Image by CODEPINK.

On Monday, June 16, Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) introduced legislation, a War Powers Resolution, to prevent President Trump from using military force against Iran without Congressional authorization. This will force all Senators to go on record supporting or opposing the following: “Congress hereby directs the President to terminate the use of United States Armed Forces for hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran or any part of its government or military, unless explicitly authorized by a declaration of war or specific authorization for use of military force against Iran.”

Sen. Kaine, a longtime advocate for exerting congressional authority over war, blasted Israel for jeopardizing planned U.S.-Iran diplomacy. “The American people have no interest in another forever war,” he wrote.

When Israel launched a surprise military strike on Iran last week, it did more than risk igniting a catastrophic regional war. It also exposed long-simmering tensions in Washington—between entrenched bipartisan, pro-Israel hawks and a growing current of lawmakers (and voters) unwilling to be dragged into another Middle East disaster.

“This is not our war,” declared Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), a Republican and one of the House’s most consistent antiwar voices. “Israel doesn’t need U.S. taxpayers’ money for defense if it already has enough to start offensive wars. I vote not to fund this war of aggression.” On social media, he polled followers on whether the U.S. should give Israel weapons to attack Iran. After 126,000 votes (and 2.5 million views), the answer was unequivocal: 85% said no.

For decades, questioning U.S. support for Israel has been a third rail in Congress. But Israel’s unprovoked attack on Iran—coming just as the sixth round of sensitive U.S.-Iran nuclear talks were set to take place in Oman—sparked rare and unusually direct criticism from across the political spectrum. Progressive members, already furious over Israel’s war on Gaza, were quick to condemn the new offensive. But they weren’t alone.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) called Israel’s strike “reckless” and “escalatory,” and warned that Prime Minister Netanyahu is trying to drag the U.S. into a broader war. Rep. Chuy García (D-IL) called Israel’s actions “diplomatic sabotage” and said, “the U.S. must stop supplying offensive weapons to Israel, which also continue to be used against Gaza, & urgently recommit to negotiations.”

Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA) was even more blunt. “The war criminal Netanyahu wants to ignite an endless regional war & drag the U.S. into it. Any politician who tries to help him betrays us all.”

More striking, however, were the critiques from moderate Democrats and some Republicans.

Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), Ranking Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, warned that strikes “threaten not only the lives of innocent civilians but the stability of the entire Middle East and the safety of American citizens and forces.”

Some pro-Israel Democrats are feeling comfortable speaking out on this conflict because it fits their anti-Trump critique. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) said: “We are at this crisis today because President Trump foolishly walked away from President Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement under which Iran had agreed to dismantle much of its nuclear program and to open its facilities to international inspections, putting more eyes on the ground. The United States should now lead the international community towards a diplomatic solution to avoid a wider war.”

Adding to this diverse chorus of opposition are some Republicans from the party’s non-interventionist wing. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) declared, “War with Iran is not in America’s interest. It would destabilize the region, cost countless lives, and drain our resources for generations.” Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH) lamented that “some members of Congress and U.S. Senators seem giddy about the prospects of a bigger war.”

And in a rare show of agreement with progressive critics, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) blasted the hawks in both parties. “We’ve been told for the past 20 years that Iran is on the verge of developing a nuclear bomb any day now. The same story. Everyone I know is tired of U.S. intervention and regime change in foreign countries. Everyone I know wants us to fix our own problems here at home, not bomb other countries.”

Of course, many in Congress rushed to support Israel. Senate Republican leader John Thune said, “Israel has determined that it must take decisive action to defend the Israeli people.” Democratic Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) voiced full support for the strike and urged the U.S. to provide Israel “whatever is necessary—military, intelligence, weaponry.” The most crass was Senator Lindsey Graham, who posted: “Game on. Pray for Israel.”

But these crude pro-war responses, once guaranteed to go unchallenged, are now being met with resistance–and not just from activists. With public opinion shifting sharply–especially among younger voters, progressives, and “America First-ers” – the political calculus on unconditional support for Israel is changing. In the wake of Israel’s disastrous war in Gaza and its widening regional provocations, members of Congress are being forced to choose: follow the AIPAC money and the old playbook–or listen to their constituents.

If the American people continue to raise their voices, the tide in Washington could turn away from support for a war with Iran that could plunge the region into deeper chaos while offering no relief for the suffering people of Gaza. We could finally see an end to decades of disastrous unconditional support for Israel and knee-jerk support for catastrophic wars.

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Photograph Source: Meghdad Madadi – CC BY 4.0

The neoconservatives who orchestrated the disastrous wars with Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya — and who were never held accountable for the profligate waste of $8 trillion taxpayer dollars, as well as $69 billion squandered in Ukraine — look set to lure us into yet another military fiasco with Iran.

Iran is not Iraq. Iran is not Afghanistan. Iran is not Lebanon. Iran is not Libya. Iran is not Syria. Iran is not Yemen. Iran is the seventeenth largest country in the world, with a land mass equivalent to the size of Western Europe. It has a population of almost 90 million — 10 times greater than Israel — and its military resources, as well as alliances with China and Russia, make it a formidable opponent.

Iran launched retaliatory attacks today on Israel following waves of Israeli strikes that hit nuclear facilities and killed several top Iranian military commanders and six nuclear scientists on dozens. There have been explosions over the skyline in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. There is video footage of at least one large explosion on the ground in Tel Aviv from an apparent missile strike and reports of other explosions in some half dozen sites in and around Tel Aviv.

“Our revenge has just started, they will pay a high price for killing our commanders, scientists and people,” a senior Iranian officials told Reuters. The official added that “nowhere in Israel will be safe” and that “our revenge will be painful.”

“They think it’ll be an easy war,” said Alastair Crooke, a former British diplomat and member of British intelligence (MI6) who spent decades in the Middle East, told me of the neocons when I interviewed him. “They want to reassert American power and leadership. They feel that every so often throwing a small country against the wall and smashing it up is good for this.”

These neocons, bonded with the Israeli leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, he went on, “will not tolerate any rival power, any challenge to American leadership and American greatness.” They will create facts on the ground – a war between Israel and Iran – that will “pull Trump into a war with Iran.”

You can see my interview with Crooke here.

While Iran’s air force is weak, with many of its fighter planes decades old, it is well supplied with Russian air defense batteries and Chinese anti-ship missiles, as well as mines and coastal artillery. It can shut down the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important oil chokepoint that facilitates the passage of 20 percent of the world’s oil supply. This would double or triple the price of oil and devastate the global economy. Iran has a large arsenal of ballistic missiles it can unleash on Israel, as well as on American military installations in the region. While initial waves can be intercepted, repeated attacks would swiftly deplete the Israeli and U.S. air defense stockpiles.

Israel is not equipped to endure a war of attrition, such as the eight year conflict between Iran and Iraq that ended — despite U.S. support for Saddam Hussein’s regime — in a stalemate, or as in Israel’s 18 year occupation of southern Lebanon that eventually forced it to withdraw in May, 2000, after repeated losses suffered from Hezbollah.

When Iran, in its Operation True Promise, launched over 300 ballistic and cruise missiles at Israel’s military and intelligence sites on April 13 and 14, 2023, in retaliation for an Israeli strike on the Iranian embassy in Damascus, the U.S. intercepted the vast majority.

“Israel cannot fight off an Iranian missile attack,” John Mearsheimer, a West Point graduate and a professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago, told me. “You have this very interesting situation where not only can Israel not win these wars, but they’ve turned [them] into protracted wars” in which “Israel is heavily dependent on the United States.”

“We have lots of assets in the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean, as well as in Israel itself and in the Red Sea,” he said. “These [are] designed to help Israel in its various wars. This includes not just Iran. It also includes the Houthis. It includes Hezbollah. So we are deeply involved in helping them fight. That was not the case in 1973 or any time before this war.”

Israel and its neocon allies believe they can eradicate Iran’s nuclear enrichment program by force and decapitate the Iranian government to install a client regime. That this non-reality-based belief system failed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, eludes them.

Israel, at the same time, wants to divert world attention from its genocide and mass starvation in Gaza and the accelerated ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. Internet connection has been completely shut down in Gaza. The West Bank has been placed under a total blockade.

“The Israelis understand that if you have a general conflagration, people will not be paying much attention to the Palestinians,” Mearsheimer said. “People will be willing to give Israel more of a pass than they would in peaceful times. So let’s really ramp things up. Let’s have a general conflagration, and the end result will be that we can cleanse, on a massive scale, in Gaza and hopefully in the West Bank as well.”

You can see my interview with Mearsheimer here.

Iranian attacks would eventually leave hundreds, then thousands dead. Iran will appeal to Shi’ite Muslims through the region in what the Iranian leadership will describe as a war against Shi’ism, the second largest branch of Islam. Saudi Arabia — which condemned the attacks on Iran — has two million Shi’ites who live in the oil-rich Eastern province. There are significant Shi’ite communities in Pakistan, Bahrain and Turkey. Shi’ites form the majority in Iraq.

The Shi’ite-dominated government in Baghdad will side with Iran. Yemen will continue to disrupt maritime traffic in the Red Sea and hit Israel with drone attacks. Hezbollah, however crippled, will renew attacks on northern Israel. Expect terrorist attacks on U.S. bases in the region and perhaps even U.S. soil, as well as widespread sabotage of oil production in the Persian Gulf.

Iran will soon have enough fissile material to produce a nuclear weapon. A war will be a powerful incentive to build a bomb, especially with Israel possessing hundreds of nuclear weapons. If Iran acquires a nuclear weapon Saudi Arabia will be next, with Turkey, Iraq and Egypt not far behind. The efforts to blunt nuclear proliferation in the Middle East will evaporate.

A war, as Mearsheimer points out, will also solidify the alliance between Iran, Russia and China.

“The United States has pushed China, Russia, North Korea and Iran very close together,” he noted. “They form a tight knit bloc. Largely as a result of the Ukraine war, the Russians and the Chinese have been driven together, and given what’s happening in the Middle East, the Iranians and the Russians have been drawn together. The United States may be helping Israel, but it’s important to understand that the Russians are helping Iran. It’s not to America’s advantage to have China and Russia aligned closely against Washington. It’s not in America’s interest to have Russia and Iran working together against Israel and the United States.”

“There’s always the possibility that if a war heats up involving Iran on one side and the United States and Israel on the other side, that at some point down the road that the Russians will get dragged into that war, because the Russians now have a vested interest in supporting Iran,” he added.

A war could last months, if not years. It will be an aerial duel, one largely between Israeli warplanes and missiles and Iranian missiles. But to subdue Iran it will require perhaps a million U.S. troops being deployed to invade and occupy the country. An occupation of Iran will end with the same humiliating defeat the U.S. experienced in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The fantasy of Israel and the neocons is that they can break Iran with aerial assaults, an updated version of Shock and Awe, the bombing campaign in Iraq in 2003. But the amount of ordinance required, especially to pulverize Iran’s underground nuclear facilities, will be massive. Israel, in its decapitation of the leadership of Hezbollah in Beirut, including Hezbollah’s General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah, had to employ Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) 2,000-pound bunker-buster bombs.

“If you’re going to fly F-35’s with JDAM missiles, each of those is about 14 tons,” Crooke said. “It’s not just the weight, but the fuel they use. So you have to refuel maybe once, refuel twice, then you’ll have to fight your aircraft to suppress their defenses. You’re talking about a huge performance. Is America going to be able to do this? The Iranians have multiple air defense systems and good radars, over the horizon radars as well.”

So why go to war with Iran? Why walk away from a nuclear agreement that Iran did not violate? Why demonize a government that is the mortal enemy of the Taliban, along with other Takfiri groups, including al-Qaeda and Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL)? Why further destabilize a region already dangerously volatile?

The generals, politicians, intelligence services, neocons, weapons manufacturers, so-called experts, celebrity pundits and Israeli lobbyists are not about to take the blame for two decades of military fiascos. They need a scapegoat. It is Iran. The humiliating defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq, the failed states of Syria and Libya, the proliferation of extremist groups and militias, many of which we initially trained and armed, along with the continued worldwide terrorist attacks, have to be someone else’s fault.

The chaos and instability we unleashed, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, left Iran as the dominant country in the region. Washington empowered its nemesis. It has no idea how to reverse this other than to attack it.

International law, along with the rights of almost 90 million people in Iran, is ignored just as the rights of the peoples of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria were ignored. The Iranians, whatever they feel about their leadership, do not see the United States as allies or liberators. They do not want to be attacked or occupied. They will resist. And we, and Israel, will pay.

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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

The falling out between Donald Trump and Elon Musk would make a grand opera. Two titans of business who entered a political marriage of convenience have had a predictable clash of egos and, instead of parting company privately, have flung mud at each other in public. Coming to the Met in 2026: Philip Glass’ monumental Musk v. Trump.

Don’t mistake this affair for mere entertainment. The deeper issue here is corruption and what happens when collusion goes awry, as it so often does.

The ostensible reason for the rift was Musk’s criticism of Trump’s budget bill, which the industrialist rightly pointed out would add trillions to the national debt. With the bill in danger of foundering in the Senate, Trump can’t afford to have a high-profile critic like Musk standing in the way of what might be his only serious legislative initiative.

This disagreement could have remained at the level of policy debate but instead quickly devolved into something closer to a schoolyard squabble. Musk claimed credit for Trump’s election. Trump pointed to Musk’s consumption of drugs during his DOGE rampage. The South Africa-born tycoon asserted a connection between Trump and infamous pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and went so far as to champion Trump’s impeachment. The president threatened to sever all relations between the federal government and Musk’s enterprises. Musk countered with a proposal to stop running flights for NASA, which would effectively end the transportation of U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station.

Both men have since stepped back from the brink (for the time being). Musk removed his Epstein and impeachment tweets from X and even acknowledged that they “went too far.” Trump stopped threatening massive retaliation (except in the case of Musk financially supporting Democrats). And Musk has approved of Trump’s dispatch of the National Guard to California to quash anti-ICE demonstrations.

Trump is famous for forgiving the worst examples of disloyalty—such as J.D. Vance’s comments that Trump was “America’s Hitler” and a “moral disaster—as long as that person has political/financial clout and is willing to grovel at his feet. Though he certainly meets the first condition, Musk is no groveler. So, don’t expect a reconciliation any time soon.

In fact, if contemporary parallels hold true, Musk should be either hiring more security guards, taking on more accountants to thwart an IRS audit, or preparing to relocate overseas.

The Fate of Oligarchs

If you fall afoul of Viktor Orban in Hungary, you might get frozen out of business deals, but you generally don’t have to fear for your life. Hungary is a member of the European Union and a popular tourist destination. However corrupt and autocratic Orban might be, he’s not a contract killer.

