Image by Europena.

War kills in so many ways. These days, Americans are bombarded with images from Gaza and elsewhere of people or broken bodies being ferried on stretchers from the rubble of homes and hospitals, by rescue workers whose thin bodies and stricken faces suggest they are barely better off than those they’re helping. Social media and journalists make us eyewitnesses to emaciated children too weak to cry. And yet, compared with air raids that crush and bloody instantaneously, a slower disaster, more difficult to capture (especially given our made-for-TikTok attention spans), consists of the hours that many people in war zones spend wasting away from infectious diseases of one sort or another.

Let me count a few of the ways.

In Iraq in 2004, three-month-old Ali tries to cry but he’s too weak to make a sound, since his body has been ravaged by diarrhea. Between 2003 and 2007, half of Iraq’s 18,000 doctors left the country due to the deteriorating security situation (with few intending to return). Health facilities had also been bombed out and destroyed. By then, about two-thirds of the deaths of children under the age of five, like Ali, were due to respiratory infections and diarrhea compounded by malnutrition.

In Pakistan in 2017, one of a handful of countries that has yet to eliminate the polio virus, the father of a five-year-old boy is inconsolable when he learns that his son will never walk on his own again. Among displaced people in the Afghan-Pakistani border region where they lived, concerns about counterinsurgency air raids from U.S. and later Pakistani government and opposition forces, security threats toward vaccination teams in conflict-torn parts of that country, and suspicions among parents like that boy’s father that health workers had been sent by the U.S. government to sterilize Pakistani children, all prevented kids from getting the immunizations that they needed.

In Burkina Faso in 2019, three-year-old Abdoulaye dies after contracting malaria while in a shelter for people internally displaced by violence between government forces and Islamic militias. Malnourished and anemic, without direct access to a health clinic, he succumbs to a treatable illness.

In Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 2020, as in other military towns across the U.S., rates of sexually transmitted infections like syphilis, herpes simplex, and HIV are among the highest in the country. Bases tend to drive up poverty among civilians by making the surrounding populations dependent on low-wage service work. And stressed-out, war-traumatized American soldiers are more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior that spreads disease among the broader population.

In Ukraine in 2023, a soldier treated for severe burns dies of sepsis, despite being given multiple antibiotics. Doctors found klebsiella, a multi-drug-resistant pathogen, in his body. Despite successful efforts by the Ukrainian government to curb antimicrobial resistance in its population prior to Russia’s 2022 invasion, mounting casualties, along with shortages of supplies and personnel, mean that Ukrainian health workers now try to do whatever they can to keep soldiers alive. In the long term, antibiotic-resistant infections traceable to Ukrainian patients are already beginning to appear in places as distant as Japan.

In May 2025 in the Gaza strip, four-month-old Jenan dies from chronic diarrhea after losing half her bodyweight. She needed hypoallergenic milk formula, but aerial bombardments and blockades of basic food and medical supplies have made that once common product scarce. As anthropologist Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins points out, prior to the start of the war between Israel and Hamas in October 2023, cases of diarrhea in young children there averaged about 2,000 per month. In April of the following year, however, such cases already numbered more than 100,000. Likewise, in the decade before the war, there were no large-scale epidemics in Gaza. In just the first seven months of that conflict, however, overcrowding in makeshift shelters, nutritional deficits, shortages of hygiene products — only one in every three Gazans has soap! — and contaminated water have led to new outbreaks of infectious diseases like measles, cholera, typhoid, and polio, exacerbated by widespread starvation.

At some level, it couldn’t be simpler. War destroys all too many of the modern amenities that make life possible. Preventable illness and death occur even in industrialized settings that are marked by inequality, lack of information, psychological trauma, or just the chaos of combat that hinders long-term thinking. In poor- and middle-income countries like Yemen, Syria, and Nigeria, infectious diseases were already among the top causes of death, even before the outbreak of significant conflicts. Their incidence, however, grew so much worse in wartime, especially among civilians who didn’t have the same access to doctors and medical hospitals as armed groups.

The body of a single child, wasting away from the lack of the basic fluid that runs in my sink or yours, best captures the way war casualties ripple across time and populations. For every soldier who dies in battle, exponentially more people suffer deaths from malnutrition, disease, or trauma-related violence even after battles end. Preventable infections play a large role in this story.

The War on Children

Children are particularly vulnerable to sickness and death in armed conflicts because of their immature immune systems, greater nutritional needs, tendency to succumb more easily to dehydration, and reliance on families who may not even be around to care for them. A study of more than 15,000 armed-conflict events in 35 African countries found that children aged 10 or younger were far more likely to die if they lived within 100 kilometers of a battle zone than they would have in earlier periods of peacetime. Increases in mortality ranged from 3% to about 27%, varying with how many people also died in nearby battles. Strikingly, many more babies under the age of one died annually in the eight years following a conflict’s end than while the battles were going on — infectious disease being a primary killer.

Take Yemen as an example of how war may affect young children and their families over time. Since the start of that country’s civil war in 2015, cholera, a waterborne illness doctors have known how to prevent since 1954, has ravaged the most vulnerable members of that country’s population, particularly children, due to a lack of appropriate sanitation or reasonable access to healthcare. As of December 2017, more than a million people had contracted the disease, nearly half of them children, and more than 2,000 had died of the illness. Compare that to the more than 10,000 Yemenis estimated to have died in direct combat by that time, and you get an idea of how significantly death by illness counts among the casualties of war.

Nearly a decade later, in fact, there are hundreds of thousands of new cases of that illness in Yemen each year and hundreds of annual deaths, making up more than a third of all cases globally. When Rami discovered that his daughters, aged 10 and 7, had cholera, he managed to scrape together the equivalent of about $15 to travel to a clinic so that the family could get lifesaving fluids and information to prevent further cases. Many families like his, however, can’t afford such treatment, forcing all too many of them to delay care or even experience the unthinkable: losing a child.

Consider what it would do if someone you loved perished because they were born in the wrong place at the wrong time in the storm of war that destroys infrastructure so central to our lives that normally we barely even notice its presence. I hope it’s an experience that neither you nor I ever have.

War and Displacement

Still, I think about such things every day, as I bet do many of my colleagues connected to the Costs of War Project. When we first launched that project in 2011, Professors Catherine Lutz, Neta Crawford, and I met with experts in armed conflict to discuss how we would cover the issue of war’s health impacts. Repeatedly, they reminded us of how hard it is to talk about war and health without understanding what it’s like for families to be forced to leave their homes in search of safety.

Unsurprisingly, refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) are uniquely vulnerable to disease and illness. Anyone who has gotten sick while traveling knows that the challenges of getting care are compounded by a lack of knowledge of the community you find yourself in. In the case of today’s more than 122 million war refugees or displaced people, stigma and harassment are frequent travel companions. According to one meta-analysis, more than one-fifth of refugee and IDP women have experienced some form of sexual violence while living in displacement settings. A study of more than 500 immigrants and refugees in Italy found that nearly half experienced physical violence, sexual abuse, harassment, or workplace discrimination.

The stories that extremist politicians tell about migrants — think of Donald Trump’s tall tale of supposedly dog- and cat-eating Haitians in Springfield, Ohio — distract us from the social problems such politicians seem unwilling to deal with like loneliness and poverty. Displaced persons lack political clout and voting power in places that host them and, in actual war zones, fighters rarely respect shelters and camps designated for their survival.

For people who flee their homes, the basic boring stuff is lacking, too. Only 35% of refugees have clean drinking water where they live, while less than a fifth of them have access to toilets. Imagine how that would affect all of the higher-order things you value in your life, including gatherings with people you care about, if you couldn’t even find a decent place to wash your hands or brush your teeth!

Most of all, what stands out to me as both a social worker and a scholar of war is how people forced to leave their communities end up losing connections to health providers they trust. I can’t tell you how many individuals I’ve met in clinical and humanitarian settings who had declined to seek care for Covid-19, pneumonia, severe flu symptoms, and other illnesses because they lacked confidence that professionals in their host communities had their best interests at heart.

My Government’s Assault on Public Health

As Republicans in Congress struggle to pass a bill that would deprive millions of Americans of health insurance in the near term, as high-level officials spread disinformation about vaccines for once-eradicated illnesses like measles, and as public health workers and officials face threats of violence, all too many poor Americans are starting to experience the sorts of obstacles to healthcare common in war zones.

Meanwhile, with the Trump administration’s decisions earlier this year to fire at least 2,000 U.S. Agency for International Development workers and freeze foreign aid dollars used (in part) to treat and monitor infectious diseases elsewhere on this planet, the threat that a foreign pandemic might make it to this country has grown considerably.

To quote Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) at a recent town hall with constituents worried about losing healthcare, “we are all going to die.” While that is indeed so, it also matters how. A long life with access to basic services like immunizations and clean water is one of the differences between dying like a human being and dying like one of the wild animals I find in my rural area, infected by bacteria in the water or exhausted from heat exposure.

How, I wonder, did we Americans reach a place where many of us are silent or supportive of a strongman’s $45 million birthday military parade that closed roads to residents and commuters for days? How did we get to a time when our leaders seem loath to invest in healthcare and don’t even hide their disdain for poor people, a significant number of whom are military personnel and veterans?

I’m not sure I know what this country stands for anymore. I don’t know about you, but these days America sometimes feels to me like a treacherous foreign land.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

The post Illness and Endless Wars appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

The upside down flag is a signal of distress. This one flew at the Hands Off rally in Olympia, Washington April 5. Credit: Wikipedia Commons

The Constitutional Republic in Danger

Another July 4. It is 249 years after independence was declared in Philadelphia, one year shy of a quarter millennium of U.S. national existence. Tonight I will go up on my deck overlooking Lake Union and watch Seattle’s fireworks display. I wouldn’t miss the show, but this year there’s not much to celebrate.

It is a moment when it is uncertain whether the constitutional republic will survive in any recognizable form by the time the nation’s 250^th birthday is celebrated. A Supreme Court decision last July granted immunity from criminal prosecution for presidential actions undertaken as official duties. A recent decision stripped the power of district courts to make rulings affecting the entire nation, reversing decisions that would limit the Trump administration’s power to revoke birthright citizenship. Now we must look to a rightist Supreme Court to rule for the nation.

These decisions were made by judges picked by the Federalist Society, which holds the doctrine of the unitary executive. This states that all powers of the executive branch vest with the president. Trump executive orders seeking to take away the independence of regulatory agencies fall in line with this. As do the recent two decisions, putting near unbridled power in the hands of a man inclined to push the envelope as far as possible.

Add to that the effective creation of a domestic army under the Big Bad Bill, tripling the ICE budget to $30 billion and increasing its detention budget 265% to $45 billion, 62% higher than the entire federal prison system. Expect a proliferation of Alligator Alcatraz’s such as the new installation in Florida bearing marked resemblance to barracks at Auschwitz or WWII Japanese internment camps. Concentration camps are nothing new in U.S. history. After all, Hitler and the Nazis took inspiration from native reservations as a model for their own camps. Those who believe these forces will be turned only on immigrants should recall how Border Patrol troops were deployed to Portland during the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings. This is the creation of a domestic military force under the direct control of the president.

The picture this presents has the most grave implications, tipping towards worst case scenarios. The separation of powers that balances the executive, legislative and judicial branches has been skewed heavily in the direction of the executive. Trump has seized authority at every step, and he can be expected to take full advantage of the powers the Supreme Court and Congress have given him. We face the prospect of executive dictatorship.

Trump will play his hand to the hilt, and likely overplay. The question is whether the immune response of the U.S. body politic will be strong enough to resist this onslaught, and the answer is uncertain. Ultimately, only a societal uprising will turn this back, and one that spans the political spectrum, including traditional conservatives alarmed at the decline of the rule of law. It has to be deeply rooted in the communities where we live.

A crisis long in coming

Even more deeply implicated is the constitutional system itself, as indicated by that last point. Increasingly, as populations have sorted and Democrats have concentrated in larger states, the advantage the Constitution gives smaller states in the electoral college makes minority wins such as Bush 2000 and Trump 2016 more likely. That derives from the provision giving every state two senators, whether it is California with 39,529,000 people or Wyoming with 585,000. Add to that computer-generated gerrymandering creating safe legislative districts, and the system is twisted beyond genuine possibilities for true representative democracy.

We have to ask ourselves whether this system can be fixed, and whether the travesties we face today are not an aberration, but its logical outcome. Honest answers are no to the first and yes to the second. The roots of our emerging national crisis are in the system itself and to emerge from the crisis intact we need to fundamentally change it. In other words, we need a New American Revolution.

The seeds of the crisis were planted in the first revolution, the one we commemorate today. The mythology of overthrowing the tyranny of King George notwithstanding, the revolution of 1776 was conceived and led by the ruling class of the 13 colonies. The oligarchy of its day saw the potential to build a great empire in North America eclipsing the power of the tiny islands across the Atlantic. The British saw this too, and were trying to hold the colonies back. In 1763 they imposed a line forbidding further settlement west of the Appalachians.

This gored the interests of many colonial leaders, notably George Washington who became the richest man in the colonies as a land developer and speculator. When we learned in grade school he was a surveyor, this is what it really meant. Washington wrote that this ban could not stand.

The colonial elite was also alarmed at the growth of slavery abolition sentiment in Britain. Slavery pervaded the colonies, only to be abolished in the north between 1777 and 1804. Shipping and financial interests in the north were deeply involved, while the New England rum industry, one of the region’s largest, made much of its profit having its product traded for slaves. Meanwhile, in Britain where possession of slaves was illegal, a slave gained his freedom through the Somerset case. The colonies made much of their earnings off tobacco and other crops raised by slaves, and the owners feared loss of their productive capital.

The elite stirred up the populace by sparking rage against taxes being imposed by Britain to cover its costs in the wars which had driven the French from North America. The taxes were relatively modest, but they were a point of agitation. In the end, perhaps a half of the colonists sided with the revolution, while 20% were loyalists, and the rest were stand asides. Many of the loyalists went to Canada, explaining why resistance to the U.S. remains deep rooted north of the border. As for King George the tyrant, that was largely propaganda. The monarchy had already been limited by the power of Parliament following the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Those taxes were acts of Parliament, rather than the king.

When the fighting started in earnest, it should come as no surprise most of the Blacks and native tribes who joined the battle came in on the side of the redcoats. Blacks knew their best chances for freedom and natives knew the best way to hold back a tide of white settlement rested with the British. In the end, both were on the losing side.

There were genuine democratic sentiments among many of the common people who joined the revolution. Afterwards, there were democratic stirrings in the states. But they were pushing a course the elites could not abide, paying war debts with paper money rather than precious metals. Finally, taxes to pay debts sparked Shay’s Rebellion in Massachusetts, alarming the elite. Led by Alexander Hamilton, they convened the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 to create a strong federal government capable of limiting democracy in the states and putting down rebellions. The anti-democratic elements of the Constitution that stifle us today emerged from that.

Thus, the very crisis we face today grew out of our earliest beginnings. Oligarchic rule was there from the start. In our era it was set back by the 1930s Depression and the social reforms of the time. But it came back with a vengeance beginning in the 1970s, and then with the neoliberal shredding of progressive taxation, the public sector and labor power in the 1980s and 1990s, a work accomplished by both political parties. The racism reflected in the enslavement of Black people and genocidal land thefts from native tribes is at the center of Trump’s war on immigrants and general racist undertone of his politics. In general, today’s elites play an old game of divide and conquer, tricking working class whites into voting against their best interests by setting them against non-white groups, as is evidenced by the way the Big Bad Bill will strip Medicaid and food assistance.

Finally, a nation that has been at war most of its existence, first building a continental empire and then in the 20^th century a global empire, is seeing empire come home in the form of a new domestic army and internment camp system. The U.S. has staged coups in dozens of countries to replace democratic governments with dictatorships. Now it seems to be generating one in the imperial metropole, the U.S. itself.

Change comes from rooted struggle

The key point is that the extension of democracy, as well as what we have of social gains such as old age pensions, unemployment insurance and labor organizing rights, was only secured by popular struggle. Those struggles began in particular places, in cities and states. If there is to be a New American Revolution, it will emerge in the same way.

The recent primary victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York mayor’s race has heartened many. It is the model for what progressives have long advocated. Instead of running to the center to pick up independent voters, a declining segment, Mamdani ran clearly to the left with a progressive program offering real answers for the economic stresses people are feeling, such as affordable housing and public groceries. He turned out people who don’t usually vote, especially younger people who voted in far greater numbers than usual. Instead of relying on big money funders, Mamdani ran a people power campaign mobilizing tens of thousands of volunteers.

Whether the decrepit Clintonian centrists of the Democratic Party establishment will eventually undermine Mamdani is an unknown. But he has made a strong start, notably overcoming the phony charges of antisemitism raised by Zionist funders, media and party hacks with the support of many young Jews.

In my hometown of Seattle, activist Katie Wilson is running a similar grassroots campaign against corporate Mayor Bruce Harrell. She is also forwarding a progressive platform including just taxation and social housing. Katie has a solid record as one of Seattle’s most effective organizers. I’ve worked with her myself and can attest to that. There is a good chance she can pull a Mamdani in Seattle.

As The Raven has long advocated, we must build power in place, in cities and communities where progressive populations are centered and where democratic possibilities are greatest. We build from that local base to take power in state governments. These are the places where we can not only build resistance to the current regime, but forward and implement the ideas that will make better places and a better nation. That will make a New American Revolution.

There are darker possibilities, a national breakup, a new civil war. The centrifugal tendencies in the U.S. are greater than many people recognize. I’ve written about that here. That California Gov. Gavin Newsum could seriously propose California might withhold federal taxes, as he has, shows some boundaries have already been crossed. To be honest, there are many including people I count as friends who question whether the U.S. should continue at all. Some of the strongest tendencies toward a new declaration of independence are in my part of the world, the West Coast and Cascadia. And perhaps the national system is so intractable this will be the only course.

From my standpoint, it would be better to work for a different system overall, to stir social movements in all parts of the U.S. working for genuine democracy and change. I would not want to leave public lands in the hands of many western states, nor would I want to abandon people of color populations in the South. In every part of the country significant progressive populations exist, even in the reddest of states. I would rather see us go together than go it alone.

On this July 4, 2025, one year short of 250 years of national existence, the constitutional republic is challenged in a way it hasn’t been since the Civil War. We can hope for better outcomes than a bloody conflict or national breakdown, with the likelihood of huge death tolls. Let us call to those better angels of our nature which have expanded democracy and justice over these 249 years, working in the places where we live to organize power and forward the ideas that will make a just and sustainable future. That is the ground for a New American Revolution.

It is with those thoughts that I will watch the fireworks over Lake Union tonight, looking forward to a time we might have something to celebrate.

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

The post Time for a New American Revolution appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Palestinians at a GHF aid distribution site in Gaza being fired on by American “security” contractors. Still from a video shot by a contractor and given to the Associated Press.

There’s no precise number for how many Palestinians have been starved to death by Israel’s embargo on food entering Gaza. But there is a number for how many Palestinians have been killed trying to keep from starving to death at food distribution sites, many of them by Israeli gun or mortar fire: 549, with 5 to 10 more Palestinians being killed every day. More than 4,000 have been wounded.

These killings weren’t accidents. They weren’t provoked. They didn’t come about as an attempt to quell riots. The people killed were not collateral damage in attempts to kill Hamas fighters. The shootings were not in retaliation for any violence from the Palestinians. Israeli troops were ordered to fire on Palestinians coming to get scraps of food handed out by the Christian fundamentalists and mercenaries who run the food distribution sites set up by Trump and Netanyahu. Let’s repeat that: Israeli troops were ordered to kill starving, unarmed civilians who were trying to get food for their families.

These killings aren’t news to anyone who has been paying attention to reports coming out of Gaza from Palestinian journalists, eye-witness testimony from survivors of the attacks, and doctors who have treated the wounded and examined the bodies of the dead.

The news is that the Israeli paper Haaretz got Israeli soldiers to describe how their superiors ordered them to fire into crowds of people seeking food at aid distribution sites that Israel itself had designated. These sites have become the latest kill zones for Palestinian civilians.  “In the place where I was, between one and five people were killed every day,” an IDF soldier told Haaretz. “They’re fired upon as if they were an attacking force: no crowd-dispersal methods are used, no tear gas — they shoot with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade machine guns, mortars.”

Nearly all of Gaza has been on the brink of famine since the first week of March, when Israel imposed its latest embargo on humanitarian aid entering Gaza. As global pressure mounted against Israel for imposing a mass starvation policy on Palestinians in Gaza, the Netanyahu government turned to a newly created company with the backing of Trump, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, now run by Johnnie Moore, Jr. Moore is an evangelical Christian with close ties to Trump. Moore had hailed Trump’s plan to assume control of Gaza, saying: “The USA will take full responsibility for the future of Gaza, giving everyone hope and a future.”

Atar Riyad, a displaced Palestinian father of five from Beit Hanoun, whose wife is pregnant. Described to Al Jazeera the treacherous experience of trying to get his family food at aid sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation:

The Israeli military forced us into displacement. We ended up in Gaza City on the streets. I have a family. I have children who are all under the age of 15. My wife is pregnant. My financial situation is not easy. A few weeks ago I had to sell some of my belongings. I had a stroller that I used to push the gallons of water on. I had a bicycle too and other things I had to sell to buy flour. We have no food, no water. We don’t have anything. I went to the US aid distribution sites and to the aid trucks. I went there seven or eight times to get food. About 20,000 people gather at the distribution sites along the Netzarim corridor early in the morning, but only 2,000 manage to get any food parcels. Why? Because of the overcrowding. Because of the number of people creating chaos. The food parcels they put in front of us are not enough compared to the number of aid seekers. The American site is a dead end. They told me that there is American aid in Netzarim. I went there. I walked 15 kilometers to look for some flour, rice or lentils. I couldn’t get anything. I went to the Netzarim aid site three or four times. All in vain. We go there only to find death in front of us. There was no food or water. There was only death. People were lying dead in the sand in front of us. I don’t know what to say. This situation is very hard. They told us there is aid in the trucks. Then, we went to the trucks. The trucks move very fast, running over people. The trucks were running on top of people! Today, I am unable to do anything. I used to weigh 90 kilos. Now I weigh only 58 kilos. Things are hard, really hard in Gaza. We are subjected to the worst torture in the world.

These distribution sites, which operate for only one hour each morning, are not a serious attempt to avert the famine in Gaza that Israel engineered and continues to enforce. They are a distraction and a half-hearted one. Worse, they serve as a magnet, drawing thousands of desperate Palestinians together within the scope of Israeli guns and tanks. The humanitarian aid sites, like the humanitarian zones for Palestinian tent camps where so many families have been burned alive as they sleep by Israeli airstrikes, have become, in the words of one Israeli soldier, “killing fields.”

The first GHF aid station opened on May 25 and was immediately met with violence that killed three Palestinians and injured dozens. This set the daily pattern, where the promise of food served as bait to trap and kill unsuspecting Palestinian civilians.

On June 1, 32 Palestinians were killed and more than 250 wounded near the Rafah aid station, in what became known as the “Witkoff Massacre,” after Trump’s Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff.

On June 3, at least 27 Palestinians were killed and 184 were injured by an Israeli airstrike on the road leading to the Rafah distribution center.

On June 8, 13 Palestinians were killed and 173 wounded when Israeli forces fired on crowds at the Rafah aid site.

On June 9, 14 Palestinians were killed and 207 were injured at another GHF site.

On June 10, 36 Palestinians were killed and 207 were wounded at an aid site near Deir al-Balah.

On June 11, 25 Palestinians were killed at night, as they camped near a GHF distribution site and another 14 were killed during the day as they lined up to receive boxes of food.

On June 12, 26 Palestinians were killed by an Israeli drone strike on a crowd near an aid site.

On June 14, 29 Palestinians seeking aid were killed and more than 380 wounded in separate attacks at aid distribution sites.

On June 16, 23 Palestinians were killed and 200 wounded outside the Rafah aid site.

On June 17, 59 Palestinians were killed and 221 injured when Israeli drones, tanks and troops fired on a crowd at the Khan Yunis aid site.

On June 18, 12 Palestinians were killed and 72 wounded by Israeli gunfire and mortars while they waited for food trucks to arrive at the Deir al-Balah aid site.

On June 19, 12 Palestinians were killed and 60 were wounded at the aid site in the Netzarim Corridor.

On June 20, 23 Palestinians were killed and more than 100 wounded by Israeli drone and tank fire at the aid site in central Gaza.

On June 21, 8 Palestinians were killed and more than a dozen were injured by Israeli gunfire at a GHF aid center.

On June 22, 6 Palestinians were killed and more than 20 were injured by Israeli troops at an aid site in central Gaza.

On June 24, at least 40 Palestinians were killed by Israeli drones and gunfire at the GHF site in southern Rafah.

On June 25, 25 Palestinians were killed and 30 were wounded by Israeli forces at the aid site near the Netzarim checkpoint.

On June 27, 18 Palestinians were killed by an Israeli drone strike as they assembled to get flour from a GHF site outside Deir al-Balah.

