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Photograph Source: Basel Yazouri – CC BY 2.0

“What are you going to do now, pull a baby out of your bag?”

The guard’s voice echoed through the marble halls of Capitol Hill, his words hitting me like a physical blow. Not just because of their callousness, but because I had indeed come carrying images of babies–Palestinian children murdered in Gaza, photographs and stories tucked in my tote bag that I believed any human with a heart would see and demand action.

It was January 2025. Biden was still in office. I stood with other seasoned professionals in the Capitol Hill lobby, planning our day of advocacy for Palestine. The space towered above us with its high ceilings and white marble floors, a black metal monument rising like an arrow, pointing upward toward some unreachable justice.

We were a quiet crowd when four or five guards approached. One of them — short, stocky, visibly angry– began shouting as if shooing away a herd of animals: “This is your first warning. If you do not disperse, I will arrest all of you!” We shuffled slightly, exchanging quizzical glances, unsure what had triggered such fury. Then came the line that would haunt me: “What are you going to do now, pull a baby out of your bag?”

In seven words, this guard had unknowingly exposed the mechanism by which an entire society can watch children starve on their screens and remain unmoved. His mockery revealed something deeper than individual cruelty; it exposed what the Dominican Sociologist called the “coloniality of power”—a global system that determines whose children matter, whose tears move us, whose deaths register as loss. It is a system based on racial hierarchy and empowered by economic interest, mainstream media that manufactures consent (to use Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s framework), and by the principle that might make right.

The Logic of Disposable Children

The officer’s statement reveals what Quijano identified as the enduring colonial logic that organizes our world. Though formal colonialism ended, its organizing principle, racial hierarchy, persists in determining human worth. Europeans created racial categories during colonization, not as biological facts, but as what Quijano calls “mental constructions” to justify why it was acceptable to enslave, kill, or dispossess certain populations while granting full humanity to others.

This isn’t abstract theory. When Winston Churchill defended Zionist settlement during the 1937 Palestine Royal Commission hearings, he made the racial logic explicit: “I do not admit that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia, by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race… has come in and taken their place.”

The guard’s question operates within this same framework. Palestinian children exist at the bottom of a hierarchy that renders them fundamentally different from other children. They are what Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon called inhabitants of the “zone of non-being” — not marginalized humans, but beings positioned outside the category of human altogether.

I carried those photographs to Capitol Hill because a Palestinian network to which I belong had launched what we thought would be an undeniable campaign: protecting Palestinian children. Surely, we reasoned, when Americans saw what was being done to children — children — they would demand accountability.  We armed ourselves with the Leahy Law, which prohibits U.S. military assistance to foreign forces that commit gross violations of human rights. We brought documentation of systematic torture, of night raids, of children shot while playing. 

We were doing what Palestinians are perpetually forced to do: ask to be treated like the rest of humanity. The guard’s mockery was a brutal reminder of what we’re truly up against. Palestinian poet and activist Mohammad El Kurd has written scathingly about the impossible performance Palestinians are forced to undertake—the demand to be “perfect victims”: docile, depoliticized, stripped of religious identity, and severed from any connection to resistance. We must present ourselves as helpless rather than resilient, individual rather than collective, grateful rather than dignified. In this colonial logic, children represent the ultimate “perfect victim”—innocent, non-threatening, deserving of universal sympathy. Yet the guard’s mockery reveals the bankruptcy of even this strategy. When Palestinian children—the most unassailable subjects for empathy—can be dismissed with such casual cruelty, it exposes the illogical logic El Kurd describes: no performance of Palestinian victimhood will ever be perfect enough to pierce the racial hierarchy that renders us fundamentally ungrievable, as Judith Butler so eloquently put it. The guard’s question strips away the liberal fiction that Palestinian suffering simply needs better documentation or more compelling presentation. Even our “perfect victims” remain imperfect in the eyes of power.

When the Baby in the Bag Is Real

Palestinian scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has a term for what happens to Palestinian children: “unchilding”: the systematic stripping away of childhood’s protections and innocence to serve colonial goals. This isn’t metaphorical. Palestinian children are the only children globally prosecuted by military courts. Israel detains between 500 and 700 Palestinian children annually. Since 2000, approximately 13,000 Palestinian children have been detained, interrogated, and incarcerated by Israeli military authorities, with reports of torture and sexual violence abound. In Gaza, the statistics regarding children have broken every record: Gaza has the highest per capita child amputees globally; more children and women have been killed than in any other war in recent history; and the United Nations described Gaza as a graveyard for children. 

The guard couldn’t have known that the “baby in my bag” was statistically real. Gaza now has the highest child amputation rates in the world. Over 11,300 Palestinian children have been identified as killed since October 2023, approximately 30% of them under age five. More than 39,000 children have lost one or both parents. At least 17,000 children are unaccompanied or separated from caregivers, many buried beneath rubble or disappeared during forced displacement.

Gaza has become what UNICEF calls “the deadliest place in the world for children.” As I sat in those windowless congressional offices, my hand shaking as I handed staffers photographs of Palestinian children — one killed, one incarcerated — I was witnessing what happens when logic itself breaks down in the face of racial hierarchy.

The Bosnia Test: When Children Matter

The differential treatment and logic breaks down, become starkest when we compare international responses to child endangerment. In the 1990s, when Bosnian children faced imminent death in Srebrenica, the international community mounted complex evacuation efforts. Between 8,000-9,000 Bosnian Muslims, including children, were evacuated in March-April 1993 when Bosnian Serb forces threatened to attack. The UN declared “safe areas” and deployed 25,000 peacekeeping personnel from dozens of nations.

When diplomatic pressure failed, NATO responded with overwhelming force: 400 aircraft, 3,515 sorties, over 1,000 bombs. The message was unmistakable: attacks on civilians would meet severe consequences. Even when protection failed catastrophically at Srebrenica, the failure generated accountability, resulting in resignations, tribunals, and commemorations.

Gaza presents different geopolitical realities, certainly. Israel is a powerful U.S. ally with Security Council veto protection and the “logic” is might makes right. But these factors interact lethally with the racial hierarchy the guard’s question exposed. Unlike Bosnia, where evacuations were attempted despite risks, no safe corridors for Gaza’s children have been seriously pursued by powerful states. Instead, the primary provider of humanitarian protection, UNRWA, has been systematically delegitimized and defunded.

When Humanitarian Aid Becomes a Death Trap

Even when the international community attempts to provide basic sustenance to a starving population, the logic of Palestinian disposability transforms relief into execution. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), established in May 2025 as a U.S. and Israeli-backed initiative to distribute food aid, has become what UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini called “a death trap costing more lives than it saves.” Since operations began on May 27, 2025, over 410 Palestinians have been killed and at least 3,000 Palestinians have been injured while seeking food at these distribution sites. More recent figures from Gaza’s Health Ministry put the death toll at 743 Palestinians killed and more than 4,891 others injured while seeking assistance at GHF sites.

Reports emerged of Israeli soldiers being ordered to fire at unarmed crowds near food distribution sites in Gaza, even when no threat was present. As one soldier told Haaretz: “We fired machineguns from tanks and threw grenades. There was one incident where a group of civilians was hit while advancing under the cover of fog.” Another soldier reported that “between one and five people were killed every day” at their position. The UN Human Rights Office condemned this as “the weaponisation of food for civilians” which “constitutes a war crime and, under certain circumstances, may constitute elements of other crimes under international law.”

This systematic violence against those seeking food reveals how colonial logic operates: Palestinian hunger is addressed through mechanisms designed to maximize humiliation and death. Where Bosnian children’s endangerment prompted international rescue efforts, Palestinian children’s starvation is met with militarized aid distribution that functions as target practice. The same racial hierarchy that allows the Capitol Hill guard to mock Palestinian suffering enables a system where even the act of providing food becomes an opportunity to eliminate Palestinian life.

The contrast is devastating. Despite a UN investigation in August 2024 finding insufficient evidence for most allegations against UNRWA staff, Israel proceeded to pass legislation effectively banning the agency from operating in Israeli-controlled territory. The consequences are catastrophic: UNRWA operates 96 schools serving 47,000 children in the West Bank alone, runs 43 clinics, and provides social security to over 150,000 residents. In Gaza, it serves as the primary provider of education and healthcare services to over one million residents. As UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini warned: “We have today 1 in 2 persons in Gaza below the age of 18, among them 650,000 girls and boys living in the rubble, deeply traumatized at the age of primary and secondary school. Getting rid of UNRWA is also a way to tell these children that you will have no future.”

Certainly, the international community did not do enough for Bosnia.  However, where Bosnian civilian deaths spurred military retaliation and institutional reckoning, the systematic murder and starvation of Palestinian children have been met with continued arms transfers, vetoed ceasefires, and impunity. The difference lies not in capacity, but in the colonial valuation of life.

The Performance of Humanity

Since October 7, 2023, I have lived in perpetual whiplash, between crushing despair and fierce determination, between witnessing livestreamed genocide and the unshakeable conviction that Palestine will be free. But underneath this activism was a darker recognition: we are forced to perform our humanity.

We must choreograph our grief, curate our suffering, package our children’s deaths in ways that might penetrate power’s callousness. The guard’s mockery echoed in every advocacy meeting: “What are you going to do now, pull a baby out of your bag?”

In our congressional appointments, I found myself translating Palestinian humanity into terms that might be comprehensible to those taught to see us as threats. “Our children are the only children prosecuted by military courts,” I would say, trembling with emotion. “Gaza has the highest per-capita amputees in the world. Please help us protect our children.”

This constant advocacy carries its own violence. When Israeli officials call Palestinians “human animals” or declare there are “no innocent civilians in Gaza,” these words don’t just wound, they reshape how Palestinians must move through the world. Walking toward the elevator that day on the Hill, I passed a young man who, upon seeing me, had a look of disgust on his face, pushed himself against the wall away from me, and gestured with the back of his hands as he shooed me away. This bodily recoil– automatic, unthinking, visceral — exemplifies how racial hierarchies operate through embodied affect that bypasses rational thought.

We become vessels carrying the weight of collective suffering, our voices pleading our case for basic humanity while calculating what can be digestible to observers: “Is this photo expressive enough? It cannot be grotesque and anger viewers for its cruelty. And of course, is it respectful of our children? Or are we using the very beings we want to protect as props?”

What I was witnessing was what scholar Sherene Razack describes as the breakdown of logic itself, how “nothing has to make sense when the subject is Muslim.” Here I was, presenting evidence of systematic violations of international law, documented torture of children, clear violations of the Leahy Law. Yet the response was measured political language that effectively communicated indifference.

The Production of Ignorance

The guard’s question exposes how genocide adapts in the digital age. This isn’t the crude efficiency of industrial death, but the sophisticated violence of racial logic that transforms Palestinian children from subjects deserving protection into abandoned objects or collateral damage. Genocide now operates through legal frameworks and humanitarian discourse, through the very institutions designed to prevent it.

Consider a telling 2022 example: A video went viral showing an 11-year-old blonde girl confronting a soldier, telling him to go to his country. Media outlets applauded the girl, whom they believed to be Ukrainian, and the video garnered 12 million views. When it was revealed that the video actually showed Palestinian girl Ahed Tamimi confronting an Israeli soldier, the celebration stopped. At 16, Ahed was jailed–a human rights violation that prompted U.S. statements but no action. Within the global racial hierarchy, Ukrainian children deserve celebration for resistance; Palestinian children deserve imprisonment.

The officer’s mockery operates within this same logic. His question assumes Palestinian testimony is inherently manipulative, Palestinian pain is performed, Palestinian children exist only as props in political theater, never as subjects deserving protection.

The Question That Speaks

But the guard’s attempt to silence us becomes the question that speaks. In trying to mock our evidence, he inadvertently testified to its power. Yes, we carry dead babies in our bags, not as props but as proof. Not as manipulation but as documentation of systematic elimination.

The photographs I carry are what we might call “counter-archives” — testimonies that refuse the violence of forgetting, evidence that survives the production of ignorance. When the guard asked his question, he revealed the mechanism by which certain deaths are rendered ungrievable, certain suffering incredible, certain children “unchilded.”

This is genocide’s vulnerability: its need to mock reveals its consciousness of guilt. The question that was meant to shame us into silence becomes evidence of the racial infrastructure that makes genocide possible, the hierarchy determining whose babies matter, whose tears move us, whose deaths register as loss.

Refusing Erasure

Palestinian children themselves refuse the logic of disposability the guard’s question assumes. In Gaza’s rubble, they create schools from destroyed buildings. In detention centers, they maintain solidarity despite torture. In refugee camps across generations, they preserve stories, languages, and histories that refuse erasure. Every act of Palestinian children asserting their humanity — every drawing made in a tent, every game played in destroyed streets–represents what Palestinians call Sumud (steadfastness), resistance that refuses colonial logic.

But Palestinian agency alone cannot dismantle the structural foundations enabling such casual cruelty in centers of power. The guard’s mockery echoes in every Security Council veto, every blocked investigation, every weapons transfer. Genuine protection for Palestinian children requires confronting the material structures sustaining their “unchilding”: ending military aid that facilitates their targeting, dismantling economic relationships that profit from their suffering, creating accountability mechanisms that cannot be suspended based on racial hierarchies.

The guard assumed his words would shame us into silence. Instead, they become evidence–not only of individual cruelty, but of a global system that has normalized Palestinian children’s disposability.