The same can’t be said of Vladimir Putin, who uses murder as a principal mode of dissuasion. The Russian leader arranges the assassination of political rivals (like Boris Nemtsov) to discourage serious electoral challenges. He facilitates the elimination of journalists (like Anna Politkovskaya) to ensure that the media doesn’t poke holes in Kremlin narratives. He oversees the removal of human rights activists (Stanislav Markelov) to send a message to civil society that Russia no longer tolerates “independent” spaces.

The business community initially thought itself safe. Most Russian oligarchs were on board with Putin because of the obvious benefits of doing business with the Kremlin. Of course, if you changed your mind about the Russian leader, as did oligarch Boris Berezovsky, you could expect retribution. He survived two apparent attempts to kill him with car bombs before fleeing to the UK where, in 2013, his death was ruled a suicide.

Even if Berezovsky did in fact kill himself—he was involved in an expensive divorce at the time—the Kremlin still managed to communicate its message: bad things happen to those who cross Vladimir Putin. Putin even created the new category of “death by association.” Several of Berezovsky’s associates—Georgian businessman Badri Patarkatsishvili (heart attack), former deputy director of Aeroflot Nikolai Glushkov (strangled with a dog leash)—were also found dead in London.

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, oligarchs started dropping dead left and right. John O’Neill and Sarah Wynne write in The Hill:

Vladislav Avayev, an immensely wealthy banker and government official, was found dead in his Moscow apartment, gun in hand, alongside the bodies of his wife and young daughter, all shot to death. He was described by neighbors as a “happy nerd.” Within 24 hours, Sergey Protosenya, a Russian natural gas oligarch, was found hanged in a Spanish villa. Nearby, his wife and young daughter were hacked and stabbed to death with an axe and a knife, both wiped of fingerprints. Much evidence suggests these were murders at the direction of Putin.

The list goes on: an aviation industry exec died after falling off his yacht in Vladivostok, a sausage magnate died after falling out of a hotel window in India, an oil company CEO died after falling from a hospital window in Moscow. Even non-Russian oligarchs who criticized Putin ended up dying in mysterious circumstances, like Latvian-American financier Dan Rapoport, who perishedafter falling out of a building in Washington, DC.

If you’re an oligarch and you criticize Putin, you should probably move into a ranch house.

Should Musk Worry?

Authoritarian regimes routinely dispatch their enemies. Kim Jong Un famously eliminated his uncle, who’d been possibly plotting to take over. Mohammed bin Salman’’s henchmen took a bone saw to prominent Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In the Philippines, under Rodrigo Duterte, more than a dozen outspoken journalists were killed.

Corrupt, semi-democratic states, meanwhile, go after their critics in other ways: squeezing their assets, taking them to court, forcing them out of the country. At the moment, Donald Trump is going down this road. As his dispatch of National Guard troops to Los Angeles demonstrates, he is certainly interested in quashing dissent. But he is generally doing so in more bureaucratic ways—firing federal workers, eliminating funding for NPR and PBS, leaning on universities.

When it comes to the corporate world, Trump has demanded fealty and, in return, has distributed administration positions like expensive party favors. Billionaires Howard Lutnick, Linda McMahon, and Scott Bessent serve in his cabinet. Several billionaires were given plum ambassadorial positions (Warren Stephens to the UK, Charles Kushner to France). Through the power of his office, he has made lapdogs of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. In the wake of the feud between Trump and Musk, Bill Gates visited the White House, hat in hand, to plead for the resumption of USAID funding.

Musk is perhaps the first high-profile, high-assets apostate. Given the resources at his disposal and his desire to influence elections, an anti-Trump Musk could pose a risk to MAGA Republicans. Ro Khanna (D-CA) even reached out to Musk’s people to see if he could help the Dems in the mid-terms. But bringing the most hated man in America into a party that has its own problems coddling the rich is not going to win any elections.

The Musk Affair is useful in other respects. It is the most prominent example of the corrupt practices of the Trump administration. Trump rewards his loyalists with power and money. He has fired the federal workforce not only to decimate the “deep state” but also to have thousands of new opportunities to distribute favors. The flip side of this patronage system is the punishment of defectors. Putin communicated the price of disloyalty very clearly to the oligarchs who dared to protest the war in Ukraine or the business practices of the Russian government. He has been careful, however, to maintain plausible deniability. Other leaders similarly punish their powerful opponents behind the scenes.

Trump prefers to make his threats in public no matter how unethical the actions might be. The cancelation of federal contracts with Musk’s companies would be as corrupt as the awarding of them in return for his political favors. Because he is an autocrat, Putin can act with impunity when he kills his challengers. Trump also aspires to act with impunity—indeed, his lawyers have argued before the Supreme Court that he has immunity for practically anything he does as president.

Corruption, however, has taken down many a ruler—Ferdinand Marcos, Viktor Yanukovych, Jacob Zuma. This could be Trump’s Achilles’ heel. Citizens tolerate a certain amount of corruption if they themselves are doing okay economically. But once the cuts in government services begin to bite, they will be newly appalled at the politically motivated contracts, the naked grab for money through pyramid scams like meme coins, and all the other pay-to-play games of access in Washington.

Trump can do a lot of damage to Musk and will do so in order to send a message to anyone contemplating disloyalty. But Musk can also do a lot of damage to Trump by amplifying an anti-corruption message through his social media platform. Musk himself is no Alexei Navalny. But if the Musk-Trump war goes hot again after the current ceasefire—and if Musk decides to go public with an insider’s account of the administration’s corrupt practices—it might cause some real damage to the administration.

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Smoke from Israeli airstrike on Iran. Screengrab from video posted to X.

Israel’s consistent attacks on Iran since 2023 have all been illegal, violations of the United Nations Charter (1945). Iran is a member state of the United Nations and is therefore a sovereign state in the international order. If Israel had a problem with Iran, there are many mechanisms mandated by international law that permit Israel to bring complaints against Iran.

Thus far, Israel has avoided these international forums because it is clear that it has no case against Iran. Allegations that Iran is building a nuclear weapon, which are constantly raised by the United States, the European Union, and Israel, have been fully investigated by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and found to be unfounded. It is certainly true that Iran has a nuclear energy programme that is within the rules in place through the IAEA, and it is also true that Iran’s clerical establishment has a fatwa (religious edict) in place against the production of nuclear weapons. Despite the IAEA findings and the existence of this fatwa, the West – egged on by Israel – has accepted this irrational idea that Iran is building a nuclear weapon and that Iran is therefore a threat to the international order. Indeed, by its punctual and illegal attacks on Iran, it is Israel that is a threat to the international order.

Over the past decades, Iran has called for the establishment of a Middle East Nuclear Free Zone, a strange idea coming from a country accused of wanting to build a nuclear weapon. But this idea of the nuclear free zone has been rejected by the West, largely to protect Israel, which has an illegal nuclear weapons programme. Israel is the only country in the Middle East with a nuclear weapon, although it has never tested it openly nor acknowledged its existence. If Israel was so keen on eliminating any nuclear threat, it should have taken the offer for the creation of a nuclear-free zone heartily.

Neither the Europeans, who so often posture as defenders of international law, nor the United Nations leadership have publicly pushed Israel to adopt this idea because both recognise that this would require Israel, not Iran, to denuclearise. That this is an improbable situation has meant that there has been no movement from the West or from the international institutions to take this idea forward and build an international consensus to develop a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East.

Israel does not want to build a nuclear-free zone in the region. What Israel wants is to be the sole nuclear power in the region, and therefore to be exactly what it is – namely, the largest United States military base in the world that happens to be the home to a large civilian population. Iran has no ambition to be a nuclear power. But it has an ambition to be a sovereign state that remains committed to justice for the Palestinians. Israel has no problem with the idea of sovereignty per se, but has a problem with any state in the region that commits itself to Palestinian emancipation. If Iran normalised relations with Israel and ceased its opposition to US dominion in the region, then it is likely that Israel would end its opposition to Iran.

Israel and the United States Prepared the Way

In January 2020, the United States conducted an illegal assassination at Iraq’s Baghdad Airport to kill General Qassim Soleimani, the leader of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Soleimani, through the Quds Force, had produced for Iran an insurance policy against further Israeli attacks on the country. The Quds Force is responsible for Iranian military operations outside the boundaries of the country, including building what is called the ‘Axis of Resistance’ that includes the various pro-Iranian governments and non-governmental military forces. These included: Hezbollah in Lebanon, various IRGC groups in Syria that worked with Syrian militia groups, the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, several Palestinian factions in Occupied Palestine, and the Ansar Allah government in Yemen. Without its own nuclear deterrent, Iran required some way to balance the military superiority of Israel and the United States. This deterrence was created by the ‘Axis of Resistance’, an insurance policy that allowed Iran to let Israel know that if Israel fired at Iran, these groups would rain missiles on Tel Aviv in retaliation.

The assassination of Soleimani began a determined new political and military campaign by the United States, Israel, and their European allies to weaken Iran. Israel and the United States began to punctually strike Iranian logistical bases in Syria and Iraq to weaken Iran’s forward posture and to demoralise the Syrian and Iraqi militia groups that operated against Israeli interests. Israel began to assassinate IRGC military officers in Syria, Iran, and Iraq, a campaign of murder that began to have an impact on the IRGC and the Quds Force.

Taking advantage of its genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza, Israel, with full support from the United States and Europe, began to damage the ‘Axis of Resistance’, Iran’s insurance policy. Israel took its war into Lebanon, with a ruthless bombing campaign that included the assassination of the Hezbollah leader Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah on 27 September 2024. This campaign, while it has not totally demolished Hezbollah, has certainly weakened it. Meanwhile, Israel began a regular bombing campaign against the Syrian military positions around Damascus and along the road to Idlib in the north. This bombing campaign, coordinated with the US military and with the US intelligence services, was designed to open the roadway for the entry of the former al-Qaeda fighters into Damascus and to overthrow the government of al-Assad on 8 December 2024. The fall of the al-Assad government dented Iran’s strength across the Levant region (from the Turkish border to the Occupied Palestinian Territory) as well as along the plains from southern Syria to the Iranian border. The consistent campaign by the United States to bomb Yemeni positions further resulted in the loss of Ansar Allah’s heavy equipment (including long-range missiles) that fundamentally threatened Israel.

What this meant was that by early 2025, the Iranian insurance policy against Israel had collapsed. Israel began its march to war, suggesting an attack on Iran was imminent. Such an attack, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knows, would help him in a domestic political fight with the ultra-orthodox parties over the question of a military exemption for their communities; this will prevent his government from falling. Cynical Netanyahu is using genocide and the possibility of a horrendous war with Iran for narrow political ends. But that is not what is motivating this attack. What is motivating this attack is that Israel smells an opportunity to try to overthrow the Iranian government by force.

Iran returned to the negotiations brokered by the IAEA to prevent such an attack. Its leadership knew full well that nothing would stop a scofflaw such as Israel from bombing Iran. And nothing did. Not even the fact that Iran is still at the negotiation table. Israel has taken advantage of Iran’s momentary weakness to strike. And that strike might escalate further.

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Photo by Jon Tyson

There are various reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, but there is one important factor that has not been sufficiently explored.  The Soviet Union in the 1980s had become increasingly irrelevant.  The irrelevance was particularly obvious in international economics, where the Soviet ruble was not a convertible currency; in international diplomacy, where the Soviet Union played no major role in the Middle East or the Global South; and in international ideology, where the Soviet model was a non-factor.  Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze understood that one of the major tasks of the Soviet Union was to restore Soviet relevance in all of these areas.  They had to grapple with the troglodytes in the Soviet leadership to reach this goal.  They tried, but they never achieved their goal.

We have our own troglodytes, although the United States is not facing the threat of dissolution.  Donald Trump’s executive actions are clearly weakening the international standing of the United States and begging the question of U.S. relevance in terms of its political, diplomatic, and even economic standing.  A strong case can be made that the U.S. role in international diplomacy is already weakening.  The United States is no longer a major factor in  the diplomacy of arms control and disarmament.  In fact, the U.S. emphasis on a national missile defense (the so-called Golden Dome) will worsen the strategic environment, and encourage many others to enhance their strategic offensive arsenals to overwhelm a Golden Dome or simply pursue their own nuclear weapons.  The Golden Dome will never be able to achieve its objective of providing strategic stability..  I will address the flaws of the system in a future article.

The Trump administration has made many mistakes in the past several months, but picking a fight with China is certainly the worst of them.  The Trump national security team is dominated by China Hawks who can’t tolerate the increased power and influence of China.  But China controls the global supply of many important rare earth metals and magnets.  The United States has limited exports of software for making semiconductors, gases such as ethane and butane, and components for nuclear and aerospace systems.  The Chinese have responded to Trump’s challenge  by placing limits on their export to the United States of the rare minerals needed for U.S. fighter aircraft, aircraft carriers, and strategic missiles.  Ford Motors has already had to close a factory in China because of a lack of magnets from Chinese producers.

Trump’s plans for a $175 billion antimissile shield, designed to shoot down ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles, wouldn’t protect the United States from drone technology, which has already changed the nature of war between Ukraine and Russia.  The Pentagon is overly wedded to piloted fighter aircraft, and has not invested in the types of small drones used so effectively by both Russia and Ukraine.  America’s adversaries will not try to emulate the United States regarding a national missile defense, assuming that a less costlier investment in offensive weaponry will be sufficient.  The United States will be a loser on all of these fronts as arms control becomes irrelevant.

China holds leverage in every aspect of Trump’s trade war.  Tariffs, moreover, lead to higher prices at home for businesses and consumers, and reduced economic growth.  Trump’s xenophobia and his campaign against U.S. elite universities and research institutions will encourage the best of our international students to return home, We will suffer from lost technological innovation as we lose the “best and the brightest” of our international students.  This happened in the Soviet Union in the 1980s and 1990s, and it happened in Russia in the wake of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Trump’s tariff war not only marks the decline of U.S. global influence, but it will weaken the value and influence of the American dollar. There are already indications that U.S. tariffs are hurting our relations with Southeast Asian nations, and that China is gaining from U.S. losses.  This is true in the global south as well.  There are signs that global investors are avoiding U.S. treasury bonds and pursuing alternatives to the American dollar,

Trump’s campaign of America First, which resembles the isolationism of Charles Lindburgh’s campaign against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 is creating setbacks on the international front.  While Trump ignores the genocidal military campaign that Israel is fighting against Palestinians, Europeans and others are stepping up their protests of the actions of Benjamin Netanyahu.  The foreign ministers of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom have announced sanctions and “other measures” against two far-right Israeli cabinet ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, for “inciting violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.  New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman warned that their “ugly, nihilistic policy in Gaza” will endanger Jews everywhere.

