On Saturday Israelis and Palestinians rejoiced as the fourth prisoner/hostage exchange took place under Phase One of the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas. But will the ceasefire last?
On Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu will visit Trump’s White House to talk about what comes next. Also this week, negotiators will resume work to fine-turn Phase 2 of the agreement, which will include the release of all the remaining hostages and prisoners. It is unclear, however, whether Netanyahu will allow Phase 2 to be implemented, as he has already told his government allies that fighting will resume. Pressure from the USA may be the only way to a lasting peace.
But does President Trump want a lasting peace? On Thursday Trump restated his proposal that 1.5 million Palestinians be evicted from Gaza and sent to Jordan and Egypt. Both governments have rejected this proposal, as has the Palestinian leadership. But Trump’s intention is clear: to remove Palestinians from (at least) northern Gaza, so that the area can be occupied and resettled by Israel. This is a long-standing goal of Israeli expansionists, and any attempt to implement it would lead to regional chaos and further war. We must resist.
WEEK ONE OF THE GAZA CEASEFIRE – WILL IT HOLD?
(Video) Rashid Khalidi on Peter Beinart’s “Notebook’
—— Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi talks with Peter Beinart about the state of the struggle for Palestinian liberation. [February 2, 2025] – 60 minutes [Link].
(Video) Netanyahu to Meet Trump in D.C. as Israel Escalates War on West Bank Amid Gaza Ceasefire
From Democracy Now! [January 30, 2025]
---- We speak with Palestinian writer and analyst Muhammad Shehada about the ceasefire in Gaza, which has allowed half a million displaced people to return to what’s left of their homes in the north of the territory, as Israel’s ban on UNRWA goes into effect. Hamas militants released another three Israeli captives Thursday, as well as five Thai nationals, all of whom were taken to Gaza during the October 7, 2023, attack. In exchange, Israel will release another 110 imprisoned Palestinians, including 30 children. But while the first phase of the Gaza ceasefire continues to hold, Israeli forces are ramping up attacks on the occupied West Bank, particularly in the Jenin refugee camp. [See the Program]
The U.S. appears to be pushing for more ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Will it succeed?
By Mitchell Plitnick, Mondoweiss [January 29, 2025]
---- Donald Trump has brought back a plan to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza that was pushed by the Biden administration and the Israeli far right. Although these plans have been rebuffed so far, there are signs Trump might be more successful. … Egypt, Jordan, or any other Arab or Muslim country are not refusing to take in Palestinians merely because it would look bad or be unpopular. Beyond the genocide Israel has already committed, if Trump and Israel could move a significant number of Palestinians out of Gaza, it would represent a stunning blow to the Palestinian cause. Any country that accepted Palestinian refugees forced out in such a manner would be taking in potentially hundreds of thousands of people who would be resentful toward that government for helping to remove them from their homeland. The local populations would support that view. That is a clear recipe for unrest, and that is before we consider what an influx of such a large number of refugees would mean to countries that are already facing considerable economic crises like Egypt and, especially, Jordan. [Read More]
NEWS NOTES
As the Senate confirmation hearing for RFK, Jr. approached (Health & Human Services), his cousin Caroline Kennedy sent a letter to the Senators, and then read it on video, calling him “dangerous and willfully misinformed. See this 6-minute video here.
Ali Abunimah is the founder and director of the website “Electronic Intifada.” Last week he was in Switzerland at the invitation of a Swiss organization to talk about the situation in Palestine. He was arrested by the Swiss Ministry of Defense and held for several days while a worldwide campaign was launched to free him. Read Kevin Gosztola’s (“The Dissenter”) chronicle of Abunimah’s ordeal and liberation 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.) 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 the Rolling Stone published “The Hundred Best Protest Songs of All Time." Yes, music videos of Sam Cook’s "A Change Gonna Come"; Billie Holiday’s "Strange Fruit"; Nina Simone’s "Mississippi Goddamn"; Bob Dylan’’s "Masters of War” and 96 others. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW WEEKLY READER
FEATURED ESSAYS
The Three Ultimates?
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch [February 1, 2025]
---- Let’s face it: Electing Donald Trump was nothing short of a suicidal act. And that’s something we humans seem to have a genuine knack for these days. If you don’t believe me, just consider those record-setting burned-out areas around Los Angeles. Admittedly, that was Nature (with a capital N), but given a grim helping hand by You Know Who. You can thank big oil, big coal, and big natural gas for that (and, in the future, add President Donald Trump to that list in a big-time way). Yes, things do turn out to burn far more fiercely on an overheating planet. And they get wetter faster, too (though not in Los Angeles when rain was truly needed). The phrase now is “climate whiplash,” and if you think it’s fun living under a lashing weather whip, think again. Mind you, despite what at least some of us now know, the human crew (that’s us) is continuing to pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in a distinctly record fashion. [Read More]
Blood Ties. The real story of pain in America.
