Several days ago it appeared that the Trump team had agreed to a “Memorandum of Understanding” put forward by negotiators working towards a ceasefire and an end to the US-Israel war on Iran. Then, on Friday, a 2-hour meeting ended with Trump declaring that he was not satisfied, and would not agree to a 60-day ceasefire pending further talks.
What’s going on? In a nutshell, since the beginning of “talks” Iran has proposed two stages, the first to create a ceasefire and end the killing, the second to discuss issues such as Iran’s nuclear program. The Trump people have sometimes accepted this, but now it seems that Trump wants all issues fixed at once, or no ceasefire and perhaps a return to war.
We recall that this war is a war of aggression, not in response to some attack on the US or Israel by Iran, but an attack out of the blue by Israel and the US, while US talks with Iran were on-going. And Iran’s response to the attacks has been to “close” the Strait of Hormuz, causing a shortage of oil, fertilizer, and other things that hurt the world’s economy. And so we see that Trump has painted himself into a corner: he can’t continue the war without greatly damaging himself and his political party, and he can’t end the war without this appearing as a defeat.
It is also significant that the Iranian negotiating demands, to be accomplished at the beginning of talks, not later, is that Israel must end its invasion of Lebanon. Israel now controls the southern 20 percent of Lebanon, bombs civilian areas continuously, and appears to be re-establishing a permanent zone of Israeli expansion. In demanding an end to this war, we should support Iran’s demand that the attacks on Lebanon also end.
This war, stupid and illegal from Day One, has little support in the world or the USA. We demand that it end immediately, that we also end Israel’s war on Lebanon, and that the war does not restart. Call our congressional reps - Latimer - (202) 225-2464, Sen. Gillibrand - (202) 224-4451, Sen. Schumer – (202) 224-6542, and Lawler - (202) 225-6506. Ask that they speak out against this war. Thanks.
SOME ESSAYS ILLUMINATING OUR TIMES
With Iran Deal in Limbo, Do US War Crimes Doom the World to Endless War?
By Medea Benjamin and Nicholas J.S. Davies, Code Pink [May 28, 2026]
---- On May 24, Iran rejected President Trump’s latest fake peace deal, confirming that he had misrepresented what Iran had agreed to and that the two sides are still very far apart, on nuclear enrichment, on control of the Strait of Hormuz, on peace in Palestine and Lebanon, and on lifting US sanctions, paying war reparations and Iran’s $100 billion in frozen assets. Iran’s conditions for a peace agreement are necessarily uncompromising, in response to the US record of using negotiations as cover for sneak attacks, and the charade of one-sided “ceasefires with Israeli characteristics,” in which the US and Israel routinely ignore and violate every ceasefire they agree to, including the present ones in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran. Since no agreement with the United States or Israel is worth the paper it’s written on, it’s hard to imagine an agreement that would really protect Iran from future attacks. Without a more radical change in US policy, the United States and Israel will keep attacking Iran, in open violation of the UN Charter, no matter what they all agree to. [Read More]
To Break the Siege – [The Flotilla to Gaza]
By Piper French, New York Review of Books [May 31, 2026]
---- When a ship sends out a Mayday signal, nearby vessels have a duty to come to its aid. This is a core tenet of maritime law. But on Monday, May 18, when a group of about fifty boats in international waters started radioing out their distress calls, nobody responded. Cyprus, the country nearest and thus responsible for their safety, took no action. Soon armed individuals drew up alongside the boats, boarded, subdued the passengers, and brought them aboard prison ships, where, they later recounted, they were beaten, tased, shot with rubber bullets and pelted with stun grenades, taunted, sexually humiliated, and held in stress positions for hours on end. This fleet had crossed no invisible line, committed no act of aggression; it was passing through a part of the Mediterranean that yachts and shipping liners regularly traverse. That such violence was permitted to occur becomes plausible only once you consider that the vessels had been on the last leg of their journey toward Gaza, in the hopes of breaking Israel’s total blockade of the strip and bringing supplies to the besieged territory, and were intercepted by the Israeli navy. … As of May 22 all 430 people who were taken have been released, many testifying that they suffered or witnessed beatings and other forms of abuse. The American journalist Alex Colston, who documented his journey toward Gaza and subsequent detention for Zeteo, described a guard methodically wrenching his metal handcuffs until he lost consciousness from the pain. There have been at least fifteen individual allegations of sexual assault. [Read More] ALSO OF INTEREST is this report from US Colonel Ann Wright, “Rape, Assault, Abuse,” LA Progressive [May 26, 2026] [Link]
NEWS NOTES
Close students of the mainstream media may be unaware of the many successful labor strikes and other labor action in recent months. New Yorkers saw the Long Island Railroad strike post a victory, and the housekeepers in NY hotels only had to threaten a strike to win big pay raises. For more hopeful news, check out Labor Notes and this month’s article by editor Alexandra Bradbury, “Green Shoots of Hope in the Labor Movement” [Link].
