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Nine witnesses will testify at five hearings between Tuesday and Thursday.

House Democrats have set up a packed schedule for their second full week of impeachment inquiry hearings, with nine witnesses set to testify between Tuesday and Thursday.

Things kick off on Tuesday morning at 9 am Eastern, with testimony from Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman (a National Security Council staffer) and Jennifer Williams (a State Department official detailed to the vice president’s office). We’ve embedded a live stream above, and you can also watch it on C-SPAN or other news networks.

Later, on Tuesday afternoon at 2:30 pm Eastern, the committee will hear testimony from Kurt Volker (the former US special representative for Ukraine) and Tim Morrison (a National Security Council staffer).

The hearing beginning Wednesday morning at 9 am Eastern will likely be especially explosive. It will be devoted entirely to Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the European Union. And Sondland is viewed by Democrats as the least credible witness so far — much of his testimony has conflicted with other aides’ recollections and documents, and he’s already “updated” his testimony once. So expect him to face serious pressure over whether he’s telling the full story.

That afternoon, Wednesday at 2:30 pm Eastern, two lower-profile witnesses — Laura Cooper (a Defense Department official) and David Hale (the under secretary of state for political affairs) will appear.

The week’s testimony will close out on Thursday at 9 am Eastern, with testimony from Fiona Hill (the former top NSC staffer handling Russia and Europe), as well as David Holmes (a Kyiv-based State Department official who stepped forward only recently to report new information about the scandal.)

All of these witnesses have already given closed-door depositions in the impeachment inquiry, so most of what they have to say is already known. The hearings are primarily to have them repeat their accounts of what they saw transpire in public.

And, for Ambassador Sondland in particular, they provide one more opportunity for him to try and remember some of the many things he failed to recall in his first go-round.

Where the facts stand in the Trump-Ukraine scandal

The impeachment inquiry has reached a point where relatively few of the underlying facts are disputed. Extensive witness testimony and documents have clarified the following:

• Very soon after Ukraine elected a new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in April 2019, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani began urging Zelensky’s team to launch certain investigations Trump wanted.
• Some Trump administration officials became involved in this effort, too. Specifically, they demanded investigations into Burisma (a Ukrainian gas company that Joe Biden’s son Hunter sat on the board of) and into purported Ukrainian interference with the 2016 US election.
• When Trump talked to Zelensky on the phone on July 25, he brought up both investigations specifically and urged Zelensky to talk to Giuliani and Attorney General Bill Barr about them.
• The Ukrainians were seeking a White House meeting between Trump and Zelensky. Trump officials told them that they wouldn’t get it unless they committed to those investigations: a quid pro quo.
• Around the same time, Trump was holding up nearly $400 million in military assistance Congress had approved for Ukraine’s government. Ambassador Sondland has admitted telling the Ukrainians that they likely wouldn’t get the aid unless they placated Trump by publicly committing to the investigations. The aid, however, was let through just before this scandal broke into public view.

We’re still lacking some facts about the military aid holdup and release (because the key officials involved, like acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and former National Security Adviser John Bolton have refused to testify). Still, the question of whether a quid pro quo was presented to the Ukrainians is no longer in doubt. In fact, two were — first, a White House meeting in exchange for investigations, and then, releasing military aid in exchange for investigations.

Meanwhile, Trump’s team is still trying to downplay the extent of the president’s involvement in all this — arguing that it was limited to what he said on just one phone call. But more information keeps coming out suggesting he was personally involved in what his aides and allies were doing all along.

What the witnesses will talk about this week

Nine separate witnesses are expected to testify this week. Some were more involved in the scandal than others — and some may be more eager to defend Trump politically than others.

For instance, three of the approved witnesses — Kurt Volker, Tim Morrison, and David Hale — were actually requested by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee. (The GOP requested a longer list, but Democrats only approved those they deemed most relevant to the inquiry).

None of these witnesses will get Trump off the hook, exactly — in fact, Morrison’s testimony can be read as quite damning for Trump, and Volker turned over a plethora of text messages that have been crucial evidence for Democrats. But Republicans who heard their closed-door testimony evidently concluded they’d each by politically helpful in some way.