By Jeanne Morefield, Boston Review [January 22, 2025]
---- The stage for Trump’s particularly bloody equation of the border with the fentanyl crisis was set long ago. He needs no Hitlerian inspiration for his rhetoric; both Democrats and Republicans have been building this common sense for years, renovating and expanding its capacities over time—including with bids for ever more border patrol agents, counterinsurgency funding, and technology. According to this homegrown conventional wisdom, “lethal doses” of drugs flow in a single direction: from the outside in. They are never “of us” or “from us.” When Trump began linking fentanyl to immigrants in 2016, he simply moved into the house built by his predecessors, amped up the vitriol, and promised to stop the invasion. This time around, Trump says, the war must be brought to Mexico itself. He assured us he would target drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations—and already started that process by executive order. He says he will order the Pentagon “to make appropriate use of special forces, cyber warfare, and other covert and overt actions to inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership, infrastructure, and operations.” … The question, a senior Trump transition member told Rolling Stone, is not if the United States should invade Mexico, but “how much.” As crusader and favored Secretary of Defense head Pete Hegseth might intone, this time the blood of the infidels must be spilled to protect the blood of the lamb. [Read More]
After the LA Fires
By Promise Li, Counterpunch [January 31, 2025]
---- When the Eaton Fire first began its retreat from Altadena, I was in one of many self-organized mutual aid teams scattered across the area, cleaning up debris. Around this time, I connected with some Black community members who had just lost their homes. They had returned from evacuation almost immediately to help coordinate mutual aid for their neighbors. But they were harassed by the police as they tried to return to their homes. Hundreds of armed California National Guard, summoned by Los Angeles police and sheriffs, had effectively begun occupying parts of Altadena. The fires already disproportionately affected Western Altadena, the historically Black area of the city where most of the deaths have been located so far and where residents were given notices to evacuate hours after those in majority-white areas of Altadena were informed. The Los Angeles fires have become the most devastating in American history, causing widespread destruction in the Pacific Palisades and the San Gabriel Valley. The state seized the moment to portray itself as a savior in a time of great need. But its operations belie a different reality. [Read More]
(Video) “War of Plunder”: How Rwanda Has Fueled War in DRC as Western Countries Look Away
From Democracy Now! [January 29, 2025]
---- The long-simmering conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo escalated this week when Rwandan-backed M23 rebels captured at least part of the eastern city of Goma. The fighting between the militia and Congolese forces has killed at least 17 with over 370 people injured, and hospitals are overwhelmed. U.N. chief António Guterres has called on Rwandan forces to withdraw immediately from the DRC and end support for M23, as fears grow of a wider regional war, but Maurice Carney, co-founder and executive director of Friends of the Congo, says Rwanda’s actions in the DRC will continue unless Western countries stop rewarding President Paul Kagame with development aid, trade deals and military funding. “This lack of accountability, this rampant impunity, lack of justice has enabled this to continue to this day,” says Carney, calling Rwanda’s involvement in the DRC a “war of plunder” aimed at securing the country’s mineral wealth. [See the Program]. ALSO OF INTEREST – “Rwanda, the West’s ‘Donor Darling,’ Seizes an Opportunity in Congo,” New York Times [January 28, 2025] [Link]; and “Life After a Rebel Takeover,” by Caleb Kabanda, et al., New York Times [February 1, 2025] [Link].
