Dr. Soma Baroud, was killed on 9 October when Israeli warplanes bombed the taxi that carried her and other tired Gazans somewhere near the Bani Suhaila roundabout near Khan Yunis.
“Your lives will continue. With new events and new faces. They are the faces of your children, who will fill your homes with noise and laughter.”
These were the last words written by my sister in a text message to one of her daughters.
Dr. Soma Baroud was murdered on October 9 when Israeli warplanes bombed a taxi that carried her and other tired Gazans somewhere near the Bani Suhaila roundabout near Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip.
I am still unable to understand whether she was on her way to the hospital, where she worked, or leaving the hospital to go home. Does it even matter?
The news of her murder – or, more accurately assassination, as Israel has deliberately targeted and killed 986 medical workers, including 165 doctors – arrived through a screenshot copied from a Facebook page.
“Update: these are the names of the martyrs of the latest Israeli bombing of two taxis in the Khan Yunis area ..,” the post read.
It was followed by a list of names. “Soma Mohammed Mohammed Baroud” was the fifth name on the list, and the 42,010th on Gaza’s ever-growing list of martyrs.
I refused to believe the news, even when more posts began popping up everywhere on social media, listing her as number five, and sometimes six in the list of martyrs of the Khan Yunis strike.
I kept calling her, over and over again, hoping that the line would crackle a bit, followed by a brief silence, and then her kind, motherly voice would say, “Marhaba Abu Sammy. How are you, brother?” But she never picked up.
I had told her repeatedly that she does not need to bother with elaborate text or audio messages due to the unreliable internet connection and electricity. “Every morning,” I said, “just type: ‘we are fine’.” That’s all I asked of her.
But she would skip several days without writing, often due to the lack of an internet connection. Then, a message would arrive, though never brief. She wrote with a torrent of thoughts, linking up her daily struggle to survive, to her fears for her children, to poetry, to a Qur’anic verse, to one of her favorite novels, and so on.
“You know, what you said last time reminds me of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude,” she said on more than one occasion, before she would take the conversation into the most complex philosophical spins. I would listen, and just repeat, “Yes .. totally .. I agree .. one hundred percent.”
For us, Soma was a larger-than-life figure. This is precisely why her sudden absence has shocked us to the point of disbelief. Her children, though grown up, felt orphaned. But her brothers, me included, felt the same way.
I wrote about Soma as a central character in my book “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter”, because she was indeed central to our lives, and to our very survival in a Gaza refugee camp.
The first born, and only daughter, she had to carry a much greater share of work and expectations than the rest of us.
She was just a child, when my eldest brother Anwar, still a toddler, died in an UNRWA clinic at the Nuseirat refugee camp due to the lack of medicine. Then, she was introduced to pain, the kind of pain that with time turned into a permanent state of grief that would never abandon her until her murder by a US-supplied Israeli bomb in Khan Yunis.
Two years after the death of the first Anwar, another boy was born. They also called him Anwar, so that the legacy of the first boy may carry on. Soma cherished the newcomer, maintaining a special friendship with him for decades to come.
My father began his life as a child laborer, then a fighter in the Palestine Liberation Army, then a police officer during the Egyptian administration of Gaza, then, once again a laborer; that’s because he refused to join the Israeli-funded Gaza police force after the war of 1967, known as the Naksa.
A clever, principled man, and a self-taught intellectual, my Dad did everything he could to provide a measure of dignity for his small family; and Soma, a child, often barefoot, stood by him every step of the way.
When he decided to become a merchant, as in buying discarded and odd items in Israel and repackaging them to sell in the refugee camp, Soma was his main helper. Though her skin healed, cuts on her fingers, due to individually wrapping thousands of razors, remained a testament to the difficult life she lived.
“Soma’s little finger is worth more than a thousand men,” my father would often repeat, to remind us, ultimately five boys, that our sister will always be the main heroine in the family’s story. Now that she is a martyr, that legacy has been secured for eternity.
Years later, my parents would send her to Aleppo to obtain a medical degree. She returned to Gaza, where she spent over three decades healing the pain of others, though never her own.
She worked at Al-Shifa Hospital, at Nasser Hospital among other medical centers. Later, she obtained another certificate in family medicine, opening a clinic of her own. She did not charge the poor, and did all she could to heal those victimized by war.
Soma was a member of a generation of female doctors in Gaza that truly changed the face of medicine, collectively putting great emphasis on the rights of women to medical care and expanding the understanding of family medicine to include psychological trauma with particular emphasis on the centrality, but also the vulnerability of women in a war-torn society.
When my daughter Zarefah managed to visit her in Gaza shortly before the war, she told me that “when aunt Soma walked into the hospital, an entourage of women – doctors, nurses, and other medical staff – would surround her in total adoration.”
At one point, it felt that all of Soma’s suffering was finally paying off: a nice family home in Khan Yunis, with a small olive orchard, and a few palm trees; a loving husband, himself a professor of law, and eventually the dean of law school at a reputable Gaza university; three daughters and two sons, whose educational specialties ranged from dentistry to pharmacy, to law to engineering.
Life, even under siege, at least for Soma and her family, seemed manageable. True, she was not allowed to leave the Strip for many years due to the blockade, and thus we were denied the chance to see her for years on end. True, she was tormented by loneliness and seclusion, thus her love affair and constant citation from García Márquez’s seminal novel. But at least her husband was not killed or went missing. Her beautiful house and clinic were still standing. And she was living and breathing, communicating her philosophical nuggets about life, death, memories and hope.
“If I could only find the remains of Hamdi, so that we can give him a proper burial,” she wrote to me last January, when the news circulated that her husband was executed by an Israeli quadcopter in Khan Yunis.
But since the body remained missing, she held on to some faint hope that he was still alive. Her boys, on the other hand, kept digging in the wreckage and debris of the area where Hamdi was shot, hoping to find him and to give him a proper burial. They would often be attacked by Israeli drones in the process of trying to unearth their father’s body. They would run away, and return with their shovels to carry on with the grim task.
To maximize their chances of survival, my sister’s family decided to split up between displacement camps and other family homes in southern Gaza.
This meant that Soma had to be in a constant state of moving, traveling, often long distances on foot, between towns, villages and refugee camps, just to check on her children, following every incursion, and every massacre.
“I am exhausted,” she kept telling me. “All I want from life is for this war to end, for new cozy pajamas, my favorite book, and a comfortable bed.”
These simple and reasonable expectations looked like a mirage, especially when her home in the Qarara area, in Khan Yunis, was demolished by the Israeli army last month.
“My heart aches. Everything is gone. Three decades of life, of memories, of achievement, all turned into rubble,” she wrote.
“This is not a story about stones and concrete. It is much bigger. It is a story that cannot be fully told, however long I wrote or spoke. Seven souls had lived here. We ate, drank, laughed, quarreled, and despite all the challenges of living in Gaza, we managed to carve out a happy life for our family,” she continued.
A few days before she was killed, she told me that she had been sleeping in a half-destroyed building belonging to her neighbors in Qarara. She sent me a photo taken by her son, as she sat on a makeshift chair, on which she also slept amidst the ruins. She looked tired, so very tired.
There was nothing I could say or do to convince her to leave. She insisted that she wanted to keep an eye on the rubble of what remained of her home. Her logic made no sense to me. I pleaded with her to leave. She ignored me, and instead kept sending me photos of what she had salvaged from the rubble, an old photo, a small olive tree, a birth certificate ..
My last message to her, hours before she was killed, was a promise that when the war is over, I will do everything in my power to compensate her for all of this. That the whole family would meet in Egypt, or Türkiye, and that we will shower her with gifts, and boundless family love. I finished with, “let’s start planning now. Whatever you want. You just say it. Awaiting your instructions…” She never saw the message.
Even when her name, as yet another casualty of the Israeli genocide in Gaza was mentioned in local Palestinian news, I refused to believe it. I continued to call. “Please pick up, Soma, please pick up,” I pleaded with her.
Only when a video emerged of white body bags arriving at Nasser Hospital in the back of an ambulance, I thought maybe my sister was indeed gone.
Some of the bags had the names of the others mentioned in the social media posts. Each bag was pulled out separately and placed on the ground. A group of mourners, bereaved men, women and children would rush to hug the body, screaming the same shouts of agony and despair that accompanied this ongoing genocide from the first day.
Then, another bag, with the name ‘Soma Mohammed Mohammed Baroud’ written across the thick white plastic. Her colleagues carried her body and gently laid it on the ground. They were about to zip the bag open to verify her identity. I looked the other way.
I refuse to see her but in the way that she wanted to be seen, a strong person, a manifestation of love, kindness and wisdom, whose “little finger is worth more than a thousand men.”
But why do I continue to check my messages with the hope that she will text me to tell me that the whole thing was a major, cruel misunderstanding and that she is okay?
My sister Soma was buried under a small mound of dirt, somewhere in Khan Yunis.
Dr. Soma Baroud, was killed on 9 October when Israeli warplanes bombed the taxi that carried her and other tired Gazans somewhere near the Bani Suhaila roundabout near Khan Yunis.
“Your lives will continue. With new events and new faces. They are the faces of your children, who will fill your homes with noise and laughter.”
These were the last words written by my sister in a text message to one of her daughters.
Dr. Soma Baroud was murdered on October 9 when Israeli warplanes bombed a taxi that carried her and other tired Gazans somewhere near the Bani Suhaila roundabout near Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip.
I am still unable to understand whether she was on her way to the hospital, where she worked, or leaving the hospital to go home. Does it even matter?
The news of her murder – or, more accurately assassination, as Israel has deliberately targeted and killed 986 medical workers, including 165 doctors – arrived through a screenshot copied from a Facebook page.
“Update: these are the names of the martyrs of the latest Israeli bombing of two taxis in the Khan Yunis area ..,” the post read.
It was followed by a list of names. “Soma Mohammed Mohammed Baroud” was the fifth name on the list, and the 42,010th on Gaza’s ever-growing list of martyrs.
I refused to believe the news, even when more posts began popping up everywhere on social media, listing her as number five, and sometimes six in the list of martyrs of the Khan Yunis strike.
I kept calling her, over and over again, hoping that the line would crackle a bit, followed by a brief silence, and then her kind, motherly voice would say, “Marhaba Abu Sammy. How are you, brother?” But she never picked up.
I had told her repeatedly that she does not need to bother with elaborate text or audio messages due to the unreliable internet connection and electricity. “Every morning,” I said, “just type: ‘we are fine’.” That’s all I asked of her.
But she would skip several days without writing, often due to the lack of an internet connection. Then, a message would arrive, though never brief. She wrote with a torrent of thoughts, linking up her daily struggle to survive, to her fears for her children, to poetry, to a Qur’anic verse, to one of her favorite novels, and so on.
“You know, what you said last time reminds me of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude,” she said on more than one occasion, before she would take the conversation into the most complex philosophical spins. I would listen, and just repeat, “Yes .. totally .. I agree .. one hundred percent.”
For us, Soma was a larger-than-life figure. This is precisely why her sudden absence has shocked us to the point of disbelief. Her children, though grown up, felt orphaned. But her brothers, me included, felt the same way.
I wrote about Soma as a central character in my book “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter”, because she was indeed central to our lives, and to our very survival in a Gaza refugee camp.
The first born, and only daughter, she had to carry a much greater share of work and expectations than the rest of us.
She was just a child, when my eldest brother Anwar, still a toddler, died in an UNRWA clinic at the Nuseirat refugee camp due to the lack of medicine. Then, she was introduced to pain, the kind of pain that with time turned into a permanent state of grief that would never abandon her until her murder by a US-supplied Israeli bomb in Khan Yunis.
Two years after the death of the first Anwar, another boy was born. They also called him Anwar, so that the legacy of the first boy may carry on. Soma cherished the newcomer, maintaining a special friendship with him for decades to come.
My father began his life as a child laborer, then a fighter in the Palestine Liberation Army, then a police officer during the Egyptian administration of Gaza, then, once again a laborer; that’s because he refused to join the Israeli-funded Gaza police force after the war of 1967, known as the Naksa.
A clever, principled man, and a self-taught intellectual, my Dad did everything he could to provide a measure of dignity for his small family; and Soma, a child, often barefoot, stood by him every step of the way.
When he decided to become a merchant, as in buying discarded and odd items in Israel and repackaging them to sell in the refugee camp, Soma was his main helper. Though her skin healed, cuts on her fingers, due to individually wrapping thousands of razors, remained a testament to the difficult life she lived.
“Soma’s little finger is worth more than a thousand men,” my father would often repeat, to remind us, ultimately five boys, that our sister will always be the main heroine in the family’s story. Now that she is a martyr, that legacy has been secured for eternity.
Years later, my parents would send her to Aleppo to obtain a medical degree. She returned to Gaza, where she spent over three decades healing the pain of others, though never her own.
She worked at Al-Shifa Hospital, at Nasser Hospital among other medical centers. Later, she obtained another certificate in family medicine, opening a clinic of her own. She did not charge the poor, and did all she could to heal those victimized by war.
Soma was a member of a generation of female doctors in Gaza that truly changed the face of medicine, collectively putting great emphasis on the rights of women to medical care and expanding the understanding of family medicine to include psychological trauma with particular emphasis on the centrality, but also the vulnerability of women in a war-torn society.
When my daughter Zarefah managed to visit her in Gaza shortly before the war, she told me that “when aunt Soma walked into the hospital, an entourage of women – doctors, nurses, and other medical staff – would surround her in total adoration.”
At one point, it felt that all of Soma’s suffering was finally paying off: a nice family home in Khan Yunis, with a small olive orchard, and a few palm trees; a loving husband, himself a professor of law, and eventually the dean of law school at a reputable Gaza university; three daughters and two sons, whose educational specialties ranged from dentistry to pharmacy, to law to engineering.
Life, even under siege, at least for Soma and her family, seemed manageable. True, she was not allowed to leave the Strip for many years due to the blockade, and thus we were denied the chance to see her for years on end. True, she was tormented by loneliness and seclusion, thus her love affair and constant citation from García Márquez’s seminal novel. But at least her husband was not killed or went missing. Her beautiful house and clinic were still standing. And she was living and breathing, communicating her philosophical nuggets about life, death, memories and hope.
“If I could only find the remains of Hamdi, so that we can give him a proper burial,” she wrote to me last January, when the news circulated that her husband was executed by an Israeli quadcopter in Khan Yunis.
But since the body remained missing, she held on to some faint hope that he was still alive. Her boys, on the other hand, kept digging in the wreckage and debris of the area where Hamdi was shot, hoping to find him and to give him a proper burial. They would often be attacked by Israeli drones in the process of trying to unearth their father’s body. They would run away, and return with their shovels to carry on with the grim task.
To maximize their chances of survival, my sister’s family decided to split up between displacement camps and other family homes in southern Gaza.
This meant that Soma had to be in a constant state of moving, traveling, often long distances on foot, between towns, villages and refugee camps, just to check on her children, following every incursion, and every massacre.
“I am exhausted,” she kept telling me. “All I want from life is for this war to end, for new cozy pajamas, my favorite book, and a comfortable bed.”
These simple and reasonable expectations looked like a mirage, especially when her home in the Qarara area, in Khan Yunis, was demolished by the Israeli army last month.
“My heart aches. Everything is gone. Three decades of life, of memories, of achievement, all turned into rubble,” she wrote.
“This is not a story about stones and concrete. It is much bigger. It is a story that cannot be fully told, however long I wrote or spoke. Seven souls had lived here. We ate, drank, laughed, quarreled, and despite all the challenges of living in Gaza, we managed to carve out a happy life for our family,” she continued.
A few days before she was killed, she told me that she had been sleeping in a half-destroyed building belonging to her neighbors in Qarara. She sent me a photo taken by her son, as she sat on a makeshift chair, on which she also slept amidst the ruins. She looked tired, so very tired.
There was nothing I could say or do to convince her to leave. She insisted that she wanted to keep an eye on the rubble of what remained of her home. Her logic made no sense to me. I pleaded with her to leave. She ignored me, and instead kept sending me photos of what she had salvaged from the rubble, an old photo, a small olive tree, a birth certificate ..
My last message to her, hours before she was killed, was a promise that when the war is over, I will do everything in my power to compensate her for all of this. That the whole family would meet in Egypt, or Türkiye, and that we will shower her with gifts, and boundless family love. I finished with, “let’s start planning now. Whatever you want. You just say it. Awaiting your instructions…” She never saw the message.
Even when her name, as yet another casualty of the Israeli genocide in Gaza was mentioned in local Palestinian news, I refused to believe it. I continued to call. “Please pick up, Soma, please pick up,” I pleaded with her.
Only when a video emerged of white body bags arriving at Nasser Hospital in the back of an ambulance, I thought maybe my sister was indeed gone.
Some of the bags had the names of the others mentioned in the social media posts. Each bag was pulled out separately and placed on the ground. A group of mourners, bereaved men, women and children would rush to hug the body, screaming the same shouts of agony and despair that accompanied this ongoing genocide from the first day.
Then, another bag, with the name ‘Soma Mohammed Mohammed Baroud’ written across the thick white plastic. Her colleagues carried her body and gently laid it on the ground. They were about to zip the bag open to verify her identity. I looked the other way.
I refuse to see her but in the way that she wanted to be seen, a strong person, a manifestation of love, kindness and wisdom, whose “little finger is worth more than a thousand men.”
But why do I continue to check my messages with the hope that she will text me to tell me that the whole thing was a major, cruel misunderstanding and that she is okay?
My sister Soma was buried under a small mound of dirt, somewhere in Khan Yunis.
Netanyahu takes a selfie with US troops in Israel. Image: Screenshot from video on X.
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A retaliatory military operation that many wizened pundits predicted would last no more than a month or so has now thundered on in ever-escalating episodes of violence and mass destruction for a year with no sign of relenting. What began as a war of vengeance has become a war of annihilation, not just of Hamas, but of Palestinian life and culture in Gaza and beyond.
While few took them seriously at the time, Israeli leaders spelled out in explicit terms the savage goals of their war and the unrestrained means they were going to use to prosecute it. This was going to be a campaign of collective punishment where every conceivable target–school, hospital, mosque–would be fair game. Here was Israel unbound. The old rules of war and international law were not only going to be ignored; they would be ridiculed and mocked by the Israeli leadership, which, in the days after the October 7 attacks, announced their intention to immiserate, starve, and displace more than 2 million Palestinians and kill anyone who stood in their way–man, woman or child.
For the last 17 years, the people of Gaza have been living a marginal existence, laboring under the cruel constrictions of a crushing Israeli embargo, where the daily allotments of food allowed into the Strip were measured out down to the calorie. Now, the blockade was about to become total. On October 9, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warned: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, food, or fuel; everything is closed.” He wasn’t kidding.
These are the same Palestinians in Gaza who, for years, have functioned as Israel’s low-wage labor force. As one Palestinian laborer from Rafah told Amira Hass after an Israeli bombardment in 2004: “We Palestinians build your homes in Israel, now Israel comes and destroys ours.” After October 7, thousands of Palestinian workers in Israel were detained without warrants by Israeli forces and kept for weeks in torturous conditions. This time, Israel wouldn’t just destroy Palestinian houses; it was going to obliterate entire cities.
Israel didn’t hide its intentions to traduce 75 years of international law when its missiles, drones and quadcopters began blowing up apartment buildings, houses, markets, hospitals, schools, mosques, water treatment plants, pipelines, libraries, universities, UN buildings, media offices, aid convoys and tent cities. Israel’s own soldiers and commanding officers posted videos of these war crimes on social media platforms, including one funded by the press office of the IDF. The Netanyahu regime often gave a more unvarnished account of the horrors they were inflicting on Gaza than you’d find in the pages of the New York Times or broadcasts from the BBC.
For the past year, Israel has acted as if the disaster of October 7, when the Israeli government ignored repeated warnings that an attack was imminent, gave it impunity to commit atrocities on a much vaster scale, using remote-controlled weapons and AI targeting against an essentially defenseless civilian population, allowing it to blow up whatever targets it wanted at will with little fear of reprisals or legal consequences. Israel had good reason to indulge in this sadistic arrogance. Its principal weapons dealer has continued to rush shipment after shipment of bombs, missiles and artillery shells to Israel, ensuring that the stockpiles of its arsenal remain full, even though by March Israel had already dropped 70,000 tons of bombs on Gaza, more than the World War II bombings in Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined. The pace of the bombing (and the resupplies) has accelerated since then.
According to a damage assessment from UNOSAT in early September, Israeli airstrikes, bombs, artillery and bulldozers have damaged 163,778 buildings in the Gaza Strip, around 66% of structures in Gaza. Of these, 78% were completely destroyed or severely or moderately damaged. Among the damaged buildings are at least 227,591 housing units, leaving much of Gaza’s pre-war population of 2.3 million people seeking shelter in UN schools or tent camps. The ruins of these bombed structures have left behind more than 42 million tons of debris, some of it toxic, much of it covering human remains, that will take at least 14 years to clean up.
Satellite imagery collected by the UN on September 6 shows that at least 87 percent of school buildings in the Gaza Strip (493 out of 564) have been destroyed or damaged by Israeli airstrikes. Fifty-five percent of these schools (273) are government schools, a third (161) are UNRWA schools, and 12 percent (59) are private schools. Before the Israeli assault, these destroyed or damaged schools served about 541,227 students and employed more than 20,222 teachers.
Since October 7, 2023, the Israeli military has issued over 65 evacuation orders, including five since 1 October 2024. As a result, around 84 percent of the Gaza Strip remains under evacuation orders, more than a year after the war began. The new orders issued for October cover about 70 square kilometers, or 19 percent of the Strip, including areas where Palestinians had been ordered to evacuate multiple times.
According to a UN estimate, at least 75,000 people have been displaced over the past ten days, mainly within the north. The new orders applied to tens of critical service facilities, including 16 healthcare facilities, dozens of water, sanitation and hygiene facilities, 28 schools sheltering refugees, and one bakery.
Since October 7, Israel has made 516 attacks on healthcare sites across Gaza. Israel has attacked UNRWA facilities, aid workers and aid convoys more than 464 times, killing 228 UN workers and damaging 190 UN facilities in Gaza. Only seven of UNRWA’s 17 medical clinics remain operational.
South Africa saw this for what it was: a genocide in the making. On December 29, it filed an 84-page petition with the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza and requesting that the Court issue provisional measures of protection. Biden, who ordered his UN ambassador to veto several ceasefire resolutions passed by the Security Council, denounced South Africa’s petition as “meritless.” On January 26, the Court ruled that it had found “that at least some of the rights claimed by South Africa and for which it is seeking protection are plausible” and ordered Israel “to take measures to prevent acts of genocide in the Gaza Strip; to prevent and punish incitement to genocide; to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza; and generally, to take more measures to protect Palestinian civilians.” Since the ICC ruling, Israel has killed at least another 16,000 Palestinians in Gaza, constricted the flow of humanitarian aid and food into the Strip and routinely bombed areas Israel itself had instructed Palestinians to relocate into.
The few rhetorical red lines the Biden-Harris administration drew, Israel almost immediately crossed with no lull in the flow of weapons. “Every time Israel escalates the war, Biden rushes in to protect Israel from the consequences of its own escalation,” says Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute. “That is not a strategy to prevent escalation; that is a strategy that fuels escalation.”
Biden not only protected Israel from the UN, but, more cravenly, he shielded Israel from damning findings made by his own administration. In April, the State Department’s Refugee Bureau and officials at the US Agency for International Development determined that Israel was deliberately blocking aid into Gaza, a finding that should have triggered the Leahy Act, which bans military assistance to countries that block American humanitarian aid. Yet Biden and Blinken buried the reports and falsely told Congress that Israel was not in violation of the law, allowing the weapons to continue streaming to Israel, even as it laid waste to Rafah in an operation Biden timorously told Netanyahu to scale down.
Palestinian refugees tent in flames after Israeli airstrikes near Al Aqsa Hospital. Photo: UNRWA.
According to Brown University’s Cost of War project, since October 7, the Biden-Harris Administration has spent $22.76 billion to support Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza. This figure includes $17.9 billion in direct “security” aid to Israel (more than in any other year since the US began giving Israel military assistance in 1959) and $4.86 billion to support US military operations in the region.
The grotesque consequences in human terms have become almost numbingly familiar by now. After a year of unrelenting attacks on Gaza, the official death toll from the Palestinian Health Ministry stands at more than 42,065 Palestinians killed and 97,886 wounded. At least 32,280 of the dead have been identified, including 10,627 children, 5,956 women, and 2,770 elderly. At least another 10,000 Palestinians are estimated to be buried under the rubble. At least 3,100 Palestinian children under the age of five have been killed in Gaza, 700 of them were killed before their first birthday. The actual death toll, according to estimates from medical investigators at Lancet and elsewhere, probably exceeds 200,000 and is perhaps much higher. A study by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins of Bard College found that as many as 67,000 Gazans may have already died of starvation since the start of the war. The Israelis have forced the children of Gaza to exist on only 245 calories per day, which is literally a starvation diet.
The leadership of Hamas has been decimated, including the apparent death of Sinwar. Two-thirds of the population of Gaza has been displaced. Polio and other infectious diseases are spreading through the surviving population. Palestinians have been without reliable supplies of clean water, power, fuel, medicine and food for a year. Children haven’t been to school since last October. And yet the killing, maiming and destruction goes on, almost unabated, under the risible rationale of “self-defense.” In recent weeks, the slaughter has even escalated, especially in North Gaza, where the Netanyahu regime appears intent on implementing the so-called “General’s Plan,” a genocidal scheme to drive as many as 400,000 weary, homeless and starving Palestinians southward so that Israel can permanently seize much of the northern reaches of the Strip.
Here’s a summary of what’s happened in Gaza in the days since the anniversary of the October 7 attacks.
+ Israel’s latest siege on the northern Gaza Strip and its new offensive on Jabalia began two weeks after Netanyahu announced to Israeli lawmakers that he was considering a plan put forward by several Israeli generals — known as the “Generals’ Plan” — aiming at emptying the north of the Gaza Strip of Palestinians by making the area uninhabitable. At least 350 Palestinians have already been killed in the area in the last ten days.
According to Muhannad Hadi, Humanitarian Coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territory: “In the past two weeks, over 50,000 people have been displaced from the Jabalya area, which is cut off, while others remain stranded in their homes amid increased bombardment and fighting. A military siege that deprives civilians of essential means of survival is unacceptable.”
+ As of mid-October, no humanitarian food assistance had entered northern Gaza in two weeks. Israel had closed all the crossings, forcing kitchens, bakeries and food distribution points in the North Gaza governorate to shut down, in an area where at least three-quarters of the population rely on food aid to survive.
+ On October 13, five bakeries in Deir al Balah and Khan Younis were forced to close due to the shortage of flour. Already in September, about 1.4 million people ( nearly 70 percent of the total population) failed to receive their monthly food rations, which comprised pasta, rice, oil, and canned meats. If the flow of assistance does not immediately resume, almost two million people will lose this vital aid in October. According to the World Food Program, “People have run out of ways to cope, food systems have collapsed, and the risk of famine is real.”
+ During the first half of October, Israel killed another two journalists and wounded three others in Gaza. On October 6, a Palestinian journalist and freelance photographer was killed by a missile fired from an Israeli drone and another journalist was killed and one injured when an Israeli drone fired at a TV crew covering Israeli forces operations in the Jabalya refugee camp. Between October 7, 2023, and October 10, 2024, 168 Palestinian journalists and media workers were killed in the Gaza Strip by Israeli forces or missiles, including 17 women. At least 360 have been injured and another 60 have been detained.
+ All three of the hospitals in North Gaza – Kamal Adwan, Al Awda and the Indonesian Hospital – are operating at minimum capacity and experiencing critical shortages of fuel, blood, trauma equipment, and medications. In total, 285 patients remain in these facilities, including eight children and five adults receiving mechanical ventilation in ICUs and 161 patients in emergency departments. Many patients urgently need advanced procedures, such as neurosurgery and vascular surgery, that can’t be conducted under current conditions.
+ The Kamal Adwan Hospital continues to be overwhelmed, receiving at least 50-70 newly injured patients daily. While emergency obstetric care continues to be provided at Kamal Adwan and Al Awda, “the lives of newborns in incubators and women with pregnancy complications are hanging by a thread,” according to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). The UNFP report emphasizes that more than 9,000 pregnant women have been forced to move multiple times due to the latest evacuation orders. Meanwhile, none of the 25 primary healthcare centers in North Gaza are functional, and only five out of 15 medical clinics that had been operating in recent months continue to provide primary care.
+ On the anniversary of the October 7 attacks, after Israeli airstrikes hit a mosque and a school in Deir al Balah, Al Aqsa Hospital received 53 wounded patients and 22 dead bodies. According to doctors with Médecins Sans Frontières MSF, many patients suffered injuries to the head, thorax and abdomen, Several of the wounded had to be treated on the floor due to the shortage of beds.
+ Around three in the afternoon that same day, 13 Palestinians were killed and others injured when Israeli airstrikes targeted a group of people standing near a gas station in the Jabalya refugee camp in North Gaza.
+ Nine hours later, Israel bombed a house on Block 10 of Al Bureij refugee camp in Deir al Balah, killing 19 Palestinians, including nine women and five children.
+ On October 7, at about 3 PM, 10 Palestinians, including four women and three children, were killed when an Israeli missile struck a house in the Al Atatrah neighborhood in northeastern Rafah
+ In the early morning hours of October 9, nine Palestinians were killed and five others injured when Israel bombed a house in the Ash Shujai’yeh neighborhood in eastern Gaza City.
+ A few hours later, an Israeli airstrike targeted the Al Yaman As Saeed Hospital, where Palestinian refugees were sheltering. According to the UN Human Rights Office, the strike killed 17 people.
+ At 11:30 in the morning on October 10, Israel bombed the Rufaydah school west of Deir Al Balah, which was sheltering thousands of Palestinian refugees. At least 28 Palestinians, including women and children, were killed and more than 54 were injured, including five critically injured children.
+ Half an hour later that day, eight Palestinians were killed and a dozen others injured when they were shot in the back by Israeli quadcopters while trying to evacuate from the Jabalya refugee camp through the Abu Sharakh roundabout.
+ Shortly after 9 PM on October 11, 22 Palestinians, including several women and children, were killed and 90 others injured when Israeli airstrikes leveled several houses on a residential block in Jabalya Al Balad, in North Gaza.
+ At four in the afternoon on October 12, Israel targeted a house on Al Yafawi Street in the Jabalya refugee camp in North Gaza, killing nine Palestinians and injuring ten others.
+ Near 10:30 at night on October 12, Israel bombed a house in An Nuseirat refugee camp in Deir al Balah, killing eight Palestinians and wounding several others.
+ At 4:30 in the afternoon on October 13, five Palestinian children were killed and several others injured when an Israeli airstrike hit a group of Palestinian children while they were playing at a kindergarten in As Shati’ camp, west of Gaza City.
+ Seven hours later, 36 Palestinians, including 15 children, were killed and 80 others injured when Israeli artillery shelled the Al Mufti UNRWA school in An Nuseirat refugee camp, where over 6,200 displaced people were sheltering. According to UNRWA, the school was going to be used as a Polio vaccination site the following day.
+ At about 10 in the morning on October 14, ten Palestinians were killed, and 40 others were injured when an Israeli airstrike hit outside theUNRWA distribution center in Jabalya refugee camp. According to UNRWA, this happened while people waited to collect food and flour.
+ At 1:20 in the morning on 14 October, Israeli drones opened fire on the courtyard of Al Aqsa Hospital in Deir al Balah, where displaced Palestinians were sheltering. The attack ignited a fire that quickly engulfed dozens of tents, killing at least four Palestinians and burning several patients alive in their hospital beds as they writhed in pain, many of them still attached to IVs. Several Palestinians tried to put out the fire. One of the survivors told a reporter with Al Jazeera: “We woke up to the sound of the strike, which blew away 40 tents. We spent the whole night transporting the injured. People were burned, and some were melted. People came here from everywhere, escaping death, but we came to a second death. Without tents or cover, what will people do now? Winter is coming. Where shall we go?”
+ At least four people were burned to death and more than 40 others were injured, including women and children. Médecins sans Frontières reported that Al Aqsa Hospital treated 40 patients, including ten children and eight women, many of whom had severe burns. Another 25 patients had to be referred to other health facilities due to the lack of capacity at Al Aqsa, which a few hours earlier had already received dozens of people injured in the strike on the Al Mufti school. According to an assessment by UN agencies, out of the hundreds of displaced families sheltering in the courtyard, some 40 families were affected, half of whom lost their shelter and other belongings in the fire. Referring to these incidents, Acting Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Ms. Joyce Msuya, stated: “There seems to be no end to the horrors that Palestinians in Gaza are forced to endure… There really is no safe place in Gaza for people to go. Fighting is intensifying in the north and essential supplies for survival are running out… These atrocities must end. Civilians and civilian infrastructure must always be protected.”
+ In Jabalia in northern Gaza, where Israeli forces continued their latest ground offensive for the tenth day in a row, Israeli quadcopter drones opened fire on Palestinians who had gathered to receive food at a UNRWA aid distribution center, killing at least ten people and wounding more than 40 others.
+ On Wednesday, the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia issued an urgent call for medical supplies and generator fuel. The hospital, one of the last functioning hospitals in the strip, warned that the amount of fuel that could enter the area was only enough for ten more days.
+ On October 15, the family home of a Virginia man of Palestinian descent was destroyed in repeated airstrikes by Israeli forces in the Jabalyia refugee camp in northern Gaza. There were 15 people in the house when it was struck, including seven children and the man’s mother, a lawful permanent resident of the United States. The man’s mother and several relatives survived the initial attack but were trapped beneath the rubble of the house. In an effort to rescue the injured, the family called the Israeli authorities, gave them the address and GPS coordinates of the bombed house, and let them know that an ambulance had been dispatched to the scene. Instead of clearing the route for the rescuers, the IDF apparently used the information provided by the family to launch a second round of airstrikes, targeting both the ruins of the house and the ambulance coming to the aid of the wounded. The Israeli missile that hit the ambulance killed Dr. Ahmed Al-Najjar. The missile that struck the already bombed residence killed everyone except a seven-year-old boy. When Americans are attacked, Biden vowed, we will respond…with condolences and more 2,000-lb bombs.
+ As I was writing this column, word came of an Israeli airstrike on yet another UNRWA school being used as a shelter in North Gaza. The bombing of the Abu Hussein School in Jabalia refugee camp on Thursday killed at least 28 Palestinians (and likely many more) and injured at least 160 people, including many women and children. Once again, the airstrikes ignited the tents where thousands of Palestinian families were sheltering. Al Jazeera journalist Hani Mahmoud reported that the victims were taken on carts and private cars to Al Awda and Kamal Adwan hospitals, already overflowing with patients and running low on fuel and supplies. “The scene is horrific, Mahmoud reported. “They can’t keep up with the large influx of casualties.”
A UN official in northern Gaza on October 10, 2024. Photo by OCHA.
+++
The war of revenge has become a war of dispossession, conquest and annexation, where war crime feeds on war crime. Not even the lives of the Israeli hostages will stand in the way; they will become Israeli martyrs in the cause of cleansing Gaza of Palestinians.
There can be little doubt now that this is the ultimate exterminationist goal. Smotrich and Ben Gvir have openly said as much and Netanyahu and Gallant have put their incendiary rhetoric into ruinous action. (This week, Netanyahu’s Likud government circulated invitations to an event called “Preparing to Settle Gaza.”) Even Benny Gantz, hailed as an enlightened alternative to Netanyahu by many in the West, proclaimed after learning of Sinwar’s death: “The circle is closed, but the mission is not over. The IDF will continue to operate in the Gaza Strip for years to come.”
