This week, despite a ceasefire, fighting flared once again. On Thursday, President Trump said that the ceasefire was “over” and called the Iranians “scum.” This looks bad; how bad is it?
Last month the US and Iran signed a “Memorandum of Understanding” (MoU), a brief agreement with 14 points framing the way forward for negotiations. The first point ended the fighting (including in Lebanon). The 5th point set out ground rules for how the Strait of Hormuz would be regulated. This is where things got complicated last week.
The Strait is a narrow waterway that borders Iran on one side. Through the Strait oil, fertilizer, and other products from Iran and the Gulf states (also bordering the Strait) pass into the Arabian Sea and on the way to Asia, Africa, and beyond. The MoU says that Iran “will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge….” Following this guidance, Iran has said that ships entering and leaving the Strait must follow the channel near the Iranian coast. But the US rejects this, saying that it amounts to Iranian “control” of the Straits.
“Control” of the Straits is vital to Iran’s self-defense. Its ability to shut down commerce created an economic crisis that was the key factor in forcing Trump/US to agree to a ceasefire and the 14 points of the MoU. Trump is now attempting to claw back concessions he made in the MoU ending the fighting. Iran knows that, without control of the Strait, the US and/or Israel will certainly attack it again.
On Friday, it appeared that hostilities had ended and that negotiations on the 14 points outlined in the MoU might restart. Because the US has achieved none of the goals Trump announced when starting his war against Iran, negotiations might be interrupted by fighting again, and perhaps by dangerous escalation. Yet Trump is boxed in: whatever economic crisis his intransigence may create are hemmed in by the political consequences of a business recession and by the prospects of a loss in the November elections.
Will traditional considerations, like those stated above, of economic and/or political gain constrain Trump from military tantrums, perhaps even from using nuclear weapons? With each passing day it is more and more obvious that Trump is suffering from various mental deficiencies – in speech, memory, and thought – that make his instability dangerous. He has few if any advisers that could guide a path toward ending his wars, and he appears to be unable to seek or to listen to advice. The world trembles.
SOME ESSAYS ILLUMINATING ANOTHER WEEK OF WAR
(Video) “A Disastrous Development”: Trita Parsi on Breakdown of U.S.-Iran Ceasefire
From Democracy Now! [July 9, 2026]
---- We speak with political analyst Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, about the latest events in the Middle East. The United States has bombed Iran for multiple days after President Donald Trump declared the ceasefire between the countries to be “over.” Iran says it has retaliated by attacking U.S. military bases and other strategic sites in Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar. Parsi says the renewal of fighting is “a disastrous development” for chances of a long-term peace and a reset in the U.S.-Iran relationship. “Both countries are in dire need of an end to this war.” [See the Program]
(Video) Beyond the Battlefield: What Comes Next for the Iran and Gaza WarsFrom Drop Site News July 7, 2026
---- Palestinian Lawyer Diana Buttu and Iran analyst Vali Nasr speak to Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain. [See the Program]
Israel debated: Why Palestine is rewriting the Rules of domestic US Politics
By Ramzy Baroud, Middle East Monitor [July 8, 2026]
---- The shift is part of a broader, undeniable trend. A nationwide survey published in late June 2026 by Quinnipiac University revealed that an unprecedented 48 percent of American voters now think the United States is “too supportive” of Israel—the highest percentage recorded since the pollster first began tracking the question in 2017. This is precisely why Massie’s amendment carries such profound weight. It is significant not because US politicians have suddenly developed a collective moral conscience, but because recent election cycles represented the first time in modern American history where Palestine factored as a major, decisive variable in how citizens cast their ballots. For years, conventional political analysts dismissed pro-Palestinian mobilization, claiming Americans only vote based on immediate socioeconomic interests and rigid party loyalties. That assessment has since proven faulty. The political cost of Washington’s complicity became undeniable following the fallout of the 2024 presidential race, a reality later confirmed by those within the inner sanctums of power. In the post-election debates, senior administration insiders admitted that the handling of the Gaza genocide alienated core voter blocks. [See the Program]
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 can be read on Substack, and is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook group. Another Facebook group 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 join in the pursuit of happiness. Here are 2 videos of skating superstar Alysa Liu, in the aftermath of her gold medal win in the Olympics. Please check out her skating to “Stateside”; and to “Promise.” Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW WEEKLY READER
FEATURED ARTICLES & ESSAYS
(Video) What Happens ‘When the World Sleeps’ (w/ Francesca Albanese) |
From The Chris Hedges Report [July 7, 2026]
---- United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese shares stories of the immense suffering in Palestine and laments the gutting of international law in her book, “When the World Sleeps.” [See the Program] – ALSO OF INTEREST - “When the World Sleeps; Stories, Words and Wounds of Palestine: Francesca Albanese’s Courageous Witness Against Genocide and Silence,” by Michael Leonardi, Thinking Palestine [July 10, 2026] [Link].
