Just International

Surrendering to Authoritarianism

By Chris Hedges

Liberal institutions, including universities, traditionally surrender without a fight to the dictates of autocrats. Ours are no exception.

24 Mar 2025 – I was not surprised when Columbia University’s interim president Katrina Armstrong caved to the demands of the Trump administration. She agreed to ban face masks or face coverings, prohibit protests in academic buildings and create an internal security force of 36 New York City Police officers empowered to “remove individuals from campus and/or arrest them when appropriate.” She has also surrendered the autonomy of academic departments, as demanded by the Trump administration, by appointing a new senior vice provost to “review” the university’s department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies and the Center for Palestine Studies.

Elite universities such as Harvard, Princeton, Columbia or Yale, were created to train and perpetuate the plutocracy. They are not and never have been centers of cutting-edge intellectual thought or hospitable to dissidents and radicals. They cloak themselves in the veneer of moral probity and intellectualism but cravenly serve political and economic power. This is their nature. Don’t expect it to change, even as we fall headlong into authoritarianism.

Armstrong, like most of the heads of our universities, is fruitlessly humiliating herself. She would, I expect, happily make space on her office wall to hang an oversized portrait of the president. But what she does not know, and what history has taught us, is that no appeasement is sufficient with autocrats. She, and the rest of the liberal elites, groveling abjectly in an attempt to accommodate their new masters, will be steadily replaced or dominated by buffoonish goons such as those seeded throughout the Trump administration.

The Department of Education has warned 60 colleges and universities that they could face “potential enforcement actions,” if they do not comply with federal civil rights law that protects students from discrimination based on race or nationality, which includes antisemitism. Columbia, stripped of $400 million in federal grants, is desperately trying to restore the funding. I doubt it will work. Those mounting these assaults against universities intend to turn them into indoctrination machines. The so-called campaign against antisemitism is simply a cynical tool being used to achieve that end.

The warning follows an open letter signed by 200 faculty members on Feb. 3 urging Columbia University implement measures to “protect Jewish students.” Amongst their demands are the removal of Professor Joseph Massad who teaches Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at the university and beginning a Title VI investigation against him, that the university adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which conflates criticism of Israel with racism against Jews, and the university hire tenured pro-Israel faculty.

These institutions of privilege — I attended Harvard and have taught at Columbia and Princeton — have always been complicit in the crimes of their times. They did not, until the world around them changed, speak out against the slaughter of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the crushing of labor and socialist organizations at the turn of the twentieth century and the purging of institutions, including the academy, during the Red Scare in the 1920s and 1930s, and later the witch hunts under McCarthyism. They turned on their students protesting the war in Vietnam in the 1960s as viciously as they are turning on them now.

Many of the dregs of the Trump administration are products of these elite academic institutions. I can assure you their children will also attend these schools despite their public denunciations. Rep. Elise Stefanik, who humiliated in congressional hearings the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, graduated from Harvard. Vice President JD Vance graduated from Yale Law School. Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth went to Princeton University and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who has ordered a review of grants to universities from his agency over allegations of antisemitism — graduated from Harvard.

Professor Katherine Franke, who taught at Columbia Law School for 25 years, recently lost her position at the university for defending Columbia students’ right to protest in favor of a ceasefire of the Israeli slaughter in Gaza and for Columbia University to divest from Israel. She also condemned the spraying of pro-Palestinian protesters on the campus with a toxic chemical that left students hospitalized.

“Part of why I think Colombia was such an easy target — and it’s not just Columbia, I think this is true for Harvard, for Yale, for the elite universities — is that the boards of trustees are no longer made up of people who are involved in education — committed to the educational mission, in some way professionally or otherwise — see themselves as custodians of the special role that the academy plays in a democracy,” she told me.

“Instead, they are hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, corporate lawyers and in our case, arms manufacturers as well.” She went on:

And they see that responsibility is to protect only the endowment. I often describe Columbia — which is the largest residential landlord in New York City — as a real estate holding operation that has a side hustle of teaching classes. It has evolved over time into just a business that enjoys nonprofit status. And so when the pressure started here, there were no voices on the boards of trustees to say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, we have to be the front line of resistance.’ Or at a minimum, we have to defend our academic mission.’ When I was sitting in my living room watching [former] president Minouche Shafik testify before that House committee…I was upset because they mentioned me, but more importantly, the fact that president Shafik did not even begin to defend Columbia, its faculty, its students, our project, our history of being one of the premier universities in the world. Instead, she groveled before a bully. And we all know that when you grovel before a bully, it encourages the bully. And that’s exactly what’s happened here up until today, where they’re still negotiating with the Trump administration on terms that the administration has set. And this university, I think, will never be the same if it survives at all.

