I am a 20-year-old Egyptian and Palestinian woman living in America, and by the time I write this, no words are extreme enough to describe the horrors in Palestine we are all watching in real time. Thousands of people have infinitely more knowledge and firsthand accounts of what is occurring in not only Gaza, but the West Bank and even Lebanon under Israel’s catastrophic reign of collective punishment. So, my voice is not equipped to speak of the facts and statistics of the current atrocities. I instead wish to share a perspective. One that I know is not nearly as important as those on the front lines, but a perspective, nonetheless.

As my ethnicity suggests, I have always been…aware of things. Some of my earliest memories involve my mother taking me and my brother to protest for the Egyptian revolution against Hosni Mubarak. And it wasn’t very long into my adolescence that I learned that there was a seemingly never-ending battle taking place over the country my father and his family were born in, and whether it has the right to exist at all. I took to the streets in 2021, pouring faith and outrage into the movement for Palestinian liberation that I thought would never fade. But as with everything in the media, the news stopped reporting. The protests died down; the social media posts once again sunk into the background. And then, on October 7^th and the days following, my reaction, along with many others I’m sure, was simply of dread. We all knew that this attack was what Israel was waiting for. The final nail in their coffin of excuses of why their treatment of the Palestinians was justified, and why they ought to make their mission of eradication so much louder.

And all the louder they became. Over the constant sound of explosions and gunfire they told us that it was a right to self-defense. That Islam was a religion of violence, so the Muslim innocents were, not in fact, innocent. That they would never bomb a hospital. Then they were justified in bombing that hospital. That the “children of darkness” brought this upon themselves. And as per the words of David Azoulai of the Metula Council, “It (Gaza) should resemble the Auschwitz concentration camp.” And loudest of all was the hateful yet self-vindicated cry of ‘HAMAS.’  “The people elected and support Hamas, so they reap what they sow.” “Blame Hamas for all the dead civilians.” “But Hamas raped and killed 1300 people!” “Hamas beheaded 40 babies!” “Do you condemn Hamas? Do you support Hamas?”

Hamas.

Hamas.

HAMAS.

The west became more obsessed with the existence and alleged actions of Hamas than the entire Palestinian American community had ever been. People like Piers Morgan screamed its name over our attempts to share our truth, demanding that we bow our heads in shame and denounce everything a band of orphaned resistance fighters stood for before being deemed worthy enough to speak. By proxy of originating from the same country that this group was fighting to liberate, our deaths, our family’s deaths, our people’s deaths, were to be considered collateral damage of Hamas’ sin, not at all resulting from the missiles fired into Gaza and Lebanon. And our attempts to refute this condemned us to join the growing circle of so-called terrorist supporters facing mass demonization. The word ‘Hamas’ threatened to deafen us all.

 And so, we responded with our own noise. We once again took to the streets. I stood outside my college, surrounded by barricades and police and old men cursing me and my peers out, calling us terrorists, alongside councilwoman Inna Vernikov who illegally flashed her gun before our very eyes as we called to the officers present about this threat to our safety, only to be ignored for over fifteen minutes. At Bay Ridge, the police halted our march and corralled us by the hundreds onto the sidewalks before laying siege on us with their fists and handcuffs. Despite it all, we continued to make noise.

But even so, it felt like there were barriers. Not the kind that currently surround Gaza, but metaphorical walls, each consisting of another fact about my identity that drives me further apart from the idea of what an Egyptian Palestinian woman is. Me and my brother were born in America, and raised to speak English. Both sides of my family are Christian by majority, not Muslim. My father was born in West Jerusalem, which was occupied by Israel in 1948, and he was lucky enough to exist simply as an Arab citizen rather than a Palestinian remnant in the eyes of others. And we have always lived in neighborhoods that were mostly white. And when the people weren’t white, they weren’t Middle Eastern. And when the people were Middle Eastern, they were somehow more of it than us. So, the noise that I have made has always felt quieter. Separate from those of my peers, teetering on the line of a voice that has no business joining this movement. I grieve for my country that I have never been to, for my people that I do not speak the same language as or even share any religious beliefs with, for the attack on my identity that seems to exist as an Americanized version of the sum of its parts. At times I feel as if I exist only as another face to support the sheer numbers of our outcry for liberation. The noise I make, and the voice I cry out with, may in some way push the volume of this outcry higher, but more than anything, I have come to find that it mostly bounces off of these walls and echoes back into myself, a reminder that I am not quite Palestinian enough to be integrated with my peers, but not distanced enough to be considered a supporting ally.

So then, where does this leave me? My voice supposedly does not belong with the others, yet I still attend a college under a student body president responsible for helping stoke the flames against anti-Zionist sentimentalities, in perhaps the most Zionist city in America, under a federal government pouring our tax dollars into the bombs that are blowing children to pieces right now. The genes in my blood that just so happen to come from my father’s side of the family may not make me fully Palestinian relative to more ‘Arab’ people, but it will always make me a terrorist sympathizer under the gaze of our opposition. My keffiyeh will always be judged as a symbol of extremist ideologies. And my voice, by default of joining the demands for an end to the senseless killing by the IDF, will always be perceived as one amplifying the goals of Hamas. So, to all of those who feel as if their voices do not belong, who are starting to feel crushed under the weight of their own echoes, do not despair, because the ones who wish to silence and exterminate us are knocking our walls down for us. And in uniting us under their attempts of mass demonization, they are giving us more power and opportunities to use our voices in our cries of defiance than they ever have before.

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“Today I am at the head of the strongest Army in the world, the most gigantic Air Force and of a proud Navy.” 

– Adolf Hitler, Speech to the Reichstag declaring war on the United States, December 11, 1941.”

“Any alliance whose purpose is not the intention to wage war is senseless and useless.” 

– Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf.”

“I’ve had a lot of wars of my own.  I’m really good at war.  I love war….” 

– Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Iowa in 2015.

The geopolitical bookends of my life may include existing with the megalomania and mendacity of two dangerous individuals: Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump.  Hitler was the dominant force of the geopolitical environment in my first seven years, and now that I’m in my mid-eighties it is possible that Donald Trump will dominate my later years.  I cannot explain why these depraved and pathetic excuses for human beings exercised so much influence and power over seemingly normal people in their countries, but the fact that they were able to prosper politically in socially and scientifically advanced states such as Germany and the United States is stunning.  

Both men governed powerful countries that brandished huge offensive military capabilities.  Hitler had tight control over the strategic aspects of World War II, making terrible and costly decisions that weren’t challenged by his leading generals and admirals.  The example of Donald Trump is particularly worrisome since he faced no checks and balances over the use of nuclear weapons as commander-in-chief from 2017 to 2021.  This is not a matter of debate.  In 2017, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Bob Corker (R-TN) and ranking member Ben Cardin (D-MD) agreed that the president has the sole authority to give that order, whether we are responding to a nuclear attack or not.”

In 1943, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, asked Harvard psychoanalyst Walter Langer to prepare a psychoanalysis of Hitler that accurately predicted there would be a military coup against him and that suicide would be Hitler’s “most plausible outcome.”  These events took place in 1944 and 1945, respectively.  Langer predicted that Hitler would undertake neither surrender nor capitulation nor negotiations, and that he would seek horrendous vengeance on a world he despised in order to achieve ideological immortality.  

Hitler and Trump agreed on the decrepitude of the United States.  A month after declaring war on the United States, Hitler said “I don’t see much future for the Americans…it’s a decayed country.  Everything about the behavior of American society reveals that it’s half Judaism, and the other half negrified.  How can one expect a State like that to hold together?”  

In his inauguration speech in 2017, Trump described the United States in strikingly dark and even apocalyptic tones.  He spoke of “mothers and children trapped in poverty,” “rusted out factories scattered like tombstones,” “the crime and the gangs and the drugs,” and infrastructure in “disrepair and decay.”  Trump spoke of no policy specifics, and his four-year term produced no policy initiatives to address the “American carnage” that he described.  

Trump had Fox News, and Hitler had an excellent propagandist in Joseph Goebbels and the documentary talents of Leni Riefenstahl.  Both men played on the resentments of their followers, which was a shared characteristic of the Nazi and MAGA worlds.  Trump probably never read Mein Kampf, which is virtually unreadable, but his language echoes that of Hitler, with references to those who oppose him as “vermin” and to immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of America.  In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that “those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live.”  On January 6th, 2021, Trump rallied his insurrectionists with “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

There are other comparisons, but I’m not sure what to make of them.  Both men misogynists.  Both men physically unimpressive; both men uncomfortable in debate or discussion.  Both men nonsmokers and teetotalers.  Most importantly, both men suffering from malevolent narcissistic personality disorders.

The nuclear comparison is the most frightening.  The world was lucky that Germany never achieved the ability to forge nuclear weapons during World War II, but the global community should be concerned with Trump’s ability, if he were to return to the White House, to unilaterally use them.  There is a chain of command for the use of conventional weapons, but no checks and balances for the use of nuclear weapons.  

There have been previous examples of high-level officials worrying about the stability of the commander-in-chief and possible use of nuclear weapons. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger warned his general staff to inform him if there were  any nuclear orders from President Nixon during the last months of his presidency.  Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley issued a similar warning during Trump’s last months in office.

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The deadline for Julian Assange’s fight against extradition to the United States looms, as British judges will decide his case on February 21. Meanwhile, the American demand that Wikileaks publisher Assange stand trial in Virginia on trumped-up charges is what has kept this journalist locked up in Britain’s maximum security Belmarsh jail for four years, and sequestered for refuge in the Ecuadoran embassy in London for seven years before that. Back then, Assange predicted Washington would try to extradite him, but his fair-weather friends in the press pooh-poohed this worry. Guess who assessed U.S. judicial aggression correctly? Hiding from the Empire was the right move. But it took a huge toll. Basically, Assange has been imprisoned in miserable conditions for over a decade – all for the crime of reporting so honestly that it embarrassed American political elites.

So who in the pathetic pantheon of celebrated U.S. mediocrities did Assange offend? Well, he especially irked two wildly narcissistic and entitled bigwigs, Hillary “My Turn to Be President” Clinton and Mike “Bomb China” Pompeo. You do not want to reveal secrets that put you on the wrong side of either of these two, at least to judge from their schemes for Assange. Clinton famously whined “Can’t we just drone him?” when Assange stayed out of Washington’s reach in the Ecuadoran embassy, while Pompeo reportedly considered having the CIA kidnap or poison, that is murder, Assange. What secrets did Assange reveal that so infuriated this duo? Plenty. And they were big ones.

Assange slipped onto HRC’s bad side via truth so ugly that it revealed presidential candidate Clinton to be quite the hideously high-handed anti-democratic creature. How so? Assange published leaked emails that disclosed the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee rigging the 2016 presidential primary to knock left-wing populist Bernie Sanders out of the running. In any functioning democracy, this news would have shamed the ruling class into an electoral do-over. But not in twenty-first-century America. Here our rulers focused all their wrath on the messenger, Assange, and let the illegitimately chosen queen keep her primary campaign crown. This affair proved axiomatically that democracy had died here in the U.S., but that did not ruffle any Washington feathers. The inside-the-Beltway crowd had the candidate they wanted and had anointed via subterfuge, and no scruffy news organization was going to alter that immutable fact.

But don’t think acting like nothing had happened meant that HRC and her many parasites intended to take Assange’s truth-telling lying down. I would be very surprised if the media campaign and especially the headlined hysteria regarding the phony Swedish rape charges against Assange did not trace back very circuitously to offended Clintonistas. Not that our pusillanimous press needed much urging to kick a great journalist when he was down. But there were probably lots of Hillary toadies getting their licks in surreptitiously, too.

How Assange offended Pompeo involves national security – of course, because Pompeo was President Trump’s CIA director in 2017, when Assange transgressed by allowing sunlight to beam down on the agency’s secrets. According to the Guardian on September 27, 2021 about events four years earlier, “Pompeo and his top officials were furious about Wikileaks’ publication of ‘Vault 7,’ a set of CIA hacking tools, a breach which the agency deemed to be the biggest data loss in its history.” A former Trump official said “they were seeing blood,” back in 2017. Senior CIA officials and some inside the white house asked for sketches and options for killing Assange. ‘“There seemed to be no boundaries,’ a former senior counterterrorism official was quoted as saying.”

So Pompeo looks to have taken Assange’s revelations personally. Le CIA, c’est moi. As did HRC, both thus divulging a truly breathtaking sense of entitlement. These two political hacks let their heads swell to a point where they no longer accurately distinguished where their own personal boundaries stopped and the Empire began. They acted as though they saw themselves as embodiments, indeed avatars of Empire. And in truth, perhaps their narcissism was correct. Perhaps the individuals Hilary Clinton and Mike Pompeo are in reality mere fictions – their true nature, form, substance and destiny best summed up as official imperial bogeymen, out to torment anyone they could convict of decency, honesty or rebellion in the name of justice against their own very personal power.

Despite such lugubrious speculation, here and there hope glimmers. In December, U.S. district court judge for the Southern District of New York John Koeltl ruled in favor of four Americans, journalists and lawyers, suing the CIA in the Assange matter. According to RT on December 20, these Americans “claim their electronic devices were illegally searched on behalf of the agency when they visited Wikileaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadoran embassy in London.” The complaint against the embassy’s now-defunct security agency, Mike Pompeo and the CIA did not succeed entirely. Koeltl ruled “that the plaintiffs could not hold Pompeo personally accountable for the alleged violations of their constitutional protection from unreasonable search and seizure.” One wonders why not, given that Pompeo appears to have approached all things Assange with the fury of a gangster lusting for revenge.

But the deceptively inoffensive, minute fact that a case against the CIA and its former director for abrogating Fourth Amendment rights can proceed in these dark times is something. “We are thrilled that the court rejected the CIA’s efforts to silence the plaintiffs, who merely seek to expose the CIA’s attempt to carry out Pompeo’s vendetta against Wikileaks,” said Richard Roth, counsel for the four Americans. Plaintiffs are thrilled and you should be too. This is one of the rare moments, time out of mind, when the CIA has been called to account for its monstrous actions. Incidentally, aside from Politico, no corporate media saw fit to report this development and its implications for the much abused and often discarded Bill of Rights.

These four plaintiffs alleged, according to Kevin Gosztola in the Dissenter December 19, that they had to give their electronic devices to the embassy’s security firm, UC Global. The four Americans charge that this firm was in cahoots with the CIA. Koeltl ruled that whether the firm acted as an agent “of Pompeo and the CIA is a question of fact that cannot be decided on a motion to dismiss.” Earlier, Gosztola reports, “at a November hearing, Koeltl took an interest in the apparent fact that the government had not obtained a warrant to access the contents of the attorneys’ or journalists’ electronics.” Oh ho! With its warrantless snooping, the CIA has rampaged through the founders’ carefully arranged constitutional farmyard for years. But somebody looking out from the halls of justice finally noticed. Could the chickens of CIA abuse at last be coming home to roost?

So there exists a slight chance that the CIA and Pompeo will not get away entirely with violating whoever’s rights they felt like trashing. Given the agency’s grotesquely overblown powers, courtesy of abominations like the Patriot Act, and the agency’s frequent trampling of the Bill of Rights, this is small consolation. But it is better than nothing. And it may be a start. When one judge shows backbone and mildly defies security state tyrants, it emboldens others. Suddenly they begin to take their juridical role as guarantors of constitutional protections more seriously and cower less in the CIA’s shadow. Who knows, Koeltl’s careful, measured decision may even inspire those jurists across the Atlantic who hold Assange’s fate in their hands. They might actually rule in his favor. Justice begets justice. That would be an excellent outcome for Assange, a free press and all the rest of us.

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“….a world which is sure of itself, which crushes with its stones the backs flayed by whips: this is the colonial world.”

– Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

“This whip. In the garbage! We’ll untie him and destroy the cart!”

– Saeed Al-Err

Amidst carnage, rubble, detonations and the sonic torture of incessantly buzzing drones, Palestinians have been live-broadcasting their genocide via social media since the beginning of the Israeli-U.S. bombardment of Gaza on October 8, 2023. One such video records Saeed Al-Err intervening on behalf of a bloodied donkey

Purchasing the donkey to relieve his agony, Al-Err removes his metal collar and unties the maze of heavy straps and chains encircling his face and diminutive frame. He invites the camera to focus on the donkey’s mange-covered coat and two large gaping wounds on his neck and rump where he has been repeatedly struck.

A hand holding a whip fills the screen. “This whip. In the garbage!” shouts Al-Err, “We’ll untie him and destroy the cart!” Casting down the whip, two men take up sledgehammers and proceed to smash the cart to shreds.

The ethos of Al-Err’s organization, Sulala Society for Animal Care, dismantles the logic of incarceration and use of force. Not only checkpoints, surveillance, jails, artillery and bombs, but also whips, bits, blinders and cages. Sulala’s solidarity subverts the entangled hostile structures of white supremacism and anthropogenic, or human-caused, violence.

Frantz Fanon’s discussion of colonialism’s “zoological terms” elucidates the 2023 Israeli-U.S. siege of Gaza. Israeli and U.S. political leaders justify Palestinians’ extermination on the grounds that they are “animals.”

Solidarity between mainstream animal advocates and decolonialists is scarce. Despite the interdependence of racism with speciesism, the anti-Zionist movement fails to center animal suffering while prominent animal rights platforms remain silent about Gaza.

To question human violence against animals transporting cartloads of murdered and wounded Palestinian refugees, themselves treated like “animals,” is to approach what Claire Jean Kim calls a “dangerous crossing”. Kim advocates an ethics of mutual avowal, whereby we simultaneously see and respond to multiple forms of oppression. Applied to the current catastrophe, mutual avowal means challenging both white supremacy as well as ever-present human-on-animal “warfare”.

Al-Err has been modeling this for a long time, aiding abandoned and abused animals since the early 2000s amidst brutal apartheid and occupation and establishing Sulala Animal Rescue near the northern Gaza city, Al Zahra, in 2006. Prior to Nakba 2023, Sulala housed more than 400 dogs and 120 cats, divided between two shelters and Al-Err’s home.

It also provided educational resources to improve humans’ treatment of animals, including donkeys and horses used for transportation. With the help of his brother, a structural engineer, Al-Err repurposed children’s toys as wheelchairs for several disabled dogs.

Since October 8, Al-Err and his family have been displaced twice. When Israel first ordered northern Gazans to evacuate to the south, Al-Err was forced to leave the 400 dogs with open bags of food and the sanctuary gates open. He and his family moved with 120 cats into one of the cat shelters, located just south of the evacuation line.

On Christmas day, after flyers were dropped ordering another evacuation, Al-Err’s family relocated a second time to central Gaza. Shortly before this article’s publication, Al-Err’s son, Sa`ed, reported that they may need to evacuate at any moment yet again, this time to Rafah.

Al-Err and his family currently have more than 150 animals in their care, including 120 cats and two donkeys (Al-Err rescued a second donkey subjected to violent beatings, with oozing sores and a nail in her leg. While most of the dogs in the northern shelter are presumed killed, remarkably seven of them found their way to Al-Err after walking six or seven kilometers.

Of the more than 30 dogs that remain in a temporary shelter, 20 are amputees or paralyzed dogs Al-Err picked up at the beginning of the war. The remainder includes four puppies found wandering alone, one dog hit by an ambulance, one with a shrapnel injury and another paralyzed dog brought to Al-Err by photojournalist Motaz Azaiza.

Before the war, ten veterinary student volunteers assisted Sulala. When Israel-U.S. bombed the shelter in the north, one of them transformed a room of his house into a clinic for Sulala. But then the house was bombarded, killing the volunteer’s parents. The last time Al-Err heard from him, he himself was hospitalized.

