Hello All - We see – the whole world sees – Palestinian children lying on the hospital floor, skin and bones, on the edge of death. In pictures they are attended by mothers, themselves unable to breastfeed their babies because they are also so malnourished. The children die slowly. Doctors and UN staff report that Israel won’t allow infant formula to enter Gaza, Those attempting to enter Gaza or Israel with baby food in their suitcase or knapsack have it confiscated at the border. 13 kids died from malnutrition yesterday; 169 people have starved to death since the food and medicine blockade was renewed in March. 93 of these were children. The UN agency focused on famine in the world says that 320,000 children in Gaza are at risk of dying of starvation. In articles linked below, scholars and medical people describe what they know and can see. How can the world continue to function when everyone knows that this is going on?
Our government is deeply involved in this mess. If genocide is taking place in Gaza, our government is complicit in this crime. Since May, the United Nations food program has been banned from working in Gaza. Instead, a bogus “foundation” funded and staffed by the US and Israel provides small amounts of food as part of an evil plan to lure Palestinians into a small area, which is actually a concentration camp. No one is allowed to leave this “area,” once inside. And while this is going on, Israeli soldiers and US mercenaries are shooting aid-seekers, about 900 have died so far. In an article linked below, a former Green Beret working as a “contractor” describes what he saw as people/children were shot lining up for food. How is this not genocide?
What should be done? What can be done? There are many answers, easy to implement if Israel and the USA would allow them. The most straight-forward remedy is to allow the United Nations relief program, UNRWA, to bring its truckloads of food and medicine into Gaza, where for years it has provided food to people needing it at some 400 distribution centers. According to one UNRWA spokesperson, some 6,000 food and medicine trucks are parked at the Gaza border, waiting to enter.
Another urgent task is for the world to enact and enforce crippling sanctions on Israel until they comply with programs of humanitarian relief. The United States, of course, sends Israel $10 million each day, and has provided billions of dollars worth of military equipment that allows Israel to fight its war. But we know that “sanctions regimes” can be far more powerful. A ban on doing business with Israel, not allowing Israel to use the world banking system, cutting off Israel’s oil, etc. etc. – standing orders when “sanctions” are imposed on Iran or Russia or Cuba – should be immediately applied by the UN and NATO countries. There is some support for this inside Israel itself, as 31 prominent Israelis published a letter in the UK Guardian stating “The international community must impose crippling sanctions on Israel until it ends this brutal campaign and implements a permanent ceasefire.” [Link]. Fighting fire with fire, starvation must be met with starvation. If Palestinians can’t eat, why should Israelis?
The world rejects what Israel and the USA are doing. NATO countries are denouncing genocide. In a recent poll, less than one-third of people surveyed support Israel’s war. Only 9% of Democrats and 25% of Independents support Israel’s war. Our “leaders” will only act to save the Palestinians if they are persuaded that they will lost elections if they do not do so. This is not a time to “be nice”; a genocide is in progress.
ILLUMINATING THE WEEK THAT WAS
Recognizing Palestine Won't Stop the Genocide in Gaza – Sanctions on Israel Will
By Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz [Israel] [August 3, 2025]
---- International recognition of a Palestinian state rewards Israel, which should be thanking each and every country doing so, since such recognition serves as a misleading alternative to what must actually be done – imposing sanctions. Recognition is an erroneous substitute to boycotts and punitive measures that should be taken against a country perpetuating genocide. Recognition is hollow lip service that the hesitant and weak European governments are using to show their enraged public that they're not holding their silence. Recognizing a Palestinian state, which does not and will not exist in the near future, if ever, is shameful silence. People are being starved in Gaza, and Europe's reaction is to recognize a Palestinian state. Will this save starving Gazans? Israel can ignore these declarations with the U.S.' support. There's talk of a diplomatic "tsunami" in Israel, in the knowledge that it won't reach Israel's shores, as long as recognition isn't accompanied by the imposition of a price tag for genocide. [Read More]
Israel’s food points are not just death traps – they’re an alibi for the starvation of Gaza
By Alex de Waal, The Guardian [UK] [July 26, 2025]
---- When mass starvation grips a community, something rare and terrible occurs. Starvation is not only the biological phenomenon of the body wasting away. It’s also the death rattle of society. Famine is the sight of people scavenging for food in a garbage heap. It’s a woman cooking in secret, hiding food from her starving cousins. It’s a family selling its grandmother’s jewelry for a single meal, their faces blank and emotionless, their eyes glazed. This is the degradation, the humiliation, the shame – and, yes, the dehumanisation – that happens when human beings scrabble for food like animals. This is a reality that no statistics can capture. … The social breakdown that we are witnessing, the degrading of human beings, is not a byproduct of the harm that Israel is inflicting. That’s the central element of the crime: destroying Palestinian society. The government of Israel shows no indication that it cares in the slightest whether Palestinians live or die. It wants to avoid the stigma of being accused of starvation and genocide, and the GHF is its current alibi. Let’s not be fooled. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “Netanyahu Is Choosing to Starve Gaza,” by Alex de Waal, New York Times [August 1, 2025] [Link]; and “Famine by Design: How Israel Ignored Warnings and Starved Gaza,” by Nir Hasson, Ha’aretz [July 29, 2025] [Link].
