Entrance to a forested homeless camp, outside Bend, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

In the largest eviction of a homeless encampment in recent history, around 100 unhoused people were recently forced to vacate Oregon’s Deschutes National Forest — or else face a $5,000 fine and up to one year in jail.

The forest was the last hope for the encampment’s residents, many of whom were living in broken down RVs and cars. Shelters in nearby Bend — where the average home price is nearly $800,000 — are at capacity, and rent is increasingly unaffordable.

“There’s nowhere for us to go,” Chris Dake, an encampment resident who worked as a cashier and injured his knee, told the New York Times.

This sentiment was echoed by unhoused people in Grants Pass, 200 miles south, where a similar fight unfolded. A year ago this June, in Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court’s billionaire-backed justices ruled that local governments can criminalize people for sleeping outside, even if there’s no available shelter.

Nearly one year later, homelessness — and its criminalization — has only worsened.

Today, a person who works full-time and earns a minimum wage cannot afford a safe place to live almost anywhere in the country. The federal minimum wage has remained stagnant at $7.25 since 2009, and rent is now unaffordable for half of all tenants.

As a result, there are now over 770,000 people without housing nationwide — a record high. Many more are just one emergency away from joining them. 

The Supreme Court’s abhorrent decision opened the door for cities to harass people for the “crime” of not having a place to live. Fines and arrests, in turn, make it more difficult to get out of poverty and into stable housing.

Since Grants Pass, around 150 cities have passed or strengthened “anti-camping” laws that fine, ticket, or jail people for living outdoors — including over two dozen cities and counties in California alone. A Florida law mandates that counties and municipalities ban sleeping or camping on public property. Due to a related crackdown, almost half of arrests in Miami Beach last year were of unhoused people.

Emboldened by Grants Pass, localities have ramped up the forced clearing of encampments — a practice known as “sweeps.”

While officials justify them for safety and sanitation reasons, sweeps harm people by severing their ties to case workers, medical care, and other vital services. In many cases, basic survival items are confiscated by authorities. Alongside being deadly, research confirms that sweeps are also costly and unproductive.

Punitive fines, arrests, and sweeps don’t address the root of the problem: the lack of permanent, affordable, and adequate housing.

President Trump is only doubling down on failed housing policies. He ordered over 30 encampments in D.C. to be cleared based on a March executive order. And his budget request for 2026 would slash federal rental assistance for over 10 million Americansby a devastating 43 percent (all to fund tax breaks for billionaires and corporations.)

For too long, our government policies have allowed a basic necessity for survival to become commodified and controlled by corporations and billionaire investors. We must challenge this if we ever want to resolve homelessness.

Housing is a fundamental human right under international law that the U.S. must recognize. Homelessness is solvable in our lifetime if our country commits to ensuring that every person has a safe, affordable, dignified, and permanent place to call home.

As housing experts have long noted, governments should invest in proven and humane solutions like Housing First, which provides permanent housing without preconditions, coupled with supportive services.

Despite the obstacles, communities continue to fight back — including in Grants Pass, where disability rights advocates are challenging the city’s public camping restrictions. Others are forming tenant and homeless unions in their cities, organizing rent strikes, and pushing for publicly funded housing (or “social housing”) that’s permanently affordable and protected from the private market.

The Grants Pass decision may have opened the door to new cruelties, but local governments still have a choice to do what’s right. Now, more than ever, we must demand real housing solutions.

The post Criminalizing Homelessness Doesn’t Work, Housing People Does appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

Saner voices in the U.S. media have been appropriately appalled by President Trump referencing the word “genocide” while claiming that violent persecution of white farmers in South Africa was driving them to flee. This fact-indifferent accusation echoes, presumably deliberately, longstanding white supremacist narratives of “white genocide” in the U.S. and other Western countries. The rise of the MAGA movement had already mainstreamed some mildly subtler versions of these narratives (like “Great Replacement theory”), but this is the closest Trump himself has come to saying “white genocide” without using the exact two word phrase.

If Trump were anyone other than Trump, we might consider this rhetoric a curiously extreme enactment of reputational self-sabotage. It arguably exceeds the shameless racism even of his 2017 “very fine people on both sides” comment about the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville that turned deadly. Since he is Trump, though, being even more nakedly white supremacist will probably somehow work out to help him accumulate more power, wealth and lethal capacity. He has notably linked (a) his expressed white supremacy to (b) his concern for protecting Israel from South Africa’s accusations of genocide. Instead of the former tainting the latter, perhaps he expects the latter will put lipstick on the pig of the former. But the lipstick itself drips blood.

A review of Trump’s beef with South Africa, and the pro-Israel dimension of this beef

During Trump’s surreal White House meeting with South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa, he went so far as dimming the lights to make his unhinged accusations more dramatically. This meeting intensified media attention on the administration’s determination to strain relations with post-Apartheid South Africa. Months earlier, Trump had made his intentions clear with his February 7^th executive order to “(a) … not provide aid or assistance to South Africa; and (b) … promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination…”

The most interesting feature of the executive order, though, was the combination of reasons for issuing it. Section 1 of the order first references South Africa’s supposed “shocking disregard of its citizens’ rights” by having “enacted Expropriation Act 13 of 2024 (Act), to enable the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation.” This claim, as one might expect, grossly exaggerates the functional significance of a provision within South Africa’s bill allowing for expropriation without compensation as an exceptional circumstance. The fact that expropriation without compensation is exceptional means that the typical expropriation is compensated. That said, there are some legitimate, rights-concerned, reasons to quibble with South Africa’s bill.

Whatever rights-based outrage Trump might have been appealing to (half-heartedly), he still must have known on some level that he was morally discrediting himself. It is a non-starter to anchor a cessation of U.S. aid in the claim that post-Apartheid, democratic, one-person-one-vote South Africa is violently oppressing its white Afrikaners. Everyone who has been paying attention knows that the Afrikaners were once privileged by a much more saliently oppressive, and anti-democratic, system called “Apartheid”, and are still much wealthier than the average South African, even with de jure Apartheid gone.

But the most puzzling feature of Trump’s self-discrediting executive order is that it seems designed to discredit Israel also. Right after the hysterical fulminations against the supposed violation of Afrikaners’ rights, and still in Section 1 of the executive order, there is an ancillary grievance that “South Africa has taken aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice.”

An obviously racist, reality-untethered and white supremacist executive order is an odd forum for emphasizing one’s strong loyalty to Israel, at least if one actually likes Israel. But we should keep in mind the way Israel has grown accustomed to being Israel—especially lately. What would have registered as a stealthily-concealed smear a decade ago might now be welcomed as stalwart support.

In this context, consider the executive order’s implication that Hamas’s October 7 attack was a genocide. As brutal as this attack was (even in the no-lies-or-exaggerations Amnesty International account), calling it “genocide” is absurd. It would be like calling the Chinese government-led 1989 massacre of pro-democracy students and workers in Beijing “genocide.” Such an obvious exaggeration sullies the otherwise legitimate impulse to condemn such massacres for being, well, massacres. Not every mass killing has to be genocide to be bad. In any case, to try to divert opprobrium from a genocide by referencing a massacre is a very odd persuasive technique. In fact, the curious phrasing in Trump’s executive order—”accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide”—comes off as self-owning whataboutism.

And yet this particular whataboutist deflection, from Israel’s overwhelming and ongoing war crimes to the one day horror show of October 7, 2023, is pretty normative. Trump certainly did not innovate it. The mainstream media voices inclined to this deflection presumably have to just pretend they never saw reports by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, international genocide scholars, legal scholars, and United Nations experts referring to Israel’s carnage in Gaza as “genocide.” Lately, they also need to ignore Israel’s former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Olmert has recently acknowledged, “Yes, Israel is committing war crimes” and, “What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians.”

Even to the extent whataboutists discount the expertise of actual experts (and even a former Israeli Prime Minister) in determining what “genocide” and “war crimes” are, they should still have to contend with the naked facts. Israel has killed at least 53,655 Palestinians (and by the upper end plausible estimate of excess deaths, something more like 400,000). There are plausibly tens of thousands of children among the dead. The official child death tally, inevitably an underestimate, is 16,500. And that is not counting the legless, armless and otherwise maimed. Unicef, lumping killed and injured children together, puts the tally of child casualties at 50,000.

At the end of 2024, Oxfam assessed that Israeli military forces had killed more children in one year than other perpetrating nations had killed in any other “conflict” in the 21^st century so far. By comparison, Hamas and other participants in the October 7th mass killings are reported to have killed 37 children under 18. So to use Hamas as a contrastive foil to minimize Israel’s catastrophically destructive, and still ongoing, siege of Gaza is odd. It’s like saying, “You’re so angry about those tens of thousands of Palestinian cockroach vermin ‘children’ killed in our righteously endless battle to guarantee Israel’s security, but what about those 37 Actually Human Children that Hamas and company killed so brutally during their one day Holocaust? And what about the hostages?”

The fact that this whataboutism makes no moral sense to those who embrace human equality on principle has not kept it out of mainstream public discourse, though.  This suggests that the principle of human equality may not be as popular among ruling elites as we have often been led to imagine. So Trump might be expecting that his naked disregard for human equality in other, more taboo, ways will just endear him more to the same powers who helped him twice into the presidency.

An interlude on a more persuasive form of whataboutism

Though widely and relentlessly disseminated, the “what about October 7^th?” kind of whataboutism typically gets run out of town on a rail in more morally grounded and politically informed discursive communities. So those who wish to break the natural link between outrage and action as regards the Gaza genocide often employ a more sophisticated whataboutist strategy. They first express heartbreak and sympathy about the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza. Then they pivot to pleading that other relatively neglected horrors in relatively neglected countries like the Congo, Sudan, Ethiopia, Haiti and Myanmar not fly under the radar of activist concern (see, e.g. Sam Harris’s blog post to this general effect).

This strategy is sophisticated because relatively decent people could feel obliged to parrot these whataboutist talking points. These beta (as opposed to alpha) whataboutists need not harbor any strategic intention to get people to twiddle their thumbs in the face of an ongoing genocide funded by the most powerful government in the world. Logically, though, this more sophisticated whataboutism is still whataboutism. As such, it quickly fails the smell test if applied as a general principle for responding to people’s passionate determination to do something about any specific ongoing horror.

For instance, imagine someone expresses outrage about the Rapid Support Forces’ (RSF’s) plausibly genocidal atrocities in Sudan. Imagine they call on the U.S. government to sanction (Israel’s new ally) United Arab Emirates until they cease bankrolling the RSF. Anyone who makes a general principle out of their Israel-defending whataboutism would be obliged to retort, “my heart breaks for the people of Sudan, but don’t forget other neglected humanitarian crises in Myanmar, Ethiopia, Haiti and the Congo.” Applying the whataboutist principle consistently enough lets everyone my-heart-breaks-but-don’t-forget their way to just streaming prestige TV on Max every night. Whataboutism, whatever its intent, functions to weaken people’s resolve to work against any of the horrors they say their hearts break for.

And even some Israel-boosters don’t like the more sophisticated strategy, as it implicitly concedes that there is something comparable about what Israel is doing in Gaza and the atavistic brutality that less “democratic and free” political entities are unleashing on targeted populations. Left unmentioned is the fact that, as per Oxfam’s research noted above, the other reason these comparisons are not favorable to Israel is because Israel’s atrocities still manage to be more atrocious than those of less “democratic” states. Also left unmentioned are the roles that U.S. allies—including Israel—have played in all these other horrors. Like, is attention to the horrors of Myanmar—whose genocidal junta Israel has supported for Islamophobic reasons—really a distraction from the horrors of Israel’s government?

Logic and reason don’t really matter, though. For the whataboutism to function well, it just needs to cause confusion, division and collective paralysis where there might have been principled genocide-stopping collective action. And since the case for the speciousness of the “whatabout Sudan-Congo-Haiti-Ethiopia-Myanmar?” trope is a bit subtle, the trope is still a safe go-to strategy for suppressing anti-genocide mobilization.

Trump’s new “what about white genocide?” riff on the whataboutist rhythm is thus particularly curious. If his intention was to shame South Africa in the eyes of the world for accusing Israel of genocide, he could have just expanded Trumpishly on the more sophisticated “whatabout Sudan, etcetera?” trope already circulating so widely.

Trump could, for instance, have accused South Africa’s political leaders of being “self-hating Black people” who “don’t care about Black people in Sudan, Congo, Haiti and Ethiopia! Sad!” This would have been a safe move within the Trumpian idiom. It would also have been absurd, of course. But it would have been only as absurd as his claimed devotion to rooting out antisemitism from American universities while clearly being an antisemite himself (and surrounding himself with antisemites, from Steve Bannon to Elon Musk).

For whatever reason, Trump has forgone this potentially potent and seductive whataboutist refrain for a more transparently preposterous and racist one. The combined effect of his executive order and his White House debacle with President Ramaphosa adds “what about the white genocide in South Africa?” to compound the stupidity of “what about Hamas’s genocide on October 7?” In addition to being the least persuasive forms of Israel-serving whataboutism on the merits, the choice to use the former kind of whataboutism especially is an odd thing for such an Israel-beloved American president to do.

Trump’s chosen form of whataboutism carries a whiff of “look at the decline of life quality that befell white South Africans when they abandoned Apartheid—do you really want apartheid-protected Jewish Israelis to suffer the same fate?” It is as if Trump wants to give credence to Israel-with-South Africa apartheid comparisons. And he has also effectively planted in Americans’ mind that Israel’s fate post-apartheid might be similar to South Africa’s fate post-Apartheid. This is an odd idea to plant as a quick internet search reveals that South Africa is at worst subpar by developed nation standards, and it is not a nightmare of civil war and genocide.

But it is the latter type of catastrophe that pro-Israel pundits more typically claim would result from enfranchising and giving equal rights—including voting rights—to all Palestinians now under IDF domination. This “universal citizenship and suffrage => genocide” claim, long debunkable, is losing a lot of steam lately, for obvious reasons. The land under IDF control is already a nightmare of war and genocide, genocide exacerbated by the dehumanization of Palestinians at the heart of political Zionism, so there isn’t much ground to lose on this score at this point.

In any case, propagandists for Israel almost never say “if we give universal citizenship and suffrage to all Palestinians, we’ll end up like South Africa!” South Africa’s situation is just not anywhere near catastrophic enough to support a hysterical narrative for the need to maintain Israeli apartheid. For this reason, it is usually those who condemn Israel who make Israel-South Africa comparisons, or give mental space to the possibility of a universal citizenship and suffrage one-state solution, like South Africa’s, to escaping Israel’s apartheid trap.

An interlude on “apartheid” and the “one state solution”

Now I am not saying that there is anything wrong with the condemnatory comparison or the fully egalitarian proposed solution.  There is not. Israel’s system of institutionalized state oppression and violence towards Palestinians might be administratively different from pre-1990 South African Apartheid, but it is distinct primarily in being more lethally brutal. In addition, Israel’s institutionalization of anti-Palestinian oppression and violence has long been more complex, and Israel has framed its laws, regulations and policies to allow for plausible denial of Apartheid-like intentions.

However Israeli institutions might gloss it, though, the human rights community consensus—increasingly mainstream within Israel itself—is that Israel practices apartheid for all practical purposes. And whatever you might want to call it, there has been a longstanding institutionalized four-level hierarchy among lands and peoples “watched over” by Israeli Defense Forces. Jewish Israelis rank first, whether they live in Israel proper or forcefully annex large (government-subsidized) illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. Palestinian and other citizens of Israel rank second, with enfranchised Palestinians regarded as a fifth column within Israeli society. Palestinians in the occupied West Bank rank a much more distant third, lacking both citizenship and suffrage, and subject to extreme restrictions on their movements, regular land seizures, house demolitions and unprosecuted violent attacks by settlers and soldiers. Then the blockaded, bombed and starved Gazan Palestinians have ranked an even more distant last since 2005—with the phrase “dead last” seeming particularly apt lately.

U.S. bipartisanship has historically embraced the idea that ending Apartheid in South Africa was good, while at the same time asserting the goodness of aiding the “self defense” of Israel (such as it is). So did U.S. bipartisan opinion on these scores get reflected in historical tension between Israel and Apartheid South Africa? In fact, historically, there was a cooperative, albeit quiet, relationship between Israel and Apartheid South Africa, up to and including transfer of nuclear weapons technology from the former to the latter.

And the fact that leaders of the South African Apartheid regime were often antisemitic in addition to being racist in more fundamental ways was apparently not a dealbreaker for Israel’s political leadership at the time. As the Guardian notes, “many of the Afrikaner leaders of the time had a history of deep antisemitism. John Vorster, the then prime minister [of Apartheid South Africa], was feted on a visit to Jerusalem in 1976 despite having been interned during the second world war for Nazi sympathies and membership of a fascist militia that burned Jewish-owned properties.”

An interlude on Israel’s support for antisemitic regimes

As can be inferred from the stratospheric popularity of the classically antisemitic Trump among Israelis, Israel’s support for Apartheid South Africa was not a unique case. Israel is often quite content to stand with the more classically antisemitic side of a political “conflict.” For instance, one country that played an outsized role in Israel’s obtainment of nuclear weapons, Argentina, later went through a political phase—the Dirty War of 1976 to 1983—that should not have endeared it to those with philosemitic inclinations. During that period, the ruling junta felt compelled to kill 10,000 to 30,000 of its own citizens for being too far left, among them at least 1296, and possibly more than 3000, Jewish Argentines.

Given that Argentina’s Jewish population was about 300,000 at the time, the mass killings took as much as one percent of this population. If you are like me, you have spent most of your life knowing nothing about this relatively extreme post-War loss of diaspora Jewish life. I challenge anyone to ask their available Artificial Intelligence chatbots if any other mass killings of diaspora Jews ever reached this volume post-Holocaust.

So, given that every act of violence against Jewish Israelis makes the front pages worldwide, why have we not heard about the antisemitic bloodbath against Jewish Argentines, particularly given its scale and scope? Perhaps part of the reason relates to Israel having been one of the countries providing military funding to the junta responsible. In fact, one of the junta leaders whom Argentina’s prosecutors sought, three decades later, to try for war crimes during his tenure—Teodoro Aníbal Gauto—was found, after an extensive search, to be living in Israel. Israel refused to extradite him to stand trial.

To some extent, Israel’s support for Argentina’s junta was consistent with Israel’s broad support for anti-leftist—and thus typically antisemitic—dictatorships in Latin America during the Cold War. Though the Soviet Union was the first country to recognize the state of Israel, Isreali leadership lost faith early in the Soviets’ geopolitical friendliness. Israel joined the U.S. side of the Cold War in the 1950s and found it was quite adept at helping the U.S. with some of its messiest Cold War dirty work. Israel’s relations with Russia didn’t warm up again until after the Soviet Union fell, and grew particularly close after Vladimir Putin took power. All that is to say that Cold War considerations presumably influenced Israel’s support for things like Apartheid in South Africa and the murderously antisemitic junta in Argentina. Yet in the case of Argentina—already the most puzzling one—Israel’s political leadership curiously went beyond realpolitik Cold War obligations.  Israel still continued to stand with Argentina’s overtly fascist government even when it broke the Cold War fascists-with-capitalists alliance and attacked the U.K.-ruled Falkland Islands in 1982.

Sometimes the antisemitism even spews rather directly from the mouths of Israelis close to the centers of power. For instance, Yair Netanyahu, Bibi Netanyahu’s son, has expressed his scapegoating displeasure with the “globalists” and exhorted the preservation of “Christian Europe.”  Yair didn’t even bother to use the more polite “Judeo-Christian” euphemism for white Europeans, and just dived right into white Christian nationalist buzzwords.

An interlude on the implicit accusations of antisemitism in deployments of whataboutism for Israel

Israel’s effective nonchalance about classic antisemitism, as reflected in its history of aiding and abetting it around the world when expedient, suggests that Israel is not an uncomplicatedly philosemitic political entity. That might partially explain extreme popular affection for Trump in Israel. Trump himself is not an uncomplicatedly philosemitic political entity.

For the rest of us, though, the mystery is why any reasonable people take such antisemitism-stained political entities and individuals seriously as contributors to the conversation on what antisemitism is. Isn’t it clear that the enforcement of their preferred understanding is precipitating a potentially Republic-ending constitutional crisis? And have we not noticed that the intersecting movements subject to being crushed by this understanding of antisemitism have disproportionately Jewish leadership and participation? And shouldn’t any state that sold weapons to a regime that killed the most diaspora Jews since the Holocaust be disqualified from the collective discernment process on these matters anyway?

The definition of “antisemitism” that the State of Israel and its supporters most vigorously promote is that of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA). The U.S. government and many other U.S. institutions (including colleges and universities) are pushing to enshrine the IHRA definition as the guiding one, rather than dismissing it as stained by its antisemitism-sullied promoters. The more morally coherent Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, by contrast, has gained much less traction with those running U.S. institutions. And the difference between the definitions? The IHRA definition highlights rhetorically provocative condemnation of the State of Israel as antisemitic; the JDA definition does not.

To understand the absurdity of defining rhetorically provocative condemnations of Israel as antisemitic, imagine that a Jewish Argentine, who lost her family members to the junta, learned of Israel’s military support for that same junta. Then imagine that, in her rage, she intemperately posted on social media something like, “This is my scream of horror against the Nazi state of Israel for helping the junta that killed my Jewish family.” Now imagine the talking heads of America and their institutional enforcers reframing this Jewish victim of actual antisemitism as being guilty of comparing-Israel-to-the-Nazis type “antisemitism” by the IHRA definition.

This hypothetical accusation would follow much the same logic as accusing Anita Hill of facilitating a “high tech lynching” (i.e. anti-Black racism) for adding a wrinkle to the otherwise smooth and bipartisan 1991 confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Anita Hill’s actual “crime”: speaking up about the sexual harassment she experienced from this judge appointed to the court by a U.S. president who had won his election in part with racist Wille Horton ads. For that matter, going after Anita Hill for being an anti-Black racist because she didn’t want a toady for white racists in the Supreme Court is very much like going after Jewish pro-Palestine activists for being antisemites because they don’t want a toady for antisemitic white supremacy receiving U.S. tax dollars and diplomatic cover for their ongoing genocide.

The absurd logic at the heart of the IHRA definition grounds the absurd obligation that many Americans feel to say “whatabout whatabout whatabout” whenever there is a push to hold Israel accountable for its acts of oppression or unjust violence. There is a specific encouragement to whataboutism nestled within the IHRA definition, in fact: defining as antisemitic the application of “double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”

Granted, such “expectations of democratic nations” are probably too subject to contention to ever use them to actually pin down an Israel critic as antisemitic by this standard. But the standard itself encourages a comprehensive “what about” review of all other nations’ atrocious behavior before deciding whether or not to “require” something of Israel. And this review is not obligatory prior to requiring an end to injustices and horrors committed by any other nation state.

Whatever the intention behind this feature of the IHRA definition, the whataboutism that it effectively encourages functions as an attention-distracting diversion from the task of seeking accountability for anything the State of Israel has done. In addition, such whataboutism also functions as a distractingly maddening, albeit not always explicit, accusation of antisemitism. As in, “Why are you so determined to hold a Jewish state accountable for killing tens of thousands of children while bombing hospitals, universities, schools of all kinds, mosques, churches, journalists, and aid workers; as well as implementing a program of deliberate starvation and destruction of a whole society’s critical infrastructure for sustaining life? Why are you so upset about a Jewish state doing these things on the U.S. dime, hmmmm? Why aren’t you putting all your time instead into ensuring accountability for atrocities in Sudan, Congo, Ethiopia, Haiti and Myanmar? Could it beeee…ANTISEMITISM?”

A return to puzzling over what Trump thinks he is doing

Trump, whether or not he perceives the maddening absurdity of this commonplace, and bipartisan, line of argument, might well be fully enjoying his extension of it into even more preposterous ideological territory. As noted earlier, Trump’s bullying of post-Apartheid South Africa strongly suggests that he thinks Apartheid in South Africa was a good thing: a necessary bulwark against the “white genocide” supposedly taking place there now as a result of having abandoned that system (for one-person-one-vote liberal democracy).

Trump almost seems to be reveling in propagating this effectively defamatory-to-Israel message: “Hey, look at me! I’m a stalwart supporter of apartheid Israel and its right to unleash whatever genocidal violence it pleases AND I am also a racist panderer to white supremacists and a nostalgist for South African Apartheid!” Trump has essentially (a) grabbed headlines by promoting the theory of “white genocide” in South Africa while (b) citing his concern for Israel as part of his animus to post-Apartheid South Africa. By the usual expectations of those with experience and expertise in public relations, this association between Israel and Apartheid South Africa should be bad for Israel. Not good, bad.

However, since any public relations disaster for Israel in this regard should be proportionate to how much of a disaster it is for Trump, Israel might well weather this association quite well. Trump, after all, has made a political career out of jumping off a public relations cliff almost daily and levitating regardless. Trump’s racism, specifically, has manifested so many times that most Americans—including Trump opponents—are largely inured to it as just part of the existing political landscape. Indeed, Trump’s general lack of concern for how he might be perceived by people with functioning intellect and conscience is arguably an active ingredient in his charismatic mystique. It might even be the most active ingredient. There is thus a distinct possibility that Trump is not scoring on his own team with this madness, but for it.

If so, this is not the first time, and it will not be the last, that Trump makes himself and his movement temporarily more powerful by broadcasting loudly and shamelessly some unspeakable bipartisan lie, or indulgence in expedient horror. Exposing bipartisan U.S. lies and horrors for what they are while still transparently embracing those lies and horrors is a key part of Trump’s modus operandi. Why this approach to accumulating power works at all for Trump is a question for another time.

And, sure, all innovations on cruel tyrannical domination might not work in the long run, as Percy Shelly laid out in his famous poem Ozymandias. But arguments that in the long run Trump (and the genocidal apartheid system in Israel?) will suffer the same fate as Ozymandias are of little reassurance to those of us who have to live out that long run. Still, as we watch these bubbles of power grow ever larger against all expected laws of human social psychology (except, perhaps cognitive dissonance), we should allow ourselves to benefit from whatever conceptual clarity the bubbles dispense before they burst.

The post Whatabout Whatabout Whatabout “White Genocide” in South Africa? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Ömer Faruk Yıldız.

The decision resonated as shocking for all sides. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose entire war strategy hinges on the starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, unilaterally decided on May 19 to allow “immediate” food entry to the famine-stricken Strip.

Of course, Netanyahu still maneuvered. Instead of permitting at least 1,000 trucks of aid to enter the utterly destroyed and devastated Gaza per day, he initially allowed a mere nine trucks, a number that nominally increased in the following days.

Even Netanyahu’s staunch supporters, who fiercely criticized the decision, found themselves confounded by it. The prior understanding among Netanyahu’s coalition partners regarding their ultimate plan in Gaza had been unequivocally clear: the total occupation of the Strip and the forced displacement of its population.

The latter was articulated as a matter of explicit policy by Israel’s Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich. “Gaza will be entirely destroyed, civilians will be sent to… third countries,” he declared on May 6.

For food to enter Gaza, however minuscule its quantity, directly violates the established understanding between the government and the military, under the leadership of Netanyahu’s ally, Defense Minister Israel Katz, and Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir.

These two significant additions to Netanyahu’s war cabinet replaced Yoav Gallant and Herzi Halevi. With these new appointments, Netanyahu stood poised for his master plan.

When the war commenced on October 7, 2023, the Israeli leader promised that he would take control of the Gaza Strip. This position evolved, or rather was clarified, to signify permanent occupation, though without the Palestinians themselves.

To achieve such a lofty objective–lofty, given Israel’s consistent failure to subdue the Palestinians over the course of nearly 600 days–Netanyahu and his men meticulously devised the “Gideon’s Chariots” plan. The propaganda that accompanied this new strategy transcended all the hasbara that had accompanied previous plans, including the failed “Generals’ Plan” of October 2024.

The rationale behind this psychological warfare is to imprint upon the Palestinians in Gaza the indelible impression that their fate has been sealed, and that the future of Gaza can only be determined by Israel itself.

The plan, however, a rehash of what is historically known as “Sharon’s Fingers,” is fundamentally predicated on sectionalizing Gaza into several distinct zones, and leveraging food as a tool for displacement into these camps, and ultimately, outside of Gaza.

However, why would Netanyahu agree to allow food access outside his sinister scheme? The reason behind this relates profoundly to the explosion of global anger directed at Israel, particularly from its most staunch allies: Britain, France, Canada, Australia, among others.

Unlike Spain, Norway, Ireland and others that have sharply criticized the Israeli genocide, a few Western capitals have remained committed to Israel throughout the war. Their commitment manifested in supportive political discourse, blaming Palestinians and absolving Israel; unhindered military support; and resolute shielding of Israel from legal accountability and political fallout on the global stage.

Things began to change when US President Donald Trump slowly grasped that Netanyahu’s war in Gaza was destined to become a permanent war and occupation, which would inevitably translate to the perpetual destabilization of the Middle East – hardly a pressing American priority at the moment.

Leaked reports in US mainstream media, coupled with the noticeable lack of communication between Trump and Netanyahu, among other indicators, strongly suggested that the rift between Washington and Tel Aviv was not a mere ploy but a genuine policy shift.

Though Washington had indicated that the “US has not abandoned Israel,” the writing was clearly on the wall: Netanyahu’s long-term strategy and the US’ current strategy are hardly convergent.

