While President Trump was in the Middle East last week, Israel continued its attack on the people of Gaza. More than 100 people are being killed each day. Israel has announced that this is the beginning of an invasion by thousands of soldiers who will force the people of Gaza into a small area of land. Is there any hope for rescue, for peace not war?
While under bombardment, the people of Gaza also face starvation. Israel has not allowed any food or medicine to enter Gaza since March 2nd. Tens of thousands of people, especially children and the elderly, are on the edge of starvation. EVERY ONE of the 2.3 million people living in Gaza lives in famine conditions. NO ONE has enough to eat.
Most experts believe that only President Trump can force Israel to change course, to allow humanitarian aid to come into Gaza and to achieve a permanent ceasefire in which all the Israeli hostages will be released. Is this likely? Is this possible? Trump seems to govern by mood swings, and perhaps a miracle is possible, but there is no sign that our government is motivated to end the starvation or to end the war.
Our news media are full of stories about “Trump this” and “Trump that.” There is very little space left for news about the US-supported genocide in Gaza. “Gaza” is also left out of the many anti-Trump marches and rallies, with people rising up against US fascism. We can’t let our fight against fascism not include a rejection of war and an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Will the world watch in silence as the Palestinian people are destroyed? We can’t let this happen.
ESSAYS ON DEATH & STARVATION IN GAZA
(Video) “Surveillance Humanitarianism”: As Gaza Starves, U.S.-Israeli Plan Would Further Weaponize Food
From Democracy Now! [May 15, 2025]
---- Israel has imposed a complete block on humanitarian aid into Gaza since March 2, with hundreds of trucks with lifesaving aid waiting at the border. Now many of Gaza’s kitchens have closed, and Palestinians face mass starvation as rations run low. We speak with Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University, author of Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine. “The majority of people in Gaza are facing emergency or catastrophic levels of food insecurity,” says de Waal. “Rations are getting low, and the poorest and most vulnerable are beginning to starve and die.” [See the Program]
(Video) World ‘indifferent’ as Israel planning ‘huge extermination’
From Aljazeera [May 17, 2025]
---- Gideon Levy, an analyst and columnist at the Israeli media outlet Haaretz, says what is happening in Gaza is the beginning of a “huge extermination programme”. Speaking to Al Jazeera, he said the new phase of Israel’s war will be “against an uprooted people, refugees, without anything, who will be pushed to the south, and then the entire Gaza Strip will be really exterminated”. The “world is indifferent to Israel’s plans”, and some Israelis believe that “that’s the right thing to do” after the October 7 attack, he added. Claims of soured relations between Trump and Israel, based on the US president not including the country in his recent Middle East tour, meanwhile, shouldn’t be taken too seriously as the Republican leader often changes his views and plans day by day, Levy argued. “Israel was left aside because it was very clear that Netanyahu is not ready to put an end to the war and to withdraw from Gaza, and without it, there is no [ceasefire] deal,” he said. [See the Program]
NEWS NOTES
For your enjoyment, linked here is a short video in which Illinois congresswoman Delia Ramirez makes some rapid-fire remarks criticizing Homeland Security head Kristi Noem. Watch “Rep. Delia Ramirez Accuses Kristi Noem of Corrupt Acts and Demands Resignation,” [May 16, 2025] [Link]. (h/t ILG)
Our congressional representative, $15 million-man George Latimer, was impolitely confronted during a recent appearance at the proletarian Scarsdale Golf Club. According to a report in the New RoAR News, “The program was interrupted by Climate Defiance and other protesters. With a forthright banner the protesters chanted, “You’re not bold, you’re not bright, you’re just a Dem who doesn’t fight,” and “Hey George, what do you say? Why don’t you go to the Bronx today!” Read more 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
REWARDS!