Most of the massacres have taken place in the morning, as Palestinians line up in front of the aid sites before the gates open, even though, as one Israeli soldier said, there was “no danger to the forces. There’s no enemy, no weapons.”

“[We’d open fire] early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range”, the soldier said. “Once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire. I’m not aware of a single instance of return fire.”

The rations are meager by any standard, but critically so considering the ever-deepening crisis in Gaza, where 2.3 million Palestinians are starving, nearly two-thirds of them women and children. In its first 10 days of operation, GHF reported distributing 8.3 million meals, equivalent to less than four meals per person for every Palestinian in Gaza, or approximately one meal every two and a half days.

Even now, the aid sites are only distributing enough aid to feed each Palestinian in Gaza one meal a week. And most, perhaps even the majority, aren’t getting that. There are only four aid sites, and each is open for only one hour a day. The goal isn’t to feed Palestinians, but to pretend to be doing so. Yet people are so hungry they’re willing to risk their lives to get a small box of food.

From the opening days of the war, the Israeli plan has been to starve the Palestinians out of Gaza. The strategy for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza has been one of maximum brutality on every front, making the choice for Palestinians a cruel one: leave or die.

“A combat brigade has no tools to operate against a civilian population in a combat zone,” another IDF soldier told Haaretz. “Firing mortars to drive away hungry people is neither professional nor humane. I know there are Hamas members among them, but there are also people who simply want to receive aid…Every time we fire like this, there are casualties and deaths, and when you ask why a shell is necessary, there are never any smart answers.”

Both Biden and Trump have endorsed using humanitarian aid as a weapon: Biden with his ridiculous humanitarian pier and Trump with the aid distribution sites, where Palestinians are forced to line up in fenced lanes like cattle at an auction to get a box of pre-packaged rations, resembling the MREs of the Gulf War. That’s if they don’t get shot. The aid sites serve, in the words of the UN’s Tom Fletcher, as “a fig leaf for further violence and displacement.”

The GHF operation is projected to cost $550 million. Yet, so far, the US has contributed only $30 million. Where’s the rest of the money coming from? Yair Lapid, the Israeli opposition leader, said that both GHF and Safe Reach Solutions (the private security company run by former CIA officer Philip Reilly) were actually shell companies constructed to conceal the fact that they were funded and controlled by the Israeli government. In the words of UNICEF’s James Elder, “These are not humanitarians, they are people with guns.”

It’s not just the Israelis slaughtering defenseless Palestinians. By their own admission, American security contractors hired by GHF are engaging in the same murderous attacks on people seeking food, firing on them as if in sport, under rules of engagement that give them an “open license to do whatever they want.” Two contractors told Associated Press reporters Julia Frankel and Sam Mednick this week that US mercenaries routinely toss stun grenades and pepper spray bomblets into lines of Palestinians, some of them holding their children, and fire rounds of live ammunition “in all directions, into the air, into the ground, and at times toward the Palestinians.”

One of the contractors said that most of his heavily armed fellow contractors have little to no experience in these kinds of operations and view all Palestinians with suspicion. A video shot by one of the contractors records a conversation on how to disperse the crowd of Palestinians after the aid site had run out of food parcels. A contractor says that he’d called on the Israelis to have one of their tanks make “a show of force.” Then there’s the sound of around 15 gunshots being rapidly fired off.

“Whoo! Whoo!” A contractor exclaims.

Another one congratulates him: “I think you hit one.” 

“Hell, yeah, boy!”

“This has become routine,” a soldier said. “You know it’s wrong. You feel that it’s wrong, that the commanders here are taking the law into their own hands. But Gaza is a parallel universe — you move on quickly. The truth is, most people don’t even stop to think about it.”

The aid site massacres are acts of state terrorism. By instilling the fear that even the helping hands are holding machines that might strafe you down at any moment, Israel is attempting to make Palestinians lose all hope that they can hold out long enough for the world to finally turn against Israel and force it out of Gaza. Even as the bodies pile up at a rate of 10 or 12 a day, these tactical acts of butchery are doomed to fail. Gaza is Palestinian land and here they will stay, against all odds.

This is an expanded version of a piece that ran in the June 28 edition of Gaza Diary.

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Photo by Arman Taherian

A spate of break-ins has been taking place in your neighborhood. Armed thugs associated with a crime syndicate have been knocking down doors and grabbing what they can. The police show up only after the assaults, which have led to injuries and even a few deaths. Under-resourced and overstretched, they haven’t been able to thwart the robbers.

Someone in your neighborhood puts up a sign: This Homeowner Is Armed and Dangerous. The next night, the thugs break into the houses on either side, not even bothering to test whether the homeowner in the middle has a gun or knows how to use it. They just leave that house alone.

Question for you: do you buy a gun?

Maybe you don’t believe in guns. So, do you consider putting up a similar sign even though the most dangerous item in your house is a nail clipper? The evidence seems clear. Even just the threat of retaliation is enough to dissuade the would-be attackers. Your life and the lives of your family are on the line.

This is the dilemma facing many countries around the world, except that the gun in this analogy is a nuclear weapon. Countries without nuclear weapons—Libya, Yugoslavia—experienced attacks that eventually led to regime change. Countries that possess even just a few warheads—North Korea, China—have managed to deter states with malign intent.

Iran, a country that has put up a warning sign in its window without fully committing to acquiring the ultimate deterrent, was recently bombed by both Israel and the United States. A tenuous ceasefire now holds in this conflict. The Trump administration imagines that it has destroyed Iran’s nuclear program. It also believes that it can now put more pressure on Iran to give away its nuclear weapons program at the negotiating table.

But the obvious takeaway for Iran after the recent attacks is that it’s certainly dangerous to semi-covertly pursue nuclear weapons but it’s perhaps even more dangerous not to have them. If nuclear powers don’t suffer devastating bombing campaigns, insecure nations conclude that they best acquire a nuke as quickly as possible.

It’s not just Iran. Other countries are drawing similar conclusions about how to survive in an international environment where collective security—the global equivalent of the police—is falling apart as quickly as a fence in a hurricane.

Iran’s Complex

Guns can be used for different things—to hunt, to hit clay targets, to massacre children at a school.

Likewise, nuclear complexes can serve very different purposes. Iran has long maintained that its nuclear facilities are for the production of energy, medical isotopes, and so on. But a country doesn’t need to enrich its uranium to 60 percent, as Iran reportedly has done, to achieve these peaceful goals. Nuclear power requires an enrichment level of 3-5 percent. Weapons-grade uranium, meanwhile, is 90 percent.

The Obama administration, with a number of international partners, negotiated a nuclear agreement with Iran that capped the level of enrichment at 20 percent and began diluting Iran’s uranium stockpiles to 3.5 percent. The Trump administration pulled the United States out of the agreement. The enrichment level of Iran’s uranium not surprisingly began to creep upwards.

Iran has maintained two underground enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordow. These were two of the targets of U.S. bunker-busters. The 14 bombs the United States dropped on these targets might be expected to have returned Iran to the pre-nuclear stone age. And that’s certainly what the Trump administration has claimed.

But Donald Trump is quick to claim victory even in the throes of obvious defeat (remember COVID, Afghanistan, and the 2020 election?). According to an anonymous source in the Defense Intelligence Agency, the recent U.S. attack set Iran back “maybe a few months, tops.” The Trump administration dismissed this assessment as a leak from “an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community.”

But the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, echoed the DIA report: “The capacities they have are there. They can have, you know, in a matter of months, I would say, a few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium, or less than that.” Even Iranian officials, caught speaking privately about the attack, were surprised that the damage was not as great as they’d anticipated.

Even if the capacity to enrich uranium had been destroyed, the U.S. and Israeli attacks couldn’t root out the knowledge of these processes from the minds of the Iranian scientists—or the desire to acquire nuclear weapons from the Iranian population as a whole. According to a poll from June of last year, nearly 70 percent of Iranian respondents favored the country going nuclear—this after nearly two decades of public opinion opposing the weaponization of the program.

Memo to both the United States and Israel: it’s not just Iran’s political leadership that wants nukes. In other words, regime change is not going to resolve this nuclear question. Iran’s complex.

Future Negotiations?

Considering Trump’s cancellation of the Iranian nuclear accord back in 2017, diplomacy wouldn’t seem to be top on the administration’s agenda. But it wasn’t diplomacy per se that Trump rejected, only diplomacy associated with the Obama administration.

As late as the Friday before the U.S. attack, even as Israel was continuing its own bombing runs, the Trump administration was conducting secret talks with Iran. According to CNN:

Among the terms being discussed, which have not been previously reported, is an estimated $20-30 billion investment in a new Iranian non-enrichment nuclear program that would be used for civilian energy purposes, Trump administration officials and sources familiar with the proposal told CNN. One official insisted that money would not come directly from the US, which prefers its Arab partners foot the bill. Investment in Iran’s nuclear energy facilities has been discussed in previous rounds of nuclear talks in recent months.

That sounds a lot like the Agreed Framework that the Clinton administration pursued with Pyongyang, with South Korea largely footing the bill for the construction of reactors that could power North Korea’s civilian sector. Those reactors were never built, and North Korea went on to assemble its own mini-arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Iran has said that it would consider returning to the negotiating table at some point after it receives guarantees that there will be no future attacks. Without much trust among the various sides, it would be hard to imagine Iran forever renouncing a nuclear option or Israel forever forswearing attacks on Iran, even if they both make rhetorical commitments for the purpose of restarting talks.

Trump the Opportunist

There is much loose speculation that Donald Trump is an isolationist, an anti-militarist, a believer in spheres of influence. The U.S. attack on Iran should dispense with such nonsense.

Donald Trump is a political opportunist. He takes positions—anti-abortion, pro-crypto—based not on principles but on how much they will boost his political (and economic) fortunes.

On foreign policy, Trump has raised opportunism to the level of a geopolitical doctrine. He has talked of steering clear of military conflicts in the Middle East, but then the opportunity presented itself to strike against Iranian targets effectively risk-free (because Israel had already secured the airspace). He has railed against corruption in Ukraine and declared President Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator,” but then the opportunity presented itself to sign a minerals agreement with the government in Kyiv.

Trump has no problems negotiating with religious fundamentalists. He gets along just fine with Sunni absolutists in the Middle East, and he would probably be hard-pressed to explain the religious differences between the Sunnis of Saudi Arabia and the Shia of Iran. If an opportunity presents itself to negotiate a deal with Iran, Trump may well take it—mostly because he can then call himself the person who really vanquished that country’s nuclear “threat” (take that, Obama!).

Meanwhile, Trump continues to make it more likely that countries around the world will invest in their own nuclear weapons programs.

At home, despite some rhetoric about the lack of any need for new nuclear weapons, Trump is adding nearly $13 billion to the budget for nuclear weapons. And his plan for a “golden dome” will only encourage other nuclear powers to spend more to evade such heightened defenses Such dangerous one-upmanship was, after all, the rationale for the dearly departed Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty.

Trump’s reluctance to provide assurances to allies that the United States will come to their defense in case of attack has poked huge holes in the nuclear umbrella that hitherto covered much of Europe and Asia. Now European politicians are talking about building out their own nuclear capabilities—with the French arsenal at its center—and conservatives in South Korea have also begun talking about establishing a nuclear deterrent.

And the rest of the world? The Iranian parliament has begun drafting the country’s withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Only one other country has exited the treaty—North Korea—and only a handful of countries are not parties to it (Israel, India, Pakistan, South Sudan) If Iran goes, there may well be a rush to the exits, beginning with Saudi Arabia and Turkey, which have made noises about the nuclear option.

Nothing speaks louder than Trump’s actions. He exchanged “love letters” with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un (nukes), is a big fan of Vladimir Putin (nukes), and has indicated that he has more respect for China (nukes) than Taiwan (no nukes). On the other side of the nuclear fence, he has bombed Iran, threatened Venezuela and Cuba, and discussed the possibility of taking over Greenland and Canada.

I’m no advocate of nuclear armaments. But if I were Canadian, I might start thinking that a reputation for niceness just doesn’t cut it in TrumpWorld. A couple of nuclear-tipped ICBMs, however, would send a message that this White House more readily understands.

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Photograph Source: Dan Scavino – Public Domain

It has now been more than 30 years since the butcher of Auschwitz Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu, warned the world that Iran would soon acquire nuclear weapons. In 1992, in an address to the Israeli Knesset, he stated: “Within three to five years, we can assume that Iran will become autonomous in its ability to develop and produce a nuclear bomb.” He repeated the warning and whispered the need to invade Iran in the ears of every US president ever since. The warnings became louder after Al Qaeda attacked the US. The Jerusalem Post reported on September 12, 2001, that “Netanyahu warned last night that the attack could be a harbinger of worse tragedies that could kill millions of people once Iran or Iraq acquires nuclear weapons.” Later Netanyahu admitted that he had told the US Congress that there was “no question whatsoever that [Saddam] Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction.” Ahead of the 2003 Iraq invasion, Netanyahu told the US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, “you will finish this [invasion] very quickly. But your primary goal is the Iranian regime. And the Iranian regime is trying to develop a nuclear weapon.” He urged the US to invade both Iran and Iraq, but primarily Iran. This was, of course, at the time when Netanyahu’s moles in the White House, the so-called neocons (neoconservatives), were pushing George W. Bush to invade Iraq and Iran, in a policy that was called dual containment.  Bush complied by invading Iraq, saying: “God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam [Hussein], which I did, now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East.” But given the fiasco that followed the Iraq invasion, Bush did not grant Netanyahu his main wish, i.e., invading Iran. Netanyahu, however, kept trying. In 2009, after Barack Obama took office, Netanyahu told members of Congress that Iran was just one or two years away from nuclear capability. 

Three years later, on September 27, 2012, Netanyahu appeared before the UN General Assembly and held up a diagram of a cartoonish-looking bomb with a fuse and drew a redline on it at 90% enriched uranium. The bizarre spectacle was mocked by some as “Bibi’s Wile E. Coyote-style cartoon bomb.” As I stated at the time, this was not only the proverbial “one too many times” that Netanyahu had cried wolf, but it was mocked so much by the media that it seemed to be the beginning of the end of Netanyahu’s intense and unsuccessful campaign to make the US attack Iran. 

Netanyahu could not convince Obama that bombing Iran was necessary. Instead, Obama signed a deal with Iran in 2015 called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). In exchange for some sanctions relief, the JCPOA placed a 15-year limit on Iran’s enrichment of uranium to a maximum level of 3.67%, limited the stockpile of enriched uranium to 300 kilograms, and put a 10-year limit on the number of centrifuges Iran could operate. Netanyahu did everything in his power to sabotage the enactment of the JCPOA. He even appeared before a joint session of the US Congress in 2015 to challenge the US president and overturn the deal. He received standing ovations, but the JCPOA continued to hold despite much opposition to it in the US Congress. 

But why was Netanyahu crying wolf for all those years and trying to defeat an agreement that assured peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program? The answer is that Netanyahu never believed that Iran is building a nuclear bomb. Like the case of Iraq, Netanyahu, as I had argued for many years in my books and articles, used the issue of a nuclear bomb as a ruse to bring about the so-called regime change in Iran. Why a regime change? Because Iran, similar to Saddam Hussein, supported militant groups that stood in the way of total annexation of Palestinian lands. Netanyahu was interested in resurrecting the friendly relations that Israel had with the Shah of Iran prior to the 1979 Iranian Revolution. This intention was laid bare recently when Netanyahu talked about regime change, and the son of the infamous Shah declared his readiness to return to Iran. 

Netanyahu could not get what he wanted as long as some degree of sanity prevailed in the White House. All this changed when Donald Trump, who shares many traits with Netanyahu, entered office.  The man who had never read a page of the JCPOA and had no clue what the agreement was all about withdrew the US from the JCPOA, talking gibberish as to why he was doing so. But it appeared that his animosity toward Obama was the sole reason for his action. The leaders of Iran decided to stay in the agreement but kept enriching more and more uranium, hoping to bring the US back to the bargaining table. Instead of negotiating, Trump exerted “maximum pressure” on Iran by imposing more and more sanctions. He invaded Iranian airspace by flying a drone that was shot down by Iran and ordered the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force. Iran attacked a US base in Iraq and promised to punish the perpetrators of the assassination. The attack was choreographed, designed mostly for domestic consumption. Iran had informed the US ahead of time about the attack, and, therefore, there were no serious injuries. Trump left office without any retribution for assassinating an Iranian general and his compatriots.

Joe Biden, a self-proclaimed Zionist, who showed signs of aging and dementia, was not much interested in returning to the JCPOA. He allowed Netanyahu to turn Gaza into a killing field and to slaughter people in Lebanon. He also continued Trump’s policy of maximum pressure on Iran, levying more and more sanctions and threatening, through his European allies, to bring back UN- imposed sanctions, using a clause in the JCPOA usually referred to as “snapback” or “trigger mechanism.”  He was also hoping that the IAEA would build a stronger case against Iran, using some decades-old issues, as well as some new ones, such as activities related to the enrichment of uranium. Knowing all of this, the leaders of Iran, instead of trying to de-escalate the situation, continued to increase the stockpile of enriched uranium and the level of enrichment. This insane and dangerous act, as I argued in a recent interview, was meant to bring back to the negotiation table a cognitively impaired man and his mostly Israeli-loving advisors. The Iranian leaders ignored the fact that Netanyahu was on a killing spree in the region and would soon attack Iran with his far more superior force, aided by the US and European allies. Instead, the generals of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) boasted, almost daily, about their prowess and the impending demise of Israel. 

In April 2024, Israel attacked the Iranian embassy in Damascus, killing top Iranian commanders and several officers. A few days later, the IRGC launched drones and missiles at Israel, most of which were intercepted by Israel, the US, European countries, and regional allies of Israel. Soon after, Israel attacked Iran, taking out some anti-aircraft systems that protected nuclear facilities. In July 2024, Israel assassinated one of the political leaders of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, in a guesthouse in Tehran run by the IRGC (details of which remain unclear to this day). The IRGC did nothing but make the usual bombastic statements. In September 2024, Israel injured Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon in the infamous and diabolical pager attack on Iran’s ally, Hezbollah. Subsequently, Israel killed the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, in an airstrike near Beirut. In retaliation, in October 2024, Iran launched drones and ballistic missiles at Israel, most of which were once again intercepted. Israel responded by attacking and destroying Iran’s air defense systems in late October. Iran promised retaliation, but it never materialized. By now, the IRGC knew what Israel was capable of and that Iran had no air defenses. Yet, they continued with their pompous rhetoric. The amount of enriched uranium, particularly highly enriched, also increased. The stage was set for a full-blown attack on Iran by Israel and its allies. 

Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election gave the Iranian leaders the false hope that they could make a deal with a man who bragged about his deal-making abilities. So, they enthusiastically welcomed making a deal with Trump and entered five rounds of negotiations with Trump’s representative, Steven Witkoff.  As I stated in my interview with a reformist journal in Iran—a few weeks before the Israel/US-Iran war—the leaders of Iran not only forgot Trump’s hostile acts toward Iran, but they ignored all the vile traits of the man. They appealed to his crooked shopkeeper mentality.  They forgot that Trump, who is basically a real estate dealer, knew nothing about the intricacies of Iran’s nuclear dispute and the history of Netanyahu’s decades-old claims about Iran’s intention. All Trump knew and could say was that “Iran can’t have a nuclear bomb.” Steven Witkoff was also a real estate dealer and as ignorant as Trump about world affairs. In the first rounds of negotiations, he appeared to be completely lost, not knowing what the issues were. He made comments that were contrary to the wishes of Netanyahu and his brethren in the US, mostly the same neocons who had made the US invade Iraq in search of nuclear bombs that did not exist. But after a few rounds of talks, Witkoff was apparently told to say that Iran couldn’t enrich any uranium on its soil, period. Soon after, Trump, who was silent about the issue of enrichment level, started to say the same thing. This position, as most analysts pointed out, was a “deal-breaker.” The Iranian officials had always argued that, under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, they have an inalienable right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. Thus, they would never agree to the zero-enrichment level proposed by Trump and Netanyahu. Given the impasse, war was inevitable; Netanyahu’s 33-year-old dream was finally becoming a reality. 

Two days before the sixth round of negotiations started, Israel staged a massive attack against Iran with the full knowledge and backing of Trump and his cohorts. It is, of course, too early to evaluate this attack and its consequence, especially in this short space. But in brief, the attack that lasted for 12 days resulted in the death of many top members of the IRGC, Iranian nuclear scientists, and ordinary citizens. According to the latest official data, as this essay is being written, 935 people died in Iran. Other sources put the estimate much higher. Israel also bombed Iranian nuclear facilities, missile sites, storage facilities, chemical facilities, infrastructures, hospitals, residential buildings, etc. They even bombed Iran’s state broadcasting building and the Evin prison, where some political prisoners are kept. This last diabolic act was apparently intended to help bring about the proverbial “regime change.” According to official estimates, 79 people died in that attack. Iran threw some punches of its own against Israel with drones and long-range missiles. But the death and destruction in Israel was nothing near to what Israel had done to Iran. According to Israeli sources, 28 people died in Israel. The death ratio between Iran and Israel, by itself, points to the power imbalance. 

In the middle of the war, the deranged man who rules the US tried to take credit for what the madman in Israel was doing. He posted on his “Truth Social”: “We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran.” He seemed to forget that he had said he deserved a Nobel Peace Prize, wanted to get the US out of “forever wars,” and was in the middle of negotiations with Iran when his and Netanyahu’s war with Iran started. In a final act of madness, the President of the US did what previous presidents had refused to do: he dropped bombs on Iranian nuclear facilities at the behest of Netanyahu. These nuclear sites had already been attacked by Israel, but in one case—a deeply buried facility at Fordo—the US dropped twelve 30,000-pound “bunker-buster” bombs. After bombing these sites, Trump said: “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” In another choreographed act, intended mostly for domestic consumption, Iran, in turn, fired some missiles at a US base in Qatar, almost all of which were intercepted, since Iran had already warned Qatar. 

After this senseless war, which has cost many lives and perhaps billions of dollars (one bunker-buster bomb alone is estimated to cost $20 million), an uneasy and unofficial truce ensued. All sides declared victory and boasted about their destructive abilities. Somewhat reminiscent of the Iraq War, when US forces looked for nonexistent nuclear bombs, the US, Israel, and the IAEA are now trying to find out what happened to the stockpile of enriched uranium. Were they “obliterated,” along with the nuclear sites? Are they still there, or were they taken away? To find some answers, human elements, such as IAEA members, must enter the sites. But then the IAEA, which Iran accuses of being in cahoots with Israel, the US and other Israeli allies, can’t access these sites, especially if they were “obliterated.” This is now a bigger mess than before the war started. 

I have been asked by some people what I expect to happen next. My answer is: I don’t know! We deal with some madmen and a few madwomen. Can we predict what mad people would do? 

Some things, however, are certain. Netanyahu has not accomplished his goal of “regime change,” i.e., to restore the monarchy in Iran. He will, therefore, continue his push. The new IRGC officials will continue with their long-winded rhetoric about their prowess and the imminent demise of Israel. They will try to resurrect their enrichment program and use it as a bargaining chip to get some sanctions relief. They might dig deeper holes to protect their nuclear facilities, but they will certainly not build shelters to protect their citizens from future attacks. And Donald Trump will continue to wreak havoc on this planet.  

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Donya Ahmad Abu Sitta’s kindergarten class.

Donya Ahmad Abu Sitta and her family were first displaced just four days into the war, on October 11, 2023. She told me, “They bombed our neighborhood in Khan Younis, so we evacuated to a nearby school that had been converted into a shelter. We were thinking the school would be safer than our home because it was under UN control. But after we were there for a month, they bombed the building next to the school. It was 6 a.m.; I awoke covered by glass shards because the blast broke the window beside me.”

Everyone fled the school. Donya and her family went to stay at a friend’s place. The next day, however, that apartment block was bombed, so, with nowhere else to go, they returned to the school. With bombs continuing to strike in and around the school grounds every day, Donya says, “We were forced to evacuate again, this time to another city, Rafah. But I felt like a part of my heart was still in Khan Younis.”

“The first thing I did in Rafah was to write my first article of the war, titled ‘We Died Four Times but We Are Still Alive.’ With that, I mean that we were targeted four times and survived, but we don’t want this survival after living a nightmare.”

“In Rafah,” she said, “we went to our aunt’s house and then set up our tent in Al Shaboura camp. At my aunt’s, we had good internet for the first time since the start of the war. It was the sixth of December. I remember that date—exactly—because when I checked the news, I learned the worst thing possible: that Dr. Refaat Alareer had been killed by the Israelis.”

A professor at the Islamic University of Gaza, Dr. Alareer had taught and inspired a generation of young writers, not only in his classroom but throughout Palestine. Donya participated in a project he started called We Are Not Numbers, in which experienced authors around the world worked with young writers in Gaza. She said, “I was not at his university but he taught me so much. When I heard the news that he’d been killed, I promised myself that I would continue doing the kind of work that Dr. Refaat had started. I would keep writing.”

For almost two years, several outlets, including The Electronic Intifada, Palestine Chronicle, and Drop Site News, have been publishing Donya’s on-the-scene accounts of people’s everyday struggles under Israel’s unrelenting assault. In her poetry—which includes a book and a book-in-progress—she expresses the inexpressible realities of life under genocide.

