Hello All - In his recent book The World After Gaza, Pankaj Mishra evokes the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz recalling hearing the screams from the Warsaw Ghetto (April 1943) as the Nazis began their final assault.
The screams gave us goose pimples. They were the screams of thousands of people being murdered. It traveled through the silent spaces of the city from among the red glow of the fires, under indifferent stars, into the benevolent silence of gardens. … There was something particularly cruel in the peace of the night, whose beauty and human crime struck the heart simultaneously. We did not look each other in the eye.
Perhaps we are in another time of avoiding eye contact. The Polish poet could hear the screams from the Ghetto because he lived nearby. We can hear the screams from Gaza because they are broadcast, live-streamed, 24/7. Over breakfast, from Aljazeera, I can get up to speed on the current count of infants starving to death, and watch and hear the grieving parents and the doctors and nurses unable to save the children. I can then turn to the Israeli paper Ha’aretz, or perhaps The New York Times, to read the Israeli denials that they are doing anything wrong, and that Gaza’s infants would have baby formula and diapers if Hamas were not stealing the supplies. In the evening, on TV, I watch the antics of President Trump, apparently the only person on Earth who can stop Israel’s madness, as he sets off to Scotland to play golf. All this, I think, defies poetry.
Are things changing? My sources are limited, but I detect a shift in the elite media, as if the group-think of the New York Times and other leading news outlets may be undergoing a paradigm-shift. This morning, for example, a leading story in The Times is headlined “No Meals, Fainting Nurses, Dwindling Baby Formula: Starvation Haunts Gaza Hospitals.” The article quotes a doctor at Al-Shifa Hospital: “There are no nutritional supplements, no vitamins, no premature infant formula, no amino acid intravenous solutions — nothing, Their bodies need these basics, and without them they will die.” [Link]. Over at the Washington Post, readers were offered “Gazans are dying of hunger. Here’s what happens to a starving human body.” A well-written article, with pictures and diagrams, explains: “Photos and videos from the territory show emaciated children with skin stretched tightly over bones and distended bellies. … As hunger sets in, the toll on the human body is evident. The younger the person, the greater the impact.” [Link]
An obvious point to make is that these articles, and many similar ones appearing in the mainstream media, could have been written 8, 12, 15 months ago. What is causing (if it is really happening) our elite media to notice that the Israeli emperor has no clothes, even though his justifications for genocide have been threadbare for many months? And will a paradigm shift in elite consciousness about the war (in the US, NATO, the global south, etc.) make any difference? Further research is necessary. In the meantime, boycotting everything Israel and Israel’s supporting cast seems like a good first step.
ESSAYS ILLUMINATING THE WEEK THAT WAS
“Food Has Become a Memory”: My Hunger Diary in Gaza
By Sara Awad. The Intercept [July 26 2025]
---- This is my attempt to document what it feels like when your stomach rumbles, becoming louder than your thoughts. … Here in Gaza, we are enduring the suffocating siege imposed by the Israeli government in order to make us starve, in a deliberate attack against us Gazans. Today marks the 89th day of the starvation war. I woke up with a dizzy feeling in my head as I had not eaten anything since yesterday morning. My stomach needed its sense of normalcy. My family and I poured our energy into securing the only meal of the day. We often spend approximately half a day only thinking about what our meal will be. My family is making every possible effort to fill our hungry stomachs, but I can see their powerlessness on their faces. My thoughts go immediately to my youngest siblings Ahmed, 10, and Yame, just 4 years old. They cannot endure or understand that no food is available to eat, and I feel helpless when I do not have anything to offer them. I have always wondered why children must suffer! What do they do to deserve this denial? … Food has become a memory. I dream of a big family meal, multiple meals filled with meat and chicken, and I dream of cooking my favorite meal again. I am fed up with empty plates. I am tired, tired of looking at past meals on my photo albums. I long for my past days, when food was a routine, not a matter of bare survival. [Read More]