Similarities Between Hitler’s Handling of the Warsaw Ghetto and How Netanyahu is Handling Gaza are Disturbing
By Dave Lindorff, Counterpunch [August 1, 2025]
---- Here is the reality: Israel has, at least since October 2023, effectively become Nazi Germany, Netanyahu has become a Hitler, the IDF is the Wehrmacht, , the Palestinians are today’s imperiled Jews: loathed and subject to being killed as “regrettable incidents” (for which Hamas should always be blamed for allegedly hiding among he general Gaza population) or driven from their homeland with no mercy. And the US has once again become what it was in the 1930s: and early ‘40s: the bankroller of fascism and genocide. This growing similarity between Zionist Israel’s treatment of its subject population of Palestinians, and the Third Reich’s treatment of the Jews in Germany and the territories it captured during the World War will be hard to recover from in terms of world opinion and will likely have a lasting impact on Israel’s (and America’s) standing in the world — especially should Palestine become a recognized nation with a seat and a voice in the UN General Assembly. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “Israel’s international isolation has begun,” by Philip Weiss, Mondoweiss [August 1, 2025] [Link]; and (Video) “Israel accused of genocide through destruction of Gaza’s society, culture and governance: B’Tselem,” from Aljazeera [July 29, 2025] – 6 minutes [Link].
NEVER AGAIN! – HIROSHIMA – AUGUST 6, 1945
Hiroshima and the End We Refuse to Imagine
By Jason Farago, et al., New York Times [August 1, 2025]
---- Now, 80 years after Hiroshima, we have blundered into a new age of nuclear perils. In 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said that the planet faced the greatest risk of nuclear confrontation since the Cuban Missile Crisis. … I needed to come here, to Peace Memorial Park, to learn again how artists envisioned what we have been refusing to face — how they put into words, and images, our intertwined capacities for self-destruction and self-delusion. This is a city whose very name once authoritatively established a “nuclear taboo,” which was the political scientist Nina Tannenwald’s term for the implicit norm in all nuclear states not to launch a weapon. But the name “Hiroshima” has grown fainter, its impact weaker, and last month the Japanese health ministry reported that the number of survivors of the attacks here and in Nagasaki dropped below 100,000 for the first time. [Read More]
Eighty Years of Nuclear Terror
By Lawrence S. Wittner, Znet [August 3, 2025]
---- Despite the enormity of the nuclear danger, major governments, in the decades after 1945, were too committed to traditional thinking about international relations to resist the temptation to build nuclear weapons to safeguard what they considered their national security. Whatever the dangers, they concluded, military power still counted in an anarchic world. Consequently, they plunged into a nuclear arms race and, on occasion, threatened one another with nuclear war. At times, they came perilously close to it―not only during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, but during the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war and on numerous other occasions. By contrast, much of the public found nuclear weapons and the prospect of nuclear war very unappealing. Appalled by the nuclear menace, they rallied behind organizations like the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy in the United States, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Britain, and comparable groups elsewhere that pressed for nuclear arms control and disarmament measures. … In recent decades, however, the dwindling of the popular movement and the heightening of international conflict have led to a revival of the nuclear arms race, now well underway. [Read More]
THE MAMDANI CAMPAIGN
Zohran Mamdani's support for Palestinian rights sealed mayoral primary win, poll shows
From Middle East Eye [July 29, 2025]
----- Last month, New York City's Democratic mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani, not only mounted one of the biggest upsets in establishment politics in years, but he also won the most votes of any candidate on a primary ballot in the city's history. New polling numbers released on Tuesday now show that his open support for Palestinian rights was the issue that "supercharged" his campaign. An overwhelming 78 percent of New Yorkers who voted for Mamdani agreed with him that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, and 79 percent agreed that weapons transfers to Israel should be restricted. [Read More]
‘Anybody but Mamdani’: 5 Groups Emerge to Raise Millions in Attack Funds
By Dana Rubinstein and Nicholas Fandos, New York Times [July 30, 2025]
---- Real estate titans and financiers are forming super PACs to try to defeat Zohran Mamdani. Some organizers say that they won’t succeed unless Mayor Eric Adams or former Gov. Andrew Cuomo drops out. month after Mr. Mamdani’s primary victory stunned New York’s business elite, its leaders have begun cranking open a powerful gusher of outside spending to try to stop the man whose socialist policies they fear could sour the city’s business climate. [Read More].