In addition to calling for an immediate and lasting ceasefire, Al-Err began asking supporters to pressure animal aid organizations to obtain animal food and medical supplies for Gaza, but the organizations’ hands are tied because Israel won’t allow them. Sulala subsequently shifted to encouraging direct pressure on Israel to allow animal supplies into Gaza.

Amidst infrastructural decimation, targeted assassinations, imposed starvation and potable water deprivation, imagine the utter precarity of providing for and repeatedly relocating one’s family along with 120 cats and two donkeys, while temporarily sheltering more than 30 disabled dogs at another location. Jeremy Scahill’s observation that Israel-U.S. has reduced Gaza from open-air prison to “ever-shrinking killing cage” drives home the shared fragility of non-white and animal life in colonial, carceral reality.

Al-Err and his family acknowledge their psychological and moral exhaustion even as they act unwaveringly to generate spheres of sanctuary for the most wretched in their midst. Sulala’s social media documentation guarantees the endurance of their loving, care-centered practices in collective memory across the globe.

Edward Smith observes on Facebook that “Palestinian culture is the future of culture.” “What,” he asks, “can cultural expression offer up to us as we face a horizon of total catastrophe? This is the question Palestinian culture has been answering for decades and it’s the question all of human culture will soon be grappling with on a global scale.”

To Smith’s observation, I would add that Sulala’s transspecies solidarity is the future of care and resistance, a manual of perseverance in the face of annihilation. Sulala’s interventions point the way to a world wherein no creature is “animalized” nor subjected to the use of force.

Netanyahu defines “Operation Swords of Iron” as a “struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle”. White supremacy and an always exclusionary “humanism” stand on one side, with racialized and sub-humanized “animals,” on the other.

While Zionists exult “swords of iron” – deceptive code for Israel’s futuristic, multibillion-dollar weaponry – Al-Err repudiates a primeval instrument of cruel force. Al-Err’s order to “Throw down the whip!” demolishes Netanyahu’s war cry.

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Wars seem to breed fantasy: hero worship, victory parades, exuberant patriotism, or “a war to end all wars.” Such fantasies are usually based on inflated expectations, grand illusions, or outright lies.

Even some of history’s great generals have fallen prey to fantasy. An illusion of imminent victory caused them to miscalculate and lose battles.  For example, Napoleon thought he could conquer Moscow before the snows arrived.  He was wrong and his wintertime invasion of Russia in 1812 led to a catastrophic French defeat.

Or recall the illusion of Japanese General Isoroku Yamamoto at the Battle of Midway in June 1942. He thought he could eliminate American carriers in a decisive battle, but U.S. forces deciphered his intentions and launched a devastating counterattack. Yamamoto lost both the battle and his life.

Closer to home, U.S. General George Custer mistakenly believed he could overwhelm a larger combined tribal force at the Battle of Little Big Horn in June 1876.  By dividing his troops into three separate battalions for an untimely attack he suffered an ignominious defeat.

Like those defeated generals before them, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have both pursued illusory paths–with U.S. President Joe Biden tagging along behind them.

The U.S. and NATO helped Ukraine rightfully and successfully defend Russia’s attack on Kiev in February and March 2022.  However, the existential war for national survival transformed into a contest over long-disputed land in the southern and eastern regions. A failed Ukraine counterattack last summer morphed into a continuing stalemate, with heavy losses on both sides.

Rather than agree to a ceasefire or invoke diplomacy to settle territorial claims, Zelensky has held fast to his top two strategic goals: expulsion of all Russian troops and recovery of Crimea. Such prospects are an illusion. How can Ukraine expect to achieve such a vision of success when it faces an enemy four times its size and confronts its own manpower shortfall.

Until declining weapons support from the West causes him to rethink his goals, Zelensky will likely remain in the grip of illusion.  His valent troops will continue to die on the battlefield and in the trenches.

Following the brutal and inexcusable massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas militants on October 7, Netanyahu announced as his primary goal the total elimination of Hamas in Gaza. Unlike Zelensky in Ukraine, Bibi must have known that his stated goal was illusory. How could such a deeply entrenched organization as Hamas, with its thousands of active militants either comingled with innocent civilians above ground or concealed underground in miles of deep tunnels, be “eliminated?”

The Israeli leader must have realized that his purported vision was in fact an illusion; that the intended but unannounced purpose of his invasion of Gaza was the complete elimination of Palestinians there.

Evidence of such intention may be found in the relentless IDF bombing, shelling, and sniping in all parts of the Strip; the repeated use of unguided bombs and bunker busters in crowded spaces; the frequent bombardment of hospitals, schools, libraries, mosques, churches, refugee camps and humanitarian facilities; the targeting of journalists, medical personnel, and intellectuals; a siege that has almost entirely eliminated civilian access to clean water, food and other necessities of life; and forced evacuations that have relocated most of the 2.2 million Palestinians to confined areas near the Rafah border with Egypt.

Even the Egyptian army could hardly restrain a border breach by more than a million desperate Gazans seeking food and safety.  The most likely outcome would seem to be the forced relocation of the expelled Palestinians to a desert camp in the Sinai.  Then the crafty Netanyahu can claim credit for reenacting the 1948 Nakba. 

For his part, U.S. President Joe Biden has fully bought into both illusions, without any apparent recognition of the realities in either Ukraine or Gaza.  In Ukraine, he continues to advocate for more weapons to help Ukraine pursue its illusion of victory over Russia.  In the Gaza war, Biden seems to accept at face value Israel’s publicly stated illusion of eliminating Hamas.  Accordingly, he continues his cheek-by-jowl support of Netanyahu.  He continues to supply offensive arms that kill women and children; and he continues to defend Israel in the United Nations.

America’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine costs Zelensky the lives of his soldiers. America’s enabling of Netanyahu not only costs civilian lives in Gaza, but also risks regional conflict. More importantly for the longer term, it undermines the international rule of law established with U.S. leadership after the Second World War and it establishes a dangerous precedent for lawless behavior.

When the illusions of the three leaders are exposed, reality will overtake fantasy.

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Every Winter Solstice, Walt Patterson, a UK-based Canadian physicist and widely published writer and campaigner on energy, sends Solstice Greetings to some 600 friends and colleagues around the world. Beyond Nuclear was one of the recipients. It’s a delightful read to start the new year, with some important reflections, so we republish it here, thereby expanding Walt’s circle of “friends and colleagues.”

By Walt Patterson

Once more the time rolls round to send you the traditional Solstice Greetings. I am frankly dumfounded to realize that since I arrived on this planet the earth has gone the whole way around the sun eighty-seven times. A lot has happened to me in those eighty-seven trips, and I’m delighted to find that I can still recall a lot of it, despite the stroke that hit me two years ago. Was that really only two years ago? Amazing.

In 1990 the NASA Voyager spacecraft 3.7 billion miles away took and sent back to us the photo that Carl Sagan the US astronomer called ‘The pale blue dot’. For what we call eighty-seven years, I’ve been riding this pale blue dot around the universe, as it circles an unremarkable ordinary star in a tenuous arm of what we call our local galaxy. Even on the blue dot I’ve covered a  lot of ground.

Soon after I got here, Otto Frisch, Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner discovered nuclear fission in uranium. Physics had long been the most dramatic and exciting branch of science, but now nuclear physics leapt to the forefront. My first love of science was astronomy, but as an impressionable youngster I decided I wanted to study nuclear physics too.  I did, acquiring a post-graduate Master’s degree, and was about to try for a PhD at the University of Edinburgh, until I changed my mind.

After leaving my home town of Winnipeg in the middle of Canada, five hundred miles from anywhere, I had spent the winter in Greenwich Village in Manhattan, crossed the Atlantic on a freighter, travelled around the UK in an old black London taxicab with two South African guys and three Australian girls, hitchhiked all over northern Europe, including an unforgettable ride with a fellow Danish hitchhiker in a vast American convertible with two young US GIs who picked us up at the Dutch-German border and drove us all the way to Copenhagen.

When I reached Wien (Vienna) on my return trip I walked to the Zentralfriedhof, the Central Cemetery, which is far from central as it proved, and found area 31, the burial place of great composers. I can’t now recall which exactly were actually buried there rather than just memorials; walking among the statues of many Strausses, and Mozart and Schubert and Beethoven and Bach, the air and my head were filled with melody, a vivid sensation.

In due course I reached Paris, and explored the riverside bookstalls along the Seine, where I was delighted to find many titles I knew were banned not only in Canada but also in the US and the UK, notably Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller and other Miller books, which I duly bought and devoured, smuggled into the UK, where with my expatriate Canadian mates I held endless boozy pub bull-sessions discussing Miller and Lawrence Durrell, from whom I’m sure I acquired a fascination with Greece.

When improbably the opportunity arose I made my way to Greece, to a remote island found by odd circumstances, where in due course the brilliant and lovely woman who became my life-mate, my late beloved Cleone joined me. Having abandoned my stated plans to gain a PhD, I had always enjoyed writing, and harbored vague thoughts of becoming a writer, and by early 1968 I at last completed what I still think of as my statutory unpublished first novel. I typed it laboriously on my battered Royal portable with six carbon copies, and sent carbons to my erstwhile Canadian pub-chat mates.

To my astonishment one of these mates, an extraordinary fellow ex-Winipegger called Bob Hunter, inspired by my novel effort, abruptly materialized to visit me at my new home with Cleone in the Bucks countryside. Now a columnist with the Vancouver Sun, Bob during his visit told us about a ferment boiling up on the west coast of North America about something called ‘the environment’.  To Cleone and me this was an apocalypse, a revelation that changed our lives.

As we gradually became ‘environmentalists’, reading Barry Commoner and Paul Ehrlich, I  also grew aware of a controversy involving nuclear physics, about what was called ‘nuclear power’, a topic on which I had no prior knowledge; but I spoke the language.

Poets, including the future poet laureate Ted Hughes, founded a small magazine called Your Environment. By accident I learned about it, got in touch and found out they wanted to write about radioactive waste. I offered to do a piece for them; they accepted, and I set to work to learn about radioactive waste. I then wrote an article which I entitled ‘Odorless, Tasteless and Dangerous’. Your Environment published it, and I was hooked. I began working unpaid for the little magazine, and attending press conferences about environmental issues, while I read everything I could about them.  I also wrote book reviews, yet more info about environment issues.

I was not impressed by a lurid screed called ‘ Perils of the Peacful Atom’, but the low-key prose of ‘The Careless Atom’ by Sheldon Novick was much more convincing. I contacted Novick, then editing a US magazine just called ‘Environment‘, and offered him a piece on ‘The British Atom’ about UK nuclear power. He accepted and I set to work gathering info.

Alas, as I reminisced about where I’ve been riding on the blue dot I found myself writing a memoir — a good idea, but not for Solstice Greetings. When I get to it, it will include Stockholm June 1972, Washington DC, San Francisco, Rome, Hong Kong, Vancouver, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Hiroshima, France, Toronto, Seoul, and many other places at various points on the Earth’s orbit.

Eighty-seven years after I got here the blue dot is now in serious trouble. Not the dot itself, but all of us creatures riding on it. My eighty-seven year ride coincides precisely with the time we have been living with the knowledge about nuclear fission. As I have contemplated it most of my life I have been compelled to conclude that nuclear electricity, so-called nuclear power, has never been a normal economic activity, it has never paid its way, and still does not, it has always relied on vast injections of money and resources from taxpayers and electricity users, decreed by governments.

Civil nuclear power has been in effect a cover story, to disguise the true reason for pouring so much of our wealth into this dangerous sinkhole. In the eyes of governments, the key nuclear activity has been to stockpile terrifying quantities of nuclear explosives for use as weapons, nuclear political power, in which someone says, in effect, unless you do what I want, or give me what I want, I’ll obliterate this blue dot.

As climate change makes more and more of the blue dot uninhabitable, conflicts are breaking out world-wide. We have to hope that some people, some of our fellow dot-riders, some states-people, can find a way to defuse the nuclear threat.

Best wishes for a better 2024 — Walt.

This first appeared on Beyond Nuclear International. 

The post “Our Pale Blue Dot”: Reflections From an 87-year Journey appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

The Question is WHY?

Is the US Establishment Sinfully Aiding and Abetting (Instead of Stopping Cold) Israel’s Genocide of Palestinian Civilians In Order to Warn Rebellion-Minded Red State Republicans (and Others): “THIS is What Happens to Armed Insurrectionists and Their Communities”?

“I worry that no matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.”

–Lily Tomlin, acting in Jane Wagner’s 1985 one-woman play titled The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe

I have long bought into the wisdom Ms. Wagner imparts in this sage line. Virtually everything of major consequence that happens in our Not-great society and sinfully structured, obscenely stratified world is selfishly dictated by the incumbent wealth and power elites who own and run the commanding heights of the world economy, and implemented by the institutional show-runners who comprise the ruling elites’ good and faithful (very highly paid) servants.

Much of the time our highest level power elites keep the furtive-motivations and covert machinations behind the momentous events they author shrouded in secrecy. As JFK (who learned from his father about the wiles of Joseph P. Kennedy’s fellow business sharks) put it while campaigning for the presidency in 1960: “Things do not just happen, they are made to happen.” Exactly.  President Kennedy’s assassination was one of them. And, I assert, the miasmic televised genocide in Gaza is another.

For 12 God-awful weeks now, with “the whole world watching” Israel has been engaged in a devastating and morally abominable genocidal mass murder spree against the Palestinian people in Gaza, the vast majority of whom have no direct affiliation with Hamas.

Media coverage by Aljazeera and increasingly elsewhere is reminiscent of the Vietnam War years with its graphic televised imagery of wholesale destruction of villages, hamlets and contested battleground towns, and “body counts” totaling hundreds per day. The number of Palestinians in Gaza killed now exceeds 21,000 men, women, children and babies and another ~55,000 have been injured, many very seriously. With women and children accounting for most of the casualties. And due to Israel’s savage bombardments and forced shuttering of virtually of all medical facilities in Gaza and the embargo on everything needed to run them, the grievously injured and wounded in Gaza are suffering untreated.

The IDF (Israel Defense Forces), known to the Palestinians as IOF (Israel Occupation Forces), is employing barbaric siege and starvation tactics and committing mass-murders most foul largely indiscriminately (and in some case discriminately) against the civilian population of Gaza, from its everyday people to its most talented non-combatant civil society personnel including journalists, health care providers, scholars, educators, writers and poets. X Twitter This perverse targeted “eliticide” further includes Gaza’s aspiring entrepreneurs. Aljazeera

And the galling rhetoric of Israel and the US to the effect that the former’s military operations in Gaza are directed at “eliminating Hamas” (whatever that means) rather than primarily aimed at “thinning” or “eliminating” (by extermination or exile) the population of Palestinian civilians in Gaza makes the Grand Canyon-sized “credibility gaps” of the Vietnam War era US presidential administrations look minuscule by comparison. In a nightmarish re-run of both America’s criminally insane neo-colonialist war in Vietnam and much longer ago (but pertinent) the razing of Gaza by Napoleon in 1798-99 Times of Israel during the French emperor’s imperialist expedition to Egypt, Israel and the US are saying in sum (while trying to keep a straight-face) that “it’s necessary to destroy Gaza in order to save it.” Ugh!

Americans of conscience and common decency (ie. the real “silent majority”) have been watching Israel’s vengeful sadistic slaughter wrought by its First World military weaponry with mounting fury and disbelief. President Biden’s approval rating is correspondingly and deservedly plummeting along with his (vanishing) re-election prospects. NY Times

I take no pleasure in being able to say to the president: “I told you so sir.” X Twitter

But in a glaring disconnect with public opinion that has long been routine in our prevailing (possibly even pre-revolutionary) scoundrel times, America’s ruling elites are continuing to provide essentially unconditional financial, moral and military and diplomatic support for Israel’s Operation Genocide (my phrase), including vetoes of 2 UN Security Council cease-fire resolutions, while (farcically) feigning rhetorical disapproval for the wholly disproportionate magnitude and sickeningly omnibus nature of Israel’s war aimed at immiserating and eliminating Gaza’s populace.

And lest “genocide” be deemed too dramatic a term: Already >1.8M Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to flee their homes! Only to be slaughtered in the locations they were told to flee to for their safety. Middle East Monitor

“Out of the Mountain of Despair, A Stone of Hope:” South Africa’s Very Well-Wrought Complaint Against Israel for Committing Genocide Lodged with the International Court of Justice (AKA The World Court)

MLK, Jr.’s famous line seems apt. And not a moment too soon. The concept of “paying it forward” (at scale) is being validated: By helping to liberate South Africa from apartheid in the 1980s the world‘s concerned-citizenry positioned the country that produced Nelson Mandela to now perform one of the most noble exigent actions in the annals of international law and diplomacy: Namely to cogently articulate in the requisite detail for international legal purposes what “everybody knows,” in Leonard Cohen‘s famous (possibly actually too-cynical) song of that title, and seek via a complaint to the World Court an immediate cessation of Israel’s diabolical genocide in progress against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

South Africa summarizes its case in a nutshell in the part of its application to the World Court International Court of Justice Filing that asks the presiding judge to issue the equivalent of a preliminary injunction, as follows:

5. South Africa, mindful of the jus cogens character of the prohibition of genocide and the erga omnes and erga omnes partes character of the obligations owed by States under the Genocide Convention, is making the present application to establish Israel’s responsibility for violations of the Genocide Convention; to hold it fully accountable under international law for those violations; and — most immediately — to have recourse to this Court to ensure the urgent and fullest possible protection for Palestinians in Gaza who remain at grave and immediate risk of continuing and further acts of genocide.

6. In light of the extraordinary urgency of the situation, South Africa seeks an expedited hearing for its request for the indication of provisional measures. In addition, pursuant to Article 74(4) of the Rules of Court, South Africa requests the President of the Court to protect the Palestinian people in Gaza by calling upon Israel immediately to halt all military attacks that constitute or give rise to violations of the Genocide Convention pending the holding of such hearing, so as to enable any order the Court may make on the request for the indication of provisional measures to have its appropriate effects. To that end, the Court should order Israel to cease killing and causing serious mental and bodily harm to Palestinian people in Gaza, to cease the deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as a group, to prevent and punish direct and public incitement to genocide, and to rescind related policies and practices, including regarding the restriction on aid and the issuing of evacuation directives.

“We’re the United States of America“

President Biden likes to intone this line in a stentorian voice; delivered with gravitas and emphasis it is meant to connote (in sum) our national omnipotence (for better or worse).

As Americans wince in anguish, sorrow and outrage at the scenes of carnage and suffering befalling Palestinians in Gaza that continue to fill their tv and device screens over these decidedly unhappy holidays, the question most of us (with the sole exception of the few Jewish American who are fanatic “Israel-right-or-wrong” Zionists) are asking themselves is: “Why is it that the American leaders we elected are not using the power they clearly have (as the superpower ally Israel would not long survive without) to put an immediate END to this ghastly genocidal crime against Palestinian humanity?!?

The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the “Proxmire Act” That Implemented It as US Law

Raphael Lemkin Lemkin Program and William Proxmire C-SPAN are whirling (like tops) in their graves. Each made the cause of hyper-criminalizing in (enforceable) international and US law (in sum) the collective extermination or partial-extermination of one massive set of kindred human beings by aggressors who seek to end the targeted group’s corporeal existence.