Here, you can hear her read one of her poems, with background instrumentation. It evokes an especially obnoxious trauma plaguing the people of Gaza during the past 21 months: the noise created by deadly drones constantly hovering overhead. When I asked her about drone noise, she answered with a mirthless chuckle and a single sentence: “If I had the power to delete just one thing from this world, it would be those things.” The source of her animosity goes far beyond noise. In June, she wrote that a drone operator had targeted her brother Karim, wounding him with shrapnel in the shoulder and back.

Donya’s family was able to return to their hometown of Khan Younis in May, 2024. There, between studying, writing, and other work, she also taught kindergarten. In a recent story for We Are Not Numbers, she relates that last November, she and her young students celebrated World Children’s Day with a meager but highly enjoyable meal. She told me, though, that she had an anxious moment when a student, Ibrahim, got the idea to run out to a Takiyya, an improvised, free soup kitchen in the area, and get some additional food to bring back and share.

She faced a horrible dilemma: How could she deny her student the chance to bring food for his desperately hungry classmates, but how could she let him go out into the dangerous streets? Her concern was justified; the occupation forces’ snipers were everywhere. Fortunately, two of Ibrahim’s classmates came to her (and Ibrahim’s) rescue, piping up to advise him not to go, that the Takiyya had already given out all the food they had for that day.

After Israel broke the brief ceasefire of early 2025, the bombardment of Khan Younis and other cities returned with a vengeance. Donya reported for The Electronic Intifada that on the morning of June 12, after enduring especially heavy bombardment overnight, “We could see the aftermath of the explosions. The black-gray smoke from the airstrikes suffocating the horizon; the white smoke from the tank shells snaking horizontally through the buildings.” At that moment her phone rang, and a robotic voice ordered her family to evacuate immediately. The family found themselves displaced yet again.

Image by Donya Ahmad Abu Sitta.

When we spoke two weeks later, she told me, “The seven of us are now in Dier-al-Balah [in central Gaza]. We moved into this lodging just two days ago. It’s a large room that we’ve divided into two parts. One is for studying during the day and sleeping at night. The other side is for other family activities. I’m not able to continue working with my kindergarten children, because they, like everyone, had to evacuate, and I don’t know where they all are now. But I do have three girls who I’m teaching here in Dier-al-Balah.”

With Israel having permitted no food shipments into Gaza for months, the family is dependent on the Takiyya and on what little they can afford on the outrageously costly private market, which is largely run by Israeli-supported gangs. Donya says they absolutely will not go to the U.S.-Israeli “Squid Game” slaughterhouses cosplaying as “aid distribution centers.”

Referring to the centers, Donya said, “I am now working on a new poem [title: “Inhuman in Human”]. It’s about the ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,’ because that thing is not humanitarian and it’s not a foundation. It is so very dangerous to go to that place because it is part of a zone completely controlled by the Israeli Army. Every day when people go there to get food, the Israelis are targeting and killing them. My uncle was injured there. My mother has asked all of us not to go to that place. There is a woman here who is still searching for her son, who went to get food and has not returned.”

The Gaza Humanitarian (sic) Foundation (sic) shootings are pushing Gaza’s medical-care systems even closer to total collapse, says Donya. “One of the doctors at Nassar Hospital posted a message—it was so terrible—asking people to please not go to those sites—not because they don’t want them to get food but because if they get shot, the hospital doesn’t have the capacity to deal with them due to lack of medical supplies.”

“In this middle area of Gaza,” Donya said, “there is no major hospital, and all medical facilities are overwhelmed. Doctors and medical students are setting up ‘medical courts’ in each of the camps so they can deal with smaller injuries and the hospital can deal with the most severe ones. No medicine has entered Gaza since March, and blood stocks are badly depleted. When people go to donate blood, many are told they cannot because they have anemia or some other health problem”—conditions largely caused by Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon.

In contrast to Donya, who has met such terrible inhumanity with great valor (defined as “boldness and determination in facing great danger”), Israeli armed forces have displayed nothing but cowardice. Why are the occupation forces targeting civilians and not engaging in battle with the resistance forces? Her response: “The Israelis don’t distinguish between civilians and fighters. That was clear when at the start of the war, a minister referred to us as ‘human animals’ and announced that they would cut off food, water, and electricity—and they did that. In fact, it didn’t start with this war. They have been stealing our land since 1948 and have had us under siege for 17 years.”

What about water? “In Khan Younis, we were living next to Nasser Hospital, which had drinking water that people could come and get. Here, there’s no place for people to go for drinking water, so tanker trucks come around and distribute it. But it’s not good water, not clear. It’s a mix of daily-use and drinking water.” And fuel for cooking? “The food from the Takiyya is cooked, and otherwise most of what we get is canned, so we can get by mostly without cooking.”

“Students have missed many chances because of this siege,” she says. “They can’t leave Gaza to study at outside universities. Before this war, many of my friends said, ‘When the war ends, I want to travel outside, and I won’t return.’ People who are stuck in this miserable life; they say I will do this and this and this, but I know they don’t mean it. When there was an opportunity to leave Gaza at the beginning of the war, and my mother asked me if I wanted to get out, I told her, ‘No! I will not do that!’”

The occupation forces recently killed two of Donya’s friends, Roaa and Doaa. “I have tried to write something about them,” she said, “but when I start writing, I feel stuck. Still, I tell everyone caught in this war, “Don’t let the dark times make you think in a negative way, think positively. I have been thinking that way during all of this, and I find it’s a way to talk with friends when you are stuck.”

Despite being displaced a half dozen times, with hatred and death raining down on her homeland, Donya graduated from Al Aqsa University this spring with a degree in English language. Now, still in a war zone, she is setting out to study medicine. “I didn’t want to start this under these kinds of conditions,” she said, “but my friend Chana, who is helping edit my book, told me, ‘Yes, you can! Your country needs you more than ever.”

That’s very true, but Donya is not interested in being praised for her resilience and selflessness, or for her eloquence in documenting the horrors that Israel is inflicting on her people. She says, simply, “I feel it is my duty as a human. I keep working all day because I don’t want to be sitting and thinking of how life was then and how it is now.”

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NATO Summit 2025, dinner. Photograph Source: Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken – CC BY-SA 4.0

By the end of the annual meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in The Hague in June 2025, it became clear that everything was about money. In fact, the final communiqué was perhaps the shortest of any NATO meeting – only five points, two about money and one to thank the Netherlands for hosting the summit. The Hague Declaration was only 427 words, whereas in the previous year, the Washington Declaration was 5,400 words and ran to 44 paragraphs. This time, there was not the granular detail about this or that threat, nor the long and detailed assessments of the war in Ukraine and how NATO supports that war without limit (‘Ukraine’s future is in NATO’, the alliance said in 2024, a position no longer repeated in the brief statement of 2025). It was clear that the United States simply did not want to permit a laundry list of NATO’s obsessions. It was instead the US obsession that prevailed: that Europe increase its military spending to compensate for the US protective shield around the continent.

Having agreed to increase their military spending to 5% of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the European states have created a series of problems for themselves.

The first problem is that they would have to invent the money out of their tight budgets. To raise their military expenditure to 5% of GDP would require them to reduce their social spending – in other words, to deepen the austerity policies that are already in place. In Germany, for instance, 21.1% of the population faces the risk of poverty or social exclusion. The German government, led by Chancellor Friedrich Merz, has pledged €650 billion over the next five years to the military – an amount even the Financial Times finds to be ‘staggering’. To get to 5% of GDP, Germany, for instance, will have to raise about €144 billion per year out of reallocating budgets (austerity) and increased borrowing (debt); raising taxes is unlikely, even if these are regressive Value Added Taxes on consumption.

The second problem is that despite the disbursement of money to the military, Europe simply does not have the production lines ready to roll out tanks and missiles at the required pace. Unlike the United States, Europe began to deindustrialise its military sector after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. It will now have to spend considerable sums of money just to recover its industrial potential. Over the past few years, European military industrial firms have struggled to meet the needs of Ukraine, with the European Union unable to meet the one million artillery shells requirement in 2024. Rheinmetall, meanwhile, is only able to produce 150 Leopard 2 tanks per year, far below what European companies built during the Cold War and far below the needs of a European army if it must be on the battlefield against Russia. Neither the Eurofighter Typhoon nor the Dassault Rafale fighter jets can be produced quickly. Procurement offices across Europe are slowed down by European Union regulations and customs requirements. No rapid growth of the military will be possible.

The 5% of GDP number is more public relations than reality.

Threats

The Hague Summit Declaration says that the Euro-Atlantic alliance faces ‘profound security threats and challenges’. Who threatens the Euro-Atlantic? The only adversary named in the Declaration is Russia. But around the time that the NATO members met in The Hague, US President Donald Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin about de-escalation in Ukraine and ending the tensions around Europe, and the Istanbul Talks continued among the various parties involved in ending the war. If there is a ceasefire in Ukraine and if Russia and Europe agree on certain security guarantees, then what is the 5% of GDP increase in military spending about?

Even if Russia ends the war in Ukraine, there are several other concerns that the NATO members have insisted define their increase in military spending. For instance, the NATO member states in Europe have allowed their military facilities to deteriorate, which from a peace standpoint is acceptable but not from one that anticipates war (the military lobby in Europe has especially pointed to the continent’s laxity around cyberattacks and weaponised Artificial Intelligence – although how rebuilding barracks will help with this is unclear). The Baltic states have sounded the alarm against a potential Russian invasion, while the instability around Iran has alerted Europe to dangers near its borders. These are some of the reasons given by war intellectuals in Europe for the necessity of increased military spending.

But by far the most important reason has nothing to do with Europe’s borders or with threats to Europe: China. In NATO’s Strategic Concept 2022, it considered China to be ‘a systemic challenge to Euro-American security’. But in what way is China a threat to Europe? The United States sees China as its main rival, not in military terms, but in terms of the economic dominance of the US-based multinational corporations. Europe’s countries have only benefited from Chinese investments, such as through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Of the 44 countries in Europe, 29 have signed up to the BRI – most of these countries are in Europe’s east, and two-thirds of European countries have signed Memoranda of Understanding with China for trade and development. Italy departed from the BRI in December 2023, but the other countries remain committed to the BRI project. Of the thirty-two NATO member states, twelve have an agreement with China to be part of the BRI or some other major project (Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Greece, Hungary, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Poland, Portugal, and Türkiye). That these states are reliant upon China’s economic buoyancy shows that they are not threatened by China, which begs the question of what threat NATO sees in China.

The habit of austerity and war grips the NATO governments, while the Global South has committed itself to peace and development. It is striking how anachronistic The Hague Declaration sounds when placed alongside the slogan of the 17th BRICS Summit in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in July 2025: Inclusive and Sustainable Global South (Sul Global Inclusivo e Sustentável).

NATO has no real threats, only expensive hallucinations.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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The Louth-London Royal Mail, by Charles Cooper Henderson, 1820

This story keeps giving—which is why we keep returning. When a billionaire dubbed the ‘Czech Sphinx’ takes control of Royal Mail—Britain’s storied postal service—it’s both a chance for modernisation and a kind of slow-motion national retreat. Add a freshly decorated union leader, a former Tory minister turned company adviser, and a beleagured Labour government clutching a golden share in one hand and silence in the other, and things get murkier. This isn’t just about logistics or labour anymore. It’s a case study in corporate power, institutional compromise, and the fine print of national identity.

The question now: who’s really at the wheel?

The June 9 board meeting was billed as pivotal. Then—silence. An announcement on pay and conditions was expected a week ago. It didn’t come. A weekend statement, meant to clarify, only confirmed further delay. Will a formal union-management framework ever emerge, people were asking? Will these negotiations—if they ever end—steady or destabilise Royal Mail’s future? Or, as some had speculated—without confirmation—is new owner Daniel Křetínský under financial pressure from a potential debt covenant breach elsewhere?

Meanwhile, eyes turn to Greg Hands, former Tory Cabinet minister, now advising Křetínský. And Dave Ward, General Secretary of the Communication Workers Union (CWU)—a man you sense must be obeyed—was just awarded a CBE mid-discussion. Not bad for a ‘Keep Corbyn’ campaigner on £144,635 a year.

The honour, granted via King Charles III, credited Ward’s role in the ‘New Deal for Workers’ campaign and the Employment Rights Bill, along with advocacy across postal, telecoms, finance, and tech sectors. Patrick Roach (CBE) and Sue Ferns (OBE) received similar honours, though some suggest such awards reward cooperation more than struggle. Not everyone was pleased. To think, Danny Boyle and Frank Auerbach, notably, have refused such honours in the past.

‘The oppressor would not be so strong if he did not have accomplices among the oppressed,’ wrote Simone de Beauvoir—though no union leader actually said that. Still, the fear lingers. Ward faced harsh criticism for the pro-company ‘Negotiators Agreement’ reached through ACAS in April 2023. Critics say it blocked strike action, enabled job cuts, introduced two-tier pay, reduced sick leave, and increased workloads. Despite a 96% strike vote in February 2023, CWU leadership chose negotiation over confrontation.

To many, it signalled corporatist unionism: where leaders broker compromises that dampen labour resistance and align with establishment politics. The Employment Rights Bill, once a rallying point, now seems business-friendly and riddled with loopholes. Deputy PM Angela Rayner’s hard stance on strikes, notably in the Birmingham bin workers dispute, deepens concern over a Labour–union axis that sidelines resistance.
Rewind to December 2024. A thick, Dickensian, blast-from-the-past fog hung over Whitehall as the UK did the once unthinkable—handed over its 500-year-old postal service to a Czech energy tycoon in black cashmere. Enter Daniel Křetínský, owner of EP Group. By acquiring International Distribution Services (IDS) for £3.6 billion, he became the first foreign owner of this critical infrastructure.

In a letter to the government, Křetínský spoke of his ‘deep respect for Royal Mail’s history and traditions,’ promising to be a ‘responsible long-term owner.’ The solemn tone felt strangely out of place—even to this government.

‘A man may smile and smile and be a villain,’ wrote Shakespeare. Behind the polite reverence, was this just classic capitalism—consolidate, streamline, automate? His strategy prioritised parcels over letters, lockers over front doors, logistics over legacy. He promised to invest, modernise, and work with all stakeholders: workforce, regulator, government.

To win approval, EP Group agreed to binding commitments: keep Royal Mail’s HQ and tax base in the UK, retain the six-day Universal Service Obligation (USO), maintain ownership of the profitable GLS unit for at least three years, and allocate 10% of future dividends to an employee trust. The government retained its ‘golden share’—a veto over asset sales and restructuring. An emergency brake, at least on paper.

Then came the twist. The CWU—long known for militancy—welcomed the deal.

Yes—welcomed.

‘There are many ways to betray a cause, but none more insidious than to embrace it falsely,’ said Jean Genet.

In December 2024, Ward and Deputy General Secretary Martin Walsh signed a framework agreement with EP Group. IDS Chair Keith Williams told The Standard: ‘We have secured a far-reaching package of legally binding undertakings, endorsed by government.’

Ward echoed the line. No asset stripping. No break-up. No outsourcing. He called it ‘the strongest platform in years’ to influence Royal Mail’s direction.

Key protections included:

The six-day USO stays.

No gig-economy ‘owner-drivers.’

Pensions untouched.

Monthly meetings with EP Group leadership.

A 10% employee dividend share.

Ward framed it as ‘a fresh start.’ EP Group said it was about respecting the workforce and building a sustainable future.

But not everyone agreed. Grassroots activists—especially in Scotland—accused CWU leadership of capitulating. The Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC) called it a ‘sell-out.’ The World Socialist Web Site called it a ‘stage-managed surrender.’ There was no member ballot. A January pay freeze remained. Surveillance tools stayed.

A key worry: the £1 billion pension surplus. Critics alleged it might fund job cuts or new projects. CWU leadership denied this and reaffirmed its opposition to outsourcing and pension raids.

Still, tension lingered. Some reps called for new ballots, pay restoration, and resistance to service cuts. It wasn’t insurrection—but it simmered.

In April 2025, just after the takeover’s approval, EP Group appointed Greg Hands as a strategic adviser. According to disclosures, Hands would advise on public affairs and regulation in the UK and Germany. Though barred from direct lobbying, his presence signalled EP’s desire for political fluency—especially with GLS active across Europe.

‘He passed like a shadow through the streets,’ wrote Thomas Hardy. Behind the scenes, Křetínský’s strategy sharpened: automation, parcel lockers, NHS deliveries, digital logistics.

‘We believe there is long-term value in the postal sector—if managed properly,’ said a spokesperson. Whether that means fewer postal workers—or just different ones—remains unclear.

The government, still clutching its golden share, watches. TSSA and Unite have voiced concern over potential outsourcing in parcels—raising the prospect of union coordination.

CWU leadership insists the agreement gives them strategic influence. The monthly advisory committee will be the test. From GLS’s fate to NHS logistics, smart lockers to letter delivery—it’s the forum where labour, capital, and logistics collide.

And the 10% dividend trust? If managed well, it could be a rare tool for worker influence in post-privatisation Britain.

Royal Mail under Křetínský isn’t just about a national institution anymore. It’s a live experiment in how labour and capital coexist amid asset acquisition, platform logistics, and so-called ‘post-neoliberal industrial strategy.’

Some see the takeover as pragmatic. Others call it the slow death of public service. What’s clear: CWU is betting on leverage over confrontation.

Last week, on their podcast, the CWU called on Labour to greenlight a select committee on the USO pilot. As if the rebellion hadn’t vanished—just gone underground. Some observers weren’t convinced.

CWU leaders then said they’d reached an agreement with Royal Mail. But that their Postal Executive—including Dave Ward, Martin Walsh, Tony Bouch, Andy Furey, Davie Roberston, and (Interim) Assistant Secretary Bobby Weatherall—had to debate and vote on it. That raised eyebrows. If there was no agreement until the vote, what exactly was just announced? And if it wasn’t shareable until then—was it even real? Then they said they will vote this week, as if to allay such concerns.

‘Has the union sold out? Has someone done a secret deal, now dressed up as hard-earned?’ people were asking, whatever the outcome. The June 26 seven-page bulletin on the USO reform pilots has been described by one person who has seen it as ‘a whitewash,’ seemingly laying much of the blame at the door of ‘CWU Deputy General Secretary Postal’ Martin Walsh. The reforms appear more geared towards slashing £300 million across 1,200 delivery offices—‘profits destined for billionaire Daniel Křetínský’s EP Group,’ as Tony Robson on the World Socialist Web Site reports—than in protecting jobs.

‘The model is a fraud,’ wrote Robson: ‘that three delivery workers can do the job of four with fewer full mail delivery dates.’ No wonder he calls fatigue a recurring theme, one of the reasons why increasing numbers of postal workers are now calling this all out on Facebook. Darkly, some are convinced the mail service will not even survive ‘this vandalism’.

‘I am an Antichrist, I am an anarchist.’ That old punk refusal feels distant now. ‘The test will be what happens when Křetínský tries to cross a red line,’ one former union organiser had said, off the record. ‘Because eventually—he will.’ Well, is this line already being crossed?

Somewhere in Prague, the billionaire at the centre of it all remains quiet, precise, enigmatic. In a 2015 speech to students, he was reported as saying he invests in ‘industries that are dying… because we think they’ll die much more slowly than the general consensus says.’

And maybe that’s the real story: not a hostile takeover, but a slow, velvet one—sanctioned by silence, gilded with honours, cloaked in modernisation. Royal Mail may or may not survive, but in what form if it does—and at what cost? In the end, this isn’t just about postmen or parcels. It’s about what a country lets go of, and who’s left holding the letter when no one’s left to deliver it.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

PBS’ Amna Nawaz tried.

When interviewing Tricia McLaughlin, Assistant U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, Nawaz asked for clarification on Trump’s flipflop of whether or not to exempt from arrest undocumented agricultural and hospitality workers.  McLaughlin responded that 75% of ICE arrests have been of violent criminals, dismissing as untrustworthy a CNN report that showed otherwise.  What’s odd is that that report featured ICE data showing that less than 10% of arrests during fiscal year 2025 were of criminals convicted of any crime, violent or otherwise.   

Considered alongside other claims from Trump administration officials, McLaughlin’s exchange with Nawaz is part of a pattern.  Put more succinctly, confusing the public has become central to how key players in the government legitimize the administration’s controversial mass deportation program.  Finding clarity on the numbers and pointing to who really stands to gain from rounding up scores of people, reveals a concerted effort to have taxpayers bankroll the privatization of public security to benefit a handful of Trump allies.

Another stat worth examining – that 75% of ICE arrests have been of violent criminals.  Where did McLaughlin get that from?

And it’s not just McLaughlin who’s invoked it.  

Secretary Noem, in an Instagram post where she holds up images of individual migrants who she says committed crimes like assault and robbery, captions the video with “75% of the illegal alien arrests under the Trump administration have been charged with or convicted of a crime.”  The same figure appears in a DHS post praising Trump for making America safe.  The 75% figure was also bandied around by the DHS the first time Trump was President.

The problem – none of these references are corroborated with evidence.  Perhaps the goal is to repeat something so often that we assume it’s true.

Then there’s Border Czar Tom Homan’s word salads.

Case in point – his extended interview with the New York Times’ Natalie Kitroeff.  There, when asked about arrest priorities, Homan notes that first ICE is going after public security threats but that “no one is off the table.”  He continues, that “we are nation of laws, we have to enforce the laws. If we don’t, we send a message to the whole world that you can come illegally, it’s a crime, don’t worry about it.”  When pressed about the widely unpopular workplace enforcement raids that have taken place on farms, car washes, and construction sites, Homan notes that these are the places where they tend to find violent criminals “hiding.”  

Someone should inform Homan how immigration works.  

People have come to the US historically in waves, usually because they are escaping a famine, the outbreak of war, political or economic disruption, or fear of some form of persecution.  Breaking the law is secondary to the human instinct for self-preservation, as well as love for one’s family.  Such details are lost on Homan who also believes murderers are fixing roofs or doing landscaping.

Furthermore, the focus on public security is made a farse by Trump pressuring agents to make 3,000 arrests a day.  Reports show not only how this hurts the morale of ICE agents, but works at cross purposes with the stated intention of going after “the worst of the worst.”  Sacrificing quantity for quality, agents don’t have the time to investigate who really are the violent criminals.  

Here is where the truth appears, namely, that upping arrest quotas gets the public to finance the deportation industry.

First, people arrested need housing.  Enter private detention firms Geo Group and CoreCivic, which together either house themselves or run publicly-owned jails for nearly 90% of ICE detainees.  These same companies spent extravagantly last year either donating directly to the Trump campaign, or to Trump-affiliated super-PACs.  

Trump’s fancy to send migrants to El Salvador, or Sudan, is also part of this scheme as Geo Group’s subsidiary, Geo Transport Inc, signed a five-year contract last year with ICE to conduct deportation flights.  

Rightwing players in tech are also cashing in.  Palantir – the firm founded by GOP megadonor and Trump ally, Peter Thiel – was awarded a $30 million contract with ICE to track migrants, particularly those who over stay visas as well as leave voluntarily.  This amount is in addition to the $113 million given to the software giant to analyze data from DHS and the Pentagon.  

And the American taxpayer is stuck with the bill for all these facets of immigration enforcement.

Of the billions dedicated for border security in Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill,’ $45 billion is for detention capacity, $14.4 billion for transportation, and $1.5 billion for infrastructural modernization, including technological enhancements, with billions more for hiring new agents and conducting special operations.  

Trump administration mouthpieces dangle shiny objects to distract us while they stuff bodies into a for-profit detention system.  They confuse us because the facts are not on their side.  Adding insult to injury, we, American taxpayers, are paying for this.  But beyond dollars and cents, the real cost is to our institutions of public security that are now for sale.    

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Photo by Steven Cordes

“There is no question or doubt that nobody will starve or go hungry in the United States.” Herbert Hoover spoke those words in 1931, days after thousands of poor Americans converged for a Hunger March on Washington DC, demanding government aid. The Great Depression had thrown millions out of work and into poverty, but President Hoover refused to consider how he and Congress could help them. He opposed any form of welfare or “government dole.” Media reports of hunger and destitution were “over-exaggerated,” he said.

Almost a hundred years later, the Trump administration is repeating that same playbook. Researchers in The Lancet wrote that Congress’s proposed cuts to Medicaid could cause 14,660 American deaths each year, which otherwise would not have happened. Unprecedented cuts to food benefits (SNAP) will make millions of people hungry and malnourished, increasing the risk of suffering and premature death. Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, went on CNN and called these reports “totally ridiculous” and “astroturf.”

The Boston University School of Public Health’s Impact Counter estimates that almost 60,000 children worldwide have already died of severe acute malnutrition as a result of Trump and DOGE throwing USAID’s humanitarian aid into the woodchipper. Scientists in Nature calculated that 369,000 more children will die of malnutrition every year, children who would have been saved if aid had not been cut. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called these numbers “false” and “fake:” “There’s just no evidence of the fact… that 100,000 children have starved to death because of cuts to USAID.” Rubio told the Senate that poor countries are to blame for having their aid cut, because they don’t make business and mineral deals with the US.