You can see my interview with Professor Franke here.

Universities and colleges across the country have shut down free speech and squandered their academic integrity. They have brutalized, arrested, suspended and expelled faculty, administrators and students that decry the genocide. They have called police to their campuses — in the case of Columbia three times — to arrest students, often charging them with trespassing. Following the lead of their authoritarian masters they subjected students to internal surveillance. Columbia University, out front on the repression of its students, banned Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace a month after Israel’s genocide in Gaza had begun in November 2023, when both organizations called for a ceasefire, long before the protests and encampments began.

Columbia’s violent suppression of protests and decision to lock down its campus, which is now surrounded by security checkpoints, paved the way for the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, who was a graduate student at the School of International Public Affairs. He is a legal permanent resident. He did not commit a crime. But the university administration had already demonized and criminalized Khalil and the other students, many of whom are Jewish, who dared to protest the mass slaughter in Gaza.

The video — shot by his wife on March 8 — of Khalil being taken away by plainclothes federal agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who did not identify themselves, is a chilling reminder of the secret police abductions I witnessed on the streets of Santiago during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

The law in authoritarian states protects the criminality of the powerful. It revokes due process, basic freedoms and the rights of citizenship. It is an instrument of repression. It is a very small step from the stripping of rights from a legal resident holding a green card to the stripping of rights of any citizen. This is what is coming.

Khalil was ostensibly arrested under the Immigration Nationality Act of 1952, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act. It gives the Secretary of State the power to deport foreign nationals if he has “reasonable ground[s] to believe” their presence or activities in the U.S. “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” It was used to deny entry to the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Márquez and the British author Doris Lessing. It was also used to deport the poet and essayist Margaret Randall and civil rights activist and journalist Claudia Jones. Senator Patrick McCarran, an open admirer of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and a rabid antisemite, formulated the act to target not only dissidents and communists, but also Jews. When the law was enacted, it was used to ban Eastern European Jewish Holocaust survivors from entering the U.S. due to their alleged sympathies with the Soviet Union.

“The irony of that is not lost on any of us, that these are laws that are at their core, deeply antisemitic, that are now being deployed in the name of protecting Jewish citizens or our foreign policy goals with the state of Israel,” Franke said. “And that’s the cynicism of this administration. They don’t give a darn that there’s that history. They’re looking for every piece of power that they can get, every law, no matter how ugly that law may be. Even the laws that interned Japanese people during World War Two. I’m sure they would be more than happy to use those at some point.”

James Luther Adams, my mentor at Harvard Divinity School, was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 until he was arrested and deported by the Gestapo. He worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by dissident clergy such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams saw how swiftly and cravenly German universities, which like ours were considered some of the best in the world, surrendered to the dictates of fascism and self-destructed.

The theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich, a close friend of Adams, was fired from his teaching post and blacklisted ten weeks after the Nazis came to power in January 1933. Tillich’s book “The Socialist Decision” was immediately banned by the Nazis. Tillich, a Lutheran pastor, along with the sociologist Karl Mannheim and the philosopher Max Horkheimer, who wrote “Eclipse of Reason” which examines the rise of authoritarianism, were branded as “enemies of the Reich,” blacklisted and forced into exile. The 1933 “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” saw all Jewish professors dismissed. The vast majority of academics cowered in fear or, as with the case of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, joined the Nazi Party, which saw him appointed as the Rector of Freiburg University.

Adams saw in the Christian Right disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi. He was the first person I heard refer to the Christian Right as “Christian fascists.” He also warned us about universities and academics which, if the country fell into authoritarianism, would debase themselves to protect their status and privileges. Few would speak out or defy authority.

“If the Nazis took over America, 60 percent of the Harvard faculty would happily begin their lectures with the Nazi salute,” he quipped.

And this is where we are. None of the liberal institutions, including the universities, the commercial media and the Democratic Party, will defend us. They will remain supine, hypocritically betray their supposed principles and commitment to democracy or willingly transform themselves into apologists for the regime. The purges and silencing of our most courageous and accomplished intellectuals, writers, artists and journalists — begun before Trump’s return to the White House — is being expedited.

Resistance will be left to us. Enemies of the state.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief.

31 March 2025

Source: transcend.org

Mineral Deal Gives the US Total Control over Ukraine’s Future

By TFF Transnational Foundation

Mineral Deal Gives US TOTAL Control Over Ukraine’s Future

Imagine Russia or China had suggested a deal with this content and these intentions, depriving Ukraine of its sovereignty.