Mr. Lemkin gave the world the word “genocide” to denote the kind of unspeakable totalistic madness involved in undertaking such acts of collective extermination and wrote the 1948 UN Convention outlawing it. UN Fact Sheet

And, with tenacity that earned him the nickname “Bulldog,” Mr. Proxmire spoke briefly on the subject on the floor of the US Senate every day it was in session for 19 years until that body ratified the Genocide Convention in 1986 albeit with the reservation that implementing US legislation be passed, giving it the force of US law. That, in turn, required Senator Proxmire to spend two more years negotiating with Republicans traditionally wary of subjecting Americans to the strictures of international law and in this instance one that might oblige the US to prevent genocides abroad. In the end, two compromises were made:

The first compromise restricted the Proxmire Act (AKA Genocide Convention Implementation Act of 1987) to genocides or incitements-to-genocide where:

(1) the offense is committed within the United States; or

(2) the alleged offender is a national of the United States (as defined in section 101 of the Immigration and Nationality Act). (Emphasis on OR added.)

The second category should seemingly give Jewish-American adventurers who serve in the IDF and have been deployed in Gaza since October 7th considerable cause for concern. The same applies to any Israeli officials who have dual US citizenship who have either authored or “merely” incited Israel’s genocide in Gaza. (The statute of limitations on genocide, like that of murder, is presumably indefinite.)

The second compromise involved limiting the maximum punishment for committing genocide to life imprisonment and a fine of $1M whereas the Republicans favored the death penalty.

And on a rainy day in November 1988, at a ceremony held at O’Hare airport in Chicago, President Reagan   signed that implementing legislation, paying tribute to Senator Proxmire and others in stilted serviceable bipartisan remarks that make Reagan seem like Cicero in comparison to the top leaders of the US and Israel today, both of whom resemble Auden’s Ogre from his poem August 1968:

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach,
The Ogre cannot master Speech:
About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

Today, the proscriptions enshrined in the UN Genocide Convention and US law implementing it are being openly and notoriously mocked.

In view of both the hyper-criminality and universal ignominy of genocide and President Biden’s unquestioned power to order Israel to stand down (as President Reagan did in a telephone call with Prime Minister Menachem Begin during Israel’s sociopathic Lebanon invasion in 1982): On the surface there is no rational explanation for America’s tortuously prolonged acquiescence to Israel’s methodical annihilation of Gaza civilians en masse in lieu of primarily engaging with the Palestinian armed militants there. This form of scorched earth war criminality is referred to in IDF military parlance as “the Dahiya doctrine” (which is simply mass murder by another name).

On the contrary, as President Reagan’s remarks at the Proxmire Act signing ceremony attest, our country’s current (unfathomable) condonation of open and notorious genocide belies everything America has said it stands for since we helped midwife the United Nations into being following WW2. And it didn’t just happen. It was made to happen. The question, again, is Why?

President Truman Recognized the Potential for Genocidal Communal Violence Posed by Zionism’s Aberrant Form of Settler-Colonialism Which Aimed to Displace the Palestinian Populace in 1947 Palestine With European Jews, and Tried to Mitigate It.

Zionism was the last and arguably the worst form of settler-colonialism because it illegally dispossessed through military force (AKA stole) most of the land, natural resources, infrastructure and human capital of an entire country, British Mandate Palestine (hereinafter “1947 Palestine”); and did so based on an utterly fabulistic (self-invented self-proclaimed) claim that Jews had/have an alleged “right” to entirely displace the Palestinian population not “just” subjugate, dominate and exploit the locals. See generally Ilan Pappe’s important 2017 book titled The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

This was a dangerous whopper claim no other European settler-colonialists had EVER made. Simply because the whole purpose of English, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German and other European colonization was “merely” ill-gotten financial gains.

In his classic 1957 book titled The Colonizer and the Colonized, Albert Memmi, the gifted (but eternally conflicted) Tunisian Jewish writer describes with lacerating insight the aberrant vanities of privileged French colonialists, the white-skinned privileged Frenchmen, mostly Babbitt-like businessmen and civil servants, who were (in sum) “in Tunisia (the real Tunisia) but not of it.” His portrait of his fellow colonizers’ assorted complexes and insecurities vis-a-vis their mainland France compatriots is wickedly discerning as is his depiction of the French interlopers’ deep-seated racist, condescending and dehumanizing attitudes towards the Tunisian multitudes, with whom the colonizers were co-dependent.

In a telling passage in Part Three of his book (titled Conclusion) that is suddenly disturbingly relevant, Memmi explains why European colonialists never seriously considered “final solutions” such as that which psychopathic-sociopathic Israelis are acting-out now in Gaza:

It has not been so long since Europe abandoned the idea of a possible total extermination of a colonized group. It has been said, half-seriously, with respect to Algeria: “There are only nine Algerians for each Frenchman. All that would be necessary would be to give each Frenchman a gun and nine bullets.” The American example is also evoked: and it is undeniable that the famous national epic of the Far West greatly resembles systematic massacre. In any case, there is no longer much of an Indian problem in the United States.

As Memmi further explains though:

Extermination…actually contradicts the colonial process. Colonization is above all economic and political exploitation. If the colonized is eliminated, the colony becomes a country, like any other, and who then will be exploited? Along with the colonized, colonization would disappear, and so would the colonizer.

Evaluating all the complex sociological co-dependencies between colonialist Israelis and colonized Palestinians is beyond the scope of this writing. But briefly applying Memmi’s insight to the present crisis is not reassuring. On the one hand, Israel profits immensely from its associations with colonized Palestinians. For example:

*    Jewish owned- and operated businesses in Israel and the West Bank employ Palestinians in large numbers as an exploited proletariat;

*    Israel exports the Panopticon-type surveillance technology it develops and deploys during its draconian military policing operations in the West Bank;

*    It markets arms that it tests during its regular military bombardments and re-invasions of Gaza, a (25 miles long and 4-5 miles wide) area bordered by Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea that Israel has essentially converted into a land-mass-wide imprisoned society of >2M Palestinian people (mostly refugees from 1947 Palestine and their multi-generational progeny); and

*    Israel duns hundreds of billions of dollars from US taxpayers ostensibly based on its utility to America as a Western colonial military outpost in the oil-rich Arab world and on the alleged existential threats the Jewish colonists there face from the Palestinians they ejected en masse from their land and communities during the 1948 Nakba and again after the 1967 6-day war and incrementally ever since in the West Bank and East Jerusalem through “salami tactics” that have highly-complicated if not foreclosed a 2-state solution.

And all of these revenue streams would lessen if not disappear if Israel ever, God forbid, completed a “final solution” comparable in size to the Holocaust the Nazis perpetrated against European Jewry during WW2.

On the other hand, Memmi’s reference to a post-genocide colony becoming a “nation like any other” (eerily) dovetails with Zionism’s crackpot founding creed, and it cannot be safely presumed that the economic utility of Palestinians to local Jews will ultimately stay Israel’s hand from doing its worst.

And, since Israel’s unilateral partial “disengagement” from Gaza in 2005 leaves it with no commercial ties to speak of with Gazans other than those associated with being an open-air prison warden, in the grim calculous of which Palestinians are most vulnerable to Israeli genocidal aggression Gazans clearly are in the most peril, followed by Palestinians in the West Bank, followed by Palestinian citizens in Israel.

Knowing There Was a Distinct Possibility It Would Someday Result in Genocidal Violence, at the Behest of His “First Friend” Edward “Eddie” Jacobson, President Truman Recognized Israel Against US Secretary of State George Marshall’s Sound Advice; That Day of Reckoning Has Now Come

Prior to Israel’s self-declaration of statehood in 1948 President Truman had become exasperated with the insistence by Zionist lobbyists that Israelis’ genocide-minded fever dreams to displace all Palestinians with Jewish immigrants be indulged by the US. Gary Ginsburg, an author of a book on presidential “first friendships” (and an ardent Zionist) wrote:

Truman’s own State Department, led by General George Marshall, a World War II hero and a man almost universally revered, adamantly opposed the idea of partitioning Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, believing it would push the Arab world into the Soviet sphere. Marshall also argued that such a move would imperil American access to Arab oil, and almost certainly require the presence of US troops to contain the violence.  (Emphasis added this writer, not Mr. Ginsburg.)

Truman felt so put-upon that he told his aides not to schedule any more meetings with bumptious Zionist representatives. Zionist lobbyists then enlisted Edward “Eddie” Jacobson(no relation to myself), Truman’s Jewish WW1 Army buddy and later Truman’s partner in a haberdashery business in Missouri. Jacobson persuaded the president to relent and Truman ultimately granted US recognition to Israel’s self-declaration of statehood shortly after they had done so in May 1948.

In two videos found in his presidential library President Truman discusses for posterity his thinking behind that fateful diplomatic recognition. In one he discloses that he was attempting to navigate equitably between Palestinian Arabs and European Jews who both sought exclusive sovereignty over- and residency in 1947 Palestine. Each group, he said in his “plain speaking” Missouri drawl, wanted to exterminate the other: “The Jews wanted to chase all the Arabs into the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and the Arabs wanted to chase all the Jews into the Red Sea.”

In the other video Truman evinces exasperation (by name) with the Zionists who, he said, had what we would today call an “entitlement syndrome” and wanted the US to (in sum) approve their ethnic cleansing of “5-6 million” Palestinians to make room for “5-6 million” Europeans Jewish immigrants. So much for the fatuous Zionist propagated myth that 1947 Palestine was a “land without a people for a people without a land.”

The net impression one gets from the videos (especially in conjunction) is of a US President straining to elide the potentially genocidal implications of what he has done and asserting (without much conviction) that ultimately Palestine can equitably be shared: “We had all sorts of objections to everything that was done…now it’s working out. Eventually I think we’ll have them all satisfied. But it’s going to take a great deal of time yet to get the job done.” (Emphasis added.)

The president’s support tor the 1948 UN Genocide Convention may not have been coincidental. And, as we now know, these optimistic words from Truman’s lips about having “them all satisfied” (Palestinians and Jewish immigrants) never made it to God’s ears. And as a president who coined the phrase for the Oval Office desk: “The buck stops here” and further in light of his personal responsibility for conferring legitimacy on Israel, it’s likely that President Truman too has been spinning in his grave at the damnable genocidal world-historical civilizational debacle that has unfolded since October 7th.

As a Matter of Natural Law, Zionism’s Aberrant Settler-Colonial Core Tenets Were- and Are Unsound, Unjust and Indefensible and As a Matter of Equity Had No Practical Utility Following the Allied Victory Over the Axis Powers in WW2

Now that the “s–– has hit the fan” (ie. Israel has “jumped the shark” and the genocide President Truman and Secretary of State Marshall (and some of their successors) sought to avoid is in deadly progress), this is another subject that is too pertinent not to mention but is space-prohibitive to fully discuss in this writing.

Briefly put:

Virtually all diaspora Jews rejected Zionism (AKA Jewish statehood) when it was first formally proposed in 1897. Jewish communities throughout the diaspora recognized Zionism was a tacit endorsement of the extant premise of antisemites that Jews “didn’t belong” in the European countries many Jews (including my own paternal German-Jewish grandparents and their parents) had successfully assimilated into following the admission of Jews into civil society in Europe as a consequence of the post-French revolution Napoleonic wars. See the ingenious emancipatory blueprint Napoleon employed in France first here: Wikipedia

And the vast majority of theistic European Jews also saw Zionism as a religious heresy in that Judaism had irreversibly morphed over ~2,000 years into a diaspora religion. In sum,  notwithstanding (or more accurately because of) the Passover Seder recital “Next year in Jerusalem,” observant Jews everywhere in the diaspora viewed Jews returning to Palestine en masse by human agency as opposed to divine providence as a violation of Jewish messianic religious precepts.

Their religious teaching told them Zionism constituted what Erich Fromm called “forcing the Messiah” and their common sense told them Zionism had all the makings of a European colonialist prescription for disaster for all concerned in essentially every respect. Only the Holocaust and the US refusal to admit ships carrying Jews fleeing Nazi persecution caused any sizeable fraction of European and North American Jews to reluctantly support Zionism.

And this is not to speak of the schisms within Zionism of the sort a group of 30 distinguished Jewish notables including Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein adverted-to in their famous December 2, 1948 letter to the editor of the NY Times.

This intense well-wrought letter warned the American Jewish community and the Truman administration about the maniacally fascistic nature of Menachem Begin and his ultra-extremist Irgun wing of the broader Zionist terrorist network which was attempting to re-brand itself as a conventional conservative political party. The letter’s chilling account of the Irgun Zionists’ genocidal massacre of 240 Palestinian “men, women and children” at the peaceable Palestinian village of Deir Yassin is a terrible foreshadowing of the nearly hundred-fold higher wanton slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza Israel’s fascistic government has ordered the IDF to conduct since October 7, 2023.

Nor does Zionism’s central claim to legitimacy as a settler-colonialist project survive any objective logical scrutiny: Namely that Jews’ (broken) generational linkage with ancient Jewish forebears dating back ~2,000 years gives them (and I speak here of my people as my 94-year-old mother is also Jewish as were her parents) a right to re-occupy all or most of the same lands in Palestine where tribes of Jews then lived.

Accordingly, Israel and the US have ludicrously told Palestinians (with a straight face) since 1948: You must agree to be expropriated by and governed by the “returning” modern progeny of ancient Jewish tribes. To put it simply (and kindly), this absurdist generational-time-travel/irredentist claim is foreclosed by the natural laws of civilizational adverse possession, which entirely favors the Palestinians’ claim to sovereignty over all of 1947 Palestine:

At the time the British relinquished sovereignty of 1947 Palestine, Palestinians had been continuously living on their ancestral land for over 100 generations! And in part due to the technological advancements wrought by British colonialism, Palestine was a complex thriving society in 1947. My late father-in-law’s father, for example, who lived with his wife and children in Jabal al-Karmil, a coastal mountain community, worked as a train engineer in nearby Haifa; and launched his brilliant eldest son on an educational and career path that led him to become a high-ranking professional electrical engineer in Canada’s civil service.

As a Jewish-American who married into a Palestinian family I can attest that Palestinians are perhaps the most warm, personable, pious, hospitable, charitable, middle-class family-oriented people on the planet and that what Zionist Israelis have done- and are continuing to do to them via their genocidal-minded military invasion and exceptionally oppressive settler- colonization of 1947 Palestine is a shanda (Yiddish for shameful sin) and moral abomination of the highest order.

At the Time of Israel’s Inception in 1948 Neither European Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust Nor Diaspora Jews Elsewhere Needed a Zionist Garrison-state in Palestine to Serve as a Safe-haven from Potential Genocidal Targeting by Militarily-Empowered Organized Antisemites Anywhere in the World; Because the Latter No Longer Existed

The US and our Allies, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, had defeated the virulently-antisemitic German Nazis and their allied Italian and Japanese Axis bloc fascist states 3 years prior to Israel’s founding. Germany itself then underwent a thorough de-Nazification program and the unreconstructed Nazis who survived in remnants scattered and settled in the Americas, including in the US, where they were partially but not fully quarantined. See The Nazis Next Door by Eric Lichtblau.

And whereas antisemitism persisted at the grassroots level in the USSR, especially in western Ukraine, and in Russia’s Eastern Europe satellite countries following World War 2, the authoritarian Communist governments throughout the USSR all suppressed it (as I briefly discussed in my last CounterPunch essay).

Until the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991 theistic Jews behind the Iron Curtain lacked religious freedom in common with Orthodox Christians and Muslims throughout the USSR and in Communist-governed Eastern bloc countries where (in keeping with Karl Marx’s most dubious contention) monotheistic religion was regarded as “the opiate of the masses” and atheism was promoted by the state.

(It didn’t occur to Marx that, for example, the Jewish concept of the Sabbath as “a day of rest” from work and for worship—the forerunner of the modern 40 hour work-week and weekend—is what distinguishes free people from slaves who were- and still are in some wretched places today, obliged to work for their masters essentially 24-7-365. One or two days of rest per week is less than the liberation Marx sought from capitalistic exploitation of workers altogether, but clearly represented an advancement for human civilization.)

Following WW2, in America and virtually everywhere in the world where diaspora Jews lived, although not completely free from antisemitic prejudice, diaspora Jews and their communities were as- or more safe, secure, prosperous and socially accepted than Jews had ever been in world history. In the US today, antisemitism, such as it still is, is more than ever the vulgarian “poor man’s socialism” it always predominantly was and less the bigoted opportunity-diminishing bill of attainder based on religious, ethnic or cultural differences it was to varying degrees in pre-WW2 America. (An example of those largely bygone times is that President Truman’s own in-laws in Missouri, in whose house Harry and his wife Bess lived, were confirmed antisemites who wouldn’t allow Truman’s Jewish friend, Army buddy and business partner Eddie Jacobson to even sit on their front porch!)

And I’m confident that most American Jews were off-put if not outright offended (as I was) at President Biden’s parroted Zionist talking point at the December 2023 White House Hanukkah ceremony: “Folks, were there no Israel, there wouldn’t be a Jew in the world who was safe – were there no Israel.” Come again Mr. President?!

This gaffe (or gaffe-adjacent) remark by the president managed to cast doubt on both the safety and patriotism of America’s Jewish citizenry. Because if, God forbid, say, an antisemitic-tinged civil war were to break out in the US American Jews would enlist and fight the Nazis here at home rather than flee to Israel in any appreciable numbers. Jews have fought in every American war and few if any would ever think of fleeing to Israel if, God forbid, a second US civil war came.

American Jews embrace ethnic and religious and racial pluralism and diversity and have no truck with racism much less KKK-type exterminationist violence such as Israel is criminally insanely visiting upon the Palestinians. US Jews remember, admire and appreciate President Washington’s famous letter to the Jews of the Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island: “America” Washington said, “gives to bigotry no sanction. To persecution no assistance.” And (again, apart from a few chauvinistic “Israel right or wrong Zionists”) US and all diaspora Jews worldwide abhor, condemn and in no way condone the ethnocentric ultra-bigoted anti-Palestinian true colors fascistic Israelis are now showing and genocidally acting out.

Truman’s Hopes That Palestine Could Be Peaceably Partitioned Almost Immediately Turned to Dross as Did His Lesser Hope That Genocide Could Be Prevented; and “the Rest Became History” Which Has Now Gone Ghoulishly Awry 

President Truman stated that he agreed to award ~half of 1947 Palestine to Zionist Jewish settler-colonialists (in sum) to PREVENT a genocidal war between the former (who had formed well-armed militias) and Palestine’s Arab populace of 5M who were not nearly comparably militarily mobilized. But (to understate it considerably) Truman’s earnest hope that “eventually I think we’ll have them all satisfied” was dashed.

No sooner had the “ink dried” on America’s recognition of Israel did Zionist militias sociopathically perpetrate the Nakba, the genocidal ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians by terror, mass murder and forcible transportation of the local populace from their homes (the keys to which many kept and passed on to their children, always expecting to return) and communities in Palestine to refugee camps in neighboring countries. The exterminationist massacre at Deir Yassin was not an isolated incident; another occurred at Tantura which is the subject of a 2022 documentary featuring confessions by Israeli soldiers to a near My Lai-level massacre and atrocities.

(Radical journalist IF Stone would call the Palestinian refugee camps created by this massive crime against Palestinian humanity “a moral millstone around the neck of the Western world.”)

History will judge (harshly) how and why successor US presidential administrations “blew it” and failed to usher in a peaceable 2-state solution or suitable melding of the 2 “peoples of the book” into a single pluralist, just and secure successor state to British Mandate Palestine. And the manner in which that failure, grounded (in sum) in US appeasement of Israel’s Zionist fascists throughout the ensuing 75 years, positioned Israel to dare commit the current genocide.

This is yet another space-prohibitive topic for another time. Suffice it for me to say (as a possessor of a mere BA degree in history from UC Berkeley with distinction in general scholarship) that historians will focus much of the blame on the misguided but alas entrenched “Progressive except Palestine” outlook of the post-Truman and post-JFK Democratic Party.