This has happened before. The United States has a long history of using hunger as a weapon and a policy, and denying responsibility for its impacts.

The hunger marchers of the Great Depression recognized that food was power. Government authorities, charities and employers colluded to keep poor people hungry so that they would work and do what they were told. Plantation owners withheld access to food from the croppers on their land, to keep them obedient and disciplined. Mine owners paid their workers with little brass tokens called scrip, which could only be used at the company store, where prices were high. When miners or textile mill workers went on strike, or when their labor was no longer needed, owners tried to starve them out. Local charity offices made sure that only obedient workers had access to relief. Striking workers’ self-help kitchens were bombed and destroyed. Their children went hungry.

Hunger forced poor people to work. As one Union army commander put it after Emancipation, “the liberty given [freedpeople] is the liberty to work, work or starve.” US Indian Agents used hunger to discipline Native people who had been removed from their homelands to reservations. Agents withheld food rations to force Native people to sell their land, work for wages and send their children to Indian schools. US agents then blamed Native people and freedpeople for their own hunger, accusing them of backwardness and indolence.

Welfare agencies also used hunger as a tool for discipline and exclusion. Local welfare officials sometimes made poor people labor for public works to access food benefits. In the 1960s, county welfare offices in the South set up barriers to accessing food aid by making poor people pay an impossibly high deposit for food stamps, or by requiring a letter from a landowner to sign up for benefits. When thousands of people suffered from hunger and malnutrition, public officials blamed them for making bad food choices or for being lazy.

Early in Ronald Reagan’s presidency, drastic welfare cuts led to long lines at food pantries across the country. White House Counselor Edwin Meese dismissed reports of rising hunger in America. Like Rubio, Meese called statistics on hungry children “purely political.” He claimed that there was no evidence: “we do not know how many people there may be who are hungry.” And he suggested that poor people were faking hunger. “People go to soup kitchens because the food is free and that that’s easier than paying for it.”

Poor people are not fooled by this kind of duplicitous rhetoric. Eleven year-old Grace Chiaramadi, daughter of two unemployed textile workers, joined the Children’s Hunger March in 1932. A skeptical reporter told her, “you don’t look hungry.” “Oh, don’t I though!” she retorted. “Sometimes we go for days without eating anything.” Chiaramadi told the reporter that she had a two-month old brother, who she feared would die of starvation. “I want to tell you I know what it means to be hungry.” Children across the US and worldwide know what it means to be hungry. If Trump and Congress ignore them, the price will be suffering and death.

This first appeared on the UC Press blog and is reprinted with permission.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“He who saves his country violates no law,” tweeted President Trump in February. He was echoing a line often attributed to Napoleon. His supporters were electrified by Trump’s tacit invocation of a right to boundless power.

The Trump presidency is already spurring legal battles across the nation. Americans should be aware of how the judicial process and political-media culture are skewed against holding officialdom liable for its crimes.

One of the most stunning examples of federal impunity is the whitewashing of the Bush administration torture scandal. President George W. Bush unleashed a worldwide torture regime that left victims dead and maimed around the globe. But federal officials and federal judges made sure that not a single torture policymaker or CIA torturer faced any penalty for their barbarity.

Torture policymakers seemed to recognize only one possible adverse consequence from getting rough with their targets. “If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong,” wrote Jonathan Fredman, the top lawyer for the CIA Counterterrorist Center in 2002. A congressional hearing in June 2008 revealed that “C.I.A. lawyers believed they had found a legal loophole permitting the agency to use ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading’ methods overseas as long as they did not amount to torture,” the New York Times reported. Fredman warned other federal lawyers involved with sanctifying the interrogation regime: “If someone dies while aggressive techniques are being used, regardless of cause of death, the backlash of attention would be severely detrimental.”

The official attitude toward killing detainees was stark early on in the case of Gul Rahman. He was captured by U.S. agents in October 2002 and was suspected of being a militant. The CIA subjected Rahman to “48 hours of sleep deprivation, auditory overload, total darkness, isolation, a cold shower and rough treatment.” Rahman died in November 2002 after effectively freezing to death “after being stripped naked from the waist down and shackled to a cold cement wall in the Salt Pit, where temperatures were approximately 36°F.” Rather than face prosecution for killing Rahman, the primary CIA interrogator was recommended for a $2,500 cash award for his “consistently superior work,” according to a 2014 Senate report.

For government officials, the decisive legal question is not what federal law prohibits but what behavior will be punished. What happens when feds violate the law of the land?

Today’s legal system allows presumed good intentions to almost always exonerate the worst abuses by government officials. As long as they deny criminal intent, they will almost always be absolved by their fellow government employees.

The Intentions Test for government officials becomes almost a tautology. People work for the government because they want to help other people. Therefore, when some government official violated some legal technicality, did he intend to do something bad?

The Bush administration exploited this presumption to argue in secret memos that U.S. government agents could not be found guilty of torture regardless of their conduct. Bush-appointed lawyers showed how easily even the most aggressive interrogators could be free of a torturous intent:

“Because Section 2340 [of the federal Anti-Torture Act] requires that a defendant act with the specific intent to inflict severe pain, the infliction of such pain must be the defendant’s precise objective. If the defendant acted knowing that severe pain or suffering was reasonably likely to result from his actions, but no more, he would have acted only with general intent. As a theoretical matter, therefore, knowledge alone that a particular result is certain to occur does not constitute specific intent…. Thus, even if the defendant knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent even though the defendant did not act in good faith.’

The memo offered the following illustration: “In the context of mail fraud, if an individual honestly believes that the material transmitted is truthful, he has not acted with the required intent to deceive or mislead.” Mailing brochures on bogus cholesterol cures helped set the standard for government employees who maimed detainees who did not confess quickly enough. The memo assured would-be torturers and torture supervisors: “A good faith belief need not be a reasonable one.”

Such legal reasoning spawned a world-wide epidemic of “good-faith torture.”

The Justice Department memo recited the damage of 9/11 in order to justify the presumption that torture would prevent similar carnage: “Given the massive destruction and loss of life caused by the September 11 attacks, it is reasonable to believe that information gained from al Qaeda personnel could prevent attacks of a similar (if not greater) magnitude from occurring in the United States.” But a 6,000-page Senate Intelligence Committee report finally released in 2014 concluded that the torture failed to produce any information that prevented terror attacks or saved American lives.

In one of the most stunning assertions, the Justice Department stressed that even intentionally killing people during an interrogation might be okay: “The necessity defense may prove especially relevant in the current circumstances. First, the defense is not limited to certain types of harms. Therefore, the harm inflicted by necessity may include intentional homicide, so long as the harm avoided is greater (i.e., preventing more deaths).

“Second, it must actually be the defendant’s intention to avoid the greater harm….

“Third, if the defendant reasonably believed that the lesser harm was necessary, even if, unknown to him, it was not, he may still avail himself of the defense….

“Clearly, any harm that might occur during an interrogation would pale to insignificance compared to the harm avoided by preventing such an attack, which could take hundreds or thousands of lives.

The Justice Department preemptively exonerated U.S. government officials who violate the Anti-Torture Act: “If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate Section 2340A, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network.” The Justice Department did not explain why preventing a catastrophic attack is the only reason why a suspect might be maimed during interrogation.

The memo sanctified boundless power by stressing the uniqueness of the post–9/11 world: “The situation in which these issues arise is unprecedented in recent American history…. [These] attacks aimed at critical Government buildings in the nation’s capital and landmark buildings in its financial center.” But President James Madison did not announce that the U.S. government was obliged to start torturing people after the British burned down Washington in 1814.

After the Abu Ghraib photos became public, Bush continually stressed America’s good intentions as proof that the U.S. government did not torture. On June 22, 2004, Bush responded to criticism: “Let me make very clear the position of my government and our country…. The values of this country are such that torture is not a part of our soul and our being.” Bush continually recited his praise about American values whenever he was challenged about the torture he authorized.

In late 2005, 18 months after leaked memos revealed the Bush administration’s belief that the Anti-Torture Act was null, Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act, which prohibited the use of “cruel, inhumane, or degrading” interrogation methods. Top Justice Department officials responded to the new law with a secret internal memo declaring that all the interrogation methods currently being used — head slapping, waterboarding, frigid temperatures, and blasting with loud music to assure sleep deprivation — were not “cruel, inhumane or degrading.” The secret torture memos, written by assistant attorney general Steven Bradbury, relied on “a Supreme Court finding that only conduct that ‘shocks the conscience’” would go too far.

Other administration officials used the same standard to exonerate themselves. Vice President Dick Cheney, who largely dictated the Bush policy, was asked in a television interview, “What’s the president’s prerogative in the cruel treatment of prisoners?” Cheney invoked the “shocks the conscience” standard, and then mentioned that “what shocks the conscience” is to some extent “in the eye of the beholder.” This standard leaves it up to government officials to decide whether they are personally offended about how they are using their power. If a policy does not shock a politicians’ conscience, it must be okay.

The “shock the conscience” test becomes a slippery slope. The more abuses government commits, the more numb people become. What would have been condemned one year evokes shrugs and yawns a few years later. This becomes Barbarism on the Installment Plan. Cheney publicly declared his approval for simulated drowning of detainees, even though the U.S. government had considered this a war crime for over a century.

In 2007, the New York Times detailed how, after 9/11, the CIA constructed an interrogation program by “consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods long used in training American servicemen to withstand capture.” For decades, the U.S. government condemned Soviet, Egyptian, and Saudi torture. But interrogation systems designed to compel victims to sign false confessions supposedly provided the model for protecting America in the new millennium.

In a July 2007 executive order, Bush offered a “good intention” definition of torture. Bush stressed that interrogators are prohibited from “intentionally causing serious bodily injury” and “acts intended to denigrate the religion, religious practices, or religious objects of the individual.” Bush banned “willful and outrageous acts of personal abuse done for the purpose of humiliating or degrading the individual in a manner so serious that any reasonable person … would deem the acts to be beyond the bounds of human decency, such as sexual or sexually indecent acts undertaken for the purpose of humiliation.”

Former Marine Corps Commandant Paul X. Kelley condemned the new guidelines for encouraging abuses: “As long as the intent of the abuse is to gather intelligence or to prevent future attacks, and the abuse is not ‘done for the purpose of humiliating or degrading the individual’ — even if that is an inevitable consequence — the president has given the CIA carte blanche to engage in ‘willful and outrageous acts of personal abuse.’” Georgetown University law professor David Cole noted that Bush’s order “appears to permit cutting or bruising a suspect so long as the injury does not risk death, significant functional impairment or ‘extreme physical pain,’ an entirely subjective term.” The key portion of the executive order — the list of approved interrogation techniques — was kept secret. Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch observed, “All the order really does is to have the president say, ‘Everything in that other document that I’m not showing you is legal — trust me.’”

Thanks to this legal framework, none of the deaths that occurred during interrogations by U.S. government agents were homicides. Instead, they were simply accidents, regardless of how much force was used or how many bones were broken. The CIA made tapes of its vigorous interrogations but destroyed them, even though a federal court had ordered their preservation. Attorney General Michael Mukasey refused to appoint a special counsel to investigate possible crimes because “certifications were given” by the Justice Department which absolved the CIA agents “who permissibly relied on it.” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) derided this position “as the Nuremberg defense…. I had authorization and therefore I’m immune from prosecution.”

But the Bush torture policymakers got away with their crimes — thanks in part to President Obama betraying a campaign promise and issuing a blanket exoneration for interrogation abuses.

The presumption that government officials have good intentions provides a license to destroy evidence. The CIA taped many of its brutal interrogations of detainees after 9/11.  In 2005, a federal judge ordered the agency to preserve the videotapes as potentially criminal evidence.  Federal judges need not apply at Langley: CIA headquarters ordered agents around the world to destroy 92 tapes.  What were the legal consequences of scorning the court order? Gina Haspel, the lady who drafted the order for the shredding, was confirmed as CIA chief in 2018.   After President Trump  nominated her, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) complained  of an “A to Z cover-up” of Haspel’s torture record. The National Security Archive, a private nonprofit organization, noted that Haspel “personally supervised the torture of a CIA detainee in 2002 leading to at least three waterboard sessions, subsequently drafted the cable that ordered destruction of the videotape evidence of torture, and served as a senior CIA official while the Agency was lying to itself, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the Congress, and the public about the effectiveness of torture in eliciting useful intelligence.” As the New York Times noted in 2022, though Haspel’s “role as chief of base at the [torture] site in Thailand  is widely known, it is still considered a state secret.”  

When it came time for the Senate to vote on Haspel’s nomination to become CIA chief, she has miraculously morphed into the best hope for America.  Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) declared, “I believe she is someone who can and will stand up to the president, who will speak truth to power if this president orders her to do something illegal or immoral, like a return to torture.”  Promising that someone will “speak truth to power” is one the favorite accolades in the least trusted city in America.  Former senator and then-current Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats promised that Haspel is someone who would assure “we never have to relearn lessons of the past.”  But what if the biggest lesson is the folly of trusting federal intelligence agencies to obey federal law? Former CIA chief Mike Pompeo boasted of CIA machinations: “ We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s – it was like – we had entire training courses.”  No wonder Haspel was easily confirmed by the Senate. 

Freedom cannot survive blanket immunity for the most powerful individuals in the land. The government uses strict liability to judge companies and industries that deal with hazardous substances. With this standard, an individual can be found liable even without proof of negligence or reckless behavior. The more force a government official uses, the more he should be judged by a strict liability standard.

The more power a person seeks, the less credit his unverifiable intentions deserve. Politicians and the media encourage people to judge rulers by the same standard used for aunts and uncles. But good intentions are far more dispositive in private life than in political life. This is especially true of high-ranking government officials, who almost always avoid vigorous courtroom and congressional examinations of their conduct — much less depositions.

“Meant well” is sufficient apology for bone-headed birthday presents but not for the destruction of rights and liberties. Sen. Daniel Webster warned in 1837 that “the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.” The Founding Fathers crafted the Constitution to protect Americans against politicians who claimed good intentions. Nothing has happened in the subsequent centuries to justify giving any politician a good intention license for tyranny.

+ An earlier version of this piece was published by The Future of Freedom Foundation.

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Starving Palestinians gather in the early morning hours at an aid distribution site along the Netzarim Corridor in Gaza. Still from a video posted to X.

In Gaza today, hunger has a price—and for far too many civilians, that price has been death.

The Israeli Newspaper, Haaretz described the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) distribution centers as “Killing Field” where, Israeli soldiers ordered to shoot at civilians queuing for the meager aid. Mothers, fathers, children, and elders—unarmed civilians killed while trying to secure essential food rations. They arrive seeking flour or a bag of food, but leave in body bags.

Launched with propaganda flair, the Israeli designed and U.S.-funded GHF was billed as an “alternative” to UN aid organizations. It promised food, and relief to the besieged stip. What it has delivered instead is organized cruelty: starvation management at gunpoint.

Unlike long-established agencies such as UNRWA or the World Food Programme, (WFP), this foundation has no meaningful aid infrastructure, no distribution network, and no impartial oversight. Following three months of total food blockade, GHF was created not to alleviate suffering, but as part of an apparatus—designed to mask weaponized starvation behind the façade of humanitarian relief.

For over a year and a half, UN bodies like UNRWA successfully delivered food across Gaza, often under Israeli bombardment. Even then, Israeli soldiers either opened fire on civilians waiting for aid convoys or stood by as Israeli-armed, ISIS-affiliated looters hijacked food trucks. Now, the death toll at the GHF “killing field” is rising alarmingly: as of June 25,  549 have been killed and more than 4,000 have been injured.

The Israeli military’s responses for these incidents are as predictable as they are cynical: “We fired warning shots.” “They approached in a threatening manner.” “We are unaware of any shooting.” “We will investigate.” Each excuse is part of a well-rehearsed script to deflect accountability.

Western governments and media accept these non-answers as fact, reinforcing Israel’s impunity and whitewashing war crimes with bureaucratic platitudes.

Such attacks extend far beyond physical harm—they are designed to inflict profound psychological wounds, humiliation, fear and despair. When the simple act of seeking basic sustenance becomes life-threatening, it shatters the human psyche and erodes hope. Targeting the hungry is not just torture; it is an attempt to break the human spirit, deny them of their dignity, making survival itself a relentless, terrifying struggle. Places meant to offer relief and compassion are being transformed by Israel into zones of terror and trauma.

Combine the starvation campaign with the deliberate destruction of homes, shelters, educational system, healthcare facilities, and water and power infrastructure—acts intended to compound the psychological trauma and societal collapse. These tactics pave the way for the ethnic cleansing of civilians to build more Jewish-only colonies, euphemistically dubbed “emigration” or “Trump’s vision.”

For instance, the European Union—and despite its own findings that Israel is violating human rights under the terms of their trade agreement—has taken no meaningful action. Instead of suspending the partnership until those violations are addressed, the EU has treated Israel as an exception, and opted for business as usual. Even when it condemns attacks by illegal Jewish colonists on Palestinian villages in the West Bank, it absurdly calls on Israel—the very state that armed, funded, and implanted those colonists—to stop these crimes. The height of EU hypocrisy when it purportedly opposed Israel’s move to legalize 22 new Jewish-only colonies—calling them a “breach of international humanitarian law”—while continuing to maintain trade relations with those very same illegal colonies.

This is how systems of accountability collapse: when there is no consequence to breaching “international law.”

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is not the result of a failed aid distribution mechanism, but a measured effort to dismantle a proven system. It is a U.S.-Israeli instrument designed to normalize starvation by controlling—and severely restricting—the delivery of humanitarian aid. It exists only because Israel blocks UNRWA and the World Food Programme (WFP) from delivering the thousands of aid trucks stranded outside the Gaza borders. Both UNRWA and WFP have been undermined by politically motivated defunding campaigns, led primarily by Washington and Tel Aviv. Unproven allegations of bias and anti-Israel sentiment have been cynically weaponized to dismantle impartial, effective aid organizations and replace them with a politicized contraption built to serve Israeli military objectives, not humanitarian needs.

Control over resources vital for survival is part of Israel’s broader military tactics to control the narrative. By barring international journalists from Gaza and killing local reporters, the aim is to censor independent coverage and conceal war crimes. Replacing established, impartial aid organizations with a U.S.-Israeli-aligned initiative further enables Israel to dictate the flow of aid and also the story told to the world.

Feeding the hungry under occupation or inside a war zone is not an act of charity—it is an obligation under international law. Starving civilians is not a pawn to be traded for political concessions or to achieve a military strategy, nor should their elementary survival depend on the whims of those who occupy and besiege them.

In response, Jake Wood, the foundation’s first executive director, resigned on May 25, stating that he will not take part in an organization “…that forcibly dislocates or displaces the Palestinian population.” Despite the protest resignation, Donald Trump falsely claimed last week that “other countries are not helping out.” In truth, they are being prevented from helping. For example, Israel is blocking 3,000 thousands of aid trucks from entering Gaza, obstructing UN agencies and international donors from delivering life-saving humanitarian relief.

The misnomer “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” has, in practice, become a death trap to lure the hungry. It has turned humanitarian aid distribution from a lifeline into a firing squad. For parents of malnourished children in Gaza, the grim choice is no longer food or famine, but death by starvation or death by bullet at the U.S.-funded, Israeli-engineered Gaza Assassination Trap.

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Photograph Source: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street – OGL

In a few days’ time the Labour party will be celebrating the first anniversary of its landslide 125-seat victory in the 2024 UK general election.

For now though there seems little to celebrate. Keir Starmer and his equally unappealing chancellor of the exchequer/finance minister Rachel Reeves have led Labour’s lurch from one U-Turn to another virtually from Day One. This is indicative of at least 2 things: (1) deficient policy-making; and (2) political antennae so defective they can’t pick up the political equivalent of an exploding megaton bomb.

When Labour has been in power historically, the UK’s overwhelmingly rightwing media has been quick to throw the muddy and hysterical “tax and spend” label at it in the hope that it will stick (a move certain Democrats in the US–  Zohran Mamdani in particular at this moment– will be thoroughly familiar with).

Anticipatory baulking at the likelihood of being called “tax and spenders” by the UK’s rightwing has pushed Starmer-Reeves into a corner.

Rather than taxing the rich to rescue a welfare system devastated by 14 years of Conservative austerity, a move consistently favoured in opinion polls, Starmer-Reeves have given paltry increases to a few welfare programmes while cutting several of the rest. They insist that their push for economic growth will create a supposedly prosperous UK that will then be able to fund a more ample welfare system. Understandably the public is not swayed by such nebulous imaginings about future “growth”.

Most of the Starmer-Reeves U-turns involve cuts to welfare that have had to be walked back. In the past month alone Starmer has U-turned on 3 occasions.

First, the government had axed in its 2024 Budget the one-time winter heating allowance of up to £300/$412 from 10 million pensioners, by turning what had been a universal policy into a means-tested one. The overall “savings” from this cruel measure were negligible, reflected in the U-turn’s cost of about £1.25bn/$1.70bn a year. It was Starmer’s holding out on rescinding this welfare cut for months, while committing to increased spending on defence to 2.5% of GDP from April 2027, rising to 5% of GDP in 2035, purely in order to conform to Trump’s diktat to NATO governments, that provoked the ire of Labour MPs. The increased defence spending will include bombers carrying nuclear weapons based in the UK for the first time since 1998— an obvious breach of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. It was this abrupt military largesse that prompted his appalled MPs to pressure Starmer into making his U-turn on the winter heating allowance.

Starmer’s intransigence was said by his more diehard supporters to be a signal that Starmer-Reeves were prepared to be “tough” on limiting government spending, except of course when it came to the grovelling-before-Trump acquisition of new generation cyber weaponry.

Second, cuts were made to the Personal Independence Payments (PIP), which deprived 370,000 people of this support. The prospect of stroke victims unable to wash or dress themselves having budget cuts enacted on their backs was again too much for many Labour MPs—some of whom remarked pointedly that they did not enter politics to amplify the already wretched condition of the severely disabled. Also restored in this U-turn was the income of all those receiving the health element of Universal Credit, cuts which affected 2.2 million people.

 In the short term, Starmer and Reeves need £5bn/$7bn “savings” a year to balance the books and avoid increased borrowing, pleading that they inherited a £22bn/$30bn fiscal “black hole” from the previous Tory government which Labour now has to fix. This “black hole” was not mentioned when Starmer announced the massive boost to military spending. The recently abandoned benefits cuts were however said at the time to be a vital part of the financial and social “reforms” needed to deal with the Tory fiscal incontinence inherited by Labour. The U-turns on these “reforms” will certainly incur increased borrowing and/or taxation in the government’s Autumn Budget. Starmer has deferred such decisions until that Budget is announced in a few months’ time (October to be precise).

Another U-turn by Starmer involved the decision to hold a national inquiry into the child grooming gangs which prey on vulnerable teenage girls in a number of northern English cities (the police jurisdictions of Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire were mentioned in a report by Baroness Louise Casey which highlighted significant institutional failures in protecting children from sexual predation).

For months Starmer had dismissed calls for a such a national inquiry, arguing the issue had already been examined in a seven–year inquiry led by Professor Alexis Jay. The matter is sensitive because the police had found a disproportionate numbers of men of Asian ethnicity (primarily Pakistani) among those arrested for group-based child sexual exploitation. The UK anti-immigrant far right is always willing to exploit such issues when it comes to stereotyping and marginalizing immigrant communities. Perhaps out of fear of being accused of  racism the organizations tasked with protecting children at risk from predation did not take these data about two-thirds of offenders being Asian into account during investigations.

Louise Casey said in a later interview that the data should be investigated as it was “only helping the bad people” not to give a full picture of the situation, before she went on to say: “You’re doing a disservice to two sets of population, the Pakistani and Asian heritage community, and victims”.

Whatever his motives, Starmer’s delaying over the child exploitation scandal has done nothing to detract from the “too little, too late” image that has been pinned on to him. Starmer has sunk precipitously in opinion polls, with Labour losing a lot of potential voters to the far-right Reform UK led by Nigel Farage.

Starmer made his U-turns in the hope this would dissuade some of the 126 Labour MPs – about a quarter of the parliamentary party – who signed up to a wrecking amendment that could bring down the government’s Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill. A vote on the crucial second reading of the bill is due next Tuesday, and these MPs argue that the amended bill is still not good enough to merit their support. In particular they object to Starmer’s refusal to remove the two-child cap on child benefit imposed by the Tories when in power, and a restriction Starmer-Reeves place on the PIP allowance despite their U-turn, that is, the proviso that only those currently in receipt of PIP will benefit from its restoration—once Starmer’s bill becomes law, future PIP claimants will have their allowances reduced in line with the stricter eligibility rules of the originally intended bill. This results in what critics say will be an unjust two-tier welfare system based not on need but on the vagaries of time affecting the onset of one’s disability. Hence a quadriplegic parent disabled as a result of an accident on a construction site currently receiving PIP will benefit from the U-turn, but their child who becomes a quadriplegic from a car accident (say) after Starmer’s bill becomes law will suffer from the cut to PIP. Same disability, but discrepant benefit outcomes, so as the French would say: quelle justice!