The week’s Rewards for stalwart readers are plucked from the basket of a zillion great antiwar song our team created during the Vietnam War. First up is John and Yoko with "Give Peace a Chance." I’ve always liked Freda Payne’s "Bring the Boys Home." And here is Jimmy Cliff with "Vietnam." And from that time to our own, Phil Ochs has something to say with "Power and Glory." Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ARTICLES & ESSAYS
Poof! It’s Gone: Disappearing the America We Once Knew
By Karen J. Greenberg, TomDispatch [May 14, 2025]
---- In these first 100-plus days of the nation’s 47th presidency, President Donald Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk have cast a frightful spell over the country. As if brandishing wands from inside their capes — poof! — offices and their employees, responsibilities and aims, norms and policies have simply disappeared. The two have decreed a flurry of acts of dismantlement that span the government, threatening to disappear a broad swath of what once existed, much of it foreshadowed by Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for drastically reorganizing and even dismantling government as we know it during a second Trump administration. To my mind, the recent massive removals of people, data, photos, and documents remind me of the words of Czech novelist Milan Kundera in his classic novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” … As part and parcel of this bureaucratic house-clearing, an unprecedented attack on the records of government agencies has been taking place. Basic facts and figures, until recently found on government websites, are now gone. As I wandered the Internet researching this article, such websites repeatedly sent back this bland but grim message: “The page you’re looking for was not found.” Many of the deletions of facts and figures have been carried out in the name of the aggressive anti-DEI stance of this administration. [Read More]
The “Crisis” of Male Adolescence Is Nothing New
By Katha Pollitt, The Nation [May 13, 2025]
---- What about the boys? That’s the big question these days. They’re behind girls in school, and they’re less likely to go to college and to graduate. Too many spend all day playing video games, watching porn, getting stoned, and getting into trouble. As industrial jobs vanish, young men face a disappearing advantage in the new economy, where jobs require education and social skills. … In many ways, toxic masculinity is a kind of curdled male entitlement. Boys and young men simply have not absorbed the fact that certain privileges are no longer laid out on a platter for them, as they were for their fathers and grandfathers. Girls and women expect to work, which means they can be choosier in dating and marrying. The quotas that openly favored males are gone, although a vestige of that system still survives in the worship of male high school athletes and in the advantage many colleges quietly afford male applicants. There are lots of women doing manly-men things, like excelling in math and science, joining the military, and playing sports. If they weren’t kicked to the sidelines by harassment, rape, and unintended pregnancies, who knows how much girls could accomplish? Maybe the solution to boys falling behind is for them to act more like girls: Put down the joystick and pick up a book. Do your homework, join the Spanish club, volunteer in the community, and learn to cook (which is actually fun). [Read More]
THE WAR ON PALESTINE
(Video) Gideon Levy: Gaza Burns & Israel Turns On Itself
[May 15, 2025] – 35 minutes
---- Gideon Levy is an Israeli journalist, author and columnist at Haaretz. Levy describes how genocide has become normalised and the internal problems that are building within Israel. [See the Program]
Israel Is Spiraling
By Ori Goldberg, The Nation [May 12, 2025]
---- Israel is spiraling. The bombardment, siege, and starvation of Gaza continue unrelentingly, and the direct genocidal incitement coming from senior members of the country’s government toward the people of Gaza is, somehow, getting worse. Betzalel Smotrich, minister of finance and minister for West Bank affairs at the Ministry of Defense, says that the plan is clear: move forward, occupy territory (not just in Gaza but in Lebanon and Syria as well), remove “enemy subjects” and hold that territory indefinitely. What could “removal” mean but genocide? Why does Israel consider itself above all existing international law? Why doesn’t “the world” stop Israel when this “world” is fully cognizant of what is happening? Rage and frustration are the order of the day. Still, the choice to remain in the realms of rage and frustration misses the fact that Israel is spiraling. The country is caught up in various negative momentums, both foreign and domestic. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “It is not only ‘this’ Israeli government that has carried out ethnic cleansing,” by Ahmad Ibsais, Mondoweiss [May 15, 2025] [Link]; and (Video) “Israel’s “Crime of Apartheid”: New Report by U.S. Professors as Palestinians Mark Nakba Day,” from Democracy Now! [May 15, 2025] [See the Program]
WAR WITH IRAN? OR A NUCLEAR DEAL?