Delaney Hall, an ICE prison in Newark now stuffed with immigrants on hunger strike and work strikes, has been in the news recently, thanks to strong protests from family members and people from the community, including Newark political leaders. For an overview of the issues and the protests, there was good coverage this week from Democracy Now! and The Intercept.
As the legislative session in Albany wrapped up, immigrants and their supporters won a partial victory, as limits were placed on collaboration between state and local authorities, including police, and immigration police, ICE and the Border Patrol, etc. However, the demand that “informal” cooperation between local police and federal authorities stop was not passed. A rally protesting this failure was held in Yonkers on Friday, A useful article about the issues and the legislative maneuvering was recently published in New York Focus.
And finally, a happy birthday shout out to Randolph Bourne. While still in his 20s, in the years preceding and during the First World War Bourne became one of the leading voices against the idiocy of the War and especially the collaboration of his fellow intellectuals with the BS promises of Woodrow Wilson to fight “a war to end all wars.” His sharp criticism made him unemployable in the arts world, while the Sedition Act of 1918 made it a crime to criticize the Constitution, the government, the military, or the flag. When his insights and voice were most needed, he was one of a million victims of the Influenza epidemic of 1918. Towards the end of his life he wrote: “The State is not the nation, and the State can be modified and even abolished in its present form, without harming the nation. On the contrary, with the passing of the dominance of the State, the genuine life-enhancing forces of the nation will be liberated.” To learn more about this interesting man, go here.
CFOW NUTS & BOLTS
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Weather permitting we meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) The Northwest Yonkers Neighbors for Black Lives Matter holds a Monday afternoon vigil at 5:30 pm at the corner of Warburton Ave and Odell. The CFOW newsletter can be read on Substack, and is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook group. Another Facebook group focuses on the climate crisis. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. If you would like to support our work by making a CONTRIBUTION, please make out your check to “Frank Brodhead,” write “CFOW” on the memo line, and send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks.
REWARDS!
Stalwart newsletter readers know that I admire genius woman Elle Cordova and have put several of her music sessions, with her partner Toni Lindgren, in the newsletter. Today I was listening to their playlist of “covers” of other musicians’ music, some of which I like at least as well as the original. So here, for you to decide, are Elle & Toni’s covers of “Octopus’ Garden” (The Beatles); “You Never Can Tell” - “C’est la Vie” (Chuck Berry); “Don’t think Twice” (Bob Dylan); “Whose Bed Has Your Boots Been Under?” (Shania Twain); and “Cold, Cold Heart” (Hank Williams). Lots more songs on Elle Cordova’s You Tube channel.
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW WEEKLY READER
FEATURED ARTICLES & ESSAYS
The Pleasure of Cruelty: We Are all Palestinians Now
By Yoav Litvin, Informed Comment [May 30, 2026]
---- Since October 7th, 2023, Israeli soldiers and civilians have posted videos documenting heinous crimes: murder and torture of incapacitated, disabled and blindfolded Palestinian detainees, murder of journalists and medical personnel, use of dogs as tools of abuse, destruction of civilian infrastructure, desecration of cemeteries and mockery of Muslim and Christian clerics and sacred sites, particularly in Jerusalem, Gaza and Lebanon. Recent testimonies from Gaza-bound flotilla activists detained by Israeli authorities are consistent and disturbing: physical and psychological abuse, denial of medication, water and toilet access, constant looping of Israel’s national anthem, sexual assault and what multiple witnesses describe as Israeli captors laughing: visibly, sadistically enjoying themselves. … This is not a new Israeli tactic; Palestinians have been reporting on their subjection to Israeli sadistic cruelty for years. Now, however, this barbaric behavior has been exposed with its systematic implementation on white, Western allies of the Palestinian cause. … This is a feature, not an aberration of colonial systems, which continuously extend their dehumanization efforts to enable expansion of territorial targets for theft and oppression. What’s new is the visibility: we now witness it on our screens across the world, and so far the international community has declined to confront it. [Read More]
Some Films About the Vietnam War
---- While some newsletter readers remember the Vietnam War only too well, younger readers will not. The “Kanopy.com” platform offers several dozen films about the war FREE to those with a Westchester library card. I watched some this week, and recommend “In the Year of the Pig,” (1968) my favorite among the several excellent films that tried to explain the war to an incipient antiwar movement; ““The War at Home: Resistance to the Vietnam War” (1979), which follows the arc of a growing (very large) antiwar movement in Madison, Wisconsin; and
“Sir! No Sir!” the drama of antiwar action within the US military – both in the USA and in Vietnam itself – perhaps the antiwar straw that broke the back of the Empire and its war. Kids of all ages: you won’t learn this stuff in school.