Part of the blame for such chaotic stumbles are laid at the feet of Starmer’s Rasputin-like chief of staff, the Blairite Morgan McSweeney. It was McSweeney who masterminded Starmer’s coup in the party leadership race after Jeremy Corbyn’s resignation. It may be recalled that Starmer campaigned on upholding Labour’s election manifesto proposals (which were popular with the party membership) before dumping this commitment as soon as he was voted leader. McSweeney, behind the scenes, then orchestrated Starmer’s purge of the party’s social democrats. Quite simply: Starmer was campaigning on a false prospectus, in effect promising “Corbynism without Corbyn” before switching to outright Blairism when elected leader.

McSweeney was also one of the brains marshalling those Blairites who had sabotaged Corbyn at Labour HQ, after Corbyn came near to winning the 2017 general election, into his shadowy anti-left organization Labour Together. These Blairites had connived with a vicious rightwing-media character assassination of Corbyn, accusing him of antisemitism for being pro-Palestinian and being a former eastern bloc spy (even the BBC threw its weight behind the latter). But McSweeney found these Corbyn saboteurs to be good company in a move that matched any Trotskyite vanguardist infiltration of mainstream political parties.

Starmer, who is said by many who know him to have no real political convictions while red-hot with ambition, was not associated initially with McSweeney’s Labour Together. However Starmer, now on the verge of being a veritable Trojan Horse, was promoted by them to give the appearance of “continuity Corbynism” before espousing Blairism as soon as he was elected. This is amply documented in the book Get In: the Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund.

With the rise of Nigel Farage in the polls, seemingly at Starmer’s expense (Labour now has a 6-point poll deficit behind Farage’s Reform), Starmer has started to steal Farage’s racist and anti-immigrant electoral clothes, apparently at McSweeney’s instigation.

In May Starmer gave a speech about cutting immigration in which he said the UK risked becoming “an island of strangers” as a result of immigration. Starmer’s speech echoed the notorious “rivers of blood” speech delivered in 1968 by the anti-immigrant Tory MP Enoch Powell, a classics professor in a previous life, who referenced “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”, when voicing his feverish anxieties about immigration.

In typical fashion Starmer retracted his racist speech. In an interview published in the Observer newspaper Starmer said: “I wouldn’t have used those words if I had known they were, or even would be interpreted as an echo of Powell.

“I had no idea – and my speechwriters didn’t know either.

“But that particular phrase – no – it wasn’t right. I’ll give you the honest truth: I deeply regret using it”.

Oh dear, Starmer shows in these remarks how shockingly ignorant he is about the UK’s recent political history, and in any event he needs to give his speechwriters the boot, given that they were almost certainly drawn from the McSweeney operation.

The indication here is that Labour and Starmer are torn between 2 opposing electoral strategies.

On the one hand is the McSweeney approach designed to peel-off Labour voters who might defect to Nigel Farage. On the other is a broader strategy, said to be favored by the influential centre-right Labour minister Pat McFadden, which opts for an appeal to the national electorate instead of attracting those who might move to Farage in a general election.

For now the McSweeney strategy prevails with the ambitious leader lacking in political principles. However, if Labour continues to sink in the political ratings, its MPs may decide that Starmer is not up to the job. It is rumoured he’s been given a year to sort things out. Who knows what will happen, least of all the endlessly irresolute Starmer?

At the same time Labour lacks even the merest critique of capital, has no intention of deepening democracy by backing proportional representation, and refuses to take seriously the fucking of our planet as the despoliation of the environment and nature are given free rein.

Labour’s position is dire, and not just electorally. The only improvement for it on the horizon is getting rid of Starmer and his spectral eminence grise Morgan McSweeney.

Some of us who recall a better Labour still live in hope.

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Photograph Source: MSC / Preiss – CC BY 3.0 de

An angry argument is currently raging over the extent of the damage inflicted on Iran’s nuclear capabilities by the American attacks on Iran’s three principal declared nuclear sites.

While the argument is relevant, the reality is not.

It is now widely accepted that Iraq’s alleged possession of nuclear weapons was the excuse, not the reason, for the Israeli/American desire to destroy Iraq.

It should also be obvious than Iran’s alleged aspiration to develop and possess nuclear weapons is the excuse, not the reason, for the Israeli/American desire to destroy Iran.

If such an alleged nuclear weapons aspiration were a genuine Israeli concern, Prime Minister Netanyahu would not have opposed the negotiation of the JCPOA and would not have pressured President Trump to withdraw from and effectively negate it during his first administration.

The reason why Israel opposed the JCPOA is that it removed any alleged “Iranian nuclear threat” and hence deprived Israel of any excuse to attack and seek to destroy Iran.

In this context, continuing Israeli/American insistence that Iran’s nuclear capabilities have been obliterated, whether true or exaggerated, should deprive Israel and the United States, at least in the near term, of any excuse for resuming their effort to destroy Iran.

It is therefore in the best interests of the region and the world that the Israeli and American claims are maintained and are not definitively debunked by any contradictory facts.

After the effective neuterings of Egypt and Jordan (with the consent of their governments) and of Iraq, Lebanon, Libya and Syria (by violence and successful regime change wars), Iran is clearly perceived by the Israeli and American governments as the only regional state still standing which might threaten an effective response and resistance to the long sought and increasingly open objective of the Zionist project in Palestine — a Palestine without Palestinians.

From a Zionist perspective, the last obstacle to achieving this objective, Iran, must be destroyed or, at least, neutered like the other regional states.

If Trump and Netanyahu maintain their claims of having achieved a great military success that has eliminated the alleged “Iranian nuclear threat” for many years or even decades, one may hope that they will cease to hold power before they can launch a new effort to destroy or neuter Iran and that, ideally because of positive developments in Palestine, their successors may no longer see any need to do so.

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Photograph Source: موسسه مطالعات و پژوهش های سیاسی – Public Domain

“If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation.  We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.”

– Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s classic representation of American virtue and clairvoyance, 1999.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is planning to come to Washington in the next week or so, and probably will make his case for regime change in Iran.  Having convinced Donald Trump of the need to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Netanyahu will presumably turn to his next goal, which is to end the regime of the Ayatollah and destroy the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the military organization dedicated to regime control and survival.

Trump has muddied the waters on this issue.  Although he has said he opposes regime change, he raised the possibility two days after the successful military attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities.  This contradicted the statements of Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who said the United States was not trying to topple the regime in Tehran.

The air attacks of the Israeli Defense Forces suggested that their bombardment campaign was against Tehran’s internal political power as well as Iran’s nuclear and external military power.  There were rumors that Netanyahu was on the verge of targeting the Ayatollah Khamenei, but was talked back by Donald Trump.  Netanyahu must be concerned that the Trump administration is still considering the resumption of diplomatic talks with Iran, and he will arrive in Washington to make the case for a continued military campaign.  When asked if he was targeting Khamenei himself, Netanyahu replied that “We are doing what we need to do.”

Meanwhile, the regime change efforts of the United States have had a long and unsuccessful history.  Seventy years ago, the CIA and Britain’s MI-6 colluded to overthrow the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh.  This opened the door to decades of authoritarian rule under the Pahlavi monarchy and the Islamic Republic.  Currently, the eldest son of the late Shah, Reza Pahlavi, has emerged as the most visible opposition leader, although there is no indication that he has any influence in Tehran or any popular support in the country. The strategic failure of the coup in 1953 should have demonstrated that regime change, externally engineered, is likely to lead to even more repressive government and not to democratic alternatives.

President Eisenhower, known for his classic warnings against militarism and the military-industrial complex, had secretly delegated to major theatre commanders the authority to initiate nuclear attacks under certain circumstances and was directly responsible for getting the Central Intelligence Agency into the business of regime change, both in Iran and in Guatemala.  The twin forces of paranoia and hubris that were evident in the regime change operations in the Persian Gulf and Central America ultimately led to the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, which lasted two decades and cost 55,000 American lives.

In 1954, the CIA backed a coup in Guatemala that installed the most brutal regime ever in Central America.  The CIA has never released documents that discuss the 200,000 Guatemalans who were killed by the regime’s security services—trained by the CIA.  During the Reagan administration, the agency also trained similarly abusive internal security organizations in Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador.  The Pentagon’s Intelligence Support Activity was ostensibly created to support the war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, but it was organized to operate anywhere in Central America and to conduct regime change.

The Kennedy administration was responsible for one of the worst attempts at regime change with the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, which demonstrated high-level ignorance of the popularity of Fidel Castro.  After 36 years of secrecy, the CIA finally released its Inspector General’s report, which described the “arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence” within the CIA that led to the disaster.  Several Cubans, initially trained by the CIA for covert action against Castro, were involved in the break-in at the Watergate.

The Kennedy administration was also involved in the overthrow and ultimate death of South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem, which marked a turning point in the Vietnam War.  With the overthrow of Diem, the United States never again had the cooperation of a viable South Vietnamese leader.

The Nixon administration’s contribution to the failure of regime change was the CIA’s role in the overthrow of the democratically elected Salvador Allende and the emergence of Augusto Pinochet, who was responsible for the deaths of several thousand leftists, socialists, and political critics.  Operation Condor, a U.S.-supported terror operation throughout South America, was founded at the behest of the Pinochet regime in 1975.

The invasion of Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11 was designed to topple the Taliban regime and to oust the terrorist organization al-Qaeda.  Both of these goals were achieved in a matter of months, but the Bush-Obama-Trump-Biden administrations made the mistake of pursuing the democratization of Afghanistan for the next twenty years.  The Afghan mission cost more than $1 billion as well as 3,600 Western lives and 50,000 Afghan civilians.  Today, the Taliban are back in control and, ironically, the country is more stable and safe than it was during the U.S. and European military campaign.

The administration of George W. Bush engaged in a disinformation campaign regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as well as the assertion that Saddam Hussein collaborated with al-Qaeda to conduct the 9/11 attacks in order to conceal the real motive for the U.S. invasion in 2003, which was regime change. Ironically, Hussein was overthrown not because he had nuclear weapons but because he didn’t have nuclear weapons.  This was not the first example of cooked intelligence to justify the use of force and, sadly, it will probably not be the last. There are already examples of the Trump administration cooking the intelligence books.

President Obama, who should have known better in view of his skepticism regarding the powers of the Pentagon and the CIA, authorized regime change in Libya 14 years ago, and Libya is still suffering the consequences of the removal of longtime dictator Muammar Qadhafi.  The state has virtually disintegrated with two different governments fighting for control as the political situation and the human rights situation remain extremely precarious.  Libya remains the classic case of the failure of air bombardment to effect regime change.  Air bombardment is the only possible tool to effect regime change in Iran, which is highly unlikely to be successful.

Foreign-imposed regime change, a clear violation of the sovereignty of independent states, has registered a series of failures.  In most of the cases cited above, the newly installed governments haven’t been able to cope with the challenge of creating a stable government and coping with the many crises and conflicts that follow foreign intervention. The CIA’s attempt to assassinate Patrice Lumumba in the Congo led to the emergence of Mobutu Sese Seku, the most evil tyrant in modern African history.  It is difficult to conjure up a U.S.-backed attempt at regime change that didn’t become a long-term strategic failure or liability.

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Photograph Source: Syeda Amina Trust – CC BY 2.0

There is not much more that can be said about the unfathomable levels of devastation the genocide in Gaza has reached. Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, has been chronicling the genocide and joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to shed light on the current situation in Gaza, including parts from her upcoming report on the profiteers of the genocide.

Israel’s siege on the Palestinians is leaving the population starving, and Albanese lambasts other nations for not stepping up and completing their obligations under international law. “[Countries] have an obligation not to aid, not to assist, not to trade with Israel, not to send weapons, not to buy weapons, not to provide military technology, not to buy military technology. This is not an act of charity that I’m asking you. This is your obligation,” she explains.

Albanese compares Gaza and Israel’s siege to a concentration camp, stating it is unsustainable but also allows the world to witness how a Western settler colonial entity functions. “There is a global awareness of something that has for a long time been a prerogative, a painful prerogative of the global majority, the Global South, meaning the awareness of the pain and the wounds of colonialism,” Albanese tells Hedges.

In her forthcoming report, Albanese will detail exactly how Palestine has been exploited by the global capitalist system and will highlight the role certain corporations have played in the genocide. “[T]here are corporate entities, including from Palestine-friendly states, who have for decades made businesses and made profits out of the economy of the occupation, because Israel has always exploited Palestinian land and resources and Palestinian life,” she says.

“The profits have continued and even increased as the economy of the occupation transformed into an economy of genocide.”

When the history of the genocide in Gaza is written one of the most courageous and outspoken champions for justice and an adherence to international law will be Francesca Albanese, the special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories. Albanese, an Italian legal scholar, has held the position of UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories since 2022. Her office is tasked with monitoring and reporting on “human rights violations” that Israel commits against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Albanese, who receives death threats and endures well-orchestrated smear campaigns directed by Israel and its allies, valiantly seeks to hold those who support and sustain the genocide accountable. She lambasts what she calls “the moral and political corruption of the world” for the genocide. Her office has issued detailed reports documenting the war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza and the West Bank, one of which, Genocide as Colonial Erasure, I reprinted as an appendix in my latest book A Genocide Foretold. She is at work on a new report exposing the banks, pension funds, tech companies and universities that are aiding and abetting Israel’s violations of international law, human rights and war crimes. She has informed private organizations that they are “criminally liable” for assisting Israel in carrying out the “genocide” in Gaza. She announced that if, as has been reported, former British Foreign Secretary David Cameron threatened to defund and withdrawal from the International Criminal Court (ICC) if it issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, Cameron and the former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak could be charged with a criminal offense under the Rome statue. The Rome Statue criminalizes those who seek to prevent war crimes from being prosecuted. She has called on top EU officials to face charges of complicity or war crimes over their support for the genocide, saying that their actions cannot be met with impunity. She was a champion of the Madleen flotilla that sought to break the blockade of Gaza and deliver humanitarian aid, writing that the boat, intercepted by Israel, was carrying not only supplies but a message of humanity.

Joining me to discuss the genocide in Gaza and the failure by Western governments to intervene or adhere to international law is Francesca Albanese.

Let’s just lay out where we are in Gaza. It’s very bleak. We can’t sugarcoat it, especially since March 2nd.

Francesca Albanese

Yes, Chris. So first of all, thanks for having me. Such a pleasure.

Look, the situation in Gaza has gone so rotten, so horrible that I really don’t have the words to describe it anymore. I remember that when I had the first reports about cases of starvation, it was last year, primarily in northern Gaza, which by the way, is completely cut off our understanding of what’s going on in Gaza.

In a sense, the misery that we see is in the south of Gaza. The north is completely obscured. But when I received the first reports on starvation, I remember people from Gaza saying we are turning into monsters.

And this is something that I hear more and more from people. The hunger is so much, it’s so widespread, so profound that it’s turning people into a stage of pre-humanity and this is what happens to people who experience this brutality. They are forced, they are pushed back into a space which predates civilization and, again, thinking that this is strategic, this is intentional from Israel, it’s a stain for all of us.

How can we let it happen? Why European states, why Arab states have not sent their navies yet to break the blockade? It must be done. It’s an obligation, it’s not an act of charity. They must break the siege. And it’s already too late, you know? This is the situation in Gaza. It’s devastating.

Chris Hedges

Well, this is the kind of action of the flotilla with Greta Thunberg, of course they weren’t going to get through, but it was an act of shaming in a way, an act of conscience, certainly an act of courage. Your voice has been one that has just been unwavering since the genocide began. And yet at the same time, I think many of us who speak out against the genocide have to accept that we haven’t been able to save a single life and yet we must keep speaking out anyway.

Francesca Albanese

Yeah, look, I often wonder what is it for? Because, again, I feel in a way restless. I never stop talking about Gaza, the West Bank, the Palestinians. Because I think I’m like many, I carry a wound right now. It’s something that I would have never wanted to see happening again.

I am also from a generation who saw the genocide in Rwanda, who read about the genocide in Rwanda. I have vivid memories of the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina and seeing the genocide of the Palestinians happening in slow motion and being the chronicler of this genocide somewhat has irreparably wounded me but it’s okay.

My only form of healing is by making sure that people wake up and realize that this carries the fingerprints of all of us. And when I say that I’m not using it adverbally, it’s real. Because when you see the profits that companies registered in Western countries and others are making out of the genocide of the Palestinians, you see, I mean, you lose hope in humanity for good.

And it’s true that we have not managed to save lives, but we don’t know. We don’t know, Chris, in fact, because I do believe that had Israel been left free hands, it would have already cleansed Gaza of the Palestinians, while in fact by denouncing what Israel is doing, we are contributing to make sure that Palestine doesn’t disappear from the maps.

Because somewhat inside me I have this sense that the sacrifice of the Palestinians in Gaza will continue, will continue, really, will continue unless there is an arms embargo and unless the blockade is, I mean, the siege is broken and it cannot happen without coercive measures. The only way to protect Israel, to ensure that Israel is protected, is by stopping Israel. Israel is harmful to the Palestinians, to the region, is harmful to many of us and is harmful to itself and its citizens.

This is something that Israelis must understand. None of us working for human rights and justice have anything… Personally, I have a lot of pain for the Israelis themselves because I think that they must be traumatized to the point that they have lost their humanity. And I can just think of a huge form of healing both for the Palestinians and Israelis.

But again, I don’t know, surely we have not saved lives, but we have contributed to show the real face of Israel’s apartheid.

Chris Hedges

When you talk about coercive measures, I covered the withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Northern Iraq when they were carrying out a genocidal campaign against the Kurds. NATO forces established a no-fly zone. Iraqi forces had to withdraw what was happening to the Kurds. Doesn’t begin to compare, finally, what is happening to the Palestinians in Gaza.

But it was clear at that moment that only coercive measures would save the Kurds. And you’re, of course, correctly pointing out that that is exactly now where we are with the Palestinians. That without coercive measures, and that has to be imposed from the outside, then Israel’s campaign of genocide and probably displacement will not be stopped.

Francesca Albanese

Absolutely. And you know what shocks me is that when I talk to member states, even the most enlightened, so to speak, in the global, I mean in the West, which I call the global minority, given our territorial irrelevance in this world. But even when you spoke to member states who seem to be, to have an enlightened position and a human rights oriented position on Palestine. When I make my recommendations to them, they say, oh, but you really expect us to boycott Israel?

Well, you’re a state, it’s not up to you to boycott. You have an obligation not to aid, not to assist, not to trade with Israel, not to send weapons, not to buy weapons, not to provide military technology, not to buy military technology. This is not an act of charity that I’m asking you. This is your obligation.

And this sort of nonchalance the member states have even the ones who appear the most principled toward the disrespect of international [law] because this is what they do with great nonchalance, they violate international law through and through.

And the way, the only thing that comes to their mind is, do you think that we are really going to isolate Israel? Yeah, yeah, I mean the fact that they are really struggling with the thought is a measure of how far we are from the solution of the question.

Chris Hedges

What do you think, I mean starvation and over a half million Palestinians are now on the cusp of starvation. And then there is the whole issue of water. There’s no clean water. And then of course, medical supplies or humanitarian [aid] or anything, 90% of the Palestinians are either living in tents or in the open air. Where is this headed?

They’re luring the Palestinians like mice into a trap in the South with these… and nobody thinks that the aid hubs or the amount of food, the paltry amount of food is anything more than bait to essentially cram Palestinians into guarded compounds in the South. And of course they’re shooting dozens of Palestinians off in a day in desperation trying to get something to eat.

Are they going to push them into the Sinai? Do you have any sense or maybe Israel doesn’t know but do you have any sense of where this is going to go next?

Francesca Albanese

I don’t have a precise sense other than knowing that Israel would be fine with whatever solution that takes the Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip for now and then out of the West Bank later and then probably out of Israel. These are the three stages of the planned ethnic cleansing of historical Palestine because your audience shall never forget that Israel is a state that was created inside Palestine.

So what we are talking about the Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem are the little pieces of land that remain. And even there, Palestinians are not let free to enjoy the right of self-determination, like existing as a people. Israel is after this. Israel doesn’t want the Palestinians in their way. This is the real victory.

Because when 80% of the population supports the government in maintaining this level of violence toward the Palestinians, especially those in Gaza who are starving as we speak, who have nothing left than their dignity and the very few things and loves that remain in their life. The only victory for this government, which represents a large portion of Israeli society, is to get rid of the Palestinians.

I mean of course it doesn’t matter if it’s the Sinai or the Congo, they are begging every country to take the Palestinians. And the problem is that no one can do that unless they are forced, unless the Palestinians ask and beg for being saved. This is so cruel and this is what’s happening.

But the Palestinians have not done it yet. Eyal Weizman of Forensic Architecture, has a very interesting way, having studied other genocides like the German genocide of the Nama and Herero people in Namibia, saying this way that the Israel are following to confine the people in a place where they cannot survive on their own.

It’s like a concentration camp. It’s like being fully dependent on a hand that gives you, that hands out something but that’s not sustainable and all the rest is being destroyed. Gaza will not return to what it was because of the environmental damage, because of the contamination, because of all what Gaza is today. But it doesn’t matter. If there is a place where the Palestinians from Gaza will move, it’s Israel.

This is the opportunity to let the Palestinians return to their original homeland. And I understand that this is a huge shock, comes as a huge shock for the Israelis, but sooner or later they would have been confronted with this. They are living like many, like other settler societies. Sorry, you’re living on stolen land.

And you cannot, like the Americans who are not Native Americans and like the Australians who are not Aboriginal, you are living on stolen land. And the only redemption that you can have in this life, it’s fixing, it’s making right the wrongs of the past. So this is what conscientious Israelis should do.

Chris Hedges

I want to talk about erasure. Israel is not just physically erasing Palestine and of course has attacked its universities, its museums, its cultural centers. It has physically erased or killed through targeted assassinations, its intellectual class, its writers, its poets, over 200 journalists, its doctors.

And to what extent, and I want you to talk about the heavy campaigns that have been mounted against you by AIPAC and the Israel lobby, not only, I think, because you’re outspoken, but because your reports make it hard for Israel to erase what they’ve done and erase what is happening, which all genocidal killers seek to do.

Francesca Albanese

I often say that the attacks against me are emblematic of various aspects of this struggle. On the one hand, what happens to me is not unique in the sense that being accused of being pro-Hamas, pro-terrorism, antisemitic, it’s the litany of falsehood that everyone from the Pope to the secretary general to scholars, activists, journalists, anyone with a minimum of decency who has dared denouncing the abhorrent reality in Palestine had to face.

So what has happened to me again is not unique. What I think is unique is the relentlessness of the attacks and how they continue to grow because I don’t give up. I believe it’s that because the more they threaten me the more I say let me see how better I can do my job because it’s not about… I call them the barking dogs.

They’re really barking dogs and they don’t matter, their objective is to distract me and they will not succeed because I know them I understand them because I often say I come from a place that has been plagued by the mafia. You know how many things I’ve realized over the past months also about myself.

Why am I the way? Why I’m not scared by them? Why every time I ignite my car I am scared. Of course there are times where I don’t open the door thinking my god, who’s going to be behind it? But this is why I live my life in a way that it’s full of meaning. I love my family. I love my kids. I love my husband. I love my friends. I love my colleagues and this is what I treasure and I cherish every day and every day I whenever I manage to go to bed and sleep I have no regrets because I’m doing what everyone should be doing.

So on the one hand, if I were someone in Gaza or in other places in Palestine, but even one of the many Israelis with whom I interact constantly and feel desperate, feel devastated by what is being done in their name. If I were one of these people, I would love to have, I would like to have someone who understands them, who listens to them and who connects the dots. This is the thing that annoys my detractors superbly.

The fact that on the one hand they don’t manage to make me shut up, rather the contrary, at every attempted slap there is a storm against them. Doesn’t matter where they come from, doesn’t matter who they are, it always turns into more support over me. This is why when people ask me, how do you feel to be so hated? By whom?

By this bunch of minions and charlatans who are defending the genocide. Who cares? Who cares? But there is an entire world which is in turmoil and somewhat I have the possibility to be listened to, which is a huge privilege for me. And because I know how fallacious human, sorry, yeah, the human nature can be.

My anchor continues to be international law to the best way I can of interpreting it because this is universal. This applies to all of us. This is for all of us. So I’m not bringing my precepts or my ideology. I’m bringing something that belongs to all of us. And this is the thing that annoys the detractors is that I use the solidity of the facts and the law to tell them who they are, to put them in front of a mirror and it’s not that they don’t like me, they dislike the image that through me they get of themselves, genocidaires or supporters of a genocide.

Chris Hedges

How much has this changed the global community? And I’m thinking in particular, of course, within the Global South, which suffered their own Holocaust. You mentioned the Herero and the Namakwa, but the Armenians, the Kenyans under British colonialism, the Indians, especially the 1943 Bengal famine, for instance, three million Indians died.

And these Holocausts are not recognized by their perpetrators. Aimé Césaire in Discourse on Colonialism says that the reason that the Holocaust carried out by the Nazis against the Jews resonated was because the tactics that were employed, and these are his words, against the Coolies in India and the Blacks in Africa and the Algerians by the French in Algeria just were turned on other white Europeans.

