Trump is selling everything to raise money for himself and his campaign.

The Trump Bible (which also includes a copy of the U.S. Constitution, Pledge of Allegiance, Declaration of Independence, and Bill of Rights).

Trump shoes (ranging from the nearly all-gold “Never Surrender” high tops priced at $399 to the lower-cut “Red Wave” and “POTUS 45”).

Shares in Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform.

You might think that the world can’t be bought and sold, but apparently there are no bounds to the promises Trump will make to get back into the White House.

Digital trading cards (of which the most recent set, “The Mugshot edition,” offers collectors a chance to own a swatch of the suit the former president wore for his Fulton County, Georgia, mugshot, priced at $99 a piece or $4,653 for the full set, which includes an invitation to a dinner at Mar-a-Lago).

Trump cologne and perfume stamped with the former president’s name (the “Victory47” bottles are each listed for $99 respectively. The cologne bottle’s image, subject to change, has a Trump head topper).

But now, Trump is selling something far, far bigger. In fact, you can’t get any bigger.

He’s selling the entire world.

You might think that the world can’t be bought and sold, but apparently there are no bounds to the promises Trump will make to get back into the White House.

Everything’s for sale.

When Trump sat down with some of America’s top oil executives last month at Mar-a-Lago, according to the The Washington Post, they complained of burdensome environmental regulations, despite spending $400 million to lobby the Biden administration in the last year.

Trump’s response? He would offer them a better deal.

He told them to raise $1 billion to return him to the White House and he’d reverse dozens of Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted (according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation).

The $1 billion “deal” would more than pay for itself, Trump told the oil executives, because of the taxes and regulations they would avoid thanks to him.

Biden has called global warming an “existential threat,” and over the last three years, his administration has finalized 100 new environmental regulations aimed at cutting air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, restricting toxic chemicals, and conserving public lands and waters.

Trump has called climate change a “hoax.” His administration weakened or wiped out more than 125 environmental rules over four years.

Now, he’s making an even bigger offer. At that Mar-a-Lago dinner, the former president told Big Oil executives that they’ll have an even greater windfall in a second Trump administration — including new offshore drilling, speedier permits, and other relaxed regulations — if they sink a billion into his campaign.

Trump promised to immediately end the Biden administration’s freeze on permits for new liquefied natural gas exports — a top priority for the executives. “You’ll get it on the first day,” Trump said.

Trump told the executives that he would start auctioning off more leases for oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, another priority for several of the executives. He railed against wind power. And he said he would reverse the restrictions on drilling in the Alaskan Arctic.

Trump also promised that he would scrap Biden’s rules for electric vehicles. The rules require automakers to reduce emissions from car tailpipes but don’t mandate a particular technology such as EVs. Trump called the rules “ridiculous” in the meeting with donors.

Will Big Oil put up $1 billion for all of this? Maybe.

The conclusion of the World Bank Spring Meetings held in Washington D.C. in April has left a bitter taste in the mouths of many who had hoped for a decisive pivot toward increased financing for renewable energy. The World Bank's enduring support for fossil gas investments starkly contrasts with the ongoing climate emergency, thus exacerbating the vulnerabilities and hardships faced by communities across Africa, compounding their development challenges.

Africa has been courted to produce natural gas in the guise of economic development, as proponents claim gas is a transition fuel capable of catalyzing long-term economic prosperity. This is a misguided and dangerous assumption creating a missed opportunity for the World Bank to set the record straight.

If the World Bank maintains its stance on gas, it risks perpetuating a neocolonial narrative by anchoring Africa in a fossil fuel-dependent development model that binds the continent to poverty and environmental degradation. This approach not only stifles Africa's potential to harness its vast renewable resources for clean, affordable energy but also obstructs a path toward sustainable and equitable prosperity. It is imperative for Africa to leverage its renewable energy capacities to foster genuine development that benefits all.

The recent horrors witnessed in Mali, where more than 100 people were scorched to death in what was deemed as one of the deadliest heatwaves ever to sweep through the Sahel region, should be a wake-up call to the dangers of the climate crisis.

The World Bank bears a profound duty to eradicate energy poverty in Africa in ways that promote sustainable growth and equitable progress, contributing meaningfully to the global fight against climate change. Instead, the World Bank has created a finance system that has continued to lock Africa at the bottom of the food chain. As it stands, many African nations are positioned at the forefront of intense global energy conflicts, as major international players compete to secure resources to tackle the growing energy crisis. This pursuit to have Africa be the “gas station” for the world unfolds at a critical juncture when there is a proposal to reform the global financial architecture. The reforms currently under discussion amount to mere cosmetic changes—that have allowed over $1.2 Billion in direct financing for fossil fuel-related projects.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has clearly articulated that beyond the projects committed to as of 2021, there is no further necessity for investments in new fossil fuel supplies. The IEA's position is unambiguous: No new oil and gas fields are envisaged in their recommended pathway, nor are any new coal mines or extensions deemed necessary. Given this scientific consensus, one must question the rationale behind the continued pursuit of fossil fuels and the absence of a fossil fuel finance exclusion policy within the bank's operational framework. Furthermore, is the World Bank stance on fossil gas a clear sign that multilateral development banks have missed the mark on setting a blueprint on what true development looks like in Africa? The legitimate demand for Africa's development should not rationalize actions that ultimately entrench economic dependencies or risk the creation of assets that may soon be obsolete.

Over the decades, Africa's relationship with the World Bank has been steeped in the politics of debt. Loans from the World Bank, though framed as tools for development and economic growth, often carry stringent conditions. These conditions—ranging from economic restructuring to significant policy changes including adopting fossil gas as a transition fuel—may not always be congruent with the unique socioeconomic realities of each African nation, including their vulnerability to climatic shocks. The recent horrors witnessed in Mali, where more than 100 people were scorched to death in what was deemed as one of the deadliest heatwaves ever to sweep through the Sahel region, should be a wake-up call to the dangers of the climate crisis.

African economies have been locked at the bottom of the global value chain since colonial times, and the risk of stranded assets will only trap the continent in a cycle that could cause substantial declines in exporters' sovereign credit ratings, increasing their challenge in servicing existing debts that have crippled over half the continent's population.

The World Bank needs to think critically about its role in Africa's development. Massive growth in financial investment into renewable energy is required in Africa to address the severe underfinance the continent has suffered.

Persisting in his support for an unpopular war, the Democrat in the White House has helped spark a rebellion close to home. Young people — least inclined to deference, most inclined to moral outrage — are leading public opposition to the ongoing slaughter in Gaza. The campus upheaval is a clash between accepting and resisting, while elites insist on doing maintenance work for the war machine.

I wrote the above words recently, but I could have written very similar ones in the spring of 1968. (In fact, I did.) Joe Biden hasn’t sent U.S. troops to kill in Gaza, as President Lyndon Johnson did in Vietnam, but the current president has done all he can to provide massive quantities of weapons and ammunition to Israel — literally making the carnage in Gaza possible.

A familiar saying — “the more things change, the more they stay the same” — is both false and true. During the last several decades, the consolidation of corporate power and the rise of digital tech have brought about huge changes in politics and communications. Yet humans are still humans and certain crucial dynamics remain. Militarism demands conformity — and sometimes fails to get it.

When Columbia University and many other colleges erupted in antiwar protests during the late 1960s, the moral awakening was a human connection with people suffering horrifically in Vietnam. During recent weeks, the same has been true with people in Gaza. Both eras saw crackdowns by college administrators and the police — as well as much negativity toward protesters in the mainstream media — all reflecting key biases in this country’s power structure.

“What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic,” Martin Luther King, Jr., said in 1967. “Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”

Disrupting a Culture of Death

This spring, as students have risked arrest and jeopardized their college careers under banners like “Ceasefire Now,” “Free Palestine,” and “Divest from Israel,” they’ve rejected some key unwritten rules of a death culture. From Congress to the White House, war (and the military-industrial complex that goes with it) is crucial for the political business model. Meanwhile, college trustees and alumni megadonors often have investment ties to Wall Street and Silicon Valley, where war is a multibillion-dollar enterprise. Along the way, weapons sales to Israel and many other countries bring in gigantic profits.

The new campus uprisings are a shock to the war system. Managers of that system, constantly oiling its machinery, have no column for moral revulsion on their balance sheets. And the refusal of appreciable numbers of students to go along to get along doesn’t compute. For the economic and political establishment, it’s a control issue, potentially writ large.

As the killing, maiming, devastation, and increasing starvation in Gaza have continued, month after month, the U.S. role has become incomprehensible — without, at least, attributing to the president and the vast majority of Congressional representatives a level of immorality that had previously seemed unimaginable to most college students. Like many others in the United States, protesting students are now struggling with the realization that the people in control of the executive and legislative branches are directly supporting mass murder and genocide.

In late April, when overwhelming bipartisan votes in Congress approved — and President Biden eagerly signed — a bill sending $17 billion in military aid to Israel, the only way to miss the utter depravity of those atop the government was to not really look, or to remain in the thrall of a dominant death culture.

During his final years in office, with the Vietnam War going full tilt, President Lyndon Johnson was greeted with the chant: “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” Such a chant could be directed at President Biden now. The number of Palestinian children killed so far by the U.S.-armed Israeli military is estimated to be almost 15,000, not counting the unknown number still buried in the rubble of Gaza. No wonder high-ranking Biden administration officials now risk being loudly denounced whenever they speak in venues open to the public.

Mirroring the Vietnam War era in another way, members of Congress continue to rubberstamp huge amounts of funding for mass killing. On April 20th, only 17% of House Democrats and only 9% of House Republicans voted against the new military aid package for Israel.

Higher learning is supposed to connect the theoretical with the actual, striving to understand our world as it truly is. However, a death culture — promoting college tranquility as well as mass murder in Gaza — thrives on disconnects. All the platitudes and pretenses of academia can divert attention from where U.S. weapons actually go and what they do.

Sadly, precepts readily cited as vital ideals prove all too easy to kick to the curb lest they squeeze big toes uncomfortably. So, when students take the humanities seriously enough to set up a protest encampment on campus and then billionaire donors demand that a college president put a stop to such disruption, a police raid is likely to follow.

A World of Doublethink and Tone Deafness

George Orwell’s explanation of “doublethink” in his famed novel 1984 is a good fit when it comes to the purported logic of so many commentators deploring the student protesters as they demand an end to complicity in the slaughter still underway in Gaza: “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it.”

Laying claim to morality, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has, for instance, been busy firing media salvos at the student protesters. That organization’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, is on record flatly declaring that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism” — no matter how many Jews declare themselves to be “anti-Zionist.” Four months ago, ADL issued a report categorizing pro-Palestinian rallies with “anti-Zionist chants and slogans” as antisemitic events. In late April, ADL used the “antisemitic” label to condemn protests by students at Columbia and elsewhere.

“We have a major, major, major generational problem,” Greenblatt warned in a leaked ADL strategy phone call last November. He added: “The issue in the United States’ support for Israel is not left and right; it is young and old… We really have a TikTok problem, a Gen-Z problem… The real game is the next generation.”

Along with thinly veiled condescension toward students, a frequent approach is to treat the mass killing of Palestinians as of minimal importance. And so, when New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote in late April about students protesting at Columbia, he merely described the Israeli government’s actions as “failings.” Perhaps if a government was bombing and killing Douthat’s loved ones, he would have used a different word.

A similar mentality, as I well remember, infused media coverage of the Vietnam War. For mainline news outlets, what was happening to Vietnamese people ranked far below so many other concerns, often to the point of invisibility. As media accounts gradually began bemoaning the “quagmire” of that war, the focus was on how the U.S. government’s leadership had gotten itself so stuck. Acknowledging that the American war effort amounted to a massive crime against humanity was rare. Then, as now, the moral bankruptcies of the political and media establishments fueled each other.

As a barometer of the prevailing political climate among elites, the editorial stances of daily newspapers indicate priorities in times of war. In early 1968, the Boston Globe conducted a survey of 39 major U.S. newspapers and found that not a single one had editorialized in favor of an American withdrawal from Vietnam. By then, tens of millions of Americans were in favor of such a pullout.

This spring, when the New York Times editorial board finally called for making U.S. arms shipments to Israel conditional — six months after the carnage began in Gaza — the editorial was tepid and displayed a deep ethnocentric bias. It declared that “the Hamas attack of October 7 was an atrocity,” but no word coming anywhere near “atrocity” was applied to the Israeli attacks occurring ever since.

The Times editorial lamented that “Mr. Netanyahu and the hard-liners in his government” had broken a “bond of trust” between the United States and Israel, adding that the Israeli prime minister “has been deaf to repeated demands from Mr. Biden and his national security team to do more to protect civilians in Gaza from being harmed by [American] armaments.” The Times editorial board was remarkably prone to understatement, as if someone overseeing the mass killing of civilians every day for six months was merely not doing enough “to protect civilians.”

