Yesterday dozens of Palestinians were killed in the southern Gaza city of Rafah and at the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza. This morning 65 died in Israeli attacks on central Gaza. And so it happens every day. Many people are killed by “quad-copters,” small drones flying overhead, controlled by Israeli forces far away, firing at people trying to obtain food, or in the case of the refugee camp, trying to flee the area blockaded by Israel for the past month, cut off from all food and medical supplies. All of this is live-streamed.
The Gaza Ministry of Health reports that 43,000 have been killed in the 400-day war, and more than 100,000 have been injured. Other reports say that up to 300,000 have been killed. The United Nations reports that thousands of people in the north face starvation, especially children and the elderly. There are no functioning hospitals, and UN refugee staff are prevented from reaching the area. All universities and most schools have been destroyed. There is little water and no sewerage treatment. Though winter is coming fast, hundreds of thousands take shelter in flimsy tents. The possibility of rescue seems hopeless.
History will record that this slaughter took place in full view of the “civilized world.” While tens of millions of people around the world protest and watch in horror, our political leaders ignore our cries and speak of Israel’s “right of self-defense.” UN agencies have described what is happening in Gaza as “genocide,” a claim supported by agencies such as Human Rights Watch. And as noted below, sending US aid to Israel now breaks several US laws, yet the Biden people lie and say that Israel is in “full compliance” with US human rights guidelines.
As the Biden people prepare to hand off leadership of “the free world” to the unhinged Trump cartel, it is possible that Israel’s project of ridding Gaza of its Palestinian residents will be achieved. The annexation of the West Bank to Israel, and the “cleansing” of Palestinians from the Occupied Territories is on the agenda. Will the USA ever live down the shame of its role in this genocide?
[USEFUL READING ON THIS EDITORIAL]
(Video) Report from Gaza: Palestinians Feel They Are Being “Slowly Exterminated” in Israel’s Genocide
From Democracy Now! [November 14, 2024]
---- We go to Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, where we get an update from Arwa Damon of the humanitarian organization INARA on “deteriorating conditions” as Palestinians are “slowly exterminated” by disease and starvation caused by Israel’s brutal siege. A special U.N. committee has found that Israel’s actions in Gaza are “consistent with the characteristics of genocide.” Palestinians in Gaza feel that “they are living through their own annihilation,” says Damon. “There is actually a real sense that the worst is yet to come.” [See the Program] ALSO OF INTEREST is “Human Rights Watch: Israel's Deliberate Displacement of Gazans Amounts to War Crimes,” [November 16, 2024] [Link].
What 'Lame Duck' Biden Can Do to Stop the Gaza War
By Dahlia Scheindlin, Haaretz [Israel] [November 13, 2024]
---- Six months have passed since U.S. President Joe Biden began advocating for a cease-fire in Gaza. President-elect Donald Trump has also said the war must end. So will Biden uses the "lame duck" period ahead of Inauguration Day to take a dramatic step toward ending the war in Gaza? … However, there is a much more mainstream and feasible call to apply existing U.S. laws limiting the overwhelming flow of weapons to Israel, when these are employed in severe human rights violations. There is an extremely compelling case for doing so: it's U.S. law. [Read More]
What Rough Beast? – [President Biden’s Gaza Policy Leaves the Middle East in Flames]
By Juan Cole. Tom Dispatch [November 10, 2024]
---- Unlike Carter, who was stymied by the Iranian hostage crisis, or Bush, who faced a popular Iraqi resistance movement, Biden’s woes weren’t inflicted by an enemy. Quite the opposite, it was this country’s putative partner, the Israeli government, that implicated the president in its still ongoing genocide in Gaza, as well as its disproportionate attacks on Lebanon and Iran, for which Biden steadfastly declined to impose the slightest penalties. Instead, he’s continued to arm the Israelis to the teeth. By his insistence on impunity for the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden has left the Middle East in flames and the U.S. and the world distinctly in peril. [Read More]
Peace Action
CFOW is an affiliate member of Peace Action, the largest antiwar network in the US. This week Peace Action urges us to be aware of/alarmed by two pieces of legislation coming before Congress. The first is a Resolution in the House of Representatives - HR 4595 – that would give President Trump the power to kill nonprofit organizations by removing their “tax exempt” status. This would threaten the existence of many liberal advocacy organizations, including some in Westchester. Please call you member of Congress on this. (Bowman – 202-225-2464). The second is a set of Resolutions sponsored by Bernie Sanders and other Senators - explained here – that would block the Biden plan to send an additional $20 billion worth of weapons to Israel. Sanders explains that "there is a mountain of documentary evidence demonstrating that these weapons are being used in violation of U.S. and international law." Please call our Senators – Schumer (202-224-6542) and Gillibrand (202-224-4451) -- and tell the person answering the phone that you want the Senator to support Sanders’ “Joint Resolutions of Disapproval” regarding sending weapons to Israel. Thanks!
