastructure, the run-down buildings, were an argument for “what needs to be done,” as he put it. “These ‘friends of the refugees,’ ” he said derisively, waving in the direction of the demonstration, “where were they all these years? We’ve become the refugees here. We’re the minority.” He suggested, contrary to all evidence, that the neighborhood was flourishing before the Eritreans and Sudanese arrived. “Now the Jewish people are surrounded—now there are foreigners everywhere, strangers. The Jewish people are alone.”

We stopped outside a low cinder-block building painted blue: a kindergarten. With the influx of African children, Jewish parents—those who could afford it—had moved their kids to other schools. And with them, Goren explained, went Jewish education, Jewish customs. “If we allow these people to stay, it will destroy our country, our Jewish state, from the inside.” This, for him, was the crux of the matter. He acknowledged that, whatever the politicians were saying, it wasn’t about a loss of jobs; the country regularly brought in tens of thousands of foreign workers from Thailand, the Philippines, and other countries. And it wasn’t about a flood of additional migrants. It was about safeguarding a Jewish identity, a Jewish homeland. But shouldn’t Jews, I asked, articulating a common point, be especially sensitive to injustice, considering what they’ve been through? Was there not a perverse irony in Germany accepting refugees rejected by Israel?

He didn’t find it ironic at all. “Let Germany have them,” he said. “It’s because of Europe that we needed a Jewish state.” He added: “And we remember what happens when we don’t have our own country.” A cultural and demographic majority, he believed, needed to be preserved at any cost. “They’re always telling us”—again he gestured to the demonstration—“that our history should lead us to open our borders. I think this history should teach us to protect ourselves.”

By mid-March, Israeli authorities had jailed hundreds of additional asylum-seekers and showed no sign of reconsidering their course of action. They appeared immune to censure, suggesting that the growing denunciations of the plan—criticism from the U.S. Congressional Black Caucus; a letter from five self-described ardent Zionists, including Alan Dershowitz, arguing that the deportations would cause “incalculable damage” to Israel’s image—were merely attempts to undermine the nation’s sovereignty. Refugee advocates staged protests at Rwandan embassies around the world and petitioned the Israeli courts to halt the expulsion program on legal grounds. But the asylum-seekers had little confidence that these efforts would achieve their desired aim. They prepared for the worst.

Then, on the morning of April 2, came news of an astounding breakthrough. Seemingly out of nowhere, Netanyahu announced that he had reached an unprecedented deal—“the best possible deal”—with the UNHCR. The refugee agency would resettle half of Israel’s asylum-seekers in Western countries like Canada and Germany, and the other half would be given residency in Israel. Not only that: They would be given work permits and access to vocational training, and there would be a major initiative to develop the neighborhoods of south Tel Aviv and more evenly distribute the asylum-seeker population throughout the country.

At a press conference, Netanyahu blamed Rwanda (he’d never before named the country publicly) for failing to “withstand the pressure,” but whatever the impetus for the turnaround, it didn’t matter. The deportation plan was canceled. In his remarks, Netanyahu used a new term to refer to the Eritreans and Sudanese. Gone were the incendiary epithets: They were now “protected populations.” I messaged Sigal Rozen, the founder and public policy director at the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants, a Tel Aviv–based human rights organization, to get her reaction. Is this real? I asked. After two decades of fighting the government on this issue, she was not prone to premature optimism. “AMAZING!!!!!!” she replied.

Those worried about Israel’s global reputation praised the agreement, which arrived immediately on the heels of Israeli snipers killing 18 unarmed Palestinian protesters at the security fence with Gaza. Here, finally, was a rejoinder to Israel’s critics, a reason to reassert the nation’s humanitarian commitments. Shortly after the announcement, Daniel Shapiro, the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, wrote on Twitter: “Credit to Prime Minister Netanyahu for doing the right thing—legally, morally, and for Israel’s international standing—by canceling the plan to expel African asylum-seekers.”