It’s equally apparent that nothing Israel does, including killing American grandmothers, college students, and aid workers, will trigger the US government, whether it’s under the control of Biden, Harris, or Trump, to intervene to stop them or even pull the plug on the arms shipments that make this genocidal war possible. This week, Biden, while his secretaries of State and Defense publicly waged their fingers on Netanyahu for continuing to starve Palestinians, ordered US troops to Israel to operate the THAAD missile defense system he had just gifted them. Shortly after they arrived, Netanyahu took a gloating selfie with the fresh-faced US troops who had now officially placed their boots on the ground in Israel’s ever-widening war.
When did shock jock and satellite-radio wit Howard Stern turn into a cream puff and shill for Kamala Harris and her floundering campaign for the presidency?
Is she really that far behind that she needed to play vaudeville, first The View and then The Howard Stern Show, presumably on the basis that a defanged Howard would lay off Californication questions about cocaine or encounters of a hot-tub kind.
I tuned into the nationally syndicated interview with the vice president, thinking that if anyone could chip away at Harris’s iceberg persona, it might well be Stern, who has eaten the lunch of many guests, even if they are served up over breakfast.
For much of the last generation, Stern has been nobody’s fool, but then the sitting vice president entered his studio, and he went weak at the knees, as if he had been granted a date with Miss America—to whom he gushed:
I think you’d be a great president. I think you’re compassionate. I think you’ve had all the life experience. I love your experience as a prosecutor and I want to thank you for all the years of public service. I appreciate anyone who really serves the public and serves them in a way. And I know even as a prosecutor, you got people out of jail who were falsely accused.
Howard, we hardly knew ye. But Kamala, when you go on the Stern show, it’s a moment to tell jokes or feed off his riffs, not to sound like an AI reading of a Brookings Institution white paper.
* * *
I am sure you have seen interview outtakes on social media, but what the excerpts missed is that for 57 minutes of the hour-long show, Stern held Harris by the hand as she walked across dangerous political intersections.
For example, Stern said:
It’s really weird, too, because to me, you’re the law and order candidate. And yet they try to paint you like you’re some leftist who, I don’t know, who wants to have people running through the streets committing crimes. You were a prosecutor…
And he asked her pageant contestant questions about her departed mother, about paying for law school, her early job interviews, working at McDonald’s, and how, as a crime-busting prosecutor, she had fearlessly sent numerous wise guys up the river.
Harris’s answers were the political equivalent of painting-by-numbers, little set speeches that her staff has market tested and written (based on polling algorithms) and that she has memorized.
Here’s one recital (she told exactly the same anecdote at the debate with Donald Trump):
Well, I think that we just — we should remember the good. And I don’t mean to sound naive, but we have to remember the good. We have so many hardworking, good people who I have the great experience of meeting every day. For example, one of my passions is small businesses. So my mother worked full time. Worked long hours. And we lived on a nursery school above a child care center. And the woman who owned that, Mrs. Shelton, we called her our second mother. She helped my mother raise us. She was a small business owner. I grew up as a child knowing small business owners. They are leaders in the community. They hire locally. They mentor. So I have a real passion for small businesses.
Maybe she does, but her stage voice, at least on the sycophantic Stern & Friends, was deadpan, to the point that Howard had to jump in and coax her toward her punchlines.
I am not saying she’s Biden or Trump, lost at sea in mid-sentence, but one reason she’s not scraping the deck with the dysfunctional Trump is because there’s a bloodless quality to her language, which often makes her sound like a seventh grader reciting the Gettysburg Address.
* * *
Only in the last three minutes of the interview did Harris drop her monotone and show she has a pulse—over the improbable subjects of a U2 concert at the Vegas Sphere and her passion for Formula One car racing.
I could have guessed the U2 devotion (although “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” might be too close to her campaign’s continental drift), but not her Age of Aquarius gushing for the otherworldliness of the Sphere, of which she said (perhaps with the only conviction of the interview):
You sit in there and it’s almost like Disneyland or Disney World where things just start to change around you….And you feel like you lose a sense of gravity because it’s really phenomenal. And also what’s interesting about it, then, is to your point about mics and all this stuff, you don’t really need a lot of stage props because the props are all in the sphere on the monitors.
Then she tried to convert Stern—who by this point must have known the interview was a bust—to Formula One, if not Sir Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes team. At least this exchange had some passion.
For once sounding like the old Stern, he asked her: “Why do you like Formula One? These guys drive around the cars over and over again in a circle.” Then they had this banter:
HARRIS: We love it. Our whole family does.
STERN: It’s not a campaign thing.
HARRIS: No. God, no. No. Well, actually, I haven’t been able to watch it a lot recently because I am campaigning because, you know, also depending on where they’re driving the time of day, you know, you’ve got to wake up.
STERN: Who is your favorite driver?
HARRIS: Lewis Hamilton, of course.
STERN: Well, I don’t even know who that is. He’s leaving Mercedes. You don’t know. You don’t watch Formula One?
HARRIS: No. I mean, oh, once you start, I think you should see it. You might get hooked.
I am not saying that enthusiasm for a Vegas escape room or Lewis Hamilton are enough to allow Harris to beat the deplorable Trump, but these were the only words of her interview that hinted of delight or conviction. Alas, presidents are not often chosen based on their passion for Vegas floorshows.
* * *
Stern is enough of a pro so that even on bended knee he decided not to ask Harris why she wants to be president, fearing that the answer would meander to the “opportunity economy” and those $6,000 tax breaks so that new parents can buy car seats to drive newborns to the mall.
But for him not to bring up Gaza or Ukraine (or the undeclared war in Yemen) was journalistic malpractice, and it led the most cringeworthy dialogue of the interview, which began with Harris’s world view sounding like a brochure for Model United Nations:
HARRIS: But to your point, I’ve now met as vice president over 150 world leaders, presidents, prime ministers, chancellors and kings. And part of what keeps me up at night is the knowledge based on experience. America is so important to the rest of the world, Howard. We are so important to the rest of the world. We are a role model for what it means to be a democracy so we can look at other countries and our allies and our adversaries and say, these are the principles that must be upheld. And while we uphold these principles, we will also be the strongest economy in the world. We will have the most lethal fighting force in the world. All these things coexist. But you’ve got to have a president who appreciates and understands that on the issue of military. We already discussed where Donald Trump is. He belittles the members of our military.
STERN: And who’s more important than our military? I mean…
HARRIS: But right. You look at the economy. My plans for the economy. Listen, I am a capitalist. I’m also — I’m also a devout public servant that knows government can’t do everything by itself.
[Note to Howard: I can think of many things “more important than our military”, especially since the Pentagon hasn’t won a war since 1945.]
Trump’s vision of foreign policy is to sell the United States down the river Putin (perhaps in exchange for oligarchic funding for his failed condo and golf projects?), but Harris’s city-on-a-hill allegory (“a role model for what it means to be a democracy…”) doesn’t quite jibe with the administration’s weekly shipment of cluster bombs to Israel.
* * *
In 1976 and then again in 1992, the struggling Democratic candidates—Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton—put their hands on the radio or opened their doors to Playboy magazine to give their campaigns a jolt.
Even the Georgia peanut farmer Carter confessed to Playboy that “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust; I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times…” which made the Sunday school teacher seem a little less saintly.
For this fifteen minutes of humanity, Bill Clinton acknowledged “personal failings” in his marriage and to blowing some weed (although never inhaling).
Even with Howard Stern, the father confessor of drive-time radio, Kamala Harris remained buttoned up (“I don’t like talking about myself. It feels I was raised not to be a narcissist…”), struggling just to remember her lines about the economy (“My econ policies, Goldman Sachs, the 16 Nobel laureates will tell you that my plans will strengthen our economy…”).
At the same time her candidacy (and most of her hour with Stern) is all about the immaculate conception of Herself, yet another American politician (as was Obama) whose favorite bedtime story is the lottery win of their presidential nomination and celebrity apprenticeship.
Trump is criminally insane, but he does speak to his supporters as he might talk to them in a booth at Denny’s—perhaps something he learned from his appearances on Howard Stern (who, by the way, when he on top of his game, got Trump to confess his incestuous desires for his daughter Ivanka).
After news broke that Han Kang—the South Korean author—had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, her father—the novelist Han Seung-won—asked her where she wanted to hold a press conference to talk about the award. She published her fiction with Changbi and her poetry with Munhakdongne, both of which hoped to host her. Initially, Han Kang, the 53-year-old author of the 2016 Booker Prize-winning The Vegetarian, thought that she would talk to the press. But then, after reflection, she told her father that he should make a statement in her place. “With the war intensifying and people being carried out dead every day,” she told the press through her father, “How can we have a celebration or a press conference?”
The Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize this year to the organization Nihon Hidankyo “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.” The group was formed in 1956 by survivors of the U.S. nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Its mission from the first has been to ban nuclear and other horrendous weapons. Part of its impact had been to hold Hiroshima Day events on August 6 to publicize the dangers of such weapons (these events have sadly become less impactful, but perhaps the Nobel Prize will raise their status). At its press conference, one of the co-heads of Nihon Hidankyo Toshiyuki Mimaki (who had been struck by atomic radiation in Hiroshima at the age of three), said, “I thought the prize would go to those working hard in Gaza… In Gaza, bleeding children are being held [by their parents]. It’s like Japan 80 years ago.”
It is like Japan in its effects: the “bleeding children” that Mimaki referred to have been a constant sight for the past year. But it is not like Japan in its execution. Only a small number of people knew the deadly potential of the atomic bomb when the U.S. military dropped it on Hiroshima and then three days later Nagasaki. After the bombs fell, first Japan and then the United States prevented journalists from reporting on their impact. One hundred and fourteen employees of Chugoku Shimbun, the main newspaper of Hiroshima, died in the attack. Those who remained created Verbal Reporting Corps or kudentai to go about and provide information in person about relief opportunities. Yoshito Matsushige from the paper took some of the most evocative photographs of the devastation. Two foreign reporters—Leslie Nakashima (Asian American) and Wilfred Burchett (Australian)—broke through the barricades to report from Hiroshima. “What had been a city of 300,000 population had vanished,” Nakashima wrote for United Press International on August 31, 1945.
The Bombs Continue to Drop
In fact, the city had not vanished. Despite the overwhelming Israeli bombardment (far greater firepower used in Gaza than on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), the Palestinians remain across Gaza in their homes and in shelters. They refuse to leave, as many of them tell me, because they remember the stories of their grandparents and parents from 1948; when the Israelis chased them off from their villages then, they never allowed them to return. That feeling of defiance combined with the fact that there really is nowhere to go has kept the Palestinians amid rubble.
And the Israelis have not stopped their bombing. There is not one atom bomb, but thousands of lethal bombs that continue to rain down from Israeli jets. In December 2023, the Israeli authorities designated al-Mawasi, just west of Khan Younis, as a humanitarian or safe zone. Despite that, Israel has continued to attack settlements and shelter within this safe zone, reducing what was already measly to a fraction of what had been designated for the people. The density of population per square kilometer in this zone is roughly 35,000, far greater than the densest place on earth (Macau, a small city, with a population density of 21,000), and—for comparison—the density of population in the United States is 35 people per square kilometer.
In one week this month, the Israelis struck three schools that have become shelters in Deir al-Balah, 15 kilometers north of al-Mawasi, as reported by Abubaker Abed: Ahmed al-Kurd school (October 5), al-Ayesha School (October 3), and Rufaida al-Aslamia Secondary School for Girls (October 10). The Israeli attacks on Rufaida school just before 11:30 a.m. killed 28 Palestinians, many of them children and the elderly, and among them two staff of the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF). The bombs landed, as Imad Zakout reported, when the coordinators of the shelter were handing out milk formula to the children and their parents.
The bombs dropped by Israel—the GBU-39—are manufactured by Boeing and are designed to scatter shrapnel and cause great physical harm even to those who survive the blast. No one in the shelter takes Israel’s contention that it struck Hamas operatives. The people have been identified, and everyone knows them and knows that they are not part of any Hamas structure. The youngest person killed was Mila Alaa al-Sultan (age six) and the oldest was Sumaya Younis al-Kafarna (age 87). Among the dead are a much-loved policeman named Salem Ruwaishid al-Waqadi (age 26) and the administrator of the school named Ahmed Adel Hamouda (age 58).
Humans Are Scary
Those who have read Han Kang’s Human Acts (2016) will not be surprised by her reaction to the Nobel Prize and the genocide in Gaza. When she was 10 years old, in 1980, the South Korean military dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan unleashed terrible force against the Gwangju Uprising for democracy. This violence, in Han Kang’s hometown, led to the deaths and injuries of thousands of people. When she was 13, her father showed her an album of photographs of the violence. “If I had been older,” Han Kang reflected in 2016, “I would have experienced a social awakening out of anger toward the new military regime. But I was too young. My first thought was that humans are scary.”
Human Acts tells the story of several characters from May 1980 to the present: Jeong-dae dies in the uprising, Eun-sook and Kang Dong-ho gather the dead, Kim Jin-su goes to prison and commits suicide ten years later, while Seon-ju is tortured by the military. These are powerful stories of human courage and dignity in the face of terrible violence. That is what Han Kang and others see in the Palestinian predicament: the Israeli violence is ugly, but the remarkable resilience of the Palestinians demands that humans commit acts that refuse the feeling that “humans are scary.”
South Korean novelist Han Kang has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, beating short-listed literary heavyweights like Thomas Pynchon, Haruki Murakami, Salman Rushdie, Gerald Murnane, and the all-odds-favorite, Chinese author Can Xue. Han Kang was as shocked as anyone else after receiving the call notifying her that she had won. When asked what she would do next, she said she would quietly “have tea with her son”.
She has refused a press conference, saying that “with the wars raging between Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, with deaths being reported every day, she could not hold a celebratory press conference. She asked for understanding in this matter.”
A brilliant, powerful writer, but clearly the literary dark horse in the race, Han Kang’s unexpected award is the closest the Nobel committee could get to acknowledging the Palestinian genocide. Han Kang herself had not mentioned Palestine until her recent Nobel award. But it’s unmistakable that her award is a reflection of the current historical moment.
Of course, we cannot presume what the Nobel Committee’s position on the Palestinian genocide is. Certainly, the Nobel Committee would have been crucified by institutional powers if they had awarded the prize to a deserving Palestinian writer or poet; nor could they have risked a redux of Harold Pinter’s public takedown of Western brutality and hypocrisy.
But the Nobels are always political statements, situated in the political moment, and across a backdrop of live-streamed genocide and daily atrocity, it’s unthinkable that that Palestinian genocide could have been far from their minds or ignored in their deliberations.
The awarding of the Nobel to Han Kang is that oblique acknowledgment. Of the short and long lists, she is the only contemporary writer dedicated to witnessing and inscribing the horrors of historical atrocity and mass slaughter perpetrated by the Imperial powers and their quislings.
The Nobel committee suggests this by praising her for “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” and characterizes her work as “witness literature”, “a prayer addressing the dead”, and as artworks of mourning that seek to prevent erasure.
The echo of Palestine is not lost in that description of her major works: In Human Acts (“The Boy is Coming”), she wrote about the effects of the US-greenlighted massacres of civilians in the city of Gwangju by a US-quisling military dictatorship.
At the time, the US did not want a redux of the fall of the Shah of Iran, where popular protest brought down a US quisling dictator. Instead, the Carter Administration authorized the deployment of South Korean troops (at the time under full US operational control) to fire on and slaughter students and citizens protesting the recent US-backed military coup.
And exactly as in the current moment, the US portrayed itself as a hapless bystander to mass murder, enmeshed but incapable of preventing it, when in fact, it was the underwriter and the agent of the massacres.
Tim Shorrock clearly documented the doublespeak:
“Gwangju was an unspeakable tragedy that nobody expected to happen”, he said. The State Department, he added, continues to believe the United States “has no moral responsibility for what happened in Gwangju.”
Han Kang’s book doesn’t bother to accuse the US: her book is not a political tract, and most people in South Korea know these facts backwards and forwards. Instead, she reanimates the human suffering of this massacre from the standpoint of multiple characters: the grieving, the dead, the tortured, the resisting, the guilty living–including herself.
Starting with a pile of hundreds of decomposing bodies in a makeshift morgue, tended to with exquisite care by a young boy, Dong Ho, she shows us what it smells and feels to contact an unfiltered massacre. Dong Ho is actually a stand-in for a real person, Moon Jae-Hak, a high school student shot dead in Gwangju. Han Kang reveals that Dong Ho/Jae-Hak had moved into the room of the home that Han Kang herself had vacated 4 months earlier as her family serendipitously moved out of the city of Gwangju. It’s clear that had it not been for fate, Han Kang herself could very easily have been that dead child: Dong Ho is a stand-in for both Jae-Hak and Han Kang. That trope becomes obvious as Dong Ho survives a first skirmish, runs away from a shooting, while his comrade falls. Han Kang writes:
I would have run away… you would have run away. Even if it had been one of your brothers, your father, your mother, still you would have run away…There will be no forgiveness. You look into his eyes, which are flinching from the sight laid out in front of them as though it is the most appalling thing in all this world. There will be no forgiveness. Least of all for me.
It may not be possible to write herself into forgiveness for surviving, and Han Kang does not attempt it.
You’re not like me…You believe in a divine being, and in this thing we call humanity. You never did manage to win me over…I couldn’t even make it through the Lord’s Prayer without the words drying up in my throat. Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. I forgive no one, and no one forgives me.
She simply bears witness:
I still remember the moment when my gaze fell upon the mutilated face of a young woman, her features slashed through with a bayonet. Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn’t realised was there.
And she mourns the unmournable:
After you died, I couldn’t hold a funeral, So these eyes that once beheld you became a shrine. These ears that once heard your voice became a shrine. These lungs that once inhaled your breath became a shrine…After you died I could not hold a funeral. And so my life became a funeral.
And she denounces, what could easily be an echo of current Israeli “Amalek” doctrine:
At that moment, I realized what all this was for. The words that this torture and starvation were intended to elicit. We will make you realize how ridiculous it was, the lot of you…We will prove to you that you are nothing but filthy stinking bodies. That you are no better than the carcasses of starving animals.
In another novel, I do not part (“I won’t say farewell”; “Impossible Partings”), she tells the story of those who perished, disappeared, were buried, without a farewell. The title is a message to those who disappeared, perished under rubble, or vanished into mass graves without so much as a farewell, a stubborn assertion that they will not be lost, abandoned, forgotten.
Drawing from an image from a relentless dream, and a line gleaned from a pop song overhead in a taxi, she tells the story of the US-instigated genocide of Jeju Island in 1948, where 20% of population were wiped out, bombed, slaughtered, starved to death under the command of the US military government in Korea. This is Gaza–with snow:
Even the infants?
Yes, because total annihilation was the goal.
After the surrender of Japan in WWII, post-colonial Korea had been assigned to the shared trusteeship of the USSR and the US. On August 15th of 1945, the Korean people declared liberation and the establishment of the Korean People’s Republic, a liberated socialist state consisting of thousands of self-organized workers’ and peasant collectives. The USSR was supportive, but the US declared war on these collectives, banned the Korean People’s Republic, forced a vote in the South against the will of the Koreans who did not want a divided country, and unleashed a campaign of politicide against those who opposed or resisted this. Jeju island was one of the places where the carnage reached genocidal proportions, before cresting into the full-scale omnicide of the Korean war. That genocide was covered up and erased for half a century, where not even a whisper of truth was permitted. For this, Han Kang uses over and over again the metaphor of snow:
A cluster of forty houses, give or take, had stood on the other side, and when the evacuation orders went out in 1948, they were all set on fire, the people in them slaughtered, the village incinerated.
She told me about how, when she was young, soldiers and police had murdered everyone in her village…
The next day, having heard the news, the sisters returned to the village and wandered the grounds of the elementary school all afternoon. Searching for the bodies of their father and mother, their older brother and eight year old sister. They looked over the bodies that had fallen every which way on top of one another and found that, overnight, a thin layer of snow had covered and frozen upon each face. They couldn’t tell anyone apart because of the snow, and since my aunt couldn’t bring herself to brush it away with her bare hands, she used a handkerchief to wipe each face clean…
Snow, for Han Kang “is silence”. Rain, she says, “a sentence”.
This is a theme in her books: cleaning bodies, brushing away blood and snow with precision, to see things clearly, trying to recover some dignity and truth, no matter how excruciatingly painful. The book itself is an excavation–a relay race, as she put it–passed along through three women characters, each one excavating further into the harrowing truth–“to the bottom of the ocean” of horror.
The snow that fell over this island and also in other ancient, faraway places could all have condensed together inside those clouds. When, at five years old, I reached out to touch my first snow in G—, and when, at thirty, I was caught in a sudden rain shower that left me drenched as I biked along the riverside in Seoul, when the snow obscured the faces of the hundreds of children, women and elders on the schoolyard here on Jeju seventy years ago…. who’s to say those raindrops and crumbling snow crystals and thin layers of bloodied ice are not one and the same, that the snow settling over me now isn’t that very water?
As she uncovers—like “a tough homework assignment”–the Bodo league massacres, the Jeju massacres, Vietnam massacres, Gwangju, she tries to thread all of them together in an unbroken thread using “an impossible tool”–the flickering heart of her language–animated by an “extreme, inexhaustible love” and the stubborn refusal to turn away:
Han Kang recalls her very young self when she first became aware of the atrocities in a secret chapbook, and thus formed the question that centers her writing:
After it had been passed around the adults it was hidden away in a bookcase, spine facing backwards. I opened it unwittingly, having no idea what it contained.
I was too young to know how to receive the proof of overwhelming violence that was contained in those pages.
How could human beings do such things to one another?
On the heels of this first question, another swiftly followed: what can we do in the face of such violence?“
Han Kang’s question is the question that should animate all of us, as we, too, realize what is happening.
None of can unsee what is unfolding in front of our eyes. The French have an appropriate wording:
Nous sommes en train d’assister à un genocide: we are witnessing—that is to say, assisting, in smaller or greater ways—a genocide. As Jason Hickel puts it:
The images that I see coming out of Gaza each day—of shredded children, piles of twisted corpses, dehumanisation in torture camps, people being burned alive—are morally indistinguishable from the images I have seen in Holocaust museums. Pure evil on a horrifying scale.
What can we do? Each of us must confront this question individually and collectively, and all of us, together, must take action. None of us will be forgiven for turning away.
Storm-destroyed house, coastal Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Do you know that you’re in good hands with Allstate? Or how about State Farm? Do you know that, like a good neighbor, State Farm is there? Of course you do. Insurance companies have been blasting slogans like these at us for years now. In 2022 alone, Allstate spent $617 million on advertising. State Farm spent an even more whopping $1.05 billion.
But if insurance giants like State Farm truly rated as our “good neighbors,” they’d be behaving — in real life — quite a bit differently than their award-winning advertising suggests.
In hurricane-plagued Florida, for instance, State Farm last year denied 46.4 percent of homeowner claims, refusals that directly impacted over 76,000 households.
“Property insurers who deny legitimate claims,” notes Martin Weiss, the founder of the nation’s only independent insurer rating agency, “are sending the implicit message, ‘If you don’t like it, sue us.’”
To add injury to that insult, Weiss adds, Florida governor Ron DeSantis had just before last year signed into law new legislation that makes policyholder lawsuits against insurers “far more difficult.”
For recently retired Allstate CEO Michael Tipsord, insurance industry lobbying victories along that Florida line have helped him pocket some stunning personal rewards. Tipsord pulled down $24.4 million in compensation two years ago, almost $4 million more than his industry’s second-highest 2022 CEO pay total. Tipsord had pocketed even more, $24.5 million, in 2021.
“CEOs are living high on the hog while increasing insurance premiums for people living paycheck to paycheck,” the Consumer Federation of America’s Michael DeLong charged last October. “Insurers are telling regulators that ordinary consumers have to pay much more for auto and home insurance because the companies are struggling with inflation and climate change, but they are quietly handing CEOs gigantic bonuses.”
Overall, DeLong’s Consumer Federation reports, the chief execs at America’s ten largest personal insurance lines collected over a quarter-billion dollars in CEO compensation for their services in 2021 and 2022.
If we really had a “good neighbor” at Allstate — or any other insurance giant — those companies wouldn’t have been spending recent years denying relief to the victims of climate change. They would have been insisting instead that lawmakers crack down on the fossil-fuel corporate giants doing so much to foul our planet.
Top insurers did make an early feint in that direction over a half-century ago. Way back in 1973, notes Peter Bosshard, the global coordinator of the U.S.-based Insure Our Future campaign, “the insurance industry first warned about climate risks.” But that warning, in the years to come, wouldn’t stop insurers from “underwriting and investing in the expansion of fossil fuels.”
Giant insurance companies that actually took climate science seriously, Bosshard observes, would have been “suing fossil fuel companies, to make polluters pay for the growing costs of climate disasters and keep insurance affordable for climate-affected communities.”
Insurers haven’t been doing any of that.
”Insurers talk a lot about their climate commitments and supporting their clients through the energy transition, but this is plain greenwashing,” charges Ariel Le Bourdonnec, a Reclaim Finance insurance activist. “They are still profiting from providing cover that allows companies to develop new fossil fuel projects. Insurers could be a force for change, but instead they are undermining climate action.”
Other critics are emphasizing that insurance industry execs have gone beyond “greenwashing” to “bluelining,” as Lilith Fellowes-Granda, a Center for American Progress associate director, points out. These execs are increasing prices and withdrawing services “from regions they perceive to be at high environmental risk.” These moves typically hit hardest on the “communities most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.”
Climate activists are advocating for a variety of policy changes to reverse these dynamics, everything from making sure property insurers must share the risks they cover to ensuring underserved communities access to affordable insurance.
Another reform approach might more quickly catch the attention of top insurance industry boards of directors: tying an insurance company’s tax rate to the ratio between that company’s CEO pay and the paychecks of the firm’s workers.
Inside the insurance industry, as in every other major U.S. economic sector, that ratio between CEO and worker has soared over recent decades.
In 2023, the chief executive at Chubb Ltd., Evan Greenberg, took home $27.7 million, enough to make him that year’s top-paid American property and casualty insurer. Those millions added up to 452 times more than the annual pay of the typical Chubb employee. In 2022, Greenberg pocketed a mere 346 times his company’s typical employee pay.
Back in 1965, the Economic Policy Institute noted last month in its latest annual CEO pay report, the top execs at major U.S. corporations only averaged 21 times what typical American workers earned. Nearly a quarter-century later, in 1989, CEOs were still only averaging 61 times worker pay.
How could we restore greater equity to corporate compensation and, at the same time, give top corporate executives an incentive to care about more than simply maximizing their own personal compensation? Lawmakers at the state and federal levels have over recent years advanced dozens of proposals that tie corporate tax rates to the size of the gap between top executive and worker pay.
In all these proposals, the higher a corporation’s CEO-worker pay ratio, the higher that corporation’s tax rate.
The Institute for Policy Studies has compiled an exhaustive guide to these CEO-worker pay gap proposals. Maybe the winds of Hurricane Milton will help give these moves the momentum they need to turn into law — and give top execs a reason to care about something more than the size of their own personal pay.
“Who’s got time for poems when the world’s on fire?” asks Aja Monet in the heart-achingly beautiful and gut-wrenchingly honest ‘For Sonia.’ Her answer, it becomes clear, is that it is precisely when the world’s on fire that the movement, such as it is, needs the nourishment and meaning and soul that poetry provides more than ever. But Monet will not offer words to comfort and soothe at the expense of truth. “These days it hurts to write,” the track continues, “Every sentence is a false promise.”
Her debut album, 2023’s outstanding ‘When the Poems Do What They Do’ is a phenomenal emotional journey through what it means to be a human struggling to remain human in today’s confusing and collapsing world. Joy, pain, celebration, grief, triumph, bewilderment, love, disappointment, hope, and the struggle against hopelessness: it is all there, over an intricate soundscape that in turns rises, throbs and challenges like its subject matter.
Monet, who hails from Brooklyn, NYC but now lives in LA, was in Britain earlier this year to perform at We Out Here, the jazz festival founded by Gilles Peterson. I caught up with her shortly afterward.
Monet describes herself as a ‘surrealist blues poet,’ and when I ask about her influences, she explains that the blues is the thread running through all of them: “I grew up in the nineties so of course hip hop was a huge cultural phenomenon for my generation and in the streets that I lived and walked through in NYC. My mum was an avid listener of Soul and R and B, so that was huge for my family, and reggae was also a major part of my upbringing. But I would say that all of it stems from the blues. You can find traces of the blues in all of that music, it’s what connects it all; the connective tissue for African music on these shores and beyond. The blues is an African tradition, and we can hear traces of it in every genre of music. So it is what informs me, it’s what I am listening for in any song and is at the core of all my major influences.”
Certainly, Monet’s music has the healing quality that comes with the blues: expressing the pain in order to move through it. But for me, Monet’s performances with her band often evoke the call-and-response relationship between a Baptist preacher and their congregation, and I wonder whether the church had any influence on the young Monet: “As I became a teenager, I spent a lot more time in the church. I was grappling with some of the issues in my life and in my family – and church, and the relationship to God, was the place that I needed to go to to resolve things that did not make sense or that felt unjust. The church was a cornerstone for so many reasons.”
In terms of her art, however, the influence related more to honesty and integrity than to any particular style or form: “One of the things about the church is that when you go to praise and worship, you can’t lie in the music, because you are playing for God. It’s one of the few places where music is potent in terms of the truth and the authenticity of the expression – it’s not about bravado, or ego, or how cute you look, or how well you’re speaking, or how amendable you are to people’s feelings. It’s about conveying the depth and the full expression of God and all of its complex sentiments and realities. And that is something you can find in every walk of African life. African spirituality is crucial to who we are and how we make music and what we do; when I think of the church, and my time in the church, I think of African spirituality.”
Part of this spirituality, to my mind, is the collective participation in cultural and artistic expression – breaking down, that is, the barriers between ‘creators’ and ‘consumers’ of art. Monet suggests that “the first responsibility for all people is to themselves and to their self-determination – and the process of art is part of that process of self-determination. Art should be democratized; all people should find themselves living and moving in the world as artists or creators and innovators of their own conditions and their own realities. We will always need meaning-making, and we will always need value-making, and that is cultivated in the creative process and in how one arranges or approaches their imagination. There is a lot of work to be done in the psyche and the cultural imagination of our people, so this is literally the organizing space of the heart, of the mind, and of the spirit. When I sit down to create, the most transformative part of creating art is not the product that people consume, or the peace that people receive, it is the actual process and where one goes and how one delves into that process. That, I think, is the true test of the value of art. Democratizing the creative process for the people is part of what one would hope to do.”
This does not mean, however, that there is no such thing as an ‘artist’, characterized by their distinctive contribution to the field of cultural creation: “There are people that are gifted and are called upon to create in ways that are transcendent of role or title or marketing or capital, and there is no study, no amount of technical skill that will ever amount to some of the ways that gifts are poured into people who are born with those gifts. There are people that are born with a voice and you don’t know why or how and it will stop you in your tracks and there is nothing you can do about it; they couldn’t be doing anything else, and everything else in their life continues to return them back to that gift and to that craft. There are things that one can study and things that can never be taught.”
Over time, Monet discovered that there were some questions that the church could not answer: “As I became older I became more politicized and I learned that the things I was going through, and my family and community was going through, weren’t problems for just me or us and that, whilst, yes, God could help with problems at school or with rent or whatever, there were systemic things that were put into place to make it impossible for us to take care of those things. So whilst we were looking for some lofty figure in the sky spiritually to come help us solve our problems, we learned that there were authoritative figures that made policies that impacted our communities. So then one becomes transformed by that education – it is no longer just you and your problem; now it becomes a collectivized issue that we must organize around and learn the ways that we can combat it and shift and change it. At least that was my hope.”
From an early age, Monet began to throw herself into that organizing. She has a long-standing connection with the Haitian community in Miami and organized artists and cultural workers whilst still at College to raise funds for water filtration systems following the Haitian earthquake of 2010; the cultural connections made through that project made ripples that are still manifesting today.
She is also a long-term participant in the Palestine solidarity movement. I ask her about the deep historical and ongoing connection between the Black Radical tradition in the USA and the Palestine liberation movement, but the question seems to trouble her: “There is a real strange obsession with romanticizing oppressed people’s connections within our struggle. These connections are wonderful, I think we ought to tell those stories – but the reason it is important to be in solidarity with Palestine is not because I’m a Black person in America that knows what it is like to deal with oppression – it is just what is decently humanly right. This isn’t a discussion about perspective; there is no angle other than the truth, and the truth is, people deserve basic human decency and shelter and education and protection and the right to self-determination and to their land. I don’t see it any other way. It’s not about being white or Black or Palestinian or African; it’s just right or wrong. I get a little annoyed that we continue to try to use identity politics to pull people in because I just don’t know how the human heart will survive that sort of insult to character and to common sense. I am disgusted with the fact that people are clinging to their flags, their skin color and their tropes around who they think they are and who they want to be – in spite of,and at the expense of, the genocide that’s taking place, not just in Palestine, but in the Congo and in Sudan. It’s just preposterous, it literally disgusts me. Am I part of my tradition and part of the legacy of the African people who have tried to stand up and to do what’s right? For sure. But at this point – come on now.”
It feels to me like the current moment is very much one of demoralization, at least for those who have (or had) hopes for a world based on equality and justice. The collapse of the movements around Corbyn and Sanders (in which Monet was actively involved) have left a program of annihilation of surplus populations abroad, and persecution of the survivors and their relatives at home, as seemingly the only political game in town in both the USA and Britain, and increasingly the rest of the world also. I ask Monet where she sees hope today, and whether there are any movements from which she takes inspiration. Her answer is – as they all have been – unexpected: “I don’t know if I am inspired by much of anything by humans of late. I love people, don’t get me wrong. I’m not so pessimistic that I do not believe in the power of people to organize and change the conditions of their lives – but I feel less entitled to believe that it is just humans alone who will shift the conditions of our reality. There are other kinds of intelligences, other kinds of information that we must listen to and adhere to and that’s what is inspiring me: the invisible, the unlanguageable, the things that are not so much about our ego and who we are and what we are going to do to change it.
“Nature has the wisdom. The land, the earth, the air, the water, the wind, the sun, the sky – those are the places that I have seen the most change that has inspired me. When the lockdown happened, and everybody had to sit the fuck down and contend with themselves, more change took place across the globe than years and years of organizing by humans who thought that they were the greatest agents of change. The water cleaned up, the air cleaned up – it’s fascinating what humans not doing human shit can mean for the world.
“I’m learning and I’m growing because I age and I lose people and I watch the shifting of conditions in light of losing people. I understand things different than I did when I was younger; and death and grief have an incredible way of teaching you some of the most invaluable lessons. I don’t have the answers, I’m not so easily inspired these days – but music and art has kept me going. And some of the artists and cultural workers that I love inspire me because of the ways they are tapping into other realms and forms of information – and the better one can get at listening to, harnessing and facilitating that, the better we can get to be as people. So we’ll see.”
Monet’s commitment to authenticity–to calling it as she sees it, and not just as she thinks she is supposed to see it – seems to me to be exactly what we need in these times. We need to acknowledge the bleakness of our situation, and the limits of our ability to change it, to get to the place – intellectually, emotionally and spiritually – where we can begin to chart a way forward. It seems to me that the politics her analysis is pointing towards is that of a more holistic – more nature-centred and less anthropocentric – form of Marxism, freed from the shackles of colonel modernity and human entitlement. A Marxism infused with African spirituality – and the blues.