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.) A "Black Lives Matter/Say Their Names" vigil is held in Yonkers on the first Monday of the month from 5:30 to 6:00 pm at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. Our newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. Another Facebook page 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!
This week’s Rewards for stalwart readers come from the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. For contemplation and renewal, I hope you will enjoy these performances of his "Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten" and his "Fratres.” [h/t FA]
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW WEEKLY READER
FEATURED ESSAAYS
Will Trump End or Escalate Biden’s Wars?
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies, Code Pink [November 13, 2024]
---- When Donald Trump takes office on January 20th, all his campaign promises to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours and almost as quickly end Israel’s war on its neighbors will be put to the test. The only conflict where peace negotiations seem to be on the agenda is Ukraine. In April, both Vice President-elect JD Vance and Senator Marco Rubio voted against a $95 billion military aid bill that included $61 billion for Ukraine. … So a Trump effort to cut funds to Ukraine could run up against a bipartisan congressional effort to keep the war going. The Middle East, however, is a more difficult situation. … Trump seems as unlikely as Biden to cut U.S. weapons to Israel, despite public opinion polls favoring such a halt and a recent UN human rights report showing that 70% T the people killed by those U.S. weapons are women and children. [Read More]
Notes on Fighting Trumpism
By Robin D. G. Kelley, Boston Review [November 2024]
---- I’m less interested in conducting a postmortem of this election and tweaking the Democrats’ tactics than trying to understand how to build a movement—not in reaction to Trump, but toward workers’ power, a just economy, reproductive justice, queer and trans liberation, and ending racism and patriarchy and war—in Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Haiti, and elsewhere, in our streets masquerading as a war on crime, on our borders masquerading as security, and on the earth driven by the five centuries of colonial and capitalist extraction. We have to revive the idea of solidarity, and this requires a revived class politics: not a politics that evades the racism and misogyny that pervades American life but one that confronts it directly. It is a mistake to think that white working-class support for Trump is reducible to racism and misogyny or “false consciousness” substituting for the injuries of class. ]Read More]
Torn Apart [Immigration]
By Patricia J. Williams, New York Review of Books [December 5, 2024 issue]
---- Kidnapping children to punish parents is a mythic kind of barbarity. A witch places a curse on a family’s favorite daughter. An evil dragon devours the firstborn babe of the king. It’s biblical: damning the son for the sins of the father. It’s what crime syndicates do: threatening the bodily integrity of a beloved as “incentive” for a debtor to cough up ransom. We view such bargaining as criminal when extracted by humans—and even when the threat is issued by the gods. What, then, to make of a constitutional democracy that builds such a payment scheme into its very system of justice? What to make of a political regime that explicitly designs an immigration policy for removing children from parents just to “disincentivize” future migrants from seeking asylum within its borders? That, of course, is the essence of the “zero tolerance” child separation program begun under President Donald Trump. ]Read More]
Antisemitism versus Anti-Zionism
By Stephen R. Shalom, ZNet [November 13, 2024]
---- We are living in the midst of one of the great humanitarian tragedies of our lifetimes. Tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children — especially women and children — are being slaughtered in Gaza. Thousands more are being killed in Lebanon. They are dying from bombs, provided to the Israeli military by the United States government. They are dying from the intentional cutting off of food aid and medical supplies. They are dying buried under tons of rubble. They are dying from the systematic destruction of their health care system. What can be done about this? Israel could agree to a ceasefire. The United States could cut off the massive flow of weaponry. Washington could stop giving Israel diplomatic cover at the United Nations for its crimes. But, no, Israel and its supporters in the United States have a better strategy. They just accuse anyone who criticizes Israel of being an antisemite, of hating Jews. [Read More]