Despite the formidable political power of the pro-Israel lobby in the US, and its robust support on both sides of the Congressional aisle, Trump’s position was strengthened by the fact that some pro-Israeli circles, also from both political parties, are fully aware that Netanyahu poses a danger not only to the US, but to Israel itself.

A series of decisive actions taken by Trump further accentuated this shift, which received surprisingly little protest from the pro-Israel element in US power circles: continued talks with Iran, the truce with Ansarallah in Yemen, talks with Hamas, etc.

Though refraining from openly criticizing Trump, Netanyahu intensified his killings of Palestinians, who fell in tragically large numbers. Many of the victims were already on the brink of starvation before they were mercilessly blown up by Israeli bombs.

On May 19, Britain, Canada, and France jointly issued a strong statement threatening Israel with sanctions. This unfamiliar language was swiftly followed by action just a day later when Britain suspended trade talks with Israel.

Netanyahu retaliated with furious language, unleashing his rage at Western capitals, which he accused of “offering a huge prize for the genocidal attack on Israel on October 7 while inviting more such atrocities.”

The decision to allow some food into Gaza, though patently insufficient to stave off the deepening famine, was meant as a distraction, as the Israeli war machine relentlessly continued to harvest the lives of countless Palestinians on a daily basis.

While one welcomes the significant shifts in the West’s position against Israel, it must remain abundantly clear that Netanyahu has no genuine interest in abandoning his plan of starving and ethnically cleansing Gaza.

Though any action now will not fully reverse the impact of the genocide, there are still two million lives that can yet be saved.

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“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.” Marx’s aphorism feels newly prescient. Last week, the U.S. Department of Energy issued a jingoistic call on social media for a “new Manhattan Project,” this time to win the so-called race for artificial intelligence supremacy.

But the Manhattan Project is no blueprint. It is a warning—a cautionary tale of what happens when science is conscripted into the service of state power, when open inquiry gives way to nationalist rivalry, and when the cult of progress is severed from ethical responsibility. It shows how secrecy breeds fear, corrodes public trust, and undermines democratic institutions.

The Manhattan Project may have been, as President Truman claimed, “the greatest scientific gamble in history.” But it also represented a gamble with the continuity of life on Earth. It brought the world to the brink of annihilation—an abyss into which we still peer. A second such project may well push us over the edge.

The parallels between the origins of the atomic age and the rise of artificial intelligence are striking. In both, the very individuals at the forefront of technological innovation were also among the first to sound the alarm.

During World War II, atomic scientists raised concerns about the militarization of nuclear energy. Yet, their dissent was suppressed under the strictures of wartime secrecy, and their continued participation was justified by the perceived imperative to build the bomb before Nazi Germany. In reality, that threat had largely subsided by the time the Manhattan Project gathered momentum, as Germany had already abandoned its efforts to develop a nuclear weapon.

The first technical study assessing the feasibility of the bomb concluded that it could indeed be built but warned that “owing to the spreading of radioactive substances with the wind, the bomb could probably not be used without killing large numbers of civilians, and this may make it unsuitable as a weapon…”

When in 1942 scientists theorized that the first atomic chain reaction might ignite the atmosphere, Arthur Holly Compton recalled thinking that if such a risk proved real, then “these bombs must never be made… better to accept the slavery of the Nazis than to run a chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind.”

Leo Szilard drafted a petition urging President Truman to refrain from using it against Japan. He warned that such bombings would be both morally indefensible and strategically short-sighted: “A nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for purposes of destruction,” he wrote, “may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.”

Today, we cannot hide behind the pretext of world war. We cannot claim ignorance. Nor can we invoke the specter of an existential adversary. The warnings surrounding artificial intelligence are clear, public, and unequivocal.

In 2014, Stephen Hawking warned that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” In more recent years, Geoffrey Hinton, referred to as the “godfather of AI,” resigned from Google while citing mounting concerns about the “existential risk” posed by unchecked AI development. Soon after, a coalition of researchers and industry leaders issued a joint statement asserting that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” Around this time, an open letter, signed by over a thousand experts and tens of thousands of others, called for a temporary pause on AI development to reflect on its trajectory and long-term consequences.

Yet the race to develop ever more powerful artificial intelligence continues unabated, propelled less by foresight than by fear that halting progress would mean falling behind rivals, particularly China. But in the face of such profound risks, one must ask: win what, exactly?

Reflecting on the similar failure to confront the perils of technological advancement in his own time, Albert Einstein warned, “the unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our mode of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” His words remain no less urgent today.

The lesson should be obvious: we cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of the atomic age. To invoke the Manhattan Project as a model for AI development is not only historically ignorant but also politically reckless.

What we need is not a renewed arms race fueled by fear, competition, and secrecy, but its opposite: a global initiative to democratize and demilitarize technological development, one that prioritizes human needs, centers dignity and justice, and advances the collective well-being of all.

More than thirty years ago, Daniel Ellsberg, former nuclear war planner turned whistleblower, called for a different kind of Manhattan Project. One not to build new weapons, but to undo the harm of the first and to dismantle the doomsday machines that we already have. That vision remains the only rational and morally defensible Manhattan Project worth pursuing.

We cannot afford to recognize and act upon this only in hindsight, as was the case with the atomic bomb. As Joseph Rotblat, the sole scientist to resign from the Project on ethical grounds, reflected on their collective failure:

“The nuclear age is the creation of scientists… in total disregard for the basic tenets of science… openness and universality. It was conceived in secrecy, and usurped—even before birth—by one state to give it political dominance. With such congenital defects, and being nurtured by an army of Dr. Strangeloves, it is no wonder that the creation grew into a monster… We, scientists, have a great deal to answer for.”

If the path we are on leads to disaster, the answer is not to accelerate. As physicians Bernard Lown and Evgeni Chazov warned during the height of the Cold War arms race: “When racing toward a precipice, it is progress to stop.”

We must stop not out of opposition to progress, but to pursue a different kind of progress: one rooted in scientific ethics, a respect for humanity, and a commitment to our collective survival.

If we are serious about the threats posed by artificial intelligence, we must abandon the illusion that safety lies in outpacing our rivals. As those most intimately familiar with this technology have warned, there can be no victory in this race, only an acceleration of a shared catastrophe.

We have thus far narrowly survived the nuclear age. But if we fail to heed its lessons and forsake our own human intelligence, we may not survive the age of artificial intelligence.

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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

The installation of the malevolent Trump regime has spawned endless analogies to Hitler, Nazi Germany, Mussolini. It has been pointed out that Trump is in thrall to Kim Jong-Un, North Korea’s strongman. Then there is the linkage to Vladimir Putin: Trump is under the sway—if not a direct employee—of the Russian dictator.

All of this is understandable–to an extent. Trump, at times, conveys the bearing of the stereotypical foreign potentate. A military parade on his birthday, for example, feels intrinsically foreign.

One flaw in this reasoning are the assumptions that Trump has a firm grasp on anything outside his narrow interests, which revolve around making lots of money, avenging himself for perceived slights, playing golf, and hot babes. His awareness of the outside world is extremely limited; his attention span is fleeting.

The larger issue, though, is that these constant comparisons to Hitler or Putin or Mussolini are inadvertent cop-outs: As if Trump is such an aberration that his pathology must originate from foreign sources. In reality, authoritarianism, viciousness, and violence are part and parcel of the American schema. As is censorship. And notions of racial superiority and inferiority—the purity of blood—have entrenched roots in the United States. When Trump spreads alarm that “illegals” are polluting the precious American bloodline, he is recycling an American trope. Hitler borrowed some of this from us.

If one is looking for Trump’s antecedents from the 1930s and 1940s, a more honest reckoning would be to basically disregard Hitler and Mussolini and devote some attention to, say, Theodore Bilbo, Mississippi’s arch-racist governor and senator from the 1920s to 1940s.

Bilbo inveighed against racial “mongrelization” and generated proposals to deport America’s African-American population to Africa. As governor, he “fired many faculty members of Mississippi’s colleges and universities and brought the state almost to bankruptcy.” (Britannica) That sounds awfully familiar. Bilbo’s career was mired in scandal and he became a famous synonym for racial intolerance—and earned the “clownish” appellation, which also sounds familiar. Bilbo is actually referenced in the 1947 film Gentleman’s Agreement—without explanation, which suggests the extent of his infamy. Infamous or not, though, the Honorable Theodore Bilbo—champion of racial purity and advocate for mass deportation—held high office in the Land of the Free.

Trump also bears some striking similarities—although not in demeanor and presentation—to George Wallace, who combined populist grievances with ugly racist tropes and leaped to prominence—and not just in the South.

There is a very real link from Joseph McCarthy to Trump —not just in the tactics of spreading baseless conspiracies and a gusto for ruining lives—but a flesh-and-blood link in the person of former McCarthy right-hand man Roy Cohn, one of Trump’s charming mentors.

Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon’s first vice president, has faded from public memory, but at one point he was a household name. Agnew was a prime example of a frightening American archetype: the malevolent doofus. (Trump is the malevolent doofus par excellence.) Agnew launched a ferocious attack against the (supposed) elitist, biased press. He was full of pithy comments, like “if you’ve seen one city slum, you’ve seen them all” and referred to a Japanese-American reporter as a “fat Jap.”

There was Nixon himself. A meteoric political rise took him to the vice presidency at the uncommonly young age of thirty-nine, yet Nixon was perpetually aggrieved,  complaining constantly about biased media coverage. He cast himself as the president of “law and order” and the spokesman for the “silent majority,” a fierce opponent of protestors, do-nothings, radicals, eggheads. And it was Nixon who—by means of what was deemed the “Southern strategy”—brought the Dixiecrat strain into the Republican fold.

Frank Rizzo, the repulsive mayor of Philadelphia in the 1970s—cited approvingly by Trump—also merits inclusion. Rizzo—at the time so notorious as to make an appearance in Doonesbury—promised to “make Attila the Hun look like a faggot,” inveighed against the press, and urged his supporters to “vote white.”

There is also a direct line from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump that is more instructive than comparisons to Hitler or Putin. Reagan and Trump both came to prominence as entertainers, dispensers of carefully crafted media images.

Reagan spoke in code. When he referred to “welfare queens,” the inference was apparent: Chiselers and spongers—of a darker skin hue—were running rampant. When Reagan castigated government overreach, he meant civil rights legislation and social programs, not a bloated military and corporate welfare. Trump has upped the ante: He does not speak in code and his positions are more extreme than Reagan’s. But there is a real link.

The veneration of Ronald Reagan also speaks to a certain bizarre American mythos. Reagan, it was said, brought back a sorely needed blood and guts to American politics. He embodied the tall-in-the-saddle Western ethos. He reintroduced piety and those cherished American values. He brought class and elegance back to the White House. He was warm and avuncular, always with a ready quip. Leaving aside the blatant discrepancies—Reagan was a pampered movie star—no one person could embody all these different, contradictory traits.

And so it is with Trump, with even more hypocrisy: The New York City rich kid whose policies aid his fellow plutocrats is deeply in tune with the problems of the average American. The foul-mouthed rapist is a paragon of religious values. He is tough and resolute, although he has daily hissy fits. He has restored law and order, yet is also a badass, a gangster. He upholds tradition, yet is a disruptor. Like Reagan, these traits simply don’t add up in any one person.

And since Trump is more of a gross manifestation and not a person with normal human responses, it doesn’t seem like a stretch to offer comparisons to fictional characters. There has been mention of Buzz Windrip, malevolent doofus in Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, and Lonesome Rhodes, hayseed demagogue (played by Andy Griffith) in the 1957 film A Face in the Crowd, based on a Budd Schulberg short story. There’s a good deal of Trump in the sniveling, vindictive—and incompetent– Frank Burns of M*A*S*H. Trump can be construed as the cannier, pathological version of Ted Baxter, the vain, dim-bulb anchorman on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. And Trump is an utterly fake Archie Bunker, but his viewpoints are the same: stupid, misinformed, brutal.

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Trump is also firmly ensconced in the tradition of proud, emphatic provincialism. A stock character in movies and television was the oddball foreigner, most often in a position of culture and intellect: classical musician, painter, chef, scientist. Psychologists were lampooned with a German accent. For real culture and intellectual rigor, one looked to Europe. We really didn’t need those strange people with their funny accents and weird food. This is source of some of the animus against non-Americans that so preoccupies Trump and his supporters. There’s no need for fancy-pants foreign graduate students or academics. There is nothing whatsoever to be gained by exposure to the outside world.

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None of this is meant to minimize the unprecedented danger we’re now facing. The lethal strands that contributed to the ascent of Donald Trump are not unprecedented, but the fact that they have all coalesced is a new, perilous phenomenon. Reagan and other malignant figures were worshipped, but it is the degree of worship and veneration for Donald Trump that is unprecedented. It is a perfect storm, a confluence of the baser elements in the American tradition, with flimsy democratic guardrails shunted aside.

When I read accounts of ICE snatching people off the street, my visceral response is that this is a totalitarian dystopia of some obscure foreign origin. When there are accusations that Haitians eat household pets, it does remind me of Nazi archetypes. But this is not dystopian fiction or Nazi Germany. It is an inevitable outgrowth of a distinctly American horror.

References to Walt Kelly’s Pogo comic strip, once very common, are hard to come by these days. The eponymous protagonist—an insightful possum–was once so famous as to run for president. “We have met the enemy,” Pogo opined in what became a famous catchphrase, “and he is us.”

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Photo by ev

While the Trump administration deploys Palantir to create detailed portraits of millions of Americans, the UK Data (Use and Access) Bill sits on its own edge of becoming law. This could mean more Palantir as they already have contracts here—notably the £330 million (nearly $440 million) one developing the NHS’s Federated Data Platform (FDP). The same Palantir of course said to be enabling ICE with their mass US deportations through their innocently called Immigration Lifecycle Operating System (ImmigrationOS).

Most UK politicians—especially Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology Peter Kyle—like to give voice trendily on modernisation. As if it somehow grants the elixir of youth. They talk of clean, slick lines of efficiency, perhaps in between glances at the mirror. But I swear there’s something else below the surface—a distant sound, like boots on cobblestones at night. The kind you don’t normally hear until it’s too late.

The government says it’s progress. They always do. But critics, those who still care about liberty and a person’s right to be left alone, call it something else: surveillance. Deep and wide and nasty. Like a net cast by men who never expect to be pulled down themselves. I suspect we will all be drowning not waving soon. Or as Michel Foucault—who died in 1984—put it in Discipline and Punish, “Visibility is a trap.”

The UK’s increasingly unfathomable Labour Party took power in July 2024. By October, they placed the DUA Bill before the Lords. They spoke of order. Of trimming the fat. The old data bill had died quietly in the spring, like a seal on a rock. Parliament dissolved, and with it, what little restraint remained.

Now, the new data bill’s caught in a game of parliamentary ping pong—a term probably as unserious as the stakes are grave. This is when the Lords and Commons knock amendments back and forth while the law’s teeth growl in the background like Muttley of Wacky Races fame. They say Royal Assent is close. That means it becomes real. That means it begins.

To be clear, the bill lets the Department for Work and Pensions open your bank account without knocking. If you’re poor, for example, if you’re living off the state, they’ll watch you. They’ll look for ‘fraud indicators’—a holiday abroad, a gift, money you didn’t explain fast enough. Banks will feed them your life in spreadsheets. Johnny Cash once sang, “You can run on for a long time… sooner or later God’ll cut you down.” But this isn’t God watching. It’s an algorithm trained to suspect the weak.

Live facial recognition. That’s the second thump to the stomach. The bill doesn’t stop it. Doesn’t even slow it down. In 2024, the police in the UK scanned five million faces. Arrested 600. They put cameras in shopping centres. At football matches. Outside your child’s school. “Big Brother is watching you,” Orwell famously wrote. And he was. And now he has 2K 4MP QHD and 4K 8MP UltraHD image resolution, too. There are no clear rules. Only permissions.

Automated decisions. That’s the third. The bill lets machines decide your fate. No judge. No case. No second look. Immigration. Benefits. Policing. Just you and the machine. A marriage made in hell. The Open Rights Group rightfully warns that machines make mistakes. But machines don’t get embarrassed. And they don’t apologise. Baudrillard said AI lacks artifice—and therefore, intelligence. But it still gets to judge you. Poet and artist Nayyirah Waheed wrote, “To be human is to be broken and broken again, and still love anyway.” As she also knows, machines only calculate.

They’re cutting oversight too. The Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner in the UK is gone. His office, his code, his eyes on the system—all gone. Folded into the ICO like an embarrassing little note you hope no one reads. Critics say this will lead to abuse. But abuse is a soft word. The right word is control.

So who watches the watchers now? No one. Not anymore. The Investigatory Powers Act already gave the state long arms. Now they stretch further. The amendments let them see your internet, your movements, your past. Your phone isn’t yours. Your data isn’t private. The DUA Bill locks it in. They call it national security. You call it your life. Nor will you know what they’ve taken until you’re denied something you needed and can’t find out why.

Together, these powers tell a story. They tell of a country trading liberty for safety—or the illusion of it. They tell of a net, not dropped on criminals, but cast over everyone in case you’re one and just haven’t acted yet. This isn’t paranoia. It’s pattern.

Big Brother Watch, Privacy International—they’re ringing bells, and no one’s listening. Short-sighted people probably find these bodies too woke anyway. I guess the storm’s just not loud enough for them yet. But it’s a-coming. Just like those boots across the cobblestones. There’s a line in another song which readers will know: “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” Maybe freedom works like that. Maybe you don’t feel like you’re in a cage until it’s locked.

Progress must not wear a badge and carry a database. But it seems like it will. Or it already does. As for the people completing the bill, they still say they want efficiency. But so did the men who built the railways to Auschwitz. Order. Precision. Everything accounted for. Civil liberties are not efficient. That’s the point. So there must be oversight. Sunlight. Debate. There must be people who say no. Or at least wait.

Because if you don’t fight for the small freedoms, you’ll wake up one morning and find the big ones gone too. As Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka once said, “The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.” And if you want it blunter, funnier, and just as tragic, there’s always Vonnegut: “The truth is a deadly weapon.

The DUA Bill in someone like Peter Kyle’s iconic red ministerial despatch box may be well-intentioned. But as the well-worn but often useful metaphor these days goes, so is the man who lights the fire in the forest to warm himself, not thinking about the wind. The wind blows anyway. The fire spreads. The forest burns. The question is not what the law says. It’s what the law allows. And what kind of country takes root in the shadow of that allowance. On the theme of well-intentioned overreach, maybe C.S. Lewis put it best: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”

As the UK edges closer to enacting the Data (Use and Access) Bill, we can see familiar buzzwords already ring out: “data utilisation for public service efficiency.” But behind the sheen of digital reform lurks the age-old tension: innovation versus individual liberty. Let’s be clear one more time. Updating data laws may be essential in the digital age. But if modernisation becomes a Trojan horse for theft—of civil liberties, privacy, autonomy—then we’re not advancing at all. We’re regressing, just in sharper suits. Safeguards, oversight, transparency—these aren’t luxuries. They are necessities. Without them, our technological future—certainly here in the UK—risks becoming less a beacon of progress… and more a blueprint for surveillance, dressed up as reform.

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Photo by Josh Hild

On May 15, 2025, Logan Rozos was the selected student speaker at NYU’s Gallatin School commencement. Briefly addressing the large crowd of faculty, students, their families and friends, Rozos offered brief remarks condemning “the current atrocities currently happening in Gaza” with U.S. financial, political, and military support. Nowhere in the short remarks were Israel or Jews mentioned. The remarks received prolonged applause from the students, followed by some jeers. Immediate social media accusations charged Rozos with “antisemitism” and “Jew hatred.” NYU, the country’s most expensive university, quickly condemned the remarks and withheld Rozos’s diploma as a consequence. A day later, at NYU’s Tisch School commencement, a group of faculty, in full regalia, stood on stage with white gags tied across their mouths, reminiscent of slavery’s muzzles. (Logan Rozos is Black and transgender.) To date, NYU has restrained from disciplining them, concerned perhaps about further inflaming tensions.

The social costs of spiraling inflation place overbearing burdens on the many while proving profitable for the small group well positioned to benefit from rising prices. The latter tend to be those controlling conditions of political economy, the former those lacking such power. Spiraling charges of antisemitism today raise related questions about the consequent social costs of the manufactured political panic in play: undermining the social standing and prospects of Israel’s critics, especially of those younger who have less institutional support or protection; intensification of uncertainty concerning what can be critically uttered and done; heightening of social conflict and the institutional costs from having to manage the impacts and fallout; and ultimately extending political control over institutions of higher education.

Accusations of rampant antisemitism on U.S. college campuses are fueling investigations by the Departments of Education and Justice. The Trump administration and Republican politicians have promoted the charges to assert greater control over prominent universities, private and public, regarding what can be taught as well as to limit critical political activity on campus. The NYU case illustrates larger dynamics in play.

Key to the Trumpian strategy has been to pit Jewish donors against administrations, faculty and student groups, and administrations, faculty, and students against each other. The aims are twofold. First, universities are being pressured into “deliberalizing” campus thinking, teaching, and culture. And second, Jewish supporters of higher education, traditionally more Democrat leaning, are being pitted against more progressive campus constituencies, further undermining the basis of anti-Republican strength. Inflating “antisemitism” has been key to these ends, encouraged by the current Israeli government and long fueled by Israel’s support groups and organizations in the U.S. and globally.

Central to this strategy is adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA 2016) formulation as the key determinant of what counts as antisemitic. The IHRA account has been adopted by 40 states, including the U.S. State Department, and a host of other institutions, among them universities like Harvard, as their basis for placating the Trump administration by opposing “antisemitism,” to the point of illegalizing it.  Congressional Republicans have been pushing the Antisemitism Awareness Act. This would require the Department of Education to deploy the IHRA definition in its attacks on higher education, effectively criminalizing most criticism of Israel. The Act expands antisemitism’s definition to include most anti-Zionist expression for the purposes of civil rights law. It thus seeks to curtail critical political speech. One exception Senate Republicans have introduced reveal the politics in play. The charge that Jews killed Jesus, long a Christian nationalist assertion, would not be considered antisemitic (despite IHRA explicitly formulating it as such). Republicans would protect the claim in the name of advancing First Amendment free speech rights. The outcry has been muted, at most. It seems that not all actual antisemitism is, well, “antisemitism.”

IHRA’s principal author, Kenneth Stern, director of the Center for the Study of Hate at Bard College, has repeatedly emphasized that the “working definition” was never intended as a state or legal principle. Rather, it was provided as a working account to be used especially by European researchers to monitor expressions of antisemitism across the many countries on the continent. Stern is clear: IHRA should not be used to prohibit or restrict non-contemptuous criticism of Israel, or of Zionism, notwithstanding his own disagreements with such criticism.

On its face, the definition IHRA offers appears largely uncontroversial, centering “hatred of Jews.” If one substituted “hatred of Muslims” or “Islam” it could easily serve as a comparable formulation of Islamophobia. But “hatred” reduces more complex considerations to affective criteria, sliding by discriminatory group stereotyping or material dimensions. Following the likes of Charles Murray and Dinesh D’Souza, Christopher Rufo has suggested that group crime rates justify not hiring or admitting Black applicants for some positions. And “positive discrimination” might privilege group members at the expense of non-members. Theodor Herzl, a key founding figure of Zionism, famously offered the Sultan of Turkey free accounting service (“financial regulation”) by Jews in exchange for Palestine as the site for “the Jewish state.” Herzl was trading on the time-worn stereotype that Jews are good money-managers, the world’s Shylock in less flattering terms. Donald Trump has reportedly mimicked the characterization: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” These sorts of gross characterizations reinforce the longstanding antisemitic stereotype of Jews controlling the local or global financial system.

Given antisemitism’s conceptual elasticity, then, it becomes understandable why Stern cautioned against adoption of IHRA as a formal legal account. The more fraught terrain across which both antisemitism and Islamophobia operate suggests turning to an actionable disposition rather than an affective consideration to ground plausibility to charges of antisemitism or Islamophobia. Both are expressive or active antagonisms towards and on the basis of uniquely picking out Jews and Muslims, or their institutions, respectively—for character traits, actions, social standings or roles attributed to the group as such. This would make the definition’s applicability far less nebulous and porous than the claimed basis on hatred. The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA) offers a more fine-grained account than IHRA’s, one consistent with that I offer here. It parses out antagonisms as “discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence” directed at “Jews as Jews (or  Jewish institutions as Jewish”). Antagonism is a disposition of antipathy, treating Jews (or Muslims in the case of Islamophobia) differently or for pejoratively different reasons than others.

The JDA offers a careful set of guidelines for what counts as antisemitism, most notably regarding criticism of Israel. Tellingly, its definition has received far less uptake, application, or discussion than the more elastic and easily weaponized IHRA formulation. It has been adopted, as far as I can tell, by no states. Like the IHRA definition, though, it explicitly rejects being codified into law.

The IHRA controversy, however, is made to turn less on its actual definition and more readily on the sorts of examples of antisemitism it offers as heuristics. Pretty much the entire public conversation around adopting the IHRA account slides by the formal definition, leaving it unmentioned. Instead, the examples are taken up as if inevitably instances of antisemitic expression no matter the circumstance and without exception. The examples effectively serve as definitional substitute.

A careful reading of the IHRA document, however, calls for a more nuanced, less definitive analysis of what “might” or “may” or “could” amount to antisemitic expression, depending on “overall context”  in specific circumstances.  Sloppy readings of provisional considerations of “overall context” nevertheless have opened IHRA applicability to an expansive range of instances, loosening parameters currently in play, while also rendering any specific determination prone to more or less robust contestation. The overwhelming effect has been accusation inflation and expression suppression. Mere accusation has foreclosed analysis, been made guilt-producing. Its political uptake has been designed to produce panic, by individuals and institutions.

The eighth example IHRA offers, arguably the key one, is especially telling here. What counts as antisemitism is “the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity” unless “criticism of Israel [is] similar to that leveled against any other country.” (Five of the eleven examples offered focus on statements about Israel.) The qualification is so central to IHRA that example 8 is repeated verbatim from the claim made in the preamble paragraph to the eleven examples IHRA offers. The conditional is invariably disregarded by those adopting IHRA’s account. The definition is effectively read as “classif[ying] most anti-Zionism as antisemitic.”

Consider this: Were a person—call them X– to say they hate Russia for the way it has treated Ukrainians few if any would so much as blink. But were X to say they hate Israel because of the way it has treated Palestinians, Israel’s supporters would quickly turn them into an antisemite, threatening their career if not life. What’s the difference exactly? The latter would certainly not be transgressing the letter and, for Stern, spirit of the IHRA definition. X would not be saying they hate Jews but criticizing the state of Israel in ways they might reasonably criticize another state, say Russia, as IHRA insists they must if not to qualify as antisemitic.

In response, Israel now declares itself not just a Jewish state but the state of all Jews. For a Jew to say it is not their state is not to declare themselves not Jewish, even if Netanyahu’s state seems to be gesturing to that declaration. It is to say Israel is not the state of this Jew, and a growing number of others like them in this regard. One might say something analogous of Russia, or Ukraine, of most all other states. Ethnicity is not reducible to state belonging. It is not that one would rather not be bound by its laws, culture, or politics. Netanyahu’s belligerent state is ready to radically narrow the range and diversity of Jewishness, effectively reducing official “Jewishness” to a minority of an already distinct global minority. This would make Jewish Israel far less secure and more vulnerable than advancing the longstanding Jewish tradition, traceable to the Torah, of embracing the stranger, and living justly with the neighbor.

A careful reading of this particular IHRA example, then, more generally implies that critics of Israel reasonably objecting to any state defining itself on reductively ethno-religious, -national, or -racial grounds would prima facie not qualify as antisemitic. A critic questioning the Israeli government’s self-characterization in law and policy as “theJewish state” materially and legally privileging Jews while restricting in materially discriminatory ways all who are not would not be questioning only Jewish self-determination or sovereignty. Grounding such criticism on a general theory that any such state ends up invariably precluding those not meeting the (usually shifting) criteria of ethno-religious belonging is not reductively anti-Jewish. States ethno-religiously self-defined (no matter the religion) almost inevitably turn repressive to sustain their ethno-purity. Once embracing secularity, they usually scale back some on state violence or restriction against those of different ethnic or religious background even as the state might retain vestiges of its historical culture usually referenced as its “national character.” The latter might take on pernicious implication at the hands of a nationalist government but, unlike ethno-religious ones, secular states do not invariably end up doing so.

+++

Those inflating political charges of antisemitism have overwhelmingly ignored, if not resisted, more fine-grained analysis of the kind suggested here. President Trump’s commitment to rooting out antisemitism from college campuses, and seeking to deport non-citizen campus critics of Israel, proceeds by reductively collapsing ethnicity with a political state. Stern is right. Most criticisms of Zionism should not be deemed antisemitic, as Israel’s supporters too often charge. Zionism, after all, is a political ideology. It is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for Jewishness. Criticisms of Zionism are not necessarily antisemitic unless linking it perniciously to Jewishness. Those defending against political criticisms of Zionism most often dismissively reduce all anti-Zionism to antisemitism. This mere assertion, nevertheless, does not create the fact of it, nor a shield from the reach of justice.

Harvard’s reports on Antisemitism and on Islamophobia, both released April 29, 2025, reveal the numbers of Harvard Jewish and Muslim constituents expressing fear of antagonism towards them on campus. The data are telling. Well over 2,000 Harvard faculty, staff, and students responded to a survey. Almost half of Muslim (47 percent), 15 percent of Jewish, and 6 percent of Christian respondents felt physically unsafe on campus.  Nearly all Muslims (92 percent), 61 percent of Jews, and 51 percent of Christians registered anxiety about expressing their political views. And yet the overwhelming  focus–at Harvard, in media reports, by the Trump administration–has been on antisemitism.