NEWS NOTES
After Democrat Senators Schumer and Gillibrand joined a minority of Senate Democrats to vote against Sen. Bernie Sanders resolutions to prevent US offensive weapons going to Israel, some 200 Jewish Voice for Peace activists showed up at Schumer’s Manhattan office to complain. About 50 were arrested. The Dem leaders have few followers these days. Check out the pots & pans and protest action with this video from Democracy Now!
Two weeks ago the US “sanctioned” UN official Francesca Albanese for the sin of issuing a report critical of the US and Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Secretary of State Rubio’s “sanctions” would prohibit Albanese from commuting from her home in Italy to her day job at the UN in NYC. A UN spokesperson replied that the imposition of sanctions on UN “special rapporteurs” is “unacceptable” and sets a “dangerous precedent.” More drama will certainly follow. You can read up on the case with this good article from Pass Blue, an excellent women-run publication about what’s happening at the UN. (h/t MB)
Recent demonstrations against the government in Israel have broadened from a demand for the Israeli captives to be freed to one that demands an end to the war, in part because of the suffering of Palestinian civilians. The organization behind this new direction is Standing Together, which is composed of both Jews and Palestinians. In a statement on their interesting web page, the write: “As a progressive grassroots movement, we are focused on building the political will in Israeli society to reach a political solution by building a mass movement of Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel who truly believe that such a shared future is possible.” To learn more, go 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 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 newsletter readers look back on the contributions to our world of mathematician and humorist Tom Lehrer, who died this week at the age of 97. Lehrer’s obituary in the Washington Post describes “the real 1950s” as “a decade of protest and disillusionment,” which may come as a surprise to many readers both old and young. But the very idea of a Harvard mathematician singing pop songs about drugs and nuclear war and such might be a place to begin reconsideration of the era. Explaining why he quit the song world for teaching math, Lehrer stated, “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.” For proof, listen to classics such as "So Long Mom: A Song for WWIII”; "We Will All Go Together When We Go"; and "The Wild West is Where I Want to Be." It was obvious that this decade would lead to trouble.
Best Wishes
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ESSAYS
Epstein Is Only the Tip of the Iceberg: The Trump Protection Machine and the Epidemic of Violence Against Women
By Rebecca Solnit 30 Jul 2025
---- One reason this violence is so unacknowledged is that it is in the most literal sense not news – there are tides of hatred and violence against other groups that ebb and flow, but violence against women is global and enduring, a constant rather than an event. Another is that law enforcement and the legal system have often been more interested in protecting perpetrators, and society has often normalized and even celebrated violence against women. … The only thing exceptional about Jeffrey Epstein's crimes was their scale and maybe the complexity of the international financial, transportation, and other systems he used to traffic, control, abuse, and silence victims. The nature of the crimes was ordinary and common. In the United States, there's a rape every sixty-eight seconds, a woman is beaten by an intimate partner every nine seconds, and about two thousand women are murdered by men every year, and while more men are murdered annually than women, the majority of women murdered are murdered by partners or former partners. Globally a woman or girl is murdered by her partner or family member every ten minutes. A high percentage of human trafficking worldwide is of women and girls for sexual exploitation. [Read More]
Gaza and the End of History
By Joelle M. Abi-Rached, The Boston Review [July 30, 2025]
---- During a recent panel on Gaza and human rights held in Bangkok, I was asked whether the destruction of Gaza represents a watershed moment for the twenty-first century. The answer, of course, is unequivocally in the affirmative. Nearly two years into Israel’s onslaught, we have heard something like this claim made many times: there is the world before this annihilation, and the world after. Have we really understood what this means? … Why now? Why, after twenty-two months of complacency and complicity, have some European and American elites suddenly changed their tone? The conceit that the basic facts or circumstances have changed—that real alarm was inappropriate until now—defies all serious analysis. Is it rather because starvation has long been the Achilles’ heel of imperial adventurism, a moral bridge too far for the enlightened nations? It would be flattering to the West to think so, but the shift instead looks driven by utilitarian considerations: an attempt to salvage some credibility in the face of plummeting popular support, and perhaps the belated recognition that, left completely unchecked, Netanyahu’s expansionist ambitions—to annex the West Bank and Gaza Strip—spell disaster for the West’s own interests. [Read More]
The Genocidal Partnership of Israel and the United States
By Norman Solomon, Znet [July 28, 2025]
---- For decades, countless U.S. officials have proclaimed that the bonds between the United States and Israel are unbreakable. Now, the ties that bind are laced with genocide. The two countries function as accomplices while methodical killing continues in Gaza, with both societies directly – and differently – making it all possible. The policies of Israel’s government are aligned with the attitudes of most Jewish Israelis. In a recent survey, three-quarters of them (and 64 percent of all Israelis) said they largely agreed with the statement that “there are no innocent people in Gaza” – nearly half of whom are children. … While public opinion is very different in Israel and the United States, the genocidal results of the governments’ policies are indistinguishable. … The politics of genocide in the United States involves papering over the big gap between the opinions of the electorate and the actions of the U.S. government. While the partnership between the governments of Israel and the United States has never been stronger, the partnership between the people of Israel and the United States has never been weaker. But in the USA, consent of the governed has not been necessary to continue the axis of genocide. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “Entering a Golden Age for War Profiteers,” by William D. Hartung, Antiwar.com [July 30, 2025] [Link]; and “Rethink sanctions. They’re killing as many people as war does,” by Mark Weisbrot, Los Angeles Times [July 24, 2025] [Link].
