Ethiopia’s Trade Union Movement Is Growing Stronger Over the last decade, Ethiopia’s trade unions have experienced impressive growth, more than doubling their membership. Ethiopia and other African states with growing unions cut against the idea that organized labor is facing global decline.

Ethiopia’s Trade Union Movement Is Growing Stronger

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Choose Class War, Not Boomer Resentment The generational warfare promoted by centrists and the Right, who have long been desperate to cut and privatize Social Security, is a fool’s solution to what ails the system. Taxing the rich is the answer.

Choose Class War, Not Boomer Resentment

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Stephen Lewis’s Complicated Legacy for the Canadian Left Stephen Lewis, leader of the Ontario NDP, son of founding NDP member David, and father of current leader Avi, has died. He leaves a complex legacy: he helped bring the NDP into the mainstream but at the cost of expelling a socialist faction from the party.

Stephen Lewis’s Complicated Legacy for the Canadian Left

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This story originally appeared in _Mondoweiss_ on April 02, 2026. It is shared here with permission. The picture of Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir jubilantly trying to open a champagne bottle on the Knesset floor over the passing of a death penalty law for Palestinians will be anchored in history as one of those photographs that needs no caption. It’s the image of a country that has never truly left the colonial moment into which it was born. It didn’t simply inherit British practices, but kept them alive for over 70 years. It now reaches back to retrieve one of the darkest of these practices. Israel’s new death penalty law, which exclusively targets Palestinians, did not come out of nowhere. It was passed down from a scaffold the British had already built on the same land, testing it on the same people under the same sky. In his study of Britain’s “pacification” of Palestine, Matthew Hughes, a military historian at Brunel University, shows how the military courts established by the British Mandate in November 1937 were built for speed above all else — a terror performed so quickly that no one had time to appeal or look away. Shaykh Farhan al-Sa’di, an elderly Qassamite revolutionary leader and one of the principal field commanders of the 1936 uprising, was captured on a Monday, tried on a Wednesday, and hanged on a Saturday. It’s the same law Israel reintroduced today. What those courts also reveal is that British execution policy was, from the beginning, applied differently depending on who stood before the judge. Palestinians were hanged for carrying four bullets; Jews received prison sentences for firing weapons. The courts were equal on paper and unequal in practice, and everyone living under them knew it. Bahjat Abu Gharbiyya, a Palestinian nationalist and resistance fighter who lived through the British Mandate and left some of the most detailed firsthand accounts of that period, documented this disparity plainly: in his account, the capital sentence fell on Arabs, while Jews charged with the same or graver offenses walked away with prison sentences. The rope, in practice, was for Arabs only. The new Israeli law carries this same racism forward, entering a prison system where Palestinians make up the vast majority of political prisoners, and where the definition of who is dangerous has been stretched until it fits almost anyone who refuses to disappear quietly. The rope, as it always has been in Palestine, is for Arabs only. There is something else that legalizing execution does, something beneath the law’s stated purpose that may be its more consequential effect. Hughes shows that in Mandate Palestine, official policy and unofficial violence never operated separately. As British courts hanged men with increasing speed and confidence, the threshold for what soldiers felt permitted to do in the field quietly fell. At Miska, a Palestinian village in the coastal area, British police tortured four captured Palestinian rebels in May 1938, killing them once interrogation was complete — not in a courtroom, but in the open. Law and lawlessness were not opposites in that system: they fed each other. The widened application of capital punishment in the courts gave license to soldiers in the field. What we are watching in Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank today follows the same pattern, pushing the boundaries of permissible conduct. For years, Israeli forces already operated under rules that permitted the shooting and killing of unarmed persons, so long as they could nominally be deemed a threat. But Israel’s current war has expanded this category to the point that nearly everyone can now be made into a target. ## A codification of existing practice In this sense, Israel is not doing something new with this law. It is catching up with itself. The execution law is largely a shield designed to protect soldiers from even the limited threat of accountability, and to formalize what the field has already made routine. According to Israeli rights group Yesh Din, of the 1,260 complaints filed against soldiers for harming Palestinians between 2017 and 2021, soldiers were prosecuted in less than 1% of cases — 0.87%, to be precise. The law does not create impunity, but guarantees it. Once enshrined, it pushes the violence further, each legal expansion making extrajudicial killing easier to justify, and each unjustified killing creating pressure for new legal cover. They drive each other. For decades, Israel maintained a public performance of conscience. The language of democracy, the announcements of investigations, the carefully worded regret after each killing — none of this changed what was happening, but it served a purpose: it kept Western governments comfortable enough to provide diplomatic and military cover, and gave Israeli liberal society a way to say: this is not who we are, this is an exception, this will be looked into. The champagne bottle ends that performance — not because Ben Gvir has changed what Israel does, but because he has decided it no longer needs to be explained or excused. > Law follows violence in colonial systems. What changes when the law arrives is not what soldiers do, but what they no longer need to fear — and once that fear is gone, the violence goes further until it outpaces the law again, and the law must catch up once more. **GET FEARLESS, AD-FREE, UNCOMPROMISING REAL NEWS IN YOUR INBOX** Sign up What Israel does and what Israel is willing to admit to doing are now the same thing. And when a political project stops apologizing for itself, it rarely goes back. The frankness becomes normal, the normal becomes policy, and the policy becomes law — until what was once unsayable is written into statute, and what was written into statute becomes the last thing a family sees through a car window on the way home, or what two wanted Palestinian men see before being executed while surrendering to Israeli soldiers. That is what happened in Tammoun and Jenin in recent months. In Jenin, on November 27, 2025, Israeli border police surrounded a building harboring two fugitives and known fighters in the Jenin area, al-Muntaser Billah Abdallah, 26, and Yousef Asaasah, 37. They came out with their hands raised and lifted their shirts to show that they were completely unarmed. They were ordered back into the building and then shot dead at point-blank range. The whole sequence was caught on camera. Ben-Gvir publicly backed the troops: they acted exactly as expected. That was not political cover. It was a declaration of policy, made by the same man who held the champagne bottle several months later to celebrate the legalization of execution. More recently, in Tammoun, Ali and Waad Bani Odeh were on the way home from a family shopping trip in Nablus alongside their four children. It was the night before Eid, and they were coming home after midnight when they were met by an undercover Israeli unit in a car with Palestinian license plates. The soldiers opened fire without warning. Ali, 37, Waad, 35, and their two youngest sons — Othman, 7, who was blind and had special needs, and Muhammad, 5 — were shot in the head and killed. The two older children, Khaled, 11, and Mustafa, 8, survived with shrapnel wounds. Between Jenin and Tammoun lies what this law was written to protect and expand — to protect the soldiers executing the two men with their hands raised, or the family on its way home from buying Eid clothes. The British did the same in 1937, building courts fast enough to hang Shaykh al-Sa’di, not because the law required it, but because the field had already laid the groundwork for it. Law follows violence in colonial systems. What changes when the law arrives is not what soldiers do, but what they no longer need to fear — and once that fear is gone, the violence goes further until it outpaces the law again, and the law must catch up once more. ## Refusing Israel’s timetable for death Execution is scheduled death — the state’s claim that it alone decides when a life ends, that the moment of dying belongs to power and not to the one who dies. The British knew this when they hanged al-Sa’di on a Saturday, moving fast enough that no appeal, no intercession, and no calendar could intervene. Israel knows it now, writing the hour of execution into law so the decision becomes permanent. And the logic of this law is the same logic driving Israel’s war, both depending on controlling the