Learning by Doing

The thousands of student protesters encountering the edicts of college administrations and the violence of the police have gotten a real education in the true priorities of American power structures. Of course, the authorities (on and off campuses) have wanted a return to the usual peaceful campus atmosphere. As military strategist Carl von Clausewitz long ago commented with irony, “A conqueror is always a lover of peace.”

Supporters of Israel are fed up with the campus protests. The Washington Post recently featured an essay by Paul Berman that deplored what has become of his alma mater, Columbia. After a brief mention of Israel’s killing of Gazan civilians and the imposition of famine, Berman declared that “ultimately the central issue in the war is Hamas and its goal… the eradication of the Israeli state.” The central issue. Consider it a way of saying that, while unfortunate, the ongoing slaughter of tens of thousands of children and other Palestinian civilians doesn’t matter nearly as much as the fear that nuclear-armed Israel, with one of the most powerful air forces in the world, is in danger of “eradication.”

Pieces similar to Douthat’s and Berman’s have proliferated in the media. But they don’t come to grips with what Senator Bernie Sanders recently made clear in a public message to the Israeli prime minister: “Mr. Netanyahu, antisemitism is a vile and disgusting form of bigotry that has done unspeakable harm to millions. Do not insult the intelligence of the American people by attempting to distract us from the immoral and illegal war policies of your extremist and racist government.”

College protesters have shown that they will not be distracted. They continue to insist — not flawlessly, but wonderfully — that all people’s lives matter. For decades, and since October in a particularly deadly fashion, the U.S.-Israel alliance has proceeded to treat Palestinian lives as expendable. And that is exactly what the protests are opposing.

Of course, protests can flicker and die out. Hundreds of U.S. campuses shut down in the spring of 1970 amid protests against the Vietnam War and the American invasion of Cambodia, only to become largely quiescent by the fall term. But for countless individuals, the sparks lit a fire for social justice that would never be quenched.

One of them, Michael Albert, a cofounder of the groundbreaking Z Magazine, has continued with activist work since the mid-1960s. “A lot of people are comparing now to 1968,” he wrote in April. “That year was tumultuous. We were inspired. We were hot. But here comes this year and it is moving faster, no less. That year the left that I and so many others lived and breathed was mighty. We were courageous, but we also had too little understanding of how to win. Don’t emulate us. Transcend us.”

He then added:

“The emerging mass uprisings must persist and diversify and broaden in focus and reach. And hey, on your campuses, again do better than us. Fight to divest but also fight to structurally change them so their decision makers — which should be you — never again invest in genocide, war, and indeed suppression and oppression of any kind. Tomorrow is the first day of a long, long potentially incredibly liberating future. But one day is but one day. Persist.”

Persistence will be truly essential. The gears of pro-Israel forces are fully meshed with the U.S. war machinery. The movement to stop Israel’s murderous oppression of Palestinians is up against the entire military-industrial-congressional complex.

The United States spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined (and most of them are allies), while maintaining 750 military bases overseas, vastly more than all of its official adversaries put together. The U.S. continues to lead the nuclear arms race toward oblivion. And the economic costs are stunning. The Institute for Policy Studies reported last year that 62% of the federal discretionary budget went to “militarized programs” of one sort or another.

In 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr., described this country’s spending for war as a “demonic, destructive suction tube,” siphoning tremendous resources away from human needs.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

With transcendent wisdom, this spring’s student uprising has rejected conformity as a lethal anesthetic while the horrors continue in Gaza. Leaders of the most powerful American institutions want to continue as usual, as if official participation in genocide were no particular cause for alarm.

Instead, young people have dared to lead the way, insisting that such a culture of death is repugnant and completely unacceptable.

The origins of the current political influence by weapons corporations to profit from perpetual wars, occupations, and arm sales; the fossil fuel industry to continue burning oil, gas, and coal in the face of irrefutable evidence that it’s overheating the planet; and insurance and pharmaceutical corporations to prevent the enactment of Medicare for All aren’t any law, regulation, or executive decision. Rather, they’re Supreme Court rulings that define corporate entities as legal “persons” with many of the same rights as human beings under the U.S. Constitution.

This reality didn’t begin with the Citizens United v. FEC 2010 decision, contrary to common belief. Citizens United simply expanded corporate First Amendment “free speech rights” to directly donate (or, more accurately, invest) in elections that originated with the First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti case in 1978

The actual “birth” of corporate constitutional rights, often referred to as “corporate personhood,” dates to May 10, 1886 in the Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company ruling. The summary of the tax case, called the “headnotes”—not the actual decision—granted the railroad corporation with “equal protection rights” under the 14th Amendment.

All the good work by individuals and organizations to legalize protections of individuals, communities, and nature and hold corporate entities accountable for their harms will never be systemically achieved as long as we continue to constitutionalize corporate rights as equivalent to the rights of human persons.

The 14th Amendment granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the U.S, including former enslaved human beings. Although it was not intended to apply to corporations, they hijacked the Amendment for their political and economic benefit. As former Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black declared, “Of the cases in this court in which the 14th Amendment was applied during the first 50 years after its adoption, less than one half of 1% invoked it in protection of the negro race, and more than 50% asked that its benefits be extended to corporations.”

Human persons are grossly unequal to corporations. Bankruptcy, tax, and criminal laws are more favorable to “corporate persons” than human beings. Corporations can write off certain legal expenses; real people can’t. Laws increasingly allow corporations to design arbitration rules that force employees and customers to settle disputes over unsafe products, consumer fraud, employment discrimination, nonpayment of wages, and other instances of corporate malfeasance. And unlike human persons with limited lifespans and physical mobility, corporations can live forever and legally and quickly move assets between physical locations to evade accountability.

The Santa Clara corporate perversion of the 14th Amendment profoundly shifted how corporations were defined. Until then, state legislatures granted individuals a corporate charter, or license, to conduct business. The charter established specific standards for a limited period, after which in many instances the business became public. The charter’s terms were privileges, not rights. If the business violated the charter’s terms, it was revoked by state legislatures or courts, which frequently occurred, and the company was dissolved. The same occurred following the shift from individually granted charters to the creation of state laws addressing entire categories of corporations, such as banks, railroads, and canals.

Santa Clara represented a tectonic antidemocratic shift in the authority to define corporate entities—from the state legislative arena to federal courts, specifically the U.S. Supreme Court, which was beyond the direct reach of citizens and elected officials. It unleashed business corporations to massively plunder, profit, and protect themselves from democratic accountability, resulting in the declining protection of people, communities, and the ability to ensure a livable natural world.

Corporate First Amendment political “free speech” rights to invest money in elections, including the Citizens United decision, is the most recent constitutional descendant of the Santa Clara precedent. There are many others.

√ First Amendment Right Not to Speak, Negative Speech Rights and Commercial Speech Rights

The Supreme Court overturned a California state law allowing a ratepayer advocacy group to enclose information in the utility corporations’ billing envelopes calling for regulations that would lower utility rates and a New York law that would save energy by banning the promotion of the use of electricity by a utility corporation. A court also overturned a Vermont law mandating the disclosure of a dangerous synthetic growth hormone on dairy products. These court-invented rights have been used by corporate entities to defy the legitimate rights of people to know factual information; the authority of government to protect the health, safety, and welfare of residents; the provision of basic health needs of employees; and the ability to hold corporations publicly accountable.

√ Fourth Amendment Search and Seizure Rights

The Supreme Court overturned laws mandating routine surprise inspections of corporate property, claiming the “right of the people to be secure in their persons [and] houses... against unreasonable searches and seizures” applied to corporations. These judicial decisions treat corporate entities like human persons, even though the Fourth Amendment’s original language applies only to human beings, their homes, and personal effects. Governmental attempts to protect the public from the dangers stemming from commercial activities like food contamination, drug impurities, automobile defects, and environmental hazards are thwarted by removing surprise inspections, thus allowing businesses to hide, alter, or disguise dangerous conditions.

√ Fifth Amendment Takings Rights

The Supreme Court has struck down regulatory laws protecting homeowners and workers from corporations, claiming the laws are a “taking of property without just compensation.” This includes a Pennsylvania law regulating the mining of coal beneath homes to prevent their sinking and a California law allowing union organizers from having access to agricultural employees at worksites under certain conditions. Public laws to protect residents, communities, and the natural world should supersede legally mandated compensation of lost present and future corporate profits. This is especially urgent as it becomes more evident that to tackle climate change, fossil fuels must be kept in the ground. This may simply not be possible as long as corporations can assert Fifth Amendment “takings rights.”

Corporate constitutional rights transcend Citizens United and corporate First Amendment political “free speech” rights. All the good work by individuals and organizations to legalize protections of individuals, communities, and nature and hold corporate entities accountable for their harms will never be systemically achieved as long as we continue to constitutionalize corporate rights as equivalent to the rights of human persons.

The We the People Amendment (HJR54) is the only current proposal that seeks the abolition of all corporate constitutional rights. More support is needed to add co-sponsors. The amendment, however, will never achieve sufficient power to make change until we decolonize our minds from believing that corporate rule and rights are inevitable and irreversible. A good place to start, especially on this day, is to internalize the statement: “Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property. Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that a property is a person.”

It’s time we quickly end the life of constitutional corporate persons.

Since October 2023, Israel has been committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. We do not need, and should not wait for, a court ruling or authoritative arbiter to believe the proof in front of our eyes. The daily reports, photos, and video pouring out of Gaza have been unbearable. By now, we have been inundated with declarations by the highest level of Israeli government and military that they intend to destroy Gaza and the people who live there. There are countless videos of Israeli soldiers committing war crimes and wanton destruction, many posted publicly by soldiers themselves. Israeli bombing has decimated all means of life support in Gaza, causing catastrophic levels of damage not seen since the saturation bombings of World War II.

That Israel has caused such horror and devastation in such a short period of time is incomprehensible. The concept of genocide means nothing at all if it is allowed to exclude Israel’s intentional and/or indifferent mass killing and injuring; displacement of an entire population; creation of man-made famine; and destruction of the majority of homes, hospitals, schools, businesses, universities, and infrastructure in Gaza. Palestinians have been shouting at the world to accept the overwhelmingly clear evidence of genocide and do something to stop it. Yet as we speak, Israel is escalating its attacks against displaced civilians seeking refuge in Rafah.

Are our friends, families, colleagues, and neighbors willing to engage with the straightforward realities of the situation and do something about it?

The evidence of the situation could not be any clearer. However, we must continue to reiterate that what is happening in Gaza is straightforward because of intense efforts by politicians, media, and others to convince Americans that the facts are simply too complicated, too nuanced to draw clear ethical and political conclusions. Insisting that the context is incomprehensibly complex after nearly 35,000 dead and 78,000 injured, mostly children and women, is genocide denial. Those facts may be uncomfortable for some to face; but they are not hard to understand. Moreover, stopping genocide also means recognizing that violence against Palestinians did not begin in October 2023.

Just as the events since last year are not complicated, neither is the history of what is called the “conflict” between Palestinians and Israelis. It has a definitive beginning in the late 1800s and since that point the aggressors have been the pre-state Zionist movement and, after 1948, the State of Israel. Zionism, a 19th-century European Jewish nationalist movement, sought to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine at the expense of the Palestinians already living there. To do so, Zionists organized migration to settle and colonize a territory that was 95% Palestinian Arab and 5% Jewish at the time. The settlers’ explicit goal was to take as much territory as possible and change the demographics in their favor. The Zionists set about accomplishing those political goals, with full recognition that they would need to violently dispossess the Palestinians to achieve them. Everything that has happened in the decades since flows from that project to take territory and expel or subjugate as many Palestinians as possible.

No group of people has a right to take territory by violence and expel another group. No group of people has a right to subjugate another. Israel has done, and is doing, those things to Palestinians, not the other way around. That Zionism emerged in response to very serious European antisemitism does not mean the Zionists were justified in their actions. One group cannot free itself by subjugating another. Palestinians have been colonized, and they have resisted that process across more than a century. Whether nonviolent or not, that resistance has been deemed illegitimate by Israel and its allies. Seriously creating peace, justice, and perhaps reconciliation demands understanding root causes and addressing the harm that has been done. We must face history and be willing to name the aggressor: The State of Israel. This is not too complex to understand.

We are living in a clarifying moment. Watch closely what people say, and more importantly, what they do. Who is willing to call the situation unambiguously what it is: genocide? And who insists on obfuscating with recourse to complexity and nuance? Are our friends, families, colleagues, and neighbors willing to engage with the straightforward realities of the situation and do something about it? Or are they making excuses to justify inaction or worse to legitimize mass killing? Far too many Americans, and others, are in the latter group, implicitly and explicitly defending the actions of the Israeli government and military, which are committed to subjugating, ethnically cleansing, and “erasing” Palestinians.