Antisemitism no doubt exists on campuses. It tends to be generally reflective of the antisemitism at any point in the culture at large. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the reported numbers have spiked following Israel’s dramatically disproportionate, increasingly genocidal response to the murderous Hamas attacks of October 7. But reports of the robust spike in instances of campus antisemitism require careful disaggregation too. Antisemitic language has been used by some, perhaps especially a small number of students, critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza. Whether such expression is all a product of sustained antisemitic belief, thoughtless insensitivity, or caught up in the emotion of the moment remain open questions. It is not clear to what degree the spike in reports has been inflated by treating most any criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza as antisemitic for making Israel-supporting Jewish students “uncomfortable” or “distressed.” It is also unclear to what degree Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian antagonisms have ramped up: the Harvard reports suggest they have to a significantly greater degree than antisemitism.

Anyone identifying with or expressing support for Israel in the wake of October 7 may well feel discomfort due to even reasonably articulated concerns about genocidal reactions by the Israeli state to the attacks. Jews, as some have pointed out, understandably feel especially sensitive about Israel being charged with genocide.  And relatedly, there is great resistance to admitting that Israel’s leaders could be driving one. That campus supporters of Israel tend to report a dramatic spike in antisemitism while Jewish critics of Israel do not suggests that the underlying sensitivities tend often to prompt the charge of antisemitism out of the discomfort.

Discomfort alone, however, doesn’t fit either the IHRA or JDA definitions. The tension between discomfort, sometimes produced by insensitive expression by young students, and students’ like Logan Rozos’s cutting critiques of genocidal destruction will not be resolved by pedagogical institutions turned punishment machines. The Genocide Convention characterizes genocide as intentionally eliminating or harming some (not necessarily all) members of a group by killing or removal. Copious evidence of this exists in Gaza. The notable Haaretz journalist, Gideon Levy, recently indicated that Netanyahu’s current undertaking is to “exterminate” all Palestinians in Gaza. Former Knesset member and now head of a far-right libertarian party, Zehut, Moshe Feiglin, recently declared that “Every child in Gaza is the enemy. . . not a single Gazan child will be left [in Gaza].” Those condemning Israel, both Jewish and not, have been antagonistically targeted by some stridently Israel-supporting faculty and non-campus observers, almost invariably with the prompting or support from Israel-supporting organizations. The latter hardly ever face campus disciplinary action when their accusations against named individuals or groups prove after vigorous campus administrative investigation, including by outside lawyers, to be fabricated at worst or exaggerated at least.

The contrasts in response to Islamophobia or anti-Palestinian and antisemitic antagonisms are telling. There are no accounts of pro-Israel students beaten up by off-campus thugs or police, being picked up by ICE and threatened with deportation without due process, as Palestinian-supporting students and faculty have been. There are very few cases of disciplinary action against Jewish defenders of Israel. Shai Davidai, Israeli faculty member in Columbia’s Business School, was briefly barred from campus in late 2024, whereas Columbia Law School’s Katherine Franke, a vocal critic of Israel, was forced into early retirement. There have been streams of disciplinary action against students, Palestinian or Jewish, critical of Israel’s ongoing massacre in Gaza, as there have been against those protesting Israel’s treatment of Palestinians well before Oct 7. Palestinian (and indeed Jewish) faculty critical of Israel regularly receive death threats.

Government spokespersons, American and Israeli, as well as mainstream media,  have instantaneously characterized as “antisemitic” Elias Rodriguez’s chilling murder of two Israeli embassy employees in Washington D.C. The same is true of the awful flame-throwing attacks by Mohamed Soliman on those holding a vigil calling for the release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas in Boulder this past Sunday. That there is no justification for such violence should not distract from the fact that, to date,  there is no evidence either was aimed at Jews as Jews. Both were directed at Israel for its war on Palestinians (and not just on Hamas), by attacking its employees or supporters.  In both cases the perpetrators shouted “Free Palestine,” adding no words at the scene or on social media about Jews.  The murders and attacks, each conducted by lone men and horrific as both events were, will also likely heighten not dissipate violence against Palestinians. In the ten days between the embassy murders and Boulder attacks, Israel killed well over six hundred Gazans, including many peacefully lining up at a food distribution site after two months of Israel’s preventing any aid reaching Gaza. These killings have received far less media coverage than the two U.S. events. Mainstream reports of the IDF bombings have almost completely maintained anonymity of those killed. No one should be subjected to violent assaults like these, whether conducted by loners or states.

+++

Targeting of Israel’s critics as antisemitic appear to ramp up exactly when Israel’s government makes public and carries out its violent plans in Gaza. Charges of “antisemitism” against critics now represent a textbook case of a politically- and media-inspired moral panic, as theorized in the 1970s by Stanley Cohen and Stuart Hall. Concerns about some incidents become blown up to include an entire population, all members of which then get targeted, further exacerbating the panic about the group. The initial concern, linked to a long historical animosity, becomes ramified into the stereotype. Much as racism historically manifested race, the political panic produces the targeted population, not the reverse.

The strident attacks on Israel’s critics are not happenstance. They are produced by well-funded organizations, some financially supported by Israeli state entities as well as by Jewish American billionaires. StandWithUs, Canary Mission, and Betar have all made it a central cause to use any means available to them to shut down criticism of Israel, including providing the Trump administration with names of Israel’s critics to deport.

“Discomfort” and “distress” are the sort of psychic sensibilities that IHRA’s centering of hate in defining antisemitism has tended to encourage. That these considerations are so subjective render inflationary antisemitism that much easier and politically effective. They silence most public and campus reference to the “hundred’s year war” on Palestinians. In classrooms and forums, accusation and political theatre have substituted for any need to provide arguments to support Israel’s actions. The recourse is mostly to claims of “existential threat.” Quick charges of “existential threat,” while perhaps understandable against the backdrop of mid-twentieth century history, cannot close down debate, let alone criticism.

Despite the accusations, Harvard University is hardly the hotbed of rampant antisemitism, “perpetuating an unsafe campus environment that is hostile to Jewish students, promotes pro-Hamas sympathies,” as Homeland Security Director Kristi Noem recently charged. That’s not to say there is no antisemitism at Harvard, nor that there is not more post October 8 than before it. Where Jewish organizations such as Hillel are the objects of Israel-critical protest, these would count as antisemitic only where the campus organization has no record of supporting, embracing, defending, or rationalizing Israel’s devastation of Gaza. Where there is no such record, targeting a Jewish organization or institution—Hillel or a synagogue, say—would be doing so because identified as Jewish. But where the institution’s membership or board as such has supported Israel’s actions in Gaza, criticism becomes legitimate public political expression. Criticizing the ADL for these attacks would not count as antisemitic unless criticisms included evident antisemitic stereotypes or self-evident presuppositions. Concretely, the Anti-Defamation League has attacked critics of Israel’s actions in Gaza. Harvard and other universities like Columbia have too readily ignored these distinctions in the interests of placating the Trump administration only to find out that whatever concessions the university makes never satisfy Trump’s political calculus.

Charges of antisemitism now serve as the dead end (excuse the metaphor) for acknowledging the kind of genocidal action taking place before us. Genocides thankfully have never completed themselves, despite the deadly suffering they produce. But as Jews and Germans today could surely both attest in their own ways, or South Africans for that matter, they leave indelible marks not just on victims and perpetrators but on generations of their offspring alike.

+++

Antisemitisms have seen some increase, as I’ve said. The increase in reports and charges is driven in part by concerns for Israel, the heartfelt covering for the politically cynical. Concerns about Jewish student wellbeing are amplified,  those for Palestinian or Muslim students relatedly under-emphasized, even ignored. In response to Harvard’s antisemitism report, a Trump administration spokesman declared that “Universities’ violation of federal law, due to their blatant reluctance to protect Jewish students and defend civil rights, is unbecoming of institutions seeking billions in taxpayer funds.” They were deafeningly silent in response to the Harvard report on Islamophobia.

Trump’s vocal stress on college antisemitism (spurred on by the likes of the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther) was fueled initially by Elise Stefanik’s grilling of then Harvard President Claudine Gay in a December 2024 congressional hearing on college antisemitism and the outcry that followed Gay’s floundering. As he assumed power, Trump mobilized antisemitism as a wedge issue to assert increasing control over college constituencies long critical of both him and ultra-right nationalism. This embrace has helped to undermine confidence in university knowledge-making, as much in the natural as human sciences. This, in turn, was meant to politically elevate the claim to deific presidential authority, to fill the vacuity left in the wake of the skepticism.

“Antisemitism” has served politically for the second Trump administration much as the attack on Critical Race Theory did for Republicans from 2020-2022. Looking strong on confronting campus “antisemitism” has helped to cover up some of the administration’s dramatic erosion of civil rights much as the anti-CRT campaigns did in conservative states and the anti-DEI and anti-woke focus more nationally since. In her letter to Harvard purporting to end Harvard’s capacity to admit international students, Director Noem explicitly linked antisemitism to Harvard’s “employ[ing] racist ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ policies.” The politics of inflationary antisemitism serves, in short, as heavy artillery in conservativism’s war on woke.

The political roiling of campuses around matters of Israel and Palestine poses a larger question, however. Israel’s supporters, whether governments, institutions, or individuals, are at least implicitly supporting Palestinian removal in Gaza and, through annexation, in the West Bank too. Those more explicit in this commitment characterizePalestinians as “human animals,” to be eliminated by bombing, starvation, or “self-deportation.” Not a condemnatory word has been uttered by those supporting Israel’s crusade against Gaza of Feiglin’s call to “kill all Gazan babies”. Inflationary antisemitism is the rationalizing legitimation of this crusade.

The political panic around antisemitism, then, has exacerbated anxiety of its occurrence. And this heightened anxiety, in turn, tends to find it around every corner, in every critical statement concerning Israel’s actions, in every damnation of its excesses. The panic produces the “proof.”

The larger question, then, concerns the tough work in the face of all this not just of reconciliation but as a stepping-stone to addressing what now seems even more impossible: how to live together, across separation divides such as borders but especially also literally as next-door neighbors, as partners in governing and commerce, even as friends and lovers? What would it take to find or really reparatively make ways of living together side-by-side, on campuses and in classrooms as in cities and countrysides, engaging with each other rather than fenced off by ideological or actual walls? Inflationary antisemitism serves to wall out even thinking this possibility, let alone its realization.

The political panic of “antisemitism” is exemplified by the fact that anything critical of Israel can now be dismissed in its name. Four years ago Christopher Rufo torched Critical Race Theory as a communist plot initiated in the 1960s by four Jewish European philosophers. The charge was repeated ad nauseam by his prominent followers like Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, and Mark Levine despite abundant evidence of its complete historical fabrication. No one registered the slightest concern that the  claim represents as classic a trope of Nazi-like antisemitism as one might find.

The political instrumentalization of “antisemitism”—now screeched save when proving all too inconvenient—empties the charge of the necessary power when really needed as a timely weapon to face down deadly attacks on Jews and Palestinians. Frantz Fanon famously declared that when Jews are attacked, Blacks should pay attention as they would be next. We might now say that when Palestinians are attacked, most notably by Israel and its supporters, Jews especially should pay attention. “Antisemitism” today renders more powerless the defense against the much more dangerous antisemitism of the Christian nationalists when tomorrow they no longer find useful the currently convenient embrace of the Judeo- to Christian ascension.

These are the challenges of our times, as pressing today as ever in the wake of ideological elasticity and the production of panic. It requires a response from every one of us, and from the university we want in our world. It is the question, after all, of how ultimately we choose, individually and interactively, to inhabit our humanity.

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Washington crossing the Delaware on December 25–26, 1776, depicted in Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 painting.

The belief that Russia is a country with an unpredictable past is a common one, frequently cited in academic and cultural studies.  Now the Trump administration has taken a step largely ignored by the mainstream media that will pave the way to an unpredictable past for the United States.  Russia has a complicated and tumultuous history that found czars and commissars rewriting the past for their own benefit.  Until now, the United States has never had  a president who was so focused on altering the historical narrative of the country.

For the past 165 years, the Office of the Historian in the Department of State has produced an official documentary historical record of U.S. foreign policy decisions and diplomatic activities, using declassified records from foreign affairs and even intelligence agencies. Congress created the publication series during the Civil War to ensure an official account of President Abraham Lincoln’s foreign policy during the Civil War. The publication is called the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), and is essential to the work of congressional lawmakers and academic researchers.  The publication series is also available to the public in major libraries and online.

An advisory committee of diverse historians helps ensure that the publications remain unbiased, transparent, and thorough.  Well, no more.  In April, Donald Trump, who has been vigorously attacking major aspects of our democratic civil society, quietly fired all the members of the committee.  No reason was given, which is typical of the abrupt firings that Trump has made to the civil service, accompanied by a simple “Thank you for your service.”  The Historical Advisory Committee (HAC) consisted of nine distinguished academics who served rotating terms and formed one of the most prestigious associations in the field of history.  The committee itself was created by President George H.W. Bush in 1991.  Dismantling the HAC cannot be described as a cost-cutting move, since the members of the advisory committee received a stipend of $250 for each quarterly meeting.

Bush created the HAC in the wake of the controversy over Iran-Contra and the questioning of the accuracy of the foreign relations series in describing key events during the Cold War.  Former CIA directors such as Robert Gates were omitting or censoring documentation on CIA’s covert involvement in the Iran coup d’etat in 1953, the Guatemalan coup d’etat in 1954, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1960, and the mass killings in Indonesia in 1965-1966.  The appointment of the HAC led to a far more thorough and judicious FRUS series.

Trump’s move will ensure that future volumes will be far less thorough and judicious, if they are produced at all.  This move is typical of his attacks on the inspectors general, government auditors, Department of Justice monitors, and research agencies that are designed to ensure responsibility and integrity in governance.    Trump tried to dismantle the history committee in his first term, but accepted a compromise in requiring term limits for committee members to ensure greater rotation.  The committee was designed to provide oversight of the work of the State Department historians.  The absence of oversight will lead to a product that will be heavily partisan and incomplete.  This is a major victory for Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who couldn’t be more eager to do Trump’s bidding.

No one is safe from Trump’s axe.  Even the director of the National Portrait Gallery was fired; Trump called her “highly partisan.”  The gallery is part of the Smithsonian Institution, which Trump has castigated for “divisive narratives” and an “anti-American ideology.”  He called the director a “highly partisan” person, and a strong supporter of “DEI, which is totally inappropriate for her position.”  The Smithsonian is not under the purview of the executive branch, but that hasn’t stopped Trump from making his purges.

The mayor of the District of Columbia is helping Trump to do his job, which she didn’t do in his first term in the White House.  Mayor Muriel Bowser recently extended pre-trial detention, which means immigrants and others could be detained without being charged; repealed the Sanctuary Values Act, which means neighbors could be turned over to ICE; and increased funding for the police department, which has been cooperating with ICE.

Trump’s attacks on law, higher education, and research is reminiscent of Adolf Hitler’s campaign against similar institutions in Germany in 1933-1934.  The humanities and the law were attacked in Germany in the early 1930s.  The humanities and the law are certainly under attack in the United States, although we are starting to see some semblance of a pushback from key institutions such as Harvard University and the universities that make up the Big Ten.  Hitler’s attacks on the judicial system were very successful, and the United States today finds a significant increase in threats against federal judges and the law itself.  Even decisions from the Supreme Court are being ignored with impunity.

The major loser in the dismantling of the advisory committee is our democracy.  George Washington University professor of American studies, Melani McAlister, attributed the firings to an effort to have power over the telling of history.  “You would have to try very hard to even know the History Advisor Committee even existed,” McAlister said. “When people start targeting the telling of history, that becomes very dangerous for democracy.”

Trump’s moves in just under five months are consistent with Adolf Hitler’s moves in 1933 and 1934.  In his first six months, Hitler managed to turn the democracy of the Weimar Republic into the police state of the Third Reich, mobilized around the cult of its leader.  At that point in time, no one could have predicted how radical the transformation would become.

Trump has not turned the United States into a police state, although the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which includes raids at churches and schools, have certainly been transformative and frightening.  Trump has attacked virtually every aspect of civil society, as we have witnessed heavy-handed moves against law firms and legal institutions, federal judges and their decision making, higher education, and the most basic research in science and medicine…and now history.

Trump’s campaign will ensure that a very different America will emerge from these vicious attacks over a period of time.  It is impossible to predict what the United States will resemble after a full four-year term for Donald Trump.

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Photo by tom coe

Donald Trump’s offer of U.S. sanctuary to white South Africans is rightly considered a racist gesture not justified by any serious discrimination or persecution, much less the “genocide” referred to by the Fabulist-in-Chief.  Many other groups are far more entitled to of asylum than the farmers who still own most of South Africa’s land. But there are two groups who should be considered prime candidates for admission to the Land of the Free: Palestinians and Israeli Jews.

Admitting the Palestinians who wish to live here is a no-brainer. This is a people who are in danger of genocide or who are being murdered as we talk; if anyone deserves asylum, they do. Moreover, those who supplied the weapons used by Israel to maim and kill them, as well as providing political and ideological support for their partial extermination, obviously owe the survivors compensation. Most Palestinians would probably prefer to live in a free, peaceful, autonomous Palestine, but Americans should welcome those who want to join us here for however long they want to stay.

Less obviously, but with clear justification, we should open the Golden Door to Israeli Jews as well. Last year, some sixty thousand Israelis left their country – a record emigration – and forty percent of those presently resident in the Jewish State admit to thinking about leaving. This is not hard to understand.  I have many friends in that country who are deeply troubled by their government’s complicity in genocide, and who don’t see things improving significantly in the future. The U.S. government that, in league with Israeli ethno-nationalists, has made Israel’s foreign and domestic policies an affront to Jewish values and a source of rising antisemitism, owes the Jews as well as the Palestinians a right of sanctuary.

Both Palestinians and Israeli Jews tend to be highly skilled, family-centered, socially responsible people whose presence in America would enrich this country in every way.  Why not admit those who wish to live with us, while giving all of them the choice to remain in the Holy Land or to emigrate?  No doubt, some Israeli and American Jewish leaders will brand this proposal outrageously anti-Israel, a disguised form of antisemitism, yada yada. Their predecessors made the same noises after World War II, when Jews and progressives averse to displacing the Arab population of Palestine recommended the mass admission of Jewish refugees to the U.S.A.  But it’s still a fine idea.

 In the destruction of Gaza, we see the execrable results of a political Zionism based on Jewish supremacy over the Palestinians and an imperialism based on U.S. supremacy over all the peoples of the Middle East. Inviting the victims of these oppressive policies to share the relative wealth and freedom of the United States seems the least that we can do.

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Gaza City Neighborhood of Shuja’iyya destroyed by Israel during Operation Protective Edge (2014). Photo by Gary Fields.

It is now imperative to acknowledge what people of conscience the world over know to be true: The State of Israel is operating a Death Camp for the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. By forcibly confining the Palestinians of Gaza within impassable bounds, while at the same time slaughtering and starving them within this confined space, the State of Israel has made a mockery of the slogan, “Never Again.”

In broad outline, Gaza is similar to the camps of the Shoah where Jews were mercilessly confined and murdered. In the case of Gaza, however, Palestinians have replaced Jews as victims of slaughter, starvation and eradication, and the State of Israel, in turn, has evolved into the keeper of the Camp.

What also differentiates the death camp that is Gaza from the camps of the Holocaust, is that during the latter, camps were decentralized with six primary camps utilized for the horrendous mass killing of Jews, the most famous being Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz. Gaza, by contrast, is a single confined space and killing field.

Finally, the other difference of note is that during the Shoah Jews were killed in the camps primarily with poison gas, while the Palestinians of the Gaza camp are being liquidated by unceasing bombing and shelling along with the deliberate starvation of the population and the destruction and withholding of all necessities for bare life.

The record of this murderous conduct by Israel has been visible to the entire world as Israel’s leaders and public figures have publicized their aims openly.

From the time of Israeli President, Issac Herzog saying on October 14, 2023: “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s not true;” to the present-day acknowledgment of Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, that “Gaza will be totally destroyed,” there exist countless admissions of this exterminationist discourse coming from Israel leaders and the public posted on social media.

At the same time, Israeli soldiers on the front lines of the killing have posted their exploits openly for the entire world to witness on TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms in such broad numbers that even the Israeli military has warned them not to continue this practice.

The record of Israel in this murderous mayhem is indeed grim. The Israeli military has bombed and shelled Gaza daily and unceasingly for the last 19 months, save for brief moments of ceasefire, and has killed, by official statistics over 54,000 Gazans, although reputable estimates such as that of the Lancet put the total killed closer to 200,000. In this onslaught, it has killed close to 20,000 children, a number unmatched by any conflict in this century. By contrast, the war in Ukraine to date has witnessed the deaths of 682 children. If children are the future, Israel is clearly seeking to eliminate that future.

Alongside this killing spree, Israel has obliterated all infrastructure enabling Palestinians of Gaza simply to exist. It has bombed and destroyed 92% of Gaza’s housing stock. It has targeted Gaza’s entire health sector destroying or incapacitating all 36 of Gaza’s hospitals. Israel has bombed every single bakery in the territory and has obliterated the one desalination plant providing the only internal source of drinking water within the Camp to the people of Gaza. For 90 days since March, Israel did not allow a single truckload of food, water or basic necessities including medicines to enter the territory. Only in the last 4-5 days has Israel allowed a controversial but pathetically inadequate number of trucks with food and water into Gaza for the 2.2 million people there. In effect, the State of Israel with its military campaign, has created conditions in Gaza for mass extermination.

Israel insists that what it has inflicted on the Palestinians of Gaza is due to Hamas and that Palestinian fatalities are the collateral damage resulting from Hamas hiding among civilians. “Our war is with Hamas,” is the mantra repeated over and over by Israel’s political and military establishment. In truth, the war waged by Israel seeks to eradicate the Palestinians of Gaza, and Hamas, it appears, is the collateral damage.

In its 84-page submission before the International Court of Justice charging Israel with Genocide in Gaza, South Africa used nine of those pages to document statements of genocidal intent made by Israeli politicians, military figures and media personalities in just four months since October, 2023. Since that time, candidly open genocidal incitement by key figures in Israel society has only intensified.

Even former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who for most of the last eighteen months denied that Israel was engaged in acts of genocide, recently described Israel’s onslaught in Gaza as a war of annihilation: “What we are doing in Gaza is a war of extermination,” he admitted, “indiscriminate, unrestrained, brutal and criminal killing of civilians.”+++

In a well-known book about the protest movement against the Vietnam War, Todd Gitlin reprised a famous slogan from the anti-war movement in titling his classic, The Whole World is Watching. Today, in the 19^th month of Israel’s genocidal onslaught against the people of Gaza, the entire world knows exactly what it is witnessing.

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Photograph Source: Fort Hunter Liggett – Public Domain

Should a healthy 52-year-old woman with a normal BMI who has had Covid-19 three times and has received six previous doses of a Covid-19 vaccine get vaccinated with the latest update of the vaccine? The question is asked in a New England Journal of Medicine by Dr. Martin A. Makary, Trump’s commissioner of the FDA and Dr. Vinay Prasad, who was appointed by Makary as head of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. Their answer is that this is not known and that therefore they were removing the FDA’s recommendation that healthy individuals between 4 and 64 years of age receive the updated vaccine.  They explain that removing the recommendation will compel manufacturers to conduct the studies that will determine whether this woman should take one of their vaccines, because without proof that they work for her, their sales will be limited because of lack of an FDA recommendation

This is terrible science and terrible public health policy.  The CDC collected data from 6 hospitals from September 2024 to January 2025, and the data show that an 18–64-year-old who has not received the 2024-2025 vaccine has a 55% greater chance of being hospitalized with Covid than a person who has (author’s calculations are here).   It also shows that of the unvaccinated who are hospitalized, 36% – more than a third –would not have been hospitalized (either because their infection would not have been bad enough or because they would not have been infected to begin with) had they taken the vaccine.  (Persons younger than 18 are not included in the discussion here because data about them is not readily available.)  Thus, the vaccine is effective, and in fact anyone in the 18 to 64-year-old age group should get it.

But what about individuals who have already had 6 vaccines and 3 prior infections? Such individuals are rare.  Only 8% of the patients between the ages of 18-65 who were hospitalized for any illness during the CDC study period had been immunized with the 2024-2025 vaccine.  Also, the most recent vaccination of those who were not vaccinated with an updated dose occurred 1,042 days (median), almost three years, before hospitalization.   To stop vaccinations for all because there may be a few individuals who get the vaccine even though they don’t really need it does not make sense and for many people this policy will be fatal.

Although woefully unreported in the news, there were more than 35,000 deaths due to Covid in the last 12 months; one-third of these deaths were people younger than 65.   Ninety-two percent of these, or about 11,000, were unvaccinated. (This assumes that the rates of vaccination among the dead are the same as among the hospitalized.)  As we have seen, 36% of them, or about 4,000 individuals, would not have died had they been vaccinated. In fact, instead of stopping the vaccinations, the FDA should be vigorously encouraging people to get them.

Even if the search for additional data were justified, however, these data could be collected while vaccinations continue. The rate of vaccination is so low, that there is no need to administer placebo in order to know the fate of the unvaccinated.   But instead of the manufacturers doing these studies, it will require that a government agency, perhaps the NIH, will perform them.

In general, there is no reason why manufacturers should be the ones who conduct the testing of drugs that show evidence that they may be effective, either in the lab or based on prior use. It is far better to have the FDA and the NIH, which after all represent the public, conduct the tests.  This would, of course, raise the profits of the manufacturers, but these could be lowered by regulating drug prices.  Testing by the government would remove a prime excuse that manufacturers give for the high prices they charge, and it would also encourage more drug development by making it more affordable for new manufacturers to enter the market.

Good science and good public policy would be for Covid vaccinations to continue, and for their effectiveness, and indeed the effectiveness of all drugs, to be evaluated not by their manufacturers but by the government.

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Photograph Source: U.S. Embassy Jerusalem – CC BY 2.0

Question: What member of Trump’s cabinet has four major posts, but only one job?

Answer: Marco Rubio

Marco Rubio is the uber-mensch of the Trump administration.  He is the secretary of state, the acting national security adviser, the acting director of (what’s left) of the Agency for International Development, and the acting director of the National Archives.  His only full-time job has never been performed by a secretary of state, canceling visas for international students and making sure that migrants are sent to horrific prisons in El Salvador or the South Sudan where a civil war is taking place.  He has even targeted a group of Venezuelan migrants who were given legal status by the Biden administration.  Nearly every Rubio decision on immigration matters has been illegal, and he presumably knows these decisions are illegal.  Nearly every decision has been blocked or challenged in federal courts.

After his confirmation in January, Rubio began his campaign to cancel visas for at least 1,500 international students.  The secretary of state has the power to cancel such visas, but Rubio is the first secretary of state to do so.  Rubio has no interest in defending the free speech rights of students; he maintains that anyone who associates with protestors should not attend a U.S. university.  This week, he ordered U.S. embassies and consulates to stop student visa applications, which will give the Trump administration time to issue even more restrictions.

Rubio favors an even broader crackdown on foreign students following the ban on foreign students at Harvard.  Last week, he ordered embassies and consulate to screen the social media accounts of visa applicants.  Any foreign student who has expressed a pro-Palestinian point of view will be denied a visa; those students already in the United States who do so will be detained and their legal status will be revoked.  Anti-semitic content will also serve as a barrier to a foreign student visa or a student’s legal status.  The First Amendment has been shelved in the process.   (On May 28, a federal judge extended the block on Rubio’s efforts to prevent Harvard from enrolling foreign students.)

Like the China Hawks that populate the Trump aviary, Rubio proclaimed on May 28 that he will “aggressively revoke” visas of Chinese students who have ties to the Chinese Communist Party or who are studying in “critical fields.”  The 275,000 students from China represent the second-largest group of international students in the United States.  Wesleyan University President Michael Roth, one of the few university president standing up to the Trump administration, believes this to be “terribly misguided, counterproductive and another way in which we are shooting ourselves in the foot.”

Rubio has even gotten into a contretemps with Richard Grenell, a senior White House adviser who is close to Donald Trump.  Grenell has a history of working with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, whom Rubio detests.  Rubio favors no concessions to Maduro, but Grenell has had Trump’s blessing to negotiate for Venezuela to take deportees in exchange for our buying oil from Venezuela.  Grenell even had Maduro’s agreement to take in deported Venezuelans, but Rubio undercut Grenell by lobbying successfully for sending the migrants to El Salvador.  Again, a federal court said that the flights to El Salvador needed to be delayed, but Rubio ignored the order.  More evidence that Rubio doesn’t care if he’s acting illegally.

Trump and Rubio received one of their only victories from the federal court when the Supreme Court upheld the termination of protections for up to 350,000 Venezuelans.  This decision reversed an order from the Biden administration that allowed them to live and work in the United States for humanitarian reasons.  The Walt Disney Company, which has been cozying up to the Trump administration, moved quickly to place its Venezuelan workers on leave without pay following the high court’s ruling.  Disney did not have to do this because the decision itself did not stipulate that the Venezuelans had lost their legal status and work permits.  Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is demonstrating that it will allow the egregious immigrant decisions to stand in view of the president’s power to protect national security.