And of course it’s been the Global South led by South Africa that has stood up to try and impose the rule of law on Israel on the genocide. But is this reconfiguring the global community?

Francesca Albanese

I think it is. I think it is. Not as fast as ending the genocide would require, but it is. So there are different trends that I see. First of all, as you say, there is a coming together around certain basic things. I’ve never heard so many people speaking the language of international law.

Seriously, I mean it’s as a lawyer, as a human rights lawyer, if I were given the opportunity not to look at the genocide for a moment, I would feel that the human rights mission is somewhat fulfilled because people are aware and are aware through a common lens that is allowing many, really, from Africa to Asia to the global minority and other places, really, to look at Palestine and recognize that.

There are some commonalities. People speak the language of human rights. Phenomenal, right? There is also another aspect of awakening is that never before have I heard so many people connecting the dots between the past and the present and the colonial past and the present.

I don’t know if you agree with me, but at least I sense that there is a global awareness of something that has for a long time been a prerogative, a painful prerogative of the global majority, the Global South, meaning the awareness of the pain and the wounds of colonialism.

Israel as a settler colonial frontier, a Western settler colonial frontier is giving an opportunity to understand what settler colonialism is and has done. The third thing is that the awakening is coming by linking the dots. And look, I mean, we will have a chance to talk once my report is out.

But I keep on saying two things as I prepare myself to unveil what I’ve discovered through the findings of the last six months of investigation that the genocide in Gaza has not stopped because it’s lucrative, it’s profitable for far too many. It’s a business. People have exploited, I mean there are corporate entities, including from Palestine-friendly states, who have for decades made businesses and made profits out of the economy of the occupation, because Israel has always exploited Palestinian land and resources and Palestinian life.

But I mean, the profits have continued and even increased as the economy of the occupation transformed into an economy of genocide. And again, people need to understand that because Palestinians have simply, and I say simply with a lot of pain, and I don’t mean disrespectful toward the Palestinians, but they have provided these boundless training field to test the technologies, test weapons, to test surveillance techniques that now are being used against people everywhere from the Global South to the Global North.

Look at what’s happening in the United States or in Germany. We are spied [on]. I mean, look at the use of drones, of biometrics. These are all things that have been experienced on the Palestinians first and foremost. So I think that there is this link that unfettered and boundless unchecked capitalism, which has been, colonial racial capitalism also for the Palestinians, detrimental for all of us.

So how to respond to this? I do see a movement, I do see a revolution brewing, I call it the watermelon revolution and it’s there. There are young people, workers, anti-Zionist Jews or Jews who do not recognize themselves as anti-Zionist but still don’t want to have anything to do with Israel’s crimes and don’t want them to be in their names.

So there is this movement and at the level of countries I see for example the Hague Group which is a coalition primarily of countries from the Global South and it shouldn’t be like that. So I’ve supported, I’ve sustained, I’ve commended these countries and I call on other states from Asia to Africa and especially the West to join the Hague group, which says let’s start by taking some modicums, some minimal steps to comply with international law.

No impunity, no harbor and no weapons for Israel. Which is really basic, but here’s where we are. Baby steps.

Chris Hedges

Can you talk about in this report that’s coming out some of the global corporations that are profiting off of genocide and how they’re profiting off of genocide?

Francesca Albanese

I won’t be able to tell you much because the report is still embargoed. But I decided to list about 50 corporate entities, from arms manufacturers to big tech companies to companies providing construction materials or extracting construction materials from the Occupied Palestinian Territory to the tourism industry, goods and services, supply chain.

And also these are the two main sectors of the displacement replacement of the Palestinians. And then there is a network of enablers like insurers, pension funds, wealth funds, banks, universities, charities. It’s an ecosystem sustaining this illegality.

You know, the private sector tends to escape scrutiny, they’re very smart. And in fact, the private sector has historically been either a driver of settler colonialism. During the 1600s, for example, think of companies of the Indies. They were leaving from the Netherlands, the Dutch ports, to co-reach and colonize West India or Southeast Asia. I mean, why? Why? Why on earth? And this has happened.

But also there are also cases where companies or private entities were not the drivers but the enablers providing tools, funds for colonial enterprises that then profited them. And this is why big companies and corporate interests have helped shape the law in a way that allowed them to escape scrutiny.

It’s not new that companies have profited from genocides, but think of what happened during the Holocaust. The Holocaust industrialist trials helped understand how companies made businesses out of the tragedy of millions of Jewish people.

And it’s shocking to see that some of the companies who were held responsible in the case of the Holocaust industrialist trials are still involved in the genocide of the Palestinians. And then there was the South Africa experience after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded its work. Some companies were condemned to make reparations. So there have been historical moments that have prompted greater regulation for companies.

And for example, the UN guiding principles imposing due diligence to companies are an outcome of the South Africa experience. And still, it’s not enough. It’s definitely not enough because companies continue to operate in the gray areas of state responsibility.

So, for example, I put on notice 48 businesses and the response was, yeah, but it’s not our fault, it’s Israel. Yeah, it’s not up to you to tell us what we should do, it’s the states. So no, I’m sorry. Today the occupation is unlawful. Israel has been put on notice, is investigated directly or indirectly in at least three proceedings for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. And you cannot continue business as usual.

And if you do, you will have to face justice. So this is probably the storm that I will help to mount against them is to make sure that civil society and lawyers in every country where this business are registered, are active, and also that consumers know that they can vote, they can bail out. They can make sure, for example, there are tourism companies who advise settlement properties. You should see, or for example, real estate agents who sell nice English speaking neighbourhood in the heart of Judea and Samaria.

So this is normalization of the occupation by a clique and you are going to be punished. Maybe not in court but surely you will lose a lot of clients when they will know what you do.

Chris Hedges

Let’s just close by talking about international bodies, the ICC, the United Nations. They’ve certainly stepped up and spoken in opposition to the genocide, attempted to hold Israel accountable for the genocide, but have no enforcement mechanism. How do you look at these international organizations and the role that they’ve played in the genocide?

Francesca Albanese

Look, I do not agree to the fullest with the argument that there are no enforcement mechanisms. There are enforcement mechanisms and this is member states. Member states have an obligation to enforce the decision of the ICJ.

There is even the Security Council. The Security Council last year passed a resolution ordering a ceasefire in Gaza, which was not respected. So there is no enforcement of anything these days that is thought, is conceived to put a limit to Israel’s impunity.

And in a way, yes, I agree with what you were saying before. Israel is seen somewhat like part of Western settler colonialism. Israel is seen as part of the Western confrontation with the rest of the world, which is shameful frankly. We shouldn’t be here, still here, in this racial way of, racial optics, this racialized way of looking at each other.

We are part of the same family. This is what humanity means. Doesn’t matter the color of your skin, doesn’t matter the God you worship or don’t, doesn’t matter. It’s what makes us human and we are so cruel among all animals among all creatures in this world because we really have so many barriers that we have erected and we need to remove them.

Now it’s the chance I don’t know if we need another genocide, but this genocide is triggering something more Chris. You see the war in Iran? The war against Iran? It was totally predictable. It was totally predictable because Israel has been seeding wars in the region for decades. And it was Iraq, then it’s been other countries, Libya and Syria have also been devastated. It’s true, you cannot blame Israel for everything.

Well, Israel has surely benefited from an annihilation of all adversaries in the region. And Iran, bombing Iran has been like feeding a demon. It was the long-term goal of several Israeli governments and finally it has happened.

What would the Israelis have to gain from this seriously? From the death of innocent lives, being them Iranians or Israelis? This is why I say this needs to stop. And the enforcement is there, but it’s with member states. Well, member states keep on, you know, kicking the can in the air and expecting that it’s a deus ex machina to intervene, being the European Union as a whole or being the United Nations as a whole. No!

It starts with principal member states and this is why once again I commend so much the Hague Group because they are acting not as a regional or trans-regional organization but as a coalition of like-minded and principled states.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Across the country, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are tearing families apart, terrorizing communities, and upending businesses.

Mario Romero was among those arrested by ICE recently. His daughter, Yurien Contreras, witnessed ICE agents taking him “chained by the hands, feet, and waist” after they raided his workplace in Los Angeles. Over 40 other immigrant workers were also arrested.

“It was a very traumatic experience,” she told The Guardian. But “it was only the beginning of inhumane treatment our families would endure.”

The architect of this anti-immigrant agenda, top Trump aide Stephen Miller, has demanded that ICE make 3,000 arrests like these per day — an arbitrary quota with no legal basis.

To meet this quota, masked, plainclothes ICE agents embrace violent and unconstitutional tactics to abduct people from courthouses, citizenship appointments, churches, graduations, restaurants, Home Depots, farms, and other workplaces. They arrest people without warrants or probable cause, violate their right to due process, and deny them their basic human dignity.

There’s mounting evidence of ICE using racial profiling. “We have U.S. citizens who are being asked for their documents and not believed when they attest to the fact that they are U.S. citizens,” said Angelica Salas, who directs the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights. “They just happen to be Latino.”

In one disturbing case in Chicago, ICE agents grabbed, handcuffed, and forced Julio Noriega into a van as he stepped out of a Jiffy Lube in late January. ICE detained him for 10 hours before releasing him when they realized he was a U.S. citizen.

In another instance, ICE forced two children, who are both U.S. citizens — one undergoing Stage 4 cancer treatment — onto their mother’s deportation flight to Honduras in April. The cancer patient is four years old — and ICE deported him without his medication.

The inhumane treatment continues in ICE’s sprawling network of private prisons and county jails.

The U.S. spends over $3 billion annually on the world’s largest immigration detention system, which is primarily operated by for-profit prison contractors like GEO Group and CoreCivic. These facilities are notorious for poor medical treatment, dangerous overcrowding, due process violations, and preventable deaths.

The largest ICE detention center in California, Adelanto, is operated by GEO Group and currently houses dozens from the LA raids, including Yurien’s father, Mario.

The prison has a sordid history. Recent detainees have been forced to sleep on the floor without blankets and pillows and have been denied a change of clothing, underwear, or towels for over 10 days, reported the Los Angeles Times.

If these attacks on immigrants were really about “following the law,” then immigrants fleeing war and persecution would be able to exercise their right to seek asylum — a human right long enshrined under international and U.S. law. Their due process rights would be respected.

In fact, the vast majority of immigrants in this country — including those kidnapped by ICE — have no criminal history. According to agency data compiled by research organization TRAC, out of the 56,397 people held in ICE detention as of June 15, 71.7 percent had no criminal record.

Both Republicans and Democrats have enabled ICE’s rampant human rights abuses since the agency’s creation in 2003. ICE functions as a quasi-police force with limited public oversight and uses private data sources like utility bills to conduct unauthorized surveillance of potentially anyone in the U.S.

The current system has a vested interest in locking up and deporting people instead of pursuing real immigration solutions, like pathways to citizenship. This system, which includes ICE and its detention facilities, must be defunded and dismantled.

People abducted by ICE are not numbers. They’re someone’s entire world. They’re cherished members of communities. And they’re on the frontlines of defending all of our civil liberties. We must stand together and demand that ICE leave our communities. We are a nation of immigrants after all.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The War at Home—State Terrorism on Full Display

Across the globe, we are living in a moment of profound crisis where the very essence of education as a democratic institution is under attack. In the United States, the assault on higher education is part of a broader war waged by authoritarian forces aiming to dismantle the pillars of not only academic freedom, dissent, and human rights, but also the essential foundations of democracy itself. Universities are no longer seen as spaces of intellectual freedom and critical inquiry but as battlegrounds for ideological control. Campus protests are met with police brutality; students are abducted for their political views, and those who dare to speak out against the prevailing orthodoxy face expulsion, censorship, and criminalization. Trump’s administration has fueled this campaign, not only targeting academic freedom but also pushing policies that criminalize dissent, especially when it comes to movements like those advocating for Palestinian liberation. The erosion of civil liberties extends to international students protesting in solidarity with Gaza, with threats of deportation looming over them. The chilling message is clear: higher education is no longer a sanctuary for free thought; it is a field of repression where the rule of authoritarianism dominates.

State terrorism at home targets those who dare to engage in the dangerous practice of critical thinking and the courageous act of holding power accountable. It is a violent apparatus that imposes terror on all who are deemed “other”—immigrants, Black people, trans people, brown people, campus protesters, and anyone who refuses to conform to the narrow, racist vision articulated by Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff. He is notorious for his white nationalist views, has become a central figure in shaping the Trump administration’s policies. At a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden, he boldly declared that “America is for Americans and Americans only,” a mantra that echoed the Nazi slogan, “Germany for Germans only.”  As Robert Tait reports in The Guardian, Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, warns that his rise is a direct threat, as he now wields the power of the federal government to impose his fascist worldview.

Setmayer, who now leads the women-led political action committee Seneca Project, explains that his vision has been fully embraced as a core political strategy under Trump. “That view has now been transformed into the main political policy and aim of Donald Trump’s presidency,” she states. The demagoguery surrounding immigration has always been at the heart of Trump’s political ascent. With Miller’s goal to make America whiter and less diverse now backed by the unchecked power of the presidency, Setmayer warns that this combination is not just dangerous, it poses a grave threat to American values and the rule of law itself.

Under the Trump rule, state terrorism is not confined to domestic borders; it extends its reach through reckless, international aggression. Trump’s administration is waging war not just within the U.S., but abroad, with flagrant violations of international law. His unprovoked aggression against Iran, coupled with his unwavering support for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and its unthinkable war on children, exemplifies the regime’s disregard for global norms and human rights. Beyond the Middle East, Trump’s regime seeks to impose its will through threats, tariffs, and naked displays of power. His brutal crackdown on immigration, the transformation of I.C.E. into a Gestapo-like force, and the relentless narrowing of who is permitted entry into the U.S. expose his deeper authoritarian impulses. In this vision, the international community becomes little more than a pawn in his relentless pursuit of geopolitical dominance.

Trump’s disdain for allies and international cooperation reached alarming heights, exemplified by his call to attack Panama, annex Canada, and seize Greenland. These wild, imperialistic notions reflect  a deeply rooted belief that America’s might should dominate the global stage, with little regard for diplomacy or the sovereignty of other nations. In Trump’s worldview, global relations are defined by the logic of conquest and dominance, where the violence of state terror is justified by the expansion of America’s influence and control. This is a regime that knows no limits, expanding its machinery of  fear and violence, both at home and across the globe, in a sustained assault on humanity, justice, and the most basic principles of international law.

The Scourge of Neoliberalism

The ongoing assaults on democracy, both domestically and globally, are not isolated events but part of the groundwork laid by gangster capitalism for the rise of fascism in American society. Central to this process is the transformation of the university from a public good to a privatized institution, where students are seen as human capital, courses are dictated by consumer demand, and more recently the curricula is whitewashed and filled with far-right propaganda, often  under the cover of implementing patriotic education, cleansed of antisemitism. Under the market-driven logic of neoliberalism, universities have become spaces that prioritize economic outputs over intellectual autonomy, turning critical thought and democratic engagement into commodities. This shift has undermined the university’s role as a crucible for challenging the status quo, replacing it with a system of training rather than fostering a culture of critical learning, dialogue, and informed judgment.

As neoliberal policies encourage privatization, restrict access, and force institutions into service to corporate interests, the university is no longer seen as a public trust. It has become a tool for ideological indoctrination, training citizens to uphold the status quo rather than challenge it. This transformation, in part, is a direct response to the democratization of the university that reached its peak in the 1960s, with intellectuals, campus protesters, and marginalized communities seeking to broaden the educational mission. The assault on higher education as a site of critique and democratization has intensified over the last four decades with the rise of the far-right, with broader implications that include intellectuals, minority students, and critical formative cultures essential to the foundation of a substantive democracy.

As the South African Nobel Prize winner in literature, JM Coetzee,  points out in a different  context, the reactionary hedge-fund billionaires “reconceive of themselves as managers of national economies” who want to turn  universities into training schools equipping young people with the skills required by a modern economy.”  Coetzee’s words are even more relevant today, given that  this attack on higher education, which is both ideological and increasingly dependent on the militaristic arm of the state, reflects a broader attempt to eliminate the university’s critical function. Rather than serving the public good, the university is increasingly framed as a private investment, or an arm of state repression, where its governance mirrors  the merging of the exploitative practices of corporate models, such as Walmart’s labor relations and the governing principles of fascism. In the spirit of this concern, Coetzee advocates for the defense of education as an institution dedicated to cultivating intellectual insight, civic responsibility, social justice, and critical thinking.

The questions we must ask at this crucial moment in American history are not about how the university can serve market interests or the authoritarian ideologies of the Trump regime, but how it can reclaim its role as a democratic public sphere. How might we redefine the university to safeguard the interests of young people amidst rising violence, war, anti-intellectualism, authoritarianism, and environmental collapse? As Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskisastutely point out, “How will we form the next generation of intellectuals and politicians if young people will never have an opportunity to experience what a non-vulgar, non-pragmatic, non-instrumentalized university is like?” In this spirit, we must recognize how larger economic, social, and cultural forces threaten the very idea of education, especially higher education, at a time when defending it as a space for critique, democracy, and justice has never been more urgent. Moreover any defense of the university as a public good demands an alliance of diverse groups willing to recognize that the fight for higher education cannot be separated from the wider struggle for a socialist democracy. The threats being waged against higher education are also a threat to the nation, a culture of informed citizens, and how we think about agency and its fundamental obligations to democracy itself.

At the same time, as neoliberalism faces a profound legitimacy crisis, failing to deliver on its promises of prosperity and social mobility, it increasingly resorts to fascist rhetoric. This rhetoric scapegoats Black communities, immigrants, and dissenting students, blaming them for the deepening crises plaguing America. In doing so, neoliberalism shifts blame while reinforcing a narrative that justifies authoritarian measures, further marginalizing those already oppressed. As this rhetoric spreads, the very institutions meant to foster critical engagement—like the university—are further corrupted, their original role of challenging the status quo replaced with one of reinforcing the existing power structures.

Edward Said’s Pedagogy of Wakefulness -Dreaming the Impossible

It is within this oppressive context that Edward Said’s work gains renewed relevance, offering the crucial pedagogical framework for resisting authoritarianism and reclaiming higher education as a site of resistance. In opposition to the debased view of educational engagement promoted by the neoliberal agenda and far-right politicians, Said championed what I label as the “pedagogy of wakefulness.” This pedagogy emphasizes the need for intellectuals to remain vigilant, awake to the realities of power, work with an array of social movement, and actively engaged in resisting systems of oppression. Said’s pedagogy demands that education be used as a vehicle for social change, not simply as a means of economic productivity or ideological conformity. Moreover, he argued that cultural workers and all manners of engaged intellectuals work in a variety of sites and on different platforms in  order to address the public in a language that was rigorous, accessible, and comprehensive in its ability to connect a variety  of issues.

In defining Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness, I am reminded of a deeply personal passage from his memoir, Out of Place, where he reflects on the final months of his mother’s life in a New York hospital. Struggling with the ravaging effects of cancer, his mother asked him, “Help me to sleep, Edward.” This poignant moment becomes a gateway for Said’s meditation on sleep and consciousness, which he links to his broader philosophy of intellectual engagement. Said’s meditation moves between the existential and the insurgent, between private pain and worldly commitment, between the seductions of a “solid self” and the reality of a contradictory, questioning, restless, and at times, uneasy sense of identity. The beauty and poignancy of his moving commentary is worth quoting at length:

‘Help me to sleep, Edward,’ she once said to me with a piteous trembling in her voice that I can still hear as I write. But then the disease spread into her brain—and for the last six weeks she slept all the time—my own inability to sleep may be her last legacy to me, a counter to her struggle for sleep. For me sleep is something to be gotten over as quickly as possible. I can only go to bed very late, but I am literally up at dawn. Like her I don’t possess the secret of long sleep, though unlike her I have reached the point where I do not want it. For me, sleep is death, as is any diminishment in awareness. ..Sleeplessness for me is a cherished state to be desired at almost any cost; there is nothing for me as invigorating as immediately shedding the shadowy half-consciousness of a night’s loss than the early morning, reacquainting myself with or resuming what I might have lost completely a few hours earlier….A form of freedom, I like to think, even if I am far from being totally convinced that it is. That skepticism too is one of the themes I particularly want to hold on to. With so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place.

Said’s reflection here is more than a personal meditation; This passage becomes a powerful metaphor for Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness. It is a call to remain in constant motion—intellectually, politically, and socially. The metaphor of sleeplessness, for Said, embodies a refusal to succumb to the seductions of conformity or passive consumption. This state of “wakefulness” requires intellectual vigilance, a refusal to settle for easy answers or unchallenged ideologies. It speaks to the necessity of embracing discomfort, of being “not quite right and out of place,” as Said himself puts it. In this intellectual space of uncertainty, a new, critical sense of identity can emerge—one that is always questioning, always in motion.

For Said, intellectuals–those who are alive to thinking critically and acting bravely–must engage critically with the world, confronting its injustices and inequalities, and using their positions to challenge power. His pedagogy insists that education is not merely about transmitting knowledge but about awakening students to the complexities of the world. It demands that we lift complex ideas into public discourse, recognizing human suffering and injustice both inside and outside the academy, and using theory as a tool for critique and change.

This pedagogy is particularly urgent in the context of the current Trump regime, where the state has weaponized ignorance and repression, seeking to silence dissent and erase marginalized histories. Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness provides a framework for resisting this intellectual and cultural erasure; what Marina Warner in a different context called “the new brutalism in academia.” By embracing Said’s vision, educators can transform their classrooms into spaces of radical engagement—spaces where students are encouraged not only to critique but to act, to connect their private struggles to the larger social issues that shape their world. This is particularly relevant in the fight for Palestinian liberation, where Said’s work has long offered a framework for resisting colonial violence and challenging the narratives that justify oppression.

In a time of rising civic cowardice in the mainstream media, elite education institutions, and cravenly law firms, hiding behind appeals to balance and objectivity makes it difficult for educators, journalists, public servants, and media pundits to recognize that being committed to something does not cancel out what C. Wright Mills once called hard thinking. More specifically, Mills argued “that  social analysis could be probing, tough-minded, critical, relevant and scholarly, that ideas need not be handled as undertakers handle bodies, with care but without passion, that commitment need not be dogmatic, and that radicalism need not be a substitute for hard thinking.”  Building on Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness “hard thinking” points to a pedagogy that needs to be rigorous, self-reflective, and committed not to the dead zone of instrumental rationality or the abyss of indoctrination, but what  Gayatri Spivak calls “the practice of freedom,” to a critical sensibility capable of advancing the parameters of knowledge, addressing crucial social issues, and connecting private troubles and public issues.

The Role of Culture in Pedagogy: A Call for Resistance

 In my own work, I have long argued that culture plays a crucial role in shaping the civic consciousness necessary for resistance. Culture is not merely a passive reflection of society; it is a dynamic force that shapes our understanding of the world and our place within it. In an era where neoliberalism and fascism are increasingly intertwined, culture becomes a vital space for alternative narratives to take root. It is crucial to acknowledge that culture has become a tool for authoritarian regimes to control public consciousness, suppress dissent, and maintain the status quo. However, it remains one of the few spaces where resistance can also flourish.

Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness offers a critical lens through which to view the role of culture in education. It calls on educators to resist the commodification and militarization of culture and instead cultivate a pedagogy that is engaged, critical, and rooted in the politics of resistance. This is not simply an intellectual exercise in critical thinking or a new found attentiveness about the rise of fascist politics,  but a call to arms—an invitation to create a culture of resistance within the university and other cultural apparatuses, that equips students and the broader public with the tools to challenge the growing tide of authoritarianism.

This cultural resistance must be grounded in the belief that education is a public good, a space where the radical potential for social change can be realized, anti-capitalist values can be challenged, and the groundwork can be laid for mass resistance to an America marked by what the late Mike Davis, cited in Capitalist Realism, called “an era in which there is a super saturation of corruption, cruelty, and violence…. fails any longer to outrage or even interest.” Universities must reject the neoliberal redefinition of education as a commodity and instead embrace the idea that education is a moral and political practice, one that is central to the health of democracy. As Said argued, intellectuals and educators have a responsibility to bear witness to human suffering, to challenge power, and to use their positions to promote justice. In doing so, they can help reclaim education as a space for imagination, resistance, and liberation.

Conclusion

The current assault on higher education is not just an attack on academic institutions but on the very idea of humanity, thinking, and democracy itself. As universities become increasingly corporatized and ideologically colonized, we must resist the neoliberal and fascist forces that seek to transform education into a tool of indoctrination. Edward Said’s pedagogy of wakefulness provides a vital framework for this resistance, offering a vision of education that is both critical and politically engaged. By embracing this pedagogy, educators can help transform the university from a site of ideological compliance into a space where students are empowered to resist, imagine, and fight for a more just and democratic world. The struggle to reclaim education as a democratic force will determine not only the future of the university but the future of democracy itself.

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Image by SJ Objio.

There are military manufacturers hiding in Brooklyn on city property. It’s time to evict them.