An edited version of this piece originally appeared in the Morning Star
“Gaza’s Are Trapped in a Prison That Was Decades in the Making,”
– Mark Landler, New York Times, October 8, 2024.
Gaza is a “big outdoor prison.”
– British Prime Minister David Cameron, July 28, 2010.
Fourteen years after British Prime Minister David Cameron charged the Israels with creating a “big outdoor prison” in Gaza, the New York Times finally acknowledged that the Palestinians in Gaza have been “effectively imprisoned…in a 141-square-mile strip of land between Egypt and Israel that has become a killing zone.” On the same day, the Washington Post finally acknowledged that it would take “80 years to rebuild all of Gaza’s destroyed homes” if the pace of construction “mirrors previous conflicts.” Israel has bombed Gaza on several previous occasions, but the past year has seen “an unprecedented scale of destruction,” according to the United Nations”
A U.N. satellite assessment recorded that Israeli shelling and airstrikes have “damaged more than 65 percent of structures in Gaza, including 230,000 homes. The World Health Organization estimates there are at least 10,000 bodies buried beneath these buildings. Clearing the rubble and getting to these bodies will be particularly difficult because approximately 70 percent of Gaza’s road network has been damaged. The toxic dust and debris from Israeli bombings over the years has caused long-term health problems, according to Natasha Hall, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Toxic byproducts from the current war are likely to pollute Gaza’s already limited water supply, according to the Washington Post, and will undoubtedly cause many more serious health issues.
The mainstream media has been very slow to acknowledge the Israeli-Egyptian collaboration that has imprisoned Gaza since Hamas’ election victory in 2005, which endorsed Hamas for its opposition to Israel and for providing welfare, schools and nurseries to the impoverished residents of the territory. Hamas won 75 out of 118 seats, leaving Fatah with 39.
More than two million Palestinians have been in this lockdown for the past 17 years. Since 2007, Israel has banned Palestinians from leaving through Erez, the passenger crossing from Gaza into Israel; it is through Erez that they can reach the West Bank and travel abroad via Jordan. Palestinians are not permitted to operate an airport or seaport in Gaza, and Israeli authorities sharply restrict the entry and exit of goods. As a result, the rebuilding of Gaza will take decades if it is even possible to create a postwar Gaza.
Israel also has made it impossible for Palestinians from Gaza to relocate to the West Bank. Because of Israeli restrictions, thousands of Gaza residents who arrived on temporary permits and now live in the West Bank are unable to gain legal residency. Although Israel claims that these restrictions are related to maintaining security, there is ample evidence that the main motivation is to limit Palestinian demography across the West Bank, whose land Israel seeks to retain, in contrast to the Gaza Strip.
Egypt is no better than Israel when it come to the humiliation of Palestinians trying to leave Gaza for legitimate medical reasons. The parents of a 7-year-old boy with autism and a rare brain disease said they sought to travel for medical treatment for him in August 2021; Egyptian authorities only allowed the boy and his mother to enter. The mother said their journey back to Gaza took four days, mostly as a result of Rafah being closed. During this time, she said, they spent hours waiting at checkpoints, in extreme heat, with her son crying nonstop. She said she felt “humiliated” and treated like “an animal,” observing that she “would rather die than travel again through Rafah.”
The laws of occupation permit occupying powers to impose security restrictions on civilians, but they also require them to restore public life for the occupied population, which Israel has never done and which the international community has ignored. A prolonged occupation, such as Gaza, demands that the occupier must develop narrowly tailored responses to security threats; these must minimize restrictions on rights. Israel has never done so, and the mainstream media has never paid any attention to the debilitating effect of Israeli unwillingness to respect the human rights of Palestinians.
For years, Human Rights Watch has documented the cases of Palestinians in Gaza who were denied permission to reach the West Bank or East Jerusalem for professional and educational opportunities. In 2019, a Gaza soccer team had a match scheduled on the West Bank with a rival in a match that would determine the Palestinian representative in the Asian Cup. The Gaza team applied for permits for the entire 22-person team and 13-person staff, but Israel granted permits to only four people, only one of whom was a player.
For the past 17 years, Israel has limited Gaza’s use of electricity, forces sewage to be dumped in the sea, makes sure that water remains undrinkable, and endures fuel shortages that cause sanitation plans to be shut down. Netanyahu’s actions ensures the perpetuation of desperation among those forced to live in these conditions. Such desperation would lead any human being to believe that violent resistance is the only recourse. Is there a comparison here with the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943?
No one can ever justify the brutality of the Hamas invasion of Israel on October 7th, but the brutal conditions that Israel and Egypt have imposed on the citizens of Gaza help to explain the motivations for that invasion. There are two compelling factors that stand out in any examination of the crisis in Gaza: the persistent intransigence of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Israeli unwillingness to pursue a diplomatic and political solution to the Palestinian tragedy. Like a long line of Israeli politicians, Netanyahu favors total humiliation of the Palestinian people. The Hamas invasion of October 7th was inevitable.
This is the season of patriotism in Latin America as many countries commemorate their independence from colonial powers. From July to September, public plazas in countries from Mexico to Honduras and Chile fill with crowds dressed and painted in national colors, parades feature participants costumed as independence heroes, fireworks fill the skies, and schoolchildren reenact historical battles.
Beneath these nationalist displays ripples an uneasy tide: the colonial legacies that still tie the Americas to their Iberian conquerors. And as the calendar turns to October, another holiday highlights similar tensions – Columbus Day.
Since 1937, the U.S. has observed the holiday on the second Monday of the month, commemorating the explorer’s 1492 arrival in the New World. It remains a federal holiday, even as many states and cities rename it “Indigenous Peoples Day,” rejecting Christopher Columbus as a symbol of imperialism.
Most Latin Americans, meanwhile, know Oct. 12 as “Día de la Raza,” or Day of the Race, which also celebrates Columbus’ arrival in the New World and the tide of Iberian conquistadors that followed. But commemorating the event is all the more charged in these countries, home to the Spanish Empire’s most lucrative territorial assets and sweeping spiritual conquests. Days before taking office in September 2024, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum reiterated her predecessor’s demand that the king of Spain apologize for the genocide and exploitation of the conquest 500 years ago.
As a historian of Latin America, I’ve paid attention to the ways calendars signal a nation’s “official” values and how countries wrestle with these holidays’ meanings.
This moment of contact began Mexico’s 500-year transformation into a “mestizo” nation: a hybrid identity with largely European and Indigenous roots. During the colonial period, racial differences were codified into law, and those with “pure” Spanish bloodlines enjoyed legal privileges over the racially mixed categories that fell below them. The 19th century ushered in independence from Spain and liberal ideas that promoted racial equality – in principle – but in reality, European influence prevailed.
It was Spain that first proposed the Día de la Raza, held on Oct. 12, 1892, to commemorate the 400-year anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas – implying a celebration of Spain’s contributions to the mestizo racial mixture.
The celebration was part of a bid to fortify nationalism in Spain, as the waning colonial power continued its retreat from the hemisphere it controlled for the better part of four centuries. Spain also hoped to export the invented holiday to the Americas, strengthening trans-Atlantic cultural affinities tested by the United States’ growing sway. Across the Americas, Día de la Raza came to be synonymous with celebrating European influence.
In Mexico, the 1892 commemoration empowered members of the political elite who promoted European investments and culture as the model for modernizing the country. They used the occasion to extol the civilizing influence of the “madre patria,” or motherland, justifying the conquest and colonialism as a period of benevolent rule.
Mestizo nationalism
Only a few years later, however, the U.S. victory in the Spanish-American War swept the last vestiges of Spanish empire from the hemisphere. Spain’s exit made way for dual – and dueling – phenomena: rising patriotic spirit in Latin American countries, even amid increasing economic pressure and cultural influence from the U.S.
The 1910 Mexican Revolution ignited mestizo nationalism, which soon extended to other countries. In 1930s Nicaragua, Augusto Sandino started a revolution to oust the occupying U.S. Marines while calling for the unification of the “Indo-Hispanic Race.” Meanwhile, Peruvian intellectual José Mariátegui envisioned a modern nation built upon the ideals of a collective, reciprocal society, modeled by the Incan ayllu system. And in Mexico, beauty pageants celebrating native features gained popularity among the social classes accustomed to perusing department stores for Parisian imports.
Yet a tendency to emphasize Spanish cultural ancestry rather than Indigenous ones persisted. In the late 1930s, for example, October issues of Mexican children’s magazine Palomilla celebrated Columbus’ arrival as a heroic entry that provided the region with a common language and religion.
Pan American Day
Meanwhile, the U.S viewed Pan-Hispanic sentiments as a threat: Spanish economic goals, cloaked in racial and cultural solidarity.
The Pan American Union, an inter-American organization headquartered in Washington, saw the new date as an opportunity to forge common traditions across the hemisphere. It vigorously promoted Pan American Day celebrations, primarily among schoolchildren, exhorting teachers to implement games, puzzles, pageants and songs created in Pan American Union offices.
The holiday met enthusiastic reception in the United States. Midwesterners donned sombreros for parades, and Spanish language clubs in California hosted pageants celebrating the flags of American nations.
But Latin American commemoration was tepid at best. The Organization of American States, the successor to the Pan American Union, still recognizes Pan American Day. However, it never gained traction in Latin America and faded in the U.S. during World War II.
Recent shift
Latin America’s ambivalence toward holidays to commemorate the colonizers has taken a turn since 1992. The 500-year anniversary of Columbus’ arrival corresponded with yet another form of colonialism, in many Latin Americans’ eyes, as a new wave of multinational corporations colluded with heads of state to tap the continent’s oil, lithium, water and avocados.
Activists used the commemoration to call attention to lingering economic, social, racial and cultural inequities. In particular, the anniversary inspired Indigenous rights movements – some of which commemorated an “anti-quincentenary” to celebrate “500 years of resistance.”
In some places, renaming the holiday has drawn attention to Indigenous rights and culture. Bolivians, for example, draped a statue of a European monarch in a traditional “aguayo” garment, transforming her into an Indigenous woman. However, critics suggest that removing the holiday’s reference to the colonizers erases an important reminder of the conquest and its painful legacy.
As in the U.S., monuments to colonizers are coming down – including the monument to Columbus that occupied a conspicuous spot on La Reforma, one of Mexico City’s most-traversed thoroughfares.
In its place is a new installation: a purple silhouette of a girl with her fist raised, in honor of Latin America’s women activists. She heralds a new era of statues lining La Reforma, and heroes for the future – not mired in the colonial legacies of the past.
No one had expected that one year would be enough to recenter the Palestinian cause as the world’s most pressing issue, and that millions of people across the globe, would, once again rally for Palestinian freedom.
The last year witnessed an Israeli genocide in Gaza, unprecedented violence in the West Bank, but also legendary expressions of Palestinian sumud, or steadfastness.
It is not the enormity of the Israeli war, but the degree of the Palestinian sumud that has challenged what once seemed to be a foregone conclusion to the Palestinian struggle.
Yet, it turned out that the last chapter on Palestine was not yet ready to be written, and that it would not be Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who would write it.
The ongoing war has exposed the limits of Israel’s military machine. The typical trajectory of Israel’s relationship with the occupied Palestinians has been predicated on unhindered Israeli violence and deafening international silence. It was largely Israel that alone determined the timing and objectives of war. Its enemies, until recently, seemed to have no say over the matter.
Yet, this is no longer the case. Israeli war crimes are now met with Palestinian unity, Arab, Muslim and international solidarity, and early, albeit serious signs of legal accountability as well.
This is hardly what Netanyahu was hoping to achieve; just days before the start of the war, he stood in the United Nations General Assembly Hall carrying a map of a ‘New Middle East’, a map that had completely erased Palestine and the Palestinians.
“We must not give the Palestinians a veto over (..) peace,” he said, as “Palestinians are only 2% of the Arab world.” His arrogance didn’t last long, as that supposedly triumphant moment was short-lived.
Embattled Netanyahu is now mostly concerned about his own political survival. He is expanding the war front to escape his army’s humiliation in Gaza and is terrified by the prospect of an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court.
And as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) continues to look into an ever-expanding file, accusing Israel of deliberate genocide in the Strip, the UNGA, on September 18, resolved that Israel must end its illegal occupation of Palestine within a year from the passing of its resolution on the matter.
It must be utterly disappointing for Netanyahu – who has worked tirelessly to normalize his occupation of Palestine – to be met with total and thundering international rejection of his schemes. The advisory opinion of the ICJ, on July 19, declaring that “Israel’s presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (is) unlawful” was another blow to Tel Aviv, which despite unlimited US support, failed to change international consensus on the illegality of the occupation.
In addition to the relentless Israeli violence, the Palestinian people have been marginalized as political actors. Since the Oslo Accords in 1993, their fate has been largely entrusted to a mostly unelected Palestinian leadership, which, with time, monopolized the Palestinian cause for its own financial and political interests.
The sumud of the Palestinians in Gaza, who have endured a year of mass killing, deliberate starvation and total destruction of all aspects of life, is helping reassert the political significance of a long-marginalized nation.
This shift is fundamental as it runs opposite to everything that Netanyahu had tried to achieve. In the years prior to the war, Israel seemed to be writing the final chapter of its settler colonial project in Palestine. It had subdued or co-opted the Palestinian leadership, perfected its siege on Gaza and was ready to annex much of the West Bank.
Gaza became the least of Israel’s concerns, as any discussion around it was confined to the hermetic Israeli siege and the resulting humanitarian, though not political crisis.
While Palestinians in Gaza have tirelessly implored the world to pressure Israel to end the protracted siege, imposed in earnest in 2007, Tel Aviv continued to conduct its policies in the Strip according to the infamous logic of former top Israeli official, Dov Weissglas, who explained the rationale behind the blockade as “to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”
But a year into the war, Palestinians, due to their own steadfastness, have become the center of any serious discussion on a peaceful future in the Middle East. Their collective courage and steadfastness have neutralized the Israeli military machine’s ability to exact political outcomes through violence.
True, the number of dead, missing or wounded in Gaza has already exceeded 150,000. The Strip, impoverished and dilapidated to begin with, is in total ruins. Every mosque, church or hospital has been destroyed or seriously damaged. Most of the region’s educational infrastructure has been obliterated. Yet, Israel hasn’t achieved any of its strategic objectives, which are ultimately united by a single goal, that of silencing the Palestinian quest for freedom, forever.
Despite the unbelievable pain and loss, there is now a powerful energy that is unifying Palestinians around their cause, and the Arabs and the whole world around Palestine. This shall have consequences that will last for many years, long after Netanyahu and his ilk of extremists are gone.
It would be good to be able to recognize fascism when you see it. Sight is our dominant sense (light travels faster than sound) and provides us warning. In addition, because “fascist” is an epithet as well as political term, it must be used carefully. In 1942, a New Hampshire Jehovah’s Witness named Chaplinsky was arrested after calling a Rochester city marshal a “damned fascist.” The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the arrest on the grounds that the expression constituted “fighting words,” excluded from constitutional protection. Recent court decisions in the U.S. have widened speech freedoms, but the word “fascist” remains highly charged, underlining the need for historical and political discretion.
Because of Hitler and Mussolini, it’s relatively easy to recognize fascism retrospectively. Though Hitler preferred the term “National Socialism” and Mussolini “fascism”, their regimes had enough in common that we can use the single word, fascism, to describe them both. They were violent, imperialist, racist, anti-Semitic, anti-individualist, and nationalist. “Palingenetic ultranationalism,” a phrase coined by Roger Griffin in 1991, describes their shared, underlying ideology: interwar fascists believed they were spurring the revolutionary rebirth and modernization of a decadent nation for the benefit of racially superior citizens. Fascism is hierarchical and corporatist; it endorses existing aristocracies of birth and wealth; it is capitalism in its desperate, parasitical phase.
Fascist iconography
While the Germans worshipped ancient Norsemen and Aryans, the Italian fascists venerated the Roman Empire. They embraced its symbols – the fasces (a bundle of sticks with an ax in the middle) and she-wolf. That the legendary founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, were suckled by a wolf, allowed the Italian fascists to proclaim their own decent from a fierce and ruthless beast. Like the Roman emperors, Caesar Augustus and Marcus Aurelius, Mussolini and his followers were bent on imperial conquest. Mussolini was IlDuce, the name derived from the Latin dux, or Roman military commander.
The attainment of national and racial destiny, according to the fascist idea, is the result of individual will. Both Italian and German regimes were premised upon the “leadership principle” — in German Führerprinzip — the idea that power and wisdom reside in a single, great leader and that the people owe him loyalty and obedience. In 1936, Hitler and Mussolini quietly agreed to support each other politically and militarily; two years later, they openly formalized the relationship in a “Pact of Steel.” By the Spring of 1945, both were dead – the one by suicide, the other killed by a mob of ordinary Italians.
Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will, 1935.
Because of the indelible stain it left, fascist iconography is memorable: the toothbrush moustache and stiff salute, swastikas, goose-stepping troops, the SS symbol, black shirts, and the ancient fascist emblem itself. Here are two stills from Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary/propaganda film Triumph of the Will, about the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg; And here are two propaganda photos of Mussolini reviewing his troops. Together, they represent militarism, masculinism, elitism, nationalism and the Führerprinzip,
Photographers unknown, Mussolini speaking (Rome, 1940) and Reviewing Troops (Rome, c. 1938).
This iconography was so well known that it could be satirized by Charlie Chaplin in his popular, 1940 film, The Great Dictator. The story concerns a Jewish barber (no name given) who bears an uncanny resemblance to the dictator of Tomania, Adenoid Hynkel. Both roles are played by Chaplin. (Rather than Führer, he’s called the “phooey” of Tomania.) Hynkel is allied with, but also in comic competition with Benzio Napaloni, the dictator of Bacteria, played by Jack Oakie.
The movie is vague on the details of Nazi politics and ideology. But the best three minutes of the movie – Hynkel’s ballet with a giant balloon-globe — effectively suggests the imperial ambitions of fascist leaders. It includes many of the icons of Nazism: Hitler’s moustache, uniforms, jackboots, eagle, and swastikas (the latter so well-known they can be changed into doubled x’s). The balloon/globe — which bursts at the end — suggests both Hitler’s violence and self-destructiveness.
Still from The Great Dictator.
Not until the end of the war, did Chaplin fully learn about another Nazi iconography: piles of emaciated dead bodies, hollow-eyed survivors, showers that sprayed poison gas instead of water, industrial-sized crematoria, and the slogan, Arbeit Macht Frei (“work sets you free”), above the entrance to the forced-labor/death camp at Auschwitz. During the Nuremberg trials (1945-47), documentary films played in court showing these icons of genocide. They were edited and replayed as newsreels all over the world.
From concentration camp films, shown at Nuremberg Trials, Nov. 29, 1945.
Fascist architecture and art in Italy and Germany
If that were all there was to the visuality of fascism, the question in my title would be answered. Look for swastikas, goosesteps, stiff arm salutes, jackboots, or the sign Arbeit Macht Frei, and there you’ll find fascism. But the visual culture of interwar fascism is obviously much more extensive than that, encompassing fine art, architecture, and design. And it’s quite varied — up to a point.
Giuseppe Terragni, Casa del Fascio, Como,1932–36. (Photographer unknown).
During their first decade in power, fascist authorities in Italy allowed a wide variety of artistic and architectural styles to co-exist and even flourish. Avant-garde modernism, with its focus on structure and function, appealed to a state striving to develop or modernize its infrastructure. Many civic buildings, schools and railway stations — such as theSanta Maria Novella (1932-35) by Giovanni Michelucci and others — present an austere, modernist aspect. The archetypal example of fascist modernism however, is Giuseppe Terragni’s Casa del Fascio, in Como (1932–36). The building, with its planarity, grid, and lack of ornament, draws upon Walter Gropius’s innovations at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, and Gerrit Rietveld’s Schroeder House, among other buildings. Tarragni was part of Gruppo Sette, a coalition of Italian rationalists. In their 1926 manifesto, they rejected Expressionism and Futurism in favor of “logic and rationality.”
Marcello Piacentini, Palace of Justice, in Milan,1932-40. (Photographer unknown).
Mussolini himself in 1933 proclaimed rationalism the correct architectural style for fascist Italy, but internal and external competition forced a change, and by the middle 1930s, a more traditional and ostentatious architecture – an architecture of power — was favored. An example is Marcello Piacentini’s colossal Palace of Justice, in Milan (1932-40). It speaks the language and rhythm of classicism – tripartite horizontal and vertical division of the main facade, rusticated lower level, tripartite central portals, half columns between the windows, plus cornices and entablature. But ornamentation (capitals, fluted columns, pediments and decorative moldings) is reduced or eliminated. Classical antiquity is recalled not by detailing, but sheer monumentality — it has 1200 rooms — and lavish materials, chiefly marble and bronze.
In Nazi Germany, the modern movement in architecture – meaning the Bauhaus and its planning and design offshoots — was cast aside as soon as Hitler came to power in 1933, though no theory or program of art and architecture ever took its place. Instead, modern artists and designers and more traditional ones were forced into competitions which the former could not possibly win. Thus, classicism – at once buffed-up and stripped down –was the chosen idiom for major architectural commissions such as the Haus der Deutschen Kunst in Munich (1936) by Paul Troost, and the New Reich Chancellery in Berlin by Albert Speer (1939).
Postcard of Haus der Deutschen Kunst, Munich, 1936.
Albert Speer, New Reich Chancellery, 1939. (Photographer unknown).
Speer was of course the kingpin of Nazi architecture. He was Hitler’s favorite and later named Minister for Armament and War Production, in which post he commanded hundreds of thousands of slave laborers. Speer claimed to have no architectural program or theory, only a desire to tailor his plans to the Fuhrer’s will. Indeed, his buildings, and Nazi public architecture in general, are not programmatic expressions of Nazi ideas about race, Lebensraum, Judeo-Bolshevism or the Führerprinzip. In both architectural and symbolic terms, they are banal in the extreme. They are however, effective instruments of political strategy, in particular, war planning. Parade grounds, Zeppelin fields, stadiums, party headquarters, the Chancellery and more were built with a speed and scale intended to drum up enthusiasm for war. They were public demonstrations that Germany was a powerful and ambitious nation. Only a state with a legitimate claim on empire would build on such an imperial scale and at such expense. “On the long walk from the entrance to the reception hall,” Hitler said of the Chancellery, “they’ll get a taste of the power and grandeur of the German Reich!” Two over life-sized figures by Arno Breker, Hitler’s favorite sculptor, flank the entrance court; on the left is Partei and on the right, Wehrmacht. They are roughly derived from the famous ancient Greek bronze figure of Zeus, hurling a thunderbolt.
Albert Speer, New Reich Chancellery, grand gallery, 1939. (Photographer unknown.)
Arno Breker, Partei and Wehrmacht, outside, New Reich Chancellery, 1939. (Photographer unknown.)
As in architecture, so in art. There was no single aesthetic criteria guiding Nazi or fascist painting and sculpture, except the consistent preference for traditional over modern art. That, however, was not unusual. Representational art was the preference across Europe, Russa, and the Americas. It could be used for indoctrination, persuasion or entertainment, and was deployed by progressive as well as regressive institutions and states. Despite the inroads of modernism, traditional art retained its popular appeal. It was familiar – available to be seen in churches, newspapers, advertising, and movies – and therefore comforting. The great modernists on the other hand — Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Klee, etc – despite their considerable success, were little understood by the broad public.
Where fascist or totalitarian states differed from capitalist democracies, was in their enforcement of the preference for traditional art. In Nazi Germany, this was most clearly manifested in the contest between the annual Great German Art Exhibitions, inaugurated in 1937, and the Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937-38. The former arose from an open
Great German Art Exhibition, Haus der Deutschen Kunst, 1937 (photographer unknown).
Catalogue for Great German Art Exhibition, 1937; Adolf Ziegler, The Four Elements, 1934.
invitation to artists in 1937 to submit works for national exhibition at the new, Haus der Deutschen Kunst in Munich. After seeing the submissions, which included some modern and expressionist works, Hitler was furious. A few years before, he had called modern artists “incompetents, cheats and madmen.” He thereupon fired the jurors (who had been chosen by propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels) and appointed his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffman to curate the selection. In addition, he endorsed
Visitor at Degenerate Art exhibition, Munich, 1937.
Goebbels’ proposal to mount a didactic exhibition of the rejected artists and many others, under the rubric “Entartete Kunst”. The “degenerate artists” included much-derided German expressionists such as Grosz, Dix, Kirchner, Marc, and Nolde, as well as dozens of others, including Impressionists, Post-Impressionists (including Van Gogh), Cubists, Dadaists, Surrealists and more. The works were hung helter-skelter among wall texts that read, for example: “nature, as seen by sick minds”, “madness becomes method”, “revelation of the Jewish racial soul” and “deliberate sabotage of national defense” (the latter displayed anti-war imagery by Dix, Grosz and others). And while the Great German exhibition was lauded in the Nazi-controlled press and the Degenerate exhibition mocked, the former was little visited while the latter attracted nearly 3 million total viewers. It was probably the most visited art exhibition of all time. Whether that represents widespread embrace of the Nazi derision of modern art, or broad endorsement of the works is unclear.
Crowd awaiting entry to Degenerate Art exhibition, Berlin 1938 (photographer unknown).
What does fascism look like today?
Fascism doesn’t have a light switch with an on/off setting. It may be found in capitalist democracy, just as democracy may be discovered in the recesses of fascist states. Maybe it’s better to say fascism is controlled by a dimmer switch. Under Donald Trump, turned up quite high. Under Biden it has been dialed down, but still glows in the background and sometimes flares up, like in the current U.S. president’s growing anti-immigrant rhetoric, or his consistent support for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and now Lebanon. That’s fascism by proxy.
George Bergstrom, The Pentagon, Arlington, VA, 1941-43.
However, it’s difficult to speak of fascist art and architecture in the U.S. The amount of public patronage of art is tiny, and what exists is extremely diverse in form and style. There are certainly municipal, state and federal buildings that serve deeply oppressive, even fascistic, purposes: prisons, psychiatric hospitals, military bases, and some schools. And a few buildings, like the U.S. Pentagon resemble in monumentality and style, buildings by Speer. (It was built just two years after the completion of The New Reich Chancellery, and may have been influenced by it.) But these are outliers and marked by contradiction. For example, when the Pentagon was completed in between 1943, it was the only public building in the state that had integrated lunchrooms and toilet facilities. In that respect, it may have been the least fascist building in Virginia!
Sue Coe, Rio Grande, 2023. (Courtesy the artist).
Today, the U.S. the border wall with Mexico – actually, dozens of different and colliding walls, fences, and natural barriers – is an icon of fascism. So are the concentration camps (detention centers) that temporarily house immigrants. But the image of these facilities — in photographs and memory — have also made them a resource of anti-fascism, as apparent in drawings and linocuts by British-born, U.S. artist Sue Coe. For example her linocut titled Rio Grande, depicts immigrants caught up in razor wire and drowned on the Texas/Mexico border. This actually happened on Jan. 14, 2023. (For more such images, please see our new book, The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism.)
A more clear-cut diagnostic of fascism is the MAGA hat. Trump often wears one when he gives speeches, and regularly repeats the phrase “make America great again.” Here’s a few lines from a speech he gave in 2023, that has since become standard at rallies: “Illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation. They’re coming from prisons, from mental institutions, from all over the world. Without borders and fair elections, you don’t have a country. Make America great again.”
MAGA is today emblazoned on millions of caps, T-shirts, yard-signs, flags and more, It’s an expression of palingenetic ultranationalism — almost. By proposing the revival of an earlier time, it’s more conservative than revolutionary; and the “greatness” it promises is not imperialist. There is no discussion of “lebensraum”. Indeed, Trump’s other major slogan, “America First” is isolationist, dating back to Charles Lindberg’s America First movement, which aimed to head off U.S. participation in World War II. But given Trump’s rhetoric about Iran and China, as well as his proposals to increase military spending and massively update and expand the nation’s nuclear arsenal, I’d argue that his policies are in fact expansionist – in that sense, fully consonant with fascist militarism and imperialism. Trump’s rallies suggest he has a war strategy. They are intended to mobilize thousands of followers who will, if needed, storm U.S. voting stations, state capitals and the capital in Washington to overturn an unwelcome election outcome.
As we have seen, fascism has no settled or essential iconography. It can’t. Wherever it appears, it draws from motifs and ideologies that are distinctive to that particular nation. In 1939, a Yale professor and Methodist minister named Halford Luccock gave a lecture at Riverside Church in New York City. Observing the growing strength of Nazism and fascism abroad and a rising fascist movement in the U.S., he warned his audience:
“When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled ‘made in Germany’; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, ‘Americanism.’…The high-sounding phrase ‘the American way’ will be used by interested groups, intent on profit, to cover a multitude of sins against the American and Christian tradition, such sins as lawless violence, tear gas and shotguns, denial of civil liberties.”
Huey Long, governor of Louisiana from 1928-32, himself often called a fascist, said: “American Fascism would never emerge as Fascist, but as a 100 percent American movement; it would not duplicate the German method of coming to power but would only have to get the right President and Cabinet.” Fascism, as I said at the beginning of this brief survey, is easy to see in retrospect, but not in prospect. However, when it appears right in front of you, identification becomes simple – signs and symbols appear everywhere. As we approach the U.S. election, we can clearly witness one political party’s tight embrace of fascism – but seeing it doesn’t mean we can easily stop it.
Considered Angola’s crown jewel by many, Lobito is a colorful port city on the country’s scenic Atlantic coast where a nearly five-kilometer strip of land creates a natural harbor. Its white sand beaches, vibrant blue waters, and mild tropical climate have made Lobito a tourist destination in recent years. Yet under its shiny new facade is a history fraught with colonial violence and exploitation.
The Portuguese were the first Europeans to lay claim to Angola in the late sixteenth century. For nearly four centuries, they didn’t relent until a bloody, 27-year civil war with anticolonial guerillas (aided by the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces) and bolstered by a leftist coup in distant Lisbon, Portugal’s capital, overthrew that colonial regime in 1974.
Lobito’s port was the economic heart of Portugal’s reign in Angola, along with the meandering 1,866-kilometer Benguela Railway, which first became operational in the early 1900s. For much of the twentieth century, Lobito was the hub for exporting to Europe agricultural goods and metals mined in Africa’s Copperbelt. Today, the Copperbelt remains a resource-rich region encompassing much of the Democratic Republic of Congo and northern Zambia.
Perhaps it won’t shock you to learn that, half a century after Portugal’s colonial control of Angola ended, neocolonialism is now sinking its hooks into Lobito. Its port and the Benguela Railway, which travels along what’s known as the Lobito Corridor, have become a key nucleus of China’s and the Western world’s efforts to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources in our hot new world. If capitalist interests continue to drive this crucial transition, which is all too likely, while global energy consumption isn’t scaled back radically, the amount of critical minerals needed to power the global future remains unfathomable. The World Economic Forum estimates that three billion tons of metals will be required. The International Energy Forum estimates that to meet the global goals of radically reducing carbon emissions, we’ll also need between 35 and 194 massive copper mines by 2050.
It should come as no surprise that most of the minerals from copper to cobalt needed for that transition’s machinery (including electric batteries, wind turbines, and solar panels) are located in Latin America and Africa. Worse yet, more than half (54%) of the critical minerals needed are on or near Indigenous lands, which means the most vulnerable populations in the world are at the most significant risk of being impacted in a deeply negative fashion by future mining and related operations.
When you want to understand what the future holds for a country in the “developing” world, as economists still like to call such regions, look no further than the International Monetary Fund (IMF). “With growing demand, proceeds from critical minerals are poised to rise significantly over the next two decades,” reports the IMF. “Global revenues from the extraction of just four key minerals — copper, nickel, cobalt, and lithium — are estimated to total $16 trillion over the next 25 years. Sub-Saharan Africa stands to reap over 10 percent of these accumulated revenues, which could correspond to an increase in the region’s GDP by 12 percent or more by 2050.”
Sub-Saharan Africa alone is believed to contain 30% of the world’s total critical mineral reserves. It’s estimated that the Congo is responsible for 70% of global cobalt output and approximately 50% of the globe’s reserves. In fact, the demand for cobalt, a key ingredient in most lithium-ion batteries, is rapidly increasing because of its use in everything from cell phones to electric vehicles. As for copper, Africa has two of the world’s top producers, with Zambia accounting for 70% of the continent’s output. “This transition,” adds the IMF, “if managed properly, has the potential to transform the region.” And, of course, it won’t be pretty.
While such critical minerals might be mined in rural areas of the Congo and Zambia, they must reach the international marketplace to become profitable, which makes Angola and the Lobito Corridor key to Africa’s booming mining industry.
In 2024, China committed $4.5 billion to African lithium mines alone and another $7 billion to investments in copper and cobalt mining infrastructure. In the Congo, for example, China controls 70% of the mining sector.
Having lagged behind that country’s investments in Africa for years, the U.S. is now looking to make up ground.
Zambia’s Copper Colonialism
In September 2023, on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in India, Secretary of State Antony Blinken quietly signed an agreement with Angola, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the European Union to launch the Lobito Corridor project. There wasn’t much fanfare or news coverage, but the United States had made a significant move. Almost 50 years after Portugal was forced out of Angola, the West was back, offering a $4 billion commitment and assessing the need to update the infrastructure first built by European colonizers. With a growing need for critical minerals, Western countries are now setting their sights on Africa and its green energy treasures.
istoric moment,” President Joe Biden said as he welcomed Angolan President João Lourenço to Washington last year. Biden then called the Lobito project the “biggest U.S. rail investment in Africa ever” and affirmed the West’s interest in what the region might have to offer in the future. “America,” he added, “is all in on Africa… We’re all in with you and Angola.”
BothAfrica and the U.S., Biden was careful to imply, would reap the benefits of such a coalition. Of course, that’s precisely the kind of rhetoric we can expect when Western (or Chinese) interests are intent on acquiring the resources of the Global South. If this were about oil or coal, questions and concerns would undoubtedly be raised regarding America’s regional intentions. Yet, with the fight against climate change providing cover, few are considering the geopolitical ramifications of such a position — and even fewer acknowledging the impacts of massively increased mining on the continent.
In his book Cobalt Red, Siddharth Kara exposes the bloody conditions cobalt miners in the Congo endure, many of them children laboring against their will for days on end, with little sleep and under excruciatingly abusive conditions. The dreadful story is much the same in Zambia, where copper exports account for more than 70% of the country’s total export revenue. A devastating 126-page report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) from 2011 exposed the wretchedness inside Zambia’s Chinese-owned mines: 18-hour work days, unsafe working environments, rampant anti-union activities, and fatal workplace accidents. There is little reason to believe it’s much different in the more recent Western-owned operations.
“Friends tell you that there’s a danger as they’re coming out of shift,” a miner who was injured while working for a Chinese company told HRW. “You’ll be fired if you refuse, they threaten this all the time… The main accidents are from rock falls, but you also have electrical shocks, people hit by mining trucks underground, people falling from platforms that aren’t stable… In my accident, I was in a loading box. The mine captain… didn’t put a platform. So when we were working, a rock fell down and hit my arm. It broke to the extent that the bone was coming out of the arm.”
An explosion at one mine killed 51 workers in 2005 and things have only devolved since then. Ten workers died in 2018 at an illegal copper extraction site. In 2019, three mineworkers were burned to death in an underground shaft fire and a landslide at an open-pit copper mine in Zambia killed more than 30 miners in 2023. Despite such horrors, there’s a rush to extract ever more copper in Zambia. As of 2022, five gigantic open-pit copper mines were operating in the country, and eight more underground mines were in production, many of which are to be further expanded in the years ahead. With new U.S.-backed mines in the works, Washington believes the Lobito Corridor may prove to be the missing link needed to ensure Zambian copper will end up in green energy goods consumed in the West.