The Black woman on the train did not look away. How much longer will we?
By Errin Haines, 19th News [July 2026]
---- It is an arresting image: On the Fourth of July, a lone, young Black woman sits on a train filled with White nationalists headed to commemorate America’s 250th birthday in our nation’s capital. Her thousand-yard stare is one of dignified terror. It is a moment forced upon her, in a democracy still reckoning with its contradictions about who gets to belong, where patriotism and freedom are perverted and how a Black woman becomes an unwitting and unwilling passenger amid a sea of mostly white men. Their identities are not known, but the fear the image evokes is familiar. A crowd of faces, sitting and standing, intentionally unseen behind sunglasses and scarves. And then, in their midst, a single face exposed: brown, female, eyes fixed in the direction of the camera. In this photograph, what was meant to intimidate became insight. The men are masked. She is not. Once again, a Black woman was captured in a moment where she must confront the worst of America with composure and become the mirror that shows the distance between who we are and who we say we are — or who we want to be — as a country. We do not yet know the name or age of the woman in the visceral and now viral photograph taken Saturday by Reuters photographer Cheney Orr. But we know the look on her face. [Read More]
Armed Israeli Settlers Detained Ro Khanna. He Wants Their Illegal Outposts Demolished.
By Jonah Valdez, The Intercept [July 11, 2026]
---- On a hot Wednesday afternoon in the Palestinian village of Zanuta, California Rep. Ro Khanna walked through the ruins of a Palestinian school demolished by Israeli settlers several years earlier. In 2023, Israeli settlers took firearms and bulldozers to the village, destroying the school and other buildings and displacing dozens of Bedouin Palestinian residents from their homes. While standing amid the rubble, one of Khanna’s staffers spotted an Israeli settler wearing a large smile on his face with an assault rifle draped around his shoulder, peering at the group through a broken window. … Over the next 75 to 90 minutes, Israeli settlers, who carried what appeared to be M4 assault rifles, intimidated and harassed Khanna and his group, who felt their fear rising from inside the van. The settlers proceeded to menace the Americans: They prevented the group from leaving the village, brandished their rifles, laughed and yelled taunts at the group, kicked the van’s tires, and wiped down the windows with their hands to gawk inside, recording the group and snapping photos. Khanna and Kasky said their security aide identified the men as members of the Hilltop Youth, an extremist settler group with a history of violent raids, which prompted more concern among the delegation. [Read More] ALSO OF INTEREST - “An American Politician Is Blocked by Israeli Settlers in the West Bank,” by Lisa Lerer, The New York Times [July 11, 2026] [Link].
The New Ellis Island – [El Paso]
By Julia Preston, New York Review of Books [July 23, 2026 issue]
---- El Paso sits in a verdant opening between arid mountains at the westernmost tip of Texas, at a place where the Rio Grande often runs shallow enough to wade across from Ciudad Juárez, its twin city in Mexico. Since the lands north of the river were taken over by the United States in 1848 as the spoils of the Mexican-American War, the pass has been a crossing point, in both directions, for Mexican immigrants, laborers, and traders; for soldiers and smugglers, politicos and revolutionaries; for cowboys, Native people, Black people; for families bifurcated by the boundary. The journalist Jazmine Ulloa grew up in the city, and in the course of her work over the past decade she came to feel that her hometown had been wrongly marginalized in the story Americans tell about the origins and development of their country. In El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory, she sets out to restore the city “to its rightful position” as a place of entry and connection as consequential as Ellis Island to the east and Angel Island to the west, and more enduring than either. … What is new in Trump’s second term is the scale of the deportation blitz. The whole country is becoming a borderland, as DHS tries to achieve Trump’s goal of deporting one million people this fiscal year. [Read More]
WHERE IS NATO GOING?