On Wendesday, June 18th, I was one of four activists arrested at the Brooklyn Navy Yard for protesting two military manufacturers, Easy Aerial and Crye Precision, which produce gear and technology for the Department of Defense, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Israeli Occupation Forces (officially known as the Israeli Defense Forces). These companies profit from and are complicit in state violence in both the United States and Israel.

Funny enough, they have disguised themselves within the progressive self-branded “mission-driven industrial park” that provides economic vitality for the local community. Among over 500 tenants are dozens of art studios, home goods companies, and media producers. Their leases are managed by the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation (BNYDC), a non-profit serving as real estate developer and property manager of the Yard. The actual land is owned by New York City, which purchased it after the shipbuilding facility for the U.S. Navy closed in 1966.

The military manufacturers have hidden themselves among their art and technology neighbors; Easy Aerial, a drone-maker, is categorized as a “Fine Art/Photography” business; and Crye Precision, which produces tactical gear, is categorized as “Fashion.” We took action last Wednesday to show the rest of the Navy Yard who their neighbors really are.

 

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Our direct action clearly pissed some people off – and not just Crye Precision employee Matt Heyner, who tackled an activist sitting on the floor at the direction of Jonathan Antone, General Legal Counsel for the Brooklyn Navy Yard. After this was filmed and posted online, Antone deleted all social media.

After we were arrested, we were taken all the way to the 75^th Precinct in East New York and held in a cell littered with urine puddles and chicken bones for 10.5 hours. Our friends spent three hours looking for us and only confirmed our location by spotting us through a window, while the precinct denied we were there. I asked for a phone call to my mother seven times and was never given one. These conditions (and worse if you’re not white protestors) are the norm for the 75^th Precinct, which has the highest reports of police misconduct in the city.

We at Planet Over Profit planned this direct action to help escalate the campaign work of Demilitarize Brooklyn Navy Yard, a group of neighbors, tenants, and organizers who have spent the last 10 months trying to evict the two military manufacturers. They have held weekly pickets outside Building 77 (a public food hall), attended board meetings, flyered public events, and organized extensive tenant and worker outreach.

Many tenants had no idea they were among military manufacturers until the Demilitarize Brooklyn Navy Yard campaign began. “It’s a well-kept secret,” an owner of a woodworking business in the Navy Yard told me. “It was really shocking to me because I have always felt like the Navy Yard is, you know, a place of creation and of, you know, creative efforts and people building things. And this is basically the opposite.”

Easy Aerial, headquartered on the 6^th floor of Building 77, is an Israeli-American drone manufacturer founded in 2014. Its clients include the Department of Defense, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Israeli Occupation Forces. The company’s drones are used to monitor the U.S.-Mexican border and the Gaza Strip; it is thus directly complicit in the violence committed against migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. and Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.

In December 2024, co-founder Ivan Stamatovski told Truthout their drones were an “immediate need” for Israel after October 2023, when Israel launched a full-fledged assault on Gaza in response to a Hamas-led attack on Israel that took 251 hostages and killed around 1,200 people. Since Israel’s retaliation began, the IOF has killed at least 61,709 people, including 17,492 children.

Easy Aerial also held discussions with Mayor Eric Adams in 2022 about the NYPD purchasing its drones to “fight crime” with more drone surveillance. While I could not find concrete proof of drone purchases, the NYCLU has documented a dramatic increase in police drone usage since 2022. The NYPD frequently uses these drones to surveil Pro-Palestinian protests, building on a pattern of tactics and training shared by the IOF and NYPD.

Crye Precision, which leases Building 128 in the Navy Yard, claims to outfit “nearly every service member in the U.S. Armed Forces.” The company signed 238 contracts with the U.S. government between 2008 and 2021. In September 2024, a whistleblower confirmed that Crye produces camouflage for the IOF.

These are companies that supply and hence profit from Israel’s war crimes – crimes the U.S. has often endorsed and provided the weapons for.

“When you know something unjust is happening in your own neighborhood, you have to speak up,” a parent who lives nearby told me. She has spoken at two board meetings this year. “I’ve spoken to the BNYDC as a parent, a neighbor and a nurse who is deeply concerned about the health and safety of all our kids. The board members know what is going on and have a choice of whether or not to be complicit in the harms of the NYPD and the deaths of innocent people in Palestine or to stand up for our community.”

Easy Aerial and Crye Precision are neck-deep in state violence, abuse, and genocide. Their drones surveil migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexican border, and clothe the DHS officers who confront them. Their drones monitor the genocide in Gaza and camouflage the IOF soldiers committing war crimes.

If the Brooklyn Navy Yard actually wants to be the “mission-driven industrial park” it claims to be, then military manufacturers have no place there.

Demilitarize Brooklyn Navy Yard will continue to fight for the eviction of Easy Aerial and Crye Precision. To learn more about how to get involved and support the campaign’s work, you can follow them on Instagram and Linktree.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

On the same day that Israel’s genocidal army issued an evacuation order for Tehran for the first time, after having done so repeatedly in Gaza, Beirut, and Damascus, a statement came out of Iran by certain Iranian dissidents, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi, demanding an “immediate halt to uranium enrichment by the Islamic Republic” and “the cessation of military hostilities.” Their language echoed that of European leaders who call on both sides to de-escalate. Such framing was, to say the least, misleading in a war waged by Israel against Iran.

It presents Israeli invasion as a “devastating war between the Islamic Republic and the Israeli regime,” thereby falling into a bothsidesism that equates the aggressor with the one being invaded. Of course, contrary to the Gaza war, where there exists only one side, namely Israeli genocide, in the case of Iran, there are two state parties involved in the war, as the Islamic Republic has also long cheered on catchy but empty rhetoric, calling for the annihilation of Israel.

Yet, any uninitiated observer would easily recognize the asymmetrical power dynamic between the two parties: one supported, funded, and armed by the United States and all Western powers, the other defending itself alone. In such an unbalanced war, primary responsibility rests with the side that has the capacity to end the conflict simply by halting its bombing campaign. Yet, the dissidents’ statement made no mention of Israel’s unprovoked, unjustifiable, and illegal aggression. Instead, they appealed, predictably so as they have done before, to “the United Nations and the international community” to save them and to pressure the Islamic Republic “to cease all uranium enrichment activities” and to demand that “both parties halt military strikes.”

While it has some truth to it, this statement falls short of establishing the reality on the ground. Israel’s war was not about the nuclear program, nor did it appear to aim for regime change. Rather, following the genocidal campaign in Gaza and extending its war to Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, it aims to destabilize and wreak havoc across all four corners of the region by creating failed states in order to exert full control over the region. This aligns with its “new Middle East” vision, something deeply concerning to the region’s inhabitants, activists and resistance movements alike.

For more than half a century, the people of the Middle East have suffered at the hands of corrupt leaders whose primary mission has been to preserve Israeli-American interests in the region. Once that order began to fray during the waves of Arab revolts in 2011, the fearful reactions of Israeli political and military leaders made it clear they saw popular uprisings as a destabilizing threat. And their American partners did not hesitate to back their subordinate allies, even by means of a coup like the one in Egypt.

Since its establishment as a colonial project created by Western powers after WWII, Israel has been the root cause of keeping the status quo intact in the Middle East. Iran’s 1979 revolution could have changed this, yet through a protracted and convoluted chain of events, the dominant political forces that established power instrumentalized a genuine anti-imperialist movement. This explains Tehran’s regional activities, needless to say, not for the sake of the people of the Middle East or the Palestinian cause but to counterbalance Israel’s superior political and military power and to challenge the American presence beyond Afghanistan and Iraq across the entire region.

Being aware of their political and military inferiority, ever since the end of Iran-Iraq war in 1988, the Islamic Republic’s strategic plan has been to keep its adversaries and enemies outside its borders in order to balance the power relation in the region. This further ossified the status quo in the Middle East, as the Islamic Republic found it beneficial to maintain the basic regional power structure while seeking to expand its influence. This was epitomized by the Islamic Republic’s support for Bashar al-Assad after he suppressed the Syrian popular uprising, which turned Syria into a battlefield for regional and Western powers, including the omnipresent, interventionist US. What now seems like a distant past is directly tied to Syria’s impact on both Hezbollah and Hamas, the former losing its legitimacy among not only Syrians but also the Lebanese, and the latter experiencing a decade-long estrangement from Iran after refusing to support the Assad regime, as requested by Tehran.

Known as the “neither war nor peace” strategy, this approach translated into walking a delicate yet dangerous line: never initiating a war, yet never coming to terms with Israeli or American interests in the region. It formed the rationale behind the Islamic Republic’s decision-making, one that is often overlooked by Western leaders and media, who, true to their hypocritical nature, portray Iran as an “evil” actor while empowering Israel to terrorize the region. Before coming back to bite it on June 13, this strategy had enabled the Islamic Republic to navigate geopolitical power asymmetries with the US and its allies over the past four decades.

Ironically and paradoxically, however, the continuation of this very “neither war nor peace” state appeared to play into the hands of the US to characterize Iran as a perpetual threat. The Bush-era bellicosity of the “axis of evil,” which has persisted to this day, was heavily sustained by such representations. To maintain its dominance across the region, the US has consistently relied on constructing an “evil,” from Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, to the Islamic Republic.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s “good vs. evil” narrative over the past three decades mirrors the same US policy of the axis of evil and the war on terrorism. Not a single international podium has gone without him raising his graphs and cartoon bombs portraying Iran as a nuclear threat and the source of evil in the region. All the while, following the aforesaid strategy, Tehran has never initiated a war with any sovereign country in its modern history, whereas Israel has initiated and engaged in nine wars with its Arab neighbors, including Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and others, not to mention its brutal occupation of Palestinian lands, which amounts to waging a daily war for over seventy years.

It is an utterly bitter irony that such a colonial entity, which no longer hides its genocidal intentions nor its vision for a “new Middle East,” emboldened by its European and American patrons, dares to lecture the world while invading one nation after another.

Iranians do not want to be saved by the international community as indicated in the statement signed by Narges Mohammadi and others, the very same international community that turned a blind eye to the ongoing genocide in Gaza for nearly two years. Yet this does not mean giving up the struggle against the Islamic Republic. Consider a second statement released by four female political prisoners written from Evin prison, including Verisheh Moradi, who is under a death sentence by the Islamic Republic, which reflects their unconditional condemnation of Israel’s invasion while affirming that emancipatory movements cannot and should not be exploited by the colonial interventions. We are not to choose between fighting internal despotism or external imperialism. The two are inexorably tied together, and neither can fully come to fruition without the other. The egalitarian struggles in the Middle East have always been fought simultaneously on different fronts.

In this respect, Israel’s nuclear disarmament must also be brought back onto the agenda, alongside its occupation and genocide, by popular movements, political activists, journalists and public figures, if we are to move beyond the region’s entrenched state power dynamics. Only an anti-imperialist movement in the region, which takes the initiative back from competing powers, can present a new vision for the Middle East, one that while grappling with its own domestic regimes, including corrupt Arab monarchies, seeks to put an end to a genocidal regime that targets opposing countries one after another, whenever and wherever it wants. However unattainable it may seem, this path has been trodden before by the Arab revolts of 2011, and in the case of Iran, even earlier. This is an arduous struggle, but one worth fighting for.

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A beautiful day in an ugly world just doesn’t cut it anymore. Blue skies feel like an insult. Sunlight, once a balm, now stings. Ask a Gazan whose family is mown down at a food distribution site under a cloudless sky. Beauty mocks. Horror endures. Sunshine doesn’t cleanse the blood.

And then, beneath that same sun, the US bombed Iran.

No longer hypothetical. No longer curling like a threat through the corridors of power. The escalation many feared had arrived, with those black origami-like stealth bombers reigniting US militarism in the region in a way no one could any longer pretend was dormant. Violence is real. Its consequences, vast.

Even an attendant nation like the UK stood at a threshold, with history and its own people watching. Despite 20 alleged Iranian plots on UK soil of late, the country was immediately taking a non-violent stance—urging talks at every turn.

Two days before those B-2s flew, a moment of diplomacy—some said hypocrisy—still lingered. Leading Hezbollah commander Mohammad Ahmad Khreiss had just been assassinated in Lebanon. This was as UK, French, and German foreign ministers met Iran’s Abbas Araqchi in Geneva, Araqchi reiterating Iran’s willingness to return to nuclear negotiations. ‘Europe’s not gonna be able to help on this one,’ warned an unimpressed Trump, MAGA-capped at Morristown, New Jersey. And Tulsi Gabbard still couldn’t get a meeting anywhere.

Suddenly, though, Gaza and Iran were both facing the full force of Israeli firepower, in Iran’s case with serious US back-up. Soroka Hospital in Beersheba—no deaths confirmed the first time—must have feared renewed attacks. The chessboard had been knocked over. Diplomatic pieces lay scattered. Strategic logic had given way to raw escalation.

Iran had its own dark ledger—destabilising neighbours while stifling reform at home. That charge was echoed back towards Netanyahu’s government, which escalated with the killing of Saeed Izadi, head of the Palestine Corps of the Quds Force, in Qom. That was before the B-2s flew and therefore before a hastily declared ceasefire and later presidential F-word. Nor was Izadi’s killing a strike on Iran’s nuclear programme but the product of a broader, more powerful, institutional memory.

Netanyahu’s complaint that his son’s wedding had again been cancelled due to missile threats—‘a personal cost for his fiancée as well, and I must say that my dear wife is a hero’—may have been intended to humanise the crisis. But some were already calling his Iran strikes either politically expedient or downright survivalist. On the ground, of course, it was not about such optics. It was about lives.

A mother in Rafah or Isfahan, pulling her child into the shadow of a stairwell. Fathers digging with bare hands through rubble, searching for a shoe, a breath, a limb. As in Gaza, these were not strategists. They were not combatants. They had no place in the war room. Only in the wreckage.

Every strike echoes—in neo-natal wards without power, in schools flattened by miscalculation, in aforementioned breadlines turned bloodbaths. The language of ‘proportionality’ and ‘deterrence’ cannot translate the sound of a child calling for their dead sibling. Civilians are not a footnote. They are the story. And the truth bears repeating because it keeps being ignored: it is always the voiceless who suffer most.

Trump, with the bluster of a person delivering a shock sales pitch, was demanding Iran’s ‘complete and total surrender.’ Pandora’s box was open. This was no flashpoint. It was a chain reaction. One US analyst I knew remarked that Iran could—if pushed further—invade Iraq and unite the Shia population across both sides of the border, a community already empowered by the previous Iraq War.

This didn’t begin with Trump walking out of the JCPOA in 2017. Nor with Netanyahu’s targeted assassinations. To understand this escalation, we have to return to 1953—the year the British and the CIA helped overthrow Iran’s elected government and install the Shah. In the aftermath, the CIA—with some help from Mossad—helped build SAVAK, the Shah’s brutal secret police, one of whose torture methods—the ‘Apollo’—involved placing a metal bucket over a prisoner’s head and beating it until their screams bounced back like a mass screech of lunar static.

This was the architecture of betrayal that made today possible.

For the UK, watching from the edge, things already felt weirdly different now. There was still a choice. Appetite for direct involvement was limited to a few sabre-rattling Tory MPs chasing relevance. ‘Let the US and Israel do this themselves,’ one ex-military Brit told me. And he was right. Why should the UK join a war it didn’t start, can’t direct, and will never end? Harold Wilson declined one with Vietnam. Polls showed no public appetite for escalation.

Meanwhile Cabinet Minister Jonathan Reynolds confirmed over the weekend that the UK had no operational role in the strikes, but was informed in advance. He also had to admit that the risk of domestic terrorism had increased. Everyone knew this didn’t make the UK neutral. The UK may not have launched any of the missiles, but would almost certainly have supported in undeclared ways—through intelligence sharing, logistics, diplomatic cover. Theirs was a quiet bargain: let others take the heat while they held the flashlight.

And the UK is overstretched. Ukraine and Russia continue to drain military and political resources. That war, too, might have ended in Istanbul—had more people listened at a similar stage.

The UK priority had been to keep its Tehran embassy open. By Friday, evacuation had been ordered. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer—under pressure at home—continued to be viewed as measured abroad. Legal advice from Attorney General Lord Hermer had reportedly warned him that UK strikes on Iran would breach international law. That advice was leaked. The mole was being hunted. Starmer meanwhile had continued to call for a return to negotiations. His critics said he was being too quiet. It was refreshing to others having a leader who did not beat the drums of war the whole time. They saw that quiet as strength.

As Auden wrote, ‘We must love one another or die.’ But even Auden disowned the line. And so too must we disown the romance of intervention.

This was not a drill. There was no Berlin Wall. No Kennedy with a quip and a cigar. Only brittle alliances, confusion, and oil tankers still drifting like giant ghosts on their back through the Gulf. For now, the Strait of Hormuz remained open—if only because China needed it to.

If the UK had joined the fighting, the theatre would have begun by now: flag-draped podiums, yet another ‘coalition of the willing,’ and a media narrative already written. The special relationship, even with a fresh trade deal, would have revealed wear. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. And the 24-hour news cycle is our opiate. Once upon a time Hunter S. Thompson would have spat in the bin and called this kind of thing madness dressed in chrome. Wolfe would’ve renamed The Right Stuff as The Right PR.

Today, UK military bandwidth is overstretched. Even the latest defence review may be deemed out of date by this. Direct involvement would only expose our troops, our infrastructure, and our citizens to potential retaliation—not just in the Gulf, but at home. Cyberattacks. Worse. (They may happen anyway.) Iraq’s ghost is still with us. Another war with shadowy intelligence and vague pretexts? It would be political folly. Moral failure.

Besides, the IAEA’s Rafael Grossi, despite Iranian criticism of him, maintained there was no current evidence Iran was developing nuclear weapons. Senior Iranian official Ali Shamkhani, just days before his assassination, had said Iran would ‘never have a nuclear weapon’ and wanted ‘better relations with the US.’ Regardless, any use of such weapons would surely guarantee Iran’s destruction. And yet he was killed. The JCPOA was not just suspended—it was entombed.

The Gulf nations are still watching—many already drifting eastward. Qatar once hit became a brief, oddly meaningless, part of the theatre. At the end of the day, each initial attack drove oil prices higher, pushed alliances to the edge, and gave Vladimir Putin cause to grin behind his freshly scrubbed hands.

And still, to do nothing was not a strategy. The UK had options: quiet diplomacy, backchannels, coordinated pressure. Realpolitik, yes—but not blood. This was not cowardice. It was calculation.

The region is still a powder keg. History is still a poor extinguisher. As Jagger sang, ‘Rape, murder—it’s just a shot away.’ There are no good wars. Only necessary ones. And this was not one.

So if more strikes must come, let them come without us. We know, all too well, that what burns in war is not only infrastructure, but memory, trust, and future. What breaks today may never be whole again.

The sky, however blue, will not forgive.  And neither will history—we should know—if we chase borrowed glory into another avoidable inferno.

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Well, I took time off from writing (and from following major news for that matter) . A detox of sorts. Mine was somewhat required due to life circumstances from a very large move across the country. An imperative that simply didn’t allow time to focus on much of anything else. I probably wouldn’t have had the ability to hold off on scrolling and bemoaning without that forced interlude, but we will take our spiritual prods where we can get them.

I certainly encourage others to take a moment off as well. Not even weeks, perhaps simply leaving your phone in another room and stepping away for a few hours. Do it a little bit each day and increase the time span as you are able (but don’t be a dick to your friends and family who might need you, let them know what you’re up to if you’re a terminally available person—that will scare them if you suddenly go silent). Do this if only to show how jangled up our minds have become. I am not saying to seclude yourself in the forest and completely lose the ability to verbalize, but at least take some time off from following the terrible reports, and stop reacting to the latest shocking event of the moment with the fullness of your blood pressure and cortisol. This probably sounds like a vantage point of privilege, and it is. Having the ability to not need to concern oneself of the horrors at the exact moment they are reported on is a privilege, but they will all be there when you return, sadly enough. And when you return hopefully you will bring with you a perspective and ability to fight the injustices with a more untangled parasympathetic nervous symptom. I think I have achieved this to perhaps 5%, but hey, we have to keep trying. Any attempt is valuable.

We vastly underestimate how much of the current system is placed together, not as a grand conspiracy, but a conveniently congruent set of defaults those in power have launched into place. It is a given that we will spend much of our time unhappy, wheels spinning without traction, and fully believing that we are powerless in the face of it all. If we truly realized the power we have in a collective manner and what we have within ourselves, the results would be unrecognizable. We all know this on some level.

It’s certainly simple to theorize this sort of thing with the masses plunging into a decidedly non-thoughtful future, but the theorizing of others with more toxic ideology has certainly been able to pierce the consciousness and result in actual societal changes. The pure nonsense from writers like (yes, I know I mention her too much) Ayn Rand have impacted so many of those who rose to leadership positions in our society. Her junk food style of philosophy has been able to trend us towards the selfishness that we now know all too well. Stillness and empathy are hollowed out by those with damaged and unquestioning minds. It’s wonderful to find worldviews that match your pathology. Hate women? Feel threatened by alternative sexuality….well, here’s some conservative Christianity for you. Want to hoard money and not feel concern for the homeless people you step over on your way to glittering high rise places of finance? Well, I’m sure something from the University of Chicago will fit your needs. We have to stop giving even 1% validity to these blueprints written in hateful self-serving ink.

The thousand small choices of history and all of those individual decisions…….that trajectory has been the one that has dominated, and it is steering us towards oblivion. Not the least of which is this normalization of wanton violence. The notion that cooperation and respect is somehow a weakness is now much more mainstream than even a couple of decades ago. Our belief in an inability to change anything simply adds ballast to the terrible ship, aiming straight for “here be dragons” on the map.

At one time, rural areas of America were hotbeds of populism –and not the reactionary vicious type we see now. This wasn’t all that long ago. Those in power have been able to convince workers that their enemy is someone working for a better life instead of who the true villains of this story are. I sit in a city that flat would not have been built back without the hard and skilled work of people from Mexico after Katrina. The lack of gratitude is astounding. I think those in power currently know the formula. They demonize an other. It could be anyone. It can be trans people, those who are new to the country, women who want control of their bodies……they just need an other to divert attention from themselves. So many simply fall for it. And they fall for it from the trickle of propaganda they willingly ingest.

I bring this very obvious notion up to discuss how we are all ingesting similar toxic propaganda that allows for only so much discourse in a narrow window. Those of us on the left think we are immune just because but when we watch any reports that say “we bombed Iran” that embedded “we” is a virus. I didn’t bomb anyone. I doubt you did. When you take a small break from ingesting even what you consider neutral media, you certainly begin to notice the fingerprints of the oligarchs. We are so much more than the agreed upon identities of our nationality, our sex on the birth certificate, the color of our skin. They want us fixated on the minutiae so we do not realize we are the universe. They are the greedy pathologies that have taken over, like cancer to healthy cells.

This is my long-winded way of encouraging a small break for everyone. Read a classic, identify one thing that sounds beautifully outrageous, but that you’ve always wanted to do, and go out and do just that. Then come back to the rest of us with a new story and a new outlook. At times you have to change up these established patterns to be able to see again.

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Many of us have been following the inflation data closely for evidence of Trump’s tariffs. Along with most other economists I have been somewhat surprised that we haven’t seen more evidence to date.

One thing we can say based on the evidence, is that exporters are not eating the tariffs, as Trump promised. The data on import prices, which do not include the tariffs paid on goods, shows non-fuel import prices rose in both April and May.

The index for non-fuel import prices for May was up 1.7 percent from its year ago level. By comparison, in May of 2024 the year-over-year increase was just 0.5 percent. We will have to wait to see the extent to which the tariffs end up leading to lower profits for importers and retailers, as opposed to higher prices for consumers, but it’s clear that the exporters are not paying them.

Just as we are waiting for more evidence on where the tariffs are hitting, we are also waiting for clearer evidence of the impact of Trump’s mass deportation policy. While the pace of arrests and deportations has picked up sharply in the last month, the bigger effect is likely the fear that this process has created among immigrants, including many who are here legally or are even U.S. citizens.

With ICE officials saying that they are not subject to standard legal procedures, in terms of obtaining warrants, identifying detainees, and allowing access to lawyers and family members, millions of non-white people are scared to go out in public. This is especially true in places where the crackdowns have been most intense, like Los Angeles, but there are also reports from farmers across the countries of people not showing up for work, presumably because they fear an ICE raid.

We may see some effects of these fears on both the consumption and employment sides of the economy. On the consumption side, there are anecdotal accounts of businesses in immigrant neighborhoods, like restaurants and barber shops, being nearly empty. These businesses are not a large share of the total economy, but the fear of many immigrants to carry on their normal lives may show up in categories like restaurant sales in June, especially when we have data for states and cities that have been especially hard hit.

We may also soon see some impact on prices. Again, we only have anecdotal evidence at this point, but if migrant farmworkers are scared to go to work, we will see many crops rotting in the fields. This will start to show up in higher food prices starting in July and August, when we would ordinarily be seeing recently harvested fruit and vegetables showing up in supermarkets. This impact will be compounded by Trump’s tariffs. For example, Mexican tomatoes, which now account for 70 percent of domestic consumption, are now expected to face a 20 percent tariff starting in July.