As with so many other situations, we can look to the bravery of students across the country for guidance. We should look to those who are risking a great deal to articulate the uncontroversial principle that genocide is unacceptable, no matter the perpetrator, and that it is imperative to take action to force institutions in the U.S. to stop supporting it.

All of us—and we are legion across the worldmust keep our eyes on the genocide in Gaza, as well as on the vicious pogroms underway in the West Bank. A recent statement by James Elder of UNICEF reports that in Rafah, “The European hospital is crammed with severely injured and dying children. A military offensive here will be catastrophic.”

At the same time, throughout the West Bank, mobs of fascist settlers torch homes, steal possessions including livestock, kill Palestinians and drive them off their land. All of this has been enabled by President Joseph Biden, who has sent fulsome amounts of aid to Israel to carry out its genocidal and ethnic cleansing assaults on the Palestinian people. A holocaust, underwritten by the greatest military power in the world, is underway in both occupied territories.

Promoting the savageries Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, said, “Whoever perpetrates against the Jewish people like these evil ones have perpetrated on us, will be destroyed, they will be annihilated, and it will echo for decades and decades onwards.” In another statement he declared: “Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat, total and utter destruction that will erase the memory of the Amalek from under the skies.”

This is the fulfillment of Israel’s dream of inhabiting all of what was once historic Palestine, making it a land unencumbered by its indigenous Arab population. Israel’s ongoing efforts since 1948 to kill or expel all Palestinians from what was historic Palestine have triggered student sit-ins and demonstrations on some 120 American college campuses.

Israel has become a country with powerful fascistic tendencies, headed by fanatics and demagogues catering to a population so filled with hatred of Arabs that it welcomes the genocide. In a recent article, “Dead on Arrival: Israel’s Blowback Genocide,” Ellen recalls visiting the West Bank city of Hebron in the 1980s and seeing graffiti on walls that proclaimed, “Arabs to the Gas Chambers.” At that time renowned Israeli public intellectual Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned that Israel was turning its soldiers into Judeonazis. Recent YouTube videos of soldiers mocking their victims bear out his prophecy. This hatred is pervasive in Israel. There are courageous exceptions like journalists Amira Hass and Gideon Levy who write for the newspaper Haaretz and the group Combatants for Peace. But all too many Israelis have supported their country’s assault on Gaza, or even wanted something worse.

The student protests that for weeks have been under public scrutiny have been peaceful mass gatherings of citizens outraged at Biden’s unconditional support for Israel's relentless campaign in Gaza. Yet early on, riot police were summoned to Columbia’s campus as well as that of the City College of New York, the University of Texas-Austin, UCLA, and others, to dismantle the encampments, arrest, and sometimes beat up students and supporting faculty. Ayman Mohyeldin on MSNBC last week showed images of a mob hurling fireworks at the UCLA protesters, spraying them with pepper spray, and beating them with sticks and other weapons.

In tandem with the police actions, cries of “antisemitism” have arisen about the protests. When interviewed in print or on television, the Jewish student activists have said unanimously that these protests are neither antisemitic nor hate-filled. Moreover, the antisemitism claims are irreconcilable with the fact that thousands of Jewish students nationwide are participating. Two leading protest organizations, Jewish Voices for Peace and If Not Now, are Jewish, proclaiming that never again may genocide take place against any people, not just Jews.

Both of us writers of this article have experienced real antisemitism. Ellen remembers, in her early childhood, around 1945, her mother saying that the local grocer, a Mr. McGonigle, was glad Hitler was “mopping up all the kikes.” She remembers the child in her third-grade class who called her “a kike.” Jennifer remembers being pelted with spitballs by classmates shouting “Jew!” at her for making a Star of David design in her art class. Meanwhile, her father recalled being chased around the block by a neighborhood bully holding a knife saying, “You killed Christ!”

These experiences mirror what until now has been the guiding definition of antisemitism, that of The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA): “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish and non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

Yet the campaign against alleged “antisemitism” has gone forward, adding criticism of Israel to the definition of the term. In Congress, the House of Representatives on May 1 passed a bill entitled “The Antisemitism Awareness Act.” It makes speech seemingly threatening the existence of Israel newly “antisemitic,” citing, for example, the cry, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as a call for the annihilation of the Jewish state and of the Jews in it. It makes no difference that Jewish students and people like the writers of this article have chanted that slogan, intending its meaning to be that Palestinians should be free within a redefined state.

Congressman Jerrold Nadler, a longtime supporter of Israel and a Zionist, has criticized the bill: “While there is much in the bill that I agree with,” he said, “its core provision would put a thumb on the scale in favor of one particular definition of antisemitism to the exclusion of all others to be used when the Department of Education assesses claims of antisemitism on campus.” He continued that the new definition includes “contemporary examples of antisemitism,” adding: “The problem is that these examples may include protected speech, in some contexts, particularly with respect to criticism of the State of Israel.”

Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, described by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial museum as one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide, is the author of an article entitled, “Weaponizing Language: Misuses of Holocaust Memory and the Never Again Syndrome.” In a recent dialogue with the Israeli Holocaust scholar Raz Segal, the two discussed antisemitism and “the perils of antisemitism and its current weaponization.”

In an April 30 interview on Democracy Now!, Bartov noted the peaceful nature of the University of Pennsylvania demonstration as well as the one at Brown University. Of antisemitism he said that it “is a vile sentiment, it’s an old sentiment, it has been used for bloodshed, for violence, and for genocide. But it has also become a tool to silence speech about Israel. And that, too, has quite a history, and numerous governments under Benjamin Netanyahu have been pushing this agenda of arguing that any criticism of Israeli policy, not least, of Israeli occupation policies, is antisemitic.” He added that there are Jewish students who feel threatened, for instance by the term “Intifada,” which literally means “shaking off,” as in the shaking off of the 57-year-long occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. “But there’s nothing threatening about opposing occupation and oppression.”

The Antisemitism Awareness Act, which indeed weaponizes antisemitism against those protesting Israel’s savagery in Gaza and the cruelty of its overall occupation policies, is soon to be voted upon by the Senate. Its enactment would mark a giant step towards degrading the U.S. Constitution, in particular its protection of freedom of speech, assembly, and a free press. It also threatens the status of academia as a realm in which the free exchange of ideas can flourish.

Fascism threatens American democracy embodied in a Republican Party that has long ceased to be a political party and is rather, according to Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein of The American Enterprise Institute, “an insurrection.” The reelection of Donald Trump would import an Israeli-style fascism embodied by Netanyahu and Smotrich, while the reelection of Joe Biden will allow these smoldering tendencies to ignite the flames of that ideology within the U.S. If the Antisemitism Awareness Act is passed by the Senate, the erosion of civil liberties long anchored in the Constitution seems all but certain.

Like all forms of prejudice and ethnocentrism, antisemitism has no place in an enlightened society. But what about genocide? Is that an acceptable manifestation of a modern society? Are those denouncing protests against Israel’s genocidal and ethnic cleansing actions OK knowing that over 100,000 people, most of them women and children, have been killed, wounded, and maimed in indiscriminate bombing raids across the Strip since Oct. 7th?

Meanwhile, all the focus on alleged antisemitism has diverted national attention from the genocide in Gaza and the barbaric settler actions in the West Bank. The official number of Gaza’s dead is close to 35,000 with another 8-10,000 people unaccounted for under the rubble. If 6,000 of these people were Hamas fighters, that still leaves a total of nearly 40,000 civilians dead.

News of atrocities within this holocaust continues. Recently, UN Special Rapporteur of the Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese stated, “I am extremely alarmed by information that Dr. Adnan Albursh, a well-known surgeon at #alshifa_hospital, has died while detained by Israeli forces in the Ofer military prison. While I acquire more information, I urge the diplomatic community to intervene with CONCRETE MEASURES to protect Palestinians. No Palestinian is safe under Israel’s occupation today.”

Israel is neither a democratic nor a peace-loving society. It is an arm of US regional hegemony and a US client state that receives $3.8 billion annually in military aid and that has received over $30 billion additional military aid since October 7th. Since its founding in 1948, Israel has received $158 billion in military support, making it the greatest recipient of US military aid in history. Israel has nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons the only such power in the Middle East to have this kind of arsenal. [We] suggest the next time someone complains that “little Israel” is “surrounded by enemies” (a false statement to begin with), people consider these facts. We need look no further than Tel Aviv to determine which nation is the real destabilizing force in the region.

If the Antisemitism Awareness Act passes the Senate, what will befall student protests? Will they all become acts of civil disobedience? What about the alternative press, whose independent organs have become invaluable given the corporate media’s pussyfooting or downright ignoring of the Gaza holocaust and West Bank atrocities? Will it be shuttered by the federal government on the grounds of banned “hate speech”? Will what we write be rejected by publications that fear for their survival?

“As a Jewish person who stands hand-in-hand with my Palestinian brothers and sisters and works daily against anti-Arab hate, I find this weaponization of my identity particularly disgusting,” states Arab-American Antidiscrimination Committee staff attorney Chris Godshall-Bennet. “Criticism of Zionism and of the Israeli government is not antisemitic, and conflating the two only serves to provide cover for Israel’s numerous, ongoing human rights abuses and violations of international law, as well as its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.”

Declares Palestinian poet Mohammad Al Kurd, “I am asked to have patience for these kinds of debates that tell me that words are genocidal. The Israeli regime is engaging in a war of attrition against the Palestinian people and yet we are asked to talk about chants and slogans… But this is about our moral obligation as human beings to reject genocide, the real genocide that is happening in real time.”

All people of conscience must keep this in mind. And we must maintain our focus on the agonies of Gaza and the West Bank, denouncing them and calling for an end to Israel’s assaults, to settler violence, and ultimately to the occupation of both the West Bank and Gaza.

We must honor the student demonstrators and all who champion them as the heroes they are, cease the opportunistic abuse of the term ‘antisemitism,’ and urge them to continue their protests.

The trade dispute over Mexico’s limitations on genetically modified (GM) corn and glyphosate continues to unfold. On April 30, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) Secretariat published the U.S. rebuttal to Mexico’s comments published in March. Much of what’s in that analysis repeats previous U.S. comments, arguing that Mexico has violated the terms of the agreement and has failed to offer scientific evidence that GM corn and herbicide residues present potential dangers to Mexican consumers.

Civil society groups, many of which have made official submissions to the trade panel on the case, offered some responses to the issues raised in the lengthy statement by the U.S.

Does the U.S. refute the science presented by Mexico?

The U.S. claims that Mexico failed to produce scientific evidence to back its restrictions on the use of GM corn in tortillas. However, Mexico presented many important studies in its submission. The U.S. neglected to address many of these studies in its response.

“There are a dozen references in the U.S. rebuttal to papers published in industry-friendly journals by scientists whose work has been funded for years by GMO seed and pesticide companies,” notes pesticide expert Charles Benbrook, who co-authored a detailed submission to the panel by Friends of the Earth. “Their work draws heavily on cherry-picked data the companies chose to provide these analysts. The absence of any reference to, or discussion of, the dozens of credible, high-quality papers supporting points made in the Mexican submission, including several pointing to possible human food safety issues with genetically engineered (GE) corn, is strong evidence that the U.S. response is a political document, not a scientific one.”

“There are a dozen references in the U.S. rebuttal to papers published in industry-friendly journals by scientists whose work has been funded for years by GMO seed and pesticide companies.”

“The U.S. government still fails to take seriously the evidence Mexico has provided showing ample cause for its precautionary restrictions on GM corn in its tortillas,” said IATP’s Timothy A. Wise of the U.S. response. “Mexico justifiably wants scientific evidence that GM corn with glyphosate residues is safe to eat for Mexicans, who consume 10 times the corn we do in the U.S. and do so not in processed foods but in minimally processed foods. The U.S. has provided no such evidence.”

Nor does the U.S. government take seriously the science showing risks to native corn biodiversity from GM corn varieties, according to Mercedes López of Regeneration International. “The U.S. claim that ‘The prohibition of corn for tortillas and the gradual substitution of Mexico are not ‘related’ to the conservation of an exhaustible natural resource’ is totally false. Mexico is a center of origin and constant diversification of corn. It is a product of the biodiversity of hundreds of generations. The possible planting of genetically modified corn and the import of GM corn for staple foods would threaten that biodiversity and endanger the millions of people who consume corn.”

Does the U.S. have the right to claim “reasonable expectation” of GM corn exports?

The U.S. response also makes the case that U.S. producers have suffered damages from Mexico’s limited restrictions on the uses of GM corn in tortillas, even though there is little evidence it has affected many U.S. producers. U.S. officials now claim that Mexico’s decree violates the trade agreement because it threatens future expected exports, a theory debunked by IATP advisor and trade attorney Sharon Treat.