28 Mar 2025 – This is posted on Sebastian Sas’ important YouTube Channel with no less than 120,000 subscribers. His succinct analysis is based on an article published by the NED, EU and NATO-supported Ukraine-based newspaper, European Pravda.

I hope you are half as shocked as Sas – and I – are. Because, remember that this war, this destruction of Ukraine has been caused by the Russia-NATO conflict – that is, by the Obama administration’s regime change in Kiev in 2014, the US-led NATO’s expansion and the US/Western pumping of arms into Ukraine.

Now, Ukraine is destined to be paying for generations ahead and give away its natural resources to an extent that makes it impossible to see it as a sovereign state in the future. The Trump Regime’s proposal is in colonial-slave style – also meant to undermine the European Union’s plans…

31 March 2025

Source: transcend.org

From JFK to Donald Trump: How the USA Became Wedded to Zionist Israel

By Rick Sterling

27 Mar 2025 – There are many contrasts between the 35th president, John F. Kennedy, and the 45th and 47th president, Donald J. Trump. One extreme example is regarding U.S. policy toward Israel.

JFK and Israel/Palestine

Unknown to many people today, JFK supported Palestinian rights and sought a sustainable peace in the region.

In 1960, when JFK was campaigning to be president, he spoke at the convention of the Zionists of America. In his speech, Kennedy was complimentary about Israel but frankly said,

“I cannot believe that Israel has any real desire to remain indefinitely a garrison state surrounded by fear and hate.”

That warning, issued when Israel had only existed for 12 years, was ignored.

Kennedy did not just issue warnings. To the chagrin of the Israelis, JFK established friendly relations with Egypt’s President Nasser. The Kennedy administration provided loans and aid to Egypt.

The JFK administration supported UN resolution 194 which called for the right of return for Palestinian refugees driven out of their homeland. Although Israel committed to abide by UN resolutions when it was admitted to the United Nations in 1949, the Israelis reneged on this commitment and were hostile to the resolution. The day before JFK was assassinated, the New York Times reported (p 19), “Israel Dissents as U.N. Group Backs U.S. on Arab Refugees” and “U.S. Stand Angers Israel.”  The second item begins, “Premier Levi Eshkol expressed extreme distaste today for the United States’ position in the Palestinian-refugee debate.”

John Kennedy’s brother Robert was Attorney General and headed the Department of Justice. For two years, up until the end of 1963, the DOJ made increasingly strict demands that the American Zionist Council (AZC)  register as agents of a foreign country. In response, the AZC stalled, delayed, and created the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

The most intense disagreement between Tel Aviv and Washington was regarding the nuclear site under construction at Dimona. JFK was intent on stopping the expansion of countries which possessed nuclear weapons. Although Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion said the nuclear site was for peaceful purposes, JFK insisted that the US needed to inspect and confirm this. The inspection deadline was December 1963.

In each of these four areas of contention, US policy changed dramatically after JFK was assassinated and Lyndon Johnson became president. Dimona was never properly inspected, and LBJ did not object to Israeli acquisition of nuclear weapons. The demand that the American Zionist Council register as an agent of a foreign country was dropped. Over time, the US withdrew their support of UN resolution 194, and LBJ was hostile to Nasser and ended US loans and support. Details of this process are described in this article and this book.

Israel Policy since JFK and Today

With few exceptions, US policy has been subservient to Israel’s wants ever since JFK.  An extreme low point was the treachery of President Johnson in covering up the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty during the June 1967 “Six Day War”. News about the Israeli killing and injuring of over 200 US sailors was suppressed for decades.

Now we are in a new extreme low point. In his first presidency, Trump flouted international law and longstanding US policy by moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The significant move was driven by mega donor Sheldon Adelson who wanted it announced on Trump’s first day in office.  Another prime concern of Adelson was to torpedo the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran. Trump responded as expected and withdrew the US from the agreement, effectively killing it.

Now President Trump’s administration is trampling on the right to free speech and aggressively suppressing critics of Israel. This repression on behalf of Israel was taking place under Biden but has escalated dramatically. Authorities have imprisoned a perfectly legal resident, Mahmoud Khalil. They have forced Columbia University to punish students without just cause and to impose obvious restrictions and prohibitions on speech and opinion. Why did they do this? It appears to follow the wishes of megadonor Miriam Adelson. She is president and chief funder of the Maccabee Task Force, which has campaigned on these issues for months.