sequence and deciding not only who is targeted, but when, in what order, and on whose terms. Israel’s war has moved through its fronts one at a time: Gaza decimated, Lebanon engaged and paused, Iran struck twice, and later the West Bank. Each front is kept separate from the others, each managed in its own contained interval so that no single front becomes the moment that breaks the timetable. The war machine, like the military court, works best when it holds to the schedule. But Ibrahim Tuqan, Palestine’s foremost poet of the Mandate era and the man who turned the gallows into the defining image of Palestinian resistance, wrote the oldest answer to this belief in his poem, “The Red Tuesday.” It has aged well. The poem recounted the death of three Palestinian revolutionaries who had participated in a precursor event to the 1936 uprising, hanged by the British on Tuesday, June 17, 1930. Fouad Hijazi, Muhammad Jamjoum, and Atta al-Zir were set to be executed in three consecutive hours in Acre prison, each execution timed so that each death arrived alone, and that each grief was absorbed before the next. And this is exactly what Israel’s war planners are doing today: sequencing death, containing resistance, and managing the intervals. > What resistance across this region is attempting to do, unevenly and at enormous cost, is to refuse the sequencing, to sync its fronts, and to make the hours run together faster than the war machine can pull them apart Tuqan’s poem is structured around this very fact. Rather than narrating the executions from the outside, he gives each of the three hours its own voice — the first hour speaks, then the second, then the third, each one personifying the martyr whose death it contains. The hour is not a passive unit of time in the poem; it is a claimant. By doing this, Tuqan takes the executioner’s instrument — the scheduled interval, the managed sequence — and hands it back to the men who died inside it. Each hour becomes the martyr’s own declaration rather than the state’s mechanism of elimination. But what the empire had not written into its schedule was what the condemned men did next. They began to fight each other for the right to die before their comrades, collapsing three managed hours into a single racing will to be the first martyr. Tuqan captures this by giving the second hour its own voice, letting it speak its impatience directly: _زاحمتُ مَنْ قَبْلي لأَسبِقَها إلى شَرَفِ الخلودِ_ _I jostled the one standing in front of me to reach the honor of immortality first_ What resistance across this region is attempting to do, unevenly and at enormous cost, is exactly this: to refuse the sequencing, to sync its fronts, and to make the hours run together faster than the war machine can pull them apart. It is a fight for time as much as for land — a struggle to take the clock from the hand that has held it for a century and insists, with champagne and statute and strikes from the air, that the hour of every reckoning belongs to it alone. It is, in Tuqan’s image, the attempt to jostle — to refuse the order the scaffold imposes, to race toward the hour rather than wait for it to arrive, in the hope that when enough hands reach for it at once, the schedule itself breaks down. ### _Related_ Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license. Close window ## Republish this article This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. We encourage republication of our original content. Please copy the HTML code in the textbox below, preserving the attribution and link to the article's original location, and only make minor cosmetic edits to the content on your site. # ‘The rope is for Arabs only’: Israel’s new death penalty law for Palestinians recycles a colonial playbook by Abdaljawad Omar, The Real News Network April 3, 2026 <h1>‘The rope is for Arabs only’: Israel’s new death penalty law for Palestinians recycles a colonial playbook</h1> <p class="byline">by Abdaljawad Omar, The Real News Network <br />April 3, 2026</p> <div class="wp-block-media-text is-stacked-on-mobile" style="grid-template-columns:30% auto"> <figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img src="https://therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Untitled-design-21.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-272634 size-full" /></figure> <div class="wp-block-media-text__content"> <p>This story originally appeared in <em><a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2026/04/the-rope-is-for-arabs-only-israels-new-death-penalty-law-for-palestinians-recycles-a-colonial-playbook/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mondoweiss</a></em> on April 02, 2026. It is shared here with permission.</p> </p></div> </div> <p class="has-drop-cap">The picture of Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir jubilantly trying to open a champagne bottle on the Knesset floor over the <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2026/03/war-crime-global-condemnation-as-israeli-ministers-celebrate-death-penalty-law-targeting-palestinian-prisoners/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">passing of a death penalty law</a> for Palestinians will be anchored in history as one of those photographs that needs no caption.</p> <p>It’s the image of a country that has never truly left the colonial moment into which it was born. It didn’t simply inherit British practices, but kept them alive for over 70 years. It now reaches back to retrieve one of the darkest of these practices.</p> <p>Israel’s new death penalty law, which exclusively targets Palestinians, did not come out of nowhere. It was passed down from a scaffold the British had already built on the same land, testing it on the same people under the same sky. In his <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/britains-pacification-of-palestine/67969BBBDFB9CF57200581CBB61C4427" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">study</a> of Britain’s “pacification” of Palestine, Matthew Hughes, a military historian at Brunel University, shows how the military courts established by the British Mandate in November 1937 were built for speed above all else — a terror performed so quickly that no one had time to appeal or look away. Shaykh Farhan al-Sa’di, an elderly <a href="https://www.palquest.org/en/biography/9837/izzeddin-al-qassam" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Qassamite</a> revolutionary leader and one of the principal field commanders of the <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2026/02/when-palestinian-peasants-brought-an-empire-to-its-knees/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">1936 uprising</a>, was captured on a Monday, tried on a Wednesday, and hanged on a Saturday. It’s the same law Israel reintroduced today.</p> <p>What those courts also reveal is that British execution policy was, from the beginning, applied differently depending on who stood before the judge. Palestinians were hanged for carrying four bullets; Jews received prison sentences for firing weapons. The courts were equal on paper and unequal in practice, and everyone living under them knew it.</p> <p>Bahjat Abu Gharbiyya, a Palestinian nationalist and resistance fighter who lived through the British Mandate and left some of the most detailed <a href="https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1648088" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">firsthand accounts</a> of that period, documented this disparity plainly: in his account, the capital sentence fell on Arabs, while Jews charged with the same or graver offenses walked away with prison sentences. The rope, in practice, was for Arabs only.</p> <p>The new Israeli law carries this same racism forward, entering a prison system where Palestinians make up the vast majority of political prisoners, and where the definition of who is dangerous has been stretched until it fits almost anyone who refuses to disappear quietly. The rope, as it always has been in Palestine, is for Arabs only.</p> <p>There is something else that legalizing execution does, something beneath the law’s stated purpose that may be its more consequential effect. Hughes shows that in Mandate Palestine, official policy and unofficial violence never operated separately. As British courts hanged men with increasing speed and confidence, the threshold for what soldiers felt permitted to do in the field quietly fell. At Miska, a Palestinian village in the coastal area, British police tortured four captured Palestinian rebels in May 1938, killing them once interrogation was complete — not in a courtroom, but in the open.</p> <p>Law and lawlessness were not opposites in that system: they fed each other. The widened application of capital punishment in the courts gave license to soldiers in the field. What we are watching in Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank today follows the same pattern, pushing the boundaries of permissible conduct.</p> <p>For years, Israeli forces already operated under rules that permitted the shooting and killing of unarmed persons, so long as they could nominally be deemed a threat. But Israel’s current war has expanded this category to the point that nearly everyone can now be made into a target.