THE WAR ON PALESTINIANS
Photo Essay: The silent displacement in the West Bank
By David Lombeida, Mondoweiss [November 12, 2024]
---- The following images were taken in the South Hebron Hills and Jordan Valley of the West Bank. The photographs document five families that have been forced out of their communities due to settler violence or lost their homes from demolitions, and in some cases, due to both. Their stories share an ongoing reality of displacement and settler harassment throughout the West Bank. Every single family I spoke with is still being harassed by the same settlers who displaced them and reported their homes to the army for demolition. [Read More]
(Video) Israel’s War on the Foreign Press
From the Chris Hedges Report [one hour] [November 13, 2024]
---- Reporting from Israel in the aftermath of October 7th demands guts and courage. Censorship, rouge military personnel and an entire state hellbent on their goals of national security and ethnic cleansing spells a nightmare for journalists seeking to expose the truth. This nightmare became a reality for Grayzone reporter Jeremy Loffredo, who was detained in Israel in solitary confinement for three days after reporting on the Iranian missile attacks on October 1. Loffredo joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to review his reporting covering Israel in the U.S., the Occupied Territories and Israel itself—as well as his frightening detainment by the occupying forces. [See the Program]
THE WAR ON LEBANON
Hezbollah demystified
By Qassam Muaddi, Mondoweiss [November 15, 2024]
---- So, who is Hezbollah? What does it want? How does it work? And how much of what is said about it in the West and the media is true? … The most important aspect of Hezbollah, and the most overlooked too, is that it is far more than a militant group with a cause and guns. Hezbollah represents the tradition and the decades-long struggle of a key component of Lebanese society. It is also the strongest representative, today, of the political choice of resistance to the US and Israel in Lebanon, which is much older and much more diverse than Hezbollah itself. It is also a social force with a strong presence in all fields of Lebanese public life, from politics, to education, to charity, to art and culture. And in times of war, it represents the feelings of large parts of the Lebanese society, that extend beyond the limits of religious communities or political sectarianism. [Read More]
WAR WITH IRAN?
'Inflating the Iranian Threat Is an Israeli Manipulation Meant to Justify the Occupation'
By Hilo Glazer, Haaretz [Israel] [November 14, 2024]
---- Among scholars of Iran, certainly among the Israelis in this field, his views are exceptional – Sternfeld himself admits that he is "considered quite fringe." A key point of contention revolves around Sternfeld's analysis of the Iranian threat. "A fiction" is his categorization of that threat – or, a "caricature." He continues to espouse this view even now, when the danger of a regional war looks more real than ever, after Iran launched two extensive missile attacks on Israel and is threatening a third, and despite the accumulation of evidence that it continues working toward the manufacture of a nuclear bomb. He holds this view, he explains, "not because Iran doesn't constitute a threat to Israel, or because it can't deal a painful blow to Israel. The point is the mistaken perception of that threat in Israel: namely, that the Iranian regime has set Israel's eradication as a supreme goal, and by implication the annihilation of the country's entire Jewish population." [Read More]
THE WAR IN UKRAINE
Trump Can Speed Up the Inevitable in Ukraine
By Megan K. Stack, New York Times [November 17, 2024]
---- If Mr. Trump pushes Ukraine into talks that result in lost territory, his political rivals as well as hawks in his own party will accuse him of abandoning Ukraine and rewarding Vladimir Putin’s hunger for expansion. They would be right; there’s no way to sugarcoat it. Ukrainians would be hung out to dry, and Mr. Putin could end up attacking again or expanding his imperial designs to other neighbors. Mr. Trump should do it anyway. Dozens of people, and often hundreds, are dying every day in this grinding war. Mr. Trump should seize the chance to save lives. Nobody is coming to save Ukraine. A settlement will eventually be needed. [Read More]
Ukraine Divided
By Tim Judah, New York Review of Books [December 5, 2024 issue]