“The USMCA text affirms each country’s rights to honor its legal obligations to Indigenous communities. Mexico has many such commitments in Federal law and the Constitution. Now in its rebuttal, the U.S. argues that even if Mexico’s actions are justified under the Indigenous rights provision, Mexico hasn't proved that its actions don't amount to a ‘disguised restriction on trade.’ The U.S. argues that exporters had a ‘reasonable expectation’ that Mexico’s rules would never change. Contrary to the U.S. contention, the text simply does not say that the status quo at the time the trade agreement was signed could never be altered. The Indigenous rights provision specifically protects Mexico’s authority to adopt new measures to honor its obligations” says Treat, who coauthored a joint submission to the tribunal on Indigenous rights to GM-free corn with the Rural Coalition and the Alianza Nacional de Campesinas.

The U.S. rebuttal is stuck in a mythical past, when massive agribusiness exports would supposedly save family farmers from low prices. That hasn’t worked in the U.S. or in Mexico. Mexico is taking a different approach to create greater resiliency and healthier alternatives that meet public demand. We should be learning from their experience rather than trying to disrupt it.

See IATP’s resource page on the dispute, where you can read the submissions from Mexican, Canadian and U.S. NGOs.

Here we go again. Every couple of years, conservative members of Congress launch highly partisan attempts to root out alleged “bias” at NPR and PBS—which remain incredibly popular and trusted among the American public—and threaten to slash funding that supports local nonprofit radio and TV affiliates nationwide.

This year’s so-called outrage? A contentious and inaccurate critique of NPR published by a disgruntled editor. In it, then-NPR senior editor Uri Berliner claimed that NPR ignores conservative viewpoints and storylines.

GOP members of Congress claim that Berliner’s essay proves that “NPR suffers from intractable bias,” arguing that “it is time Congress investigates how federal dollars are being used at NPR and what reforms may be necessary.”

While I don’t represent NPR, PBS or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, I was called to testify on May 8 before a House Energy and Commerce Committee subcommittee to offer my views about public funding for local news and information, a pillar of Free Press’ work over the past 20 years.

In testifying, I hoped to provide a voice for NPR’s tens of millions of weekly listeners, who rely on the service for fact-checked journalism, local viewpoints, and international coverage. But I also hoped to paint a picture of the possibilities of an expanded public-media system, one that receives more robust public funding for the kinds of local news and information that have gone missing in local communities.

Inquiries like the House hearing will likely make NPR leadership more timid, and I imagine that’s the point.

Over the past two decades, I have been both an advocate for and a critic of the public broadcasting system—which I believe can do more to live up to its mandate and mission. This won’t be accomplished by tarnishing the reputation of NPR’s accomplished journalists, tearing down the institution, or starving it of funds.

But inquiries like the House hearing will likely make NPR leadership more timid, and I imagine that’s the point.

Defunding threats don’t just harm NPR executives—they endanger the work of more than 1,000 local radio stations providing essential information to communities large and small.

While I always welcome Congress’s interest in public media, especially given the crisis in local journalism, I’m perplexed that an essay by one disgruntled editor at NPR is cause for a congressional inquiry.

The United States spends a pittance per capita on public media when compared to other healthy democracies.

Berliner’s essay (which was published, confusingly enough, in a Substack publication called “The Free Press”) is riddled with fuzzy math and cherry-picked evidence. For example, he inaccurately describes several stories as going uncovered, when NPR did extensive reporting or publicly interrogated its own editorial decision-making about them.

That said, public media’s purpose should be to tell stories not already told by commercial media and serve audiences not represented elsewhere.

Berliner laments NPR’s increased focus on racial diversity since 2020. If in 2024 you’re still questioning whether systemic racism exists, you should probably spend more time listening to the experiences of your colleagues from different backgrounds.

If Berliner had done so, he would have found many people of color inside and outside of NPR and PBS who consistently and repeatedly criticized public media’s failures to reach and serve new and diverse audiences. Numerous NPR and PBS employees and associates also raised concerns about the workplace environment for people of color at NPR and PBS, editorial decision-making, and budgeting and funding priorities when it comes to media makers from marginalized backgrounds.

Berliner’s supposed bombshell that D.C. residents in NPR’s newsroom are all registered Democrats—in a city where just 5 percent of voters are registered as Republicans—doesn’t withstand scrutiny either. As NPR journalist Steve Inskeep points out, NPR has 662 people in its newsrooms around the world, including far more in D.C. than the 87 Berliner tallied. The numbers don’t add up.

While Congress has a role in overseeing the operations and financial management of NPR, threats to defund it based on a perceived failure to cover certain topics or hire certain people strike at the heart of journalistic freedom.

Yet these rickety claims have sent a GOP-controlled House subcommittee down a precarious path. I’m deeply concerned about the request the House majority sent in a letter to NPR CEO Katherine Maher, asking her to track and report to Congress on the political affiliations of NPR’s newsroom employees.

This dangerous overreach, which came at the urging of House Speaker Mike Johnson, raises serious First Amendment concerns and smacks of a political loyalty test. While Congress has a role in overseeing the operations and financial management of NPR, threats to defund it based on a perceived failure to cover certain topics or hire certain people strike at the heart of journalistic freedom.

Yes, there also must be a firewall between NPR executives and the newsroom. NPR’s new CEO may have once volunteered for a Biden campaign. The head of the CPB used to co-chair the RNC. Neither is, nor should be, involved in editorial decisions.

Berliner insists he doesn’t want NPR defunded, but his complaints have been seized upon by those who seek to defang or destroy public media. This is just the latest chapter in a long history of attacking NPR personnel on trumped-up charges of bias.

There is another path. Instead, Congress should take this moment of crisis in local journalism as an opportunity to talk about how to rebuild and expand the public-media system to meet the real needs of local communities.

Congress should take this moment of crisis in local journalism as an opportunity to talk about how to rebuild and expand the public-media system to meet the real needs of local communities.

There’s much common ground to explore on this topic. At the hearing, I found myself in agreement with Howard Husock of the American Enterprise Institute, who also argued that more public-media resources should be devoted to local journalism to replant news deserts.

With changes to the law, this could go beyond broadcasting to support emerging nonprofit news outlets that are providing in-depth and (as of this week) Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage. Right now, the United States spends a pittance per capita on public media when compared to other healthy democracies. That’s just $3.16 per capita a year in public funding compared to $75–$100 per capita or more annually in countries like England, France, Germany and Norway. That’s literally pocket change.

Instead of cutting back even further, Congress should increase funding for public media and ensure that locally engaged outlets—and those reaching the diverse audiences NPR hasn’t—can receive more support. This should not be a partisan debate about right versus left, but rather one about returning the public airwaves to local hands, lifting up diverse local viewpoints, amplifying community affairs and playing local music over the airwaves.

I imagine many members of Congress remember a time when there were multiple local outlets covering their campaigns and accomplishments—actually telling people back home what they do in Washington.

A renewed and vibrant public media system focused on local voices is possible. But it requires a different approach, one that builds on public media’s founding purpose, quoting President Lyndon Johnson, to use the public airwaves, “which belong to all the people … for the enlightenment of all the people.”

You know how the oil industry is always saying the U.S needs to drill more to lower gas prices and protect energy independence? Well it turns out they've actually been scheming behind the scenes with the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to do the exact opposite.

A bombshell complaint filed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last week reveals that Scott Sheffield, the former CEO of Pioneer Natural Resources—one of the largest oil producers in the Permian Basin—colluded with OPEC officials in an attempt to artificially limit supply and jack up prices.

The FTC's complaint alleges that Sheffield exchanged private WhatsApp messages with leaders at OPEC, assuring them that Pioneer and other Permian companies would pump the brakes on output in order to keep prices high. He even threatened to "punish" any companies that dared to ramp up production. I don't know about you, but to me it's hard to imagine anything more un-American and anti-competitive than that.

The FTC complaint is the latest proof: The fossil fuel industry will always put their greed above American consumers and fair competition.

This private coordination with OPEC glaringly contrasts with Big Oil's public rhetoric blaming the Biden administration for constraining U.S. production and raising energy costs—a bogus talking point that Republicans have been parroting for months now. The bad faith has been laid bare: Oil executives themselves are colluding with a foreign cartel to throttle supply and price-gouge American consumers to pad their own pockets.

These revelations fit into a broader pattern of the fossil fuel industry's deception and abuse. Just one day before the FTC filing, the Senate Budget Committee held an explosive hearing detailing how oil giants have waged a decades-long, industry-wide disinformation campaign to downplay the catastrophic climate damage that they knew their products would cause, all while raking in record profits. From ExxonMobil's long-running climate denial to Pioneer's recent price-fixing, it's clear this rogue industry's business model is deny, deceit, and delay.

Here's the kicker: Big Oil is about to get a whole lot more powerful. With it looking like the Exxon-Pioneer merger is going to move forward (without Scott Sheffield), and Chevron pursuing a $50 billion takeover of Hess, a few mega-corporations are rapidly consolidating to control our energy grid. Studies show that mergers like these are pretty certain to squash competition, send prices soaring, and concentrate massive political influence to block necessary climate action.

That's the grim future we face if we let them get away with it: A world where a handful of greedy oil oligarchs collude with OPEC to bleed us dry at the pump while knowingly burning our planet. Fortunately, cities and states are fighting back with lawsuits and legislation to make polluters pay for their lies and damages.

Last year, California joined the fight, suing Exxon, Shell, BP, Chevron, and their lobbying arm for deliberately deceiving the public about fossil fuels' climate impacts, aiming to force them to cough up billions for disaster recovery. And right now, states like Vermont are advancing bills to create climate "superfunds" funded by Big Oil's ill-gotten gains. In fact, New York just passed their polluter pay bill in the Senate this week, bringing New Yorkers and the nation one step closer to accountability for Big Oil.

But in order to truly rein in this reckless industry, we need help at the federal level. At a minimum, Congress should eliminate fossil fuel subsidies and strengthen antitrust laws. At the Department of Justice, leaders must investigate the industry's long history of spreading disinformation. And in the White House, President Joe Biden should declare a climate emergency and wield his powers to rapidly increase the production of clean energy resources.

For decades, Big Oil has ransacked our wallets, ravaged our environment, and rigged our democracy. The FTC complaint is the latest proof: The fossil fuel industry will always put their greed above American consumers and fair competition. It's time to make polluters pay.

As Israel continues its merciless assault on Gaza, there is at least some sanity taking hold in regard to U.S. policy on military assistance to Israel. Several weapons shipments have been put on hold by the Biden Administration and congressional leadership over concerns about Israeli conduct in its ongoing slaughter in Gaza. This is surely the result of relentless protests, organizing and advocacy by the broad, growing movement for a ceasefire.

Currently, as Israel surrounds and attacks Rafah, and ceasefire talks sputter, the U.S. government is poised to likely give Israel a clean bill of health in a report to Congress.

All that is required of Congress and the president is to do their jobs and uphold existing U.S. and international law.

The report, expected any day now, is required by National Security Memorandum - 20 (NSM-20), and is not specific to Israel. It simply states that countries receiving U.S. military assistance must follow U.S. and international law regarding the laws of war and allow humanitarian assistance to reach civilians. Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Kenya, Colombia, Ukraine and Israel are the countries addressed in the report. Israel has speciously asserted that it is in compliance.

NSM-20 was adopted by the Biden administration in a compromise with U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), supported by 18 other senators, when his and other amendments were denied a vote in the recent military supplemental appropriations process. Subsequently, 88 House members led by U.S. Reps. Jason Crow (D-Col.) and Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) wrote to the Administration expressing their support for holding Israel accountable under NSM-20 and section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act, which prohibits U.S. security assistance to any state which restricts U.S. humanitarian aid.

Reports by the executive branch to Congress are ordinarily obscure and dry, read only by committed policy wonks. This one is justifiably getting more attention, as it is a tool for accountability that merely restates existing U.S. and international law, at a time when ending the calamity in Gaza could not be more urgent. The fact that the report may be delayed (it was due May 8) reflects internal divisions within the State Department not just about Israel’s fallacious claim of compliance, but what to recommend to the executive branch in terms of possible action against Israel.

This is likely the first bite at the apple regarding the NSM-20 process, as peace advocates, and our allies in Congress, see it as a potential lever to impact U.S. policy toward Israel, hopefully to bring about an end to the war.

Congressional action is of course only one form of pressure on the Biden Administration to end military aid to Israel and press for a ceasefire. The remarkable spread of campus protests and consistent "No Preference" or "Uncommitted" Democratic presidential primary votes in state after state are powerful statements of no confidence in Biden’s bear hug of support of Israel. All that is required of Congress and the president is to do their jobs and uphold existing U.S. and international law. The question is whether they can, for once, stand up to the pro-apartheid, anti-Palestinian human rights lobby and do the right thing.

