The author was held by the Egyptian police along with other activists by the side of the highway between Cairo and the Sinai. Photo by Tessa Kraan.

As Greta Thunberg plans her second attempt to reach Gaza, genocide through forced starvation  continues there. Thunberg will take part in the Global Sumud Flotilla departing from Spain on August 31st. This time, dozens of boats will sail via Tunis in an attempt to break the blockade that Israel has imposed on the Strip since 2007. The calculated nature of this orchestrated famine makes it unlike any other in the world. In June, Thunberg had already taken part in the Freedom Flotilla Coalition that was intercepted by the Israeli Occupying Force. Alongside the other members of her crew, she was detained, questioned, and deported.

At the same time that the flotilla was challenging the sea blockade, hundreds of activists flew to Egypt to walk to Gaza across the Sinai peninsula. The Global March on Gaza was an international effort bolstered by a motorised convoy from Algeria and Tunisia. These activists were rumored to have received free gas as they drove across Libya before being stopped at the Egyptian border.

I flew from Barcelona to Cairo via Milan to join the sizable Swiss delegation taking part in the march. On the plane, I spotted other unmistakable activists linking up with the Spanish delegation. The Egyptian authorities were said to be turning participants away at the border so we kept our distance from each other and maintained that we were coming to see the Pyramids.

An Egyptian NGO had organised buses to ferry marchers from Cairo to el-Arish in the Sinai. From there, the plan was to walk two days to the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing to increase pressure on the Israelis to open the border and let in thousands of tons of aid that are currently blockaded on the Egyptian side. There was never any pretence that we would try to walk into Gaza, but the hope was that combined efforts by participants from five continents would contribute to forcing our own governments to confront Israel’s genocidal policy.

I had not been to Egypt since 2007 – before Tahrir Square, the fall of Mubarak, Morsi’s election, and el-Sisi’s coup and consolidation. Surprisingly, much of Downtown felt familiar when I arrived without being delayed at passport control. (The FT reports that the rich have started to return to a neighbourhood where rents were slashed under Nasser.)

I was staying in a hostel directly overlooking Tahrir Square. I had decided to avoid the hotels recommended for our coordinators. This decision proved fortuitous as the Spanish delegation was raided by the Egyptian police and sent back to the Iberian peninsula. When we signed up to participate in the march, the organisers had informed us that the protest would be rubber stamped by the Egyptian government and that everything we did was legal.

I had reasoned that, despite its deference to the US and crackdown on all forms of political opposition, el-Sisi’s regime was at least nominally pro-Palestinian. In May, a previous protest had taken place in el-Arish and participants included 11 members of the Italian parliament and three members of the European Parliament.

My naiveté became apparent as activists with Arab surnames traveling to Cairo on European passports were turned away at the airport, and the organisers advised us not to congregate in Downtown Cairo and to avoid walking around with backpacks that might indicate we were joining in the march.

The Swiss delegation was working with a team of Egyptian lawyers to whom we gave power of attorney. When we contacted the embassy to inform them of our plan, they politely recommended that we go home.

The streets of Downtown were constantly patrolled, and the organisers had still not received approval for the march by June 13th – the morning on which we were meant to depart. The buses out of Cairo were off the table. We were all supposed to take taxis in pairs to Ismailia on the Suez Canal where the buses would pick us up.

Friday, June 13th was the first day of Israel’s strikes on Tehran. I buddied up with an American who had spent the month of January in the West Bank trying to prevent continued settler violence. Without incident we got out of Cairo and onto the single highway linking the capital to the Sinai peninsula. At the first checkpoint, the police took anyone aside who had a foreign passport. There were hundreds of us. The Egyptian government had banned the march. They made us wait by the side of the highway all afternoon.

Guarded by teenagers with automatic weapons, we hid from the baking desert sun behind a rest stop. The Sahara stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction. Keffiyehs came out of packpacks. The Turkish delegation led us in songs about internationalist solidarity. Activists posted videos urging those back home to call their embassies and pressure the Egyptians into letting us march. The Irish fainted in the 39°C heat.

As the hours passed, we tried to develop a collective strategy, but this move was impeded by the lack of organisation within each delegation. Before flying to Egypt, we had been asked to sign a pledge committing to non-violence, but beyond that, the march was politically heterogeneous. The sanctity of individual choice prevailed over the safety that comes with collective agency. Given the time constraints inherent in organising an international protest of this kind, there was no way we could develop the structures required for some kind of sociocracy. The allergy to hierarchy common in the European Left meant that we were bereft of any mechanism for making fast, democratic decisions. I felt that the lessons from Occupy and Tahrir Square had not been learned. As a European – ignorant of the local context, unused to political work outside the global North, unable to speak Arabic – I would have been happy following instructions that day. No sane organisation would give me the same amount of power as local organisers. Yet there we were, beholden to the whims of the least experienced in the group who would feel no obligation to follow what we decided regardless. We struggled to make a group decision: how should we react if the police decide to clear our little encampment? Should we attempt to link up with the rest of the march that was kettled one checkpoint further along the highway?

At 7 p.m., the police brought a convoy of buses to take us all away. Some people refused to board, and they were taken aside and put on a different bus. We panicked, thinking they would be detained indefinitely, but these activists were taken straight to the airport and deported. Given Egypt’s reliance on tourism – our lawyers later told us – the regime was reluctant to be seen putting visitors on tourist visas in detention. I felt that many activists behaved as if they were at a sit-in in some European city, rather than facing Egyptians not wearing any insignia or uniform. Were they police? Military? Men in polo shirts walked around with stacks of fifty passports stuffed into back pockets. The violence at the other checkpoint was far greater: videos of activists beaten and whipped began circulating online.

After two hours spent getting passports back to each of us, the convoy of buses headed for Cairo. As we turned off the highway, I assumed we were all being taken to the airport, but it seemed that the regime did not have the energy to organise flights for us all. Instead, we were dumped by the side of a motorway south of the city. We piled into cabs and headed downtown.

Over the next few days, as the Israelis tried to persuade the United States to bomb Tehran, it became clear that no second attempt at a march was coming. I ended up making a surreal trip to see the Pyramids – experiencing the common dissociation that comes when reintegrating mainstream society after political action.

In some ways, the aborted Global March on Gaza was like most political work: time-consuming, exhausting, frustrating. Nonetheless, I’m glad I went and tried to leverage what collective power we have right now in a situation that requires fighting for the least worst outcome. I felt inspired to be around people who had come from all over the world to be a part of that fight.

I hope that those in Gaza and the West Bank saw what we were trying to do and that it means something to them (even if you cannot eat solidarity). Hope is a practice – it dies if you do not maintain it.

You can donate to the Global Sumud Flotilla here.

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Photograph Source: kremlin.ru – CC BY 4.0

Vladimir Putin has been demonized. Not only is the president of the Russian Federation under indictment by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, he has been compared to Hitler, Stalin, and Saddam Hussein. Already in 2012, Reuters cited references to Putin as a “czar-like autocrat,” a “KGB thug,” More recently, after the invasion of Ukraine, Al Jazeera referenced Putin with words like “evil,” “unhinged,” and “unstable.” Should heads of states negotiate with people who are under indictment for war crimes or worse and are called “evil,” “unhinged,” and “unstable”? 

One reference to answer the question about negotiating with the evil Putin is Biblical. The Book of Job begins with a casual negotiation between “the Lord” and his sons, including Satan. “The Lord” boasts about “his servant” Job and Job’s piety. Satan replies that the only reason Job is so pious is because he is blessed with success in family and wealth. As Satan notes; “But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face.” That’s the challenge. Will Job remain pious if he is no longer blessed?

And “the Lord” accepts the challenge. “Behold, all that he hath is in thy power, only upon himself put not forth thine hand.” So “the Lord” accepts that Satan could take away all Job’s privileges, but not kill him.  

According to the Bible, “The Lord” negotiated with the Devil. Negotiating with the Devil is also the title of a book by the journalist/activist Pierre Hazan – Negotiating with the Devil. Hazan’s argument is that to establish peace in conflict zones requires negotiations with all relevant parties. In a phrase often used by conflict mediators; “If you are part of the problem, you are part of the solution.”

In this sense, there is no question that Putin must be included in negotiations to stop the Russia/Ukraine conflict. Despite Putin’s pariah legal status, with numerous sanctions and obligations by states to arrest him if he enters their territory, the Russian president cannot be ignored. (The United States is under no such obligation to arrest him since it did not sign the Rome Treaty.) Putin must be included in any negotiation. As far as we know, only he can stop the war. So to headline that Putin had already won the negotiations by being invited to the U.S. and regaining legitimacy ignores the necessity of talking to him. 

But even assuming Putin to be evil and that negotiating with him is a necessity, it does not follow that he should be treated with great fanfare.  It was not necessary, for instance, to give him the royal red carpet treatment when he arrived in Anchorage, Alaska, or to invite him to ride in the presidential vehicle, the Beast. There should be limits on how the Devil is treated.

Also, who is talking to Putin? Mediators are generally neutral, such as delegates of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Imagine the moral difficulty of those who negotiated with Slobodan Milosevic about access to prisoners of war during the Yugoslav crisis at the same time they were aware of atrocities being committed by the Serb forces under his control. Negotiating with the Devil does not include being chummy with him. 

Which brings me to the role of DJT. Who is Trump to act as mediator in Ukraine/Russia negotiations? He claims he has mediated a truce between Armenia and Azerbaijan, between India and Pakistan, between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda among several others. His attempts to negotiate peace in larger conflicts such as between Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Palestine are part of his Nobel Peace Prize campaign.

But DJT is not a professional international mediator. Negotiating peace between opposing countries or international groups has become a profession. There are people who have done this as a career in various conflict zones, such as Pierre Hazan. This is not the moment for an amateur to organize a cease-fire or peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine, even the president of the United States. Not only is Trump an amateur diplomatic negotiator, his point man in the Ukraine negotiations and other peace missions, Steven Witkoff, has a background as a real estate investor, quite unlike former American career professional mediators such as Aaron David Miller or Dennis Ross.

(I purposively refrain from mentioning someone who shared a Nobel Peace Prize for “having negotiated a cease fire” in a war that never should have started and that he could have ended earlier then when the fighting finally stopped.) 

Beyond neutrality and amateurism, Trump has his own military agenda. He has increased the U.S. military budget beyond any reasonable means and challenged NATO allies to do the same. He is militarizing the domestic U.S. police forces. There is no aspect of peaceful neutrality in all he does. Trump continues to confuse differences between the art of a real estate deal and international diplomacy. One cannot be mediator, guarantor of security (even if it’s only “by air”) and interested financial party all at the same time. Transactionalism has its diplomatic limits. 

In addition, if more is necessary; if Trump had arranged some cease-fire deal, he would have taken all the credit. Since the summit was a failure, he returned responsibility for the negotiations to Ukrainian President Zelensky, Europeans and others professionally engaged with the problem. “Now it’s really up to President Zelensky to get it done,” he said after the summit. “I would also say the European nations have to get involved a little bit,” he added.

In typical Trumpian manner, he will never admit defeat. He tried, now it’s for others to continue. No more insisting on a cease-fire. No more if Putin doesn’t agree to some settlement within 10 days there would be “very severe consequences” or a “rough situation.” That’s not how professional mediators act. 

A brief mention is also necessary about Trump’s failed diplomacy concerning the specifics of the summit’s negotiations. The announced negotiating time of roughly 3 hours included interpretation. I was told during the Geneva Biden-Putin summit that 3 hours of talk with interpreters actually means 11/4 hours of true negotiations. The lack of serious negotiations in Alaska was also confirmed when neither Putin nor Trump accepted questions at the end of the very short press conference after their meeting. 

If DJT is not a diplomatic negotiator, what is he? If you want to demonize Putin, you might also demonize Trump as “evil,” “unhinged,” and “unstable.”  That two devils negotiated in Alaska explains the (s) in my title. 

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Image by Jr Korpa.

In 1948, George Kennan, then State Department Director of Policy Planning and one of the most influential men in the United States government, wrote in an internal memo:

“[The U.S. has] about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population… Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.”

This is the naked logic of empire-building, and the true violence of its enactment both before and after Kennan’s memo would surprise many U.S. citizens, but few people elsewhere.

From the genocidal seizure of Native American lands and the transatlantic slave trade to the systematic violence underlying free trade deals that dispossessed millions of subsistence and small-scale farmers in Mexico and facilitated the forced proletarianization of formerly land-based communities in Southeast Asia, the projection of U.S. dominance across the world has always relied on the bullet or the velvet-covered fist.

Over the intervening three-quarters of a century, the U.S. government has facilitated coups, established military bases around the world, cowed nations into economic submission, and wielded both bombs and aid as cudgels to subdue and control the rest of the planet. A financial and military barricade has been erected to protect U.S. citizens — especially elites and, to a lesser but still significant extent, the middle class.

This is the context in which, in April of 2025, the Trump administration first announced, then scaled back, sweeping tariffs on products imported into the United States. The results, in the short term, were economically unprecedented. Markets went into freefall, crashing further than ever before in one day as Trump’s policies challenged the prevailing economic orthodoxy on which most U.S. business is built: ideas, intellectual property, capital, and financial products come from within the core of empire, while the dirty and hard industrial labor of actually producing physical products is done elsewhere.

Many seem to assume that Trump’s tariff policy is unintelligible, that it represents stupidity, nothing more than a strongman’s attempt to assert his authority. And in the end, that may be true. The market collapse and political backlash to Trump’s tariffs, which led to the administration walking most of the policies back within several days, may ultimately reflect an economic logic that is too deeply entrenched to be changed.

While I don’t believe in the moral righteousness of Trump’s economic policies — or in the underlying logic of U.S. dominance or industrial capitalism itself — most of the criticisms I have seen of the tariff policies are simplistic.

I am not an economist. But I am a scholar and opponent of empire, and I recognize a self-conscious attempt to reassert the economic, political, and (by extension) military dominance of the United States as a world superpower when I see one.

Trump is no fool, unfortunately. He sees rising competition, especially from China. He is concerned with maintaining hegemony against the rise of BRICS. And he believes, as articulated in this brilliant piece by Vincent Kelley in reversing the process of globalization and “re-shoring” industry.

Trump and his advisors have a long-term strategy, and in their view, rebuilding U.S. dominance may involve crushing both internal and global economic stability in the meantime. Just like Reagan’s offshoring policies in the 80s devastated the manufacturing heartland of the United States while buttressing the fortunes of the hyper-wealthy, Trump ultimately has no interest in the poor. He is playing the role of imperial leader. He is building power.

The economic turmoil and political backlash to Trump’s tariffs show how U.S. hegemony and the economic growth it powers have become essential to first-world people.

More than half of U.S. households have retirement accounts; that is, rather than cash savings, investments allocated towards buying stocks and other types of financial products. These purchases provide operating funds to businesses, and in return, investors gain the right to sell their stocks in the future. The system operates under the assumption that well-run businesses grow in value over time. The S&P 500, a stock index tracking the largest 500 companies in the United States, grows by an average of 6.8% per year. In this way, everyday people are invested, quite literally, in the growth of capitalism, through monthly monetary contributions.

This cycle, in which capital investment leads to increased production, which in turn generates greater capital, makes sense at small theoretical scales. Say, for example, I’m bad at growing corn, but want to eat some. I lend my tools and contribute money to buy seeds with my neighbor, who’s a skilled farmer. If they have a successful crop, they share the harvest with me, and everyone wins. If their crop fails, we both miss out.

In the real world, the investment and the economic growth it powers is far different. Rather than small plots of corn, agribusinesses invest in clearing vast swathes of rainforest for palm oil plantations. Tech companies vacuum up gigawatts of power for sprawling data centers. Speculators bet on every aspect of the economy, and others bet on them. All of this has nothing to do with meeting basic necessities (which current productive forces are, according to some research, powerful enough to do. I’m not sure I buy it, especially when it comes to profit. The drive for profit incentivizes corporate actors to engage in more and more behavior that is harmful to nature.

If this behavior wasn’t rewarded, we wouldn’t see it continue to happen. But in this case, not only are the perpetrators rewarded with paychecks, large swaths of society — including congresspeople, government employees, academics, and more than half of U.S. households — are also financially rewarded through participation in the stock market.

What this means is simple. As the climate crisis accelerates, as the 6th mass extinction spirals further, as chemical pollution reaches record levels day after day, as our overshoot predicament worsens, as more land is paved and more wild places bulldozed, bank accounts continue to rise.

We — that is, anyone with a retirement or investment account, and anyone who cheers when the economy booms and groans when it falls — have become business partners in the apocalypse.

The Magnificent Bribe

This is what cultural critic Lewis Mumford, one of the most important thinkers in U.S. history, termed “the magnificent bribe.” Mumford writes in his 1964 piece Authoritarian and Democratic Technics:

“Present day technics³ differs from that of the overtly brutal, half-baked authoritarian systems of the past in one highly favorable particular: it has accepted the basic principle of democracy, that every member of society should have a share in its goods. By progressively fulfilling this part of the democratic promise, our system has achieved a hold over the whole community that threatens to wipe out every other vestige of democracy.”

What Mumford means, of course, is that even violent and despotic systems gain power from collective consent. When the people agree to go along with a financial system that is killing the planet and dooming future generations to live in conditions we cannot even imagine, they have been bribed.

Scholars have written of this; how growth is often used as a mechanism not just to generate profit, but to maintain hegemony. By growing the economy, elites are able to distribute benefits to otherwise restive social groups, while still maintaining and expanding inequality. This, in the long-term, is Trump’s game. He seeks to re-energize the American empire in the image of William McKinley, his favorite past president, who seized Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, and annexed Hawaii as part of a grand imperial vision.

And, broadly speaking, it is working. There is broad knowledge in the global north that consumer culture and economic growth is associated with environmental harm and human rights abuses. And yet, most people do not participate in social change movements, let alone revolutionary movement. Most activism that does take place focuses on reforming this system rather than abolishing it. In other words, most focus on preserving Mumford’s “authoritarian technics” and the growth system that they enable, while attempting to mitigate, regulate, and ban the worst excesses. This is one of the reasons why the prerequisites for a degrowth paradigm shift are not currently close to being met, and we continue to spiral deeper into ecological collapse.

And this is a good time to insert a word about the Democrats, because the Democratic Party, democratic votes, and progressives in general are the prototypical U.S. example of these politics in action. They seek a friendlier empire: a world of FSC-certified lumber, politically correct advertising, “green” energy and a carbon-neutral military, a circular economy, and clean manufacturing.

This, of course, is a total fantasy, as I outlined in my book Bright Green Lies.

But it is an incredibly appealing vision, especially when one recognizes that there are only two real alternatives: the naked, brutal empire-building vision of the far right, and the revolutionary transformation of society envisioned by people like me. And only in one of those visions will your stock portfolio continue to grow.

Revolution or Barbarism

Outside of the middle class and the wealthy, the process of globalization, as just one manifestation of the harms of industrial capitalism, civilization, and empire, has been fiercely contested by the poor, indigenous communities, and many people of the global south. As I wrote last July, reflecting on the anti-globalization movement and the motivations for the 1999 anti-WTO protests in my hometown of Seattle:

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Note: At the time of writing, a summary analysis similar to the one below was published Current Affairs, attributed to “Lex Syd.” There are a few differences in our sources and analyses, but the numbers are the same. 

For a year and a half, whether we’ve noticed it or not, people who look at international news have read variations on the following sentence many, many times: “The Gaza Ministry of Health does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.” Its inclusion is so mindlessly automatic at this point that it keeps showing up in major media’s occasional articles on how many children the Israeli Defense Forces have killed, an obscene caveat suggesting that for all we know, most of these kids—even most of the pre-teenage kids—were justified targets.

It has made some sense to rely on the Ministry’s count as a baseline death toll, since it only includes recovered bodies, most of them identified by name. This is why every country, U.N. organization, international humanitarian organization, and mainstream media outlet uses it—even Israeli intelligence agrees with its numbers. But given the shocking pace at which the death toll in Gaza has climbed, it has seemed to genocide skeptics to demand a qualifier. So, early on in the war on Gaza, the “does not distinguish” sentence became an editorial incantation allowing a measure of disbelief in the livestreamed reality of the mass killing of civilians.

This obsession with ambiguity was at once very human — who wouldn’t prefer to see a reality where we weren’t complicit in a genocide? — and deeply inhuman, in its rote soft-pedaling of atrocities in which all Americans, as their primary suppliers and chief international supporters, have always been complicit. If the unbelievable numbers of unarmed people killed by one of our closest allies, with the active support of our own country—5,000 of them, and then very quickly 10,000, and 25,000, and then 30 and 40 and 60,000 people just like us and our families—if an indeterminate number of them were actually “combatants,” well, maybe this was was only, as so many supporters of the war on Gaza kept saying, the storm and fog of just another war. After all, the IDF had estimated, as the siege of Gaza began, that there were some 30,000 Hamas fighters in Gaza. Maybe a 30%, or a 40%, or even a 50% civilian death rate, many people apparently thought, was just the price that had to be paid for the realization of a fantasy that no one ever really believed was possible—the “eradication” of Hamas.

Wherever one has stood in relation to this open-ended spectrum of horror, the Ministry numbers have seemed to be something everyone could pretty much agree on, at least within the fringes of the discourse on Gaza. Unless you were so rabid to keep the death machine rolling that your first instinct was to call the unspooling names of dead children “Hamas propaganda,” or you were so certain that we were being forced into complicity in a genocide that you obsessively recalculated and posted the most probable real death toll (as I’ve done every month since the siege began), you saw the visible consensus: however many thousands, “according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.”

Yet virtually everyone who accepts that number also accepts that it must be an undercount of some significant but unknowable size. Since the Health Ministry only counts recovered bodies, every single unrecovered body is also uncounted. When we recall what the damage in Gaza looks like—massive bombs dropped on densely populated urban areas, generally with no actionable warning, usually with vague or expired location data and often without guidance systems anyway—it’s hard to avoid the question of how many people have died, quickly or in prolonged agony, whose bodies have never been recovered. Imagine for a moment that the greater New York metropolitan area were reduced to this, with virtually no one allowed to leave as it happened, nowhere to shelter, and with further bombing of the areas to which any internal refugees relocated, and you can begin to imagine how many human beings were hit so hard that there was nothing left to recover or identify; how many more could never be recovered, brought in to be identified, or counted; how many bodies were buried either anonymously, in cemeteries since razed flat by the IDF, or in the mass graves it has dug; how many families had no members left alive to report the dead. 

As Arwa Mahdawi put it in The Guardian last week, “We have no idea how many people have been killed in Gaza but I would bet my own life that the number is far higher than the 60,000 number the media uses.” That’s a very common thought in discussions of Gaza. There’s even a very occasional qualifier to the “does not distinguish” clause in major media coverage, noting that the Ministry’s death toll is “likely to be an undercount.”

The problem with leaving this sentiment at “we have no idea how many people have been killed” is that we do have a very clear idea of the minimum, based on the most rigorous, detailed analyses that statisticians, epidemiologists, and experts on urban warfare, working together under stringent peer review in the world’s leading research forums, agree on. And that minimum number is indeed much higher than the Ministry’s count.

That minimum scientifically plausible number of traumatic deaths only—immediate deaths from bullets, bombs, and demolished buildings—in the Gaza genocide is currently more than 115,000. 

The minimum scientifically plausible number of deaths attributable to the genocide overall is more than 460,000.

Anyone who claims to rely on the best scientific consensus today must report the current death toll in the Gaza genocide as “more than 115,000” violent deaths or “more than 460,000” overall.

Here, in detail, is why. 

The Gaza Ministry of Health’s death toll as I write this has just passed 62,000—I’ll refer to this number as “GMH,” so anyone can easily replicate this math at any point in the future. Here are the steps, with citations, for understanding this number’s relationship to the current 115,000-460,000 range. In every step, I will use the most conservative plausible parameters of any uncertainly, ensuring that our minimum really is the minimum.

1. The first adjustment that must be made to this number is the Ministry of Health’s likely undercount, due to the sheer chaos of the genocide. The definitive scientific study calculating this number was published in February 2025 by four of the world’s leading clinicians, epidemiologists, and experts in emergency medicine, in The Lancet—a 200-year-old, rigorously peer-reviewed scientific journal and the world’s most prominent research publication in general medicine. The researchers, the research, and the venue here are unimpeachable, and its results have since been confirmed nearly exactly by a second major study using a completely different approach. The study found, with a 95% confidence interval, that the Ministry undercounted the death toll from traumatic injury by 41%. This means that the Ministry’s count at the time represented only 59% of the actual deaths due to traumatic injury. It is almost certainly more of an undercount now, since reporting conditions have only deteriorated in the more than 13 months since the end of the period considered in the study—but we will stay with the minimum plausible number.

For this, we need to divide GMH / .59, for a minimum of 105,085 deaths by traumatic injury.

2. The calculation of this undercount excludes those who are missing and presumed dead.

A second adjustment must be made for the number of Palestinians whose bodies have gone unretrieved. That calculation has remained more or less set, by organizations including the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the Lancet study, since at least May 2024, at about 10,000.

It is almost certainly much higher: ever more buildings have been bombed and demolished, and no heavy equipment capable of digging out bodies has been allowed to operate. An indeterminate number of others were shipped to Israeli prison camps to be imprisoned without charges and frequently starved, beaten, and/or sexually or medically tortured. An unknown number of these Gazans have also been killed, their bodies dumped on the ground back in Gaza to be identified or not, or buried or stored in Israeli territory, their names often unrecorded and rarely reported. 

But again, we’ll go with the consensus minimum: 10,000.

GMH / .59 

+10,000

The current minimum death toll in the Gaza genocide is now 115,085—our overall minimum number for deaths by traumatic impact alone.