Another witness — Gordon Sondland — has also seemed to be trying gamely to protect Trump in his testimony so far, often in ways that strain credulity. For instance, he has argued that the quid pro quo push came relatively late and that he didn’t even realize it was about the Bidens, he has tried to put the blame for it on Giuliani, and he has repeatedly failed to “recall” any personal involvement from Trump in it.

But after Sondland went in to give his initial deposition, other witnesses told the impeachment investigators a very different story. They recalled that Sondland was heavily involved in demanding investigations from the Ukrainians, and that he repeatedly claimed to have talked with Trump about the topic and to be carrying out Trump’s wishes.

One new witness, Kyiv-based State Department official David Holmes, came forward just recently to reveal that he saw Sondland call President Trump while they were in a restaurant together. Holmes said he could hear Trump ask about “investigations,” that Sondland assured him the Ukrainians would play ball, and that Sondland said after the call that Trump only really cared about Ukraine for the purposes of investigating Biden.

Holmes was a late addition to Democrats’ hearing lineup, and will appear Thursday. The other witnesses called by Democrats include, as mentioned, Fiona Hill and Alexander Vindman (National Security Council officials who were deeply concerned by the push for investigations), Laura Cooper (a Defense Department official who struggled to learn why the White House was blocking aid to Ukraine), and Jennifer Williams (a State Department official detailed to Vice President Mike Pence’s staff).

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Vice Media CEO Nancy Dubuc | Tori Stolper for Vox Media

“No one knows the brand better than he does.”

Vice’s old CEO, Shane Smith, is a scandal-plagued figure in media circles. But Vice’s new CEO Nancy Dubuc doesn’t think he gets enough respect.

Dubuc took over as CEO in early 2018 after reports emerged of a rampant frat-boy culture at the media company that caters to millennials who are turned off by traditional old-guard media fogeys. Smith, the ousted CEO who once called himself a “brand artist,” remains the company’s chairman, so he is still involved in selling ads to possible buyers.

“Shane doesn’t get as much credit as he maybe deserves,” Dubuc told Recode’s Peter Kafka at the Code Media conference in Los Angeles on Monday. “He’s never once interfered with me running the company — and that’s not something that many founders do easily.”

Dubuc saluted Smith because he “asked a woman to step in and gave me full charge.” She said she “welcomes” Smith’s involvement in Vice.

“A founder’s role to a company is very unique and one that should be respected,” Dubuc said. “No one knows the brand better than he does.”

But Smith or no Smith, Dubuc, the former head of the media company A&E, has a lot of convincing to do. Years after companies like Vice were being heralded as the future of digital media, one of its biggest investors, Disney, wrote down its own investment into the company to virtually nothing earlier this year.

Vice has recently been trying to achieve scale. After raising $250 million in debt, the company acquired Refinery29, a women’s lifestyle publisher, to better compete with the Facebooks and Googles of the world.

But while some digital media executives have floated consolidation in order to try and compete for ad dollars against the tech giants, Dubuc isn’t delusional about the impact this acquisition will make.

“I don’t think the logic of this merger makes us more powerful against Facebook and Google,” she said. “They are what they are — and I think there’s a pretty big piece of the pie left for those of us that are going to be big.”

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James Heckman and Ross Levinsohn have a really hard sell. | Tori Stolper for Vox Media

Speaking at Code Media, they tried to spin massive layoffs as better business.

“We bought the brand Sports Illustrated; we didn’t buy the company,” Maven Media founder and CEO James Heckman told the Code Media audience in Los Angeles about the company’s highly controversial purchase and restructuring of the venerated sports publication earlier this year.

He also didn’t buy Sports Illustrated’s business model, which consisted of paying a large staff of traditional journalists with money made from selling ads. After buying Sports Illustrated, Maven promptly laid off nearly 40 percent of its editorial staff.

Sports Illustrated has a “great brand, great reporters, unbelievable tradition — but they were in the wrong business model,” said Heckman, who was joined onstage by Sports Illustrated’s new CEO Ross Levinsohn. “They’ve got a 1986 business model. We’re bringing in specialists — team, fantasy, gambling, backpacking. That’s the model of the future,” Heckman said.