The Washington Post fearmongered about the latest projections reported by the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, declaring in its headline “Social Security and Medicare finances look grim as overall debt piles up.” The Post, which put a negative spin on the trustee report despite it showing improved conditions from the previous year, then pushed misleading framing about Social Security and misinformed readers about President Joe Biden’s and former President Donald Trump’s proposals regarding the future of the program.

The Post falsely claimed Social Security will run out of money

The Post ran a misleading headline, “Social Security and Medicare finances look grim as overall debt piles up,” only to partially contradict itself in the sub-headline: “A hot job market means the programs won’t run out of money as fast as once feared, but projections are still bleak.”

In fact, the report from the Social Security board of trustees showed a slight improvement to the program’s fiscal outlook, thanks to economic growth and low unemployment increasing the amount of tax revenue paid into the system.

Even the fiscal obstacle to which the report is looking ahead is not as dire or unavoidable as the Post makes it out to be. The issue is that the amount of revenue taken in from payroll taxes has been lower than the benefits paid out in recent years, forcing the program to tap into its accumulated trust fund in order to pay scheduled benefits in full. But even if no policy changes are made at all, and the current economic projections continue to the year 2035, Social Security would not “run out of money,” as the Post phrased it.

According to the trustee report, current revenue and spending levels can sustain full scheduled Social Security benefits through 2035, after which point the program can sustain 83% of scheduled benefits, a significant hit but a far cry from having no money at all. Moreover, a number of potential solutions are still feasible, which could avoid that steep cut.

Last year’s trustees report examined multiple policy options to extend the solvency of Social Security’s trust fund. One in particular — eliminating the payroll tax cap on taxable income without increasing benefit outlays — was projected to increase the solvency through about 2060. (And that was just one possibility, among many. The Congressional Budget Office has periodically produced reports on the effects of payroll tax adjustments, consistently finding that raising the payroll tax or amending it to include more high incomes would drastically improve Social Security’s finances.)

The Post misleadingly tied Social Security to the national debt

The Post headline tied Social Security to the national debt, and the article claimed that Social Security may be “plunging the nation into insurmountable debt” if the trust fund’s solvency isn’t extended.

But as retirement journalist Mark Miller explained in a Reuters myth-busting column on Social Security, “By law, Social Security cannot contribute to the federal deficit, because it is required to pay benefits only from its trust funds,” which are “funded through a dedicated payroll tax.” This point is also made by economist Alicia Munnell, the director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, who wrote: “Social Security does not contribute one iota to the deficit, since, by law, it can only pay benefits from its trust funds.”

The only way Social Security could ever contribute to the national debt would be if Congress passed new legislation, which was then also signed into law by the president, permitting general revenue to pay out benefits. Congress could just as easily pass a law raising the payroll tax cap, which is currently indexed to $168,600 and applies to around 82% of all taxable income. Every dollar earned after that $168,600 threshold is exempt from payroll taxes, resulting in people with extremely high incomes contributing a lower percentage of their income to Social Security than people who earn less.

Media outlets, particularly the Post, have long pushed the myth that Social Security is a driver of the national debt. Far from contributing to the national debt, Social Security was for many years the U.S. government's "single biggest creditor," as the trust fund is required by law to invest its surplus revenue in U.S. Treasury bonds.

The Post falsely claimed Biden has no plan to strengthen Social Security’s finances

The Post made a blundering attempt at both-sides coverage of this issue in the presidential election, bizarrely proclaiming, “Neither Biden nor former president Donald Trump have released proposals to right Social Security’s finances.” But then, in the very next sentence, the Post included one of Biden’s actual ideas to deal with the fiscal issue: “Biden has signaled a desire to raise taxes on individuals earning more than $400,000 and devote that new revenue to the Social Security Trust Fund.” (This would be one version of the aforementioned options to raise the payroll tax threshold.)

Such a proposal would indeed add years to the trust fund. But, because the Post dismissed the idea as seemingly not a serious proposal, it didn’t bother to do the math to find out. The Post’s decision to virtually ignore Biden’s policy is particularly strange given that it was included in his budget proposal published in March and featured prominently in his State of the Union address (also in March).

The Post then contrasted Biden’s opposition to benefit cuts, as he voiced in his past two State of the Union addresses, with Trump’s dithering on the entire subject: “Trump has floated cuts to the programs, but quickly backpedaled from that position and insisted he wouldn’t support reducing benefits.”

The Post is putting its own spin on Trump’s record here. This March, while Biden was outlining his plan to sustain Social Security through payroll taxes, Trump signaled his openness to gutting the program. When Trump was president, he proposed completely eliminating the payroll tax that funds Social Security, and each one of his budget proposals included cuts to the program, facts the Post had previously reported.

The Post has previously used concern over Social Security’s finances to push for benefit cuts

On Threads, American Independent senior writer Oliver Willis (a former Media Matters writer) posted images of Post headlines going back decades, showing the paper spreading panic of looming insolvency for both Social Security and Medicare. If some of these headlines were to be believed, the U.S. would have exhausted some trust funds years, even decades ago. Indeed, just a year ago, the Post warned of the same problem — but arriving a few years earlier, with the headline “Social Security funding crisis will arrive in 2033, U.S. projects.”

That same month, the Post’s editorial board called for, among other things, benefit cuts through “gradually indexing up the age, currently 67, at which people may retire at full benefits, to take account of longer retirements due to rising life expectancy,” among other changes. This is nothing new for the Post; in a nearly two-and-a-half-year period after November 2010, the Post editorial board published 23 editorials that mentioned benefit cuts as a solution for Social Security shortfalls, compared to just 4 articles which mentioned increasing revenues as a solution.

Almost 90 percent of us think of ourselves as being “middle class,” but we’re way off. In 1970, 62 percent of Americans did qualify; but by 2021, our shrinking middle class was down to 42 percent. By 2022, the value of our minimum wage has fallen by 40 percent since the late 60s.

And our poverty rate? Today, at 12.4 percent, it’s the highest among almost all 38 OECD nations. Only the newest member, Costa Rica, suffers a higher poverty rate.

So, how did our view of ourselves become so distorted?

We were once indeed primarily middle class because we had stepped up to tackle poverty. In the late 1950s, our official poverty rate was about 22 percent, but Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty cut that rate in half, hitting a low of 11 percent in 1973. Then Reaganism struck, and by 1983 poverty had spread to nearly 15 percent.

And now?

While our official rate is indeed lower, it is still high and misses millions struggling to meet essential needs.

Our path to this sad outcome began in the 1980s. Reversing the War on Poverty, Reagan began dismantling welfare protections while slashing taxes on the ultrarich. Capturing the tenor of the time, in the 1987 film “Wall Street”, Gordon Gekko declared “greed is good.”

Reaganomics paved the way for today’s shocking inequality.

In 1978, the top 0.1 percent held roughly 7 percent of wealth. By 2018, this tiny group enjoyed about 18 percent. Most shocking: By 2019, America’s three richest families held more wealth than the bottom half of us.

Hardly a middle-class nation, today’s concentration of wealth ought to make a Russian oligarch blush. Out of 178 countries the CIA ranks by income inequality, the U.S. lands between Micronesia and Morocco—at 56th. No industrial democracy is near us. The closest—New Zealand—is 31 places less extreme, at 86th.

An additional injustice?

While workers’ share of national wealth has been shrinking, their productivity has soared. Between 1979 and 2017, worker productivity grew by 70 percent, while hourly compensation rose by a meager 11 percent.

And who benefited?

As earnings for the bottom 90 percent of Americans rose by just over a fifth, the wealth of the top 0.1 percent grew by 343 percent. That's 17 times more!

Thus, we shouldn’t be surprised that in 2019 the bottom half of us held only 2 percent of the nation’s wealth.

Moreover, while American workers had to take on more hours to boost their relatively stagnant earnings and as healthcare and housing costs climbed, the wealthy increased their gains and used it to further warp our nation’s democratic institutions: By funding candidates and hiring lobbyists to ensure their interests were heard at the expense of ours. From 1998 to 2023 alone, dollars spent paying Washington lobbyists grew almost three-fold, from $1.5 billion to $4.1 billion.

Thus, when our rules are set to bring the highest return to those with the most, a market economy not only selectively rewards the already wealthy; it undercuts democracy.

The pain of Reaganomics should have taught us one clear lesson. A market economy can only work for the common good within rules set democratically—free from private control—to ensure opportunity for all. The beginning of these rules would be basics such as an enforced, livable minimum wage, as well as strong and enforced anti-trust laws.

Such steps could move us toward a market serving the most basic freedom of all—the freedom to thrive.

People across the world are watching in horror as scenes of violent crackdowns on peaceful student protests reach the news and social media. Students protesting America’s role in Israel’s mass murder of Palestinians face police in riot gear wielding batons.

In Boston, as police closed in, Amina Adeyola, an Emerson College student organizer working with hundreds of protesters , made an impassioned speech urging the mayor to call off the city’s police. She highlighted that the city ordinance used by the police to arrest protesters was the same one first designed to remove unhoused people from a large encampment just months earlier.

Immediately after her speech, she was arrested. Scenes of Emerson students being dragged, body-slammed, belongings being torn from their hands, were live-streamed on social media. Students reported substantial injuries.

The student protesters implore us to see the interconnectedness of global freedom struggles against systemic oppression and authoritarian force.

As physicians caring for people experiencing homelessness in Boston, we are all too familiar with the anti-homeless ordinance used to arrest the students. The context was different, but the swift crackdown in the name of public health and safety was the same. We see haunting similarities in the use of expanded police power and the weaponization of public health and safety to criminalize dissent and control oppressed groups.

Just a few months earlier, facing a crisis of increasing homelessness and rising housing costs, Boston enacted the new ordinance banning tent camping throughout the city. The mayor called on the police to sweep encampments of homeless communities and to ticket and fine individuals for living outside. While the ordinance required that police first offer storage for belongings and a shelter bed, this seemed disingenuous. The largest shelters in Boston were already full, with people routinely sleeping on the floor.

We vociferously opposed the measure based both on personal experience and on evidence from encampments across the country. After prior sweeps, our patients who were receiving life-saving medications, including treatments for HIV and other serious infections, would disappear—whether in jail, pushed to a more distant encampment, or dead, we often did not know. Disturbing images from previous encampment removals were fresh in our minds: wheelchairs being confiscated and crushed, medications and other crucial belongings being forcibly taken from patients. Mounting public health research shows that law enforcement-led sweeps of homeless encampments do not bring health and safety. They do not result in less violence. They do not result in less drug use. They result in disconnection from life-saving harm reduction services and medical care. They result in more hospitalizations and fatal overdoses.

To hear city officials, including physicians, cite “health and safety” as the motivation for the ordinance was deeply unsettling. The well-being of the unhoused individuals who were ultimately arrested, or pushed into less visible parts of the city, was never the primary concern. Instead of investing the necessary money and time into tackling hard problems—lack of affordable housing, cycles of incarceration and poverty, inadequate addiction treatment—the city chose to expand police power against an already marginalized group.

Today we see this same ordinance wielded against students demanding divestment from Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In defending the police action, Mayor Michelle Wu cited the “health and safety” of Bostonians. The morning after the Emerson College protest crackdown, city workers cleaned up blood from the protest site. It’s difficult to square the sight of protesters’ blood on sidewalks resulting from police violence, with that call for health and safety. How could they do this?

As Adeyola astutely pointed out, we gave them the tools.

Rather than fund housing and other necessary services to prevent homelessness, our elected leaders use our tax dollars to fund police and prisons which are full of unhoused people. Rather than disclose and divest from Israeli apartheid, occupation, and genocide, university leaders invite police forces (often militarized by the Israeli Defense Force) onto campus in the name of student safety, to brutalize and arrest students and their faculty and community supporters.

The student protesters implore us to see the interconnectedness of global freedom struggles against systemic oppression and authoritarian force. They demand that we not shield our eyes from our leaders’ brutal disregard of Palestinian life in the false name of Israeli security. As medical providers, we have an obligation to speak out against the deliberate destruction of Gaza’s critical infrastructure and the mass murder of healthcare workers who are desperately trying to save civilian lives. As healthcare workers committed to the genuine health and well-being of all—whether unhoused people, student protesters, or the people of Gaza—we must denounce everywhere the use of state violence in the name of safety. And beyond rhetoric, we must protect and support those most vulnerable who speak out and demand a more just world. We cannot abandon our young people to risk everything alone. Healthcare workers must be by their sides, flooding every student encampment across the nation.

In these dark times for democracy, we as homeless medicine physicians witnessing attacks first on homeless people and now on protesting students, are reminded that our collective silence and inaction endangers us all.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

—Martin Niemöller

The next time you see a politician’s lawn sign or hear a politician’s voice, saying, “Vote for a Vet,” you need to remember two things:

First, there are good veterans and there are bad veterans. The bad ones go all the way back to Benedict Arnold, a Revolutionary War turncoat whose name has become a handy shorthand for traitor. In more modern times, bad vets include Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated John F. Kennedy, preventing the president from pulling American troops out of Vietnam, as he had planned, a murderous act that led to 58,000 American deaths in that war; Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber; and Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibal serial killer. That names a few.

