Hello All – On Friday Israel’s “war cabinet” decided to expand its war on Gaza. Over several months, Israel’s military will “cleanse” Gaza City of the hundreds of thousands of people who live there. It will soon launch a new invasion to do this, presumably killing thousands, perhaps including some of the Israelis still held prisoner by Hamas. Netanyahu’s plan is opposed by Israel’s military leaders and a great many of Israel’s people.
Netanyahu’s planned military campaign clearly rejects the option of any negotiated end to its war on Gaza. Murder, starvation (now dozens each day, and certain to rise quickly), and sadistic torture of civilians seeking food and water will be front-burner news for the indefinite future. And what will “our” government do about this? “Our” government gives Israel billions of dollars each year, as well as the bombs and bullets Israel uses to kill people. Despite the fact that most people in the USA oppose Israel’s war on Gaza, our political class is helpless to stop this. Trump and his deranged group of insiders seem immune to ordinary political pressure.
ALL human rights organizations say that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. That is, Israel is trying to wipe out an entire community. To destroy a people. This is the worst crime of all. European governments are attempting to reflect the overwhelming demands of the people of Europe to stop the war, yet the governments of the UK, France, and Germany are afraid to go beyond useless symbolic measures against Israel, afraid to arouse the wrath of Big Brother in Washington. But in Israel itself, groups such as Standing Together are changing the debate to the need to end the war to both free the hostages AND to stop the slaughter of Palestinian children.
The tide is turning against Israel’s war. We must keep protesting. Please call Congress. Tell Rep. Latimer - (202) 225-2464, Sen. Gillibrand - (202) 224-4451, and Sen. Schumer – (202) 224-6542 that you want them to speak up against Trump’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza. And take to the streets, in any way that you can.
DEEPER INSIGHTS INTO THE GAZA WAR
How to Hide a Famine - Israel’s deliberate campaign to obfuscate the hunger crisis in Gaza. By Alex de Waal, Boston Review [July 31, 2025]
---- “The worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip.” These were the words of food insecurity experts at the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) mechanism earlier this week. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu replied, “Israel is presented as though we are applying a campaign of starvation in Gaza. What a bald-faced lie. There is no policy of starvation in Gaza and there is no starvation in Gaza.” To the extent that there is hunger, he says, it is the fault of Hamas for stealing United Nations aid—a claim backed by no evidence, part and parcel of the demonization used to justify all its actions in Gaza. But Netanyahu knows perfectly well how he could prove who is telling the truth and yet chooses not to do so. Three steps would settle any possible denial or deliberate mystification about what is happening there—and who is really responsible for the bald-faced lie. [Read More]
(Video) “Tightening the Chokehold”: Amjad Iraqi on Israel’s Plans to “Empty Out” Gaza and Annex West Bank
From Democracy Now! [August 7, 2025]
---- Israel’s security cabinet is considering plans to expand Israel’s assault on Gaza toward a full military takeover, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly pushing for a monthslong offensive on Gaza City and central Gaza refugee camps. The cabinet meeting comes as Israel’s forced starvation of Gaza claimed at least four new victims over the past 24 hours, according to health officials. “Israeli politicians have really made it no secret that they envision and want to see the mass displacement of Palestinians as southward as possible, if not completely ejected from the Gaza Strip,” says Amjad Iraqi, senior Israel-Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group. Given that Israel’s allies have allowed the state to act with impunity, Iraqi adds, “you also cannot separate Gaza and the West Bank.” The Israeli government is “deciding that it could actually pursue and replicate many of the same policies in the West Bank.” [See the Program]
The Nightmare in Gaza: Preventing Criticism of Israel by Defining It as Antisemitic
By Aviva Chomsky, Tom Dispatch [August 2025]
---- In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), a group of 35 mostly European countries, drafted what it called a working definition of antisemitism. The Alliance had been founded in 1998 to promote Holocaust education and, in its own words, to “strengthen governmental cooperation to work towards a world without genocide.” All too sadly, right now, its definition is being used to do the opposite: it’s helping to criminalize opposition to genocide. … The IHRA’S definition goes far beyond the obvious one, that of stereotyping, prejudice against, or harm against Jews, and has little to do with preventing genocide. It is an eminently political definition that tries to prevent criticism of Israel by defining such criticism as antisemitic. Turning it into law heavily limits freedom of speech and political debate — and has nothing to do with antisemitism. As Israel, in fact, continues to carry out mass killings of Palestinians, attempting to destroy every institution of Palestinian life and culture in Gaza, and herding them into militarized camps, this definition has been mobilized to try to silence any hint that it might be engaging in war crimes, creating concentration camps, or committing genocide. [Read More]
NEWS NOTES
It would be impossible to write about the hundreds of antiwar and anti-Trump demos that happened last week. So let this one - “ Jewish Rabbis & Allies Outside NY Trump Hotel Call for U.S. to Stop Arming Israel” – stand in for all of them. From Democracy Now!