Rubio also favors the deportation of migrants from various countries to South Sudan, a conflict-ridden nation in no position to protect the safety of its own people, let alone migrants  from Cuba, Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos, and Mexico.  Rubio ensured that the migrants were given less than 24 hours notice before being placed on a plane.  The 24 hours didn’t even coincide with business hours for the judicial system.  Rubio thus ignored his own department’s official notice: “Do not travel to South Sudan due to crime, kidnapping, and armed conflict.”

A federal judge did not order the return of the migrants but his judgments led the United States to divert the plane to a naval base in Djibouti.  There is no additional information regarding possible screening interviews of the migrants and their access to lawyers.  Once again, Rubio has demonstrated complete lack of concern for the humanitarian protections that are required by international law.  The administration obviously believes that, by sending migrants to the worst possible places in terms of violence and danger, this will serve as a deterrent.

From the very start of the Trump administration, Rubio has signaled his association with the hardline views of Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, the ranking hardliner in the administration.  Rubio has worked to speed up the deportation process, to reverse the protections for immigrants given by the Biden administration, and to ignore orders of federal courts.  Trump has always advocated for the use of fear in national security decision-making, and Rubio has introduced fear into the foreign student and immigrant communities.

The immigration nightmare introduced by the Trump administration, led by Donald himself, Rubio, Miller, immigration tsar Tom Homan, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem will go down as one of the ugliest episodes in the history of the United States.  Rubio’s performance is the worst of all because he is working opportunistically to enhance his own credentials, presumably to make a run for the presidency in 2028, while all of the others are doing what comes naturally.  There has never been a more heartless and cruel team in charge of American national security policy.

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Photo: Nimrod Kerrett.

Not only abroad, but also within his own country, Israels’ Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu is finally facing growing and substantial protests against his war in Gaza. After he broke the ceasefire on March 18 and launched a new attack on Gaza, a number of women took the initiative to set up ‘Action for Children’.

The post “These Could be Our Children:” Israeli Women Opposing the War, an Interview appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Image by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona.

The following is an excerpt from The New York Times’ bestseller, Genocide Bad: Notes on Palestine, Jewish History, and Collective Liberation, by Sim Kern. Check out Sim’s recent interview on CounterPunch Radio, and head over to Interlink Press to pick up a signed, deluxe copy of this important book. Proceeds support the Middle East Children’s Alliance.

+++

When you say “Genocide bad,” Zionists will counter, “But Hamas [did something terrible].”

“But Hamas” comments try to derail you from talking about Israeli violence by asking you to first address the violence of the Palestinian resistance.

Comments might sound like, “Do you condemn Hamas?” or “But Hamas started this!”

They may share facts, such as, “Hamas abducted children,” lies such as, “Hamas beheaded babies,” or—trickiest of all—partial truths, like, “Hamas calls for a genocide of Jews in its charter.”

As I’m writing this chapter, Israel has just invaded Lebanon, and this familiar refrain on cable news networks has shifted to, “But Hezbollah!” If Israel continues expanding its regional war, Hasbarists will continue responding to any criticism of Israel by asking you to first condemn any local populations daring to take up arms and resist their own extermination.

It’s up to you whether you want to get derailed here. Because sometimes we do need to talk about Hamas. We need to talk about the important distinction between violence that comes from imperial colonizers versus violence that comes from Indigenous people defending their homes. Though if you start down that road, you’re going to have to define what you mean by “colonizers” and “Indigenous,” and you’ll get drawn into debating the meaning of Indigeneity.^[1]

But notice—you were trying to say “Genocide bad,” and now they’ve got you arguing semantics!

We also need to contradict blatant lies about the Palestinian resistance, like the “Hamas beheaded babies” story. It’s important to clarify that, no, they did not. That story proved to be false. Israelis are the only military force that have actually beheaded babies over the past year, babies like Ahmad Al-Najr, eighteen months old, whose head was severed from his body in the bombing of a Rafah tent encampment on May 26, 2024. The video of Ahmad’s father, shaking his headless child’s body, wailing in agony as people burned alive in the holocaust of tents behind him, was the worst thing I’ve ever seen, even after a year of this digitally broadcasted genocide.

So Israel beheads babies, not Hamas.

Remember: every accusation, a confession.

What’s trickier and more time-consuming than contradicting outright lies is picking apart the strands of partial truths—but this is especially important work, as these half-truths, or truths-stripped-of-all-context can cause a lot of confusion. Take the example above, that “Hamas calls for a genocide of Jews in its charter.”

The kernel of truth here is that Hamas’s original 1988 charter defined its struggle as a “struggle against Jews,” included a quote from the Quran about a prophecy of Muslims killing Jews, and decreed in Article 15: “In face of the Jews’ usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised.” However, in its 2017 revised charter, Hamas clarified, “Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine.” Hamas also explicitly condemns anti-Jewish hate in its revised charter: “Hamas rejects the persecution of any human being or the undermining of his or her rights on nationalist, religious or sectarian grounds. Hamas is of the view that the Jewish problem, anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews are phenomena fundamentally linked to European history and not to the history of the Arabs and the Muslims or to their heritage.”^[2]

You might also take the time to unpack the anti-Muslim hate and panic that informs Westerners’ understanding of the word “jihad.” Many USians think “jihad” is a synonym for suicide bombings or genocide. When they hear “jihadist” they picture ISIS fighters storming their suburb to enact Sharia law. In reality, the word just means “struggle” or “fight,” and is often used in Arabic in nonviolent contexts, such as a struggle for self-improvement or what a Christian might term “wrestling with your faith.”

But if you get into all of that, not only are you now miles away from whatever point you started off making (genocide bad), now a hundred Zionists in your comments are still going to insist, “BUT HAMAS BEHEADED BABIES!” And you’re back where you started.

If you give a Zionist a cookie, they’re going to ask you to condemn Hamas.

And maybe, in fact, you do want to condemn an action of Hamas. Maybe Hamas has done something that violates your moral code, and it’s important for you to make sure your audience knows that, because otherwise you fear you’ll lose credibility with them.

For example, I am staunchly against abducting children. I don’t think children should be taken from their parents at gunpoint, under any circumstances. So yes, I condemn Hamas’s abduction of thirty children from their families on October 7th. I’ll also condemn the abduction, rape, torture, and killing of any civilians.^[3]

But consider—why am I asked to condemn Hamas for abducting children first, when every year, Israel abducts an estimated 500–700 Palestinian children at gunpoint? Since October 7th, at least 640 children in the West Bank have been arrested by the IOF, many facing medical neglect, abuse, and even torture in Israeli prisons.^[4] Furthermore, before October 7th, Israel had killed forty-one Palestinian children in the West Bank, taking them from their families forever. Between October 2023 and July 2024, the Lancet, a leading international medical journal, estimated that 186,000 deaths “could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.” And because 47 percent of the population of Gaza are children, 87,420 of those killed by Israel may be children. Though even that’s likely a conservative estimate, as children are more vulnerable to violence, famine, disease, and medical neglect, so the number of Palestinian children killed by Israel’s genocide may be even higher.

For whatever action you’re being asked to condemn Hamas, the IOF has done something similar, more extremely and more frequently, to more people, for a longer period of time—and they fucking started it.

So sure, sometimes we need to talk about Hamas, but most of the time, we should avoid this derailment tactic that sets us on a defensive footing, apologizing for the actions of an impoverished, besieged Indigenous resistance rather than attacking one of the most powerful and violent colonial militaries in the history of the world.

That’s why, 99 percent of the time, I shut down people asking me to condemn Hamas with, “Forget Hamas! My tax dollars don’t fund Hamas.”

^^That’s where I ended this chapter when I first drafted it. With a tidy soundbite that let me avoid going too deep into my thoughts and feelings on armed resistance—which are unsettled at best. I’m way out of my depth on this topic. And armed resistance is a very loaded topic to discuss, because if I misstep, I risk, on the one hand, being exiled from the Free Palestine movement for the crime of normalization,^[5] or, on the other hand, landing on a government no-fly list for being a radical terrorist sympathizer.

Or … worse. There are worse things that have happened to authors who are proponents of armed anti-colonial struggle.

So you can see why I hesitated to get too deep into my thoughts. But since completing that first draft, I watched on my phone—on my little handheld magic window into war crimes—the last moments of Yahya Sinwar, chairman of Hamas’s political bureau, before he was killed by a gunshot to the head. I suspect he was killed by the Israeli drone that filmed his last moments, although that detail has not been confirmed.

Now I have more to say about Hamas, although it’s all kind of a mess in my head. Forgive me that what follows is fragmentary and won’t come to a tidy resolution.

You should watch the video if you haven’t seen it.

The clip begins as a disembodied viewpoint swooping over an apocalyptic landscape. From the abrupt, robotic adjustments of the flight path, you can tell this is drone footage—and a very expensive drone at that, delivering crystal-clear HD images. I had to remind myself, in those first moments, that I wasn’t watching the intro to some Hollywood movie. The demolished city was no multi-million dollar set or CGI creation, but the very real ruins of thousands of homes in the Tal al-Sultan neighborhood in Rafah, a refugee camp—and now a graveyard for countless people who died beneath the rubble.

In 2017, the sci-fi series Black Mirror aired a chilling episode called “Metalhead,” which follows a woman as she flees through an abandoned landscape from a pack of dog-like, four-legged armed drones. Throughout the tense, forty-one-minute episode, she is mostly silent, because the drones are attracted by noise. After surviving several near-death encounters with the metalheads, she is wounded and takes shelter in an abandoned home. In the final shot, an aerial drone pans away from the house, showing a dozen of the killer robot-dogs closing in on her location, and we presume she is done for.

“Metalhead” was a cultural phenomenon in the US—the kind of TV that got everyone in the teacher’s lounge at my school insisting, “You have to watch it.” “Metalhead” left such an impression on me that I included police drone-dogs in my 2023 sci-fi novel, The Free People’s Village, the cover of which features a masked punk smashing a Metalhead-like drone with a baseball bat.^[6]

But in Gaza in 2024, there’s nothing futuristic about armed robots hunting down human beings—that nightmare has become a part of everyday life. One evening last June, that reality came crashing into my own cushy life in the imperial core. I was in Berkeley, California, attending the Bay Area Book Festival to promote The Free People’s Village. I was walking towards an author meet-and-greet event, wearing my keffiyeh, because I had vowed to bring Palestine with me onto every stage I was afforded. Still, I was trying to compartmentalize the genocide, for the moment. I was having fun. My kids were back at the hotel with my spouse, and I was looking forward to a free drink ticket, cheese plate, and schmoozing with other authors, feeling swept up in the glamour of the rare chance to travel for my author career.

Halfway to the event, my phone buzzed with a notification—it was my friend Mohammed in Gaza.

Throughout the spring, I had been using my TikTok platform to fundraise for pregnant and postpartum people in Gaza who were trying to evacuate to Cairo. I had used a random number generator to select Mohammed’s campaign from a list of hundreds of such fundraisers. By raffling off signed copies of my book, I had raised the nearly $100,000 in bribe money that Mohammed’s extended family needed to pay off Egyptian officials and evacuate. But in June, before any members of Mohammed’s family were able to evacuate, Israel had destroyed the Rafah border crossing—the last route for Gazans to escape from genocide.

Though their plans to evacuate had fallen through, Mohammed, his wife, Shahd, and I had stayed in touch. Their baby, Heba, had been born just a few days after my own baby. We started chatting regularly, sending each other baby pictures and updates on our kids’ milestones. I learned about how Mohammed had visited my state of Texas as a teenager, on a foreign-exchange student program, staying on a ranch where he’d fallen in love with the USA and horses and wide-open spaces. I learned that they were both doctoral students in biomedical engineering, still somehow taking exams and writing papers between bombardments and diaper changes. By June, I loved baby Heba like a niece, and I considered Mohammed and Shahd to be friends.

So that evening in Berkeley, my heart dropped into my stomach as soon as I saw the notification. It was the middle of the night in Gaza, so something must be terribly wrong.

Mohammed texted me that an armed quadcopter was patrolling the street outside the building in Rafah where they were then staying. A dog right outside their window had just barked at the drone and been shot dead. Mohammed was terrified, because there was no glass in the window. Only a thin curtain separated his sleeping family from the quadcopter, which would attack anything that made a noise. What if baby Heba woke up and started screaming?

I slumped against the side of a building, the horror of Mohammed’s reality shattering that balmy northern California evening. Couples strolled past me on the sidewalk, chatting in soft tones or laughing with their heads thrown back. I was holding my breath, hoping a robot didn’t massacre this precious family on the other side of the world.

I could do nothing for Mohammed but be there with him, digitally at least. I could bear witness as he stayed awake through the long watches of the night, tensed to comfort Heba at the first sign of movement. I texted some pitiful banalities, like, “That’s so terrifying. I am praying for you.” And even though I’m not religious, it was true.

They got lucky. Heba slept soundly. The quadcopter moved on. My friends have survived, to the day I am writing this. And Heba’s mother, Shahd, has written a powerful letter to you, dear reader, which you’ll find on the final pages of this book.

So of course I was thinking about that quadcopter when I watched the video of Sinwar’s last moments. I wondered if the drone stalking him was the same make and model of machine that had killed a dog outside the window where baby Heba slept. I wondered about all the people who built these machines, and what they got paid for their labor. I wondered what it cost the Israeli military to buy a drone like that. And I wondered who profited the most from their sales.

In the video of Sinwar’s last moments, the quadcopter zooms into the bombed-out side of a building, where everything is thickly dusted with rubble. It takes the viewer—and the drone—a few moments to recognize that a man is sitting there on an overstuffed sofa. He’s camouflaged by the asbestos-filled dust that coats his skin as thickly as everything else in the room. But if your eyes can’t pick him out, don’t worry—the drone’s AI software soon identifies the human form, tracing a helpful red line around his head and torso.

Like Predator. Like Terminator. Except wait—you must remember! You’re watching real life, not a movie.

At that moment, you might notice that the man is missing a hand, and the blood leaking from the stump of his arm has darkened the armrest of the sofa. He holds very still, like he is hoping the drone will not spot him. But we viewers have already seen the red identifying line, foreshadowing the man’s death. We have seen the caption of the video—“Sinwar’s last moments!” Time flattens; in the video, the man is alive and hoping to survive, but we in the future know he is doomed.

Growing up, my older brother was obsessed with Star Wars. He had Star Wars bedsheets, a collection of the original 1970s action figures, and dozens of tiny plastic ships that he would arrange in elaborate formations on the carpet before acting out space battles, making the laser beam sounds with his mouth. Pew-pew! Because I idolized my big brother, I absorbed an encyclopedic amount of Star Wars trivia. To this day, tons of information on the military hardware of a fictional space empire is still stored in my brain—I can tell a Tie Bomber from a Tie Fighter, and an AT-AT from an AT-ST. Among our small collection of VHS tapes, we had all three Star Wars movies, which meant—in those days before streaming services—that we watched them over and over.

I must have watched The Empire Strikes Back—my brother’s favorite—about a hundred times. Burned into my memory forever is the image of Luke Skywalker as he clutches a catwalk above a windswept abyss, filthy and bleeding from his forehead and the stump where Darth Vader has just cut off his hand with a light saber. Luke screams in defiance, “I’ll never join you!” and lets go, plummeting into a seemingly bottomless void.

Luke Skywalker is one example of a classic sci-fi archetype—the plucky resistance fighter taking on an evil empire. Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, Paul Atreides in Dune, and Evey Hammond in V for Vendetta are other examples. All are stories that mirror anticolonial resistance movements throughout history, with one crucial change: in the Hollywood versions, the rebels engaged in violent struggle are all white.

Hollywood raised my generation on stories of young people who take up arms against an imperial army full of robots despite overwhelming odds. These heroes are violent. They carry light sabers and blasters and fly bomber spaceships. They mow down soldiers by the dozen. They blow up space stations, presumably staffed with at least some civilians. And they destroy capital cities full of wealthy-but-otherwise-innocent bystanders.

Hollywood taught me that their violence was justified.

What was Hollywood thinking?

According to Western journalism, only white people representing colonial empires are allowed to do violence in “self-defense.” Black and Brown people who fight back are engaged in “terrorism.”

So when these film franchises were in production, did the multimillionaire elites who owned the studios think that we’d pay more attention to Luke Skywalker’s white skin than his material conditions? Did they think, when presented with the stark difference between the wealthy revelries of the Capitol and the starving laborers of District 12, that we would not see parallels to income inequality between the imperial core and the Global South? Were they counting on us to dehumanize Black and Brown people that much?

When you watch the final moments of Yahya Sinwar, you are not seeing Luke Skywalker. But you are seeing a man with a bleeding stump where his hand should be, facing down a killer robot. You will recognize familiar tropes. You will have been trained, by countless sci-fi shows and movies and video games, to identify which character is the plucky resistance fighter and which character is the imperial droid. And even if you have never watched Star Wars or read The Hunger Games, even if you know absolutely nothing about the man in the overstuffed chair, you will recognize that he is human. He is a member of your species, and the thing that is hunting him is decidedly not. On a primeval, ancient, lizard-brain level, you are going to root for the human being over the killer robot that hunts him.

Unless, of course, you don’t see the man in the chair as human. Maybe you’ve been indoctrinated since birth to see men like him as monsters. Well, then you’re going to cheer on his demise, the way movie theaters full of parents will laugh and applaud, even beside their very young children, when the villains of Disney movies meet with a violent death.

In the footage—which, remember, is not a Disney film—Sinwar realizes he’s been spotted, and we see a blur of movement. The red outline appears again, tracing the shape of something in his hand. Is it a gun? A sword? No, just a piece of wood—a splintered bit of framing blown off the wall at some point in a year of relentless bombardment. Sinwar tests the stick’s weight, readying it to throw. With what must be the last of his strength, his lifeblood gushing out the stump of his arm with every heartbeat, Sinwar lobs the stick over his head.

You already know how this ends. You’ve read the caption. And from the moment the stick leaves his hand, you can plainly see the trajectory is off and that it will fall short. And yet you can’t help hoping that somehow, miraculously, his aim will prove true. That a simple piece of wood will take down a sophisticated robot. That human will defeat machine.

The drone pivots to track the arc of wood through the air—a moment of distraction—and if this were a Hollywood movie, that’s when Sinwar would get up, sprint across the rubble as bullets graze past his ankles, launch himself out the blasted-out wall of the apartment building, and plummet toward the streets below, only to be rescued at the last second by an allied hovercraft.

Or maybe a team of his comrades would burst through a back door, blasting the drone out of the air in its moment of distraction. A Steadicam from another angle would capture Sinwar turning to his battle-buddies with a grin, saying, “Took you long enough.”

But this is not a Hollywood movie, I can’t stress that enough. It’s a snuff film of a man’s death, released purposefully by the Israeli military, in what has to be one of the worst Hasbara blunders in history.

The video abruptly ends. Sinwar died from a gunshot to the head, but we don’t see that part.

On Israeli television, the on-air personalities—in their brightly lit studios, in thousand-dollar suits, with their perfect hair and teeth—played this clip and then passed around sweets, one journalist chewing with relish and licking his fingers. Their food-based celebration may strike you as in particularly bad taste if you know, or care, that Israel is intentionally starving two million Palestinian people as a tool of genocide.

You will recognize the tropes. If you have seen The Hunger Games, the twentieth-highest-grossing film franchise of all time, you will correctly identify which of these characters lives in the Capitol, and which character lives—well, lived—in District 12.

Unless—unless you were raised in the Capitol, and you’ve been taught since birth that War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Jews are Indigenous to Palestine—then you might be so blinded by hate for the man with the stick that you fail to see how enormously sympathetic he appears in that video, regardless of how one feels about Hamas.

The global film industry is worth upwards of $136 billion, and people pay all that money to watch actors, with no firsthand experience of war, pretend to have the kind of courage in the face of certain death that Yahya Sinwar displayed in the last moments of his life.

And Israel released that footage to the world of its own volition.

Whoops! Big ol’ PR blunder.

A representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran described Sinwar’s death to the UN as follows: “When Muslims look up to Martyr Sinwar standing on the battlefield—in combat attire and out in the open, not in a hideout, facing the enemy—the spirit of resistance will be strengthened. He will become a model for the youth and children who will carry forward his path toward the liberation of Palestine.”

Yeah. I don’t doubt it. If there were any teenagers out there, waffling about whether or not to join the armed resistance, I don’t doubt that watching the footage of Sinwar’s last stand might have swayed their decision.

Israeli and Western media scrambled to regain control of the narrative in the twenty-four hours after the snuff video’s release. Every major USian news outlet ran a profile on Yahya Sinwar, reminding their audiences that Sinwar was the architect of October 7th, the top terrorist we’re all supposed to fear and loathe these days, now that Saddam and Bin Laden are gone.

Even riddled with Zionist distortions, these articles all painted a pretty sympathetic picture of Sinwar. I had known vanishingly little about the man before his death. I had heard his name mentioned as the “head of Hamas.” I’d heard that he’d taken over ceasefire negotiations after Ismail Haniyeh’s assassination, but that was about it.

From the flurry of media after his death, I learned that Sinwar had been labeled a “psychopath” by Israeli officials. Then I learned this diagnosis was made by Shin Bet agent Michael Koubi, a man who had interrogated Sinwar for 180 hours over the course of Sinwar’s twenty-two years in Israeli prisons. Forgive me if I don’t take professional torturers at their word when it comes to diagnosing the mental health of their victims.

The idea that Sinwar was primarily motivated by a hatred of Jews—as Koubi attests—also doesn’t square with the fact that the year Sinwar assumed command of Hamas was the year that Hamas revised its charter as discussed above—specifically to clarify that Hamas’s beef was with the Zionist occupation of Palestine, not the Jewish people.

Sinwar had reasons for his grievances against the occupation. He was born into a refugee camp in Khan Younis, the child of parents whose home had been stolen by Zionists during the Nakba.^[7] In 1967, when Sinwar was four years old, Israel took command of the Gaza Strip after the Six-Day War. Thereafter, Sinwar and his family were subjected to the daily humiliations of life under Israeli occupation.

In his young adulthood, he was detained by Israeli forces multiple times for involvement with student political groups, and by his early twenties, Sinwar was involved in armed resistance. According to Israeli courts and Western reporting, in this period of his life, he tortured and killed people—including two Israeli soldiers and twelve Palestinians whom he suspected of collaborating with Israel. Now once again, I’ll condemn torture. Genocide bad; torture bad. Bear in mind, however, that the information that led to Sinwar’s conviction was also extracted by Israeli “interrogation.” Meaning torture. Israeli forces torture Palestinian prisoners.

Sinwar spent the following twenty-two years in Israeli prisons, where he taught himself Hebrew, studied Jewish history, wrote a novel, and once led a hunger strike of 1,600 prisoners. In 2011, his brother had him freed through a hostage swap in which Israel traded one Israeli soldier for over 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. A hostage swap. That’s as deep as I’m going to dive into Yahya Sinwar’s biography, because I have absolutely no qualifications or additional information with which to dig deeper. But even from these surface-level facts, reported by every mainstream Western outlet, you can understand Sinwar’s logic when it comes to October 7th. He got free through a hostage deal, so maybe another one could free his 5,000 Palestinian comrades who were still being held in Israeli detention on October 7th, 2023. He was trying to pay it forward. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that Sinwar was more motivated by a desire to free his people than to kill a bunch of Jews.

But Hamas did do that. We don’t know exactly how much of the slaughter of October 7^th was carried out by mob violence, and how much was planned and intentionally executed by Hamas fighters. But those Hamas fighters certainly killed people on October 7^th, and they abducted over 250 people, most of them civilians, including those thirty children—acts I’ve already condemned.

So do I condemn Hamas? Do I condemn Yahya Sinwar?

I mean truly, who the fuck needs my opinion here? Let me tell you something else I understood watching the footage of Sinwar’s end: I understood the depths, the profound depths of my own cowardice.

Ghassan Kanafani was a Palestinian author of short fiction and an advocate of armed resistance, writing in the 1960s and ’70s. I read Kanafani’s Palestine’s Children last spring, when I was trying to sort out my feelings on armed resistance.

In the climactic scene of his short story, “Return to Haifa,” Kanafani’s protagonist proclaims, “A man is a cause.” And I didn’t really get what that meant when I read it last spring. Because most people I know—most of us in the West? We are not a cause. Most of us are a bundle of anxieties and materialistic aspirations wrapped in flesh.

But Yahya Sinwar was a cause. He was willing to die for his people, and for liberation.

And that’s the kind of shit I’ve only ever seen in movies. All my life, I’ve watched these little fantasy stories, just for the rush—just for that sweet ache in my heart when Katniss makes the sign of the Mockingjay, when Luke lets go of the catwalk, when Aragorn, at the gates of Mordor, cries, “There may come a day when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship. But it is not this day!”

Something inside us needs these stories of people who are a cause—something that is starved by Western civilization.

So I’ve watched these fictions about white characters, written by white authors, acted out by white actors on soundstages in Propaganda City in the heart of a white supremacist empire. And meanwhile, I have led a charmed, white, middle-class life in the wealthiest nation on earth. I wasn’t born in a refugee camp. I’ve never gone hungry. I’ve never stared down the barrel of a gun that’s pointed at me. I’ve never heard a bomb explode. I’ve never spent so much as a night in jail, because I always dip out of the protest when the cops pull out their zip ties. I have zero firsthand experience of war—only those images I’ve seen through my phone screen.

And all the peace and comfort I’ve enjoyed throughout my life has been purchased in blood—blood that I’ve never had to get on my hands. The US sits at the pinnacle of a global economy founded on the enslavement of the entire Global South. Western empire exports endless violence around the world to ensure obedience to its core project: funneling ever more wealth and resources and human blood and entire ecosystems into the foundries of capitalism—all so we can make rich people richer and richer and richer until there’s nothing left of life on earth.

And because I was born as the right race, in the right place, at the right time, I’m supposed to sit back and enjoy my little comforts near the tippy-top of this system. Being white in the US affords me air conditioning, and my own car, and a dozen streaming services to distract me from the horrific cruelty that makes my society possible. And I can choose from a zillion flavors of booze to numb the pain of watching the rapidly approaching collapse of the planetary systems that sustain carbon-based life on Earth.

Oh, I make my little TikToks, and I write my little books, calling for a more just and sustainable world, but I have never come close to putting my life on the line for a cause. Not really.

What kind of credibility do I have to sit in judgment of a man like Yahya Sinwar? A man born beneath the crushing weight of that same empire, whose life experiences were so radically different from mine? And the same question goes for all these Western journalists who open every interview with a Palestinian or Palestinian-sympathetic guest with the question, “Do you condemn Hamas?”

What a farce. What clown shit—for those of us in the Capitol to pass judgment on the resistance fighters in District 12.

Honestly, it’s clown shit that our most enduring myths of principled resistance, within the US, are children’s stories written by other privileged white people like George Lucas and Suzanne Collins, people who have never experienced war, occupation, or colonization firsthand. And though these creators became exorbitantly wealthy off their whitewashed stories of anti-imperial struggle, they have not reinvested that wealth into supporting anti-imperial struggles in the real world.

As a Jewish USian, the only real-life stories of armed resistance that I grew up with were stories of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In the spring of 1943, Nazis began the final phase of liquidating the Warsaw Ghetto—shipping 265,000 Jews in crowded cattle cars to the extermination camp of Treblinka, where they were immediately herded at gunpoint into gas chambers and killed with a rat poison called Zyklon B. On April 19^th of that spring, around 750 young Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto took up arms and fought back. Vastly outgunned and outmanned, the resistance held out for twenty-seven days, taking out Nazi troops using guerilla tactics, until finally the Nazis burned the entire ghetto to the ground and hunted down the resistance fighters still hiding among the ruins.

These days, I feel like the whole world is in pretty unanimous agreement that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was justified, and Jews celebrate its fighters as heroes. No one cries, these days, over dead Nazis. Now I’m not saying October 7^th provides a parallel to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising—that would not be an apt comparison, in part because the Jews of the uprising did not target civilians. But when Hamas fighters are trading fire with the IOF among the rubble of Gaza City and Rafah—as they have throughout this past year—the parallels are striking, especially considering that the IOF have admitted to learning from Nazi tactics during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In 2002, a senior Israeli military officer told Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahranot, “the Nazi campaign to subdue the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943 required careful study as an example of successful urban combat.”

On the much-celebrated twenty-fifth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a former combatant named Yitzhak Zuckerman said, “I don’t think there’s any real need to analyze the uprising in military terms. This was a war of less than a thousand people against a mighty army, and no one doubted how it was likely to turn out. This isn’t a subject for study in military school …
If there’s a school to study the human spirit, there it should be a major subject. The important things were inherent in the force shown by Jewish youth after years of degradation, to rise up against their destroyers, and determine what death they would choose: Treblinka or uprising.”

At the time he gave this speech, Zuckerman was living on the Kibbutz Lohamei HaGeta’ot, which translates to “the Ghetto Fighters,” a settlement he and his wife founded north of Haifa, on stolen Palestinian land. If Zuckerman ever spoke publicly about Palestinians, I haven’t found it. Did he foresee that someday Palestinian youth, “after years of degradation” at the hands of settlers like himself, would “rise up against their destroyers, and determine what death they would choose:” Israeli drone, JDAM missile, or Hamas?