Second, remember this: Probably the worst, most dangerous vet currently occupying a seat in the United States Congress is Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas. His latest bit of warmongering is a threat to the International Criminal Court, which has been investigating the way Israel is pursuing its war in Gaza. "Target Israel and we will target you," reads the letter, leaving zero doubt that he would love to make life difficult for the Court. Cotton not only signed it, but led in putting that threatening letter together, signed by 11 other senators, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

At a time when calmer voices are expressing something approaching alarm about the dangers of a possible wider war in the Middle East... Cotton has predictably thrown caution to the winds.

And this wasn't the first time that Cotton has led senators far senior to himself in seeking confrontation. Years ago, when President Barack Obama was negotiating a deal with Iran about nuclear weapons, Cotton intervened by putting together a letter to the Iranian mullahs, essentially warning them off the deal. In the Senate, an institution where seniority is everything, how did the youngest senator—at age 37 and with only two months of seniority—manage to persuade 46 other senators, with a total of 4,775 months of seniority (390 years), to join him in this bold venture? Was it the power of his intellect and his Harvard degrees? Was it his status as a combat veteran? Or was it the incipient aura of some future presidential candidacy?

None of this should come as a surprise, because Cotton clearly announced his fierce ideology in his maiden speech in the Senate. Cotton’s intense demeanor and appearance, right out of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (“Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look”) was fully on display from that moment on. He delivered that maiden speech on March 15, 2015—a date that brings to mind another Julius Caesar reference, “Beware the Ides of March.” It was a grim piece of our-enemies-are-coming-for-us rhetoric, painting a dark picture of America’s “retreat” and declining status in the world, raising concern about increasing threats from Russia and China and a list of other nations. To react to those threats, Cotton set out national goals of “global military dominance” and “hegemonic strength,” and he made absolutely clear where he stood on defense spending: America needs more—a lot more.

Cotton built the career leading to that speech with an impeccable academic and military resume. He earned an undergraduate degree from Harvard University, followed by a law degree from Harvard Law School. He has also checked the warrior box: After 9/11, he left the practice of law and spent nearly five years as an infantry officer, including deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan. His time in combat boots does not appear to have soured him on war. That consistent bellicosity, plus his proven knack for making headlines, makes him especially scary. “He is my least favorite congressional veteran, maybe in history,” said Danny Sjursen, a former army major who also saw combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, taught history at West Point, and became as staunchly antiwar as Cotton is pro-war. “I mean, he’s that bad.”

As his leadership in that letter to Iran's mullahs demonstrates, the Arkansas Republican has had a fixation on Iran from his first moments in the Senate. Now, at a time when calmer voices are expressing something approaching alarm about the dangers of a possible wider war in the Middle East, and Iran gets mentioned often as a backer of terrorists, Cotton has predictably thrown caution to the winds. He has fired volleys of criticism at President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for being soft on Iran. Soft, of course, is a beloved word of Republican politicians. They emerge from the birth canal yelling, “You’re soft on national security,” or “You’re soft on crime.” Cotton is no exception.

The Iran letter was not the only time Cotton made headlines. In 2020, after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck until he died, protests broke out around the nation and the world. To Cotton and others, the sporadic violence arising from those protests was serious business. Cotton had long ago made clear his views on the issue of race relations. During his Harvard days, he had written a review of a book about race for the conservative Harvard Salient. Cotton claimed to have seen real progress on the issue of race, and all America really needed to do was to just quit talking about it so much. “If race relations are better now than at any time in our history and would almost certainly improve if we stopped emphasizing race in our public life, what would the self-appointed ‘civil rights leaders’ have to do with themselves? For this reason, they continue to make hysterical and wholly unsubstantiated claims that inflame public opinion and create a gnawing cynicism in the American people.”

His attack on the International Criminal Court, which is trying to investigate whether Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza, is terrifying.

Suddenly, in 2020, that progress seemed to have ground to a halt with the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protests. So Cotton weighed in loudly with an immediately controversial op-ed in the New York Times about the looting and violence that had broken out at a limited number of the protests. “A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants,” Cotton wrote. “But the rioting has nothing to do with George Floyd, whose bereaved relatives have condemned violence. On the contrary, nihilist criminals are simply out for loot and the thrill of destruction, with cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa infiltrating protest marches to exploit Floyd’s death for their own anarchic purposes.” His solution: Invoke the Insurrection Act and call in the military.

Cotton’s op-ed, under the headline that the Times chose, “Send in the Troops,” caused an immediate uproar inside the Times. Dozens of staffers complained, many of them tweeting this line: “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.” It didn’t take long for the paper’s leadership to issue an unusually earnest apology for not vetting the piece more carefully: “After publication, this essay met strong criticism from many readers (and many Times colleagues), prompting editors to review the piece and the editing process. Based on that review, we have concluded that the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published.” In the uproar, the paper’s opinion editor, James Bennet, acknowledged that he had not even read Cotton’s op-ed during the editing process and admitted that it was the Times that had invited the senator to write the piece. A few days after the op-ed ran, Bennet resigned from his senior position at perhaps the most powerful newspaper in the country. Cotton clearly has the power to shake things up.

At a time when the United States needs to be careful and clear-headed about how it responds to the Middle East crisis, Cotton’s cheerleading for devastating military action against Iran is deeply unhelpful. His attack on the International Criminal Court, which is trying to investigate whether Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza, is terrifying. He is someone to be watched carefully, as Julius Caesar felt about Cassius. “He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.”

On April 30, when Columbia University student protesters took over Hamilton Hall, they renamed it “Hind’s Hall,” dropping a large banner out the windows above the building’s entrance. This was a hall famously occupied by students in the 1968 protests against the Vietnam War and against Jim Crow racism in the United States. The students risked suspension and expulsion, and a very real blacklist has already been generated against them, with Congress joining in to define criticism of genocide as a form of antisemitism that state universities and state-linked employers will not be allowed to tolerate.

I believe their love for Hind Rajab guides the movement so desperately needed to resist militarism. Hind was six years old when Israel used U.S.-supplied weapons to kill her.

If our civilization survives a looming ecological collapse that is helping to drive catastrophic nuclear brinkmanship, I hope future generations of students will study the “Hind’s Hall” occupation in the way that students of the civil rights movement have studied the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the story of Emmett Till. Hind’s story is tragically emblematic. Her cruel murder has befallen many thousands of children throughout the decades of Israel’s fight to maintain apartheid.

To remember Hind’s story is an act of resistance. Commemorating her short life builds resolve to confront profiteers who benefit from developing, manufacturing, storing, and selling the weapons that prolong wars—robbing children of their precious right to live.

Just in our young century, from September 2000 to September 2023, Israel’s B’tselem organization reports that 2,309 Palestinian minors were killed by Israelis and some 145 Israeli minors were killed by Palestinians, and these numbers exclude Palestinian children dead from deliberate immiseration via blockade or traumatized as hostages in prisons. We hear reports that 38 Israeli children and some 14,000 Palestinian children have been murdered since October 7, deaths which can all be laid on the doorstep of the ethnostate project so lethally determined to keep one ethnicity in undemocratic governance.

No six-year-old poses any threat to anyone. Like the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children starved to death during the U.S. imposition of economic sanctions against Iraq, none of these children could be held accountable for the actions of their government or military.

Hind Rajab committed no crime, but she was made to watch her family die and wait for death surrounded by their corpses. When the ambulance crew asked safe passage to come rescue her, she was used as bait to kill them as well. Her story must be remembered and told over and over.

As Jeffrey St. Clair writes, Hind was a little girl who liked to dress up as a princess. She lived in the neighborhood of Tel al-Hawa, an area south of Gaza City.

“Hind Rajab was in her own city when the invaders in tanks came,” St. Clair notes. “What was left of it . . . Hind’s own kindergarten, from which she’d recently graduated, had been blown up, as had so many other schools, places of learning, places of shelter and places of safety in Gaza City.”

On January 29, when the Israelis ordered people to evacuate, her mother, Wissam Hamada, and an older sibling set off on foot. Hind joined her uncle, aunt, and three cousins who traveled in a black Kia automobile.

The uncle placed a call to a relative in Germany which initiated the family’s contact with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS). After the initial connection with the PRCS switchboard, the car was targeted and hit, killing Hind’s uncle, her aunt, and two of her cousins.

Hind and her fifteen-year-old cousin, Layan, were the only survivors.

Switchboard operators handling the phone contact with Layan had immediately notified ambulance workers that the little girls were alive and needed to be rescued.

But it would have been suicidal for a rescue crew to enter the area without first working out coordinates with the Israeli military.

Similar to the World Central Kitchen workers killed on Monday, April 1, they waited hours for the coordinated rescue plan.

On the audio tape shared by the PRCS workers, Layan’s petrified voice can be heard. The tank is coming closer. She is so scared. A blast is heard and Layan no longer speaks. PRCS workers call back and Hind answers.

She pleads, “Please come and get me. I’m so scared.”

St. Clair writes, “The [PRCS] dispatched an ambulance crewed by two paramedics: Ahmed al-Madhoon and Youssef Zeino. As Ahmed and Youssef approached the Tel al-Hawa area, they reported to the Red Crescent dispatchers that the IDF was targeting them, and that snipers had pointed lasers at the ambulance. Then there was the sound of gunfire and an explosion. The line went silent.”

The tank-fired M830A1 missile remnant found nearby had been manufactured in the United States by a subsidiary of the Day and Zimmermann Corporation. Day and Zimmermann prides itself on having once received the U.S. National “Family Business of the Year” award—an Internet search for the award chiefly produces references to this company. The company states that it believes in civic and community service, with core values of safety and integrity; emphasizing their success as a team that hits its targets. But since last October, their business has been killing families like Hind’s.

Although Israel predictably insists that Layan and Hind, and the additional slain paramedics, were all lying with their final breaths and that no IDF tanks were present to attack them, Al Jazeera’s analysis of satellite images taken at midday on January 29 corroborates the victims’ accounts and puts at least three Israeli tanks just 270 meters (886 feet) from the family’s car, with their guns pointed at it.

When rescuers were finally allowed to approach the remains of Hind and her family on February 10, the car was riddled with bullet holes likely coming from more than one direction.

Hind’s mother couldn’t go to the site until February 12.

On May 5, Israel raided the offices of Al Jazeera at the Ambassador Hotel in Jerusalem and moved to shut down the television network’s operations in Israel.

To remember Hind’s story is an act of resistance. Commemorating her short life builds resolve to confront profiteers who benefit from developing, manufacturing, storing, and selling the weapons that prolong wars—robbing children of their precious right to live.

Universities should, in theory, be places to learn things of importance, and we can learn from the students of Hind Hall to throw comfort and ambition out the window while keeping hold of love, as the students clung to that banner and to the name of Hind Rajab. We can learn to keep hold of our humanity. We learn by doing, as these students are learning to do, drawing wisdom from people like Phil Berrigan who famously said, “Don’t get tired!”

The list of Gaza solidarity encampments grows each day. Conscious of increasing famine in Gaza, students at Princeton University launched a water-only fast on May 4 as they continue to call for their university to divest from corporations selling weapons to Israel. The United Nations warns of a potential collapse of aid delivery to Palestinians with Israel’s May 7 closure of the two main crossings into Gaza. These crossings are critical entry points for food, medicine, and other supplies for Gaza’s 2.3 million people. The disruptions come at a time when officials say northern Gaza is experiencing a “full-blown famine.”

With thousands of innocent lives in the balance, promoters of peace should take advantage of this crucial opportunity to follow the young people, learning alongside the students whose hunger for humanity reveals stunning courage.

Violent crackdowns on student protesters across the United States have brought to light an uncomfortable truth that goes unacknowledged by universities, the White House, and the mass media: the United States is an obstacle to peace in Gaza.

As Israel has directed an unrelenting military assault against Gaza, the United States has enabled it every step of the way. Among its most significant moves, the United States has provided Israel with offensive weapons, opposed a permanent ceasefire, and cracked down on student protesters.

“What we are doing today is very bad policy,” Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said on April 23. “We are aiding and abetting the destruction of the Palestinian people.”

Since October 2023, Israel has been directing a military siege of Gaza. Israel began its operations in response to a terrorist attack on October 7, when Hamas militants crossed into Israel, killed 1,200 people, and took 250 people hostage. Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, is still holding an estimated 100 people hostage.

Not only has the Biden administration regularly approved weapons transfers to Israel, but it has also worked with Congress to secure billions of dollars of additional military assistance.