3. This number does not include anyone killed in the genocide by any means other than traumatic violence leading directly to death (though we can be sure that many thousands of those actually suffered in the worst imaginable pain and despair beneath the rubble, or in the street, or on a bombed-out hospital floor, for some time before dying). 

If we want to include Gazans killed by other siege tactics—Israel’s strategic denial of food, water, medical supplies, power, and medicine—we must rely on data from previous bombing and siege campaigns with similar profiles. This is challenging in part because the Gaza genocide is genocidal: because only a tiny fraction of Gazans have been allowed to leave Gaza, and because the IDF has ensured a civilian casualty rate that vastly exceeds that of comparable bombardments, and because no bombing campaign has been as proportionately destructive since or even before World War II, the scope of “excess mortality” compared to the death rate before October 2023 may be so large that there is nothing in the historical data to help us estimate a probable maximum. 

But again, let’s set the minimum. 

The Lancet followed up its initial study by publishing a letter from three other internationally respected doctors and epidemiologists pointing out that according to extensive studies of recent wars compiled by the UNHCR, the ratio of “indirect deaths” to direct deaths from traumatic impact ranged from 3:1 to 15:1. It’s worth emphasizing once again that the bombing campaign in Gaza has been far more destructive than any of the wars that yielded these ratios. Nonetheless, we will take the smallest recorded ratio of 3:1—even less than the 4:1 ratio that the UNHCR study uses as its most “conservative” metric.

GMH / .59

+10,000

x3

The minimum death toll in the Gaza genocide is now 463,220—our minimum number of deaths directly attributable to the genocide.

These numbers, which represent the most conservative minimum that is scientifically plausible in each case, can now be used as a baseline for further calculations based on other data:

+ Before October 2023, the population of the Gaza Strip was about 2.23 million. Direct deaths from the genocide have killed at least 5% of the population. Direct and indirect deaths from the genocide have killed at least 20% of the population.

+ Given Israel’s own estimate that there were some 30,000 Hamas fighters in Gaza as of October 2023, of which it now says it has killed some 20,000 (it has provided no evidence for either figure), the civilian death rate it has inflicted through direct deaths is more than 83%. The overall civilian death rate it has inflicted in Gaza since October 2023 is at least 96%.

+ Before October 2023, children under 15 years old represented 44% of Gaza’s population. The Hamas fighters that Israel claims to have killed are a statistically negligible part of that population. The Lancet study found 59% of direct deaths to be those of women, children, and the elderly—excluding military-age men. Basic demographics show that 66% of that 59% were children under 15. The direct death toll for children under 15 in this genocide is at least 45,221. The death toll for children under 15 including all deaths caused by the genocide is, at minimum, 135,664—and almost certainly many more. 

There will be no way to accurately count the dead in Gaza until the bombing ends. Even then, it will take years. Nonetheless, we can bear better witness than the repetition of the baseline numbers tallied by the Gaza Ministry of Health; and we can bear far better witness than to recite, like a talisman, that it “does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.” 

We can—we must—start acknowledging the bare minimum of what this genocide has already, indisputably wrought.

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Photograph Source: Donetsk Regional Military Civil Administration – CC BY 4.0

Before I get going, let’s get it out of the way: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a clearly illegal and evil and it has cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Throughout the conflict, there has been a kind of open secret inside Washington, one that has been reiterated to me by people at the State Department and the Pentagon for years: this was not an unexpected result, and Washington was aware that the Russians would invade well before the Ukrainians. The conflict pretty well exemplifies a standard American imperial strategy and helps to show how Washington maintains a world hegemonic position through the calculated destabilization of rival powers while sacrificing peripheral countries, basically as expendable chess pieces. The terrible tragedy in Ukraine represents the planned, deliberate implementation of a containment policy that treats sovereign countries as tools in the American plan to preserve permanent unipolar dominance. 

As most interested people know, the strategic approach to Ukraine goes back decades, as Washington has violated documented promises, moving its military alliance eastward and functionally encircling Russia. The NATO expansion did not serve a legitimate security purpose for existing members of the bloc, but actually worked as a tool of American empire building, pushing Washington’s post-Cold War advantage and stretching its sphere of influence right to Russia’s border. Putin’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 explicitly challenged this imperial project and warned that NATO expansion was a legitimate provocation that showed the U.S.’s real commitments. These objections were dismissed as inconvenient obstacles to imperial expansion.

The 2014 color revolution shows the playbook in detail. We know from Nuland’s communications, among many other pieces of evidence, that the U.S. helped to orchestrate regime change in Kiev, essentially hand-picking the country’s leadership while insisting that it was all just democratic self-determination of a sovereign country. Washington straightaway gave legitimacy to the coup government despite documented violations of the country’s own constitutional system, showing how the U.S. redefines systems both within the global context and domestically to align with its interests. The effort was to rapidly integrate Ukraine into the U.S.’s military-economic system, making it an imperial client up against Russia.

The militarization of the country that followed is a familiar imperial tactic where a proxy is armed to fight Washington’s geopolitical battles. Many years of sophisticated American military training and weapons prepared the Ukrainians for a confrontation with Russia, even as the U.S. was (and still is) able to maintain plausible deniability in public. Such an approach creates a welcome scenario for the U.S. in that it provokes Russia sufficiently to get a military response and to inflict huge losses on Russia, but the strategy’s careful limitations mean that there was never going to be a decisive victory that would end the war too quickly. 

The imperial logic is familiar. Washington successfully weaponized Ukrainian nationalism to weaken a key rival, while bearing minimal direct costs. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian casualties represent losses that are acceptable within U.S. imperial calculus, insofar as Russian power is diminished and U.S. hegemony preserved. The strategy mirrors historical imperial practices of using local populations as hapless cannon fodder in great power struggles, revealing the fundamentally exploitative nature of an American global dominance that masquerades as promoting democracy and human rights. Both the U.S. and Russia fundamentally operate as crime syndicates on a worldwide scale, pursuing power and wealth through violence, threats, and bribery.

Ukraine is tragically caught in the middle. The front lines will harden into a drawn-out stalemate, with no official settlement in the short term, leaving a heavily-armed buffer zone. This is consistent with what we’ve seen in some other recent Russian military conflicts and will ultimately be acceptable to both the U.S. and Russia. We should all notice that it was the Ukrainians who paid the price, and we should also remember the bloodless Washington cynicism that led us here. 

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Photograph Source: PunkToad – CC BY 2.0

The Trump administration is currently attempting to rewrite American history by whitewashing the country’s negative legacy and scrubbing out references to anything connected to multiculturalism or diversity.

Gone is Harvey Milk’s name from a Navy ship and Bea Arthur’s contributions to the Marine Corps from a Pentagon webpage. The administration attempted to remove Harriet Tubman from the National Park Service’s digital description of the Underground Railroad. It is gearing up for a showdown with the Smithsonian over its presentation of U.S. history.

Trump is also readying his alternative. For the country’s semiquincentennial next year, he is planning to erect a National Garden of American Heroes with sculptures of 250 great individuals from American history.

Purging U.S. government websites and censoring Smithsonian exhibits is not the only, or the most important, way that Trump is whitewashing American history. His pardoning of the January 6 rioters transformed coup plotters, murderers, and right-wing extremists into “patriots” (while also releasing some very dangerous individuals back into the community). His executive order abolishing birthright citizenship was a bid to rewrite the U.S. constitution. Changing the interpretation of facts is not as satisfying for “men of action” like Trump as changing the actual facts on the ground.

For decades, historians have moved away from the “great man” theory of historical analysis to focus on a more diverse array of actors, from less prominent individuals and previously maligned groups to social movements and impersonal forces like the economy and the environment. Trump is pushing back against this trend by insisting that only “high quality” individuals have been history’s movers and shakers.

In truth, Trump only cares about one “great” individual—himself. He believes that he is the greatest president in U.S. history. With Steve Bannon as his Hegel, Trump styles himself as a Napoleonic embodiment of the spirit of the age—a “world-soul on horseback.” Never mind that Napoleon trampled the ideals of the French Revolution, launched horrific wars of conquest, and ended up (twice) exiled to an island. He was a nasty piece of work who took big risks. Sound familiar?

Unfortunately, even some of Trump’s critics have begun to agree with his self-evaluation. In declaring Trump “great,” but not necessarily good, the founding editor of Politico John Harris argued earlier this year that greatness “is now simply an objective description about the dimensions of his record.” It’s why Time magazine named Trump Person of the Year twice (after winning the 2016 and 2024 elections). A good man like Jimmy Carter contented himself with one term and a post-presidential career of humanitarian service. A “great man” like Trump lies and cheats his way back into the Oval Office in order to finish the work he started in his first term of destroying American democracy.

Other leaders are engaged in their own effort to remake their countries’ history. Russia’s Vladimir Putin is resurrecting the idea that the genocidal Stalin was a laudable leader. Hungary’s Viktor Orban has attempted to make the fascist Admiral Horthy great again. And the Philippines’ Bongbong Marcos is doing his best to untarnish the image of his father, dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

But Trump is doing more than just rewrite America’s past and remake America’s present. His posture toward history is also his way of approaching geopolitics. He presents himself as the savior on a white horse who can end the war in Ukraine, the conflict in Gaza, the standoff with North Korea, and the ongoing crisis with Iran. He is not a fan of diplomacy, unless you mean one-on-one sessions with other “great men” like Benjamin Netanyahu. As Vice President J.D. Vance recently observed about the prospects for a deal on the war in Ukraine, “The way to peace is to have a decisive leader sit down and force people to come together.”

And thus the decisive leader will soon sit down in Alaska with Russian President Vladimir Putin in what can only be described as a show of force—toward each other, toward Ukraine, toward Europe. Will anything good, much less great, come of it?

Cornering Putin?

One way of looking at the last couple months of Trump policy is that the president has been doing whatever he can to put Vladimir Putin in his place, with that place being the leadership of a second-rate power, a Venezuela with nukes. During the first six months of his second term, Trump has tried to take the lead in his dance with Putin only to discover that the Russian leader is not a follower. The impertinence of the man!

So, in an extended fit of pique, Trump has set out to punish Putin and Russia. The most prominent sign of this change in attitude from bromance to bruhpture was Trump’s threat to levy a 100 percent tariff on any country that had the temerity to continue importing cheap Russian oil. That, in itself, was a lowballing of the bipartisan congressional threat of a 500 percent tariff. It turned out, in practice, to be even lower, when Trump added only 25 percent to India’s tariff rate. In any case, it seemed sufficient to get Putin’s attention.

Other efforts to needle Putin included Trump’s reconciliation with Volodymr Zelensky, the leader of Ukraine, and the greenlight given to European allies to send their U.S.-made weapons systems to Kyiv. Trump even asked Zelensky if Ukraine could use U.S. missiles to target Moscow and St. Petersburg (though he later backed away from that implied threat). Trump then maneuvered Armenia and Azerbaijan to sign a peace deal in Washington that marked a serious reduction of Russian influence in the region, transforming Putin from regional peacemaker to regional bystander.

Proving that he’s the only alpha male in the room may be the foremost motivation in Trump’s calculations from one minute to the next. But ultimately, the president wants to fulfil a campaign promise (to end the war in 24 hours), extricate the United States from all commitments to Ukraine, and shift full strategic attention to China.

This prime directive of Trump policy seems to have led his envoy to Moscow, Steve Witkoff, to misunderstand a key demand of Putin’s. The Russian leader wants to control all four of the provinces that he has formally incorporated into the Russian federation—Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson. Witkoff apparently thought that Putin was willing to give up on the latter two provinces if Ukraine would cede the remainder of the first two. This appears to be the reason why a “land swap” was at the heart of the rationale for the Alaska meeting. Given that Ukraine controls only a tiny sliver of Russian territory at this point, talk of a “land swap” only makes sense in the context of this misundertanding.

But Putin actually said that he wanted Ukrainian forces, not the Russian army, to abandon Zaporizhzhya and Kherson. The Russian leader is not in the mood to compromise, not with his military continuing to gain a bit of territory every day and his political control predicated on the exigencies of a wartime emergency.

With this latest invitation from Trump, Putin has already won before the planes have landed in Alaska. He’s heading back to the United States for the first time in a decade, without fear of being delivered to the International Criminal Court. He’s secured a one-on-one conversation with Trump, without the pesky Europeans or the obstreperous Zelensky at the table. The secondary sanctions are, except for India, on pause.

Putin has already gotten what he wants. Why should he give up anything more? Don’t expect much from this meeting, except for some vague and ambiguous statement that both leaders can claim as victory.

Glad-handing Netanyahu

From time to time, Trump has expressed his irritation at Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. He skipped visiting Israel on his May trip to the Middle East, a sign of Trump’s unhappiness that Netanyahu hadn’t agreed to a more permanent ceasefire in Gaza. More recently, Trump has pushed back against Bibi’s claims that there’s no starvation in Gaza, reportedly even yelling at the Israeli prime minister in a phone call last week.

As a “great man,” Netanyahu has also acted with decisiveness in changing the facts on the ground. In this case, the policy also happens to be genocidal. That doesn’t bother Trump very much. After all, he too proposed turning Gaza into a luxury resort, which would necessitate kicking the two million Palestinians off their land. However, Trump doesn’t consider the photos of starving children to be a good look.

And yet, the U.S. president has not opposed Netanyahu’s plan to take over Gaza. “It is going to be pretty much up to Israel,” he said. The president has no problem trying to interfere in Brazilian politics by slapping the country with additional sanctions because it’s prosecuting Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro. But when it comes to Israel committing genocide in Gaza—or Nayib Bukele changing the laws in El Salvador so that he can be president for life—Trump is suddenly respectful of sovereignty.

“Great men” don’t contradict themselves—they contain multitudes. Trump’s reign is one long “song of myself,” a not-very-lyrical paean to the president’s own brilliance and capacity to wrangle other autocrats. The problems arise when those other autocrats refuse to be wrangled.

The Future of “Greatness”

Trump is taking over Washington, DC under the pretense of combatting crime—in a city where the crime rate is actually going down. He is threatening to assert federal control over other cities, all of them controlled by Democrats.

Consider this a form of territorial acquisition. Putin grabs the Donbas, Netanyahu seizes Gaza, and Trump takes over DC. It’s a dubious strategy. Occupations always face spirited opposition from the locals.

The merely good set out to negotiate compromises that improve, however marginally, something broken in society. Their incrementalism often draws fire from those who rightly point out that half-measures are insufficient in dealing with climate change, global poverty, or endemic corruption. But beware of those whose proffered solutions take the world not forward a half-step but a great leap backward. Trump doesn’t do compromise. He doesn’t have the patience for incrementalism. His real estate projects—ugly hotels, glitzy resorts, water-hogging golf courses—never improve the neighborhood.

Like Putin and Netanyahu, Trump wants to do big things. They all want to smash the ordinary and use the rubble to build something extraordinary, which usually end up being monumental statues to themselves. Look on their works, ye mighty, and despair…

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Image courtesy of Al Jazeera.

In contemporary conflict the “weaponization of information” or “targeting of journalists” shows a pattern of squashing dissent. Analysts like Martin Libicki and John Arquilla argue how information itself becomes a battlefield in what they call noopolitik. The U.S. and Israel are historically accustomed to exploiting land, sea and air. Manipulating the information space is also nothing new. +972 Magazine’s Yuval Abraham indicated that Israeli intelligence, or Aman, formed Legitimization Cells to preempt Gaza journalists as Hamas members when Palestinian reporting was spot on, although the press with a political affiliation is commonly accepted elsewhere in the world.

In this Q&A, legal scholar and international relations expert Richard Falk discusses the August 10, 2025, Israeli airstrike that killed four Al Jazeera journalists and two others in Gaza. Falk argues that discrediting truth-tellers and murdering the press is consistent with the apartheid worldview that dominates Zionist ideology.

Daniel Falcone: When we first spoke on the ruthless censorship of Palestinian journalism, you emphasized how they play a crucial role in challenging the symbolic dominance of the Israeli narrative, often costing their lives. How do you interpret the ongoing deliberate censorship of Palestinian journalism in both Israel and the U.S. and what does that say about the perceived threat of their reporting to dominant geopolitical interests?

Richard Falk: When our eyes and ears are conveying a sense of reality that collides with the strategic interests of autocratically disposed governance, the established elites and special interests attached to the status quo become anxious. One response is to exert pressure on private sector media, including advertisers, to engage in self-censorship of a character that obscures perception with ambiguities and false accusations. Israel, with Euro-American acquiescence has gone along with the weaponization of antisemitism to situate criticisms of Israel and Zionism in a zone of uncertainty that blunts action-oriented responses based on international law or shared values, while discrediting or punishing those critics however strong their credentials as skilled analysts and trustworthy presenters of reality as honestly perceived.

The prolonged reluctance of influential media in the West to name the assertion of Jewish primacy in various domains of Israeli life as racial or ethnic discrimination that constituted an institutional adoption of a governance style that violated the 1973 International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid is a striking pre-October 7 example of this phenomenon. Both Western governments, especially, the United States and its NATO partners, remained silent about these apartheid accusations even in the face of a series of academic style reports by the most respected international human rights NGOs (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International), the UN (ESCWA 2017), and even the leading Israeli human rights NGO (B’Tselem) each documented the apartheid allegation.

Despite these responsibly asserted apartheid accusations they were neither substantively challenged nor commented upon but completely ignored. Indeed, the most forthcoming response, although not intended as such, was from Israel, which indirectly confirmed apartheid allegations in the Knesset Basic Law adopted in 2018. This type of legislation enjoys the highest status in Israel, which has no constitution. The 2018 law explicitly identified Israel as the state of the Jewish people exclusively enjoying the right of self-determination, privileging Hebrew as the official language, and oblivious to the human rights of Palestinians and other minorities living in Israel as well as in the Palestinian Territories of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

This slippage of Israel’s formal democracy into the silent embrace of apartheid was revealingly not treated as relevant in any way to a proper appraisal of Palestinian resistance in the context of the October 7 attack. Instead, public discourse almost totally decontextualized October 7 without reference to the harsh Israeli blockade of Gaza maintained since 2007 or the periodic massive Israeli military incursions of 2008-09, 2012, 2014 or the failure to even explore the diplomatic initiative of Hamas for a long-term ceasefire with a duration of up to 50 years.

The response to the publication of the UN ESCWA (Economic and Social Commission of West Asia) report, of which I was co-author along with Virginia Tilley, seems especially illustrative of this impulse to fight back against fact-based scholarship, journalism, and independent experts. Shortly after its issuance in March 2017 our report was attacked in a Security Council meeting by the Israeli and American diplomats in a typical diatribe that was obviously intended to divert attention from the apartheid allegations to claims that the authors were biased against Israel. Seeming to expect self-censoring discipline even at the UN after October 7, the Trump chief representative at the UN, Ambassador Nikki Haley, dutifully launched a venomous personal attack on me (“What’s wrong with this Falk guy?”) and threatened U.S. defunding of the UN if the recently selected UN Secretary General, António Guterres, did not repudiate apartheid report.

In response, Guterres appeased the U.S. by ordering the report withdrawn from the ESCWA website, where it was reported to be receiving record number of requests, but stopped short of repudiating its contents. It was enough of a cave in to prompt the principled resignation of the Executive Secretary of ESCWA, Rima Khalif, to resign. [See “Dismissing Israel apartheid report is an abuse of power writes author,” Middle East Monitor, April 26, 2017.]

This ESCWA anecdote is significant because it demonstrates that the diversionary formula of silence + defamation + naming inhibitions + threats was relied upon before October 7 to protect Israel not only from allegations of serious international crimes but from truth-telling efforts by experts and scholars to name the realities reported upon in a truthful, recognizable language by individuals whose work was highly respected in professional circles. It should not occasion surprise that the same tactics of deflection have been used with even greater vigor to obscure the shameful realities of Gaza genocide. These tactics are losing their self-censoring implementation in recent months as the persistence of genocidal language and tactics by Israeli leaders become increasingly undeniable, not so much by words as by the daily images of dying children and starving Palestinians being shot and often killed at crowded and unruly U.S./Israeli administered aid sites while struggling for death-averting sacks of food.

Daniel Falcone: The recent Israeli strike that killed several Al Jazeera journalists outside Al-Shifa Hospital, including Anas al-Sharif, was later accused posthumously of being a Hamas operative, a practice from allies and outlets with actual problematic connections. How does international law evaluate such retroactive justifications for targeting press members in conflict zones?

Richard Falk: I regard as this post-hoc justification for targeting and killing Anas al-Sharif in a Gaza hospital safe zone as an extension of Israel’s determination to destroy, discredit, and inhibit scathing criticism of its genocidal campaign against a defenseless civilian population, estimated at about 2 million survivors of an October 7 population of 2.3 million. Israel tries here to envelop brave Gaza journalists in an intentionally dense ‘fog of war,’ reinforced in relation to Anas al-Sharif by the inflammatory accusation without any accompanying evidence that he is an undercover Hamas operative.

Ever since this military onslaught commenced nearly two years ago, Israel has been targeting the most influential journalists by relying on advanced surveillance techniques being developed by Palantir and Anduril, companies mentioned by name in the UN Special Rapporteur in her report that led to her formal sanctioning by the U.S. Government on July 9. The report to the UN entitled “From the Economics of Occupation to the Occupation of Genocide,” devoted to depicting corporate complicity drawing upon a large data base. This continues Israel’s policies of non-cooperation with the most carefully crafted critical journalism that justifies punitive action against truth-telling journalists by an appeal to economic and political national interests.

The U.S. Government acting outside the combat zones in Gaza or neighboring Israel has been experimenting with less lethal tactics that have similar goals of inducing confusion, silence, and uncertainty, reinforced by strongly discouraging naming of the carnage and accompanying dehumanizing language as ‘genocide’ on principal media platforms. The defunding of leading university research programs by claiming to be reacting to campus antisemitism and the mounting challenges to undocumented foreign students seems both integral to the commitment to silence Israel’s critics and an aspect of the wider Trump agenda to discredit knowledge based governance, which would make the citizenry even more susceptible to the ultra-right belief-based agenda of the MAGA base, which includes waging a regressive epistemological war against reliance on science-oriented experts. Such a worldview diverts attention from the gravity of increased global warming and indulges the most rapacious dimensions of capitalism.

Let me conclude my response by grieving over Anas al-Sharif’s untimely and vengeful assassination by quoting his words indicting our silence and passivity: “If this madness doesn’t end, its people’s voices silenced, their faces erased—and history will remember you as a silent witness to a genocide you chose not to stop.”

Daniel Falcone: Al Jazeera has long accused the IDF of running a campaign of incitement against its journalists, calling it a tactic to justify the targeting. How do you view this use of dehumanizing language in priming the public for violence against media workers?

Richard Falk: I regard Al Jazeera’s accusations as well founded as a first approximation. The fact that more than 230 journalists have been killed by Israel firepower in Gaza since October 2023, many by design and at close range does give these accusations what lawyers call a prima facie case. It would seem consistent with the stress that Israel has long put on the control of the public discourse pertaining to the underlying Israel/Palestine conflict with tactics shifting as the context shifts. The gravity of the sustained assault on Gaza has gradually turned the tide of public opinion against Israel including its escalations of attempts by Israel to suppress journalistic realism and smear brave journalist as they try to cover the deepening humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the weakening of Western support for the Zionist Project. Al Jazeera has led this effort to tell it like it is, generating extreme hostility among the war planners and political leaders in Tel Aviv. It still not appreciated that this genocide is reaching the point of no return, where the next phase of lament will be in the spirit of ‘we did too little too late.’

Israelis have ‘a need not to know,’ and that places a strain on its highly effective state propaganda machine given what is seen and heard daily throughout the world with decreasing or abandoned filters. For journalism to flourish in this era it needs to be liberated from the beliefs of the ruling elites and get back to addressing the facts as impartially interpreted. There is no other means of assuring a revival of reality-based journalism that is not life threatening to the journalist, but this will depend on the educating the citizenry to demand the protection and valuing of such reportage by organizing civil society pressure on government and special interest private sector lobbying.

As suggested earlier in the moving words of Anas al-Sharif it may be already too late, even if such pressures arise forcefully to help end the suffering of Gaza survivors, but we owe it to ourselves and to the human future to shed cautious impulses, and go all out to end this horrifying spectacle of genocide and seek an edifying process by which the perpetrators are held accountable. At present it seems a dream, but some dreams are indirect agents of change.

Daniel Falcone: The journalists killed at the gates of the hospital were at a protected site under international law. This compounds the violation. Does this all suggest a greater erosion of respect for international humanitarian norms in Gaza?

Richard Falk: Such targeted assassinations aggravate the criminal offense of killing journalists properly identified. This assessment is especially true in relation to Gaza which remains an Occupied Territory subject to compliance by Israel with the framework of international humanitarian law, especially as set forth in the Geneva Convention IV governing Belligerent Occupation.

The manner by which these Al Jazeera journalists were targeted should also be legally and morally condemned as forming a vital component of the ongoing genocide by its obvious intention of punishing an influential journalist who conveyed to readers the true nature of the Israeli tactics, thereby warning surviving journalists to avoid truth-telling if they hope to live, a terrifying message that hopes to insulate this Israeli genocide from scrutiny and sanctions.

Daniel Falcone: Reports indicate possibly 186 journalists killed in Gaza since October 2023. Are we witnessing a collapse of traditional protections for war correspondents (Also see: “the limits of the war photograph” – Mary Turfah)? Or does this mark a change in how information and its messengers are deliberately neutralized as part of military strategy? Israel almost seems proud of this rogue element and technique to state building through state violence.