Nothing Gold Can Stay
By Vanessa Ogle, New York Review of Books [February 1, 2025]
----Gold just ended a banner year. Its price rose 27 percent in 2024, closing at $2,617 per ounce. Only the Nasdaq Composite index, fueled by reliably strong performances from the so-called Magnificent Seven tech giants, did better, at 31 percent. According to analysts at JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup, the rally won’t end here. They project gold to reach a historic $3,000 per troy ounce in 2025.February 1, 2025. …It is easy to forget that behind the abstractions of price movements and market swings lies a material that has to be mined from the ground. Beyond the trading rooms, Bloomberg terminals, and the high-security storage vaults of the superrich, gold quickly loses its shine. According to the United Nations, 20 percent of the world’s gold supply is extracted not in big industrial mining enterprises but in “artisanal” settings, which are small-scale, informal, and often illegal. [Read More]
IMMIGRATION AND DEPORTATION
(Video) As ICE Conducts Made-for-TV Raids, Cities from Chicago to Newark Resist Trump’s Immigration Crackdown
From Democracy Now! [January 28, 2025]
---- Immigration and Customs Enforcement is ramping up raids across the United States, arresting more than 1,000 people in operations Monday after detaining a similar number on Sunday. Immigrant communities and their allies say the raids violate human rights, the Constitution, and are being carried out in retaliation against sanctuary cities that have policies aimed at protecting undocumented residents. In Chicago, immigrant rights organizer Dulce Guzmán says there is “palpable fear and anxiety among families,” but she lauds elected officials, including Mayor Brandon Johnson and Governor J.B. Pritzker, for pushing back against what she says is the Trump administration’s “white supremacist agenda.” Meanwhile, in Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Ras Baraka has condemned an ICE raid last week at a seafood depot where federal agents took three people into custody, including a U.S. military veteran.“ [See the Program]
Mass Desperation
By Anna Lekas Mille, The Progressive [January 29, 2025]
---- Even though Mexican laborers who came into the United States under the Bracero Program were essential to keeping the U.S. economy alive during the labor shortages of World War II, U.S. leaders wasted no time looking for ways to kick them out once their contracts were up. In 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower launched Operation Wetback to unleash military raids to facilitate large-scale deportations across the country that terrified Mexican-American communities and separated mixed-status families. Trump has repeatedly spoken about Operation Wetback as his inspiration for military-style mass deportations. … While Cuban immigrants arriving by boat were seen as refugees fleeing Fidel Castro and communism—and granted almost immediate political asylum and stipends to facilitate their new lives in the United States—Haitian refugees were detained in camps at Guantánamo Bay, long before the island became notorious for torturing terrorism suspects. Detaining them offshore allowed the U.S. government to more easily facilitate their deportation. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST – “The Evolving Strategy for Defending Immigrant Workers”
By David Bacon, Rosa Luxemburg Foundation [January 21, 2025] [Link]; and “Guantanamo to hold ‘illegal aliens’: The Constitution v The President, 2.0,” by Clive Stafford Smith, Aljazeera [January 30, 2025] [Link]
THE WAR ON GAZA
A Ceasefire Won’t Stop the War on Palestine
By Tariq Kenney-Shawa, The Nation [January 16, 2025]
---- If the ceasefire in Gaza does hold, it will be the material result of dynamics introduced by the incoming Trump administration—a reminder of how easily Washington can influence Israel’s actions if it actually wants to. President Joe Biden, blinded by his commitment to a mythic Zionism that exists solely in his imagination, was unwilling to see how the war was not only morally grotesque in its own right but also detrimental to both American and Israeli interests in the region. In many ways, Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its campaign of regional destabilization also became the Biden administration’s own war. Trump operates without the same ideological constraints, and he is far more concerned with what he can gain from a given relationship. Trump sought a ceasefire deal not only because it would serve as a massive PR coup—he can brag that he solved a problem Biden never could, and rightly so—but more importantly because it will allow his administration to get on with other priorities, such as brokering a normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia. [Read More]
THE WEST BANK
Photos: Inside the deadly Israeli invasion of Jenin
From Mondoweiss [January 31, 2025]
--- It has been close to two weeks since the Israeli army launched its latest offensive on the occupied West Bank city of Jenin, its refugee camp, and the surrounding towns. Dubbed Operation “Iron Wall,” the operation has featured a ground invasion and airstrikes that have caused massive destruction in the city, particularly the Jenin refugee camp. As of Friday, January 31, at least 19 Palestinians had been killed by the Israeli military, including a child as young as two years old. Dozens more have been injured, and thousands of Palestinians have been displaced from the refugee camp. The successive Israeli and PA attacks have left residents in Jenin living in fear, not only for their lives but for what the future holds for them. The tactics the military has used, including mass destruction of infrastructure, airstrikes, the forcible displacement of residents, cutting off electricity and water, attacks on local hospitals, and more, have drawn sobering comparisons to the tactics employed in Gaza. The following series of photographs, captured by Palestinian photographer Wahaj Bani Moufleh, shows a glimpse of what the reality has been like in the Jenin refugee camp for the past few weeks. [Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES
The Forever Charade: Gitmo, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
By Karen J. Greenberg, TomDispatch [January 28, 2025]
---- Sometimes, when it comes to Gitmo, it almost seems as if forces beyond the capacity of mere mortals are at play. No matter what promises are made, no matter what hope-inspiring acts are taken, no matter what progress occurs, the prison seems to have a life of its own, aided and abetted by those who continue to mount obstacles to any significant steps forward. Of course, the biggest of the lessons learned should have been to honor the laws, both domestic and international, forbidding torture. Had the United States not authorized a program of what was euphemistically referred to by the administration of President George W. Bush as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including beatings, waterboarding, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, sensory bombardment, and all too much more, those trials could have been held in a timely fashion and in federal court on the mainland. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
Trump’s neofascism is here now. Here are 10 things you can do to resist
By Robert Reich, The Guardian
---- In light of Trump II’s predictably cruel and bonkers beginning, many people are asking: “What can I do now?” Here are 10 recommendations.
