Honestly, its hard even to take in. I'm thinking about a strip of land only about 25 miles long, parts of which are less than four miles wide, that once upon a time (not so very long ago) was one of the most densely populated places on the planet. Starting in October 2023, however, it was pummeled almost constantly. More or less every kind of weaponry except nuclear ones has been used there (much of it provided by the United States of America), and Gaza yes, of course, that's the strip of land I'm thinking about is now in literal ruins. You simply cant look at photos of the place anymore and see anything but devastated buildings and a landscape of almost pure rubble.
And its no small thing, despite what happened to Israel in October 2023, for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and crew to have devastated Gaza in that fashion, killing an estimated nearly 70,000 Palestinians and wounding or injuring possibly 170,000 more, adding up to approximately 10% of that strips prewar population. Those who survived have, of course, been displaced many times over. And count on one thing: the devastation of that small strip of land undoubtedly hasn't ended yet.
Of course, until relatively recently, Donald Trump backed his pal Netanyahu to the nth degree from sending vast amounts of military equipment to arm his forces to bombing Iran (and, of course, fantasizing about depopulating Gaza and turning it into the Riviera of the Middle East). Now, however, even Donald Trump has grown somewhat disgusted by the nightmare in Gaza. Hes begun to turn on his old pal and started insisting that he will decide whats right for Israel. What happens next is anyone's guess in the strange world of Trump and Netanyahu, but in the meantime, let TomDispatch regular Mattea Kramer fill you in on how these endlessly unnerving developments are playing out in this country. Tom
An Unexpected Con to End Free Speech
How Trump Uses Jews
Rooting out terrorism and antisemitism was the supposed reason that plainclothed ICE agents arrested doctoral student Rmeysa ztrk on a street in Somerville, Massachusetts, after she coauthored an op-ed calling on Tufts University to divest from companies with ties to Israel due to the killing and starvation of Palestinian civilians. There is an international movement to boycott, sanction, and divest from Israel, but in the United States, President Donald Trump is imperiling the freedom even to publicly discuss such ideas, which should, in effect, be considered a test case for his larger attack on free speech. So far, the test is going well for Trump.
In what seems a long time ago, in 2024, the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, released a blueprint for what it called a national strategy to combat antisemitism by addressing what it described as Americas virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American pro-Palestinian movement. In essence, and in whats amounted to an extraordinarily effective work of political theater that has been sold to my own state, Massachusetts, among other places, that foundation dubbed its political opponents supporters of terrorism. It also labeled organizations working in opposition to its agenda a terrorist support network, and claimed for itself the noble mantle of combating antisemitism even as it deftly redefined antisemitism from hatred of Jewish people to criticism of the U.S.-Israel alliance. President Trump has put the Heritage Foundation strategy into action and gone even further.
It may be his most original idea. As political scientist Barnett Rubin put it in September, President Trump always says hes very creative and accomplishes things no one has ever done before. And now he is building a fascist regime which is legitimized by the fight against antisemitism. Nobody ever thought of doing that before.
How the Defense Department (Oops, Sorry, the War Department) Promotes World Peace
I attended Hebrew school as a child, and today, when I try to recall what I learned there about Israel and Palestine, I find in my memory an image of a desert, replete with flowers, and the pleasant recollection that the State of Israel was founded in that empty landscape. In 1998, I visited Israel with my family. My brother had his bar mitzvah at the mountain-top fortress of Masada overlooking the Dead Sea. Though I enjoyed an enviable private school education, I didn't hear the word Nakba until adulthood. That Arabic word for catastrophe refers to the displacement of 700,000 Palestinian people for Israels founding in 1948. A majority of the population of the modern-day Gaza Strip descended from refugees of the Nakba.
According to Amnesty International and the Israeli human rights organization BTselem, Israel has imposed a system of oppression on Palestinians across Israel and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories through an enforced system of segregation that constitutes apartheid. For decades, Israel has controlled who could enter or exit the Gaza Strip and, from 2007 on, that 25-mile strip of land functioned as what Human Rights Watch called an open-air prison. As of 2022, the unemployment rate in Gaza had hit 45%, and 65% of the people there were living in poverty. On October 7th of the following year, an armed group broke out of Gaza and waged attacks on Israel that killed 1,195 people, 815 of whom were civilians.
In the two years since then, Israel has responded by killing more than 67,000 Palestinians in Gaza in a military campaign of such horror that, as the head of Doctors Without Borders reported to the U.N. Security Council, children as young as five said that they preferred to die rather than continue living in fear while witnessing the slaughter of their family members. A girl named Sham was born in Gaza in November 2023 and survived smoke poisoning as an infant. As a toddler, she was diagnosed with acute malnutrition, before being killed on May 6th of this year when Israel dropped explosives on the shelter where she was living with her family. The United Nations and prominent experts, including Israeli-American professor of Holocaust and genocide studies Omer Bartov, have concluded that Israels war on Gaza is a genocide. The current ceasefire has slowed, not stopped, the death toll.
By 2024, the International Court of Justice, the worlds highest court, had ruled that Israels occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem was illegal; that Israel needed to halt all settlement construction, evacuate its settlers, pay restitution to Palestinians, and allow them the right of return. It also indicated that all states and international organizations have a legal obligation not to assist Israels further occupation of the area.
However, since October 2023, according to the Israeli Defense Ministry and the Council on Foreign Relations, using 800 transport planes and 140 ships, my own country has delivered 90,000 tons of arms and equipment to Israel, including tanks, artillery shells, bombs, and rockets. The U.S. government gives Israel billions of dollars annually in military aid, which that country spends mostly on purchases made through the U.S. Foreign Military Sales program. According to a Defense Department website, that program sells articles and services [that] will strengthen the security of the United States and promote world peace.
Despite how, as Israeli historian Lee Mordechai described it, Israel has limited the flow of information out of Gaza and campaigned to discredit critical voices, a July Gallup poll found that 60% of Americans disapprove of Israels military actions there. Even more strikingly, a September Washington Post poll found that nearly half (48%) of Jewish Americans disapprove (and only 46% approve).
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