Eight Contradictions Behind NATO’s Summit of “Love”
By Medea Benjamin, Code Pink [July 9, 2026]
---- “I just want to say there was tremendous love in that room,” President Trump declared as he wrapped up the 2026 NATO summit in Ankara. But anyone looking beyond the carefully choreographed photo-ops saw an alliance beset by public feuds, competing visions of security, and widening political divisions. Here are eight contradictions that defined the Ankara summit—and raise fundamental questions about NATO’s future. … The biggest question hanging over the Ankara summit was not inside the conference halls but in the streets: should NATO still exist? Created in 1949 to contain the Soviet Union, the alliance steadily expanded its mission long after the Cold War ended, intervening in places from the Balkans to Afghanistan and increasingly projecting military power far beyond its original mandate. … For peace activists across NATO countries, those contradictions only reinforce what they have argued for decades: Europe needs a new security architecture based on diplomacy, arms control, common security, and cooperation, while the United States needs a foreign policy that relies on diplomacy rather than militarism. For them, the ultimate lesson is clear: the time has come to dissolve NATO and replace it with a security system that reduces tensions instead of fueling arms races and preparing for endless war. [Read More] - ALSO OF INTEREST is “NATO’s Ankara Moment: From Consolidation to Burden Sharing,” by Mehmet Rakipoglu, Informed Comment [July 12, 2026] [Link].
THE MAMDANI/DSA EXPLOSION
(Video)“Now or Never”: DSA & Justice Democrats on Changing the Democratic Party, Mamdani, Gaza & More
From Democracy Now! [Juy 10, 2026]
---- As a rose-tinted wave of progressives and democratic socialists win Democratic primaries across the United States, we take a look at two of the organizations behind this recent slate of successful electoral campaigns: the Democratic Socialists of America and Justice Democrats. From Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York to Melat Kiros in Colorado to Janeese Lewis George in Washington, D.C., major victories from self-described democratic socialists and DSA-backed candidates show that “socialism is losing its scare factor.” Ashik Siddique, co-chair of the DSA’s National Political Committee, explains that DSA’s “goal is to reframe politics around class lines in the United States, which is what the ruling class has been doing forever. We want to transfer power from the 1% to the working class, and to replace capitalism with socialism, which means expanding democracy in every part of our lives.” [See the Program]
Younger Voters Are Propelling the Democratic Socialist Surge in New York
By Emma Goldberg and Luke Vrotsos, New YorkTimes [July 12, 2026]
---- There are a multitude of reasons for the Democratic Socialists of America’s expanding reach in blue states like New York: dissatisfaction with the status quo, anger over Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, concern about the growing affordability crisis. But what became clear during the June primaries is that those sources of friction have weighed heaviest among the younger voters driving the D.S.A.’s success at the polls. A New York Times analysis of election data about Ms. Valdez and another democratic socialist who won a House primary, Darializa Avila Chevalier, found a strong correlation between the average age of people who voted in June in a precinct and its support for candidates backed by the D.S.A. … While the two D.S.A.-backed candidates did better on average in precincts with more college graduates and higher median incomes, those correlations were not as pronounced as voters’ age. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - (Video) “Darializa Avila Chevalier on Zionism, October 8, and Her Experience in the West Bank,” from Peter Breibart, Substack [July 12, 2026] [Link]; “The Democratic Socialists Winning Elections Far From New York City,” by Benjamin Oreskes and Mark Sommer, New York Times [June 12, 2026]. [Link];
and “Socialist Francesca Hong on Her Wisconsin Insurgency: An interview with Francesca Hong, Jacobin Magazine [July 8, 2026] [Link].