Richard Falk: You pose an essential question that it is difficult for me to offer a helpful response as I lack necessary familiarity with developing doctrine and how reporting the news is manipulated to avoid friction with public support for military operation. One of the learning lessons of Washington think tanks and foreign policy advisors was the misleading belief that ‘the war was lost in American living rooms,’ and especially seeing flag-draped coffins on TV carrying the remains of combat casualties. The solution devised, which conveniently relieved the military strategists for the political outcome of the Vietnam War was to embed journalists in combat units, supposing more favorable coverage of military operations and less emphasis on depicting casualties.

Israel seems to have followed a much cruder approach in relation to allegations of genocide -given plausibility by fearless journalists reporting from Gaza’s many ground-zero sites of devastation and suffering. Simply put, it is a matter of discrediting truth-telling journalists and other experts if the damaging reports are from Westerners, assassinating if from Palestinians, a pattern borne out by the statistics so far compiled and consistent with the apartheid worldview that dominates Zionist ideology and is subscribed to by a broad echelon of high-level Israeli advisors.

For Further Reading:

Abraham, Yuval – +972 Magazine

Albanese, Francesca – UN Human Rights Council

Davidson, Lawrence – To the Point Analysis

El-Ad, Hagai – B’Tselem

Falk, Richard and Tilley, Virginia – UN ESCWA report, …The Question of Apartheid (2017)

Levy, Gideon – Haaretz

Loewenstein, Antony – Middle East Eye

Mansour, Sherif – Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)

Morayef, Heba – Foreign Policy

Paul, Ari – FAIR, The Battleground

Reporters Without Borders (RSF)

Nassar, Tamara – The Electronic Intifada

Pappé, Ilan – Al Jazeera, The Guardian

Shakir, Omar – Human Rights Watch

Turfah, Mary – Los Angeles Review of Books

Zunes, Stephen – The Progressive

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Peace is the highest good – every day that passes, more soldiers and civilians are killed in the Ukrainian war.  It is estimated that more than a million persons have lost their lives in this senseless war, which must be brought to an end as early as possible. This can be done with a modicum of common sense and professionalism. The war should never have started, and it could have been ended in March 2022, if Ukraine had not renegued on the compromise negotiated by Turkish President Erdogan in Istanbul.  There were many opportunities to sit down and discuss terms for a cease fire, but the US, Europe and Ukraine insisted that “Putin must lose”.  Thus, the many blueprints for peace issued by the African countries, China and countless international organizations including the International Peace Bureau, as well as private scholars, were fruitless.  This stubbornness and intransigence continues as Ursula von der Leyen, Friedrich Merz and other European leaders oppose the US peace initiative and conspire to continue the war no matter what. 

When Trump and Putin meet at the Elmendorf-Richardson base outside Anchorage, Alaska on 15 August, peace will be on the table.  It will not be an easy meeting, because US-Russian relations have never been as dire.  Nevertheless, the Global Majority of humanity wishes them a good beginning of direct negotiations, a businesslike summit that will build on the prior footwork of Steve Witkoff and Sergei Lavrov.  Peace is crucial for Europe, for the US, for civilization.

At the Peace of Westfalia in 1648 a sustainable peace was crafted that allowed the major European States and hundreds of German principalities to close the chapter on the disastrous Thirty Years’ War, which cost eight million lives and economically devastated central Europe.  There were no winners. Everyone was exhausted and wanted out.

The Ukraine-Russia conundrum is not a bilateral conflict, but a messy multiparty war involving the United States and most NATO and EU countries, which since 2014 have provided military, economic, political, diplomatic and propagandistic support to Ukraine.  I say 2014 and not 2022, because the war in the Donbass started with the US and European supported Putsch against the democratically elected President of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovich, and with the arrival in Kiew of a rabidly Russophobic, unconstitutional regime that prohibited the use of the Russian language and relentlessly shelled the Russian civilian population of Lugansk and Donetsk, causing some 14,000 deaths before the Russian invasion of 24 February 2022. 

This human tragedy has a long pre-history.  There will be no peace until the root causes of the war are addressed, something with the Biden/Blinken Administration and the European powers have refused to do.  Most importantly, a European security architecture must be agreed upon that will guarantee the sovereignty of Ukraine and at the same time end the Eastward expansion of NATO, which was condemned by George F. Kennan as early as 1997.

The most serious obstacle to crafting a viable peace agreement is the lack of credibility of the United States, or for that matter of the European supporters of Zelinsky.  The mainstream media will tell us otherwise, but the fact is that we in the West are notorious for our “culture of cheating”, and this tradition of not honouring agreements renders it difficult to craft viable agreements.

The Ukrainian conflict goes back to a breach of a promise made by President George HW Bush and repeated by his Secretary of State James Baker to Mikhail Gorbachev in the years 1989-91, that NATO would not expand an inch eastward.  As Professors John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs have convincingly argued, NATO’s 2008 invitation to Ukraine and Georgia to join the alliance constituted a major cause of the current conflict.  It is obvious that NATO’s presence at Russia’s borders means a significant security risk.  No sovereign country would accept such a menace.  As has been said by many, the United States would never accept Mexico or China entering into a military alliance with Russia – or China.  We already have the precedent of the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when the US threated the Soviet Union with nuclear annihilation, unless the Soviet missiles being installed in Cuba were removed immediately.  At the time the United Nations contributed significantly to defusing the crisis and while Khruschev removed the missiles from Cuba, Kennedy removed US missiles from Turkey. 

There are consequences to breaking one’s word, and if a country breaks an agreement, the other party is on notice and must be careful.  Trump has recently proven that he is profoundly untrustworthy, recalling the US bombardment of Iran in June 2025, while at the same time negotiating with Teheran to reach a mutually satisfactory agreement.  It will take a long time for this breach of good faith to be forgotten.  In the context of the Ukraine war, we remember that in 2014 and 2015 the Agreements known as Minsk I and Minsk II were negotiated, providing for a cessation of the Ukrainian bombardment of the Donbass and a commitment on the part of Ukraine to sit down with the representatives of Lugansk and Donets and  work out a constitutional arrangement granting a measure of autonomy to the Russian majorities of the Donbass.  In exchange, Ukraine received a guarantee of its territorial integrity and sovereignty.  Alas, Ukraine reneged on both commitments and accelerated its terroristic attacks on civilian targets in the Donbass.  This happened partly because of the military, economic and political support being provided by the US and Europe.  As far as the trustworthiness of the Europeans, it suffices to recall the statements made by Angela Merkel and François Holland that they only entered into the agreement in order to “gain time” so that Ukraine could be properly armed.  Such lack of good faith not only flies in the face of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, it also sends the message to the Russians:  be cautious, because these people cannot be trusted.

 It is irritating to hear European leaders invoking “international law” and refusing to even envisage territorial concessions by Ukraine.  This is surrealistic.  Have they not imposed illegal unilateral coercive measures on Russia and half the world, notwithstanding the yearly resolutions of the United Nations General Assembly and UN Human Right Council condemning these UCMs, wrongly referred to as “sanctions”?  Did the US and Europe not aggress Belgrade and destroy the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia in 1999?  Did they not use lethal force to tear Kosovo away from Yugoslavia and give it diplomatic recognition?  Was it not the US that recognized the illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, that recognized the illegal “annexation” of the Golan Heights by Israel, that applauded the Israeli aggression against Iran in June 2025?

Do the European leaders fail to understand that the world does not consider the US and Europe to be defenders of international law, that most African and Asian leaders consider the US and Europe to be in open rebellion against the United Nations Charter and against international law itself? No, in the eyes of the true “international community” – the Global Majority minus the “collective West” — do not consider that the US and Europe have any moral or legal superiority.  

In the context of the Israel/Palestine war, what is more evident than the refusal of the US and Europe to honour the Advisory Opinions of the International Court of Justice concerning of 9 July 2004 and 19 July 2024?  The continued military, economic, political, diplomatic, propagandistic support given to the genocidal state of Israel by the US and Europe reveal them not only as international outlaws – but as morally bankrupt.

Of course, Putin is no saint, and this author does not pretend to confer any moral edge to the Russians.  But for those who live in the real world and not in the parallel worlds created by think tanks and the mainstream media, the Russians do have certain legitimate interests, which they will not give up at the Alaska summit or elsewhere. It is worth revisiting Putin’s 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference and Putin’s interview with Tucker Carlson in February 2024.

The Russians insist on their right to national security.  Doubtless the expansion of NATO and the relentless provocations of Russia constituted a violation of article 2(4) of the UN Charter, which prohibits not only the use of force, but also the “threat” of the use of force.  

The Russians are also concerned about the Russian majorities who live in the Donbass and who were subjected to aggression by the Ukrainian government, in a manner that certainly called for intervention pursuant to the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine.  

Putin did not rush to war.  Pursuant to article 2(3) of the UN Charter, he tried for more than eight years to settle the problems diplomatically.  He negotiated with and through the OSCE, the Normandy Format, the Minsk Agreements etc.  

The right of self-determination of the Russians of the Donbass is non-negotiable.  In the same manner as the Albanian Kosovars would never consent to be ruled by Belgrade, the Russians of the Donbass will never consent being again ruled by Kiev.  Too much blood has been spilled and we must recognize that the level of hatred is such that the reintegration of Kosovo into Serbia and the “return” the Donbass to Ukraine is simply not viable.

I hope that Trump will understand that to reach a deal with Putin, he must recognize that Ukraine will never be in NATO and that the Donbass Russians must have their self-determination.  These are not maximalist demands.  These are facts that cannot be ignored.

I hope that someone gives Trump the text of paragraph 80 of the 2010 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice on Kosovo:

Several participants in the proceedings before the Court have contended that a prohibition of unilateral declarations of independence is implicit in the principle of territorial integrity. The Court recalls that the principle of territorial integrity is an important part of the international legal order and is enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, in particular in Article 2, paragraph 4, which provides that: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.” In General Assembly resolution 2625 (XXV), entitled “Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States in Accordance with the Charter of the United Nations”, which reflects customary international law (Military and Paramilitary Activities in and against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v. United States of America), Merits, Judgment, I.C.J. Reports 1986, pp. 101-103, paras. 191-193), the General Assembly reiterated “[t]he principle that States shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State”. This resolution then enumerated various obligations incumbent upon States to refrain from violating the territorial integrity of other sovereign States. In the same vein, the Final Act of the Helsinki Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe of 1 August 1975 (the Helsinki Conference) stipulated that “[t]he participating States will respect the territorial integrity of each of the participating States” (Art. IV). Thus, the scope of the principle of territorial integrity is confined to the sphere of relations between States.

It is clear that in the case of Kosovo, the right of self-determination of the Albanians was given precedence over the principle of territorial integrity of Serbia.  This has created a precedent that has been followed in Crimea, the Donbass and will be followed by many other peoples who aspire to determine their own futures, including the Palestinians.

In this sense let us hope that the Alaska summit brings some preliminary results and that the slaughter ends – better today than tomorrow.  

The post Ukraine: Pax Optima Rerum appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Donald Trump successfully championed anti-immigrant hysteria during his 2024 (re)election campaign … and it worked.  Once in office, immigration became the leading political issue of Trump’s presidency.  

The Department of Homeland Security’s claims a record arrests and deportations since Trump took office. In an April 28, 2025, press release, it claimed that immigration arrests and deportations had “already surpassed the entirety of Fiscal Year 2024 [numbers], and we’re just 100 days into this administration.” 

Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, stated in late May 2025 that the administration had deported around 200,000 people over four months; the Department of Homeland Security reported over 207,000 deportations as of June 11, 2025. The New York Times indicate over 200,000 deportations since Trump’s return to office.

Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) reports that the Trump administration recorded fewer than 932,000 deportations; other sources suggest a figure closer to 1.5 million deportations.

TRAC reports that “deportations during a similar period [February-May 2024] under President Joe Biden’s administration” 257,000 people were deported.  Pres. Barack Obama deported 3 million noncitizens over his two terms in office. This is, according to one source, “more than any other president in American history.”

In comparison, Pres. George Bush removed about 870,000 people; Pres. Bill Clinton, about 2 million; and Trump about 1.2 million people during his first term.

Trump, like many presidents and politicians before him, knowns that foreign and foreign-born Americans are a perfect target.  And U.S. history is the history of targeting the other as the enemy, often resulting in deportations and/or forced migrations.

+++

Americas were divided over slavery, not only whether it was immoral if not illegal, but whether to expand it from the South to the new states in the West (e.g., Kansas).  A decade before the Civil War started, the abolitionists were divided over what to do with the slave population, especially when they were freed.  In 1854, future president Abraham Lincoln gave a speech in Peoria, IL, arguing:

“I should not know what to do as to the existing institution [of slavery]. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia, to their own native land.”

When in office in 1861, he ordered a secret trip to the isthmus of Chiriqui in the northern part of today’s Panama to assess the viability of relocating former slaves.  The land was owned by Ambrose Thompson, a wealthy shipbuilder from Philadelphia, who proposed it as a refuge for freed slaves.  As one source notes, “The slaves would work in the abundant coal mines on his property, the coal would be sold to the Navy, and the profits would go to the freed slaves to further build up their new land.”

Most insightful, Zaakir Tameez, a recent Yale Law School graduate, is quoted by New York Times op-ed writer Jamelle Bouie:

The colonization movement proposed abolishing slavery or winding it down over a period and then effectively deporting formerly enslaved people to Africa. The colonization societies could not imagine white and Black people living as equals in this country or African Americans being a political body in this country. So their proposal was just to mass deport them.

Before there were attacks on Mexican and Mexican Americans, Chinese immigrants were singled out.  In the spring of 1882, Congress passed — and Pres. Chester A. Arthur signed — the Chinese Exclusion Act. It banned Chinese immigrating from to the U.S. for ten years.

In the wake of California’s gold rush, thousand of Chinese people immigrated to the U.S. seeking a better life. Michael Luo, writing in The New Yorkers, notes that by 1880, “the Chinese population in the country exceeded a hundred and five thousand.”  He adds, by “the mid eighteen-eighties, during probably the peak of vigilantism, at least a hundred and sixty-eight communities forced their Chinese residents to leave. In one particularly horrific episode, in 1885, white miners in Rock Springs, in the Wyoming Territory, massacred at least twenty-eight Chinese miners and drove out several hundred others.”

Singling out still other immigrants, the U.S. undertook a series of select deportations as part of what’s recalled as the Palmer Raids conducted in November 1919 and January 1920.  Adam Hochschild, writing in The New Yorker, noted, it was “the country’s first mass deportation of political dissidents in the twentieth century.”

Pres. Woodrow Wilson ordered the U.S. Department of Justice to capture and arrest suspected radicals, especially anarchists and communists, and deport them. Palmer’s agents, led by J. Edgar Hoover, arrested nearly 10,000 people in seventy cities and deported nearly 600 people, including the anarchist Emma Goldman.

Trump’s rage against Mexican migrants is not the first of such campaign against Mexicans and Mexican Americans.  During the Depression, Pres. Herbert Hoover’s provocative slogan, “American jobs for real Americans,” kicked off a spate of local legislations banning employment of anyone of Mexican descent.  The majority of deportations occurred between 1930 and 1933 as police descended on workplaces, parks, hospitals and social clubs, arresting and dumping people across the border in trains and buses.

As the Guardian reports, “Nearly 2 million Mexican Americans, more than half U.S. citizens, were deported without due process. Families were torn apart, and many children never again saw their deported parents.”  Deportations took place in border states like California and Texas as well as heartland states like Michigan, Colorado, Illinois, Ohio and New York.

If deportation is one way to force unwanted people from the U.S., blocking immigrants is a way of keeping such people out. In June 1939, the German ocean liner St. Louis and its 937 passengers, almost all Jewish, were turned away from the port of Miami, forcing the ship to return to Europe; more than a quarter died in the Holocaust.

As the Smithsonian magazine reminds readers, Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt “repeated the unproven claims from his advisers that some Jewish refugees had been coerced to spy for the Nazis.” It then quotes FDR: 

“Not all of them are voluntary spies. It is rather a horrible story, but in some of the other countries that refugees out of Germany have gone to, especially Jewish refugees, they found a number of definitely proven spies.”

The belief that refugees posed a serious threat to national security was not limited to FDR but was shared by the State Department and the FBI.  Immigration restrictions tightened as the refugee crisis worsened. As the Smithsonian notes, “Wartime measures demanded special scrutiny of anyone with relatives in Nazi territories—even relatives in concentration camps.”

+++

What Trump and many others forget, America was never a “white” nation.

When the first Europeans, be they Spanish in St. Augustine, FL; the Dutch carrying enslaved Africans to Jamestown around 1619; or the English in New England, arrived in what is today’s American, the country was already populated with indigenous peoples.  Enormous efforts were made to irradicate the Native peoples including horrendous wars, mass displacements and forced colonization on reservations.  Native peoples didn’t receive citizenship until 1924.

Often forgotten, at the time of the Revolution, the total population was approximately 2.6 million, of which 566,000 were of African descent and 90 percent were enslaved. As of 2024, the U.S. was a multi-racial, multi-ethnic society of 332 million people.  It was a mixture of non-Hispanic whites = 58.4 percent; Hispanic/Latinos = 19.5 percent; Blacks = 13.7 percent; Asians = 6.4 percent;

Native American/Alaskans = 1.3 percent; and Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders = 0.3 percent.

In just two decades – in 2045 – the U.S. will become “minority majority” nation. During that year, whites will comprise only 49.7 percent of the population.

This well may be freaking out Trump and other white nationalists. He inherited more than money and a real-estate business from his father, Fred Trump.  Father Trump, like his son, did not serve during war – in Trump senior’s case, WW-II — but made a fortune from the postwar housing boom. Few remember that in 1927, Trump the elder was arrested with six other racists at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Queens, NY.  Senior Trump, 21 at the time, was a long-time racialist and, like his son, a real-estate conman.  

On Memorial Day 1927, supporters of Mussolini’s Italian fascism and Klansmen rioted in the Bronx, killing two Italian men.  In Queens, 1,000 white-robed Klansmen marched through Trump’s Jamaica neighborhood, and he was busted.  The white nationalist confronted 100 policemen and, as a local report claimed, “staged a free-for-all.”  Trump senior reportedly wore a Klan robe and, while arrested, no charges were brought against him.

Marx once noted, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”  But what if history repeats itself a third or fourth time? 

The post Trump:  Make America White Again appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“Flush with newfound confidence and authority, Mr. Netanyahu seemed finally to have gained the political capital he needed to override opposition from his far-right government allies to reach a truce in Gaza.”

– The New York Times, August 5, 2025, p. 1, “With Fate in His Hands, Netanyahu Fumbles It.”

The New York Times, over the years has been an apologist for Israel and Israel policies no matter how blameworthy, and the page one story cited above is typical of its biased reporting.  The author (Patrick Kingsley) assumes that Netanyahu actually wants a cease fire; that the right-wing coalition is responsible for blocking it; and that Netanyahu gained the “political capital” in Iran that he was seeking in order to get a truce.  All of these assumptions can be challenged.

It’s only been in the last few months that the Times has acknowledged the horrors of Israeli bombardments of Gaza and the fact that the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  But as recently as last week, the Times’ lead story emphatically stated that Netanyahu is not to blame for the failure to reach a cease-fire in Gaza—that the right-wing opposition is responsible.

Until recently, the mainstream media fully supported the Israeli view that Hamas is responsible for the protracted nature of the war in Gaza.  Palestinian suffering was given short shrift until journalists got into Gaza and witnessed the devastation first hand instead of relying on propagandistic Israeli press accounts.

“Flush with newfound confidence and authority, Mr. Netanyahu seemed finally to have gained the political capital he needed to override opposition from his far-right government allies to reach a truce in Gaza.” (The New York Times, August 5, 2025, p. 1, “With Fate in His Hands, Netanyahu Fumbles It.”}

The New York Times over the years has been an apologist for Israel and Israel policies no matter how blameworthy, and the page one story cited above is typical of its biased reporting.  The author (Patrick Kingsley) assumes that Netanyahu actually wants a cease fire; that the right-wing coalition is responsible for blocking it; and that Netanyahu gained the “political capital” in Iran that he was seeking in order to get a truce.  All of these assumptions can be challenged.

It’s only been in the last few months that the Times has acknowledged the horrors of Israeli bombardments of Gaza and the fact that the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  But as recently as last week, the Times’ lead story emphatically stated that Netanyahu is not to blame for the failure to reach a cease-fire in Gaza—that the right-wing opposition is responsible.

Until recently, the mainstream media fully supported the Israeli view that Hamas is responsible for the protracted nature of the war in Gaza.  Palestinian suffering was given short shrift until journalists got into Gaza and witnessed the devastation first hand instead of relying on propagandistic Israeli press accounts.

Several days after Kingsley’s article, the Times reported that Netanyahu was preparing to tell his security cabinet that Israel is planning to take military control over the entire 26-mile Gaza Strip, ignoring the advice of Israeli military leaders.  Donald Trump stated that an Israeli takeover of Gaza was “really up to Israel.”  Like the military, Mossad intelligence officials also warned that expanding operations in Gaza could endanger the hostages and kill more Palestinian civilians.  The Israeli military has reported that most of the Hamas leadership has been decimated; the Hamas arsenal has been destroyed; and that additional bombardment will threaten the 20 remaining hostages still alive.

Prominent Israeli military officials have informed the government that the war has been won and that there is no purpose in continuing the bombardment.  However, not a single high-ranking military or intelligence official has criticized, let alone refused participation, in the Israeli genocidal campaign that has involved mass killings of Palestinian civilians.

When a cease-fire was finally declared in January 2025, it was Netanyahu who broke it in March.  Once again, the mainstream media argued that Netanyahu had to do so to keep his right-wing coalition together, but it is becoming increasingly likely that Netanyahu chose to do so in order to avoid the additional judicial proceedings that he faces.  In August, he achieved one of his major domestic objectives when the Knesset voted unanimously to dismiss Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, one of his most prominent critics.  The Israeli High Court must now rule on the legality of the Knesset vote.

Netanyahu faces serious legal and political challenges if he decides to support a cease-fire in Gaza; the far-right members of his coalition could bring down the government and force an election.  An election loss for Netanyahu would make him vulnerable to corruption charges that have pursued him for the past five years.  Another recent development in the mainstream media is their acknowledgment that Netanyahu is prolonging the war so that he doesn’t face another general election until October 2026.

As a result, the war drags on with mounting deaths of Palestinian civilians, including thousands of children under the age of 11, as well as Israeli hostages who are dying in captivity.  Netanyahu has been branded a “war criminal,” and Israel has become a pariah state.  The International Court of Justice is considering claims that Israel is committing genocide, and several Israeli human rights organizations as well as prominent Israeli intellectuals have already reached that conclusion.  Saudi Arabia had been moving in the direction of an exchange of diplomatic relations with Israel, but the mounting civilian deaths, particularly the gruesome deaths of children from malnutrition, have ended any chance for recognition in the near term.

Public opinion in Europe and the United States is certainly moving into an anti-Israeli orbit.  French President Emmanuel Macron is preparing to recognize a Palestinian state at the UN meeting in September; several European states have already done so.  The Democratic Party, which heretofore backed Israeli policy, is now becoming seriously divided over the issue of Israel’s use of excessive military force.  These differences may have contributed to Kamala Harris’s election loss in 2024.  The collateral damage of Israel’s war is mounting, and the pain and suffering for the hostages, their families, and the Palestinians will worsen.“Flush with newfound confidence and authority, Mr. Netanyahu seemed finally to have gained the political capital he needed to override opposition from his far-right government allies to reach a truce in Gaza.” (The New York Times, August 5, 2025, p. 1, “With Fate in His Hands, Netanyahu Fumbles It.”}

The New York Times over the years has been an apologist for Israel and Israel policies no matter how blameworthy, and the page one story cited above is typical of its biased reporting.  The author (Patrick Kingsley) assumes that Netanyahu actually wants a cease fire; that the right-wing coalition is responsible for blocking it; and that Netanyahu gained the “political capital” in Iran that he was seeking in order to get a truce.  All of these assumptions can be challenged.

It’s only been in the last few months that the Times has acknowledged the horrors of Israeli bombardments of Gaza and the fact that the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  But as recently as last week, the Times’ lead story emphatically stated that Netanyahu is not to blame for the failure to reach a cease-fire in Gaza—that the right-wing opposition is responsible.

Until recently, the mainstream media fully supported the Israeli view that Hamas is responsible for the protracted nature of the war in Gaza.  Palestinian suffering was given short shrift until journalists got into Gaza and witnessed the devastation first hand instead of relying on propagandistic Israeli press accounts.

Several days after Kingsley’s article, the Times reported that Netanyahu was preparing to tell his security cabinet that Israel is planning to take military control over the entire 26-mile Gaza Strip, ignoring the advice of Israeli military leaders.  Donald Trump stated that an Israeli takeover of Gaza was “really up to Israel.”  Like the military, Mossad intelligence officials also warned that expanding operations in Gaza could endanger the hostages and kill more Palestinian civilians.  The Israeli military has reported that most of the Hamas leadership has been decimated; the Hamas arsenal has been destroyed; and that additional bombardment will threaten the 20 remaining hostages still alive.

Prominent Israeli military officials have informed the government that the war has been won and that there is no purpose in continuing the bombardment.  However, not a single high-ranking military or intelligence official has criticized, let alone refused participation, in the Israeli genocidal campaign that has involved mass killings of Palestinian civilians.

When a cease-fire was finally declared in January 2025, it was Netanyahu who broke it in March.  Once again, the mainstream media argued that Netanyahu had to do so to keep his right-wing coalition together, but it is becoming increasingly likely that Netanyahu chose to do so in order to avoid the additional judicial proceedings that he faces.  In August, he achieved one of his major domestic objectives when the Knesset voted unanimously to dismiss Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, one of his most prominent critics.  The Israeli High Court must now rule on the legality of the Knesset vote.