AI Mining for AI Energy
The office of KoBold Metals in quaint downtown Berkeley, California, is about as far away from Zambia’s dirty mines as you can get. Yet, at KoBold’s nondescript headquarters, which sits above a row of trendy bars and restaurants, a team of tech entrepreneurs diligently work to locate the next big mine operation in Zambia using proprietary Artificial Intelligence (AI). Backed by billionaires Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, KoBold bills itself as a green Silicon Valley machine, committed to the world’s green energy transition (while turning a nice profit).
It is in KoBold’s interest, of course, to secure the energy deposits of the future because it will take an immense amount of energy to support their artificially intelligent world. A recent report by the International Energy Agency estimates that, in the near future, electricity usage by AI data centers will increase significantly. As of 2022, such data centers were already utilizing 460 terawatt hours (TWh) but are on pace to increase to 1,050 TWh by the middle of the decade. To put that in perspective, Europe’s total energy consumption in 2023 was around 2,700 TWh.
“Anyone who’s in the renewable space in the western world… is looking for copper and cobalt, which are fundamental to making electric vehicles,” Mfikeyi Makayi, chief executive of KoBold in Zambia, explained to the Financial Times in 2024. “That is going to come from this part of the world and the shortest route to take them out is Lobito.”
Makayi wasn’t beating around the bush. The critical minerals in KoBold mines won’t end up in the possession of Zambia or any other African country. They are bound for Western consumers alone. KoBold’s CEO Kurt House is also honest about his intentions: “I don’t need to be reminded again that I’m a capitalist,” he’s been known to quip.
In July 2024, House rang his company’s investors with great news: KoBold had just hit the jackpot in Zambia. Its novel AI tech had located the largest copper find in more than a decade. Once running, it could produce upwards of 300,000 tons of copper annually — or, in the language investors understand, the cash will soon flow. As of late summer 2024, one ton of copper on the international market cost more than $9,600. Of course, KoBold has gone all in, spending $2.3 billion to get the Zambian mine operable by 2030. Surely, KoBold’s investors were excited by the prospect, but not everyone was as thrilled as them.
“The value of copper that has left Zambia is in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Hold that figure in your mind, and then look around yourself in Zambia,” says Zambian economist Grieve Chelwa. “The link between resource and benefit is severed.”
Not only has Zambia relinquished the benefits of such mineral exploitation, but — consider it a guarantee — its people will be left to suffer the local mess that will result.
The Poisoned River
Konkola Copper Mines (KCM) is today the largest ore producer in Zambia, ripping out a combined two million tons of copper a year. It’s one of the nation’s largest employers, with a brutally long record of worker and environmental abuses. KCM runs Zambia’s largest open-pit mine, which stretches for seven miles. In 2019, the British-based Vedanta Resources acquired an 80% stake in KCM by covering $250 million of that company’s debt. Vedanta has deep pockets and is run by Indian billionaire Anil Agarwal, affectionately known in the mining world as “the Metal King.”
One thing should be taken for granted: You don’t become the Metal King without leaving entrails of toxic waste on your coattails. In India, Agarwal’s alumina mines have polluted the lands of the Indigenous Kondh tribes in Orissa Province. In Zambia, his copper mines have wrecked farmlands and waterways that once supplied fish and drinking water to thousands of villagers.
The Kafue River runs for more than 1,500 kilometers, making it Zambia’s longest river and now probably its most polluted as well. Going north to south, its waters flow through the Copperbelt, carrying with them cadmium, lead, and mercury from KCM’s mine. In 2019, thousands of Zambian villagers sued Vedanta, claiming its subsidiary KCM had poisoned the Kafue River and caused insurmountable damage to their lands.
The British Supreme Court then found Vedanta liable, and the company was forced to pay an undisclosed settlement, likely in the millions of dollars. Such a landmark victory for those Zambian villagers couldn’t have happened without the work of Chilekwa Mumba, who organized communities and convinced an international law firm to take up the case. Mumba grew up in the Chingola region of Zambia, where his father worked in the mines.
“[T]here was some environmental degradation going on as a result of the mining activities. As we found, there were times when the acid levels of water was so high,” explained Mumba, the 2023 African recipient of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize. “So there were very specific complaints about stomach issues from children. Children just really wander around the villages and if they are thirsty, they don’t think about what’s happening, they’ll just get a cup and take their drink of water from the river. That’s how they live. So they’ll usually get diseases. It’s hard to quantify, but clearly the impact was there.”
Sadly enough, though, despite that important legal victory, little has changed in Zambia, where environmental regulations remain weak and nearly impossible to enforce, which leaves mining companies like KCM to regulate themselves. A 2024 Zambian legislative bill seeks to create a regulatory body to oversee mining operations, but the industry has pushed back, making it unclear if it will ever be signed into law. Even if the law does pass, it may have little real-world impact on mining practices there.
The warming climate, at least to the billionaire mine owners and their Western accomplices, will remain an afterthought, as well as a justification to exploit more of Africa’s critical minerals. Consider it a new type of colonialism, this time with a green capitalist veneer. There are just too many AI programs to run, too many tech gadgets to manufacture, and too much money to be made.
Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin observed of Russian history that there were “decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen.” The U.S. has entered a similar hinge moment in our history, and the next few weeks could determine our national prospects.
As a former senior U.S. national security official, I spend much time deliberating with colleagues around the world on geopolitical risks and trends. It is by now a commonplace that unprecedented uncertainty governs the international scene. Great power rivalries and regional instabilities are escalating. New technologies have changed the playing field. Furthermore, the U.S. itself has become a major source geopolitical risk.
I tell my foreign interlocutors – sitting and former officials, clients, other analysts – that it is necessary to monitor at least three tv screens simultaneously: the electoral horserace, the perils of transition, and the policy picture amid polycrisis. This multidisciplinary split-screen view is essential to grasp the dynamic complexity of the challenges before us and to plot course corrections. It will not be an easy task.
The Horserace
The first screen features the domestic electoral horserace in its last weeks: who’s up, who’s down in the myriad polls, what surprises does October hold, what else could affect voter turn-out. This drama is nothing new.
But the sheer volatility and intensity of this election cycle is new. For the first time since 1968, a president eligible for reelection has stepped back in favor of a largely untested vice president who did not obtain the party’s nomination through a competitive process. And a bloody-minded former president hell-bent on revenge is engaging in increasingly extremist rhetoric.
Trump briefly appeared to be an electoral shoo-in – his climax occurred in the bloody, fist-pumping “never surrender” days right after the first assassination attempt in Pennsylvania and his dramatic coronation at the RNC. In a spectacle reminiscent of World Wrestling Federation theatrics, Trump was so self-assured of victory that he doubled his bet on MAGA nativism rather than having truck with RINOs or other centrists.
Yet Trump has been struggling to regain the same level of confidence ever since Joe Biden was effectively forced out of the race due to perceived infirmity. Biden may have played a historically necessary role in defeating Trump in 2020, but in the eyes of his own party he had necessarily became political history in 2024.
Biden’s unceremonious ouster was achieved thanks to the months-long tandem efforts of his former boss Barack Obama and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, likely with the tacit cooperation of Vice President Kamala Harris herself. After all, it was Harris who quickly seized the mantle as party nominee. This power grab is probably the most impressive feat on a resume otherwise thin in executive decision-making and suggests more moxie in Harris than commonly appreciated.
Trump has been petulant about the “switcheroo” – fulminating about what was nothing short of a political coup within the Democratic party, but an entirely lawful one. As a result Trump has been deprived of his familiar old punching bag.
Despite palpable if not universal Democratic relief at the replacement of Biden, the electoral picture remains suspenseful. While the truculent Trump remains consumed with the quest for personal power and the need to stay out of jail, a cautious Harris avoids talking about anything that could be mistaken for a compelling strategy of national renewal, whether on economic or foreign policy. The United States, a nation with unparalleled capacity for adaptation, is badly in need of a paradigm shift in major policy areas and can ill afford drift and delay. More on this below.
Veteran political watcher and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan has archly summarized the contest as “Awful vs. Empty.” It’s clear that a reversion to the authoritarian and erratic Trump would be more than awful for the Republic, but it is not obvious that Harris has a credible plan to cure the country’s polarized malaise and reverse the incipient slide into chaos, notwithstanding her platitudes about “joy,” “a new way forward,” and “an American-built opportunity economy.” Who doesn’t want those fine things? More worrying, erstwhile co-pilot Harris is trapped paying lip service to Biden’s shaky legacy.
To be clear, one should unequivocally prefer Empty to Awful, but it’s hard to pretend that Harris’ Chauncey Gardiner act is what compelling leadership looks like. Not being Trump might be just enough to win, but it is not enough to govern and lead. Harris may yet fill in the empty spaces and measure up.
The Perils of Transition
The second screen looks at the perils of transition – and specifically the risk that election day might not be decision day.
The period between Election Day and the inauguration on January 20,is an unduly long, fundamentally unnecessary but constitutionally-required transition as America awaits the certification of the election and eventual investiture of the new president. The transition used to be taken for granted as a formality, but that is no longer the case.
The main drama of the transition is not merely the maddening passage of time but Trump’s preemptive threat to challenge the election results. The former president has essentially taken the position that he cannot rightly lose this election. The “big lie” which he uses to question the 2020 result after the fact has long since morphed into a tool to try to delegitimize the 2024 election in advance as “rigged.”
The Trump team has already unleashed massive lawfare tactics to change or challenge election rules at the state level. They are also prepared to dispute certification of the electoral count with a view to final judicial appeal to the Trump-stacked Supreme Court.
Only a Blue Wave and overwhelming Harris victory in the electoral college could forestall the risk of an unstable transition. Four of the six presidential elections since 2000 have been decided by fewer than 120,000 votes in a handful of states — in 2020 it was about 44,000 votes in three states — and the 2024 ballot is likely to follow that pattern.
Of course Trump could win free and fair. But he is also capable of trying to steal a close election he would otherwise win.
The most dire and cynical lesson Trump learned in 2020 was to strike first: not to wait for all the votes to be canvassed and counted and for a winner in a close contest to be declared. Instead, he knows it’s imperative to disrupt the counting in enough localities and states as quickly as possible to leave the outcome in doubt.
The underhanded goal would be to short-circuit the electoral college, maintain control of a majority in the House and force a so-called contingent election in Congress where a majority of Republican-controlled state delegations could pick the winner under the obsolete 12th Amendment procedures, most likely against the will of the popular majority.
Some of the leading tactical scenarios for ending up with a contingent election have been described in my co-authored three-part series “Dancing in the Dark.” Another variant of a disputed electoral endgame can be found here. Most of these troubled transition scenarios spring from the fact that the venerable old U.S. constitution provides a shaky framework for an indeterminate election and leaves too much authority over the presidential election with the states, making ample room for mischief.
One might say Trump is going full Venezuela, prepared to bend the constitution, to incite opposition street protests and to make a Maduro-style announcement of his own victory regardless of the facts. Trump has all but declared civil war by other means on the American Republic. This fact is noticed abroad, and has an impact on U.S. creds as a lamp of democracy, a fact seemingly lost on the foreign policy types which continues to preach democracy promotion as though nothing out of the ordinary is happening at home.
The vulnerability of our long transition period should make Americans envy parliamentary systems such as the UK’s where a new prime minister can take office on the morning after an election with a simple majority of seats.
Yet Biden’s lame duck status as president with plenipotentiary powers until January 20 and a new if worrying ambit of executive immunity thanks to the recent landmark Supreme Court ruling also presents an interesting possibility to stop electoral sabotage in progress rather than wait for a January 6th sequel.
Both the Congressional hearings in 2021 and the Jack Smith federal case against Trump have amply demonstrated that the insurrection and coup attempt were the result of a wide conspiracy as clumsy as it was brutal. What about now, in 2024? Is there any reason to believe a similar criminal conspiracy is not already underway in the run-up to this election?
The failure to prosecute and convict the capo for January 6th has fueled a dangerous sense of impunity. Will the sitting President at some point feel compelled to step in, whether through law enforcement or emergency powers to protect the constitution? The fact that these are valid and pressing questions highlights the uncertainty of our national predicament.
Policy Picture Amid “Polycrisis”
The third screen we must monitor has to do with policy, particularly national security and international relations. U.S. foreign policy has seemingly been on autopilot for some time while the world is increasingly on fire, literally and figuratively.
So much time and energy are spent by the political elite on the first two screens – the topsy-turvy horserace and the novel perils of transition – that there is little coherent policy engagement with the “polycrisis” engulfing the planet, including climate change, migration, widening inequalities and continuing poverty, the unregulated rise of artificial intelligence and the cold and hot wars threatening to plunge us into deeper conflict, perhaps even WW3.
Our national policy conversation is increasingly sophomoric and unserious. Trump’s response is a series of atavistic slogans about nationalism, protectionism and promises of quick fixes. By contrast, Harris alternates between vowing to stay the course of Biden’s ineffectual foreign policy, wedded as it to a paradigm of U.S. power hat no longer corresponds to reality, and committing to building a more “lethal” military. For its part, the U.S. Congress is a theater of the absurd, engaged chiefly in grandstanding and obstruction.
But we do not exist in a vacuum. And our track record is plain to see even if we engage in selective memory. The rest of the world noticed that after 9-11 the U.S. engaged in twenty years of failed military interventions and regime change exercises in the Greater Middle East, violating sovereignty at will and causing havoc and massive loss of life, all under cover of “the war on terror” and “nation-building.” One of the basic rules of power is that if you use it and fail to achieve your objectives, your power diminishes. Judgment is as important as raw might.
The world has noticed that the U.S. abandoned the people of Afghanistan after making piles of high-minded but unrealistic promises of transformative support, quite similar to those currently being made to Ukraine in the name of “defense of democracy.” The Vietnam War may be a distant memory, but it too was a muscular and failed democracy promotion expedition couched in dubious metaphors such as “the domino theory” and “strategic hamlets.”
The world has noticed, too, that Gaza at the hands of an unbridled U.S. friend looks a lot like Mariupol at the hands of an unhinged U.S. foe. There are many significant differences between the two cases but a common denominator is that the U.S. has failed to find a way to stop the cycle of escalation in either place — indeed, we may be underwriting it in both places.
The Global South has noticed that the U.S. and its allies did nothing to stop Ethiopia’s slide into brutal civil war and are now doing little to deal with impending famine in Sudan on a scale not seen in modern times.
The rest of the world has noticed the U.S. walking away from the gospel of free trade after Washington concluded that a rising China could be gaining the edge in platform technologies, supposedly by stealing intellectual property, and in access to critical minerals, allegedly by plundering Africa and other sources. The message is that globalization was acceptable as long as the U.S. won the competition.
It has often been asserted that globalization is a fact, not a theory. True enough, the world is objectively interdependent. Yet the once authoritative mantras of ineluctable global cultural and normative convergence thanks to open borders for trade and investment and the pursuit of market efficiencies have long faded from the prestigious panel discussions at Davos.
None of this is to lay sole blame on the U.S. for the global polycrisis – other actors share responsibility and have been engaged in astounding geopolitical brinkmanship – but we should focus on getting our own act together before lecturing others. Choices have consequences and it’s high time for a reckoning about our own ledger over the past quarter century.
Two pillars of the U.S. global security strategy – commitment to a binary struggle between democracy vs. authoritarianism and espousal of the “rules-based international order” – are fracturing in practice and need self-critical adjustment. Credibility matters, and we are losing it.
The “Blob” – meaning the Washington foreign policy establishment comprising pious liberal interventionists and pumped-up traditional hawks who play at being Churchillian and insist that America’s wars are by definition “good wars” and our economic dominance is intrinsically beneficent – would dismiss all such criticisms as forms of whataboutism, appeasement and declinism. They are right to lobby for a better world, but wrong to tar skeptics who counsel greater strategic prudence.
Not only does the Blob tend to self-congratulate, but they manage to self-perpetuate. It is striking that so few members of the foreign policy elite responsible for what Zbigniew Brzezinski aptly called “suicidal statecraft” have lost their jobs over the past few decades. Instead, many of them have been retained and promoted across Administrations in their respective parties. The primacy of loyalty and patronage over insight and track record could be one reason foreign policy experts are held in such low regard.
Can the U.S., once a pioneering architect of multilateralism, adjust to a new power balance? A major reckoning lies ahead if the U.S. wishes to maintain its preponderant global status, dynamism and relevance.
Make no mistake about it. The volatility on the first two screens contributes to the risks we see on the policy screen. And the rest of the world is watching the show. Foreign actors monitor — and often misinterpret — America’s internal disarray. They also act on those (mis)perceptions. Some of them also try to meddle in our election through disinformation and other methods, partly as payback for a long history of U.S. interference in the internal affairs of other countries.
Thus, we see U.S. allies, foes and those in the vast grey middle alike hedging their strategic bets, testing the envelope, not knowing which version of America will emerge: isolationist, liberal interventionist or something new? The policy whiplash from Bush-Cheney to Obama to Trump to the current Biden interregnum has left U.S. predictability is in tatters. The central questions now are whether and how credibility can be restored in a significantly changing world.
To do so, the US must define and pursue sustainable long-term policies based on a hard-headed assessment of national interests as opposed to abstract values alone. As other analysts have argued, an effective rethink will require a revival of the principled pragmatism of George Kennan who counseled the U.S. “to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming” in favor of “our immediate national objectives.”
The Democrats have no monopoly on wisdom on these policy issues. And, in fairness, Trump has raised numerous valid policy questions about the way the U.S. wields power in the world and minds its own affairs. Indeed, Trump’s unexpected rise within the Republican party in 2016 was based on impertinent takedowns of the post-9/11 Bush-Cheney doctrine as well as the globalist neoliberal ideology espoused by Wall Street masters of the universe. Trump, however, almost always fails to answer convincingly the strategic questions he might justifiably pose. Thus, the messenger taints the message, further crippling our national deliberation.
A meaningful strategic reckoning will include the following three elements:
First, we need a revival of robust diplomacy backed up by the judicious use of power. Perhaps as a result of the insouciant post-Cold War triumphalism of the Clinton-Gore Administration (in which I served) and the go-it-alone bravado of the Bush-Cheney Administration, the U.S. State Department has evolved into an agency that prefers to speak only with friends, allies and mentees. Senior officials who dare to open channels of dialogue with dangerous U.S. adversaries risk professional banishment.
The U.S. is unilaterally and unnecessarily surrendering its considerable advantages in diplomatic knowhow and prowess. Today almost anybody who advocates for conflict resolution through diplomacy is liable to be labeled an appeaser. We are weaker for it.
Every attempt at negotiation is not a repeat of “Munich,” referring to Chamberlain’s failed strategy of appeasement of Hitler or “Yalta,” referring to FDR and Churchill’s supposed betrayal of Eastern Europe. The U.S. should embrace not forget its skills and experience at diplomacy with difficult adversaries.
On the Korean Peninsula , where U.S. forces were direct combatants – my father served in the U.S. Army under General Douglas MacArthur — we negotiated a ceasefire that has held since 1952, allowing our ally South Korea gradually to emerge from dictatorship to democratic prosperity.
Under Nixon, the U.S. was the architect of the “one China” formula to keep the peace across the Strait and allow Taiwan to emerge from dictatorship to democratic prosperity over decades, yet now Washington hawks recklessly promote Taiwan’s declaratory independence, baiting conflict with an irritable and irredentist Beijing.
At Dayton in 1995, the U.S. and Europeans and Russia negotiated with a triumvirate of Yugoslav war criminals to stop the massive killing in Bosnia and put in place a peace plan that has largely held in the Balkans since then.
These historic U.S.-led deals were all imperfect diplomatic solutions based on pragmatic compromise and prudence, both of which are moral virtues in a policy universe of suboptimal choices and necessary tradeoffs like the one we inhabit. Our key interlocutors in all those situations were not nice people.
Second, a strong dose of unsentimental historical perspective in place of political correctness and self-righteous moralizing. This requires knowledge of history – yes, context matters — and encouragement of open debate.
Obama, who was probably the most perceptive internationalist to occupy the White House in recent times, once commented: “We are a superpower, and we do not fully appreciate the degree to which, when we move, the world shakes… Our circumstances have allowed us to be ahistorical. But one of the striking things when you get outside the United States is—Faulkner’s old saying, ‘The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.’ . . . People remember things that happened six hundred years ago. And they are alive and active in their politics.” The circumstances of America’s ahistoricism may have expired.
Ideological rigidity comes in many forms. The 9-11 Commission identified “group think” as a major contributing cause of the intelligence failure. That problem has metastasized. Not since the McCarthy era has doctrinaire pablum quashed critical thinking and robust policy debate as it does today among the national security elite and pundit class.
A corollary of historical perspective is awareness that buying time can be strategic and that containment is often better than confrontation. “Give me liberty or give me death” is a heroic sentiment but can be a lousy national security strategy. In a contentious world, “die another day” is not a bad maxim for life or for foreign policy.
A third and most difficult mental challenge is that the U.S. will need to accept a new type of multilateralism if it hopes to enjoy a bigger role in reshaping it. To rebuild credibility and effectiveness in a crowded world of cultural differences with a flatter distribution of hybrid power, the U.S. must embrace multilateralism that is both more multipolar and more multicultural.
After the end of the Cold War, the U.S. was intellectually spoiled by a period of essentially unipolar multilateralism in which “the rules-based international order” looked suspiciously like the rule of America’s law. The U.S. habit of imposing the latest evolution of its own legal norms on other countries, typically via financial sanctions and conditionality, while at the same time exempting itself from multilateral treaties such as the International Criminal Court and the Law of the Sea, is a telltale sign of policy solipsism. It represents “our way,” meritorious as it may be, masquerading as universalism. The best that can be said of this foreign policy strategy is that it was viable as long as we could get away with it.
Foreign accusations of U.S. unilateralism are often self-serving but they also represent the flip side of America’s self-appointed “exceptionalism” touted by the liberals and hawks alike. Evidence suggests the hegemonic post-Cold War moment has run its course. The U.S. should get more used to the ways of reciprocity and mutuality: a world where “sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.”
Yet this need not be the end of American leadership. It’s late in the day for a foreign policy reckoning, but not too late. The good news is that there are inchoate stirrings in both the Democratic and Republican camps (for example, see here and here), which admittedly are not monolithic. However, in the current environment of bitter national polarization, it is unclear whether and how something like a new cross-partisan consensus on durable approaches to national security can be achieved. The next president must strive for it.
The alternative to articulation of a coherent U.S. leadership vision adapted to “the world as it is” will be further descent into domestic disillusionment and international anarchy. That outcome is unequivocally not in the U.S. national interest.
Again, the three screens of America’s ongoing reality tv drama are interlinked. Continued foreign policy drift will lead to more discontent at home. Equally, avoidance of impending election and post-election chaos at home is the necessary, but not sufficient, condition for our forward progress on the wider policy front. And Trump and Harris are the only two choices left on the menu.
To steer away from impending disasters, we will need multidisciplinary insight and bold leadership willing to change directions. The same goes for other major world powers, whom we may influence but do not control. To borrow from futurist Yuval Harari, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the stakes in the current complex nexus of political and policy challenges are existential.
Milton from the International Space Station. Photo: NASA.
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+++
“It is a grave error to imagine that the world is not preparing for the disrupted planet of the future. It’s just that it’s not preparing by taking mitigatory measures or by reducing emissions; instead, it is preparing for a new geopolitical struggle for dominance.”
– Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse
+ Two weeks after Hurricane Helene tore through the Florida panhandle and left a trail of destruction into the Appalachians and beyond, the Atlantic brewed up three more hurricanes, Kirk, Leslie and Milton: the first time three such storms have been swirling simultaneously after September.
+ Helene killed at least 238 people (with hundreds more still missing) in six states (Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia), making it the second-deadliest hurricane to strike the United States mainland in the past 50 years, after Hurricane Katrina, which killed at least 1,833 people in 2005.
+ More than half of Helene’s deaths took place in North Carolina.
+ Only eight hurricanes have killed more than 100 people since 1950. The last time a storm near as deadly as Helene hit the US was Hurricane Harvey in 2017, which killed 103 people after making landfall near Houston.
+ The initial estimates put Helene’s economic impact at $200 billion, making it the costliest storm in U.S. history.
+ Fueled by record-high temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, Helene went from a tropical storm into a category 4 hurricane in only two days.
+ Weather Channel depiction of what a 9-foot storm surge in a coastal Florida town would look like.
+ 15 feet: Helene’s storm surge when it swamped the coastal towns of Keaton Beach and Steinhatchee.
+ 12 feet: Milton’s storm surge at Sarasota.
+ Total rainfall east of the Mississippi during Hurricane Helene:over 40 Trillion gallons. More than 20 Trillion gallons fell across Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, and North and South Carolina, especially over mountainous terrain.
+ Over three days, Helene unleashed more than 30 inches of rain over parts of North Carolina.
+ Human-caused climate change boosted Hurricane Helene’s rainfall by about 10% and intensified its winds by about 11%, scientists said in a new flash study released just as Hurricane Milton threatened the Florida coast less than two weeks later.
+ The Gulf of Mexico has warmed at a rate of 0.34 °F (0.19 °C) per decade since 1970, more than twice the rate of the oceans at large.
+ Upper ocean heat content in the Atlantic during the last 66 years…
+ The destruction inflicted by Hurricane Helene forced the Federal Government’s largest repository of climate and weather data, including all historical billion-dollar storms, offline.
+ Chevron is sponsoring articles about Hurricane Helene as part of a PR blitz to convince people that its new ultra-high-pressure offshore deep-drilling project, Anchor, is climate-friendly.
+ Trump Hurricane Helene: “She [Harris] didn’t send anything or anyone at all, days passed, no help as men, women, and children drowned. North Carolina has eight military bases. FortBragg. They changed the name. We won two wars from FortBragg.”
+ More than 5,000 National Guard troops from at least nine states were dispatched to help with Hurricane Helene relief efforts, including soldiers from Connecticut, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Ohio, New York, South Carolina, Florida, and North Carolina. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has sent personnel to Georgia, as well as dam, levee, and bridge inspection specialists to Tennessee and Kentucky, while others are working to restore temporary power to North Carolina.
+ After the wreckage left by Helene, Florida’s largest property insurer announced it was cutting policies for more than 600,000 homeowners in the state.
+ Milton is the only Category 5 hurricane in Atlantic records (HURDATv2, 1851-present) to exhibit any southeasterly motion vector.
+ According to US Stormwatch, the blue in this image is of birds caught in the Eye of Milton.
Most intense Atlantic hurricanes in history by minimum barometric pressure:
+ St. Petersburg reported nearly seven inches of rain in an hour and 10 inches over 3 hours, more of a drenching than a thousand-year rain event. Thresholds for 1,000-year rain in South Florida:
5.56”/1 hour
7.16”/2 hours 8.50”/3 hours
+ Milton generated more than 130 tornado warnings in South Florida as the storm neared the coast, a new record for Florida…
+ Only seven hurricanes have gone from Category 1 to Category 5 in 24 hours or less. Milton is now the second fastest to do so…
Wilma: 12 hours
Milton: 18 hours
Maria: 18 hours
Felix: 24 hours
Dean: 24 hours
Andrew: 24 hours
Anita: 24 hours
+ The “free” Starlink service Elon Musk offered for communities devastated by Hurricane Helene is not free. It’s just the ordinary 30-day trial, and you must buy the hardware.
+ Trump: “I don’t like the reports that I’m getting about the Federal Government and the Democrat Governor of the State going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas.”
+ Recall that Trump blocked $20 billion in aid for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria killed over 3,000 people and knocked out electricity on the island for 11 months.
+ There are already hundreds of allegations of price-gouging after Hurricane Helene and Milton. Harris was against price-gouging for about two days, then backed down after getting slapped by blowhards like Larry Summers–the Dick Cheney of economics. Nothing since, even though the evidence is everywhere. McDonalds is now suing the meatpacking industry for price-fixing…
+ The State of Florida refused to evacuate more than 1,200 people from the Manatee and Lee county jails, which were directly in the path of Hurricane Milton. (During Katrina, the people who ran the jails of New Orleans decided that 6,500 incarcerated people, some as young as ten years old, would remain “where they belong.”)
+ This was the second warmest September on record (2023). Nearly 15% of the globe had their single warmest September.
+ Foreign aid for fossil fuel projects quadrupled in a single year,found, spiking from $1.2 billion in 2021 to $5.4billin in 2022. Meanwhile, clean energy projects received only one percent of total foreign aid, according to a report from the Clean Air Fund.
+ Helene and Milton have given rise to a new grift: Hurricane Conspiracies….
+ “Yes, they can control the weather,” Marjorie Greene Tweeted on X. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done…Climate change is the new Covid. Ask your government if the weather is manipulated or controlled. Did you ever give permission to them to do it? Are you paying for it? Of course you are.”
+ Trump: “Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants, many of whom should not be in our country…They stole the FEMA money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season.”
+ Of the many false claims about Hurricane Helene, one asserted that North Carolina state police had begun arresting FEMA workers. It was planted on social media by a “mid-level” organizer from the Bundy Ranch standoff.
+ According to Wired, “the weather conspiracies, in particular, ramped up significantly after 2011 when a member of the Rothschild family acquired a controlling stake in Weather Central, a company that provides weather data to media companies.”
+ Give MAGA credit. Their conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds (one of them apparently invested in Weather Central) summoning up pre-election hurricanes out of the Gulf and aiming at red states is at least an admission of human-caused climate change. You’ve come a long way, baby.
+ If you want to make it big on the Net, you must have a theory of why what happened didn’t happen.
+ The Helene Conspiracies spread so broadly across his district that Republican Congressman Chuck Edwards felt obliged to issue this extraordinary press release, which is worth reprinting in its entirety as evidence of just how “weird” things have become…
Over the past 10 days, I have been proud of how our mountain communities have come together to help one another. We have seen a level of support that is unmatched by most any other disaster nationwide; but amidst all of the support, we have also seen an uptick in untrustworthy sources trying to spark chaos by sharing hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and hearsay about hurricane response efforts across our mountains.
While it is true, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to Hurricane Helene has had its shortfalls, I’m here to dispel the outrageous rumors that have been circulated online:
1. Hurricane Helene was NOT geoengineered by the government to seize and access lithium deposits in Chimney Rock.
Nobody can control the weather.
Charles Konrad, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southeast Regional Climate Center, has confirmed that no one has the technology or ability to geoengineer a hurricane.
Current geoengineering technology can serve as a large-scale intervention to mitigate the negative consequences of naturally occurring weather phenomena, but it cannot be used to create or manipulate hurricanes.
2. Local officials have confirmed the government is NOT seizing Chimney Rock.
There was no “special meeting” held in Chimney Rock between federal, state, or local governments about seizing the town.
3. Local officials are NOT abandoning search and rescue efforts to bulldoze over Chimney Rock.
4. Chimney Rock is NOT being bulldozed over.
Rutherford County emergency services personnel are going to extensive lengths to search for missing people, including in debris by using cadaver dogs to locate any remains of individuals trapped in the debris.
Just as every other community in Western North Carolina, Chimney Rock officials are focused first and foremost on recovery efforts, followed by plans to rebuild in the future.
5. FEMA is NOT stopping trucks or vehicles with donations, confiscating or seizing supplies, or otherwise turning away donations.
FEMA does not conduct vehicle stops or handle road closures with armed guards—all road closures are managed by local law enforcement, who prioritize getting resources to their fellow community members.
6. FEMA has NOT diverted disaster response funding to the border or foreign aid.
Disaster response efforts and individual assistance are funded through the Disaster Relief Fund, which is a dedicated fund for disaster efforts.
FEMA’s non-disaster related presence at the border has always been of major concern to me, even before Hurricane Helene, and I will continue to condemn their deployment of personnel to the southern border, but we must separate the two issues.
7. FEMA is NOT going to run out of money.
FEMA officials have repeatedly affirmed that the agency has enough money for immediate response and recovery needs over the next few months.
Secretary Mayorkas’ statement indicating otherwise was an irresponsible attempt to politicize a tragedy for personal gain.
In the coming months, Western North Carolina is going to need more disaster relief funding than is currently available to assist with recovery efforts.
I’m confident that supplemental disaster relief funding, which I am already involved in the process of creating, will be considered in the House once we return to session in mid-November.
8. FEMA cannot seize your property or land.
Applying for disaster assistance does not grant FEMA or the federal government authority or ownership of your property or land.
9. The FAA is NOT restricting access to airspace for Helene rescue and recovery operations.
The FAA or North Carolina Emergency Management will not prohibit anyone from flying resources into Western North Carolina as long as they coordinate their efforts with NC Aviation.
If you are looking to conduct an airdrop of resources but don’t know who to contact for approval, please reach out to my office and we will share that information with you.
10. FEMA is NOT only providing $750 to disaster survivors to support their recovery.
The initial $750 provided to disaster survivors is an immediate type of assistance called Serious Needs Assistance that may be made to individuals in need as soon as they apply for FEMA assistance.
The $750 is an upfront, flexible payment to help cover essential items like food, water, baby formula and medication while FEMA assesses the applicant’s eligibility for additional funds.
This award is just the first step of a longer process to provide financial assistance to disaster survivors in need of federal support.
As an application moves through the review process, individuals are eligible to receive additional forms of assistance for other needs such as temporary housing, personal property and home repair costs, etc.
I encourage you to remember that everything you see on Facebook, X, or any other social media platform is not always fact. Please make sure you are fact checking what you read online with a reputable source.
With my warmest regards,
Chuck Edwards
Member of Congress
+ Before Florida went MAGA, hurricanes that hit Florida were God’s punishment for the sodomy Pat Robertson believed was rampant in Miami…
+ Exxon knew better in 1990, according to its own internal memos…
+ Biden to FEMA Director Deanne Criswell: “Deanne, you’re doing a helluva job.” As our friend Jesse Walker said, “Saying this to a FEMA director is like taunting the gods.”
+ Feeling a little schadenfreude, Michael Brown?
+ Floridian Jeff VanderMeer, author of Annihilation, which was set in St Marks National Wildlife Refuge: “Very little has been learned or implemented since Hurricane Ian, which I co-wrote about for The Nation at the time. With Milton potentially hitting the same area. FL gov needs to get its act together, beyond just getting better about evacuation orders. Florida politicians have failed us while dismantling regulations and pandering to developers. This has made all of us less safe. You simply CANNOT build in parts of Florida without severe repercussions, but the legislature and developers have done so anyway…I want to emphasize this: Florida was more prepared for hurricanes fifteen years ago with much better regulation and land use ordinances than today. Developers have left us much more vulnerable by building in places they shouldn’t have, aided and abetted by Republican governors.”
+ Tim Barker: “My parents live in the Tampa Bay area. I am glad they are allowed to evacuate to safety. I am furious at my own government for denying this right to people in Gaza, which thanks to the US and Israel has become “a mass death trap” (per NYT). The moral stain will be indelible.”
+ As Hurricane Milton raged across the Gulf, Bobby Lindamood, mayor of Colleyville, Texas, suggested nuking the hurricane to “stop its rotation.”
