As Israel continues its blockade of food and medicine in Gaza, tens of thousands of people are on the edge of starvation. Many are also about to die because of the lack of medicine to treat diabetes, cancer, and other diseases. Yet our political leaders stand by, doing nothing. What can we do?
Since Israel began a total blockade of Gaza on March 18th, no humanitarian aid has been allowed to reach the 2 million residents of Gaza. On Thursday, the main charitable organizations providing meals to tens of thousands, including the World Central Kitchen, shut down. There was simply nothing left to cook, to serve, to feed people. A week ago UN agencies in Gaza reported that 9,000 children had been admitted to hospitals (such as they are) for “acute malnutrition”. Since then the number of children on the edge of starvation has undoubtedly grown, and is growing faster and faster.
On Thursday the Israeli publication +972 Magazine reported that “over 70,000 children are now hospitalized with acute malnutrition, and 1.1 million lack the daily minimum nutritional requirements for survival. The magazine’s report continued: “Shortly after Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz declared on April 16 that “no one is currently planning to allow any humanitarian aid into Gaza,” local and international food distributors, once a lifeline for hundreds of thousands, started shutting down one by one. On April 25, the World Food Program announced it had run out of its remaining food stocks. On May 7, World Central Kitchen announced that it ‘no longer has the supplies to cook meals or bake bread in Gaza.’”
After the end of the Second World War, thousands of German civilians claimed that they had little or no knowledge that their government was slaughtering millions of Jews because they were Jews. Though on a much smaller scale, today Israel is slaughtering thousands of Palestinians because they are Palestinians. What “lack of knowledge” will the peoples of “the Free World” claim this time? In fact, the killing and starving of Palestinians is live-streamed on media readily available to anyone the least bit curious. This time, after this slaughter, there will be no ambiguity, no forgiveness.
If you are opposed to the action and inaction by our government in not ending Israel’s blockade of Gaza, please call our congressional representatives. They are Sen. Gillibrand - (202) 224-4451 and Sen. Schumer – (202) 224-6542, and Rep. Latimer - (202) 225-2464. Tell the person answering the phone that more effort is needed to end the aid blockade in Gaza and to stop the war. Thanks!
MORE THOUGHTS ABOUT STARVING GAZA
(Video) “We Are Not Living. We Are Enduring.” Gaza Mother on Struggle for Food, Safety Under Israeli Blockade
From Democracy Now! [May 9, 2025]
---- Ahead of the Mother’s Day holiday in the Untied States, we speak to Duha Latif, a mother of two children in Gaza, about life for mothers living under Israeli occupation and assault. Democracy Now! last spoke to Latif over a year ago, when she was attempting to evacuate Rafah with her family. She now resides in a tent in Khan Younis and struggles to feed her family as Israel’s blockade has created widespread famine throughout the Gaza Strip. “We are not living. We are enduring,” says Latif. Her children, 8-year-old Amir and 3-year-old Karim, are suffering the effects of hunger and malnutrition. “The loss they are living is more than just the absence of food — it’s the absence of life as they knew it.” [See the Program]
Why Is US Congress Silent on the Manmade Nightmare It Is Enabling in Gaza?