Netanyahu faces serious legal and political challenges if he decides to support a cease-fire in Gaza; the far-right members of his coalition could bring down the government and force an election.  An election loss for Netanyahu would make him vulnerable to corruption charges that have pursued him for the past five years.  Another recent development in the mainstream media is their acknowledgment that Netanyahu is prolonging the war so that he doesn’t face another general election until October 2026.

As a result, the war drags on with mounting deaths of Palestinian civilians, including thousands of children under the age of 11, as well as Israeli hostages who are dying in captivity.  Netanyahu has been branded a “war criminal,” and Israel has become a pariah state.  The International Court of Justice is considering claims that Israel is committing genocide, and several Israeli human rights organizations as well as prominent Israeli intellectuals have already reached that conclusion.  Saudi Arabia had been moving in the direction of an exchange of diplomatic relations with Israel, but the mounting civilian deaths, particularly the gruesome deaths of children from malnutrition, have ended any chance for recognition in the near term.

Public opinion in Europe and the United States is certainly moving into an anti-Israeli orbit.  French President Emmanuel Macron is preparing to recognize a Palestinian state at the UN meeting in September; several European states have already done so.  The Democratic Party, which heretofore backed Israeli policy, is now becoming seriously divided over the issue of Israel’s use of excessive military force.  These differences may have contributed to Kamala Harris’s election loss in 2024.  The collateral damage of Israel’s war is mounting, and the pain and suffering for the hostages, their families, and the Palestinians will worsen.“Flush with newfound confidence and authority, Mr. Netanyahu seemed finally to have gained the political capital he needed to override opposition from his far-right government allies to reach a truce in Gaza.” (The New York Times, August 5, 2025, p. 1, “With Fate in His Hands, Netanyahu Fumbles It.”}

The New York Times over the years has been an apologist for Israel and Israel policies no matter how blameworthy, and the page one story cited above is typical of its biased reporting.  The author (Patrick Kingsley) assumes that Netanyahu actually wants a cease fire; that the right-wing coalition is responsible for blocking it; and that Netanyahu gained the “political capital” in Iran that he was seeking in order to get a truce.  All of these assumptions can be challenged.

It’s only been in the last few months that the Times has acknowledged the horrors of Israeli bombardments of Gaza and the fact that the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  But as recently as last week, the Times’ lead story emphatically stated that Netanyahu is not to blame for the failure to reach a cease-fire in Gaza—that the right-wing opposition is responsible.

Until recently, the mainstream media fully supported the Israeli view that Hamas is responsible for the protracted nature of the war in Gaza.  Palestinian suffering was given short shrift until journalists got into Gaza and witnessed the devastation first hand instead of relying on propagandistic Israeli press accounts.

Several days after Kingsley’s article, the Times reported that Netanyahu was preparing to tell his security cabinet that Israel is planning to take military control over the entire 26-mile Gaza Strip, ignoring the advice of Israeli military leaders.  Donald Trump stated that an Israeli takeover of Gaza was “really up to Israel.”  Like the military, Mossad intelligence officials also warned that expanding operations in Gaza could endanger the hostages and kill more Palestinian civilians.  The Israeli military has reported that most of the Hamas leadership has been decimated; the Hamas arsenal has been destroyed; and that additional bombardment will threaten the 20 remaining hostages still alive.

Prominent Israeli military officials have informed the government that the war has been won and that there is no purpose in continuing the bombardment.  However, not a single high-ranking military or intelligence official has criticized, let alone refused participation, in the Israeli genocidal campaign that has involved mass killings of Palestinian civilians.

When a cease-fire was finally declared in January 2025, it was Netanyahu who broke it in March.  Once again, the mainstream media argued that Netanyahu had to do so to keep his right-wing coalition together, but it is becoming increasingly likely that Netanyahu chose to do so in order to avoid the additional judicial proceedings that he faces.  In August, he achieved one of his major domestic objectives when the Knesset voted unanimously to dismiss Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, one of his most prominent critics.  The Israeli High Court must now rule on the legality of the Knesset vote.

Netanyahu faces serious legal and political challenges if he decides to support a cease-fire in Gaza; the far-right members of his coalition could bring down the government and force an election.  An election loss for Netanyahu would make him vulnerable to corruption charges that have pursued him for the past five years.  Another recent development in the mainstream media is their acknowledgment that Netanyahu is prolonging the war so that he doesn’t face another general election until October 2026.

As a result, the war drags on with mounting deaths of Palestinian civilians, including thousands of children under the age of 11, as well as Israeli hostages who are dying in captivity.  Netanyahu has been branded a “war criminal,” and Israel has become a pariah state.  The International Court of Justice is considering claims that Israel is committing genocide, and several Israeli human rights organizations as well as prominent Israeli intellectuals have already reached that conclusion.  Saudi Arabia had been moving in the direction of an exchange of diplomatic relations with Israel, but the mounting civilian deaths, particularly the gruesome deaths of children from malnutrition, have ended any chance for recognition in the near term.

Public opinion in Europe and the United States is certainly moving into an anti-Israeli orbit.  French President Emmanuel Macron is preparing to recognize a Palestinian state at the UN meeting in September; several European states have already done so.  The Democratic Party, which heretofore backed Israeli policy, is now becoming seriously divided over the issue of Israel’s use of excessive military force.  These differences may have contributed to Kamala Harris’s election loss in 2024.  The collateral damage of Israel’s war is mounting, and the pain and suffering for the hostages, their families, and the Palestinians will worsen.“Flush with newfound confidence and authority, Mr. Netanyahu seemed finally to have gained the political capital he needed to override opposition from his far-right government allies to reach a truce in Gaza.” (The New York Times, August 5, 2025, p. 1, “With Fate in His Hands, Netanyahu Fumbles It.”}

The New York Times over the years has been an apologist for Israel and Israel policies no matter how blameworthy, and the page one story cited above is typical of its biased reporting.  The author (Patrick Kingsley) assumes that Netanyahu actually wants a cease fire; that the right-wing coalition is responsible for blocking it; and that Netanyahu gained the “political capital” in Iran that he was seeking in order to get a truce.  All of these assumptions can be challenged.

It’s only been in the last few months that the Times has acknowledged the horrors of Israeli bombardments of Gaza and the fact that the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  But as recently as last week, the Times’ lead story emphatically stated that Netanyahu is not to blame for the failure to reach a cease-fire in Gaza—that the right-wing opposition is responsible.

Until recently, the mainstream media fully supported the Israeli view that Hamas is responsible for the protracted nature of the war in Gaza.  Palestinian suffering was given short shrift until journalists got into Gaza and witnessed the devastation first hand instead of relying on propagandistic Israeli press accounts.

Several days after Kingsley’s article, the Times reported that Netanyahu was preparing to tell his security cabinet that Israel is planning to take military control over the entire 26-mile Gaza Strip, ignoring the advice of Israeli military leaders.  Donald Trump stated that an Israeli takeover of Gaza was “really up to Israel.”  Like the military, Mossad intelligence officials also warned that expanding operations in Gaza could endanger the hostages and kill more Palestinian civilians.  The Israeli military has reported that most of the Hamas leadership has been decimated; the Hamas arsenal has been destroyed; and that additional bombardment will threaten the 20 remaining hostages still alive.

Prominent Israeli military officials have informed the government that the war has been won and that there is no purpose in continuing the bombardment.  However, not a single high-ranking military or intelligence official has criticized, let alone refused participation, in the Israeli genocidal campaign that has involved mass killings of Palestinian civilians.

When a cease-fire was finally declared in January 2025, it was Netanyahu who broke it in March.  Once again, the mainstream media argued that Netanyahu had to do so to keep his right-wing coalition together, but it is becoming increasingly likely that Netanyahu chose to do so in order to avoid the additional judicial proceedings that he faces.  In August, he achieved one of his major domestic objectives when the Knesset voted unanimously to dismiss Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, one of his most prominent critics.  The Israeli High Court must now rule on the legality of the Knesset vote.

Netanyahu faces serious legal and political challenges if he decides to support a cease-fire in Gaza; the far-right members of his coalition could bring down the government and force an election.  An election loss for Netanyahu would make him vulnerable to corruption charges that have pursued him for the past five years.  Another recent development in the mainstream media is their acknowledgment that Netanyahu is prolonging the war so that he doesn’t face another general election until October 2026.

As a result, the war drags on with mounting deaths of Palestinian civilians, including thousands of children under the age of 11, as well as Israeli hostages who are dying in captivity.  Netanyahu has been branded a “war criminal,” and Israel has become a pariah state.  The International Court of Justice is considering claims that Israel is committing genocide, and several Israeli human rights organizations as well as prominent Israeli intellectuals have already reached that conclusion.  Saudi Arabia had been moving in the direction of an exchange of diplomatic relations with Israel, but the mounting civilian deaths, particularly the gruesome deaths of children from malnutrition, have ended any chance for recognition in the near term.

Public opinion in Europe and the United States is certainly moving into an anti-Israeli orbit.  French President Emmanuel Macron is preparing to recognize a Palestinian state at the UN meeting in September; several European states have already done so.  The Democratic Party, which heretofore backed Israeli policy, is now becoming seriously divided over the issue of Israel’s use of excessive military force.  These differences may have contributed to Kamala Harris’s election loss in 2024.  The collateral damage of Israel’s war is mounting, and the pain and suffering for the hostages, their families, and the Palestinians will worsen.“Flush with newfound confidence and authority, Mr. Netanyahu seemed finally to have gained the political capital he needed to override opposition from his far-right government allies to reach a truce in Gaza.” (The New York Times, August 5, 2025, p. 1, “With Fate in His Hands, Netanyahu Fumbles It.”}

The New York Times over the years has been an apologist for Israel and Israel policies no matter how blameworthy, and the page one story cited above is typical of its biased reporting.  The author (Patrick Kingsley) assumes that Netanyahu actually wants a cease fire; that the right-wing coalition is responsible for blocking it; and that Netanyahu gained the “political capital” in Iran that he was seeking in order to get a truce.  All of these assumptions can be challenged.

It’s only been in the last few months that the Times has acknowledged the horrors of Israeli bombardments of Gaza and the fact that the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  But as recently as last week, the Times’ lead story emphatically stated that Netanyahu is not to blame for the failure to reach a cease-fire in Gaza—that the right-wing opposition is responsible.

Until recently, the mainstream media fully supported the Israeli view that Hamas is responsible for the protracted nature of the war in Gaza.  Palestinian suffering was given short shrift until journalists got into Gaza and witnessed the devastation first hand instead of relying on propagandistic Israeli press accounts.

Several days after Kingsley’s article, the Times reported that Netanyahu was preparing to tell his security cabinet that Israel is planning to take military control over the entire 26-mile Gaza Strip, ignoring the advice of Israeli military leaders.  Donald Trump stated that an Israeli takeover of Gaza was “really up to Israel.”  Like the military, Mossad intelligence officials also warned that expanding operations in Gaza could endanger the hostages and kill more Palestinian civilians.  The Israeli military has reported that most of the Hamas leadership has been decimated; the Hamas arsenal has been destroyed; and that additional bombardment will threaten the 20 remaining hostages still alive.

Prominent Israeli military officials have informed the government that the war has been won and that there is no purpose in continuing the bombardment.  However, not a single high-ranking military or intelligence official has criticized, let alone refused participation, in the Israeli genocidal campaign that has involved mass killings of Palestinian civilians.

When a cease-fire was finally declared in January 2025, it was Netanyahu who broke it in March.  Once again, the mainstream media argued that Netanyahu had to do so to keep his right-wing coalition together, but it is becoming increasingly likely that Netanyahu chose to do so in order to avoid the additional judicial proceedings that he faces.  In August, he achieved one of his major domestic objectives when the Knesset voted unanimously to dismiss Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, one of his most prominent critics.  The Israeli High Court must now rule on the legality of the Knesset vote.

Netanyahu faces serious legal and political challenges if he decides to support a cease-fire in Gaza; the far-right members of his coalition could bring down the government and force an election.  An election loss for Netanyahu would make him vulnerable to corruption charges that have pursued him for the past five years.  Another recent development in the mainstream media is their acknowledgment that Netanyahu is prolonging the war so that he doesn’t face another general election until October 2026.

As a result, the war drags on with mounting deaths of Palestinian civilians, including thousands of children under the age of 11, as well as Israeli hostages who are dying in captivity.  Netanyahu has been branded a “war criminal,” and Israel has become a pariah state.  The International Court of Justice is considering claims that Israel is committing genocide, and several Israeli human rights organizations as well as prominent Israeli intellectuals have already reached that conclusion.  Saudi Arabia had been moving in the direction of an exchange of diplomatic relations with Israel, but the mounting civilian deaths, particularly the gruesome deaths of children from malnutrition, have ended any chance for recognition in the near term.

Public opinion in Europe and the United States is certainly moving into an anti-Israeli orbit.  French President Emmanuel Macron is preparing to recognize a Palestinian state at the UN meeting in September; several European states have already done so.  The Democratic Party, which heretofore backed Israeli policy, is now becoming seriously divided over the issue of Israel’s use of excessive military force.  These differences may have contributed to Kamala Harris’s election loss in 2024.  The collateral damage of Israel’s war is mounting, and the pain and suffering for the hostages, their families, and the Palestinians will worsen.“Flush with newfound confidence and authority, Mr. Netanyahu seemed finally to have gained the political capital he needed to override opposition from his far-right government allies to reach a truce in Gaza.” (The New York Times, August 5, 2025, p. 1, “With Fate in His Hands, Netanyahu Fumbles It.”}

The New York Times over the years has been an apologist for Israel and Israel policies no matter how blameworthy, and the page one story cited above is typical of its biased reporting.  The author (Patrick Kingsley) assumes that Netanyahu actually wants a cease fire; that the right-wing coalition is responsible for blocking it; and that Netanyahu gained the “political capital” in Iran that he was seeking in order to get a truce.  All of these assumptions can be challenged.

It’s only been in the last few months that the Times has acknowledged the horrors of Israeli bombardments of Gaza and the fact that the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  But as recently as last week, the Times’ lead story emphatically stated that Netanyahu is not to blame for the failure to reach a cease-fire in Gaza—that the right-wing opposition is responsible.

Until recently, the mainstream media fully supported the Israeli view that Hamas is responsible for the protracted nature of the war in Gaza.  Palestinian suffering was given short shrift until journalists got into Gaza and witnessed the devastation first hand instead of relying on propagandistic Israeli press accounts.

Several days after Kingsley’s article, the Times reported that Netanyahu was preparing to tell his security cabinet that Israel is planning to take military control over the entire 26-mile Gaza Strip, ignoring the advice of Israeli military leaders.  Donald Trump stated that an Israeli takeover of Gaza was “really up to Israel.”  Like the military, Mossad intelligence officials also warned that expanding operations in Gaza could endanger the hostages and kill more Palestinian civilians.  The Israeli military has reported that most of the Hamas leadership has been decimated; the Hamas arsenal has been destroyed; and that additional bombardment will threaten the 20 remaining hostages still alive.

Prominent Israeli military officials have informed the government that the war has been won and that there is no purpose in continuing the bombardment.  However, not a single high-ranking military or intelligence official has criticized, let alone refused participation, in the Israeli genocidal campaign that has involved mass killings of Palestinian civilians.

When a cease-fire was finally declared in January 2025, it was Netanyahu who broke it in March.  Once again, the mainstream media argued that Netanyahu had to do so to keep his right-wing coalition together, but it is becoming increasingly likely that Netanyahu chose to do so in order to avoid the additional judicial proceedings that he faces.  In August, he achieved one of his major domestic objectives when the Knesset voted unanimously to dismiss Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, one of his most prominent critics.  The Israeli High Court must now rule on the legality of the Knesset vote.

Netanyahu faces serious legal and political challenges if he decides to support a cease-fire in Gaza; the far-right members of his coalition could bring down the government and force an election.  An election loss for Netanyahu would make him vulnerable to corruption charges that have pursued him for the past five years.  Another recent development in the mainstream media is their acknowledgment that Netanyahu is prolonging the war so that he doesn’t face another general election until October 2026.

As a result, the war drags on with mounting deaths of Palestinian civilians, including thousands of children under the age of 11, as well as Israeli hostages who are dying in captivity.  Netanyahu has been branded a “war criminal,” and Israel has become a pariah state.  The International Court of Justice is considering claims that Israel is committing genocide, and several Israeli human rights organizations as well as prominent Israeli intellectuals have already reached that conclusion.  Saudi Arabia had been moving in the direction of an exchange of diplomatic relations with Israel, but the mounting civilian deaths, particularly the gruesome deaths of children from malnutrition, have ended any chance for recognition in the near term.

Public opinion in Europe and the United States is certainly moving into an anti-Israeli orbit.  French President Emmanuel Macron is preparing to recognize a Palestinian state at the UN meeting in September; several European states have already done so.  The Democratic Party, which heretofore backed Israeli policy, is now becoming seriously divided over the issue of Israel’s use of excessive military force.  These differences may have contributed to Kamala Harris’s election loss in 2024.  The collateral damage of Israel’s war is mounting, and the pain and suffering for the hostages, their families, and the Palestinians will worsen.“Flush with newfound confidence and authority, Mr. Netanyahu seemed finally to have gained the political capital he needed to override opposition from his far-right government allies to reach a truce in Gaza.” (The New York Times, August 5, 2025, p. 1, “With Fate in His Hands, Netanyahu Fumbles It.”}

The New York Times over the years has been an apologist for Israel and Israel policies no matter how blameworthy, and the page one story cited above is typical of its biased reporting.  The author (Patrick Kingsley) assumes that Netanyahu actually wants a cease fire; that the right-wing coalition is responsible for blocking it; and that Netanyahu gained the “political capital” in Iran that he was seeking in order to get a truce.  All of these assumptions can be challenged.

It’s only been in the last few months that the Times has acknowledged the horrors of Israeli bombardments of Gaza and the fact that the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  But as recently as last week, the Times’ lead story emphatically stated that Netanyahu is not to blame for the failure to reach a cease-fire in Gaza—that the right-wing opposition is responsible.

Until recently, the mainstream media fully supported the Israeli view that Hamas is responsible for the protracted nature of the war in Gaza.  Palestinian suffering was given short shrift until journalists got into Gaza and witnessed the devastation first hand instead of relying on propagandistic Israeli press accounts.

Several days after Kingsley’s article, the Times reported that Netanyahu was preparing to tell his security cabinet that Israel is planning to take military control over the entire 26-mile Gaza Strip, ignoring the advice of Israeli military leaders.  Donald Trump stated that an Israeli takeover of Gaza was “really up to Israel.”  Like the military, Mossad intelligence officials also warned that expanding operations in Gaza could endanger the hostages and kill more Palestinian civilians.  The Israeli military has reported that most of the Hamas leadership has been decimated; the Hamas arsenal has been destroyed; and that additional bombardment will threaten the 20 remaining hostages still alive.

Prominent Israeli military officials have informed the government that the war has been won and that there is no purpose in continuing the bombardment.  However, not a single high-ranking military or intelligence official has criticized, let alone refused participation, in the Israeli genocidal campaign that has involved mass killings of Palestinian civilians.

When a cease-fire was finally declared in January 2025, it was Netanyahu who broke it in March.  Once again, the mainstream media argued that Netanyahu had to do so to keep his right-wing coalition together, but it is becoming increasingly likely that Netanyahu chose to do so in order to avoid the additional judicial proceedings that he faces.  In August, he achieved one of his major domestic objectives when the Knesset voted unanimously to dismiss Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, one of his most prominent critics.  The Israeli High Court must now rule on the legality of the Knesset vote.

Netanyahu faces serious legal and political challenges if he decides to support a cease-fire in Gaza; the far-right members of his coalition could bring down the government and force an election.  An election loss for Netanyahu would make him vulnerable to corruption charges that have pursued him for the past five years.  Another recent development in the mainstream media is their acknowledgment that Netanyahu is prolonging the war so that he doesn’t face another general election until October 2026.

As a result, the war drags on with mounting deaths of Palestinian civilians, including thousands of children under the age of 11, as well as Israeli hostages who are dying in captivity.  Netanyahu has been branded a “war criminal,” and Israel has become a pariah state.  The International Court of Justice is considering claims that Israel is committing genocide, and several Israeli human rights organizations as well as prominent Israeli intellectuals have already reached that conclusion.  Saudi Arabia had been moving in the direction of an exchange of diplomatic relations with Israel, but the mounting civilian deaths, particularly the gruesome deaths of children from malnutrition, have ended any chance for recognition in the near term.

Public opinion in Europe and the United States is certainly moving into an anti-Israeli orbit.  French President Emmanuel Macron is preparing to recognize a Palestinian state at the UN meeting in September; several European states have already done so.  The Democratic Party, which heretofore backed Israeli policy, is now becoming seriously divided over the issue of Israel’s use of excessive military force.  These differences may have contributed to Kamala Harris’s election loss in 2024.  The collateral damage of Israel’s war is mounting, and the pain and suffering for the hostages, their families, and the Palestinians will worsen.“Flush with newfound confidence and authority, Mr. Netanyahu seemed finally to have gained the political capital he needed to override opposition from his far-right government allies to reach a truce in Gaza.” (The New York Times, August 5, 2025, p. 1, “With Fate in His Hands, Netanyahu Fumbles It.”}

The New York Times over the years has been an apologist for Israel and Israel policies no matter how blameworthy, and the page one story cited above is typical of its biased reporting.  The author (Patrick Kingsley) assumes that Netanyahu actually wants a cease fire; that the right-wing coalition is responsible for blocking it; and that Netanyahu gained the “political capital” in Iran that he was seeking in order to get a truce.  All of these assumptions can be challenged.

It’s only been in the last few months that the Times has acknowledged the horrors of Israeli bombardments of Gaza and the fact that the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  But as recently as last week, the Times’ lead story emphatically stated that Netanyahu is not to blame for the failure to reach a cease-fire in Gaza—that the right-wing opposition is responsible.

Until recently, the mainstream media fully supported the Israeli view that Hamas is responsible for the protracted nature of the war in Gaza.  Palestinian suffering was given short shrift until journalists got into Gaza and witnessed the devastation first hand instead of relying on propagandistic Israeli press accounts.

Several days after Kingsley’s article, the Times reported that Netanyahu was preparing to tell his security cabinet that Israel is planning to take military control over the entire 26-mile Gaza Strip, ignoring the advice of Israeli military leaders.  Donald Trump stated that an Israeli takeover of Gaza was “really up to Israel.”  Like the military, Mossad intelligence officials also warned that expanding operations in Gaza could endanger the hostages and kill more Palestinian civilians.  The Israeli military has reported that most of the Hamas leadership has been decimated; the Hamas arsenal has been destroyed; and that additional bombardment will threaten the 20 remaining hostages still alive.

Prominent Israeli military officials have informed the government that the war has been won and that there is no purpose in continuing the bombardment.  However, not a single high-ranking military or intelligence official has criticized, let alone refused participation, in the Israeli genocidal campaign that has involved mass killings of Palestinian civilians.

When a cease-fire was finally declared in January 2025, it was Netanyahu who broke it in March.  Once again, the mainstream media argued that Netanyahu had to do so to keep his right-wing coalition together, but it is becoming increasingly likely that Netanyahu chose to do so in order to avoid the additional judicial proceedings that he faces.  In August, he achieved one of his major domestic objectives when the Knesset voted unanimously to dismiss Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, one of his most prominent critics.  The Israeli High Court must now rule on the legality of the Knesset vote.

Netanyahu faces serious legal and political challenges if he decides to support a cease-fire in Gaza; the far-right members of his coalition could bring down the government and force an election.  An election loss for Netanyahu would make him vulnerable to corruption charges that have pursued him for the past five years.  Another recent development in the mainstream media is their acknowledgment that Netanyahu is prolonging the war so that he doesn’t face another general election until October 2026.

As a result, the war drags on with mounting deaths of Palestinian civilians, including thousands of children under the age of 11, as well as Israeli hostages who are dying in captivity.  Netanyahu has been branded a “war criminal,” and Israel has become a pariah state.  The International Court of Justice is considering claims that Israel is committing genocide, and several Israeli human rights organizations as well as prominent Israeli intellectuals have already reached that conclusion.  Saudi Arabia had been moving in the direction of an exchange of diplomatic relations with Israel, but the mounting civilian deaths, particularly the gruesome deaths of children from malnutrition, have ended any chance for recognition in the near term.

Public opinion in Europe and the United States is certainly moving into an anti-Israeli orbit.  French President Emmanuel Macron is preparing to recognize a Palestinian state at the UN meeting in September; several European states have already done so.  The Democratic Party, which heretofore backed Israeli policy, is now becoming seriously divided over the issue of Israel’s use of excessive military force.  These differences may have contributed to Kamala Harris’s election loss in 2024.  The collateral damage of Israel’s war is mounting, and the pain and suffering for the hostages, their families, and the Palestinians will worsen.“Flush with newfound confidence and authority, Mr. Netanyahu seemed finally to have gained the political capital he needed to override opposition from his far-right government allies to reach a truce in Gaza.” (The New York Times, August 5, 2025, p. 1, “With Fate in His Hands, Netanyahu Fumbles It.”}

The New York Times over the years has been an apologist for Israel and Israel policies no matter how blameworthy, and the page one story cited above is typical of its biased reporting.  The author (Patrick Kingsley) assumes that Netanyahu actually wants a cease fire; that the right-wing coalition is responsible for blocking it; and that Netanyahu gained the “political capital” in Iran that he was seeking in order to get a truce.  All of these assumptions can be challenged.

It’s only been in the last few months that the Times has acknowledged the horrors of Israeli bombardments of Gaza and the fact that the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  But as recently as last week, the Times’ lead story emphatically stated that Netanyahu is not to blame for the failure to reach a cease-fire in Gaza—that the right-wing opposition is responsible.