In upstate NY, the Broome County sheriff flew an Israeli flag over the county jail for more than 600 days. Peace activist Jack Gilroy describes how the local Veterans for Peace successfully campaigned to take the flag down; with useful information about how/why the Israeli flag-flying on public property is illegal in NY.
The Mamdani campaign remains in the news, not least because the rich & powerful “leaders” of the city can’t figure out how to stop him. A New York Times article this week spoke about his voting strength among Jewish New Yorkers, in part because many agree with his opposition to Israel’s war on Palestinians.
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 were inspired by a New York Times article claiming to mark the 50th anniversary of “Fleetwood Mac,” the album and sort of the group, describing the album as “a marvel of serendipity and perfectionism.” While the genealogy of the group may be too complicated for precise anniversaries, no excuse is really needed to play some of their tunes from back in the day. I hope you will enjoy "Dreams"; "Rhiannon"; and "Go Your Own Way." Lots more on-line.
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
for CFOW
FEATURED ESSAYS & ARTICLES
You Are Contaminated
By David Wallace-Wells, New York Times [August 2025]
---- Everywhere they look, they find particles of pollution, like infinite spores in an endless contagion field. Scientists call that field the “exposome”: the sum of all external exposures encountered by each of us over a lifetime, which portion and shape our fate alongside genes and behavior. Humans are permeable creatures, and we navigate the world like cleaner fish, filtering the waste of civilization partly by absorbing it. … It isn’t just plastics. Centuries after we began using the term “nature” to describe what it was that modern civilization was despoiling — and several decades since the environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben warned of the end of nature — there is no longer really such thing, or such place, as pristine. There is now some kind of contamination in much of what we eat, and breathe, and touch, which is how it gets inside us: by digestion, in the gut; via respiration, in the lungs; and through our pores, the smallest particles delicate enough to slip through the skin when they aren’t being carried, practically weightless, thousands of miles through the air. This essay is the first in a series on the subject — the way our lives are embedded in ecological context, and vice versa, each of us inescapably linked to one another and to the external world, now woven through with waste. [Read More]
It’s Our Turn to Build a New System of Care
By Ai-jen Poo, The Nation [August 8, 2025]
---- It’s been 60 years since President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Medicaid and Medicare Act into law, and those programs have built a safety net of care for American families. Sixty years since advocates, organizers, and families came together and refused to let our country abandon adults as they aged into poverty and low-income workers as they struggled to afford healthcare. But in the wake of the largest cut to Medicaid in history, this is no ordinary anniversary. Today, nearly 80 million people rely on Medicaid for care. From covering 40 percent of all childbirths to nearly 70 percent of home care for older and disabled people, Medicaid is more than a line item. It has represented a promise that no matter the ups and downs of life, our ability to care for one another, from generation to generation, will be protected. The $1 trillion in cuts included in the massive budget bill signed into law in July, however, put care for 17 million people at risk. The caregivers, the direct care workers, the disabled and chronically ill, and the families juggling it all will bear the brunt of the pain. This big, ugly bill tells us that our care, and our lives, are disposable. The promise of Medicaid is being shattered. But in the wake of this devastation, the dream of something better is coming into view. We have the chance to shape the future by building a system of care that leaves no one behind. … We deserve policies that let us thrive. To get there, we have to keep coming together—not only in moments of crisis, but in our everyday lives. Each of us must commit to showing up and organizing others to demand change. Only we can plant the seeds for what comes next: a future of care worth fighting for. [Read More]
The Twilight Zone [About a dystopian novel]
By Sue Halpern, New York Review of Books [August 21, 2025 issue]