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-a-codification-of-existing-practice">A codification of existing practice</h2> <p>In this sense, Israel is not doing something new with this law. It is catching up with itself. The execution law is largely a shield designed to protect soldiers from even the limited threat of accountability, and to formalize what the field has already made routine. According to Israeli rights group <a href="https://www.yesh-din.org/en/law-enforcement-against-israeli-soldiers-suspected-of-harming-palestinians-and-their-property-summary-of-figures-for-2017-2021/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Yesh Din</a>, of the 1,260 complaints filed against soldiers for harming Palestinians between 2017 and 2021, soldiers were prosecuted in less than 1% of cases — 0.87%, to be precise. The law does not create impunity, but guarantees it. Once enshrined, it pushes the violence further, each legal expansion making extrajudicial killing easier to justify, and each unjustified killing creating pressure for new legal cover. They drive each other.</p> <p>For decades, Israel maintained a public performance of conscience. The language of democracy, the announcements of investigations, the carefully worded regret after each killing — none of this changed what was happening, but it served a purpose: it kept Western governments comfortable enough to provide diplomatic and military cover, and gave Israeli liberal society a way to say: this is not who we are, this is an exception, this will be looked into. The champagne bottle ends that performance — not because Ben Gvir has changed what Israel does, but because he has decided it no longer needs to be explained or excused.</p> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote"> <blockquote> <p>Law follows violence in colonial systems. What changes when the law arrives is not what soldiers do, but what they no longer need to fear — and once that fear is gone, the violence goes further until it outpaces the law again, and the law must catch up once more.</p> </blockquote> </figure> <p>What Israel does and what Israel is willing to admit to doing are now the same thing. And when a political project stops apologizing for itself, it rarely goes back. The frankness becomes normal, the normal becomes policy, and the policy becomes law — until what was once unsayable is written into statute, and what was written into statute becomes the last thing a family sees through a car window on the way home, or what two wanted Palestinian men see before being executed while surrendering to Israeli soldiers. That is what happened in Tammoun and Jenin in recent months.</p> <p>In <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2025/11/outrage-after-footage-of-israeli-soldiers-executing-two-palestinians-in-jenin-goes-viral/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Jenin, on November 27, 2025</a>, Israeli border police surrounded a building harboring two fugitives and known fighters in the Jenin area, al-Muntaser Billah Abdallah, 26, and Yousef Asaasah, 37. They came out with their hands raised and lifted their shirts to show that they were completely unarmed. They were ordered back into the building and then shot dead at point-blank range. The whole sequence was caught on camera. Ben-Gvir publicly backed the troops: they acted exactly as expected.</p> <p>That was not political cover. It was a declaration of policy, made by the same man who held the champagne bottle several months later to celebrate the legalization of execution.</p> <p>More recently, in <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2026/03/israeli-army-killing-of-palestinian-family-sends-shockwaves-throughout-the-west-bank/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Tammoun</a>, Ali and Waad Bani Odeh were on the way home from a family shopping trip in Nablus alongside their four children. It was the night before Eid, and they were coming home after midnight when they were met by an undercover Israeli unit in a car with Palestinian license plates. The soldiers opened fire without warning. Ali, 37, Waad, 35, and their two youngest sons — Othman, 7, who was blind and had special needs, and Muhammad, 5 — were shot in the head and killed. The two older children, Khaled, 11, and Mustafa, 8, survived with shrapnel wounds.</p> <p>Between Jenin and Tammoun lies what this law was written to protect and expand — to protect the soldiers executing the two men with their hands raised, or the family on its way home from buying Eid clothes.</p> <p>The British did the same in 1937, building courts fast enough to hang Shaykh al-Sa’di, not because the law required it, but because the field had already laid the groundwork for it. Law follows violence in colonial systems. What changes when the law arrives is not what soldiers do, but what they no longer need to fear — and once that fear is gone, the violence goes further until it outpaces the law again, and the law must catch up once more.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Refusing Israel’s timetable for death</h2> <p>Execution is scheduled death — the state’s claim that it alone decides when a life ends, that the moment of dying belongs to power and not to the one who dies. The British knew this when they hanged al-Sa’di on a Saturday, moving fast enough that no appeal, no intercession, and no calendar could intervene. Israel knows it now, writing the hour of execution into law so the decision becomes permanent.</p> <p>And the logic of this law is the same logic driving Israel’s war, both depending on controlling the sequence and deciding not only who is targeted, but when, in what order, and on whose terms. Israel’s war has moved through its fronts one at a time: Gaza decimated, Lebanon engaged and paused, Iran struck twice, and later the West Bank. Each front is kept separate from the others, each managed in its own contained interval so that no single front becomes the moment that breaks the timetable. The war machine, like the military court, works best when it holds to the schedule.</p> <p>But <a href="https://palquest.palestine-studies.org/en/biography/9721/ibrahim-tuqan" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Ibrahim Tuqan</a>, Palestine’s foremost poet of the Mandate era and the man who turned the gallows into the defining image of Palestinian resistance, wrote the oldest answer to this belief in his poem, “The Red Tuesday.” It has aged well.</p> <p>The poem recounted the death of three Palestinian revolutionaries who had participated in a precursor event to the 1936 uprising, hanged by the British on Tuesday, June 17, 1930. Fouad Hijazi, Muhammad Jamjoum, and Atta al-Zir were set to be executed in three consecutive hours in Acre prison, each execution timed so that each death arrived alone, and that each grief was absorbed before the next. And this is exactly what Israel’s war planners are doing today: sequencing death, containing resistance, and managing the intervals.</p> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote"> <blockquote> <p>What resistance across this region is attempting to do, unevenly and at enormous cost, is to refuse the sequencing, to sync its fronts, and to make the hours run together faster than the war machine can pull them apart</p> </blockquote> </figure> <p>Tuqan’s poem is structured around this very fact. Rather than narrating the executions from the outside, he gives each of the three hours its own voice — the first hour speaks, then the second, then the third, each one personifying the martyr whose death it contains. The hour is not a passive unit of time in the poem; it is a claimant. By doing this, Tuqan takes the executioner’s instrument — the scheduled interval, the managed sequence — and hands it back to the men who died inside it. Each hour becomes the martyr’s own declaration rather than the state’s mechanism of elimination. </p> <p>But what the empire had not written into its schedule was what the condemned men did next. They began to fight each other for the right to die before their comrades, collapsing three managed hours into a single racing will to be the first martyr. Tuqan captures this by giving the second hour its own voice, letting it speak its impatience directly:</p> </p> <p><em>زاحمتُ مَنْ قَبْلي لأَسبِقَها إلى شَرَفِ الخلودِ</em></p> <p><em>I jostled the one standing in front of me to reach the honor of immortality first</em> </p> </p> <p>What resistance across this region is attempting to do, unevenly and at enormous cost, is exactly this: to refuse the sequencing, to sync its fronts, and to make the hours run together faster than the war machine can pull them apart. It is a fight for time as much as for land — a struggle to take the clock from the hand that has held it for a century and insists, with champagne and statute and strikes from the air, that the hour of every reckoning belongs to it alone.</p> <p>It is, in Tuqan’s image, the attempt to jostle — to refuse the order the scaffold imposes, to race toward the hour rather than wait for it to arrive, in the hope that when enough hands reach for it at once, the schedule itself breaks down.</p> <p>This <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com/israels-death-penalty-for-palestinians">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com">The Real News Network</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/cropped-TRNN-2021-logomark-square.png?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;"></p> <img id="republication-tracker-tool-source" src="https://therealnews.com/?republication-pixel=true&post=342459&amp;ga4=G-7LYS8R7V51" style="width:1px;height:1px;"><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: "https://therealnews.com/israels-death-penalty-for-palestinians", urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id="parsely-cfg" src="//cdn.parsely.com/keys/therealnews.com/p.js"></script> Copy to Clipboard 1