China is also gaining from U.S. withdrawal from full participation in the World Health Organization and the World Trade Organization, which the United States did so much to create in the first place.  China immediately announced that it would compensate for any losses that occur due to the reduced role of the United States.

Since the end of World War II, the United States has been a global leader, but has spent too many resources and too much energy in pursuing global supremacy.  The depressing state of our domestic political system can’t be addressed because the Republican-led Congress will not challenge the authoritarianism of the Trump administration.  The absence of a seasoned national security adviser and a fully-staffed National Security Council have ensured the absence of diplomacy needed to address international problems.

Our efforts to divide Russia and China have only driven Moscow and Beijing closer together.  But neither Russia nor China represents the threat or challenge that Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once represented.  It’s time for diplomacy to find a way to open talks with both Moscow and Beijing instead of pursuing a feckless dual containment that is only worsening tensions.  Both President Putin and Xi Jinping have signaled an interest in opening bilateral talks.  We have neither a plan nor a process for doing so, and the absence of a serious national security team guarantees a missed opportunity.

U.S. military supremacy has wasted resources and achieved nothing internationally and promises to create havoc at home in the wake of National Guard and Marine deployments that only serve the interests of the president.  Trump’s contempt for constitutional democracy represents the existential threat that demands the serious political opposition that is lacking.

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Photograph Source: @zelamine – instagram

Many years from now, long after Gaza has been obliterated and its unwanted survivors have been dispersed to whatever hellish limbo awaits them, in that distant future when everyone will have always been against this, I suspect what I will remember most from our end of the genocide is not the butcherers who have rotated through the White House and Downing Street and das Bundeskanzleramt, nor the savages-in-suits of AIPAC and the rest of the Israel lobby, nor even the supposed realpolitik behind it all—the oil-mad demand of Western powers for a beachhead in a West Asia that is too rich in combustible carbon.

No, what I will remember is my neighbors in Boulder, Colorado, and their reaction to the recent attack here on a group of peaceful protestors. In that reaction I have come to a better understanding of how easily the couple next door or the friends around the block become Hitler’s willing executioner’s—Bibi’s at any rate. The specific form of good German I have in mind are those who haven’t quite cheered on the genocide but have abetted it almost as insidiously by their obeisance to the authoritarians who tell them what to think and say about the slaughter. Their weakness of character—make that their abandonment of character—is the bulwark against which the genocidaires in Washington and Jerusalem place their backs, the surety that enables them to carry out the darkest of deeds in the broadest of daylight.

But first, a thumbnail of the events of June 1: On that sunny Sunday a group of protestors held, as they have each week for the last year and a half, a peaceful 18-minute vigil in downtown Boulder calling for the immediate release of hostages held by Hamas. The protestors were part of a group called Run for Their Lives, which has been holding similar weekly protests in a scattering of cities around the world. But on that Sunday, as you of course know, the Boulder group was set upon by an Egyptian immigrant, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, who burned fifteen people and one dog with homemade incendiaries while shouting “Free Palestine!” Elsewhere he had issued calls to “end Zionists.”

(It should go without saying that attacking peaceful protestors is abhorrent and intolerable, but because I will inevitably be tarred for this article as a supporter of violence, let me say here that I have no truck with it whatsoever.)

After an outpouring of sympathy for the victims—all to the good there—Boulder went off the rails. Or rather, it stayed on them, chugging blindly along on tracks that had been carefully laid, tie by tie, league after league, over many a long year. Three aspects of my neighbors’ response may be of interest beyond the parochial confines of Boulder.

First, virtually every public official, every civic group of note, every rabbi or business owner or passerby whom a reporter could scare up for a quote condemned the attack as “antisemitic.” Many of them declared that “Boulder’s Jewish community” had been attacked. The Boulder Daily Camera, the town’s pale imitation of a newspaper, flatly declared in article after article (typically in the lede, no less) that the attack was antisemitic, and the independent Boulder Reporting Lab did no better. Many Boulderites went still further and condemned the rampant and rising antisemitism in Boulder, and more than one said the attack was the predictable culmination of such hate. (Never mind that the attacker came from 150 miles away.)

What was lacking in these many declarations was proof the attack was antisemitic. Anti-Zionist, certainly; the attacker declared as much. Antisemitic? I know of no shred of evidence. While I’m not privy to every utterance of the unhinged Mohamed Soliman, from those that have been made public he seems to have been outraged by the genocide in Gaza and thought he was striking a blow against Israel and Zionism, not a word about Jews or Judaism.

It matters, of course, whether his crime is described as “anti-Zionist” or “antisemitic” because antisemitism is the brush with which Israel and the White House have long tarred critics of Israel’s many barbarities. Do you condemn Zionist settlers who brutalize Palestinians and kick them off their land in the West Bank? You’re an antisemite. How about the slaughter of infants and toddlers by the thousand? Antisemite. The slow starvation of two million people? The murder of those who seek aid at food stations? The destruction of their homes and hospitals and universities and mosques and anything else rising more than a meter or two above the Gazan soil? Antisemite, antisemite, antisemite.

Among Boulder’s broad spectrum of civic, business, and political leaders, just one refused to play along. A city councilor named Taishya Adams declined to sign a statement by the city council that declared “in the strongest possible terms that this was a targeted, antisemitic attack.” Adams asked the council to add “anti-Zionist” to its description, and her reward was multiple sharp, public dressings down from her fellow councilors and a sound pillorying by Zionist journalists as far off as Europe and Israel.

Until now Adams has not been a leader who has evinced—how to put this delicately?— notable acuity or dogged devotion to progressive values. (She has voted, for example, against a tepid 15-percent increase in the minimum wage, apparently having been dumb enough to fall for the Chamber of Commerce canard that paying workers fairly is bad for business.) But she had the intelligence to see through the lies about Gaza, and she had the courage of her convictions, and this show of spine stirred such horror among Boulder elites—“one of ours” had broken ranks!—that there followed a whole new round of inveighing against the rise of antisemitism locally.

Such was the frenzy that civic leaders, including the mayor (a man as weak of principle as he is of chin), got together with a far-right outfit called the Combat Antisemitism Movement to host what they billed as an “emergency summit” on antisemitism at the University of Colorado. The merits of this “summit” I think we can deduce from the fact that in eight hundred words telling us about it, the Daily Camera’s sympathetic scribe couldn’t find a single example of antisemitism in Boulder worth noting. He did, however, report that many summiteers were offended—offended, I tell you—by student protests against Israel’s genocide and, further, that the Combat Antisemitism Movement has called for legislation to outlaw the wearing of masks at such protests.

Lest there be any doubt about what “antisemitism” means in all the foregoing, let’s look briefly at another gathering, a vigil for the victims of Soliman’s attack, held at the Boulder Jewish Community Center. The organizers of this confab pitched it as a healing occasion but somehow saw fit to invite as speaker an envoy of the genocidaires: Israel Bachar, one of Israel’s consuls general to the United States. Bachar, not incidentally, is a political hack who was among those responsible for returning Bibi the Butcher to power in 2009. Inviting Bachar to your town’s therapeutic session doesn’t quite rise to the level of inviting, say, Steve Bannon, but the difference is one of degree rather than kind.

“Israel is facing a seven-front war,” Bachar railed to the crowd of twelve hundred people. “It is not a war that we initiated, but it’s a war that we are going to win. We cannot afford to lose this war.” This sort of talk isn’t even code anymore. Everyone by now knows its plain meaning: We will obliterate Gaza. Yet I found no sign of any Boulder leader who condemned this call to erase Gaza. Perhaps they were taking their cues from their constituents. When Bachar said, “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” the crowd applauded. To some sizable number of Boulderites, to criticize Israeli genocide is to be an antisemite.

My second observation is that in the many reports on Run for Their Lives, I’ve yet to come across one locally (or, come to that, nationally) that mentioned one salient and hard-to-miss fact about the group: its leaders and some share of its participants—I would hazard a majority of those—are squarely comfortable with genocide. This does not mean they deserve to be set on flame. But in our rush to sympathy, why must we omit this truth? If a bunch of Klan sympathizers were set on fire by a black man, wouldn’t their racist beliefs get a mention in the reports? And if the attacker had said he attacked them not because they were white but because he objected to their racist views, wouldn’t we think this might be so? Certainly we wouldn’t say this was an attack on “Boulder’s white community.” Most of us would say it was an attack on people who sympathized with the Klan.

But of course, to talk of such things—to acknowledge that some of the victims of Soliman’s attack likely favor genocide (and certainly that the group behind their rally does)—is the last thing a good German wants. It would, among other things, get in the way of hopping into bed, under cover of sympathizing with the victims, with some of Run for Their Lives’ more noxious bedfellows, like Consul Bachar.

Why do I say Run for Their Lives is at ease with genocide? For a start, at their protests in Boulder (and in other cities as well, to judge from photos online) participants commonly fly the genocidal flag, the avowedly Zionist standard of Israel, which all decent people surely now regard with the same revulsion that was once reserved for the swastika-emblazoned flag of Nazi Germany. But to say they fly the flag understates the case. Many of them, as I have seen in town, literally wrap themselves in the genocidal colors, swaddling their bodies in a flag that by now positively drips with Palestinian blood. The second-most-common flag at these affairs is the Stars and Stripes, banner of the genocide’s chief underwriter. To Palestinians and those who sympathize with them, these are not unsubtle messages.

Additionally, Run for Their Lives manages to lament the plight of the hostages on their website without breathing a syllable of concern for the genocide being undertaken in their name. “Innocent children, women, the elderly, and young people,” the site’s statement of purpose says, “should not be living in tunnels 20 meters underground for over a year—they should be in their homes with their families.” This is inarguably true. I couldn’t agree more. But what deformity of conscience allows a group to say such a thing without acknowledging that twenty meters above the heads of those few dozen innocents, millions of other innocents are being driven from their homes and are daily terrorized, with untold numbers of their families being maimed and murdered? Only people who have made peace, if that’s the word, with genocide could call for compassion for one set of innocents while ignoring the far greater devastation to innocents literally steps away.

By the same token, I know of no prominent person or group in Boulder (Councilor Adams excepted) who has used the word “genocide” in a statement condemning Soliman’s attack—nobody who has said, “No matter how appalled we are by Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, we unequivocally condemn Sunday’s attack.” Even the Boulder Progressives, the town’s softly left-of-center voice, put out a windy statement that couldn’t get past the attack’s “antisemitism.” So conditioned are my neighbors to the lie that to stand against genocide is to stand against Jews, they dare not even name the crime. Silence does not always signal consent, but it does always damn the silent.

For a final example of Boulder’s failure to name the truth, consider this sentence from a bookseller at the Boulder Bookstore, writing in the store newsletter after the attack: “Whether you need a book to help you cope with grief or stress, a journal to help you meditate and reflect, a history book to help better understand the complicated history of the Israel & Palestine conflict . . . we can help you find what you need.”

The complicated history, you see. That is of course how Israel’s ruthless settler colonialism has always been—and, now, its final solution no doubt will also be—obscured. It’s complicated.

It’s not, of course. But how many customers would the bookseller have lost had she written, “The history of Israel and Palestine is actually quite simple. Israel stole land that the Palestinians were living on and ever since has been brutalizing them and forcing them onto smaller and smaller parcels.”

My third observation is that what is remarkable about these two responses from Boulder—the rush to label the attack antisemitic rather than anti-Zionist, and the refusal to name the crime of genocide or the genocidal sympathies of Run for Their Lives—is that these sins are being committed not by elites but by what amount to commoners: two-penny town politicians, small-minded Rotarians, the corner-lot developers who populate the Chamber, even local liberals who fancy themselves small-bore, truth-to-power types. From the national elite, these responses would of course have been expected. Whatever they may personally believe, a congressperson or a governor, the president of an Ivy League university, a talking head or the editor of all the news that’s fit to print must either get on the Zionist bandwagon or risk losing their cushy perch, their government funding, their next primary, or their “relevance” among the nation’s other shapers of opinion.

But none of those motives applies in Boulder, which is why I find my neighbors’ responses so remarkable. Nobody in Boulder is going to be targeted above the table by AIPAC money or beneath it by Adelson money. Nobody is losing a hundred thousand X followers for a humane tweet against genocide. There is simply no structural incentive of this sort to go along with the madness. And yet Boulderites do.

Why? I believe it’s because like Holsteins at the trough, they have simply slurped up the propaganda about antisemitism that the New York Times, MSNBC, Chuck Schumer, the DNC, and all the rest of them have slopped out for so long. Boulderites, I gather, half-digest this swill in their own homes and then regurgitate it as cud to be chewed in coffee-shop conversations and text threads with friends and family. I’ve never thought much of the political insight of my townspeople (last time out they nearly elected a Republican mayor, for Christ’s sake), but I thought them marginally brighter than this. Up to two weeks ago I’d have wagered that a large number of them could see through such obvious lies. Apparently no. At any rate, if great masses do, they are silent or have been silenced.

A last observation: Back when this was Biden’s genocide, Boulder’s liberals found it convenient to buy the propaganda that Israel needed to defend itself by decapitating infants and strafing medics and torturing teachers. Not to swallow the agitprop would have meant confronting the “news” that the Democrats were genocidaires and, consequently, that to cast a vote for them was at best morally dubious. With Trump looming, my neighbors couldn’t abide such facts.

That it is now Trump’s genocide changes nothing. After all, were Boulderites now to call the genocide by its name, they would be admitting that they themselves have long been good Germans who abetted the butchery. To accuse themselves would also be to simultaneously accuse their like-minded friends and family—with unpleasant impacts on dinner-party invitations and serendipitous sidewalk chats. The cartwheels that people will do to avoid such psychic and social difficulties are really quite something.

This, I’m sure, is what I will remember years from now. The slaughterers in Washington and Jerusalem along with their abettors in high places like the Times editorial board may be the chief culprits of this genocide. But it is my neighbors—and, I suspect, many of yours—who are their willing executioners. By mindlessly parroting the lie that to oppose genocide is to be an antisemite, they make themselves the playthings of Netanyahu, Biden, and Trump, and those tyrants take their stupidity for the license it is to commit the gravest of crimes against humanity.

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Who Pays to Stop a Pandemic? Image: Sue Coe.

Throughout human history, zoonotic diseases, illnesses that jump from animals to humans, have shaped civilizations, triggered pandemics, and rewritten the course of economies. The Black Death, which ravaged Europe in the 14th century, originated from bacteria transmitted by fleas that lived on rats. Ebola, HIV, and SARS-CoV-2, which caused COVID-19, all had animal origins. As humanity’s relationship with animals has become increasingly industrialized through factory farming, the risk of zoonotic spillover has escalated.