+ Another potential hurricane appeared to be brewing in the western Caribbean that may hit Florida by the end of next week…
+++
+ The “God Bless the USA” Bibles that Trump signs and sells are made by Chinese workers in Hangzhou, China. The cost per book is $3. Trump sells them for $60 to $1,000. These Trump Bibles include copies of the US Constitution that exclude amendments 11-27, including those abolishing chattel slavery and giving women the vote. This recalls the Bibles given to enslaved people in the South and Caribbean in the 19th century, which omitted much of the Old Testament and nearly half of the New Testament because enslavers believed they contained passages that might incite rebellions.
+ Trump speaking in Detroit on Thursday: “The whole country will be like Detroit if Kamala Harris is your president.” Motown for all! Glam it up, baby!
+ Go Tigers!
+ Trump at the same speech to the Detroit Economic Club: “The word grocery. It’s sort of a simple word. But it sort of means like everything you eat. The stomach is speaking. It always does.”
+ Trump: “I could be right now in the most beautiful ocean, on the sand, exposing my really beautiful body – so beautiful – to the sun and the surf. Skin cancer, right? All over the world. Or I could be in Detroit with you.”
+ If his pal RFK, Jr. found Trump on the beach, he might be tempted to collect the hulking body, strap it to the roof of his Bronco and haul it back to Mount Kisco…
+ Trump on tariffs: “Our greatest wealth probably proportionately was in the 1880s.. we had so much much, money all from tariffs… then you had the depression. A lot of people said tariffs caused it. They didn’t; tariffs came in 1932 after the depression.”
+ Ah, yes, a return to the 1880s, the good old Gilded Age, which Twain described as ” a time when one’s spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death. It is a time when one is filled with vague longings; when one dreams of flight to peaceful islands in the remote solitudes of the sea, or folds his hands and says, What is the use of struggling, and toiling and worrying any more? Let us give it all up.”
+ Someone needs to collect these gems into the Trump version of Mao’s Little Red Book…
David Graham: “The paradox of running a campaign against Donald Trump is that you have to convince voters that he is both a liar and deadly serious.”
+++
Stephen Colbert: “Under a Harris administration, what would the major changes be, and what would stay the same?”
Harris: “Sure. Well, I mean, I’m obviously not Joe Biden. So that would be one change. But also, I think it’s important to say, with 28 days to go, I’m not Donald Trump.”
+ This is a profound answer that neatly encapsulates the substance of the Harris/Walz campaign. At this point, however, it’s unclear if Harris is “not Liz Cheney.”
Harris in 2024: “I can’t think of a thing I’d change.”
+ Bernie Sanders: “Congratulations to Vice President Harris for announcing a bold vision to expand Medicare to cover not only home health care, but also vision and hearing.” The vision is so bold that it’s actually less expansive than Biden’s plan, which included vision, hearing and dental!
+ Contrast Harris’ “do your own root canals” Medicare plan with Mexico’s Claudia Scheinbaum’s plan to hire 20,000 doctors and nurses to visit every elderly and disabled person’s home regularly and provide them with free medical attention.
+ The number of migrants crossing into the U.S. illegally at the southern border reached the lowest point of President Biden’s administration in September, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security.
+ Harris now supports extending rules blocking access to asylum to anyone who crosses the border illegally and either returning them to Mexico or rapidly deporting them to their home country–policies she harshly criticized when Trump imposed them in 2019.
+ Acclaimed documentarian Errol Morris made a film on family separations at the border (Separated) produced by MSNBC. But they’re holding the release of the movie until after the elections. An infuriated Morris asks: “Why is my movie not being shown on NBC prior to the election? It is not a partisan movie. It’s about a policy that was disgusting and should not be allowed to happen again. Make your own inferences…What is “Separated” about? Hell, if I know. But it might be about the evil of bureaucracies and self-deception. Thank God, it has its heroes.”
+ Kamala Harris has raised over $1 billion since entering the presidential race. Will this turn out to be the Democrats’ version of Trump’s crypto scam?
+ Bleak but entirely predictable given Harris’ non-campaign new polls by Quinnipiac:
Pennsylvania
—Harris up 49/46
—Casey up 51/43
(3 weeks ago, Harris 51/45; Casey 52/43)
Michigan
—Trump up 50/47
—Senate tied
(3 weeks ago, Harris 50/45, Slotkin 51/46)
Wisconsin
—Trump up 48/46
—Baldwin up 50/46
(3 weeks ago, Harris 48/47, Baldwin 51/47)
+ Harris’s self-defeating campaign may prove too much for even the Swifties to salvage.
+ On Wednesday, Biden and Harris announced a $43 million federal investment in lead-free pipes in Wisconsin. (Note: Flint still doesn’t have safe drinking water…)
+ Teamster head Sean O’Brien: “The Democrats fucked us over for 40 years.” No doubt. But they also bailed out the Teamsters’ pension fund to the tune of $36 billion, around $100,000 per member. Meanwhile, Nevada’s influential Culinary Union warned this week that Harris would lose the state if the election were held today.
+ Kamala Harris on “The View”: “I plan on having a Republican in my cabinet. You ask me what’s the biggest difference between Joe Biden and me, that would be one of the differences.“ Dick for Sec of Defense? Liz for CIA? Has her dad endorsed Jill Stein yet?
+ On Sunday night, Tim Walz told a group of supporters that Harris doesn’t back the benefits for undocumented immigrants he signed into law as governor of Minnesota, including government health care, free tuition, and driver’s licenses, marking a shift from her own past positions.
+ The Harris campaign immediately distanced itself from Tim Walz’s entirely sensible statement, supported by more than 60 percent of the country, that the “electoral college must go.” Why did Harris tap Walz for her running mate if she wasn’t willing to let Walz be Walz. Given her unwavering position on Israel, she might as well have picked Josh “Those Student Protesters Remind Me of the KKK” Shapiro.
+ 45 words in search of a meaning…Kamala Harris on Netanyahu ignoring US calls for a ceasefire/humanitarian pause: “The work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements by Israel in that region that were very much prompted by or a result of many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.”
+ Obama went off on the lack of support for Harris black men during his rally in Pennsylvania on Thursday night:
“Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and reasons for that. And you’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses; I’ve got a problem with that. Because part of it makes me think–and I’m speaking to men directly–part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.
“Women in our lives have been getting our backs this entire time. When we get in trouble and the system isn’t working for us, they’re the ones out there marching and protesting. And now, you’re thinking about sitting out or supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you, because you think that’s a sign of strength, because that’s what being a man is? Putting women down? That’s not acceptable.”
+ Bill Clinton was the first black president who was white and Obama was the first white president who was black. They both used their “blackness” to chastise black men.
+ The internal polling must be really dismal if the DNC is spending some of its war chest on ads attacking…Jill Stein and the Green Party. Where’s the joy, Jaime? Why don’t you pick on someone your own size? Well, perhaps you are…
+++
+ During the trial in Colorado over its merger, an executive at Kroger admitted that the supermarket chain had a program that raised prices at “no-comp stores” —towns where there was no competition, while it kept prices lower in towns with a Safeway (Albertsons).
+ The Irvine, California police department shelled $150,000 on a customized Cybertruck. What will it do? According to the department, it “will principally be driven by DARE officers to schools.”
+ Shortly after claiming that discrimination does not exist in Idaho, state Sen. Dan Foreman angrily told Trish Carter-Goodheart, a statehouse candidate from the Nez Perce tribe, to go back to where she came from as he stormed out of a public forum of the candidates.
+ Michele Fiore, the former MAGA candidate for Governor of Nevada, was convicted this week of embezzling money from a charity to honor a slain police officer to use it on her plastic surgery and daughter’s wedding.
+ Pro-crypto donors account for almost half of all corporate donations to PACs in the 2024 election cycle. The Crypto lobby has now spent more money influencing elections over the 14 years since Citizens United *than every industry other than fossil fuels.*
+ Trump’s proposed tax policy changes would, on average, result in a tax cut for the richest 5% of Americans and a tax increase for all other income groups. According to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the middle 20% of Americans would see an average tax increase of $1,530.
+ According to the mail tracking firm Mintt, in September, 81% of all direct mail sent in the US was either promoting Trump or attacking Harris, a slight decline from August, when GOP-afflated groups sent 96% of all direct mail relating to the presidential race.
+++
+ Here are some nuggets (believe them or not) from Bob Woodward’s latest book, War:
+ After the Afghanistan withdrawal, George W. Bushed rang up Biden and said, “Oh boy, I can understand what you’re going through….I got fucked by my intel people, too.”
+ Biden on Obama’s decision not to confront Russia militarily after the invasion of Crimea in 2014:“They fucked up in 2014. That’s why we are here. We fucked it up. Barack never took Putin seriously. We did nothing. We gave Putin a license to continue! Well, I’m revoking his fucking license!”
+ Biden on Putin: “That fucking Putin…Putin is evil. We are dealing with the epitome of evil.”
+ Biden on CIA intel that Russia was poised to invade Ukraine: “Jesus Christ! Now I’ve got to deal with Russia swallowing Ukraine?”
+ During her meeting with Zelensky to share what the Biden administration knew about Russia’s eminent invasion, Harris urged the Ukrainian president it was time to “start thinking about things like having a succession plan in place to run the country if you are captured or killed or cannot govern.” Afterward, she told staffers that she feared it would be the last time she saw him alive.
+ Biden on Netanyahu: “That son of a bitch, Bibi Netanyahu, he’s a bad guy. He’s a bad fucking guy!… He’s a fucking liar.”
+ Woodward, citing a Trump aide, claims there have been “maybe as many as seven” calls between Trump and Putin since Trump left the White House in 2021. He also reports that while Trump was president, he ordered a secret shipment of COVID-19 testing equipment to Russia for Putin’s personal use during the pandemic. Though it elicited denials from Trump, this week, the Kremlin confirmed the story.
+ Lindsey Graham on Trump: “Going to Mar-a-Lago is a little bit like going to North Korea. Everybody stands up and claps every time Trump comes in.”
+ Graham’s campaign advice to Trump: “You’ve got a problem with moderate women. The people that think that the earth is flat and we didn’t go to the moon, you’ve got them. Let that go.”
+ Secretary of State Anthony Blinken on Crown Prince Bonesaws: “MBS was nothing more than a spoiled child.”
+ Woodward writes that MBS has a bag with 45 burner phones, including one labeled “Trump” and another “Jake Sullivan.”
+ Harris on her relationship with Biden: “[Perhaps] the only reason that he still really is comfortable with me to a point, [is] because he knows that I’m the only person around who knows how to properly pronounce the word motherfucker.”
+ Woodward writes that a close friend of Biden’s told him in December last year that the president is “exhausted half the time. … That’s obvious in his voice.” According to Woodward, “A review of empirical evidence suggests that Biden’s age was clearly impacting his ability to perform coherently at some public events from the summer of 2023.”
+++
+ Lessons in political geography from the NYT…
+ Apple, which has been telling its consumers how fiercely it defends their privacy from the prying eyes of corporations and governments, held a conference for police at its Cupertino HQ. At the Apple Global Police Summit, cops from seven countrieswere invited to learn how they use Apple technologies, from iPhones to CarPlay to Vision Pro to various surveillance apps.
+ Alan Dershowitz has threatened to sue a fellow guest on Piers Morgan’s” Uncensored” talk show after author Mohammad Hijab brought up Dershowitz’s association with sex trafficking financier Jeffrey Epstein and called him “an old pervert.”
+ Two days after NY Jets head coach Robert Saleh, a Muslim-American of Lebanese descent, was photographed on the sidelines of a game in London wearing a Lebanese flag patch on his sweatshirt, he was fired by Jets owner Woody Johnson, Trump’s former ambassador to the UK…
+ FoxNew’s Jesse Watters: “We are getting a lot of texts from women about Stephen Miller. Our audience believes you are some sort of sexual matador.”
Stephen Miller: “Some advice to any young man out there. If you are a young man who’s looking to impress the ladies and be attractive, the best thing you can do is wear your Trump support on your sleeve. Show that you are a real man. Show that you are not a beta. Be a proud and loud Trump supporter, and your dating life will be fantastic.”
+ Mini-Goebbels, sex symbol?
+ Oregon’s most populous county (Multnomah) has sued the state’s biggest gas provider (NW Natural) for spreading doubt about the causes of climate change. This is the first time a utility has faced charges of climate deception.
+ Since the beginning of the decade, global deforestation has accelerated rather than declined, despite an agreement to end it by 2030. Last year, an area about the size of Latvia (6.37 million hectares) was logged off, nearly two million hectares more than the global target set by the 2021 UN Climate Conference in Glasgow.
+ Russia’s coal exports fell by 11.4% in January-July. and are now at the lowest level in the last 30 years. Russian coal shipments to China in the first half of 2024 fell by 8%, while India cut its coal imports from Russia by 55% and Turkey by 47%.
+ A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the Lāhainā wildfires rank among the deadliest natural disasters in US history. Mortality statistics suggest that the fire comprised “the single leading cause of death in any recorded week and likely since Western colonization in Maui County.”
+ A study of raptors in Montana showed that 52% percent of blood samples from hawks, eagles, owls, and falcons in the state showed high levels of lead, mainly from the fragments of lead shot from duck hunters.
+ I’m glad I lived to see this…The first salmon in more than 100 years have been spotted swimming in waters previously blocked by dams on the Klamath River.
+ In its relentless drive to turn MLB into NASCAR, we’ve been forced to look at the Strauss logo on every baseball helmet in the playoffs, and I still have no idea who they are or what kind of junk they sell. If I did, I’d boycott them…
Riley Green, the gifted young left-fielder for the Detroit Tigers, has been turned into a human billboard for Meijer, Nike and Strauss.
Robert Coover: “The superhero, his underwear bagging at the seat and knees, is just a country boy at heart, tutored to perceive all human action as good or bad, orderly or dynamic, and so doesn’t know whether to shit or fly.”
+ Coover (Origin of the Brunists, A Public Burning, Spanking the Maid), who died last week, was one of the writers who signed the Writers and Editors War Tax Pledge, vowing not to pay federal income taxes in protest of the Vietnam War.
+++
If It Keeps on Rainin’, Levee’s Goin’ to Break, When the Levee Breaks, I’ll Have No Place to Stay…
“As far back as 1992, the Union of Concerned Scientists warned that humanity faced a stark choice between spending its resources on war and violence, or on preventing catastrophic environmental damage. The report was signed by 1,700 scientists, including the majority of Nobel Prize winners in the sciences. In 2017 the warning was reissued, and this time it was signed by more than 15,000 scientists: it concluded that the state of the world was even worse than before. The first UCS report attracted a good deal of attention; the second one passed almost unnoticed.”
That Kamala Harris and Tim Walz could lose the presidential election in November to serial fraudster, convicted felon, adjudicated sexual abuser, and Wall Street stock jobber Donald Trump does not mean that they will, but it says a lot about the sad state of the Democratic Party that this election is close, especially as Trump’s campaign speeches sound like a variation of a gig by Cheech & Chong (“Don’s not here, man…”).
The warning bells sounded recently in Butler, Pennsylvania, when what looked like a Pittsburgh Steelers’ crowd showed up for Trump’s return engagement three months after he dodged fate at the business end of Thomas Matthew Crooks’s AR-15 assault rifle.
Although an overflow crowd at the familiar shooting gallery does not mean that Trump will win in Pennsylvania or prevail in the electoral college, the fear is that the overflowing crowd is a canary in the coal mine, suggesting that Trump’s supporters bring more passion to their candidate than do the Democrats for Harris and Walz.
Curious about the Democrats’ failings, I attended—if only virtually—several Harris and Walz rallies and events. I came away with the sinking feeling that their message has all the passion of a Madison Avenue product pitch—a bunch of key words (“fight” is a favorite) and endless clichés (“And because we love our country…”)—all of which seem like a campaign to sell the American people a used car from the 1970s, something along the lines of an AMC Gremlin.
To the Democrats it is eternally 1975, with the future riding on car manufacturing, if not WIN (Whip Inflation Now) gardens.
* * *
The mantra of the Harris/Watz campaign is “A New Way Forward,” which is held aloft on placards at all of their rallies, although at one Walz speech a supporter holding a Colin Kaepernick (the black-balled 49ers quarterback) jersey got in the way of the message.
At least in 1884, when the Republicans ran against “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion,” it was clear that they had no time for the Democrats’ affection for moonshine, Catholicism, and former Confederates. Also clear was the response that year by the Democrats, who pronounced: “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine! The continental liar from the state of Maine!”
With the anodyne “A New Way Forward,” the Democrats are essentially offering “a campaign about nothing.”
Yes, at her rallies, Harris has set spiels about what she calls the “opportunity economy” (ad men, including Don Draper, were never very bright), and in every speech she dangles tax deductions for new parents or small-business owners, but in a country fighting three proxy wars (Gaza, Lebanon, and Ukraine) and with climate-changed hurricanes (Helene, Milton) laying waste to much of the Southeast, you might think a major party would have more to offer politically or intellectually.
Harris loves to say: “Ours is a fight for the future. Ours is a fight for the future, and ours is a fight for freedom….” but even “Keep Cool With Coolidge” had more poetry to offer than “A New Way Forward.”
* * *
The essence of the Harris candidacy is that she is neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump.
The early days of the Harris nomination accession (democracy is too precious to leave to the voters) generated a rush of enthusiasm. Unfortunately, once it was established that the vice president was not a tired old man in a suit, her campaign began to drift.
I watched an event in Flint, Michigan, which had Magic Johnson and a local United Auto Workers shop steward as the warm-up bands. Magic was on hand as a Michigan native son and to turn out the votes of black men for Harris, but oratorically he still had a few air balls.
In many ways Magic is the embodiment of what’s wrong with the Democrats, which uses billionaires and celebrities to invoke working-class values—to sing the praises of Chevy’s Citation while tooling around LA in a Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupe (as Magic does).
* * *
Harris spoke for 35 minutes. While throughout the scripted speech (Kamala doesn’t riff) people clapped and cheered, and occasionally chanted “U-S-A! U-S-A”, the only well-spring of enthusiasm came when she vowed to protect women’s reproductive rights and shouted “We’re Not Going Back” (which is a little harder to decipher than, say, FDR’s 1940 slogan: “Better A Third Termer than a Third Rater.”)
More telling was when the speech was over (after Kamala had led the crowd in a refrain from the amen corner: “And if we fight…we win…”), and the Flinters sat motionless in their seats.
No one stretched to shake her hand, and no one climbed on the stage, as happens at a Bruce Springsteen concert. Instead, as the camera panned the crowd, it sat there impassively, as if some “live audience” from a game show that later that afternoon might wander over to the studio for Jeopardy!.
For her part, after speaking, Harris tried to animate the crowd. She pointed to some friends in the audience (it’s a Hillary thing to build rapport, even if you don’t know a soul there), and line danced a few steps, but nothing moved the frozen audience, as if their piece-work contracts including clapping during the speech but not afterwards.
Can the Democrats really win without buzz?
* * *
I caught up with Governor Tim Walz in York, Pennsylvania, where if he had his druthers, he might well have said, “Can we just skip this speech and go somewhere for a beer?
Instead, he soldiered on for a half hour about how recently he and J.D. Vance had had a “civil if spirited” debate and how as governor of Lake Woebegone (“…where all the politicians are below average…”), he had learned to “reach across the aisle” to solve the community’s problems.
His homilies—about teaching, coaching, his union card, and his mother’s social security check—are heartfelt, but they don’t address the political problem that Walz will not deliver any states to Harris’ electoral college column that she would not have won without him.
* * *
One of the ironies of the Walz campaign is that he has almost no support in what should be his natural constituency: what Springsteen calls “my hometown”.
A gun-owning, school teaching, Friday Nights Lights football coach from the Great Plains (he was born in Nebraska) ought to appeal to at least some of the MAGA base, where issues such as crop insurance, job training, solar energy, and $35 insulin resonate.
For reasons that would a require full psychiatric examination on about half the country, the MAGA base—many from rural counties where Walz has spent most of his life—more closely identifies with a high-rise, golf-playing New Yorker with gold fixtures on his toilets.
Walz also served in the National Guard and deployed overseas, yet it is the draft-dodging Trump (who called the war dead “suckers”) who resonates more with veterans.
* * *
Logically, Walz is an heir, in some capacity, to the likes of Wisconsin Senator Robert M. La Follette, one of the founders of Progressive Party, or maybe Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president, Henry Wallace, but both of them, intellectually, approached government as something more than a Boy Scout jamboree.
In voting for candidates for their top jobs, Americans often pass on nice guys. In 1844, they passed on the eloquent Henry Clay in favor of the duplicitous and wily James K. Polk (“Reannexation of Texas and Reoccupation of Oregon”). In 1868, the winning slogan for Ulysses S. Grant was: “Vote as you shot.”
In 1876, voters (perhaps fraudulently) chose Rutherford B. Hayes over “Honest” Sam Tilden, so that later someone could quip of Hayes: “He did such a good job I almost wish he had been elected.”
* * *
Another irony of the 2024 election, perhaps fatal to Democratic chances, is that while the Republicans want to be National Socialists the Democrats seem to want to be Republicans.
In York, Waltz gave a shoutout to Ronald Reagan (not to Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, or Grover Cleveland), just the way Kamala Harris’s idea of a celebrity endorsement is one from Dick and Liz Cheney.
Listening to Harris and Walz gave me little idea (other than $25K for first-time home buyers) of their vision of a Democratic future, other than that they believe in the compassion of the community and in political fairness. That’s not nothing, but in Flint the message still kept the voters glued to their seats.
Otherwise Harris and Walz are silent on international justice for Gaza, the finer points of climate change, the meaning of the national debt, the casino wheels at the Federal Reserve, the hired hands on the Supreme Court, Trump’s bestie Vladimir Putin, the threat (or not) posed by the Chinese, the American future in NATO, or how to amend the Affordable Care Act to support the homeless.
Trump is corrupt, immoral, deceitful, paranoid, and a pathological liar, but keep in mind he’s also the reincarnation of William McKinley, who in 1896, also with tariffs as his only only platform, ran on “Patriotism, Protection, and Prosperity,” which defeated the eloquence and moral decency of another Nebraskan, William Jennings Bryan.
Not even with his “No Cross of Gold, No Crown of Thorns” slogan could Byran take downMcKinley’s plutocracy.
The U.S. government often claims to stand for the rule of law, but this past year has made it painfully clear that this doesn’t apply to Palestinians. The moral, financial, and security costs of U.S. support for Israel’s rapidly expanding wars are adding up for Americans, too.
Despite the International Court of Justice finding genocide “plausible” and calling on Israel to prevent it and ensure the delivery of lifesaving aid, Israel — like the U.S. — has ignored all of the court’s orders.
The U.S. has enabled this ongoing genocide and other crimes by providing unconditional support for Israel despite mounting atrocities. This has emboldened Israel to expand its assault to Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen as it threatens to drag the U.S. into a wider war with Iran.
None of this is inevitable.
As Israel’s chief supplier of arms, the U.S. has sent billions worth of high-powered explosives since October 7, which have turned up at massacre after massacre committed by Israel’s military. That’s a violation of our own laws barring assistance to forces that commit human rights abuses or block delivery of humanitarian aid, as Israel has done.
“Our democracy is at stake” has been an ongoing refrain this election season. But it’s also a threat to our democracy when elected officials ignore the vast majority of their constituents who have rightly demanded a permanent ceasefire and arms embargo on Israel. Instead of listening to voters, our leaders have backed violent crackdowns on protests, which threatens our First Amendment rights.
And even though most Americans oppose Israel’s war on Gaza, we’re still paying for it.
Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates that over the past year, the U.S. has spent at least $22.76 billion and counting on Israel’s onslaught in Gaza and other U.S. military operations in the surrounding region. In August, the Biden administration approved an additional $20 billion in arms sales to Israel.
All this comes on top of the $3.8 billion the U.S. already sends Israel in military aid each year. That same $3.8 billion a year could fund 29,915 registered nurses, 394,738 public housing units, or 39,158 elementary school teachers, according to the National Priorities Project.
As our post-COVID safety net continues to crumble, more people are left unable to afford housing, health care, groceries, education, and other basic necessities. Compounding these challenges, more states are battling climate disasters. We desperately need those funds at home, not funding wars and lawlessness abroad.
Nevertheless, many of our elected officials would rather support the military-industrial complex than their own constituents. In a particularly flagrant example, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham recently appeared on Fox News to plead for more U.S. weapons for Israel in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, which had ravaged his home state of South Carolina.
More than statistics, law, and politics, our nation’s role in the Palestinian genocide should shake our conscience and cause us to question its morality. Are human rights and justice good for some but not others? And can we recognize our complicity in this genocide and not take action to end it?
However one answers these questions, our shared humanity hangs in the balance.
After a year of watching thousands of people suffer a genocide fueled in large part by U.S. dollars and technology, the usual order of life on university campuses has been upended. Students, staff and faculty have protested, picketed, rallied, and exercised a long tradition of “expressive activity” that has come to define the unique space that inhabits university life. To say that this is a novel upsurge would be to ignore the student mobilizations throughout the years, against the massacres in Vietnam, apartheid in South Africa, and racisms past and present in our backyard. Each of these struggles have become part of the glossy photos memorializing universities’ nostalgic past, and seeming proof of their reputations as bastions of free expression, even in the face of government oppression.
All manner of concerned voices have turned out to protest the countless atrocities roiling the globe, each protestor possessing different privileges and access to the halls of power. Coalitions have formed and frayed, and debates have raged over the proper strategy to bring attention to the tragedies we are witnessing and abetting with our tax dollars and silence.
One group that has formed an intimate connection to the struggles for Palestinian liberation and peace for Israel [as well as war, famine and violence all over the globe] – are international students. Their families often remain deeply connected to the regions that are only pictures that we scroll past on a news app for the rest of us. Their loved ones send them videos of not only the horrors they are experiencing, but also the news coverage and outrage unfolding everywhere else. Yet these students and their positions face an uneven set of responses, about whose suffering merits outrage and compassion. For many students – depending on where their ancestral homes sit in the U.S. global order of allies and enemies – the “rational”, quiet, scheduled, approved, and non-disruptive forms of dissent on university campuses are simply a form of silencing.
International students, like many other students, have raised their voices, at risk of suspension and other disciplinary actions in an era of increased campus suppression. But they face an additional risk in doing so. Their status in the country is tied to their status as a student, and once they have lost that student status, they run the risk of losing their permission to live – and sometimes work – in the country. What befalls these students afterwards is a cascade of sometimes uncertain consequences, including loss of work and a requirement to leave the country. They may (or may not) become a priority for removal, or they may just become another one of the 11 million people living in the shadows. Perhaps if they have the resources and ability to do so, they will go back to where they originally called home.
What does this mean for university administrators and their role in immigration enforcement? Only the U.S. government has the ability to deport, and deport it does, in racially and gendered ways that leave families and communities torn apart. But the U.S. government has a range of accomplices in doing this work, who need not even intend this handy alliance. The increased “devolution” of control over immigration enforcement has increasingly rendered state and local law enforcement as deputies to federal efforts near the border, and far into the interior. But the increasing privatization of the immigration regime has meant that not only have private detention centers increasingly stood to profit from the surge in detainees all over the country, but also all manner of private actors have been dragged into the mechanics – the banal bureaucracy – of immigration enforcement. This means that even (aspiring) sanctuary campuses, in sanctuary counties and cities, are implicated.
Employers are perhaps the clearest example of accomplices to immigration enforcement, as they, since 1986 have been handed the responsibility to verify the work authorization of their employees, a shift that even many conservatives bemoan. There are plenty of stories of abusive employers who have used this power to retaliate and clamp down on labor mobilization, often in carefully calculated and cruel ways. But more often than not, employers are simply engaging in their own official mandate to do the government’s bidding, or risk their own sanctions and penalties. Indeed, even “good employers” become an arm of the immigration state, while also enjoying the enormous power that they are afforded in this role. Employees and students need only consider the possibility and threat of losing their immigration when deciding whether to act on moral conviction and exercise their freedom of speech.
The banal reality of immigration enforcement is less spectacular than the raids that were popular in decades past, which dragged hundreds of undocumented workers into deportation proceedings and sometimes even cattle areas while they awaited being hauled off to detention – often without legal representation or any real possibility of relief. But the mundane administrative bureaucracy of immigration enforcement has been far more effective, and a handy tool for Democratic administrations seeking to seem softer on immigration. The millions of “non-immigrants” working and studying in the U.S. are in plain view of the immigration state (with the help of their employers, universities, and other sponsors) and are subject to some of the same methods that have been honed on the millions of undocumented in the shadows.
In this regard, international students rallying have an allyship with the undocumented and DACA-mented student activists throughout the country. This is true especially for those non-White and Muslim students who have been targeted by all manner of law enforcement assuming their presence a threat. Black and Brown men also face a fundamentally more severe treatment of policing – campuses are not immune to these effects.
While the situations of our non-citizen students differ, their future in our country and our campuses is similarly uncertain. High profile undocumented activists have historically been targeted by federal immigration enforcement, as was the case of Daniela Vargas who was detained soon after calling out the injustice of the ICE raids in the South following the inauguration of Donald Trump. Dairy workers in Vermont too suffered retaliatory arrests during this era, which was ultimately challenged successfully in court.
The chilling effect of immigration enforcement on immigrant students is severe, as even the Presidents Alliance for Higher Education has noted. This is especially the case for those engaging in civic engagement and political struggle. But these effects are part of a well-oiled bipartisan machine. The potential to be swept into deportation proceedings is ever present for all but those immigrants who have naturalized. Universities rely increasingly on an international student body and workforce – at Cornell University this is a quarter of the total student population, who are also hailed as a source of diversity, and are a significant source of recruitment for many programs. Many others are also international faculty, who will often rely on the university for their potential path to a green card, until when they too are vulnerable.
What do universities owe these international students and workers? What is the proportionality of the consequences they face when the university deems them noncompliant, often through a seemingly innocuous stream of bureaucratic warnings and interventions, in the name of equity and student safety? Whose safety will we champion behind the veil of civil discourse?
Photograph Source: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – CC BY 2.0
Over the past year, mindful that I have been blessed to live under Oregon’s tranquil skies, I reflect upon the Palestinians and Lebanese who begin and end theirs days under skies fraught with drones and bombers.
I also think of the Israeli pilots who have since 8 October 2023 dropped over 70,000 tons of bombs on a densely populated strip of land about the size of Las Vegas. Have they considered the reality of their missions? Do they see themselves in the German SS soldiers who turned on the gas in the death chambers of Auschwitz? And what of American politicians and corporate media’s complicity in Israel’s year-long genocide?
These questions, and more, led me to recall a well-known statement made in 1925 by the 30th president of the United States, Calvin Coolidge; a statement that has come to define U.S. policy at home and abroad: “The chief business of the American people is business.”
Economic hegemony has been the cornerstone of U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf since the end of the Second World War. America’s “special relationship” with Israel, a term first coined by President John F. Kennedy in 1962, is founded on business. Economic supremacy was also at the heart of the oil-for-security bargain that the United States sealed with oil-rich Saudi Arabia after World War II.
The raison d’être for the United States and Israel in the region has been carpetbaggery—they have become the two-headed serpent of the Middle East. For the United States the goal has been domination of the region’s energy resources and vital trade routes. For the Zionist Israelis, it has been the establishment of colonies on stolen land and use of all of Palestine’s water and other resources for the sole benefit of Jewish colonists.
Israel has been America’s regional enforcer, assassinating leaders and terrorizing countries that refuse to abide by its rules. As General Alexander Haig, then-secretary of state, averred in 1982, “Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk.”
Washington’s landed carrier is a projection of U.S. imperial power in the Middle East. It has been the linchpin of America’s ongoing doctrine of force and economic imperium for a half-century.
In return for Israel’s services, Washington has invested heavily in its security, providing huge sums in military aid ($3.8 billion annually), supplying and co-producing advanced weaponry, security and intelligence systems, and giving diplomatic cover against Israel’s numerous violations of international humanitarian law.
The U.S. imperial plan to create a “new” reality in the Middle East has been in progress for some time. Force and economic incentives have been its bedrock. When warfare has failed, as has been the case in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, Washington has placed greater emphasis on economic incentives, like the Abraham Accords, to subjugate the region.
Since the late 1970s, Israel has been central to U.S. imperial strategy. As the military and economic hub of the region, it was positioned to protect and buttress “American” interests. The reality envisioned by Washington also included removing any and all obstacles to U.S. hegemony.
The geopolitical alignment of the United States and Israel can be sourced to 1962 when Washington began providing missiles to Israel. And in 1974, when the Gush Emunim (Block of the Faithful) movement was formed to promote Jewish religious settlement on the occupied West Bank, the United States failed to take effective action, as it has to this day.
Throughout the 1970s, the United States sought to protect its interests through its Twin Pillars policy, by acting through and empowering regional enforcers, Iran and Saudi Arabia. With the Iranian Revolution of 1979, that policy collapsed as did the regime of the Shah of Iran. This landmark event gave birth to the 1980 Carter Doctrine, declaring that the United States would use every means, including military force, to protect “its” vital interests in the Persian Gulf.
With the loss of its “stable” pillar in Tehran, Washington looked increasingly to Israel, as well as Saudi Arabia, to uphold its regional interests. Then-Senator Joe Biden, in 1986, made America’s objectives explicit, declaring that Israel was the best $3 billion (annual) investment the United States has ever made, and that if Israel did not exist, the United States would have to invent it to protect American interests in the region.
American imperial power was manifested when the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003. President George W. Bush’s national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, explained the objectives of the invasion in an editorial for the Washington Post in August of that year. She wrote, “Today, America and our friends and allies must commit ourselves to a long-term transformation in the…Middle East.”
The devastation, failure and upheaval that followed Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to remake the region through force have not lessened Washington’s determination to engineer a “new” Middle East aligned with Israel.
The large cadre of business-minded, monied interests surrounding President Donald Trump (2017-2021) concluded that regional integration/transformation could be achieved through economic manipulation. To that end, the Trump administration brokered the 2020 Abraham Accords, normalizing diplomatic and economic relations among Israel, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan.
President Joe Biden has invested in strengthening the accords, pushing for further military and economic integration. By September 2023, Washington and Tel Aviv were confident that they were on the cusp of achieving their objectives and that Saudi Arabia could be persuaded to agree to normalization.
The administration also presumed that Palestinians had been marginalized and their cause forgotten, and that the Axis of Resistance—Iran, Syria, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Ansar Allah in Yemen, Islamic Resistance in Iraq had been weakened.
Confident of success, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brazenly presented the U.S.-Israeli plan at the 78th session of the U.N. General Assembly in September 2023. He described their scheme as “monumental and transformative,” and that their agreements would usher in an era of security and prosperity across the region.
He held up a map titled “The New Middle East,” depicting Israel from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea—without any trace of the occupied Palestinian territories. Netanyahu boldly stated that the Palestinians should not stand in the way of future normalization agreements, and preened that Israel was close to an historic agreement with Saudi Arabia.
As part of the “new” Middle East economic initiative, Netanyahu also hailed the advent of the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), an expansion on the Abraham Accords.
The IMEC—America’s largest geopolitical project for the region—was unveiled by President Biden at the September 2023 G20 summit in New Delhi.
The proposed trade venture fit into Washington’s strategic agenda to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and to cement relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. The BRI (New Silk Road) route connects Asia to Europe via the Middle East and Africa, with Central Asia, Iran and Turkiye the essential links.
Conversely, the U.S.-designed route —a seamless infrastructure of ports, railways and roads linking India with the Middle East and Europe—relied on Israel as a link between east and west. Israel’s port at Haifa would have become a consequential economic hub.
In addition to extending U.S. power in the region, the project was viewed as laying the foundation for a “new era” of integration and cooperation among Israel and U.S regional janissaries. The power politics behind the trade initiative was revealed in the exclusion of Palestine, Turkiye, Iraq, Iran, Qatar and Oman.