Until recently, the mainstream media fully supported the Israeli view that Hamas is responsible for the protracted nature of the war in Gaza.  Palestinian suffering was given short shrift until journalists got into Gaza and witnessed the devastation first hand instead of relying on propagandistic Israeli press accounts.

Several days after Kingsley’s article, the Times reported that Netanyahu was preparing to tell his security cabinet that Israel is planning to take military control over the entire 26-mile Gaza Strip, ignoring the advice of Israeli military leaders.  Donald Trump stated that an Israeli takeover of Gaza was “really up to Israel.”  Like the military, Mossad intelligence officials also warned that expanding operations in Gaza could endanger the hostages and kill more Palestinian civilians.  The Israeli military has reported that most of the Hamas leadership has been decimated; the Hamas arsenal has been destroyed; and that additional bombardment will threaten the 20 remaining hostages still alive.

Prominent Israeli military officials have informed the government that the war has been won and that there is no purpose in continuing the bombardment.  However, not a single high-ranking military or intelligence official has criticized, let alone refused participation, in the Israeli genocidal campaign that has involved mass killings of Palestinian civilians.

When a cease-fire was finally declared in January 2025, it was Netanyahu who broke it in March.  Once again, the mainstream media argued that Netanyahu had to do so to keep his right-wing coalition together, but it is becoming increasingly likely that Netanyahu chose to do so in order to avoid the additional judicial proceedings that he faces.  In August, he achieved one of his major domestic objectives when the Knesset voted unanimously to dismiss Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, one of his most prominent critics.  The Israeli High Court must now rule on the legality of the Knesset vote.

Netanyahu faces serious legal and political challenges if he decides to support a cease-fire in Gaza; the far-right members of his coalition could bring down the government and force an election.  An election loss for Netanyahu would make him vulnerable to corruption charges that have pursued him for the past five years.  Another recent development in the mainstream media is their acknowledgment that Netanyahu is prolonging the war so that he doesn’t face another general election until October 2026.

As a result, the war drags on with mounting deaths of Palestinian civilians, including thousands of children under the age of 11, as well as Israeli hostages who are dying in captivity.  Netanyahu has been branded a “war criminal,” and Israel has become a pariah state.  The International Court of Justice is considering claims that Israel is committing genocide, and several Israeli human rights organizations as well as prominent Israeli intellectuals have already reached that conclusion.  Saudi Arabia had been moving in the direction of an exchange of diplomatic relations with Israel, but the mounting civilian deaths, particularly the gruesome deaths of children from malnutrition, have ended any chance for recognition in the near term.

Public opinion in Europe and the United States is certainly moving into an anti-Israeli orbit.  French President Emmanuel Macron is preparing to recognize a Palestinian state at the UN meeting in September; several European states have already done so.  The Democratic Party, which heretofore backed Israeli policy, is now becoming seriously divided over the issue of Israel’s use of excessive military force.  These differences may have contributed to Kamala Harris’s election loss in 2024.  The collateral damage of Israel’s war is mounting, and the pain and suffering for the hostages, their families, and the Palestinians will worsen.“Flush with newfound confidence and authority, Mr. Netanyahu seemed finally to have gained the political capital he needed to override opposition from his far-right government allies to reach a truce in Gaza.” (The New York Times, August 5, 2025, p. 1, “With Fate in His Hands, Netanyahu Fumbles It.”}

The New York Times over the years has been an apologist for Israel and Israel policies no matter how blameworthy, and the page one story cited above is typical of its biased reporting.  The author (Patrick Kingsley) assumes that Netanyahu actually wants a cease fire; that the right-wing coalition is responsible for blocking it; and that Netanyahu gained the “political capital” in Iran that he was seeking in order to get a truce.  All of these assumptions can be challenged.

It’s only been in the last few months that the Times has acknowledged the horrors of Israeli bombardments of Gaza and the fact that the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  But as recently as last week, the Times’ lead story emphatically stated that Netanyahu is not to blame for the failure to reach a cease-fire in Gaza—that the right-wing opposition is responsible.

Until recently, the mainstream media fully supported the Israeli view that Hamas is responsible for the protracted nature of the war in Gaza.  Palestinian suffering was given short shrift until journalists got into Gaza and witnessed the devastation first hand instead of relying on propagandistic Israeli press accounts.

Several days after Kingsley’s article, the Times reported that Netanyahu was preparing to tell his security cabinet that Israel is planning to take military control over the entire 26-mile Gaza Strip, ignoring the advice of Israeli military leaders.  Donald Trump stated that an Israeli takeover of Gaza was “really up to Israel.”  Like the military, Mossad intelligence officials also warned that expanding operations in Gaza could endanger the hostages and kill more Palestinian civilians.  The Israeli military has reported that most of the Hamas leadership has been decimated; the Hamas arsenal has been destroyed; and that additional bombardment will threaten the 20 remaining hostages still alive.

Prominent Israeli military officials have informed the government that the war has been won and that there is no purpose in continuing the bombardment.  However, not a single high-ranking military or intelligence official has criticized, let alone refused participation, in the Israeli genocidal campaign that has involved mass killings of Palestinian civilians.

When a cease-fire was finally declared in January 2025, it was Netanyahu who broke it in March.  Once again, the mainstream media argued that Netanyahu had to do so to keep his right-wing coalition together, but it is becoming increasingly likely that Netanyahu chose to do so in order to avoid the additional judicial proceedings that he faces.  In August, he achieved one of his major domestic objectives when the Knesset voted unanimously to dismiss Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, one of his most prominent critics.  The Israeli High Court must now rule on the legality of the Knesset vote.

Netanyahu faces serious legal and political challenges if he decides to support a cease-fire in Gaza; the far-right members of his coalition could bring down the government and force an election.  An election loss for Netanyahu would make him vulnerable to corruption charges that have pursued him for the past five years.  Another recent development in the mainstream media is their acknowledgment that Netanyahu is prolonging the war so that he doesn’t face another general election until October 2026.

As a result, the war drags on with mounting deaths of Palestinian civilians, including thousands of children under the age of 11, as well as Israeli hostages who are dying in captivity.  Netanyahu has been branded a “war criminal,” and Israel has become a pariah state.  The International Court of Justice is considering claims that Israel is committing genocide, and several Israeli human rights organizations as well as prominent Israeli intellectuals have already reached that conclusion.  Saudi Arabia had been moving in the direction of an exchange of diplomatic relations with Israel, but the mounting civilian deaths, particularly the gruesome deaths of children from malnutrition, have ended any chance for recognition in the near term.

Public opinion in Europe and the United States is certainly moving into an anti-Israeli orbit.  French President Emmanuel Macron is preparing to recognize a Palestinian state at the UN meeting in September; several European states have already done so.  The Democratic Party, which heretofore backed Israeli policy, is now becoming seriously divided over the issue of Israel’s use of excessive military force.  These differences may have contributed to Kamala Harris’s election loss in 2024.  The collateral damage of Israel’s war is mounting, and the pain and suffering for the hostages, their families, and the Palestinians will worsen.“Flush with newfound confidence and authority, Mr. Netanyahu seemed finally to have gained the political capital he needed to override opposition from his far-right government allies to reach a truce in Gaza.” (The New York Times, August 5, 2025, p. 1, “With Fate in His Hands, Netanyahu Fumbles It.”}

The New York Times over the years has been an apologist for Israel and Israel policies no matter how blameworthy, and the page one story cited above is typical of its biased reporting.  The author (Patrick Kingsley) assumes that Netanyahu actually wants a cease fire; that the right-wing coalition is responsible for blocking it; and that Netanyahu gained the “political capital” in Iran that he was seeking in order to get a truce.  All of these assumptions can be challenged.

It’s only been in the last few months that the Times has acknowledged the horrors of Israeli bombardments of Gaza and the fact that the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  But as recently as last week, the Times’ lead story emphatically stated that Netanyahu is not to blame for the failure to reach a cease-fire in Gaza—that the right-wing opposition is responsible.

Until recently, the mainstream media fully supported the Israeli view that Hamas is responsible for the protracted nature of the war in Gaza.  Palestinian suffering was given short shrift until journalists got into Gaza and witnessed the devastation first hand instead of relying on propagandistic Israeli press accounts.

Several days after Kingsley’s article, the Times reported that Netanyahu was preparing to tell his security cabinet that Israel is planning to take military control over the entire 26-mile Gaza Strip, ignoring the advice of Israeli military leaders.  Donald Trump stated that an Israeli takeover of Gaza was “really up to Israel.”  Like the military, Mossad intelligence officials also warned that expanding operations in Gaza could endanger the hostages and kill more Palestinian civilians.  The Israeli military has reported that most of the Hamas leadership has been decimated; the Hamas arsenal has been destroyed; and that additional bombardment will threaten the 20 remaining hostages still alive.

Prominent Israeli military officials have informed the government that the war has been won and that there is no purpose in continuing the bombardment.  However, not a single high-ranking military or intelligence official has criticized, let alone refused participation, in the Israeli genocidal campaign that has involved mass killings of Palestinian civilians.

When a cease-fire was finally declared in January 2025, it was Netanyahu who broke it in March.  Once again, the mainstream media argued that Netanyahu had to do so to keep his right-wing coalition together, but it is becoming increasingly likely that Netanyahu chose to do so in order to avoid the additional judicial proceedings that he faces.  In August, he achieved one of his major domestic objectives when the Knesset voted unanimously to dismiss Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, one of his most prominent critics.  The Israeli High Court must now rule on the legality of the Knesset vote.

Netanyahu faces serious legal and political challenges if he decides to support a cease-fire in Gaza; the far-right members of his coalition could bring down the government and force an election.  An election loss for Netanyahu would make him vulnerable to corruption charges that have pursued him for the past five years.  Another recent development in the mainstream media is their acknowledgment that Netanyahu is prolonging the war so that he doesn’t face another general election until October 2026.

As a result, the war drags on with mounting deaths of Palestinian civilians, including thousands of children under the age of 11, as well as Israeli hostages who are dying in captivity.  Netanyahu has been branded a “war criminal,” and Israel has become a pariah state.  The International Court of Justice is considering claims that Israel is committing genocide, and several Israeli human rights organizations as well as prominent Israeli intellectuals have already reached that conclusion.  Saudi Arabia had been moving in the direction of an exchange of diplomatic relations with Israel, but the mounting civilian deaths, particularly the gruesome deaths of children from malnutrition, have ended any chance for recognition in the near term.

Public opinion in Europe and the United States is certainly moving into an anti-Israeli orbit.  French President Emmanuel Macron is preparing to recognize a Palestinian state at the UN meeting in September; several European states have already done so.  The Democratic Party, which heretofore backed Israeli policy, is now becoming seriously divided over the issue of Israel’s use of excessive military force.  These differences may have contributed to Kamala Harris’s election loss in 2024.  The collateral damage of Israel’s war is mounting, and the pain and suffering for the hostages, their families, and the Palestinians will worsen.

Prominent Israeli military officials have informed the government that the war has been won and that there is no purpose in continuing the bombardment.  However, not a single high-ranking military or intelligence official has criticized, let alone refused participation, in the Israeli genocidal campaign that has involved mass killings of Palestinian civilians.

When a cease-fire was finally declared in January 2025, it was Netanyahu who broke it in March.  Once again, the mainstream media argued that Netanyahu had to do so to keep his right-wing coalition together, but it is becoming increasingly likely that Netanyahu chose to do so in order to avoid the additional judicial proceedings that he faces.  In August, he achieved one of his major domestic objectives when the Knesset voted unanimously to dismiss Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, one of his most prominent critics.  The Israeli High Court must now rule on the legality of the Knesset vote.

Netanyahu faces serious legal and political challenges if he decides to support a cease-fire in Gaza; the far-right members of his coalition could bring down the government and force an election.  An election loss for Netanyahu would make him vulnerable to corruption charges that have pursued him for the past five years.  Another recent development in the mainstream media is their acknowledgment that Netanyahu is prolonging the war so that he doesn’t face another general election until October 2026.

As a result, the war drags on with mounting deaths of Palestinian civilians, including thousands of children under the age of 11, as well as Israeli hostages who are dying in captivity.  Netanyahu has been branded a “war criminal,” and Israel has become a pariah state.  The International Court of Justice is considering claims that Israel is committing genocide, and several Israeli human rights organizations as well as prominent Israeli intellectuals have already reached that conclusion.  Saudi Arabia had been moving in the direction of an exchange of diplomatic relations with Israel, but the mounting civilian deaths, particularly the gruesome deaths of children from malnutrition, have ended any chance for recognition in the near term.

Public opinion in Europe and the United States is certainly moving into an anti-Israeli orbit.  French President Emmanuel Macron is preparing to recognize a Palestinian state at the UN meeting in September; several European states have already done so.  The Democratic Party, which heretofore backed Israeli policy, is now becoming seriously divided over the issue of Israel’s use of excessive military force.  These differences may have contributed to Kamala Harris’s election loss in 2024.  The collateral damage of Israel’s war is mounting, and the pain and suffering for the hostages, their families, and the Palestinians will worsen.

The post The New York Times Continues to Give Netanyahu the Benefit of the Doubt appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

It is always dangerous to try to get into Donald Trump’s head, and there probably is not much point to the exercise, but Trump says the purpose of his tariffs is to bring down the trade deficit and move to balanced trade.  Tariffs can certainly reduce imports, and it is plausible that the tariffs he has put in place will raise import prices enough to bring us somewhere close to balanced trade. It is not clear how this would benefit the United States, but it is worth taking a closer look at the story.

First, it is important to get a general picture of the trade deficit over the last three decades.

As can be seen, trade was close to balance coming out of the 1990-91 recession, with the deficit hitting just 0.3 percent of GDP at the start of 1992. It rose modestly in mid-1990s as the economy recovered from the recession but then grew far more rapidly in the late 1990s.

This was due to three factors. First, we had a rapidly growing economy driven by the Internet bubble, which pulled in a huge quantity of imports.

Second, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin had an explicit “high dollar” policy. This made our exports more expensive to people living in other countries and imports cheaper for people living in the United States. Less competitive exports, combined with cheaper imports, means the trade deficit will rise.

The third factor was the East Asian financial crisis. In 1997, there was a run on the assets of the countries of East Asia, which had been experiencing a boom earlier in the decade. In a policy dictated by the Clinton Treasury Department, the I.M.F. offered loans to these countries, but it was conditioning on letting their currencies plunge in value. The idea was that they would export enough to pay back the loans, and many of the exports went to the United States.

There was a further run-up in the trade deficit following the end of the 2001 recession. This was driven largely by an explosion of Chinese exports to the United States. The trade deficit eventually peaked at more than 6.0 percent of GDP in the fourth quarter of 2005.

What happened next is underappreciated, certainly by Donald Trump, but also many more knowledgeable people. The trade deficit fell sharply. Part of that story was the recession following the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008-2009.

But even as we recovered from the recession, the deficit never came anywhere close to prior peaks. It settled near 3.0 percent of GDP, roughly half of its peak in 2005. The drop was due to a huge decline in the value of the dollar against other currencies, as well as a big increase in US oil and gas production that sent imports of these fuels tumbling.

This means we got halfway to balanced trade from 2005 to 2013. The impact of this reduction in our trade deficit of 3.0 percentage points of GDP should look similar to what we can expect from Trump’s move to balanced trade by imposing high tariffs.

If anyone thought this plunge in the trade deficit meant a boom in manufacturing employment, they would be badly mistaken. Manufacturing employment was still over 14 million in 2005 when the trade deficit was peaking. It stood at just over 12 million in 2013. It has risen modestly over the last dozen years as the trade deficit stabilized, but the growth could hardly be called a boom.

We may expect some further increases in manufacturing employment if we move close to balanced trade, and can avoid a recession, but most likely any increase would be in the hundreds of thousands, like the rise since 2013. That is not a very big deal in an economy with more than 160 million workers.

There are a few other points that can be made about Trump’s trade policies. If most of the story is reducing imports by roughly a third, as several analysts have estimated, then two or three years out we will be importing around $2 trillion a year in goods, rather than the current $3.3 trillion.

This decline in imports will mean that our market is far less important to foreign countries than it is today. While countries like South Korea, Japan, and Canada would suffer serious economic hardship from an abrupt loss of the US market today — just as a manufacturer would suffer harm from losing a major customer — that will not be especially true after they adjust to the Trump tariff regime.

Not only would their exports to the US be a much less important share of their market, they would all know that the United States could not be counted on as a reliable trading partner. This means that most businesses and countries will have taken precautions against the possibility that Trump, or a possible MAGA successor, could in a fit of anger new impose barriers to their exports.

They might still be willing to give Trump a gold coin, like Apple CEO Tim Cook, but they would no longer be willing to make real concessions. Trump’s tariff game-playing is a one and done deal. Other countries will not allow their prosperity to depend on the whims of an old man who is out of touch with reality.

There is also another side to trade that Trump doesn’t seem to know about. Almost 40 percent of our exports at the end of last year were services, and these exports had been growing far more rapidly than our exports of goods. These are items like foreign travel in the US, which includes student tuition (19.3 percent of service exports), financial services (16.2 percent of service exports), and payments for intellectual property (13.6 percent of service exports).

It is a safe bet that our exports in all of these categories will be falling sharply as a result of the Trump administration’s actions. We are already seeing a sharp decline in foreign tourism. Apparently not many people are anxious to vacation in a country that claims the right to detain and hold them indefinitely, for no reason whatsoever.

Foreign spending on US financial services is also likely to plummet as they cut their ties to the US market and develop alternative payment mechanisms. This is especially likely given the Trump administration turning a blind eye to corruption and promoting bloat in our financial sector with its ridiculous embrace of crypto.

And foreign payments for intellectual property will be dropping as we cut research funding and chase the people who do the research out of the country. Donald Trump may not understand the impact of his policies in these areas, but other countries that are reaching out to US scientists do.

The basic story here is that we may see a reduction in our trade deficit. We will pay more money for inferior American products. We will see a modest increase in manufacturing jobs, most of which will be no better than the jobs these workers would have held otherwise. And we will have gutted dynamic sectors of our economy, like biomedical research and clean energy.

That may be MAGA, but it doesn’t sound very great.

The post The Impact of Trump Tariffs on the Trade Deficit appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Kelly Sikkema.

On July 7, the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI released a joint, unsigned memorandum that began with these words: “As part of our commitment to transparency….” The two-page memorandum reveals that these federal agencies had searched everything from databases to hard drives to locked cabinets and closets for documents pertaining to the international sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein, the college dropout who had amassed a $577.7 million fortune at the time of his death, according to probate documents in the U.S. Virgin Islands. 

The statement from the DOJ/FBI said its extensive searches had turned up 300 gigabytes of Epstein-related data. (For an idea of how much that might translate into if converted into Microsoft Word documents, it comes out to approximately 19.5 million pages or 65,000 pages per gigabyte according to tech experts.)

But despite that opening promise of “transparency,” the memorandum meanders its way to a very Trumpian finish. Not one word of the 300 gigabytes of Epstein data in the hands of the government would be released to the public. That’s because the President’s Praetorian Guard, populated by his own former defense attorneys, have determined that there was no “incriminating ‘client list’ ”; “no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals” and not a scintilla of “evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”

The intellectually insulting memo landed like a hot fireball among Trump’s MAGA base. Trump had promised for years to expose all the elite pedophiles controlling the Deep State if he was returned to the Oval Office. The outrage was immediate on rightwing podcasts and social media.

The fallout has spiraled nonstop for the past month on evening news programs. Unfortunately, corporate media can’t seem to even whisper the name of the most obvious third-party target for a DOJ criminal charge: the largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, with a storied history of money laundering; five previous DOJ felony counts; and client relationships with Epstein’s two major money men – billionaires Leslie Wexner and Leon Black – both of whom have ties to Israel, as did Epstein. 

According to court records, JPMorgan Chase sat at the very center of the financial side of this sex trafficking network and has an existing spreadsheet showing it processed 9,000 transactions payable to Epstein-related persons that occurred between 2005 and 2019 with a combined value of over $2.4 billion. 

The hard evidence against JPMorgan Chase for both “facilitating” and “participating in” Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation consumes one million pages and 82,000 documents in court files in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in lower Manhattan. The documents were filed in connection with two separate federal lawsuits against JPMorgan Chase that were brought in late 2022 by the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands (where Epstein trafficked underage girls to his rich pals on his own secluded island compound); and a class action lawsuit brought by Epstein’s sexual assault victims.

After extensive discovery and the filing of tens of thousands of pages of redacted or sealed documents and deposition transcripts throughout much of 2023, JPMorgan Chase settled with the victims for $290 million and with the U.S. Virgin Islands for $75 million, rather than face a jury trial. 

These federal lawsuits were civil cases, leaving the door wide open for the U.S. Department of Justice to bring criminal charges against JPMorgan Chase – something that, to date, the DOJ has failed to do despite a well-developed roadmap provided by these cases.

Although JPMorgan Chase was legally obligated to file Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) with the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) on a timely basis regarding these highly suspicious money flows to Epstein from some of the wealthiest men in America, the bank did not file SARs until after Epstein died in his jail cell on August 10, 2019, according to the U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General’s office. (The New York City Medical Examiner ruled Epstein’s death a suicide.)

While many of these court documents have been sealed since the moment they were filed with the court in 2023, the public and congressional investigators can download hundreds of lightly-redacted documents, as we did throughout 2023. These documents provide a critical investigative trail that any honest and competent prosecutor can follow to mount a strong case against JPMorgan Chase. In fact, that $365 million in settlement payments by JPMorgan Chase to Epstein’s victims and the U.S. Virgin Islands is a strong indicator that there are far bigger revelations to come.

At a March 13, 2023 court hearing, the Epstein victims’ attorney, David Boies, argued in open court that JPMorgan Chase had used a private jet owned by the bank’s hedge fund, Highbridge Capital, to transport girls for Epstein’s sex trafficking operation. (Epstein had brokered the deal for Highbridge Capital to be sold to JPMorgan in 2004 and received a $15 million fee for his work.)

A January 13, 2023 amended complaint filed by Boies’ law firm, elaborated on the allegation as follows: “Moreover, Highbridge, a wholly-owned subsidiary of JP Morgan, trafficked young women and girls on its own private jet from Florida to Epstein in New York as late as 2012.”

During a burst of document filings with the court in July 2023, we located an expert report written by a former FBI agent of 23 years, Shaun O’Neill, who indicated in writing that JPMorgan Chase had “impeded” the federal criminal investigation of Epstein. 

The document had a heading at the top of each page that read: “Highly Confidential – Subject to Protective Order.” However, the notation on the docket was that the document was now being presented as a “redacted” document. We called the court deputy to be certain that the media was allowed to quote from the unredacted parts of the document. We were assured that we could.

A major revelation in the document is that former FBI agent O’Neill had been allowed to read the full deposition given in the case by William Langford, an anti-money-laundering (AML) executive at JPMorgan Chase, who had previously worked for the U.S. Treasury’s FinCEN. 

According to O’Neill, Langford indicated in his deposition that Epstein became a JPMorgan client in 1985, not in 1998, the date that most major news media has heretofore reported that the relationship began. JPMorgan has not publicly corrected that information. If Langford is correct, that would mean that JPMorgan Chase has financial transaction files on Epstein dating back 40 years – which would certainly open a window into who provided Epstein’s early seed money and who his largest financial funders were over the decades.

An internal document filed with the court by JPMorgan Chase lists accounts at the bank that have been coded as “Epstein related” as of October 18, 2007. (See data beginning on page 21 of 29.) Those include accounts belonging to Epstein’s clients (despite the DOJ/FBI memo telling the public on July 7 that no such client list exists.) The table also indicates the date that the account was first opened. The earliest account is for the J. Epstein Foundation, which shows that the account was opened on December 31, 1991. Another early Epstein-related account is for the billionaire retailing magnate, Leslie Wexner. It was opened on March 9, 2000. A trust for Wexner’s children, of which Epstein was Trustee, was opened on January 21, 1999.

A significant part of Epstein’s wealth came directly from, or through, Leslie Wexner, including Epstein’s upper East Side mansion in Manhattan; his Boeing 727 jet known as the “Lolita Express”; and an estate in New Albany, Ohio that was adjacent to Wexner’s own luxurious estate there. The value of Epstein’s assets originating from Wexner were estimated at over $100 million at the time of Epstein’s death in 2019.

In a 2016 deposition given under oath by one of Epstein’s former underage sex slaves, Virginia Giuffre (who died by a reported suicide in April of this year) the following exchange occurs between an attorney and Giuffre:  

Q. Was Les Wexner one of the powerful business executives that you were trafficked to?

A. Yes.

Q. How many times did you have sex with Les Wexner?

A. Multiple.

Q. What’s the approximate range of number, more than three?

A. More than three.

Q. More than five?

A. Possibly.

Q. More than ten?

A. No.

Q. Did Mr. Wexner ask you to wear any particular clothing during your sexual trafficking? [Back and forth comments between lawyers.]

A. Yes, I wore lingerie for him.

Q. At his request?

A. It wasn’t his request, it was Ghislaine [Maxwell] who set it up for me. [Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence after being convicted by a jury on federal sex trafficking charges related to Epstein’s victims.]