Sports Illustrated’s new business model includes a pared-down editorial staff as well as an army of “content creators” that Levinsohn said operate like franchises. Those content creators make money through a revenue share in which Sports Illustrated pays them a portion of ad revenue, based on the traffic they attract, rather than a salary.

Heckman said this could be a lucrative business model, referencing a North Carolina basketball writer who, he said, makes $900,000 a year employing this model at CBS (which bought Heckman’s previous sports media company, Scout).

Critics have called the system a content mill. As Deadspin put it, Maven “wants to build out a network of SI-branded Maven ‘team communities’ that will drive traffic through a combination of cynical SEO ploys, news aggregation, and low-paid and unpaid labor.”

By the end of next year, Levinsohn said the company would have more than 200 paid journalists and “hundreds if not thousands of content creators.”

Whether Sports Illustrated’s new business model will actually work — for the company or its bosses — remains to be seen.

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Trump reverses course on flavored vape ban; documents detail the disappearing of China’s Muslims.

Vox Sentences is your daily digest for what’s happening in the world. Sign up for the Vox Sentences newsletter, delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday, or view the Vox Sentences archive for past editions.

Trump administration’s vape ban dissipates

• President Trump is backing away from his initial support for implementing a flavored vape ban. [Washington Post / Josh Dawsey and Laurie McGinley]
• The swift reversal is reportedly prompted by Trump’s concern about a ban impacting the jobs of thousands of his potential voters ahead of the 2020 election. [Vox / Julia Belluz]
• “We’re waiting to see what our president puts out. Until then, we’re biting our fingernails and praying,” said Christian Liriano, a vape shop owner since 2014. [CNBC / Angelica LaVito]
• Trump is also likely concerned about the protests and social media campaigns against banning flavored vapes. [Slate / Elliot Hannon]
• In September, his administration moved to ban the product after a study exposed the large increase in the use of e-cigarettes by young people and a health crisis that unfolded in October. [USA Today / Jayne O’Donnell]
• More than 2,000 cases of vaping-linked illnesses, with at least 12 deaths, are confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Scientists and health officials have tentatively pointed to chemicals found in e-cigarettes. [Newsweek / Kashmira Gander]
• Several states have passed their own bans on vaping, and, somewhat unexpectedly, some teens are leading the charge. [The Guardian / Jessica Glenza]
• Rolling Stone explores if the ban would really have a significant impact for Trump in the upcoming election. [Rolling Stone / EJ Dickson]

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What’s happening to China’s Uighurs

• Leaked papers published by the New York Times show how China’s repression and detention of the minority Uighur Muslim population began, with harsh rhetoric and surveillance as early as 2014. [New York Times / Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley]
• When students started returning to their Uighur families in the western province of Xinjiang, they were met by officials who said their family and friends were in points-based “schools” for their reeducation — free of charge and well-provided for. [Independent / Zoe Tidman]
• In 403 pages of internal documents, the Chinese government details efforts to control and reeducate the Uighurs. There were also directives informing family members outside of the camps that release of their imprisoned relatives would depend on their behavior. [New York Times / Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley]
• Despite the Uighur population not being a threat to the Chinese government, Chinese President Xi Jinping primed his country for the “reeducation” programs with speeches that spoke to the need for “struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism” that implied the danger of the minority population. [Axios / Rashaan Ayesh]

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Miscellaneous

• Chicago’s teachers union voted to accept a new contract created after the nearly two-week strike.
• Immigrants aren’t looking for states that will provide them health insurance, according to a new study. [Vox / Nicole Narea]
• After Google set out to purchase Fitbit, users are becoming wary of the company’s privacy practices. Some are even getting rid of their fitness smart devices. [CNBC / Jennifer Elias]
• Thousands of Iranian intelligence documents reveal the extent to which Iran worked to expand its influence in Iraq. [New York Times / Tim Arango, James Risen, Farnaz Fassihi, Ronen Bergman and Murtaza Hussain]
• HBO adds mental health viewer advisory warnings before several of its shows, including Euphoria. [Forbes / Lisette Voytko]

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Verbatim

“Everyone else knows each other, but I know none of them. We are all puzzles, and I’m the only puzzle who doesn’t fit.”