JFK “died trying” to deal (quite testily) with Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion regarding 3 major issues: the Palestinian refugees who had been unjustly expelled from their communities and homes during the Nakba and their right to return; Israel’s development of nuclear weapons; and the vast Zionist lobbying operations in the US (of the sort that had exasperated President Truman) which President Kennedy and his brother, the Attorney General, decided should require the pro-Israel lobbyists to register as foreign agents. All as recounted in Chapter 14 of a fine monograph published in 2022 by Monica Wiesak titled America’s Last President: What America Lost When It Lost John F. Kennedy.

Fast-forwarding to the past 3 decades, this blinkered US Israel-lobby-induced-and-enforced “progressive except Palestine” politics has eroded sympathy for the Palestinians’ plight amongst Democratic power elites (although America’s grassroots Democrats and more progressive independents have become increasingly pro-Palestinian), derailed the “middle east peace process” into an unproductive cul-de-sac (the Oslo Accords) and then into hibernation altogether when Israel and the US nullified the victory Hamas won in free-and-fair 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections (by prohibiting Hamas from having any role in the governance of the West Bank as opposed to Gaza). All this in turn set-up the Palestinian civilians in Gaza to thereafter endure multiple rounds of sadistic merciless massacres at the hands of Israel’s first-world military, bombings and shellings Israeli fascist officials (psychopathically) dubbed “mowing the lawn” (whatever that means).

The UN Genocide Convention Embodies Fundamental Human Rights America Fought Our Revolution Against Great Britain to Secure for Ourselves, Our Posterity and to the Extent Practicable, for All People in the World; the Palestinians Among Them. It is in America’s Vital Interests to Enforce It By Ending Israel’s Genocide Forthwith

As the whole world now recognizes, genocide is the ultimate desecration of human rights. For it totally negates and blasphemes the distillation of natural law Thomas Jefferson famously outlined in 1776 in our nation’s founding charter, the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” (First letter capitalization emphasis in original; underscored emphasis added)

President Kennedy restated it as well as anyone in modern times in his 1961 Inaugural Address: “[T]he same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe—the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God. We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. … [P]roud of our ancient heritage—[we are] unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.” (Underscored emphasis added.)

Palestinians were always entitled to take umbrage at the US and even the UN “playing God” and enabling European Jewish immigrants to steal half of their ancestral land. Palestinians were NOT responsible for the Holocaust, the force majeure event that catalyzed Israel into existence.

And the Palestinians were and are NEVER going to go quietly into the good night of historical extinction at the hands of European Zionist usurpers of their land, society and culture that rightfully belongs to them. They had and have the same God-given rights as all men and women to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and the corollary right to resist occupation and tyranny by European colonizers as all other colonized peoples in the global south did in the 20th century.

It is therefore no surprise that the most patriotic Palestinians in Gaza developed a non-negligible but limited capacity to militantly resist what Israelis have never hidden was- and is their ultimate intention to commit genocide against the Palestinians by entirely displacing them from the occupied territories (and eventually from Israel itself) via extermination or forced exile.

But while there has been much talk about the failure of Israel‘s intelligence services in advance of October 7, 2023 there has been no attention whatsoever paid to the failure of US intelligence to properly apprise President Biden and his senior advisors about how quickly and contagiously genocidal dynamics could occur in Gaza given the striking of the right match by Hamas for example.

At least one senior US official was in a position to warn President Biden about the risk at hand and advise him of steps he could have taken to head off Israel’s epochal dastardly genocidal aggression because she had already formulated such a “path not taken” some 2 decades ago. Samantha Power, President Obama’s US Ambassador to the United Nations and current head of USAID, literally “wrote the book” (“A Problem From Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide) on the subject of the (at least moral) obligation of America to prevent clearly foreseeable genocides (via strenuous diplomacy and if absolutely necessary via Responsibility to Protect Humanitarian Military Interventions).

In an interview with a University of California professor aired on  UCTV in the early 2000s Ms. Power explained how America could and should respond if Israelis or Palestinians were “moving toward genocide” as the questioner put it. The interview is still online here: YouTube

What if any private advice Ms. Power has given the president in the current crisis is unknown. But, as Ms. Power candidly (if overly tactfully) alluded to in her (yesteryear) interview response: Squarely at issue before President Biden now is whether the “progressive except Palestine” doctrine that has become embedded amongst Democratic Party power elites will be durably stretched to encompass “anti-genocide, except Palestine” and paralyze America from decisively intervening to end Israel’s hyper-criminal genocidal aggression against the Palestinians.

If it, God-forbid, were to be so enlarged, America will irretrievably forfeit whatever may be left of our reputation for having redeeming features to balance our myriad unattractive ones in the eyes of world public opinion. In sum, our further complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza will FOREVER stain our escutcheon as a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” in Lincoln’s famous line in the Gettysburg Address hearkening back to the Declaration of Independence. The clock is ticking on that indelible reputational harm.

And in a world that is rapidly evolving from unipolar to multi-polar in nature, how long America can survive such a total depletion of our moral capital, is an open question. By enlisting us as a partner in their daily sociopathic crimes against Palestinian humanity, Israel is impairing our nation’s vital interests. In a worst-case scenario, the accumulating revilement we are generating “on the streets” of virtually all non-Western countries and in the huts and villages of half the world (aka the global South) JFK also referred to in his Inaugural Address, can ultimately put us in a position to lose WW3, and possibly deserve to lose.

So WHY Is the Genocide Being Televised? The Awful Truth Is That the US Establishment Is Sinfully Sacrificing Palestinian Lives and Society Knowing That What Israel Is Doing Is Evil, Because Israel’s Slaughter Is a Useful Means of Intimidating Potential Armed Insurrectionists in America’s Red (and Purple) States (And Their Fellow Travelers Elsewhere in the US and In Other Western Countries)

Of all the post-Truman presidents by far the most opprobrium for the current crisis, in my view, must be heaped on the incumbent, who has yoked his name to the genocidal horror show in Gaza he has inexplicably allowed to play out for over 12 weeks like a depraved Grinch Who Stole Christmas and all other year-end holiday festivities all over the world, including New Year’s Eve on which I am finishing this essay. “Hey ho, Genocide Joe, How many kids have you killed for dough” may not have the ring of “Hey, hey LBJ how many kids have you killed today?”  But it properly indelibly associates President Biden’s name with the hyper-criminal mass murder of >21,000 Palestinians (almost entirely civilians) and identifies mercenary motives that are in the background of everything elite politicians do in an era in which virtually every highly advantaged person has “broken bad” to one degree or another.

But the indictment the president will face at the bar of history that should most concern the president is one that relates to what I believe history will judge to have been President Biden’s ulterior motives for “standing there” instead of “doing something” for 12 weeks (and counting) while Palestinian lives were being merciless and needless extinguished by the IDF, when it was in his power to save them.

Having considered and dismissed all the conceivable competing remotely plausible explanations (a laundry list too long and immaterial to spell out) for President Biden to have allowed this I cannot avoid the conclusion that he and his Democratic elite cohorts have an ulterior motive for countenancing Israel’s barbaric genocide that is so baroque, sinister and Machiavellian as to initially defy credulity; but which, on reflection, is the only explanation by which sense can be made of this otherwise irrational, inexplicable and ghoulish world-historical event:

It appears the president has allowed this genocide to go on and on and on in order to send the following message to (primarily but not exclusively) the Democrats’ rebellion-minded red (and purple) state Republican political opponents: “THIS kind of wholesale death, destruction and destitution (or worse) is what can and will happen to YOU and your communities if you dare to attempt an armed revolt following the 2024 presidential election or any future elections!”

Such a serious (highly cynical and somewhat inflammatory) surmise, of course, requires at least some supporting evidence. And (alas) there IS evidence that inflicting genocidal violence against their domestic political opponents has in fact entered the thinking of mainstream elected Democrats:

Eric Swalwell, a prominent Northern California (East Bay) Democratic Congressman and 2020 presidential candidate, said this “quiet part out loud” in a Twitter exchange he had on Nov. 16, 2018 with Joe Biggs, a rightist Trump supporter and conservative social media influencer (who was later convicted of seditious conspiracy and given a 17 year prison sentence for co-leading the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol).

Rep. Swalwell was advocating for a federal gun control law that would mandate the compulsory buy-back of citizens’ assault weapons. Biggs responded (in sum) that if the federal government ever sought to enforce such a gun control law it would start a civil war: “So basically @RepSwalwell wants a war,” Biggs tweeted. “Because that’s what you would get. You’re outta your f—ing mind if you think I’ll give up my rights and give the gov all the power.”

To which Swalwell retorted: “And it would be a short war my friend. The government has nukes. Too many of them. But they’re legit. I’m sure if we talked we could find common ground to protect our families and communities.” (Emphasis added.)

Biggs’ account- and hence his part of the exchange has been deleted by X-Twitter; Rep. Swalwell has left his part of the (disturbing) exchange up. See X Twitter. This could only be because Swalwell received no Democratic Party peer pressure (at least none he was willing to heed) to take it down. The least that can be deduced is that Mr. Swalwell’s “brain fart” (so to speak) was not that of an isolated crank within mainstream Democratic Party elite circles.

And if (as Swalwell’s undeleted tweet indicates) mainstream Democratic officials are now comfortable issuing in terrorem (genocidal) threats to resort to nuclear weapons if Republican rightists engage in armed rebellion against the United States, then a fortiori the idea of resorting to conventional warfare against Republican rebels and their communities (ala the razing of Gaza we have all been witnessing) in the event say, of an armed uprising in response to the GOP’s loss of the 2024 presidential election, is something that Democratic Establishment elites and their deep state allies would have even less compunction about doing.

And (unfortunately) there is another data point that fortifies my thesis: One that is far too incendiary to have “just happened” but had to have been “made to happen.” Rep. Swalwell’s unhinged nuclear threat was recently echoed by Israel’s Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu who said in a radio interview on Sunday Nov. 12, 2023 that Israel dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip was “an option.” See AP News.

Given the official Israel policy of (in sum) “strategic ambiguity” about whether it even possesses nuclear weapons, it is virtually inconceivable that a government minister would “accidentally” mention the possibility of Israel using nuclear weapons in their genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza. And further, in view of the close coordination between the Biden administration and the Israeli government, it is highly likely that an Israeli minister’s reference to the use of nuclear weapons in Gaza—a “brain fart” identical to Mr. Swalwell’s which was sure to garner international news coverage—was choreographed in or near Washington DC, likely in Langley Virginia. And meant to strengthen the “demonstration effect” the ghastly televised Gaza genocide is intended to have on potential-American-rebel audiences.

Adding a nuclear strike threat to the genocidal aggression Israelis are wretchedly visiting upon Gazans with bunker-buster bombs and other conventional weapons to such lethal effect, was almost certainly “made to happen” by US officials who were aiming to get the attention of say, Trump supporters who might otherwise be likely to resort to armed insurrection in late 2024 in the event that say, (unlike in 2020) they really are cheated out of a Trump second term.

And therein, I submit, lies the real (indeed surreal and despicably tawdry) reason President Biden is permitting Israel to conduct this televised genocide and for the mainstream Democrats’ deafening silence in the face of all the sadistically-inflicted atrocities against innocent Palestinians in Gaza. It has essentially nothing to do with the merits of the Israel-Palestine conflict. It is simply the Democrats’ perverse way of demonstrating to Trump’s rightist base what can and will happen to THEM if they ever dare to take up arms in the event President Biden defeats the 2024 Republican nominee. It also explains why the actions and explanations of Biden and his senior officials for what they are doing make absolutely NO rational sense. They are deflections from the real reason, which is too transgressive to be publically admitted.

In reprehensibly so approving Israel’s mass murder of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians—men, women, children and babies—each and every one of whom possessed the God-given right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” President Biden and mainstream Democratic power elites are deplorably betraying America’s founding values and collapsing our nation’s “soft power” by forfeiting and forsaking one of THE most important achievements in the entire post-World War II era civilization canon, the 1948 Genocide Convention and the 1988 US implementing law (the Proxmire Act).

Instead of invoking the Genocide Convention and demanding that Israel to stand down, Democrats are using Israel’s genocide to frighten and intimidate their conservative-and-farther-right political rivals. To call that unconscionable and Un-American is a vast understatement. It is diabolically evil. 

President Biden must order Israel to end this genocidal madness AT ONCE! CEASEFIRE NOW!

My Further Advice to the President Biden

In closing, I acknowledge having light credentials to issue the further policy advice I am about to give President Biden and his team. I am a former Naval Reserves petty officer and a recovering political consultant who advised Colorado Senator Gary Hart during his 1980s Democratic presidential primary campaigns.

Sen. Hart, a serious JFK acolyte, taught that the highest office in the country is that of “citizen.”

And it is in that capacity that I wish to channel the advice I believe the late great George C. Marshall, US Army Chief of Staff under Presidents Roosevelt and Truman during World War 2 and Secretary of State and later Secretary of Defense under President Truman, would give the incumbent president were he to beam in from heaven regarding the disaster Marshall knew would someday happen if President Truman recognized Israel (without more), and implored Truman to avoid.

President Biden ought to further inform Mr. Netanyahu and his fascist cohorts that by perpetrating this nightmarish vengeful aggression that President Truman and Secretary of State Marshall most feared, a televised genocide, Israel has effectively forfeited its entitlement to separate Jewish statehood. President Biden should rescind the US diplomatic recognition of Israel President Truman (reluctantly) conferred. And further inform Israel’s leaders and civil society as follows:

In America, (since 1865) we’ve resolved political differences by the ballot box, not by civil warfare. What’s needed now in 1947 Palestine is a medium-to-long-term transitional peace and reconciliation process whereby sovereignty in all of Israel and the occupied territories is re-established as a byproduct of a plebiscite among ALL the inhabitants of 1947 Palestine and their progeny. In this way, President Truman’s fond hope—“eventually I think we’ll have them all satisfied”—may come to pass at long last.

And while the good statesman-like, decent, thinking, kinder and gentler people in Israel and Palestine work earnestly together to found a liberated, new, just, democratic and peaceable Palestine, in my personal best-case scenario the senior leaders of Israel who authored this psychopathic-sociopathic hyper-criminal bloodletting against Palestinian civilians will be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court for genocide, be convicted and life-imprisoned: Preferably on the flyspeck island of Saint Helena, where Napoleon, who also scourged Gaza, took his last breath.

Let Mr. Netanyahu and his partners in war crime and genocide ruminate there for the rest of their days on their mass murders most foul of Palestinian civilians and on the hash they and all their fellow Zionists have made of Napoleon’s good deed in liberating Europe’s Jews from their ghetto and shtetl lives.

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The underbelly of contemporary violence is colonialism, the politics of disposability, religious fundamentalism, neoliberalism, and raw militarism.  Violence seems to have engulfed the earth like a blinding sandstorm. Children are being killed en mass in Gaza, homelessness is increasingly spreading among youth in many countries, inequality exists at staggering levels, and a culture for justice has been replaced by a global culture of war. Gangster capitalism is waging a war on the working class, women’s reproductive rights, gay rights, people of color, and democracy itself–brazenly wrapping itself in the discourse of fascism.

Morality increasingly collapses under the weight of historical amnesia, the repression of dissent, and the ruination of civic culture. Language has lost its ability to awaken consciousness under the suffocating weight of the spectacle and the crazed vocabulary of demagogues. Social responsibility is adrift and is no longer associated with how American society functions. The politicians and entrepreneurs of death ignore the blood produced by their weapons and invest heavily without accountability in state and global terrorism. Entire families, children, schools, hospitals, and places of worship are bombed, and women and children are killed as the barbarians of fascism and  the arms industries gloat over their mounting profits made from bloodshed and unimaginable suffering.[1] As Chris Hedges has argued, gangster capitalism has reached its logical and toxic conclusion, “fertilized by widespread despair, feelings of exclusion, worthlessness, powerlessness and economic deprivation.”[2] The outcome is a slide into a fascist politics that portends the death of the idea of democracy in the United States.

 The Vichy journalists and media outlets now more than ever trade in “objectivity” and calls for even handedness as violence escalates at all levels of society.[3] Trump is treated as a normal candidate for the presidency despite embracing nihilistic forms of lawlessness. He spews racism, hatred, and endless threats of violence, indifferent to calls for accountability, however timid. Cowardice hides behind the false appeal to a wobbly notion of balance. The mainstream media have a greater affinity for the bottom line than for the truth.[4] Their silence amounts to a form of complicity.

The Republican Party is now mostly a vehicle for fascist politics.[5] The United States has reached the endpoint of a cruel economic and political system that resembles a dead man walking–a zombie politics that thrives on the exploitation of the working class, immigrants, the poor, dispossessed, and helpless children dying under the bombed-out rubble of state terrorism. White Christian nationalism merges with the most extreme elements of capitalism to enforce cruel and heartless policies of dispossession, elimination, and a politics of disposability. Mouthfuls of blood saturate the language of authoritarianism, and policies of destruction, exploitation, and utter despair follow. Public time based on notions of equality, the common good, and justice fades into the dustbin of a white-washed history. As James Baldwin once noted, until the Nazis knock on their door, these “let’s be balanced” types refuse to have the courage to name fascism for what it is.

In the face of emergency time, it is crucial to develop a great awakening of consciousness, a massive broad-based movement for the defense of public goods, and a mobilization of educators and youth who can both say no and fight for a socialist democracy.  The fight against fascism cannot take place without new ideas, vision, and the ability to translate them into action. Dangerous memories and the resuscitation of historical consciousness help. And are even more necessary as democracy is choking on the filth of demagogues, white nationalism, class warfare, militarism, and Christian nationalism.  Those Americans who believe in democracy and justice can no longer accept being reduced to a nation of spectators; they can no longer define democracy by reducing it to a voting machine controlled by the rich; nor can they equate it with the corpse of capitalism;  they can no longer allow the silence of the press to function as a disimagination machine that functions to largely depoliticize the public;  they can no longer allow education to be pushed as machinery of illiteracy, historical amnesia, and ignorance.

 I am not engaging in a paralyzing pessimism, but rather highlighting the urgency a historical moment that is on the verge of spelling the death knell for America as an idea, as a promise of what a radical democracy might presume for the future. We live in an era of emergency time—a time of crises in which time has become a disadvantage and public time a necessity and call for militant thought and action. Without agency there is no possibility of imagining a future that does not echo the fascism of the past, without possibility there is no reason to acknowledge the very real material and ideological threats to the United States and the rest of the globe now face.

Fascism is no longer interred in history. The spirit of Weimar 1933 is being replayed. How else to explain Trump’s openly fascist claim that he plans, once elected, to imprison political dissidents in the prison camps? Or his pledge “to root out the communist, Marxist, fascist, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible—they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally—to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.” Trump’s belligerent rhetoric merges a vocabulary of dehumanization with a language of racial cleansing and repeated threats of violence. He claims that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” states that “the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff deserves to be executed, and to discourage shoplifters urged polices officers to shoot them. He openly states with a smirk on his face that he wants to be a dictator.[6] For the far-right and MAGA politicians, fascist politics is now displayed and enacted as a badge of honor. There is more at work here than an echo of former authoritarian regimes. The ensuing threats from Trump and his warrior-soldier types lead directly to the Gulags and camps in a former age of authoritarianism.

The spirit of the Confederacy along with an upgraded and Americanized version of fascism is back. The corpse-like orthodoxies of militarism, racial cleansing, and neoliberal fascism point to both the bankruptcy of conscience and an instance in which language fails and morality collapses into barbarism, and any vestige of democracy is both mocked and attacked. As the new year approaches, I want to end on a note of possibility by providing a quote from Howard Zinn, my former mentor and friend. He writes:

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, and kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

Notes.