---- Laila Lalami’s disturbing new novel, The Dream Hotel, raises an existential question: How to read dystopian fiction when what has been imagined is now a familiar, quotidian reality? Lalami’s protagonist, a thirty-eight-year-old American-born academic and archivist at the Getty Museum named Sara Hussein, is pulled aside by functionaries from the government’s Risk Assessment Administration (RAA) when she arrives at Los Angeles International Airport after attending a conference in London. An algorithm has flagged her as “an imminent risk” for a crime she has not committed, based in part on her dreams. Sara is then remanded to a “retention center” for a “forensic observation” until she lowers her “risk score”—an inscrutably derived number that supposedly represents the likelihood of committing a crime in the future. A long-standing piece of legislation, the Crime Prevention Act, gives authorities the power to incarcerate anyone they deem potentially dangerous. … Dystopian novels are not merely the expression of vivid imaginations, they are often warnings about what’s to come. So far no one is mining our dreams, though who is to say that won’t happen in the future—and for many of us, Trump and his attendants have already infected our sleep. The lesson of The Dream Hotel is not that it—which is to say surveillance and the demolition of civil liberties—can happen here or even that it is happening here. It is that dissent is still an option, if only, like Sara Hussein, we choose to take it. [Read More]
In One Image - Anatomy of an ICE Arrest
By Todd Heisler, et al., New York Times [August 3, 2025]
---- Like many people charged with entering the country unlawfully, Mr. Lopez Benitez showed up regularly for court dates related to his deportation proceedings, a legal process in which an immigration judge decides whether a person who entered illegally should be removed from the country. As part of that process, Mr. Lopez Benitez had applied for asylum, a type of legal protection for immigrants who fear returning to their home countries. … But upon leaving the courtroom, he was surrounded by federal agents, arrested and taken away. He was sent to a crowded holding cell at 26 Federal Plaza for three days before the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency transferred him to a detention facility 1,600 miles away — in Houston. [Read More]
THE WAR ON PALESTINE
A History of Israel’s Military Occupations of Gaza
By Seraj Assi, Jacobin Magazine [August 2025]
---- Israel’s current genocide in Gaza and recently announced plans to occupy Gaza City are both part of a long and tortured history of Israeli military occupations of the tiny strip. Whenever we imagine that Israel’s genocide has reached its nadir, the country plumbs new depths of evil. Israel’s genocidal energy in Gaza seems bottomless. On Thursday, nearly two years into the genocide, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Fox News that Israel intends to take military control of the entire Gaza Strip. On Friday, Israel’s security cabinet approved a plan to occupy Gaza City, which will involve the mass displacement of “all Palestinian civilians from Gaza City.” If implemented, the planned reoccupation, which comes exactly twenty years after Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in August 2005, will unleash Israel’s third military occupation of Gaza, culminating a decades-long history marked by brutal violence, mass slaughter and ethnic cleansing, and endless displacements. … It started during the Nakba, the mass displacement of Palestinians at Israel’s founding in 1948 when over 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their land and homes in Israel and made lifetime refugees. [Read More]
From Sakhnin to Ramallah, a new wave of Palestinian popular struggle takes root
By Awad Abdelfattah, 972 Magazine [Israel/Palestine] [August 6, 2025]
---- In recent weeks, Palestinian grassroots mobilization has gathered remarkable momentum, particularly within the 1948 territories and the occupied West Bank. This surge reflects a growing effort to reconnect with a reinvigorated wave of global solidarity that has persisted, and even expanded, despite severe crackdowns on pro-Palestinian movements across the United States and much of Europe. All signs suggest that this momentum will continue to grow, potentially building toward a broader popular uprising, one capable of pushing back against Israel’s brutal policies toward Palestinians across the land. The harrowing images from Gaza — emaciated children, families repeatedly driven from their homes, people being shot dead while waiting for food — have become impossible for Israel’s allies to ignore or explain away. These images have begun to haunt Western governments long complicit in Israel’s genocidal campaign, shaming them in the court of public opinion and exposing the moral bankruptcy of their silence. [Read More]
THE STUDENTS
Mahmoud Khalil Tells His Story
From The Ezra Klein Show [NY Times] [August 5, 2025]
---- Khalil was not followed into his building by plainclothes officers and taken to an ICE detention center in Louisiana for more than a hundred days — imprisoned there while his wife gave birth — because the U.S. government feared him. He was imprisoned there because the U.S. government wanted others like him to fear them. It wanted noncitizens and immigrants to stop speaking out. It wanted everyone to ask: If they could do this to Khalil, could they do it to me? If they could detain him on such flimsy grounds, could they not come up with a reason to detain me? Khalil is out now on bail. He is still speaking. So I wanted to hear what he had to say. [Read More]