The Answer That Exposes

“Pull a baby out of your bag?” This question exposes genocide in its contemporary form. In seven words, the guard revealed how systematic elimination operates through the colonization of perception itself, through institutions and frameworks designed to prevent the very atrocities they enable.

But his question also exposes genocide’s ultimate failure. Yes, we will continue pulling Palestinian children from the zones of abandonment where they have been placed, from the archives of erasure where their deaths are hidden, from the racial hierarchies that render them disposable. Not as props in political theater, but as witnesses to their own elimination and agents of their own liberation.

The guard’s question exposes genocide. Our answer reveals the children who refuse to be erased and the global transformation required to ensure that no child, of any background, ever again becomes the subject of such a question.

The post “Pull a Baby Out of Your Bag?” The Question That Exposes a Genocide  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Image Source: מפה מדינית של המזרח התיכון – Public Domain

Over the past four decades, there have been at least three tectonic shifts in the geopolitics of the Middle East, often referred to as efforts at “changing the map” of the Middle East.  In 1982, Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon invaded Lebanon in order to destroy the threat of  Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization.  In 2003, the Bush administration created the lie that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” in order to invade Iraq.  Most recently, Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu stated explicitly that he would use military force to “change the map” of the Middle East as part of his campaign to annihilate Hamas in the Gaza Strip.  The map of the Middle East has not changed, but hundreds of thousands of innocent Arabs have been killed.

In every case, the “day after” was far different and far more threatening than anything that Sharon, Bush, or Netanyahu promised.  Military campaigns and occupations that were supposed to last months turned into years.  In the cases of Lebanon and Iraq, Israeli and American occupations lasted decades, and after two decades in Iraq there are still several thousand U.S. military troops in vulnerable positions there. The U.S. invasion of Iraq allowed Iran to become the chief outside influence in Baghdad, marking a huge strategic setback for the United States.  As for Gaza, Netanyahu promised to make the Strip uninhabitable, and there is no reason to believe at this point that it will ever be habitable for Palestinians.

Ariel Sharon devised a secret plan in 1982 for taking the invasion of Lebanon all the way to Beirut, which he didn’t share with Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who had a nervous breakdown in the wake of the initial invasion and the war crimes that were committed at two refugee camps—Sabra and Shatila.  The operation was planned to last several days; Israeli forces formally withdrew from Lebanon 18 years later, and there are still Israeli units in southern Lebanon.  The PLO was forced to leave Lebanon and the Middle East, and repaired to North Africa.  But the PLO was replaced by a newer and far more threatening force—Hezbollah—with the assistance of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

In 2003, President George W. Bush lied his way into a military invasion of Iraq to destroy weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein didn’t possess.  The mainstream media, particularly the New York Times, played a key role in repeating the hundreds of lies of the Bush administration.  Like Sharon, Bush wanted to “change the map” of the Middle East by introducing democracy in Iraq that would become a model for other Arab states.  Vice President Dick Cheney played a major role in favoring the creation of democratic governments, telling the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in 2002 that the “freedom-loving peoples of the region” will turn to democratic forms of government.

Oil was also a factor in the partnership between Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair who discussed dividing up Iraq’s oil wealth, which was reminiscent of the talks between President Dwight Eisenhower and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to overthrow the elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953.  The Suez War of 1956 was a huge disaster for the interests of Britain, France, and Israel. The commander of CENTCOM in 2003, General John Abizaid, when asked about Bush’s war, said “of course, it’s about oil.”  All of these wars were driven by economic interests.

Netanyahu is proclaiming that his war against Hamas, the attacks on Iran, and the new attacks on Syria will create a “new” Middle East.  Israel has been using military force against Syria for the past 12 years, but the mainstream media has paid little attention to this campaign. Netanyahu’s claim of creating a “sterile defense zone” with Syria was simply a case of opportunism, using military force without any indication of the policy that would follow.  This has been typical of Israeli use of force since the Six-Day War in 1967 that found Israel with occupied lands, but with no idea of what would come next.

Netanyahu’s answer for all questions about the Gaza War was to stress “changing the face” of the Middle East, which was echoed across much of the American and Israeli press.  The Jerusalem Post typically explained “In the past year, Israel has done more for stability in the Middle East than decades of ineffective UN agencies and Western diplomats.”  (See the New York Times Magazine, July 27, 2025, “Netanyahu’s War,” for an authoritative account  of Netanyahu’s prolonging the war in order to stay in power.)

Trump has not been a direct collaborator in Netanyahu’s efforts, but he campaigned on the promise that the “Middle East is going to get solved.”  Trump’s first-term efforts on behalf of Israel made it clear that he would support Netanyahu’s aggressive policies in the region.  He emphasized that he had no preference for a two-state or one-state solution, and he recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel without getting any concessions from Israel.  He cut U.S. aid to UNRWA as well as to various Palestinian aid groups on the West Bank that were hostages to Israeli governments.  Finally, he had no problem with the Israeli settlements on the West Bank that previous U.S. administrations and various international organizations had declared illegal.

Trump’s second term is far worse, marked by complicity with Israel’s genocidal campaign, and ignoring the forcible starvation of the Palestinian people.  As John Paul, a former State Department official who resigned from the Biden administration, remarked, politicians “cannot admit they have been wrong, ignore the evidence of their eyes, and find some way to avoid facing the truth.”  Trump and Netanyahu most recently blamed Hamas for the starvation in Gaza, which Israel’s high-level military commanders denied..

The balance of power in the Middle East is probably more threatening now than at any other time in the post-World War II period because of Israel’s military domination and its easy willingness to use military power.  There certainly has been no “sign of stability.”  Historically, Israelis have claimed the high moral ground in their confrontations with the Arab states because of the Jewish suffering of the Holocaust.

However, Israel’s genocidal military campaign in Gaza and its ethnic cleansing campaign on the West Bank have contaminated that claim. It has also divided the Western world—including the Jewish diaspora— on the legitimacy of Israel’s self-proclaimed status.  The United States had been in position to possibly expand the number of Arab nations in the Abraham Accord, but U.S. influence in the Middle East has declined.  The “no war, no peace” situation in the region will continue, and the apartheid reality in Israel will only worsen the geopolitics of the region as it continues to erode Israel’s moral standing.

These three scenarios demonstrate that war will not “change the map” of the Middle East, but rather create more chaos and tragedy.  Conversely, there is the example of the way peace and diplomacy did “change the map” of the Middle East.  That would be the result of the 13 days of talks at Camp David in 1978 between Israeli and Egyptian leaders Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat that produced an historic agreement.  It meant that Arab states, without Egypt, could not start a war against Israel.  That certainly changed the map.

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Image by Ahmed.

Israel is meticulously following a textbook model of instigating unrest in the occupied West Bank. The latest such provocations consisted of stripping the Palestinian-run Hebron (Al-Khalil) municipality of its administrative powers over the venerable Ibrahimi Mosque. Worse, according to Israel Hayom, it granted these powers to the religious council of the Kiryat Arba Jewish settlement, an extremist settler body.

Though all Jewish settlers in occupied Palestine can be qualified as extremists, the approximately 7,500 inhabitants of Kiryat Arba represent a more virulent category. This settlement, established in 1972, serves as a strategic foothold to justify subjecting Hebron to stricter military control than virtually any other part of the West Bank.

Kiryat Arba is infamously linked to Baruch Goldstein, the US-Israeli settler who, in February 1994, unleashed a horrific attack. He opened fire at Muslim worshipers kneeling for dawn prayer at the Ibrahimi Mosque, mercilessly killing 29. This bloodbath was swiftly followed by another, where the Israeli army brutally cracked down on Palestinian protesters in Hebron and across the West Bank, murdering an additional 25 Palestinians.

Yet, the Israeli Shamgar Commission, tasked with investigating the massacre, resolved in 1994 that the Palestinian mosque, a site of profound religious significance, was to be grotesquely divided: 63% allocated to Jewish worshipers and a mere 37% to Palestinian Muslims.

Since that calamitous decision, oppressive restrictions have been systematically imposed. These include pervasive surveillance and, at times, unjustifiable, extended closures of the site, solely for exclusive settler use.

The latest decision, described by Israel Hayom as “historic and unprecedented,” is profoundly dangerous. It places the fate of this historic Palestinian mosque directly into the hands of those fanatically keen on acquiring the holy site in its entirety.

But the Ibrahimi Mosque is merely a microcosm of something far more sinister underway across the West Bank. Israel has exploited its war in Gaza to dramatically escalate its violence, carry out mass arrests, confiscate vast tracts of land, systematically destroy Palestinian farms and orchards, and aggressively expand illegal settlements.

Though the West Bank, previously largely subdued by joint Israeli military pressures and Palestinian Authority crackdowns, was not a direct party to the October 7, 2023, assault nor the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, it has inexplicably become a major focus for Israeli military measures.

In the first year of the war, over 10,400 Palestinians were detained in Israeli army crackdowns, with thousands held without charge. Furthermore, hundreds of Palestinians have been forcibly ethnically cleansed, largely from the northern West Bank, where entire refugee camps and towns have been systematically destroyed in protracted Israeli military campaigns.

Israel’s overarching aim remains the strangulation of the West Bank. This is achieved by severing communities using ubiquitous military checkpoints, imposing total closures of vast regions, and the cruel suspension of work permits for Palestinian laborers, who are almost entirely dependent on the Israeli work market for survival.

This insidious plan also explicitly targeted all Palestinian holy sites, including the revered Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem, and the Ibrahimi Mosque. Even when these shrines were nominally accessible, age restrictions and suffocating military checkpoints make it difficult, at times utterly impossible, for Palestinians to worship there.

In August 2024, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asserted that his relentless violent campaign against the West Bank was part of confronting the “broader Iran terror axis.” Practically, this statement served as a green light for the Israeli army to treat the West Bank as an extension of the ongoing Israeli genocide on Gaza. By mid-July 2025, over 900 Palestinians had been killed by the Israeli army in the West Bank, while at least 15 were murdered by settlers.

As Palestinians were pushed further against the wall, with no centralized strategy by their leadership to meaningfully resist, Israel exponentially increased its illegal settlement constructions and the brazen legalization of numerous outposts, many built illegally even by Israeli government standards.

Israel’s actions in the West Bank were not a sudden deviation but consistent with a long-standing, insidious scheme. This includes a plan solidified by the Israeli Knesset in 2020 that allowed Israel to officially annex the West Bank. Israel’s ultimate goal has always been to confine the majority of Palestinians into Bantustan-like enclaves, while asserting full control over the vast majority of the region.

In August 2023, extremist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir articulated this sinister vision: “My right, the right of my wife and my children to move around Judea and Samaria (the occupied West Bank) is more important than freedom of movement for the Arabs.”

More coercive measures swiftly followed, including Knesset laws to significantly curtail UNRWA operations, and further legislation to entrench de facto annexation. Last May, Smotrich audaciously announced 22 more settlements. On July 2, 14 Israeli ministers made a public call on Netanyahu to immediately annex the West Bank.

In fact, every action Israel has undertaken, especially since the commencement of its devastating genocide in Gaza, has been carefully calculated to culminate in the irreversible annexation of the West Bank – a process that would inevitably be followed by declaring native inhabitants persona non grata in their own homeland.

This level of systemic pressure and oppression will ultimately lead to a popular explosion. Though suppressed by the brutality of the Israeli army, the terror of armed settlers, and the suppressive actions of the Palestinian Authority, the breaking point is fast approaching.

Those in the West who preach hollow calls for calm and de-escalation must understand the region is hurtling towards the brink. Neither diplomatic platitudes nor sterile press releases will suffice to avert the catastrophe. They are advised to act decisively against Israel’s destructive policies, and they must act immediately.

The post Beyond Gaza’s Shadow: The Unseen War for the West Bank’s Future appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Photo by Šimom Caban

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an integral part of modern society, revolutionizing industries, enhancing daily life, and driving economic growth. From virtual assistants to advanced data analytics, AI applications are diverse and continue to expand rapidly. However, this rapid growth comes with significant environmental implications, particularly concerning energy consumption and carbon emissions. As AI technologies become more prevalent, understanding and mitigating their environmental impact is crucial for sustainable development. A typical AI data center, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), uses as much power as 100,000 households right now, but the largest centers currently being constructed will consume 20 times that amount.

The Energy Demands of AI

AI models, especially large-scale ones, require substantial computational power for training and operation. Training sophisticated models like GPT-3 (a platform that enables natural language conversations with advanced artificial intelligence) involves processing vast amounts of data through complex algorithms, necessitating extensive computational resources. For instance, training GPT-3 with 175 billion parameters consumed approximately 1,287 megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity, resulting in carbon emissions equivalent to driving 112 gasoline-powered cars for a year.

The energy-intensive nature of AI extends beyond training to deployment and inference phases. AI applications, such as image and speech recognition, natural language processing, and recommendation systems, continuously process data, resulting in ongoing energy consumption. Data centers, which house the hardware for these computations, have seen a significant rise in their electricity consumption. In 2022, global data center electricity consumption reached 460 terawatt-hours (TWh), positioning data centers as the 11th largest electricity consumer worldwide, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. In fact,projections by the IEA indicate that by 2030, electricity demand from data centers could more than double to around 945 TWh—more than Japan’s current annual electricity use.

The Carbon Footprint of AI

The environmental impact of AI is closely tied to the energy sources powering data centers. Many data centers rely on non-renewable energy sources, leading to substantial carbon emissions. In the United States, data centers accounted for over four percent of the nation’s total electricity consumption, with 56 percent of this energy derived from fossil fuels, resulting in more than 105 million tons of CO2 emissions.