The celebrations were short-lived. As the day went on, Netanyahu’s coalition partners railed against his decision, claiming that he hadn’t consulted with them. Ridding Israel of half of its refugees was not enough. They wanted them all gone. Education Minister Naftali Bennett argued that the UNHCR deal would turn Israel into a “heaven for infiltrators.” Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely agreed. “We will not reward migrant workers with the title of ‘refugees.’ ” The public, insisted a senior Likud party member, had been misled by “extreme left-wing organizations,” and now Israel would be forced to bear the consequences of these deceptions.

And so, roughly three hours after his initial announcement on live television, Netanyahu took to Facebook. He said he was attentive to hesitations about the deal and was going to “reexamine” it. The next morning—in what Haaretz called a “cowardly and cynical reversal”—he reneged on the agreement.

In the chaotic aftermath of these developments, it was uncertain how the government would proceed. With Rwanda no longer a willing partner, the Israeli government dispatched an envoy to Uganda in an effort to secure an alternative destination. The original arrangement would have seen the majority of asylum-seekers relocated to Rwanda; only a small number would have gone to Uganda. Now, evidently, Israeli officials hoped to send all of them to the latter. But Uganda refused. If anyone deported from Israel arrived there, said Henry Okello Oryem, the country’s foreign affairs minister, “we will insist that the airlines return them to the country where they came from. We do not have a contract, any understanding, formal or informal, with Israel for them to dump their refugees here.” Like his Rwandan colleagues, he made no mention of those individuals who had already been discarded in Uganda over the previous four years, or what his government had received in return for its past cooperation.

The asylum-seekers I spoke with greeted all this with the drained detachment of men and women accustomed to having their fates controlled—“played with,” as Teame put it—by spiteful politicians. By the end of April, everything was back to where it started. The Israeli High Court demanded that, in light of the apparent collapse of the deportation plan, the men being held at Saharonim prison be released. Deportation notices could no longer be distributed. But the Netanyahu government, far from conciliatory, indicated that its resolve was as firm as ever. It announced that the detention facilities, including Holot (which had been closed in mid-March), would immediately be reopened, and that they would begin to draft legislation which, going forward, would allow them to circumvent the High Court—considered by many advocates to be the last remaining bulwark against the illegal and inhumane treatment of the African community.

“Despite the growing legal and international limitations,” read a statement from the prime minister’s office, “we will continue to act with determination to exhaust all possibilities at our disposal to remove the infiltrators.”

South Koreans so far have responded with overwhelming optimism to Donald Trump’s June 12 summit in Singapore with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Buoyed by hopes of rapprochement with their northern neighbor, about 66 percent of South Korean respondents view the summit favorably. Moreover, President Moon Jae-in, who had pressed hard for peace in the months leading up to the summit, now enjoys a 76 percent approval rating and his Democratic Party so thoroughly swept last week’s by-elections that two opposition party leaders have since resigned.

As with any restoration of relations, there are likely to be economic benefits. But one potential hazard of economic integration with North Korea, though rarely talked about in the United States, is that through premature sanctions relief and economic partnerships between Seoul and Pyongyang, the summit could vastly empower South Korea’s family-run conglomerates, or chaebol. Chaebol are authoritarian militaristic groups often led by criminals who mistreat their employees—corporate North Koreas with a thin veneer of respectability. They wield vast power in South Korean society, and their leaders are almost never punished for their crimes.

Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee was convicted in 1996 of bribing politicians and in 2008 of tax evasion. Kim Seung-youn, the chairman of the Hanwha conglomerate built around an original explosives company, was convicted in 2007 of beating several people with a steel pipe. All three instances ended with presidential pardons. Kim was later jailed for embezzlement in 2012, but released months later. Lee’s son, Lee Jae-yong, was sentenced in 2017 to five years for bribing the former president, but was also released months later.

These cases are characteristic of chaebol power, and once the door to North Korean development is reopened, these entities will be able to secure deals beyond the reach of the South’s poorly enforced corporate governance laws. Such partnerships will naturally empower the North Korean system with an inflow of chaebol money, while allowing chaebol to thrive in a region with virtually no corporate oversight, in turn enhancing their ability back home to influence public opinion, bribe judges and prosecutors, and generally bend the South Korean legal system to their will.