As reported at Responsible Statecraft, “Adelson’s support for the administration’s campaign to stifle criticism of Israel on college campuses isn’t a new focus but her alignment with the levers of state powers to implement her vision are unprecedented. In fact, tax documents reveal that she is directly overseeing a social media campaign targeting Khalil and Columbia University.”

In addition to suppressing free speech and punishing critics of Israel, the Trump administration has bombed and attacked They are doing this despite the fact that Yemen did NOT threaten U.S. ships in the region. The Houthi government only threatened Israeli ships after Israel unilaterally broke the ceasefire and prevented food and other necessary humanitarian aid into Gaza. Israel, with U.S. support,  is blatantly defying the International Court of Justice which ordered Israel to “Maintain open the Rafah crossing for unhindered provision at scale of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance” and “Immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Israel is in violation of this order and the US is complicit by providing most of the weapons.

President Trump, who campaigned and won election on the pledge to STOP needless wars, has started a new war with Yemen which is of no benefit to the US but serves the interests of Netanyahu’s Israel.  Will he authorize attacks on Iran, in further subservience to Bibi?

Corruption of the Political Process

When Jewish donors to JFK’s 1960 campaign suggested they should determine his Mideast policy, JFK was shocked and definitively said NO.  As reported by Seymour Hersh in “The Samson Option”, Kennedy talked with a friend who described what happened:

“As an American citizen he (JFK) was outraged to have a zionist group come to him and say, ‘We know your campaign is in trouble. We’re willing to pay your bills if you’ll let us have control of your Middle East policy.’”

At that time, JFK vowed to change the US electoral system to prevent this corruption if he got elected.  As president, he tried,but faced big hurdles and did not succeed.

Ever since JFK’s death, pro-Israel forces have had undue influence on U.S. policy.  If the International Court of Justice decides that Israel is committing genocide, as seems likely, the U.S. will be the primary collaborator in the war crimes. The US is increasingly alone in supporting the zionist state as it practices apartheid within Israel, theft of land in the West Bank, and massacres in Gaza including attacks on hospitals, schools, and UN facilities. Fourteen countries now support South Africa’s charges of genocide against Israel.

Under Democratic President Joe Biden, U.S. policy to Israel was unwaveringly obsequious. Despite 70% of Democratic Party voters wanting the U.S. to get a ceasefire in Gaza, the Biden/Blinken team refused to do this.  The Democratic Party leaders zionist ideology combined with zionist financial influence superseded their party members’ wishes. Netanyahu ignored Biden’s “red lines” with impunity.

Republican  President Trump has taken this to a new level. His zionist donors determine his Israel policy. To protect Israel, Trump issued an executive order which weaponizes antisemitism. Universities are being compelled to implement a new definition of antisemitism which conflates criticism of Israel with ethnic discrimination.  Trump’s campaign to “Make America Great Again” has evolved into “Miriam Adelson Gets All”.

It is a remarkable descent from the days when JFK did what was best for the U.S. as well as being best for Palestinians and non-zionist Jews.

Rick Sterling is a member of the TRANSCEND Network and an investigative journalist who lives in the SF Bay Area, California.

31 March 2025

Source: transcend.org

The Unraveling: Zionism, October 7, and the Ongoing Nakba

By Ilan Pappé

12 Mar 2025

Is the Zionist narrative collapsing? Historian Ilan Pappé breaks down the ideological contradictions at the heart of Israel’s settler-colonial project and why October 7 exposed the impossibility of being both a Zionist and a democrat.

From Gaza’s destruction to the West’s complicity, Pappé unpacks the Nakba al-mustamirra (ongoing Nakba), Israeli genocide, and the urgent need for global solidarity to challenge apartheid and safeguard human rights. What does this mean for the future of Palestine—and the world?

Video:

The Unraveling: Zionism, October 7, and the Ongoing Nakba w/ Ilan Pappe

Prof Ilan Pappé was born in Haifa, Israel in 1954. He graduated from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1979 and received his Ph.D. from the University of Oxford in 1984. He taught at the University of Haifa until 2006 and then moved to the University of Exeter in the UK, where he is currently the director of the European Center for Palestine Studies. Pappé is the author of 20 books, among them The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2007) and On Palestine, with Noam Chomsky (2010).

31 March 2025

Source: transcend.org

Do Palestinians Have the Right to Resist? MUST WATCH

By Richard Falk

28 Mar 2025

In this unmissable, must-watch conversation, Professor Richard Falk—international law expert, former UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine, and leading scholar on global justice—breaks down the complexities of international law, the right of resistance, and the enforcement gaps in global governance.