Some diseases are transmitted through direct contact with animals, such as rabies from a bite or tuberculosis from infected cattle. Others spread through the consumption of poorly cooked meat, contaminated dairy products, or wet markets that sell live animals. Vector-borne diseases, where insects like mosquitoes and ticks act as intermediaries, transfer pathogens from animals to humans.

Factory Farms and the Growing Threat of Zoonotic Pandemics

The intensification of industrial agriculture has amplified these risks. The crowded, high-density conditions of factory farms create a breeding ground for disease. Animals raised in confined spaces experience high levels of stress, which weakens their immune systems and increases their susceptibility to infections. When a pathogen emerges in this environment, it can mutate rapidly and spread with alarming efficiency.

This is particularly concerning with influenza viruses, which frequently originate in birds and pigs before adapting to humans. Bird flu has been detected in sheep, raising concerns about the virus’s ability to cross species boundaries. Such a discovery underscores the unpredictability of zoonotic diseases, particularly in terms of cross-species transmission and the potential for rapid evolution of health threats.

Philip Lymbery, author and global CEO of Compassion in World Farming, thinks the danger is serious: “Factory farms are a ticking time bomb for future pandemics,” he says. “Hundreds of coronaviruses are in circulation, most of them among animals including pigs, camels, bats, and cats. Sometimes those viruses jump to humans.”

Antibiotics, widely used in industrial farming to promote growth and prevent disease, exacerbate the issue. Overuse has led to the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which can jump to humans through direct exposure, contaminated food, or environmental runoff from farms. The World Health Organization has repeatedly warned that antibiotic resistance could become one of the greatest threats to human health, rendering common infections untreatable. COVID-19 was a wake-up call, but it was not the first time a zoonotic virus wreaked havoc on global health. The HIV/AIDS epidemic, which originated from nonhuman primates, has killed over 40 million peoplesince it emerged in the 20th century.

The 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic, which was linked to pig farming, spread globally within months. Bird flu strains continue to pose a significant threat, with highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N1) causing sporadic human infections, resulting in a fatality rate of over 50 percent.

Reimagining Protein: Innovations That Could Prevent the Next Pandemic

Despite these risks, the global demand for animal protein is surging. Humans now eat 350 million metric tons of meat annually, nearly “a thousand Empire State Buildings in carcass weight,” according to academic and writer Tim Searchinger. The United Nations estimates that meat production will increase by more than 70 percent by 2050. This trajectory presents challenges not only for climate change, deforestation, and water pollution but also for the likelihood of future pandemics.

However, emerging innovations in food technology present possible solutions. Precision fermentation and cultivated meat are being explored as methods to reduce dependence on traditional livestock. Precision fermentation, which is used to produce dairy-identical proteins without the need for cows, utilizes engineered microbes to create compounds such as whey and casein.

Cultivated milk, bio-identical to cow milk but grown in a bioreactor rather than in a cow, is expected to enter the market soon. Cultivated meat, grown from animal cells in bioreactors, provides real meat without the need for slaughterhouses or crowded factory farms.

These technologies have the potential to transform global protein production, significantly lowering the risk of zoonotic disease spillover. Because they bypass live animals, they eliminate the risks associated with confined feeding operations, antibiotic resistance, and cross-species viral mutations. Studies suggest that precision fermentation and cultivated dairy could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 96 percent compared to conventional dairy farming.

Jeff Tripician, who has worked in the meat industry for 40 years, recently moved to head a cultivated meat company based in the Netherlands. He told the Future of Foods Interviews podcast that, “Cultivated meat is the only solution on the table.” In regard to bird flu, he went on to say that, “Livestock disease could wipe out huge areas of herds. We’re seeing that in the U.S. with egg-laying hens. Eight percent of the supply has been euthanized.”

Challenges for alternative proteins remain, including regulatory hurdles, production scaling issues, and consumer acceptance barriers. Governments worldwide are still determining how to classify and approve these products for sale, with Singapore leading the way in regulatory approval for cultivated meat. The U.S., Israel, and UK regulators are following closely behind, but widespread commercialization is still a few years away. Affordability is also a concern. Although costs are declining, cultivated meat remains significantly more expensive than conventional meat. However, as production scales, prices are expected to fall.

A Turning Point: Reducing Pandemic Risk Through Food System Reform

The transition away from industrial animal farming will take time, but the need for change is apparent. If the world continues down its current path, the risks of future pandemics will only grow. Addressing this problem requires serious attention, including government policies that promote alternative proteins, investment in food technology, and increased public awareness of the health impacts of factory farming.

Experts in epidemiology, virology, and food innovation continue to examine the intersection of food production and disease risk. Dr. Michael Greger, physician and author of Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching, has long warned about the pandemic potential of factory farming. Dr. Rob Wallace, an evolutionary biologist and author of Big Farms Make Big Flu, examines how industrial agriculture fuels the evolution of viruses.

Journalists covering the relationship between food, health, and climate change will need to monitor closely how food production impacts disease risk. There is no single solution, but reducing reliance on industrially farmed animals could significantly lower the likelihood of the next global pandemic.

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Photograph Source: Defense Dept. photo by Helene C. Stikkel – Public Domain

Former CIA director Robert M. Gates was on “Face the Nation” last month and demonstrated that there has never been a better truckler in the federal bureaucracy over the past four decades.  “Face the Nation” moderator Margaret Brennan gave Gates ample opportunity to separate himself from the Trump administration, but he used these opportunities to legitimize the actions of Donald Trump.

The worst of these examples took place when Brennan asked Gates to comment on Trump’s purge of the National Security Council and his appointment of Secretary of State Marco Rubio as acting director of the NSC.  Gates defended the purge by glibly remarking “be loyal or be gone,” which was his credo over the years.  Indeed, it was how he operated.

But the role of the national security adviser is probably the second most powerful position in any administration, since he or she must ensure that the president has received all policy options from the national security community and then to ensure that the chosen policy has been implemented.  The issue of “loyalty” is secondary; expertise and experience are paramount.  At this moment, the NSC lacks experience and has no leadership.  It plays no role in policy making.  As a result, there is no foreign policy process in the Trump administration.  It’s unusually random.

Gates ignored the opportunity to assess the role of real estate oligarch, Steve Witkoff, who actually performs as secretary of state in dealing with Iran, the Middle East, Russia, and Ukraine.  Witkoff is overmatched in dealing with the experienced counterparts that he is facing.  Gates truckled once again by endorsing Witkoff and favoring the role of “new faces” and “fresh eyes” in conducting sensitive negotiations.  When asked about the firings throughout the intelligence community, Gates punted and said he “didn’t know enough” to comment.

Gates, a former secretary of defense, made sure not to respond to any question regarding the current secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, who is incompetent in terms of the skill set needed for the job.  The same dance was conducted with respect to the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who is not hiding her role in politicizing intelligence prepared for the president on sensitive matters.

Gates even defended Trump’s style of negotiations as a tactical approach to ascertain what is possible from an ally or an adversary, and then switching tactics when faced with opposition.  The lambasting of Ukraine’s President Zelensky and the praise for Russia’s President Putin pointed to the random nature of policy making. There was also the one-day policy for turning Gaza into the “riviera” of the Middle East; the following day the policy was dropped and Israeli President Netanyahu had his free hand for pursuing the genocidal policy against the Palestinians.  He even praised Netanyahu’s military campaign for “changing the strategic equation” in the Middle East, and thanked Trump for getting the U.S. military back in the Middle East.

I’ve known Gate for more than 50 years so nothing in the interview surprised me.  I also learned from my military sources at the National War College that no secretary of defense in recent history was more brutal in crushing alternative views than Gates.  He did the same thing at the CIA in the 1980s as the deputy director for intelligence.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media has praised the actions of Gates.  MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, who conducted her own obsequious interview of Gates, described the former CIA director as a “public intellectual.”  Gideon Rose, then editor of Foreign Affairs, enthused that Gates was “cut from the same cloth” as the soldier-statesman George C. Marshall, and argued that Gates was “involved in making history over the last 30 years.”

Maddow and Rose and so many others from the media may be unfamiliar with Gates’ central role in politicizing intelligence on behalf of President Ronald Reagan and then CIA director William Casey.  Or they may simply be choosing to ignore one of the worst cases of politicization in CIA’s history.  Gates was of course totally wrong in exaggerating the Soviet threat in order to advance Reagan’s record peacetime spending on defense.  He made the entire CIA wrong in failing to report the Soviet decline in the 1980s that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the fall of the Warsaw Pact in 1990, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.  Some of the agency’s worst analytical failures.

Reagan nominated Gates to be CIA director after Casey died in 1986, but the director of the Senate intelligence committee, Senator David Boren, told Gates that he couldn’t get his committee to advance Gates’ nomination to the entire Senate for confirmation.  Gates withdrew his name from the process.  President George H.W. Bush nominated Gates five years later; Gates was confirmed but with more than 30 senators opposing the confirmation.  At the time, this was the most resistance to a confirmation of a CIA director since the creation of the agency in 1947.

Gates continued to defend Casey from the charges of politicization but, long after Casey’s death, he acknowledged watching Casey “on issue after issue, sit in meetings and present intelligence framed in terms of the policy he wanted pursued.”  I sat in on some of these meetings, and flinched as Gates passed notes to Casey to support the entire politicization effort.  Over the years, Gates’ recommendations to Casey included support for the use of force against Nicaragua and Libya in the 1980s, which is the very policy advocacy that CIA leaders must foreswear.

I can only suggest two possible explanations for CBS giving Gates a full hour interview that allowed for the one-sided assessment of the Trump presidency in national security matters.  Both explanations involve truckling.  First, CBS is truckling to the Trump administration so that its parent company, Paramount Global, can benefit from a merger between CBS and Skydance Media, which requires regulatory approval.  Second, Gates may believe that there will eventually be an opening for him at the NSC because Rubio can’t be an absentee landlord forever.  Gates, the windsock, is certainly always ready to serve…his master.

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Photo by Sunguk Kim

The US has a long history of not knowing how to end or peacefully resolve vexing international crises and conflicts with less powerful nations. 

A triumphalist attitude in the national character is partly to blame, but in part, at least, it is also likely the result of our history. 

The country was founded through an act of violence — a long war of independence which the rebels ultimately won. The new country was then enlarged through further acts of violence and the genocidal destruction of indigenous inhabitants. The new United States then established itself as a global industrial power by first a civil war that the Union won through application of overwhelming force and the destruction of a rival economy based upon slavery.  

Finally, there was the USA’s participation in two global wars in the 20th century in which the nation emerged unscathed itself, leaving rival powers, including its erstwhile allies, all battered and weakened, 

Through all that time the United States has had little experience with or interest in the art of negotiation. 

This preference for war and for the use of force to have its way around the world was only reinforced when both World Wars ended with the unconditional surrender of the losing side. These two unusual conclusions to wars led to an assumption in Washington and among the broader public that all conflicts should end that way. 

The Korean War should have disabused America of that notion. In that incredibly bloody conflict, three million Koreans — mostly civilians — and 38,000 US soldiers died and yet there was never any peace treaty. This was thanks to the  stubbornness by the US, Rather than seek peace once US and UN forces had pushed North Korean Forces out of the South, America instead pressed on toward the Chinese border, leading the new Chinese Communist government to send its own war-tested People’s Liberation Army flooding into battle, which led to a stalemate on the Korean Peninsula that has endured now for three-quarters of a century. 

Vietnam is another example of where the US slaughtered millions of civilians because it was unwilling to allow the people of a small country, Vietnam, that had struggled to free itself of French colonial rule, to be an independent country. Even though, during WWII,  Vietnam’s Viet Minh peasant army had helped the US and its wartime allies defeat the Japanese in the Indochina theater of WWII. they were prevented from  choosing their own path to independence.

The world thankfully has changed significantly since Wold War II. Not only is the US no longer the pre-eminent military power in the world, losing its war on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, but unable to win the war in Afghanistan,  but the proliferation of nuclear weapons to eight other nations means that even a relatively small power like North Korea can stand up against US or international pressure by simply threatening to use its nuclear weapons. 

And when It comes to the big powers — those with large military forces and nuclear stockpiles that could totally wipe out a rival or lead to global destruction — the idea that military force is the answer to conflicts, and that negotiation is weakness is nothing short of madness. 

Far too many of our leaders in the US and of late in Europe, don’t get this though (They are, that is to say, certifiably mad.) 

In the US, the country with the most powerful and globe-encircling military the world has ever known, promotes the idea of itself as a noble nation of Spartan “warriors” able to defeat any enemy (despite all the contrary evidence that no amount of military might can defeat  even a ragtag irregular force of fighters armed with assault rifles, homemade mines and a willingness to die for a cause). They also dream that American technology will eventually create a military so overpowering and perhaps automated, that Washington will be able to dictate the terms of its rivals’ submission. 

And so we have Donald Trump’s upcoming $50-million military parade spectacle in front of the White House next week to celebrate his 79th birthday and America’s military might, and we also have his hair-brained call for a hugely expensive “Golden Dome” of orbiting anti-missile weapons, to protect America from any and all nuclear threats. 

At the same time,  Russia’s Vladimir Putin is boasting about his country’s development of new hypersonic nuclear missiles. Instead of flying to targets thousands of miles away following easily predictable and perhaps intercept-able ballistic arcs, his new missiles autonomously hug the ground and are able to maneuver to avoid defenses or even switch to different targets, all while moving at speeds in excess of 15,000 miles per hour.

As the risk of big-power nuclear war rises to a level not seen since the darkest days of the Cold War in the late 1950s to 1970s, NATO countries, including the US, are providing Ukraine with long-range missiles made by NATO nations, missiles capable of striking deep inside Russia, perhaps eventually even hitting targets in Moscow and other large cities.  That is something that never happened in the last 80 years since the wartime detonation of two atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

Sanity seems to be in short supply. This is a problem in governments and among the public at large.

The US began this new nuclear brinksmanship back when the Bush-Cheney administration pulled the US out of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which banned the stationing of missiles located just minutes’ flight time  from the borders of each others’ borders. Obama later made things worse by approving a $1-trillion (now $2-trillion), 30-year program to refurbish, modernize and add new versions to its strategic nuclear stockpile. That program includes developing new delivery systems too. It was that program that has led to the Russians developing as a counter-measure almost impossible-to-stop hypersonic missiles that zip to their targets at close to grand level. (Note: these are not first-strike weapons as they would take far too long, coming all the way from Russia, to catch the US unawares with its  ICBM missiles still in their silos.)