Another Kind of Weapon [Famine]
By Afeef Nessouli and Steven W. Thrasher, The Intercept [July 21, 2025]
---- Reporting from inside Gaza over the last few months, The Intercept observed a famine that is manufactured and an aid distribution system seemingly designed to cause more suffering and death. Amid the war, Israel has rendered Gaza inaccessible to the foreign press; American journalist Afeef Nessouli accessed the Strip by volunteering as an aid worker for a medical nonprofit and reporting in his off-hours. Usually during war, the distribution of medical care and food to a besieged population would not be administered by any party waging war against it, much less by an illegally occupying military. And in most situations, aid operations would closely involve established organizations already active in the area. But that’s not the case in Gaza. Israel has effectively banned the biggest and longest-running aid group in the region: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA. And by gutting the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, a critical funding vehicle for aid groups including UNRWA, U.S. President Donald Trump has strangled international aid in Gaza. Israel and the U.S. have instead rolled out a new scheme centered around a fledgling U.S.-based nonprofit that operates alongside the same Israeli military responsible for killing more than 230 journalists, 1,400 health care workers, and 17,000 Palestinian children in the last two years. [Read More]
Starvation as a Weapon: Chris Hedges on Gaza
From The Intercept [July 25 2025]
---- More than 1,000 Palestinians seeking food have been killed by Israeli forces in just the last few months, according to the United Nations. Israel’s blockade on aid, ongoing bombardment, and the dismantling of independent relief efforts have pushed Gaza to the brink of mass famine. At least 600,000 people are suffering from severe malnutrition, and aid groups warn of a manufactured humanitarian catastrophe. “It’s not about the distribution of food, it’s not about humanitarian aid. It’s about creating — luring Palestinians who are desperate into the south, putting them into a closed military zone,” says Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times. This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jordan Uhl speaks with Hedges about how we got here and what’s at stake. Hedges spent seven years covering the conflict between Israel and the Palestine, much of that time in Gaza. He’s the author of 14 books, the most recent being “The Greatest Evil Is War” and “A Genocide Foretold.” [Read More]
THE FREEDOM FLOTILLA TO GAZA
Israeli Military Attacks Handala in International Waters, Abducts 21 Unarmed Civilians
[FB – Press release July 26, from the Freedom Flotilla Website - https://freedomflotilla.org/ for latest news.]
---- The Freedom Flotilla Coalition confirms that its civilian vessel Handala, en route to break Israel’s illegal, genocidal blockade on Palestinians in Gaza, has been violently intercepted by the Israeli military in international waters about forty nautical miles from Gaza. At 23:43 EEST Palestine time the Occupation cut the cameras on board Handala and we have lost all communication with our ship. The unarmed boat was carrying life-saving supplies when it was boarded by Israeli forces, its passengers abducted, and its cargo seized. The interception occurred in international waters outside Palestinian territorial waters off Gaza, in violation of international maritime law. Handala carried a shipment of critical humanitarian aid for Palestinians in Gaza, including baby formula, diapers, food, and medicine. All cargo was non-military, civilian, and intended for direct distribution to a population facing deliberate starvation and medical collapse under Israel’s illegal blockade. The Handala carried 21 civilians representing 12 countries, including parliamentarians, lawyers, journalists, labor organizers, environmentalists, and other human rights defenders. The crew includes: [Read More]
“They Wanted to Humiliate Us”: Israel’s Abuse of Freedom Flotilla Activists
By Saliha Bayrak, The Nation [July 22, 2025] [NB – This is from the earlier voyage.]