THE WAR ON PALESTINE
It is Genocide: Omer Bartov Interview
By Fariba Amini, Informed Comment [July 30, 2025]
[FB – Omer Bartov is a leading scholar in “genocide studies” and much else.]
---- The clear goal of the Israeli government is to make Gaza uninhabitable for its population, to push it to the southern part of the Strip, and then to remove from the Strip altogether. In late May 2025 PM Netanyahu was cited at a discussion in the foreign and security committee: “We are destroying more and more houses; they have nothing to return to. The only consequence resulting from this will be the desire of Gazans to emigrate out of the Strip. Our main problem is [finding] states that will take them in.” He added, in reference to the plan for distribution of humanitarian aid in Gaza [GHF], that reaching these “distribution sites” will be dependent on preventing the return of Gazans to the places from which they came. A few days before that minister Smotrich explained: “I think that it will be possible to declare that we ‘won’ within a few months. Gaza will be totally ruined; its citizens will be concentrated south of the Morag corridor [the axis that dissects the Strip from east to west between Khan Yunis and Rafah] – and from there large numbers of them will leave to other countries.” [Read More]
(Video) “Designed as Death Traps”: Former Green Beret Who Worked at Gaza Food Sites Reveals Rampant War Crimes
From Democracy Now! [July 29, 2025]
---- As more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed seeking aid at militarized aid distribution sites run by the U.S.- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a former GHF security contractor tells Democracy Now! he saw U.S. mercenaries and Israeli forces commit war crimes by indiscriminately shooting at starving Palestinians waiting for aid. “What I witnessed in Gaza, I can only describe as a dystopian, post-apocalyptic wasteland,” says Anthony Aguilar, a retired U.S. soldier who worked as a subcontractor with UG Solutions in the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid delivery operation. “We, the United States, are complicit. We are involved, hand in hand, in the atrocities and the genocide that is currently undergoing in Gaza.” [See the Program]
The Death of Gaza in Slow Motion
By Aseel Aburass, et al., New York Times [July 30, 2025]
---- Over more than 21 months, Israel has destroyed Gaza’s health care system. Israeli airstrikes have continuously targeted Gaza’s hospitals. Governmental policy has led to the denial of fuel, water and medical supplies. Israeli forces have not only blocked evacuation corridors but also killed and arrested over 1,800 medical personnel. These attacks have shut down trauma care, oncology, obstetrics and dialysis and dismantled public health infrastructure. As a result, Palestinians have been stripped of even the most basic forms of medical care: Routine vaccinations have all but ceased, communicable diseases have spread unchecked and preventive services have been eliminated. The question of whether the Israeli government is committing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza has generated intense debate. Many have asked: If Israel were truly committing this crime, wouldn’t it look different? Wouldn’t it be faster, larger in scale or more spectacular in form? At the Physicians for Human Rights Israel, an organization working to advance the right to health for all under Israel’s control, we have reached a hard but inescapable conclusion: Through the wholesale destruction of Gaza’s health care system, Israel is committing genocide, but on a longer timeline than direct killing would imply. [Read More]
THE STUDENTS & THEIR UNIVERSITIES
I spent decades at Columbia. I’m withdrawing my fall course due to its deal with Trump
By Rashid Khalidi, The Guardian [UK] [August 1, 2025]
---- Dear Acting President Shipman,
I am writing you an open letter since you have seen fit to communicate the recent decisions of the board of trustees and the administration in a similar fashion. These decisions, taken in close collaboration with the Trump administration, have made it impossible for me to teach modern Middle East history, the field of my scholarship and teaching for more than 50 years, 23 of them at Columbia. Although I have retired, I was scheduled to teach a large lecture course on this topic in the fall as a “special lecturer”, but I cannot do so under the conditions Columbia has accepted by capitulating to the Trump administration in June. Specifically, it is impossible to teach this course (and much else) in light of Columbia’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. [Read More]
WAR WITH CHINA?
