🚨Help Free 16-year-old Palestinian American Mohammed Zaher Ibrahim from Israeli Prison🚨
So much of what’s happening in Palestine feels out of our control, but this is a chance to make a real, material difference.
Yesterday I spoke with Mohammed's father, Zaher, about his son and their fight to free him from Israel's notoriously brutal Megiddo prison. I’ll be sharing clips from that interview along with tools to send letters to Huckabee, Rubio, and your Senators. His family is worried for his life and completely desperate to get him home, and they believe enough public pressure could actually move the US gov't to action. Please look for the links below, and share widely.
"They took my son away. We can do nothing about that. But can you give us something back, give us some happiness back? Can you at least get Muhammad out of jail?”
Here’s Mohammed’s father—and uncle of Sayfollah Musallet, who was beaten to death by settlers last month—recounting what Sayfollah’s father told Mike Huckabee when the two men met him: one seeking justice for his murdered son, the other fighting to free his son from military detention.
Pausing the video clips to share two forms that make it easy to email Huckabee, Rubio, and your Senators. Please fill them out ASAP—it takes just minutes—and share with everyone you know.
The family spends half of every day trying to reach recently released prisoners from Megiddo who might know something about Mohammed. In recent months, two healthy young men from his prison block have died—one, a 17-year-old from disease; the other, a 20-year-old beaten to death. When the latter died, they spent five agonizing hours trying to find out if it was him. Frankly, the family has good reason to fear for his life.
Here’s Mohammed’s father and sister talking about what he’s like—really just a normal kid! Just before the Israeli military abducted him, he’d been in California visiting his sister to help with her newborn. That’s them on the right.
On the 20 masked soldiers who stormed their house in the middle of the night, blindfolding and tying up Mohammed before taking him away and telling the family nothing. He is now wasting away in prison, down at least 25 pounds and covered in scabies. His family hasn't been able to speak with him since he was abducted in February.
On learning his nephew, Sayfollah, was beaten to death by settlers last month. Mohammed had planned to spend the summer with him in Florida, working together at the family’s ice cream shop. They don’t know if Mohammed even knows he was murdered. That’s them in the photo: Sayfollah on the left, Mohammed the little guy in the middle.
Mohammed is accused of throwing a rock. Not of hitting anyone. Not of throwing it at a car. Just throwing a rock. He's facing three years in prison, but his trial has been delayed three separate times, and nothing is currently scheduled. A single phone call from Trump or Huckabee could get him out.
On Tuesday, for the first time, a reporter asked the State Department what they’re doing to free Mohammed from Israel’s illegal detention. The spokesperson’s response was a complete non-answer.
Please help bring the little guy in blue back to his family. They fear for his life and are desperate to have him home. I’m allowing myself the slightest hope that with enough pressure, we can make it happen. Here are the two forms to contact your representatives again:
I told this unhinged creep that if he tweeted about Layla or the other young women who accused him of harassment and filed No-Contact Orders against him again, I’d release our DMs. I reminded him that every time he does, he terrifies them and triggers rape and death threats. He said, among many other insane things, "Don't threaten me unless you are willing to back up your threats with action. Don't start wars you cannot finish." Psychotic. Anyway, it took him exactly one day to share a fucking powerpoint deck naming them, showing their photos, and calling them "terror supporters"--including a 19-year old female student. I DM’d him yesterday to delete the tweet and remove their names, and he ignored it. So anway, here he is accidentally contradicting his new narrative by admitting that he "lost his job" at Columbia because of the investigation that Layla and his other accusers launched against him.
I spoke to Layla about this. She knows he’ll likely go after her even harder now, but she told me to go ahead—she thinks it’s more important to expose the extent of his creepiness than to shield her own name.
To reiterate, I don’t want to be doing this. I’d much rather focus on freeing 16-year-old Mohammed Zaher Ibrahim from Israeli prison and on other work. But this guy simply cannot control himself, and ignoring him just means he keeps terrorizing young women unchecked.
After I said, “I thought you left on your own accord,” he tried to walk it back with, “She made it impossible for me to stay there.” You can be the judge on that one.
From there he went into his usual weepy rant about how hard his life has been these past two years. I kept trying to de-escalate. I didn't even deny any of his outrageous accusations against her—I just said we should let bygones be bygones—he stops tweeting about Layla and her friends, I stop talking about his harassment—and reminded him again what he’s inciting against her (below). He said it's her own fault for being an antisemite.
Biden officials David Satterfield and Jacob Lew (now a @ColumbiaSIPA professor, shockingly) introduce a fascinating new theory in their piece for @ForeignAffairs: Biden’s unconditional support for Netanyahu’s genocidal war prevented a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
🧵It's nice that the Times decided to cover the explosion of settler violence in the West Bank, but I'm going to tell you everything that's wrong with the article.
The core issue is the framing. This isn’t about “extremist” settlers or isolated cases of “arson” and “land grabs.” These are the deliberate and inevitable results of a fundamental shift in West Bank governance—engineered by Smotrich and backed by Netanyahu—that set them in motion.
The military doesn’t just fail to “prevent” these attacks—they often take part in them. Just yesterday, a soldier shot a Palestinian dead during a settler raid in Duma. And that’s not even counting the many settlers the army has armed, uniformed, and effectively deployed as soldiers themselves.
An off-duty IDF soldier shot and killed a Palestinian in Duma today. Same pattern as always: settlers set up an illegal outpost beside a village, carry out regular pogroms, Palestinians eventually confront them, and settlers and/or soldiers open fire.
Israeli media immediately spins it as “Palestinian terrorists attacking a ‘Jewish farm’”—their cutesy name for outposts run by the most violent settlers. Soon enough, the government will send them more weapons to “protect themselves.”
They’ve got it down to a system—build outpost, attack, seize land—and it’s why gov't leaders call these settlers “Jewish heroes & pioneers.” They’re on the front lines, expanding Israel’s borders. Read here: “The Violent Settlers Are Just Doing Their Job.” infinitejaz.substack.com/p/the-violent-…
Shit like this happens every single day in the West Bank: Israeli soldiers stopped a 25-year-old at a checkpoint in Sebastia, beat him, stole his phone, filmed him at gunpoint saying “I love Israel” and “I will do everything they ask of me,” then posted the video to his Facebook.
The Azem family had me over for cookies and coffee last time I was in Sebastia. Kind, warm people who just want to live in peace.
An ex-Israeli spy tied to Iran-Contra who’s lobbied for Mugabe, Myanmar’s junta & Sudan’s generals is pushing to install a former PA official & businessman with ties to Trump allies as Gaza’s post-war governor, backed by $53B in Gulf money. Says it would be “good for the Jews.”