[Sixth grader Angel Angon Quiroz after attending his new middle school in a different neighborhood]

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Watch this: Everything is designed for this man, even drugs

Making things for the “average man” isn’t a good idea. [YouTube / Kim Mas and Ranjani Chakraborty]

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Carolyn Everson, vice president of global marketing solutions at Facebook, onstage at the 2019 Code Media conference in Los Angeles. | Tori Stolper for Vox Media

Facebook is not getting better at answering questions about its political ads policy — or a lot of other political matters.

Facebook has come under heavy scrutiny in recent months over its political ads policy that allows politicians to lie in ads. On Monday, one of Facebook’s top marketers again defended the policy and said the company has no plans to change it, insisting that it’s up to voters to decide what messages resonate and are true, even if they’re false.

“That’s not a role that Facebook should be playing and interfering with democracy,” said said Carolyn Everson, vice president of global marketing solutions at Facebook, in an interview with Recode’s Peter Kafka at the 2019 Code Media conference in Los Angeles on Monday. But critics have argued that Facebook’s policy allows political campaigns to do that very thing.

Since the 2016 election, Facebook has been forced to reckon with the ways its platform can be weaponized to spread disinformation, undermine democracy, and influence politics. The company insists it’s trying to do better, largely by promising to be more transparent. (Everson declared that Facebook is “the most transparent ad platform in the world”).

But when it comes to substantive changes, the social media giant keeps saying it’s government regulators’ responsibility to figure out what to do. Facebook knows that Washington, DC, moves slowly; it will be a long time, if ever, before US lawmakers pass regulations on issues such as privacy, data collection, and ads for social media platforms. And so in the meantime, Facebook gets to keep calling the shots — and avoiding responsibility when it doesn’t.

In September, Facebook faced strong backlash when it refused to take down an ad run by President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign that made false claims about former Vice President Joe Biden. In the months since, the controversy surrounding this decision has snowballed. High-profile Democrats such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Elizabeth Warren have pressed Facebook on the matter, and some progressive groups have tried to test Facebook’s policy out to make a point about its pitfalls. But Facebook has dug in on the policy, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg vocally defending it in public.

Everson pointed out that when Warren’s team put out a fake ad claiming that Zuckerberg had endorsed Trump’s reelection bid as a way to exemplify the implications of the policy, Facebook let the ad stay up. “We stuck to the principle,” she said. Of course, the ad acknowledged it was a lie — that was the point.

And Facebook has bent its rules on this one already: When progressive marketer Adriel Hampton filed to run for California governor earlier this year so he could run fake ads on Facebook, the company shut him down because they said it was a ploy.

Some have floated the idea that one potential solution would be for Facebook to consider limiting political ad targeting, which Twitter recently said it plans to do with regard to issue ads. (At the end of the week, Twitter will ban political ads entirely.) When asked by Kafka for updates on that front, Everson said that’s actually not on the table. “We are not talking about changing the targeting,” she said.

When Kafka asked whether Facebook would consider a political ad blackout ahead of elections, Everson responded, yet again, that the company is working on more transparency.

At least one of the reasons why Facebook is so reticent to more carefully regulate political content on its platform is that it’s platform is so big that it would struggle to effectively do so. When making this point, Everson reminded the audience of a scandal that unfolded earlier this year around a doctored video that spread online that misleadingly made House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appear to be drunk. Despite the video being obviously fake, the company refused to take it down, and it’s been viewed millions of times on Facebook.

“If you’re going to take the Pelosi video down, then why not take down the millions of videos that have been doctored about Trump, about Bush, about Obama, about celebrities? We haven’t,” Everson told Kafka.

Facebook’s politics problem isn’t going away

Although Everson’s appearance at Code Media touched on many points about the company and its ad business, the audience kept focusing on Facebook’s decisions on politics and news coverage during the question segment of the interview.