Although Israeli officials have insisted that their goal is to destroy Hamas, their military campaign has devastated Gaza. The Israeli siege has killed more than 34,000 people and displaced most of Gaza’s 2 million people. There is now “full-blown famine” in northern Gaza, according to the head of the World Food Program. The World Court is investigating whether Israel has committed genocide.

Over the course of Israel’s military offensive, the United States has provided Israel with diplomatic and military support. Although President Joe Biden has criticized Israel’s military campaign as “over the top” and Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has identified Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “major obstacle to peace,” both the White House and Congress have worked together to help Israel continue its siege.

“This is not an Israeli war,” Senator Sanders said. “This is an Israeli-American war. Most of the bombs and most of the military equipment the Israeli government is using in Gaza is provided by the United States and subsidized by American taxpayers.”

Arming Israel

The primary way in which the United States has intervened in Gaza is by arming Israel, just as Senator Sanders noted. Not only has the Biden administration regularly approved weapons transfers to Israel, but it has also worked with Congress to secure billions of dollars of additional military assistance.

This past April, a large majority of elected officials in both the Democratic and Republican Parties voted to send more weapons to Israel. On April 20, the House of Representatives approved a bill to provide more arms to Israel by a vote of 366 to 58. On April 23, the Senate granted its approval as part of a broader package with a vote of 79 to 18.

“It’s a good day for world peace, for real,” President Biden said, shortly after signing the legislation into law.

Regardless of the president’s efforts to frame the legislation as a victory for world peace, several U.S. officials expressed dismay. Nearly 20 representatives issued a joint statement in which they warned that the approval of additional military assistance to Israel made the United States complicit in the destruction of Gaza.

“Are we going to participate in that carnage or not?” Representative Joaquin Castro (D-TX) asked. “I choose not to.”

When Senator Sanders spoke against the additional military assistance, he argued that the United States was violating the Foreign Assistance Act, which forbids the United States from providing military assistance to countries that are blocking the delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance, just as Israel has been doing in Gaza.

“It’s illegal to continue current military aid to Israel,” Sanders said.

Regardless, only a minority of officials in Washington cared about the legality of sending additional arms to Israel. Their priority has been to ensure that Israel can continue its siege, just as several U.S. officials have acknowledged.

“If you don’t help Israel replenish their conventional weapons, there will be a day when Israel, if they have to, will play the nuclear card,” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) warned.

Opposing a Permanent Ceasefire

Another way in which the United States has empowered Israel is by preventing a permanent ceasefire. At the United Nations, the United States has repeatedly thwarted diplomatic efforts to bring Israel’s military offensive to an end.

When the UN Security Council crafted a resolution for an immediate ceasefire in December 2023, the United States vetoed the resolution. After the Security Council moved forward with another attempt in February 2024, the United States vetoed that resolution as well.

In March 2024, the United States allowed the Security Council to pass a ceasefire resolution, as it abstained from voting, but U.S. officials made no effort to follow up on the resolution or enforce it. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, falsely claimed that the resolution was “nonbinding,” meaning that countries were not required to follow it.

Growing international pressure has had some effect, however. The same month that the Security Council passed its ceasefire resolution, the Biden administration began claiming that it wanted to see a ceasefire in Gaza. Administration officials took the position that a ceasefire would be beneficial to Gaza and Israel by halting the fighting and creating the conditions for the release of hostages.

The actions of the United States are ensuring that Israel’s siege of Gaza will continue.

As administration officials changed their public diplomacy, however, they framed their demands in ways that made it difficult to achieve a ceasefire. For starters, the White House refused to call for a permanent ceasefire. Instead, administration officials said that they favored a temporary ceasefire that would enable Israel to continue its military operations at a later date.

At the same time, the White House portrayed Hamas as the main obstacle to a ceasefire, even after Hamas indicated that it would accept a permanent ceasefire and Israel insisted that it would continue with its military offensive, “with or without a deal,” as Prime Minister Netanyahu put it.

Indeed, the main priority of the Biden administration has been to enable Israel to continue its siege of Gaza, just as Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged earlier this year.

“Israel has made good progress in doing to Hamas what needs to be done so that it can’t do October 7 again,” Blinken said. “That’s what Israel should be focused on. That’s what we are focused on.”

Cracking Down on Protesters

More recently, forces within the United States have made another major move in opposition to peace. Across the United States, police have been cracking down on student protesters who have been calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and divestment from Israel.

Elected officials in Washington have been behind the crackdowns. Not only have they worked to destroy the careers of university leaders by calling on them to testify before Congress, but they have pressured university leaders to call in police forces to arrest students and eliminate their encampments.

“Administrators must take charge of their institutions,” Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) demanded on April 30. “Clear the encampments.”

So far, police forces have dismantled several encampments and arrested or detained more than 2,500 people.

As legislators have pushed for the crackdowns, many of them have justified their demands by portraying student protesters as anti-Semitic. Essentially, they have weaponized anti-Semitism, meaning that they have accused the protesters of being racists for the purposes of silencing them, destroying their reputations, and undermining the broader antiwar movement.

Amid the crackdowns, legislators have increased the pressure on universities. On April 30, House Republicans announced that they are starting to investigate whether universities that have experienced student protests should continue to receive federal funding.

“The Congress has two really important responsibilities that will be fulfilled in this exercise,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) explained. “One is oversight,” and the other is “the use of the power of the purse.”

A day after House Republicans threatened to defund universities, the House of Representatives passed a bill to broaden the definition of anti-Semitism so that it would include criticism of Israel. Although its fate is uncertain in the Senate, the bill puts tremendous pressure on universities to silence members of their communities who are continuing to protest Israel’s siege of Gaza.

Still, a small but not insignificant number of legislators have come to the defense of student protesters. The country’s most progressive lawmakers have consistently supported the protesters, even visiting their encampments and providing messages of support.

After police violently cleared an encampment at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts, Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) issued a statement in which she praised the students for “raising their voices and putting their bodies on the line to press for action to save lives in Gaza.”

Following similar crackdowns at other colleges, Senator Sanders delivered a speech from the Senate floor in which he defended the students. Putting their actions into context, the senator linked the protesters’ actions to major movements for social justice in U.S. history, including the civil rights movement and the movements against the U.S. wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

“It is outrageous and it is disgraceful to use that charge of anti-Semitism to distract us from the immoral and illegal war policies that Netanyahu’s extremist and racist government is pursuing,” Senator Sanders said.

Regardless, there is little interest in Washington in taking the protesters seriously, even among officials in the Biden administration who have acknowledged that “the protests in and of themselves are not anti-Semitic.” Facing growing pressure from both Democrats and Republicans to take action, the White House has denounced the protesters.

On May 2, President Biden gave a speech in which he claimed that the student protesters are spreading chaos, violence, and anti-Semitism. Just as the Republicans have been doing, he weaponized anti-Semitism in an effort to delegitimize the antiwar movement.

“Order must prevail,” the president insisted.

Suppressing the Truth

Now that the Biden administration has established that it will not tolerate any criticism of Israel, the siege of Gaza is likely to continue. Even if some kind of deal is forged to establish a temporary ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, there is no guarantee that Israel won’t renew its military operations at a later date, just as it did after a previous pause in fighting in November 2023.

What is perhaps most remarkable, however, is how the United States has suppressed one of the key truths about the destruction of Gaza. Across elite institutions of American society, people in leadership positions remain largely silent about what student protesters have been trying to bring to the attention of the public: the United States is an obstacle to peace in Gaza.

“This is not just an Israeli war,” Senator Sanders insisted, in one of the few exceptions to the silence in Washington. “This is an American war as well.”

Indeed, the actions of the United States are ensuring that Israel’s siege of Gaza will continue. Not until the United States changes its approach will it become possible to bring an end to the destruction.

Just what exactly happens when a society becomes substantially more unequal, when a few become fabulously richer than the many?

Defenders of our deepest pockets have a ready answer. What happens when wealth starts concentrating at a society’s summit? Nothing we need worry about. In fact, the richer our richest become, these cheerleaders for grand fortune posit, the better the lives the rest of us get to lead.

Or so the American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethokoukis would have us believe.

“Rather than wishing for a world without billionaires, as some radical thinkers do,” Pethokoukis declared last month, “we might want to think about the immense value that uber-successful entrepreneurs provide.”

People who live in highly unequal societies feel “a lower sense of control” and look less askance at unethical behaviors, either from others or from themselves, than do people who live in distinctly more equal societies.

“Without the possibility of amassing significant wealth,” this think-tanker went on to add, “we wouldn’t have benefited from the contributions of entrepreneurs like Bezos and Bill Gates.”

But those “contributions,” researchers have made plain over recent years, have all come at an exceptionally high price. People who live in societies with wide gaps between the wealthy and everyone else turn out to live briefer lives than people who call more equal societies home. People who live in more equal societies, meanwhile, tend to live happier lives than their unequal-society counterparts. They face less crime. Their economies crash less often.

Epidemiologists and economists the world over are exploring all these sorts of phenomena. So are sociologists and political scientists. And, over recent years, psychologists have been jumping big-time into the fray, as an analysis from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management has just highlighted.

One example: Recent studies from Northwestern’s Maryam Kouchaki and her colleagues Christopher To from Rutgers and Dylan Wiwad, a former Kellogg postdoc, have been illuminating how unequal distributions of income and wealth are serving to increase “the acceptability of self-interested unethical behaviors.”

Why do unequal societies tend to be more accepting of this “immoral behavior”? Kouchaki and her colleagues have been exploring that question. They’ve dug deep into huge international data sets that go back decades. They’ve also conducted experiments to dig even deeper into the psyches of both high- and low-inequality societies.

One of these fascinating experiments, involving some 800 participants, used images of ladders to help show how levels of inequality can impact attitudes on the importance of behaving ethically. The research team showed the participants five different ten-rung ladders. Each ladder represented a different society, with each ladder rung representing 10% of each society’s population. The top rung represented the richest 10%, the bottom the poorest.

Upon each rung, the researchers placed images of money bags to indicate the total net worth of households in each particular 10%. In the most equal of these five ladder societies, no one rung carried many more money bags than any other rung. In the most unequal ladder societies, just the opposite. In these unequal societies, the overwhelming bulk of the money bags sat on the ladders’ top-most rungs.

Northwestern’s Kouchaki and her colleagues then asked their experiment’s participants to choose the ladder image that best reflected the distribution of wealth in their own real-life society. They also asked these participants to rate how acceptable unethical behaviors—everything from cheating on exams to illegally downloading software—have become in their own real-life societies.

The bottom line from this particular experiment matched up with the findings from all the rest of this research effort: People who live in highly unequal societies feel “a lower sense of control” and look less askance at unethical behaviors, either from others or from themselves, than do people who live in distinctly more equal societies.

“Overall,” Kouchaki and her colleagues conclude, “our results suggest inequality changes ethical standards.”

Other recent psychological research has come to the same core conclusion.

“When are people more open to cheating?” asked the Canadian researchers Anita Schmalor, Adrian Schroeder, and Steven Heine in a paper published earlier this year. “Economic inequality makes people expect more everyday unethical behavior.”

The longer we let inequality define our contemporary daily lives, this new research helps us understand, the more the unethical behavior all around us will seem to reflect just the way our world naturally works. Economic inequality, in effect, normalizes unethical behavior. The sun will always rise and set, we come to assume, on a deeply unequal world that no mere mortals can ever change.

We need, some observers of our fraying social fabric suggest, more people in public life noble enough to champion basic ethical norms. True, we do need those champions. But what we need even more: a world of distinctly more equal societies.

The Biden administration is spending billions of taxpayer dollars to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order for the U.S. to achieve Net Zero emissions by 2050, an important goal, in the opinion of most climate scientists, for saving our planet.

As immense as this spending seems, it is only a small fraction of what will ultimately be required. If America is to achieve Net Zero without massive tax increases, the cost of climate action must shift from taxpayers to fossil fuel producers; in other words, to those who profit from the products that pollute the air. Government regulation is essential to make this happen.

ExxonMobil’s CEO recently said “the people who are generating the emissions need to be aware of and pay the price for that.” Unfortunately, he was pointing to consumers, not producers. These fossil fuel producers are actively avoiding paying the price for cleaning up these emissions.

Fossil fuel companies make tremendous profits off of products that cause GHG emissions and should be the ones to take responsibility for these emissions.

Let’s consider an example. Last month, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded $6 billion to support 33 projects aimed at reducing emissions. One of the largest awards, $332 million, was for an ExxonMobil project to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at its Baytown, Texas, chemical plant by 2.5 million metric tons per year—a mere 0.04% of U.S. emissions. This award came after ExxonMobil warned the project might not continue due to unsatisfactory government incentives.

ExxonMobil’s net profit in 2023 was over $36 billion, more than 100 times the government award. Why does it need taxpayer funds to decarbonize? Can’t ExxonMobil reduce its emissions at its own expense as a cost of doing business? Fossil fuel companies make tremendous profits off of products that cause GHG emissions and should be the ones to take responsibility for these emissions. But the reality is they won’t unless they are required to do so.