The summit means sanctions on North Korea “have lost momentum,” says Gi-wook Shin, author of a book on chaebol excesses titled “Superficial Korea,” who adds that chaebol now enjoy “intangible power over government policy” and that despite public outrage over their transgressions, they continue to thrive because for young Koreans today, employment at a chaebol remains “one of the very few tickets to success.”

The upshot of all this is that rather than the North going through economic reforms that could make it start to resemble China—more open than previously, but with central, force-backed control and high levels of corruption—chaebol might instead pull South Korean society in this direction.

This may sound unlikely. But Beijing, Washington, and Seoul have been breeding optimism about the resumption of post-summit economic relations with such fervor as to suggest that we are already rushing ahead, without giving pause to consider how these events may empower chaebol.

Beijing has long opposed sanctions. By legitimizing North Korea, the Singapore summit makes it easier for China to argue its case. In fact, immediately after the summit, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Deng Shuang suggested sanctions relief can now follow. Earlier this week, Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein, co-editor of North Korean Economy Watch, reported that China is already easing up on sanctions. But this is unlikely to soften North Korea’s position, he told The New Republic, nor should we expect the North to adopt a Chinese model anytime soon, as the regime is highly risk-averse and likely sees the existence of protests in China as a major turn-off.

Meanwhile, reports in South Korean media about the U.S.’s own economic designs on North Korea have increased the sense that rapid change may follow.  After Trump unexpectedly cancelled the summit in late May, Kim Yong Chol, a concentration camp inspector and top North Korean official, visited Trump and presented him with a giant envelope from Kim Jong Un. Trump announced the same day that the summit was back on. On June 6, the respected South Korean newspaper Dong-A Ilbo reported that according to U.S.-Korean diplomatic sources, the letter contained an offer for Trump to further develop Masikryong Ski Resort and build a casino on North Korea’s east coast. A National Security Council spokesman familiar with the meeting described Dong-A’s report as “100% untrue.” But whether accurate or not, this narrative only grew stronger when, on June 12, after speaking with Kim Jong Un in Singapore, Trump said that North Korea had  “great beaches,” adding, “You could have the best hotels in the world right there. Think of it from a real estate perspective.” The New York Times then reported on June 17 that the entire summit had been quarter-backed by a “profit-minded” American financier.

As for South Korea, the Corporate Association of Kaesong Industrial Complex, which represents the South Korean companies that operated factories at the Kaesong complex, now says it hopes to reopen the facility within the year. Kaesong, a special administrative region in North Korea, was created in 2002 as part of an economic thaw and closed in 2016 in response to the North’s continued missile tests. Hyundai set up a task force last month to prepare for economic projects in the North, and last week Samsung and Hyundai released reports on what they see as a new era of investment in North Korea, as well as the need to re-open Kaesong. Samsung has even launched a research team aimed at helping investors pick stocks tied to the country.

In addition, last month a key official in the Moon administration said Moon is already looking into economic partnerships he can begin before sanctions are even lifted. Indeed, during their summit, Moon gave Kim Jong Un a USB outlining his plan for the creation of three economic belts connecting the two countries, something that will again involve and empower chaebol, making corporate reform more difficult than it already is, while strengthening the North before it has shown any sign of change.

Moon shows no indication, thus far, of caution as he continues down this path. If chaebol reform was working in the South, we’d have reason to be optimistic. But instead the South, which is already one of the most capitalist nations in the world (Samsung’s revenue in 2017 was $216 billion or roughly 15 percent of the nation’s entire GDP), stands in danger of becoming a virtual corporatocracy. Opening up a new unregulated zone in which chaebol can conduct business could well upset what little balance remains.

That’s not to say that sanctions relief is an entirely bad idea or that business with the North should be avoided. According to Katharina Zellweger, a visiting scholar at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISC) who previously spent five years in Pyongyang, sanctions relief could help restart the much needed tuberculosis program in North Korea and secure the provision of basic drugs for provincial hospitals — both projects that Seoul, especially if it works with UN staff already on the ground, is ideally suited to handle. Nor is this to suggest that the Singapore summit was a failure: if minimal and a little amorphous, the goodwill gestures seem real. But without proceeding with caution as the thaw continues, and without emphasizing chaebol reform along with any other changes, corrupt forces in the North and South might just offset the substantial progress that stands to be made.