Compared to other sectors, the carbon footprint of AI and data centers is becoming increasingly significant. For example, the emissions from in-house data centers of major tech companies, such as Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple, may be over seven times higher than officially reported. This underreporting underscores the need for increased transparency and accountability in evaluating the environmental impact of AI technologies.

One analyst from the Carbon Disclosure Project noted, “There’s a major transparency gap in how companies report data center emissions. As AI workloads surge, it’s essential we close that gap.”

How AI Is Accelerating the Climate Crisis 

The escalating demand for AI technologies places additional strain on global energy resources. As AI becomes more integrated into various sectors, the energy required to support these applications is expected to increase. Projections indicate that by 2028, data centers could account for up to 12 percent of the United States’ annual electricity consumption. This surge in energy consumption could lead to higher greenhouse gas emissions, exacerbating global warming and hindering efforts to combat climate change.

Furthermore, the expansion of data centers to support AI growth has led to increased water consumption for cooling purposes, adding another layer of environmental concern. The cumulative effect of these factors points to the urgent need to address the ecological impact of AI technologies.

In Ashburn, Loudoun County, Virginia—dubbed “Data Center Alley” due to its exceptionally high concentration of data centers, forming a significant hub for global internet traffic—water usage increased by nearly 63 percent between 2019 and 2023, primarily driven by the growth of AI-driven infrastructure. Similar concerns have been raised in Chile, where community opposition led Google to abandon water-based cooling at its Santiago facility in favor of more sustainable alternatives.

Tania Rodriguez, a community leader in Santiago, said, “We’re not against technology. But we cannot allow AI to grow at the cost of our water and future.”

Steps Toward Sustainable AI

Addressing the environmental challenges posed by AI necessitates a multifaceted approach that combines technological innovation, policy changes, and industry collaboration.

Efficiency Improvements: Optimizing AI models to enhance efficiency can significantly reduce energy consumption. Techniques such as model pruning (which removes redundant neural connections while maintaining performance), quantization (which reduces model precision by converting to lower bit-width formats), and knowledge distillation (which trains smaller “student” models to mimic larger “teacher” models) help streamline AI models, making them less computationally intensive without compromising performance. Implementing these methods can lead to substantial energy savings during both training and inference phases.

Renewable Energy Integration: Transitioning data centers to renewable energy sources is a critical step toward sustainability. By leveraging solar, wind, and hydroelectric power, data centers can decrease reliance on fossil fuels and mitigate environmental impact. Companies such as Google and Microsoft have invested in renewable energy projects to power their data centers, aiming to reduce their carbon footprints.

Google has matched 100 percent of its electricity use with renewable energy sources since 2017, and Microsoft has committed to becoming carbon negative by 2030. Meta and Microsoft have also pioneered liquid cooling techniques and direct current power systems, resulting in an improvement in energy efficiency of over three percent.

Anthropic and OpenAI have not disclosed specific sustainability benchmarks, raising questions about transparency in this space. However, industry-wide collaboration efforts, such as the AI Energy Score project, are beginning to push toward unified accountability standards.

Advanced Cooling Techniques: Innovative cooling methods, such as liquid cooling and AI-driven climate control systems, can enhance energy efficiency in data centers. These systems can reduce cooling energy consumption by over 18 percent compared to traditional air cooling methods. Implementing such technologies helps lower overall energy usage and associated emissions.

In a 2025 collaboration, Microsoft and Meta adopted electric vehicle-derived cooling systems to manage high-density AI racks exceeding one megawatt per unit, technologies that reduce heat while minimizing water usage.

According to Noman Bashir, Computing & Climate Impact Fellow at MIT’s Climate and Sustainability Consortium, the relationship between response speed and energy consumption in AI models is significant yet often overlooked. Despite this direct correlation, users remain largely unaware of how their AI interactions impact energy usage, as companies rarely highlight this aspect in their product presentations.

Policy Advocacy and Regulation: Governments and regulatory bodies play a pivotal role in promoting sustainable AI practices. Implementing policies that encourage energy efficiency, mandate transparency in reporting emissions, and provide incentives for using renewable energy can drive the industry toward more environmentally friendly practices. For instance, tax policies that address the carbon emissions from AI and cryptocurrency operations can help mitigate their environmental impact.

In the U.S., states such as Virginia are considering legislation to mandate water use estimates for data centers. Minnesota’s data center law, passed in 2025, requires data centers to consider water conservation measures if they plan to use more than 100 million gallons per year to cool their facilities. Ireland, facing grid instability due to rising demand driven by AI, is now reevaluating its permitting processes for new facilities.

Decentralized and Sustainable Data Centers: Exploring decentralized data center models powered by renewable energy sources can contribute to sustainability. Initiatives such as Earth Friendly Computation advocate for building data centers on Indigenous lands, utilizing local renewable resources, and promoting community involvement. Such approaches not only reduce environmental impact but also foster economic development in local communities.

Conclusion

The rapid advancement of AI brings about transformative benefits across various sectors. However, it also presents significant environmental challenges, particularly in terms of energy consumption and carbon emissions. Recognizing and addressing these hidden environmental costs is imperative for sustainable AI development.

Businesses, researchers, and governments must collaborate to prioritize sustainability in AI initiatives. This includes investing in energy-efficient technologies, integrating renewable energy sources, advanced cooling methods, and implementing supportive policies and regulations. Transparency in energy reporting and the use of standardized metrics for measuring AI’s environmental impact will be crucial in driving accountability and ensuring its responsible use.

Consumers also play a role in reducing AI’s energy footprint. By closing apps when not in use, choosing less resource-intensive tools, and supporting companies that demonstrate environmental responsibility, individuals can contribute to the collective effort, notes The World Economic Forum.

Ultimately, the future of AI must align with the planet’s future. As we continue to unlock AI’s potential, we must ensure that innovation does not come at the expense of our environment. Only by embedding sustainability into every layer of AI development can we achieve a brilliant—and responsible—technological evolution.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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Photograph Source: Christopher Michel – CC BY 2.0

“There is no nation that feeds its enemies.  The British didn’t feed the Nazis nor did the Americans feed the Japanese, nor do the Russians feed the Ukrainians now.” 

– Amichay Eliyahu, Israel’s Heritage Ministry, July 24, 2025

“How many times can a man turn his head/and pretend that he just doesn’t see.”
– Bob Dylan, “Blowing in the Wind,” 1962

“Israel is prolonging the war, even though we do not see where further progress cans be made.”

–Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump’s special envoy, 2025

Last week, Bret Stephens, the New York Times’ leading warmonger and apologist for Israel, penned a lead editorial that denied Israel was committing genocide in Israel.  The editorials and articles in the NYT’s have always favored Israel, but no NYT’s columnist compares to Stephens, whose writings are chauvinistic and bellicose.  Stephens, a former editor of the Jerusalem Post and a supporter of all Israeli policies, left the Wall Street Journal to join the Times in 2017 because he believed Israel was not getting a fair hearing in the mainstream media.  In doing so, he joined other Jewish columnists at the Times (Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, Paul Krugman, and Roger Cohen).  However, while these men bring some objectivity to the problem of Israel, Stephens has no limits in his support of Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Stephens limits his definition of genocide to assault against innocent civilians, which allows him to ignore the international definition developed during World War II that includes cultural genocide.  Even with his definition, Israel is committing genocide on the basis of the brutal starvation of the Palestinian population, which is an assault on the physical survival of Gaza’s population. 

Israel is clearly committing cultural genocide to ensure that its militarism stops Palestinians in Gaza from ever constituting itself as a political, social, or cultural entity.  The convention against genocide mandates that signatory states must prevent genocide and that war criminals who carried out genocide must be punished.  The International Court of Justice stipulates that severe sanctions can be imposed on nations that conduct genocide.

The targeting procedures of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are consistent with the objectives of cultural genocide.  The IDF has made Gaza uninhabitable and, in the process, has systematically destroyed or damaged virtually the entire civilian infrastructure.  This military campaign has targeted every government building, hospital, medical clinic, school, university, mosque, library, and archive.  Israel had turned Gaza into an outdoor prison before the war, and there is no chance that Gaza can now be revived for civilian life.  As Netanyahu said in May, “We are destroying more and more homes.  They have nowhere to return to.”  Certainly, this is genocidal.

The relentless and repetitively compulsive Israeli attacks over the past two decades indicates that Israelis are making innocent Palestinians pay for the savagery of the Germans 85 years ago.  The current massacre, such as the one in Sedalia, with Palestinian children carrying white flags and running for their lives from Israeli tanks and artillery, is reminiscent of the massacre of the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest of all Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II.  We know so little of Israel savagery because the Israelis have kept journalists out of Gaza.  There is also terrible savagery in the West Bank, but Western journalists have displayed little interest in covering the terror imposed by Israeli settlers against Palestinians. The mainstream media is finally getting around to covering the starvation in Gaza after the evidence mounted in a year and a half of savage bombing with U.S.-supplied weaponry..

Now, we are seeing the IDF target women and children who are trying to get food and medicine from a very limited assistance effort that Israel is permitting.  According to Omer Bartov, a Professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, “Gaza now has the grim distinction of having the highest number of amputee children per capita in the world.” Chronically ill Palestinians have very little access to hospital care.  The fact that Palestinians must risk their lives to acquire a bag of flour is absolutely repulsive.

Stephens justifies Israeli savagery as necessary against Hamas, but there is little left of Hamas to target.  Instead, the IDF is preoccupied with moving Palestinian civilians from one part of Gaza to another, while its bombardment continues everywhere in the Strip.   The IDF fight against Hamas was essentially over more than a year ago, and the weakened group that still emerges from their tunnels to contest the IDF is extremely limited. Stephens explains that Israel could kill many more Palestinians if it was truly pursuing genocide.  What a pathetic statement.  Israeli intent is obvious.

Israeli acts of violence against innocent Palestinians have been taking place for over 75 years, beginning with the terrorism and ethnic cleansing that took place in the 1948 war…the Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic.  The forced displacement and dispossession of Palestinians from their homes that began in 1948 is still taking place in the West Bank, in addition to Gaza.  The Nakba in 1948 involved the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians from what became the Jewish state.  Palestinians are the only refugees in the world that have hereditary refugee status among international relief agencies..

There are several certainties in this narrative.  First, the New York Times will always give Israel the benefit of the doubt, and Bret Stephens will excuse any barbarity that Israel imposes on the Palestinian people.  The NYT’s Walter Duranty, ironically, was the leading apologist for Stalin’s genocide in the 1930s.  Second, when scholars and academics study genocide in the future, they will frame their writings and research around Joseph Stalin and Ukraine (the Holodomor); Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust; and Benjamin Netanyahu and the latest Nakba.  Third, the United States—particularly Biden and Trump—will be guilty of complicity for the barbarity that Israel is imposing on innocent Palestinians.

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Mountain pass, California rare earth mineral ining and processing facility. Photo courtesy of Tmy 350 and Creative commons Attribution Share alike 4.0 .

Montanans are well aware of the asbestos disaster caused by the vermiculite mine in Libby that turned the town into a Superfund site. Libby’s tremolite asbestos lurked in the shadows for decades until determined citizens brought the hidden killer to light. But too late for more than 400 people who died and many more left sickened with asbestosis, dying slowly and painfully from asbestos fibers lodged in their lungs. 

A similar disaster was narrowly avoided when actinolite, a mineral that belongs to the amphibole family became a topic of concern about the proposed Skalkaho vermiculite mine near Hamilton in 1999. The question of asbestos was not addressed by officials until the mine was almost permitted. Only after the Bitterroot National Forest had issued its Final Environmental Impact Statement did the agency decide to evaluate the potential for asbestos exposure. The mining company folded before testing. 

As “Roadside Geology of Montana” notes: “Several early attempts to mine vermiculite in the Skalkaho intrusion went poorly. While at one time that seemed unfortunate, now it’s clear that we narrowly escaped having another major environmental disaster.”

Yet, Montanans are facing this situation once again with the US Critical Materials Sheep Creek mine project at the headwaters of the West Fork of the Bitterroot River. There could hardly be in a riskier place to mine given the location, the surrounding wilderness lands, and the threat of river contamination throughout the Bitterroot Valley. 

The company did not pick that spot for a rare earth elements deposit nor choose other minerals associated with the rare earth elements in the ore veins. But one of those minerals is actinolite, a close relative of Libby’s deadly tremolite — and both are asbestos in their fibrous form. 

As a recent study on the dangers of actinolite concluded: “The lack of widespread awareness regarding actinolite complicates efforts to mitigate its health risks. Unlike more commonly known asbestos types…actinolite often remains underestimated. Actinolite occurs in both fibrous and non-fibrous forms, but the fibrous type has garnered a reputation due to its links with asbestos. The health risks associated with this mineral cannot be overstated: Exposure to actinolite, particularly in environments where it is disturbed, poses significant respiratory health risks. The potential for mesothelioma, lung cancer, and other diseases expands with prolonged exposure.”

To be clear, nobody knows if there is asbestos at Sheep Creek. But there is good reason to suspect asbestos may be there. Geologists at Montana Tech report that actinolite is one of the most common minerals in the host rock and the veinlets containing ore are “actinolite-rich.” The Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology Crowley Bulletin reports actinolite at Sheep Creek “forms masses of radiating fibers surrounding other crystals.” The American Mineralogist, a prestigious industry journal, confirms: “actinolite forms clusters of fibers, usually in radiating groups.” 