Over the past year, I have witnessed glimpses of the Israeli degradation of Palestinians. I have not smelled the blood. I have not felt my bones rattled by the explosions. But through my magic window into war crimes, I have seen countless precious children with their skulls smashed open, their mouths ajar, their blue skin and lifeless limbs. I have seen babies, with their sweet milk-breath, choked with the poison dust of rubble. I have seen toddlers, whose hands should be so chubby, shriveled to skeletons from weaponized starvation. I have seen kids no larger than my own seven-year-old carrying the corpses of their younger siblings on their backs, or in pieces in a backpack, or in plastic bags full of loose meat. I have heard the wails of parents clutching their children and grandchildren in a last embrace, and I have heard the wails of children realizing they have just been orphaned—left without any grown-ups to love them in an unfathomably cruel and heartless world. I have heard the shouts of those trapped beneath the rubble, and the anguished cries of those above, of the men who shred their palms digging through concrete with their bare hands, trying to free the people below. I have fundraised for pregnant moms, trying to get them out of harm’s way before they had to give birth, only for Israel to blow up all the crossings, trapping two million people between concrete walls and Israeli tanks and the sea. I have cried as one of those babies was born alive—miraculously—only to die that very night, because there was heavy bombardment nearby, and her little heart couldn’t take the fear. Her name was Manal Mattar, and she died of terror. Of Israeli terrorism. She lived to be not one day old.

I have watched extermination. I have watched a holocaust.

The more real-world violence I’ve seen in this life, the less I can tolerate fantasy violence. I used to love a good first-person-shooter video game as much as the next millennial, but after decades of mass shootings in the US, I can’t bear to play any game that involves guns. A guy I dated once convinced me to buy a gun for “home defense.” But after living with it for a while, and deeply contemplating what it would be like to shoot another person, I decided I’d rather be murdered than kill anyone, and I got rid of it.

But that feeling changed after I had kids. If anyone was about to do to my children the things I have seen done to the children of Gaza, I wouldn’t hesitate to pull a trigger, not for a second. And come to think of it, I don’t think I would hesitate to pull a trigger to save my spouse or my parents or my friends either. In fact, alone in an alley, if anyone was about to do to anyone else the kinds of things I have seen done to the children of Gaza, I’d pull that trigger.

So I’m not sure I believe in self-defense, but child-defense? Other-people-defense? Genocide-defense? That’s easy math for me.

And that’s why anyone pretending to be baffled by the existence of violent Palestinian resistance is full of shit.

But it’s also why Israel’s reaction—in collectively punishing millions of people for the deaths of 1,200 Israelis, including children—was totally predictable. Not justified, of course not—GENOCIDE BAD. But it was predictable, because Zionist Israelis truly believe that Palestinians want their mass extermination, that Palestinians hate them just because they’re Jews, not because they are being violently oppressed under racial apartheid. Israel’s genocidal reaction was predictable even to me, on the other side the world, because throughout Israel’s brief seventy-six years of existence, it has never passed up a good excuse to further the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

Sinwar knew Israel would retaliate disproportionately, and yet he was involved in the planning of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. I don’t know what exactly Hamas’s marching orders were that morning. And again, given the Hannibal Directive, I don’t know how many of the 1,200 Israeli victims were killed by Hamas and how many were killed by the IOF to prevent more hostages being taken captive. As for the abduction and killing of Israeli children—I don’t know if Hamas leadership intended to target children, or were apathetic about targeting children, or if they’d actually given orders to avoid targeting children, but individual fighters broke protocol or made mistakes in all the chaos.

Gun to my head, if I had to guess, I’d bet it wasn’t the first one. In the last interview he ever gave, Sinwar spoke with Vice News about why Hamas fires rockets at civilian areas.

“Israel,” he says, “which possesses a complete arsenal of weaponry, state-of-the-art equipment and aircrafts, intentionally bombs and kills our children and women. And they do that on purpose. You can’t compare that to those who resist and defend themselves with weapons that look primitive in comparison. If we had the capability to launch precision missiles that targeted military targets, we wouldn’t have used the rockets that we did. We are forced to defend our people with what we have. And this is what we have. What are we supposed to do? Should we raise the white flag? That’s not going to happen. Does the world expect us to be well-behaved victims while we’re getting killed? For us to be slaughtered without making a noise? That’s impossible. We decided to defend our people with whatever weapons we have.”

I can’t begin to understand what it’s like to be Yahya Sinwar, but I can understand that logic. According to his own words, it sounds like Sinwar would’ve preferred to only strike military targets. Perhaps, similarly, he would’ve preferred to only take Israeli soldiers hostage on October 7th, if Hamas had had the firepower to do so. But Sinwar and the rest of Hamas leadership made the decision to carry out an attack that would include civilians among their targets, thus provoking one of the most powerful militaries in the world from a nation founded on the erasure of Palestinians. Not only that, on October 7th, Hamas killed and kidnapped Israeli kids.

It’s not in any way fair that imperial powers like Israel can mass-abduct and mass-murder Indigenous Palestinian children, as they’ve done throughout their 76-year history, and still be considered a respectable nation in the eyes of the world. Meanwhile, impoverished resistance fighters using homemade bullets and mortars are held to much higher standards of military decorum. Israel can mass-murder hundreds of thousands of civilians and still participate in Eurovision and the Olympics; and calls for Israel to be banned from those events are labeled “antisemitic” by Western media. Meanwhile, Palestinian resistance fighters are vilified as terrorists for killing even a single Israeli. And anyone who publicly advocates for Palestinians’ right to armed resistance will be dismissed as a terrorist sympathizer and face severe material consequences—up to and including assassination.

This double standard is not fair, but that’s how Western empire maintains its dominion. International law and order have historically operated as a PR campaign for genocidal empires. The Geneva Conventions aren’t to be applied to United States and its allies, but they provide a convenient pretext for the US to invade or bomb or orchestrate a coup in any nation in the Global South that doesn’t bow down to US interests. And those interests require these nations to enslave their own people in the businesses of extracting oil or lithium, or cleaning rich peoples’ houses, or providing them with beautiful beachfront resorts, so that all the wealth of these nations can be transferred to the Global North as cheaply as possible—maximizing profits for the West and maximizing poverty for the Global South. Any country that even just tries to protect its wealth and nationalize those resources will be accused of violating international law for some reason or other, and sanctions, assassinations, and drone strikes are sure to follow.

And for those who dare to violently attack a Western imperial power? Well, for them, the sky’s the limit in terms of punishment. And that punishment will not be constrained by the Geneva Conventions or any UN resolution.

I wonder if Sinwar ever regretted October 7th, this past year. As the death toll mounted into the tens of thousands—as the estimated dead surpassed the violence of the Nakba several times over. Was he surprised when Netanyahu proved to give absolutely zero fucks about getting the hostages back, or even avoiding killing them in the bombardment? Of course, Sinwar had known Israel would retaliate for October 7th, but I wonder if he had any idea that it would hold nothing back. That it would pursue, in full view of the entire world, the extermination of the Palestinian people, dropping more tonnage on the Gaza Strip than the entire amount of explosives used in World War II in the bombardment of London, Dresden, and Hamburg combined.
I wonder if Sinwar ever had moments where he wished he could take it back, as Israel obliterated the hospitals and schools and refugee camps. As Israel found newly cruel and despicable ways to mass-murder and torture Sinwar’s people with each passing day. Had he banked on more help from a callous world that has failed and failed and failed to put a stop to the genocide? Some of us common people have marched, and we’ve carried banners and dropped banners and chanted and held press conferences and written letters to the editor and gone to meetings and vigils, and those of us on social media have made our rabble-rousing little tweets and reels. College kids camped out. And some people vandalized private property about it. Some people went to jail about it. Not me—well, I had the convenient excuse that I was breastfeeding. But some of my more courageous comrades in JVP got arrested about it.

Aaron Bushnell made the ultimate sacrifice and set himself on fire about it.

But still, day after day after every day until this one, we have failed to end the genocide.

But at least we’ve been trying.

Most people haven’t. Most people in the world haven’t lifted a single finger or spoken a single public word in solidarity with Palestine. Either they were too scared, or they couldn’t be bothered.

Stern speeches have been made in the UN, the General Assembly has passed resolutions, and the ICC has issued warrants for Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant’s arrest. But that body, which is supposed to represent the sum total of global political leadership, has also failed to end the bloodshed.

And so I can’t tell you how it affected me—to witness a man who actually fought for the people of Palestine, right up until the bitter end. Starving, hand blown off, riddled with shrapnel, he hurled a stick at a killing machine, defying empire to his last breath.

Do I condemn Hamas?

Do I condemn Yahya Sinwar?

Do I wish he had consented to be “slaughtered without making a noise?” After all, in 2021, the year he gave that last interview, Israel only killed 319 Palestinians—not hundreds of thousands. That year, Israel only stole 895 Palestinians’ homes—whereas this year, the number of homes destroyed rose above two million. If the members of Hamas had been “well-behaved victims,” then maybe Israel would still be grudgingly allowing some Palestinian children to grow up with all their limbs intact. Maybe baby Manal’s heart would still be beating, along with tens of thousands of other slaughtered kids. And sure, they would live out their lives trapped in the concentration camp of Gaza, drinking polluted water, malnourished, denied civil rights and any employment besides performing manual labor for the racist occupiers who stole their ancestral lands, under the constant threat of being randomly arrested, disappeared, tortured, killed in a bombardment, or shot for no particular reason by a bored Israeli teenager.

Without Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, the people of Gaza could’ve still had that status quo, instead of this full throttle genocide. And if every life is precious, is a universe unto itself—wouldn’t that have been worth it? Parents who are now bereaved—who loved their children every bit as much as I love mine—they could’ve watched those kids grow up, and fall in love, and have babies of their own—to be subjected to lifelong Israeli occupation in their turn. At time of writing, Israel has exterminated all members of at least 902 families in Gaza—erasing those lineages from existence, and from participating in whatever the future may hold.

If every life is precious, is a universe unto itself, and if October 7^th triggered this mass death, then why won’t I condemn Hamas?

In The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, Rashid Khalidi relates how, in the 1980s, the Palestine Liberation Organization asked an anticolonial resistance expert, Eqbal Ahmad, to evaluate its military strategy. Ahmad was no softhearted lib normalizer, okay? He “had worked with the Front de libération nationale in Algeria in the early 1960s, had known Frantz Fanon, and was a renowned Third World anticolonial thinker.”

After studying the PLO’s situation, even though he was, “in principle a committed supporter of armed struggle against colonial regimes … Ahmad questioned whether armed struggle was the right course of action against the PLO’s particular adversary, Israel. He argued that given the course of Jewish history, especially in the twentieth century, the use of force only strengthened a preexisting and pervasive sense of victimhood among Israelis … it unified Israeli society, reinforced the most militant tendencies in Zionism, and bolstered the support of external actors.” Perhaps in part as a result of Ahmad’s advice, in 1988, the PLO renounced armed resistance as a strategy for Palestinian liberation … until the Second Intifada.

Khalidi characterizes the First Intifada of the late ’80s and early ’90s—a mostly nonviolent uprising consisting of strikes, boycotts, demonstrations, and civil disobedience—as “the first unmitigated victory for the Palestinians in the long colonial war that began in 1917.” Precisely because Palestinians remained nonviolent, whereas Israeli forces responded with their typical brutality, “[international] television viewers were riveted by repeated tableaus of wrenching violence, which inverted the image of Israel as a perpetual victim, casting it as Goliath against the Palestinian David.” Khalidi argues that the nonviolent uprising unified Palestinian factions, spread the Palestinian narrative to a worldwide audience, and led to a “profound and lasting positive impact on both Israeli and world opinion” of Palestinians.

The 2000 Second Intifada would be very different from the first.

Between the two uprisings, the Oslo Accords would be signed. US President Bill Clinton brokered this agreement between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat. Optimistic Palestinians hoped that the result of the process would be the creation of an autonomous Palestinian state, but they would hope in vain. Khalidi details how the US and Israel rigged the talks and frustrated the aims of the PLO, ensuring that the Palestinian delegation failed to secure any substantial material improvements for the Palestinian people.

In the final agreement, the PLO “recognized” the state of Israel, and Israel “recognized” the PLO—not as a state, but as a “representative of the Palestinian people.” That’s some tepid bullshit, but it was a big change from Israeli policy in the past. So why did Rabin break with tradition and give the PLO a shred of legitimacy? Khalidi argues it’s because of “the lesson Rabin learned from the First Intifada: that Israel could no longer control the Occupied Territories solely by the use of force.” Through the Oslo Accords, Rabin essentially hired Arafat and the PLO to control the territories on Israel’s behalf, as the rebranded Palestinian National Authority—now shortened to the Palestinian Authority, or PA.

What did Arafat get in return for agreeing to “recognize” Israel, even though Israel had not “recognized a Palestinian state or even made a commitment to allow the creation of one?” Well, he got to live in Palestine, after years of exile in Jordan, Lebanon, and Tunisia. Now, he and the other members of the PLO could return to Palestine, and Israel had promised them they would live comfortably compared with other Palestinians, and they’d enjoy positions of authority. As Israel built an elaborate system of checkpoints and walls throughout the West Bank, “Arafat and his colleagues in the PLO leadership … sailed through the checkpoints with their VIP passes” and “did not seem to know, or care, about the increasing confinement of ordinary Palestinians.”

The PLO had fallen prey to elite capture. At the time Khalidi wrote The Hundred Years’ War, he characterized the PA as having “no sovereignty, no jurisdiction, and no authority except that allowed it by Israel … its primary function, to which much of its budget is devoted, is security, but not for its people: it is mandated by US and Israeli dictates to provide security for Israel’s settlers and occupation forces against the resistance, violent and otherwise, of other Palestinians.”

In Yiddish, we have a word for what Arafat and the PLO became. Yiddish is a language rife with deliciously biting and fun-to-say insults like schlemiel, schlimazel, alter cocker, and vilde chaya, but the worst thing one Jew can call another—the most humiliating, degrading, and loathsome of all insults—is kapo. Kapos were the Jews who worked for Nazis in the ghettos and camps. Kapos were cops and snitches and prison guards who subjugated their own people in exchange for slightly less meager rations and a modicum of power, and the promise that they wouldn’t be killed by the Nazis—for as long as they remained useful. Kapos didn’t have to perform manual slave labor, because they became the overseers of their fellow enslaved Jews. Kapos made their cousins line up in the center of camp whenever the SS wanted to randomly execute someone. I get called a kapo all the time by Zionist Jews, not because it’s a particularly fitting insult for me, but because it’s the meanest thing they can think to say. A kapo is something so much worse than a rat or a pig or a motherfucker. A kapo incites rage.

Understandably, there was plenty of rage to go around as the consequences of the Oslo Accords set in. Palestinians had less control over their lands than ever, and now they were being harassed and brutalized, not just by Israelis, but by their own people in the Palestinian Authority. The backlash to the PA’s new role allowed more militant groups—like Hamas and Islamic Jihad—to challenge the PA’s authority amid the Second Intifada.

The Second Intifada was extremely violent compared to the strikes and boycotts of the first. Suicide bombers targeted crowded civilian areas within Israel, like buses, cafés, and shopping malls. The bombers traded their lives to inflict some of the pain and grief so familiar to Palestinians onto random Israeli people. Only a third of their Israeli victims would be members of the Israeli security forces. These attacks were planned by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah, and, eventually, even what remained of the PLO, as they tried to stay relevant with this new, more aggressive generation. But the largest portion of suicide attacks came from Hamas. And thus, the Western world was first introduced to Hamas as a group of suicide bombers who blew up buses full of Jewish people, including pregnant women and Holocaust survivors and children.

In Khalidi’s estimation, the Second Intifada “constituted a major setback for the Palestinian national movement. Its consequences for the Occupied Territories were severe and damaging.” In retaliation for the bombings, Israeli forces killed nearly 5,000 Palestinians and reoccupied what cities and towns it had evacuated after the Oslo Accords, “[shattering] any remaining pretense that the Palestinians had or would acquire something approaching sovereignty or real authority over any part of their land.” And on the international stage, “the terrible violence of the Second Intifada erased the positive image of Palestinians that had evolved since 1982 and through the First Intifada and the peace negotiations.”

Throughout 2024, a common protest chant at pro-Palestine demonstrations has been “Viva, Viva, Intifada!” And I know the protest leaders mean, like, the concept of intifada, an Arabic word that just means “rebellion” or “uprising.” But given the stark difference and impacts between the capital-I First and Second Intifadas, when they chant “Viva, Viva, Intifada,” I always want to ask, “But, like … wait, which one?”

Perhaps Hamas leaders realized the bloody strategy of the Second Intifada was hurting their own cause, because they largely quit suicide bombings in the mid-2000s and abruptly pivoted towards electoral politics. Hamas ran candidates in the 2006 parliamentary elections, in a campaign that downplayed its historical violence, conservativism, and religiosity, instead promising “reform and change”—a slogan which would rhyme with Barack Obama’s electoral promise of “hope and change” in the US presidential election a year later. In Palestine, Hamas won by a landslide, taking control of the Gaza Strip from Fatah, the largest political party of the PLO.

After the election, Hamas, Fatah, and other Palestinian groups tried to set aside infighting and come together in pursuit of unity, but Israel and the US were not going to let that happen. Israel vetoed the inclusion of Hamas as part of the Palestinian Authority, and the US Congress passed a bill to ensure US funding would never go to a Palestinian Authority that included Hamas. Numerous nonprofits that sustained the Palestinian people would be forced to shutter. Fatah leaders responded by trying to regain power in the Gaza Strip by attacking Hamas fighters. A bloody battle ensued between Fatah and Hamas in Gaza in June 2007, from which Hamas emerged victorious. From then until the present day, Hamas became the de facto authority in the Gaza Strip, operating independently from the Fatah-governed PA in the West Bank.

Israel responded to Hamas’s triumph by imposing the siege of Gaza—walling off the Strip, closing the borders, restricting aid and fuel, and imprisoning two million people in a 140-square-mile concentration camp for the past seventeen years.

Long enough for an entire generation to grow up without a future.

What did Israel think was going to happen?

History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. In an echo of the First Intifada, the youth of Gaza attempted their own massive nonviolent resistance movement in 2018—the Great March of Return. Every Friday for a year, Palestinians in Gaza marched to the border wall separating them from Israel, demanding an end to the blockade of Gaza and the right to return to their ancestors’ homes. Israeli forces responded to these nonviolent protests with mass murder, killing 266 people and wounding over 30,000. Like the First Intifada, the Great March of Return highlighted the cruelty of the Israeli occupation for an international audience. I had been drifting away from Zionist thinking for a few years already, but 2018 marked the first year I attended a Palestinian demonstration, the year I started reading Palestinian books and calling myself an anti-Zionist.

Dear reader, if you don’t already know, would you like to take a guess who orchestrated the March of Return? Well, orchestrated may not be the right word. Reporting is conflicting, but from what I can tell, the protests started as a spontaneous popular uprising, but were then absorbed and encouraged and sustained by Hamas.

And who do you think insisted that the march continue to be characterized by “peaceful resistance,” and insisted that participants continue “avoiding the militarization of the demonstrations”? Who showed up to march at the front of the crowds and gave speeches, even though he had been one of Israel’s most-wanted targets ever since being released from prison in a hostage exchange and had taken over leadership of Hamas?

That’s right, it was the man, the cause, the rebel fighter with a stick: Yahya Sinwar.

Everyone who participated in the Great March of Return has my deepest respect and admiration for that action. Week after week, for over a year, they walked into range of Israeli snipers on the border wall, risking their lives to highlight the Palestinian struggle to an uncaring world. And it worked—to an extent. The images of Palestinians linked arm and arm, mowed down by body-armored Israeli storm troopers, evoked the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. The marchers’ message reached some of us here in the US, and activated us—it activated me! But not enough of us before Israel started gunning down the protesters. And people can only be reasonably expected to march peacefully into live gunfire for so long. I wouldn’t do it even one time. No way. I’ve already told you I’m a coward.

Yahya Sinwar was no coward. In another interview from 2021, he said about the prospect of his assassination, “The greatest gift the enemy and occupation can give me is to assassinate me, so I can go to Allah as a martyr by their hand. Today I’m 59 years old, and truthfully I prefer to be killed by an F-16 or missiles than die from Covid, or from a stroke, heart attack, car accident, or any other thing people die from.” Here, Sinwar sounds less like Luke Sykwalker and more like another beloved resistance fighter from Star Wars. At the end of A New Hope, Obi Wan Kenobi, the elderly Jedi, is dueling with Darth Vader and glimpses Luke running across the docking bay of the Death Star. Obi Wan taunts Vader, distracting him from his student, by saying, “If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” He puts up his lightsaber, and Vader slashes—but Obi Wan’s body vanishes into thin air. Vader prods the empty cloak where the Jedi just stood, as Luke and the gang make it onto the Millenium Falcon and escape. For the rest of the trilogy, during moments of great fear and crisis, Luke will see Obi Wan’s ghost or hear his teacher’s steadying voice in his mind, still guiding him from the afterlife … or wherever Jedis go when they vanish from the mortal plane.

Yahya Sinwar did not vanish into mist at the moment of his death. Israel released a picture of his dead body—recovered one day after his final encounter with the drone. In the picture, five IOF soldiers stand over Sinwar’s corpse, which is curled up and cradled by rubble, the blood of his gunshot wound dried and already coated with a layer of dust. The top-down angle distorts perspective, making the soldiers appear twice as large as Sinwar. Hasbarists clearly sought to humiliate Sinwar and demoralize the resistance by publishing the drone-clip and the photos of his corpse, but their publication had the opposite effect. The hashtag #Sinwar quickly racked up two million shares on Twitter, and pro-Palestine social media flooded with praise and mourning for Sinwar.And I’m sure that there are millions of people all over the world who, like me, hadn’t spared a thought for Yahya Sinwar before his death, but will be haunted by the footage of his last moments for the rest of our lives.

Eqbal Ahmad’s assessment, back in the 1980s that due to the unique history of the Jewish people, armed resistance—particularly any that resulted in civilian casualties—served only to strengthen Israel, while weakening the Palestinian cause in the eyes of the world, seems to have been borne out by the events of the First and Second Intifadas.

But maybe not by October 7th. In the wake of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, more people worldwide have rallied to Palestine’s cause than ever before. Israel’s retaliatory genocide, and the accompanying gleeful, sadistic content that countless Israelis have posted to social media over the past year, have laid bare the fundamentally racist nature of Zionism. Even among Israel’s formerly most stalwart allies—US Jews—a sea change is occurring. Incredibly, a recent survey found that fully a third of teenage US Jews now “sympathize with Hamas.”

Meanwhile, op-eds claim that “Israeli society is unraveling.” And while I don’t know the metrics for societal unraveling, recently a massive demonstration of over 750,000 people shut down Tel Aviv to protest Netanyahu’s government. The war has cost Israel around $66 billion, its global credit rating has been downgraded, and numerous northern settlements have been abandoned, along with the port of Eilat. New construction has ground to a halt because Israel relied on Palestinians for their hard, manual labor. The Jerusalem Post, in October 2024, exposed just how vulnerable the Israeli economy is—with less than 100,000 highly educated people in tech and medicine propping up the entire economy. These are the types of settlers who tend to possess dual citizenship with other countries, and, according to the head of the Shoresh Institute for Socioeconomic Research, many of those people “are giving up and leaving.” Their departure could cause Israel’s economy to collapse.

The Israeli military, meanwhile, is running out of bombs. At the time of writing, Israel is fighting ground wars in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, air-striking targets in Syria and Yemen to boot, and being targeted by embargoes from principled anti-genocidal countries around the world. As a result, the IOF has begun rationing armaments—a development Haaretz credits for an increase in Israeli casualties. It turns out that genocide, as the Nazis learned, is extremely costly and difficult to pull off.

I want to return to one statistic I mentioned earlier—that the Israeli forces have dropped more explosives on this tiny, densely packed area of the Gaza Strip in one year than the entire amount of explosives used throughout WWII on the cities of London, Dresden, and Hamburg combined. They’ve bombed Gaza as much as they possibly can. And yes, they’ve likely killed hundreds of thousands of people through this violence and the brutality of their siege. But there are still, surely, more than a million people in Gaza who’ve survived that unbelievable, historic bombardment. The IOF is trying its damndest to exterminate Palestinians, but it’s failing! Because Palestinians in Gaza are more resilient, resourceful, organized, and unified than they could imagine, and, at least in part, because for the past year, Hamas has continued fighting Israel’s ground invasion of the Gaza Strip through urban combat.

It’s hard to do a genocide! And if the leaders of Israel don’t quit trying, they seem likely to destroy themselves in the attempt, just as Nazi Germany did.

Even Israeli soldiers are figuring out this war is futile. Their military is facing a crisis of defections. More and more soldiers are refusing to return to their deployments. In October of 2024, just after the one-year anniversary of the war, Israeli Hebrew media outlet Ha-Makom described the collapse of Israeli morale, publishing interviews with soldiers who kept being deployed to the same neighborhoods in Gaza they had previously cleared. “We are like ducks at the (shooting) range,” one IOF soldier said, “we don’t understand what we’re doing here.”

Israel’s loss of stature in the eyes of the world has had major consequences beyond its borders. In the US, the Democratic Party’s association with the genocide likely depressed turnout and contributed to its historic losses in the 2024 election. A global movement of college students engaged in civil disobedience faced brutalization and arrest at the hands of police, finding themselves at odds with the administrators of their own universities. With striking uniformity across the Western world, the ruling class has responded to nonviolent, anti-genocide protests for Palestine with disproportionate police violence. Such brutality can be a radicalizing experience for young people. Just look what became of those kids who marched peacefully in Gaza in 2018.

In a zillion-jillion ways I couldn’t possibly enumerate, the impact of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood has touched every corner of the world. It has likely forced everyone on earth with an internet connection to contemplate Palestine at some point over the past year, and its aftershocks have rattled an empire to its foundations. Because let’s be real—Israel is a proxy for the US military. The IOF are Jews who’ve consented to be cannon fodder in exchange for proximity to whiteness and the privilege of brutalizing an Indigenous population. And if US empire in Israel can be defeated, then empire anywhere can be defeated. If Palestine can get free, then anyone, anywhere can get free. And a certain class of people are willing to burn down the world rather than let that happen.

Sinwar must have died understanding, to some degree, the extent of these impacts. And so maybe, staring down the barrel of a flying gun, he died with no regrets at all.

I’ve probably focused on Sinwar too much here. He’s just one man—and the strength of an anticolonial resistance, like Hamas, relies on its decentralization. Israeli media described the killing of Sinwar as “cutting off the head of a snake.” But that’s a shit analogy for a guerilla fighting force like Hamas, and every Israeli and US military strategist should know that. Because an idea like “armed resistance to colonization” is not a snake that has a head to cut off. It’s not an idea that can be killed! Anyone who was involved or responsible for the US’s failed wars on Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan should know that.

And I suspect they actually do know that. All these generals and politicians and Hasbarists. They know Hamas and Hezbollah will never be defeated through force. They just don’t care, because the weapons manufacturers who own them will make trillions whether or not the US empire “loses” or “wins” its forever wars. All that matters is that the war against Indigenous people continues—somewhere, anywhere—forever. For war profiteers, 2023 was the most profitable year in history, with the global defense budget jumping to a record high of $2.4 trillion. And if 2024 doesn’t prove to be significantly higher, I’ll eat my keffiyeh.

In mansions and palaces, from Western Massachusetts to Moscow to Paris to Shanghai, the people who own the means of producing bombs are watching this spectacle of armed resistance and genocide and are, I assume, cackling with glee as they bathe in swimming pools full of money, Scrooge-McDuck-style. Because for every maimed and mutilated human body, their wealth and power becomes more unassailable. Israel is running out of bombs? Cool. That’s a guarantee they’ll sell even more next year.

So does armed resistance actually gain ground against empire, or does it just play into the schemes of the billionaires who sell bombs, and extract the oil that makes the bombs, and pull the puppet-strings of empire? Was any of the last year worth it? When I think about baby Manal, whose first and only hours in this world were shattered by screams and hellfire and exploding shells so loud and violent that her heart just couldn’t take it … When I think about baby Heba, sleeping a few feet away from a murderous drone, protected by nothing but her silence and a thin piece of fabric … .

Was October 7^th worth it? The questions of whether a military action is moral, legal, and/or strategic are not necessarily connected. The war crimes committed that day were illegal, according to international law, and immoral, according to my own subjective, privileged, never-remotely-put-to-the-test moral code. But was the operation strategic? Was Hamas’s plan a foolish gambit that woefully underestimated what the scope of Israel’s retaliation would be and banked on assistance that failed to materialize from its allies in the Arab world? Or was October 7th a calculated, accelerationist, 4-D chess move, designed to trigger such incredible violence that Israel would self-destruct in the process of meting it out? Do their intentions matter to the many tens of thousands of lives that have been destroyed in its wake?

Someday, if and when Palestine is free, future Palestinian historians may debate whether that liberation was a direct result of, or in spite of, the attacks of October 7^th. I don’t know the answer to that question. But my guess is, I doubt they’ll come to a clear consensus.

Call me naïve, I still believe that words are more powerful than weapons. I think we do a great injustice to the memory of those who lost their lives in nonviolent struggles—in the First Intifada and the March of Return of 2018—if we don’t recognize how those movements primed the world to react in the way it has to October 7th. For me personally—I first started reading Palestinian books in 2018, because of the March of Return. I, and a few other anti-Zionist Jews formed Houston’s chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace in 2021, because we’d been activated by Palestinian journalists reporting on the Sheikh Jarrah protests. We were ready to respond on October 7^th, as anti-Zionist Jews standing in solidarity with Palestinian people, because of the education that had already been spread around the world by earlier nonviolent movements. It wasn’t killing and abductions that inspired me to say “Genocide bad” on October 8^th. It was fucking poems! The poems of Mahmoud Darwish and Mohammed el-Kurd, and the prose of Hala Alyan and Raja Shehadeh, which I had only bought and read because nonviolent struggle had caught my attention from the other side of the world.