October 7, however, torpedoed the U.S.-Israeli agenda. It has undermined, if not ended, the IMEC enterprise and weakened normalization plans. The incursion also revealed a weakened U.S. imperium, desperate to keep Israel, its largest investment and landed aircraft carrier in the Middle East afloat. The war on Palestinians in Gaza is remaking the Middle East, but not in the way the United States and Israel had hoped.
The seeds of catastrophe were planted in the heart of the Islamic world 107 years ago when the British regime unceremoniously promised the land of Palestinians to the Jews of Europe. Since then, untold numbers have been killed, heritage sites destroyed and ecosystems devastated.
It has escaped the United States and Israel that they cannot bomb the resistance into submission; they cannot exploit the region’s resources; and most importantly, they cannot change it.
For one-year, the intrepid resistance of the Palestinians has given the region hope for a new direction—one free of Zionism and imperialism, militarism, corporatism and those who reap but do not sow. That time will come, inshallah, when this catastrophe ends and Palestine returns to its roots.
Swords Into Ploughshares Peace Center, Detroit. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
“I tell my children there are two ways to lie. One is to tell me something that didn’t happen, and the other is not to tell me something that did happen.”
“I’ve been a reporter for 20 years; the reporters of those who believe more sympathetically about Israel and its right to exist don’t have a problem getting their voice out.”
CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash have accused Congresswoman Rashida Talib of antisemitism. One would have thought after nearly a month of baseless Haitian smears that CNN’s star anchors would have exercised a modicum of journalistic due diligence before themselves smearing a pro-Palestinian congresswoman. But multi-millionaire media anchors and politicians are cut from the same jaded cloth. Whether in the newsroom or the hollow halls of government, plutocracy rules and plutocrats lie.
Or perhaps, they were attempting to compensate for failing to question Trump about his own unequivocal antisemitism during their moderation of the Biden-Trump presidential debate. After all, it was President Joe Biden – not CNN’s Dream Duo, who brought up the fact that Trump has said that “Hitler had done some good things.” Previously, Trump has claimed that Biden has “turned a blind eye to the greatest outbreak of antisemitism in American history, while simultaneously accusing him of being “a servant of globalists.” He has labeled Senator Chuck Schumer “a proud member of Hamas” and likened him to “a Palestinian.” Apparently, an antisemite who, like an incontinent chimpanzee diarrheatically, flings accusations that his political opponents are antisemitic does not warrant interrogation in the political theater of televised debates.
This latest game of defamatory telephone began on September 21, when Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel posted to X, formerly Twitter, a statement accusing Tlaib of antisemitism because she questioned Nessel’s decision to prosecute pro-Palestinian campus protesters.
Rashida’s religion should not be used in a cartoon to imply that she’s a terrorist. It’s Islamophobic and wrong. Just as Rashida should not use my religion to imply I cannot perform my job fairly as Attorney General. It’s anti-Semitic and wrong.
The statement was in response to Tlaib’s September 13 Detroit Metro Timesinterview, in which she told the interviewer:
We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest. We’ve done it for climate, the immigrant rights movement, for Black[1] lives, and even around issues of injustice among water shutoffs. But it seems that the attorney general decided if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs.
On September 23, Tapper, in his State of the Unioninterview[2] with Democratic Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, informed her that Nessel had lodged charges against pro-Palestinian protesters and that Tlaib had called those charges “shameful.” During his summation, he identified Nessel as Jewish.
Quoting directly from Tlaib’s Metro Times interview, Tapper continued:
And Tlaib said – quote – It seems that the attorney general decided, if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs –unquote.
Having greased the way for the smear, Tapper lunged, asking Whitmer, “Do you think that Tlaib’s suggestion that Nessel’s office is biased is antisemitic?” When Whitmer demurred, Tapper rephrased the question-veiled accusation:
But do you think that Attorney General Nessel is not doing her job? Because Congresswoman Tlaib is suggesting that she shouldn’t be prosecuting these individuals that Nessel said broke the law and that she’s only doing it because she’s Jewish and the protesters are not? That’s quite an accusation. Do you think it’s true?
Whitmer again evaded the question, visibly reluctant to enter the accusatory hearsay fray. However, facing mounting criticism over her evasion, she issued a statement a day later that served to perpetuate the lie:
The suggestion that Attorney General Nessel would make charging decisions based on her religion as opposed to the rule of law is antisemitic. Attorney General Nessel has always conducted her work with integrity and followed the rule of law. We must all use our platform and voices to call out hateful rhetoric and racist tropes.
This would have been a reasonable criticism had Tlaib actually made the statement. Ironically, the fact that Whitmer’s own statement – which piggybacks off Tapper’s bogus assertion that Tlaib’s concern over Nessel’s charges was motivated by her religion and not because of legitimate concerns about the rule of law and Nessel’s objectivity – is patently anti-Palestinian – it assumes Tlaib’s criticism of Nessel is based on Tlaib’s religion – remained unquestioned.
So much for “the most trusted name in news.”
Equally questionable is that rather than familiarizing herself with the facts, Whitmer, who had at least a day to check out Tlaib’s interview before issuing her condemnatory statement, chose not to use her own “platform and voice to call out hateful rhetoric and racist tropes” but, caving to political pressure, to perpetuate them.
This is how smears metastasize. In this case, however, instead of malignant slanders against Haitians spread by a hapless Ohioan who misplaced her cat (later found in her basement), third-hand hearsay Facebook posts, and neo-Nazi thugs obsessed with American racial purity, we have a smear against a congresswoman spread by trained journalists and a local government official who perhaps let her guard down to avoid being herself potentially smeared as antisemitic.
Later, on Inside Politics, Bash, Tapper’s tag-team partner in calumny, poured more fuel on the conflagration when, in a conversation with CNN Political Director David Chalian, she opined:
And now to a sad reality, and that is antisemitism is everywhere. And it comes from both ends of the political spectrum. But politicians sometimes sidestep calling it out when it comes from a member of their own party. We saw two examples on State of the Union yesterday. First, with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, when my co-anchor Jake Tapper asked about a Democratic congresswoman’s accusation that the state’s Jewish Attorney General was letting her religion influence her job.
After playing segments from Tapper’s interview with Whitmer and Senator Tom Cotton, who, when asked about Trump’s rant in which he preemptively blamed American Jews for his election loss, not only failed to criticize the GOP fuehrer but praised him as “the most pro-Israel President we’ve ever seen,” if not necessarily an ally of American Jewry.[3] Cotton also ducked questions about North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson’s antisemitic statements. Despite his failure to denounce the statements of Trump and self-avowed “Black Nazi” Robinson, Bash expressed her gratitude toward Cotton, who she said had spoken out against antisemitism when pro-Palestinian protesters, disrupted her book event in Washington, D.C. to accuse her of bias and complicity in the Gazan genocide. Her gratitude, she tells Chalian, is shared by “anybody who is the subject and the victim of antisemitism … hate … or any other hate. And the key is, which we have learned the hard way, you’ve got to call it out wherever it comes from. What does it tell you about the inability or unwillingness to do so when it comes from a prominent person in your own party?” Unfortunately, calling out guests who fail to call out prominent antisemites on one’s own show does not seem to count. Nor does calling out Islamophobia and anti-Palestinianism, overt and implied, when it comes from prominent government officials and co-hosts.
Here, Bash and Tapper wallow in the shallow waters of false equivalency and bogus bothsidesism. Let’s be clear: Donald Trump unequivocally declared that if he loses the election, the Jews are to blame, a bone-chilling statement reminiscent of Germany’s blaming Jews for its defeat in WWI. He has made countless antisemitic statements before and will, no doubt, continue to do so. It was not Tlaib but Steve Neavling, the reporter who conducted the interview, who brought up Nessel’s faith. Despite her critics, unlike Trump, Tlaib does not have a history of antisemitism, unless one defines opposition to genocide, ethnic cleansing, and a desire for a free Palestine as antisemitic. Neavling has called out the statement attributed to her as a lie, noting that Tlaib’s issue with Nessel was not her religion but that she allegedly caved to pressure from “university authorities.” Or are we to assume that she is insinuating that they are Jews, too?
After facing a backlash, Bash issued a “clarification” – not an apology or a retraction – stating: “Tlaib did not reference Nessel’s Jewish identity. Her office has not responded to our requests for clarity. Her allies insist that’s not what she meant, but Nessel still says she believes it is antisemitic and repeated on CNN yesterday that quote – clearly she’s referencing my religion.”
Bash’s putative “clarification” is misleading on several levels. First, it sanitizes their original accusation. Tapper and Bash did not simply accuse Tlaib of suggesting Nessel was biased; they repeated Nessel’s assertion that those biases were based on Nessel’s being a Jew. Second, she attempts to deflect criticism by mischaracterizing objection to the misrepresentation of Tlaib’s statement as coming from Tlaib’s “allies, whom she conveniently fails to name. Again, Neavling has denied Tlaib referred to Nessel’s Jewishness, a fact easily confirmed by reading the interview itself.
Second, why does CNN have to reach out to Tlaib’s office for clarification when they can presumably read the original interview and the subsequent articles, interviews, and X postings by the Neavling that show she did not make the statement? Is it because he is [cue ominous music] an “ally” and, presumably, an antisemite by association?
Finally, it ignores the fact that Nessel responded to Tlaib’s criticism with a false equivalency when she posted the statement that ignited the smear campaign that appeared to defend Tlaib against a vicious Islamophobic National Reviewcartoon that implied that Tlaib is a Hezbollah operative.
But here’s the rub: That cartoon is an actual artifact; it exists; it can be Googled and viewed in all its vile, unambiguous, racist infamy. Did CNN call out The National Review? Were the editors of The National Review and the artist called in to “clarify” their intent? Were they suspended or fired? Did the publication of the cartoon spark panel punditry on Islamophobia in general and in the media in particular? The fact is the cartoon exploits all too familiar and normalized tropes that paint Arabs and Muslims as terrorists. Nor is it the first to portray Tlaib as such. Why else would the caricatured congresswoman have a Mossad booby-trapped pager? The cartoonist’s intent is obvious to anyone save the most obtuse, which Nessel clearly is not. Then why does she equate criticism with racism? Sure, one can immediately jump to the conclusion that Tlaib’s criticism is motivated by antisemitism. However, that says more about the accuser and the state of America’s toxic anti-Palestinian political discourse that reductively labels any criticism of Israeli policies inherently antisemitic. But sometimes Occam’s scalpel cuts its wielder: In imputing an antisemitic motive to Tlaib, Nessel is guilty of precisely what she accuses Tlaib of, if only in reverse, that is, of having antisemitic intentions because she is Muslim. In all fairness, Nessel does not say this, but if we want to play the game of impute the motive, this is where we end up. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
Ultimately, none of this serves the fight against anti-Palestinian hate and indifference, which is as pervasive and pernicious as antisemitism. The protesters at Bash’s D.C. book event were attacking those, including Bash, whom they perceived as complicit in the genocide in Gaza that is taking the lives of their families and loved ones. One of the women shouted at Bash that the carnage in Gaza is not a “war,” not an unreasonable assertion given the fact that, unlike Israel, Hamas has no standing army, no air force, no navy, and no nuclear weapons. Its cheap, homemade Qassam rockets are no match against 2,000-pound U.S.-manufactured bombs; U.S. navy destroyers do not shoot down Israeli missiles that rain down on Gaza; the $2.9 billion U.S.-supplied Iron Dome and U.S.-based RTX Corp. (formerly Raytheon)-co-developed David’s Sling do not protect the people of Gaza. The gross disproportionality of the conflict in terms of both military power and civilian casualties makes calling it a “war,” as we conventionally apply the term, obscenely problematic.
“My friends have been dying in Gaza,” another protester shouted at Bash, “but you have not been reporting it.” Accusing her of taking “millions from Zionists, “millions from AIPAC… to spew lies about the Palestinian people,” she voiced her frustration that pro-Palestinian protesters “have tried to sit with politicians day after day and they don’t listen to us” as their “family and friends are dying. What else are we supposed to do if this was happening to your family?” The deafness to their pleas might be because AIPAC has spent millions to deafen politicians by defeating those who have criticized Israel’s actions in Gaza, creating a disincentive for politicians to meet with those families. Nor is it simply a matter of “deafness”: the DNC silenced the voices of pro-Palestinians when it ejected pro-Palestinian protesters after they unfurled a “Stop arming Israel” banner inside the convention hall (but allowed a Joe Biden supporter who repeatedly struck one of the protesters on the head with a “We love Joe” sign to remain) and deniedPalestinian American delegates a stage to address the convention.
Media reports, including Bash’s, have shown bias in framing these events. Bash has likened pro-Palestinian protesters to Nazis and April 30 clashes at UCLA between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel protesters to 1930s Europe, even thoughmasked pro-Israel counter-protesters initiated the violence, physically assaulted pro-Palestinian protesters while policeidly stood by, an incident which CNN itself has described as “erupt[ing] into the worst violence stemming from the ongoing college protests around the country over Israel’s war in Gaza.” Although some of the protesters were not UCLA students, it is clear that some in the mob were, in the words of Hillel UCLA, “fringe members of the off-campus Jewish community.” Tellingly, law “enforcement” did not record the injuries, although encampment organizers state that 150 pro-Palestinian protesters were pepper sprayed and at least 25 were sent to emergency rooms with serious injuries.
In the same Inside Politics broadcast, Bash showed a clip in which a UCLA student accused protesters of barring him from entering the campus because he is Jewish. Pro-Palestinian protesters reportedly barred campus students who “would not denounce Israel” from portions of the campus, an act described as designed to discriminate against Jewish students. However, these reports fail to elucidate whether the protesters also denied entry to non-Jewish students who support Israel or admitted Jewish students who denounce Israel for its actions in Gaza. While it may be unconscionable for students to bar access to the university based on ideology, it is not necessarily an antisemitic act since Jewishness is not determined by unconditional support of Israel. Were this so, it would effectively make Jews who reject Israel or who are critical of its policies Jewish apostates, even as they identify as Jews, which itself would constitute an egregious act of antisemitism.[4]
The tactic, however, is not unique to pro-Palestinian protesters. It is part and parcel of the calculus of Israeli occupation and oppression. As Ta-Nehisi Coates toldCBS Mornings co-host Tony Dokoupil, who essentially accused him of writing a “backpack extremist” manifesto for providing a voice to Palestinians in his book The Message:
I walk over there, and I walk through the occupied territories, and I walk down the street in Hebron, and a guy says to me, I can’t walk down the street unless I profess my religion… I’m working with – the person that is guiding me is a Palestinian whose father, grandfather, and grandmother was born in this town, and I have more freedom to walk than he does. He can’t ride on certain roads, he can’t get water in the same way that Israeli citizens who live less than a mile away from him can. Why is that okay?
Forget about the aforementioned geese and ganders; in this light, when it comes to restricting access, the chickens have come home to roost.
Flaming Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian sentiment, however, is nothing new for Bash. Previously, she went after Rep. Ilhan Omar, bizarrely twisting her statement against antisemitism into its opposite. During an April 28 interview with Sen. Bernie Sanders, Bash played a video of Omar in which she says she found it “extremely regrettable that individuals do not care about the fact that all Jewish children should be kept safe, and we should not have to tolerate bigotry or antisemitism for all Jewish students, regardless of their pro- or anti-genocide views,” Bash apparently objecting to the implication that Jews who support Israel’s actions in Gaza are “pro-genocide.” Sanders, to his credit, did not take the bait, instead, stressing that Omar’s “essential point” was that “we do not want to see antisemitism in this country.” But Sanders went a step further, adding he would leave it to the International Court of Justice to decide whether Israel’s actions constitute genocide, even though he did not doubt they constitute “ethnic cleansing,” a charge also made by one of the demonstrators at Bash’s book event.
“Take off your mask,” Bash calmly told one of her detractors during the event. Bash might have admonished the masked April 30 UCLA pro-Israel counter-protesters to do the same. Or better still, someone might have told Bash to take off her blinders, which, in effect, was what the impassioned protesters were chiding her to do before they were ejected from the venue.
In the end, Bash’s Manichean worldview only recognizes pro-genocide Palestinians. It refuses to acknowledge the existence of pro-genocide Jews since in the comfortable binary black-and-white world she inhabits, victims, particularly Jewish ones, can never be victimizers because it can never recognize Palestinians as victims.
Bash has shown a pattern of minimizing Israeli brutality and the reality of Palestinian suffering. In an interview in December with Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Jayapal points out that 15,000 Palestinians, most of them children, had been killed in Israeli airstrikes. Not missing a beat, Bash counters, “You don’t see Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian women.”[5] No, we don’t, largely because the mainstream media ignores such incidents, whether they involve IDF soldiers raping Palestinian woman and girls in Gaza and the West Bank or Palestinian men in detention camps, though it appears that in Israel whether it is “legitimate? to plunge broom handles up rectums is a matter of heated debates. Perhaps, one day CNN will cover them or, like MSNBC, “uncancel” hosts that would.
It is little facts like these that corporate media and corporate politicians (after Citizens United, are there any other kind?) tend to elide, perhaps because they fear sharing the same fate as Al Jazeera and other journalists. Significantly, complaints of biased coverage of the slaughter in Gaza come from CNN’s own staff, which has accused the network of stenographing Israeli propaganda and silencing Palestinian voices.
For his part, Tapper now says he “misspoke,” although he used Whitmer’s statement to back the smear they amplified. How is this any different from Trump defending anti-Haitian smears because he “saw people on television” say that their pets had been eaten or JD Vance saying he was merely repeating what his constituents allegedly told him? In the case of Tapper, it appears he just read it on X. How can you expect CNN to credibly fact-check serial liars when it fails to check itself and refuses to retract those lies and offer a sincere apology?
This is not the only time corporate media has worn its pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian bias on its sleeve. Those who support peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters are asked repeatedly, even after they have answered the question, if they denounce Hamas, its October 7 terrorist attack, and its use of rape as a weapon of war. In contrast, those who support Israel are seldom asked if they denounce the genocide in Gaza, the IDF’s slaughter of Palestinian civilians, or the rape and torture of Palestinian detainees. Rather, corporate media prefers to argue that those who draw attention to its bias are themselves engaging in false equivalency since everyone knows that Hamas engages in terrorism. They will not even entertain the thought that Israel engages in terrorism and genocide if only because they would have to accept the cognitively dissonant reality that the victims of atrocity can become its future perpetrators. To recognize this reality would be to admit that Jews can supportwhite nationalists, invite self-avowed “racial realists” to university campuses, or pal around with neo-Nazi influencers, and that Afro Cubans can head white supremacist groups, and black lieutenant governors can be Nazis.
Terrorism, however, is an equal-opportunity exterminator. Although he later retracted it, Ted Turner, the creator of CNN, made this point way back in 2002. “The Palestinians,” he said, “are fighting with human suicide bombers, that’s all they have. The Israelis… they’ve got one of the most powerful military machines in the world. The Palestinians have nothing. So who are the terrorists? I would make a case that both sides are involved in terrorism.”
However, like the plight of Palestinians, this is a chapter in the network’s history it would apparently like to erase, to banish to the corn field.
Significantly, while Tapper and Bash have both taken hits from the right for fact-checking Trump during the presidential debate, neither took the opportunity to question him about his antisemitism, to go after his proven record of antisemitism, in which he quotes Hitler and accuses American Jews of disloyalty when he isn’t repeatedly telling them that Israel is “your country” and Netanyahu “your prime minister” and characterizing Jews who criticize Israel as traitors to both the United States and Israel. Instead, they took the easy path and targeted a Muslim American congresswoman. Not only that, Trump’s most recent statements, questioning the sanity of Jews who vote for Harris and blaming them if he loses the election, have set the stage for an escalation of antisemitism should he in fact lose the election. Following the first assassination attempt, antisemitic incidents rose as rumors spread that the would-be assassin was Jewish.
However, Bash was only partially right: antisemitism is indeed everywhere and comes from both ends of the political spectrum. The same is true of Islamophobia.
In the wake of October 7, nationwide attacks on Palestinian Americans and Muslims have increased dramatically. According to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), it received 3,578 complaints during the last three months of 2023, up 178% from the same period during the previous year. A week following the Hamas attack, in Illinois, a 6-year-old Palestinian boy was fatally stabbed 26 times, and his mother, who survived, 12. A month later, in Vermont, 3 Palestinian college students were shot, leaving one permanently paralyzed. That same month in California, an Arab student was the victim of a hit-and-run, the driver reportedly shouting, “fuck you and your people,” before accelerating. This year, in Texas, a Palestinian man protesting the genocide in Gaza was dragged out of his car and stabbed in the chest. (Interestingly, the grand jury did not file hate crime charges, even though the assailant reportedly repeatedly shouted “nigger” at the victim.) A woman in Texas attempted to drown a 3-year-old Palestinian girl. This is not to mention Palestinian Americans who have been arrested, detained, and killed in Gaza and the West Bank. It is not that the media has not covered these incidents; it is that they have not been covered with the same intensity or met with the same degree of outrage that has greeted antisemitic attacks. Nor is the price exacted for the expression of Islamophobia the same. Antisemites, real or imagined (including “tenured” and nontenured Jewish professors), lose their jobs. Islamophobes rarely face such consequences. They may even serve on senate committees ostensibly designed to investigate hate crimes.
Case in point: Louisiana senator John Kennedy. Kennedy proudly demonstrated his Islamophobic bono fides during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on hate crimes. On September 17, when Maya Berry, the executive director of the Arab American Institute, along with two other experts, testified, Kennedy couldn’t help but spin some GOP, good ole boy, home-spun bigotry.
Off the bat, Kennedy used his time to engage in a series of performatively provocative questions designed to bait Berry and paint her as an antisemitic, terrorist supporter.
Kennedy: You support Hamas, do you not?
Maya Berry: Senator, oddly enough, I’m going to say thank you for that question because it demonstrates the purpose of our hearing today, in a very—
Kennedy: Let’s start first with a yes or no.
Berry: Hamas is a foreign terrorist organization, which I do not support. But you asking the executive of the Arab American Institute that question very much puts the focus on the issue of hate in our country.
Kennedy was not done; racists never are.
Kennedy: You support Hezbollah, too, don’t you?
Berry: Again, I find this line of questioning extraordinarily disappointing, senator.
Kennedy: Is that a no or a yes?
Berry: You have Arab American constituents that you represent in your grand state—
Kennedy: I understand that, but my time’s limited, and I apologize, but is that a yes or a no?
Kennedy cuts her off, demanding a yes or no answer.
Berry: A yes or no answer to do I support Hezbollah? The answer is I don’t support violence, whether it’s Hezbollah, Hamas, or any other entity that invokes it, so, no, sir.
Kennedy: You can’t bring yourself to say no, can you?
Berry: No, I can say no; I can say yes. What I can say is –
Kennedy: Do you support or oppose Iran?
Berry: [Sighs]
Fortunately, the hearing was not about pet-eating. If it had been, and White House Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre had been called to testify, Kennedy would have probably begun his line of questioning with “How do you like your dogs and cats? Baked or broiled?”
And following the hearing, Tapper and Bash would have asked her for the recipe.
Notes.
1. Unless used in a direct quote, I have chosen not to capitalize “black” until there is substantive reform of American police enforcement and the criminal justice system that results in the criminal prosecution of those who use excessive force and a systemic, long-term reduction in the number of police killings and brutalization of black people.
3. Cotton’s evasions are revealing. Not only does he not denounce Trump and Robinson, but he also seems to have persistent difficulty distinguishing American Jewish voters from the state of Israel. Although Tapper presses Cotton four times to respond to American antisemitism, the senator repeatedly conflates the two, focusing on Israel and ignoring American Jews entirely. Then again, this is the same good ole boy who can’t distinguish Singaporean CEOs from communist Chinese. Unlike Whitmer, however, Cotton has received little if any backlash for his evasions.
4. If Jewishness is contingent on supporting Israel, then what is one to make of anti-Zionist Jews and Jews who protest the genocide in Gaza and demand that the U.S. stop arming Israel? Do they somehow, magically, cease to be Jews?
5. For a discussion of the problematic nature of such statements, see Revital Madar’s “Beyond Male Israeli Soldiers, Palestinian Women, Rape, and War: Israeli State Sexual Violence Against Palestinians,” Conflict and Society 9 (2023): 72–88. Madar notes that reports of such incidents are generally limited to Israeli soldiers and do not include police, prison guards, military court officials, Shin Bet, and other security forces. “Spatially,” she writes, “as much as Palestinian women are subject to sexual harassment and assaults at checkpoints and during house raids, their vulnerability exceeds these spaces and includes interrogation rooms, courts, and prisons.” Madar is among several Israeli scholars listed on Israel Academic Monitor, a blog that tracks “anti-Israel activities of Israeli academics and other academic-related issues.”
Protests at Dunn Meadow, IU campus, Bloomington. Photo: Steven Higgs.
When Quinn the Sniper Man gets here, Everybody better duck and run.
Yes, this piece is about that Quinn Buckner – captain of the undefeated, 1976 NCAA champion Indiana University basketball team, NBA All Star and coach, long-time television analyst for the Indiana Pacers.
Buckner was appointed to the IU Board of Trustees in 2016, in one of Governor Mike Pence’s last official acts before becoming Donald Trump’s vice president. Today he is board president and senior board member. The six governor appointees and three alumni-elected representatives compose the Big 10 university’s governing body.
President Buckner and the trustees are responsible for everything that happens on every one of IU’s nine campuses, from website content to the deployment of state storm troopers last spring to silence free speech on the university’s flagship property.
Buckner’s hand-picked IU President Pamela Whitten, whom he says has his full support, “invited” the Indiana State Police onto the Bloomington campus to bust up peaceful pro-Palestinian protests last April 27.
Police respond to protests at Dunn Meadow, IU campus, Bloomington. Photo: Steven Higgs.
***
On Buckner’s watch, the Bloomington campus made national headlines that spring day with a viral photograph of a state police sniper atop the iconic Indiana Memorial Union building overlooking campus war protests.
Three floors below the gunman’s sights, in the historic Free Speech Zone known as Dunn Meadow, armed Indiana State Police with riot shields advanced on peaceful protesters, evicted them, tore down their encampment, and arrested fifty six.
Two days before, I spent an afternoon in the Meadow observing and photographing the scene.
Pro-Israel students at the Chabad center directly across Seventh Street counterprotested by playing loud music, wrapping themselves in Israeli and American flags, and chanting their own slogans. An antiwar demonstrator paced along the sidewalk twenty feet from the pro-Israel contingent. A couple Jewish kids walked around the antiwar encampment perimeter with an Israeli flag.
It all seemed to me a refreshing, healthy sign that, fifty-five years after Buckner and Company’s trustee predecessors officially designated Dunn Meadow a Free Speech Zone – when I was a freshman protesting the Vietnam War – such civic engagement was still possible, despite twenty years of unrelenting intellectual degradation by ultra-right Republican Governors Mitch Daniels, Mike Pence, and Eric Holcomb.
While confirming the sniper’s presence and defending this year’s show of force in the Meadow, the state police chief cited “disgusting, terrible, personal, hateful, vile comments made about other people.” Other than obliquely alluding to statements “encouraging the death of the Jewish people globally,” the chief refused to give examples.
The event was covered minute-by-minute by campus, city, and state media, and absolutely no one, not even antiwar Jewish students and faculty interviewed in the encampment, cited any hate speech or threats against Jews whatsoever.
Calling the university’s actions “constitutionally dubious,” the local prosecutor dropped charges against all but one protester, who allegedly bit a police officer.
Protests at Dunn Meadow, IU campus, Bloomington. Photo: Steven Higgs.
+++
What Whitten and Buckner’s other underlings did on April 27 was literally orchestrated in secret, just hours before the sniper ascended the Memorial Union stairs. With the 1969 Free Speech Zone designation still in place, an ad hoc IU committee quietly changed university rules to say temporary encampments were only allowed in Dunn Meadow with prior administration approval.
And far from being an exception or a defensible overresponse to a volatile situation, the episode is symptomatic of state Republicans unvarnished war on speech, tenure, and academic freedom under the Pence-Buckner-Whitten regime.
The Bloomington Herald-Times just did a series on the disreputable process the trustees orchestrated to hire Whitten in 2021.
“Whitten, who has a history of upsetting faculty wherever she goes, was seemingly handpicked by the Board of Trustees to lead IU,” H-T Editor Jill Bond wrote. “Her selection was done under a shroud of secrecy, with most aspects of how she was identified and why she was chosen sealed by nondisclosure agreements and hidden from public view by the use of private search firms.”
Buckner and the trustees departed from precedent by rejecting a short list of recommendations from a search committee composed of faculty, students, and trustees. Instead, apparently relying on a private search firm’s recommendations, they asked the board to consider Whitten and three others “for still unknown reasons,” the H-T series reported.
In July, the trustees approved a new Expressive Activity Policy that, the IDS reported, limits speech “to the hours between 6 a.m. and 11 p.m. every day, prohibits camping at any time of day, prohibits impeding vehicle and pedestrian traffic and building entrances.” Signs and temporary structures must be approved at least 10 days in advance by the university.
Signs must now be approved by the university.
Dunn Meadow, IU campus, Bloomington. Photo: Steven Higgs.
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Whitten’s reputation as an academic hatchet man, however, was public knowledge.
In October 2016, the University of Georgia student paper Red & Black reported that, when Whitten was provost there, a professor who had demanded the university acknowledge slavery said an administrator told him Whitten “was considering measures that would make it impossible for [him] ever to gain employment at other universities.”
In April 2019, the Kennesaw State University student paper KSU Sentinel reported, a student group there accused then-President Whitten of refusing to publicly condemn racism.
Before Whitten left KSU for IU, her provost and senior vice president chaired a committee that, according to a December 2021 post from the American Association of University Professors, ultimately “eviscerated” tenure in the University System of Georgia, the first in the nation to do so. The process started when Whitten was still in Kennesaw.
As I reported in CounterPunch in September 2022, IU President Whitten laughed out loud when asked on a public radio program why the faculty might be concerned she was coming after tenure. She said they might have been “conflating” talk in the Georgia legislature.
In March this year, NPR reported that Governor Holcomb signed a bill that allows state universities to “revoke tenure if profs don’t foster ‘intellectual diversity,’” specifically citing conservative ideals.
Whitten issued a boilerplate, milquetoast statement opposing the bill when it was before the Indiana General Assembly. But she will enforce it.
Buckner brought her to Bloomington to eviscerate tenure.
+++
Whitten’s two-year stint at IU has been marked by the same turmoil and animosity that characterized her career in Georgia, a performance for which Buckner and the Trustees have awarded her an annual $650,000 base salary – plus travel, business, and entertainment expenses. In her first two years, they gave her bonuses of $162,500 and $175,500.
In Spring 2022, the Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition went on a month-long, end-of-semester strike, which resulted in yearly teaching salary minimums rising from $15,000 to $22,000. They failed to receive approval to form a union.
At that time, Whitten’s salary/bonus totaled $812,500 – before benefits. According to university salary data,103 professors and administrators at the IU Kelley School of Business earned more than $200,000, averaging $270,000 apiece.
Noting that the cost of living in Bloomington is an estimated $41,441, the grad student coalition last spring held a three-day strike called “Three Days for a Raise.”
“This year, the IGWC delivered 1,300 signed union cards and a letter to IU President Pamela Whitten, urging a union election, negotiation and a living wage minimum,” the Indiana Daily Student reported in April. “The IGWC said in a press release this week despite multiple follow-up attempts, there was no response.”
Quinn Buckner, when he was an NBA analyst.
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Throughout her tenure, Whitten has moved several times to quell free speech on campus and has been reviled by practically the entire IU-Bloomington community for her actions.
This past January, her administration suspended political science Professor Abdulkader Sinno for helping the Palestine Solidarity Committee organize a public event on the Gaza War.
In February, for alleged security reasons, the administration canceled an exhibit of artwork by IU alumnus and Palestinian-born artist Samia Halaby, amid accusations they were censoring her pro-Palestinian views.
In March, the Trustees inched away from a plan to sever university relations with the seventy-seven-year-old Kinsey Institute, the world renowned, sex research institution that has come under attack from Penceian Christian Nationalists in the state.
In April, in response to these and daily indignities forced upon them by Buckner’s hand-picked administration, 93% of 948 faculty members passed a vote of no confidence in Whitten for “encroaching on both academic freedom and shared governance.”
In April, 77% of the faculty in the Kelley School of Business likewise passed a resolution calling for Whitten’s contract to be terminated. By larger margins, the business profs also called for repeal of the structure policy and for the yearlong campus bans imposed on the fifty six arrested protesters to be rescinded.
Buckner personally responded: “Let me be absolutely clear: President Whitten has my full support and that of every member on the Board of Trustees. … She is an extraordinary leader who is crucial to Indiana University’s success and will be serving as our president for years to come.”
+++
Before the first day of class for the Fall Semester, Quinn Buckner and Company erected a chain-link Trumpian Wall around Dunn Meadow – literally fencing out free speech altogether.
A sign says the “temporary fence allows for our dedicated facilities team to restore this location to its original condition, making it accessible to the entire campus community.”
In 2009, a Victoria Secret PINK Concert turned the Meadow’s west end into a mudhole, reminiscent of an Indiana pigpen in April. The company had it resod and reopened in two weeks.
+++
Since Buckner et al have effectively declared Dunn Meadow a No Speech Zone, campus protests have been reduced to late-night vigils at the nearby Sample Gates, intentionally held in violation of Whitten’s Expressive Activity Policy.
The ACLU sued after university police referred two protesters to their deans for speaking at the rallies after 11 on Aug. 25.
According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, IU now ranks 243rd out of 250 colleges and universities for free speech and inquiry.
The Iranian retaliation against Israel followed a week of political ploy and military subterfuge. On the political level, Iran’s newly elected reformist president extended conciliatory gestures at the UN General Assembly, while the Supreme Leader issued somber statements of resignation in what seemed to be an acceptance of fate.
On the military front, U.S. intelligence appears to have intercepted communication along with surveilling satellite information on October 1st, indicating Iran’s response was imminent. Yet, and despite the advanced notice, the Israeli and American led missile defense system, stationed in the advanced Israeli buffer zone of Jordan and American bases in Iraq, failed to stop a significant number of missiles from reaching their targets.
In order to bypass the only foreign American taxpayer-funded air defense system, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) must have utilized military tactics inspired by Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to outwit the observing eyes and create confusion. It appears the IRGC may have conducted misleading maneuvers including the readying of old generation liquid-fueled ballistic missiles for launch. These older, liquid-fueled missiles, which take longer to fuel and deploy, may have been deliberately readied in plain sight, while the faster, more advanced solid-fuel rockets were secretly stationed in underground bunkers, poised for a surprise launch.
Based on the synchronized delivery of missiles to the intended military targets, Iran may have initially fired the older Shihab family missiles to reinforce the false assessment of the monitoring satellites. Thus, creating confusion when they were followed by the newer, supersonic Fatah-1 rockets. The launching of different types of missiles would make it nearly impossible for the defense system to quickly calculate the trajectories of multiple objects flying at different altitudes, some within and others outside the Earth’s atmosphere, and at varying speeds (ranging from Mach 5 to Mach 15). As a result, many missiles evaded interception, with satellite photos showing at one site, Nevatim air base, at least 20 missiles reached their target.
Iran’s measured retaliation last April, following Israel’s raid on its consular offices in Damascus, was merely a warning, meant to demonstrate the capabilities of the IRGC. However, Netanyahu misinterpreted the message, viewing the use of slow-moving drones, outdated missiles, and the advance warning as signs of weakness. This misjudgment, combined with an ineffective American president, fed Netanyahu’s hubris, leading him to believe he could continue to act with impunity.