From the historic context of decolonization to the current war in Gaza, Falk sheds light on the accountability challenges facing Israel and the role of civil society in pushing for change. Listen to his insights on the urgent need for justice-driven action and the role of geopolitical dynamics in shaping the international order.

Video:

UNMISSABLE: Do Palestinians Have the Right to Resist? w/ Richard Falk

31 March 2025

Source: transcend.org

Palestinian Citizens of Israel

By Jonathan Kuttab

One of the key strategic elements to Israel’s control over Palestinians has been the establishment of a focused system of fragmentation of the Palestinian community. Palestinians have been forcefully divided into distinctly separate categories, each with a different legal system, economic system, leadership, and community-specific concerns. These include: Israeli Citizens, East Jerusalemites, West Bankers, Gazans, and the Diaspora (lacking any status whatsoever). Israel adamantly refuses to interact with the Palestinian people as a unified entity and insists on dealing with each component separately, sometimes making it physically impossible for members of each group to communicate with, trade with, or even intermarry with members of the other Palestinian communities.

An explicit hierarchy of rights and privileges has also been established by Israel between each category. The highest level (within the Israeli hierarchy of control) are those Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship, who managed to remain in the land in 1948. There are currently about 2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, constituting approximately 20% of the Israeli citizen population. They enjoy the highest standard of living, the greatest freedom of movement, and some of the benefits of Israeli society because they do hold citizenship. Some of them are occasionally trotted out as proof of the tolerance and equality in a “democratic” state of Israel, as promised in the not-legally-binding Declaration of Independence.

This community often complains of systematic discrimination, in a state which openly declares itself to be a Jewish state and NOT a state for all its citizens. Yet, compared to other Palestinians, their situation is truly enviable. It reminds me of free blacks living in the American North during the pre-Civil War era. Often victims of terrible discrimination, but surely they are to be envied when compared with those living under brutal conditions of chattel slavery.

I have been curious as to how this segment of my people are faring these days. In my travels this month, I met and talked with many of them, particularly in the Galilee, where (in addition to the Negev) most Palestinian citizens of Israel today live. In addition to their usual situation, as Arabs (second-class citizens) in a Jewish state, they had two major concerns.

First, is the rampant criminality in the Arab Community, which the Israeli police—particularly under their Minister of Police Ben Gvir—is doing very little to curb. Protection rackets, municipal corruption, shootings and homicides are frightening daily occurrences. Already, 55 homicides have been reported this year, with the vast majority not “solved” by the police. In fact, it has even been admitted by the authorities that many of the criminal elements have special relationships with the Shin Bet (Israeli secret service) and perform “valuable services” to the security of the state, giving them wide latitude if not outright immunity.

Second, they report that since October 7 there has been open hostility, hatred and repression, particularly on free speech and political expression. While Israeli Jews daily demonstrate, block roads, disrupt government offices, and debate intra-Jewish differences almost to the point of civil war, Palestinian citizens of Israel are often forced to cower in fear. They face persecution, the loss of jobs, criminal charges and jail time, with long sentences for even the mildest expressions of concern for the victims of the Gaza genocide or even expressing “grief for the innocent babies” being killed in Gaza. Technical eavesdropping and artificial intelligence is used to monitor, report, and prosecute any postings on social media, or even “likes” on individual posts, that show sympathy for the people of Gaza. Such expressions are considered “support and sympathy for terrorism” and are being harshly repressed. Even Israeli Jews opposed to Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies feel some of the heat, but for Palestinian citizens of Israel there does not exist even the semblance of democracy or freedom of speech.

A friend of mine told me, “The Israel that you knew previously no longer exists. There is not even the pretense that we have democracy or freedom of expression.”

One well-known TV journalist lost her job and was threatened with criminal persecution when she commented on the apparent good health of some of the released female Israeli hostages. One university student was jailed and persecuted for tweeting on her social media that “God is Victorious.”

An attorney colleague of mine said, “I feel like this is the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad on steroids. You have to watch every word and especially anything you say on the phone or on social media. I can still say some things in court that I would not dare put in an email or say on my Facebook account. I do not know how long this will last.”

I even heard on the radio a “Public Service Announcement” urging anyone who hears or sees anything suspicious, anything appearing to reflect enemy propaganda giving aid and comfort to the enemy, to “call *911 and report it to a special unit that fights hostile cyber propaganda!”

Indeed, many reports about outlandish behaviour by the police seem to be in response to complaints by Jewish citizens upset at the utterances or “unpatriotic behavior” of Palestinian citizens. One Jewish lawyer lodged a complaint to the bar association against a Palestinian lawyer who dared to write on her social media “Good Morning Gaza!” a few days after October 7. This complaint is being investigated.