1. Protect the decent and hardworking members of your communities who are undocumented or whose parents are undocumented [And 9 more] …
10. Keep the faith. Do not give up on America
Remember, Trump won the popular vote by only one and a half points. By any historical measure, this was a squeaker. In the House, the Republicans’ five-seat lead is the smallest since the Great Depression. In the Senate, Republicans lost half of 2024’s competitive Senate races, including in four states Trump won. America has deep problems, to be sure. Which is why we can’t give up on it – or give up the fights for social justice, equal political rights, equal opportunity and the rule of law. The forces of Trumpian repression and neofascism would like nothing better than for us to give up. Then they’d win it all. But we cannot allow them to. We will never give up. [Read More]
“People Will Die”: The Trump Administration Said It Lifted Its Ban on Lifesaving Humanitarian Aid. That’s Not True.
By Brett Murphy and Anna Maria Barry-Jester, Propublica [January 31, 2025]
---- American-funded aid organizations around the globe, charged with providing lifesaving care for the most desperate and vulnerable populations imaginable, have for days been forced to completely halt their operations, turn away patients and lay off staff following a series of sudden stop-work demands from the Trump administration. Despite an announcement earlier this week ostensibly allowing lifesaving operations to continue, those earlier orders have not been rescinded. … Trump’s rapid assault on the international aid system is quickly becoming the most consequential and far-reaching shift in U.S. humanitarian policy since the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II, aid groups and government officials warned. Among the programs that remain grounded as of Friday: emergency medical care for displaced Palestinians and Yemenis fleeing war, heat and electricity for Ukrainian refugees and HIV treatment and mpox surveillance in Africa. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
James Baldwin’s Day of Mourning: A tragedy in Birmingham and the making of a radical.
By Ed Pavlić, Boston Review [December 15, 2023]
---- “Now we are here not only to mourn those children, who cannot really be mourned,” said James Baldwin in his address to a crowd of seven thousand that filled Foley Square in lower Manhattan on September 22, 1963. It was the Sunday following the Sunday morning bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, one of the most heinous hate crimes since the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board had sparked a modern Black protest movement—and with it, a resurgence of white backlash. Over the past year, the traditionally standoffish 16th Street Baptist congregation had increasingly engaged the freedom movement. During protests in April and May of that year the church served as a base from which thousands of marchers—many of them children—departed on their way to being intercepted and jailed by police. On the morning of Sunday, September 15, the inaugural Youth Day at the church, a small group of girls had stopped in the women’s lounge to attend to their hair and straighten each other’s outfits between sessions. At 10:22 a.m. a bomb hidden under the stairs the previous night by Klansmen blasted out the wall and stained-glass window of the lounge. Four girls, ages eleven to fourteen—Addie Mae Collins, Carole Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, and Carole Robertson—were killed in the explosion. Later that day, teenagers Johnny Robinson and Virgil Ware were fatally shot in separate racist attacks. In one day, six Black kids in Birmingham were dead. [Read More]
Tony Kahn: Boy Fugitive in the Cold War [The Hollywood “Blacklist”]
By Paul Buhle, Portside [January 30, 2025]
---- The larger historical saga of Hollywood writers on the run from the FBI and Congressional hearings gets a small boost from time to time, then slips back into the memory hole of events and personalities, long ago. That history has special interest for this reviewer, who interviewed several dozen survivors, saw as many of the films the future Blacklist victims wrote as possible (something like 400) and tried to figure out, across several volumes, the meaning of it all. … During happier years, film work had been a good run for B film writers as well as the famous “swimming pool communists” who contributed heavily to leftwing causes. Writers in trouble could look back a few years to fundraising parties with Charlie Chaplin, Lucille Ball, Frederick March and naturally Katharine Hepburn among many others in the hills near the famed Hollywood sign. Suddenly, it was all over. … Survivors of the Hollywood Blacklist are now all gone. If contemporary reports are accurate, writers and actors supporting the Palestinian cause face another generation of blacklisting. In one form or another, the story goes on. [Read More]