 Now, we are hearing many of the world’s nuclear nations’ government leaders and military strategists talking as if war between nuclear powers is likely or unavoidable!  There’s Russia’s Vladimir Putin musing about nuclear weapons and saying “I hope they will not be required.” He says this even as the US and Nato nations like Britain and Germany provide ever longer-range missiles that the Ukraine military is  using to strike targets within Russia (something that never happened throughout the whole Cold War!). 

Last week, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that Britain must be put on a “war footing” because of Russia’s hypersonic missiles and increasingly long-range and powerful drones. Meanwhile, General Sir Roly Walker, new head of the UK Army, is warning that because of “converging geopolitical threats” of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, the British army has three years to “prepare for war.”  

Starmer’s response to that terrifying prediction, instead of looking for a way lower the temperature, is proposing that the UK purchase 36 US F-35A Lightning stealth fighter bombers, each adapted to carry two B61-12A thermonuclear bombs that can be set to explode with an explosive power ranging anywhere between 0.3 kilotons (300 tons  of TNT), and 50 kilotons, which is three times the power of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. 

As if that weren’t terrible enough, some US military leaders are similarly predicting that China and the US could be at war over Taiwan by 2027 — a war that would likely spiral to a full-scale strategic nuclear war  within days once started, especially if the US decided to honor its commitment to defunct Taiwan. 

Then too, there  are US experts saying that if the US and Iran don’t succeed I renewing the agreement the Obama administration reached for Iran to stop further enrichment of uranium to a point where it could be used to quite quickly produce a simple nuclear bomb, Israel would likely attack Iran to destroy its nuclear facilities, and probably much of its military and industrial sites — a development that could also spread, given Russia’s and China’s support for Iran. 

(Trump dropped out of that deal, refusing to lift sanctions on Iran late in his first term of office.)

War fever is getting so crazy that when a spy satellite took a photo of several rows of large tents numbering several dozen in a snowy field in Russia about 20 miles distant from the Finnish border north of the Arctic Circle, papers like the NY Times and the right-wing British Telegraph speculated about whether it means that a Russian invasion of the newest NATO member state (which during the Cold War had remained neutral) is imminent. Not mentioned is the fact that the US has long been conducting joint military exercises with new “front line” NATO countries — not just  Finland, but Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia etc.—all of which share borders  borders with Russia. 

Nobody in the West or in the western media is  suggesting that perhaps the US and NATO might be preparing to launch a war against Russia, but it’s worth considering that possibility, or looking at such joint exercises through Russian eyes. After all, the US is the country with first-strike weapons like the 400 super-accurate Minuteman missiles in hardened silos in North Dakota and other states, and the hundreds of Trident missiles in giant Trident nuclear subs off the coast of Russia. There is no purpose swerved by pinpoint accuracy for nuclear delivery systems except destroying unlaunched weapons in a surprise first strike. 

The same war fever is evident in the Asia, whereUS military and political  leaders meanwhile say that a war with China is “inevitable” within a few years. Why inevitable?  Because China is building an imposing modern military that could rival the US, at least in the western Pacific and South China Sea. Okay but why should that make war with the US inevitable? 

One might reasonably ask such question, since the US has had nuclear missiles and aircraft ringing China and Russia since almost since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, but hasn’t launched a war. However as I document in my book Spy for No Country (Prometheus Books, 2024), US nuclear war plans as early as 1950 for launching a first-strike on the USSR also included nuclear targets in China, including Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and other major metropolises.  

British Philosopher Bertram Russell, back in the dark days of the Cold War, sparked a mass international anti-nuclear movement by declaring “Better Red than Dead!”  I remember back then, as a pre-teen thinking that it sounded like a pretty self-evident concept, but many Americans — and the politicians they elected, rather incredibly saw the saying as outrageous. “Better dead than Red!” they’d boldly counter, perhaps not realizing their braggadocio was condemning their children and grandchildren to death, not just themselves. 

Looking back at the history of wars back to the beginning of the global war era, when mass killing on a heretofore unimaginable industrial scale became a feature of all wars, it’s hard to justify any conflict that has occurred. 

Let’s start with WWI. Europe stumbled into that war because of a network of bi-lateral mutual assistance pacts in which countries promised to come to the aid of each other.  In the event, one lone Croatian student anarchist assassinated the Archduke Ferdinand, heir-apparent to the Austrian-Hungarian empire throne, and that web of promises caused most of Europe to end up going to war lest their credibility be lost. 

There was no real purpose or clash of ideologies involved. Some15-22 million people died in that war, 9-15 million of them civilians. Many more were severely injured. That conflict had nothing to do with defending democracy — there were democracies and autocracies and even monarchies among the combatants on both sides. Could a better alternative have been found than a five-year war that left Europe in ruins and that dragged in a lot of other parts of the world too? Certainly!

Then there’s World War II. There, the monstrosity of Hitler’s Third Reich with its elevation of the Aryan race and oppression and hatred of the Jews, the Roma people, Communists and Socialists and the disabled, is often cited as a reason the war was necessary or at least justified. But consider this: The allies did almost nothing to save those millions of oppressed minorities who were tossed into concentration camps, shot in mass killings on the streets or burned in their shtetls during the Wehrmacht’s march into the Soviet Union. Even the US turned away boatloads of Jewish refugees during the war, and rejected pleas to bomb the dead-end rail lines that brought more doomed Jews to the camps and crematoriums. Japan for its part committed mass murder in its invasion of the Korean Peninsula, Manchuria,Nanjing and later Southeast Asia and the Philippines, but the US did nothing about it until the Japanese made the mistake of attacking the US Pacific fleet docked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. It was three years into the war before the US even began to fight, and not until the last 11 months that D-Day in Europe was launched. 

By the time that six-year war was over, including the incineration of two entire Japanese cities by America’s two new atomic bombs in three days in early August 1945, between 60-85 million people — civilians and military personnel — but the vast majority ordinary men, women and children, had died of bullets, bombs execution, starvation or disease. As for the over six-million Jews and Roma people who were killed by the Nazis, does anyone really believe that Hitler — even HItler! — could have carried out such a massive genocide had he not been able to conduct it inside of a police state that was entirely cut off from the outside world during the war? Could many of those people, and many of the millions of civilian victims and military draftees who died, as well as the millions who died in the Pacific Theater,  have been spared had the world taken collective action to prevent Hitler’s rise in the first place — for example by denying Germany’s industry and government credit as soon as Hitler set out to begin rebuilding Germany’s arms industry and military? 

Of Course it could have been done! But there was money to be made in Germany. So US industrialists like Henry Ford, George W. Bush’s grandfather Prescott Bush, and  many other of the of America’s financiers and banks, all through the 1930s until the Nazi invasion of Poland were happy to help with Hitler’s efforts by investing in the growing German economy and in making profitable loans to German arms-makers. And no politicians in the US wanted to allow millions of poor Jews into the as refugees.  

Honestly confronting these difficult questions becomes more than just a debating point and gains urgency because in a world of nuclear weapons, the scale of slaughter in any major war will dwarf what happened in the last bloody century. As Einstein once said , when asked what he thought of the future for a nuclear world, replied, “I don’t know how a  World War III will be fought, but I do know how World War IV will be fought: with sticks and stones.” 

My view is that my country, the United States, as clearly the most powerful nation in the world militarily, and for the moment at least, economically, and its people, have to assume the responsibility of making the first bold move of stepping back from disaster. What the world needs is not more and ever deadlier arms, not an endless cycle of one-upmanship in new weapons and new counter-weapons, but rather fewer weapons, better treaties, a revitalized world government with enforcement powers  and no Security Council vetoes.

When a weaker country tries to stop a war by trying to appease a strong aggressor, it only invites more aggression. It is only when a strong nation, confident in its power, calls for negotiations to achieve more peaceful relations, that a climb-down from hostilities can happen.  

We had a glimpse of how such a thing might work when President Ronald Reagan, an avowed enemy of Communism and a staunch Cold Warrior, knowing that the US, with its far stronger economy,  was winning the competition in terms of weapons development and acquisition, but he was willing to sit down with his counterpart in the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, and to talk about to reduce both countries’ nuclear weapons and delivery systems and the risk of their being used. And the two leaders did make concrete steps in that direction. 

The problem is that once that was achieved and once Gorbachev freed the Warsaw Pact countries to to go their own ways, Reagan’s second term ended. He was succeeded by George H.W. Bush, a former CIA Director. Bush didn’t reverse what Reagan had done, but he did nothing to advance the detente either and build on it. 

Bush was defeated when he ran for a second term only to be replaced by Bill Clinton, who then undid much of the developing new friendship and sense of trust between the new smaller Russia Federation and the US, by inviting a number of former “frontline” states that before 1990 had been Soviets (states) of the USSR or former captive states of eastern Europe, like Poland, Czechoslovakia and Rumania, to join NATO.

After surviving an attempted military coup, in which he was briefly detained, Gorbachev resigned from politics. He was succeeded as Russia’s leader by former Moscow Mayor Boris Yeltsin,  a former Communist who had gained considerable popularity for standing squarely against the attempted coup against Gorbachev, was elected president. He won a second term but his presidency was plagued by corruption and by his alcoholism. He resigned early in his second term and was succeeded by his chosen successor KGB veteran Vladimir Putin who was appointed to replace him.   

It’s difficult to guess whether the course of events from that point could have gone differently. Clinton, with his expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders, clearly wasn’t interested in seeing Russia become an integral part of Europe. The same is true for the Bush-Cheney administration.

The Obama administration came into office in 2009 looking to develop stronger economic relations with Russia but difficulties arose because his policy towards Ukraine was to leave eventual NATO membership —a non-starter for the Russians—up to popular opinion in Ukraine. And eventually, by 2013-14 his State Department, headed by Hillary Clinton and Undersecretary for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, two Cold Warrior relics who helped foment a coup to oust the elected pro-Russia president of Ukraine in a coup.  That pretty much finished any hope of a detente or a restoration of any trust between the US and Russia.  

From there things went spiraling downwards in the relationship. Any chance of a friendlier relationship and especially of a denuclearization by the two largest nuclear powers was over.  

That of course brings us to Trump’s first election as president in 2016. During that campaign, Trump made no secret of his favorable view of Putin as a ‘strong’ leader who had restored his country after years of economic decline following the collapse of the Communist government and the break-up of the Soviet Union. In his campaign he once famously publicly called on Putin to hack his primary opponent Hillary Clinton’s phone to learn what she was up to in trying to beat him in the coming November election. 

The Putin-Trump relationship is certainly warm, but it is very unusual too, because establishment military and national security people in the Washington bureaucracy and in Trump’s first-term cabinet kept him on a short leash in his dealings with the Russian leader. 

Trump’s loss to Joe Biden —  anther Cold War relic— further chilled relations, as a civil war raged in eastern Ukraine between the coup government in Kiev and ethnic Russian rebels in the Donbas region, who were being supported by Russia. 

Once Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, it effectively made  the US and Russia enemies, with the US supplying Ukraine with massive amounts of advanced arms. 

As Biden Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin admitted during a stealth visit to Ukraine in early May 2022, the US goal, which initially had been to help Ukraine halt the Russian invasion, had just two months later shifted. At that point, the  goal became a shameful strategy of actually prolonging the conflict, using Ukrainian soldiers to so “weaken” Russia that it could never again have the power to invade a a border state.

Others in the Washington national security establishment spoke of using the war to “bleed Russia” without involving American troops.

It was and remains an outrageous abuse of Ukrainian draftees who think they are risking death for their country, but are actually risking death for America’s geopolitical benefit. But it’s also a hugely dangerous game Washington is playing. Trump has at this point a much more pliant staff. At the same time, his relationship with Putin is not one between equals: Putin clearly understands Trump’s narcissism and knows how too play him by plying him with compliments, while not giving an inch on his goal of wearing down Ukraine to the point where that country and its people give up any idea of joining Europe and NATO. But if the US and NATO were to push too hard to the point that Putin faced rebellion or palace coup, the possibility of his turning to a ‘tactical “ nuke can not be ruled out. 

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Photograph Source: Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office – CC BY 2.0

At least 27 Palestinians were killed after Israeli soldiers opened fire near an aid distribution hub in Rafah, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza. It was the third such incident around the Rafah hub in as many days. What we are witnessing in Gaza is not merely a humanitarian crisis or a logistical misstep. It is a man-made catastrophe. It is a calculated design, turning aid into a lure that controls and displaces.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, backed by the U.S. and Israel, promises to feed a starving population. Yet its setup—centralized hubs in Israeli-controlled zones—feels less like salvation and more like a trap. My argument isn’t just about pointing fingers; it’s about unmasking how aid, sold as a lifeline, can morph into a tool of power. These hubs don’t just distribute food; they reshape Gaza’s social and spatial fabric, forcing people into perilous journeys and military choke points under the guise of relief. This isn’t charity—it’s control dressed up as compassion.

Gaza’s crisis is a global flashpoint, a place where 2 million people teeter on the edge of famine after a year of war and an 80-day Israeli blockade that ended in May 2025. The world watches, assuming aid is a neutral good, a bandage on war’s wounds. But when aid becomes a magnet for violence—31 killed on Sunday, three on Monday, 27 on Tuesday—it demands we question its deeper purpose. Are these hubs saving lives or reshaping them to fit a geopolitical agenda? The stakes are human: survival, dignity, and the right to stay on one’s land.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s system is new, launched May 27, 2025, to bypass traditional aid groups like the UN, which Israel accuses of letting Hamas siphon supplies. Yet the UN and others call this setup unethical, a “death trap” that forces Palestinians to trek long distances through war zones to reach food.

Witnesses describe chaos: gunfire from tanks, drones, and helicopters at the Al-Alam roundabout, a kilometer from the Rafah hub. The Red Cross reported 184 casualties there on Tuesday alone, many with gunshot wounds to the head and chest. The Foundation denies violence at its sites, claiming incidents happen “well beyond” their perimeters. Israel says its troops fired “warning shots” at “suspects” deviating from designated routes. But the pattern is undeniable: crowds gather, shots ring out, bodies pile up.

History shows aid as a tool of control, from colonial powers doling out bread to pacify restless subjects to modern refugee camps that segregate and monitor populations. In the 19th century, British rulers in India used food rations to quell dissent, tying relief to loyalty. During the Irish famine, soup kitchens doubled as conversion hubs, pushing Protestantism on starving Catholics. Today, refugee camps in Jordan or Kenya often serve as de facto holding pens, keeping displaced people in limbo while governments exert oversight. Gaza’s hubs echo this: centralized, militarized, and inaccessible to many, they dictate where people go and who survives. The UN warns this setup risks mass displacement, funneling northern Gazans south, potentially clearing land for Israeli control. It’s not hard to see the chessboard: aid as a pawn in a larger game.