When pressed on Facebook’s refusal to fact-check political ads, Everson tried to defend the company’s stance by referencing the rules that govern how broadcasters must handle political advertisements. In the US, the Federal Communications Commission has extensive guidelines for television and radio broadcasters around political advertising that bar broadcasters from censoring ads or from taking down ones that make false claims. Those guidelines don’t apply to online platforms, including Facebook, but the company has consistently tried to hide behind them.

“We have no ability, legally, to tell a political candidate that they are not allowed to run their ad,” Everson said. That’s not true.

An audience member also asked Everson why Facebook has decided to allow right-wing website Breitbart to be listed in its new News tab, which is ostensibly an indication that Breitbart offers trusted news, despite being a known source of propaganda. “We’re treating them as a news source; I wouldn’t use the term ‘trusted news,’” Everson said, pointing out that Facebook will also include “far-left” publications. That raises questions about Facebook’s standards for determining the “integrity” of the news sources it includes in its tab, which Facebook touted when it launched the feature in October.

Although Facebook’s missteps have continued in the aftermath of the 2016 election, including security breaches and more disinformation campaigns, Everson says she believes the company really has changed and is not the same company it was three years ago.

“I wouldn’t have stayed at Facebook” if the company hadn’t changed, Everson insisted. “If I didn’t see those cultural shifts, it would have been really hard for me to look people in the eye and have the confidence to stay at the company.”

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Tom and Greg scheme to get rid of incriminating evidence on HBO’s Succession. | HBO

That’s what John Stankey, CEO of HBO parent company WarnerMedia, said today at Recode’s Code Media conference in Los Angeles.

If the guy leading HBO’s parent company WarnerMedia has his way, the new HBO Max streaming video service won’t just be a Netflix competitor for cord cutters, it’ll be a new kind of cable bundle.

In an interview at Recode’s Code Media conference on Monday in Los Angeles, California, CEO John Stankey said the vision for HBO Max is to create a bundle of content that includes movies and shows not owned by WarnerMedia in addition to those it creates and licenses on its own.

“We’re basically unbundling to rebundle,” he said of the current streaming wars, where content companies are pulling shows from Netflix and launching streaming services like Disney+ and HBO Max. “At some point there will be platforms that re-aggregate and rebuild. … We’d like [HBO Max] ultimately to be a place where re-aggregation occurs,” he added.

This is the opposite of the direction the industry has been heading, with Netflix, Disney, HBO, and other media giants splintering off to create their own subscription services. But Stankey alluded to “the frustration” among consumers with this “fragmentation” and said ultimately a winning move will be to create a new version of a TV bundle.

Today, HBO Max is a $15-a-month streaming video service that offers HBO’s library of content, plus a selection of older hits like Friends and South Park. At some point in the future, Stankey hopes that it can secure content from other media companies, too, because his company is never “going to have a lock or monopoly on creativity,” he said.

Beyond his WarnerMedia role, Stankey is also the president of AT&T, the phone giant that purchased HBO parent Time Warner for $85 billion. Stankey said he won’t hold both roles indefinitely and will hire a new WarnerMedia CEO when the company gets through the current transition period. But he would not put a timetable on that.

To jumpstart HBO Max, AT&T is going to spend $4 billion on the service, the company previously said. It is giving it away to its phone subscribers and it’s trying to convince current HBO subscribers to switch to the streaming service instead.

But cable distributors, who are the current retailers of HBO subscriptions, could stand in the way, and WarnerMedia hasn’t yet cut deals with any of the big cable companies to promote the service.

Still, AT&T and WarnerMedia are projecting HBO Max will turn a $1 billion profit by 2025 and will hit 50 million subscribers. It will likely need to beef up its content library so it more closely resembles a cable bundle to get there by then.

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Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, speaks at CPAC 2019 in February. | Ricky Carioti/Washington Post/Getty Images

Trump expressed hope that the Senate would confirm one of his nominees. Days later, the RNC came calling for cash.