The Arab members of the Knesset and leaders of the community who usually speak fearlessly in the Knesset on behalf of their community have been silent, and everyone seems intimidated. Genocidal language by Israelis against Palestinians, clearly in violation of Israeli law, is widely tolerated. Yet, the mildest expressions of Palestinian views, symbols, or even sympathy are immediately investigated and prosecuted. The fear among Palestinian citizens of Israel is that the wrath being visited upon Gaza, and now the West Bank, may next be turned on them. The thin façade of democracy and freedom seems to have been removed, and they find themselves facing the full force of unmitigated bigotry, racism, and anti-Arab hatred.

It does not bode well for future coexistence.

29 March 2025

What Matters In Terms Of Donald Trump

By Sally Dugman

One of my friends sent me an article that suggested that Bernie Sanders’s recent rallies that goad Donald Trump had paid attendees. In response, I think that such a plan is dubious, although I do remember Trump paying actors to come to at least one of his public meetings to make him look popular and desirable.

So, what does it matter, anyway, about  the number and whom attended Bernie Sanders’s rallies? What matters much more so is about whom runs the narrative about happenings.

All considered, we, as a country’s citizens, aren’t acting conscionably when our main leader who is liked is someone who wants to steal Gaza for his own personal, cut-throat (literally so) financial gain (so as to build a high-end resort catering to the extremely wealthy) and we think that this action is okay. I, certainly, don’t do so.

Yes, maybe lots of U.S. citizens think that it is okay to steal land and resources (especially since our country was founded on murder and theft from millions of natives for self-gains). I do not.

Maybe most U.S. citizens think that it is okay to provide “hush money” to shut up a porn star who one solicited for sex so as to be able to present a lily-white image of self during the time that one is running for office and at that point, one’s wife has just given birth or about to do so. I do not.

Maybe they even like that Trump followed a woman, who verbally stood up to him, into a store dressing room and by forcing his finger or fingers into her vagina showed his dominance and control over her with his pay-back revenge in the way that war-mongering thugs do in conflict war zones do. I do not.

Maybe they think that it is all right to publicly make fun of a disabled reporter who is asking you an earnest question at a news conference.I do not.

Maybe they don’t mind that Trump was caught lying again and again on a frequent basis about all sorts of topics such as consuming cleaning solutions for handling a virus, I do not.

Maybe they think that it is okay that he gives funds and weapons of mass destruction at taxpayers’ expense that are used to purposefully kill children and elderly citizens in Palestine so that they simply die off in a massive genocide. I do not.

Maybe they think that it’s okay to ravage USA forests, meadows, waters, and more while causing lots of species to go extinct and climate change to run amuck while not leaving much by way of resources for future generations of humans. I do not.

Maybe they even imagine that it’s favorable to dismantle assorted U.S. agencies via a fawning lackey named Elon Musk who is on the dole for billions of dollars for his provisions to the United States government. I do not.

Maybe they think that in reverse Robin-hood style, it’s okay to steal Medicaid, SNAP, WIC and more from the poor to have ample money available to give tax breaks to billionaire personal pals. Imagine that happening being condoned by the brunt of the public. I cannot.

Perhaps Trump and the brunt of the general public like shabbily treating as a way to publicly humiliate the Ukraine leader. I do not. …and the list of the grievous and morally slipshod wrongs goes on and on all of which some people wildly condone Trump’s actions overall, including his sending  would-be Immigrants to a notorious prison in another nation! I do not … and adamantly so since I lack having any degree of liking moral lassitude.

Sally Dugman lives in and writes from Massachusetts in the USA.

25 March 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

Bomb with Everything You Have: Israel Sets the Tone for the Genocide of the Palestinians

By Vijay Prashad

On 5 March 2025, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi stepped down as chief of the general staff of the Israeli military. He had held that post since 16 January 2023 and therefore led the military during its war against the Palestinians. Several appreciations of Halevi appeared in the aftermath of his departure from this important post. In one of these long articles, in the hugely influential Yedioth Ahronoth, one of Israel’s most well-known journalists – Nahum Barnea – profiled Halevi. In this profile, Barnea described the cabinet meeting forty-eight hours after the Hamas attack on the Israeli border posts. Halevi presented the military operations that had taken place during these two days. He said that the Air Force had attacked 1,500 targets in this short time. Halevi is not a dove. This was a ferocious attack on a largely civilian area.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ‘erupted in anger’, wrote Barnea.  He began to yell and bang on the table, around which sat his cabinet. ‘Why not 5,000?’, Netanyahu scolded Halevi. ‘We don’t have 5,000 approved targets’, responded the military man. ‘I’m not interested in targets,’ said Netanyahu. ‘Take down houses. Bomb with everything you have.’