‘The rope is for Arabs only’: Israel’s new death penalty law for Palestinians recycles a colonial playbook

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End the Blockade on Cuba As a Cuban American traveling with a recent aid convoy, I witnessed the daily hardship sanctions produce. Washington must lift its devastating blockade.

End the Blockade on Cuba

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Wallace Shawn’s Road to Socialism The left-wing actor and playwright Wallace Shawn, currently in two plays in New York, describes a harsh midlife conversion to class politics — transforming from a disengaged liberal to someone who sees himself as “a participant in the world struggle.”

Wallace Shawn’s Road to Socialism

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Between Chinamaxxing and the Kill Line ### Chinese observers see US dysfunction and feel their own problems are manageable. Meanwhile, Americans idealize China’s efficiency and security. Beneath both views, each society faces the same issues: alienation, unemployment, and weak welfare systems. * * * A viral Chinese meme imagines Americans one mishap away from ruin, while American influencers fantasize about China as a frictionless techno-utopia. Each reveals less about reality than about a shared anxiety neither country can quite name. (Wang Zhao / AFP via Getty Images) On my trip to China last month, I was surprised to learn about China’s latest viral meme: the kill line (斩杀线). The term originates from video games and refers to a point at which a player’s health is so low that they’ll be defeated after a single hit. The Chinese internet has reconfigured this metaphor to create an exaggerated view of American economic precarity. According to the meme, Americans are always sitting at the cusp of a precarious “kill line.” Any minor shock such as a layoff or an accident can thrust even middle-class Americans into homelessness and destitute poverty. Chinese state media (which never passes up an opportunity to criticize the United States) has spread the meme far and wide, including by misattributing an old video about homelessness in London to the US. If the kill line was simply an exaggerated metaphor for American economic precarity and wealth inequality, there’d be little to object to. But its origins are deeply suspect. The Chinese influencer who coined the term and goes by the name “Squeaky King” claims to be an international student in Seattle who works part-time collecting corpses dumped in the sewer system for the county government. In his (entirely unsubstantiated) telling, these were the bodies of former middle-class corporate executives and professionals who were thrust into homelessness. Of course, there is no evidence or photos to back up his implausible claim that a Chinese influencer on a student visa found a part-time government job hauling corpses around Seattle. The Chinese depiction of America’s kill line is more unsubstantiated conspiracy than reality. As I learned about the kill line, I got to teach Chinese friends about “Chinamaxxing,” which befuddled them just as much as the kill line confused me. Chinamaxxing is the latest social media trend where influencers are embracing and idolizing Chinese culture. There are aspects to Chinamaxxing that are, although uncomfortably Orientalizing, mostly innocuous, such as drinking hot water, doing tai chi, and playing mah-jongg. But others that idealize life in China as zooming around cyberpunk cities in a self-driving electric SUV with a robot waiter erase the reality of daily life in the People’s Republic. Most people in China suffer from similar social and economic crises that afflict Americans today. The United States’ extreme income inequality is well-known, but China’s is comparable. After accounting for taxes and redistribution, China becomes even more unequal because it falls under the US’s (very low) standards for redistribution. While Chinese inequality has gradually shrunk over recent years, this is mostly due to compression between the top and middle of the income distribution. Those in the bottom 30 percent have been left in the lurch. Gen Z Chinamaxxers are the ones suffering the most from the crushing costs of college and see China as an escape from it. But while American higher education is exorbitantly expensive, the education affordability crisis in China is even more severe. Parents have to pay for high school, and tutoring is a de facto necessity to keep up with demanding curriculums. The bottom quintile of Chinese families spend a massive 57 percent of household earnings on their children’s education. While China lacks the widespread student debt that afflicts college-educated Americans, the same problem of massive education costs is felt during the precollege years. The kill line’s credibility has been reinforced by many videos of the very real problem of homelessness in American cities, but homelessness and extreme poverty are also major problems in China. Chinamaxxing influencers are simply blind to them because the government has successfully criminalized homelessness and driven the “low-end population” out of sight. If China’s poor aren’t at risk of falling below the kill line, it’s because they were never above it to begin with. More critical Chinese netizens have turned the kill line meme on its head and noted China’s own kill line that disrupts the Chinamaxxing fantasy: turning thirty-five. Age discrimination in hiring is legal in China, and many job postings in tech, civil service, and blue-collar work explicitly ban applicants thirty-five or older. In addition, dismissal rates rise dramatically after workers turn thirty-five. This is because employers believe that those over thirty-five can’t keep up with the seventy-two-hour workweeks that 9–9–6 office culture demands. In China, being thirty-five is its own kill line, where an unexpected layoff can permanently condemn someone to underemployment in the gig economy. Chinamaxxers’ longing for China resembles conservatives’ fantasies about life in medieval times. In the Right’s imagination, they’d be lords and ladies with castles rather than starving peasants working the land. Similarly, Chinamaxxers imagine themselves as China’s urban elite rather than the mass of impoverished gig workers who deliver their takeout. The truth is that people just like imagining themselves as economically prosperous. For Chinamaxxers, this desire for material security presents itself under the guise of life in a different country. Both the “kill line” and “Chinamaxxing” are digital projections born of the same dissatisfactions with the present. For the Chinese observer, the American kill line makes domestic struggles feel manageable by comparison. For Americans, Chinamaxxing is an escape to high-tech efficiency and economic security that feels unattainable at home. Behind these parodies lie two societies that face the same crises of alienation, unemployment, and a weak welfare state. Only by moving beyond these fictions can we build the international solidarity necessary to overcome our shared struggles. * * *