---- Roughly a month ago, the world watched as a small civilian boat called the Madleen attempted to reach Gaza with lifesaving aid. The ship, which was part of the larger Freedom Flotilla Coalition, was seized by Israel, and all 12 international activists on board were detained and deported, an action that was widely described as a violation of international law. One of them was German activist Yasemin Acar. Back at home and grappling with grief for the still-suffering Palestinians, Acar told The Nation about the inhumane conditions that she and fellow volunteers were subjected to by Israeli authorities while in detention. [Read More]
THE MAMDANI CAMPAIGN
The Elite Panic at the Heart of Liberal Attacks on Mamdani
By Tressie McMillan Cottom, New York Times [July 27, 2025]
---- Zohran Mamdani’s campaign is driving some people mad. Mamdani is, of course, the young, charismatic, charming and decidedly left-of-center candidate upsetting the political status quo. He is also Muslim and of Indian and Ugandan descent. The recent political attacks against him are coming from all directions — Republicans, Democrats and the real estate lobby. Some of these attacks are about political interests — of course, landlords wouldn’t like affordable housing and tenant-friendly Mamdani. But a lot of these attacks are thinly veiled racism. They conflate Mamdani’s left-wing political messaging with the “otherness” of his racial and ethnic heritage. It is an old racial trope that worked unevenly against President Barack Obama. Be afraid of the cheerful brown man. He isn’t a “real” American. He is dangerous because he wants to take from the rich to give to the undeserving poor. … When both sides of the political spectrum share an obsession with interrogating one’s racial purity, maybe it’s time to confront an uncomfortable truth: A lot of us are exactly who Donald Trump believes that we are. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “Can Mamdani’s Message Play Outside New York? It Already Has,” by Benjamin Oreskes, New York Times [July 27, 2025] [Link]; “Zohran Mamdani Must Confront the NYPD. Here’s What He Can Do,” by Alex S. Vitale, The Nation [July 24, 2025 [Link]; “How New York’s Tenants Won,” by Tara Raghuveer, New York Review of Books [July 22, 2025] [Link]; and “Zohram Mamdani v. Donald Trump,” Jacobin Magazine [July 24, 2025] [Link].
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 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 reflect some hard moments in our history that now have returned once again. Last week was the 80th anniversary of the atomic bomb test during World War 2. Sadly, it was a “success,” and the Truman people and the bomb makers went on to use the atomic bomb on Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9), opening the Pandora’s Box of our “nuclear era.” Marking this event was the work of the Kronos Quartet, whose rendition of Bob Dylan’s "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" closed the recent meeting of the Nobel Laureate Assembly for the Prevention of Nuclear War.” A very different time and tone frame our second Reward this week, which is Mavis Staples’ rendition of Stephen Foster’s
"Hard Times Come Again No More" (1854). This video recording frames the song with some photography by Dorothea Lang recording the US “Depression” of the 1930s. Indeed, come again no more.
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ARTICLES & ESSAYS
Approaching 80th Anniversary of Hiroshima/Nagasaki
By Joseph Gerson, The Peace Advocate [July 2025]
---- Over many years, I have had the extraordinary privilege of working with Japanese atomic and hydrogen bomb survivors. These are people who have endured and transformed the worst imaginable physical and emotional traumas into the most influential force for nuclear weapons abolition. Their fundamental call is that “human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.” Their courage, their call, and their steadfast advocacy of nuclear weapons abolition earned them the Nobel Peace Prize last December. In awarding the Hibakusha the Nobel Prize, the Nobel Committee sent the world a powerful message. The world is closer to catastrophic nuclear war than it has ever been, and we must act now for nuclear weapons abolition. Even as we celebrate the Hibakusha’s courage and achievements, we face an increasingly dangerous world. As Antonio Gramsci wrote, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”: among them Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu. The dangers of the disorienting tectonic changes marked by the reaction of the West to the rise of China and the Global South is compounded by the need to warn that humanity is 89 seconds to midnight as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock, did to warn of the nuclear danger. [Read More]
Is this Gaza’s ‘bomb the tracks’ moment?
By Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man, +972 Magazine [Israel/Palestine] [July 25, 2025]
---- With Gaza’s annihilation in plain sight, the question is what can compel global intervention to end Israel's genocide — and what form it will take. … It is often said that Israel’s war on Gaza is the first live-streamed genocide. Hind Rajab’s tragic final pleas and breaths were broadcast across the internet for all to hear. Israeli soldiers proudly post videos of their atrocities and destruction on TikTok. Brave Palestinians have built massive social media followings, as viewers log on every day to witness their hunger, displacement, and terror. More people around the world have been exposed to near real-time, graphic images of killings and starvation than ever in history. What is not unique about the genocide in Gaza is that world leaders — the only people with the means to stop it — have known about Israel’s actions, and its intentions, since day one. And they have done close to nothing to stop it. … There is, of course, an entire spectrum of potential interventions that lie between “bombing the tracks,” an arms embargo, and complete inaction. … The time for concrete action is now, and all options should be on the table. [Read More]
(Video) Rule By The Rich: Western Governments Are Oligarchies, Not Democracies
By Ben Norton, Geopolitical Economy Report [July 20, 2025] – 43 minutes
---- Western governments claim to be models of democracy, and demonize their geopolitical adversaries as "authoritarian", but empirical evidence shows that the USA and European countries are oligarchies dominated by economic elites and large corporations. Billionaire Donald Trump is the perfect symbol of this, but he's by no means the only one. Ben Norton explains. [See the Program]
THE WAR ON PALESTINE
Israel's Destruction of Gaza: Almost Nothing Is Left of Khan Yunis, Satellite Photos Show
By Nir Hasson, et al., Ha’aretz [Israel] [July 23, 2025]
---- Satellite photographs taken in recent days show that Israel's military has almost entirely destroyed Khan Yunis, the second-largest city in the Gaza Strip, and its environs, an area encompassing 90 square kilometers and thousands of homes. … In recent months, the military has greatly accelerated the pace of destruction in southern Gaza, using private contractors that earn a profit of thousands of shekels per building razed. Since the cease-fire ended in March and the launch of Operation Chariots of Gideon in May, the residents of eastern Khan Yunis and the surrounding areas have witnessed destruction on a scale unseen in earlier fighting. [Read More]
Beyond Gaza’s Shadow: The Unseen War for the West Bank’s Future
By Ramzy Baroud, Znet [July 26, 2025]
---- 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. [Read More]
Media Silence Helped Bring Starving Gaza Journalists To The Brink Of Death
By Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter [July 26, 2025]
---- No group of reporters in the modern era have demonstrated more of a courageous commitment to journalism than those living and working under siege in Gaza. Yet throughout the Israeli government’s genocide—supported by the United States and European governments—many Western journalists have looked the other way. Western media, particularly prestige media, have aided and abetted the mass killing of Palestinian or Arab journalists through their silence. On July 24, Agence France-Presse, the Associated Press, BBC News, and Reuters could no longer cower while the global news media circulated incredibly horrifying and sad images of Gaza children who are likely to die of starvation. “We are desperately concerned for our journalists in Gaza, who are increasingly unable to feed themselves and their families. For many months, these independent journalists have been the world’s eyes and ears on the ground in Gaza. They are now facing the same dire circumstances as those they are covering,” the media organizations declared in a joint statement. Instantly, the grim reality that the last remaining journalists in Gaza may die of starvation—along with 2.1 million Palestinians—became headline news. That is how easy it was to focus the world’s attention on the Israeli government’s brutal campaign, which includes moving the number of journalists showing the world images of death and destruction closer and closer to zero. [Read More]
Police Dragging Protesters as Mounted Police Disperse Tel Aviv Anti-war Rally; 24 Protesters Arrested in Haifa
By Linda Dayan and Adi Hashmonai, Ha’aretz [Israel] [July 24, 2025]
---- Thousands of protesters gathered across Israel to call for an end to the war in Gaza on Thursday. Israel Police said they arrested 24 people in the northern Israeli city of Haifa in what they termed an illegal protest. The protesters in Haifa, who were waving signs and calling for an end to the war in Gaza, were arrested a few minutes after the demonstration began. The demonstration was organized by Arab Israelis, with dozens still demonstrating at Haifa's German Colony an hour after the arrests. Police said the arrests were immediate because the protesters' actions "could disrupt public order." The demonstrators "waved signs and slogans against Israel's actions in the war in Gaza, and ignored the police instructions at the scene," they said in a statement. Footage shows the arrests were violent, and police tore up protest signs. [Read More]
THE WAR IN UKRAINE
Life on the forever front [Ukraine]
By Paul Hockenos, New York Review of Books [July 25, 2025]
---- It’s not that Ukrainians are thinking ahead or planning for a forever war; it’s just that—at the moment—it presents itself this way. They don’t see Putin ending it; they know they can’t end it themselves; they don’t see their allies helping them to expel Russia; and they’re not giving up. Putin’s obsession with subduing Ukraine has become psychotic and buries all of Russia’s other priorities: the domestic economy, the demographic disaster, the bromance with Trump, the alliance with Iran—and anything and everything else. That mighty Russia cannot thump what it considers a pathetic pseudo-country like Ukraine mortifies Putin to the marrow of his bones. [Read More]
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
How Climate Justice Reached the UN’s Top Court—and Won
By Panthea Lee, The Nation [July 23, 2025]
---- In an opinion issued today, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) declared that states have legal duties, not just moral ones, to protect the climate. These obligations, it held, are grounded in existing human rights law, environmental treaties, and the rights of future generations. Critically, the court affirmed that harm caused by climate inaction—including the continued expansion of fossil fuels—can constitute a violation of international law, strengthening the case for reparations. This unanimous opinion did not come out of nowhere. It’s the result of a years-long campaign led by Pacific students and a nation whose very name is a promise to endure. … Governments, the court said, have a duty to act—urgently, effectively, and with care proportionate to the crisis. That involves regulating private actors and ending harmful practices like fossil-fuel licensing and subsidies. Failure to meet this standard—even through inaction—can constitute a violation of international law. At the heart of this case was a demand for repair: not just of ecosystems but of relationships, futures, and worlds already lost. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “A new youth-led lawsuit is challenging Trump’s fossil fuel orders,” by Davin Faris, Waging Nonviolence [July 23, 2025] [Link]; and “Global Water Supplies Threatened by Overmining of Aquifers,” by Abrahm Lustgarten, et al., ProPublica [July 27, 2025] [Link].