Netanyahu’s statement on 9 October 2023 set the tone of the entire war. But Netanyahu was not alone in this attitude. Those Israelis who fashion themselves to be more liberal than him, and to be less ferocious, are equally committed to the bloodbath.

In June 2024, the members of National Unity (Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot) resigned from Netanyahu’s cabinet. They argued that Netanyahu was not able to focus on the war because he brought ‘outside considerations and politics’ into the discussions. Eisenkot, a former chief of staff of the military who has said he supports a two-state solution, nonetheless has pushed for more ruthless military action against the Palestinians in Gaza.

It was widely reported when Itamar Ben-Gvir’s far-right Otzma Yehudit members of cabinet resigned in January 2025 because of the ceasefire. They did not want any stoppage to the war.

So, neither the more liberal National Unity nor the far-right Otzma Yehudit wanted the bombing to cease.

Preparations to Break the Ceasefire

A ceasefire deal had been prepared on 31 May 2024, but the Israelis refused to sign it. They did, however, accept the ceasefire on 15 January 2025. It went into effect four days later. During the ceasefire, the Palestinian factions and Israel swapped political prisoners according to the timetable established during the negotiations. Ramadan began on 28 February. The first phase of the ceasefire was set to expire on 1 March, but Israel demanded that it be extended so that all Israeli prisoners could be released; Hamas argued instead that it wanted to move to the second phase of the ceasefire, which would have allowed greater humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip. On 2 March, Israel stopped the entry of humanitarian aid, and on 9 March cut off electricity to Gaza. Life inside Gaza became even more intolerable because the hope of the ceasefire had now been crushed. Palestinians waited for the Israelis to act.

Was the Israeli action really about the political prisoners that Hamas had not yet released? On 14 March, Hamas agreed to release Edan Alexander (a dual US-Israeli citizen) and the bodies of dual nationals. Israel and the United States refused to accept this offer. Other issues seem to have been at play, not the prisoner exchange.

On 16 March, Gadi Eisenkot and other members of the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee of the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) sent a letter to Netanyahu and his Defence minister Israel Katz. They argued that the ceasefire has allowed Hamas and Islamic Jihad to regroup. Hamas, they said, now has 25,000 armed fighters, while Islamic Jihad has 5,000 fighters. And, they said, that these groups had used the ceasefire to plan another 7 October style attack. These lawmakers argued that Netanyahu’s war policy and the ceasefire show a ‘failure to achieve the war’s objectives’ and ‘damage… national security interests’.

On 17 March, the Israeli cabinet held an emergency meeting to discuss intelligence claims that Hamas was planning another attack. The next day, Katz went to the Otef Israel Forum – made up of Israeli residents who live along the edge of Gaza – and told them that ‘there are constant preparations being made by Hamas for an invasion’ that is ‘similar to 7 October’. ‘We must strike them and completely finish the job’, Katz said at the forum. It was clear that the entire Israeli political class – from Netanyahu’s cabinet to his opposition – had begun to generate fear about another Hamas attack.

Hamas responded immediately that the allegations of an attack ‘are baseless and merely a flimsy pretext to justify its return to war’. Hamas said that it had ‘adhered to the agreement’ and that it was Netanyahu – ‘seeking a way out of his internal crises’ – who wanted to ‘reignite the war’.

The Israeli bombardment began on 18 March with the massacre of 400 Palestinian civilians (including 174 children).

On 22 March, the Israelis destroyed the Turkish Friendship Hospital located on al-Hurriya Street in the central Gaza region. It was the only real cancer hospital in Gaza and had provided treatment for 13,000 cancer patients who still remain in the area. When Israel had occupied the region with its soldiers, it had converted the hospital into a military barracks. When it withdrew on 19 January 2025, medical personnel hastily tried to recover the hospital for the cancer patients. Now it is destroyed.

Israeli Options

Major General Tamir Heyman heads the Institute for National Security Studies, a major think tank in Israel. In an important column, widely circulated, Heyman argues that the Israelis have two goals: rescue the prisoners and destroy Hamas. To do so, he proposes three scenarios:

First, Israeli soldiers enter Gaza and hold it under military rule, seeking out and destroying Hamas, and finding the prisoners. Second, Israel imposes an even harsher siege on Gaza and weakens Hamas (but it might not get its prisoners). Third, a ‘Hezbollah model’, where Israel recognises that Hamas ‘cannot be wiped off the face of the earth’ but the link between Hamas and the Palestinian people can be eroded by the creation of an alternative political force in Gaza.