The Foundation’s defenders argue it’s a necessary fix, delivering 21 truckloads of food on Tuesday alone. But the cost is clear—102 dead in eight days, per Gaza’s health ministry. The system’s flaws aren’t accidents; they’re structural. Armed U.S. contractors guard the sites, and Palestinians must navigate Israeli military zones, risking detention or death. The UN, boycotting the program, says it violates humanitarian principles by tying aid to military objectives. When Jake Wood, the Foundation’s ex-Marine head, quit days before the launch, he cited its failure to uphold those principles. His replacement, a Trump-aligned pastor, suggests politics, not neutrality, drives the operation.

Aid in Gaza isn’t just failing—it’s weaponized. It lures the hungry into kill zones, reshaping lives and land under the pretense of help. This isn’t about one tragedy; it’s about a system that makes tragedies inevitable. We must demand aid that reaches people where they are, not where power wants them to be. Otherwise, every box of food risks becoming bait in a deadly game. Gaza’s starving deserve more than a trap disguised as hope.

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Palestinian children on the streets of Deir al Balah. Photo: UNICEF.

A ten-year-old boy hasn’t spoken or eaten in days. When our psychologist finally gets him to talk, he asks a question that stops her cold: ‘Everyone says my friend went to heaven, but I didn’t see his head. How can he go to heaven without his head?’ This is mental health work in Gaza today.

How do you provide mental health care to people being annihilated? It’s a question I’m asked constantly as a psychiatrist in Gaza, and one that haunts every interaction I and other clinicians have with the children and families we serve. The answer, I’ve learned after 20 months of genocide, is both simpler and more complex than anyone imagines.

In my 20 years as a mental health professional in Gaza, I thought I understood trauma. Then came October 2023, and everything I knew about healing, resilience, and hope was tested against a machinery of annihilation that operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Mental Health and Forced Starvation

Nowadays, when we speak about mental health in Gaza, the main concern is the extreme worry of parents about their children’s general health after almost 20 months of deprivation of essential nutrients and now the absence of basic food. Families now prioritize who will eat today and who will not. At best, children receive one meal per day, and that meal lacks basic necessities like fruits.

Flour, the main ingredient in our daily meals throughout the Middle East and Palestine, is almost unavailable. Bread has become a memory. Now, families attempt to make bread from pasta. At least they put something in their mouths simply to cut hungry feelings.

The mental health impact of this long exposure to multiple traumatic experiences extends far beyond the catastrophic continuous bombardment that keeps children terrified and feeling on the brink of death at any moment. Multiple displacements, as families are forced to move from one unsafe area to another add new layers of hardship. In a harsh environment where 80 to 85 percent of houses and infrastructure lie destroyed, a child looks around and sees only destroyed homes, destroyed schools, and everything around them in ruins. How can they walk around? How can they think about a better day?

People say our children look numb – they are not responsive. For months we have heard about children becoming aggressive, having problems with each other, a form of expressing rejection. We are all rejecting the reality we live in, we are not happy, we are angry. And children, who are half our population, express this in very different ways.

There is a new symptom arising among adults. They feel not only angry and isolated, but unfortunately, they have begun feeling guilty. Guilty because they cannot help their children, they cannot even find food for their children. This is a strange feeling we are witnessing almost for the first time.

We add this to the usual symptoms: children being scared most of the time, problems with sleeping, nightmares, bedwetting, parents experiencing trauma like PTSD but also depression, severe anxiety, and physical pains. Those physical pains affect men, women, children, adults – everyone. It represents a variety of complex issues affecting people who have been exposed to this for 20 months, but also not for the first time. We do not speak about the third or fourth or fifth time, but multiple times since 2008, and even earlier because we have always lived under blockade, under occupation. Our lives were never peaceful, and we wake from one disaster only to fall into another.

Care in Impossible Circumstances

One thing we consistently see in people during emergencies and atrocities is their need to maintain a sense of agency – that they are accomplishing something. That is why now you see men and women constantly active: women do whatever they can to cook something for their children, men try to find any source of food here and there. And at the community level men and boys race towards every new bombed area to dig out the wounded and carry the victims to hospital on foot or any donkey cart or car. It is not an individual issue – the entire population of Gaza Strip experiences this collectively. That is why nearly every family member has a task, which somewhat masks the psychological impact on the population while simultaneously giving children roles they should not have. Kids who are six or seven years old should not be carrying bags of water and walking two or three kilometers to provide their families with drinking water or to recharge mobile phones.

This sense of agency alleviates the psychological impact. This is key when we meet people in the community – we currently have about 30 staff visiting shelters and tents, talking to men, women, and children, helping them express themselves, discuss their feelings, and receive counseling and stress management help. When there are urgent symptoms, we refer people to our community centers.

In those cases, we first ask people to look around and think about how they can help themselves and help those around them. In a way, this creates some feeling of agency that helps people move forward and think somewhat positively, if there is a chance for positive thought about what they can do.

Our teams take toys and stationery when possible, and this is a game changer. When children suddenly find they can express themselves through drawings and play, talking about the problems they face, they begin acting out – showing or discussing their fears when they draw destroyed houses, wounded people. Sometimes they draw blood, sometimes tanks. They draw what they feel, and this makes a big difference.

But of course, it is extremely difficult to help people while attacks continue. Ideally, psychological interventions begin when disaster ends or when people reach safety where mental health professionals can function like other healthcare workers or emergency workers. This is not the situation in Gaza.

Power of Expression and Healing

We emphasize that it is always important when experiencing stress to find someone to talk to – this is the simple truth. People must talk to friends, family members, colleagues, and discuss things. People can open their hearts if they can speak. For instance, if I had a terrible dream yesterday which reminded me of a house destroyed before my eyes, I talk to someone in the family or a neighbour in a nearby tent, and they share the same experience. Then there is a sense of a collective healing process.

But when it comes to children, they have different ways of expressing themselves. They are not yet mature enough to express themselves as we adults do. For example, they sometimes cannot say “we are scared, we are terrified,” but instead the child jumps from place to place, shaking or unable to stand still, becoming very irritable. Girls become very shy and isolated. Children become more aggressive – another example of how trauma expresses itself.

Here’s a story from a colleague. She visited a camp, and people told her, “Go to that tent, there is a lady whose son has not spoken for the last three or four days.” She went to that family and the mother told her, “Yes, well, it’s not only that he hasn’t talked for the last three or four days, but he hasn’t eaten anything either.” This story happened about two or three months ago when food was available – and when we say food was available, that means people had something to eat, not that they had real food.

Our colleague went and sat next to the child, who was ten or eleven years old. She had crayons and papers for drawing. She put them down and told the child, “I am a health professional, I’m here to listen to you. I heard you haven’t been talking for a while, but I am here to listen. Whatever comes to your mind, just talk to me.”

The child did nothing, said nothing. She waited, then told him again, “I am here for you.” After a few minutes, the child said, “I saw children I was playing with. They were killed in front of my eyes.”

He started to cry. A little later, she told him “they went to heaven” – something we say to children to calm them. This is what everyone says: they are in heaven, in a better place.

The child replied, “Everyone tells me that, but I didn’t see the head of my friend I was playing with. Only his body was there. How could he go to heaven without his head?”

She responded, “It’s God’s business. He is almighty and can do what is needed, and of course he can reunite the head with the body of that child.” She began comforting the child, saying, “I also heard you haven’t eaten anything. Can I bring you some food? And here are some crayons, and this bag is yours. It has toys and crayons. You can draw whatever you want.”

The mother brought food – a piece of bread with something in it – and the child started eating. He began not only to talk, but to play with the crayons and to eat.

When the psychologist shared this story at our community center, she was extremely happy because she had succeeded in getting a child to speak and eat. She spoke about how happy the mother was that the child was eating. They followed up with the child two days later and he was doing better, and they continued providing the care he needed.

Sometimes these small things you provide are very important. Sometimes you don’t realize how important they are until you see the significant change they create. With such a child, if he had not expressed what he thought about how a child could not be in heaven without his head, that would have remained a trauma with him forever.

We know trauma. Once you are exposed to trauma, the trauma remains in your psyche. You cannot erase it, but the question is: can you continue with your life? Can you process it somehow? Can you overcome it and move forward, or will it continue to harm you, to impact how you think, your capacity to concentrate, to learn new things, to continue with your life?

Today we discuss evidence-based transgenerational trauma. This is why we fear that what is happening will impact Gaza’s people not only for years, but for decades to come.

The Staggering Scale of Loss

The numbers now: the Gaza Health Ministry cites more than 60,000 people killed and more than 112,000 wounded, though research published in The Lancet suggested the death toll was 40% higher than that, taking into consideration those missing and under the rubble . Usually, not only this time but from previous attacks, at least one-third of the injured or killed are children.

We speak about 39,000 children who lost one parent. Among them, 17,000 lost both parents. The number of unaccompanied children who are the only surviving family member exceeds one thousand. Children who lost an arm or leg – children with amputations – number more than 800.

These statistics are staggering. They are for a society where before October 2023 half the population lived below the poverty rate because of Israel’s long occupation and subsequent blockade.

Imagine that those children have had no education, no schools for a year and a half, except the miraculous improvisations of Gaza’s teachers against all odds. They have not enjoyed any normal daily life during those 20 months. They live in tents, walk around destroyed places, are psychologically impacted, and see no positive signs for a better future. Not only that – bombardment continues almost every night.

Gaza Strip is about 40 kilometers in length and 8 to 12 kilometers in width. When bombardment happens in one place, everyone hears it. This is continuous exposure to traumatic events without a break that would allow healing, while living in appalling conditions not having adequate food – that enables you to stand up and walk around or run like children, to have healthy physical well-being. Nor do they have the support of the health system now suffering acutely and in crisis mode only.

Personal Losses

In 2014 our family was struck by tragedy. It was at sunset when the building was bombed, during Ramadan. It was when people sat to break their fast – around 6:00 PM after a long day of fasting for 13 or 14 hours. We were hearing the Adhan, the call for sunset prayer, the same moment when people begin eating.

We heard two large explosions simultaneously, and we knew where the bombing occurred. Later we heard the news and understood that the building with three stories had been leveled with 28 people killed, including three pregnant women and 19 children.

We spent the entire night trying to find people’s bodies. Even when we went to the mosque the next day to pray the funeral prayer, there was a large bag of bodies that were not identified or could not be separated – like everyone else, body parts were put together and placed in one grave.

It is something you can never forget. Something you must live with. I was blessed then by having many GCMHP colleagues around me, many colleagues from the international community calling, and of course family members and extended family relatives. It was one of the most reported events because of the high number of people killed in that single attack.

Then in 2023-24, many attacks killed hundreds of people. In another Ramadan, on March 18th when the ceasefire was broken by Israel and they began attacking again, they did so at 2:30 am. That was about an hour before dawn, when people were about to wake up to prepare for Suhur, the last meal before sunrise when people stop eating. Mothers were preparing whatever food they had when suddenly the loud sounds of bombardment – countless jet fighters struck Gaza at that moment, over that small geographical area simultaneously, terrifying everyone. Reports say that more than 400 people were killed during that attack, some as they slept.

Like any other family, some of my family members were also killed since October 2023 – in smaller numbers, different circumstances, but we are like any other family in Gaza Strip. Among those killed, missing under the rubble are members of   each family or extended family.

In April last year, two of my cousins from my mother’s side decided to return to their house to fetch something and collect some clothes. People had nothing when they fled their houses, and there were moments when they thought they could go back and grab something. These two children – one was 17, the other 16, who were cousins – decided to return to their house just to get a few things. One was particularly interested in getting his laptop.

They entered their house which was still standing in East Khan Younis near an area called Abasan. It seems they got inside their house, collected whatever they needed for their parents and siblings, each with a backpack filled, then headed back to Rafah to the tent area. A drone killed both.  Their parents could not go to say goodbye. People staying in a nearby school took the bodies and buried them.

A few weeks later, another tragic event involving people from my extended family were killed – another two young children, two brothers, one was 12, one was 15. Their only mistake was wanting better internet access, and they were in a building with internet access. The building was destroyed, bombed, and their bodies were in the rubble for hours. When they were pulled out, we went to the hospital in preparation for the burial.

I saw one of the fathers of the two children whose bodies were in the school, and he said, “Doctor, I don’t know what to say, but at least they saw the bodies of their children.” At least Ahmed (the father of the two killed brothers) could see the bodies of both his children and say goodbye to them, but my brother and I couldn’t say goodbye to our sons.

Trauma manifests in many ways, and the way people are exposed to trauma is different, but the impact is always unbearable, and we have to live with those stories. You have to survive, and that is why everyone living now in the Gaza Strip or who managed to leave Gaza Strip – is a survivor.

We speak about a survivor who spent 20 months running from one tent to another. We speak about a survivor who for 20 months only had the chance to shower five or six times – and for women this is extremely shameful. We speak about a child who has not had the chance to eat any kind of fruit for 20 months. We speak about a child who has never seen yogurt in his or her life.

Managing Anger

People are incredibly angry. I am also very angry, but over the years I learned how to manage my anger because you need to, one way or another – mental health workers mission is to help others. My other mission is to lead an organization that has the vision of a leading organization in the field of mental health and human rights in Palestine.

To continue that, we need to support our colleagues, support ourselves, know what to do, what to say, how to react. It is a very difficult job, in a very challenging context, but you learn how to do that. You learn it because there is no other way. We need to help the community, help people overcome difficult realities – I wouldn’t say cope because it’s beyond coping – but at least do something that would allow people to continue with their lives, prevent and minimize the psychological impact as much as possible. We try to work on resilience if any resilience remains. For that, you need to control yourself. That is how things are.

Mental Health and Human Rights

How can you be psychologically well when you are oppressed, when you do not exercise or practice your basic rights, when your right to health is absent, when your right to education is absent, when your right to safety is absent, when your right to peace is absent, when your social rights are not respected, when you experience daily violations of your basic rights, when your right to life is threatened daily. How can you survive that?

 You cannot live a healthy life or lead a healthy life when you are under oppression. We see this in victims of gender-based violence, domestic violence, in people living under oppression. But in Palestine it is unique that we speak about something happening for decades now. We are a nation not allowed to have its own state. We are people living in the 21st century under occupation, that destroys people’s daily lives, sometimes slowly and recently often in a flash.

These continuous violations of rights impact on how people live, how they think. As mental health professionals, we deal with the implications of those violations. Some violations are clear – they are visible like what happens now when people are killed or hear bombardment. Sometimes they are subtle.

For example, look at the West Bank. There are hundreds of checkpoints dividing the West Bank into segregated areas. People who work in one city, will take sometimes hours to reach their village or small town. There are uncertainties about everything. Schools sometimes in the West Bank close because of new settler or military violence, or road closures, or town closures.