We were doing well when I left – [The Afghanistan War]
By Tom Stevenson, London Review of Books [May 21, 2026]
---- The basic story of the war can be told in relatively simple terms. A complacent empire struck at from its furthest periphery sought brutal retribution and enacted a bloody occupation. Eventually it grew tired and withdrew, leaving behind no great transformation. Many of those who had been involved in the war’s inception saw the chaotic Nato withdrawal in August 2021 as a betrayal both of Afghanistan and of the project of American power in the world. There are still eccentrics who believe the occupation failed because the US and its lieutenants were insufficiently committed to terrorising the locals. As with Iraq, the war in Afghanistan is not yet widely acknowledged to have been a crime rather than just a mistake, but even the political establishment in the West sees it as a cautionary tale. … Who would want to rescue the reputation of the war in Afghanistan? Despite the efforts of some of those involved, its legacy is unlikely to improve with time and scrutiny. But bitter tastes fade. It’s possible to imagine a future in which disaster in Iran flatters by comparison the war in Afghanistan. The war was destructive for Afghanistan, but it wasn’t all that bloody for the home troops. And think of all the civilising we did. The tactics of mass torture and humanitarian bombing campaigns might be needed again. The damage the Afghanistan war did to America’s global position would be insignificant compared with the worst outcomes of the present war in Iran. Perhaps Afghanistan will once again come to be seen as a model rather than a warning. [Read More]
THE WAR ON PALESTINE
The Theatre of Punishment – [Gaza]
By Vijay Prashad, Znet [May 29, 2026]
---- The treatment of the flotilla activists by Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir was shocking only to those who continue to clothe colonial violence in the soft language of security. There is now a mountain of evidence before humanity: Gaza has become not merely a place under siege but a geography of calculated despair, where starvation and bombardment have been converted into instruments of political management. The activists aboard the flotilla were not armed combatants, nor were they soldiers threatening invasion. They were international volunteers, human rights advocates, doctors, parliamentarians, and organisers attempting to break the siege imposed on Gaza. Their journey was political, moral, and humanitarian. Yet the Israeli state met them with humiliation, detention, and theatrical violence. [Read More]
Israel Has Killed 890 Palestinians in Gaza Since the ‘Cease-fire’ Began. Here’s How
By Amira Hass, Ha’aretz [Israel] [May 25, 2026]
---- As of [last] Sunday morning, no official report could be found on the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit website, although a security source confirmed that an attack had occurred in the area. From this, it can be inferred that this was not a killing of senior Hamas operatives of the type the IDF likes to boast about. The website does contain reports of hits on “terrorists” in the preceding days…. The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit also does not report on a series of bombings and shellings across the Strip in recent days that especially hit the Al-Bureij and Nuseirat refugee camps. These followed calls for people to evacuate their homes. One such bombing of Nuseirat on Sunday morning claimed the lives of 38-year-old Mohammed Ibrahim Abu Mallouh, his 36-year-old wife Alaa Zaqlan, and their one-year-old son Osama. Thus, as of Sunday morning, the number of those killed by Israel in the Gaza “cease-fire” has reached 890. The number of wounded is 2,677. [Read More]
(Video) The True Story of Israel’s Creation: Debunking Israel’s Foundational Lies from Their Leaders’ Own Mouths
By Muhammad Shehada [May 19, 2026] – 23 minutes
---- This short film exposes the true story of Israel’s creation, entirely through the words of its own founders. For decades, Israel’s lies have been carefully designed to demonize its victims. To ensure that no matter the crimes it commits, the children it slaughters, the world remains incapable of empathy for Palestinians, or at best, treats it with the same apathy that has allowed this to go on for as long as it has. On the 78th anniversary of its creation, it’s time the world knew that Israel’s past is not different from the brutal present the world is finally seeing.[See the Program]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday instructed his military to seize fully 70% of the Gaza Strip, according to Al Jazeera,” from Informed Comment [May 2026] [Link]; “The time for a U.S. arms embargo on Israel is now,” by Josh Ruebner, Mondoweiss [May 29, 2026] [Link]; and “‘Buffer Zone’ Is Media’s Euphemism for Israeli Occupation” – [Gaza & Lebanon] – By Gregory Shupak, FAIR [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting] [May 19, 2026] [Link].