On Iran, Trump Should Resist the Zero-Enrichment Fantasy
By Trita Parsi, The American Conservative [May 13, 2025]
----President Donald Trump told reporters Monday that “very good things” are happening in his nuclear diplomacy with Iran, adding, “I think they’re being very reasonable thus far.” His optimistic tone was echoed by Iranian diplomats and Omani mediators, with Iran’s foreign minister describing the talks this weekend as “more serious” and “more detailed” than past meetings. Yet behind the upbeat rhetoric, a more complex and challenging reality is taking shape. While earlier rounds made progress toward limiting—though not eliminating—Iran’s nuclear enrichment, even prompting parallel technical discussions, the latest round saw a slight reversal. The setback stemmed from the U.S. insistence on the unrealistic demand that Iran abandon domestic enrichment entirely. Shutting down Iran’s more than 20,600 centrifuges is not required to achieve Trump’s stated goal of preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon. Nonetheless, it remains a long-standing demand of hardliners such as George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, and John Bolton. Many of them understood that insisting on total Iranian capitulation was the quickest path to derailing diplomacy and laying the groundwork for war. [Read More]
THE WAR WITH YEMEN
The $7 Billion We Wasted Bombing a Country We Couldn’t Find on a Map [Yemen]
By Nicholas Kristof, New York Times [May 17, 2025
---- The real money America is spending in Yemen is on bombs. While the United States saved modest sums by allowing little girls to starve, it escalated the Biden bombing campaign in Yemen, striking targets almost every day. The first month alone of Trump’s bombing campaign cost more than $1 billion in weapons and munitions. The Houthis in six weeks shot down seven MQ-9 Reaper drones, which cost about $30 million each, and the United States lost two F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter planes, at $67 million each. Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank, plausibly estimates that between Biden and Trump, the United States wasted more than $7 billion on bombing Yemen over a little more than two years. Most of that appears to have been spent on Biden’s watch. [Read More]
THE STUDENTS
(Video) “They Want to Silence Me”: Columbia Student Mohsen Mahdawi on ICE Jail, Palestine, Activism, Buddhism
From Democracy Now! [May 16, 2025]
---- In his first live interview since his release from ICE detention, Columbia University student and Palestinian activist Mohsen Mahdawi recounts the traumatic experience of his arrest and incarceration. Mahdawi, a green card holder who was born and raised in a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, was arrested in Vermont on April 14 when he appeared for what he was told would be a citizenship interview, and spent more than two weeks in U.S. immigration custody, where he was held in retaliation for his speech in support of Palestinian rights. Mahdawi’s detention has led him to reflect on the “interconnectedness between injustices,” as multiple members of his family in Palestine have been “unjustly” incarcerated in Israeli jails. “Now I can feel their pain,” says Mahdawi. Despite the U.S. government and pro-Israel groups’ attempts to silence his calls for an end to genocide in Gaza, he adds, “I share my pain with the world.” [See the Program]
To my newborn son: I am absent not out of apathy, but conviction
By Mahmoud Khalil, The Guardian I[May 11, 2025]
----Yaba Deen,* it has been two weeks since you were born, and these are my first words to you. In the early hours of 21 April, I waited on the other end of a phone as your mother labored to bring you into this world. I listened to her pained breaths and tried to speak comforting words into her ear over the crackling line. During your first moments, I buried my face in my arms and kept my voice low so that the 70 other men sleeping in this concrete room would not see my cloudy eyes or hear my voice catch. I feel suffocated by my rage and the cruelty of a system that deprived your mother and me of sharing this experience. Why do faceless politicians have the power to strip human beings of their divine moments? Since that morning, I have come to recognize the look in the eyes of every father in this detention center. I sit here contemplating the immensity of your birth and wonder how many more firsts will be sacrificed to the whims of the US government, which denied me even the chance of furlough to attend your birth. How is it that the same politicians who preach “family values” are the ones tearing families apart? [Read More] FOR AN UPDATE on Mahmoud Khalil’s imprisonment and legal case, read “Government Lawyers Trying to Deport Mahmoud Khalil Won’t Stop Whining,” by Natasha Lennard, The Intercept [May 17, 2025] [Link].
The Right to Be Hostile [The nature of protest]
By Alex Gourevitch, Boston Review [May 6, 2025]
---- Over the last year and a half, American universities have rapidly destroyed the right to protest on campus. At the request of administrators, heavily armed police raided unarmed, nonviolent protesters opposing Israel’s war on Gaza. Encampments have been forcibly cleared, while extreme punishment has been used as a tool of intimidation. Some 3,100 students have been detained or arrested, and thousands more face severe university discipline—suspension, expulsion, and loss of degree. … How should we fight back against this new McCarthyism? And to what end? As teachers and students learn just how little control they have over campus, it is clear that we need not just a general defense of academic freedom but also a more specific and absolutist defense of the right to protest. A democratic society generally, and colleges and universities in particular, must protect the right to engage in public, disruptive acts—including those that feature open expressions of hostility to political views—even at the cost of some people feeling discomfort or even intense unease. [Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES
(Video) Supreme Court Hears Birthright Citizenship Case That Could Also Sharply Reduce Judicial Power
From Democracy Now! [May 16, 2025]
---- The Supreme Court has heard oral arguments in a case challenging Trump’s now-halted order to end birthright citizenship. Multiple lower courts have already ruled that the order is unconstitutional. Trump’s lawyers are seeking to reinterpret the 14th Amendment, which has guaranteed citizenship to any child born in the United States for over a century. Legal expert Andrea Flores, an immigration lawyer at FWD.us, says the government’s weak arguments about implementing the unprecedented anti-immigrant order indicate that “The administration is not prepared to do this. They just want the authority to reinterpret amendments.” [See the Program].