Between Chinamaxxing and the Kill Line

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_This story originally appeared inJacobin on April 01, 2026. It is shared here with permission._ One of the most appalling aspects of the Gaza genocide — besides its near-unprecedented slaughter of children and other innocents and its near-obliteration from existence of an entire society, unpparalleled in the modern era — is that officials in both the United States and Israel were overtly hoping to make it the new, horrifying standard for modern war. As we’re seeing right now in Iran and Lebanon, they’re not wasting any time applying that standard elsewhere. Last year, as Gaza lay in ruins with more than 10 percent of its population killed or injured, the _New Yorker_ ran a chilling story related to the Gaza genocide. The magazine reported that a variety of US military lawyers and legal experts viewed Israel’s spree of murder and destruction in Gaza as not just a completely acceptable way to prosecute a war but as “a dress rehearsal” for a future conflict with a US adversary like China: namely, one free of restraint, adherence to international law, and squeamishness about killing civilians. What Israel did with full US backing in Gaza, in other words, should be the new normal for war, at least when “our side” does it. The report sat uncomfortably alongside a pattern of US and Israeli officials incessantly invoking the Allies’ carpet bombing campaigns during World War II to justify the genocide they carried out. For almost the entire period after the war, those bombing campaigns were universally understood to be war crimes and a moral horror — including by Curtis LeMay himself, the psychotic general who led the firebombing of Japan and later itched for nuclear war with the Soviet Union — and one that the civilized world immediately outlawed after that war, when it created the system of international law that today clings on by its fingernails. It was so appalling that even Richard Nixon felt the need to pretend to the press in 1972 that the Dresden firebombing had gone too far and that he would never do such a thing to Vietnam, even though he would be totally justified if he did. (He did do it, for the record). Yet for the past three years, American and Israeli hawks have no longer even bothered to pretend. What is now playing out in Iran and Lebanon is this doctrine in action. ## Iran as Gaza While estimates vary, there is a rough consensus that the United States and Israel dropped somewhere around a thousand munitions a day on Iran in the early days of the war, a similar rate to the first few days of Israel’s unprecedented bombing of Gaza. In fact, if Israel’s own estimate of having dropped 15,000 bombs on Iran over the first twenty-six days is accurate, then the daily average of 577 bombs Israel dropped on Iran outstripped the first month of its bombing of Gaza in 2023, where it reportedly dropped just under five hundred bombs a day. According to Airwars, the independent watchdog group that tracks civilian bombings, if we use the slightly different measure of the _number of targets struck_ , the first hundred hours of the US-Israeli war on Iran was twice as ferocious as the same period in Gaza three years ago. Israel hit around half as many targets in Gaza as it and the US military struck in Iran in the first four days of this current war (four thousand). Bear in mind that Gaza, particularly its earliest days and weeks, had been the most intense bombing campaign of this century, outstripping Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the war against ISIS, and Russia’s war on Ukraine — and even many wars of the last century. > "The US-Israeli method of war in Iran shares a number of characteristics that, at the time, were considered unprecedented and unique to the Gaza war." As a result, the US-Israeli method of war in Iran shares a number of characteristics that, at the time, were considered unprecedented and unique to the Gaza war. The war began with a massacre of children, in what has now been confirmed to have been a targeted US bombing of a school that killed more than a hundred young girls. We now know it also began with the bombing of a sports hall and a different elementary school that killed twenty-one people, including two children, using a new short-range missile whose first-ever use in combat was this war. The US and Israeli militaries have since then dropped heavy bombs on entire residential buildings and destroyed whole residential blocks despite the obvious danger to civilians, burying ordinary Iranians under the rubble. According to the Iranian Red Crescent Society, basically the local Iranian equivalent of the Red Cross, Israel has damaged or destroyed a total of more than 90,000 residential units around Iran, more than three hundred health and medical facilities, more than seven hundred universities and schools, and a range of other civilian structures. That includes pharmacies, scores of police stations and other security sites, and the infrastructure used to pay officers, as well as a desalination plant that helps provide drinking water and centuries-old heritage sites. It has also targeted Iranian nuclear facilities with bombings at least three times since the start of the war, risking a terrible accident. Both Israel and Donald Trump have since threatened to destroy Iran’s other energy infrastructure. **GET FEARLESS, AD-FREE, UNCOMPROMISING REAL NEWS IN YOUR INBOX** Sign up Israel has bombed oil facilities in Tehran in what amounted to a chemical attack, causing clouds of toxic fumes to linger over the city and choke its air for days and black acid rain to pour onto those below. It has now also targeted infrastructure crucial to Iran’s food supply and a cancer drug facility, as well as its steel production, critical to both the country’s economy and its ability to rebuild after the war. There is strong evidence that at least part of the reason for the indiscriminate and lawless carnage is the reliance on artificial intelligence for targeting, while Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the US military, running low on precision munitions, would start using massive five-hundred-, one-thousand-, and two-thousand-pound bombs that do more indiscriminate damage. This should all sound familiar. Bombing with no regard for danger to civilians, the use of AI and massive bombs in densely populated places, the seemingly casual slaughter of children, the use of chemical warfare and hunger as weapons of war, attacks on civilian infrastructure crucial to the basic functioning of society, including energy production, health care facilities, and heritage sites — these were all the hallmarks of Israel’s war on Gaza. It’s not just the methods of the Gaza war that are being replicated — on the US side, it’s also the rhetoric. Hegseth has dispensed with the kind of lip service that US officials used to pay to ethical warfare and concern about civilians and is instead increasingly uttering dark, Israeli-style warnings about collective murder of all Iranians, threatening that “death and destruction from the sky all day long” would be visited on the country and warning that “the only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they’re gonna live.” Just a week ago, he literally prayed for God to “break the teeth of the ungodly” and bring “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy” in this war. ## Lebanon as Gaza It would be bad enough if this was limited to Iran. But we’re seeing the same thing in the war Israel is concurrently waging in Lebanon. There the Israeli military has illegally been giving Lebanese civilians forced evacuation orders in the face of likely death in indiscriminate bombing, leading to the displacement of more than one million people, or an unfathomable 20 percent of Lebanon’s population. It plans to indefinitely occupy a large swath of Lebanon’s territory as a “buffer zone,” for which it is leveling all the now-emptied homes and buildings left by their former residents — though not before Israeli soldiers gleefully loot the homes first. In the process, Israel has been seemingly deliberately targeting Lebanese health care workers and journalists, killing dozens the former and five of the latter so far, including nine paramedics it killed across Southern Lebanon this past weekend in a series of strikes on health care sites. There is also evidence it has used white phosphorus over residential areas. > "What we are witnessing right now in the Middle East is the Gazafication of warfare." All of these were previously beyond-the-pale crimes that became appallingly regular features of Israel’s razing of Gaza. And they come alongside other Gaza parallels we just went through with Iran that have been repeated in Lebanon, including attacks on health care facilities, residential buildings, and other civilian infrastructure like power plants, water and sanitation sites, and the agricultural land it relies on to produce food. Israeli officials have actually been explicit about this, pointing to their actions in Gaza to explain their war plans in Lebanon and even invoking Israel’s genocidal destruction of the territory as a threat. Maybe most chilling, one of the most vile statistics of the Israeli forces’ conduct in Gaza — that they had killed a classroom’s worth of children every day, according to the head of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) — is almost the _exact same statistic_ the deputy chief of UNICEF just used to describe what Israel is doing in Lebanon right now. ## We Are All Gaza Now What we are witnessing right now in the Middle East is the Gazafication of warfare. It is clear that Israel and Washington are determined to make some of the most repellant Israeli behavior in Gaza, the actions we thought of as unique, world-historical exhibits of human sadism, the new normal for all of their wars going forward. This is abominable on a basic human level. The point of international law is that everyone tacitly agrees on certain ground rules, as a way of ensuring certain behavior in warfare is off limits no matter who is involved. But once you start making exceptions for yourself, your adversaries can do it too, and the result is far from pretty — as we are seeing with Iran’s own retaliatory strikes on civilian infrastructure and the sudden cries from neocons and Israeli officials that by imitating them, Iran is carrying out war crimes. Adherence to international law is not a light switch you can turn on and off at your convenience. By doing their best to shred the concept, Israel and Trump officials are not just engaging in heinous crimes. They’re creating a more brutish world where their own people are at higher risk of the very wrong they’re busy committing now: a world in which future US adversaries, for instance, will have less compunction about attacking Americans’ food supply or the infrastructure that keeps them warm in winter, or destroying or disabling the health care facilities they rely on when they’re sick, all because of an unpopular war started by leaders that most Americans don’t even like. The Gazafication of war by Trump and Israel is a big gamble. And it is our lives, and the lives of our children, our families, and other loved ones, that they are putting up as collateral. ### _Related_ Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license. Close window ## Republish this article This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. We encourage republication of our original content. Please copy the HTML code in the textbox below, preserving the attribution and link to the article's original location, and only make minor cosmetic edits to the content on your site. # The US and Israel are making Gaza-style war the new normal by Branko Marcetic, The Real News Network April 3, 2026 <h1>The US and Israel are making Gaza-style war the new normal</h1> <p class="byline">by Branko Marcetic, The Real News Network <br />April 3, 2026</p> <div class="wp-block-media-text is-stacked-on-mobile" style="grid-template-columns:33% auto"> <figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img src="https://therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/jacobin-logo.jpg" alt="Jacobin logo" class="wp-image-271557 size-full" /></figure> <div class="wp-block-media-text__content"> <p style="font-size:18px"><em>This story originally appeared in <a href="https://jacobin.com/2026/04/israel-gaza-iran-war-crimes" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Jacobin</a> on April 01, 2026. It is shared here with permission.