By Sen. Bernie Sanders, Common Dreams [May 8, 2025]
---- I want to say a few words about an issue that people all over the world are thinking about—are appalled by—but for some strange reason gets very little discussion here in the nation’s capital or in the halls of Congress. And that is the horrific humanitarian disaster that is unfolding in Gaza. Thursday marks 68 days and counting since ANY humanitarian aid was allowed into Gaza. For more than nine weeks, Israel has blocked all supplies: no food, no water, no medicine, and no fuel. Hundreds of truckloads of lifesaving supplies are waiting to enter Gaza, sitting just across the border, but are denied entry by Israeli authorities. Do we really want to spend billions of taxpayer dollars starving children in Gaza? There is no ambiguity here: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist government talks openly about using humanitarian aid as a weapon. Defense Minister Israel Katz said, “Israel’s policy is clear: No humanitarian aid will enter Gaza, and blocking this aid is one of the main pressure levers.” Starving children to death as a weapon of war is a clear violation of the Geneva Convention, the Foreign Assistance Act, and basic human decency. Civilized people do not starve children to death. [Read More]
We Cannot Look Away From the Images of Children Killed in Gaza
Editorial, Haaretz [Israel] [May 7, 2025]
---- We do not want to see the girl in this picture. If we see her, we will feel guilty. We do not want to feel guilty because October 7 happened to us, not them. And we are unwilling to let go of this feeling, even when we kill thousands of children in its name. … Israelis can continue to avert their eyes from any documentation that brings them face-to-face with the sights of the killing in Gaza. The media can continue to be derelict in its duty and not expose Israelis to what is being done in its name and by means of its children. We can continue to ignore the number of Palestinians in the Strip who have been killed – more than 52,000, including around 18,000 children; to question the credibility of the figures, to use all of the mechanisms of repression, denial, apathy, distancing, normalization and justification. None of this will change the bitter fact: Israel killed them. Our hands did this. We must not avert our eyes. We must wake up and cry out loudly: Stop the war. [Read More]
MOTHER’S DAY
In the beginning, Mothers Day was not a day about nice cards and husbands cooking breakfast: it was a day or peace. In 1870 Julia Ward Howe, abolitionist, woman suffragist leader, and writer of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” was the author of the original “Mother’s Day Proclamation.” She said: “Arise, then… women of this day! /Arise, all women who have hearts,/whether our baptism be that of water or of tears!/Say firmly:/We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies./Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage,/for caresses and applause. ...From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice/goes up with our own./ It says: Disarm, Disarm!” [Read the whole Proclamation 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 has resumed its weekly Monday night vigil at 5:30 pm at the corner of Warburton Ave and Odell. The CFOW 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
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ARTICLES & ESSAYS
The Ship Trying to Get Aid to Gaza Won’t Let a Drone Strike End Its Mission
By Saliha Bayrak, The Nation [May 9, 2025]
---- In the early hours of May 2, the humanitarian ship Conscience was attacked by a drone strike while in international waters off the coast of Malta. The Conscience—which belongs to a group of organizations aiming to break the siege on Gaza called the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC)—had finally been permitted to leave the port of Türkiye three months ago, and was headed toward Malta to pick up dozens more activists before attempting to deliver much-needed aid to Gaza. Aboard were 12 crew members and six activists from Türkiye. The man-made famine in Gaza has reached “catastrophic” proportions as Israel has blocked the entry of all humanitarian aid, medicine, food, and other basic needs for over 60 consecutive days, and the United Nations World Food Programme announced that it has run out of food. “Why are we letting a country charged with genocide decide what food people can get? What medicine they get?” Arraf said. [Read More]
U.S. Orders Intelligence Agencies to Step Up Spying on Greenland
By Katherine Long and Alexander Ward, Wall St. Journal [May 6, 2025]
---- Several high-ranking officials under Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard issued a “collection emphasis message” to intelligence-agency heads last week. They were directed to learn more about Greenland’s independence movement and attitudes on American resource extraction on the island. The classified message asked agencies, whose tools include surveillance satellites, communications intercepts and spies on the ground, to identify people in Greenland and Denmark who support U.S. objectives for the island. The directive is one of the first concrete steps Trump’s administration has taken toward fulfilling the president’s often-stated desire to acquire Greenland. [Read More]
Eighty Years On: Remembering the Defeat of Fascism—or Witnessing Its Return?By Biljana Vankovska, Znet [May 8, 2025]
---- As we approach a major anniversary, 80 years since the defeat of fascism, a strange silence hangs over my country, Macedonia, and the broader region we now call the “territory of former Yugoslavia.” National authorities have been under sustained external (Western) pressure for years: May 9 must no longer be associated with the victory over fascism. Year after year, in both public memory and the education system, May 9 has been rebranded as Europe Day. Older generations still remember, but what do younger ones know about Yugoslavia’s enormous human sacrifice—second only to the USSR—in the struggle against Evil? Almost nothing. We, the older ones, might suffer from the absence of dementia—we stubbornly remember the times when our fathers and grandfathers gave their lives for ideals that today’s youth barely even hear about. … A veil is drawn over the fact that Europe’s imperial ambitions led to two world wars. The Second World War, whose anniversary we now mark quietly—even clandestinely, behind the EU’s back—was the anticlimax of capitalism, its degeneration into Nazism and fascism. This was not merely the result of individuals like Hitler or Mussolini, but of structural conditions that emerged from the womb of the post-World War I capitalism crisis. [Read More]
Sports Can Distract Us (But Not Enough) From Continuous Trump
By Robert Lipsyte, TomDispatch [May 6, 2025]
[FB – Robert Lipsyte is one of America’s great sportswriters, appreciated by us many who don’t follow sports day-to-day. Check him out!]