[1] Henry A. Giroux, “Killing Children, the Burdens of Conscience, and the Israel-Hamas War,” Counterpunch (December 9, 2023). Online: https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/12/08/killing-children-the-burdens-of-conscience-and-the-israel-hamas-war/

[2] Chris Hedges, “Fascism Comes to America” Substack [October 8, 2023]. Online: https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/fascism-comes-to-america

[3] Thom Hartmann, “Is Cowardly Journalism Bringing Trump’s Fascism Back?”  LA Progressive [December 4, 2023]. Online: https://www.laprogressive.com/the-media-in-the-united-states/cowardly-journalism..Will Bunch, “Where’s the ‘Trump Resistance’ as autocracy looms?” The Philadelphia Inquirer [December 5, 2023]. Online: https://www.inquirer.com/columnists/attytood/trump-resistance-womens-march-felicity-huffman-college-admissions-20231205.html

[4]Jessica Corbett, “Warnings Grow That US Media Again Failing to Accurately Cover Trump’s Fascist Threat.” Common Dreams [November 13, 2023]. Online: https://www.commondreams.org/news/donald-trump-and-the-media

[5] Henry A. Giroux and Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism On Trial (London: Bloomsbury, 2024).

[6] See, Robert Kagan, “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending,” The Washington Post (November 30, 2023). Online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/30/trump-dictator-2024-election-robert-kagan/

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A bright star in the firmament of justice has gone out.   One of the greatest journalists of our era has passed away.

John Pilger was always on the side of the oppressed. He denounced Empire and all its violent predations–war, genocide, exploitation–as well as its endless lies and propaganda.

Till his death, he fought tirelessly for the freedom of Julian Assange, and his last article was a call to solidarity.John gave voice to the invisible and the voiceless: the hungry, the poor, the handicapped, the conscripted, the sanctioned & bombed,  the dispossessed, refugees, the chemically experimented on, the structurally adjusted, the coup’ed, the famine-expendable, the colonized, the genocided, the silenced, shining a light in the hidden, dark recesses of the hell of Empire.

He denounced and fought racism, war, privatization, neocolonialism, neoliberalism, globalization, propaganda,advertising, nuclear madness, US coups,

His filmography and writing is a rap sheet of the unceasing criminality of Empire and Capitalism

Arguably giving him the best homage it could render, the British Television Authority described him as “A threat to Western Civilization”

John was also prophetic: in 1970, he chronicled the insurrection of troops against the Vietnam war in The Quiet Mutiny.  In 1974, and again in 2002, he spoke out that “Palestine was still the Issue“, demanding that “the occupation of Palestine should end now”.  He warned about Japanese militarism and revisionism.In 2014, he warned that Ukraine, a “CIA theme park”, was preparing  “a Nato-run guerrilla war that is likely to spill into Russia itself”. Seven years ago, when only a few were aware, and even fewer were speaking out–in short words and articles–he released a full-length, full-throated documentary warning the world that the US was escalating catastrophically to War with China.

John was not only a powerful critical journalist and world-changing filmmaker–“Cambodia Year Zero” is considered one of the most influential documentaries in the 20th century.  He was also a craftsman, a poet, artist–he understood the power of language but also understood that in a medium restricted by word counts, what it meant to make every word count.

But it was John’s rich, resonant delivery–like a Shakespearean actor–that always struck me.  It contained the unmistakable, unimpeachable courage of moral integrity: a voice that knows it is speaking the truth.

You will hear many things about him in the days to come–as we speak, the MSM are retrieving their pre-written, canned obituaries from the deep freeze–but John’s own words are most insightful.

On the form of journalism:

In all these forms the aim should be to find out as many facts and as much of the truth as possible. There’s no mystery. Yes, we all bring a personal perspective to work; that’s our human right. Mine is to be skeptical of those who seek to control us, indeed of all authority that isn’t accountable, and not to accept “official truths”, which are often lies. Journalism is or ought to be the agent of people, not power: the view from the ground.

On making a difference:

….the aim of good journalism is or ought to be to give people the power of information – without which they cannot claim certain freedoms. It’s as straightforward as that. Now and then you do see the effects of a particular documentary or series of reports. In Cambodia, more than $50 million were given by the public, entirely unsolicited, following my first film; and my colleagues and I were able to use this to buy medical supplies, food and clothing. Several governments changed their policies as a result. Something similar happened following the showing of my documentary on East Timor – filmed, most of it, in secret… Did it affect the situation in East Timor? No, but it did contribute to the long years of tireless work by people all over the world.

On Social Media:

Ironically, they can separate us even further from each other: enclose us in a bubble-world of smartphones and fragmented information, and magpie commentary. Thinking is more fun, I think

On US Foreign Policy:

I seldom use the almost respectable term, US foreign policy; US designs for the world is the correct term, surely. These designs have been running along a straight line since 1944 when the Bretton Woods conference ordained the US as the number one imperial power. The line has known occasional interruptions such as the retreat from Saigon and the triumph of the Sandinistas, but the designs have never changed. They are to dominate humanity. What has changed is that they are often disguised by the modern power of public relations, a term Edward Bernays invented during the first world war because “the Germans have given propaganda a bad name”.

On the economy:

With every administration, it seems, the aims are “spun” further into the realm of fantasy while becoming more and more extreme. Bill Clinton, still known by the terminally naive as a “progressive”, actually upped the ante on the Reagan administration, with the iniquities of NAFTA and assorted killing around the world. What is especially dangerous today is that the US’s wilfully and criminally collapsed economy (collapsed for ordinary people) and the unchallenged pre-eminence of the parasitical “defence” industries have followed a familiar logic that leads to greater militarism, bloodshed and economic hardship.

On peace activism:

The current spoiling for a fight with China is a symptom of this, as is the invasion of Africa….I find it remarkable that I have lived my life without having been blown to bits in a nuclear holocaust ignited by Washington. What this tells me is that popular resistance across the rest of the world is potent and much feared by the bully – look at the hysterical pursuit of WikiLeaks. Or if not feared, it’s disorientating for the master. That’s why those of us who regard peace as a normal state of human affairs are in for a long haul, and faltering along the way is not an option, really.

On the future:

I’m confident that if we remain silent while the US war state, now rampant, continues on its bloody path, we bequeath to our children and grandchildren a world with an apocalyptic climate, broken dreams of a better life for all and, as the unlamented General Petraeus put it, a state of “perpetual war”. Do we accept that or do we fight back

John Pilger, Presente!

Read and watch more of John Pilger’s work on his website:

https://johnpilger.com/

https://johnpilger.com/videos

https://johnpilger.com/filmography

The post A Voice for the Oppressed: John Pilger, Radical Journalist and Documentarian appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Until October 7 events in Gaza for the past nine years rarely made the headlines even in Israel. Some event would make Hamas fire some missiles into Israel and Israeli jets would respond by dropping bombs many times more destructive on ‘select military sites’ in Gaza. All of this was regarded as so unremarkable that the Israeli military referred to it as, “mowing the lawn.” Israel’s allies, The US, Britain, France and Germany also took little notice of these events. The situation of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza could go on indefinitely. The Palestinians had endured more than half a century of occupation and oppression—why not another half century? From the standpoint of the various governments in Israel since the 1978 Camp David treaty with Egypt, these were matters that could be managed, while Israel continued its slow, gradual theft of the West Bank. As far as Gaza was concerned, its conversion after 2004 into a prison holding 2.2 million prisoners had ‘disposed’ of that issue. But then something happened.

On October 7 an eruption of violence occurred from that small piece of land that few people in Israel—or anywhere else—would have thought possible. The shock in Israel that the Hamas attack caused says much about the complacency not only in the Israeli government and military but among Israeli citizens in general. An Israeli journalist remarked recently that most Israelis looked at Palestinians like furniture that could be moved around in their living rooms.

October 7 also dashed the complacency of the US and Europe. Many events in the last six or seven years had obscured the issue of the Palestinians. The war in Ukraine was obviously the main event. But even when attention was given to the Middle East it was focused on other matters. Iran and its influence on Iraq, the tension between it and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. There were attempts in recent years to go around the issue of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and its virtual siege of Gaza. The latest attempt was ostentatiously christened ‘Abraham Accords. That—apparently a product of the brain the renowned Middle East expert Jared Kushner—was among the casualties of October 7.

After the twelve hundred people massacred by Hamas on October 7 the next casualties were the near god-like reputations of the IDF and the Mossad and its cousins in Israeli intelligence. To be fair, there were some in the Israeli intelligence establishment who sensed something might be afoot. The Israeli military intelligence Aman warned Netanyahu that the divisions in Israeli society caused by Netanyahu’s ‘judicial reforms’ could encourage an attack by Hamas or Hezbollah. But apparently the Israeli generals were as blinkered as Netanyahu whose first priority—rather like his American counterpart—is staying out of prison.

This failure accounts for the severity of the Israeli assault on Gaza. Netanyahu and the Israeli military have attempted to obscure their massive failure with a massive display of firepower that probably in its initial stages did little harm to Hamas—after all, if they’d had good intelligence before October 7, presumably with their massive advantage in firepower they would have prevented it. Also damaged were the vaunted intelligence services of Israel—Shin Bet, Mossad et al.

For Israel the Hamas attack on October 7 has been compared to 9/11 for the US. But there is a significant difference. Though US meddling and bungling in the Middle East created al-Qaeda, no one ever thought that George W Bush tried to create al-Qaeda. Not so with Netanyahu.

 It is well-documented that he and others in Likud helped to create Hamas, gave financial support to it in order to fracture the Palestinians so Likud and other right-wing Israeli parties opposed to any Palestinian state could claim they had no party to negotiate with. This simply as a delaying tactic while the Israeli settlements metastasized throughout the West Bank. But on October 7 the folly of Netanyahu’s connivance in the creation Hamas was lost for most Israelis in the mists of time. How clever he was until he wasn’t.

Netanyahu’s positive rating is about 25% as I write—take heart, Biden! He’s already being accused in the Israeli press of using the war as a photo-op for his next campaign. Many of the families of the hostages are still voicing their anger with him. It took him three weeks to work up the nerve to meet with them. He has clearly given the all-out assault priority over negotiating the release of the hostages with Hamas. The two goals are not compatible. Reducing Gaza to rubble will not free the hostages.

As if the reputation of the IDF hadn’t suffered enough damage, they killed three hostages who had somehow escaped the clutches of Hamas. They were waving a makeshift white flag. An Israeli soldier shouted, “Terrorists!” Two were shot dead immediately. The third fled into a nearby building where they chased him down and killed him while he pleaded with them for his life in Hebrew. It is hard to think of a more glaring example of stupidity and criminal ineptitude.

In the meantime, the US has become concerned about civilian deaths in Gaza which stand at more than 20,000. That’s apparently too many—the State Department has yet to announce what an acceptable number of dead civilians would be. Biden has described the bombing as ‘indiscriminate’—it has emerged that more than 40% of the bombs Israel has dropped on Gaza are so-called ‘dumb bombs.’

It would appear that Hamas has a better idea of what they are doing than either Israel or the US does. It is the guerilla strategy of avoiding pitched battles, setting small ambushes before melting away. In the case of Hamas fighters into their tunnel system. Or perhaps given the vast cityscape of shelled and deserted buildings created by Israel’s bombing—the inhabitants having either fled per Israeli pamphlets to seek shelter elsewhere or lie dead in the rubble. Hamas fighters can at night exploit the ruins as an urban jungle. They know the streets and alleys and to really root them out will be very costly for the IDF.

Two other side effects of the Hamas assault of October 7 should be mentioned. The first is Netanyahu’s crackdown on Israeli dissent. The Knesset recently passed an amendment to a counter-terrorism law making a crime of “the systematic and continuous consumption of publications of a terrorist organization,” with a maximum penalty of one year’s imprisonment. In other words, a journalist who simply reads the public statements of Hamas, Hezbollah, or even the Kurdish YPG could be thrown in prison for a year—presumably their “consumption” being caught by the Israeli company’s famous Pegasus spyware used all over the world to ‘combat terrorism’ and to arrest dissidents.

Meir Baruchin, an Israeli teacher and activist who opposes the war on Gaza, was detained and investigated for “sedition and intent to commit treason.” He spent four days in solitary confinement before he was released. For journalists, especially Palestinian journalists, it will certainly be worse. So much for what is billed as the only democracy in the Middle East.

The Israeli assault on Gaza has killed 53 journalists and their media assistants, 46 Palestinians, 3 Lebanese and 4 Israelis. The assault on the civilian people of Gaza is also an assault on reporters to cover up the assault on the civilians. The killing of the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akhleh by the IDF last year shows the Israel has no hesitation at killing journalists to kill stories.  In May of 2022 during the IDF assault on Jenin in the West Bank Abu Akhleh was shot in the head by an IDF sniper—it was not a stray bullet. Numerous investigations by non-Israeli groups, including the US Start Department, concluded she was deliberately targeted. Her killer of course was never punished.

The second effect of the Gaza war has been a surge in settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. Settlers have seized the opportunity, while the outside world is focused on Gaza, to increase their attacks on Palestinian towns, entering homes, beating people up, burning cars, destroying orchards. They terrorize small villages and in many cases succeed in driving all the inhabitants out so as to erase the villages entirely. If these actions sound like those of the Nazis in the 1930s it’s because they are the same things. First acts of violence are committed to drive out people from a place they have lived in for eons. This is a prelude to a war on them to forcibly expel them and if they resist, to kill them. In this they are following a document written six years ago by the current Israeli minister of finance Bezalel Smotrich. The title of the document was “The Decisive Plan.” The document only mentioned Gaza in passing, Smotrich advocated the annexation of entire West Bank, giving the Palestinians the choice of leaving or staying and living as non-people. Should any take up arms to resist then they should be treated as terrorists and killed. When Smotrich did a public presentation of his plan he was asked after if that meant women and children too, he replied “In war as in war.” Decisive Plan, Final Solution—for fascists there is no such thing as irony.

On December 6 the IDF recommended that Israeli civilians evacuate to a part of the southern of al-Mawasi. Now it is estimated that homes of up to 85% of the 2.2 million people have been destroyed. Al-Jazeera reported that the IDF told more than 1.5 million homeless civilians already deprived of water, food and medicine, many of them wounded and ill, to move to an area that is about the size of Heathrow Airport. One might think that such a proposal could not be taken seriously. But it should be taken seriously because its real message was: There is no room for you anywhere in Gaza. If you stay anywhere in Gaza, you will die.

The civilian death toll is usually taken to be a byproduct of a ruthless disregard for civilian by the IDF in their determination to destroy Hamas as a military force. But this is not the case. In fact civilians are a target too. This proven by an article published by small independent on-line journal called +972. The journal was started by four Israeli journalists in 2010 and now also employs a number of Palestinian journalists. The ‘+972’ is the country code assigned to both Israel and the West Bank and Gaza and may be taken as the journal’s commitment to a single state for Israelis and Palestinians.

On November 30 +972 published an article by an Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham. The title of article was ‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza.’ Abraham draws upon anonymous sources, whistleblowers, in both the Israeli military and intelligence. Apartment buildings, schools, universities, banks markets are all targets—the idea being civilian deaths and wholesale destruction will, as one of the sources puts it, “lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas.” This dubious idea only shows the stupidity of Netanyahu and his settler allies. Another anonymous source in the article says, “When a three-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed—that it was a price worth paying to hit [another] target.”

Another reason for the appalling numbers of casualty is the IDF’s use of system called Hasbora (The Gospel) which uses AI to generate targets far faster than humans could. These targets disregard any number of civilians involved what a retired intelligence officer calls, “A mass assassination factory.”

And this is central point of Yuval Abraham’s article: Palestinian civilians are as much a target in the current onslaught in Gaza as Hamas—which makes any call for the IDF to be more precise in their targeting useless. They are being precise in their targeting. They have civilians right in their crosshairs.  Nevertheless, the US continues to issue fatuous statements. On December 13 John Kirby the spokesman for the National Security said of the maps the IDF published showing which neighborhoods they would bomb, “That’s basically telegraphing your punches…I don’t know that we would do that.” Of course that is hardly high praise coming from a military power whose recent legacy is Falllujah, Ramadi and Baqubah.

Subsequently Yuval Abraham was interviewed on PBS and he spoke of another change in Israeli military targeting tactics that has multiplied civilian casualties even when they are taking into account civilian casualties:

“So, in the past, according to sources, for a single assassination attempt, dozens of Palestinian civilians would be allowed to be killed. This has become 10 times or 20 times the number that was allowed in the past after October 7.”

On October 10 an IDF spokesman said, “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.” That same day, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced: “I have lowered all the restraints – we will kill everyone we fight against; we will use every means.” The Defense Minister Yoav Gallant: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” The reference ‘human animals’ should not be taken as only referring to Hamas. Anyone who knows something about the views of many Israeli leaders knows that this is nothing new. Menachem Began, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for swindling Sadat in the 1978 Camp David Accords, referred to Palestinians as “animals on two legs.” Nor should it be taken as something confined to right-wing politicians. The celebrated Golda Meir who belonged to the Labor Party, called Palestinians “cockroaches.”

Now heavy rains are filling the streets of Gaza, and WHO, UNRWA and the many other agencies struggling to aid the Palestinians in Gaza are concerned about the outbreak of cholera and other diseases. But in the view of a retired Israeli general Giora Eiland, who previously head of the National Security Council, this will help the Israel achieve victory. In an article titled “Let’s not be intimidated by the world” he wrote:

“The international community is warning us against a severe humanitarian disaster and severe epidemics. We must not shy away from this. After all, severe epidemics in the south of Gaza will bring victory closer.”

One of the prominent issues that, according to the mainstream media, is increasingly dividing the US and Israel as the war proceeds is that the Netanyahu government has no plan for Gaza after the war ends. This is wrong. Netanyahu and his allies have a sort of plan. The only problem is that it is preposterous and has zero possibility of realization.

 The Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, cited earlier, wrote in an article published on October 30 wrote:

“The Israeli Ministry of Intelligence is recommending the forcible and permanent transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.2 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, according to an official document revealed in full for the first time by +972’s partner site Local Call yesterday.”

In its report the Ministry recommended that Israel “enlist international help” to carry out this transfer. Egypt is mentioned less than half a dozen times in the document. The two most significant are:

“A sterile zone of several kilometers should be created in Egypt.”

“Egypt has an obligation under international law to allow the passage of the population”

After the Israeli authors of this document generously donate Egyptian land to their preposterous scheme, they proceed with the breathtaking hypocrisy to speak of Egypt’s obligation under international law—which Israel has broken every day since its creation in 1948.

The plan is simple. According to Giora Eiland the plan is, “to create conditions where life in Gaza becomes unsustainable. Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.”

Abraham goes on to say that a similar scheme was put forth by a right-wing think tank the Misgav Institute headed by a close associate of Netanyahu. The author was one Amir Weitmann who showed it to a Likud member of the Knesset Ariel Kallner who said, “the solution you propose, to move the population to Egypt, is a logical and necessary solution.”

Since these plans for Gaza dovetail nicely Smotrich’s plan to empty the West Bank of Palestinians it can be assumed he and those enamored of his plan would endorse. Apart from the arrogant criminality of these plans, the plans show how divorced from reality are Netanyahu’s ministers.