Wealthy donors being rewarded with cushy ambassador gigs is not a new development in American politics, nor is it a uniquely Republican form of pay-to-play. But as with many things pertaining to the current occupant of the White House, President Donald Trump and his Republican backers have taken things in this realm to a whole new level of unseemliness.

According to a new CBS investigation, while Trump’s nomination of San Diego billionaire/campaign donor Doug Manchester to be the ambassador to the Bahamas was held up in the Senate in early September, RNC chair Ronna McDaniel sent Manchester an email that alluded to what seems to be a corrupt quid pro quo.

“Would you consider putting together $500,000 worth of contributions from your family to ensure we hit our ambitious fundraising goal?” McDaniel wrote.

McDaniel’s plea for cash came just three days after Trump expressed hope on Twitter that the Senate could confirm Manchester’s nomination. (Manchester owns a home in the Bahamas and assisted with the Hurricane Dorian relief effort.)

An RNC spokesperson told CBS that McDaniel “did not suggest to Mr. Manchester in any way that it would more quickly advance his confirmation if members of his family made a political contribution.” But the timing of her personalized email pitch to Manchester — coming as it did just days after Trump expressed hope that he would be approved as ambassador to the Bahamas — is a terrible look at best, and appallingly corrupt at worse. And suffice it to say that Manchester’s response did not help matters.

In an email sent to McDaniel that also copied staffers working for two Republican senators who sit on the Foreign Relations Committee that controlled his nomination — Rand Paul (KY) and Jim Risch (ID) — Manchester replied to McDaniel by saying his wife was donating $100,000 immediately, and he promised more if approved for the ambassadorship.

“As you know I am not supposed to do any, but my wife is sending a contribution for $100,000. Assuming I get voted out of the [Foreign Relations Committee] on Wednesday to the floor we need you to have the majority leader bring it to a majority vote … Once confirmed, I our [sic] family will respond!” he wrote, according to emails obtained by CBS. (The RNC spokesperson told CBS that Manchester’s “decision to link future contributions to an official action was totally inappropriate” and claimed the donation made by his wife was returned.)

Alas, Manchester’s nomination did not make it out of committee. According to CBS, the Risch staffer who was copied on Manchester’s email alerted the White House about the apparent pay-to-play scheme. Manchester, perhaps feeling pressure to do so, officially said he was no longer interested in becoming ambassador to the Bahamas last month.

Given that the whole episode unfolded in writing, both Manchester and the White House may have felt like there was little choice but to pull the plug. Not only is the sort of pay-to-play outlined in the emails unethical, but it’s also arguably illegal, as soliciting or receiving payments for public offices violates federal law.

Manchester isn’t the first wealthy Trump donor to land himself in hot water after donating $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. Gordon Sondland, who became Trump ambassador to the European Union after donating the same amount, has become a key witness in the impeachment inquiry about Trump’s dealings in Ukraine. Sondland even put himself at risk of perjury by revising his original testimony to congressional impeachment investigators in a manner that suggests he had been trying to protect the president until testimony from other witnesses made his position untenable.

Sondland made his fortune as a hotel magnate. Manchester made his in real estate. Neither had any diplomatic experience before they were nominated to ambassador positions by Trump. Both now find themselves at the center of scandals. It’s no wonder that Democratic senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has made no longer allowing campaign donors to become ambassadors a centerpiece of her plan to revamp the State Department.

But the Manchester scandal isn’t just one about pay-to-play gone wrong — it’s also one about the ongoing shadiness of the RNC. Already this year the committee has come under fire for accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from casino mogul Steve Wynn, who last year resigned from his position as finance chairman of the RNC amid a string of allegations of sexual misconduct. That McDaniel was willing to brazenly hit up Manchester for half a million bucks while his ambassadorial nomination hung in the balance indicates that for her committee, the ends continue to justify the means.

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The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.

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Mike Pompeo making the settlement announcement. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

What he said and why it matters.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Monday that he is reversing a longstanding State Department legal opinion labeling Israel’s settlements in the West Bank at odds with international law. This new position sharply contradicts mainstream interpretations of the law, the historic US approach to the conflict, and the broader international community’s view of the situation.