Q. How many times did you and Les Wexner and Sarah Kellen have sex together?

A. Once that I can remember.

Q. Where were you?

A. New Mexico.

Q. Are there other witnesses?

A. Number 48 [name redacted in document] I can’t pronounce her last name.

Q. [Name redacted in document]

A. [Redacted in document] yes.

Q. Anyone else?

A. Number 50, [name redacted in document].

Later in the deposition, the following exchange occurs:

Q. Did you name Les Wexner to the FBI?

A. Yes.

Q. And you said I think he has relevant information, but I don’t think he’ll tell you the truth. Do you see that?

A. Yes.

Q. Why did you think he wouldn’t tell the truth?

A. Because he did things that were wrong.

Q. What do you mean by that?

A. He participated in sex with minors.

Q. Did you tell Rebecca [Giuffre’s friend] that Les Wexner had participated in sex with minors?

A. Yes, I did.

Notwithstanding the massive wealth that Wexner transferred to Epstein and Ms. Giuffre’s credible allegations, Wexner’s name appears chiseled into numerous buildings at Ohio State University where he has been a major donor, including its Medical Center and Wexner Center for the Arts.

On July 23, 2023 we filed a request under the Ohio Public Records Act seeking copies of any investigative reports the taxpayer-supported institution of higher education had conducted on Wexner’s relationship with Epstein. After a long period of stalling, no meaningful documents were received by us.

Wexner is the former longtime Chairman and CEO of The Limited (a/k/a L Brands) retailing chain which, at various times, included Abercrombie & Fitch, Victoria’s Secret, Lane Bryant, Bath & Body Works and others. L Brands was a publicly traded company that was required to comply with Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules on the timely disclosure of material facts.

According to the SEC, Form 8K must be filed with the SEC by a publicly traded company to announce major events that shareholders have a right to be informed about. Companies typically have just four days to make the 8K filing after becoming aware of the event.

In 2019, the Board of Directors of L Brands hired the Big Law firm, Davis Polk & Wardwell, to investigate the ties between Epstein and Wexner after their close relationship became public following Epstein’s arrest on federal sex trafficking charges. Wexner’s wife, Abigail, had been a lawyer at Davis Polk prior to her marriage to Wexner and the law firm was the longstanding outside counsel to the company. After a shareholder sued the company over Davis Polk not having adequate impartiality in the matter, L Brands hired a second law firm, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, to conduct a second investigation.

We could find no public release of the findings of either the Davis Polk report or the Wachtell report. That is highly irregular for such a serious matter involving a publicly traded company.

What followed the Davis Polk and Wachtell investigations suggests that there were damaging findings. Wexner announced in 2020 that he would be stepping down as Chairman and CEO of L Brands. In 2021, both Wexner and his wife announced they would not seek reelection to the Board of L Brands. In August of 2021, L Brands ceased to exist with the spinoff of Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Body Works as separate companies.

On August 7, 2023, we filed a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) with the SEC seeking to learn if L Brands had ever filed the Davis Polk or Wachtell internal investigative reports with the SEC. If it had, that would mean that lawyers for the publicly-traded company had requested and received confidential treatment of those reports at the SEC — since they are not in the SEC’s public database.

On August 23, 2023 we received a letter via email from the SEC advising that nothing would be forthcoming to us in the way of documents under our FOIA request. The SEC based its refusal to provide even a shred of a document on the following:

We can neither confirm nor deny the existence of any records responsive to your request. Even to acknowledge the existence of such records could interfere with the personal privacy protections provided by FOIA Exemptions…Under Exemption 6 the release of this type of information would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy….

The American people should interpret the SEC response as this: billionaires will be protected even when there is more than two decades of credible evidence of a sex trafficking ring victimizing minors and operating with impunity within the United States.

Epstein functioned as a close confidante to Wexner and held a bizarrely broad power of attorney for Wexner’s financial interests. In addition to having an inordinate amount of power over Wexner’s finances connected to his retailing empire and his charities, Epstein also became a business partner of Leslie Wexner in Wexner’s multi-million-dollar residential/business development project known as the New Albany Company in New Albany, Ohio.

A lawsuit that was later dismissed by the judge alleged that the same members of JPMorgan’s Board of Directors who brought its Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, to power, were also engaged in business with Jeffrey Epstein.  

On July 21 of this year, Senator Ron Wyden, the Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, sent a letter to the Justice Department’s Attorney General, Pam Bondi, outlining the need for a broad criminal investigation into the Epstein matter. Of particular note, Wyden wrote:

The Treasury Department’s Epstein file also contains details of hundreds of millions in payments to Epstein from Wall Street financiers, including $170 million Leon Black paid Epstein for purported tax and estate planning advice.

Epstein was not a tax lawyer nor was he a CPA. He was not professionally qualified to render tax advice. Leon Black was the billionaire co-founder of Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm that he previously led as Chairman and CEO for decades. Black was in a position to hire the most qualified and expensive tax attorneys at the myriad Wall Street law firms that surrounded his firm in Manhattan. Instead, the American people are being asked to accept the story that Leon Black paid Epstein $170 million for tax advice. Assuming a high rate of $2700 per hour at a Big Law firm for expert tax planning, Epstein could have purchased 62,963 hours of tax advice for $170 million.

The common threads between Epstein, Wexner and Black (and potentially numerous others) were sexual assault allegations against the men, large sums of money changing hands, and robust support for Israel.

Leon Black has invested millions of dollars since 2017, shining up Israel’s image by publishing books on the lives of distinguished Jews. There is also an 8-book set on the origins of the State of Israel. The project is called Jewish Lives and is “a partnership of Yale University Press and the Leon D. Black Foundation.”  

On May 3, 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported that

…between 2013 and 2017, Epstein planned at least three dozen meetings with Mr. Barak [Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister of Israel]. They had appointments every month for 11 consecutive months starting in December 2015, the documents show….

The 2004 public tax filing for the Wexner Foundation shows that it paid $1 million to Ehud Barak that year as an outside contractor for “research.” (See page 6. Page 4 indicates that Jeffrey Epstein is in charge of the books of the Wexner Foundation.)

Long before Epstein was holding his secret confabs with Ehud Barak in Wexner’s former mansion in Manhattan, Les Wexner’s Foundation was strategizing on how to sell the war in Iraq to the American people while polishing the image of Israel.

In 2003, a bombshell document was leaked from the Wexner Foundation. The document was titled: “Wexner Analysis: Israeli Communication Priorities 2003.”

The underlying premise of this Israel thought control project is a “Warning” found on page 4 of the 17-page document. It reads:

There are some who would say that Saddam Hussein is already old news. They don’t understand history. They don’t understand communication. They don’t understand how to integrate and leverage history and communication for the benefit of Israel. The day we allow Saddam to take his eventual place in the trash heap of history is the day we loose [sic] our strongest weapon in the linguistic defense of Israel.

There is a self-admission in the document that it was created for the Wexner Foundation and has been tested with focus groups. A footnote reads:

This is not a policy document. This document is strictly a communications manual. As with every memo we provide, we have used the same scientific methodology to isolate specific words, phrases, themes and messages that will resonate with at least 70% of the American audience. There will certainly be some people, particularly those on the political left, who will oppose whatever words you use, but the language that follows will help you secure support from a large majority of Americans. These recommendations are based on two ‘dial test’ sessions in Chicago and Los Angeles conducted during the first ten days of the Iraqi war for the Wexner Foundation.

On July 31, 2023, Linda Singer, an attorney at Motley Rice representing the U.S. Virgin Islands, docketed a prior letter to the court suggesting that JPMorgan Chase had withheld critical information during discovery. Singer wrote:

On the afternoon of Friday, June 30, 2023, one month after the end of fact discovery, JPMorgan produced a spreadsheet listing the dates, beneficiaries—but not senders—and dollar values of over 9,000 transactions payable to Epstein-related persons that occurred between 2005 and 2019 and had a combined value of over $2.4 billion. Many of the entries reflected accounts and payments, numbering in the thousands and totaling in the hundreds of millions of dollars in value, of which USVI had no prior knowledge or information from JPMorgan’s responses and productions during the fact discovery period.

The names of the individuals who paid Epstein-related people $2.4 billion is critical to the public’s understanding of what this vast sex trafficking operation was really about and who financed it. Was this $2.4 billion for hush money payments? Was it fees for sex and/or Israel intelligence services?

The July 7 joint memorandum from the DOJ/FBI stated that its review of documents had “confirmed that Epstein harmed over one thousand victims.” That is a vast criminal operation involving the largest bank in the United States and it demands clear, precise answers to the American people.

JPMorgan Chase has attempted to portray itself in a more positive light by stating that it fired Epstein in 2013. But the veracity of that statement is called into question by a supplemental response to interrogatories that JPMorgan itself made with the court. It revealed that Justin Nelson, a banker at JPMorgan, had visited Epstein’s mansion in Manhattan, sometimes with colleagues, from 2012 through 2017. The filing stated:

Justin Nelson met with Epstein at his Manhattan townhouse on November 20, 2012; January 15, 2013; April 4, 2013 with Thomas McGraw; on April 24, 2013 with David Frame and Paul Barrett; June 6, 2013 with Chris French; May 8, 2014; December 3, 2014; May 4, 2015; September 29, 2015; November 19, 2015; December 14, 2015 with Carolyn Reers; February 14, 2017. In January 2016 he went to the Zorro Ranch….

Zorro Ranch was the name of the expansive residence that Epstein maintained in New Mexico, which was also involved in his sex-trafficking ring, according to Epstein’s victims.

There is another highly problematic internal document involving Nelson that has been submitted to the court. It involves Epstein wanting to open an account for his company called Southern Financial in 2013 and Nelson acting as a “sponsor” to get the account approved. Nelson signed off on the due diligence report on June 7, 2013, with a risk rating on the account downgraded from “high risk” to “standard risk,” despite the stunning information included in the document detailing Epstein’s alleged sexual assaults on dozens of girls in Palm Beach County, culminating in his serving 13 months in jail in 2008 and 2009. 

The downgrade of the account from “high risk” to “standard risk,” not to mention having any account connected to Epstein at the largest federally-insured bank in the United States, came after years of the anti-money-laundering (AML) and compliance personnel at the bank calling Epstein in internal emails a “known child sleaze,” and “that scum Epstein,” while another staffer acknowledged that he was aware that Epstein had stocked his mansion with “nymphettes.” The same personnel were exhorting their supervisors to fire Epstein as a client, which was overruled, year after year, by an invisible hand at the top.

It was not until 2019 that federal prosecutors finally brought federal sex trafficking charges against Epstein and put him in jail to await trial. That prosecution followed a public outcry after Julie K. Brown’s explosive series on Epstein and his victims in the Miami Herald.

As early as 2007 and continuing for years, compliance staff at JPMorgan Chase were expressing concerns about the sums of hard cash that Epstein was withdrawing from the bank. The former FBI agent, Shaun O’Neill, submitted testimony to the court that in the early 2000s Epstein was withdrawing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in hard cash from the bank.

A bank is required to file a Suspicious Activity Report for any cash withdrawals in excess of $5,000 if they occur with frequency, appear suspicious, or lack a legitimate business purpose. In oral arguments for partial summary judgment before trial, a lawyer for the Virgin Islands, Mimi Liu of MotleyRice, told the court that JPMorgan Chase did not file any Suspicious Activity Reports until after Epstein died in his jail cell. 

The U.S. Virgin Islands’ lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase contained deeply disturbing information about a top JPMorgan Chase bank executive’s close personal relationship with Epstein. According to the First Amended Complaint, Jes Staley, the head of JPMorgan’s Private Bank at the time, “exchanged approximately 1,200 emails with Epstein from his JP Morgan email account.” Several of the emails contained photos of young women in seductive poses and others further “suggest that Staley may have been involved in Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation.” For example, the lawsuit reveals the following: “In July 2010, Staley emailed Epstein saying ‘That was fun. Say hi to Snow White [,]’ to which Epstein responded, ‘[W]hat character would you like next?’ and Staley said, ‘Beauty and the Beast.’ ”

Staley also visited Epstein while he was serving jail time in Florida and made multiple visits to Epstein’s private island in the Virgin Islands.

Staley was the head of JPMorgan’s asset management division from 2001 to 2009 and CEO of its investment bank from 2009 to 2013. Staley’s compromised relationship with Epstein is indicative of a lack of adequate money laundering controls and a complete failure of KYC (Know Your Customer) rules. According to the deposition transcript of Jamie Dimon, the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Staley directly reported to Dimon and worked in an office located a few hundred feet from Dimon. 

Equally problematic for JPMorgan, the former Director of Enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Stephen Cutler, was the General Counsel at JPMorgan Chase in 2007 – the same year that Jeffrey Epstein signed a secret non-prosecution agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice and one year before he got the sweetheart deal in Palm Beach County.

Cutler’s office was located next door to Dimon’s office. Cutler worked at the bank as General Counsel from 2007 to 2015 and Vice Chairman at the bank from 2015 to 2018. In that final position, Cutler functioned as a senior advisor to Dimon and the bank’s Board of Directors.

Internal emails clearly show that Cutler was aware that Epstein was a client. In an email, Cutler called Epstein “not an honorable person” and Cutler wanted him fired as a client. Given those emails, it is highly unlikely that Cutler would not have brought the matter to the attention of Dimon or the Board of Directors. 

But according to the transcript of Dimon’s deposition conducted on May 26, 2023, Dimon’s position is this:

I don’t recall knowing anything about Jeffrey Epstein until the stories broke sometime in 2019. And I was surprised that I didn’t even — had never even heard of the guy, pretty much, and how involved he was with so many people.

There is a smoking gun email that may put that matter to rest if Congressional committees do their job and put witnesses like Dimon under oath. During Dimon’s deposition, David Boies introduced an email directly referring to a planned Epstein meeting with Dimon. The exchange went as follows:

Boies: “On February 26, 2010, Lesley Groff [an Epstein staffer] writes Mr. Epstein on the subject of, Jes [Staley] and Jamie. ‘Shall I have Lynn prepare heavy snacks for your evening appointments with [redacted], Jes Staley and Jamie Dimon? Or is this to be a nice, sit-down dinner at 9 p.m.?’ And Mr. Epstein replies, ‘Snacks.’ ”

Dimon responds in the deposition: “I have never had an appointment with Jeff Epstein. I’ve never met Jeff Epstein. I never knew Jeff Epstein. I never went to Jeff Epstein’s house. I never had a meal with Jeff Epstein. I have no idea what they’re referring to here.”

The post The Billionaires in the Epstein Files and Their Ties to Israel appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Jia Li.

At an Uzbek restaurant in Sheepshead Bay, we ate plov, manti, and shashlik, and talked for a couple of hours. It was summer. The chicken wings he’d insisted on ordering grew cold; I leaned back in my chair, my belly distended from the food and several bottles of pear soda. My eyes landed on the TV screen playing Russian new-wave music videos behind him.

I handed him the letter that was folded up in my pocket– which I had translated into Russian. It began, “I don’t know if you know this, but I am transgender.” I included an anecdote about my mother’s pregnancy with my twin and I, during which she was convinced I was a boy. At the delivery, she said, “Here he comes!” I apologized to him for withholding, explained the history behind my anxiety, and included some more recent experiences I’d had.

He looked at me, confused. He squinted, trying to read the small Cyrillic text, and my heart pounded in my chest so loudly I could hear it from within my body. He puts it down quickly and hands it back to me, and says that he’s always known I was trans.

“This no bother me. You person. You my friend, bro.” 

I met Talap Mamyrkanov when he started working at Gleason’s Gym, where I have been a coach since 2021. The gym, founded in 1937 by Bobby Gagliardi (who changed his name to Bobby Gleason to appeal to the Irish fight crowd), is the oldest consistently running boxing gym in the country. More than 136 world champions have trained there, including Jake LaMotta, Muhammad Ali, Roberto Duran, and Mike Tyson.

Image by Jia Li.

When Bruce Silverglade came on as a co-owner of the gym in 1982, he brought with him a commitment to furthering the gym’s efforts towards social inclusion and accessibility. While the gym had long been a multiethnic space, with trainers and fighters of all different nationalities, it lacked diversity along the lines of gender, class, and ability. It was a fighter’s gym, and had little room for those who didn’t fit neatly into the conventional model of amateur or professional boxing.

In 1983– a decade before USA Boxing (the amateur governing body) sanctioned women’s boxing– Bruce Silverglade started a women’s program at Gleason’s. Because there was only one locker room, Bruce convinced his business partner to close the gym early two nights a week to allow women to train. In 1987, when the gym moved to Brooklyn, there were enough women members to designate a separate locker room exclusively for them, and they integrated into the existing community. Under Bruce’s leadership, Gleason’s Gym pioneered a number of additional programs in support of even greater diversity at the gym, including a charity for under-resourced youth, free membership for veterans, and adaptive boxing classes for people with disabilities.

All of these initiatives aligned with my own interests in integration and accessibility. In 2017, I started a project called Trans Boxing, which initially consisted of a weekly group boxing class for trans and gender variant people. As the participation became more regular, a small community developed, and as it evolved, participants and supporters of the work contributed through collaborations, including a publication, various art exhibitions, a podcast, and workshops. Rather than a narrow reactionary focus on gender policing in sport, the project sought to find ways to explore the history, culture, and practice of boxing through a trans perspective.

When I approached Bruce about bringing the project into the gym, he was immediately enthusiastic. Feeling, as I did, that it was a natural extension of the kinds of programs Gleason’s had been supporting for over 50 years. Up until this point, Trans Boxing had – like the women’s program at Gleason’s–  held classes in gyms after-hours, as well as in parks, and community centers. Participation was casual, and people trained primarily for the sense of community and self-confidence it gave them.

Image by Jia Li.

This iteration of Trans Boxing at Gleason’s Gym demanded a greater commitment to integration within a much larger and more diverse context than the project had ever taken on before. It was also a huge step for me both personally and professionally. I was anxious, uncertain how I’d be received, asserting myself as a coach in such an impressive and historically significant gym.

As a fighter, I had little official experience, having only competed twice. My first fight was a “smoker”– which is an unsanctioned boxing match– on Coney Island hosted by the NYPD boxing team, where I faced a woman and NYPD officer who had formerly been a Puerto Rican national judo champion. My second fight was in the Daily News Golden Gloves tournament, where I fought an experienced fighter from the legendary Starrett City Boxing Club in the 112-pound female division. After that fight, an existing injury (a torn ligament in my wrist) worsened, requiring surgery and ending my competitive career in 2017. With competition off the table for the foreseeable future, I immediately began my medical transition, which included hormone replacement therapy followed by top surgery in 2018.

I continued to train at my home gym– the New Bed Stuy Boxing Center, and in 2020 when the gym closed as a result of the pandemic, a group of us trained with a coach from the gym at different parks in Brooklyn. The gifts of my transition revealed themselves to me most starkly through how I boxed. Aspirations I’d had for years as a fighter in terms of both ability and style, but also emotional maturity and mental attitude, started to fall into place on their own. I had more fun fighting, I felt loose and playful, and open to experimentation. The lack of emphasis on gender segregation also helped me to lean into boxing’s expressive potential, rather than its competitive aspects.

In those first couple of years, I often felt like an outsider: awkward, hyper-aware of myself and my fighters; our disruption of the status quo. There was a certain sense of fragility that, after a while, started to shift into a more solid recognition as the gym’s culture adapted to our presence, and me as a coach. I changed, too. I began to develop my own style and sensibility, and my enthusiasm and passion for coaching grew as I was able to invest more time and energy into building fighters.

Despite being ineligible to compete myself because of the restrictive policies for transgender athletes in both amateur and professional governing bodies, I had continued training and sparring. But in 2022, I discontinued a relationship with a longtime coach, due to numerous factors, but most notably his difficulty with my transition. It broke my heart to realize that what had once been a clumsy but loving awkwardness calcified into bitterness and anger.

Later that year was when I first saw Talap at the gym. It was a winter night; cold and already dark outside. Inside, it was fluorescently lit, humid, and loud, buzzing with the usual crowd. He was wearing an Adidas tracksuit and a fitted Yankees hat. He shadowed another coach, Leon, for the first couple of hours, and he didn’t smile or speak to anyone else. At first, I thought he might have been the father of one of Leon’s students, but he had a quiet professionalism and quality of attention that prompted me to introduce myself to him, extending my hand and asking, “Are you a coach?” He looked at me almost like he was surprised that someone saw him, and said, “I coach!” as he smiled and shook my hand.

We quickly became friendly with one another, greeting each other at the start and end of our shifts, and complementing one another’s training techniques and fighters. I found his personality to be incredibly earnest and kind, and started to really look forward to seeing him in the gym. As our friendship grew, we would take coffee breaks together, chat throughout the day, and walk together to the subway at night.

Image by Jia Li.

When he began to work with his own students, it was his intensity and passion that drew me to him further, as well as his training methods, which were in stark contrast to the other coaches. I started to train with him and his fighters a few days a week. Talap’s background is in soviet style boxing, which has dominated amateur boxing in the Olympics for decades. The highly technical and evasive style is more suited to tall, lanky boxers than to stocky pressure fighters, like me. But I was deeply curious about Talap’s approach and wanted to learn the principles myself so that I could properly teach components of the style to my students.

During sparring, he’d encourage me,

“Bro, your egg iron!” (By egg, he meant testicles.) “You really man!” “He scare-ed you!” He was confused, though, as to why I wasn’t competing in tournaments. “You crazy. You need fight, really fight. You need test your knowledge, your power.” 

Image by Jia Li.

I evaded his questions by telling him I had to take a medication that is prohibited. In the ring one day, he looked at me with a straight face and pointed to the two long faded scars on my chest, quietly asking, “What happen?” In our shared vernacular, I said, “I later explain.”

By this point, we had gotten to know one another more deeply and shared more about our personal lives and our respective histories. Talap told me stories of growing up in Kyrgyzstan, his amateur boxing career, studying Physical Culture at a university in St. Petersburg, and his family. He trained all five of his sons and would show me videos of their boxing and MMA competitions.

I was uncertain if Talap knew I was trans– and based on experiences I’d had with coaches in the past, I was anxious that when he found out, I’d lose the ease with which we related, or lose him completely. Talap’s influence had a profoundly positive impact on my abilities as a boxer and a coach, and his guidance and support gave me a new sense of self-confidence. Beyond that, though, he was one of the most vibrant people I’d ever met. In the weeks it took for me to work up the courage to tell him, I started crafting the letter carefully. I relished my time with him; bracing for it to end.

Instead, after I came out to him, our relationship deepened, and he embraced a partnership with me. We became a team in the gym, training our students alongside one another, taking them for runs on Brighton Beach, and working their corners together during competitions. I helped Talap register for his coaching certification. He was so happy, he grabbed my face and kissed me on the forehead.

Talap’s support has had a tremendous impact on the training of each one of my trans and non-binary fighters, and their sense of belonging in the gym. He trains my students with the same intensity he trains his own students. This past year, I prepared a transmasculine fighter of mine who competes in the women’s division for his first fight. Talap provided steady guidance, never once misgendered them, or interrogated us about their gender presentation, or eligibility.

I used to wonder why he chose to align himself with me and my students; to become a pillar of support for us, when he could have seemingly just as easily distanced himself. Later on, as we grew closer, my thinking shifted, as I thought about the connection between our perspectives. I think we saw ourselves in one another. Despite our differences in identity and background– me being trans and white, him being Asian and Muslim– we were both migrants.

Like “boxer” and “coach” the identity categories he and I occupy — immigrant and transgender — represent crossing boundaries, rejecting the limits of one’s original circumstances, and reaching towards a state unknown. These identities demand that an individual believe there is another possible reality, one categorically different from what the person knows, which is available, should the person have the audacity to claim it.

March 19th was a Wednesday. I remember watching the clock at the gym, calling him repeatedly, the horrible sound of his automated voicemail, checking his social media, praying for some activity. Every one of his fighters that arrived at the gym that day confirmed that no, they hadn’t heard from him. The next day, I found him through the online detainee locator system. He had been detained during a check-in with his immigration officer, something that had been a part of his regular routine for over two years.

He was initially detained at the Nassau County Jail. When I called, the officer barked at me, “No, you can’t talk to him. He’s being deported.” I asked him when, and he responded callously, “He might be getting loaded onto a plane right now.” A few hours later, he was transferred to a detention center in New Jersey, and then to the federal facility in Batavia. I took off time from work, and spent the next two weeks on the phone with lawyers and assistance groups. Finally, I found the lawyer who would eventually take his case.

I became Talap’s advocate on the outside, and I learned that he entered the US in 2019 after fleeing Russia, where he had faced decades of persecution and discrimination, and potential retribution and harm to his family. He was detained in Southern California for over a year before moving to Brooklyn in 2021. His lawyer worked to reopen his case, which the judge granted this past May, and his new hearing was scheduled for August 19th.

Image by Jia Li.

Shortly after he was detained, I visited Talap in Batavia. Through the thick glass, I looked at him as he sat slumped, the handset pressed against his cheek. I read him another letter, this time from one of his young boxers, a 15-year-old boy named Oscar. I noticed his body straighten and looked up from the paper to see him smiling, his big cheeks pushing up on his lower eyelids. He blinked and tears quickly fell as he said,

“This guy good. He smart. He strong. He grow up.” 

Later, another friend of his told me that when he called her that night, he said hearing Oscar’s letter made him feel like he had grown wings, and could fly over the fence that surrounds the jail.

Talap asked me to train his fighters while he’s away. “No shy. Call them. Tell them they need come training. If they no come this not correct.” Of his 20+ students, just a handful of dedicated fighters have remained at the gym in his absence.

Image by Jia Li.

The rest, I know, are waiting for him to return.

Support Talap Mamyrkanov.

Learn more about his case.

The post A State Unknown: LGBTQ+ Advocate Talap Mamyrkanov Faces Deportation appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Photograph Source: Donald J. Trump – Public Domain

Two certainties have emerged after seven months of Donald Trump’s control of America’s national security policy.  First of all, there is no comprehensive national security policy and no likely candidate in the administration for formulating and managing a comprehensive policy.  Second, the greatest challenge in the national security arena is China—the most important bilateral policy in the entire global arena—and the Trump administration is doing everything it can—whether intentional or not—to make China great and to worsen America’s standing vis-a-vis China.  The dumbing down of the United States continues under Trump, and China’s standing in the global community is becoming stronger.