THE WAR ON UKRAINE
The US suggests it might dump talks as Russia escalates war – [Ukraine]
By Anatol Lieven, Responsible Statecraft [May 26, 2026]
---- The warning from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to the U.S. and European governments to evacuate their diplomats and citizens from Kyiv before Russia launches “systematic strikes” marks a drastic escalation in the Ukraine conflict — with a serious risk of drawing the Washington and NATO into direct conflict with Russia. It most probably means that Russia intends to use Oreshnik hypersonic ballistic missiles to strike the underground headquarters in Kyiv where U.S. and European officers have been helping the Ukrainian armed forces to target Russia with missiles and drones. … We are therefore now facing the imminent prospect of a major crisis, a major dilemma for the Trump administration. This means that far from abandoning the peace process, the Trump administration needs urgently to re-engage, and to put intense pressure on European NATO allies to make offers in the area of sanctions relief, energy purchases, and normalization of relations that could lead Russia to end the war. … If the Trump administration does not re-engage in the peace process, then within the next week or so it may likely face a choice between a humiliating retreat and a much deeper and more dangerous military commitment to Ukraine, with the serious possibility of direct war with Russia. [Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES
Trump’s Crackdown on Legal Immigrants Betrays America
By Alex Poppe [May 27, 2026]
---- My dad was a World War II refugee. He and my grandmother came to the US in 1947 with assistance from the International Refugee Organization (IRO), a precursor to today’s United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHRC). With the current changes to immigration laws, would they have been able to become US citizens today? When President Trump returned to office in 2025, he implemented a historic crackdown on legal immigration. His administration set the refugee admission ceiling at 7,500 people for FY 2026, the lowest level in the US refugee resettlement program’s 45-year history. For comparison, in FY 2024, the ceiling was 100,000 people. Between October 2025 and April 2026, the US resettled 6,069 refugees: 6,066 were white Afrikaners from South Africa; three refugees were from Afghanistan. Recently, the president proposed raising the refugee admission ceiling to 17,500, with the following caveat: 10,000 of those spots are to be given to white South Afrikaners. … The United States is undergoing a major social change for the first time in its 250-year history. In 1960, 88% of Americans considered themselves non-Hispanic whites. In 20 years, this number will fall to 49%. The US is on the precipice of transitioning from a white majority democracy to a white minority democracy. Immigration is the primary driver of this demographic change. … It’s easy to dismiss the President’s new stance on immigration as merely Draconian red tape, but to do so drastically underestimates the dangerous precipice on which American culture balances. The president aims to reverse the tide of demographic change, and in doing so, he ignores how much our multi-racial melting-pot roots make America great. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
Notes From an ICE Chaser
By Amanda Moore, The Nation [May 30,2026]
---- I never really intended to cover immigration in any capacity, especially not with video. I’m a writer whose work focuses on the far right. But when President Trump brought the National Guard and ICE to Washington, DC, I started recording as much of their activities as I could. This meant recording federal agents lurking around Metro stations, apprehending people for smoking weed, and overseeing roadblocks conducted by the local police. After a few weeks, a friend who had followed ICE in DC with me suggested I go to Broadview, a village outside Chicago with an ICE facility that was central to Operation Midway Blitz, the administration’s name for the surge of federal agents into Chicago, ostensibly for immigration enforcement. By 8 am on my first day there, agents had gassed the handful of protesters who had gathered outside numerous times and had drawn handguns. After one weekend in Broadview, I could not imagine caring about any other story. [Read More]
State Terror Seeks to Dismantle the Gains of Collective Struggle
By Dawn Marie Paley, NACLA [April 15, 2026]
---- The case against organizers in Texas is the first in which Antifa-linked terrorism charges have been applied in the United States, placing it at the leading edge of a campaign to criminalize critical speech and local dissent across the country. It recasts a group of mostly young people who made zines, wore patches, and held protests against ICE as a threat to national security, and serves as a dissuasive warning against anyone considering taking action—however symbolic—against the Trump regime. On September 22, 2025, Trump signed an executive order designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, even though Antifa isn’t an organization, and there is no legal basis for the domestic terror label under U.S. law. Short for Antifaschistische Aktion, Antifa was founded in Germany in 1932 to fight against the Nazis. The name was revived in the 1980s by anarchists seeking to confront the far right, and today is used to refer to militant anti-fascism more generally. [Read More]