The possibility that the US would sign off on such proposals—and a fortiori any other country in the world—shows how out of touch with reality the Israeli right is. As I write Netanyahu is saying assault will “deepen” and “intensify.” At the same time Biden is getting pressure from careerists in the State Department and also Democrats on the House Intelligence, Armed Services or Foreign Affairs committees to curb Israel’s assault. Biden must be weighing whether his long unconditional support of Israel will now cost him his reelection. He must know also that Netanyahu’s two goals, crushing Hamas and getting the hostages back, are incompatible. The latter could be achieved by a ceasefire and negotiation. The massive assault and bombardment is more likely to kill hostages. Proposals to flood the Hamas huge tunnel system with sea water would drown them too. Biden through his career has always been inclined to compromise his ‘principles,’ but the time may be coming soon when the realpolitik of US interests and those of Israel diverge too far for compromises. Netanyahu is probably hoping for Trump’s victory in 2024 though that could backfire too—Trump has no loyalty to anyone but himself. The MAGA mob is full of anti-Semites and evangelicals who hope that Jesus will blow up the world soon.

After a vote in the UN General Assembly calling for an immediate ceasefire—which the US and Israel opposed—Biden said that Israel, “has most of the world supporting it.” The vote went against the US and Israel 153 to 10. ‘Most of the world’ according to Biden consisted of Austria, Czechia, Guatemala, Liberia, Micronesia, Nauru, Papua New Guinea and Paraguay. The main European allies of the US all abstained out of embarrassed deference. Now the desperation of the Netanyahu regime is seen in the claim of the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. On December 26 he told a Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee meeting in the Knesset that Israel is facing a “multi-arena war” from seven different fronts including Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, West Bank, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran. Gallant said Israel has “responded and acted already on six of these fronts.” In fact the Netanyahu regime wants such a war that in their calculations would suck the US into another war in the Middle East.

The lies of Netanyahu and the IDF speak of desperation. On December 12 when the northern part of Gaza was supposedly secured by the IDF, Hamas ambushed an IDF unit killing ten Israeli soldiers. More importantly, there was the lie that Hamas had a headquarters beneath al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. No evidence was ever produced for that. The video that the IDF looked like the work of an eight-year old. A Washington Post article of December 21 found no evidence to support it. Israel under Netanyahu’s policy of no Palestinian state under any condition is on a collision course with reality. Now it appears that the Hamas attack on October 7 has not only changed Israel but the calculus of the Middle East. Israel is more isolated than ever. Its military response to October 7 is only increasing its isolation, even making more people in its most powerful ally the US question its relationship with Israel.

October 7 has made one thing clear. The Palestinians will not go away. And the current Israeli leadership is deluded in thinking they can solve matters by military power. The idea that the surrounding Arab states would take in millions of Palestinians if they could—which they cannot since their economies are in crisis—is so far removed from reality that one has to wonder what alternate universe Netanyahu’s settler ministers live in. From Morocco to Iraq, Arabs—both Muslim and Christian—have lived side by side in peace with Jews for centuries. But from Morocco to Iraq, the state of Israel is regarded as a Zionist apartheid entity implanted by a colonial power in the Arab World. The rise to power of the far right in Israel has laid bare what was always the core of the Zionist project. People from Brooklyn are telling Palestinians they have no right to the land where their ancestors have lived for thousands of years. Ami Ayalon, former head of Shin Bet the Israeli domestic security agency, said, “Israel after October 7 will be a different Israel…The current leadership will have to disappear from our lives, it led us with open eyes into the most terrible crisis.”

That is a simple hard fact that US and Israeli politicians have tried to ignore for decades. There is no back door or side door that will lead to peace between the Arab World and Israel that does not lead through Palestine. The two-state solution has been for a long time a pipedream. The West Bank is now so cut up by Israeli settlements and walls that a Palestinian state there would look like jigsaw puzzle missing most of its pieces. The Israeli plan for Gaza is that it will be uninhabitable. The most realistic solution now is for Israelis and Palestinians to live together in one free state from the river to the sea.

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President Joe Biden and White House Guests, Dec. 14, 2023. Photo: The author

An invitation to the White House

About a month ago, I received an email with the subject heading “coffee date with me and Joe.” It was sent by “Kamala Harris” via info.contact@jorbiden.com. If I donated $35, I’d be entered into a contest to have coffee with Joe and his unpopular veep. I shouted across the room to my wife Harriet: “We’ve been invited to have coffee with Joe and Kamala” (long pause) “if we send them some money and win a raffle.” Harriet replied at once: “I can top that. I just got invited by Joe and Jill to the White House for a holiday reception. I can bring a guest. Do you wanna go?”

We searched online for “White House invitation scam” but found nothing. The invitation was genuine and a few weeks later, we were on our way to Washington. Harriet’s environmental justice work had garnered presidential attention!

Progressive readers of CounterPunch may at this point wonder why we didn’t return the invitation in protest: The U.S. is funding two brutal and pointless wars; pulling more oil out of the ground than any other nation in history; illegally preventing asylum seekers from applying for refuge; and presiding over a large increase in child poverty. 81 y.o Joe Biden is determined to stand for re-election despite polling behind a 77 y.o. sex abuser, thief and insurrectionist facing 91 state and federal felony counts. But a protest isn’t a protest if nobody knows about it. Was the White House event planner going to tell Joe we weren’t attending? Would The New York Times cover our remonstration? And we had good reasons for going: meeting other environmentalists, challenging environmental regulators to do a better job, and maybe even meeting the president himself and offering advice on how to end the wars, tackle climate change, and defeat Trump. Plus, we never get invited to parties.

The reception wasn’t what we hoped. As far as we could tell, no other environmentalists or environmental regulators were in attendance. In fact, the guests appeared to have little in common. To be sure, we met some nice people: a recently retired, New Jersey union boss, the head of a national foster care network, the president of the National Association of OB-GYNs, a lobbyist for private universities, and a man who leads the oldest AIDs support group in Baltimore. There was also an “interagency liaison” from the NSA who may have been a spy; I asked him why he was invited but didn’t get a straight answer. I suppose if he told me he’d have to kill me.

There was champagne and fine wine and a lot of meat — steak, lamb chops, ham, crab, shrimp — but little for us vegans, except platters of Brussels sprouts and parsnips which, to be fair, were excellent. Christmas decorations were everywhere – colored lights, decorated trees, gift-wrapped boxes, reindeers (sculpted), tinsel, toy trains, sleighs, gingerbread, and candy canes. I avoided them as best I could and admired landscape paintings by John Caleb Bingham, Jasper Cropsey, Martin Johnson Heade, and Albert Bierstadt, plus the many presidential portraits. If Trump gets back in, he’ll surely banish to a basement the prominent effigies of Barack and Michelle; that will be the first time he ever exercised sound aesthetic judgement.

At 8 pm, we all squeezed into the dining room to hear Biden. He appeared spry and confident. His ten-minute speech was boilerplate delivered with the ease of a grandfather re-telling a war story. He avoided unpleasantness — nothing about Ukraine or Palestine, or his sinking poll numbers. Frankly, I can’t remember much of what he said except that the word “abortion” got the biggest applause. What struck me most was that he said nothing about us. It was all about him. The purpose of the reception, I realized at last, was not to honor Biden’s guests, but to celebrate the president and bolster his re-election chances. Harriet and I should have realized that from moment she got the invitation, but we’d been intoxicated by the whiff of influence. Still, maybe I’ll send Kamala and Joe that 35 bucks for coffee and see what happens.

Photography as propaganda for the weak

Just a mile from the White House reception, at the National Gallery, was an exhibition called “Seeing People” consisting of photographs by Dorothea Lange. If the former event was intended as puffery for the powerful, the latter was propaganda for the weak. Lange documented poverty, migrant labor, racism, and internment. Her photography for the U.S. Resettlement Administration, Farm Security Administration and War Relocation Authority from 1935 to 1941 comprises one of the most achieved archives in the history of the medium, rivalling Jacob Riis’s documentation of New York tenements, How the Other Half Lives (1890); Lewis Hine’s photos for the National Child Labor Commission (1908-18); and James Van Der Zee’s pictures of the Harlem Renaissance. Lange was one of 11 photographers – including Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee, Gordon Parks, Arthur Rothstein, and Marion Post Wolcott — commissioned by Roy Stryker (a government economist and amateur photographer), to represent the struggles of the rural working-class during the Great Depression with the goal of increasing public support for New Deal programs. Evans and Shahn were the best artists in the group, but Lange was the best photo-journalist. Her pictures told stories that people could understand.

Plantation Overseer. Mississippi Delta, near Clarksdale, Mississippi

Plantation overseer shows a group of men in front of the Volunteer General Store on the Sterlingwell Plantation. A heavy-set, mature white man stands in the foreground with his right foot on the bumper of a shiny new car. On the porch behind him are five Black men, probably local field hands, one of whom is nearly hidden by the vehicle; only his head is visible. At the far left of the picture, cut off by the frame, are the face and hands of a young, white man, the economist Paul S. Taylor, who is also the husband of the photographer. He’s holding a cigarette and talking to the older white man, distracting him so Lange can take a more candid shot.

The overseer’s name is Boon Mosby Partee, described by A.J. Cowart, (a fieldhand on the Hillhouse Plantation), as “the meanest man there ever was.” Born in 1868, Boon was the son of “Squire” Partee, who owned Hillhouse near Clarksdale and 100 slaves. After the Civil War, the Squire lost the farm, but decades later, his son wound up managing it. No information is available about the identities of the Black men. The car is a Chevrolet coupe. Circling the taillight is visible the name “Chip Barwick,” who owned a Chevy dealership in Memphis beginning in 1931. To buy his ride, Boon probably took the Yazoo Delta Railway — aka “Yellow Dog Railroad” — from Clarksdale. The rail line was the subject of Robert Johnson’s Travelling Riverside Blues, recorded in 1937. Black and white in the Mississippi Delta led segregated but overlapping lives.

Interpretations of Lange’s photograph usually focus on the proprietary gesture of the white man with his foot on the bumper; it suggests his proprietorship of the Black men as much as the car. (The Museum of Modern Art titles the work Plantation Owner and his Fieldhands.) And that was likely Lange’s intention too. But unless Partee brought the five men with him in his fancy new car, they probably have nothing to do with him. The store was located on Sterlingwell, not Hillhouse plantation, and Partee probably drove to the Volunteer Store to buy gas or other provisions. Lange’s photograph of the store taken a month later indicates that Black men and women – and white children – were regularly seen on the porch and on the dirt road in front. Lange and Taylor likely thought the man with the white hat and new car would be a good subject, engaged him in conversation, and took the picture. The Black men just happened to be there, or else gathered to see the car and the female photographer.

The fieldhands may have known Partee from his reputation for cruelty, but there’s no evidence they were cowed by him. The area was a hotbed of union organizing by proud tenants (sharecroppers) challenging evictions and reduced pay. Efforts by the Agriculture Adjustment Administration to raise crop prices by paying farm owners to limit production had the unintended consequence of increasing unemployment and depressing wages. In addition, plantation owners and overseers reused to share federal payments with tenants as required by law. Unionized tenant framers challenged the injustice. They met – often surreptitiously — in halls, churches, and private homes across the Delta, supported by white lawyers, and local Communist Party members (white and Black). Some carried guns. Cotton pickers in the Delta even went on strike in 1935 to demand fair distribution of farm subsidies and higher wages. Though the strikers suffered physical attacks – including several murders – they succeeded in obtaining a significant pay raise and partially stemming evictions. An extensive oral history of the STFU, collected in 1974, reveals the courage and resilience of union members. The Civil Rights organizing of the 1950s and ‘60s had its roots in the Mississippi Delta of the 1930s.

A year after Lange photographed Boon Partee and the Black fieldhands in front of the Volunteer General Store, she returned to the area to photograph the Christian socialist founded (and STFU supported), Delta Cooperative Farm, near the old Hillhouse Plantation. The farm was dedicated to efficiency, cooperation, racial justice, and equal pay for equal work. Lange’s photos of the farm are for the most part unremarkable: Neat crop rows, community gardens, new tractors, well-built cabins, and farmhouses. There’s no evidence of what Mr. Partee thought about his new neighbors, who may have included the very Black men in Plantation Overseer.

Migrant Mother – photography into art

Lange’s best-known photo for the Resettlement Agency and Farm Service Administration — and among the most famous pictures ever taken — is one now called, Migrant Mother, which shows a woman named Florence Owens Thompson with three of her children. Lange much later recounted that the picture came about almost by fate. Driving home to Berkeley after a long assignment in Los Angeles, Lange passed a sign outside Nipomo (south of San Luis Obispo) that read: “Pea Pickers Camp.” She drove 20 miles past it before deciding to turn back. Lange had been there briefly some months earlier and decided she needed more pictures. Arriving at the rain-soaked camp, she got out of her car and looked around. Lange wrote:

“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions…She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children had killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food.

Pea picking was done by migrant workers, their numbers at this time swollen by thousands of families displaced by the Dust Bowl that decimated the Great Plains. Though farm conditions in California were much better due to better irrigation, regular rainfall and seasonally cool weather, the Depression reduced commodity prices and wages there too. Pickers earned barely enough to eat, and not nearly enough to pay for housing. Area residents, often driven by racial bias (many of the pickers were Latino or Asian), resisted the provision of permanent housing. A U.S. government report from 1938 described conditions in the camps:

“[Migrant workers] must either provide their own housing or take up their residences in any abandoned shack that may be handy. In many instances improvised habitations are built of burlap, boxes, brush, packing cases, tin cans, cartons or whatever may be available on the location, and occasionally we find them housed in abandoned stables.”

In 1937, a law was passed by the California legislature forbidding residents from knowingly bringing “any indigent person” into the state. (It was later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.) Other exclusionary measures were also taken. In February 1936, a month before Migrant Mother, Los Angeles police initiated a “Bum Blockade” at key points of entry into the state, arresting and deporting anybody deemed indigent. We know from Lange’s letters to Stryker that she was aware of these measures, disturbed by them and aimed to challenge them through her photographs.

Unfortunately, Lange’s memory of the origins of Migrant Mother was partly mistaken. As the photo historian Sally Stein and others have shown, Lange mixed up the story of Owens Thompson with another of her subjects. The woman in Lange’s famous picture was not a pea picker at all. She and her family were in fact on their way back to Oklahoma after her husband lost his lob in a sawmill in Northern California. Their car had broken down, and Thompson’s husband and son had gone off to try and fix it. (They had not sold the tires for food.)

When Lange approached the Thomson family in their tent, was she struck by the resemblance of the scene to a Christian nativity, like the one below by Piero della Francesca?

After taking a few medium shots, Lange turned her Rolleifex camera vertically, and took a pair of close-ups, including Migrant Mother, which recalls another subject in Christian art, the Madonna and child and John the Baptist.

Finally, Migrant Mother also brings to mind work by Julia Margaret Cameron, Lange’s greatest female antecedent. Cameron aimed to “to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and the Ideal.” Something similar could be said about Lange’s Migrant Mother. It combined the self-consciously artistic pictorialism of her teacher Clarence White, with the rationalism and facticity of her contemporaries, including Walker Evans. Migrant Mother was Lange’s most ambitious effort to turn documentary photography into art and put it to use to ennoble and empower the poor and vulnerable.

Art and politics

Not all art seeks to persuade. Some is simply itself and nothing else, providing a brief and salutary respite from a global capitalist order that seeks at every turn to sell, coerce, persuade, dominate, and sometimes even kill us. Autonomous art, however, is a poor tool in the fight against fascism – which artists in the 1930s and again today must confront. Lange and the rest of the RA/FSA photographers were among the best anti-fascist, artist-warriors of their time. Their photographs reached millions of people. John Steinbeck’s novel Grapes of Wrath (1939) and the film adaptation by John Ford a year later were both deeply influenced by these photographs and reached millions more in the U.S. and around the world.

There is today no equivalent to the New Deal art programs that functioned in the 1930s, which included the Public Works of Art Program (1933-34); the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture (1934-43); the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration; and the Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration. The failure of the current administration to recognize and respond to the depth and breadth of the crises we face – political, environmental, economic, military – was once again apparent when I saw President Biden in the White House two weeks ago and heard his anodyne remarks. My concern was reinforced when I saw the exhibition of photographs by Lange – engaged, informed, challenging, and ambitious – the following day. The work of the new year must be to keep the orange fascist out of the White House. (Under conditions of fascism, no progress of any kind is possible – there is only regression and death.) But there must a concomitant effort – including by artists — to inform, organize and persuade political leaders and the masses to address the national and planetary crisis.

 

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The primary victims of Israel’s assault on Gaza are the Palestinians trapped there. Over 20,000 people, half of them children, have been killed so far; another 53,000 have been wounded. But even wider damage is being done, damage that extends far beyond Gaza. Around the world, people forced to witness this slow-motion genocide—while feeling unable to stop it—are being subjected to moral injuries that will reverberate for generations.

Psychologists originally used the term “moral injury” to refer to the psychic trauma experienced by soldiers unable to reconcile their deeply held moral values with the immoral acts—abusing, maiming, and killing other humans—they committed or abetted as soldiers. This trauma is thought to underlie the high rates of depression and suicide observed among combat veterans.

Moral injury later came be to seen as a possible result of witnessing atrocities committed by others, and feeling betrayed by authorities once thought trustworthy and legitimate. It is also now understood that moral injury is not limited to soldiers. Journalists and nurses, for instance, can experience moral injury when, in the face of human suffering, they are unable to do what they know is right. Similar circumstances, psychologists have come to realize, can cause moral injury to anyone.

Research also suggests that moral injury depends on the degree to which people blame themselves for failing to act in accord with their values. Injury is likely to be most severe when self-blame is strong and self-forgiveness elusive. The consequences, in addition to depression, can include shame, anxiety, withdrawal from relationships, emotional numbing, and paralysis. No wonder, then, that moral injury has been described as a crushing of the human soul.

To see images of faces contorted in agony, images of limbs protruding from beneath rubble, images of dead children in the arms of grieving parents—to see these images coming out of Gaza daily is to witness an ongoing atrocity. It is impossible for anyone not blinded by racism, tribalism, nationalism, or a lust for vengeance to observe this use of indiscriminate violence to destroy or displace people as anything but morally reprehensible.

The phrase “never again,” coined in the wake of World War II and revelation of the horrors committed by the Nazis, expresses a deep moral commitment to our fellow human beings. It is this commitment that is now being betrayed. To see what is being done to the people of Gaza is to witness the kind of genocidal action we have said must never be allowed to happen again. To witness this and be unable to stop it, to feel that we are not doing enough to stop it, or to feel complicit because our tax dollars fund it, is to incur moral injury.

Moral injury can engender a belief that the world is an inhumane place, that evil prevails no matter what we do. When this belief becomes pervasive, the damage caused by moral injury rises to the level of culture. When the psychological effects of moral injury—shame, depression, withdrawal, emotional numbing, paralysis—are widespread, our collective capacity to oppose injustice and state violence is diminished. We risk becoming a populace disinclined by feelings of unworthiness and powerlessness to engage in the organized action needed to stop what we know is wrong.

Paralysis and inaction do not of course characterize the whole world’s response to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. There has been a surge of protest marches, public statements opposing violence, and expressions of support for Palestinian rights. The paramount goal of this activism is to end the violence as soon as possible. But activism is also necessary to keep moral injuries from becoming disabling.

Activism can in fact do exactly what the most effective individual therapy for moral injury seeks to do: reduce self-blame, affirm the belief that people are capable of doing good, and connect sufferers to other people working to make the world a better place. That’s why activism, in a time of collective moral injury, a time when the tendency to despair can be overwhelming, is all the more important.

One thing we often learn from collective action is that the blame for injustices lies not in flaws of character but in the political and economic arrangements that undermine democracy, pit groups against each other, and put authority in the hands of seekers after wealth and power. We have inherited these arrangements from the past and cannot fairly blame ourselves for creating them. We can, however, take responsibility for trying to change them. For many people, this is a healing recognition.