Khalidi, in a recent interview on the Bad Hasbara podcast, shared some historical evidence that this battleground of words—of public opinion—is at least equally important for an anticolonial struggle as the physical battlegrounds of armed resistance. He references several anticolonial struggles many point to as examples of the triumph of armed resistance, clarifying that, “[Algerian revolutionaries] won over huge segments of French public opinion, and that’s why they won. You think they were winning in … the mountains? They weren’t winning. The French army could’ve gone on indefinitely if French public opinion hadn’t turned against the war. The US Army could’ve gone on indefinitely in Vietnam or in Iraq if American public opinion hadn’t turned against the war.” Likewise, Israel may go on indefinitely killing people in Gaza, unless public opinion turns even more decisively against this genocide.

Here, Khalidi reveals the foolishness of comparing real-life violence with glorified, whitewashed, Hollywood movies. Unlike on the Death Star, there is no single, convenient self-destruct button that Hamas can hit to wipe out the Iron Dome. Unlike in the Hunger Games, assassinating one corrupt leader, such as Netanyahu, will do nothing to dismantle the Zionist project. There’s no simplistic, one-shot military solution. For as long as Palestinians are under assault, Hamas—or some group like them—will continue to resist, because as Khalidi also explains in that interview, “Occupation breeds resistance—inevitably, necessarily, historically, always, everywhere.” But Khalidi also cautions that due to the fact that Israel is now a settler-colony several generations old, where the people claim a profound, religious tie to the land, they will not give up Palestine as easily as French colonizers in Algeria or USian soldiers in Vietnam and Iraq did. Israelis will continue occupying Gaza “indefinitely,” unless that massive turn in public opinion can end the killing. And every day this genocide grinds on, Palestinian families and children are suffering and dying in some of the most violent ways imaginable.

After the year we’ve had, some may doubt the power of public opinion, and, granted, due to the influence of corporate money, Western political leaders are increasingly divorced from concern with public opinion. But they’re not completely divorced yet. If Israeli opinion continues to turn against this war, they may run out of soldiers to fight it. If it becomes so unpopular that all the tech bros leave Israel, their economy may collapse, and they’ll no longer be able to fund it. And, if US public opinion turns overwhelmingly and bipartisanly against Israeli aggression, far more decisively than it is right now, we may actually be able to stop the flow of armaments and aid to Israel, which would render their apartheid state nonviable in a matter of months.

So I think the reporting of Ghazawi journalists like Bisan Owda, Hind Khoudary, Belal Khaled, Wael Dahdouh, Motaz Azaiza, Ahmed Khouta, and nine-year-old Lama Abu Jamous, to name just a few, has been far more effective at forwarding the cause of Palestinian liberation than Hamas’s attack on October 7th was. But, then again, Bisan had spent years before October 7th trying to spread Palestinians’ story on social media. Calling herself the Hakawati, or storyteller, she made beautiful, well-produced videos educating the world in English and Arabic about life under occupation in Gaza. But she did not gain an audience of millions until after October 7th. If Hamas had never carried out Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, and Israel had never commenced this mask-off genocide, would any of us in the West be listening to Palestinian journalists on a daily basis? Would I even know Bisan Owda’s name?

Maybe, as Ghassan Kanafani insisted, it takes some combination of art and stories and education and bullets to overthrow a colonial occupation. Maybe the fact that he represented all those strategies in one man was why Israel assassinated him in 1972, when Mossad^[8] agents planted a bomb in his car in Beirut, Lebanon. They showed no concern that someone might be with him when the bomb went off—and there was. The explosion also killed his seventeen-year-old niece, Lamees. Similarly, in 2024, Mossad agents would plant bombs in the pagers used by thousands of people in Lebanon in order to target Hezbollah agents—without concern for how many children and doctors and nurses would be killed as collateral. I bring Israeli terrorism up, because in all this scrutiny on Hamas, we risk losing sight, once again, of who are far and away the most blood-soaked, genocidal, raping, torturing, massacring military force in occupied Palestine today. Let’s not forget that in just the first five months of this genocide, Israel killed more children than were killed over the past four years in all armed conflicts worldwide.

So while I’ll condemn a war crime, I won’t condemn armed resistance in the face of such brutal terrorism. And again, I think no one should give a shit what I think about Hamas, because I’ve never experienced anything like the suffering Israel has inflicted upon the people of Gaza.

But I fear I might someday. Aimé Césaire and Hannah Arendt, two scholars who studied imperialism, describe an “imperial boomerang,” the idea that any repressive techniques an imperial power uses on its colonies will eventually be deployed domestically, on its own civilians.

We’re going off the rails in the US. In this last election, as both political parties embraced genocide, xenophobia, and populist nationalism in their campaigns, it became clear that whatever pathetic wisps of leftism have been holding back full-throated fascism in the US are now gone. Corporate capture of US politics seems total and unassailable. Trump is retaking power, emboldened and unfettered by Congress or the Supreme Court. Politically, shit seems on track to get real bad from here on out. And this collapse of neoliberalism will coincide with catastrophic effects from climate change, as our planet hurtles rapidly past 1.5 degrees of warming.

A decade or so from now, will I find myself crouched in an abandoned building, hiding out from the killer drones that hunt me, just as “Metalhead” predicted? Just as my friends in Gaza have already experienced? Will the imperial boomerang of the genocide of Gaza come smashing into the US’s heartland?

Maybe.

So what do I think of Hamas and Yahya Sinwar?

I think war crimes are bad. And, I think, if it comes down to it, I hope I have the courage to throw a fucking stick.

NOTES

1. See Chapter 9 for this very discussion. ↑

2. I happen to agree that antisemitism is a phenomenon fundamentally linked to European history, not Arab or Muslim history. See Chapter 8 for lots more on that topic. ↑

3. Some anti-Zionists object to the notion that any Israelis are civilians, because all Israelis participate in and benefit from settler colonialism, and because Israel has a policy of mandatory military service. However in 2020, the Jerusalem Post reported that fully a third of Israeli youth do not enlist, and neither do people who move to Israel from other countries. Civilians in many countries, including the US, benefit from and are complicit in violent colonial systems, and you can point out this complicity without conflating those people with active duty soldiers. I find the flattening of the distinction between Israeli people who may or may not have served a tour in the military at some point in the past with currently-employed military and security forces to be imprecise and dangerous. Eroding the distinction between civilians and active combatants benefits people who commit genocide, not their victims. And echoing this kind of rhetoric gives credence to Zionists who say things like, “there are no civilians in Gaza.” So I will be preserving that distinction, and when I say “Israeli civilian” in this text, I mean Israelis who are not currently employed by the IOF or security forces. ↑

4. Before the whataboutists come for me, let me be clear: Yes, I absolutely condemn the police abduction (arrest) of 250,000-plus children in the United States every year! ↑

5. The BDS movement (Boycott Divestment Sanctions) defines Normalization as: “dealing with or presenting something that is inherently abnormal, such as oppression and injustice, as if it were normal. Normalization with/of Israel is, then, the idea of making occupation, apartheid, and settler colonialism seem normal and establishing normal relations with the Israeli regime instead of supporting the struggle led by the Indigenous Palestinian people to end the abnormal conditions and structures of oppression.” ↑

6. That stunning cover was done by revolutionary Egyptian street artist, Ganzeer, who also designed and illustrated the cover of this book! ↑

7. he Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” is the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, in which Zionist paramilitary forces (you might also call them terrorists) stole the homes and lands of 750,000 Palestinian people at gunpoint. Israelis call this their “War of Independence.” ↑

8. Mossad is the national intelligence agency for Israel. ↑

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A Palestinian mother mourns her child. Photo: Gaza Notifications.

The problem with writing about Gaza is that words can’t explain what’s happening in Gaza. Neither can images, even the most gut-wrenching and heartbreaking. Because what needs to be explained is the inexplicable. What needs to be explicated is the silence in the face of horror.

Israel has been brazenly upfront about its plans to subdue Gaza, depopulate it of Palestinians, and seize the Strip for itself. Israel will not change. It hasn’t deviated from this genocidal course since October 8, 2023.  For 19 months, every Palestinian has been a target because Israel wants Gaza cleansed of Palestinians. Therefore, everyone can be bombed. Everyone can be starved. Everyone can be denied medical care and the mere essentials of life.

Those who make distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate targets, between Hamas and civilians, between adults and children, themselves become targets. Humanitarians are targets because they insist on seeing Palestinians as humans. And even their deaths, their systematic slaughter, evokes silence from the countries they came to Gaza from, many killed by weapons made and sold by their home nations.  Anyone who associates with a Palestinian is treated as a Palestinian, as someone to be silenced, one way or another: Banned, gagged, exiled, deported, jailed, killed.

Silence over one atrocity serves to legitimize all those that came before and those that follow. After Israel got away with bombing its first hospital in Gaza, it knew it could get away unscathed with bombing all hospitals and clinics in Gaza. And it did.

It’s clear, Israel will not yield to public opinion; it can only be constrained by those more powerful than it. By its funders and weapons suppliers. Yet nothing changes. No one intervenes. Not the US, certainly, not the UK, not Germany, not China, not Russia or Saudi Arabia, not Turkey, India, or France. Only silence, a silence that amplifies and isolates the screams of burning children. This collective silence invalidates the West’s exalted concept of itself, exposing the monstrous hypocrisy beneath the shimmering veneer of human rights laws and fatuous rhetoric about the sanctity of civilian lives.

I’m not convinced there are any “just wars,” but there are unjust ones. There are wars that traduce every cherished notion of civilized conduct, every rule combatants have been meant to abide by since 1919. And this war, if you can call it a war, has violated all of them: not only killing, but targeting, civilians; blowing up non-military infrastructure; bombing schools, universities, churches and mosques; burning agricultrual fields, slashing down orchards, cementing wells, poisoning and gunning down livestock; killing doctors, nurses and rescue workers; murdering aid workers; using chemical weapons; detaining 1000s with without warrants; inflicting torture and sexual abuse on prisoners; using human shields; practicing perfidy during raids; assassinating diplomats and journalists; shooting children in the head.

The rules of war are set by the winner. What will the new rules look like after Gaza, where what was once forbidden became standard operating procedure?

Biden wanted credit for working toward a ceasefire he never pressed the Israelis to enact. Rafah was flattened on Biden’s watch, after he publicly said (but didn’t mean) that an Israeli invasion of the city would cross a red line. Cross one red line, cross them all. Trump wants credit for a temporary ceasefire and the swift resumption of a total war designed to empty Gaza of Palestinians. But the end result for both Biden and Trump was always going to be the same: mass slaughter of civilians, destruction of Gaza’s liveable spaces, displacement of two million people and eventual Israeli annexation of large swaths of the Strip. In a word: genocide.

Members of the Israeli war cabinet vowed this week that its military will pulverize every building with more than two stories if Hamas, whatever is left of Hamas, doesn’t surrender. Who are they saying this to? The people who don’t know that Israel has already pulverized more than 80 percent of the buildings in Gaza? What is the purpose of saying this other than as a kind of unabashed triumphalism, a declaration of impunity to commit the worst of crimes and not only get away with it but have those institutions that outlawed genocide and land theft say nothing about it.

Silence breeds silence.

Israel no longer fears any international institutions: not the UN, not the International Criminal Court, not the International Court of Justice, not NATO, not the Arab League, not BRICS, not Interpol. As Israel itself breaches international laws, knowing there will be no consequences. Netanyahu travels freely, knowing the charges and warrants against him will never be enforced.  Israel has humiliated the Western powers and has been embraced by many it humiliated for doing so.

In this time of silence, many of the words that are spoken have lost all meaning. In fact, their meaning has been inverted, twisted inside out. Humanitarian zones are tent cities, whose populations of refugees are deprived of water, food, clothing, sanitation, and heating. Humanitarian zones are where you are forced to flee in order to get starved, sickened, become hypothermic or get firebombed as you sleep with your kids in a tent made of garbage bags and rotted cloth. A humanitarian zone is where humanitarians aren’t allowed to go. A humanitarian zone is where inhuman acts take place in plain view.

Gaza’s population of two million people, most of them women and children, isn’t “starving.” They’re being starved. We’re conditioned to think of famines as natural events, caused by prolonged drought, floods, earthquakes. That’s not what is happening in Gaza. What’s happening in Gaza is an unimaginable thing. Except we don’t have to imagine it, because it’s taking place before our eyes. The famine in Gaza is completely engineered. This is famine as a weapon, designed quite literally to “starve out” the entire population of Gaza.

Palestinian mothers are so malnourished that they can’t breastfeed their newborns. This is appalling enough, but Israel has also blocked the entry of infant formula into Gaza.  But there is no shortage of food. Food is within sight of Gaza, inside trucks backed up for miles at the entry points Israel has blocked. If one can’t draw the line at the intentional starvation of newborns, where will one draw the line?

How many Palestinians has Israel killed in Gaza? 100,000?  200,000? Could Ralph Nader be right in saying the total will grow to 500,000 or more? We won’t for years.

The death toll in Gaza defies human comprehension. Viewed through a statistical lens, each new death becomes less and less significant. The first image of a Palestinian baby decapitated by an Israeli quadcopter provoked disgust, anger, and sorrow. Now, eight or 10 babies similarly slaughtered in a day barely rate a notice in the media. Our voices are silent, our revulsion has been numbed, our capacity for human empathy muted. We are dehumanizing ourselves.

The first deaths hit the hardest. The most recent deaths slip by us. We can’t think of them without condemning ourselves for doing nothing to slow the killing since seeing those first shocking images more than a year and a half ago.

According to Unicef, more than 50,000 Palestinian children have been killed or seriously wounded by Israeli military attacks in Gaza. They’ve been burned, eviscerated, decapitated, had their limbs blown off, their eyes seared shut, their skin flayed to the bone and their lungs charred. 

The murdered children of Gaza weren’t collateral damage. They were targets to be eliminated, just as much as their parents, their mass slaughter justified by the likes of. Avigdor Lieberman and Galit Distel Atbaryan, of Netanyahu’s own Likud party: “There is no such thing as innocent people in Gaza… They (Palestinians) raise an entire population of Nazis.” Knesset member Meirav Ben-Ari declared, “The children of Gaza have brought this upon themselves.” And the Prime Minister of Israel, Isaac Herzog, denounced the Pope for trafficking in blood libels for condemning Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian kids. But one sure way to prove that Israel’s committing genocide in Gaza is that it’s intent on eliminating not just this generation but the future generation, as well.

This week Dr. Feroze Sidhwa described to the UN Security Council his experiences treating victims of Israeli air and drone strikes in Gaza:

In Gaza, I operated in hospitals without sterility, electricity or anesthetics. Surgeries took place on crowded and filthy floors. Children died not because their injuries were unsurvivable, but because we lacked blood, antibiotics and the most basic supplies that are readily available in any large hospital anywhere else in the world. I did not see or treat a single combatant during my 5 weeks in Gaza. My patients were 6-year-olds with shrapnel in their heart and bullets in their brains, and pregnant women whose pelvises had been obliterated and their fetuses cut into while still in the womb. Mothers sheltering in the hospital cooked bread on hot plates in the emergency department during mass casualty events as we dealt with the reign of fire and death falling around us everywhere.

Who can hear this and not be driven to action? Who can hear this and say the children and mothers deserved it?

Many have been silenced. Many, many more have silenced themselves.

Let me submit one recent case for your consideration, that of Joseph Borrell, former head of the EU’s Human Rights office, who had a front row seat for what was going down in Gaza, where he witnessed refugee camps being strafed, ambulance drivers ambushed, poets and engineers assassinated, desalination plants destroyed and sewage pipelines ruptured, fishing boats torpedoed, bakeries detonated, Rafah, Gaza City, and Khan Younis bombed into ruins, two million people displaced, and 12,000 children killed. Yet he remained silent about what was really happening, what he knew was happening, until after he retired. Only then, at the moment when it would have the least political impact and mainly to salve his own conscience, did he feel free to call it what it was and is: genocide.

When Palestinians have attempted to break through the wall of silence that encloses the Gaza Strip and describe the crimes Israel has committed, they have been systematically killed: while reporting, while videotaping and photographing, while driving, while interviewing, while sleeping at home with their families. More than 210 have been killed, with more being targeted each week. All to keep the word from getting out. There’s never been this kind of “censorship” by drone in any other war. Yet, here we must confront a confounding double silence. Not just the terrible silence of the murdered journalists, but the deadly silence of their colleagues in the Western media about their killings and those who killed them. This is a silence that kills and buries the story along with the journalists who risked their lives to report it.

In Gaza, even the dead speak, but we refuse to hear them.

This is an expanded version of an essay that originally ran in CP +.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
– Milan Kundera

In an age where culture is the primary battlefield, authoritarianism thrives on ignorance, historical amnesia and the brutal aesthetics of cruelty, all normalized as common sense. This is a policy of scholasticide – a full-scale assault on the past – one that aims to erase not only history but the very capacity to critically engage with it. We witness this in Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, where education is methodically destroyed, universities obliterated and unimaginable violence becomes the foundation of daily life.

In this chaos, young minds are stripped of the tools to understand their history and collective selves, to challenge power and to envision a future free from oppression. Such policies are not only crimes against individual lives; they are crimes against history itself, erasing the very memory of resistance and the struggles that have shaped the present. In the United States, under the leadership of Donald Trump, historical amnesia has taken on a similarly insidious form, one that deliberately fosters ignorance, particularly surrounding the nation’s deep-seated histories of racial violence, colonialism and the ongoing struggles for justice. Books are banned, critical ideas erased from the curriculum, history is whitewashed, dissenting educators fired or threatened with prosecution, and students protesting for Palestinian freedom are abducted, detained and denied due process.

Critical pedagogy: connecting ideas to action

The fight for justice requires the reclamation of education and public space. This project is no longer optional; it is the condition of survival. As educators, we must cultivate a critical consciousness rooted in attentiveness: to history, to the structures of power, to the unseen and the silenced. This means connecting ideas to action in ways that dismantle forms of ideological and economic domination, and nourish an ethical imagination bold enough to think what the present declares impossible.

Critical pedagogy, both in its symbolic and institutional forms, plays a crucial role in fighting the resurgence of false renderings of history, white supremacy, religious fundamentalism, accelerating militarism and ultra-nationalism. Moreover, as fascists across the globe now disseminate toxic, racist and ultra-nationalist images of the past, it is essential to reclaim education as a form of historical consciousness and moral witnessing. This is particularly urgent in the face of policies like Trump’s, under which historical amnesia has become weaponized as a deliberate tactic to suppress civic consciousness and dissent. Authoritarians reject the painful lessons of history – racism, genocide, slavery and sexism – because these dark truths echo too powerfully the very worldviews they seek to perpetuate. They refuse to confront the past, for to do so would unravel the foundation of their own power. This is especially true at a time when historical and social amnesia have undermined the foundations of civic culture, matched only by the masculinization of the public sphere and the increasing normalization of fascist politics that thrives on ignorance, fear, suppression of dissent and hate. Historical amnesia serves as fertile soil for these toxic ideologies to grow – silencing the voices of resistance and obscuring the struggles that have shaped our movements for justice.

The merging of power, new digital technologies and everyday life has not only altered time and space but expanded the reach of culture as an educational force. A culture of lies, cruelty and hate, coupled with a fear of history and a 24/7 flow of information, now wages a war on attention spans, eroding the conditions necessary to think, contemplate and arrive at sound judgments.

Education beyond the classroom

Education, as a form of cultural work, extends beyond the classroom and its pedagogical influence. It plays a crucial role in challenging and resisting the rise of fascist pedagogical formations and their rehabilitation of fascist principles and ideas. We must actively counter attempts to rewrite history through the lens of authoritarian regimes, whether in Gaza, the U.S. or elsewhere. This historical amnesia is not accidental – it is a political tool, wielded purposefully to reshape collective memory and deny the possibility of resistance.

The scholar, Ariella Azolay, powerfully reminds us that educators have a responsibility to practice what she calls pedagogical citizenship – a form of teaching that, when pursued with intent and integrity, helps us remember our shared duties. In the face of relentless assaults on memory, it is education’s task to offer a counter vision: to awaken critical consciousness and expose the violence of authoritarian terror. It is through this work, through the act of resisting historical erasure, that we can equip ourselves with the tools to not only understand but to dismantle the structures of oppression threatening our world.

Any viable notion of critical pedagogy needs to create the educational visions and tools to produce a radical shift in consciousness. It must be capable of recognizing the scorched earth policies of gangster capitalism marked by staggering inequalities, settler colonialism, and the twisted anti-democratic ideologies that support it. This shift in consciousness cannot occur without pedagogical interventions that speak to people in ways that allow them to recognize themselves, identify with the issues being addressed, and place the privatization of their troubles in a broader systemic context.

Moving beyond slogans

Young people need more than slogans; they need a political vocabulary shaped by the lessons of history, alert to how fascism masquerades as freedom while delivering repression, and how it weaponizes the rhetoric of order to erase the memory of resistance. This is the work that critical pedagogy must undertake. It is not simply about teaching facts but about creating the conditions for a radical reimagination of the future, one that acknowledges the past and allows us to resist the authoritarianism that thrives on ignorance and historical erasure.

If we are to resist the scourge of historical amnesia and reclaim the future, we must all take up the struggle, through education, action and a commitment to justice grounded in the lessons of history.

This essay was originally published in The Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies.

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Aureus (Coin) Portraying Emperor Nero, 66-67 CE. Art Institute of Chicago. Public domain.

The view from 4,000 miles

When I first visited Europe in 1974 and for years after, news reports from the U.S. were typically slow to arrive. There were no smart phones or internet, no 24-hour news channels, and local papers were a day or so behind in their coverage of U.S. events. The same time lag existed for the English language International Herald Tribune, published in Paris and filled with stories from U.S. wire services.

Phone calls were still expensive and cumbersome in the 1970s and ‘80s. In France and Italy, they generally required a trip to the post office, the help of an operator, and a vacant phone booth or cubicle. For news and entertainment, I mostly read local newspapers, though with difficulty, given my poor foreign language skills. In those days, when you were away from the U.S., you were really away.

Not anymore. Having this week passed my one-year anniversary as an American expat in Norwich, UK., I can definitively say that living abroad ain’t what it used to be. Not only am I a captive of the U.S. news cycle, so is much of the British media, from the gutter press (Daily Mail, The Sun, etc) to the sober BBC. In addition, the venerated organs of the British left – London Review of Books and New Left Review (NLR) allot copious column inches to American politics and the fundamental question in the age of Trump, “What is to be done?” Given the surfeit of available news, my political outlook here in Norfolk is probably not much different than it would be 4,000 miles away in Florida, from whence I came in late May, 2024.

“Minimalism vs Maximalism”

Last week, the American historian Mathew Karp published a short column in Sidecar, a blog run by NLR, that offers a broad perspective on the Trumpian present. It succinctly laid out the terms of the ongoing debate in the U.S. and U.K. between what may be called “minimalists” and “maximalists.” What follows is an extrapolation of his argument, followed by my disagreement.

Minimalists argue that if you set aside his bombast, corruption, and criminality (the president is a convicted felon), Trump is little different from other presidents. Granted, that’s a lot to put aside, but the 47 American presidents have, with only a few exceptions, been an undistinguished lot to say the least. For every Lincoln or FDR, there have been ten James Buchanans or Calvin Coolidges. The former, by supporting “state’s rights” assured the coming of the civil war; the latter by turning a blind eye to rampant speculation and corruption on Wall Street, made inevitable the stock market crash a year after he left office.

So, while Trump may be high on most historians’ list of worst presidents, he has plenty of company. His bonehead economics – tariffs one week, no tariffs the next, rinse and repeat – are no stupider than Herbert Hoover’s. After the 1929 stock market crash and quick onset of economic Depression, he refused to offer relief to laid-off workers; unemployment soared to 23% by 1932, further depressing demand and hobbling industry, leading to even higher unemployment. Hoover’s support of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 also deepened the recession; tariffed nations reciprocated and even encouraged boycotts of American goods. Sound familiar?

Trump’s restrictions on immigration and his cruel deportation policy are also nothing new. Starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a succession of U.S. presidents have sought to limit immigration and speed deportation of people considered undesirable aliens. The deportees were generally either non-white, non-Protestant, or politically radical, and sometimes all three. President Roosevelt in 1942 issued an executive order mandating the internment of some 120,000 people of Japanese descent, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens. The rationale was military security in wartime, but the real purpose was gratification of racial hatred. In 1954, President Eisenhower approved Operation Wetback, which combined with pre-existing measures, resulted in the forced removal of at least a million people – mostly Mexican farm laborers living in the U.S. southwest. Finally, under Joe Biden, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportations were higher on a monthly basis than they have been under Trump, though not as high as Obama at his peak. Lots of presidents, Democrats as well as Republican, have enacted anti-immigrant initiatives. Trump is just louder and prouder.

Then there’s the tax cuts. New York Times columnist, Jamelle Bouie, began a recent column with a list of years: 1981, 2001, 2003 and 2017. Those are when a Republican president and Republican congress passed massive tax cuts that enriched the already affluent, impoverished the already poor and increased the already sizeable federal deficit. Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” will do the same. It’s not yet law but will be soon. (The only real drama is how Sen. Josh Hawley will weasel out of his pledge to protect Medicaid.) Bouie’s point about the tax bill presents the minimalist case in a nutshell. It’s not just Trump; this is what Republicans (and sometimes Democrats) do.

But what about DOGE? Isn’t that maximally obnoxious? In fact, as Karp reminds us, the federal workforce is just 7% smaller because of Elon Musk’s chain saw, the same size it was prior to the Covid build-up between 2019-23. Some presidents, mostly Democratic, hire federal workers, and some presidents, mostly Republican, fire them. The same pattern can be observed in protection of federal land, regulation of industry, protection of worker safety and union rights, and so on. The National Mall should have a see-saw in the middle of it, not an obelisk.

In summary, say the minimalists, Trump is destructive and awful, but apart from the theatrics, there is little new there, and nothing dramatic is needed in response. In fact, the best opposition strategy, as James Carville argued in a post-inauguration New York Times op-ed, is to “roll over and play dead,” allowing Trump and the Republicans to self-destruct. Chuck Schumer and most of the rest of the Democratic leadership welcomed the advice and have followed it assiduously, convinced that if they do nothing at all, they’ll be victorious in the 2026 midterms, and the presidential contest two years later.

Karp, who endorses what he calls “left minimalism,” is similarly confident. “The laws of political gravity appear to remain the same [for 2026]” he writes, “as they were in 2022 and 2018.” The Democrats will take the House, at least. Moreover, he argues, the political sturm und drang of the maximalists – the claim that Trump is authoritarian or fascist, and a unique threat to capitalist democracy — serves only to occlude the actuality of the current crisis: that the Democratic Party and the left more broadly, have failed to address the needs of the American working class. Before it can truly succeed in the struggle against Trump and the Republicans, therefore – not just in the 2025 midterms — the left must look facts in the face and develop a program that will attract disaffected or angry American workers. Memo to Democrats: “Physician, heal thyself!”

Trump, the hedgehog

I don’t buy it. While I agree that President Trump has many wicked, obnoxious or incompetent predecessors, and that the Democrats need to develop a concrete program for the American working class, I nevertheless uphold the maximalist position: Trump represents a unique threat to capitalist democracy. He and his movement are so antithetical to personal, political and expressive freedoms, that a broad popular front must be organized to stop him. And because of his antipathy to environmental protection – indeed his glee at the prospect of ginning up fossil capital — Trump is a threat to the very survival of human and other animal species.

How can if be that Trump, a deeply ignorant man who wouldn’t understand a political theory if it leaped up from a sand trap and bit him on the nine iron, should become the major contemporary avatar of fascism? The answer is that like the hedgehog, Trump knows one big thing: Neutralize or eliminate your enemies. The political science name for that is Gleichschaltung, “coordination” or Nazification – a term with which the U.S. president is surely unfamiliar, but whose game plan he follows.

Gleichschaltung

In the weeks following his appointment as Reich Chancellor in March 1933, Adolf Hitler began a campaign to destroy representative government. He quickly appointed his henchmen, including Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels, to important cabinet posts, while at the same time diminishing the role of the cabinet, thus arrogating more power to himself. Germany’s civil service, education system and mass media were all brought to heel on April 7 by decree of the chancellor. The same political cancellation or worse was meted out to law chambers, charitable organizations, trade unions, and the professions. Arts organization were put under the control of the Reich Culture Chamber, headed by Propaganda Minister Goebbels. The goal was the quick establishment of a dictatorial, one-party state, rearmament, and an end to the civil rights of minorities, especially Jews. Hitler was victorious in the short term; in the longer term he was successful only in destroying his own country, himself, and nearly 20 million people.

In pursuit of a “unitary executive,” the U.S. president and his ideologues have embraced a similar policy of Gleichshaltung. They have destroyed or seized control of federal agencies established by Congress which restrained previous presidents. Acting through Elon Musk, Trump has illegally dismissed thousands of civil servants, and transferred, demoted or forced the retirement of thousands of others. His assault on national law firms – by withdrawal of government contracts and denial of security clearances – has brought some of the biggest to their knees. Large media and technology companies, including ABC, CBS, Meta, Amazon, Facebook and X, have made concessions to Trump.