THE WAR ON PALESTINE
Israeli Politicians Vying to Oust Netanyahu Must Answer Some Questions First
By Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz [Israel] [July 12, 2026]
---- On the day after Benjamin Netanyahu, millions of Israelis will take to the streets with joy in their hearts; they will feel great relief and even that they’ve been saved. The world will also be glad on that day, albeit less so. People abroad already understand that Netanyahu is not Israel’s only problem. That day is at hand. A new government will come to power in Israel, but astonishingly, not a single person knows where it is heading, what it wants and what it is planning other than to replace Netanyahu. Not to say that this is not a lofty goal, but what happens on the day after? A hangover and then an emptiness. How can anyone embody such a big promise, and at such an hour of need, without saying a word about what they are offering, other than negating everything Netanyahu and his associates did? How can one aspire to be an alternative without charting some kind of course that is not just a bundle of hollow clichés about unity, Zionism, security and prosperity? [Read More]
Israel Has Become a Borderless State of Settlers
By Zvi Bar’el, Ha’aretz [Israel] [July 1, 2026]
---- In this dangerous transition, from a nation-state striving to shape its identity and values within recognized borders to a state with fluid borders, a “Sparta nation” is formed. This one fosters a fortress-minded society, alert, vigilant, armed – but one without a horizon. Not a society that asks where it wants to go, but one that wishes to get through the next week. And its values are derived accordingly. In the not-too-distant past, even people who opposed making any territorial concessions and did not believe in an agreement with the Palestinians, Syria or Lebanon still operated within a conceptual world in which the main question was what is the desired resolution. Now, a totally different framework is being created. No more striving for a permanent arrangement, but getting used to a situation in which there isn’t any; a situation in which one only needs to manage its consequences. [Read More]
(Video) Calls Grow for Israel to Release Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya; U.S. Doctor Says “Nobody Is Safe” in Gaza
From Democracy Now! [July 7, 2026]
---- Israel continues to ignore international calls to free the director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, from over 18 months of Israeli detention without charge. After seeing Dr. Abu Safiya on July 2, his attorney Nasser Odeh says the doctor faces “tangible danger to his life” from torture and medical neglect. For more, we speak to Tirza Leibowitz, the deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights Israel, about Abu Safiya’s case and efforts to secure his release. The group has filed an appeal in the Israeli courts requesting the release of Abu Safiya and 13 other Palestinian doctors who were captured in Gaza and imprisoned by the Israeli military. We also hear from Dr. Thaer Ahmad, a Chicago-based emergency room physician and former colleague of Hussam Abu Safiya. Ahmad volunteered as a medical practitioner in Gaza in 2024. He says Abu Safiya has become a “symbol of Palestinian resilience” and, in particular, Israel’s systematic targeting of Gaza’s healthcare system, which continues to this day. “The necessary aid is not entering, the bombing still persists, people are still dying on a regular basis, and these hospitals don’t have the supplies that they need to be able to treat their patients,” says Ahmad. [See the Program]
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
Drone Warfare Turns Oil From a Resource Into a Liability
By Bill Mckibben, The Crucial Years [July 8, 2026]
---- I’m equipped to pronounce, with the gravitas proper to a pundit, that Omsk is long ways from anywhere else. Including the Ukrainian border, which makes it remarkable that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s drone specialists managed to fly a whole squadron of their craft more than 2,500 kilometers from home and bomb the heck out of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s largest oil refinery. It was the high point of an ongoing campaign designed to highlight what may be Russia’s greatest weakness: that it, like a number of other countries, is heavily dependent on oil. … If our attack on Iran has made other nations demonstrably more nervous about relying on the import of hydrocarbons, Ukraine’s attacks on Russia’s petroleum network should make them nervous about depending on the stuff even if they don’t have to bring it in from afar. It turns out that in the drone age it’s a very risky business, because it relies on colossal pieces of infrastructure that can’t be easily defended. [Read More]
Gen Z Thinks About Climate Change Constantly. Why Don’t They Vote Like It?