Before and after Israel’s assassination of Palestinian leader Ismail Haniyeh, the Biden administration used the Qatari prime minister as an emissary to mediate with Iran not to retaliate, arguing that doing so could jeopardize a potential ceasefire in Gaza. The lack of the immediate Iranian retaliation as a result of the Biden/Blinken deception further boosted Netanyahu’s insolence, fueling his aggression by expanding his war of terror and extrajudicial assassinations.
The war on Lebanon escalated when Israel detonated about 3,000 explosive devices in Lebanese cities and towns, an act condemned by former CIA Director Leon Panetta as a form of terrorism. The Biden administration’s policy of appeasement allowed the supercilious Israeli prime minister to indulge further in the extrajudicial assassinations of leaders in their homes in the Lebanese capital and waging massive air raids killing and injuring more than 20,000 Lebanese, mostly civilians, in one day.
The rogue prime minister ordered the American-made jets to drop 85–1000-pound bunker-buster bombs on an alleged headquarters of Hezbollah in Beirut flattening several multi story buildings. As usual, Joe Biden and his Israeli firster Secretary of State, blessed the Israeli action disregarding the cost of civilians and that the raid obliterated an entire civilian neighborhood. Despite internal grumbling inside the administration over Israel conducting major military operations without consulting the U.S., Biden and without hesitation, obliged to Netanyahu’s request to dispatch additional American forces to help Israel deter any potential Iranian retaliation.
Using the same logic, what if the Resistance in Lebanon or Iran were to wipe out the entire Tel Aviv neighborhood surrounding Israeli government ministries? Would the killing of civilians be considered legitimate collateral damage when targeting the headquarters of Israel’s ministry of war in the heart of Tel Aviv? Or does the collateral damage rational apply only to those deemed less than equal human beings, the non-Jews and non-Westerners?
Israel is an insatiable Zionist culture of vengeance where massacring civilian is an integral part of its broader war strategy. They create false narratives such as militants hiding among civilians to justify murdering civilians. Iran’s decision to go out of its way to limit its retaliation to military sites represented a dilemma for Israel as we saw when Israeli army chief falsely claimed in a media spin that Iran aimed “to kill thousands of civilians.” The baseless allegation is part of an Israeli calculated strategy to preemptively justify and rationalize the potential targeting of Iranian civilians.
Meanwhile, and contrary to speculations in the U.S. media, the initial Israeli delay in responding to Iran’s retaliation has nothing to do with selecting targets in Iran. Israeli pilots have long simulated mock attacks on Iranian sites. Netanyahu, however, did not want to act alone—he sought for the U.S. to lead or, at the very least, join in the attack against Iran. This has always been, and remains, Netanyahu’s goal: to manipulate and coerce the U.S. into another made-for-Israel war in the Middle East.
Israel knows it cannot singlehandedly debilitate Iran’s military capabilities. However, Israel could carry a large-scale strike on Iran only to embarrass Biden and Kamala Harris’ campaign as part of Netanyahu’s October Surprise to bolster Donald Trump’s chances in November. Especially since such action is certain to provoke an Iranian counterattack that would severely damage Israel’s civil and economic infrastructure. A strike and counterstrike will thrust the war to the stage of the heated election debate, potentially benefiting Trump and hurting Harris.
There should be no illusion about Israel’s ability to cause wanton destruction in Iran. But if Iran was able to counter back with only ten percent of the extent of the Israeli damage, the devastation to Israel would be much more catastrophic. Because unlike Iran’s vast expanse and resources, Israel has only one international airport, one refinery, a handful of natural gas rigs, a small number of power plants and ports, one major nuclear facility, two major economic cities, and a handful of water desal plants.
In last week’s maneuver, Iran demonstrated the capacity to overwhelm the Israeli aerial defense system. If IRGC, in coordination with the Lebanese Resistance managed to deliver only ten explosive devices to each key infrastructure site, it would be a crushing blow, potentially crippling Israel, and for a long time.
Such a likely scenario should snap Netanyahu from his intoxicated euphoria and turn it into a prolonged hangover.
“Israeli Military Wins Back Stature Lost on Oct. 7,”
– The New York Times, October 4, 2024.
“A military asserts itself as an ‘anchor of strength’.”
– The New York Times, October 4, 2024.
Several days after the Washington Post bogusly declared that Israel has recovered the “military primacy” that it lost a year ago, the New York Times goes one step further. It obscenely proclaims that the Israeli military has regained its “stature.” We’re are talking about a sophisticated and lethal military force that has been facing Arab adversaries who lack air power and air defense for the past 57 years. Israel, a superpower in the Middle East, has been facing Arab states that have not threatened Israel since Egyptian President Anwar Sadat capitulated in Jerusalem 45 years ago. As a result of that decision, Sadat lost his life to an assassin.
The Times argues that “Israel’s display of military and technological prowess has most likely helped to reestablish itself as an ‘anchor of strength’ in the region and as a balance against Iran and its proxies.” But this has been the case since Israel’s war of independence 76 years ago. For this entire period, Israel has held air superiority throughout the region. Air power was the key to victory in the Six-Day War in 1967; the October War in 1973; and of course the pummeling of Beirut in 1982. The bombing of Beirut was particularly significant because Israeli leaders had told their Arab counterparts privately over the years that they would never attack an Arab capital because of the vulnerability of their own capital in Jerusalem.
Is it possible to use the word “stature” when you confront the nature of Israel’s genocidal and scorched earth campaign in Gaza, where more than 42,000 Palestinians have been killed, mostly women and children; the use of fighter aircraft against the occupied territory on the West Bank, which violates a series of Geneva Conventions; and now the obscene bombing of Beirut, which is beginning to resemble the Israeli bombing campaigns in Gaza over the past year. Israel has reduced Gaza to rubble, making nearly two million internal refugees. Israel threatens to do the same in Lebanon in its so-called “limited” and “targeted” operation that already has displaced more than one million Lebanese. These are the so-called achievements that have made Israel an international pariah, and have exposed U.S. hypocrisy in condemning Russian war crimes in Ukraine but ignoring Israel’s genocidal campaign.
Let’s look more closely at Israel’s military “stature” in terms of innocent lives lost, including infants who never reached their first birthday. As of October 4, 2024, the Committee to Protect Journalist’s preliminary investigations showed at least 127 journalists and media workers were among the more than 42,000 killed since the war began, making it the deadliest period for journalists since CPJ began gathering data more than 30 years ago. More than 885 healthcare workers have been killed in Gaza and the West Bank since 7 October 2023. This includes nurses, paramedics, doctors, and other medical personnel. Numerous physicians with Doctors Without Borders, whose teams have had to flee 14 different health structures and endure 26 violent incidents since the start of the war, have been killed. Several days ago, the Israelis bombed a health clinic because it was operated by Hezbollah, which is responsible for a large segment of the health infrastructure throughout Lebanon. Stature?
In a particularly obscene event in April, missiles from Israeli drones operating in Gaza struck a clearly marked convoy of the Washington-based World Central Kitchen one of the few organizations able to get supplies to starving civilians. Seven people were killed, including aid workers from the United States, Britain Poland and Australia, along with their Palestinian driver. The convoy had reported its travel and its coordinates to the Israeli Defense Forces, which is customary for such aid convoys.
An outraged President Joe Biden said once again that Israel “has not done enough” to protect aid workers and civilians from its attacks. The Biden administration has emphasized to Israel that it must follow international norms in protecting civilians, but Netanyahu’s government has demonstrated that it is unable or unwilling to do so. Secretary of State Antony Blinken states that there is no evidence that Israel is blocking aid to reach Gaza, although the internal reports of the Agency for International Development have documented Israeli hindrance of food and fuel.
Once again, Israel should be faced with the task of transforming its so-called military victories into long-term diplomatic settlements, but Netanyahu has never been interested in territorial or diplomatic compromise. Israel has never acknowledged Palestinian “right of return,” although it is part of international law, and Palestinians are specifically guaranteed that right by UN Resolution 194. This has been the problem that Israel has faced since the easy successes of the Six-Day War and the occupation of the Sinai, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank. But Israel hasn’t been able to achieve diplomatic success since 1967, and now it is even further from achieving regional stability.
The current Israeli leadership is particularly uninterested in diplomatic success, and there is no reason to believe that there are successors to Benjamin Netanyahu who are willing to address Palestinian sovereignty. Netanyahu has focused on prolonging the war in Gaza, extending it to Lebanon, and avoiding a cease-fire deal with Hamas—even at the price of abandoning the remaining hostages in Gaza, who are dying in Gaza’s tunnels. Ironically, Netanyahu’s brother lost his life in a rescue mission to release Israeli hostages being held in Uganda in 1976.
The United States provides defense guarantees to Israel and warns against escalation, but the Israeli Defense Forces conduct massive operations without giving the United States any warning. Israel has become a pariah nation for good reason, and it has dragged down the credibility and influence of the United States in the process.
Photograph Source: U.S. State Department – Public Domain
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may not have anticipated October 7. But the Hamas massacre that day gave him a welcome opportunity to execute a long=held Israeli plan. Its steps are to create a Greater Israel; destroy Hamas, Hezbollah and other adversaries in Iraq, Syria and Yemen; and quash Iran’s budding nuclear program. Over the past 12 months, that plan has unfolded successively in four principal locations: Gaza, the West Bank (and East Jerusalem), Lebanon and now Iran.
1. Gaza.
In the wake of October 7, Netanyahu vowed to eliminate Hamas, a goal that most of his military advisors deemed unachievable. Asserting “Israel’s right to defend itself,” the Prime Minister and his war cabinet proceeded to level the Gaza Strip and decimate its population with relentless bombing, missile strikes and sniper attacks. With a rising death toll, now over 42,000 (not including thousands missing and presumed dead under the rubble), Gazans have also witnessed the targeting of its journalists and health workers. Hospitals, schools and mosques have not been spared as forced evacuations have moved civilians to so-called “safe zones,” which often have become scenes of massacre with U.S.-supplied bombs and missiles.
At the same time, Israel has pursued as a war tactic, a deliberate policy of starvation. The siege declared by Defense Minister Gallant at the war’s outset has largely deprived Palestinians of clean water, food, fuel, and essential medical supplies. As a result, Gazans (especially babies and children) are dying from malnutrition and related diseases. A full-scale famine descends over the land.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration has pledged unconditional support to Netanyahu and his government. While calling repeatedly for a ceasefire and the return of hostages held by Hamas, the U.S. continues to arm the IDF with lethal weapons, including two-ton bombs and missiles tipped with white phosphorous. Unconstrained militarily and diplomatically, Netanyahu refuses to stop the bombing until Hamas surrenders and returns the hostages. With an uninterrupted supply of arms, the war goes on and innocent civilians continue to die.
2. The West Bank.
Encouraged by extremist members of Netanyahu’s cabinet, whose declared intent is to ethnically cleanse non-Jews and annex the West Bank, Israeli settlers and the IDF have escalated their attacks on Palestinian towns and villages. To date they have murdered over 6,000 inhabitants and imprisoned thousands more. They have forced many residents to flee and have destroyed their homes and enterprises. In both the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel’s apparent aim is to force the exodus of Palestinians, as in the 1948 Nakba.Central to the vision of a “Greater Israel” (extending “from the river to the sea”) is a Jewish State of some seven million Jewish citizens, devoid of a similar number of Palestinian residents. As the world’s attention focuses on Gaza (and now Lebanon and Iran), residents are seeing their community infrastructure and businesses destroyed. Observers say the West Bank is beginning to look like Gaza.
3. Lebanon.
When the Israeli genocide began in Gaza, the Hezbollah militia began attacking towns in northern Israel. In solidarity with Gaza, it pledged to continue those attacks until Israel agreed to a ceasefire. With U.S. arms flowing to the IDF. Netanyahu was not about to back down. Israel’s targeted assassinations of top Hamas and Hezbollah leaders, its rigging of exploding communication devices; and its bombing and land invasion have already cost more than two thousand Lebanese lives. Hezbollah’s militia has been degraded, but it continues to put up armed resistance. Whatever the political outcome, Israel’s war on Lebanon has already caused much devastation in Beirut and elsewhere. How will this war end?
4. Iran.
When Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress in 2015, he decried the then emerging nuclear deal with Iran, insisting that America withdraw from the multiparty negotiations Indeed, the Prime Minister has never hidden his desire to nip in the bud Iran’s near assent to nuclear power and overturn the country’s theocratic government. Now, with a significant U.S. naval presence and more than 40,000 troops in the region, Netanyahu can rest assured that America will protect Israel.
Iran sought to avenge the Israeli strike on Tehran in July that killed the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh. However, its missile barrage did little damage and killed only one person. Yet Israel has promised to retaliate. The chief of the Iranian Armed Forces then declared that if Israel does retaliate, “our response will be more forceful.” A next round of retaliations would likely unleash a major war, dragging in the Americans and giving what Israeli provocations have intended all along: an excuse to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Israel’s ongoing wars in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon are a prelude to a possible big war against Iran. Meanwhile, President Biden continues the flow of U.S. weapons to Israel. While discouraging (another “red line”) a bombing of Iran’s nuclear plants, he appears to be okay with possible strikes on Iranian oil facilities.
In short, Bibi’s bloody game plan is on track– to destroy Palestinian populations in both Gaza and the West Bank and to sow fear and chaos among Lebanese civilians by bombing suspected Hezbollah sites. The IDF has degraded the military capacity of both Hamas and Hezbollah. Yet both organizations remain alive and likely to regroup and strengthen over time.
In providing essential arms to Israel, the U.S. has become complicit in both the Gaza genocide and the war crimes in the West Bank and Lebanon. Both Netanyahu and the Biden administration deserve to be held accountable for their serious violations of international law and moral norms.
Photograph Source: U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv – CC BY 2.0
“Israel, in sum, has recovered the military primacy it lost when Hamas fighters surged across the Gaza border on Oct. 7 and ravaged Israeli civilians.”
– David Ignatius, oped, Washington Post, October 2, 2024.
“We Absolutely Need to Escalate in Iran.”
– Bret Stephens, editorial, The New York Times, October 3, 2024.
The mainstream media has been largely critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s dangerous use of military power, and largely supportive of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s equally dangerous use of military power. The leading proponents of these contrasting views have been David Ignatius in the Washington Post and Bret Stephens in the New York Times.
Ignatius could not be more wrong about Israel recovering its military primacy. Israel never lost the primacy it established in the Six-Day War in 1967 in the rapid sequencing of defeating the military forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in that order. The surprise attacks of the October War in 1973 and the Hamas attacks of October 2023 were essentially aberrations that could be attributed to intelligence and political failures on both occasions. Prime Minister Golda Meir lost her leadership because of her failures; Prime Minister Netanyahu will lose his whenever Israel gets around to holding another election.
The Middle East is facing its greatest peril at this juncture because Netanyahu now has a free hand to conduct any military operation he desires against Iran. Netanyahu no longer has to be concerned with the responses of Hamas and Hezbollah to an Israeli attack against Iran because both organizations have been strategically defeated on the battle field. Netanyahu no longer has to be concerned with U.S. calls for restraint because the Biden administration is tethered to the demands of an imminent presidential election and President Joe Biden has shown no interest in using the only leverage in his policy quiver—the withholding of military assistance. Netanyahu no longer has to be concerned with domestic opposition because it has vanished, and even former prime ministers such as Naftali Bennett are calling for Israel to destroy the network of pipelines, refineries, and oil terminals on Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf as well as the missile complex in Isfahan.
Stephens is the major U.S. cheerleader for Bennett’s proposed bombing campaign. He has invoked the need to defeat the “axis of evil” (Russia, China, and North Korea) before it provides technical help for Iran’s nuclear ambitions. According to Stephens, Biden—“at a minimum”—should destroy the Isfahan missile complex as a “direct and and proportionate response” to Iran’s aggressions. Carrying out such a threat, according to Stephens, could convince Iran to order Hezbollah and the Houthis to “stand down” and even “pressure Hamas to release its Israeli hostages.”
Stephens makes no mention of the Iran nuclear accord of 2015 that placed significant limitations on Iran’s nuclear ambitions, including its enrichment of uranium, construction of centrifuges, and production of weapons-grade plutonium. The agreement also prohibited research activities that contributed to designing and developing a nuclear device in perpetuity. If Iran is closer to development of nuclear weapons, it is due to Donald Trump’s decision in 2018 to abrogate a treaty that had significant international support, including from Russia and China. And if Iran has enough near-weapons grade nuclear fuel for several nuclear bombs, it is due to Trump and his national security adviser, John Bolton.
Stephens (and Netanyahu) wants the completion of the “decapitation” of Hezbollah and the “evisceration” of Hamas in Gaza. He has supported an Israeli invasion of Lebanon, but makes no mention of previous Israeli failures in Lebanon in 1978, 1982, and 2006, which led to unexpected losses and an unanticipated long-term occupation. U.S. efforts to pull Israeli chestnuts out of the fire led to U.S. losses in 1983. Israel successfully forced the ouster of Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization from Lebanon, but in doing so a far more dangerous Hezbollah emerged, a group that didn’t exist until Israel invaded the Lebanese capital of Beirut in 1982.
Greater use of Israeli military power has not provided Israel with greater security over the years, and there is no reason to believe that any retaliation—other than a symbolic response similar to the April attack—would end the current cycle of permanent occupation. Israeli analysts continue to speak of “escalate to deescalate,” “escalation dominance,” and “restoration of deterrence,” but Israel’s “targeted assassinations,” the violence of settlers on the West Bank, and the genocidal campaign in Gaza will never serve any long-term strategic purpose. The collusion of the Israeli defense forces, the police, and the military courts speaks to the apartheid that exists on the West Bank. Until the United States understands the necessity of diplomatic dialogue with Iran, and Israel understands the the necessity of Palestinian sovereignty on a land that they can call their own, the cycle of permanent war will continue.
+ This week’s vice-presidential debate, one of the most tedious and dull in US history, was praised by the punditocracy for its civility. Is civility in politics what we want when the current government is arming a genocide and the rival campaign wants to arrest 15 million people and deport them?
+ Before I fell into a stupor, I counted Walz saying “I agree” with the racist misogynist JD Vance at least six times. It was like listening to a table talk between Biden and Strom Thurmond in the Senate cafeteria. Why did Walz try to humanize a jerk who claims Haitians are BBQing pets?
+ The “big moment” of the night was the first moment of the night when both candidates agreed that Israel could obliterate Iran at will, as far as they were concerned…
+ CBS’s debate moderators, Margaret Brennan and Nora O’Donnell, described Iran’s attacks on Israel as “failed”–without explaining what the strategic objectives might have been. In their minds, if Iran didn’t kill a bunch of Israeli civilians, the strike had to be a failure, even though it degraded Israel’s military. It’s apparently inconceivable to them that Iran (the terror state) could have launched retaliatory airstrikes designed to minimize civilian casualties by targeting only military and intelligence sites.
+ Chief of Staff of Iran’s Armed Forces, Maj Gen Mohammad Bagheri: “Among our targets were Israel’s three main airbases, Mossad’s terror HQ, Radar sites, and gathering sites of armored vehicles around the Gaza Strip, responsible for the genocide in Gaza. Only military sites were targeted. If Israel is not contained by the US and Europe and takes action against our sovereignty and territorial integrity, tonight’s operation will be repeated in much greater size.”
+ How many schools, tents or hospitals did Iran bomb?
+ Here’s the entire dispiriting exchange on the Middle East…
Margaret Brennan: Earlier today, Iran launched its largest attack yet on Israel. But that attack failed thanks to joint U.S. and Israeli defensive action. President Biden has deployed more than 40,000 U.S. military personnel and assets to that region over the past year to try to prevent a regional war. Iran is weakened, but the U.S. still considers it the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world, and it has drastically reduced the time it would take to develop a nuclear weapon. It is down now to one or two weeks. Governor Walz, if you are the final voice in the situation room, would you support or oppose a preemptive strike by Israel on Iran? You have two minutes.
TW: Well, thank you. And thank you for those joining us at home tonight. Let’s keep in mind where this started. On October 7th, Hamas terrorists massacred over 1400 Israelis and took prisoners. Iran, or, Israel’s ability to be able to defend itself is absolutely fundamental, getting its hostages back, fundamental, and ending the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. But the expansion of Israel and its proxies is an absolute, fundamental necessity for the United States to have the steady leadership there. You saw it experienced today, where, along with our Israeli partners and our coalition, able to stop the incoming attack. But what’s fundamental here is that steady leadership is going to matter. It’s clear. And the world saw it on that debate stage a few weeks ago. A nearly 80-year-old Donald Trump talking about crowd sizes is not what we need at this moment. But it’s not just that. It’s those that were closest to Donald Trump that understand how dangerous he is when the world is this dangerous. His Chief of Staff, John Kelly, said that he was the most flawed humanity being he’d ever met. And both of his Secretaries of Defense and his national security advisors said he should be nowhere near the White House. Now, the person closest to them, to Donald Trump, said he’s unfit for the highest office. That was Senator Vance. What we’ve seen out of Vice President Harris is we’ve seen steady leadership. We’ve seen a calmness that is able to be able to draw on the coalitions, to bring them together, understanding that our allies matter. When our allies see Donald Trump turn towards Vladimir Putin, turn towards North Korea, when we start to see that type of fickleness around holding the coalitions together, we will stay committed. And as the Vice President said today, we will protect our forces and our allied forces, and there will be consequences.
MB: Governor, your time is up. Senator Vance, the same question, would you support or oppose a preemptive strike by Israel on Iran? You have two minutes.
JDV: So, Margaret, I want to answer the question. First of all, thanks, Governor. Thanks to CBS for hosting the debate. And thanks most importantly to the American people who are watching this evening and caring enough about this country to pay attention to this vice presidential debate. I want to answer the question, but I want to actually give an introduction to myself a little bit because I recognize a lot of Americans don’t know who either one of us are. I was raised in a working-class family. My mother required food assistance for periods of her life. My grandmother required Social Security help to raise me. And she raised me in part because my own mother struggled with addiction for a big chunk of my early life. I went to college on the GI Bill after I enlisted in the Marine Corps and served in Iraq. And so I stand here asking to be your vice president with extraordinary gratitude for this country and for the American dream that made it possible for me to live my dreams. And most importantly, I know that a lot of you are worried about the chaos in the world and the feeling that the American Dream is unattainable. I want to try to convince you tonight over the next 90 minutes that if we get better leadership in the White House, if we get Donald Trump back in the White House, the American Dream is going to be attainable once again. Now, to answer this particular question, we have to remember that as much as Governor Walz just accused Donald Trump of being an agent of chaos, Donald Trump actually delivered stability in the world, and he did it by establishing effective deterrence. People were afraid of stepping out of line. Iran, which launched this attack, has received over $100 billion in unfrozen assets thanks to the Kamala Harris administration. What do they use that money for? They use it to buy weapons that they’re now launching against our allies and, God forbid, potentially launching against the United States as well. Donald Trump recognized that for people to fear the United States, you needed peace through strength. They needed to recognize that if they got out of line, the United States’ global leadership would put stability and peace back in the world. Now, you asked about a preemptive strike, Margaret, and I want to answer the question. Look, it is up to Israel what they think they need to do to keep their country safe. And we should support our allies wherever they are when they’re fighting the bad guys. I think that’s the right approach to take with the Israel question.
MB: Thank you, Senator. Governor Walz, do you care to respond to any of the allegations?
TW: Well, look, Donald Trump was in office. We’ll sometimes hear a revisionist history, but when Donald Trump was in office, it was Donald Trump who… we had a coalition of nations that had boxed Iran’s nuclear program in the inability to advance it. Donald Trump pulled that program and put nothing else in its place. So Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon than they were before because of Donald Trump’s fickle leadership. And when Iran shot down an American aircraft in international airspace, Donald Trump tweeted, because that’s the standard diplomacy of Donald Trump. And when Iranian missiles did fall near U.S. troops and they received traumatic brain injuries, Donald Trump wrote it off as headaches. Look, our allies understand that Donald Trump is fickle. He will go to whoever has the most flattery or where it makes sense to him. Steady leadership like you witnessed today, like you witnessed in April. Both Iranian attacks were repelled. Our coalition is strong, and we need the steady leadership that Kamala Harris is providing.
MB: Senator Vance, the U.S. did have a diplomatic deal with Iran to temporarily pause parts of its nuclear program, and President Trump did exit that deal. He recently said just five days ago, the U.S. must now make a diplomatic deal with Iran because the consequences are impossible. Did he make a mistake? You have 1 minute.
JDV: Well, first of all, Margaret, diplomacy is not a dirty word, but I think that’s something that Governor Walz just said is quite extraordinary. You, yourself, just said Iran is as close to a nuclear weapon today as they have ever been. And, Governor Walz, you blame Donald Trump, who has been the Vice President for the last three and a half years, and the answer is your running mate, not mine. Donald Trump consistently made the world more secure. Now, we talk about the sequence of events that led us to where we are right now, and you can’t ignore October the 7th, which I appreciate Governor Walz bringing up. But when did Iran and Hamas and their proxies attack Israel? It was during the administration of Kamala Harris. So Governor Walz can criticize Donald Trump’s tweets, but effective, smart diplomacy and peace through strength is how you bring stability back to a very broken world. Donald Trump has already done it once before. Ask yourself at home, when, when was the last time? I’m 40 years old. When was the last time that an American President didn’t have a major conflict, breakout? The only answer is that during the four years that Donald Trump was president,
+ Jeet Heer: “The Biden White House has October Surprised their own candidate. A historical first, I think.”
+ When the Biden-Harris people say Israel has the “right to defend itself,”they leave out the part about that defense coming with the unquestioning US intelligence, logistical, targeting, and military support–regardless of the provocation that made the defense necessary.
+ Shortly before the debate, Trump once again tried to minimize the traumatic brain injuries suffered by more than US troops after an Iranian missile strike in 2020: “What does injured mean? You mean because they had a headache?”
+ A report by CBS found that dozens of injured soldiers initially weren’t awarded Purple Hearts, despite appearing to qualify, because the military brass feared undercutting Trump’s assertion that the injuries were minor. One soldier told CBS, that he suffered constant headaches and memory loss as a result of the TBI: “The person I was prior to a traumatic brain injury, he’s gone.”
+ Parapraxis as truth: Walz: “The expansion of Israel and its proxies is an absolute fundamental necessity for the United States…”
+ Shamefully, there were no questions on the genocide in Gaza, despite Unicef reporting that in less than a year of war, more Palestinian women and children have been killed by Israel (most with US-made weapons) than in any other conflict in the last 20 years.
+ As for climate change, even amid the carnage inflicted by Hurricane Helene, Vance accepted the premise that there is a scientific consensus on human-caused climate change only “for the sake of argument, while Walz weirdly bragged about Biden-Harris turning the US into “an energy superpower.”
+ Here’s the extent of the stultifyingly simplistic back-and-forth on climate change and Hurricane Helene: Walz talks mainly about jobs and increasing oil and gas production, and Vance complains that most solar panels used in the US are made in China (they aren’t)…
Nora O’Donnell: Let’s turn now to Hurricane Helene. The storm could become one of the deadliest on record. More than 160 people are dead and hundreds more are missing. Scientists say climate change makes these hurricanes larger, stronger and more deadly because of the historic rainfall. Senator Vance, according to CBS News polling, seven in ten Americans and more than 60% of Republicans under the age of 45 favor the U.S. taking steps to try and reduce climate change. Senator, what responsibility would the Trump administration have to try and reduce the impact of climate change? I’ll give you two minutes.
JDV: Sure. So first of all, let’s start with the hurricane because it’s an unbelievable, unspeakable human tragedy. I just saw today, actually, a photograph of two grandparents on a roof with a six-year-old child, and it was the last photograph ever taken of them because the roof collapsed, and those innocent people lost their lives. And I’m sure Governor Walz joins me in saying our hearts go out to those innocent people, our prayers go out to them. And we want as robust and aggressive as a federal response as we can get to save as many lives as possible. And then, of course, afterward, to help the people in those communities rebuild. I mean, these are communities that I love, some of them I know very personally. In Appalachia, all across the Southeast, they need their government to do their job. And I commit that when Donald Trump is president again, the government will put the citizens of this country first when they suffer from a disaster. And Norah, you asked about climate change. I think this is a very important issue. Look, a lot of people are justifiably worried about all these crazy weather patterns. I think it’s important for us, first of all, to say Donald Trump and I support clean air and clean water. We want the environment to be cleaner and safer, but one of the things that I’ve noticed some of our democratic friends talking a lot about is a concern about carbon emissions. This idea that carbon emissions drives all the climate change. Well, let’s just say that’s true, just for the sake of argument, so we’re not arguing about weird science. Let’s just say that’s true. Well, if you believe that, what would you, what would you want to do? The answer is that you’d want to reshore as much American manufacturing as possible and you’d want to produce as much energy as possible in the United States of America because we’re the cleanest economy in the entire world. What have Kamala Harris’s policies actually led to? More energy production in China, more manufacturing overseas, more doing business in some of the dirtiest parts of the entire world. When I say that, I mean the amount of carbon emissions they’re doing per unit of economic output. So if we actually care about getting cleaner air and cleaner water, the best thing to do is to double down and invest in American workers and the American people. And unfortunately, Kamala Harris has done exactly the opposite.
Nora O’Donnell: Governor Walz, you have two minutes to respond.
TW: Well, we got close to an agreement because all those things are happening. Look, first of all, it is a horrific tragedy with this hurricane, and my heart goes out to the folks that are down there in contact with the Governors. I serve as co-chair of the council of governors as we work together on these emergency managements. Governors know no partisanship. They work together to… all of the Governors and the emergency responders are on the ground. Those happen on the front end. The federal government comes in, makes sure they’re there, that we recover. But we’re still in that phase where we need to make sure that they’re staying there, staying focused.
Now, look, coming back to the climate change issue, there’s no doubt this thing roared onto the scene faster and stronger than anything we’ve seen. Senator Vance has said that there’s a climate problem in the past; Donald Trump called it a hoax and then joked that these things would make more beachfront property to be able to invest in. What we’ve seen out of the Harris administration now, the Biden Harris administration is, we’ve seen this investment, we’ve seen massive investments, the biggest in global history that we’ve seen in the Inflation Reduction Act, has created jobs all across the country. Two thousand in Jeffersonville, Ohio. Taking the EV technology that we invented and making it here. Two hundred thousand jobs across the country. The largest solar manufacturing plant in North America sits in Minnesota. But my farmers know climate change is real. They’ve seen 500-year droughts, 500-year floods, back to back. But what they’re doing is adapting, and this has allowed them to tell me, “Look, I harvest corn, I harvest soybean, and I harvest wind.” We are producing more natural gas and more oil at any time than we ever have. We’re also producing more clean energy. So the solution for us is to continue to move forward, that climate change is real. Reducing our impact is absolutely critical. But this is not a false choice. You can do that at the same time you’re creating the jobs that we’re seeing all across the country. That’s exactly what this administration has done. We are seeing us becoming an energy superpower for the future, not just the current. And that’s what absolutely makes sense. And then we start thinking about, “How do we mitigate these disasters?”
Nora O’Donnell: Thank you, Senator. I want to give you an opportunity to respond there. The Governor mentioned that President Trump has called climate change a hoax. Do you agree?
JDV: Well, look, what the President has said is that if the Democrats, in particular, Kamala Harris and her leadership, if they really believe that climate change is serious, what they would be doing is more manufacturing and more energy production in the United States of America, and that’s not what they’re doing. So clearly, Kamala Harris herself doesn’t believe her own rhetoric on this. If she did, she would actually agree with Donald Trump’s energy policies. Now, something Governor Walz said, I think is important to touch upon, because when we talk about “clean energy,” I think that’s a slogan that often the Democrats will use here. I’m talking, of course, about the Democratic leadership. And the real issue is that if you’re spending hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars of American taxpayer money on solar panels that are made in China, number one, you’re going to make the economy dirtier. We should be making more of those solar panels here in the United States of America.
TW: We are in Minnesota.
JDV: Some of them are, Tim, but a lot of them are being made overseas in China, especially the components that go into those solar panels. So, if you really want to make the environment cleaner, you’ve got to invest in more energy production. We haven’t built a nuclear facility, I think one, in the past 40 years. Natural gas. We have got to invest more in it. Kamala Harris has done the opposite. That’s raised energy prices and also meant that we’re doing worse by the climate.
Nora O’Donnell: Senator, your time is up. Governor, would you like to respond?
TW: Well, look, we’re producing more natural gas than we ever have. There’s no moratorium on that. We’re producing more oil. But the folks know, and my… like I said, again, these are not liberal folks. These are not folks that are green, new deal folks. These are farmers that have been in drought one year and massive flooding the next year. They understand that it makes sense. Look, our number one export cannot be topsoil from erosion from these massive storms. We saw it in Minnesota this summer. And thinking about, “How do we respond to that?” we’re thinking ahead on this and what Kamala Harris has been able to do in Minnesota, we’re starting to weatherproof some of these things. The infrastructure law that was passed allows us to think about mitigation in the future. How do we make sure that we’re protecting by burying our power lines? How do we make sure that we’re protecting lakefronts and things that we’re seeing more and more of? But to call it a hoax and to take the oil company executives to Mar-a-Lago, say, give me money for my campaign and I’ll let you do whatever you want. We can be smarter about that. And an all of the above energy policy is exactly what she’s doing, creating those jobs right here.
+ Trump on climate change: “The planet has actually gotten a little bit cooler recently. Climate change covers everything. It can rain, it can be dry, it can be hot, it can be cold. Climate change. I believe I really am an environmentalist. I’ve gotten environmental awards.”
+ Meanwhile, the Desert Southwest experienced the most extreme high temperatures ever recorded in October.
+ Trump on the Green New Deal, getting more and more insane: “They wanted to rip down all the buildings in Manhattan and they wanted to rebuild them without windows. Take a look; you have to see the bathrooms. Basically, water-free bathrooms, no water. It’s so gross.”
+ What kind of anti-social personality type is still watching this debate, I ask myself, while watching the debate…
+ Vance tried to excoriate Walz for signing a bill that supposedly allowed “allowed babies that survived an abortion to die.” “The statute that you signed into law, it says that a doctor who presides over an abortion where the baby survives, the doctor is under no obligation to provide life-saving care to a baby who survives a botched late-term abortion,” Vance charged.
+ Walz’s response was defensive and weak. “These are women’s decisions to make about their health care decisions, and the physicians know best when they need to do this…He’s trying to distort the way a law is written to try and make a point. That’s not it at all.”
+ The Minnesota law Vance was referring to changed a requirement that medical personnel seek to”preserve the life” of an infant who is born alive after an attempted abortion to say instead that they must “care” for infants born with fatal complications.
+ In fact, abortions late in pregnancy are extremely rare to non-existent. Abortions at or after 21 weeks (5 months) account for less than 1% of all abortions in the U.S., per the CDC, and most of these are performed because of severe health issues. 94% take place at 13 weeks or earlier. Only abortion in the third-trimester termination (32 weeks) was reported in 2022.
+ In trying to present himself as a more compassionate anti-abortion zealot, Vance said that the Trump-era GOP had to work harder at “earning the American people’s trust back” on the issue of abortion “where they frankly, just don’t trust us.” Then, in almost the next breath, Vance denied he’d ever supported a national ban on abortion. A lie, but one which Walz failed to highlight. In 2022, Vance supported Sen. Lindsey Graham’s bill to ban abortion nationwide after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
+ Vance told many stories about how government programs had helped his poor family, programs he now wants to eliminate.