THE STATE OF THE UNION
Trump Is Building a Global Gulag for Immigrants Captured by ICE
By Nick Turse and Jonah Valdez, The Intercept [May 15 2025]
---- The Trump administration appears to be laying the groundwork for a global gulag for expelled immigrants. In addition to using longtime U.S. detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, the Trump administration is seeking more far-flung locales to hold deported people, regardless of their countries of origin. The U.S. is already using the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, in Tecoluca, El Salvador, and has its sights set on numerous other countries, including many that the State Department has excoriated for human rights abuses. The U.S. has reportedly explored, sought, or struck deals with at least 19 countries: Angola, Benin, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Eswatini, Equatorial Guinea, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Kosovo, Libya, Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, Panama, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. [Read More]
(Video) “Gutted” [Hospitals]
From Aljazeera [Fault Lines] [May 13, 2025]
---- Fault Lines and Mother Jones magazine investigate how a private equity firm gutted a major United States hospital chain in pursuit of profit, leaving patients without critical care and families shattered. The film follows Nabil Haque, whose wife died after childbirth at a Boston hospital that lacked essential equipment. It also tells the story of Lisa Malick, whose newborn daughter died after delays at a Florida facility that lacked a functioning neonatal intensive care unit. Together, their stories reveal the devastating consequences of turning healthcare into a business. The investigation uncovers how Steward Health Care executives drained hospitals of resources, saddled them with crushing debt and triggered one of the largest hospital bankruptcies in US history – while walking away with millions. [See the Program]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “Why do cuts to Medicaid matter for Americans over 65? 2 experts on aging explain why lives are at stake,” by Jane Tavres and Marc Cohen, The Conversation [May 13, 2025] [Link]; and “Republican tax bill could slap ‘terrorism’ label on non-profits opposed to Trump,” by Chris Stein, The Guardian [May 14, 2025] [Link].
OUR HISTORY – REMEMBERING “THE NAKBA” [May 15, 1948]
(Video) Noura Erakat Addresses the UN in Commemoration of the 77th Anniversary of the Nakba
---- Commemorating the 77th anniversary of the start of the Nakba, Jadaliyya Co-Editor Noura Erakat addressed the UN. During the address, Erakat highlighted the shortcomings of international law in stopping Israel's ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. … Noura Erakat is a Professor of Africana Studies and the Program of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Noura is the author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), which received the Palestine Book Award and the Bronze Medal for the Independent Publishers Book Award in Current Events/Foreign Affairs. ]Watch the Program]
The Nakba Has Never Ended
By Huda Skaik, The Nation [May 15, 2025]
---- Every year on May 15, Palestinians around the world observe Nakba Day—the “Day of Catastrophe,” which marks the mass displacement and dispossession that followed the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Nakba Day serves not only as a day of commemoration but also as a living testament to a deep wound that continues to bleed in every refugee camp, every obliterated home, and every child born under the shadow of occupation and war. As we commemorate the Nakba, we do so under the unbearable weight of genocide and extermination in Gaza. The boundary marking past and present has become indistinct. Nineteen forty-eight is not over—it is unfolding again, and in more violent and destructive ways. The Nakba of 1948 resulted in the systematic removal of more than 750,000 Palestinians and their homes during the Arab-Israeli War that followed the United Nations’ partition of Palestine and the declaration of the State of Israel. More than 500 Palestinian towns and villages suffered some degree of depopulation, destruction, or capture. The rest had to undergo forcible exile. Hundreds of thousands fled to the Gaza Strip, many of them believing they would be able to return to their homes within weeks. That expectation has yet to materialize even after 76 long years. [Read More]