</em></p> </p></div> </div> <p class="has-drop-cap">One of the most appalling aspects of the Gaza genocide — besides its <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/08/israel-gaza-worst-crimes-ever" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">near-unprecedented</a> slaughter of children and other innocents and its near-obliteration from existence of an entire society, unpparalleled in the modern era — is that officials in both the United States and Israel were overtly hoping to make it the new, horrifying standard for modern war. As we’re seeing right now in Iran and Lebanon, they’re not wasting any time applying that standard elsewhere.</p> <p>Last year, as Gaza lay in ruins with more than <a href="https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/paper/HumanTollGaza" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">10 percent</a> of its population killed or injured, the <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/whats-legally-allowed-in-war" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>New Yorker</em></a> ran a chilling story related to the Gaza genocide. The magazine reported that a variety of US military lawyers and legal experts viewed Israel’s spree of murder and destruction in Gaza as not just a completely acceptable way to prosecute a war but as “a dress rehearsal” for a future conflict with a US adversary like China: namely, one free of restraint, adherence to international law, and squeamishness about killing civilians.</p> <p>What Israel did with full US backing in Gaza, in other words, should be the new normal for war, at least when “our side” does it.</p> <p>The report sat uncomfortably alongside a pattern of <a href="https://responsiblestatecraft.org/graham-gaza/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">US</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/01/israel-historical-comparison-world-war-two-ii/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Israeli officials</a> incessantly <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/israels-uk-ambassador-compares-24-080710104.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">invoking</a> the Allies’ carpet bombing campaigns during World War II to justify the genocide they carried out. For almost the entire period after the war, those bombing campaigns were universally understood to be war crimes and a moral horror — including by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDT8NdyoWfI" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Curtis LeMay</a> himself, the psychotic general who led the firebombing of Japan and later itched for nuclear war with the Soviet Union — and one that the civilized world immediately outlawed after that war, when it created the system of international law that today clings on by its fingernails.</p> <p>It was so appalling that even Richard Nixon felt the need to <a href="https://x.com/BMarchetich/status/1721896111261225436" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">pretend</a> to the press in 1972 that the Dresden firebombing had gone too far and that he would never do such a thing to Vietnam, even though he would be totally justified if he did. (He did do it, for the record). Yet for the past three years, American and Israeli hawks have no longer even bothered to pretend.</p> <p>What is now playing out in Iran and Lebanon is this doctrine in action.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-iran-as-gaza">Iran as Gaza</h2> <p>While estimates vary, there is a rough consensus that the United States and Israel dropped somewhere around a thousand munitions a day on Iran in the early days of the war, a similar rate to the <a href="https://twitter.com/IAFsite/status/1712484101763342772" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">first few</a> days of Israel’s unprecedented bombing of Gaza. In fact, if Israel’s <a href="https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/defense-news/article-891143" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">own estimate</a> of having dropped 15,000 bombs on Iran over the first twenty-six days is accurate, then the daily average of 577 bombs Israel dropped on Iran outstripped the first month of its bombing of Gaza in 2023, where it reportedly <a href="https://www.economist.com/interactive/middle-east-and-africa/2023/12/16/why-is-israel-using-so-many-dumb-bombs-in-gaza" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">dropped</a> just under five hundred bombs a day.</p> <p>According to Airwars, the independent watchdog group that tracks civilian bombings, if we use the slightly different measure of the <em>number of targets struck</em>, the first hundred hours of the US-Israeli war on Iran was twice as ferocious as the same period in Gaza three years ago. Israel hit <a href="https://airwars.org/record-pace-of-strikes-in-iran-bombing-campaign-analysis/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">around half</a> as many targets in Gaza as it and the US military struck in Iran in the first four days of this current war (four thousand).</p> <p>Bear in mind that Gaza, particularly its earliest days and weeks, had been the most intense bombing campaign of this century, <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/12/israel-defense-forces-gaza-palestine-civilian-death-casualties-women-children-journalists-war" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">outstripping</a> Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the war against ISIS, and Russia’s war on Ukraine — and even many wars of the last century.</p> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote alignright"> <blockquote> <p><q>The US-Israeli method of war in Iran shares a number of characteristics that, at the time, were considered unprecedented and unique to the Gaza war.</q></p> </blockquote> </figure> <p>As a result, the US-Israeli method of war in Iran shares a number of characteristics that, at the time, were considered unprecedented and unique to the Gaza war.</p> <p>The war began with a massacre of children, in what has now been <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/us/politics/iran-school-missile-strike.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">confirmed</a> to have been a targeted US bombing of a school that killed more than a hundred young girls. We now know it also began with the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/world/middleeast/us-precision-strike-missile-iran-lamerd.html?unlocked_article_code=1.XFA.wIvW.m2XCMt8F4wRY" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">bombing</a> of a sports hall and a different elementary school that killed twenty-one people, including two children, using a new short-range missile whose first-ever use in combat was this war. The US and Israeli militaries have since then <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/israel-is-dropping-2000-pound-bombs-on-densely-populated-tehran-reports-say/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">dropped</a> heavy bombs on entire <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/civilians-find-no-refuge-from-strikes-as-middle-east-war-widens" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">residential buildings</a> and <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/23/unprecedented-israel-us-carry-out-extensive-strikes-across-iran" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">destroyed</a> whole <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn0w1qxzd4xo" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">residential blocks</a> despite the obvious danger to civilians, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn0w1qxzd4xo" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">burying</a> ordinary Iranians under the rubble.</p> <p>According to the <a href="https://aje.news/hnjlh9?update=4449306" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Iranian Red Crescent Society</a>, basically the local Iranian equivalent of the Red Cross, Israel has damaged or destroyed a total of more than 90,000 residential units around Iran, more than three hundred health and medical facilities, more than seven hundred universities and <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/29/iran-accuses-us-of-plotting-ground-attack-as-israel-steps-up-bombardment" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">schools</a>, and a range of other civilian structures. That <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/30/schools-water-industry-what-civilian-targets-have-us-israel-iran-hit%20" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">includes</a> pharmacies, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/30/why-have-the-us-and-israel-bombed-more-than-75-iranian-police-facilities" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">scores</a> of police stations and other security sites, and the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/us-israel-iran-war-2026/card/bank-serving-iranian-security-services-targeted-in-strike-sources-say-OXbx1fxOGIHW2ID6kGaH?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=AWEtsqfq016kwce8xf27vkrs8HVocvaGZjQyDmf7VVkOk4OsICcJ44nTGRGZTdfIdMQ=&gaa_ts=69cad" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">infrastructure</a> used to pay officers, as well as a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/08/world/middleeast/desalination-plants-iran-bahrain.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">desalination plant</a> that helps provide drinking water and centuries-old <a href="https://www.npr.org/2026/03/19/nx-s1-5748554/iran-cultural-heritage-damage-war-isfahan" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">heritage sites</a>. It has also <a href="https://www.icanw.org/iran_strike_near_israeli_nuclear_site" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">targeted</a> Iranian nuclear facilities with bombings at least <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/03/1167175" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">three times</a> since the start of the war, <a href="https://cnduk.org/us-israeli-war-on-iran-risks-major-nuclear-accident/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">risking</a> a terrible accident. Both Israel and Donald Trump have since threatened to destroy Iran’s other energy infrastructure.</p> <p>Israel has <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-israel-strikes-iran-oil-gas-poison-people-environment-decades" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">bombed</a> oil facilities in Tehran in what amounted to a chemical attack, causing clouds of toxic fumes to linger over the city and choke its air for days and black acid rain to pour onto those below. It has now also <a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israel-hits-russian-iranian-weapons-smuggling-route-in-the-caspian-sea-6d09aca1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">targeted</a> infrastructure crucial to Iran’s food supply and a <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/31/cancer-drug-facility-religious-site-hit-in-israeli-us-strikes-on-iran" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">cancer drug</a> facility, as well as its <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/27/world/middleeast/iran-strikes-infrastructure-industry.