By Sarah Soroosh Moghadam, The Nation [July 10, 2026]
---- The cost of living, healthcare, and abortion were the top three issues for young voters in the 2024 election, according to a Tufts poll. Financial precarity and political instability are, in many ways, the defining features of young Americans’ futures. A record-high percentage of Americans say their finances are worsening; housing prices are 60 percent higher than in 2019, and credit card debt has risen 63 percent since 2021. It’s easy to see how a relatively post-materialist issue like climate change could get lost in this list of immediate concerns. … When survival in the present is already so exacting, thinking about what life may look like in a few decades becomes difficult, if not impossible. Inevitably and understandably, the climate has been placed on the back burner for many people. Though climate remains a concern for many Americans, this pattern indicates that those who care deeply about the climate aren’t considering it a top priority in their voting decisions—or even voting at all. … “Young people have been taught to view the climate crisis as a suicide rather than a homicide,” Stinnett said. “They’ve been told that they must change what they buy and eat and drive in order to fix everything, when in reality, climate change is a systemic problem where politicians are letting companies get away with murder.” [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “June: World’s Oceans Hottest on Record as El Niño Looms,” by Matthew England, et al. The Conversation [July 6, 2026] [Link]; “How Japan’s Media Ecosystem Is Fighting Climate Change,” by Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation [July 9, 2026] [Link]; and “Cut the Pentagon, Save the Planet: The $1.5 Trillion Climate Solution We Can’t Ignore,” by Aaron Kirshenbaum, Code Pink [July 10, 2026] [Link].
CIVIL LIBERTIES
The Deeper Meaning Behind Trump’s Raid in Ohio
By Scot Nakagawa, Znet [July 7, 2026]
---- Reports say over one hundred FBI agents descended on Ohio voter registration organizers in early June. The number is the tell. On Thursday, June 11, FBI agents searched the Cleveland offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative and fanned out across the state—to the homes of its leaders, its staff, and people who had done nothing more than basic canvassing. The agents carried subpoenas. They seized laptops and phones. They knocked on doors in front of children and asked everyday Ohioans whether they were committing voter fraud. A Collaborative board member put the count at more than one hundred agents. I want to be precise about what happened here, because precision is the most damning account. The loose version of this story—they’re trying to steal the election—is both too big and too small. Too big, because there’s no evidence of a mechanism to cancel a vote that hasn’t happened yet. Too small, because it lets you treat this as a single outrage rather than what it is: a repeatable procedure, run before, run elsewhere, and run again. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
Graham Platner’s Downfall Was All Too Predictable
By Katha Pollitt, The Nation [July 9, 2026]
---- It was a bit of a grift, but for a long time, it worked. Platner had a huge following in Maine among fed-up workers and idealistic progressives alike, including lots of women enraged by Senator Collins’s vote for Brett Kavanaugh. He won the primary. People loved him so much, and were so eager to beat Collins they excused flaws that would have sunk an ordinary Democrat: the tattoo he claimed not to know was a Nazi symbol but probably did, the misogynistic Reddit posts, bad behavior with some—but not all!—girlfriends, sexting with multiple women after the marriage that was supposed to have turned his life around. It was all down to PTSD or alcoholism. Each thing was supposed to be the last—he swore it—but it never was. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “Platner Volunteers Want to Move Forward with a New Candidate,” by Nathan Bernard, Drop Site News [July 7, 2026] [Link]; and “Maine Senate Candidates Claim They’re Just Like Platner — But Entirely Different,” by Akela Lacy, The Intercept [July 10, 2026] [Link].
OUR HISTORY
An Intimate Reckoning With the Weather Underground
By Frida Berrigan, Waging Nonviolence [June 30, 2026]
---- As we celebrate and/or mourn the 250th birthday of the most militarized, most violent, (almost) most corrupt, most polluting, most inequitable and most sad nation on the face of the Earth, I am reading “Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground.” Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s new book about his Weatherman parents chronicles a small group of revolutionaries who used dynamite, bombs and guns to blow up buildings, statutes and police cars, break people out of prison and generally make mayhem half a century ago. But it is not just history to view on the page. It says so much to our MAGA moment. It is a story of history, conscience and memory at a time of AI slop, official lies and active amnesia. It is a story of youthful rebellion against the Vietnam War that matures into revolutionary sabotage, political violence and life “underground” that eventually settles into careers in education and law outside of the mainstream. It is the story of surviving some of the most harrowing political moments of the last half century. It is a story of a family. I grew up in a very different corner of the left than Ayers Dohrn. There were no drug-fueled orgies, shootouts with the cops or days of rage in the Catholic left. But there was a similar stridency, urgency and seriousness about my family life. There was jail and prison and fear of FBI infiltration and dirty tricks. There were people with no last names who showed up for a meal or a night and headed back into the underground. We also survived separation and secrecy, and I am also not raising my children on the knife’s edge of the revolution. So, Ayers Dohrn’s effort to tell his family’s story with truthfulness, curiosity and distance landed so very true for me. [Read More]