When people go to pick their olives, this is now an annual ordeal for people. Throughout the world, farmers, when it is time to collect their farm production, it is a cheerful moment – everyone is happy. But not in Palestine. People are afraid that they can be harassed by settlers, their trees burned to the ground by settlers.

How can you psychologically survive such living conditions?

The Concept of Resilience

Resilience was something nice that I talked about twenty years ago, that I was proud of – that despite all difficulties, despite closures, despite blockade, despite the second Intifada. Despite growing up in such harsh conditions, Palestinians continue with their lives. We have the highest number of educated people, the lowest illiteracy in the Middle East, the highest number per population of master’s and PhD holders. These achievements are against the odds, and the explanation for that was “resilience” – young people are resilient.

Later, I started questioning what this means. Resilience means that despite all stresses, people do not develop mental disorders. They continue to psychologically survive. Well, we are surviving psychologically, but we are enduring so many difficulties, stressful events and times that this cannot continue. That resilience will not be able to continue forever. It cannot cover the reality or make us overlook the fact that we deserve to lead a normal human life like any other humans. We are entitled to moments of joy, to days of peace, and to lead a normal life.

Palestinians are very productive people. We deserve to live like any normal people, to thrive and see our children play, see our children have fun, and move on with our lives. The word resilience is like a reminder of how many difficult days we already went through.

Hope in the Darkness

The story of my colleague psychologist who told us about her visit to the tent – and we have many such stories – these are sources of hope. The mother of that child when she saw her son speak again and eat again is another story of hope. The story of 2 million people still surviving in Gaza Strip, despite all the horrors, is a story of hope.

Hope is present everywhere. When we had the two-month ceasefire, there were many groups of children whose families started arranging some education classes in tents. That is a source of hope.

When you see people who say “okay, we lost our house, but we are staying near our home and we are going to build it again,” that is a source of hope. When you see people sitting on the roof of their destroyed place saying, “Here we are present,” that is another sort of hope.

When you see how much solidarity exists in the international community, that is another source of hope. When you see people trying to call you to check on you, that is a sort of hope.

When you see a child who lost everyone in his family but lives with another family and thinks, “Okay, I am the survivor,” and continues with his life, that is a sort of hope. Just not being broken is a sort of hope.

That is what we try to do when we meet our people in the community – we help them identify good things around them, despite cruelties and challenges, and this becomes a source of hope. Our main source of hope is how miraculous our people are and that they are standing in front of that killing, massive killing machine, and they continue trying to survive.

A Misconception

We have seen that whenever a bombing occurs, Gaza is in the spotlight, people understand what is happening. When bombing stops, people think it ends the harsh living conditions and that people continue living in peace. This is not reality.

Between 2014 and 2023 – those nine years – the blockade on Gaza Strip with movement restrictions was always present. Drones flew in the skies constantly, reminding people of disasters. At least five large-scale operations took place between 2014 and 2023, reminding everyone of what disaster meant. Thousands of people with serious health illnesses could not get healthcare outside Gaza Strip because of movement restrictions.

This life under such human rights violations is not seen by the international community. People think life is continuing, like a disaster area where once war ends, recovery happens, and people continue with their lives. That is never the case, unfortunately, with the Gaza Strip.

In one month, two months, three months, one week – another ceasefire will be reached. That is what I pray for, what I hope for. But it does not mean our life will improve immediately. The immediate threats will stop, the bombardment sounds will stop, but our children will continue living for years with the rubble. For years to come we will not be able to rebuild all the schools and houses that were destroyed. Throughout those years we will have triggers that will keep reminding us of the traumatic conditions, of the displacement and attacks, the people we have lost – our beloved people, colleagues, friends, family members who were killed during the attacks.

The International Community Must Act

In every place where war takes place, there are rules and regulations that must be followed by law. For example, the right to health, evacuation of people who were wounded or killed, hospital safety, safety for healthcare workers, allowing food in, allowing water in. These basic things – allowing things needed for women and children, hygiene items – these very basic things are never respected and were never respected during those 20 months.

Rules are universal, and Palestinian people are not an exception. It is not acceptable that leaders of the international community are just watching and just talking. They do nothing besides making announcements or statements or sending reports and taking no serious action.

 It is beyond understanding. They need to be proactive; they need to take on-the-ground actions. Food is a very basic right. Medication is lifesaving.

As they fail with this, then why do we need them? What is the need for the international community, for INGO workers, if they cannot manage for two months now to get flour or milk into the Gaza Strip? What is the use of their presence?

 The international community has the power to act, but they must have the will to use it.

The international community has perfected the art of watching and making statements. But children can’t eat statements. Families can’t shelter under reports. If you cannot ensure that flour and milk reach Gaza’s children, then what exactly is your purpose? Mental health professionals understand this: healing requires action, not just words. The world’s mental health depends on it, too.

So, how do you provide mental health care during genocide? You do it by refusing to accept that any people deserve to live this way. You do it by helping a child speak again, by sitting with a parent’s guilt, by finding hope in the simple act of survival itself. But mostly, you do it by demanding the world remember that Palestinians are not resilient by choice—we are resilient because we have no other option. And that must change.

When this ends—and it will end—Gaza’s children will carry these traumas for generations. But they won’t be the only ones marked by this moment. History will ask what you did when you knew. Mental health, it turns out, isn’t just about healing trauma—it’s about preventing it. The question isn’t just how we provide care during genocide. It’s why the world allows genocide to continue.

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Fine (right) being sworn in as a U.S. Representative by House Speaker Mike Johnson (left), April 2025. Photograph Source: Office of Speaker Mike Johnson – Public Domain

On May 22, Sarah Milgrim, 26, and Yaron Lischinsky, 30, were gunned down outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC as they were leaving an event for young diplomats. The alleged shooter is thirty-one-year-old pro-Palestine activist Elias Rodriguez of Chicago. Video taken at the scene by an eyewitness shows Rodriguez, shouting “Free Palestine” as he was taken into custody.  “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza,” Rodriguez told the arresting officers.

The day after the shootings, Randy Fine, a Republican who represents Florida’s 6th congressional district, appeared on FoxNews.[1]  Fine, who describes himself on his personal page on X (formerly Twitter) as “Jewish and proud. Zionist,” said:

“This is what globalizing the intifada looks like. Palestinianism is built on violence. … This is a culture built on violence and we need to start to treat it that way. … We need to start to call evil for what it is, and not make excuses for it. And the fact of the matter is, the Palestinian cause is an evil one. …”

Asked about the possibility of a cease-fire in Gaza, Fine said:

“The only end of the conflict is complete and total surrender by those who support Muslim terror. In World War II, we did not negotiate a surrender with the Nazis, we did not negotiate a surrender with the Japanese. We nuked the Japanese twice in order to get unconditional surrender. That needs to be the same here. There is something deeply, deeply wrong with this culture and it needs to be defeated.”

Tucker Carlson, of all people, called Fine’s May 23 remarks “evil” and wondered why Fine has not been expelled from Congress.

In fairness to the congressman—fairness that Fine does not extend to Palestinians and Muslims—and in order to avoid a possible lawsuit for defamation[2] it is barely possible that when Fine said, “We nuked the Japanese twice in order to get unconditional surrender. That needs to be the same here,” the word that refers to unconditional surrender, not to “nuk[ing] the Japanese. If that is the case, then all Fine was calling for was Hamas’ unconditional surrender, not nuclear war on Gaza. However, every news story and commentary I have seen takes the position that Fine was calling for nuclear weapons to be used on Gaza. I think that’s a more likely interpretation.

Fine has embraced the nickname the “Hebrew Hammer,” which will be a terrific stage name if Fine ever joins the WWE (perhaps Education Secretary Linda McMahon could arrange an interview). Fine has a history of hateful rhetoric toward Muslims and Palestinians. Of Michigan Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, a Muslim and Palestinian American, Fine said: “She’s not a terrorist sympathizer, she’s a terrorist.” (Speaking of defamation, since Fine made this remark on a podcast and not on the floor of Congress, he may have opened himself to an action for defamation by Tlaib.)

I like to think that Fine is just grandstanding and not inciting genocide. Fine could be trying to distract his constituents from his enthusiastic vote for Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which among other horrors, would eviscerate Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP for millions of Americans.

+++

As yet, few public figures are promoting a nuclear strike on Gaza. President Donald Trump endorsed Fine’s run for Congress, but to my knowledge, has said nothing about Gaza and nuclear weapons. That’s not surprising considering that Trump wants to turn Gaza into a luxury resort (but not for Palestinians). In any event, the president has his hands full trying to dissuade Israel from launching a nuclear attack on Iran.

The most prominent advocate of a nuclear strike on Gaza is Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Graham is no friend to Palestinians. Recently, Graham turned his attention to the Madleen, a civilian vessel carrying 12 unarmed activists from the pro-Palestinian Freedom Flotilla Coalition. Up until June 9, the Madleen was en route to Gaza; its aim: to break the Israeli blockade and deliver desperately needed humanitarian aid to Gaza. Responding to a rumor that Swedish activist Greta Thunberg was on board (she was), Graham posted on X: “Hope Greta and her friends can swim.”

It turns out they did not need to swim. On June 9, the Madleen was intercepted and boarded by the Israeli military. The Madleen‘s passengers are now in Israeli custody. Israel says it expects to return them to their home countries.

Israel’s Minister of Defense Israel Katz smeared Thunberg and her fellow passengers as “antisemites” and “propagandists for Hamas.”

Returning to Senator Graham: during a May 12, 2024 appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, Graham told Kristen Welker that Israel is facing an existential threat. That’s nonsense. It’s the people of Gaza, not Israel, who are locked in an existential struggle. Gaza has never been able to destroy Israel. Most of Gaza’s population is in flight and Gaza can’t even adequately defend itself against an enemy that is armed to the teeth.

Graham asked: “Why’s it OK for America to drop two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end their existential threat war?” But it wasn’t “OK,” Senator. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were civilian population centers, not military targets, which made bombing them a war crime. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki do not justify using nuclear bombs against Gaza. That did not stop Graham from advising Israel to “do whatever you have to do to survive as a Jewish state.” Graham repeated: “whatever you have to do” twice.

Two lawmakers in the House have also trotted out the supposed Hiroshima/Nagasaki precedent. Representative Greg Murphy (R-NC-3) did so during a May 14, 2024 Newsmax interview. So did Representative Tim Walberg (R-MI-5).  At an invitation-only townhall on March 25, 2024, Walberg told constituents that “We shouldn’t be spending a dime on humanitarian aid. It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick.” Congressman Walberg said later that his reference to Nagasaki and Hiroshima was only a “metaphor” for the need to bring the war in Gaza to a “swift” end.)

In Israel, Knesset member Tally Gotliv demanded in an October 9 post on X that Israel use its nuclear-capable Jericho Missile, which she called a “Doomsday Weapon.”

Not to be outdone, Amihai Eliyahu, a minor cabinet minister who represents the far-right Jewish Power Party, caused a stir during a November 5, 2023 radio interview. Eliyahu said that using nuclear weapons “to kill everyone [in Gaza] is one way to go.” Using nuclear weapons was acceptable because, Eliyahu said, there are “no non-combatants in Gaza.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded that Eliyahu’s remark was “not based in reality” and that Israel would continue to follow international law (sic). Two months later, on January 24, 2024, Eliyahu reiterated his call to use a “nuclear bomb” n Gaza.

The truth of the matter is that Israel does not need to use nuclear arms in order to destroy Gaza. It’s doing just fine with conventional weapons alone. 54,700 dead Gazans can attest to that.

Ever since the US dropped an atom bomb on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 there has been an unofficial taboo on the use of nuclear arms in warfare. It would be an inestimable tragedy if that taboo were broken now.

Notes.

[1]  Representative Fine’s comments begin at 12:54.

[2]  Fine wrote on X that he is “exploring taking legal action” against Ynet News for quoting him as saying “we should nuke Gaza,” which Fine calls “a fabricated quote.”

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Photograph Source: Jaber Jehad Badwan – CC BY-SA 4.0

This is the end. The final blood-soaked chapter of the genocide. It will be over soon. Weeks. At most. Two million people are camped out amongst the rubble or in the open air. Dozens are killed and wounded daily from Israeli shells, missiles, drones, bombs and bullets. They lack clean water, medicine and food. They have reached a point of collapse. Sick. Injured. Terrified. Humiliated. Abandoned. Destitute. Starving. Hopeless.

In the last pages of this horror story, Israel is sadistically baiting starving Palestinians with promises of food, luring them to the narrow and congested nine-mile ribbon of land that borders Egypt. Israel and its cynically named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), allegedly funded by Israel’s Ministry of Defense and the Mossad, is weaponizing starvation. It is enticingPalestinians to southern Gaza the way the Nazis enticed starving Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to board trains to the death camps. The goal is not to feed the Palestinians. No one seriously argues there is enough food or aid hubs. The goal is to cram Palestinians into heavily guarded compounds and deport them.

What comes next? I long ago stopped trying to predict the future. Fate has a way of surprising us. But there will be a final humanitarian explosion in Gaza’s human slaughterhouse. We see it with the surging crowds of Palestinians fighting to get a food parcel, which has resulted in Israeli and U.S. private contractors shooting dead at least 130 and wounding over seven hundred others in the first eight days of aid distribution. We see it with Benjamin Netanyahu’s arming ISIS-linked gangs in Gaza that loot food supplies. Israel, which has eliminated hundreds of employees with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), doctors, journalists, civil servants and police in targeted assassinations, has orchestrated the implosion of civil society.

I suspect Israel will facilitate a breach in the fence along the Egyptian border. Desperate Palestinians will stampede into the Egyptian Sinai. Maybe it will end some other way. But it will end soon. There is not much more Palestinians can take.

We — full participants in this genocide — will have achieved our demented goal of emptying Gaza and expanding Greater Israel. We will bring down the curtain on the live-streamed genocide. We will have mocked the ubiquitous university programs of Holocaust studies, designed, it turns out, not to equip us to end genocides, but deify Israel as an eternal victim licensed to carry out mass slaughter. The mantra of never again is a joke. The understanding that when we have the capacity to halt genocide and we do not, we are culpable, does not apply to us. Genocide is public policy. Endorsed and sustained by our two ruling parties.

There is nothing left to say. Maybe that is the point. To render us speechless. Who does not feel paralyzed? And maybe, that too, is the point. To paralyze us. Who is not traumatized? And maybe that too was planned. Nothing we do, it seems, can halt the killing. We feel defenseless. We feel helpless. Genocide as spectacle.