There’s no question the actinolite is there. But although US Critical Materials has sampled ore for several years and tested for a long list of analytes, I can find no mention of possible asbestos on US Critical Materials’ website. 

Asbestos exposure happens by breathing contaminated dust, which is very hard to contain and clean up. Mining is dusty business. Workers at Sheep creek are already breathing dust. So why not test for asbestos to inform both the public and agency management? We’ve been down this lethal road before. Public health concerns are clear: test soon to avoid spreading asbestos around if it’s there.

Contact Bitterroot NF Supervisor Matt Anderson matthew.anderson3@usda.gov and Ranger Dan Pliley Plileydaniel.pliley@usda.gov about possible asbestos at Sheep Creek.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

If ever there was a sign that democracy in the United States is in dire straits, it was Congress’s rescission of $9 billion in funding for public media, achieved via a party-line vote of 216 to 213 on July 18, 2025. The vote took place despite the fact that millions of people wrote to their elected representatives urging them not to cut funds and that a majority of Americans, including Republicans, support federal funding of public media.

Public funding of media is not the problem that President Donald Trump and his puppet masters at the Heritage Foundation claim it is. Not enough public funding for it is the real problem. According to public media experts Victor Pickard and Timothy Neff, “the U.S. government is notable among democratic nations for how little it funds its public media.”

Compare the public media funding cuts to the $28 billion in tax dollars that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency will receive thanks to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill—a subsidy that goes against public opinion.

A well-resourced media ecosphere is essential to democracy—an informed electorate is far more capable of keeping its representatives accountable than an ignorant one. Fascism thrives on ignorance, and that is precisely what the defunding of public media symbolizes within the context of excessive funding of armed enforcement agents.

Since 1967, congressionally appropriated funds have been distributed to thousands of small broadcast media outlets via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a private nonprofit organization. But CPB funding represents only about 0.01 percent of the federal budget. American media were never very well-resourced—and that was always the problem. For a nation of nearly 350 million people, a few billion dollars of taxpayer funding for public media is akin to crumbs from a heavily laden table.

And still, using those crumbs, small radio stations managed to operate in all corners of the nation, never fully thriving, and constantly relying on pledge drives and corporate sponsorship to fill budgetary gaps.

That sliver of the federal budget just barely enabled the maintenance of an essential public service. “Although mainstream news media face historically low levels of trust, public broadcasting enjoys relatively high levels, even among Trump supporters,” wrote Pickard and Neff in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2021.

CPB President and CEO Patricia Harrison concurred, saying that “public media has served families in every corner of America, especially rural and tribal communities, providing extraordinary vital content and services free of charge.”

Moreover, according to Harrison, “Cutting federal funding could also put Americans at risk of losing national and local emergency alerts that serve as a lifeline to many Americans in times of severe need.” Given the unprecedented flooding that states like Texas and North Carolina faced in July 2025 due to unchecked global warming, local emergency alerts are more necessary than ever.

For nearly two decades, I worked at KPFK, Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles, a station that once relied on CPB funding. At regular intervals, KPFK would test—as required by virtue of being a public radio station—its emergency alert system over the airwaves. The loss of public funding is likely to lead to the closure of many such public radio stations, and therefore emergency alerts, across the nation.

We knew this was coming, and indeed, Americans voted for it. The Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership, also known as Project 2025, made defunding public media a major goal, claiming that “To stop public funding [of media] is good policy and good politics.” Advising a future Republican president, the document’s authors quoted the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as saying, “conservatives were being ‘confronted with a long-range problem of significant social consequences—that is, the development of a government-funded broadcast system similar to the BBC.’”

Project 2025 specifically named those media outlets deemed the greatest threats to conservative ideology, saying, “Stripping public funding would, of course, mean that NPR, PBS, Pacifica Radio, and the other leftist broadcasters would be shorn of the presumption that they act in the public interest and receive the privileges that often accompany so acting.” And yet, NPR and PBS in particular have often appeased the right, as per years of analysis by the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).

Interestingly, Project 2025’s authors understood that stripping public funds for media would not impact big media outlets such as NPR and PBS, saying, “Defunding CPB would by no means cause NPR or PBS… to file for bankruptcy,” and that “NPR and PBS stations are in reality no longer noncommercial, as they run ads in everything but name for their sponsors.”

Indeed, one can argue there is a correlation between private funding and bias, and not public funding and bias. The more a news outlet relies on private sources of funding, the more likely it is to play it safe to avoid upsetting its sponsors.

U.S. media has been so tilted toward the right that we have a culture that is now dominated by conservatism. If media outlets operated according to the highest standards of journalism, they would indeed be biased against the doctrine favored by billionaires and bigots—injustice, greed, domination, and authoritarianism—values that thrive in a web of lies and wither when exposed by facts. Not being tough enough on right-wing ideas and policies has, in part, paved the path to defunding the media.

To summarize, conservative forces have claimed (wrongly) that NPR and PBS are biased against them, admitted that those outlets aren’t as reliant on public funding as smaller media outlets, and voted to defund public media anyway; they are hurting the constellation of small media outlets relying on taxpayer funds. The long-term conservative goal is to fuel public ignorance and the subsequent embrace of the morally bankrupt ideology of the right.

The coming mass shuttering of small publicly funded media outlets will happen within the context of already expanding news deserts. The U.S. has, for generations, suffered from unsustainable models of media funding. Without public funding, news outlets have few options: they can rely on corporate advertisements and sponsorships, appeal to foundations for private support, or cultivate subscriptions and donations from individuals.

Corporate advertising and private philanthropic support are most problematic and can result in subtle pressures on editorial coverage to appease funders. Meanwhile, subscriptions and donations are extremely challenging, especially for smaller media outlets, and rely on a populace weary of rising costs and stagnant wages.

Public funding of the media is an antidote to bias, not the driver of it. Just as public funding offers solutions to the crises of health care, child care, banking, and education, it is an obvious solution to the crisis of unsustainable journalism.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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Photograph Source: Ashraf Amra – CC BY-SA 4.0

The bronze sculpture by Marie Uchytilová, Memorial to the Children Victims of the War, depicting the 82 children of Lidice murdered at Chełmno in 1942, serves as a haunting reminder of the barbarity that defined the Nazi-led Lidice massacre. In reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazis razed the village of Lidice, executed its men, and deported its women and children to death camps.

The murder of these innocent children, whose faces are forever memorialized in Uchytilová’s sculpture, resonates deeply today, as we witness the suffering of children in Gaza, where the cycle of violence continues unabated. The massacres of these children, then and now, serve as stark symbols of the ongoing tragedy of war and genocide, linking past and present in an unbroken chain of human suffering.

In Gaza, the atrocities visited upon children are unspeakable, a violence that staggers the imagination. Omer Bartov, a distinguished scholar of Holocaust and Genocide studies, reports in The New York Times that more than 17,000 children have been slaughtered in Gaza, 870 of them infants, not yet one year old. He further reveals that Gaza now has the highest rate of child amputations per capita in the world. These chilling figures unravel the brutal truths of modern warfare, a sickening continuation of the horrors we dared to believe had been consigned to history’s darkest pages, alongside Auschwitz and Hiroshima.

But the genocide in Gaza, like the slaughter at Lidice, cannot be hidden. It stands as an undeniable, grotesque monument to the unchecked power of the state and the monstrous machinery of war. This tragedy is different from past atrocities in one disturbing respect: the suffering of Gaza’s women and children, the use of starvation as a weapon, the unrelenting bombardment, and the spectacle of mass murder are laid bare for all to see. The grotesque violence is not concealed, it is flaunted, glorified in the guttering language of demagogues and amplified by the shameful silence of the mainstream media. In addition, as a testament to the grotesque violence of gangster capitalism, entire villages are being bulldozed in the interest of appealing to private investors who can turn Gaza, in the words of President Trump, into a “riviera of the Middle East.”

The collapse of conscience is not a distant abstraction but a visceral reality, carved into the bloodstained bodies of women and children, their lives and futures obliterated by the ruthless forces of war. It is etched into the hands of those who perpetuate this unbearable violence against a defenseless yet resilient people. This erosion of humanity is also made explicit in the chilling words of Israeli politicians. Take, for instance, former Knesset member Moshe Feiglin, who pushed this rhetoric to unspeakable extremes in a 2025 interview on Israeli Channel 14. He declared, “Every child, every baby in Gaza is an enemy. The enemy is not Hamas, nor is it the military wing of Hamas … We need to conquer Gaza and colonize it and not leave a single Gazan child there. There is no other victory.” Feigin’s words lay bare a harrowing truth: this is no longer a war, but a calculated and dehumanizing military campaign, a ruthless genocidal war,  aimed at erasing not only the most vulnerable—Palestinian children—but an entire people from existence.”

Nowhere is the heartlessness of the Netanyahu government and the Israeli state, and the shameless indifference of most of the world. more evident than in the deliberate starvation of an entire people. Because of the enforced blockade of aid to Gaza, 81 people have died from starvation, while Gaza’s health ministry reports over 28,000 cases of malnutrition, including more than 5,000 children. “According to U.N. spokesperson, Thameen Al-Kheetan, “as of July 21st, 1,054 people have been killed while simply trying to obtain food.” This is not merely a humanitarian catastrophe—it is an act of collective punishment, a slow, grinding extermination. Infants wither in their mothers’ arms, their tiny bodies hollowed by hunger. Mothers, themselves starving, have no milk to give. Children gaze with sunken eyes and swollen bellies, their cries of hunger echoing into a silence broken only by the roar of bombs. The smell of death is everywhere-with no shame, only the hunger of extermination. The deliberate starvation and murder of those seeking bread, the withering of children before the eyes of the world, is more than a moral stain or a violation of international law—it is the mark of a state descending into the savagery and cruelty of genocidal authoritarianism. And yet, the silence of much of the world remains deafening.

The atrocities occurring in Gaza are not merely a crisis–they are a profound moral catastrophe, one that forces us to confront the global collapse of conscience. As we bear witness to the brutal, real-time images of children being torn apart by bombs, snipers, and the Israeli Defense Forces, we are confronted with a global moral collapse. The major powers continue to arm Israel, while academic institutions remain silent and corporate-controlled media either ignore or vilify those who dare to speak out against the Israeli government’s actions. We are witnessing what could be described as the Hiroshima of our time, an event that signifies not only the destruction of lives but the erosion of our collective conscience.

The parallels between the children of Lidice and the children of Gaza are undeniable. Both are casualties of power, victims of regimes that see them as expendable. Yet, in the erasure of history, in the paralyzing censorship that pervades many parts of the world, we risk forgetting the lessons of the past. The ghosts of genocidal violence are not distant echoes, lingering only in the forgotten corners of history, they are present, shaping the policies that continue to devastate innocent lives. To ignore these lessons is to abandon our moral compass, to deny our shared humanity, and to let history repeat itself.

We stand at a crossroads. The violence and brutality we are witnessing today demand more than passive observation; they demand collective moral action. The tragedy unfolding in Gaza is not an isolated incident; it is part of a broader pattern of state violence and genocide. It is a global issue, one that transcends borders and affects us all. It is time to acknowledge the atrocities being committed and to act with the urgency that the situation demands. The children of Gaza are not just casualties of a distant conflict; they are the children of humanity, and it is our collective responsibility to ensure their suffering does not continue unchecked. The time to dismantle the machinery of death and state terrorism is now.

Our collective responsibility is no longer a choice, it is an imperative. Every child is our child. This is not a hollow slogan but a profound truth, a declaration of our boundless commitment, our unwavering love, and our shared hope for all children, for whom we bear an irreplaceable responsibility. It is a call to action, an urgent demand for justice that transcends mere words, and a vision of hope as a fierce, militant force resisting the childcide that stains our world. It is a rallying cry against the gangster militarism and ruthless authoritarianism that enable such horrors, a reminder that our fight for the future is inextricably bound to the lives of the youngest among us.

Note from the publisher:  You can call your representatives via Code Pink’s Congress Action page. They provide a script that urges congress to:

Support a ceasefire and open humanitarian corridors
Vote NO on future weapons shipments to Israel
Demand aid for Gaza, not bombs
Dial (202) 224‑3121 as your voice from your ZIP code.
Find the contact link here.

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Photograph Source: Ashraf Amra – CC BY-SA 4.0

“I have a cold. And in one hour, I’ll have finished a twenty-four-hour shift, heartbroken again. I lost a cardiac patient because we had no medication. Another patient shot in the head, was left to die slowly because we had no ventilator. A child with a shattered skull and exposed brain matter just died in front of me. I also just found a kidney patient collapsed on the bedroom floor. He had a seizure due to brain damage because he has not had dialysis in three months. A diabetic man hadn’t eaten in four days. He cried when I asked why. I gave him fluids and some money to buy flour. I’m so sorry for the starving, for the children we couldn’t save, for the mothers, for the elderly, for the vulnerable. Not a single shift has passed without having me shattered.”

This is the reality in Gaza right now for the medical profession struggling to save an overwhelming amount of patients, not only from the bombings and gunshot wounds but now also from starvation. And the starvation has reached everyone, including the doctors themselves, some of whom have passed out on the floors of what remains of Gaza’s hospitals, then picked themselves up and gone back to work.

Those opening words belonged to Dr. Ali Tahrawi, an emergency room doctor at Alqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, Gaza.They were read aloud at a recent Washington, DC press conference by Dr. Ashraf Abou El-Ezz, a physician from Indiana who knows he has all the resources he needs.