Threats to de-fund research and bar enrollment of foreign students have prompted the roll-back of free speech and civil rights protections at hundreds if not thousands of colleges and universities. Though I have long been a harsh critic of DEI programs and trainings, the current onslaught is aimed not at the programs themselves, but their goal: the creation of campuses and workplaces where everyone, regardless of ethnicity, class, gender status, or disability, has an equal opportunity to succeed. Trump’s executive order of Jan. 21, 2025, rolling back President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 equal employment directive, is a veritable license to discriminate. The consequence of all this, if allowed to run its course, will be the creation of a sovereign – Trump and his designated successor — empowered by what the German (later Nazi) legal theorist Carl Schmitt called “decisionism” — the capacity to act unconstrained by congress, constitution, common law, or custom. In that “state of exception,” democracy is nullified.

Why Trump is not yet sovereign

Hitler didn’t create his “state of exception” by force of will alone. From March to June 1933, a mass of storm troopers – their total number may have been as high as 2 million – rampaged across Germany, attacking the offices of opposition parties and politicians, intimidating uncompliant elected officials, and destroying or looting independent newspaper offices, union headquarters and university buildings. Hundreds of people were killed; their murderers were applauded. The Nazi state quickly authorized the creation of concentration camps and torture centers, and filled them with up to 200,000 Communists, Social Democrats and others deemed dissident or even just independent. These camps evolved into a vast archipelago that provided the militarized state with slave laborers. World war and death camps – Auschwitz, Treblinka and the rest — were the logical but grotesque conclusion of all this.

Trump has not organized militias or storm-troopers to intimidate, disappear or destroy opponents, and it’s not clear if the Secret Service or ICE could be repurposed as a praetorian guard. (Trump foolishly antagonized both the leadership and rank and file of the FBI and CIA.) But as with everything else concerning the Trump administration, past performance is not indicative of future results. The first Trump administration largely failed at its efforts to intimidate the media (“enemy of the people”), disable Medicaid, and deport millions of immigrants, but it’s well on its way to making good on those pledges. What anti-democratic initiatives will follow?

Team maximalist

I grew up in a political home in a politicized age. If not a “red diaper”, I was at least a pink diaper baby. My mother, Grace, was in her youth a member of the Young Communist League. My dad was a fellow traveler, he told me, until he attended a political demonstration and everybody around him got clubbed on the head by mounted police. As a young child I experienced the fear of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the shock and horror of the Kennedy assassination. We all watched the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, hated the war, loathed Nixon and rejoiced at his resignation. I spent my life as a professor of art history but have followed every twist and turn in American politics. In my lifetime, no president has been so determined to undermine the structures of democracy. Have there been any like Trump, discounting Confederate President Jefferson Davis? Count me a member of team maximalist.

Path ahead

Trump is not yet sovereign — not yet Trumpus Maximus, a Nero who golfs while the world burns from the consumption of fossil fuels. While the U.S. legislative branches, dominated by Republicans, have accepted Gleichshaltung without a whimper, the judicial system has not. State and federal courts have issued orders and injunctions rolling back many of Trump’s decrees concerning deportations, civil service dismissals, agency closures, and blackmail of law firms and universities. The Supreme Court, though dominated by Schmittians, has ruled against Trump in some cases, while the most important decisions are yet to come. Right now, the high court is the thin reed upon which the future of capitalist democracy leans. We need a back-up plan.

A few universities, law firms and entertainers have publicly resisted Trump. Some Democratic politicians, chiefly Bernie and AOC, have organized large opposition rallies and promise more. While democratic institutions and protections still exist – the right to protest, petition, and publish, and the right to vote — it’s essential they are used. Lacking stormtroopers, Trump and the Republicans rely upon complaisance and fear to enact their will. If political leaders – Democrats, independents, union official and others – offer leadership and an inspiring message, masses of people will join in peaceful but determined opposition to tariffs, immigration policy, tax breaks for billionaires, environmental abuses, racism, attacks on students, and cuts in Medicaid and food stamps. When that happens, the Trump administration will collapse or be dismantled like the Golden House of Nero.

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On May 22, the House passed President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill Act” by a vote of 215 to 214. By now you have probably heard that the Medicaid cuts are expected to cause 8.6 million people to lose their health insurance, with the total program funding cuts estimated to be at least $700 billion over 10 years. That’s an average annual reduction of $70 billion in Medicaid spending – 12 times the $5.8 billion (in 2025 dollars) average annual cut enacted in 2005, previously the largest reduction in Medicaid spending.

Maybe you feel bad for people on Medicaid, or are angered that millions of people could lose their health insurance so that the President and Republicans in Congress can offset tax cuts for the wealthy. But if you are not on Medicaid, you have probably thought to yourself that you are glad your healthcare will not be affected. Hold that thought. The truth is that blowing a $700 billion hole in health spending on Medicaid services will degrade health system infrastructure and reduce the quality of care for all of us.

Here’s how.

Medicaid funds flow into virtually all the community hospitals in the US. These are the hospitals that we rely on for a wide range of health services — to stabilize us when we are having a stroke or heart attack; to treat a child having a severe asthma attack; to set a broken bone after a bicycle accident. Cuts this steep will have a noticeable effect on hospital revenues, and hospitals will face tough choices when they think about which services to eliminate — and even whether they can afford to stay open. Hold times on telephone calls will go up, wait times in hospital emergency rooms will increase, and distances traveled for some hospital services like delivery of a new baby will multiply.

Industry CEOs: Medicaid Cuts Will Cause Wider Harms

The alarm about the House bill has been sounded by four of the largest Catholic health systems – Ascension, Trinity Health, Providence and SSMHealth. As detailed by Alan Condon in Becker’s Hospital Review, the health systems’ CEOs point to the negative effects of the proposed cuts on an already strained health system, and how they will jeopardize access to health care for millions more patients than those who lose Medicaid coverage. Erik Wexler, president and CEO of Providence, pointed out that Medicaid cuts affect a broader population than just the subset on Medicaid. When programs and services become unsustainable, he argued, they will be forced to close, and access to care will be diminished for everyone.

Mike Slubowski, president and CEO of Trinity Health – a hospital system where Medicaid is the health insurance for 20 percent of patients across its 93 hospitals — worries that Medicaid cuts would exacerbate Trinity Health’s losses, as current Medicaid reimbursements fall short of the actual costs of treating Medicaid patients. The gap would widen, making it difficult to staff some programs, especially nursing homes and long-term care facilities where Medicaid is the predominant source of coverage.

Slubowski also pushed back on Republicans’ claims of widespread Medicaid fraud, waste, and abuse. He argued that it’s not possible to cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid without hurting people more broadly.

Ascension president Eduardo Conrado pointed out that his health system provided care in 2024 to 6.1 million people. Of those, only 1.1 million – 750,000 covered by Medicaid and 350,000 uninsured or self-paid – would be directly affected by the proposed Medicaid cuts. But any reduction in hospital spending as a result of Medicaid cuts would reduce services for Ascension’s broader patient population as well. “Cuts of this scale,” he said, “would deepen financial pressure on hospitals, shift even more burden to the private sector, and limit access for everyone — not just those covered through Medicaid. Cutting critical services make it harder to hire and keep caregivers, risk hospital closures and limit states’ ability to fund Medicaid using proven tools like provider tax.”

Joe Hodges, the regional lead executive and president of SSMHealth’s Oklahoma/Mid-Missouri market –  which includes large rural areas – noted that 70 percent of Oklahoma hospitals operate at a loss, as do 87 percent of those in Kansas. “It is a crisis in rural healthcare,” Hodges said. “Any challenges that are associated with taking away access or funding to rural hospitals will make them even more vulnerable.”

Labor Leaders Decry Effects of Medicaid Cuts

It’s not only healthcare CEOs raising the alarm about the Republican bill. Union leaders are speaking out about the harms the Big Beautiful Bill will cause. Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, points out that cuts to health care including Medicaid in the bill “will slash nearly 500,000 care jobs in 2026 alone, forcing hospitals, clinics and nursing homes – especially in rural and lower-income communities – to close.”

Nancy Hagan, president of National Nurses United union, rejects cuts to Medicaid and other social support programs and noted that nurses will not give up the fight for patients and for public health: “Nurses believe in a society where we take care of one another, not abandon people who are born or become disabled, or happen to work a job that is not financially valued.”

April Verrett, president of the Service Workers International Union, noted that Republicans in the House passed legislation that will rip healthcare from families to make the mega rich even richer. Instead, she argued, “we should make costs go down for families, not set them up for skyrocketing bills. We should raise wages and make life more secure for working families, not pull the rug out from under them.”

The House bill will cut core services and reduce their availability not only to the subpopulation of Medicaid patients but also to the broader patient population. They will affect not only people, but the health system’s infrastructure – the hospitals, clinics, doctors, and the clinical and other staff needed to care for patients.

The “Big Beautiful Bill” now goes to the Senate, which has promised to revisit these draconian spending cuts. Preserving Medicaid’s funding is essential to maintaining the capabilities of the US health system.

This first appeared on CERP.

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Photograph Source: Aude – CC BY-SA 3.0

The Washington Post’s senior national security columnist, David Ignatius, is the mainstream media’s leading apologist for the Central intelligence Agency, American foreign policy, and Israel.  Last week, Ignatius described the politicization of U.S. intelligence  by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.  In the same column, however, he praised  former acting CIA director John McLaughlin, who was responsible for the most costly intelligence failure in CIA’s history—the phony intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction used to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. McLaughlin’s role in this debacle is public knowledge, but Igatius chooses to ignore or forget.

Tulsi Gabbard, who is completely unqualified to serve as DNI, ordered the rewrite of an intelligence assessment to protect the lies of Donald Trump regarding Venezuela’s connection to a terrorist gang, Tren de Aragua.  Trump’s lies were used to justify the deportation of hundreds of migrants—including Kilmar Abrego Garcia—to a notorious jail in El Salvador. The government has admitted that Abrego Garcia was wrongfully deported.  Gabbard not only stopped the intelligence assessment that exposed Trump’s lies, but she summarily fired two leading intelligence officials who simply did their job, preparing an honest assessment.

Ignatius exposed the wrongful actions of the DNI and her top officials, but closed his column by citing remarks by McLaughlin, a leading supporter of the CIA’s torture and abuse program as well as the officer in charge of the so-called “slam dunk” briefing.  It was CIA director George Tenet who promised President George W. Bush that he could provide an assessment that would allow Bush to make a convincing case for war against Iraq to the American people.  Tenet said it would be a “slam dunk” to prepare such a document.  McLaughlin, who was described by Tenet as the “smartest man he ever met,” was in charge of that effort and personally delivered the “slam dunk” briefing to the president

Nevertheless, Ignatius had the audacity to cite McLaughlin’s advice to young intelligence analysts to “just keep doing your job professionally.”  The abiding rule, according to McLaughlin, was to “Be humble.  Open your eyes.  You don’t know everything.  Be explicit about what you know and what you don’t know.”

That is exactly what Tenet and McLaughlin didn’t do in 2002-2003 when they politicized  intelligence in order for Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and national security adviser Rice to browbeat their critics.  With phony intelligence from the CIA, they began a war that took several thousand American lives, 37,000 American casualties, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian fatalities at a cost of more than $2 trillion.  Twenty-two years later, U.S. troops remain in Iraq.

And it is exactly what CIA director Bill Casey and deputy director for intelligence Bob Gates didn’t do when they made the phony case for an unnecessary military build up against an exaggerated Soviet threat.  Casey and Gates made their politicized case in the mid-1980s; the Soviet Union were already politically and economically bankrupt at that time and collapsed not long after that.

And there is the example of former CIA director Mike Pompeo, who did his best to compromise any intelligence that failed to exaggerate the threat from Iran in order to challenge the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, more commonly known as the Iran nuclear agreement.    One of his first acts as CIA director was to invoke the state secrets privilege to prevent CIA officers, such as Gina Haspel who was Pompeo’s successor, from testifying in the trial of Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell.  Jessen and Mitchell developed the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” that constituted the sadistic torture and abuse program.  They earned $80 million from the CIA for work that produced no useful intelligence whatsoever.

Ignatius over the years has been one of the worst examples of journalists who regularly report the self-serving comments of Defense Department and CIA officials tasked with shaping public perceptions of official policy.  In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the CIA leaked classified materials to reporters to create the false impression that its detention and interrogation program was an effective tool.  In 2002, the New York Times agreed to withhold information about a secret prison in Thailand, where torture and abuse were applied, at the urging of CIA leaders and Vice President Cheney.  And McLaughlin was permitted to contribute to a book of essays from CIA leaders who castigated the authoritative Senate report on CIA torture and abuse, and argued that they considered the “moral and ethical implications of a program that involved a degree of coercion.”  The book received no scrutiny from CIA publications review, which regularly censors criticism of CIA from CIA authors.

Finally, Ignatius is a regular apologist for the Pentagon’s use of force and CIA’s covert action.  For the past two years, he has regularly predicted victory for Ukraine because of the introduction of one Western weapons system or another.  The most recent so-called “game changer” in the war, according to Ignatius, was the ATACM-300 long range missile system.  He said the arrival of the ATACM “might eventually open the way for a just negotiated peace.”

As recently as May 25, the Washington Post’s lead article on its front page was titled “Experts: Time Ripe to Press Moscow.”  A series of editorials in the Post have argued that “if Ukraine can deny Russia from reaching the borders of Donetsk between now and Christmas, and Kyiv’s international partners are diligent in degrading Russia’s economy, Moscow will face hard choices about the costs it is prepared to incur for continuing the war.”  Well, if “ifs and buts were candy and nuts,” then every day would be Christmas.

For Ignatius, there is always light at the end of the tunnel in dealing with U.S. and Israeli militarism.  In fact, in 2023 he wrote that the “thing about tunnels is that if you keep moving through them, darkness eventually gives way to light.”  The ATACM was an example of Ignatius’ “light.”  Before that, it was the Abrams and Leopold tanks from the United States and Germany.  Russia President Vladimir Putin thus far has been willing to pay the strategic and economic costs of the war, which now finds Russia committing more than a third of its national budget to funding the war against Ukraine.

The most recent example of Ignatius’s “light at the end of the tunnel” was the column that credited the United States and Israel with “making significant  progress toward stabilizing three dangerous wars: Israel’s tit-for-tat conflict with Iran, the devastating assault on Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the brutal war against Hamas in Gaza.  For the past year, he has reported one hopeful scenario after another, ignoring the hostilities that continue and the thousands of Palestinians who face starvation.

It is a sad fact that over the course of the past 70 years, various administrations have received great support from the mainstream media in pursuing costly and unnecessary wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, which produced millions of civilians deaths and gained the United States very little.  Reporters such as Drew Middleton, Joe Alsop, and David Ignatius have contributed heavily to this task.

Fortunately, individuals and institutions have stepped in to fill the void that the mainstream media has created.  It was a whistleblower from the American Psychological Association who exposed the role of professional psychologists in creating a torture and abuse program.  And it was the CIA’s Inspector General’s report on detention and renditions that forced the Bush administration to rein in the program.  With the Trump administration, however, there are no inspectors general to probe for such transgressions, and it would take a very brave sole to be a whistleblower in our current environment.

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Photograph Source: Edwin.images – CC BY-SA 4.0

We’ve all heard the line: ‘How many times have you heard someone say, if I had his money I’d do things my way?’ But that was the lie—reiterated later in Rich Man by Vampire Weekend—wasn’t it? As the original song A Satisfied Man goes—Joe ‘Red’ Hayes and Jack Rhodes wrote it but Tim Hardin sang it best—‘It’s so hard to find one rich man in ten with a satisfied mind.’

Macabrely, it only came to mind when a friend messaged me last week about the latest trend in crypto crime: violent, real-world attacks. Kidnappings. Pistol-whippings. In two instances, fingers literally severed. Jameson Lopp, a cyber-libertarian with a freedom-fighter beard and a GitHub account, has now catalogued 22 such ‘$5 wrench attacks’ this year. Why bother with sophisticated hacks when simple brute force works? As fortunes move offline—cold wallets, hidden vaults, paper keys—the violence simply adapts. Taking your assets off-grid doesn’t take you off the map. It just makes the extraction more medieval.

It wasn’t always so. (Or perhaps it was.) I recall a dim, low-ceilinged hall near London Bridge, some eleven years ago. A pokerfaced crypto meet-up. Barely a woman in sight. Geeks crippled with shyness. Hoodies and hush. City lads dashing in like accountants late to an orgy. Everyone giddy with the same idea: money without middlemen. Digital sovereignty. Revolution. Crypto in a crypt, really. I asked myself: was there a film in this?

If action is character, as they say about film, there wasn’t any. It’s never enough just to film people making money, though the dream was exciting enough: death to the banks, birth of the blockchain. The reality? PowerPoint decks, nervous coughs, and that lit-up look of early-adopter greed. They whispered of freedom but watched the charts. Hopeful. Hungry. Hooked on the number going up. Same old, same old.

I’d been invited by American couple Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert. They were running a successful TV show in London, two in fact, at the time. Max Keiser—an electric, loud, economic evangelist—had just profiled the doctor-bolstered documentary I was making about corporate interference in the NHS. Fast-forward over a decade: he and Stacy Herbert now successfully advise El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele on cryptocurrency.

It was of course Bukele who recently turned up at the White House refusing to extradite a man whisked into one of his mega-prisons without due process—the victim’s tattoos already digitally edited in the US to suggest gang affiliation. Last week, presumably separate from that, Max Keiser was issuing dire warnings about the bond market ‘ushering in Depression 2.0’ and predicting Bitcoin would hit $2.2 million. Not a misprint. Two-point-two. Million. Per coin. It is presently just over $100,000, his initial once poo-poohed prediction.

At the same time, the New York Post was turning on MAGA-lorian Trump, accusing his family of Biden-style influence-peddling, only this time via crypto. The focus: a Chinese e-commerce shell called GD Culture Group. Eight employees, no revenue, all vibes. They announced plans to purchase $300 million of his $TRUMP memecoin. This was while Trump still dithers over whether to ban TikTok—a platform GD Culture relies on. In fact, 40 per cent of the president’s entire net worth today is said to be from 2 crypto coins, the other being World Liberty Financial, which received a recent $2 billion investment from the UAE. He was also last Thursday giving a gala dinner, including a 23-minute speech, for the top 220 holders of his $Trump memecoin, some flying in from overseas, before disappearing in a helicopter without staying for the meal. Even the Genius Act, which legitimates stablecoins, advanced in the Senate last week.

And what of China? ‘The least understood but most important to understand nation,’ as Cindy Yu wrote in The Times last week. Though we do know China wants to own the future through AI dominance, it has since 2021 kept a tight ban on cryptocurrency trading and mining. There has been talk of a reverse—Hong Kong is crypto-savvy—but most experts remain unconvinced. They point to how slow and regulated it would be.

And while all this plays out, crypto investor John Woeltz, known as the crypto king of Kentucky, is done for kidnapping and torturing Italian tourist Michael Carturan by allegedly dangling him from the fifth floor of a Manhattan townhouse, trying to get his Bitcoin password. A man in New Zealand is arrested for helping run a global crypto ring that made off with $265 million. Here in London, only last year, Jian Wen, a former takeaway worker, was convicted of laundering £2 billion ($2.69 billion) in Bitcoin. That’s billion, with a B. She’d already begun converting it into jewellery and property until the Metropolitan Police stepped in, dryly announcing the UK’s largest-ever crypto seizure.

Still looming over all this of course is the one and only figure a subpoena or writ could never touch: Satoshi Nakamoto, though most observers are bored with this story. The name. The myth. The ghost in the machine. A man? A woman? A group? ‘Satoshi’ famously posted the white paper Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System in 2008—four months later, ‘he’ launched the first ever crypto message board. The P2P Foundation profile listed Japan as home, used very British spellings, and claimed the age of 47 in 2022.

A sharp-eyed friend—aka Offshore Man—messaged me back when I asked him about Satoshi Nakamoto. ‘It wasn’t a Japanese genius nerd who created Bitcoin,’ he said. ‘That’s just a beautiful cover story. Just like it wasn’t two kids in a garage who gave us Google.’ He added: ‘Crypto was designed as a hot-money sink. A trap. Something to absorb wealth fleeing fiat debasement and steer it away from hard assets. It’ll collapse. And the suckers will be left with nothing.’

It should also be noted that Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert—nobody’s fools, either—have more than emphasised Bitcoin’s role in not only challenging but potentially replacing—with its more peaceful nature—what has been called ‘the inherent violence of fiat money’. Ironically enough, given these recent attacks.

I gather Russian crypto mining continues to flourish, with its two largest firms Intelion and BitRiver making $200 million in revenue in 2024. Russia’s illegal crypto sector meanwhile is ruefully described as ‘largely unaccounted for’. Talking of which, the UK is tightening the screws on the sector. From 2026, any operating crypto firm must collect and report extensive user data. Cold wallets won’t save you. Anonymity is done. The borderless dream gets a border, after all.

Last week, I left a meeting in Mayfair’s Shepherd Market—now cheekily dubbed ‘Silicon Alley’—and descended into Green Park Tube. A busker was belting out the song John Wesley Harding. The real name of the outlaw in the song was John Wesley Hardin (no G)—as in Tim Hardin, coincidentally enough. Dylan said he simply misspelled the name and no one bothered to fact-check it. I suspect he added the G to make it scan. A lyrical mutation. An artistic fib. And perhaps, just perhaps, a metaphor. Anyway, as I began searching ads for crypto tax tools for this piece, I kept hearing the song in my head even past Westminster:

All across the telegraph his name it did resound
But no charge held against him could they prove
And there was no man around who could track or chain him down
He was never known to make a foolish move

Lovely idea. But these days, even your best move might still cost you a finger.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Sunday, May 25, marks five years since George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Despite the flurry of statements, very little has changed. Indeed Trump’s Department of Justice is reversing modest reforms made.

Aside from a few retrospective posts in the news and from policymakers, particularly from Minnesota, Sunday was a day much like any other.

This is notable considering recent mobilization. On April 5, 2025, millions of people demonstrated across the country and indeed the world, loosely affiliated with Indivisible, organized by two former Democratic Congressional staffers. A smaller number again took to the streets on May 1 – known almost everywhere outside the U.S. as Labor Day, commemorating the 1886 Haymarket rebellion in Chicago that won us the right to the weekend. Visibly missing from the media coverage and grassroots organization of these last two worldwide protests were leaders doing specifically antiracist work, particularly combating antiblackness.

Since the beginning of Trump’s second administration, labor unions have been on the defensive. Hundreds of thousands of unionized federal employees are constantly threatened with contract termination by the Project 2025 playbook. Workers with the United States Agency for International Development were among the first to pack their bags, some having received their termination notice from halfway around the world.

This dystopia was far from foretold. We, Unions, let this happen.

We should have seen this coming, even before Teamsters president Sean O’Brien spoke at the Republican National Convention. When unions embrace a top-down or “least common denominator” approach instead of a bottom-up, inclusive antiracist approach, issues confronting BIPOC workers, and specifically Black workers, are swept aside, leaving white workers vulnerable to the manipulation and disinformation that corroborates their deeply ingrained antiblack beliefs, particularly to what Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò calls “elite capture” of identity politics.

“Either we go up together, or we go down together”

The fight for economic justice–which is why labor unions exist–is inextricably linked to the fight for racial justice.

It is no coincidence that Dr. King, one of the most iconic civil rights leaders, was assassinated while preparing to march with sanitation workers in Memphis who were on strike; in his last speech, “I’ve been to the mountaintop,” Dr. King implored collaboration and solidarity: “either we go up together, or we go down together.” Nor is it coincidental that the unrealized ‘racial awakening’ of 2020 was accompanied by a renewed energy for workplace unionization. Unions were designed to combat economic injustice–to redistribute wealth and power to those most marginalized in the workplace: workers.

The United States’ material wealth and cultural, social and political power is rooted in the economic exploitation of poor people and/or people of color. The theft of land from Indigenous people; the theft of Black, Asian, and immigrant labor for centuries; and the intentional denial of economic opportunities to these communities of color–but particularly Black folks–codified in laws and practices, form the bedrock of our nation’s wealth–and the resulting wealth gap. Hence unions exist to serve as vehicles of structural and institutional disruption. This is unequivocally antiracist work, for there can never be economic justice without racial justice, and vice versa. The power of the labor movement is derived from its ability to unite and build solidarity among workers–and this demands that unions engage directly with the issues that impact these workers and the communities they serve. As Charlene Carruthers, Chicago millennial activist and cofounder of Black Youth Project-100, argues, it is “all of us or none of us.”

“The Achilles Heel of the Labor Movement”

Unfortunately, though, unions, and the U.S. labor movement as a whole have not historically harnessed their collective power to oppose and defy racism–and they certainly have not consistently attempted to combat anti-Black racism: the deep-seated disdain for Black people that permeates every part of our society–even communities of color that also experience racism. On the contrary, unions have more often than not upheld white supremacy and been accomplices of bosses, capital, and imperialist agendas. Historians have acknowledged that the creation of “whiteness,” laws and practices that distinguished white indentured servants from their Black enslaved peers, were a direct response of the wealthy white elite who feared continued multiracial uprisings like that of Bacon’s Rebellion in the colony of Virginia. These elites deepened hereditary slavery for those of African descent while granting white farmers more rights and powers to distinguish them as different and of “higher status” than their Black enslaved counterparts.

The disdain for Black people and their well-being is not always spoken out loud; it doesn’t need to be. It is evident in the toleration of violence against Black bodies–from unparalleled police violence, to the violent systems of “discipline” in our schools that criminalize and punish Black children; to the ways in which Black mothers and children die at exponentially higher rates during childbirth. It is evident in the normalizing and even justifying of Black pain and suffering; in colorism that permeates Latin American and Asian cultures; in the ways Black people’s needs and concerns are discounted and even ignored in favor of more “universal issues”–despite the clear and well-documented history of violence, exploitation, and exclusion exacted upon Black people.

In modern day union history, this antiblackess has manifested in acts like more than 7,000 union members choosing to leave the American Federation of Teachers rather than integrate their local unions after the Brown v. Board of Education decision; to revered United Federation of Teachers (UFT) president Al Shanker leading a 36-day teachers’ strike in 1968 to quell the movement of Black and Brown parents to control their schools; to UFT’s refusal to pass a Black Lives Matter at School resolution in 2018 because it was too “divisive.” White supremacy has been, in education activist Pauline Lipman’s words, “the Achilles heel of the labor movement.”

Democrats, so-called progressives, and yes, so-called unionists, continually perpetuate antiblackness. After the majority of white voters and a significant minority of Latine and Asian voters lifted Donald Trump into his second presidency, the direction from many white labor leaders was to bring union members together; to listen to “both sides” in order to establish “common interests” so that we could “move forward together.” There was no call to address the antiblackness in our ranks. There was no acknowledgement that folks were willing to sacrifice the well-being of their Black, Latine, immigrant and transgender union “siblings” for the promise of spending a few less cents on eggs or gas–cynical promises summarily abandoned as Trump started a global trade war.

Even now, as the right unleashes its destructive Project 2025 agenda, alleged recommendations from a research group commissioned by the Democratic National Committee suggest de-prioritizing the federal attacks on DEI to amplify more “universal” (read: white) issues like tax cuts for the wealthy, tariffs, and cuts to entitlements like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, shouting “hands off!”

Indispensable 

It is not that issues such as Social Security or Medicare aren’t of concern to Black folks. Indeed, Black folks are the most targeted. It just stings when labor clearly and intentionally omits how antiblackness played as significant a role in the election outcome as the economy. White and non-Black workers were willing to embrace racist rhetoric, policy agendas, etc. because they believed they would be sheltered and that Black folks would experience the most harm–which would be acceptable.

A mantra of unions is that “an injury to one is an injury to all.” But if that were truly the case, millions would line the streets daily over the violence and cruelty that Black folks face. Our society, and yes, our unions, have determined that Black folks, while reliable, are disposable.

Progressives rely on the fact that Black people will fight and resist injustice because they have to in order to survive. And every marginalized group benefits from that struggle. But when it is time to truly ally together to protect and/or follow Black folks, and by extension, all of humanity, virtue-signaling non-Black liberals often retreat into “least common denominator” or “unifying” politics.

Imagine being the most loyal base for Democrats and labor unions, but time and again have your priorities sidelined and outright dismissed for some faux form of “solidarity.” It is not only infuriating, it is exhausting. Little wonder why Black folks have been noticeably absent from post-election protests.

Black folks want to know that our lives, our well-being, our needs, our concerns, matter–not just when folks need our labor, our organizing and our resistance.

Until Black lives matter ALL the time, true solidarity is not possible. Because when we/they demonstrate that we/they don’t see or appreciate Black people’s full humanity, this chips away at Black folks’ empathy and compassion for non-Black people.  In essence, we all become dehumanized.

Antiblackness makes us all vulnerable and unsafe. Just as we are now.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and should not be read as speaking for their affiliations. 

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The media, universities, the Democratic Party and liberals, by embracing the fiction of “rampant antisemitism,” laid the groundwork for their own demise. Columbia and Princeton, where I have taught, and Harvard, which I attended, are not incubators of hatred towards Jews. The New York Times, where I worked for fifteen years and which Trump calls “an enemy of the people,” is slavishly subservient to the Zionist narrative. What these institutions have in common is not antisemitism, but liberalism. And liberalism, with its creed of pluralism and inclusiveness, is slated by our authoritarian regime for obliteration.