----Putin has started something he has been unable to finish, but Russia has staying power, at least for the foreseeable future. Western leaders do not know how to convince Ukraine to agree to freeze the lines without committing their own troops to defending it, and anti-Ukrainian politicians are gaining ground from Germany to the US. Zelensky wants to force Putin to the negotiating table from a position of strength, but now Ukraine is on the defensive. In the meantime, many Ukrainians no longer wish to fight. As things stand, though, if the fighting stopped tomorrow, both Ukrainians and Russians would immediately begin to prepare for the next round. [Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES
(Video) ACLU Attorney Lee Gelernt on How Rights Groups Are Preparing to Fight Trump’s Mass Deportations
From Democracy Now! [November 13, 2024]
---- Immigrant rights lawyers are preparing to fight back against Donald Trump’s plans to carry out the largest mass deportation in U.S. history once he takes office again in January. Trump is also reportedly planning to greatly expand immigrant detention in private for-profit prisons, and during the campaign he spoke of invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to speed up deportations. “We have been preparing nearly a year for this,” says attorney Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, who argued some of the most high-profile immigration cases during the first Trump administration. He stresses that while groups like the ACLU will challenge the Trump administration in the courts, “it needs to be a national effort” to prevent abuses. [See the Program]
Trump Isn’t Hiding Plan to Use Military to Quash Protests and Deport Immigrants
By Marjorie Cohn, Truthout [November 12, 2024]
---- Employing federal troops to suppress domestic protests and deport immigrants from U.S. soil en masse would be illegal, but Donald Trump has been pushing to do so since his first administration. The recent Supreme Court decision granting presidents nearly absolute immunity for official acts has created a situation with far fewer guardrails to prevent Trump from abusing his authority in his second presidential term. Trump and his allies have reportedly drafted plans for him to deploy the military against civil demonstrators on his first day in office, according to a Washington Post report from November 2023. And Trump, who promised to carry out the largest deportation effort in U.S. history, has also indicated that he will use the military to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. … Regardless of the illegality of Trump’s threatened abuse of the Insurrection Act, the Supreme Court has recently granted almost absolute immunity to presidents for official acts. The ACLU is already drafting legal challenges to Trump’s invocation of the Insurrection Act against protesters. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
Should Sonia Sotomayor Retire Before January 20?
By Elie Mystal, The Nation [November 13, 2024]
---- Republicans won, and they will likely control the federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court, for the rest of my natural life. I feel like it borders on pointless to even ask the Democrats to swap out one aging minority justice for a younger one now, because Democrats are too far gone to listen to reason. Sotomayor is not going to retire. Progressives are not going to demand that she retire, and Democrats are not going to hold together enough to replace her. Democrats are not going to fill the 41 lower-court vacancies either. Democrats are going to lose, continue losing, and then blame transgender teenagers for their losses. We could have addressed this in 2021. Now, we will enjoy the consequences of our inaction. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
The Death of Karen Silkwood—and the plutonium economy
By Robert Alvarez, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [November 8, 2024]
---- On the evening of November 13, 1974—that is, 50 years ago—Karen Silkwood was driving to a meeting with a New York Times reporter and an official of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW) union. Her car flew off the road and hit a culvert on a lonely highway in western Oklahoma, killing her instantly. Karen was a union activist working as a technician at a plutonium fuel fabrication plant in Cimarron, Oklahoma owned by the Kerr-McGee Corp. Several days before her death, Silkwood’s apartment was purposefully contaminated with highly toxic plutonium—which she had no access to—from the nuclear plant where she worked. Because of her activism, the company had put her and her roommates under constant surveillance. Documents about problems at the plant that two witnesses had seen before Silkwood’s fateful drive were missing. An independent investigation found evidence that her car was run off the road—contradicting official conclusions. [Read More]