Involvement in activism to oppose state violence and genocide also teaches that, despite the cruelties we see perpetrated in the world, people can overcome racism, nationalism, tribalism, and crass self-interest—and do what’s right. Or try to. And that is really the point: not that every pursuit of peace and justice succeeds, but that the pursuit goes on, that it goes on because people care about the well-being of others, and that this capacity to care is an enduring part of who and what we are as social beings.

The moral injuries sustained by individuals and communities forced to witness genocide are real. If not treated, these injuries can paralyze us as political actors and make us less able to oppose not only state violence and genocide but all forms of injustice. As some might see it, this is the situation we are in today: a world too apathetic, distracted, and indifferent to fulfill the promise of never again, to anyone.

To be morally injured is to lose faith in humanity. This is part of the damage caused by witnessing genocide. The best healing response is to join with others to try to stop it. Succeed or fail, we must do this to keep faith in ourselves and in the possibility of making the world a better place. If we can heal the moral injuries inflicted by the world we’ve inherited, we might someday create a different world, one in which our best values are not sacrificed to uphold inequalities in wealth and power but are nurtured in the interests of peace and justice.

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Nobody in their right mind wants to be obliged to send their kid off to war in Eastern Europe if Romania and Moldova start bombing each other. Yet NATO membership requires just that. And courtesy of the best congress money can buy, now power to withdraw from NATO has been removed from the U.S. president and enshrined in the well-greased palms of our legislators. More specifically, on December 16 congress approved a bill barring the president from unilaterally exiting NATO without legislative approval. This is a disaster. It’s aimed at Trump and one of the few decent things he might do if elected president, namely ditch that trouble-making albatross, NATO. Naturally president Joe Biden did not delay signing the National Defense Authorization Act, which includes this new NATO provision; so we’re stuck with it.

You doubt this is bad news? Just look at NATO’s track record: bombing Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya and currently the abattoir NATO has made of Ukraine – or rather the disaster caused by NATO’s promise to absorb Ukraine. In Afghanistan, NATO performed with its usual, incomparable mediocrity, so the U.S. withdrew, convinced its puppet regime could hold off the Taliban for months. After all, the U.S. and NATO had bombed the country and the Taliban to smithereens – right? Well, it turned out our puppet couldn’t restrain the Taliban long enough for retreating U.S. jets to lift off from the tarmac. And what was NATO doing in Afghanistan for 20 years anyway? Don’t ask any of our military geniuses like David Petraeus, who kept telling us victory was just around the corner, and who even argued in the Atlantic, August 8 2022, that “we could have won.” Ha!

As for NATO’s 2011 military intervention in Libya, that was a debacle that transformed Africa’s most prosperous nation into a stone-age pit with open-air slave markets. The NATO 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia wasn’t much better, in that it should never have happened and arguably the only reason it did was so then President Bill “NATO Uber Alles” Clinton could distract the public from the lurid details of a sex scandal and impeachment. Thus the noble enterprises in which NATO has engaged, spreading mayhem, misery and murder across the globe in the name of freedom and democracy. What has NATO learned from these fiascos, seriatim? Arguably nothing.

Take NATO’s plans for the South China Sea and for Finland, plans which slate Taiwan for the cemetery and leave Finland bristling with U.S. bases from Helsinki in the south to Utsjoki in the north. You disagree that Taiwan’s headed for the grave? Well, numerous U.S. bigwigs have bandied about the notion of bombing Taiwan’s computer chip industry, rather than letting it fall into China’s hands. That’s American homicidal love for Taiwan. Meanwhile, back in July, NATO infuriated Beijing by portraying China as a major challenge to…you got it, NATO! What is NATO doing in the China Sea, you ask? Whatever Washington tells it to do. Lately, that means stirring up trouble and painting Beijing in the garish colors of a supervillain. NATO did so by announcing, according to Al Jazeera July 12, that China “challenged the alliance’s interests, security and values with its ‘stated ambitions and coercive policies.’”

“The PRC’s malicious hybrid and cyber operations and its confrontational rhetoric and disinformation target Allies and harm Alliance security,” NATO proclaimed. Welp, your accusations can’t get much more heatedly bellicose than that. Or maybe they can: NATO went on to decry the Moscow-Beijing strategic partnership, recriminating that those two superpowers undercut the sacred rules-based international order. That’s the order Washington cooks up on the fly to serve its interests of the moment. Those are the rules the Empire hands down that everyone, except Washington, must follow. And yes, Russia and China DO undercut this so-called rules-based order – because they follow, instead, international law. Especially as it’s enunciated in United Nations documents.

Then there is Finland, whose recent entrance into NATO president Biden no doubt regards as quite a coup. But it’ll likely turn out the way his other coup, sanctions – “the ruble will be rubble” – did. Which is to say it could backfire bigly. Finland enjoyed decades of peace with Russia, and the two nations had no problems. Now disputes will proliferate, all because the Finns believed the NATO propaganda lie that Moscow intends to conquer many neighboring countries. It does not. It intends to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and murdering its Russian population. It will likely succeed at both.

But now, as the Kremlin has warned, things have changed. Previously when Moscow regarded Helsinki, it saw a peaceful neighbor. Now it sees an enemy. You think not? Then explain Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent order recreating the Leningrad Military District on Finland’s borders. That district began to be demilitarized in November 1990 and was completely disbanded in 2010. Now it’s back. And it covers the entire Russian-Finish border. Suffice it to say if Finland eventually goes up in flames, it will be NATO, with its military bases coating that nation, that lit the match.

More accurately the United States, not NATO. For, as AP reported on December 14, Finland will sign a defense pact with the U.S., which will permit “U.S. soldiers access to 15 military areas and facilities covering the entire Nordic nation all the way from a key southern naval base and inland airbases to a vast remote army training area in Lapland, in the Arctic north.” These American bases in Finland include some directly on the Russian border. Fortunately, the U.S. probably lacks sufficient troops and equipment to pack its new Finnish bases with boots on the ground, as military expert Will Schryver has tweeted. But still, no wonder Putin reactivated the Leningrad Military District. His adversary, Biden, who allegedly gave the order to blow up the Nordstream pipelines, doubtless smirks with success and doing everything possible to goad Russia into World War III.

 You think that’s too unkind? Then explain Biden’s outburst in early December, when he threatened congressional Republicans, skeptical of more aid to Ukraine, with sending troops to fight Russia. “If Putin takes Ukraine, he won’t stop there,” Biden claimed, falsely, from all the evidence so far. Then Joe “Bring on Armageddon” Biden added, “We’ll have…American troops fighting Russian troops.” Yes, thanks to an organization called NATO and a jingoistic war president named Biden.

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ChatGPT/AI was supposed to be the next big thing to revolutionize higher education.  But based on my students’ comments, it is less than underwhelming.  But that does not matter.  AI will be the latest tool the corporate university uses to save itself from the neo-liberal education policies it has pursued for the last  fifty years

At the beginning of 2023 ChatGPT/AI took higher education by storm.  It was heralded by the likes of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the voice of neo-liberal higher ed,  as the next big thing to change teaching and learning. Much like massive open online courses or MOOCs,  clickers,  interactive whiteboards, Channel One, and a collection of other ed-tech concepts driven by profits and cost reduction and not pedagogy or learning theory, it was going to be the savior or demise of higher education as we know it. Yet the road to educational reform is littered with educational technology failures and overhypes.

I decided to see for myself what ChatGPT could do, and embraced it in all of my undergraduate courses in the fall 2023.  What my students and I found was a trove of problems.  Their ChatGPT searches produced false facts, yielded biased information, and did little to encourage critical thinking—except when I asked my students to think critically about the role of AI in the classroom.  They were underwhelmed by it.

Yet AI’s value as a teaching and learning tool is secondary to the broader implications of it as another artifice of the corporate university to leverage down costs and enhance revenues at a point when the business plan for higher education is broken.

The corporate university emerged in the 1970s.  It is one where colleges increasingly use corporate structures and management styles to run the university.  This includes abandoning the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) shared governance model where faculty had an equal voice in the running of the school, including over curriculum, selection of department chairs, deans, and presidents, and determination of many of the other policies affecting the academy.  The corporate university replaced the shared governance model with one more typical of a business corporation.

The corporate university was created in response to the emergence of a neo-liberal political philosophy characterized by less government involvement and more faith in market structures. In the case of public universities, the corporate university emerged as a result of dramatic cuts in tax dollars to fund them, forcing upon them a new business plan.  The new business plan relied less upon tenured faculty than upon a contingent workforce, standardization of and purchase of pre-paid curriculum, and a growing pool of baby boomers and students willing to pay increasing amounts of tuition for credentials and degrees in a crowded marketplace.

Critical to the corporate university plan was technology.  At best a review of the existing literature paints a mixed bag on the deployment of new technology in terms of improved teaching and learning.  Yet the “genius” of Apple thirty years ago as I started to teach was to convince schools to overinvest in technology on the premise it improves learning and teaching.  In effect, their mantra was “technology drives pedagogy,”  not pedagogy drives technology.  Over time, one learning technology after another was ostensibly going to revolutionize higher education, a code name less for improving teaching and learning and more as a way to leverage profits and augment the corporate university business plan.  First, it was the for-profit colleges that employed the new technologies but then they were adopted by the rest.

The idea was to use technology, including online courses, to teach more students per class or instructor.  Create pre-packaged, recorded courses and curricula and sell them to schools.  One could do this and reduce the dependency on full-time faculty. School administrators often speak of all these tech toys as part of “high impact” learning, a phrase that downplays the traditional emphasis on lecture, discussion, reading, research, and writing.

The corporate business model survived until the Great Recession of 2008-09.  Since then college enrollment has dropped by more than one million students.  It will hemorrhage by 2026 as the so-called enrollment cliff kicks in and colleges will see even fewer students.  Combine that with a $1.8 trillion student loan debt and tuition at pricy colleges that exceed $80,000  per year and the result is that fewer and fewer students see a university education as worth it.

Enter the new-found excitement for ChatGPT as yet another technological savior for higher education.  When it comes to ChatGPT or AI in the classroom its hype and deployment may be driven less by its educational value than by corporate profits or efforts by schools to engage in further cost reductions.  At some point, ChatGPT/AI enters the classroom once the corporate university figures out how to monetize it.  Look to see schools combine it with MOOCS or other mass curriculum deliveries in the near future as a way to salvage what is left of their failed corporate business plan.

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She wasn’t born in a safe hospital. Bulldozers made them into cemeteries. She wasn’t born in a loving home. They were obliterated by a one-ton bomb in a city turned into rubble by thousands of one-ton bombs. She wasn’t even born in a manger.

She was born in a ripped tent on a dirty blanket laying on hard sand where sewage leaked in. She died tonight without a name. An American bomb sucked the air out of her fragile lungs drawing their first breaths.

She died a week later, her mother starving, unable to suckle her, unable to scavenge a few drops of formula. “We are fighting human animals … no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel.”

A Palestinian was born tonight. He died after a month, succumbing to diarrhea, dysentery, respiratory infection, meningitis, chickenpox, hepatitis. He had never been washed. He never felt the tender rough hands of his grandmother bathe him.

He died when he was one. He never stepped foot in his family’s mosque, clapping and smiling with that little bit of drool toddlers get out of the side of their mouths when everyone oohs and aahs over them. The mosques are all Hamas, don’t you know? We regretfully destroyed them. We are “the most moral army in the world.”

He died when he was five. He never ate fish on the beach right out of the sea, fried in olive oil, slathered with crushed garlic, dusted with chili pepper, as he soaked in the Mediterranean sun. The fishing boats were bombed. They were Hamas, too.

He never bit into one of those candy-sweet watermelons Gaza is famous for. He never held the green rind, enjoyed the juicy burst of red flesh, gnawed it down to the white pith, and spit out black seeds at his sister. She’s dead, too. We are looking into it. We had to poison the land with bombs, the aquifer with saltwater to flush out Hamas Nazi terrorists. It’s all Hamas’ fault. Even the air is Hamas. We had to burn it with white phosphorus. “We cherish life.”

Tonight a Palestinian will be born. She died when she was 10. She never had a proper home. She never had a school beyond a patch of shade under a tree. We destroyed a greater proportion of homes in Gaza in one month than the Allies did in Germany in four years. We had to destroy schools, colleges, libraries. We told you everything was Hamas. “We are too nice. We are too considerate.”

She died when she was 21. She never took a class from the poet who wrote his own obituary, “If I must die, let it bring hope, let it be a tale.” She was never mentored by the writer who taught a generation the singular power of storytelling. She never pondered the beauty of math with the renowned physicist. She never contemplated the paintings of the promising young artist. She never followed the reports or joined the debates sparked by 100 different journalists. “Are you seriously asking me about Palestinian civilians?” “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.”

Tonight a Palestinian will be born. She will live. Many others will live. They will live to see a free Palestine from the River to the Sea. For all peoples and beliefs. In a world free of colonialism. Then, perhaps, there will be peace on Earth and good will to all.

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Late afternoons I walk from my neighborhood across from base housing in Albuquerque to the Walgreens on Central, and then back, a little over four miles. If there’s medication to pick up or something to buy, I’ll go into the store. Otherwise, it marks the midpoint of my walk. For years, the space in front of Walgreens has been a hangout for displaced people, of which Albuquerque has no lack, many of them mentally ill and seemingly without places to live. It affords some shelter, is a good place to panhandle (though little of that), and even, in its way, serves as a gathering point for their community, such as it is. About two years ago some Walgreens wunderkind (inspired, no doubt, by military and ATF psychological warfare tactics) came up with the idea of interminably playing the same parts of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, Rossini’s William Tell Overture, and some sort of JP Sousa fatuity through loudspeakers outside the store. This has apparently succeeded in keeping many of these unfortunate people away, at least directly in front. Most now hang out in the adjacent alley, or empty lots—no want of those, either—in the vicinity.

With the ongoing collapse of the real economy, accelerated by the COVID catastrophe, there has been a marked increase in the number of displaced human beings in Albuquerque, herded together in encampments, uprooted and hounded, scattered to other locations. The powers that be and good citizens of Albuquerque want to make them invisible, but of course they still exist and one sees them everywhere. Many would like to get rid of them altogether, but how?

As a further result of the economic collapse, Walgreens and stores like it have had to deal with rampant shoplifting. Ordinary items have been for some time secured behind locked, plastic shields. To get a tube of toothpaste or a bar of soap you have to buzz a store worker, as if you wanted to look at a watch, or a camera. Before these security measures were instituted about eight months ago, people would brazenly take things and walk out. Dental items, soap, and shampoo were among prized commodities, either to be used or sold on the street. Store workers were instructed not to stop them.

Now, Walgreens is a high-security zone, with two, sometimes three, armed IPS guards stationed permanently in the store, their shiny, black, cop-like vehicle parked conspicuously in front, the guards themselves neat, fit-looking young men in brown or khaki uniforms, equipped with all the accessories. Theirs is an impressive, intimidating presence, and anyone would think twice about pulling something. Most customers avoid looking at them directly, glancing briefly, instinctively reacting to the display of physical threat, even if it’s in the form of “protection.” The message is clear. The guards, for their part, are pleasant enough, and approachable. I am, depending on my mood, bitterly amused or hostile at their presence. For me they are a deceptively benign manifestation of Orwell’s boot stamping on a human face—forever.

These proliferating security zones, formerly known as “stores,” are perfectly logical and normal within the parameters of the rampaging capitalist system that defines life in the United States today, and most people likely take it for granted. A child growing up now perceives the situation as perfectly ordinary, in the way that same child sees as normal our diminishing natural world. There is no experience of what was before.

I used to have something of a fondness for Walgreens. It’s where I get my prescriptions, which, after a severe illness several years ago, literally keep me alive. There was a certain sense of health and renewal shopping for necessary, quotidian items like dental floss, toothpaste, and soap, now kept under lock and key. This cordoning of the harmless essential does something to our souls.

Toxicity, hostility, and fear mark our time, a greasy ride to some dreadful terminus, already there, mostly, but still slipping, faster than we ever imagined. Now, when I have to go to this place I used to know as my neighborhood pharmacy, I feel diminished, saddened, and angry. I see other human beings, beaten down, fearful, as if living in a war zone, which, in a sense, they are. I am among them, with them.

In an odd way, Walgreens was a kind of haven, or safe zone, not much different from a school, church, mosque, synagogue, or hospital. No more. The displaced are now mostly out of sight, the ones deemed acceptable are allowed to enter, but surveilled. No one is above suspicion.

If you cast your gaze thousands of miles to the east you will see one grim outcome of the increasingly dystopian conditions to which we, surveilled citizens and displaced persons alike, are passively submitting. There, the despised and displaced are being slaughtered by the tens of thousands. There, the very notion of a safe haven is a sadistic, vicious joke, a nightmare literally impossible to comprehend. If we look closely at these human beings, we can see ourselves, or we should. There are well over a half million displaced people in the United States, and the number is growing. To the majority and the powerful they are a nuisance, and for some, not even human, a subspecies. They, the displaced, know it. Those of us on the other side of the thin line, can feel the current, the unease, the threat. Or should.

Walking back from Walgreens, down Central Avenue, heading home, is a trip through a small purgatory. For years there have been numerous shuttered stores and the number is increasing. The displaced, the lost, the addicted, the mentally ill, a lot of them young, are commonplace on this heartland road, old Route 66. “Running through the heart of the city along Central Avenue, this historic highway leads travelers through some of the city’s most beloved neighborhoods,” says an official Albuquerque website.

I’ve gotten to know some of the people on Central. Sometimes we nod hello. Occasionally we exchange a few words. At times I’ll give someone money. Nothing praiseworthy or virtuous about this, just another form of communication. Sometimes they’re in a very bad way. The other evening walking back in the cold I passed a diminutive Native woman in a flimsy brown coat and pajama bottoms screaming at her reflection in the window of a shuttered store, vile, self-abasing things, pounding her small fists on the plate glass. It was disturbing and frightening, and I picked up my pace. But there it was. Staring long enough at our own reflections and what looms behind us, we’d be screaming too. Or should be.

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Last week we witnessed what the Bible calls “you reap what you sow” when the Israeli army killed three fleeing Israeli prisoners. Israel sowed a culture of hate where the life of Palestinians, or non-Jews, was expendable. The Israeli soldiers in the neighborhood of Shejaiya, Gaza, followed standard army procedures by shooting three shirtless individuals waving white flags.

Was the killing a mistake, as posited by the Israeli army, or intentional according to the Palestinian resistance?

I disagree with assertions made by the resistance spokesperson, Abu Obaida, —who increases news viewership exponentially when he delivers his video messages — suggesting that the three prisoners were deliberately killed by the Israeli army. I reject it because the shooting was in keeping with the Israeli army’s lenient military rules when encountering Palestinian civilians. The three were shot to death because the Israeli army kills civilians with white flags. The trio were victims of their own culture’s self-inflicted hate.

I, however, agree with the spokesman’s premise that having Israeli prisoners alive poses a significant challenge for Benjamin Netanyahu and upends his priorities. The Israeli prime minister would rather wake up to the news that all of his prisoners are dead to free his hand and expand the war. As previously discussed, prolonging the war offers Netanyahu an opportunity to evade criminal accountability in Israeli courts. Additionally, the killing of more Palestinians satiates a culture thirsty for revenge and might diminish the public anger over his failures.