Over the past 75 years, China has rarely relied on the use of military power—in Korea in the 1950s to stop the advance of U.S. forces, and in 1979 to “teach the Vietnamese a lesson,” which didn’t go well for Chinese forces.  Conversely, the United States has relied on the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to pursue wars that were neither winnable nor affordable (Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq), and to use covert action unsuccessfully in overthrowing democratic governments in Iran, Guatemala, the Congo, and Chile.

U.S. military engagements that were designed to last weeks and months turned into decades of military engagement and occupation.  Nearly every administration claimed it was not engaged in nation-building, but hundreds of billions of dollars were wasted in doing exactly that—nation-building.  And, of course, the ridiculous absurdity of the Iraq War that was going to introduce democracy as a model for the entire Arab world.  No strategic purpose was served by any of these interventions.  And apparently no lessons were learned.

Meanwhile, China has transitioned from one of the poorest nations in the world to the second-largest economy with nuclear-armed forces growing at a record pace.  Over the past 40 years, China has had the world’s fastest-growing economy with annual growth rates that often exceeded 10% a year.  China’s economy grew over five percent in the first half of this year; the U.S. economy expanded by one percent.  Meanwhile, U.S. tariff policy is losing friends around the world.

China’s transformation required a series of reforms in its fiscal, financial, and governance systems, marked by high levels of industrialization and urbanization.  China’s economic success has led to heavy investment in the global South, where the United States is losing influence.  The United States has relied on the projection of military power, while China has not relied on power projection and—unlike the U.S.—avoided getting involved in the decision-making and domestic politics of other nations.

In the new age of technological development, China is in a particularly strong position because of its control of critical minerals, particularly those needed in the West for defense systems.  In getting to this stage, China took full advantage of access to U.S. commodity and financial markets and U.S. knowledge, according to my former colleague at the National War College, Marvin Ott.  Hundreds of thousands of Chinese students have received advanced degrees from America’s most prestigious institutions, including the children of members of the Chinese Politburo.  Trump’s policies are weakening America’s most important educational and research institutions.

The United States is doing nothing to improve relations with China as Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and the undersecretary of defense for policy, Elbridge Colby, a grandson of former CIA director William Colby, pursue strong anti-Chinese policies.  In Trump’s first term, China hawks such as Matt Pottinger and David Feith worsened bilateral relations with China.  As the Trump administration withdraws from important international institutions such as the World Health Organization and UNESCO, China increases its involvement and influence in these organizations.

Fifty years ago, the United States pursued a strategic policy that divided the Soviet Union and China, and forced both Moscow and Beijing to seek better relations with Washington.  Today, the Trump administration is pursuing bellicose policies that are drawing Russia and China closer together.  Donald Trump’s threatening language regarding the movement of strategic nuclear submarines will certainly lead to a closer Sino-Russian strategic dialogue.

Twenty years ago, the United States led China in most global strategic technologies.  Today, the situation is reversed, with China leading the global community in nearly all strategic technologies.  This progress has allowed China to advance its military standing in all areas, including land, sea, air, space, and cyber.  In cutting-edge technology, Chinese research is the most cited in the global arena, including advanced magnets and superconductors, advanced optical communication, AI, and electric batteries.  China is the global leader in environmental technologies—EVs, EV batteries, and solar panels.  Trump’s mantra is “burn, baby, burn” regarding fossil fuels.

Trump is demanding tariffs everywhere on everything.  Instead of working cooperatively with our closest allies in Europe as well as with Japan and South Korea, he has threatened higher and higher tariffs, particularly with our good neighbors—Canada and Mexico.  Instead of persuading China to build automobile and battery plants in the United States, we are taking steps that will lead to more expensive production in the United States.  Instead of restoring federal support for scientific research and recruiting foreign experts, we are subsidizing legacy sectors such as coal and oil.

The “China hawks” in the Trump administration are aggravating and threatening our relations with China at every turn, instead of pursuing opportunities for dialogue and diplomacy in areas of common interest.  The China hawks in the mainstream media, led by Bret Stephens at the New York Times and David Ignatius at the Washington Post echoed the Trump line, asserting that high-level U.S. visits to Taiwan should be so “routine that Beijing forgets to protest.”  Just as Chinese President Xi Jinping stood up to Trump’s tariff policies, Beijing will challenge U.S. efforts to bolster Taiwan.

China now finds itself in the strongest international position it has held since the collapse of the Qing dynasty, the last of the imperial dynasties of China, which spanned the years 1644 to 1911. Xi Jinping is the strongest Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, who died in 1976.  The isolationist and erratic policies of Donald Trump will ensure that China and Xi will grow stronger in the coming years.

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The leveling of Gaza by the equivalent of 6 Hiroshima bombs is said to be the greatest destruction of an urban area in modern history.

But finally, I have to make that effort. There could be no more fitting day than this one, August 6, the 80th anniversary of the day the United States seared the Japanese city of Hiroshima with the first atomic weapon used in war, three days before the second was dropped at Nagasaki. Historians generally agree this was entirely unnecessary, that the entry of the Soviet Union into the war tipped the balance to Japanese surrender. After all, the one-day death toll in the firebombing of Tokyo had been even greater.

Now we witness events that, though it staggers belief, are even more destructive. The cumulative power of the bombs Israel has dropped on Gaza amount to six or more times that of the Hiroshima bomb, something like 90,000-100,000 tons of high explosive. The destruction is said to be the greatest of any urban area in modern history, including the Japanese cities. Now an even more pervasive weapon of starvation has been unleashed on the remaining civilian population. Famine has reached the “worst-case,” a U.N. affiliated group says. Overall deaths are often quoted in the range of 60,000, but could well run into the hundreds of thousands. Most of those who survive will experience ill effects through life, physical and psychological.

It is clearly a genocide, and though they are late in the game, Israeli human rights group B’tsalem on July 28 issued a report under the all-caps bold heading, “OUR GENOCIDE.” It concluded, “An examination of Israel’s policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes, together with statements by senior Israeli politicians and military commanders about the goals of the attack, leads to the unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking coordinated, deliberate action to destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip. In other words: Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

The same day, Physicians for Human Rights – Israel issued its own statement. It is worth quoting at length.

“Today, PHRI is releasing a position paper that documents this assault for what it is: a deliberate, cumulative dismantling of Gaza’s health system, and with it, its people’s ability to survive. This amounts to genocide. Israel’s bombing of hospitals, destruction of medical equipment, and depletion of medications have made medical care – both immediate and long-term – virtually impossible. The system has collapsed under the weight of relentless attacks and blockade.

“Each day, dozens die of malnutrition. Ninety-two percent of infants aged six months to two years don’t get enough to eat. At least 85 children have already starved to death. Israel has displaced 9 in 10 Gazans, destroyed or damaged 92% of homes, and left over half a million children without schools or stability. It has wiped out essential health services – including dialysis, maternal care, cancer treatment, and diabetes management.

“This is not a temporary crisis. It is a strategy to eliminate the conditions needed for life. Even if Israel stops the offensive today, the destruction it has inflicted guarantees that preventable deaths – from starvation, infection, and chronic illness – will continue for years. This is not collateral damage. This is not a side effect of war. It is the systematic creation of unlivable conditions. It is the denial of survivability. It is a genocide.”

In charging Israel with destroying Gazan society by making conditions unliveable, both groups are using definitions set by the 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention, one of which is, “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

This is accompanied by a general sense the worm is turning on Israel. France, Britain and Canada have announced plans to recognize a Palestinian state, though the latter two with conditions. Major figures are making statements calling for an end to the starvation campaign, including Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Keir Starmer, though the continuing shipment of arms to Israel which Trump could accomplish is not forthcoming. So his words seem to be just empty virtue-signaling.

Why did it take so long?

Israel finally made its genocide too blatant, though words of Israeli leaders at the beginning of the war made clear their intent, a reason why the International Court of Justice in January 2024 ruled in response to a South African charging genocide that it was plausible. Finally, it is no longer possible to plausibly deny it.

Why has it taken so long? Why does it go on? I have to conclude it is because in what Israel is doing in Gaza, and under less scrutiny in the West Bank, the West is seeing the reflection of its own brutal colonial past. The mass slaughter in Gaza is no different than exterminations European conquerors inflicted in the Americas, Africa and Asia. Do we find it unbelievable that Israelis actually say kill children because they will grow up to be terrorists? Do we remember that U.S. Army Col. John Chivingtonordered all to be killed in an assault on a peaceful native camp at Sand Hill, Colorado, including children. ““Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians!…Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.” Many were such massacres, from 1600s New England to 1800s California. Coast-to-coast genocide.

And if we view using starvation as a weapon with horror, let us remember how killing the buffalo herds was central to U.S. Army strategy to defeat the Sioux and Comanche who ruled over much of the west, when it was having trouble defeating them militarily. Gen. Philip Sheridan said it was necessary “to settle the Indian question.” The same Sheridan who reputedly said, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Whether or not he really did say it, it was a widespread sentiment in the 19th century U.S. So we should not be surprised to hear similar statements from the later settler colony of Israel.

What we see today is only a high-tech version of our own history. Instead of Gatling guns mowing down natives at Wounded Knee, it is F-16s dropping 2000-pound bombs on Rafah. We are shocked to see it, because Israel is acting out in the 21st century what western nations did from the 1400s on. Israel is in many ways a throwback. The Zionist idea of a Jewish state emerged in the late 1800s at the height of western colonialism. The idea that European whites were a superior race with a right to rule over others provided an intellectual legitimacy to seizing other people’s lands and committing genocide. We hear that echoed in claims of Jewish supremacy and right to the land of Palestine. It is often based, as were western claims to hegemony, on some kind of religious claim. In the end, it is theft.

If what Israel is doing in Gaza is increasingly compared to what Hitler and the Nazis did, it is partly because Hitler was a kind of throwback himself. It is said that his great crime was to treat white Europeans the same way they treated non-white populations in the Global South. Hitler had a dream Germans would settle the steppes of Eastern Europe that way the U.S. settled the west. He was an avid fan of Karl May, a German writer of western frontier adventures, and named his train The America. Trouble was, in Hitler’s case, the indigenous had tanks and were not so easily genocided.

Colonialism is woven into our lives

For while political colonialism largely ended in the decades after World War II, it has been replaced by a more insidious economic and cultural colonialism that continues to hold the Global South in thrall. In debt peonage that continues to hinder nations from developing their own economies, which as John Perkins wrote in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is quite purposive. In covert political manipulation that arranges coups and overthrows whenever a national leadership goes out of line. And perhaps most profoundly, in who does the work.

Jason Hickel, one of the world’s leading proponents of degrowth, the idea of reducing material and energy throughput to address the ecological crisis, is not by coincidence one of the world’s leading authorities on economic inequality. In 2024 Hickel published an article in Nature, “Unequal Exchange in the Global Economy.” The results are staggering:

“We find that, in 2021, the final year of data, 9.6 trillion hours of labour went into producing for the global economy. Of that, 90% was contributed by the global South The South contributed the majority of labour across all skill levels: 76% of all high-skilled labour, 91% of medium-skilled labour and 96% of low-skilled labour. In the same year, 2.1 trillion hours of labour went into the production of internationally traded goods (our use of ‘traded goods’ in this paper refers to both goods and services). The relative North–South contribution to the production of traded goods is similar to that of total production, with the South contributing 91% of all labour (73% of all high-skilled labour, 93% of medium-skilled labour, and 96% of low-skilled labour).”

In a 2022 article in which Hickel was the lead author, researchers found a huge portion of the economy of northern countries is extracted from the south, even in the so-called post-colonial era. The system is rigged by keeping resource prices low and finished goods prices high.

“This research confirms that the ‘advanced economies’ of the global North rely on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through induced price differentials in international trade. By combining insights from the classical literature on unequal exchange with contemporary insights about global commodity chains and new methods for quantifying the physical scale of embodied resource transfers, we are able to develop a novel approach to estimating the scale and value of resource drain from the global South. Our results show that, when measured in Northern prices, the drain amounted to $10.8 trillion in 2015, and $242 trillion over the period from 1990 to 2015 – a significant windfall for the North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. Meanwhile, the South’s losses through unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30.”

Israel’s genocide of Gaza is the immediate atrocity in our face. In the background are other proxy wars tied to western resource extraction in Sudan and Congo. Of course, we can look at the run of wars in West Asia and North Africa – Iraq, Libya, Syria, and perhaps one pending with Iran – as struggles over the control of energy and the western drive to preserve its colonial hegemony. It is all of a piece.

So what can we most meaningfully do in the face of all this, as people living in western countries, particularly the final guarantor of western colonialism, the U.S.? As I said, we can and must raise our voices against the current genocide, however small or powerless we feel we are. It is a necessity simply to be whole human beings. Then, at a broader level, we must examine deeply the role of continuing colonialism in our lives, dependent as we are on a flow of labor, resources and income from the Global South. Since much of this is tied to fossil energy, from which most global climate disruption flows, this is also vital to deal with the climate crisis. We need to get an honest living, because ours is not. It is built on centuries of colonial extraction.

The paradigm about which I write here, building the future in place, is all about building community-based economies grounded in the realities of nature, beginning in the communities and bioregions where we live. It is about local control of finance to invest in networks of community-based institutions – worker coops, local food providers, energy coops, circular economies, social housing, community broadband, etc. – that set us free from the global system of exploitation and extraction. That move us from these five centuries of colonialism to a just world for all.

With everything in us, let us push for the agony of the people of Gaza to end and for the colonial experiment of Zionism to be declared the manifest failure it is. It has not only brutalized the Palestinians; It has morally and psychologically twisted a large segment of the Jewish people, a tragic irony considering Jewish history. And at the same time, let us look at why the western world has largely gone along and supported what is clearly a genocide, understanding it as a late expression of what the western world has been pulling for a half-millennium. Then dig into the economic roots of this and our multiple, onrushing global crisis, and undertake the work of change in our own communities. It is hard to see the value in events that has caused so much suffering, but if Gaza spurs us to reflect on our own colonial past and move beyond it, and present, the many who have died will not have died in vain.

This first appeared on Patrick Mazza’s Substack page, The Raven.

The post In Israel’s Genocide of Gaza, We See the Face of Five Centuries of Western Colonialism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Image by Mohammed Ibrahim.

The following is an excerpt from Nafis Hasan’s new book, Metastasis: The Rise of the Cancer-Industrial Complex and the Horizons of Care, published by Common Notions. Listen to an interview with Hasan on the latest episode of CounterPunch Radio.

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Every major armed conflict since World War I has created significant cancer clusters among both civilians and soldiers. The atomic bombs dropped on Japan resulted in a 660 percent increase in leukemia rates among survivors living near the detonation zone, even twelve to thirteen years after the bombing. Increased risks for several types of solid cancers are also observed among the same population to this day. Women exposed to the bomb radiation during puberty showed higher risks of developing uterine and breast cancers than those exposed before or after puberty. The radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons tests in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958 also eviscerated the Marshallese from within––55 percent of all cancers among the Rongelap community are attributable to the radioactive fallout.

The indiscriminate use of Agent Orange, the chemical weapon used by the US military in Vietnam, resulted in increased risks for cancers of the mouth, salivary glands, stomach, and small intestine among military personnel. Vietnamese civilians exposed to Agent Orange also showed an increased prevalence of cancers, with more cancer incidences occurring at higher dose exposures. The cancers inflicted on the enemy came with collateral damage––according to a US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) study, Vietnam veterans have an increased risk of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Another study by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare showed male Vietnam veterans had a higher risk of prostate cancer, which correlated with length of service.

The War on Terror that led to the invasion of Iraq resulted in a 2,200 percent increase in leukemia rates among children in Fallujah due to the carpet bombing of the region within five to ten years of the bombings. There was a 1260 percent increase in rates of other childhood cancers and a 740 percent increase in brain tumors. Another study showed an increase in childhood leukemia rates in Basra and patients exhibiting multiple tumors simultaneously. The US veterans did not escape either––exposure to burn pits drove up non-Hodgkin lymphoma rates in male soldiers and breast cancer rates in female soldiers. Active-duty service members in the US suffer higher rates of breast, testicular, and melanoma cancers than their age-matched civilian counterparts.

At the time of writing, the only cancer hospital in the Gaza Strip has been closed by Israel’s siege. The thousands of cancer patients in Gaza await death due to the lack of medicine, if they were not already killed in the strikes on the Al-Rantisi Hospital. The cancerous effects of the thousands of pounds of bombs—that the US has supplied and Israel has dropped on Gaza’s dense, urban areas—have yet to be observed. However, as history teaches us, there will be an upcoming surge.

Survivors

The embedding of individual responsibility within thirties-era early detection and cancer awareness campaigns by the Women’s Field Army (WFA) had far-reaching implications on the social perspectives of (women) cancer patients. In the thirties and forties, when cancer was a taboo topic, the WFA organized in military fashion to campaign aggressively on a message of hope. The WFA commander Marjorie B. Illig went on public radio to declare, “Our war . . . it is a war to save human life, a war for health and happiness. We are not using bayonets or tanks or machine guns; our weapons are leaflets and lectures. . . .This war is against one of the greatest enemies of health. It is against cancer.” The military-style campaign to raise awareness about cancer imbibed the public with the war metaphor. Following the military logic of personal sacrifice and responsibility, a woman sacrificed her cancerous breast to the surgeon who would perform a radical mastectomy––creating a survivor and a hero, respectively. While cancer was ultimately situated as an individual responsibility without political or social dimensions, the question of who gets to be a survivor was and remains a political one.

During World War II, the ACS and WFA doubled down on the military metaphor, creating a map highlighting where its “cancer defense” forces were active. Commander Illig declared the month of April, originally commemorated as the Cancer Control month, as “[WFA’s] battle month.” The WFA also partnered with the Cured Cancer Clubs, first established by Dr. Anna Palmer, a retired physician and a breast cancer patient who had remained cancer-free for eighteen years and wanted to show the world that cancer was curable. These clubs informed the WFA’s optimist messaging, a predecessor to the now ubiquitous slogan that early detection saves lives. The bombing of Pearl Harbor forced the WFA to step back from their aggressive war of words; by 1944, Mary Lasker successfully wrested control of the ACS in a bloodless coup and the WFA’s activities came to an end.

Early detection was at the core of WFA’s messaging; the organization firmly believed that if more women consulted doctors earlier about their breast cancers, more lives would be saved. While no one could point to a definite cause of cancer, the narrative remained that cancer caught early could be surgically removed, resulting in a cure. The WFA’s aggressive campaign was not welcomed by all––many physicians and their colleagues were suspicious of the WFA trespassing on their territory. The doctors alleged that the WFA was providing medical information to patients, an act outside their expertise, and a violation of social gender norms. The predominantly male doctors did not take kindly to a host of women, mostly housewives, talking to their patients. To assuage their fears, the WFA stressed the responsibility of the individual in maintaining their own health; the WFA New York commander wrote to the medical societies, “individual responsibility has been the keynote of the movement . . . as it is the keynote of democracy.”

Before survivor became a term of empowerment, cancer patients were seen as victims at best and complicit in their own demise at worst. A 1947 Journal of American Medicine paper reflecting on the failure to stem cancer mortality squarely blamed the cancer patients themselves for failing to seek earlier treatment. By the fifties, early detection had become synonymous with cancer control and prevention. The ACS’ relentless campaign presented a “sanitized” version of the disease, one that solely hinged on individual responsibility and lacked any political or social dimensions. In the Cured Cancer Clubs and public media, cancer patients and doctors described their personal experiences without speculating on the cause of rising cancer incidence and mortality.

In the eighties and nineties, cancer activists took cues from feminist movements against sexual abuse and domestic violence. Cancer patients were now seen as cancer survivors and cancer warriors, not hapless victims. Reflecting on her personal experience with breast cancer and mastectomy, Audre Lorde wrote in 1980, “[W]omen with breast cancer are warriors, also. I have been to war, and still am. So has every woman who had had one or both breasts amputated because of the cancer.” In rejecting the label of victim and embracing her body with battle scars, Lorde reclaimed her agency as a woman, and not just a patient at the mercy of a disease, the healthcare system, or the environment. The notion of cancer survivors received official legitimacy with the formation of the National Coalition of Cancer Survivorship (NCCS), which advocated for survivors’ rights by lobbying for increased research funding, educational programs, and access to quality care. The NCI established the Office of Cancer Survivorship to study the aftereffects of cancer treatment and quality of life among cancer survivors; the private nonprofit sector followed suit in 1998.

By the early 2000s, survivorship had become the mainstay for cancer narratives and public discourse around cancer. Samantha King writes that Lorde’s vision was finally realized––women with cancer were no longer seen as victims or patients and were free of shame and self-harm. However, the meteoric rise of “survivor” as an identity drowned out any alternative experiences, cancer’s long-term effects, and the political and economic context of the disease and its treatments. Barbara Ehrenreich scathingly repudiated the uncritical celebration of survival––the “tyranny of cheerfulness” (as King dubbed it) ––“in the overwhelmingly Darwinian culture that has grown up around breast cancer, martyrs count for little; it is the ‘survivors’ who merit constant honor and acclaim. They, after all, offer living proof that expensive and painful treatments may in some cases actually work.” Some harrowing accounts of breast cancer notwithstanding, mainstream narratives remain focused on the “triumphalism of survivorship” in which the disease helped the survivors celebrate life and find true happiness. Ehrenreich exposed the hidden assumptions that have driven cancer treatment strategies and clinical trials.

The survivor identity that arose from the embedded kernel of personal responsibility within cancer awareness campaigns became a distorted version of Lorde’s wish that fighting cancer and fighting for one’s self would mean “recognizing the enemy outside and the enemy within” without “ignoring the strength and the barbarity of the forces aligned against.”

Race and Class Wars

There are “wide persistent cancer disparities” between social groups. Black people have twice the mortality rate for prostate, stomach, and uterine cancers as white people; Native Americans have twice the mortality rate for liver, stomach, and kidney cancers as white people. Racial disparities in cancer outcomes have been reported since the eighties––African Americans consistently have the highest mortality rates and disproportionately higher incidence rates for lung, breast, prostate, colorectal, and cervical cancers. Hispanics, Latinos, Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans suffer from higher stomach cancer incidence and mortality rates. Native Hawaiians have the highest breast cancer mortality rates of all racial and ethnic groups.

The Institute of Medicine has shown that these disparities arise from a combination of economic, social, and cultural factors. Epidemiological studies have shown that outcome disparities do not improve over time, despite aggressive mammography screening programs in nonwhite populations and after adjusting for stage of cancer at diagnosis. In fact, the disparity in death rates from all cancers combined is worse for Black men and women than their white counterparts. However, there is no inherent biological factor behind these outcome disparities; racial gaps in outcomes remain when Black and white patients have the same breast cancer type.

The reasons behind the persistence of such disparities are partly explained by socioeconomic status (SES): factors such as poverty, lack of education, health insurance or access to it. In 2022, 54.5 percent of the US population had employment-based health insurance coverage; 61 percent had private insurance. Without a universal healthcare plan, these US cancer patients are left at the mercy of their employers or the private healthcare industry, the latter of which saddles Americans with debt while siphoning off taxpayer money. In 2021, a Stanford study estimated that Americans faced $140 billion in medical debt, making medical debt the top source of debt collection. Those enrolled in Medicare are at the mercy of the pharma companies as patients, or healthcare and pharma companies as taxpayers.

Income certainly dictates the quality of care a cancer patient receives. It is also true that income inequality is an indicator of poor prognosis––US counties with persistent poverty have higher mortality rates for all cancer types; high-income counties have lower cancer death rates than middle- or low-income counties. However, SES cannot explain all racial disparities. M.N. Oliver, a prominent scholar on racial inequalities in health, notes that while substantial research between 1960 and 1990 revealed that class relations determined health outcomes, such a framework fell out of favor for the more politically accommodating framework of SES. In Oliver’s view, racialized class relations relegate African Americans to the working class and, therefore, form part of the “causal pathway by which race affects health.” The categories that make up SES––occupation, income, education––are all related to the production process, the relationship between workers and bosses. Thus, any disparities arising from such social relations can be explained by the social structure of power differentials. In other words, disparities in cancer outcomes are due to racial capitalism.

Military vernacular pervades every aspect of cancer research and treatment because it is interwoven within society at large to promote a revanchist idea of conquest against an invisible enemy lurking within oneself. The history of battle is written by the victors, who frame cancer as an enemy. Only survivors get to write the history of progress, and they often gloss over the casualties. The framework of war and individualizing of the disease erase who or what is truly responsible for cancer and its casualties. A sprawling non-profit ecosystem also provides a social grifting gateway for war profiteers and cancer-causing corporations. The real War on Cancer should be waged against capitalist relations.

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Image: Priti Gualati Cox.

Before the third week of July, when mass-starvation alarms finally started sounding, only a tiny minority of Americans were focused on the crimes against humanity that Israel was committing in Gaza. CounterPunch readers had long known what was going on, of course, but most Americans who depend on establishment media, whether liberal or MAGA, for their news had little idea. In a Harvard-Harris poll published in early June, only 2 percent of respondents said Israel’s war on Gaza was the most important issue to them. Only 5 percent believed it was even one of the most important issues facing the country today. 

Why would so many people think that if their government is enabling a campaign of slaughter and starvation against a civilian population of 2 million human beings, it’s not an important issue? Much of the blame can be assigned to government officials, other public figures, faith leaders, and establishment news media who have either defended Israel’s actions or treated its crimes as a minor issue, if they mention them at all. 