How Columbia’s Leadership Refashioned the University in Trump’s Image
By Meghnad Bose and Anna Oakes, The Intercept [August 7, 2025]
---- Shortly after Columbia University made broad concessions to the Trump administration, the school’s acting president Claire Shipman struck a triumphant tone. “Columbia retains control over its academic and operational decisions,” Shipman wrote in a July 24 email to the entire university community. In an interview with the campus newspaper, she said the topic of disciplinary action had not even come up in negotiations with the Trump administration. The claim struck critics of the university’s recent actions as odd on its face. The school had agreed to pay a $200 million fine and make significant changes to its academic operations, disciplinary proceedings, and oversight — including giving the Trump administration access to vast swaths of previously private university documents and data. Critics of the deal with the Trump administration also noted that Shipman’s claim — that disciplinary action wasn’t discussed — was far-fetched. The announcement of the deal came on the heels of the suspensions and expulsions of almost 80 students who had participated in a sit-in and protest in Butler Library on May 7 — in a newly formulated disciplinary process that hewed closely to government demands. A review by The Intercept of correspondence between the Trump administration and Columbia, the conditions and clauses of their final agreement, dozens of university records, and details of disciplinary proceedings related to pro-Palestine protests point to a different story. [Read More]
THE WAR IN UKRAINE
(Video) Danger Remains Should the Ukraine Russia War Become a Frozen Conflict
An interview with John Mearsheimer, by Danial Davis, Deep Dive [August 2025]
---- In a wide-ranging discussion with Professor John Mearsheimer, he argues that even after the Ukraine war becomes a “frozen conflict” — likely ending without a formal peace agreement — it will remain highly dangerous. Mearsheimer predicts Russia will emerge as the de facto victor, seizing more Ukrainian territory and leaving behind a dysfunctional rump Ukrainian state. The West’s failure and humiliation, he warns, will incentivize risky efforts to reverse the outcome, potentially causing the conflict to reignite. Mearsheimer dismisses Donald Trump's proposed 10-day ceasefire deadline and subsequent tariff threats as unrealistic and counterproductive, arguing that Russia has no interest in such terms, which the West also won't accept. Trump's erratic diplomacy and economic threats, including to India and U.S. allies like Japan and South Korea, are damaging global trust in the U.S. and pushing other nations to reconsider their alliances — particularly as China exploits the growing rift. Structurally, Mearsheimer believes East Asian nations have strong incentives to align with the U.S. due to geography and regional threats, but he warns that continued American diplomatic “misbehavior” could erode those relationships. Meanwhile, U.S. entanglement in the Middle East and Ukraine is limiting its ability to pivot toward Asia to counterbalance China — a strategic failure, in his view. [See the Program]
Russia Says It Will Stop Abiding by Missile Treaty
By Paul Sonne and John Ismay, New York Times [August 4, 2025]
---- Russia will no longer abide by a defunct treaty prohibiting the deployment of intermediate-range missiles, the country’s Foreign Ministry announced on Monday. But Washington has accused Moscow of violating the pact for over a decade, and Russia has been known to use missiles with ranges banned by the treaty during its war against Ukraine. … The 1987 pact, also known as the I.N.F. Treaty, banned ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers (311 to 3,418 miles). As a result, more than 2,600 Soviet and U.S. missiles were eliminated, in what was seen as a Cold War breakthrough. In 2019, during President Trump’s first term, the United States pulled out of the agreement. The Trump administration argued that Russia had long been violating the treaty with the deployment of 9M729 cruise missiles, also known as SSC-8 missiles. Russia denied any knowledge of the violations. … Moscow’s announcement on Monday came three days after Mr. Trump ordered the repositioning of two American nuclear submarines in response to a nuclear threat made online by Dmitri A. Medvedev, the former Russian president who is deputy chairman of the country’s security council. [Read More]
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
America Is Living in a Climate-Denial Fantasy
By Zoë Schlanger, The Atlantic [August 9, 2025]