With the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the government took the “carrot” approach: Give companies an incentive to act and hope that they’ll do the right thing. Some companies have been very complimentary of the IRA because it allows them to decarbonize at taxpayer expense. Their only complaint is that they want even larger incentives so they can make greater profits on their decarbonization investments. These companies now see the atmospheric carbon problems as opportunities, but they still want the U.S. taxpayer to pay for their new decarbonization business ventures.

It is time for the IRA’s carrots to be followed by a regulatory stick. If oil companies want to continue to produce fossil fuels, we should phase in a requirement that they address the emissions that result from their production and use. Companies that reduce emissions most cheaply will be more profitable than those who are less efficient, and this will accelerate the deployment of climate solutions. Oil companies will, of course, pass some of those costs on to their customers. This will prompt consumers to seek alternatives to fossil fuels and to use less—exactly what needs to happen if we are to achieve Net Zero emissions.

This regulatory approach is nothing new. When society needed gasoline to be produced without toxic lead, it was required by regulation and oil companies did it. The same thing happened when low sulfur fuels were required to reduce pollution. Companies spent billions to produce better fuels, and we have cleaner air and fewer deaths as a result. Similar regulations should, and must, be used to drive decarbonization.

This approach—requiring oil companies to decarbonize—should have supporters on both sides of the political aisle. It both improves the environment and reduces taxes—a win-win. The Big Oil lobby will be strongly opposed, just like they were to previous regulations. But in the end, they’ll do what needs to be done.

Oil companies like to talk about the and equation: Meeting society’s energy needs and reducing emissions. But there’s one more requirement they prefer not to discuss: doing it at their own expense. If they won’t do these three things at once, fossil fuel companies need to go the way of the dinosaurs. Our grandchildren will see their logos in museums and will be amazed that these giants were once so powerful that they were allowed to put our planet at risk.

More than 2,000 protestors have been arrested in pro-Palestinian demonstrations since mid-April. They have been charged with “criminal trespass” and other crimes.

University officials, police, and politicians may say that students protesting Israeli genocide in Gaza and U.S. complicity with it are criminals. But far from breaking the law, their actions are actually enforcing it. Here’s why.

The “Individual’s Obligation” to Halt War Crimes

The Nuremberg Tribunal after World War II stated, “Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity” is “a crime under international law.”

In the Zykon B case, the Nuremberg Tribunal found that “the provisions of the laws and customs of war are addressed not only to combatants and to members of state and other public authorities, but to anybody who is in a position to assist their violations.” In the Flick case the Tribunal ruled that international law “binds every citizen just as does ordinary municipal law.”

This legal principle of citizen responsibility to resist war crimes is an essential part of the rule of law. When a government violates international law with impunity, it is up to its people to impose legal restraints on it. As Judge Bernard Victor A. Roling of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal explained, the world “has to rely on individuals to oppose the criminal commands of the government.”

In a world order in which the Great Powers and many lesser ones are turning to war and genocide, popular enforcement of international law is one of the few means for protecting ourselves and the world against a cataclysmic plunge into unlimited military destruction.

By virtue of the U.S. Constitution, international law and international treaties are explicitly a part of U.S. law. U.S. Supreme Court Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson stated, “The very essence of the Nuremberg Charter is that individuals have international duties which transcend national obligations of obedience imposed by the individual state.” So, obligations under international law are also obligations under U.S. law.

Students who are protesting genocide and other war crimes in Gaza and U.S. complicity in them are fulfilling their duty to oppose criminal acts of their government.

If It Quacks Like a War Crime...

The Israeli assault on Gaza is the most visible genocide in history. The killing of more than 35,000 people, most civilians and many children, should be evidence enough. But there is also the deliberate starvation of the entire population; the bombing of electric and water infrastructure; and the destruction of homes, farms, and infrastructure.

The International Court of Justice has found that Israel’s actions in Gaza may constitute genocide in violation of international law. (Of course, they can’t issue a definitive ruling until they hold hearings and take defense statements—a process likely to take years.) The U.S. district court for the Northern District of California, finding a credible case that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and that the U.S. is supporting its actions, declared, “It is every individual’s obligation to confront the current siege in Gaza.”

When word leaked out that the International Criminal Court might be issuing war crime arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders, the U.S. and Israel responded by threatening the court with unspecified “consequences” if arrest warrants were issued. That in itself may be another crime. As the International Criminal Court said in a statement, its independence and impartiality are undermined “when individuals threaten to retaliate against the court or against court personnel should the office, in fulfillment of its mandate, make decisions about investigations or cases falling within its jurisdiction.” It added that the Rome Statute, which outlines the ICC’s structure and areas of jurisdiction, prohibits threats against the court and its officials.

Protesting War Crimes Is No Crime

Since the Vietnam war, arrested anti-war protesters have used international law as a basis for a “necessity defense” asserting that their actions were not crimes, but rather acts of citizen responsibility for preventing their government from committing war crimes. While courts have often disregarded such claims, at times juries have acted on them. For example, in 2003 Catholic Workers in upstate New York entered a military recruiting office and poured their own blood on the walls, the windows, the posters, cardboard mannequins of soldiers, the door, and the American flag to protest the Iraq War. They were charged with felony criminal damage to property. They said in court that their actions were legal under international law because they were trying to stop an illegal war. The jury deadlocked 9-3 in favor of acquitting them.

Students arrested for protesting U.S. and Israeli war crimes in Gaza may well use such an international law defense in court. Whether or not courts will accept such a defense, they will make a powerful point in the court of public opinion: If our government is committing or is complicit in war crimes, we all have “international duties” to oppose the criminal acts of our government.

Will student demonstrations against U.S. complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza have any effect? They are already helping force the Biden administration to take pause. According to news reports, U.S Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently told Netanyahu that “a major military operation” in Rafah would lead to the U.S. publicly opposing it and would negatively impact U.S.-Israel relations. When Netanyahu said the Rafah attack would go forward anyway, the Biden administration reportedly put a hold on a shipment of U.S.-made ammunition to Israel. U.S. policy hangs in the balance, but there can be little doubt that the student demonstrators have shifted the balance away from war crimes and toward peace. That’s enforcing international law through citizen action.

In a world order in which the Great Powers and many lesser ones are turning to war and genocide, popular enforcement of international law is one of the few means for protecting ourselves and the world against a cataclysmic plunge into unlimited military destruction. In that context, student protest against war and genocide in Gaza is not just an expression of a political opinion, but an attempt to pull the world order back from its current careening to criminal wars, genocide, and catastrophe.

The declaration of the U.S. district court for the Northern District of California that, “It is every individual’s obligation to confront the current siege in Gaza” has a message for the rest of us: Resistance to war and genocide is the obligation not just of the students, but of everyone.

The U.S. reaction to Iran’s retaliatory drone and missile launches against Israel was both predictable and unhelpful. More sanctions against Iran and more weapons to Israel, while at the same time calling for de-escalation, was at best contradictory. At worst, it could have the effect of exacerbating existing tensions.

Reading commentary from the Israeli and Arab press and remarks from U.S. and Western policymakers and “analysts” was even more distressing. Some Arabs celebrated Iran’s display of might as a show of strength and deterrence. Israelis meanwhile were touting the effectiveness of the defense arsenal they and their allies used to neutralize Iran’s well-telegraphed attack. There was a similarly congratulatory tone in responses from Western hawks, from the right and left, who first elevated and then denigrated the Iranian attack, while suggesting that the only effective response was for Israel to do more to “neutralize” the Iranian threat.

I appeared on a news program following a retired British general who pointedly said that Israel must now massively retaliate against Iran because that was the only way to defeat it. A limited response, he argued, would only embolden Iran to attack again.

Because the U.S. has persisted on its path of unquestioning support for Israel and refusal to challenge Israel or constructively engage Iran, we are where we are today.

Such notions are shortsighted foolishness and downright dangerous. It’s time to deal with the reality that, despite the desires of some, neither Israel nor Iran will be defeated. The costs that would be incurred in such a fool’s errand would be devastating to the entire region. Both possess considerable arsenals and allies—globally and regionally—that can wreak havoc not only in the countless lives lost but also in economic devastation in the Levant and in the Arab Gulf states as well.

The broader Middle East needs peace and stability, not more conflict. This will not come through more arms and more hostile posturing. If we’ve learned anything from history, it’s that the region’s antagonists will not be defeated. Conflict either emboldens them or results in a metastasizing of their conflicts’ root causes into new and more virulent forms.

During the past century, the U.S. and its Western allies played an extremely negative role. From the Sykes-Picot betrayal and dismemberment of the region, to the fatal partition of Palestine and United Nation’s failure to insist on Israel honoring the terms of its conditional admission in 1948, the West repeatedly turned a blind eye to Israel’s aggressive behaviors and its egregious violations of Palestinian rights. This only served to make a bad situation worse. As a result, the region has been forced to endure repeated wars involving Israel, the Palestinians, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt.

Our policies have been no better with regard to Iran. We supported the repressive regime of its Shah and worked to overthrow Iran’s effort to form a democracy in the 1950s—a wound Iranians never forgot. This hostility came into clear focus after the Shah’s pro-Western regime grew more repressive and was overthrown in a popular revolt in 1979. That promising revolution quickly devolved into the aggressive Islamic Republic of Iran with its decidedly anti-Western bent.

During the decade-long war of the 1980s between revolutionary Iran and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the U.S. supplied munitions (including chemical and biological components) to Iraq, while covertly (and illegally) funneling weapons to Iran. The results were devastating to both nations. Then came a decade of crippling U.S.-imposed sanctions on both countries and finally the disastrous U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, which led to Iran gaining a foothold in Iraq among its long-oppressed Shi’a majority. Iran was now emboldened to pursue its regional ambitions with its allies in Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, all of whom had their own grievances within their countries and with the West.

After decades of misguided U.S. and Western policies, the region now faces several separate but connected conflicts. Separate because they are rooted in circumstances particular to each country, and connected because in each case the pot is stirred by the same set of external actors: Iran and its allies, or the U.S./Israel axis and its allies.

Because the U.S. has persisted on its path of unquestioning support for Israel and refusal to challenge Israel or constructively engage Iran, we are where we are today: genocide in Gaza, Israel and Hezbollah on the brink of war, Syria still reeling from civil war, and Iran now involved in multiple conflicts including most recently in Libya and Sudan.

In response to both the lack of coherence in U.S. policies, its weakened stature in global affairs, the rise of China and a China/Russia axis, and the persistent regional threats Arab countries continue to face, several Arab governments have been forced to act on their own to protect their interests by seeking peace and stability in their region. They are developing their own ties with Iran, working with China and Russia, while continuing ties with the U.S. and making overtures to Israel. And now a devastating war in Gaza and the dangers of conflict between Israel and Iran.

Instead of finding a constructive way forward, the U.S. has fallen back on its past failed policies.

More than a decade ago, when the Obama administration was using sanctions and its diplomatic capital to negotiate a nuclear arms deal with Iran, I argued for a different course. Instead of expending these assets to stop Iran from securing a bomb they did not have, why not address Iran’s regional meddling by working with the same P5+1 members of the U.N. to convene a regional security framework modeled after the precursor to the OSCE that stabilized Europe, East and West, during the Cold War?

The idea wasn’t original, having first been broached by the 2006 Iraq Study Group. It called for the formation of an International Support Group, bringing together Iraq’s neighbors with the five permanent Security Council members to address the regional fallout of the mess created by the Iraq War.

The idea wasn’t listened to then, but should now be considered. Critical issues affecting regional stability and world peace must be addressed: Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands, the sine qua non for any future progress, and Israel’s continuing aggressive role in the region; Iran’s meddling in the affairs of several Arab countries; the need for political and economic reforms everywhere; a Nuclear Free Zone in the Middle East; security guarantees and a non-aggression pact; and promoting the benefits that can accrue from regional investment and trade.

Like the Madrid Peace Conference, a Middle East OSCE would bring together Arab countries, Iran, Turkey, and Israel, under the sponsorship of the five permanent members of the Security Council. It won’t be easy. Some countries will need to be pressured to participate. Concessions will need to be made and incentives offered. Unlike Madrid, pressure shouldn’t end when the parties convene. It must continue until agreements are reached.

I’m told by U.S. policymakers that such an idea won’t fly. They point to this or that country that won’t agree to participate. The same was said about Madrid. Such a response is lazy and lacking in imagination. It’s also foolish, and dangerous, because the alternative is to continue on the path to perpetual war.

Instead of fueling conflict and increasing insecurity, a new path must be found. Nations in the Middle East need peace and stability and to be in the position of benefiting from regional cooperation. But to get there, the U.S. needs to change direction and work within the framework of the United Nations to create a regional security framework for peace and stability.