+ Vance’s solution to the housing crisis is to build housing on national forests and BLM lands. Will Cliven Bundy’s cows still get to graze on their lawns? Another question about the Trump-Vance housing plan: who will build the houses after the mass deportation of immigrants, who make up more than 33% of the construction industry workforce in the US?
+ Trump at a rally the day of the debate: “I shouldn’t say this. I know a lot about overtime. I hated to give overtime; I hated it. I’d get other—I shouldn’t say this–but I’d get other people in. I wouldn’t + pay.”
+ Walz often sounded like he was running for reelection as Governor of Minnesota and, given her + rightward drift, it’s debatable how many of the programs he kept pointing to in his state Harris would now support.
+ By my estimate (and I stopped counting after a while), Walz said, “I agree with JD” at least six times in an attempt to manufacture an illusory common ground on issues like guns, trade, and health care that no longer exists.
+ Vance’s absurd claim that most US mass shootings are the result of illegal guns flowing from Mexico to the United States is the reverse of what’s really taking place, as the drug cartels arm themselves with weapons imported from the US.
+ Vance: “The gross majority, close to 90 percent in some of the statistics I’ve seen, of the gun violence in this country is committed with illegally obtained firearms.”
+ Nope. The overwhelming majority of shooters — 77 percent — bought at least some of their weapons legally, according to a 2022 study by the National Institute of Justice, a research unit of the Justice Department, found that of the known mass shooting cases, Illegal purchases were made by 13 percent of those committing mass shootings.
+ Imagine the level of cognitive dissonance it takes to be a Democratic these days, expecting people to rally around a Campaign of Joy while one-third of the country has been whacked by a climate-fueled hurricane, your party’s arming a genocide and playing a game of nuclear brinksmanship in eastern Europe.
+ In retrospect, it’s understandable how Walz could humanize a racist demagogue like JD Vance, after spending two months calling him “weird” (a gross understatement). Once you’ve embraced a truly demonic figure like Dick Cheney, it’s pretty easy to high-five a slick piker like Vance.
+ In one of the more laughable debate sequences, Vance claimed that Trump saved ObamaCare. Let’s set aside for the moment whether it was worth saving. But Trump tried to end ObamaCare through an executive order, through legislation and through litigation. All of which failed. Vance asserted fancifully that Vance Trump helped more people get health insurance through Obamacare marketplace coverage than either Biden or Obama. Another fantasy. The uninsured rate rose under Trump; it has dropped to its lowest level on record under Biden.
+ A friend who has covered Minnesota politics for decades and has genuinely liked Walz as governor told me after the debate, “Walz has turned out to be a dud. An easily shaken dud.”
+ Walz and Tommy Tuberville have confirmed my long-held view that football coaches should be banned from politics.
+ Instead of congratulating Trump for recognizing the futility of the xenophobic enterprise, Walz actually attacked Trump for only building less than two percent of the border wall during his four years in office.
+ Why is this the big story from the debate? Would Trump have picked someone for VP who says the 2020 elections weren’t rigged, Biden won legitimately and Trump’s been lying for four years?
+ How Vance rationalized once calling Trump an “American Hitler:” “Sometimes, of course, I’ve disagreed with the president, but I’ve also been extremely open about the fact that I was wrong about Donald Trump.” So, more of an American Mussolini?
+ Though not a “great communicator,” Walz proved himself to be Reaganesque in at least one aspect, falsely claiming he was present at historical events. For Reagan, it was the liberation of Buchenwald (he was in Hollywood). For Walsh, it was being in Hong Kong during the student protests at Tiananmen Square (he was in Alliance, Nebraska.) As a teacher, Walz regularly arranged and led student trips to Hong Kong and China. Over the years, he has exaggerated the number of trips (dozens and dozens, in reality around 15) and the timing (May 1989, in reality, August 1989).
+ Here’s what Walz has claimed about those trips…
+ During a congressional hearing on the 25th Anniversary of the protests, Walz said:
“As a young man, I was just going to teach high school in Foshan in Guangdong, and was in Hong Kong in May of ’89. And as the events were unfolding, several of us went in. And I still remember the train station in Hong Kong. The opportunity to be in a Chinese high school at that critical time seemed to me to be really important. And it was a very interesting summer to say the least. Because if you recall, as we moved in that summer and further on and the news blackouts and things that went on, you certainly can’t black out news from people if they want to get it.”
+ Five years later, on the 30th Anniversary of Tiananmen Square, the story had evolved to:
“I was in Hong Kong on June 4, 1989, when, of course, Tiananmen Square happened. And I was in China after that. It was very strange ‘cause, of course, all outside transmissions were, were blocked – Voice of America – and, of course, there was no, no phones or email or anything. So I was kind of out of touch. It took me a month to know the Berlin Wall had fallen when I was living there.”
+ Not a big deal, considering the much more consequential lies that have been told by Trump, Biden and Harris about ongoing matters of life and mass death, but Walz’s fumbling response did him no favors, making the anti-politician sound just like a politician.
“My community knows who I am. They saw where I was at. Look, I will be the first to tell you, I have poured my heart into my community. I’ve tried to do the best I can, but I’ve not been perfect, and I’m a knucklehead at times, but it’s always been about that. Those same people elected me to Congress for 12 years. All I said on this was, I got there that summer and misspoke on this, so I will just – that’s what I’ve said. I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protests. And from that, I learned a lot of what needed to be in, in governance.”
+ It’s not surprising JD Vance didn’t bring up his former career as a venture capitalist and protege of Peter Thiel, though why Tim Walz failed to exploit the faux populist’s resumé as a money-man remains a mystery.
+ Vance continues to associate immigrants with his mother’s opioid addiction: “I nearly lost my mother to the poison coming across the border.” (His mother was a nurse, who lost her job and nursing license after she was caught stealing prescription drugs from the clinic.) Moreover, most fentanyl enters the U.S. through official ports of entry on the southern border,primarily smuggled in by U.S. citizens, not immigrants.
+ The only distancing Harris/Walz have done from Biden is to his right on the economy and border.
+ Trump started out the night doing a play-by-play of the debate on Truth Social and X but quickly grew as bored as everyone else and, midway through, began Tweeting about the death of Pete Rose. No surprise that a former casino owner with mob ties, who’s been found liable for sexual assault, adulates a baseball player who was a gambling addict with mob ties and was accused of statutory rape of teenage girls…(See: HBO documentary Charlie Hustle and the Matter of Pete Rose)
+ Rose grew up poor in Cincy and had real talent and grit as a player, but in other respects is Trumpian in his character. He Rose was by almost any measure a despicable human being, a braggart and pathological liar who betrayed the game of baseball and many of those who defended him. That said, MLB is now more deeply enmeshed in the gambling industry than Pete (or Shoeless Joe) ever was. Rose died in Vegas–the new home of the stolen Oakland As.
+ It was hard to detect what Walz’s objective was in that debate, except not to offend anyone, even the offensive. To avoid offending anyone, Tim Walz put everyone to sleep. Walz was at least self-aware enough to admit the monotony of the face-off: “Thank you to all of you if you’re still up and the folks who missed ‘Dancing with Our Stars.’ I appreciate it.”
+ Football is so boring they have to inflate the points for each score to make people with couch-derived CTE think more is actually happening. If Tuesday night’s Mets/Brewers game had been scored like football,it would have been 56-28.
+ Almost nothing was said during the debate about either COVID-19 or student loans, but as the pandemic rampages onward, the Biden-Harris administration has allowed the benefits to come to an arbitrary end. The self-defeating political logic of this is genuinely Bidenian…
+ Walz was wearing a Taylor Swift-inspired friendship bracelet as he linked her to one of the world’s unfriendliest people: “I’m as surprised as anybody of this coalition that Kamala Harris has built, from Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney to Taylor Swift.”
+ Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney in Wisconsin will alienate more voters than HRC not campaign there at all.
+ Kamala Harris to Liz Cheney in Wisconsin: “I also want to thank your father, Vice President Dick Cheney, for his support and what he has done to serve our country.” Truly disgusting on a moral level, but how does it make any sense politically? Dick Cheney left office as one of the most hated figures in American history wiht an approval rating of 13%. The left and the right were united in their loathing of Cheney. Even the Bush people hate him.
+ Flaccid debates such as this one make me miss Jimmy McMillan, the perennial “The Rent’s Too Damn High” candidate for governor of New York, who didn’t hide the fact he was pissed off about the state of things.
+ Trump can at least fake populist outrage, even as he’s stiffing you out of overtime pay and raising your rent,which is one reason why he seems on track to win again.
Free Boris Kagarlitsky!
On October 8, there will be a special online conference in honor of jailed Russian dissident and long-time CounterPunch contributor Boris Kagarlitsky, who, despite his absurd five-year prison sentence, just published his latest book, The Long Retreat. The conference will address the double aspect of Boris’s work: his wide-ranging analysis of the left’s dilemmas in the face of multiple global crises and the advance of the far right; and his resistance — together with other persecuted anti-war activists in the Russian Federation — to the authoritarianism of the regime of Vladimir Putin. The conference will feature presentations by Patrick Bond, Robert Brenner, Ilya Budraitkis, Nancy Fraser, Alex Callinicos, Bill Fletcher, Jr., Jayati Ghosh, Iyla Mateeve, Trevor Ngwane and others, including Boris’s daughter, Ksenia Kagarlitskaia. You can register here.
If you’re serial felon, Ponzi schemer, and adjudicated sexual abuser Donald Trump, there are only three reasons to hire a lawyer from the Yale Law School of the J.D. Vance variety: to stay out of jail, screw your partners or the IRS, or pay off a mistress.
Otherwise, lawyers (in Donald Trump’s mind) are hired guns, and never give Trump the brilliant advice he would give himself if he was allowed to represent himself in court.
If you’re Vance, the only reason you agree to take Trump on as a client is the hope that he will pay your seven-figure fees before you, yourself, end up in jail.
Alas, as the history of broken dreams isn’t one of the subjects taught at Yale Law School, Vance seems to be missing the point that most of his predecessors—Michael Cohen, Sidney Powell, Kenneth Cheseboro, Jenna Ellis, Rudy Giuliana, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, and Alina Habba (to list only a few Trump attorneys who are drifting up the river)—never got paid and will probably end up in jail long before Trump himself is fitted with an oversized orange necktie.
* * *
For his opening statement as a mob lawyer, Vance was asked to represent his client (Trump) at what was billed as the one-and-only vice presidential debate in 2024, held in a network studio (not unlike The Price is Right, although in this case what was up for auction was the soul of a nation).
The primetime broadcast was little more than an arraignment hearing (“Isn’t it a fact, Mr. Vance, that your client conspired to kill off the democracy? Isn’t it a fact?”) at which Vance had only one assignment: to have Trump released on his own recognizance, so that he can get on with the business of the presidential campaign, which, despite all of Vance’s Yale phrases about immigration, inflation, and Israel, is to bilk the American people of millions (in campaign contributions, soft PAC money, watered shares in Trump Media, crypto currency coins, gold sneakers, Trump cologne, and hollow silver coins).
What makes that even an option is if Trump’s lawyers, Vance among them, can convince the juries of his peers that he’s an upright businessman and a compassionate politician,
As Tony Soprano’s lawyer liked to remind the judge: “Your honor, I take offense to the ‘characterization’ of my client as a ‘Mafioso.’ Mr. Soprano has not been found guilty of anything: he’s awaiting trial for ‘alleged offenses.’”
* * *
Rather than contest the points of the pending Trump “alleged offenses”, Vance employed the time-honored legal strategies of endless mob lawyers, which is to attack the government for having the nerve, the indecency, to charge his client with racketeering, embezzlement, and obstruction of justice.
In the so-called debate, Vance represented that his client was nothing more than a law-abiding citizen, a pillar of the community, and someone who only cares about job creation, women’s reproductive rights, and protecting democracy from the grasps of Facebook, someone who, on January 6th was debating the “issues” in the public square. As Vance said at the debate:
…I think that we’re focused on the future. We need to figure out how to solve the inflation crisis caused by Kamala Harris’s policies. Make housing affordable, make groceries affordable, and that’s what we’re focused on. But I want to answer your question because you did ask it. Look, what President Trump has said is that there were problems in 2020. And my own belief is that we should fight about those issues, debate those issues peacefully in the public square. And that’s all I’ve said. And that’s all that Donald Trump has said. Remember, he said that on January 6th, the protesters ought to protest peacefully. And on January 20th, what happened? Joe Biden became the President. Donald Trump left the White House. And now, of course, unfortunately, we have all of the negative policies that have come from the Harris-Biden administration.
From Vance’s pleadings, you might come to the conclusion that his billionaire client was nowhere near the Capitol when his hired goons attacked Congress with hockey sticks or that, in accumulating his fortune, he always paid more than $750 a year in income tax.
Or you might come to believe that the some 28 women who have accused Trump of sexual abuse now seem to realize all the wonderful things he did as president to defend women’s rights.
* * *
Up against Vance at the Trump arraignment hearing was a veteran prosecutor (well, okay, a football coach and school teacher from Nebraska and Minnesota who graduated from Chadron State), Governor Tim Walz, who did his best to make the case that, if reelected, Trump would carry on with his rackets.
Walz made his points but I am not sure if anyone was listening. He said, for example:
There’s one, there’s one, though, that this one is troubling to me. And I say that because I think we need to tell the story. Donald Trump refused to acknowledge this. And the fact is, is that I don’t think we can be the frog in the pot and let the boiling water go up. He was very clear. I mean, he lost this election, and he said he didn’t. One hundred and forty police officers were beaten at the Capitol that day, some with the American flag. Several later died. And it wasn’t just in there.
Walz (unless at the debate that was Gene Hackman from Hoosiers) tried walking the line between mid-western decency and the horrific realization that he is on the thin blue line between a Trump restoration and the end of the republican government.
But instead of addressing Vance for what he is—the legal heir to election hustlers Rudy Giuliani, Jeffrey Clark, et al.—the vice presidential candidate fell back on some quaint notion of professional courtesy and kept addressing Vance, in effect, as “my worthy opponent,” with whom he could agree that inflation is bad and that Israel has “the right to defend itself.”
If the Democrats lose in November, it will be because the electorate will have come to the conclusion that little makes Harris and Walz angry.
* * *
Perhaps the only consolation is that everyone, except perhaps the gullible Yale ingénue J.D. Vance, knows how this story ends: with Vance on the hook for Trump’s crimes, probably under indictment or with his head in a noose, and the client “a little behind” in paying his fees.
I am sure Vance sees it otherwise—that he’s the political embodiment of the next generation of born-again Republicans who can stand for Trumpism (all those abortion bans and Federalist Society judges) but (someday) without Trump.
Vance is also the legal mouthpiece of the Steve Miller band—which includes the Nazi-apologist Tucker Carlson, the 2025 Project for imposing martial law, and the Supreme Court caliphate—with thesame brief of detaching Trump from Trumpism.
It’s now the Vance dream too, just as it was the dream of Peter Navarro, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, Paul Manafort, and so many others.
But as should be clear by now, all there is to Trumpism is Trump’s elaborate con games and financial sleights of hand—wrapped in the flag and offered for sale around midnight on cable television.
* * *
Vance walked off the stage holding his wife’s hand, with the look of a man who had just learned that he is the legal heir to a vast, if dissipated political fortune, and that to cash it in all he has to do is to mouth clichés and deceptions about illegal immigrants streaming across the southern border or alternatives theories of January 6.
The network platitudentists all complimented Vance for how well he spoke during the debate, as if they had seen the future and it works. But I heard something else, which sounded less like Pericles andmore like the conclusion of The Great Gatsby, when even James Gatz realizes that he’s living on borrowed time and money.
As F. Scott Fitzgerald writes:
He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Vance would also do well to remember that Fitzgerald’s narrator of Gatsby’s decline and fall was Nick Carraway, yet another Yale graduate in the thrall of a criminal fortune, who only at the end (“old sport…”) came to realize that in Gatsby’s glittering universe he was just another lawn ornament.
As Fitzgerald wrote: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that held them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…”
When I first heard about the Palestinian Campaign for an Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, about twenty years ago, I thought, this makes perfect sense. Here was a way to bring international pressure to bear on Israel—a peaceful way for people of good conscience to try to stop Israel’s abuse of the Palestinian people.
I saw this campaign and other calls to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel for its oppressive behavior as akin to earlier efforts to compel the white South African government to abolish apartheid. Given the parallel injustices in both cases, how could anyone who supported sanctions against South African apartheid oppose sanctions against Israel?
As it turned out, I underestimated the power of pro-Israel lobbying groups and the commitment of the U.S. ruling class to protecting Israel as an outpost of imperialism in the Middle East. After some early successes in winning support from progressive, religious, and student groups, the movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions—or BDS, as it came to be known—ran into a pro-Israel backlash.
Pro-Israel groups and the Israeli government itself ramped up their propaganda efforts in the U.S., seeking to paint the BDS movement as unfairly discriminatory, slanderous of Israel, and, of course, antisemitic. State legislatures soon began passing laws making it illegal to boycott Israel. Today, thirty-eight states have anti-BDS laws on their books. This seems like the opposite of progress.
As a professor, I had to wrestle with the argument that boycotting Israel threatened academic freedom. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), an organization to which I had belonged for years—in large part because it staunchly defends academic freedom—opposed the boycott, even though it had previously supported a boycott of South Africa in the 1980s.
The AAUP’s position, expressed in a 2006 statement, was that academic boycotts are bad because they impede the free creation and exchange of knowledge that might serve the common good. This was superficially plausible, but I wasn’t persuaded.
One reason I supported the boycott of Israel is that it was aimed at institutions, not individuals. The point was to refuse collaboration with Israeli institutions that were complicit, one way or another, in oppressing the Palestinian people. As Maya Wind documents in her 2024 book Towers of Ivory and Steel, this would include, then and now, most Israeli universities.
To me, the boycott seemed analogous to refusing to do business with a company that engaged in unfair labor practices—much like organizing a picket line and asking others not to cross it. Even if a company makes useful products, it might still deserve to be picketed for its mistreatment of workers. Likewise with Israel.
Critics of the boycott were right in arguing that boycotting institutions could ultimately impinge on the academic freedom of individuals. For example, a boycott could make it harder for U.S.-based academics to collaborate with academics in Israeli universities. This was true; such cases could arise. If they did, they struck me as small impediments to careerism more so than threats to academic freedom.
Moreover, advocates of the boycott never wavered in saying that academics everywhere, in all universities, should enjoy freedom in research, teaching, and extra-mural expression. In fact, this commitment to academic freedom underscored for me the best reason for a boycott: Israeli universities, and indeed the government of Israel, were complicit in denying the academic freedom of Palestinian scholars and students.
If faculty at Israeli universities enjoyed academic freedom in their work, this was as it should be (although, as I learned later, faculty who fight for Palestinian rights do not fare so well). But should this freedom come at the expense of Palestinian faculty and students? Why was the academic freedom of this group relegated to insignificance?
I couldn’t accept the moral calculus that prioritized the academic freedom of some U.S. and Israeli faculty over every other moral consideration, including the rights of the Palestinian people to be free from illegal occupation, free from violence, free from apartheid—and no less free to pursue research, scholarship, and learning than their Israeli counterparts.
In the case of Israel, I thought the AAUP’s opposition to a boycott was wrong. As much as one might value academic freedom in the abstract, there were conditions, it seemed to me, under which a boycott was warranted. There were far greater injustices that called for remedy than inconveniences to privileged U.S. and Israeli faculty. If a peaceful boycott could help end the suffering of a dispossessed and oppressed people, then it was the right thing to do.
Today, after a year of witnessing Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza, the situation has changed, as have many people’s perceptions of what is now the greater moral imperative. Partly in response to what’s been happening in Palestine, the AAUP has revised its position. A new statement, recently approved by AAUP’s national council, no longer blanketly opposes academic boycotts.
As its drafters have taken pains to note, the new policy does not advocate for academic boycotts in general. Rather, it holds that academic boycotts “can be considered legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.” In short, the new statement comes around to where many AAUP members concerned about the academic freedom of Palestinian scholars and students were twenty years ago.
The new statement also makes clear that it applies to boycotts aimed at “institutions of higher education that themselves violate academic freedom or the fundamental rights upon which academic freedom depends.” It further carves out space for individual conscience, stating that while “faculty members’ choices to support or oppose academic boycotts … may be criticized and debated, faculty members and students should not face institutional or governmental censorship or discipline for participating in academic boycotts, for declining to do so, or for criticizing and debating the choices of those with whom they disagree.”
Predictably, there has been a Zionist backlash. A former president of AAUP, Cary Nelson, who has turned defense of Zionism into a late-life career, denounced the new statement as a betrayal of AAUP’s long-standing principles. Other critics chimed in—undeterred, it would appear, by rulings against Israel issued by the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.
But one sign of progress is that this time the backlash appears morally bankrupt against the background of Israel’s destruction of Gaza, its renewed program of violence in the occupied West Bank, and its campaign of assassination and bombing in southern Lebanon. Against this background, fewer people are willing to accept the idea that academic freedom for Israeli faculty and their U.S. collaborators inevitably yields a “common good” of such overriding importance that we must carry on relationships with Israel and Israeli universities as if genocide is normal and not reason enough for a boycott.
And yet, given the horrors Israel has perpetrated this past year, an academic boycott, though more necessary than ever, is weak tea. It seems that only a complete cut-off of military aid, combined with global divestment from Israel across the board, will make the difference that needs to be made. The alternative—allowing Israel’s right-wing extremist leaders to carry on as they have, to carry on as if genocide is normal, to carry on as if international law means nothing—looks more and more like the path to regional, if not global, war.
I have to wonder, too, how these debates in the U.S., among those for and against an academic boycott of complicit Israeli institutions, appear to the Palestinian scholars and students whose colleagues have been killed and whose schools have been destroyed. They, too, would like academic freedom, I imagine. They, too, would like to work in peace. They, too, would like to engage in civil discourse about science, the human condition, and the state of world, as professors and students are wont to do. One problem, as they might point out to U.S. defenders of Zionism and opponents of academic boycotts, is that Israel has left them no place in which to do it.
The official Israeli army version of why it has targeted civilian areas during the intense and deadly bombardment of September 20 in south Lebanon is that the Lebanese are hiding long-range missile launchers in their own homes.
This official explanation by the Israeli military was meant to justify the killing of 492 people and the wounding of 1,645 in a single day of Israeli strikes.
This ready-to-serve explanation shall accompany us throughout the Israeli war in Lebanon, however long it takes. Israeli media is now heavily citing these claims and, by extension, US and western media are following suit.
Keep this in mind as you reflect on earlier statements made by Israeli President Isaac Herzog on October 13 when he argued that there are no civilians in Gaza and “there is an entire nation out there that is responsible”.
Israel does this in every war it launches against any Palestinian or Arab nation. Instead of removing civilians and civilian infrastructures from its bank of targets, it immediately turns the civilian population into the main targets of its war.
A quick glance at the number of civilians killed in the ongoing war and genocide in Gaza should be enough to demonstrate that Israel targets ordinary people as a matter of course.
According to the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza, children and women constitute the largest percentage of the war’s victims at 69 percent. If we factor in the number of adult males who have been killed – a number that includes doctors, medics, civil defense workers and numerous other categories – it will become obvious that the vast majority of all of Gaza’s victims are civilians.
Only Israeli media, and their allies in the west, continue to find justifications of why Palestinian civilians, and now Lebanese, are being killed in large numbers.
Compare the following two statements, which received much attention in the media, by Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari, regarding both Gaza and Lebanon.
“Hamas systematically uses hospitals to wage war and consistently uses the people of Gaza as human shields,” Hagari said on March 25.
Then, “Hezbollah’s terror headquarters was intentionally built under residential buildings in the heart of Beirut, as part of Hezbollah’s strategy of using human shields,” he said on September 27.
For those who are giving Hagari the benefit of the doubt, just review what has taken place in Gaza in the last year.
For example, Israel claimed that the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital massacre was not of its doing, and that it was a Palestinian rocket that killed the nearly 500 displaced refugees and wounded hundreds more on October 17.
All evidence, including investigations by well-respected rights groups, concluded the opposite. Still, however, the false Israeli claims received much coverage in the media.
The Baptist Hospital episode was repeated numerous times. In fact, the lies started on October 7, not October 17, when Israel made claims about decapitated babies and mass rape. Even though much of that has been conclusively proven to be wrong, some in the media, and pro-Israel officials, continue to speak of it as a proven fact.
And though no Hamas headquarters were ever found under Al-Shifa Hospital, the unsubstantiated Israeli claims continue to be repeated as if they were the full truth.
The same logic is now being applied to Lebanon, where Israel claims that it does not target civilians and, when civilians are killed, it is the Lebanese themselves who should be blamed for supposedly using civilians as human shields.
The Gaza playbook is now the Lebanon playbook. Of course, many are playing along, not because they are irrational or unable to reach proper conclusions based on the obvious evidence. They do so because they are part of the Israeli narrative, not neutral storytellers or honest reporters.
Even the likes of the BBC are part of that narrative, as they use Israeli claims as the starting point of any conversation on Palestine or Lebanon. For example, “Israel has said it carried out a wave of pre-emptive strikes across southern Lebanon to thwart a large-scale rocket and drone attack by Hezbollah,” the BBC reported on August 26.
Israel gets away with its lies pertaining to the mass killings in Gaza, and now sadly in Lebanon, because Israeli propaganda is welcomed, in fact, embraced by western officials and journalists.
Thus when US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan described the September 20 airstrikes on Lebanon as “justice served”, he was indicating to mainstream media that its coverage should remain committed to that official assessment.
Imagine the outrage if the tables were turned, as in thousands of Israeli civilians were slaughtered in their own homes by Lebanese bombs. There would be no need to elaborate on the reactions of the US or western media as this should be obvious to anyone who is paying attention.
Lebanon is a sovereign Arab state. Gaza is an occupied territory, and its people are protected under the Fourth Geneva Conventions. Neither Lebanese nor Palestinian lives are without worth, and their mass murder should not be allowed to take place for any reason, especially based on utter lies communicated by an Israeli military spokesman.
Perpetuating Israeli lies is dangerous, not only because truth-telling is a virtue but also because words kill, and dishonest reporting can, in fact, succeed in justifying genocide.
The Biden-Harris genocide-facilitation team is celebrating the latest atrocities from Gaza to the West Bank to Lebanon, as is to be expected from an imperialist core power bloc lacking an iota of humanity when it comes to the peoples whom Israelis now oppress beyond comprehension.
But what also needs contemplating is a sub-set of economically-pro-Israel ruling classes where one might not expect them: within the BRICS+ bloc. Four of them are such blatant supporters that on September 27 at the United Nations, Benjamin Netanyahu painted them green with “THE BLESSING” label on a map: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and India.
BRICS+ foreign ministers typically utter platitudes about wanting a conflict-free world and post-Western geopolitical arrangements, including a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. So this public recognition by Netanyahu of their usefulness should be humiliating enough. (At the United Nations, among BRICS+ members only Ethiopia typically joins Axis-of-Genocide powers by abstaining on resolutions criticizing Israel, including a September 18 enforcement of the International Court of Justice’s ruling against abuses in Palestine.)
And although new BRICS+ member Iran was labeled “THE CURSE” in another map, one of the most respected Palestinian journalists, Ali Abunimah, pointed out on September 28: “Another question on many lips is why Iran, which vowed retaliation after Israel’s murder of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July, has acted with such restraint. There is a growing perception that its lack of response only encouraged Israel’s ever more brazen violence.”
Beyond the obvious neighbours and India fingered by Netanyahu, there are other BRICS+ ‘blessors’ (as end-times allies of Netanyahu self-describe) witnessed in this ten-point (partial) catalogue of how war and profits make for unfortunate bedfellows:
3. in both South Africa and Brazil, leading officials have openly bragged in recent weeks that they will not impose coal and oil sanctions on Israel, with the latter’s defense minister also opposing potential cancellation of military cooperation with Tel Aviv-based Elbit Systems (currently ‘paused’);
5. the two main parts of Israel’s main port – at Haifa – were privatized in recent years by Shanghai International Port Group and Adani, facilitating more efficient supply of weapons and ammo to the IDF;
6. Chinese-Israeli trade hit a recent record of $20 bn/annum, including $14.4 billion of exports to Israel (#1 in the world in 2022) – in spite of December 2023 claims that Chinese Cosco ships would avoid Israeli ports (a stance reversed in February);
8. the normalization of Arab-Israeli trade continues, e.g. a recent wartime 5% increase in UAE-Israeli commerce – thanks to increasingly crucial transshipment services following Houthi disruptions to Red Sea shipping – featuring co-U.S. sub-imperial powers Egypt, UAE and Saudi Arabia, as Netanyahu himself bragged when applauding the new land route;
10. thousands of migrants from Ethiopia, and hundreds from India, now serve as IDF-employed draftees or mercenaries, alongside an unknown number of South African citizens, and what may be as many as tens of thousands of Russians, because there are, as Brazilian journalist Pepe Escobar conceded, “one million plus Russian passport holders or double passport holders who live in Israel. This is a very very complicated affair because according to the Russian Constitution, Russia has to protect them. The fact that many of these are hardcore Zionist and with a genocidal mentality makes the problem even more unsolvable…”
Russian talk left, walk right
The BRICS+ leaders and allies meet in Kazan from 22-24 October. The immediate task for Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov is to bandage wounds suffered during a disastrous September 26 New York meeting of BRICS+ foreign ministers, shut down early due to apparent Egyptian and Ethiopian opposition to South Africa’s potential acquisition of a (veto-neutered) UN Security Council permanent seat.
But it is safe to predict that he and other foreign-ministry spin doctors will also work hard to disguise or outright ignore all these pro-Israeli economic and politico-military relations, as will the bloc’s many academic and media boosters who surely oppose the genocide yet deign from calling out some of its major BRICS+ facilitators.
One of the lead boosters, Escobar, wrote in June how a few days earlier, “Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa personally asked to help organize a peace conference on Palestine, at which Russia would be the first non-Arab nation invited… the Russia-China strategic partnership, BRICS, and the Global Majority have been mobilized to enshrine Palestine as a sovereign state.”
Rhetoric and reality diverge, because, with 1.3 million Russians contributing to Israel’s genocide by living there, paying taxes and in many cases directly serving in the Israel Defense Forces, no wonder that one of the most anti-solidaristic statement conceivable about the genocide was posted on (Johannesburg native) Elon Musk’s platform X by Alexander Dugin within hours of Hassan Nasrallah’s assassination on September 28. According to Dugin, the man sometimes termed “Putin’s brain“ (a term borrowed from Steve Bannon’s self-applied nickname “Trump’s brain”), these are “Lessons from the Zionist Playbook” for Russia:
“Once again, the faster one acts, the more justified they are. Those who act with decisiveness and boldness win. We, on the other hand, are cautious and constantly hesitate. By the way, Iran is also following this path, which leads nowhere. Gaza is gone. Hamas’ leadership is gone. Now Hezbollah’s leadership is gone. And President Raisi of Iran is gone. Even his pager is gone… in modern warfare, timing, speed, and ‘dromocracy’ decide everything. The Zionists act swiftly, proactively. Boldly. And they win. We should follow their example.”
It’s a notion sickeningly reminiscent of Lavrov, speaking last December to RT: “The goals declared by Israel for its ongoing operation against Hamas militants in Gaza seem nearly identical to those put forward by Moscow in its campaign against the Ukrainian government.” Another surreal pro-Putin voice is that of commentator Andrew Korybko, who decorated his September 29 substack post – “Five Lessons That Russia Can Learn From The Latest Israeli-Lebanese War” – with a profoundly disturbing image of Putin-Netanyahu eyeing each other. Korybko apparently wants Ukraine to get the Nasrallah treatment:
“Russia remains sensitive to global public opinion, which is another outcome of prioritizing political goals over military ones, while Israel is impervious to public opinion at home, in Lebanon, and across the world. Russia will therefore put its troops in harm’s way capturing locations block-by-block as opposed to practicing ‘shock and awe’ like Israel is doing in Lebanon. Even though Russia’s approach led to a lot fewer civilian deaths, it’s still criticized much as Israel is, if not more… Putin’s noble plan of a grand Russian-Ukrainian reconciliation after the special operation ends appears to be more distant than ever, yet he still believes that it’s supposedly viable enough to justify staying the course by continuing to prioritize political goals over military ones. He’s the Supreme Commander-in-Chief with more information available to him than anyone else so he has solid reasons for this, but maybe Israel’s example in Lebanon will inspire him to see things differently and act accordingly.”
Pretoria hides behind the WTO
Even in a South Africa whose government called out the genocide at the Hague, corporate elites and their pocket politicians are no different, as an African National Congress leader revealed on September 26. Answering questions in parliament, South African trade minister Parks Tau replied to the endorsement by a small party (Al Jama-ah) of “mounting calls from social justice activists to stop trading coal with Israel.” In contrast, Tau rejected BDS-Israel on coal and everything else, outright:
“Sanctions applied by one member against another in the absence of multilateral sanctions by the United Nations (UN), would violate the World Trade Organisation (WTO) principle of non-discrimination and would open the country to legal challenge.”
(Reminiscent of pro-WTO, pro-IMF and pro-G20 statements at the BRICS Johannesburg summit, Tau’s reply is consistent with the stance of BRICS+ trade ministers who recently reconfirmed support for “the open, fair, transparent, predictable, equitable, non-discriminatory, inclusive, consensus- and rules-based multilateral trading system with the WTO at its core.”)
In the process, Tau willfully ignores that the whole Western world is violating WTO non-discrimination processes (e.g. in imposing 100% tariffs on Chinese renewable energy equipment instead of treating this instance of capitalist overinvestment as a global public good). And he ignores that in the United Nations General Assembly on September 18, a super-majority vote (124 in favour, 14 against, and 43 abstentions) confirmed that all states have the obligation to “prevent trade or investment relations that assist in the maintenance of the illegal situation created by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
In spite of Pretoria’s strong stance against genocide in The Hague, Tau and colleagues in effect reject the International Court of Justice mandate of July 19: “all States are under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by the continued presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
Against Netanyahu’s blessors
The WTO is the worst site to see South Africa legitimizing the filthy coal trade with Israel, including a massive injection of 170 000 tons of coal into the Israeli power grid on September 27. Taking longer than usual due to the necessary rerouting around the west African coast to avoid Red Sea disruptions, the coal was delivered from Richards Bay harbour on August 11, just before a vibrant protest on August 22 against such shipments at the Johannesburg regional headquarters of the notorious commodities trading Glencore.
More such civil society protests here against Glencore and its main local ally, African Rainbow Minerals (led by the SA president’s brother in law) plus Ichikowitz and the U.S. Consulate (located a couple of blocks apart) are imminent, including on October 4. These will more tightly link the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and numerous climate justice activists. And brics-from-below debates about how to address the broader problem of West/BRICS+ imperial/sub-imperial relations – exemplified by the joint corporate empowerment of Israel – begin on October 8, with a day-long webinar tribute to Russian dissident Boris Kagarlitsky (sign up here).
Indeed the only beneficiaries of regimes that – like Pretoria – prop up neoliberal multilateralism in this manner are the multinational corporates based in the West and BRICS+ economies, the same ones nurturing Netanyahu. If the military balance of forces continues to degenerate in favour of Israel and its Axis of Genocide, then the resistance movements that put BDS pressure on Israel’s BRICS+ blessors will be all the more urgent.
Protests at Glencore Johannesburg headquarters, 22 April 2024 – Source: SA BDS Coalition
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