All three options share one element: pain for the Palestinians. Across the Israeli political spectrum, apart from a small section of dissidents, this is the general orientation.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter.

25 March 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

Palestinian Oscar Winner Arrested by Israeli Forces After Being ‘Assaulted and Beaten’ by Settlers

By Quds News Network

Occupied West Bank (Quds News Network)- Palestinian film director and Academy Award-winner Hamdan Ballal was arrested by Israeli forces after being severly assaulted and beaten by what his colleague described as a “lynch mob” of Israeli settlers on Monday night in the Palestinian village of Susya, south of Hebron in the occupied West Bank.

Ballal’s co-director and fellow Oscar winner of the documentary No Other Land, Yuval Abraham, said in a post on X featuring a shaky cell phone video that masked settlers “attacked Hamdan’s village, they continued to attack American activists, breaking their car with stones”.

The Center for Jewish Nonviolence said in a statement released on Monday that the five Jewish-American activists at the scene “are participating in a three-month long coresistance project” in Masafer Yatta, the village at the heart of No Other Land. Masafer Yatta is a short drive southeast of Susya, which is also the site of an illegal Israeli settlement.

The activists “responded to calls to come and support the village of Susya while it was under attack,” and “when the activists returned to their car to seek shelter, the settlers surrounded the car, slashed its tires, and smashed the windows with stones”, the statement read.

Ballal’s whereabouts were unknown after Israeli soldiers seized him from the ambulance that arrived to treat him, Abraham, a journalist for +972 magazine, said on X.

Later Abraham confirmed that Hamdan was “assaulted and beaten.. He’s injured and being held at a police station in a settlement. They did not let his lawyer speak to him yet so we don’t know more.”

Basel Adra, the Palestinian resident of Masafer Yatta whose story is told in the oscar-winning film, said on Monday that he was “standing with Karam, Hamdan’s 7 year old son, near the blood of Hamdan’s in his house, after settlers lynched him”.

Ballal “is still missing after soldiers abducted him, injured and bleeding”, Adra said. “This is how they erase Masafer Yatta.”

The Israeli forces confirmed later on Monday that it had arrested Ballal. He was arrested for allegedly “throwing stones.”

Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are illegal under international law. However, Israel has continued to build settlements across the occupied territory over the past several decades.

Israeli settler violence against Palestinians has been on the rise for several years now. Since Israel began its war on Gaza in October 2023, the attacks in the occupied West Bank have spiked even more.

The United Nations humanitarian agency, OCHA, has documented at least 220 attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians in 2025 alone.

“Local and international activists regularly document the actions of settlers carrying out similar attacks, often calling the police for some sort of recourse, but settlers are rarely, if ever, held accountable for their crimes,” the Center for Jewish Nonviolence said.

25 March 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

‘If You’re Reading This, It Means I Have Been Killed’:Journalist Hossam Shabat’s Final Words

By Quds News Network

Gaza (Quds News Network)- The colleagues of Palestinian journalist Hossam Shabat, who was killed in a targeted Israeli attack on Monday, have shared his final words.

Shabat, a journalist for the Al Jazeera Mubasher channel, was killed in northern Gaza. Witnesses said his car was targeted while in the eastern part of Beit Lahiya.

In a post on X, pre-written by Shabat, he wrote, “If you’re reading this, it means I have been killed — most likely targeted — by the Israeli occupation forces.

When all of this began, I was only 21 years old—a university student with dreams like anyone else. Over the past 18 months, I have dedicated every moment of my life to my people. I documented the horrors in northern Gaza minute by minute, determined to show the world the truth they tried to bury. I slept on sidewalks, in schools, in tents—wherever I could. Every day was a battle for survival. I endured months of hunger, yet I never abandoned my people.

By God, I fulfilled my duty as a journalist. I risked everything to convey the truth, and now, at last, I am at rest—something I have not known for the past 18 months. I did all of this out of faith in the Palestinian cause. I believe that this land is ours, and the greatest honor of my life was to die in its defense and in service of its people.

I ask you now: Do not stop talking about Gaza. Do not let the world turn away. Keep fighting, keep telling our stories—until Palestine is free.

For the last time, Hossam Shabat, from northern Gaza.”

[https://twitter.com/HossamShabat/status/1904219854183313461]

25 March 2025

Source: countercurrents.org