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">steel production</a>, critical to both the country’s economy and its ability to rebuild after the war.</p> <p>There is strong evidence that at least part of the reason for the indiscriminate and lawless carnage is the reliance on <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/04/anthropic-ai-iran-campaign/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">artificial intelligence</a> for targeting, while Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the US military, running low on precision munitions, would <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-shifting-precision-munitions-2000-pound-bombs-iran-hegseth-says" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">start using</a> massive five-hundred-, one-thousand-, and two-thousand-pound bombs that do more indiscriminate damage.</p> <p>This should all sound familiar. Bombing with no regard for danger to civilians, the use of AI and massive bombs in densely populated places, the seemingly casual slaughter of children, the use of chemical warfare and hunger as weapons of war, attacks on civilian infrastructure crucial to the basic functioning of society, including energy production, health care facilities, and heritage sites — these were all the hallmarks of Israel’s war on Gaza.</p> <p>It’s not just the methods of the Gaza war that are being replicated — on the US side, it’s also the rhetoric. Hegseth has dispensed with the kind of lip service that US officials used to pay to ethical warfare and concern about civilians and is instead increasingly uttering dark, Israeli-style warnings about collective murder of all Iranians, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/08/pete-hegseth-pentagon-trump-iran" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">threatening</a> that “death and destruction from the sky all day long” would be visited on the country and <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/pete-hegseth-mocks-iranians-think-020747836.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">warning</a> that “the only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they’re gonna live.” Just a week ago, he literally <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/03/26/pete-hegseth-pentagon-prayer-violence-united-states/89338978007/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">prayed</a> for God to “break the teeth of the ungodly” and bring “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy” in this war.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Lebanon as Gaza</h2> <p>It would be bad enough if this was limited to Iran. But we’re seeing the same thing in the war Israel is concurrently waging in Lebanon.</p> <p>There the Israeli military has <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/03/amid-protection-crisis-lebanon-un-experts-warn-bombing-civilians-force" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">illegally</a> been <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwy9xlp46zgo" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">giving</a> Lebanese civilians forced <a href="https://en.yenisafak.com/world/israel-orders-evacuation-of-lebanese-village-ahead-of-planned-attack-3716365" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">evacuation orders</a> in the face of likely death in indiscriminate bombing, leading to the displacement of more than one million people, or an unfathomable <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/30/world/video/lebanon-israel-war-gebeily-intv-ctw-0330-10a-seg2-cnni-world" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">20 percent</a> of Lebanon’s population. It <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/israeli-plan-lebanon-buffer-zone-follows-long-past-invasions-occupation-2026-03-26/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">plans</a> to indefinitely occupy a large swath of Lebanon’s territory as a “buffer zone,” for which it is leveling all the now-emptied homes and buildings left by their former residents — though not before Israeli soldiers <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ajplusenglish/videos/israeli-soldiers-are-looting-homes-in-lebanon/965795815802314/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">gleefully loot</a> the homes first.</p> <p>In the process, Israel has been <a href="https://x.com/MiddleEastEye/status/2036859652256764188" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">seemingly</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-TTOz50NKlc" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">deliberately</a> targeting Lebanese health care workers and <a href="https://time.com/article/2026/03/30/these-are-the-journalists-israel-has-killed-since-the-start-of-the-iran-war/#:~:text=Ali%20Shoeib,%20a%20reporter%20for,(10:00%20GMT)." target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">journalists</a>, killing dozens the former and five of the latter so far, including nine paramedics it <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/who-says-attacks-southern-lebanon-kill-nine-paramedics-2026-03-28/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">killed</a> across Southern Lebanon this past weekend in a series of strikes on health care sites. There is also evidence it has used <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/25/israel-white-phosphorus-south-lebanon-researchers" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">white phosphorus</a> over residential areas.</p> <figure class="wp-block-pullquote"> <blockquote> <p><q>What we are witnessing right now in the Middle East is the Gazafication of warfare.</q></p> </blockquote> </figure> <p>All of these were previously beyond-the-pale crimes that became appallingly regular features of Israel’s razing of Gaza. And they come alongside other Gaza parallels we just went through with Iran that have been repeated in Lebanon, including <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-briefing-notes/2026/03/situation-lebanon" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">attacks</a> on <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/2026-03-21/ty-article/lebanese-health-officials-idf-strikes-targeted-over-100-medical-facilities/0000019d-1164-da49-a79f-f7fea32f0000" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">health care</a> facilities, residential buildings, and other civilian infrastructure like <a href="https://www.reuters.com/graphics/IRAN-CRISIS/LEBANON-ISRAEL-INFRASTRUCTURE/gkvlklaxypb/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">power plants</a>, <a href="https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/israeli-forces-using-gaza-playbook-lebanon-decimating-water-infrastructure" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">water and sanitation</a> sites, and the <a href="https://english.ratopati.com/story/56105/israeli-attacks-destroy-22-percent-of-lebanons-agricultural-land" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">agricultural land</a> it relies on to produce food.</p> <p>Israeli officials have actually been explicit about this, <a href="https://abcnews.com/International/wireStory/lebanese-fear-occupation-israel-threatens-gaza-tactics-south-131425442" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">pointing to</a> their actions in Gaza to <a href="https://www.axios.com/2026/03/14/israel-lebanon-ground-invasion-hezbollah" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">explain</a> their war plans in Lebanon and even <a href="https://en.yenisafak.com/world/israeli-minister-threatens-to-turn-beirut-into-gazas-khan-younis-3715473" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">invoking</a> Israel’s genocidal destruction of the territory as a <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/two-israeli-ministers-warned-southern-lebanon-will-be-another-gaza-deputy-pm-mitri/vi-AA1Zz0d8" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">threat</a>. Maybe most chilling, one of the most vile statistics of the Israeli forces’ conduct in Gaza — that they had killed a classroom’s worth of children every day, <a href="https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/unicef-executive-director-catherine-russells-remarks-humanitarian-situation-children?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">according to</a> the head of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) — is almost the <em>exact same statistic</em> the deputy chief of UNICEF <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/03/1167175" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">just used</a> to describe what Israel is doing in Lebanon right now.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">We Are All Gaza Now</h2> <p>What we are witnessing right now in the Middle East is the Gazafication of warfare. It is clear that Israel and Washington are determined to make some of the most repellant Israeli behavior in Gaza, the actions we thought of as unique, world-historical exhibits of human sadism, the new normal for all of their wars going forward.</p> <p>This is abominable on a basic human level. The point of international law is that everyone tacitly agrees on certain ground rules, as a way of ensuring certain behavior in warfare is off limits no matter who is involved. But once you start making exceptions for yourself, your adversaries can do it too, and the result is far from pretty — as we are seeing with Iran’s own retaliatory strikes on civilian infrastructure and the sudden <a href="https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-iran-bombing/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">cries</a> from <a href="https://x.com/marklevinshow/status/2028222720249315662" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">neocons</a> and <a href="https://www.news.com.au/world/israeli-fm-gideon-saar-accuses-iran-of-committing-war-crimes-with-missile-strikes/video/b7e1bc9e6fafc9f75d564385095e624f" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Israeli</a> <a href="https://thehill.com/policy/international/5358951-israel-iran-war-crimes-missile-strike-hospital/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">officials</a> that by imitating them, Iran is carrying out war crimes.</p> <p>Adherence to international law is not a light switch you can turn on and off at your convenience. By doing their best to shred the concept, Israel and Trump officials are not just engaging in heinous crimes. They’re creating a more brutish world where their own people are at higher risk of the very wrong they’re busy committing now: a world in which future US adversaries, for instance, will have less compunction about attacking Americans’ food supply or the infrastructure that keeps them warm in winter, or destroying or disabling the health care facilities they rely on when they’re sick, all because of an unpopular war started by leaders that most Americans don’t even like.</p> <p>The Gazafication of war by Trump and Israel is a big gamble. And it is our lives, and the lives of our children, our families, and other loved ones, that they are putting up as collateral.</p> <p>This <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com/us-israel-gaza-style-war-new-normal">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com">The Real News Network</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/cropped-TRNN-2021-logomark-square.png?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;"></p> <img id="republication-tracker-tool-source" src="https://therealnews.com/?republication-pixel=true&post=342446&amp;ga4=G-7LYS8R7V51" style="width:1px;height:1px;"><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: "https://therealnews.com/us-israel-gaza-style-war-new-normal", urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id="parsely-cfg" src="//cdn.parsely.com/keys/therealnews.com/p.js"></script> Copy to Clipboard 1