But somehow, the words are never loud enough and even though they were spoken in the shadow of the US Capitol building, those inside had already left for the summer recess. And in any case, most of them are not listening. Only US Representative Rashida Tlaib, the Michigan Democrat and the sole Palestinian American in Congress, remained behind to host the press conference.

“I dread the moment Hanan and Misk will ask me about their legs,” continued medical student Sharad Wertheimer, a member, like the others, of the US-based global network, Doctors Against Genocide (DAG), reading the words of Hala Sha’sha’aj, a 40-year old mother of five from Gaza city.

“What will I tell them? When I go to buy shoes for my children, what will I do when Hanan and Misk ask why I don’t buy them any? If they say, ‘I want to play’, ‘I want to dance’, ‘I want to ride a bike,’ what will I say to them? They lost their father, the love, compassion and security he gave them, and they also lost their legs, the ability to move and play. Everything beautiful in their lives is gone. Their childhood was stolen. What did they do to deserve such devastation?”

One after another, the doctors in their white coats and scrubs stepped forward to read the words of their colleagues, friends, relatives and people they don’t know at all, just human beings who matter and who are trapped in the concentration camps and free fire zones that Gaza has now become under the Israeli bombardment and forced starvation.

The doctors have heard these stories over and over for 22 months, during which time the situation has continued to get worse and the inaction by the US and other governments more criminal. But now, in the heat of late July, having lobbied members of Congress, protested, disrupted meetings and been arrested, they are running out of patience.

“We will not be polite”, warned John Reuwer, a retired ER doctor and member of DAG, who said he had been to five war zones but had never seen anything as bad as the current situation in Gaza. “We are here to say ‘no more’”, he said. “We will not stop. And we will not forget.”

And so the doctors continued to bear witness on behalf of the besieged and desperate Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

“On the 28th of March, the soldiers called me and two other civilian prisoners, aged around 16 and 17, by name,” came the words of Dr. Khalid Alseer, read by Dr. Qurat-ul-ain Syedain. “It was night. They tied us very tightly at our wrists and ankles and put us in a military car. No one told us anything. We drove for around two hours into the hills. All the while they beat us, kicking us and humiliating us. They were laughing. I was trying to explain in English that the ties on my wrist were too tight, but they just said I was a doctor so I would be okay.

“At around 4 am I heard one say in Arabic, ‘these three are to be hanged.’ I thought it was the end. I was in pain. They had broken my ribs. Even when they said I was going to be hanged, I didn’t care. I just wanted it to end.” Dr. Alseer was eventually released in late September, reunited with his parents for whom he is the sole provider.

“In mid-April 2024, Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh arrived at Section 23 in Ofer Prison,” read Dr. Roxana Samimi from an eyewitness account by a captive at the notorious detention center in the occupied West Bank and as told to Sky News. “The prison guards brought Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh into the section in a deplorable state. He had clearly been assaulted with injuries around his body. He was naked in the lower part of his body. The prison guards threw him in the middle of the yard and left him there. Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh was unable to stand up. One of the prisoners helped him and accompanied him to one of the rooms. A few minutes later, prisoners were heard screaming from the room they went into, declaring Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh was dead.”

How many more such testimonies need to be heard, the doctors wondered? What has happened to our humanity if we can live in a country that allows such a genocide to continue and our tax dollars to support it? Included in that so-called support is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an Israel-US front that distributes aid as a form of Russian roulette, where young children are picked off by snipers, running barefoot to faster escape the bullets while trying to get food to feed their families.

“This is not a war, this is an extermination campaign,” said Dr. Nidal Jboor, a Michigan internal medicine specialist and a co-founder of DAG. “From the concentration camps of the Holocaust, to the killing fields of Cambodia, to the concentration zones Israel is building across Gaza, and now the American-backed death distribution centers, the genocide is the same.”

“This institution is not moving with the majority of their constituencies,” said Tlaib, pointing to the Capitol dome behind her. “And it’s shameful because if they polled their constituents to ask if they wanted another dime spent on continuing to support another war crime in Gaza, they would tell you ‘hell no’,” she said. “We say enough is enough.”

The post “Everything Beautiful in Their Lives is Gone:” US Physicians Read Aloud the Searing Testimony of Desperate Doctors and Patients in Gaza    appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Afghan evacuees boarding American aircraft during Operation Allies Refuge in 2021.

In February 2022, a British Royal Marine officer—often among the brightest—made a mistake while seconded to a UK Special Forces base at Regent’s Park barracks in London. He was trying to sift through thousands of false claimants. His task: reduce the number of bogus and potentially dangerous applicants. He believed he was protecting his country.

He emailed a spreadsheet to the wrong people. On it were names of Afghan men and women who had helped the UK. Some had fought. Some interpreted. Some did quieter work. It listed where they lived—and with whom. It also included over a hundred UK special forces and intelligence personnel, plus other government staff.

It was, in effect, a kill list. Handed out by accident.

To keep the Taliban from seeing it—without knowing if they already had—the UK government asked the courts for silence. Also, what if those UK names were passed on to Russia, China or Iran? They got it: an injunction. No one could speak. The truth was buried—not like a hatchet, more like an Afghan peshkabz—so people could be rescued. I repeat: so people could be rescued.

Not all were.

They said 100,000 were at risk. About 18,500 got out. Secret routes. Back channels. The cost? Nearly a billion pounds. The total Afghan resettlement bill? Six billion? Numbers should be easy to count. People are not. Alarmingly, defence sources now said only one in sixteen people in the breach might be genuine—might. The rest with no link to the Armed Forces. There were even whispers of attempted blackmail by one Afghan. Whispers can be pernicious, even if true. Understandably, the real claimants still stranded in Afghanistan were no friends of those exploiting the leak.

The secrecy broke only last week when the courts lifted the injunction—by then a super-injunction, meaning even its existence could not be reported.

For some Afghans, it wasn’t until the morning of 15 July that they received news of it—through emails sent by the UK government in English, Pashto, and Dari. Lawsuits began. At last count, over 600 people were seeking damages. Manchester-based Barings Law is handling many. They take a maximum of 25 percent, so may make over £100 million in fees—though they say they’re giving voice to people who lost homes, livelihoods, and liberty.

It’s such a mess that most Brits who were once there themselves feel sick to their stomachs. Remember, Brits had no warning of Biden’s sudden decision in August 2021 to abandon the Afghans. No time to look after the Triples or interpreters. Most Afghans who escaped did so after 2021. Around 36,000 through official routes. Another 4,500 came after the leak. Nearly 7,000 more are on the way.

Passage wasn’t guaranteed. Vetting takes time. Some still wait. A UK broadsheet published just under 130 photos of Afghans from the list reportedly killed by the Taliban.

I remember seeing many Afghans in Kabul and Helmand working with the UK—men and women genuinely believing they were building a peaceful, post-war Afghanistan, even as some of their politicians fled to the Gulf with some of the cash.

The doors closed on 1 July. No fresh applications. The system is full. Or tired. Or both.

In Parliament, John Healey, the Defence Secretary, rose in a navy suit. His red-and-white tie matched the earlier ministerial red box. One report said the tie was askew. It wasn’t. It was straight as a blade. He said 900 primary applicants, plus 3,600 family members, had been relocated. Cost: £400 million. They’re reviewing policy. The Triples will be reconsidered. Vetting is strong, he said. He said many things. Notably, he didn’t seek political capital from the fact it happened on a Tory watch.

It was said Tory leader Kemi Badenoch had only just learned about the leak—having declined a security briefing months ago. Interestingly, former Tory prime minister Rishi Sunak called a General Election the day after a judge declared the super-injunction should be lifted.

Outside Westminster, people got on with it.

In London, Nooralhaq Nasimi built something. A refugee turned citizen, he founded the Afghanistan & Central Asian Association. They taught English, helped women, showed people how to live here without losing themselves. His daughters, Rabia and Shabnam, joined him—sharp, certain voices for the new Afghans.

Then there’s Dr. Waheed Arian. He came from war. Became a doctor. Now he heals by phone—telemedicine calls to Helmand. His way of fighting back.

But last week, the headlines were never about them. Nor were they just about false claimants. They were also about the Triples.

CF333 and ATF444. Afghan special forces. Trained by the UK. Fought beside them. Killed for them. Left behind by them. I remember such men at such bases as Camp Bastion and Lashkar Gar.

Often small, they moved like hawks. Five thousand served alongside UK Special Forces. Trained, equipped, paid by the UK. That’s not anecdotal—it’s in court filings and official assessments. What’s under scrutiny now isn’t their service, but how they were treated after 2021. But the figure—5,000—is solid.

When they tried to come here, they were turned away. The Ministry said they didn’t serve ‘closely enough.’ Meanwhile, dozens were caught and killed as referenced above. Others tortured. Some ran.

One, a former CF333 sniper—they call him Habibullah—lives in a shared hotel room in Worcester. Supported on about £9 a week. Eighteen months waiting for asylum. Perhaps even greeted by anti-migrant protesters who have no idea what he did for UK forces. Also unaware that only 4% of migrants are asylum seekers. He went on raids. He hid. He fled. He made it here—as I say, perhaps now only hearing people shout him down.

Another flew intelligence drones. Denied entry twice. Still in hiding. Maybe in a basement. Maybe listening for knocks. Maybe hasn’t seen daylight in days.

Johnny Mercer, former Veterans Minister, called the programme hapless. I met Mercer in Kabul in 2008 when he still wore the uniform. T-shirted, sometimes. Boots dusty. He had that look soldiers get—somewhere between angry and exhausted. Never lost his manners, though.

Now they’re reviewing it all. The Triples. The rejections. The silence. Some 2,500 cases are under new scrutiny. Mercer strongly believes that Afghan special forces who worked with British personnel—the Triples—should be here, for their own safety. ‘An uneasy but necessary rescue job,’ someone called it.

The leak, the injunction, the flights—all of it converges. Lawsuits mount. Politicians talk. It’s a numbers game now. Many made it. Many did not. Some wait. Some remember the promises. Some, not a small number, may well be bogus.

That’s the story. Brutal. Simple. Sad. The way most stories end when a state picks up a weapon for someone else, before being obliged by said masters to scarper.

I mean—what were we even doing in Afghanistan? It’s not like we gained any credit from the aggressive likes of JD Vance, who calls the UK ‘a random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years.’ (All the more extraordinary that he chooses the Cotswolds for the family summer holiday this year.) And we all know ‘no new wars’ Trump has already overseen almost as many air strikes in five months as Biden in his whole presidency.

But I keep going back to the Royal Marine.

He sent the wrong file.

It was as simple—and as disastrous—as that.

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Egyptian-born Omar El Akkad had studied in the United States and been 10 years a journalist when, in the summer of 2021, he became an American citizen. Covering the War on Terror in Afghanistan and at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay exposed him to the “deep ugly cracks in the bedrock of this thing they called “the free world.” Yet he believed the cracks could be repaired – “Until the fall of 2023. Until the slaughter.”

The slaughter was Israel’s razing of Gaza following Hamas’s rampage into Israel on October 7, 2023. The Israeli assault escalated to include massive bombardment, enforced hunger, destruction of hospitals and schools, bulldozing of dwellings deprivation of medical care, torture and the slaughter of tens of thousands of men, women and children. The onslaught caused Akkad to despair for Gaza’s Palestinians and for his adopted country, whose financing and weapons enabled it. He channelled that despair into the rage that inspired this excellent and troubling book.

One Day, Everyone Will Always Be Against This is neither polemic nor memoir, although it contains elements of both. Akkad’s prose is an appeal to readers not to wait for “one day” in the distant future to resist injustice not only in Gaza, but in the wider world: “In the coming years there will be much written about what took place in Gaza, the horrors that have been meticulously documented by Palestinians as they happened and meticulously brushed aside by the major media apparatus of the western world.” When the killing ceases, as with genocides of native Americans, Tasmanians, Namibia’s Hereros and Namas, Armenians, Jews and Tutsis, it will be too late.

Akkad’s condemnation of U.S. policy in the formerly-colonized world sits uneasily beside his choice to live and raise his children in the land that torments people who, like him, are brown or Muslim or doomed to live under American-supported Arab dictators or Israeli occupation. His rationale is as simple as it is understandable: “I live here because it will always be safer to live on the launching side of the missiles. I live here because I am afraid.”

He is unafraid to speak against the Biden administration’s veto of United Nations resolutions calling for ceasefires in Gaza (“untroubled when they say a ceasefire resolution represents a greater threat to lasting peace than the ongoing obliteration of an entire people”) and its termination of funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) that was the primary supplier of food, medical care and education to Palestinian refugees. Yet speaking out seems futile. As the author of the award-winning novel American War and sometime columnist, he does not spare himself and other writers for political impotence: “What is this work we do? What are we good for?” He quotes Egyptian-American poet Marwa Helal:

this is where the
poets will say: show, don’t tell
but that
assumes most people
can see.

Too many seek refuge in propaganda that what is being done to Palestinians is necessary. Akkad quotes an Israeli newspaper post’s headline from seven months prior to October 7: “When Genocide is Permissible.” Palestinians are killed every day in Gaza, “but the unsaid thing is that it is all right because that’s what those people do, they die.”

This book is not devoid of hope, which he finds in resistance that can be positive (“showing up to protests and speaking out”) and negative (“refusing to participate”). He praises students “risking expulsion and defamation, risking their livelihoods, their entire careers” and Jewish protestors “being arrested on the streets of Frankfurt, blocking Grand Central Station in New York, fighting for peace.” Their efforts, however ineffective, absolve them of the culpability of waiting for everyone else to be “against this.”