Then, in the last week of July, when a host of international experts, monitors, and humanitarian aid groups declared that Gaza was plunging into a state of famine, I wondered if big media would expand or improve their coverage accordingly. Now that Palestinian photographers have provided us with countless images of mothers holding skeletal children in their arms, one might expect that Israel’s campaign to expel the Palestinian people from their homeland, if not wipe them out entirely, would be the story at every news outlet every day. You’d think the issue would be blowing up on social media across the political spectrum. You’d think that, as a result, Congress and the White House would be inundated with demands that they crack down on Israel and finally get enough food into Gaza. 

So I looked around, and some establishment media have indeed increased their quantity of coverage. But few are expressing the heightened sense of horror and urgency that’s needed at this juncture. Their tone often reads or sounds as if they’re reporting on the aftermath of a wildfire or earthquake or plane crash. And context is still missing. In every report or commentary, they should be reminding readers, viewers, or listeners that Israel could not have inflicted such unspeakable cruelty and human suffering on this vast scale for almost two years without Washington’s full support. They’re neglecting (or deciding?) not to provide that crucial background, much less recognize the Palestinian people’s right to live free in their own homeland.   

When it comes to cheerleading for Zionism—and blithely supporting a full-blown genocide to boot—the New York Times is the consensus champion. In the past two years, Palestine supporters have blasted the old paper harder than ever for spreading pro-Israel propaganda with its reporting, for the smug callousness of its opinion writers, and for passive-voice headlines giving the impression that the source of Palestinians’ endless suffering is a mystery. Here, though, I’ll leave monitoring of the Times to the pros and focus instead on many liberals’ favorite “objective” news source, the beleaguered National Public Radio.

Famine Finally Spurs Coverage, Sort of

It had been clear since this spring that if the Israeli occupation continued blocking food supplies from entering Gaza, famine would eventually sweep through the territory. Then on July 29, the International Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the technical body that declares when and where famines occur, issued an alert stating in part,

The worst-case scenario of Famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip. Conflict and displacement have intensified, and access to food and other essential items and services has plummeted to unprecedented levels. Mounting evidence shows that widespread starvation, malnutrition, and disease are driving a rise in hunger-related deaths. Latest data indicates that Famine thresholds have been reached for food consumption in most of the Gaza Strip and for acute malnutrition in Gaza City. Immediate action must be taken to end the hostilities and allow for unimpeded, large-scale, life-saving humanitarian response. This is the only path to stopping further deaths and catastrophic human suffering.  

This came as no surprise. In the course of the previous week, increasing numbers of children were reported to be starving to death, and more than a hundred aid organizations issued a statement warning of “mass starvation,” as the “Israeli government’s siege starves the people of Gaza.” As early as July 19, the Palestinian Information Center put out a report titled, “Famine claims hundreds of lives, including 69 children.” So around July 22, I started checking to see if corporate and public media were ramping up their coverage of Israel’s genocide and if so, what they were reporting. 

The major US TV networks have expanded their coverage, for the most part. The Times and Washington Post appear to have done so as well, but I, like many, canceled my subscriptions to them last year, so all I know of the substance of their reporting comes from their detractors. The Guardian has had lots of stories on some days and not much on others. Magazines vary. The New Yorker has done OK; don’t miss the interviews in which Isaac Chotiner has grilled and fact-checked Israeli apologists. The Atlantic has paid little attention, and what they have published comes mostly from the keyboard of Yair Rosenberg, their earnest purveyor of Zionist propaganda. Slate and The New Republic seem to have run very little if anything.

I examined NPR’s coverage more systematically, by looking through the archives of Morning Edition and All Things Considered, their top daily news programs. I sampled random dates (without looking at show contents beforehand), including eight shows, four from each program, in the July 2–17 timespan, that is, before there was much talk of imminent famine in Gaza. I then sampled fourteen shows that aired in the July 18–31 period, when a quickening drumbeat of increasingly dire famine warnings was sounding. 

In the sample of shows between June 2 and 17, I found exactly one report related to Israel’s war on Gaza. It was a gripping, harrowing story featuring NPR Gaza producer Anas Baba’s attempt to obtain food for his family by venturing to one of the phony, deadly food distribution centers being run by American mercenaries. It was very good, but it was alone; there were no reports on Gaza among the other 148 segments aired during the eight shows I checked. 

Like most outlets, NPR started paying more attention as famine closed in on Gaza between July 18 and 31. Of the 226 segments included in the fourteen shows I sampled from that period, eighteen, or 8 percent, covered Israel’s war on Gaza. Anas Baba reported again on the “food aid” death traps and also on Israel’s threat to kill any Palestinian who ventured into the Mediterranean Sea, thereby blocking people from catching fish to feed their families. There were stories about ceasefire talks and starvation among Gaza’s journalists. Then there was an interview of a British surgeon who had been operating on gunshot victims at Nasser Hospital. Among other shocking revelations, he noted that “one day we will see mainly abdominal gunshot wounds. Another day we’ll see head gunshot wounds. Another day we’ll see neck gunshot wounds. So there is a very clear pattern that all, not just me but all of us, have seen in this hospital, whereby particular body parts are targeted [by Israeli troops] on particular days.” Though few and far between, reports like those, especially ones with Anas Baba’s byline, gave a good sense of what’s happening in Gaza. 

But other segments told a very different story. 

“I’m Afraid That’s All the Time We Have”

On July 23, with children dying of starvation in ever-greater numbers, All Things Considered host Ari Shapiro interviewed the vice president of global policy for the aid organization Mercy Corps about the group’s just-issued statement on mass starvation in Gaza. Having prefaced an earlier question by saying, “I know that food has been scarce since the beginning of this war,” Shapiro asked, concerning the food centers run by US mercenaries, “Can you explain why this scheme is so much more dangerous than the previous U.N. model that you would like to see come back?”

The interviewee responded, in part, “In order to get there, [food-seekers are] often going through places that are quite dangerous, either because they’re littered with unexploded ordnance or because they have to sort of cross near Israeli forces, and as a result, we’ve seen these massacres that have occurred. And there’s also, just because of the situation I described, how little [food?] there is, often panic and chaos and lack of communication around this. And we see crushing incidents, like happened last week at one of these sites. So as a result, you know, [it’s] very dangerous to go to these places.”

That exchange may have confused listeners who’d missed on-the-scene reporting by Baba or other Palestinian journalists. Neither the interviewer nor the interviewee was putting nouns and verbs together in ways that make clear who’s causing starvation and deaths, or how. Food “has been scarce.” Why? The new food scheme is “much more dangerous than the previous U.N. model that you would like to see come back”? You mean those 400 not-at-all-dangerous UN food centers that were replaced by four US death traps? Is it only Mercy Corps that wants the UN centers back? “Massacres have occurred.” How? Does it have something to do with people having to “sort of cross near Israeli forces”? 

The Mercy Corps representative mentioned unexploded ordnance, poor communication, and “crushing incidents” but not gunfire by Israeli troops. It is, of course, the latter who have killed more than 1,000 Palestinian civilians at or on the way to food sites. (At the top of the interview, Shapiro does mention that food-seekers are “risking being shot,” but that’s just more passive-voice equivocation.)

That same day, Shapiro interviewed an Israel representative to the UN about his country’s blockade that continues to keep food out of Gaza. He allowed the official to repeat Israeli myths that Hamas—Gaza’s government—is starving its own people. And as Israeli officials always do, he also blamed Hamas for the failure of ceasefire talks: “There is a ceasefire offer on the table. We said yes, for that ceasefire … We accepted the ceasefire offer. Hamas rejected it. . . So the blame is on Hamas.”

It’s Israel that keeps scuttling deals, of course; the official was turning reality inside out. And instead of challenging him on his lies about food aid and the ceasefire talks, Shapiro came back with a clumsy taunt that implicitly accepted the official’s bogus claims: “You are saying that Hamas is able to prevent food from reaching the civilian population. Israel has spent almost two years heavily bombarding the Gaza Strip. If that was not enough to loosen the grip of Hamas, does that mean Israel’s strategy in this war has been a failure?” Having falsely but successfully pinned blame on Hamas, the official simply dismissed the accusation of failure, saying, “We accomplished a lot,” but “We have to finish the job.” 

Shapiro let those final six chilling words slip by without pointing out what Israelis mean when they say, “finish the job” in Gaza. 

Finally, Shapiro bore down hard on the official—not about Israel having created a hell on earth for two million Palestinians, half of them children, and not about Israel slaughtering more than 200 Palestinian journalists or keeping food out of Gaza, but about Israel refusing to allow Western journalists into Gaza. The official offered another vapid answer, and, with the usual “I’m afraid that’s all the time we have,” Shapiro put an end to the debacle. 

On July 29, virtually every US news outlet, including NPR, reported that two Israeli human rights groups had just taken the fateful step of labeling the war on Gaza a genocide. But Morning Edition, sustaining its reputation for hearing from both sides—however abhorrent one side’s position may be—followed its report on the groups’ announcements with a segment headlined, “War scholar discusses why he does not think there is a genocide in Gaza.” 

Rather than interview, say, an expert in international law, NPR chose John Spencer, an urban warfare scholar from the U.S. Military Academy who has embedded four times with the Israeli occupation forces in Gaza. In response to host Steve Inskeep’s softball questions, Spencer disgorged propaganda that may have been even less connected to reality than the hasbara we keep hearing from Israeli officials. Several times, Inskeep responded not by fact-checking Spenser but by asking fresh questions that seemed intended to express incredulity but instead provided the military scholar with more chances to elaborate on his lies. At other times, Inskeep just changed the subject. Here are a few examples from the interview:

Inskeep: We could argue over how many [Palestinians] are combatants or noncombatants, but many are dead. Why is that not genocide?

Spencer: Because that’s – I mean, the Genocide Convention’s only a few pages. You can read it… And all the mountain of evidence of what Israel is doing to preserve infrastructure, civilian life, to provide services – both medical. I mean, the number of field hospitals, the number of water pipes, the amount of aid… 

Inskeep: Do you think there’s a single well-functioning hospital in all of Gaza?

Spencer: Yeah … After Israel surrounds them and evacuates them, picks the Hamas out of the crowd, and then lets [the staff] go back in, they go back into operating in some way.

Inskeep [allowing that fairy tale to stand]: Why do you think food has been so desperately short in recent months in Gaza …?

Spencer: Yeah, and there’s more than one reason, and this is the problem. Israel attempted the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation effort to try to wrest the grasp of Hamas, depending on who’s…

Inskeep [interrupting]: They blamed Hamas for being connected too closely to United Nations efforts and said they’d set up their own. OK.

Spencer: [more false accusations against Hamas, which Inskeep left uncontested]

Inskeep: Why do you think the Israeli effort to replace that food distribution system has worked so poorly? 

Spencer: I don’t think it’s worked poorly… [followed by a string of lies praising the death-trap “food aid” centers run by US mercenaries] 

Inskeep: Do you not think that there are people in Israel’s government who would like the land for Israel and for the Palestinians to leave?

Spencer: What usually happens in war is, you do move in, and you occupy that ground until you find somebody else to govern it.

Inskeep: Israel has not seemed that interested in finding someone else to govern it. 

He was right on that. Israel wants to govern Gaza itself, after driving out its entire population. Lastly, Inskeep suggested a compromise by asking Spencer, in effect, OK, if you reject the term genocide, would you agree that Israel is at least committing war crimes? Spencer refused to do even that, contending that it’s only individual soldiers who have “done the wrong thing.” And with that, he got the last word. Inskeep wrapped up this bizarre who’s-on-first conversation with, “John Spencer, scholar at West Point. Thanks very much.”

These NPR interviews nicely illustrate a principle articulated by the scholar Benay Blend in her conclusion to a recent article for Palestine Chronicle: “Given their reluctance to report anything other than the Official Story, it’s not enough to ask that mainstream news cover these stories from Palestine. Given their unqualified reliance on Zionist narratives, it is perhaps best that they don’t.”

This is no time for phony “balance” or blind “objectivity” in interviewing, reporting, or commentary. If an occupying power is going all-out to obliterate the population whose land it is trying to steal, and a news outlet takes care not to take sides, then they are, in fact, taking a side, and it’s the wrong one.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

A week ago, a parade of op-ed writers, pundits, and politicians who have publicly supported, justified, or excused the war on Gaza for more than a year and a half began a series of predictable contortions in hopes of escaping what I am going to call their “active complicity” in a genocide: neither the direct commission of genocide, nor silence or ignorance in the face of it, but publicly supporting, justifying, or excusing it.

You can see the new act by the actively complicit in any major ring in the media big top. Watch them take the following positions, at the very limits of how far the human mind can bend:

+ The starvation of (so far) about 100 children may be “unjust,” but the bombing, shooting, and starvation of some 20,000 children in the first 99% of the same assault on a captive population was not. That was just “war”; these are war crimes.

+ The pictures of starving children are horrifying, while the pictures of children dismembered, or carrying the bodies of their siblings in their arms, or burning alive, weren’t that powerful, if we even saw them—maybe we just imagined them? Certainly they’re not worth recalling now, since that was just “war,” while this could well be genocide.

+ This could well be a genocide now, but it can’t have been one when it started, because even though Israel was saying and doing the same things then, that was closer to October 7^th, 2023 than now is. Israelis were not simply ramping up an extermination campaign back then—they were angry. They are less angry now, and therefore less likely to be acting justly.

+ The 20-odd countries, vast majority of experts, and vast majority of international organizations that identified the war on Gaza as a genocide a year or more ago were not really saying that until now, when two Israeli human rights organizations have finally agreed with them. Actually, I don’t really recall any previous allegations of genocide—maybe we imagined them?

+ For a long time, it was antisemitic to even consider calling this a genocide, because the legal definition of genocide seemed trivial compared to the immense weight of history. Now Gaza could well be a genocide—I don’t remember any reason that we shouldn’t say so.

+ If our coverage simply stops acknowledging the millions of people who objected to this from the start, including the campus protestors who were suspended, expelled, kidnapped, arrested, deported, and beaten for doing so, then none of that happened. Now let’s turn to Gaza’s “humanitarian crisis,” which the New York Times Editorial Board is, laudably, the first to consider.

+ I have always alternated between cheering on and gently rationalizing this genocide, but now you must welcome me into the “big tent” of people who have always objected to it. Without half-lapsed genocide supporters and deniers like me in the movement, how will you ever bring the genocide to an end?

+ Do you remember all those times when you said, “Hey, we need to stop this genocide,” and I said, “That’s not fair! Why this genocide (which isn’t one) when there are so many others you could want to stop? I can’t think of anything that makes this U.S.-supplied and funded non-genocide, which would stop immediately without unconditional American political backing, different from the others except that you hate Jews.” Remember that? Well, I don’t. It is crucial that we focus on Israel’s purposeful starvation strategy now, even though it’s really no different from any other genocide (except that it isn’t one).

Faced this week with these cynical, baffling contortions on the front pages of the nation’s largest newspapers, I initially misunderstood what was happening. I thought immediately of the indispensable title of Omar Al Akkad’s indispensable book this year on Gaza, Someday Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. But that isn’t even what publicly platformed supporters, denialists, and justifiers this week are trying—at least not yet. It’s clearly too soon—and the mediaverse too vast and unscrubbable (though I hear the sounds of scrubbing in a million X accounts) —to pretend that they have always been against it.

Instead, they are focused on the delusion that all their contributions to prolonging the mass killing, and their efforts to silence all objections to it—indeed, the fact that anyone was ever aware that something other than “war” was happening in Gaza—might simply be forgotten if the latest turn in Gaza’s genocide can be ret-conned as its true beginning.

Embedded in the coverage this week, which points again and again to the power of the “images” of starving children as the wake-up call, is the hope that the horror of those images will be powerful enough to scour away all of the information, and all of the previous images, and all of the active complicity of the past 21 months. “How does the world make sense of the images [of starvation] coming from Gaza? Where will they fit into history?” asked the Washington Post on July 30^th (The answer: alongside images of any other famine, in “the culture’s visual archive of extraordinary suffering.”) “Rare Aerial Imagery shows Displacement and Destruction in Gaza,” it exclaimed a few days later, again with a spotless mind apparently unstained by any previous images of Gaza’s decimation.

In asking us to join them in their shock at these new images, newly doubtful apologists for the genocide are asking us to join them in being shocked for the first time at this long, very public genocide.

I missed all this at first because I assumed, naively, that the first move once the news ratcheted one click too far away from the propaganda would be for the actively complicit (1) to take a cue from Al Akkad’s title as quickly as possible, and then (2) when that proved unworkable, to construct a fantasy in which they might be forgiven for “making some mistakes.” We’ve seen a lot of that from cheerleaders of the Iraq war.

But I think they already know that in this day, (1) isn’t going to be possible. And I don’t think that they even see yet that (2) may not be possible either; that having been actively complicit in a genocide is not like having posted some racist tweets, or having voted for Trump, or having supported the Iraq war; that this is going to remain a monstrous shadow that will haunt their lives and then their legacies, rendering the question of whatever evasions they hastily converged on in the summer of 2025 laughably trivial.

They don’t yet understand yet that active complicity in a genocide, like genocidal acts themselves, can almost never be forgiven.

Millions of Americans have tried their best to tune out the decimation of Gaza over the past year and a half, even though as American taxpayers they were—like me—complicit in it. History suggests that the involuntarily or passively complicit can, with a long and painful process of reconciliation and remediation, make at least some amends.

Hundreds of thousands of other Americans, though, spoke out publicly either in support of the genocide’s continuation, or to condemn those who were calling for its immediate end, or to frame the extermination as something more nuanced or complex than it was. Some of those people had no real power, and spoke to audiences of a few hundred on Facebook. Some of them had institutional power, and spoke to audiences of thousands that included university disciplinary boards, or the NYPD, or angry mobs ready to come to campus and assault protestors. Some of them had the ears or eyes of millions. Some of them represented millions of us, and directed our tax dollars to the supply this unfathomable atrocity. All of them, writ large or small, were actively complicit.

History has shown that for them, as for those who actually carried the genocide out, it’s beside the point to ask whether their fellow citizens should forgive them, because we can’t, even if we wanted to.

The only people who could meaningfully extend forgiveness for publicly supporting an ongoing genocide are the families of those killed in it—if any family members were left alive. If you are a pundit like David French, or a politician like Chuck Schumer, or a member of Canary Mission, or a university President who shut down anti-genocide speech, or a newspaper editor who made sure to soft-pedal every mention of the death toll, or just someone who liked to refer to protestors as “terrorists,” you’ll have to hope that there is some surviving mother of a maimed Gazan child left to die in the rubble, some Gazan child who is the last surviving member of her family, some surviving brother of a Gazan doctor raped to death in an Israeli prison, who can find it in their heart to set you free.

No one else can.

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Whenever Israel yields to international pressure and allows aid trucks into Gaza, it devises other methods to ensure that food is never delivered. On the same day, July 26, Israel announced airdrops and “humanitarian corridors” for UN convoys, its forces murdered 53 humans seeking aid in those corridors. Aid distribution points, rather than feeding the starving population, Israel turns them into killing zones. Time and again, since December 2023, Palestinians have been paying with blood for a loaf of bread or a bottle of water.

In less than two months, death by Israeli bullets at the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has reached over 1,054, averaging about 20 murders daily. Since July 26 when Israel announced the new “humanitarian (death) corridors,” the murder toll has more than doubled compared to those killed daily at GHF distribution centers, 325 last week alone. Meanwhile, the tokenistic airdrops by Arab collaborators are nothing short of a disgrace.

The $60 million Donald Trump brags about giving to GHF is nothing but blood money funding the deaths of hungry Palestinians. For the starved, GHF stands for Gaza Humiliation Front, not a lifeline, but an Israeli murder-line. Instead of wasting American taxpayer money on GHF death traps, Trump should consider restoring U.S. funding to UNRWA, the only agency that has offered real hope to Palestinian children for more than 75 years.

Steve Witkoff’s visit to a GHF center in Gaza, followed by his statement that there is no starvation, was a textbook case of confirmation bias. His tour did not show the absence of starvation, but rather his willful blindness not to see. Witkoff sought out information that would reinforce his predetermined narrative to whitewash starvation.

To be sure, no one had seriously expected him to witness starvation at a carefully staged (safe) site, far removed from the people. He was invited to a hospital, to see the emaciated children, and hear directly from the life-saving medical professionals. Instead, he chose a photo op and listen to the mercenaries of death at GHF.

The engineered starving in Gaza, supported by the U.S., has always been a central pillar of Israel’s psychological warfare; a calculated strategy aimed at expelling the population or driving them into a survivalist frenzy. Israel, and the U.S. funded GHF, have become the perfect linchpin of this Israeli designed contraption. Replacing a well-established UN infrastructure that operated 400 distribution centers, GHF offered only four aid points. These limited sites made it easier for Israel to surveil, shoot at the starving, and leave the survivors to fight over the meager crumbs that remained.

GHF role was exposed by Anthony Aguilar, a retired U.S. Special Forces officer, West Point graduate, and recipient of the Purple Heart and Bronze Star. Choking back tears, Lt. Col. Aguilar recounted the story of a child who “walked 12 kilometers to reach” one of GHF’s food distribution sites. “He got nothing but scraps, thanked us for it…” and then he was shot dead by the Israeli army. I urge readers to listen to the powerful three minutes testimony from a decorated U.S. military officer.

Still, the Israeli-managed “free” Western media has too often acted as Israel’s public relations arm. It downplays Israel’s horrific crimes and markets Israeli falsehood, such as the baseless claim that the resistance steals food aid. This fabricated narrative persisted even after USAID concluded that Israel failed to provide any evidence supporting that food aid was being diverted. Or they excuse the lack of food on a faulty distribution system, not the Israeli blockade. When in fact, other than for Israeli military hindrance, under UN oversight, there has been no issues delivering food to all of Gaza. Israel’s objective is simple: deflect responsibility by blaming the starving for their own starvation.

Even after these lies were debunked, the Trump administration continued to parrot Israeli disinformation. Notably, however, following his trip to Scotland, Trump’s tone has noticeably softened, acknowledging for the first time, the taunting images of starving babies. Perhaps, a few days outside the Washington bubble of his Israel-first advisors, has offered him a rare glimpse of reality.

Meanwhile, it took one video of an emaciated Zionist captive for Israelis to cry Holocaust. But not the food blockade against 2.3 million humans (including the Israeli captive soldiers), nor the images of starving Palestinians murdered at Israel’s humiliating food lines, or babies with hollow eyes, abdominal bloating, and skeletal limbs. These barely get their attention. Instead of showing human empathy, they chose to dismiss the haunting photos of dying infants, maybe because these children were less “chosen.”

Early last June, I wrote on the Israeli scheme to “lie, deny, and distort the truth.” In the article, I detailed a long list of Israeli lies and how the American media disseminated the disinformation with little to no effort to verify or challenge. You see, Israel does not just enjoy political impunity from the U.S. administration; it also has the freedom to lie with complete immunity from the American media.

The daunting question remains, how many lies must Israel tell before the media call them out, just as they do with the American President, Donald J. Trump—or other nations?

A recent example of how the Israeli-managed “free” media misrepresents facts is the latest failed ceasefire talks. Listening to U.S. media, BBC and government mouthpieces, one might conclude that the Palestinian negotiators rejected a “generous” offer for a ceasefire. In reality, the talks collapsed because Netanyahu sought only a pause to secure the release of captive Israeli soldiers, refusing to agree to end the war, or the starvation blockade.

No rational party would accept, let alone consider, such a half-measure. When Palestinians rejected a proposal short of a lasting ceasefire, Netanyahu cried foul. President Trump, and his envoy Witkoff, rushed to absolve his intransigence and refusal to accept a permanent ceasefire, and then blamed the Palestinians.

The reluctance, or perhaps intimidation of the Arab mediators like Qatar and Egypt to publicly challenge Washington’s pro-Israel stance has only deepened the media distortions. The mediators’ silence allowed Netanyahu’s false narratives to dominate international discourse, while serving as a fig leaf for the blatant submissive American bias.

Nonetheless, the tide could be turning. France and UK’s recent promise to recognize the state of Palestine, although long overdue, signals the growing frustration with Netanyahu’s lies and deceit. The European officials made it clear, they were no longer willing to tolerate the Israeli farce. The symbolic act, however, would never atone for Britain’s original sin: the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which promised European settlers a homeland in Palestine, while failing to enshrine the rights of the indigenous Palestinians on their land. Nor does it exonerate France who conspired with Britain in the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement to carve up the eastern part of the Arab world.

Still, recognition matters. Fourteen other countries are poised to follow France’s lead next month. The growing calls demanding Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire, is also telling. These governments have finally realized, what their subjects had long known, that the absence of peace is not due to Palestinian rejectionism, but to Netanyahu’s deception and insatiable thirst for the never-ending wars.

Despite the dominance of Israeli-embedded journalists and pundits in Western media, the world is finally waking up to the true face of Israel. Alternative media has, to a great extent, succeeded in piercing through the wall of Israeli lies, offering an unfiltered view into the lived horrors of starvation and the genocide. No amount of Israeli propaganda can obscure the images of skeletal ribs jutting from the bodies of dying children. The sight of starving infants suckling on their bony fists, indicts the liars more powerfully than any polished Israeli hasbara could ever hide.

To that end, a recent Gallup poll shows a clear shift in the U.S., where American support for the Israeli military action in Gaza has dropped to 32%, and disapproval has soared to 60%. For a while, Israel was enabled to “fool all the people some of the time,” and it continues to “fool some of the people all the time,” but ultimately, and as the latest poll shows, it “cannot fool all the people all the time.”

Yet babies are starving, the genocide continues and there is no ceasefire is in sight. This is only possible because Netanyahu and AIPAC continue to wag the dogs of Washington.

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