The conflation of outrage over the genocide with antisemitism is a sleazy tactic to silence protest and placate Zionist donors, the billionaire class and advertisers. These liberal institutions, weaponizing antisemitism, aggressively silenced and expelled critics, banned student groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, allowed police to make hundreds of arrests of peaceful protests on campuses, purged professors and groveled before Congress. Use the words ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’ and you are fired or excoriated.

Zionist Jews, in this fictional narrative, are the oppressed. Jews who protestthe genocide are slandered as Hamas stooges and punished. Good Jews. Bad Jews. One group deserves protection. The other deserves to be thrown to the wolves. This odious bifurcation exposes the charade.

In April 2024, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik, along with two board members and a law professor, testified before the House of Representative education committee. They accepted the premise that antisemitism was a significant problem at Columbia and other higher education institutions.

When Co-Chair of the Board of Trustees of Columbia University David Greenwald and others told the committee that they believed  “from the river to the sea” and “long live the intifada” were antisemitic statements, Shafik agreed. She threw students and faculty under the bus, including long-time professor Joseph Massad.

The day after the hearings, Shafik suspended all the students at the Columbia protests and called in the New York City Police Department (NYPD), who arrested at least 108 students.

“I have determined that the encampment and related disruptions pose a clear and present danger to the substantial functioning of the University,” Shafik wrote in her letter to the police.

NYPD Chief John Chell, however, told the press, “the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.”

 “What disciplinary action has been taken against that professor?” Representative Elise Stefanik asked in the hearing about Columbia law Professor Katherine Franke.

Shafik volunteered that Franke, who is Jewish and whose position at the law school where she had taught for 25 years was terminated, and other professors, were being investigated. In an apparent reference to visiting Columbia Professor Mohamed Abdou, she claimed he was “terminated” and promised he “will never teach at Columbia again.” Professor Abdou is suingColumbia for defamation, discrimination, harassment and financial and professional loss.

The Center for Constitutional Rights wrote of the betrayal of Franke:

In an egregious attack on both academic freedom and Palestinian rights advocacy, Columbia University has entered into an “agreement” with Katherine Franke to leave her teaching position after an esteemed 25-year career. The move — “a termination dressed up in more palatable terms,” according to Franke’s statement — stems from her advocacy for students who speak out in support of Palestinian rights.

Her ostensible offense was a comment expressing concern about Columbia’s failure to address harassment of Palestinians and their allies by Israeli students who come to campus straight from military service — after Israeli students sprayed Palestinian rights protestors with a toxic chemical. For this, she was investigated for harassment and found to be in violation of Columbia’s policies. The actual cause of her forced departure is the crackdown on dissent at Columbia resulting from historic protests opposing Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Franke’s fate was sealed when former Columbia president Minouche Shafik threw her under the bus during her cowardly appearance before Congress.

You can see my interview with Franke here.

Despite her capitulation to the Zionist lobby, Shark resigned a little more than a year after assuming her position as head of the university.

The crackdown at Columbia continues, with an estimated 80 people arrestedand over 65 students suspended following a protest in the library in the first week of May. Former television journalist and Columbia’s acting president Claire Shipman condemned the protest, stating,“Disruptions to our academic activities will not be tolerated and are violations of our rules and policies…Columbia strongly condemns violence on our campus, antisemitism and all forms of hate and discrimination, some of which we witnessed today.”

Of course, appeasement does not work. This witch hunt, whether under the Biden or Trump administration, was never grounded in good faith. It was about decapitating Israel’s critics and marginalizing the liberal class and the left. It is sustained by lies and slander, which these institutions continue to embrace.

Watching these liberal institutions, who are hostile to the left, be smeared by Trump for harboring “Marxist lunatics,” “radical leftists,” and “communists,” exposes another failing of the liberal class. It was the left that could have saved these institutions or at least given them the fortitude, not to mention analysis, to take a principled stand. The left at least calls apartheid apartheidand genocide genocide.

Media outlets regularly publish articles and OpEds uncritically accepting claims made by Zionist students and faculty. They fail to clarify the distinction between being Jewish and being Zionist. They demonize student protesters. They never bothered reporting with any depth or honesty from the student encampments where Jews, Muslims and Christians made common cause. They routinely mischaracterize anti-Zionist, anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian liberation slogans and policy demands as hate speech, antisemitic, or contributing to Jewish students feeling unsafe.

Examples include, The New York Times: “Why the Campus Protests Are So Troubling,” “I’m a Columbia Professor. The Protests on My Campus Are Not Justice,” and “Universities Face an Urgent Question: What Makes a Protest Antisemitic?”; The Washington Post: “Call the campus protests what they are” “At Columbia, excuse the students, but not the faculty”; The Atlantic: “Campus Protest Encampments Are Unethical” and “Columbia University’s anti-Semitism Problem”; Slate: “When Pro-Palestine Protests Cross Into Antisemitism”; Vox: The Rising Tide of Antisemitism on College Campuses Amid Gaza Protests”; Mother Jones: “How Pro-Palestine Protests Spark Antisemitism on Campus”; The Cut (New York Magazine): “The Problem With Pro-Palestine Protests on Campus”; and The Daily Beast: “Antisemitism Surges Amid Pro-Palestine Protests at U.S. Universities.”

The New York Times, in a decision worthy of George Orwell, instructed its reporters to eschew words such “refugee camps,” “occupied territory,” “slaughter,” “massacre,” “carnage,” “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing,” when writing about Palestine, according to an internal memo obtained by The Intercept. It discourages the very use of the word “Palestine” in routine text and headlines.

In December 2023, Democratic Governor of New York Kathy Hochul sent a letter to university and college presidents who failed to condemn and address “antisemitism,” and calls for the “genocide of any group,” would be subjected to “aggressive enforcement action,” by New York State. The following year, in late August, Hochul repeated these warnings during a virtual meeting with 200 university and college leaders.

Hochul made clear in October 2024 that she considered pro-Palestine slogans  to be explicit calls for genocide of Jews.

“There are laws on the books – human rights laws, state and federal laws – that I will enforce if you allow for the discrimination of our students on campus, even calling for the genocide of the Jewish people which is what is meant by ‘From the river to the sea,’ by the way,” she said at a memorial event at the Temple Israel Center in White Plains. “Those are not innocent sounding words. They’re filled with hate.”

The Governor successfully pressured City University of New York (CUNY) to remove a job posting for a Palestinian studies professorship at Hunter College which referenced “settler colonialism,” “genocide” and “apartheid.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in his new book “Antisemitism in America: A Warning,” leads efforts by the Democratic Party — which has a dismal 27 percent approval rating in a recent NBC News poll — to denounce those protesting the genocide as carrying out a “blood libel” against Jews.

“Whatever one’s view of how the war in Gaza was conducted, it is not and has never been the policy of the Israeli government to exterminate the Palestinian people,” he writes, ignoring hundreds of calls by Israeli officials to wipe Palestinians from the face of the earth during 19 months of saturation bombing and enforced starvation.

The grisly truth, openly acknowledged by Israeli officials, is far different.

“We are disassembling Gaza, and leaving it as piles of rubble, with total destruction [which has] no precedent globally. And the world isn’t stopping us,” gloats Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

“Last night, almost 100 Gazans were killed…it doesn’t interest anyone. Everyone has gotten used to [the fact] that [we can] kill 100 Gazans in one night during a war and nobody cares in the world,” Israeli Knesset member Zvi Sukkot, told Israel’s Channel 12 on May 16.

The perpetuation of the fiction of widespread antisemitism, which of course exists but which is not fostered or condoned by these institutions, coupled with the refusal to say out loud what is being live streamed to the world, has shattered what little moral authority these institutions and liberals had left. It gives credibility to Trump’s effort to cripple and destroy all institutions that sustain a liberal democracy.

Trump surrounds himself with neo-Nazi sympathizers such as Elon Musk, and Christian fascists who condemn Jews for crucifying Christ. But antisemitism by the right gets a free pass since these “good” antisemites cheer on Israel’s settler colonial project of extermination, one these neo-Nazis and Christian fascists would like to replicate on Brown and Black in the name of the great replacement theory. Trump trumpets the fiction of “white genocide” in South Africa. He signed an executive order in February that fast-tracked immigration to the U.S. for Afrikaners — white South Africans.

Harvard, which is attempting to save itself from the wrecking ball of the Trump administration, was as complicit in this witch hunt as everyone else, flagellating itself for not being more repressive towards campus critics of the genocide.

The university’s former president Claudine Gay condemned the pro-Palestine slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which demands the right of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, as bearing “specific historical meanings that to a great many people imply the eradication of Jews from Israel.”

Harvard substantially tightened its regulations regarding student protests, in January 2024, and increased the police presence on its campus. It barred 13 students from graduating, citing alleged policy violations linked to their participation in a protest encampment, despite an earlier agreement to avoid punitive measures. It placed more than 20 students on “involuntary leave” and in some cases evicted students from their housing.

Such policies were replicated across the country.

The capitulations and crackdowns on pro-Palestine activism, academic freedom, freedom of speech, suspensions, expulsions and firings, since Oct. 7, 2023, have not spared U.S. colleges and universities from further attacks.

Since Trump took office, at least $11 billion in federal research grants and contracts have been cut or frozen nationwide according to NPR. This includes Harvard ($3 billion), Columbia ($400 million), University of Pennsylvania ($175 million) and Brandeis ($6-7.5 million annually).

On May 22, the Trump administration intensified its attacks on Harvard byterminating its ability to enroll international students that make up around 27 percent of the student body.

“This administration is holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus,” Kristi Noem, DHS Secretary wrote on X, when posting screenshots of the letter she sent to Harvard revoking foreign student enrollment. “Let this serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions across the country.”

Harvard, like Columbia, the media, the Democratic Party and the liberal class, misread power. By refusing to acknowledge or name the genocide in Gaza, and persecuting those who do, they provided the bullets to their own executioners.

They are paying the price for their stupidity and cowardice.

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Victory Day Parade on Red Square on 9 May 2025. Photograph Source: Kremlin.ru – CC BY 4.0

Nobody doubts the difficulty of counting the dead in war. Hence the omnipresent tomb for The Unknown Soldier which commemorates that sad reality. But sometimes deficiencies in counting are about something else. Look at Gaza’s grim counter which seems to have got stuck at 52,000 when everybody knows the number is much higher. Given that by June 2024 over 39000 Palestinian deaths had been recorded, it is hard not to believe that the West has imposed its own moratorium on reporting fatalities; perhaps in some vain attempt to assuage sensitivities back home.

One death toll that is well-known, however, at least to an older generation, is 27 million. That being the number of souls the Soviet Union lost in the Second World War. And it is generally acknowledged, by historians if not by European politicians, that the fight against Fascism could not have been won without that Soviet sacrifice – their costly victory at Stalingrad being the turning point that secured victory for the Allies. And to give the size of that death toll some historical perspective: the loss of 27 million people in 1945 would have equated to wiping out of the entire populations of Poland (24m), Lithuania (2.7m) and Estonia (1.08m).

It is therefore beyond disappointing that Europe’s current political representatives felt unable to show a modicum of respect for the horrendous suffering that preserved Western Civilisation. Indeed, Robert Fico, the Slovakian Prime Minister, who only last year was seriously injured by a far-right assassin, and Aleksandar Vučić, the Serbian President, were the sole European leaders in attendance at the 80^th anniversary of V.E. Day in Moscow. But whether in attendance or not, attempting to elide that immeasurable Soviet contribution brings nothing but shame on those engaged in such historical revisionism.  It also serves to remind us that Fascism was not a movement confined to Nazi Germany.

Kaja Kallas, Vice President of the EU Commission, and well-known Estonian Russophobe, scolded the two leaders for breaking ranks, insisting that they should have marked the day in Kiev. Not wishing to take anything away from the suffering of the Ukrainian people both in WW2 and today, in the West’s proxy war against Russia, but Kalas knows that it was the Soviet army that liberated Slovenia and Slovakia from both the retreating German Nazis and the Fascist Ukrainian Nationalists – the Waffen SS Galicia Division – who were then supporting them. None of us are responsible for the actions of our ancestors, but it is surely appropriate that commemoration day is spent on the soil of the liberators rather than in the country whose Fascist forces forestalled them.

Particularly on days set aside for honouring those killed in war, it is important not to besmirch their memory with political machinations emanating from the present, but unfortunately that is what is now happening. And it is happening because of European initiatives like the 2008 Prague Declaration which is a project aimed at reframing the narrative of WW2 along the lines of a ‘Double Genocide’ in which Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union are viewed as equally complicit in war crimes. Whilst such a revisionist proposal might seem far-fetched given that it is common knowledge that the Soviet army liberated Europe from Nazi Germany – according to historian Geoffrey Roberts 80% of all combat in WW2 took place on the Eastern front – the Double Genocide construct is being deployed in order to whitewash the fact that the war against Fascism was not fought by the whole of Europe. Not only were a number of European states allied with Germany, the so-called Axis powers, but in others, particularly in the East, there was active support for Nazi efforts to exterminate European Jewry. And it is the fact of Nazi collaboration that those states, now liberated from Soviet occupation and part of the EU, are having to come to terms with.

According to the Simon Weisenthal Centre, [SWC] “the rate of Holocaust murder in the Baltics was the highest in Europe.”  Many such murders were of individuals or families who were shot by their neighbours, often close to their home. Those neighbours were not criminals or thugs, but ordinary people drawn from all walks of life. Rather than acknowledging that painful reality, the governments of such states, particularly Lithuania, have chosen to downplay their complicity in the genocide by attributing the murders to the actions of a national independence movement seeking emancipation from Soviet occupiers and their communist supporters. The difficulty with that line of argument is that it implies that the murdered Jews supported the Soviet occupation of 1940, which is not true. But even if it were true, why would 220,000 Jews need to be slaughtered for their political views? Because most of these people did not die in battles, or street fights, or any sort of partisan confrontation. They were not even armed, and many were children. And what about the Jews who escaped being murdered and did join the partisans to fight the Nazis, would they be classified as war criminals, guilty of Soviet crimes? Unbelievably, under the Double Genocide dogma formalised into Lithuanian law the answer is yes.

+++

A further problem with this notion of Double Genocide is that in order to make Soviet killings symmetrical with the Nazi genocide, the definition of genocide has to be expanded from that contained in the Genocide Convention. The definition there was specifically drafted after the war to describe Nazi actions directed against ‘a people’, i.e., a genus; and in that case the people were Jews. In order for actions or inactions to be capable of constituting a genocide they have to be directed at ‘a people’ or part of ‘a people’, and not simply at people. And what constitutes ‘a people’ is defined in the convention as something ethnic or racial or religious or national, e.g., like the Palestinians. By expanding the notion of ‘a people’ to include Social or Political groups which is what the Lithuanian Criminal Code has done in order to incorporate Soviet killings, the definition of genocide has become so diluted as to be meaningless.[1]

The ‘Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism’ which, according to Wikipedia, is the initiative of the Czech government, was signed on June 3^rd 2008 by “prominent European politicians, former political prisoners and historians.” It also received letters of support from a cluster of right-wing elder statesmen – Margaret Thatcher and Zbigniew Brzezinski, being two of them. So the project is a large one, involving politicians, academics, historians, lawyers, Europeans government institutions and NGOs.  Its overt purpose is “to call for Europe-wide condemnation of, and education about, the crimes of communism.” Without any hint of irony, the Declaration states that its intention to create a “Platform for European memory and Conscience”, draws heavily on the conception of totalitarianism.

What is taking place here is more than the countenancing of an alternative interpretation of the past. Because what is emphasised in the Declaration is the need to forge a unitary view: ‘to consolidate .. a united European memory of the past.”  Apparently, ”Europe will not be united unless it is able to reunite its history,” which is an idea that is both novel and dangerous. How many countries, parties, people have an identical view of the past? The Declaration goes on to put forward a wide range of tactics through which the desired consolidation can be effected, including:- “a Europe-wide overhaul of school text books in order to educate children about the dangers of Communism; the establishment of a new remembrance day – Black Ribbon Day – which would unite Nazi victims with Soviet ones; the promulgation of new local laws in order to punish and provide compensation for crimes retrospectively identified as ‘Communist war crimes’; the setting up of commissions of investigation within nation states in order to identify Communist war crimes comparable with Nazi ones – the so-called Red-Brown commissions and the co-opting of historians and academics to sit on them. The late historian, Sir Martin Gilbert, resigned from such a commission in disgust at the Lithuanian government’s treatment of Jewish survivors of the holocaust, who were being ‘excoriated’ as Communists and threatened with prosecution for war crimes because they had joined the partisans. Unsurprisingly, none of the octogenarians were actually prosecuted, but no public apologies were issued either.

Unsurprisingly, the Declaration has received a lot of criticism concerning its revisionism and holocaust distortion.  The SWC described it as “a new and insidious combination of antisemitism and holocaust distortion”, “a well-coordinated effort to rewrite history and to persuade Western Europe to join in jettisoning the historic concept of the holocaust.” The SWC further suggested that “The goal of this sophisticated, new incarnation of extreme forms of local ultranationalism, antisemitism and racism, is to whitewash the massive Baltic nations’ participation in the murder of their Jewish populations.” It has certainly resulted in a number of historians, who have raised the thorny issue of local collaboration, being prosecuted for defamation, particularly in Poland. In the post Prague Declaration world, governments want their populations exonerated, not accused

The Declaration also serves to protect Nazi war criminals from prosecution, as historian and former Nazi Hunter Efraim Zuroff explains, “The lack of political will to bring Nazis war criminals to justice and/or to punish them continues to be the major obstacle to achieving justice, particularly in post-Communist Eastern Europe. The campaign led by the Baltic countries to distort the history of the Holocaust and obtain official recognition that the crimes of Communism are equal to those of the Nazis is another major obstacle to the prosecution of those responsible for the crimes of the Shoa.”

Coming to terms with your nation’s or, more precisely, your parents’ collaboration in a genocide must be unimaginably painful. When Anthony Eden, Britain’s war-time Foreign Secretary was asked by film-maker, Marcel Ophuls, what he thought of the Vichy government’s collaboration with their Nazi occupiers, he demurred, politely pointing out that ‘Britain had not been occupied.’ It was a gracious moment. But Ophuls’ 4 hour documentary about that collaboration: ‘The Sorrow and the Pity’ – was devastating for French society. In 1981, more than ten years after the film had been made and shown in selected cinemas, the French government finally permitted it to be broadcast on TV and the cocoon of imagined resistance was ripped away. Voices in the establishment regarded the work as a traitorous and damaging portrait of the French people, and had tried to block its screening. But ultimately the film had a transformative effect on French culture, especially on French film and literature.

Admittedly, French Liberal society’s comfort with Nazism was not as aggressively collaborationist as that of the independence-seeking countries of Eastern Europe – ordinary French citizens tended to ignore the genocide rather than aid it. Still, the very fact of Nazi collaboration by those nascent states raises an important moral question regarding a nation’s choice of allies in its fight for nationhood, as pointed out by Lithuanian philosopher, Leonidas Donskis, in his attempt to come to terms with his country’s collusion. Donskis does not seek to moralise and he resists dividing Lithuanian society up into Jews and Lithuanians, as is so often done. Instead, he blames his country’s crimes and moral failings on a lack of leadership; on the failure of the political elites of the time to delegitimize the rule of the occupier which was their task. In Donskis view, in failing to do that they became collaborators. When under Nazi occupation in 1941, the provisional government spouted the same racist rhetoric as their occupiers, as captured by an article in a contemporary news magazine, ‘The New Lithuania’, published in July 1941: “The New Lithuania, joined to Adolf Hitler’s New Europe, must be cleansed of Jews… Exterminating Jewry, and together with it Communism, is the first task of the New Lithuania.”

If, following the Prague Declaration, Nazism and Communism are to be conflated and some sort of criminal symmetry established, it is difficult to see what hateful ideological rhetoric Communism has produced that equates with the rabid racism above. ‘Workers of the world unite,” doesn’t seem to hold quite the same menace as ‘Exterminate world Jewry’. That is not to say that the Soviet regime did not commit war crimes; they did. The massacre of 20,000 Poles at Katyn being, perhaps, the best known. What Stalin ordered to be done was horrific, but it was not genocide. It also was not inherently Communistic. Likewise, Liberal and Conservative states have carried out comparable massacres, often in the name of ‘the Civilising process’, which had nothing to do with Liberalism or Conservativism, or being civilised. The same cannot be said about Nazism.

If, as the Declaration states, “children are to be warned about Communism and its crimes in the same way as they have been taught to assess Nazi crimes,” that would seem to suggest that supporting Communist principles of egalitarianism and antiracism is as criminal as supporting the racist, ethno-supremacist ideas inherent in Nazism which does not make any sense. And actually the wording of article 2 of the Declaration exposes this obvious distinction between the two ideologies which tends to get ignored by those advocating for symmetry. For what that article actually conflates are ‘Nazi crimes’ and ‘Crimes committed in the name of Communism,’ which are obviously entirely different entities.  Crimes can be committed through actions carried out in the name of anything: God, Religion, Civilisation – that does not mean that the entity the name is taken from is itself criminal. Whereas, the essential character of Nazism is criminal because it is an inherently racist, ethno-supremacist violent ideology. If you take the criminal elements of Nazism away, nothing is left.

Unsurprisingly, the Double Genocide movement has divided historians. Yiddish scholar Dovid Katz –set up a website www.defendinghistory.com to resist this revisionist history and was subsequently dismissed from his teaching post at Vilnius University. On the other hand, a recent history book that has, intentionally or not, been used to further that thesis is Timothy Snyder’s ‘Bloodlands – Europe Between Hitler and Stalin,’ which juxtaposes Nazi systems against Soviet ones. Omer Bartov – Professor of Genocide Studies at Brown admires Snyder’s analysis but finds the work biased towards Poland, lacking in new evidence, and failing to make sufficient reference to the widespread Nazi collaboration that took place. He also accuses it of “draining the war of moral content” and points out that it is reminiscent of the revisionist claims made by German historians in the 1980s – the historikerstreit – from which came the appraisal that apart from the gas chambers, Nazis were just fighting Communism. But what seems fatal to Snyder’s regime comparison is Bartov’s observation that a Nazi victory over the USSR would not have prevented the holocaust, as indeed it would not. And, further, following such a victory it is highly unlikely, given Hitler’s desire for lebensraum in the East, that there would have remained any East European states left to be liberated in 1991.

Postmodern thinking has dispelled the illusion of ideology-free narratives. The old idea that objective truth is obtainable in any of the humanities, or even sciences, untrammelled by social and political agendas has gone. And nowhere is that more apparent than in the study of history. Nevertheless, facts still remain – slender and isolated maybe, and awaiting the historian to gather them up and convey them to a wider public, but still, facts speak through the historian’s chosen narrative which is available for analysis and critique – to be read, perhaps, more like a witness statement than a true story. E.H. Carr, a British historian of the 60s who wrote the classic, ‘What is History?’ is probably not much of an exemplar on writing history today, but his observation that once facts are found,  you need a bag to put them in, captures the reality of any narrative. The point is to study the bag in order to discern whose interests are being furthered by that particular presentation of the facts.

All historical accounts, and even accepted definitions are essentially a mix of fact and ideology. And being aware of that – both as writer and reader – may bring us closer to the truth.  Nowhere is this more apparent than with the definition of Fascism itself. Presenting it as a fixed ideological structure locked in the past and twinned with an expired counter ideology gives the impression that it is a spent force, when it is not. Such an interpretation prevents us from recognising its chameleon-like fluidity, and its particular relevance today. As Mussolini proudly declared, “The Fasci di Combattimento – [the fighting bands] do not feel tied to any particular doctrinal form.”[2] And as for there being a totalitarian equivalence with Communism, Mussolini would have denied it, asserting in 1932 “A party which governs a nation in a totalitarian manner is a unique event in history. Neither references nor comparisons can be made.”[3] Whether or not the Prague Declaration or the war in Ukraine or the fall of the Soviet Union, or perhaps even the stuttering of Capitalism itself has brought this odious mentality that promotes the basest impulses of human nature back into view, a re-invigorated awareness of Fascism’s destructive capacity is necessary. For Fascism has the distinction of being capable of destroying more than regimes or even countries; it destroys a person’s humanity.

In ‘Anatomy of Fascism’, historian Robert O. Paxton, who wrote extensively on the Vichy regime, introduces Fascism as “the major political innovation of the 20^th Century.” It is more of a force than a repository of ideas and is capable of working with Liberalism and Conservatism, but its main focus is the destruction of the Left, particularly International Socialism – its primary enemy. Paxton dismisses the notion that Fascism is an ideology on the basis that unlike other ‘isms’: Conservatism, Liberalism, and Socialism, Fascism has no intellectual base. Fascism is not a viewpoint that debates. And the reason it lacks the intellectual content necessary for debate is because, unlike those other isms, it does not feel constrained by legality. As Engels presciently observed, “We (socialists) under this legality get firm muscles and rosy cheeks and look like life eternal. There is nothing for them (Conservatives) to do but break through this legality themselves.”[4] Though the mass approval that break through met with is probably something Engels could not have imagined. Thirty years later, however, the Communist International had woken up to that reality and described Fascism as “the open, terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.”[5]

Whilst Fascism itself has no pretence of an intellectual bent that does not mean it holds no appeal for the intelligentsia, quite the opposite as history has shown. But intellectuals don’t just jump on the Fascist bandwagon, they are there at its inception.  As Paxton explains “In the early days the intellectuals helped create a space for Fascist movements by weakening the elite’s attachment to enlightenment values – until then those values had been widely accepted and given institutional form in liberal society.” What the intellectuals, whether through the church or the cultural and political elites, provide is a kind of ‘cultural preparation’. In effect they open the door to Fascism. Fascism cannot do this for itself since it has only feet.

The proponents of political ideologies – of those other ‘isms’- have tracts and manifestoes ready to argue their cause and win support by showing their ‘truth’.  Fascism’s relationship with truth is entirely different, “truth was whatever permitted the new fascist man (and woman) to dominate others, and whatever made the chosen people triumph.”[6] What Fascism has are slogans and sigils and style bcause Fascism dominates in the aesthetic realm; that space we all look to when everything else in society seems full and used up. Paxton describes Fascism as “the most self-consciously visual of all political forms.” Presumably it would have to be since it works by contagion, hiding its vulgarity beneath a stylised veneer. Jewish philosopher, Walter Benjamin, who killed himself in Spain in 1940 rather than be murdered by the Nazis, was probably the first to write about Fascism’s aesthetic essence, “The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.”[7] Benjamin regarded Fascism as a ‘violation of the masses’ since it denied them their rights and kept the property structure intact, but gave them the freedom to express themselves, primarily through violence, and particularly through war. Essentially, it used them – it fed their senses, and emotions and then left them empty. Because in the spectacle of violence brought forth by Fascism, what is occluded, albeit momentarily, are the relations of power within society. In many ways it acts like a safety valve for the capitalist system, almost like a catharsis through which the masses could vent their frustrations and purify themselves – dominate and destroy other lives before returning to the servility of their own. As Paxton reports, although “early fascist movements paraded an anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeoisie animus, that rarely came to anything”, other than the destruction of the working class through the imprisonment of trade unionists and Socialists; it certainly did not alter the socio-economic hierarchy.

“The ultimate Fascist response to the Right-Left political map was to claim that they had made it obsolete” which in many ways they had: they were offering purgation in place of equality. Thus, they could claim to be “transcending that divide in the interests of the nation.” But then, as Donskis asked earlier, what sort of nationhood does Fascism offer? Because, as Paxton explains, ‘Fascism changes the fundamental nature of citizenship’. It is no longer about debate and party and representation – those aspects of the world of legality are left behind. Rather, it enforces participation in ceremony and ritual and violence, and ultimately enforces the most debasing forms of conformity – the contagion of the pogrom or the massacre or the race riot.

How individuals and communities come back from such depravity has been the challenge of modern nationhood. A challenge to which International Socialism believed it had the solution. Whether Israel can come back from the abyss of its own ultra nationalist ideology is perhaps the question more uppermost in people’s minds right now. Even if the Zionist state survives, which seems unlikely, what would it look like? ‘Soulless’ would probably be the single word most people would use.  Thereby confirming Socrates’ warning to the jurors who unjustly condemned him that they had suffered the greater loss. Which makes you wonder what it is that lures us to risk so much. What cause is worth such tragic undoing? Tolstoy thought it was patriotism and he could be right, because what is patriotism but the velvet glove for virulent nationalism?  Tolstoy interpreted Patriotism as meaning, “advocating plunder in the interest of the privileged classes of the particular state system into which we happen to have been born.’ And, if we accept his definition then perhaps we should hope that he is right and that in the future calling someone a patriot will be recognised as ‘the deepest insult you can offer him.’

Notes.

[1] It is worth noting that according to the Weiner Holocaust Library ‘the largest mass murder of a particular group in human history’ is that of Soviet prisoners of war, denied the protection of the Geneva Convention by the Wehrmacht. In total between 3.3m to 5.7m were murdered.

[2] Quoted in Anatomy of Fascism, pg 17

[3] Altro Polo – Intellectuals and their ideas in contemporary Italy, ed Richard Bosworth and Gino Rizzo, pg 17

[4] Friedrich Engels, 1895 Preface to Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France (1848-1850) quoted in Robert O. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism, 2004, pg 3

[5] Quoted in Anatomy of Fascism, pg

[6] Robert O. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism, pg 16

[7] Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production

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