Charles Glass is a writer, journalist and broadcaster, who has written on conflict in the Middle East, Africa and Europe for the past 50 years. He was ABC News Chief Middle East Correspondent from 1983 to 1993 and has covered wars in Lebanon, Syria, Eritrea, Rhodesia, Somalia, Iraq, East Timor and Bosnia-Herzegovina. His many books have dealt with the First and Second World Wars as well as contemporary Middle East history.

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The United States is responsible for half of global spending on defense.  The Trump administration is committed to spending more than $1 trillion dollars on defense, and this figure doesn’t include the hundreds of billions devoted to the intelligence community, the Department of Energy, the Veterans’ Administration, and the Department of Homeland Security.  There is huge waste in the defense budget, and the major culprits in this department are the unneeded modernization of U.S. strategic weaponry and the so-called Golden Dome national missile defense.  The enormous cost and technological deficiencies of the U.S.-supplied, European-based missile defense system adds to the huge bloat in U.S. defense spending.

The Golden Dome missile defense system, as proposed by President Trump, is estimated to cost $175 billion. This cost is just for the initial three-year build, with ongoing operational and sustainment costs potentially pushing the total figure much higher. Some estimates from organizations like the Congressional Budget Office suggest a total cost between $161 and $542 billion over two decades. Since programs were first launched in the 1950s to build systems capable of intercepting incoming nuclear or conventional weapons, the United States has spent more than $400 billion on various missile defense programs.

Over the years, NMD has been a technical flop, having failed most of its tests.  The NMD system has flaws such as an adversary’s ability to use shorter range ballistic and cruise missiles that could “underfly” NMD.  The U.S. system could be defeated by numerous unsophisticated countermeasures and decoys that would overload the NMD system and create confusion.  Moreover, the U.S. system will never be tested in a realistic battle environment, and there is no assurance that a U.S. system could be effective against all of the many varieties of countermeasures.

Even a flawed NMD system will create instability in the nuclear community.  Russia would fear that the United States would feel protected by the so-called shield, and China would fear that its smaller nuclear arsenal would be compromised.  The level of instability could lead such non-nuclear states as Japan and South Korea to pursue nuclear weapons and thus weaken the Non-Proliferation Treaty that has kept the number of nuclear states to nine.  If unchecked, proliferation would have no logical stopping point.

Laser-driven systems, launched in the atmosphere or in outer space, have still not resolved their problems, despite billions of research dollars by various administrations over the past four decades.  Testing of these systems has failed to produce credibility, and some of the tests have created a false reality by programming the flight characteristics of the targeted missiles and artificially identifying the test missile from the decoy.

Finally, there are alternatives to national missile defense, particularly the pursuit of arms control and disarmament.  The United States missed a major opportunity in the 1990s and 2000s, when Russia was weak and open to a strategic dialogue and China was still committed to minimal strategic deterrence,  Moreover, the last arms control agreement between the United States and Russia—the New Start Treaty—is scheduled to expire in January 2026.

The U.S. retreat from arms control and renewed commitment to NMD will only worsen the problem of nuclear proliferation as nuclear nations will pursue greater deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles and non-nuclear states, such as Japan and South Korea, could consider the deployment of nuclear weaponry.  The absence of any nuclear dialogue at present and the strained relations between the United States and both China and Russia are major contributors to the current state of international instability.  The Trump administration’s cut backs at the Department of State and the National Security Council as well as the politicization of the intelligence community will make it more difficult for the United States to enter a serious and substantive dialogue on any aspect of arms control.

Our European allies are opposed to a U.S. missile defense system because of the unilateral abilities it will provide for U.S. security and the risk of greater proliferation,  President George W. Bush’s abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty marked a major setback to nuclear stability because it created an incentive to produce additional offensive weaponry.    Overall, there is no reason to invest in a national missile defense system, and no reason to believe that, if we do, U.S. strategic security will be enhanced.

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Donald Trump is putting in place the largest tax increase in the country’s history with his big import taxes (tariffs). We won’t know the full size of Trump’s taxes until after Liberation Day III (August 1), and probably not even then, but we already know that they are huge.

This is evident from the tariff revenue the government is collecting. In June the government collected $26.6 billion in tariff revenue. That is up from around $6 billion a month in 2024 before Trump’s tax hikes. The difference of $20 billion comes to $240 billion on an annual basis. Summed over a decade, as we do with other measures, this comes to $2.4 trillion.

This would be a substantial tax hike in itself, roughly $1,900 per household, but we know that the figure is almost certain to go much higher. Trump is threatening taxes of an additional 10 to 30 percent on imports from our major trading partners, such as Mexico, Canada, the European Union, and Japan. The tax take could easily end up being twice its current level, making Trump’s tariff frenzy by far the largest tax increase in US history.

While we have a great deal of evidence showing that US consumers will end up paying the bulk of these taxes, the Trump administration is in full denial mold. The first clear evidence of the tariffs’ impacts on consumer prices came with the release of June Consumer Price Index (CPI).

There were sharp price increases in some of the items subject to large tariffs. For example, apparel prices rose 0.4 percent, appliance prices rose 1.9 percent, and the price of visual and audio products increased by 1.1 percent.

The overall price index outpaced wage growth, pushing real wages down 0.1 percent for the month. While wage growth data are erratic, as is the CPI, wage growth has been slowing in recent months. A slower pace of wage growth, coupled with more rapid inflation, will mean a reduction in real wages and living standards, after healthy growth over the Biden years taken as a whole.

Many commentators (including me) have been surprised that we have not seen larger increases in prices from the tariffs. There are two factors that likely explain why the impact has not been larger so far.

First, there was a massive accumulation of inventories in the first quarter as businesses rushed to stockpile imports before the tariffs hit. We had been accumulating inventories at an annual rate of just over $50 billion in 2024. In the first quarter, we accumulated inventories at a $207 billion annual rate. Businesses are now selling from this stockpile, on which they did not pay the Trump tariffs.

The other main reason is that businesses do not know the tariffs will stick. Trump seems determined to do his reality TV show routine where we all find out the tariffs after the next commercial break. This uncertainty is likely discouraging businesses from jacking up prices as much as they might otherwise.

That reluctance can be seen clearly in the auto sector. Car prices actually fell by 0.3 percent in June. It is likely that many manufacturers are reluctant to raise prices based on tariffs that may not stick. They are prepared to take smaller margins, at least in the short term, rather than risk pricing themselves out of the market. Over the long term, if the tariffs remain in place, they will almost certainly raise their prices to pass on much, if not all, of the cost.

One issue that Trump has repeatedly raised is the possibility that exporters will absorb much of the tariff. Past experience shows this is generally not the case. We have limited data to date, but thus far it does not appear that exporters are absorbing the Trump tariffs.

Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers put out a study last week that tried to make the case that import prices were falling relative to domestic prices, and thereby claimed this meant importers were absorbing the cost of the tariffs in lower prices. This is not a serious way to measure the effect of tariffs for the simple reason that we expect tariffs to raise the price of domestically-produced goods as well.

One of the points of a tariff, and certainly one claimed by Trump, is that it will promote domestic industry. Part of that story is that by raising the price of imports, it will make it possible for domestic competitors to also increase their prices, thereby getting larger profit margins. The larger profit margins are supposed to lead to more investment and output growth.

Since the price of domestically produced goods are expected to rise in response to tariffs, showing the relative movement of the price of imported goods and domestic goods tells us nothing. Rather, we would be interested in how the price trends of imported goods and domestic goods changed following the tariffs. Here’s that picture.

As can be seen, the price of core (non-fuel, non-agricultural) imports had been rising gradually in the year prior to Trump’s election, when people first began to expect tariffs. It has continued to rise modestly in the eight months since the election. If there has been any slowing of this increase it has been very small.

On the other hand, there has been a clear reversal of course for core goods in the CPI. The price of these goods had been falling at roughly a 1.5 percent annual rate from March of 2023 to August 2024. Since August the price of core goods have risen at roughly a 1.0 percent annual rate. If the trend of falling prices from last August had continued, goods prices would be roughly 2.0 percent lower today. Since we spend over $6 trillion a year on goods consumption, this 2.0 percent difference would translate into $120 billion in annual savings, roughly half the size of the tariff revenue we were collecting in June.

These calculations are obviously crude, but they should give us a rough idea of magnitudes. What it looks like to date is that we are seeing a substantial impact of tariffs on consumer prices. We will almost certainly see more impact over time from the tariffs already imposed, if they remain in effect, and we will see a much larger impact if Trump goes through with the new round of taxes promised for Liberation Day III.

In short, we are in fact seeing the largest tax hike in the history of the country.

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

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As Trinidad and Tobago prepared for national elections in April 2025, politicians, economists, and analysts eyed the fate of a dragon that slept just off the country’s shores, in Venezuelan waters. The future of the massive gas field, known as “Dragon Gas,” had recently been dealt a heavy blow. As collaboration between Trinidad’s National Gas Company and Venezuela’s national oil company (PDVSA) had only been made possible due to Biden-era sanctions waivers for the latter, the election of Donald Trump cast doubt on the viability of the project.

The Trinbagonian government had made Dragon Gas the center of its promises to revitalize the country’s declining oil and gas industry and end the nation’s economic malaise. However, the Trump administration’s vow in late February to cancel all Biden-era sanctions waivers for Venezuelan fossil fuel projects made the government’s promises of future prosperity increasingly dubious. As Dragon Gas was effectively declared dead in the weeks leading up to the Trinbagonian elections, so too were the governing party’s chances at re-election. They were swept out of power in a landslide opposition victory.

A deeper look at this moment of intense contestation over subsoil extraction between petro-states can help shed new light on some crucial, less-understood aspects of fossil politics in an era of climate crisis. The fate of Dragon Gas reveals how economic sanctions, conventionally understood as targeted measures, actually cause powerful regional effects on unsanctioned countries. The death of Dragon Gas also foregrounds the severe limits of global south countries’ control over resources they ostensibly own, affecting their pursuit of alternatives to extractivism. The consequences of this failed project reveal one last thing: the political fall-out of fossil-fuel dependence gone awry, a type of “late petro-state politics” that calls into question our understanding of the United States itself.

The Latest Developments in the Oldest Petro-State

Trinidad is arguably the world’s oldest petro-economy. It was home to a well by 1857, two years before the drilling of the Pennsylvania well that is often treated as the birth of the modern oil industry. By World War I, the British colony of Trinidad was a primary supplier of oil to the British Empire, the world’s largest consumer of petroleum at the time.

Oil extraction in Trinidad began under colonial conditions. While Trinidad gained independence in 1962 and partially nationalized the oil industry during the 1970s, in practice the country does not entirely control the exploitation of its subsoil resources today. As the saga of Dragon Gas reveals, the country remains bound to the vagaries of the world’s largest producer and consumer of oil and gas, the United States.

The Dragon Gas Field, which would only require a short pipeline to pump gas into Trinidad’s robust natural gas-processing infrastructure due to its proximity, is an unprecedented project. It would enable Venezuela, for the very first time, to export its natural gas, which unlike oil, has to be processed to become a monetized commodity. It would also bolster Trinidad’s natural gas exports at a critical juncture. While it is among the world’s largest exporters of ammonia and liquefied natural gas (LNG), the country’s processing plants have been operating below capacity over the past decade, due in part to the United States’ commitment to fracking, which has converted the U.S. to a globally-dominant producer of natural gas. Though the project would radically restructure the power dynamics between the region’s oil producers, its fate has been ensnared in a web of sanctions: the project requires a permit from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)—the international punitive wing of the US Treasury.

Rather than seriously exploring alternatives to tenuous petro-development, the outgoing government had been focused on wooing the United States to secure sanctions waivers. Though the opposition party (UNC) has accepted the demise of the Dragon Gas project, they remain firmly committed to extractivism, promising to obtain natural gas from Guyana. Yet, as Guyanese officials have made clear to Trinidad’s new government, they also do not effectively control the fate of their natural gas. Guyanese officials have stressed that the decision regarding a potential gas pipeline to Trinidad is ultimately in the hands of US corporation Exxon-Mobil, which has expressed resistance to such a project, given that the much longer pipeline would still have to pass through Venezuelan waters.

The Trinidadian government has proceeded as if they can control the gas-flows into Trinidad by finding an unsanctioned supplier. Nevertheless, US sanctions, though framed as targeted punitive measures, produce wide-ranging regional effects. Even more to the point, however, the final decision on resource extraction often lies not with the governments of Caribbean countries that ostensibly “own” these resources, but with the private corporations that fund and execute their extraction.

A Petro-State Crisis Foretold

Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil famously asserted that the petro-state performs the “magic” of turning hydrocarbons into money, which is supposed to be spectacularly redistributed to the population. Ultimately, as Coronil himself was aware, this is not exactly the case.

Over a hundred years ago, private capital structured oil industries in Trinidad and Venezuela to reproduce dependency on export of a raw material. In Venezuela, Dutch and US companies offshored refining capacity to Curaçao and Aruba in the early 20^th century to ensure a separation between the labor of refinement and sites of extraction. Like Trinidad, Venezuela formed a national oil company during the oil boom of the 1970s, but it continued to be dependent on crude export and foreign capital. In addition, even at its peak, only a small percentage of the population was employed the oil and gas industries in Trinidad and Venezuela, though an upper-middle-class minority did benefit from professional employment.