The Israeli systematic onslaught on Gaza intending to inflict a high level of pain, both physical and psychological suffering, is the product of a cultural mindset fixated on demonizing the other. This is obvious in the lopsided casualties following the Israeli invasion where the majority of the Israelis causalities are military personnel, while the vast majority of Palestinian victims are civilians. Failing to achieve any of its strategic objectives such as freeing Israeli prisoners, end the resistance or killing known leaders, Israel resorted to indiscriminate bombing of hospitals, and homes in an orgy of murder against the defenseless civilian population.

To the extent where to be alive in Gaza according to a report by Doctors Without Borders “is only a matter of luck.” Those “lucky” ones still face the grim reality of starvation which is used “as a method of warfare” as reported by Human Rights Watch. Yet, and despite well-documented reports from international organizations, any portrayal of Palestinian suffering in the Zio managed Western media, would typically follow a decontextualized preamble qualifier to remind readers, over again, of the “horrific Hamas” attack on October 7.

Within days this October 7, a herd of Western leaders raced to pay homage to the leader of the most racist Israeli government in the history of Zionism. The irony of racism is evident when these leaders mourn the roughly 900 hundred Israeli civilians, while normalizing, rationalizing, and providing material support to murder 20,000 Palestinian civilians, 70% of whom were children and women. Western prejudice became even more palpable when it took them more than 60 days to acknowledge the pain of Palestinians and before calling for a pause in the genocide.

The hyperbolic reaction of the West following the resistance counter attack against the post guards on the largest open-air prison, coupled with the abject disregard of Palestinian life is part of that ingrained subconscious racism. The same Western culture that once ignored the dehumanization of Jews in Europe, is blinded today by a new sin carried out by the progeny of those victims. Palestinians had paid for Europe’s original sin 75 years ago, and continue to do so. The life of Palestinians is being scarified today on the Israeli altar to atone for Western guilt and their past history toward their own Jewish population.

The West has bred an alien nihilistic Zionist culture of hate that grew to become a mirror image of Western White supremacy. As an example, Jewish Americans represent approximately 10% of the illegal Zionist settlers in the West Bank. These supposed “Jews” supported by organizations that fought for equality and integration in the U.S., but espoused racial/religious superiority and segregation in the “Jewish only” colonies established on lands stolen from Palestinians.

The descendants of the Holocaust survivors did not grasp the lessons of the Kristallnacht. They replay the November program, every November, every year, terrorizing Palestinians harvesting their olive trees and leaving behind shattered branches in lieu of glass. They did not learn from the stark black and white photos of European Jews shipped in trains to gas champers, they updated the scene with colored pictures of Palestinian men removed from “safe shelters,” stripped down to their underwear and herded like sheep in open lories.

Hate is exemplified when the profound lessons of the European concentration camps become examples to be followed by Israelis advocating to flatten Gaza “just like Auschwitz” as expressed by Israeli politician David Azoulai in a recent interview. Azoulai not only called for making Gaza like Auschwitz, but also to order civilians to “go to the beaches,” to be loaded on Israeli ships and dumped “on Lebanon’s shores.”

Israeli dehumanization of Palestinians has permeated into all aspects of Western culture, government, media, movie industry, religious institutions, and public-school books. It is now creeping into the most celebrated educational institutions and infringing on the academic freedoms at the most prestigious and renowned American universities in order to normalize racism against Palestinians.

As such, it wasn’t just another one of Joe Biden’s gaffes when he dismissed the veracity of dead civilians in Gaza ostensibly because it came from Palestinian sources. This holds significance because he is directly engaged in promoting unverified Israeli falsehoods such as non-existing photos of “decapitated” Israeli children, or baselessly exonerating the murdering of civilians as human shields, or shamelessly parroting the Israeli unfounded claim of a supposed military command center under a hospital, and absolving Israel of the massacre at the al Ahli Baptist hospital. The Israeli dehumanization of Palestinians has imbued the walls of Biden’s White House, more deeply than he and his vice president are willing to acknowledge. Furthermore, the calls from Biden’s administration and European leaders for Israel to merely reduce killing, without demanding a cessation of civilian murders, underline the entrenched intuitive bigotry against those perceived as less than equal human beings.

As you celebrate the joy of Christmas, take a moment to ponder the somber reality that the first Christians, the original Palestinian Christians, will not be rejoicing in the blessings of Jesus’s birth this year. Instead, in the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, native Christians will gather to mourn the modern crucifixion of Jesus’s message in Israel’s genocidal war on their brethren in Gaza, and to protest the inherent Western bias against their people.

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(This is a transcript of the speech I gave on December 22nd at a vigil  for the overwhelming number of journalists who have been killed in Gaza since October 7th. It was held in front of The Oregonian headquarters, a publication that, like many mainstream media outlets, has chosen to remain silent amid the unprecedented targeting of their colleagues. At the time of the speech, 96 journalists had been confirmed dead, and tragically, that number has now surpassed 100. Each loss represents a grievous violation of international law and is morally reprehensible.)

My name is Nathaniel St. Clair, and I’ve worked for CounterPunch, an independent media publication, for over a decade. And though I hesitate to call myself a journalist, I have had the privilege of editing and publishing the work of hundreds, from all over the U.S. and the world. So I’m very familiar with the kind of people who commit themselves to this indispensable profession. And wow, the gravity of their work feels more powerful than ever. It certainly seems more dangerous.

Nearly 100 journalists have been killed in less than three months in Palestine. And that’s not by accident. They aren’t collateral damage. They weren’t human shields. Most were targeted deliberately. Their offense: exposing the deceit behind the propaganda flushed out by the Israeli government, and our own government, our president, and the mainstream media, many of whom don’t function as journalists. Instead, they act like stenographers for the state, for the military-industrial complex. Which is profiting massively off of this slaughter, banking on people being uninformed and indifferent to it.

Well, real journalists are preventing that, because the real journalists are standing in defiance of power, standing in the face of the war machine, and are bravely documenting its crimes. Documenting the daily horror raining down on millions of civilians trapped on a small slice of land.

So the powerful want these journalists silenced, by any means necessary, because they are proving to be very powerful themselves. I’ve gone to many rallies for Palestine over the years, and I’ve never seen the groundswell like we are witnessing now.

I have friends who rarely want to talk about politics, now asking me all about Israel and Palestine and Gaza and the West Bank, and I ask them back “Why? Why do you care now?” It’s almost always because of a Palestinian journalist that they discovered on social media, that they liked, and who gave them their first glimpse of what is really going on.

And that’s why the Israeli military, with the blessing of the United States, has killed nearly 100 journalists. Because those snapshots of reality are gaining momentum and are reshaping public perception of this awful humanitarian crisis in ways that the powerful are unfamiliar with, and are frightened of.

So we must demand accountability for the deaths of these journalists, alongside those of countless innocents, not just as a legal obligation; but as a moral imperative.

And we must carry their work forward, to continue in their fight, wielding their pen, their keyboard, their camera, their microphone and their fearlessness in our ongoing pursuit of truth and accountability.

I’m going to finish now with a quote from a journalistic giant, I.F. Stone, who said:

“The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose… until someday, somebody who believes as you do… wins.”

And I think that day, for Palestinians, is on the horizon. In large part because of the work that these brave journalists have done.

Cease Fire now. End the occupation. And never forget the people who were killed for giving us a glimpse of the truth.

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I am at the Stanton Street Bridge between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, where one year ago I watched groups of people wade through the shallow water to “pedir posada,” the Spanish-language term used for Joseph and Mary asking for refuge in Bethlehem 2,023 years ago. This year, there are no people below me, at least not right now, and the Rio Grande is a greenish, contaminated trickle that will dry up completely just east of El Paso, and then be replenished by the Rio Conchos 200 miles downriver in Presidio, Texas. On the other side of the bridge, you can see that the holiday season is in full gear as the line of people entering the United States coming from Ciudad Juárez extends up to the top of the bridge, exactly above the river. Surrounding the river are the props of the modern-day nativity scene: coiling razor wire, 30-foot walls, Texas Army National Guard troops and their armored jeeps, armed U.S. Border Patrol agents in their green-striped trucks, drone surveillance, camera surveillance, biometric systems. Partially, this is the result of the most money ever put toward federal border and immigration enforcement (as we reported this year, 2023 was $29.8 billion, a record number, which adds to the more than $400 billion since 2003). Partially, this is because Texas’s spending on Operation Lone Star, courtesy of Governor Greg Abbott and his right-wing, un-Christian justification machine, which has added up to $4.5 billion over the last two years. And this has been the response of the United States for people “pidiendo posada” for 30 years since Operation Blockade/Hold the Line began a border-building spree that has not ceased: there is no room at the inn.

I think of that cold night on the ground in a stable that is depicted in so many places this time of year as I walk past shivering refugees in heavy coats sitting outside against the Sagrado Corazón church in El Paso a few blocks from the border. I am reminded of the hundreds upon hundreds of people arriving to the Arizona border, as Melissa reported on earlier this week. I am reminded of the young Guatemalan mother I met myself at the border wall in late November as she tended to her two-month-old under the 30-foot border wall. They had been waiting there for two days. The infant was sick, and the nights were cold. The rest of the group, from the coast of Guatemala, built a fire to keep warm. When were the wise men going to arrive, the kings, the angels? The humanitarians did arrive, as they do, day after day (see Melissa’s reporting on that). I am reminded of being in Bethlehem myself a few years back, visiting the Aida refugee camp of Palestinians, which was surrounded by a tall concrete wall that had an embedded “pill box,” or a tower where snipers could point their assault rifles located mere miles from that stable where Mary gave birth on the cold ground. The Christmas story is playing out all around us, as lawyer and anthropologist Petra Molnar pointed out for us just yesterday. Where Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus had to flee Bethlehem when King Herod started to wield authoritarian power, the long trek to Egypt fleeing persecution is happening right now, throughout the world, such as in the Darién Gap in Colombia and Panama, as discussed in Melissa’s two interviews with anthropologist Caitlyn Yates—one podcast in December, one in August. Or the equivalent might be in the Mediterranean, as we discussed with Lauren Markham last June after a ship capsized near Greece, killing 600 people, or the countless places across the world where people struggle with a huge enforcement apparatus, which Anna Lekas Miller wrote about in her book Love Across Borders. We have spent the year doing our best to give you insight into what is happening on our borders.

I love this time of year, December, because things start to slow down, the frenetic pace starts to wane. For me, this becomes a more reflective period. Yet this modern Christmas story is anything but reflective. On television sets, commercials remind us of the holiday spirit (and to buy as much as we can), and movies have heartwarming tales of people coming together. Yet hospitality is scoffed at in words and policy, no matter what president, no matter what political party. Melissa has reported time and time again about the dehumanizing rhetoric; earlier this week, she wrote about a Fox News reporter talking about invaders and invasions and “credible fear thresholds.” This discourse abounds, with stories of people “taking advantage of our asylum system,” and claims that the United States can’t absorb any more people. Did Mary and Joseph hear similar soundbites on their journeys?

In these stories, we rarely hear about U.S. foreign policy, both historical and current. Take, for example, the Monroe Doctrine’s effect in Latin America: the centuries of upholding dictatorships, training generals, arming militaries—and, lately, creating border guards—and influencing politics, as well as the economic domination, in which corporate power and extractive industries enjoy a borderless world and can travel anywhere and take anything they want (see NAFTA, see CAFTA), from precious resources to cheap labor. Meanwhile, regular people—sometimes the very people displaced by corporate power—face harsher and harsher border regimes that extend throughout the continent. The same thing the Greg Abbotts of the world accuse undocumented people of doing here, corporate power is doing there. Studies have continually shown how a migrant labor force bolsters the U.S. economy in myriad, even critical ways (see, for example, the film A Day without a Mexican), yet border crossers get blamed for the big societal problems as if they had the power to set policy in corporate board rooms and in Washington. In the halls of power, debates stagnate over whether people are refugees or economic migrants—creating more divisions between the people most affected by the entrenched borders.

At the height of her pregnancy, Mary and Joseph walked for days, fleeing a Caesar Augustus’s occupying force—a story that resonates with more than 184 million people on the move today. I am reminded of my dear friend Irene Morales, a nun with the Madres of the Eucaristia, who I worked with two decades ago and who told me day after day—as we traveled through northern Mexico and the U.S. borderlands—that she saw Christ in the faces of people on the move. In the early 2000s, thousands of people were arriving to Altar, Sonora, to cross through the Arizona deserts. The people I talked to and interviewed were mostly from southern Mexico, and in many cases they were migrating because they could no longer make ends meet. From about 2002 to 2005, I talked to hundreds of people, and often it was parents thinking about their children, parents who talked about skipping meals for their children, wanting their children to get an education, or sometimes it was children on the move for a sick parent. So often it was a story of sacrifice at a time in a post-9/11 era characterized by a massive ramp-up on the border, with terrorism and migration blurring into each other at a policy level. “El rostro de Cristo,” Irene told me.

As I stand on the bridge in Juárez, where everything seems basically the same, I know a lot has happened over the last year, and we have covered much of it at The Border Chronicle. I, for one, have been following that contaminated river and have gone into Chihuahua to report on border water struggles for a forthcoming book, and I have shared some photo essays here. Melissa also wrote about Chihuahua earlier this year for The New Yorker, focusing on the epidemic of journalists assassinated in Mexico, which she summarized in The Border Chronicle. I feel so fortunate to work alongside Melissa, who not only wrote (and talked to experts) about the innards of this massive border fortification, whether it be the surge of wall building, deadly vehicle chases, Operation Lone Star, or Florida cops patrolling the border—and the right-wing rhetoric that so often propels it (not to mention the Elon Musk circus)—but also about people in border communities for inspiration and solutions such as border artists, a brilliant sidewalk school, or a doctor who spends his time treating border crossers (Doctor Brian Elmore also penned an op-ed for us). And that’s just a taste. This year, I had the opportunity to go to Yale and debate border enforcement, a humbling and educational experience, to say the least. As I wrote about my losing effort, some of the dynamics we constantly struggle with in this sort of border journalism were clearly revealed.

Much has changed over the last year, but—from what I can tell suspended between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez—much has remained the same. The border policy is the same, there is more money in the budgets, there is more money in as-of-yet-unpassed supplemental funding bills, there are more and more contracts for private industry. And now we have an election year. And, as we all know, during an election year, the border is a politician’s sacrificial lamb. So be prepared for a good dose of border theater, and we’ll be here with our coverage, commentary, interviews, and podcasts. The last thing I want to do is stand on that bridge a year from now and watch people wade through the trickling Rio Grande to “pedir posada” at a large gate at an even more fortified border wall in El Paso. That is, however, the likely outcome of 2024, and we will cover all of it. But we will also find the spaces where people are trying to make change, we will listen to the border communities, and we will document the humanitarian efforts. And trust me you, we will be looking in the places where there is generosity toward the stranger.

This first appeared on The Border Chronicle. Subscribe here.

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Julian Assange’s wife, Stella, is rarely one to be cryptic. “Day X is here,” she posted on the platform formerly known as Twitter.  For those who have followed her remarks, her speeches, and her activism, it was sharply clear what this meant.  “It may be the final chance for the UK to stop Julian’s extradition.  Gather outside the court at 8.30 am on both days. It’s now or never.”

Between February 20 and 21 next year, the High Court will hear what WikiLeaks claims may be “the final chance for Julian Assange to prevent his extradition to the United States.”  (This is qualified by the prospect of an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.)  Were that to take place, the organization’s founder faces 18 charges, 17 of which are stealthily cobbled from the aged and oppressive US Espionage Act of 1917.  Estimates of any subsequent sentence vary, the worst being 175 years.

The WikiLeaks founder remains jailed at His Majesty’s pleasure at Belmarsh prison, only reserved for the most hardened of criminals.  It’s a true statement of both British and US justice that Assange has yet to face trial, incarcerated, without bail, for four-and-a-half years.  That trial, were it to ever be allowed to take place, would employ a scandalous legal theory that will spell doom to all those who dive and dabble in the world of publishing national security information.

Fundamentally, and irrefutably, the case against Assange remains political in its muscularity, with a gangster’s legality papered over it.  As Stella herself makes clear, “With the myriad of evidence that has come to light since the original hearing in 2018, such as the violation of legal privilege and reports that senior US officials are involved in formulating assassination plots against my husband, there is no denying that a fair trial, let alone Julian’s safety on US soil, is an impossibility were he to be extradited.”

In mid-2022, Assange’s legal team attempted a two-pronged attempt to overturn the decision of Home Office Secretary Priti Patel to approve Assange’s extradition while also broadening the appeal against grounds made in the original January 4, 2021 reasons of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser.

The former, among other matters, took issue with the acceptance by the Home Office that the extradition was not for a political offense and therefore prohibited by Article 4 of the UK-US Extradition Treaty.  The defense team stressed the importance of due process, enshrined in British law since the Magna Carta of 2015, and also took issue with Patel’s acceptance of “special arrangements” with the US government regarding the introduction of charges for the facts alleged which might carry the death penalty, criminal contempt proceedings, and such specialty arrangements that might protect Assange “against being dealt with for conduct outside the extradition request”.  History shows that such “special arrangements” can be easily, and arbitrarily abrogated.

On June 30, 2022, came the appeal against Baraitser’s original reasons.  While Baraitser blocked the extradition to the US, she only did so on grounds of oppression occasioned by mental health grounds and the risk posed to Assange were he to find himself in the US prison system.  The US government got around this impediment by making breezy promises to the effect that Assange would not be subject to oppressive, suicide-inducing conditions, or face the death penalty.  A feeble, meaningless undertaking was also made suggesting that he might serve the balance of his term in Australia – subject to approval, naturally.

What this left Assange’s legal team was a decision otherwise hostile to publishing, free speech and the activities that had been undertaken by WikiLeaks.  The appeal accordingly sought to address this, claiming, among other things, that Baraitser had erred in assuming that the extradition was not “unjust and oppressive by reason of the lapse of time”; that it would not be in breach of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (inhuman and degrading treatment)”; that it did not breach Article 10 of ECHR, namely the right to freedom of expression; and that it did not breach Article 7 of the ECHR (novel and unforeseeable extension of the law).

Other glaring defects in Baraitser’s judgment are also worth noting, namely her failure to acknowledge the misrepresentation of facts advanced by the US government and the “ulterior political motives” streaking the prosecution.  The onerous and much thicker second superseding indictment was also thrown at Assange at short notice before the extradition hearing of September 2020, suggesting that those grounds be excised “for reasons of procedural fairness.”

An agonizing wait of some twelve months followed, only to yield an outrageously brief decision on June 6 from High Court justice Jonathan Swift (satirists, reach for your pens and laptops). Swift, much favored by the Defence and Home Secretaries when a practicing barrister, told Counsel Magazine in a 2018 interview that his “favorite clients were the security and intelligence agencies”.  Why? “They take preparation and evidence-gathering seriously: a real commitment to getting things right.”  Good grief.

In such a cosmically unattached world, Swift only took three pages to reject the appeal’s arguments in a fit of premature adjudication.  “An appeal under the Extradition Act 2003,” he wrote with icy finality, “is not an opportunity for general rehearsal of all matters canvassed at an extradition hearing.”  The appeal’s length – some 100 pages – was “extraordinary” and came “to no more than an attempt to re-run the extensive arguments made and rejected by the District Judge.”

Thankfully, Swift’s finality proved stillborn.  Some doubts existed whether the High Court appellate bench would even grant the hearing.  They did, though requesting that Assange’s defense team trim the appeal to 20 pages.

How much of this is procedural theatre and circus judge antics remains to be seen.  Anglo-American justice has done wonders in soiling itself in its treatment of Britain’s most notable political prisoner.  Keeping Assange in the UK in hideous conditions of confinement without bail serves the goals of Washington, albeit vicariously.  For Assange, time is the enemy, and each legal brief, appeal and hearing simply weighs the ledger further against his ailing existence.

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