I have stopped looking at the images. The rows of little shrouded bodies. The decapitated men and women. Families burned alive in their tents. The children who have lost limbs or are paralyzed. The chalky death masks of those pulled from under the rubble. The wails of grief. The emaciated faces. I can’t.

This genocide will haunt us. It will echo down history with the force of a tsunami. It will divide us forever. There is no going back.

And how will we remember? By not remembering.

Once it is over, all those who supported it, all those who ignored it, all those who did nothing, will rewrite history, including their personal history. It was hard to find anyone who admitted to being a Nazi in post-war Germany, or a member of the Klu Klux Klan once segregation in the southern United States ended. A nation of innocents. Victims even. It will be the same. We like to think we would have saved Anne Frank. The truth is different. The truth is, crippled by fear, nearly all of us will only save ourselves, even at the expense of others. But that is a truth that is hard to face. That is the real lesson of the Holocaust. Better it be erased.

In his book “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” Omar El Akkad writes:

Should a drone vaporize some nameless soul on the other side of the planet, who among us wants to make a fuss? What if it turns out they were a terrorist? What if the default accusation proves true, and we by implication be labeled terrorist sympathizers, ostracized, yelled at? It is generally the case that people are most zealously motivated by the worst plausible thing that could happen to them. For some, the worst plausible thing might be the ending of their bloodline in a missile strike. Their entire lives turned to rubble and all of it preemptively justified in the name of fighting terrorists who are terrorists by default on account of having been killed. For others, the worst plausible thing is being yelled at.

You can see my interview with El Akkad here.

You cannot decimate a people, carry out saturation bombing over 20 months to obliterate their homes, villages and cities, massacre tens of thousands of innocent people, set up a siege to ensure mass starvation, drive them from land where they have lived for centuries and not expect blowback. The genocide will end. The response to the reign of state terror will begin. If you think it won’t you know nothing about human nature or history. The killing of two Israeli diplomats in Washington and the attack against supporters of Israel at a protest in Boulder, Colorado, are only the start.

Chaim Engel, who took part in the uprising at the Nazis’ Sobibor death campin Poland, described how, armed with a knife, he attacked a guard in the camp.

“It’s not a decision,” Engel explained years later. “You just react, instinctively you react to that, and I figured, ‘Let us to do, and go and do it.’ And I went. I went with the man in the office and we killed this German. With every jab, I said, ‘That is for my father, for my mother, for all these people, all the Jews you killed.’”

Does anyone expect Palestinians to act differently? How are they to react when Europe and the United States, who hold themselves up as the vanguards of civilization, backed a genocide that butchered their parents, their children, their communities, occupied their land and blasted their cities and homes into rubble? How can they not hate those who did this to them?

What message has this genocide imparted not only to Palestinians, but to all in the Global South?

It is unequivocal. You do not matter. Humanitarian law does not apply to you. We do not care about your suffering, the murder of your children. You are vermin. You are worthless. You deserve to be killed, starved and dispossessed. You should be erased from the face of the earth.

“To preserve the values of the civilized world, it is necessary to set fire to a library,” El Akkad writes:

To blow up a mosque. To incinerate olive trees. To dress up in the lingerie of women who fled and then take pictures. To level universities. To loot jewelry, art, food. Banks. To arrest children for picking vegetables. To shoot children for throwing stones. To parade the captured in their underwear. To break a man’s teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth. To let combat dogs loose on a man with Down syndrome and then leave him to die. Otherwise, the uncivilized world might win.

There are people I have known for years who I will never speak to again. They know what is happening. Who does not know? They will not risk alienating their colleagues, being smeared as an antisemite, jeopardizing their status, being reprimanded or losing their jobs. They do not risk death, the way Palestinians do. They risk tarnishing the pathetic monuments of status and wealth they spent their lives constructing. Idols. They bow down before these idols. They worship these idols. They are enslaved by them.

At the feet of these idols lie tens of thousands of murdered Palestinians.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Most coverage of the May jobs data said the picture was pretty good, an assessment with which I largely concurred. The economy added 139,000 jobs and the unemployment rate remained at 4.2 percent, a historically low level. Wage growth also continued at a healthy 3.9 percent year-over-year pace, with the annualized rate over the last three months, a nearly identical 3.8 percent. All looks pretty good.

But it is possible to tell a more negative story. To be clear in what follows I am 100 percent guilty of cherry-picking. I am looking for evidence of a weakening labor market and ignoring factors that could go in the other direction.

The reason is that we have seen many data points elsewhere, notably indexes measuring consumer and business expectations, that paint a very negative picture of the economy. The reality and threat of massive tariff hikes has clearly scared people, as have the threatened and actual cuts in federal spending and employment.

It also has changed behavior in measurable ways, notably the surge in the trade deficit following the election and then the plunge reported for April. The deficit went from $74.3 billion in October to a peak of $138.3 billion in March and then fell back to $61.6 billion in April. People stockpiled items they expected to be subject to tariffs in these months and then cut back sharply after they had made their purchases and the tariffs started to take effect. So, the negative story is not based just on people’s speculation about the future, it can be seen very clearly in real world data.

I’ll also make an important point about the sort of recession we should be expecting. It will not be a cataclysmic collapse like our last two recessions. The 2008-09 recession was triggered by a collapse of an unprecedented nationwide housing bubble and then a subsequent financial crisis. The 2020 recession was the result of the economy shutting down due to the Covid epidemic.

The best comparisons for the sort of recession we are likely to see are the 1990-91 recession, which came on gradually, and the 2001 recession, which didn’t even feature the standard two consecutive quarters of negative growth.

Going back to prior recessions may also not be terribly useful since the economy was very different. Specifically, the highly cyclical manufacturing sector accounted for more than 21 percent of employment just before the double-dip 1980-1982 recessions compared to less than 8 percent at present.

The Bad Story for May

The start of the bad story is that the 139,000 jobs number reported for May is not as strong as it appears on its face. The jobs numbers reported for March and April were revised down by a total of 95,000. To be clear, there is nothing nefarious about these downward revisions, as conspiracy-minded folks had claimed during the Biden years. We simply got more complete data as more establishments responded to the survey.

The job growth was also highly concentrated in the healthcare sector. Healthcare has been leading job growth throughout the recovery, but the 62,200 gain reported for May accounted for almost 45 percent of job growth for the month. Given the likely cuts to the sector in the 2026 federal budget, it seems unlikely the rapid pace of job growth in the sector will continue.

Most of the rest of the job gains came from the local government sector (also being hit by cuts) and hotels and restaurants. Construction added just 4,000 jobs and manufacturing lost 8,000.

There is also some evidence of slowing wage growth. As noted above, the standard year-over-year measure shows no slowing, nor does annualizing over the last three months, but we do see a somewhat different picture if we compare the average of the last three months with the average of the prior three months. I had been using this measure for years because it gives us more recent data than the year over year number and also avoids the erratic movements we get from using data from a single month. I eventually gave it up when I realized I was literally the only person using it.

However, if we do look at the old Baker wage measure, we see that the hourly wage grew at a 3.5 percent annual rate, comparing the average of the last three months (March, April, May) with the prior three months (December, January, and February). That is a definite slowing.

If we look at the story with production workers in the low-paying hotel and restaurant industry, the annualized rate of increase was just 3.3 percent. Wages in this sector are highly sensitive to the tightness of the labor market. They rose rapidly in the tight labor market years of 2022 and 2023.

The household survey is also showing some signs of weakness. While I would not complain about the 4.2 percent unemployment rate, it is worth noting that the employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) fell by 0.3 percentage points as 625,000 people reportedly left the workforce.

This was not just baby boomers opting to retire. The EPOP for prime age workers (ages 25 to 54) fell by 0.2 percentage points.

We also saw some weakness looking at specific demographic groups. The unemployment rate for workers between the ages of 20-24, which is highly erratic, remained at the 8.2 percent rate reported for April. This is 2.2 percentage points above the low hit in January of 2024. Their EPOP fell to 65.4 percent in May, 2.8 pp below the peak hit last January.

Young workers tend to be hit hardest and first in a downturn for the simple reason that they are the ones most likely to be looking for jobs. The unemployment rate for workers between the ages of 20-24 had risen from a low of 6.5 percent in 2000 to 8.1 percent in April of 2001, just as the recession was beginning. It eventually peaked at 10.6 percent in 2003, a total rise of 4.1 percentage points

By comparison, the overall unemployment rate had risen from a low of 3.9 percent in 2002 to 4.4 percent in April of 2001 and peaked at 6.3 percent in 2003. The total increase was just 2.4 percentage points. In the 1990-91 recession, the unemployment rate for young people rose by 3.6 percentage points compared to a rise of 2.8 percentage points overall.

There is a similar story with the unemployment rate for Black workers. The unemployment rate for Black workers actually fell slightly in May to 6.0 percent, but that is still 1.2 percentage points above its low of 4.8 percent in April of 2023. The unemployment rate for Black women edged up to 6.2 percent in May. This is the highest unemployment rate since February of 2022.

The unemployment rate for Black workers rose by 4.0 percentage points in the 1990 recession, with the low actually hit just after the official start date for the recession. In the 2001 recession the unemployment rate for Black workers rose by 4.5 percentage points.

Another item that is highly cyclical and clearly pointing in the wrong direction is the percentage of unemployment due to voluntary quits. This measure reflects workers’ confidence in their labor market prospects since it indicates their willingness to quit a job before they have a new job lined up.

This fell to 9.8 percent, the lowest share since May of 2021, when we were still in the early phase of recovery from the Covid recession. By comparison, the share averaged 13.2 percent in 2018-2019, when the unemployment rate was roughly comparable.

The share of unemployment due to quits fell from a peak of 15.2 percent in 2000 to 13.3 percent in March of 2001, eventually bottoming out at 8.8 percent in 2003. The peak before the 1990 recession was 17.2 percent in 1989, falling to 15.3 percent in March of 1990 and eventually bottoming out at 9.5 percent in 1992. (The survey question for this was slightly different before 1994.)

So, does all of this mean a recession is on the horizon? I don’t think we can look at the May data and make any strong claims like this. However, we can say there are some clear warning signs in this report. It is far from unambiguously positive.

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It is clear that Donald Trump has been hoping for a protest that he can use to expand his use of the military and other militarized units.  A protest, no matter how modest, involving people of color and the issue of immigration presents the perfect opportunity.  Los Angeles may be that opportunity, although there is no evidence of a threat to public safety.

Trump has little understanding or appreciation for American history, so it is safe to assume that he also has little or no understanding of German history.  He might not appreciate a comparison of his activation of the National Guard to deal with a small street demonstration in Los Angeles, and Adolf Hitler’s handling of the Reichstag Fire in Berlin nearly 90 years ago.  Nevertheless, just as there was no justification for Hitler’s response to the fire, the Reichstag Decree, there was no justification for Trump’s federalizing of the National Guard to deal with dozens of U.S. citizens protesting the actions of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In 1933, Hitler was bent on intensifying the violence on the streets in Germany.  He received his opportunity in February, when a lone Dutch radical, Marinus van den Lubbe, burned down the Reichstag building to protest the injustices of unemployment.  Hitler used this opportunity to persuade his cabinet to suppress the Communist Party and to arrest Social Democrats and trade unionists.  There were hundreds of deaths in the streets of Berlin.

Van den Lubbe was guillotined shortly afterwards, and the German Supreme Court falsely concluded that the German Communist Party was responsible for the fire.  A special People’s Court was established with several judges from the Nazi Party to handle political offenses.  The head of the Communist Party, Ernst Thalmann, was imprisoned, and the Court made sure that defendants had few rights in defending their innocence.  Thalmann himself never got to court and never was formally charged, but he remained in prison.

It is far from certain how far Trump will go in exploiting the modest protest activity in Los Angeles, but it appears that many in the White House, including the president, are poised to exploit the situation, and were prepared to move forcefully if given the opportunity.  Unlike Trump’s first term, when he was denied the opportunity to activate the military to deal with domestic protests, there is no one in the current administration who can persuade Trump to apply the brakes.  In fact, the provocative rhetoric of subordinates such as deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, and immigration tsar Tom Homan, provides every reason to believe that Trump will be encouraged to federalize National Guard forces and deploy active duty military forces as well.  This is the first time that National Guard forces have been federalized since 1992, when there were serious civil rights protests.

The most dangerous step that Trump could take would be the invocation of the Insurrection Act of 1807 that empowers the president to nationally deploy the U.S. military and  federalize National Guard units of individual states to deal with civil unrest.  The Posse Comitatus Act prevents the use of the military in domestic situations, but it also declares that threats to national security would be an exceptional situation justifying the use of military forces.  We have already observed that the Supreme Court defers to the executive branch in any situation that could be labeled a threat to national security.  The American public would probably be supportive as well if a perceived threat to national security is declared.

The Insurrection Act has been modified twice to make it easier to declare an emergency.  During the civil war, the federal government was allowed to deploy the National Guard and armed forces in “anticipation of continued unrest.”  In the 1870s, the Act was expanded to protect African-Americans from attacks by the Ku Klux Klan, which was cited in 1992 when the National Guard was federalized to deal with desegregation fights during the Civil Rights era.  Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy used the Act to deal with political leaders who were fighting court-ordered desegregation.  Ironically, the last time the Insurrection Act was applied was also in Los Angeles, but that was a case that involved serious riots, unlike the pathetically modest and non-threatening activity currently taking place.

Just as the Reichstag fire was exploited to restrict civil liberties such as intercepting the mail and tapping phones, it is possible that expanded protest activities and the use of force, however modest, will lead to further restrictions on freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.  We know from Trump’s first term as well as the writings of Project 2025 that the MAGA movement has no interest in guaranteeing the constitutional rights of Americans, let alone immigrants.

One thing we know for sure is that the administration is doing nothing to deescalate  the situation or to bring the situation under control, which should be the primary objective.  Trump is bleating that “they spit; we hit,” and  that the bar to deploy military force is “whatever I say it is.  To make matters worse, Secretary of Defense Hegseth is talking about deploying the Marines.  Trump and Hegseth are obviously willing to politicize the military that would compromise public confidence in our armed forces.

We have been far too complacent thus far in responding to the illegal and unconstitutional activities of the Trump administration in its first five months.  We must continue to engage in civil disobedience against the illegal and unconstitutional actions of the Trump administration, although the current face-off will make it more difficult to do so if there is violence.  We can only hope that the citizens of Los Angeles will heed Governor Gavin Newsome’s request to avoid violence and make sure that Trump is not given the opportunity that he apparently seeks.

The post The Fire Trump Started appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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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.

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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.

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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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Getty and Unsplash+.

“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.

+++

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.

+++

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.

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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.

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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.

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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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