The U.S. Advances Its Dystopian Plan to Destroy China
By Megan Russell, Code Pink [July 31, 2025]
---- Imagine: it’s the summer of 2025, and the United States has been surrounded by foreign military bases. The bases have been built by some antagonistic country on the other side of the world that drones on about the inevitability of war. Leaders of the nation pump billions into their military, drumming up advanced AI weaponry, building long-range ballistic missile systems targeting the most populated U.S. cities, and sending thousands of troops to the Caribbean in preparation. Large-scale war games are held throughout the region, including drills that simulate nuclear war on the U.S. In the next two years, they say. War is coming, and we need to be ready. Meanwhile, back on domestic soil, the nation’s top thinkers gather to plan the collapse of the U.S. government, releasing a 120-page document outlining the steps to take after the war leaves nothing but dust and instability behind. But wait. You don’t need to imagine. That is happening, just not to the United States. No, the U.S. is not the victim at all—the U.S. is the antagonistic country on the other side of the world, bloating its military, prepping for war, and outlining the collapse of another nation’s government. [Read More]
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
Exceptionally Dangerous': Trump EPA Targets Endangerment Finding That Enables Climate Rules
By Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams [July 29, 2025]
---- U.S. President Donald Trump's administration faced an onslaught of criticism on Tuesday for starting the process of repealing the 2009 legal opinion that greenhouse gases endanger public health and the welfare of the American people—which has enabled federal regulations aimed at the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency over the past 15 years. Confirming reports from last week, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin unveiled the rule to rescind the 2009 "endangerment finding" at a truck dealership in Indiana. According to The New York Times, he said that "the proposal would, if finalized, amount to the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States." If the administration succeeds in repealing the legal finding, the EPA would lack authority under the Clean Air Act to impose standards for greenhouse gas emissions—meaning the move would kill vehicle regulations. [Read More]
The World Court Adds Muscle to the Climate Fight
By Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation [July 31, 2025]
---- Today’s nonstop news cycle makes it all too easy to lose sight of truly significant events, and last week’s climate ruling by the UN’s International Court of Justice is a striking example. “Landmark” and “historic” were two of the adjectives employed by the many news organizations covering the case, and those adjectives were warranted. “Landmark” because the ruling shifts the legal and political terrain on which climate policy has been contested for decades. Lawsuits against fossil-fuel companies, and against governments that enable such companies, have been given new ammunition. Experts expect the ruling will spark more lawsuits beyond the nearly 3,000 already underway in 60 countries. For journalists, every one of these lawsuits is a news story. “Historic” because the ruling addresses the core question that has bedeviled international climate politics since countries began debating the issue at the 1992 UN Earth Summit. The countries most vulnerable to climate change, most of them poor, have long pointed out that they didn’t cause the problem. The planet is overheating because a relatively small number of countries, most of them rich, have burned massive amounts of oil, coal, and gas. As a matter of basic fairness, the argument goes, rich countries should pay poor countries for the damage they are suffering. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
They Saw Their Neighbors Taken Away by ICE. Then They Made a Plan.
By Michelle Goldberg, New York Times [July 30, 2025]
---- When she saw ICE vehicles in the streets she followed them in her car, honking and shouting to warn people that they were coming. She started getting up before dawn to patrol her apartment complex. Then she contacted the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, which runs a nearby job center. Through them, she was plugged into a citywide network of people who are constantly tracking ICE’s activities. Among those doing amateur anti-ICE reconnaissance in Los Angeles are people from established nonprofits that work closely with the mayor’s office. Then there are more militant groups that, beyond simply documenting ICE’s operations, try to actively disrupt them. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “The Corporation for Public Broadcasting Shutdown: A Grim Ending for Publicly Funded Media,” by Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter [August 2, 2025] [Link]; and (Video) “60 Years After LBJ Signed Medicaid & Medicare, GOP Cuts Threaten Lifeline for Millions,” from Democracy Now! [July 30, 2025] [Link].