The 2002-2003 Oil Strike of the early Chávez years further exacerbated Venezuela’s reliance on a very crude (pun intended) form of extractivism, leading to the flight of the upper-middle-class professionals who had provided the industry’s technical expertise. The fact that the country with the world’s largest reserves of oil experiences gasoline shortages and has to import refined oil has many causes, including current government mismanagement and US sanctions. Many of the roots of the current crisis, however, predate the Bolivarian revolution by decades.

Trinidad does not face an economic crisis of Venezuela’s magnitude. Nor is it as dependent on crude oil export: windfall profits from the Oil Boom were used to construct value-added processing infrastructure for natural gas. Even still, Trinidad’s declining production and economic downturn are conditioned by its geopolitical context. Trinidad sits next to Venezuela and Guyana, the former a heavily sanctioned petro-state and the latter a new petro-state that charges extremely low royalties on foreign companies. Meanwhile, the rise of the United States to the position of the world’s largest producer of oil and gas since 2014 has weakened the bargaining power of established petro-states in the Global South and diminished U.S. reliance on imported oil and gas.

The Rise of “Late Petro-State Politics”

“Petro-states” are often defined as countries whose economies are highly dependent on the extraction or export of oil. The term usually carries the connotation of governmental “corruption” that allegedly accompanies the “resource curse” of petroleum. As such, the label is often only applied to states in the Global South, thus reproducing a (neo)colonial discourse that sees non-Western states as deviating from liberal democratic models of good governance.

The United States has historically been exempted from the label, both because it has touted itself as a liberal democratic Western nation and because its consumption of oil from around 1950 to 2011 outstripped domestic production. This has obscured the longer role of U.S. companies in profiting off of foreign fossil fuels, as well as the role of U.S. consumer demand in sustaining systems of extractivism. Over the last decade, however, the United States has been the world’s largest domestic consumer and producer of oil and gas by large margins. If the petro-state, as scholar Michael Watts has suggested, is defined by “addiction” to oil, then the United States is a petro-state that is now doubly addicted.

Framing the United States as a “petro-state” casts the country’s current political crisis within a shared regional context of climate crisis. Old petro-states in the region are experiencing what I call “late petro-state politics.” As the ability to turn fossil fuels into money faces a present of climate crisis, but petro-states remain addicted to oil and gas, politics themselves become fossilized. In this temporality, the United States, buffered by its capital and imperial power, is living in what should be a distant past of “drill, baby, drill.” Venezuela, facing an accelerated crisis, is living in the future of declining production and economic downturn. To very different degrees, an increasingly authoritarian populism replaces redistributive petro-populism as the basis of the social contract in these countries, even as these countries currently face very different fortunes.

This is the case in Venezuela today, where the vast social welfare infrastructure of the Chávez years has rapidly collapsed since 2014, not coincidentally the year that the United States cemented its global dominance in oil and gas production. Authoritarian politics and transactional loyalties hold an eviscerated social contact tenuously in place. For politicians, nationalism beckons as a distraction for a disgruntled populace, as the country’s recently-intensified border dispute with Guyana makes clear.

While avoiding political crises as intense as those of its neighbor, since 2014, politics in Trinidad has increasingly depended on promises of spectacular fossil fuel wealth to sugar-coat the reality of a declining petro-economy. The former government simultaneously preached contradictory discourses of austerity and impending prosperity linked to Dragon Gas. After the project’s demise, nationalist populism beckoned. Kamla Persad-Bissessar, who was elected as Prime Minister in 2025 by promising renewed working-class prosperity, has blamed Trinidad’s economic and security crises on Venezuelan migrants and praised Trump’s policies.

While the United States has faced no comparable economic crisis, its current political leaders hype bellicose nationalism and anti-immigrant border security while making empty promises of imminent prosperity and greatness. In Trump’s 2025 inauguration speech, the president promised to “drill, baby, drill,” rooting this mirage of greatness in the “liquid gold beneath our feet” that would make the US “a rich nation again.” After bombing Iran, Trump’s only immediate solution to political and military quagmire was to repeat his command to “DRILL, BABY, DRILL,” this time in capital letters. Yet, this assertion of unparalleled petro-prosperity and extraction was late: the US is already the largest global producer of oil and gas. More importantly, this rise to petro-dominance has coincided with the unprecedented acceleration of a climate crisis that demands transition away from fossil fuels.

As the United States continues contributing to global climate crisis at accelerating levels, one can hardly expect Global South petro-states facing dire economic situations to abandon oil and gas extraction. However, petro-states the world over must now enact a profound transformation away from fossil fuel economies in an accelerating climate crisis. In the meantime, the fossilization of politics will only grow more acute.

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The deafening racket we’re getting here in Spain from US politics or, more like it, from Donald Trump’s chaotic and volatile presidency, tends to drown out other signals we’re getting. In this situation of the Trump administration’s blind developmentalism and explicit refusal to accept any limits or to engage in mature consideration of the policies it’s pushing, Zohran Mamdani’s victory as Democratic nominee for New York City mayor is a breath of fresh air. And for more than one reason. A Muslim, born in Kampala, Uganda, of Indian parents, his personal background and practised values thoroughly contradict everything that Trumpism and the far right are preaching and imposing around the world. It’s also a relief that someone who seeks to be mayor of a city that unquestionably symbolises urban modernity should campaign with the slogan “the affordable city”.

With Spain’s local elections less than two years away, many cities are showing clear signs that their traditional development models are foundering. The impact of the 2008 financial and real-estate crisis, combined with the far-reaching effects of digital platforms offering tourist accommodation and the historical failure in terms of a good public housing policy are driving many people out of cities. Yet the city is still a key place for opportunities, exchanges, and transactions leading to all kinds of groupings with evident environmental and mobility effects that are visible in large Spanish cities, all of which don’t have enough childcare services for the under-threes, and neither do they have plans in place for dealing with lengthening lifespan and its implications for the care system. Cities and their future models are still under the thrall of the expansionist approach of the beginning of the century, so the talk is only about growth, development, and doing more and more.

Mamdani’s message is different. If we understand the city as a community of people of all ages and origins, with a wide variety of lifestyles and forms of cohabitation, but also coexisting and sharing streets and squares, then what can we all afford? What is it that brings us closer to ways of being together and forms of recognition and respect? What might allow us to look to the future without turning our homes into fortresses, without being always on guard, and distrustful of everyone around us?

In electoral campaigns, the main parties are still clinging to a notion of local development closely linked with expansion of capital, real estate, and finance. It’s the message sent out by the technocrats and it’s still alive and well among the power elites. But there is room for another kind of development, the one that holds that true development, rather than focusing on economic indicators, enhances people’s freedoms and includes education, health, participation and, in brief, fosters each person’s dignity. In these times of crude neoliberalism in which social justice is shunned as a device that is said to take from the rich part of what they have achieved “by their own merits” to reward others who have failed “because of their demerits” and haven’t achieved their goals, these two ways of understanding development (accumulation of capital versus expanded rights and freedoms) will define in each election what democracy and rule of law mean for each voter.

The night Zohran Mamdani defeated former Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, and was declared the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York he said, “We have won because New Yorkers have stood up for a city they can afford. A city where … hard work is repaid with a stable life. Where eight hours on the factory floor or behind the wheel of a cab is enough to pay the mortgage. It is enough to keep the lights on. It is enough to send your kid to school. Where rent-stabilized apartments are actually stabilized. Where buses are fast and free. Where childcare doesn’t cost more than CUNY. And where public safety keeps us truly safe.” And he added, “And it’s where the mayor will use their power to reject Donald Trump’s fascism. To stop ICE agents from deporting our neighbors. And to govern our city as a model for the Democratic Party. A party where we fight for working people with no apology.”

It’s high time that cities and citizens started thinking about what we can afford. There is much at stake. It is only from proximity that we can work in a more integral, direct, and shared way to tackle the problems of individuals, families, and communities. It begins from the premise that a fulfilled life shouldn’t be a privilege reserved for a fortunate few but that it must be something that the city administration should strive to guarantee for everyone. The dignity of people is everybody’s business.

This column was originally published in Spanish at El Diario and was translated into English by Julie Wark. 

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Sudanese refugee camp in Chad. Photo: Henry Wilkins, VOA. Public Domain.

I met up with two Sudan experts last week. Over a year ago I was lucky enough to travel with one of them to the region, meeting over two dozen key Sudanese civilians. Last week the other expert introduced me to the head of a humanitarian group still working out of Sudan, a man not only deflated like everyone else by the continuing conflict, but also by sudden, savage US aid cuts. (‘I’m scared,’ he admitted.) Since the latest fighting began in 2023, the US has slashed over 83% of its USAID programmes. Clinics have shut. Soup kitchens have vanished. Preventable deaths have soared. And yet, Sudanese health workers carry on—without supplies, without pay.

Even if people really don’t believe the US should be bailing out non-Americans anymore, no time was allowed by the Americans for an alternative rescue plan.

Reacquainting myself with all this was dispiriting. Here however is an update of a conflict so seldom reported. In early July this year, Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) intensified attacks on El-Obeid, a key supply city briefly reclaimed by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in February. Artillery strikes on July 10–11 killed at least four civilians and displaced 700 households. Densely populated civilian areas—especially where internally displaced people (IDPs) shelter—are being hit hardest.

On July 11, the US-derided International Criminal Court (ICC) told the UN Security Council that war crimes and crimes against humanity are being committed in Darfur. This includes systematic rape, bombings, kidnappings, ethnic cleansing, and starvation. Most atrocities are attributed to the RSF targeting non-Arab communities, though SAF has also carried out indiscriminate aerial bombardments of civilian areas.

In late June, a strike on Al-Mujlad hospital killed over 40 people, including children and medical staff. Both sides denied responsibility, but officials from WHO—also US-derided—confirmed the attack. Survivors reported ‘aerial weapon signatures’ consistent with SAF tactics.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) says over 70% of Sudan’s health facilities are destroyed or barely functioning. Repeated attacks—many by SAF drones—have gutted emergency care. Cholera and other outbreaks are escalating, with hospital-related deaths now 60 times higher than in 2024. These are shocking facts.

Famine stalks Darfur. In Zamzam camp, at least one child dies every two hours. MSF reports a 46% rise in acute child malnutrition. Emergency food centres have shut as convoys are blocked or looted—often by both RSF and SAF-aligned militias. The person I met last week for the first time works tirelessly to keep food flowing through, even growing some of it there.

Since April 2023, 13 million Sudanese have been displaced: 8.8 million internally, 3.5 million abroad. Chad alone has absorbed 1.2 million, with camps like Adré and Tiné overwhelmed and underfunded—only 13% of required aid has arrived. Western politicians sometimes visit these camps—one former UK Africa minister shed a possibly well-timed tear on camera there. The truth is, since Brexit the UK is increasingly sidelined by the rest of Europe, often not in meetings at all, as well as ignored by an increasingly go-it-alone US. Meanwhile, on the ground, SAF checkpoints detain civilians, and RSF loots convoys and forcibly conscripts men in Darfur. Neither Europe nor the US appear either able or interested in doing something about this.

Between April and May 2025, RSF forces bombarded the Zamzam and Abu Shouk IDP camps near El-Fashir. Hundreds were killed, including over 20 children and nine aid workers. RSF then converted the sites into military staging zones and abducted scores of civilians and aid staff.

In Khartoum, RSF-run detention centres have been exposed as torture chambers. Survivors report starvation, beatings, rape, and executions. Over 500 disappearances have been logged in Omdurman alone. I’ve heard firsthand accounts from the Sudanese diaspora in northern England of relatives missing, arrested, or buried in unmarked graves.

On January 24, 2025, an RSF drone strike hit El-Fashir’s last functioning hospital, killing around 70 patients and staff. It marked the collapse of medical care in the region.

SAF abuses are well documented too. In SAF-held zones, detainees face arbitrary arrests, forced confessions, and torture. Aerial bombing campaigns have levelled entire neighbourhoods in Darfur and Kordofan. Human Rights Watch has called SAF tactics ‘blind’ and ‘collectively punitive.’

In April, the RSF declared a ‘Government of Peace and Unity,’ claiming control over RSF-held areas. RSF is led by Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti). His self-declared government now runs in parallel to the army’s Transitional Sovereignty Council. One rumour places him living outside Sudan. SAF leader and de facto leader of Sudan is Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Hemedti’s nemesis.
Frontlines meanwhile shift weekly. In June, RSF seized trade routes near Libya and Egypt. SAF retook roads between Dalang and Kadugli. On July 7, SAF claimed to have captured Kazgeil in North Kordofan.

Despite those trying so hard to help, the humanitarian response is largely failing. Only 14% of Sudan’s 2025 needs are funded. UN Special Rapporteur Michael Fakhri has warned of ‘dystopia’ unless peacekeepers protect aid. With over 360 aid workers killed in 2024—many in Sudan—humanitarian missions are now high-risk. Both SAF and RSF have blocked convoys, looted warehouses, and harassed staff.

To summarise: civilians are under siege. Heavy artillery, airstrikes, hospital bombings, and mass killings are escalating across Kordofan, Darfur, and Khartoum. Health systems are collapsing. Famine is rising. Displacement is historic—13 million people uprooted. Accountability is absent. ICC and UN investigators cite war crimes—especially by RSF—but no ceasefire or prosecution has stuck. Governance is splintering. The rise of a rival RSF government shows Sudan’s fracture, with frontlines replacing any unified rule. The aid model itself is under scrutiny, as air drops and calls for armed humanitarian protection reflect a crisis of trust in traditional logistics.