---- Have you noticed lately how few sports stories are making their way to the top of the news beams? That’s because sports — once upon a time our most reliable source of outrage, speculation, cultish behavior, and lessons in domination, smackdown intimidation, and faux masculinity — has been replaced by a remarkable series of presidential half-time horror shows. It’s now all Trumpiana all the time. We need to get back to sports. So here are eight topics currently lost in the sauce to take our minds and emotions off the Trump-backed whale. Of course, since only he truly sells in this numbed media moment of ours, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that we’ll need sports stories with Trumpian subtexts. [Read More]
INDIA-PAKISTAN
India and Pakistan edge closer to war as nuclear-armed rivals trade strikes
By Shaiq Hussain, et al., Washington Post [May 10, 2025]
[FB – Today’s news is that there is a ceasefire, and that it may or may not hold. In either case, religious nationalism in both India and Pakistan, harnessed now to nuclear weapons, will remain a permanent danger, and Kashmir an enduring flash point.]
---- India and Pakistan appeared to be edging closer to war on Saturday, as the two nuclear-armed nations both claimed they were provoked by the other before launching strikes against military assets in their rival countries. … Details are still emerging, but Saturday’s escalation may not immediately result in full-blown war, said Sushant Singh, a Yale lecturer and former Indian military official. The government of India has not officially started a process to mobilize for war, and the attacks between the two countries are seemingly limited to air battles and do not involve branches such as the navy, he said. However, Singh noted that both sides are clearly ratcheting up tensions because military sites are starting to be claimed as targets, especially air defense systems. The stakes for the two nuclear-armed nations are high. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “India’s missile attack shows that managing an India-Pakistan crisis is easier said than done” – [Maps] - By Syed Ali Zia Jaffery, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [May 6, 2025] [Link]; and (Video) “India Wants To Send A Powerful Message To Pakistan: An interview with John Mersheimer” [May 7, 2025] [See the Program]
THE WAR ON PALESTINE
A day in the life hunting for food and water during the Gaza famine
By Tareq S. Hajjaj, Mondoweiss [May 8, 2025]
---- Normality has been redefined in Gaza. Calling home a makeshift tent is now normal, and so is shuttling between displacement centers and queuing for hours to receive food and basic necessities. It is normal for a child to spend three hours a day in a long line to fill up a small gallon of water, and it’s abnormal to see that same child stand in line for school. It’s also normal for an entire family to go two days without food. Few in Gaza think things will ever go back to how they were before. The daily habits they’ve acquired tell as much. Muhammad Abdul Aziz, 43, lives in Gaza City in a tent on a plot of land hosting 20 other tents. They house families who returned to northern Gaza from the south and found their homes leveled. Abdul Aziz lives a daily routine that is more psychologically exhausting than physically. While he endures the daily struggle to find water and food for his children, and the pain of carrying gallons of water for long distances, the sight that truly drains him is watching how his children react when they’re thirsty and water isn’t available. “The first thing I think about every day when I wake up is how I will provide food and water for my children today,” Abdul Aziz says. “And it’s the last thing I think about before I close my eyes.” Abdul Aziz describes a typical day as a displaced person in Gaza City. [Read More]
The Huge, Under-the-Radar Shift Happening in the West Bank
By Adam Rasgon and Fatima AbdulKarim, New York Times [May 8, 2025]