---- Last month, the world’s highest court issued a long-awaited opinion on how international law should regard climate harm. The International Court of Justice concluded, unanimously, that states have binding legal obligations to act to protect the climate system, and failure to do so—by continuing to produce, consume, and subsidize fossil fuels—may “constitute an internationally wrongful act.” In other words, curbing greenhouse-gas emissions is not merely voluntary in the eyes of the court; failure to do so is illegal. A week later, the U.S. government proffered an entirely opposite picture of legal responsibility. It announced a plan to rescind one of the most important legal underpinnings of the federal effort to combat climate change. The Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding for greenhouse gases, from 2009, says quite simply that these emissions endanger the public and qualify as harmful pollution; they can therefore be regulated under the Clean Air Act. This finding is the legal basis for power-plant rules, tailpipe-emissions regulations, and almost every other action the executive branch has taken to curb the release of carbon dioxide and methane. And the U.S. EPA would now like to throw it out. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
(Video) “They Poisoned the World”: The Corporate Cover-Up & Fightback Against PFAS, “Forever Chemicals”
From Democracy Now! [August 8, 2025]
---- In a major victory for environmental advocates, chemical giant DuPont and its related companies have agreed to pay $2 billion to clean up four industrial sites in New Jersey that are contaminated with “forever chemicals,” or PFAS, which have been found to persist in everything from rainwater to human breast milk. It is the third such settlement New Jersey has reached in less than three years, and marks a growing movement against the widespread use of PFAS, a class of chemicals still used to produce countless industrial and consumer goods, even though they have been linked to cancer and birth defects for over half a century. For more, we’re joined by investigative journalist Mariah Blake, the author of a new book on PFAS and the fight against them, to discuss the history of the pervasive toxins and the dangers they pose to human health. [See the Program]
OUR HISTORY - The Atomic Bombs of 1945
(Video) 80 Years After Hiroshima & Nagasaki, U.S. Keeps Covering Up Horrors of Atomic Bombing: Greg Mitchell
From Democracy Now! [August 6, 2025]
---- This week marks 80 years since the first use of nuclear weapons in war, when the United States dropped a pair of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed in the bombings. Many died instantly, and many others died more slowly from severe burns and radiation sickness. Some estimates put the combined death toll over 250,000 killed. We speak with veteran journalist Greg Mitchell, whose new documentary, streaming at PBS.org and airing on PBS, reexamines a remarkable episode in the U.S. occupation of Japan after the end of World War II, when the U.S. military held an all-star football game in the ruins of Nagasaki, reflecting what Mitchell calls a “careless” and “heartless” U.S. attitude. The Atomic Bowl is “horrifying history” that is worth reexamining, says Mitchell, because “there is not a real taboo on using nuclear weapons, because so many historians, so many in the media continue to support the use of the atomic bomb against Hiroshima and even Nagasaki.” [See the Program]
The Atomic Bombings Did Not Save Lives or End the War
By John LaForge, Znet [August 5, 2025] This August 6 and 9 are the 80th anniversaries of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 140,000 civilians at Hiroshima was the effect of jolting the city with a 60-million-degree (Celsius) explosion (ten thousand degrees hotter than the surface of the sun). Richard Rhodes, in The Making of the Atomic Bomb, explained, “People exposed within half a mile of the Little Boy fireball were seared to bundles of smoking black char in a fraction of a second as their internal organs boiled away….” The use of the atomic bombs against population centers without warning was rationalized after-the-fact using expert propaganda in the February 1947 Harper’s magazine, which transformed the burning of vast numbers of children into a positive good that “ended the war” and “saved lives, and which has since become gospel truth to generations. This in spite of the front-page New York Times story about Secretary of State James Byrnes August 29, 1945, with the headline: “Japan Beaten Before Atom Bomb, Byrnes Says, Citing Peace Bids.” The pretext of “saving lives” is now known to have been fabricated. Gen. (and later President) Dwight Eisenhower, who had been Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, told Secretary of War Henry Stimson before the July 17, 1945 Potsdam Conference he opposed using the bomb because it “was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives,” according to his memoir Mandate for Change. The general told Stimson, “…Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary. Broad declassification of wartime documents and personal diaries has made it possible to learn the facts. In one key example, Gar Alperovitz reports in The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb that the April 30, 1946 report by the Intelligence Group of the War Department’s Military Intelligence Division (“Use of Atomic Bomb on Japan”), first discovered in 1989, found “almost certainly that the Japanese would have capitulated upon the entry of Russia into the war…” which occurred on August 8. Japan surrendered a week later. ….” [Read More]