What’s urgently needed are ceasefires and protected corridors. Civilians and aid must be shielded under international supervision. Humanitarian missions need protection. Assaults on aid convoys should be treated as war crimes. Most crucially, international donors must scale up fast. Just 14% of needs met is unacceptable. And ICC investigations—without constant US sniping—must nonetheless swiftly translate into enforcement against perpetrators on all sides.

This isn’t a ‘romantic tragedy’ of collapse. It’s deliberate, preventable cruelty. And it’s unfolding now. The world has tools—ceasefire enforcement, aid corridors, legal action—but without decisive intervention, Sudan’s collapse will deepen, destabilising the wider region.

I gather most of the exiled civilian politicians I met are as determined as ever to return there, but there appears no sign of this happening any time soon. Former prime minister Dr Abdallah Hamdok once explained to me why a civilian government can be restored: ‘The seeds of democracy planted after 30 years of dictatorship are robust,’ he said. But what no one still knows is when and where it will be safe enough to plant the damned things.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

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.

– Henry Giroux, CounterPunch

The quote from Henry Giroux points to the corporatization of the university, where in the last 50 years, a professionalized administration has been growing while faculties have been shrinking or remaining stagnant. At the same time, tenured positions have been declining so that as of 2023 only 23% of all faculty jobs are tenured with 9% tenure-track. Unsurprisingly, this decline has resulted in a sharp decline of faculty governance (virtually an erasure) with the tenure-track number pointing toward the eventual demise of a tenured and thus protected faculty, unless unions are legalized at private universities, and at both private and public universities, where unions are legal, collective bargaining replaces the tenure void. Without effective collective bargaining, however, teaching will become a kind of piece work, which it is today for the large majority who do not have tenure or the chance of tenure on tenure-track.

While the national tenure statistics are dismal, a brief survey on ChatGPT suggests that first-tier research institutions still have a majority or significant minority of tenured faculty. This points to a two-tiered higher educational system, the upper tier of which (The Ivy League and its peers, such as Stanford, Duke, and UC Berkeley) produces the professional elites who ascend to political, social, and economic positions that form the nexus of national power. In spite of the significant numbers of tenured faculty at these institutions, their top-down corporate structure, their allegiance to donors and trustees, that is to money, rather than to faculty, students, and staff is dominant. Lacking ethical cores, corporate universities are chameleons: they take the color of the system in which they are embedded and that system has mandated, not without ongoing resistance, that the order of the day is the erasure of Palestine and with it the erasure of traditional Judaism for Zionism because the values of traditional Judaism support social justice and human rights and the welcoming of the stranger,—”You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Lev 19:34). 

In 1918, the economist Thorstein Veblen gave us the blueprint for the corporate university in his book The Higher Learning in America. In the corporate view, “the university is conceived as a business house dealing in merchantable knowledge, placed under the governing hand of a captain of erudition, whose office it is to turn the means at hand to account in the largest feasible output. It is a corporation with large funds, and for men biased by their workday training in business affairs, it comes as a matter of course to rate the university in terms of investment and turnover” (62). Within this system, administrators are the bosses, knowledge is a commodity, students are clients, and most scholar-teachers are bureaucrats who work within narrow niches of marketable information. Within this system the humanities and qualitative social sciences are marginalized because the knowledge these disciplines produce resists commodification and thus threatens the workings of the knowledge factory.

Through a system of rewards and punishments, the hierarchical corporate structure is built to resist solidarity, the kinship of its workers (faculty, students, and staff). The faculty are isolated one from another through the hierarchy of rank and through the relative isolation of disciplines in departmental structures. There is, of course, interdisciplinary work, but that work goes on primarily between individuals and never threatens to become communal, that is, to override departmental borders and disciplinary distinctions. Faculty focus is intensely individual and thus alienating. If one is on tenure-track, then for six years one is focused on achieving the reward of tenure and avoiding the punishment of dismissal, which will come, in the first place, if one does not meet specific publication standards in terms of quantity and quality: quality, to be determined by a jury of one’s peers both inside and outside of the institution, depends not only on the approved content of what one writes but on the prestige of where one publishes a book or articles. Experimental work is implicitly discouraged: for example, a communal project that is documented but not publishable in a print format. Such projects are at the heart of Indigenous research (see Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies). At first-tier universities, such as Cornell, where I teach, teaching comes second in the tenure track hierarchy: teaching evaluations from students are reviewed by the departmental faculty but unless there is a decided negative trend will not influence a strong publication record. Service to the department and the university is noted but negligible. After tenure, if one achieves it, one must focus on climbing the promotional ladder to associate and then full professor. This kind of career focus tends to blur one’s peripheral vision or, put another way, to stimulate one’s tunnel vision.

If one is not in a tenure-track or tenured job, that is, if one is a contingent faculty member, then one is simply focused on keeping one’s job without the scholarly benefits—primarily leaves and research support—that tenured and tenure-track faculty receive. Contingent faculty typically teach more than those tenured or on tenure-track because the research they do, if they have time to do it, cannot bring them the rewards of merit pay. Simply put, contingent faculty are the mirror image of tenured and tenure-track faculty. Though they typically have the same credentials (a Ph.D), they are paid to teach and not to do research, and they are paid substantially less than those increasingly few privileged to rise in the ranks. The status of contingent faculty implicitly alienates them from the tenured and tenure-track faculty, who have relatively secure positions, and makes the contingent vulnerable to arbitrary firing, particularly in this era if they support Palestinian rights.

For undergraduate students the road to the reward of a bachelor’s degree is equally isolating through a system of carrots and sticks that echoes the faculty path to tenure. The foundation of the system is grades reflected in the grade point average, which focuses students on quantitative rather than qualitative achievement, and the future (jobs, graduate school) rather than the present. The system of the major, coupled with the emphasis on grades, limits students’ ability to take a range of courses outside their discipline, that is, to learn in the broadest and deepest sense of the word. This is particularly true in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering , and Math), where major requirements strictly limit the number of courses outside the major that one can take. This structure, given the financial pressures (even for students with grants) instrumentalizes education. The question becomes, then, not what are we learning about ourselves in the world around us in order to change this world to provide a decent life for everyone. That is, we are not receiving an education in social justice. We are instead learning how to position ourselves, as competitive individuals, to make the best possible living, to get a return commensurate with our investment. In this corporate environment, the question of social justice is marginalized in very few courses, under fire now in the era of anti-DEI.

For graduate students, the job statistics previously cited tell the story: the end of academia. These students, being trained as scholar-teachers, typically within very narrow disciplinary limits,  when the job market has collapsed, are not being prepared for the market beyond academia, unless they are working in STEM fields where their studies may have practical applications.

Staff from middle managers (academic advisors,and administrative assistants) to service workers keep the university running, but are at the same time the most expendable employees, whose crucial importance to faculty and upper-tier administrators is virtually invisible. 

It is this corporate system, based on the alienation of all its constituencies from one another and the constituents of each constituency from each other, that explains why the universities capitulated so quickly to the weaponization of antisemitism and the attack on affirmative action (DEI). In this system, the constituents reflexively concede power to the top of the hierarchy, the upper administration, who answer to the trustees, who answer to the donors. At best, this leaves isolated pockets of resistance, which we have witnessed in sporadic student and faculty protests against the Israeli genocide in Gaza, typically met with violent suppression by university administrators, while an atomized faculty, students, and staff remain largely quiescent, locked in disconnected niches as the administration goes about its business of repression in order to keep trustees and donors content.

Within this structure, without broad faculty support, resistance can only function as a voice in the academic wilderness. Here, as a traditional Jew, and a critic of Zionism in my scholarship and teaching, I remember that the radical Jewish rabbi and Palestinian, Jesus of Nazareth, removed to the wilderness for 40 days and nights in order to prepare himself to organize the people for a ministry of resistance dedicated to social justice. So, I am reminded that keeping voices of resistance alive is crucial in a corporate structure that demands silence except when the managers speak. As one of the voices of resistance at a rally on May 9, 2025, sponsored by Cornell Grads for Palestine in memory of the 13,000 children murdered by Israel in Gaza (no doubt a conservative number),  I said the following,  which stands as an epilogue to the course, “Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance,” I taught in the spring of 2025, a course certified by the appropriate faculty committee but condemned publicly by the Cornell president:

Gaza brings home to us, if we needed it to be brought home, that for those in power in government and civil institutions, such as universities, much to their shame, human life, no matter how innocent, is infinitely expendable in order to keep that power. 

It is at this juncture that the words of the Jewish prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, reverberate for me, a Jew who has a child and grandchildren who are citizens of Israel. These words stand against the capitalist imperialism that drives the genocide in Gaza: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

The resistance against this imperialism is at bottom the struggle for one’s soul, the soul necessary to ground a revolution that will build a world in which children are no longer sacrificed for profit.

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Photo by Egor Filin

It’s often stated that useful collaboration with Russia is not possible.  Is this true?  Not really.  There are some areas where useful collaboration would be difficult due to Russian ideological commitments.  But there are areas where dialogue and diplomacy could be rewarding—such as arms control and disarmament—despite misunderstandings and disagreements that may occur along the way.  Soviet-American arms control talks over 20 years were protracted but ultimately successful.  Moscow was supportive of the negotiations for the Iran nuclear accord in 2015 as well as the removal of chemical weapons from Iraq in 2011.

Unfortunately, U.S. politicians, policy makers, and their media mainstream echo chamber are making it difficult to engage Russia because they exaggerate and worst-case both the scale of Russian weaponry and the menace of Russian expansionism and adventurism.  The fact that the Russian military has performed so poorly against a much weaker state on its borders is rarely taken into account.  The fact that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has strengthened the European alliance and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is typically ignored.

The lack of international experience of key personnel throughout the Trump administration complicates the picture. There is no Russian specialist in the administration, for example.  The fact that the United States and Russia are so different in terms of geography and history should lead us to review some fundamental truths of Russian foreign policy and national security policy in order to understand the possibility of a path forward.  This is particularly important at this juncture because the war in Ukraine has brought the United States and Russia into direct competition on a sensitive geopolitical front in Central Europe.. 

I’m putting forward these talking points in order to help understand factors that play a major role in formulating Russian behavior.  Today’s Russia bears the heavy burden of its historical baggage.  The authoritarian nature of the Russian state and the powerful role of the Russian government are unlikely to change.  State power will always dominate individual Russian rights; subjugation to the state will be seen as essential to national survival.  Mikhail Gorbachev is still viewed as a subject of scorn because his reforms suggested possible concessions to constitutionalism or individual rights, which would threaten Russian “greatness.”

Submission to the state is accepted, part of a blind faith that goes beyond patriotism.  Russians support strong, central authority that is all-powerful.  There is great support for Vladimir Putin despite his costly war, and even signs of nostalgia for Joseph Stalin and his iron rule.  Putin has successfully convinced the population that the current war is being waged against the United States and the West, not merely Ukraine.  The expansion of Western military power throughout East Europe will ultimately have to be addressed.

Russia’s technological and economic backwardness has always set it apart from the West.  Russia is the only European country that owes little to the common cultural and spiritual heritage of the West.  Russian exceptionalism is manifested in the idea of Russian moral superiority and the “idea” that Russians are able to suffer more than their Western counterparts.  The “idea” of Western freedom is viewed as an example of disorder and discontinuity.

Submission to the state is the accepted norm, and any weakness in central authority is seen as creating the possibility of disorder and discontinuity.  Freedom of the press, so essential to U.S. national security, is anathema to Russia. The Russian folk saying “Don’t carry garbage outside the hut” refers to the vulnerability associated with allowing adversaries to gain access to Russia weakness.

For these reasons, it is impossible to imagine Putin making major concessions to end the war with Ukraine, let alone to accept defeat.  Putin will not lose this war, and it hard to imagine Ukraine winning it.  Much has gone wrong for Russia’s military forces, including Ukraine’s ability to repel the initial Russian advance, Western unity to address the Russian challenge, and the strengthening of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.  The added membership to NATO (Sweden and Finland) adds an additional 830-mile border between Russia and NATO, and nearly every NATO member is increasing defense spending.  Even if Russia maintains control of most of that part of Ukraine it currently occupies, a smaller Ukraine will be a battle-tested military with a special relationship with the West.

The Russian-Ukrainian war can only be settled with dialogue and diplomacy, which could also be said for the current U.S. struggle with Iran regarding Tehran’s nuclear program as well as the Israeli-Palestinian struggle to provide a two-state solution in the Middle East.  Simply providing more weaponry to Ukraine and to Israel won’t lead to geopolitical success, and the continued use of military force against Iran won’t end the threat of Iran as a future nuclear weapons state.  In all of these scenarios, continued fighting will simply produce more death and destruction, and will make the international situation more unstable and unpredictable.  If Iran becomes a nuclear weapons state, there is the risk of greater proliferation of such states.

Sadly, there is no statesman in the global picture with the credibility and the standing to move these scenarios in a more peaceful direction.  We are in the hands of a diabolical triumvirate (Putin, Netanyahu, Trump) who lack the skills and the experiences to move the international situation in a more benign direction.  The absence of skilled U.S. diplomats at this particular juncture as well as the severe cuts at the Department of State and the National Security Council are particularly appalling and threatening.  The notion that Marco Rubio can serve as both Secretary of State and acting national security adviser is laughable.  The politicization of the intelligence community is another hindrance.

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