---- The streets looked like Gaza. Homes reduced to rubble, walls pockmarked by bullet holes, roads ripped apart by bulldozers. Neighborhood after neighborhood was deserted. But this was not Gaza, a territory devastated by the war between Israel and the militant group Hamas, where tens of thousands have been killed and hunger stalks the population. It was the occupied West Bank, another Palestinian territory where the Israeli military has been tightening control in the most sweeping crackdown on militancy there in a generation. … Israel said it has killed more than 100 militants and arrested hundreds since the operation began. It has displaced roughly 40,000 Palestinians — more than any other military campaign in the West Bank since Israel captured the territory in the 1967 Middle East war. That has summoned fears among some Palestinians of a second nakba — the Arabic word for disaster that is used to describe the mass flight and expulsion of Palestinians during the war surrounding Israel’s creation in 1948. [Read More] ALSO OF INTEREST - “Israeli plan to occupy all of Gaza could open the Door for Annexation of the West Bank,” by Leonie Fleischmann, The Conversation [May 9, 2025] [Link].
(Video) Who Killed Shireen Abu Akleh? Reporter’s Family Responds After Film Names Israeli Soldier Who Shot Her
From Democracy Now [May 8, 2025]
---- As the Israeli military kills two more Palestinian journalists in Gaza, a new documentary by Zeteo has uncovered critical details about Israel’s killing three years ago of the acclaimed Palestinian American Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. The film, Who Killed Shireen?, identifies for the first time the Israeli soldier who allegedly shot Abu Akleh. We get response from two members of Abu Akleh’s family — her brother Anton and her niece Lina — as well as the documentary’s executive producer, Dion Nissenbaum, and Zeteo founder Mehdi Hasan. … “The Biden administration and the Israeli government essentially were doing everything they could to cover up what happened that day to Shireen Abu Akleh” says Nissenbaum, who is also the correspondent in the documentary.[See the Program]
THE WAR ON YEMEN
Trump halts Bombing of Yemen, Reportedly under Saudi Pressure, and to Dismay of Israel
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment [May 7, 2025]
---- Middle East Eye reports that Saudi Arabia pressured the Trump administration to cease bombing Yemen in advance of his planned trip to the Kingdom next week because such raids would be an embarrassment for him and his host. Trump said Tuesday that he was convinced that the Houthis were sincere in their new pledge to cease targeting shipping in the Red Sea. The subtext here is that people in the region believe the US is bombing an Arab country on behalf of Israeli shipping in the Red Sea and to protect Israel from repercussions for its Gaza genocide. Attacking the Houthis, who are not otherwise popular, on these grounds while Trump is in Riyadh would make it look like Saudi Arabia is also running interference for the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Houthi strategy of hitting out at Israeli interests has helped rally the people around them and lends them some regional popularity. [Read More]
The Trump Administration Is Hiding American Casualties of War
By Nick Turse, The Intercept [May 2, 2025]
---- The Trump administration is fighting an undeclared war in Yemen, and it has not been shy about publicizing the details of its attacks. But the administration is unwilling to level with the American people about the costs of war. U.S. Central Command, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the White House are keeping the number of U.S. casualties from this ongoing conflict secret. This amounts to a cover-up. Members of Congress are calling for accountability. After two decades of intermittent war in Yemen, the U.S. officially launched Operation Rough Rider in March of this year, and has carried out strikes on more than 1,000 targets in Yemen. The strikes in Yemen are targeting the Iran-backed Houthi government, which began launching attacks on vessels — including U.S. Navy warships — in November 2023 over the war in Gaza. Recent U.S. attacks in response have targeted civilian infrastructure and, according to local reports, killed scores of innocent people. U.S. troops are also in harm’s way. [Read More]
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
In His First 100 Days, Trump Launched an ‘All-Out Assault’ on the Environment
By Kiley Bense, et al. Inside Climate News [April 30, 2025]
---- One hundred days into the second Trump administration, many environmentalists’ worst fears about the new presidency have been realized—and surpassed. Facing a spate of orders, pronouncements and actions that target America’s most cherished natural resources and most vulnerable communities, advocates fear the Trump agenda, unchecked, will set the country back decades. “It is not an overstatement to say that the Trump administration has launched the worst White House assault in history on the environment and public health. Day by day and hour by hour, the administration is destroying one of the signature achievements of our time,” said Manish Bapna, the president and CEO of the environmental nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). “If this assault succeeds, it could take a generation or more to repair the damage.” [Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES
Rümeysa Öztürk freed, as Judge Warns of Grave Threat to Free Speech
By Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams [May 11, 2025]
–-- Rümeysa Öztürk, one of several pro-Palestine scholars kidnapped and imprisoned by the Trump administration under its dubious interpretation of an 18th-century law and a Cold War-era national security measure, was released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody Friday following a federal judge’s order. U.S. District Judge William Sessions III in Vermont ruled that Öztürk—a 30-year-old Turkish Ph.D. student at Tufts University in Massachusetts and Fulbright scholar—was illegally detained in March, when masked plainclothes federal agents snatched her off a suburban Boston street in broad daylight in what eyewitnesses and advocates likened to a kidnapping and flew her to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Louisiana. … Mahsa Khanbabai, Öztürk’s attorney, told Courthouse News Service she’s “relieved and ecstatic” that her client has been ordered released. “Unfortunately, it is 45 days too late,” Khanbabai lamented. “She has been imprisoned all these days for simply writing an op-ed that called for human rights and dignity for the people in Palestine. When did speaking up against oppression become a crime? When did speaking up against genocide become something to be imprisoned for?” [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
(Video) Tyre Nichols Case: Shock & Anger in Memphis as 3 Cops Acquitted on State Murder Charges
From Democracy Now! [May 9, 2025]
---- We go to Memphis for an update after jurors acquitted three former Memphis police officers of the murder of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black father who died after the officers brutally beat him during a traffic stop in January 2023. The group beating was caught on video, provoking widespread outrage and calls for police reform. The three officers still face sentencing after they were convicted of separate federal charges, along with two other officers who pleaded guilty to the state charges and will not stand trial. “A lot of us were shocked,” says Amber Sherman, of the Memphis community’s response. Sherman, a community organizer and member of Black Lives Matter Memphis, joined the family Thursday at a community vigil and protest. She warns this latest acquittal will “embolden” Memphis police as they continue to “do whatever they want.” [See the Program]
OUR HISTORY
One Brief Shining Moment [US Reconstruction]
By Adam Hochschild, New York Review of Books [May 11, 2025]
[FB – This is a review of The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920, by Manisha Sinha.]
---- [The author’s] focus is on what she calls our Second Republic: the promise of Reconstruction following the Civil War. This period, she points out, brought not just new rights for the formerly enslaved but hope for women and Native Americans, surprising flashes of solidarity with freedom struggles elsewhere, and “the forgotten origin point of social democracy in the United States.” All of this, however, was destined to be soon replaced by what she calls the American Empire—a regime that resumed seizing land from Native Americans, ruthlessly suppressed organized labor, and acquired its first overseas colonies. … Just as we talk about the First Republic, the Second Empire, or the Fifth Republic in France, so Sinha divides American history into phases, although the transition from one to another is not so neatly demarcated, sometimes taking years. Her focus is on what she calls our Second Republic: the promise of Reconstruction following the Civil War. This period, she points out, brought not just new rights for the formerly enslaved but hope for women and Native Americans, surprising flashes of solidarity with freedom struggles elsewhere, and “the forgotten origin point of social democracy in the United States.” All of this, however, was destined to be soon replaced by what she calls the American Empire—a regime that resumed seizing land from Native Americans, ruthlessly suppressed organized labor, and acquired its first overseas colonies. [Read More]