The Race to Build AI Data Centers — Before the People Can Protest
The Intercept Briefing [May 29 2026]
---- Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary has been making the media rounds defending the 40,000-acre data center project he’s backing in northern Utah. Dismissing residents’ concerns over the environmental impacts and water demands of the proposed project in the drought-stricken Great Salt Lake region, O’Leary has claimed protesters are “bused in,” “misinformed,” and alleged that China has had a hand in orchestrating the public push back. “The Stratos project in Utah is an example of data center largesse,” says Jim Walsh, the policy director of Food and Water Watch, an organization leading a campaign to stop the rapid development of data centers across the country. As proposed, the project would be more than double the size of Manhattan. Walsh adds, “It’s important to recognize that the impacts of this data center go beyond the water and energy concerns that impact the residents of Salt Lake. They’re going to be pulling gas from the Ruby Pipeline, and this project is going to perpetuate more fracking in the Western U.S., a practice for extracting natural gas that uses extreme amounts of water.” [Read More] – ALSO OF INTEREST is “The ripple effects of organizing against data centers,” by Victoria Valenzuela, Waging Nonviolence [May 28, 2026] [Link]; and “Rockland County residents rallied to oppose the Orangeburg Data Center,” with pictures from Erik McGregor [May 27, 2026] [Link].
OUR HISTORY
Birthright Citizenship Existed Before the Fourteenth Amendment
By Van Gosse, History News Network [May 29, 2026]
---- Within the next few weeks, the Supreme Court will rule on the Trump administration’s argument that the Fourteenth Amendment’s opening sentence — “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside” — only applied to formerly enslaved persons and their children. This is self-evidently a spurious claim, but the arguments that countered it, defending the Fourteenth Amendment as a new universal right in 1868, miss some crucial history: free Black people had enjoyed birthright citizenship in much of the United States since its founding. The Fourteenth Amendment’s explicit purpose was to extend the birthright principle into a uniform national citizenship, and the men arguing for it built upon a long tradition in doing so. … It should not surprise us that today’s MAGA Republicans are again challenging the birthright principle. That is their natural inheritance, as demagogic racial populists in the mode of Andrew Jackson. With this strand in U.S. politics surfacing yet again, we should remember that notions of racial or ethnic caste have repulsed genuine democrats since the Founding, whatever their party label. [Read More]
The Criminalization of Gleaning
By Peter Linebaugh, Counterpunch [May 29, 2026]
---- The whole history of capitalism begins with the expropriation of people from the land, turning it into money and them into nothings. The passage from nothing to money is conducted by work, and yet people will cling on and find a way out of no way, because no expropriation is ever total. This is the evidence of remainders, or broadly speaking, the evidence of gleaning. The essays in Who Gets the Remainder? The Ethics and Politics of Gleaning, have an amazing range of subjects from roadside exchanges of siphoned fuel in East Africa, to the ‘three stalks’ rule of the Hebrew Mishnah, to the scrap metal dealings in Tbilisi, Georgia and Nairobi, Kenya, to artisanal gold mining in Burkina Faso, to Danish ‘fusk’, or Soviet ‘homers’, to the repurposing of beams, joists, and bannisters of abandoned houses in the American rust belt. Xenia Cherkaev and Amiel Bize provide an introduction to these exceptions to the usus, fructus, and abusus of private property. Indeed, such exceptions are the basis of another world of creativity, moral or ethical value, and belonging. What is waste or wild, what is tacitly whispered, what is illicit, sometimes criminalized, and often winked at, all take what was abused and put it to use, even fructifying it as forms of the commons. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST – Near the end of her life, France’s “New Wave” pioneering film director Agnès Varda became interested in the gleaners” of present-day France. Her film, “The Gleaners and I,” can be seen on-line; for a preview/trailer (5 minutes), go here. Our correspondent from the northern boroughs informs me that modern-day US gleaners are called “freegans.” So now you know.