The loss of immigrant labor may also be a factor in the decline in housing starts, which fell 9.8 percent in May, tying its lowest level since the pandemic recession. The monthly data are erratic and there are other factors, like high mortgage rates and economic uncertainty, that have also dampened starts, so the impact of the immigration crackdown is not clear.

On the employment side, we are likely to see some effect in the sectors where undocumented workers are most heavily concentrated, notably construction, hotels and restaurants, and home health care, as well as some sectors of manufacturing like apparel and food processing. Here also the effects will vary hugely by state and city. (Farmworkers are not included in the establishment employment data.)

Employment in both construction and manufacturing in California was already down from its year ago level in April. In construction, the drop was 1.5 percent, while the decline in manufacturing was 2.3 percent. But since the state and local data are only available through April, we are not picking up the impact of increased enforcement in May and June.

There aren’t any clear signs of the harsher immigration policies in the aggregate employment data as of yet. The number of employed foreign-born workers was 680,000 above its year ago level. The year-over-year increase was more than 1 million for most months in 2024, but the data are erratic. The year-over-year increase for December 2024 was just 340,000. We will likely see a falloff in the size of the year-over-year increase for foreign-born workers in the months ahead, but it’s not there yet.

One place where we are seeing some impact of reduced immigration, and possibly deportations, is in total job growth. The year-over-year increase as of May was 1,733,000, an average of 144,000 a month. This is lower than at any point since the pandemic recession. It is also lower than the pre-pandemic rate of job growth.

The slower rate of job growth should not be a surprise, since we are in the peak retirement years of the huge baby boomer cohorts. Just before the pandemic, the Congressional Budget Office projected the economy would be creating just 20,000 new jobs a month in 2025 and 2026. This means that without a big influx of immigrants we should be expecting to see a much slower pace of job growth than has been the case over the last four years.

The loss of immigrant workers will contribute to the other factors, tariffs, government job and spending cuts, and economic uncertainty that are already leading to slower economic and employment growth. The economy did in fact contract slightly in the first quarter, but there were enough erratic factors, most notably a huge surge in imports, that it would be reckless to treat this as the start of longer trend.

Anyhow, the story with immigration is similar to the story with tariffs. We have plenty of anecdotal evidence of how workers, employers, and communities are being affected, but the hard data does not yet give a clear picture of the impact.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

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Photo by Bingjiefu He via Wikimedia Commons.

Andrew Cuomo’s attempt at a comeback served as a case study in civic fragility, hypocrisy, party loyalty, and political amnesia. Aside from the credible allegations that once had the establishment calling for him to step down, Cuomo ensured the maintenance of structures for political reentry, channeled pandemic funds for personal gain, and facilitated a GOP-led state senate through backroom deals. Further, he joined the legal team defending Benjamin Netanyahu against genocide charges, a catastrophic error. While many union members and elected officials may be quietly ashamed of their recent self-serving endorsements, Cuomo’s entire calculus was based on a cynical reliance on strategic soft power in the locale. His reemergence wasn’t based on a political comeback per se; it was more of a revealed assumption that New Yorkers would accept a “race to the bottom” that trumped (ahem) our civic expectations.

Cuomo thought of himself as a formidable incumbent of sorts and had a campaign powered by Super PACs, landlord money, and the strategic use of name recognition. Cuomo also perceived that many voters, worn down and disengaged, would simply vote along party lines. Insurgents like Zohran Kwame Mamdani, who stood for justice and equity, initially struggled for visibility while Cuomo enjoyed disproportionate support in a race he’d lose even more convincingly, if based on a democracy instead of a polyarchy. All throughout the primary season, Cuomo enjoyed a high number of African American and women potential voters, despite his record. His campaign in my opinion, however, was not based on a return to leadership, but rather a cynical power grab rooted in his own knowledge of the structural elements of the Democratic Party machine, still designed to dismiss any past transgressions.

In an era where global conflict, migration patterns, and economic interdependence impacts local politics, the assertion that “all politics is global” has rarely felt more accurate. Mamdani’s bid for New York City mayor exemplified how international solidarity, racial identity, and transnational justice can energize a municipal campaign in direct confrontation with Cuomo’s establishment-backed approach. Operating simultaneously at the city, state, national and global levels of analysis, Mamdani’s insurgency showed how local governance has become an important place for world politics.

Levels of Analysis

Mamdani’s identity as a Ugandan-born, Indian, and Muslim-American enhanced his appeal within New York City’s diverse electorate. As one of the first South Asians in the New York State Assembly, Mamdani, a visible Muslim leader, used his lived experiences of migration, racialization, and diasporic belonging to connect with voters. Born in 1991 in Kampala, and naturalized in the United States in 2018, Mamdani successfully integrated his racial and religious identity openly into his own form of political messaging. He rather famously stated that politics shouldn’t require translation and emphasized the need for authentic representation of communities historically marginalized by traditional power structures. In this sense, Mamdani was not merely a liberal or idealist candidate, but a realistic representative of global citizenship rooted in local struggle against the forces of Blue MAGA.

Mamdani also demonstrated a strong commitment to frontline economic justice. He notably championed the rights of New York City’s taxi drivers during their fight to preserve their medallions. Recognizing the system’s failure as a symbol of the ever-increasing economic precariat, he organized and supported strikes that highlighted the drivers’ struggles against predatory lending and regulatory neglect, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. This leadership extended beyond local issues. In 2023, Mamdani led a high-profile hunger strike demanding a ceasefire in Gaza, acting on a readiness to join local and global politics with urgent human rights concerns. As a New York State Assemblyperson, Mamdani earned praise for his effective budget management, notably tackling debt responsibly while prioritizing community investments. He proved that progressive governance can be both principled and fiscally sound.

At the individual level, Mamdani’s personal story and moral clarity were in rather stark contrast to Cuomo’s gold-plated and shallow establishment Trump-Berlusconi type persona. Mamdani stood out. His background as a foreclosure counselor allowed him to work intimately with immigrant communities. He often spoke Hindi and Urdu. His resume reflected his background in crisis resolution with stakeholders rather than political pedigree and stockholders. His principled international solidarity was something rarely seen in local campaigning efforts. Zohran’s first-name recognition, combined with impressive small-donor fundraising, helped raise in the upwards of $3.8 million early on, and he surpassed $8 million in total. Liza Featherstone wrote about the Mamdani model and how it revealed a grassroots resonance capable of dwarfing Cuomo’s dependence on donor-lobbyist networks. The victorious campaign (an ongoing one to go well beyond June) shows signs of being the most impressive ground game for a progressive in New York since Julia Salazar in 2018. Nathan Robinson also noticed Mamdani’s high-quality, relatable messaging, suggesting it was an inspiration amidst organized cynicism.

In effect, Mamdani’s campaign operated as a coordinated economic populist movement from the left, built on community resilience. He introduced legislation like Assembly Bill A6943A: the “Not on Our Dime” Act, intended to revoke tax exemptions from nonprofits complicit in funding Israeli settlements. His ambitious housing and transit proposals, rent freezes (that affect over two million residents), free buses across all boroughs, city-owned grocery stores, universal childcare, and a $30 minimum wage, indicated his infrastructure-first focused economic model rather than trickle-down and incremental reforms. In another Featherstone article/study, where she combined bottom-up journalism and election ethnography, a closer look at canvassing operations helped her uncover that Mamdani attracted an unprecedented scale of volunteers; one that activated thousands to conduct door knocking and phone banking.

Image courtesy JVP Action.

Human Rights and Development

A fundamental and defining difference between Mamdani and Cuomo was seen in their opposing conceptions of development. Cuomo’s development framework aligned closely with neoliberal orthodoxies that equated progress with the expansion of capital, real estate development, and finance. His approach relied on technocrats and the maintenance of elite networks, seen in figures like Bill Clinton and Michael Bloomberg. While these endorsements were meant to convey power and legitimacy, I suggest the opposite. Relying heavily on establishment backing indicates insecurity and weak grassroots connections. Cuomo’s reliance on power acknowledged it as his race to lose, not to win, and at some point (especially in 2028), all Democrats will be called on to respond to fractures emerging within the Party.

Mamdani’s vision of development, on the other hand, was one with much more promise in the long run than Cuomo’s. It was more or less rooted in the capabilities approach championed by Amartya Sen and elaborated by Susan Marks and Andrew Clapham in their International Human Rights Lexicon. It was Sen and scholars like Arturo Escobar who famously asserted that true development was “the expansion of real freedoms that people enjoy,” extending beyond mere economic indicators to include education, health, political participation, and dignity. Human rights are not a luxury, but the foundation for sustainable development ,and Mamdani’s platform exemplified this principle. Unlike Cuomo, politicians like AOC, Tiffany Caban, and Salzar before him, Mamdani did not treat development as a byproduct of capital but as an active expansion of human capability. Local leaders, more often, can create space in addressing the failures of capitalism. Mamdani’s human rights-centered development was also seen in his push to address historic racial and economic injustices.

These two distinctions between development, one as capital accumulation (Cuomo) versus two, expanded human rights and freedoms (Mamdani), will be critical features and binaries for potential candidates moving forward, suffering through the Trump era of fascism. Cuomo’s approach brazenly reinforced a predictable status quo, while Mamdani fostered a more participatory, rights-based, and identity-conscious vision of development. He prioritized local governance and public virtue (not private vices) despite the current uphill battle with POC voting blocs wedded to long-standing political traditions. It was all admittedly very complicated, but Cuomo’s reliance on the establishment revealed his inability to fight fairly on the terrain of democracy. He managed to hold onto enough soft power and forms of influence that traditionally legitimized political authority found in capital, but at the expense of citizen control. The Cuomo industrial complex, however, showed great signs of weakness in the past two weeks, especially after AOC’s role in king-making. Dozens of “amnesia endorsements” compiled Cuomo’s main strategy of political reconstruction along with the people that depended on them, thereby showing a lack of true structural integration. This fragility was demonstrated by the advent of “Frankenstein PACs” such as #DREAM, which started the “Don’t Rank Evil Andrew” campaign, splintering a once unified front.

Mamdani’s legitimacy, by contrast, began with the grassroots, leftist identity politics and a commitment to fairness. His alliance included young voters, (52 percent are under the age of 45), as well as immigrants, working-class families, Muslims, and South Asians, and bypassed traditional Democratic gatekeeping.

Epilogue

On election eve, the savvy political analyst Michael Kinnucan reflected on the remarkable progress of socialist politics in New York, noting how far the movement has come since the early campaigns of Julia Salazar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He acknowledged the emotional stakes of Mamdani’s race. Still, he emphasized that, win or lose, the campaign represented a decisive rejection of establishment centrism and an inspiring outpouring of subsequent political energy. Mamdani, likely to win on July 1^st and certified as the Democratic candidate in mid-July, reshaped City politics, using identity as a foundation, not as a technology of the self, while blending global solidarity around peace with local grassroots organizing. He exposed the fragility of Cuomo’s establishment-backed soft power and emphasized the importance of human rights and social movements in defining real development, the capability to live the life you value, and legitimacy, a group or community’s local recognition. Aside from the Mamdani miracle, Alexa Aviles kept her city council seat and progressive Shahana Hanif was also victorious. It was a good night for the left.

Moving forward, newer candidates must reclaim political language from distortion. Phrases like “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada” have been deliberately weaponized. Politicians need to reframe these as calls for secular democracy and equal rights across historic Palestine and transnational resistance to colonialism through civil action. As Stephen Zunes once noted to me, misinformation only breeds fear, clarity disarms it, and if you don’t clarify these statements, they are indeed very problematic.

It is also vital that Mamdani continues to skillfully redefine what “existence” means in local/global politics to avoid rhetorical traps. When asked if Israel has a right to exist, progressives should never hesitate to say yes. But even further, as UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese stated, the issue is not just existence (for Israel already exists, as does Italy or Denmark), but whether any state has the right to exist as a settler-colonial apartheid regime.

Just as Kinnucan suggested, one of Mamdani’s great achievements was forcing the establishment to show its hand. Cuomo’s comeback, powered by billionaire donors and political nostalgia, revealed the fragility of establishment politics, and everyone witnessed it happen. Mamdani’s rise, backed by people, showed how justice-oriented legitimacy can displace monied legitimacy. Democrats also need to be ready to always push beyond the ballot line. Cuomo’s capital-centric approach exposed the limits of traditional power in an era where insurgent localism forges global interconnectedness. Mamdani’s campaign very powerfully illustrates the premise that all politics is global.

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Photo by Dan Meyers

On 21 June, the United States struck three locations in Iran with its massive military force. These locations were Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz – three areas where Iran has its nuclear energy facilities. To be clear, Iran’s nuclear energy facilities are legal and continue to be inspected and validated by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Iran joined the IAEA in 1958, shortly after the United Nations agency was established. It has been a member of the IAEA since then and has followed the general lines of the rules set up for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. Despite immense pressure on the IAEA from the Global North to sanction Iran, the IAEA reports have been clear that Iran has not violated the rules and is not a nuclear weapons state. Iran has also not threatened the United States and has not attacked the United States or its assets. At the same time, there has been no United Nations Security Council resolution under Chapter VII of the UN Charter that allows the United States to attack Iran. Therefore, the United States and Israel have violated international law by conducting a war of aggression against Iran.

Iran has said that there is no nuclear contamination in the area of the facilities, which means that the United States was not able to penetrate these highly protected centres. Thus far, there appears to be little appetite in the Trump administration to expand this bombing campaign and take its aggressive war into Iran’s cities as the Bush administration did to Iraq.

But there is no guarantee that there will not be a widening of the war and that it will not go beyond the strikes on the nuclear energy facilities. If Iran does not surrender at the talks that are anticipated, the United States and Israel might very well bomb Tehran and attempt to kill Iran’s leadership and seek to overthrow the government.

Both the United States and Israel have misunderstood Iran. The World Values Survey shows us that Iranians respond clearly and in large numbers to the questions that reflect national pride: 83% said that they are proud of their country, and 72% said that they are ready to fight for their country (in the United States, the latter percentage is merely 59). At the annual rallies for the 11 February Revolution, a very large number of people attend and march enthusiastically. The attacks on Iran have not weakened this resolve but seem to have increased it.

Despite the attacks, people have been coming onto the streets to demonstrate their anger and their resolution to fight anyone who attacks Iran and their sovereignty. There will be no easy road for the United States and Israel to unravel the Islamic Republic and to bring into power their proxies, such as Reza Pahlavi, the descendant of the Shah of Iran, who lives in Los Angeles in the United States.

The high rate of patriotism in Iran and the resolve of the Iranian people will stay the hand of the United States to try and invade Iran (Iran’s population is 90 million, while Iraq’s population is 45 million, and since the US could not subdue Iraq it is unlikely that it can subdue a population twice the size and one which is very young – with the median age being 33). A cowardly bombing of Iran is already one thing, but a military invasion of Iran is out of the question for countries that simply do not want to face a vigorous resistance from street to street.

The greatest spur to nuclear weapons proliferation will be this attack on Iran. The US-NATO destruction of the Libyan state (2011) and this US-Israeli attack on Iran now prove to countries such as North Korea that the nuclear shield is necessary. Indeed, North Korea’s refusal to denuclearise its military establishment shows countries across the Global South that if they want to protect their sovereignty, then building up a conventional army is insufficient. Iran will likely withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (1968), cease its cooperation with the IAEA, and build a nuclear weapon. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey will likely follow this process and totally destabilise the Middle East, while Myanmar will likely increase its cooperation with North Korea for missiles and a nuclear weapon. It is a logical shield for countries that are closely watching Iran’s sovereignty being violated, not because it has a nuclear weapon, but because it does not have a nuclear weapon.

Slowly, larger and larger groups of people have begun to drift onto the streets, horrified by the implications of this hyper-imperialist attack by Israel and then by the United States. There have been statements from groups across the world to condemn these attacks and to assert the fact that peace and development are the desires of the world’s people, not war and backwardness. There is no confusion amongst the people of the Global South that this attack by Israel and the United States has nothing to do with Iran’s behaviour, but everything to do with the war aims of the Global North to dominate West Asia.

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Image by Brett Wharton.

Unlike Russia’s quarrel with Kyiv or China’s claim to Taiwan, Washington’s war with Iran is not rooted in a national dispute with the U.S. It is a project subcontracted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his lobby group, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Donald Trump—a president addicted to flattery and drama—puffed by grandiose, proved the ideal Israeli subcontractor.

Netanyahu has refined this manipulation of U.S. politics for decades. In 2002 he assured Congress that once the United States toppled Saddam Hussein, “I guarantee you” young Iranians would overthrow their clerics. The Iraqi “change regime” came, chaos followed, and no Iranian uprising materialized. Twenty-three years later Netanyahu succeeded, again, in dragging the U.S. in his fantasy to reshape “the face of the Middle East.” A demonic feat: as America fights Israel’s wars, the region descends into chaos—reinforcing Israel’s security doctrine of fostering failed states incapable of challenging its regional supremacy.

As the ceasefire between Iran and Israel unravels, it becomes increasingly clear that Israel’s war on Iran was not to stop the emergence of a competing nuclear power in the region. The deeper objective is to sow chaos, (regime change) and divisiveness in order to preserve its exclusive dominance in a forever fragmented Middle East. For Israel, the chaos is not a by-product of policy—it is the policy. Anarchy is not a failure of strategy; it is the strategy. It is the Israeli business model.

A destabilized Middle East is a calculated Zionist objective outlined in the Yinon Plan, published in Hebrew in 1982. It serves to deflects global scrutiny from Israeli war crimes, like today’s genocide in Gaza, the occupation of the West Bank, the expansion of Jewish-only colonies, and the systemic entrenchment of Israeli Jewish apartheid.

According to the plan, Mid-East instability reinforces the Israeli narrative of existential threat—one eagerly embraced by compliant U.S. policymakers. A narrative used to justify the siphoning of billions in American taxpayer dollars and bankrolling a bellicose Israeli policy of preemption, militarization and endless wars.

When neighboring failed states are consumed by division, civil war, economic collapse, or sectarian violence, global headlines shift away from Israeli atrocities and toward regional instability. This enables Israel to act with impunity as the Palestinian suffering becomes background noise—an “unfortunate” consequence of a “tough” neighborhood rather than a direct result of a malevolent state policy.

Therefore, fueling perpetual chaos in countries like Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and now Iran serves a long-term strategic objective: to prevent the rise of any unified front capable of challenging Israel’s regional hegemony. A fragmented Middle East is not only easier to dominate—it is easier for the world to dismiss and ignore.

In Gaza, for instance, the world shrugs off genocide as just another episode in a region long written off as irredeemably chaotic. It watches with silence as the Trump administration has normalized starvation and genocide. The distribution centers of the U.S. funded, so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation have become killing zones; Israeli troops open fire daily on thousands of desperate people queuing before dawn, leaving hundreds of dead Palestinians. Every day, hungry people are murdered and many return home carrying over their shoulders a dead relative instead of a sack of flour. The scene, the starvation, the genocide, is lost in another Israeli war of chaos.

Now, Netanyahu may buy time to carry on with his genocide, and savor another “achievement” in having America, once again, fight Israel’s wars. But the euphoria will prove Pyrrhic.

All this unfolded against a growing American public resistance to foreign wars. Outside the Beltway, the mood is shifting. A majority of Americans oppose U.S. involvement in yet another made-for-Israel war. The gulf between public sentiment and the AIPAC controlled elite decision-making continues to widen, further eroding trust in institutions already weakened by inequality and partisanship.

The latest U.S. attack on Iran is likely to push Tehran’s leaders to further a global realignment to challenge the existing world order. An emerging alliance—anchored in Iran and backed by Russia and China—could start to take shape, with the potential of remaking the geopolitical landscape for decades to come. While the full extent of the U.S. and Israeli raids on Iran remains unclear, one fact is certain: neither Washington nor Tel Aviv can undo Iran’s nuclear know-how.

Meanwhile, the international community remained conspicuously silent. Instead of condemning Israel’s violations of international law prohibiting attacks on nuclear facilities, it continued to recycle the mantra that “Iran must never obtain a bomb.” This rhetorical deflection ignores the critical fact that, unlike Israel, Iran’s civilian nuclear program has been under full International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) supervision since its inception under the Shah.

The failure to speak out not only undermines the IAEA’s credibility but also diminishes Iran’s incentive to remain within its framework, increasing the likelihood that Tehran will abandon its commitments to international oversight altogether. While Iran’s next move is hard to predict, it’s entirely possible that Tehran could tell the U.S. that, after the destruction of its nuclear facilities, there is nothing left to negotiate over.

In this light, Trump may be remembered not as Israel’s “savior,” but as the catalyst who drove Iran to pursue a clandestine nuclear program—outside the reach of global inspection regimes.

When that reckoning arrives historians will trace the arc—from Netanyahu’s phone calls to stoke Trump’s gullible ego to AIPAC’s cash to elected officials—showing how the strongest nation on earth allowed its military might and foreign policy to be outsourced. They will tally the lives lost and goodwill squandered and wonder how different the story might have been had the United States acted to serve its own interest, instead of being a tool for the Israeli politics of perpetual chaos.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

On the evening of June 21^st in Washington, the morning of June 22^nd here in Jerusalem, the United States attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities, joining Israel’s more widespread assault intended to eliminate a rival for regional hegemony, one that targeted not only Iran’s nuclear facilities and ballistic missile system but civilian infrastructure as well, in the hope of inducing regime change. The meta-aims of the attack were three-fold.

First, the Trump Administration reasserted the claim to American-led global hegemony, a prerequisite upon which an isolationist America First depends. Even if the bombings were a hollow act, amounting to little more than a safe, opportunistic attack against a greatly weakened foe, they evidence the continuing primacy of force in enforcing US/NATO ascendency, a relation to “the rest” predating by far Trump’s presidency.

Second, it reaffirmed Israel’s position as a regional hegemon representing, advancing and protecting American interests – a “message” vital for an Israel that finds itself increasingly isolated in the international community and whose utility to the Americans has come into question since October 7^th – but no less important, it signaled that Israel itself had a latitude of independent action, that it could act as a regional hegemon. The fact that Netanyahu had manipulated Trump, attacking Iran despite American opposition, then handing Trump “his” glorious victory, lent significant credence to Israel as an actor in its own right. “Israel is doing the dirty work for us all,” as German Chancellor Metz observed.

Third, then, for Israel, the quick neutralizing of a powerful rival for regional hegemony with, in the end, American participation, not only sealed its status as the military hegemon of the Middle East, it reaffirmed its ability to see through the process of normalization with the Arab world initiated by Trump in his first term. All Israel’s policies and actions, we must understand, arise from one overarching ambition: completing Zionism’s 130-year project of Judaizing Palestine. For this to be achieved, a “Greater” Israel extending over all of historic Palestine must be accepted by the Arab world and the international community; the Zionist settler colonial project, now complete, requires only to be normalized as a “political fact.”

October 7^th derailed the normalization process just as Netanyahu declared from the podium of the General Assembly that, while “the Abraham accords heralded the dawn of a new age of peace, I believe that we are at the cusp of an even more dramatic breakthrough – an historic peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Such a peace will go a long way to ending the Arab Israeli conflict. It will encourage other Arab states to normalize their relations with Israel.” To get that process back on track, Netanyahu had to do two things.

First, he must ensure the ability of the Arab regimes to prosper economically in a peaceful region, as behooves a military hegemon. Towards this end he dismantled the military capacities of Iran’s proxies, Hezbollah and the Houthis (an ongoing project), while quashing Hamas, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood armed by Iran and a nuisance that prevented the Palestinian struggle from disappearing through normalization. He then went on to deploy his military to neutralize Iran as a military threat and potential rival for regional hegemony as against the Saudi Arabia in particular. That, and the Americans’ reaffirmation of Israel as their hegemonic agent, cemented Israel’s place as an indispensable party.

And second, Netanyahu has to break Palestinian resistance for once and for all, pacifying the Palestinians so that they submit to a process of normalizing a Jewish Israel over all of historic Palestine. To be sure, a sop to Palestinian rights is necessary. A “two-state solution” will take the form of a tiny, truncated, semi-sovereign and non-viable Palestinian Bantustan enveloped and controlled by an apartheid Israel. This is good enough for the Arab states who need a strong Israeli presence and, unlike their peoples, have little sympathy for the troublesome, democratically-oriented Palestinians and want to move on from the interminable “conflict.” Although Israel’s ongoing campaign of genocide, displacement and furious settlement activity runs the risk of raising opposition to normalization among the Arab and wider Muslim populations, pacification must precede normalization. Saudi Arabia cannot enter into the Abraham Accords as long as Palestinian resistance continues, although it is eager to do so. Israel must produce a period of industrial quiet in which the Palestinian struggle recedes from public view, which, counter-intuitively, explains the genocidal nature of its campaign of suppression in Gaza and the West Bank. Removing the military, political and economic support of Iran and its proxies from Hamas, the only remaining bastion of Palestinian resistance, paves the way to pacification and normalization.

The attack on Iran serves all these purposes.

The post Global Palestine: Israel, the Palestinians, the Middle East and the World After the American Attack on Iran appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.