While the announcement has no immediate policy implications, it does send a pretty clear message to Israeli settlers and its government: go ahead and keep moving en masse into land that the Palestinians might want as a home for their future state. It’s part of a distinctively Trump administration approach to the conflict that I’ve termed a “blank check”: essentially letting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies on the Israeli right get away with virtually whatever they want when it comes to the Palestinians.

The decision comes at a particularly fraught time in both US and Israeli politics. The Trump administration has been fighting back against impeachment charges fueled by the testimony of State Department officials; Netanyahu’s hold on power is extremely tenuous, as he’s trying to scuttle an opposition party’s ongoing attempt to form a new government without him. It’s hardly a big leap to see this as an attempt by Pompeo to both distract from the Ukraine situation and give the administration’s buddy in Jerusalem an accomplishment he can use to shore up political support.

Whatever the reason behind the move, the result is the same: the US is providing support for the most radical factions of Israel’s right and making the already-monumental task of negotiating a peace agreement even harder.

What Pompeo actually did — and why it matters

On its face, the legal situation seems simple. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention says that “the Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

Israel took control of the heavily Palestinian West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 Six Day War, has not formally annexed it, and yet maintains military control over the territory. If you visit the West Bank, as I did last week, you’ll see Israeli-populated settlements built after the war dotting the landscape, ranging in size from tiny outposts to small cities.

That description sure makes it seem like Israel is transferring “parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” In 1978, the Carter administration’s State Department issued a memo saying that the settlement enterprise is “inconsistent with international law.” The next president, Ronald Reagan, said he disagreed with that decision — called the Hansell Memorandum — but didn’t formally reverse it. So the memo has stayed on the books since then, even though public US statements would often carefully refer to the settlements as “illegitimate” rather than “illegal.”

The notion that the settlements are illegal is supported by a 2004 International Court of Justice advisory ruling and a number of UN Security Council resolutions that the US either allowed to pass or voted for. However, Israel and some of its defenders have argued that the settlements are not illegal: claiming that the West Bank is not occupied territory but rather “disputed territory” and that Israelis voluntarily moving into the West Bank is not a “population transfer” under the terms of the Geneva Convention.

On Monday afternoon, Pompeo essentially took Israel’s side, announcing a formal repudiation of the Hansell Memorandum. He billed this as both the result of a review of the law and an important step towards a peace agreement.

“Calling the establishment of civilian settlements inconsistent with international law has not advanced the cause of peace,” he said. “The hard truth is that there will never be a judicial resolution to the conflict, and arguments about who is right and who is wrong as a matter of international law will not bring peace.”

This argument is exceedingly strange. No one seriously believes in a “judicial resolution” to the Israeli-Palestinian situation, that the simple act of declaring the settlements “illegal” would magically get rid of them and bring peace. Rather, the argument is that the settlements are major barriers to peace — a fact which every US administration has recognized at one point or another — and that the US ought to put diplomatic pressure on Israel to limit their growth.

If you spend significant time in the West Bank, it’s easy to understand the reasoning here. The security bubble Israel maintains around settlements cuts off Palestinian communities from each other and makes a meaningful, economically viable existence for some of them impossible. The very existence of settlements creates an Israeli constituency that opposes any peace deal that involves creating a viable Palestinian state, as this would require the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of settlers from their homes.

Hazem Bader/AFP/Getty Images

Pompeo’s substantive arguments are not serious. It’s better to understand this is part of a broader set of diplomatic policies, ranging from the administration’s pick of a hardline anti-Palestinian ideologue as ambassador to its decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem, that seem designed to boost Netanyahu’s political fortunes and encourage the expansion of the settlement project with a wink-and-a-nudge. It’s an approach that indulges Israel’s worst instincts, pushing it to cement the worst elements of the occupation and undermine its own long-term prospects for survival.

“We are strong enough to deter and defeat enemies,” Nimrod Novik, the Israel Fellow at the pro-two state Israel Policy Forum, said in an emailed statement. “What we don’t have is [a] system to defend us from friends who threaten to end the Zionist vision.”

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