CIVIL LIBERTIES
(Video) What are the implications of the UK ban on Palestine Action?
From Aljazeera [“Inside Story”] [July 21, 2025]
---- The group has been classified as a ‘terror organisation’ by the UK government. There have been demonstrations against the United Kingdom’s ban on the pro-Palestinian protest group Palestine Action and its designation as a “terrorist group”. The government actions came after members of the group broke into an airbase and vandalised military aircraft. Critics say the ban is excessive and an attack on freedom of speech. So what are the implications? [See the Program]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
The Long Fight for Tenant Power
By Charlie Dulik, New York Review of Books [July 22, 2025]
---- Low- and, increasingly, middle-income tenants must choose between paying record rents in major cities or moving to areas with cheaper apartments but worse job markets and fewer social services. These shifts are both regional—toward the Sun Belt or Midwest—and local, to the outer rings of cities and beyond. In the last decade exurban population growth has outpaced urban growth by roughly 7 percent. This development has in turn transformed the suburbs, traditionally considered bastions of homeownership: the growth of renter households in cities like Dallas, Minneapolis, Boston, Tampa, and Baltimore has paled in comparison to the rise of renters in their suburban peripheries. A record number of Americans, in other words, are paying increasingly large portions of their income to compete for a shrinking number of deteriorating apartments spread farther apart. [Read More]
Science and Democracy Under Siege
By Darya Minovi, et al.,Union of Concerned Scientists [July 21, 2025]
---- The first six months of President Donald J. Trump's second term have been characterized by destruction of democratic processes, divisive and vindictive actions, and chaos in federal government agencies. … The Trump administration is operating as an authoritarian regime. And fundamental to the scheme: cutting out science and scientists that challenge their agenda. By ignoring high-quality evidence and facts, the Trump administration attempts to position itself as the arbiter of truth and reality. In the past six months, the administration has systematically and recklessly destroyed federal scientific systems by…. When science is sidelined, people are harmed. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
The Argentine Grandmothers Who Resisted the Junta
By Jacob Sugarman, The Nation [July 24, 2025]
[FB – This is a review of A Flower Traveled in My Blood, by Haley Cohen Gilliland. The story behind Gilliland’s story was dramatized in a terrific film in 1985: “The Official Story.” If you have a WLS library card, you can see the film for free here.]
---- The Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo were both forged in tragedy by historical forces that extended well beyond their country’s borders. In 1976, after two years of chaotic rule rife with inflation and political violence, a group of military officers led by Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla seized control of the Argentine government from Juan Perón’s second wife and successor, Isabel. Together, the officers implemented what came to be known as the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional, or National Reorganization Process—a plan whose generic name belied a lethal project to dismantle trade unions and neutralize the left more broadly. Years of state-sponsored terrorism followed, with the police and military pursuing many of the same tactics as the infamous paramilitary group, the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, or Triple A, that had operated during Isabel’s government. Together, they routinely tortured and disappeared political opponents real and imagined—first to clandestine detention centers like ESMA, and later aboard “death flights” over the Rio de la Plata or the Atlantic Ocean. But the dictatorship’s crimes extended well beyond extrajudicial killings: Police and military officers also frequently claimed their victims’ babies as the spoils of war. [Read More]