The US and Israel are making Gaza-style war the new normal

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Conrad Blackburn, a Socialist to Represent Harlem in Albany ### Socialist, trade unionist, and candidate for New York State Assembly Conrad Blackburn: “If you are taking money from real estate developers, then your first instinct is to deliver for those real estate entities, not the people.” * * * Socialist New York State Assembly candidate Conrad Blackburn: “Why don't we build people up instead of throwing them in jail and breaking them down?” (Courtesy of Andrea Guinn) After propelling its first two members to public office in districts in Brooklyn and Queens and a part of the Bronx a decade ago with Julia Salazar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA) chapter has elected ten additional members into city and state office and brought two already elected city council members into the organization. But the organization has yet to win a seat in Harlem. Conrad Blackburn, a public defender and trade unionist with the United Auto Workers (UAW), is trying to change that. Blackburn, who has been endorsed by NYC-DSA, several of its elected officials, and other progressive groups, is running for New York State Assembly District 70. The district, which is facing an acute crisis of displacement and poverty, has long been occupied by a more moderate part of the New York Democratic Party; it is currently represented by Jordan Wright, whose father Keith held the seat for over two decades. In 2018, Blackburn moved to New York City to work at The Bronx Defenders, a nonprofit providing legal services for poor people. Frustrated by low wages and a lack of workplace freedoms, he and his coworkers organized a union in the spring of 2020 as a part of the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys (ALAA), a part of UAW Region 9A. A couple of years prior to that, living in Brooklyn for the summer with his family while he studied for the bar exam, he discovered Salazar’s campaign and by volunteering to canvass for her was introduced to DSA. _Jacobin_ contributor Peter Lucas sat down with Blackburn to discuss the similarities between his upbringing in the South and the current political realities of Harlem, the consequences of corporate negligence in working-class neighborhoods, and suing Eric Adams. * * * Peter Lucas Can you tell us a bit about your background? Conrad Blackburn I am originally from Florida. I was born in Miami, but my middle and high school years were in Tallahassee. Both my parents immigrated from Jamaica, but my dad left my family when I was five or six years old. I lived with my mom and my little sisters in a single-parent household. We grew up poor. We lived in the projects. I was fortunate enough to do well in school growing up. I was in classes with a lot of upper-middle- and upper-class children. I was often the only black kid in my classes. When I would visit my classmates’ homes after school, not that far from where I lived, I’d see the big, fancy houses they lived in with both parents. They had food. They had everything that you could ever want. And then, I would go home and see all the things we didn’t have. We struggled to get food. Sometimes I ate rice-and-ketchup sandwiches for lunch; sometimes I ate bread and butter for dinner. Electricity was not always there. We occasionally had to live without the lights. We would have to boil water to get hot water at times. I started working at a young age, maybe thirteen or fourteen, just so my mom wouldn’t have to worry about me having some pocket change to ride the bus or get lunch. Growing up in the projects, I was routinely harassed by the police. Walking to school or around the neighborhood, cops would stop me and search me unconstitutionally. They wouldn’t find anything, but they wanted to strip me of my dignity. I never let that happen. I grew up next to people who were drug dealers and made money in other ways in the projects. I saw a lot of destitute poverty. My mom often struggled to pay our bills. I remember the first time when I realized what it meant when my mom would pick up an envelope and begin to cry. It pained me to see my mother cry over bills, and that was the first thing that radicalized me. I didn’t want to see my mom hurt in that way, and I knew I wanted to do what I could to make sure my mom would never cry again. Peter Lucas Do you see a common thread in the struggles that you faced in the South reflected in Harlem? Conrad Blackburn I see a lot of the same issues. It boils down to our ability to live a dignified life and all of the oppressive forces — from the state to big developers to corporations — stripping us of that dignity. There are similarities in exposure to pollution and overpolicing. The housing situation is dire here, the same way it was in the hood in Florida. "If you are taking money from real estate developers, then your first instinct is to deliver for those real estate entities, not the people." Many apartments in Harlem are like shoeboxes. When I lived in the South, our place in the projects couldn’t have been more than six hundred or seven hundred square feet. It would take an eternity to get anything repaired by the building. Growing up, they tried to paint over the outside of the building sometimes to cover up the disrepair, like putting a Band-Aid on a stab wound. In Harlem, if you need to make a repair on your apartment, it takes a long time and is often insufficient. Knocking doors for this campaign, we have encountered people who are heating their homes with their stove, because their boiler has been broken for days. Peter Lucas How is your campaign reaching these voters? Are you doing something different, as opposed to what you might see in a traditional campaign? Conrad Blackburn I am first and foremost an organizer, and I would take that approach in office. In this campaign, we’re not just knocking doors and asking people to support us. We’re knocking doors and asking people what they need. The most common issue is housing-related: rent, repairs, utilities, and so on. When I met the gentleman who was heating his house with a stove, I asked him: Have you talked to your landlord? Obviously, that’s the first thing you’re going to do if you have an issue. But that doesn’t mean the landlord is going to respond or actually address the problem. Asking this opens the conversation up to further questions like: Have you talked to anyone else in your building? Are they having the same problems? Have you guys made a plan to come together and collectively do something to get your landlord to act? I often hear that it’s difficult to rely on other people; it’s hard to get them to actually follow up. I get it. Because so many people have to fight so many struggles, they’re too burdened to even think about trying to band together with their neighbors to fight against their landlord. After these conversations, we put anyone that we encounter having an issue like that in touch with the tenant organizers on our team. The plan is to eventually have the organizations that our tenant organizers work with organize the buildings and lead know-your-rights trainings. It is a methodical approach to raising people’s collective consciousness, to get them to see they are more powerful together, that they don’t have to accept defeat or accept the fact that landlords are not going to resolve their issues. They can organize collectively and fight. Peter Lucas You mentioned the environmental issues facing Harlemites. On your platform, you address business pollution in your “community protection” plank, which isn’t often associated with that. Conrad Blackburn I try to include a lot under the umbrella of community protection. Community protection is about protecting the community from things like an abusive police force, the criminal punishment system, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). But it’s also about protecting the community from predatory corporations that buy a building to evict all of the tenants, so that they can knock it down to build a new high-rise where they can charge more exorbitant rent, and then in the process of constructing that new building, engage in a level of negligence that leads to things like Legionnaires’ being spread. This past year, seven people died, and more than a hundred got sick in Harlem after contracting Legionnaires’ disease, and the biggest source of it was a construction project near Harlem Hospital. Legionella developed in the water in the cooling towers for the HVAC systems after proper testing and maintenance protocols were not followed and then spread into the air, making it toxic to live or work by the hospital. It’s not the first time Harlem has had a Legionnaires’ outbreak, and there’s been another outbreak since. Last month, another outbreak, this time on 3333 Broadway, was confirmed. We live with the fear of our water having legionella in it because of this. If you knock on doors in this district, people will tell you that sometimes when they turn on their faucet brown stuff comes out. So community protection has to include protecting our neighbors from the corporations that dirty our water or air. I want to hold corporations accountable for this sort of negligence. Peter Lucas Harlem has a rich political history. How do you situate your campaign in the context of Harlem’s often-radical politics? Conrad Blackburn One of the main things that originally attracted me to Harlem is that my politics were formed by the radical leaders of the past in this neighborhood, who led the civil rights movement — people who were fighting for black liberation. And there was an understanding that in order for black liberation to actually hold, we have to fight a class struggle together. Malcolm X, A. Philip Randolph, Ella Baker — all black socialist leaders — these were the people that were forming and fomenting radical political activism in Harlem. They were all talking about the class struggle being the foremost struggle that leads to everyone being able to lead a life that is dignified. Peter Lucas There’s also a history of political establishment in Harlem. You’re running against a political family: Keith Wright held this seat for twenty-four years and his son, Jordan, has represented the district since 2024. What is the political establishment in Harlem like? Conrad Blackburn The establishment’s whole goal is to build and conglomerate power for themselves. They want to continue their family legacy and have their names etched in Harlem history. In that pursuit, they are leaving the community behind, as they court money from interests that are not aligned with the people of Harlem. If you are taking money from real estate developers, then your first instinct is to deliver for those real estate entities, not the people. Listening to those moneyed interests has led to displacement, to Harlemites living a less dignified life. Displacement is the number-one issue in this community. It is this stripping away the rich history of culture and arts and music and food in Harlem. Peter Lucas The broader New York political establishment has attacked socialism and DSA, in particular around the question of identity. What do you make of these criticisms? Conrad Blackburn It’s ironic they attack DSA for being a gentrifier organization, but DSA has never run a race in Harlem. Darializa Avila Chevalier and I are the first socialists to run in this district. It’s ironic that the machine would say that DSA is a gentrifying force when there are people who have been in power for decades, overseeing an extreme amount of displacement and gentrification in Harlem, because of the policies they endorse, on account of the special interests they are courting. Part of why they feel they can make that attack is because DSA is an organization that does have a lot of white people. But there are not only white people in DSA. There have been people of color doing amazing work in DSA for years. Nearly all of NYC-DSA’s socialists in office are people of color. The attacks that they’re making ultimately just don’t ring true. It is incumbent on DSA to build power in Harlem, and that’s exactly what I hope this campaign does. Peter Lucas How did you come to join DSA? Conrad Blackburn In 2018, when I first moved to New York after law school, I lived with my aunt in Brooklyn for a summer to study for the bar. I didn’t know anyone in New York other than my aunts and my family that lived here. It was the same summer that Julia Salazar was running her first campaign for state senate. Seeing somebody openly running as a socialist for a state office was inspiring, so I volunteered. That was my introduction to DSA. "Displacement is the number-one issue in this community." But originally, my conception of DSA was that it was a white-led organization. As someone whose politics are rooted in a black radical tradition, I did not look behind the veil to see what was going on internally in DSA for a long time. But I kept hearing about all of the amazing socialists that they were able to elect to office. I continued to pay attention to what was going on in DSA, supporting socialists who were running for office in the ways that I could. It wasn’t until later that I got a better sense of the organization. I signed up to be a member; I started going to meetings. I attended the endorsement forums and saw DSA’s democratic process in action. It reminded me of my union, and in seeing that, it clicked for me. I was like, okay, this is great, this is my political home. This reminds me of my union — how democratic it is, how member-led it is. Peter Lucas How did you get involved with the UAW? Conrad Blackburn I got involved with the UAW through organizing the union in my office. I work at a public defense organization. In my second year working there, a few of my close friends and I got together. We talked about how we were living paycheck to paycheck and couldn’t make ends meet. We didn’t have the protections and freedoms that we wanted in our workplace. We decided that the best option would be to form a union. It is crazy because there is so much work that goes into making that happen, and we were just a bunch of young kids saying, oh yeah, let’s do it. But we made it a reality by organizing. We went to the ALAA, which represents all of the indigent service providers in the city, and it fortunately had the institutional knowledge to know who to go to unionize. That’s how we got connected with the UAW, of which ALAA is an affiliate, and one of its union organizers led us through the process. Peter Lucas Can you tell us a little bit about your legal work? Conrad Blackburn I’ve been doing this for eight years now. I started as a criminal defense attorney, which I still practice, and I also did a year of immigration. I worked on deportation defense during the first Trump administration. I did three years of policy work. At my office, policy work is a dual role, so I did my own criminal defense case load at the same time as I was doing policy work, lobbying and legislating trying to get bills changed. Peter Lucas And you sued Eric Adams? Conrad Blackburn My focus was on prisoners’ rights, which led me to work on the city’s anti-solitary confinement bill, which is now Local Law 42. I worked closely with grassroots organizers and groups like the Jails Action Coalition that have been organizing to stop the ills of solitary confinement for decades. I helped them draft the bill. We knew Mayor Adams was going to veto it, so we successfully secured a veto-proof supermajority. Once it passed, Mayor Adams issued a whole bunch of illegal executive orders to stop the implementation of the bill. In doing this, he violated the separation of powers doctrine and engaged in executive overreach. I brought this to the impact litigation arm in my office and pressed to take the research to the city council. Initially skeptical, it decided to take the case and sue the mayor. We knew for this case that the city council would be a more credible voice because we know that our clients’ stories often get discounted and shot down. We won; a judge ultimately found that what Mayor Adams did initially with those executive voters was unconstitutional. Peter Lucas What is the current state of prisons and solitary confinement in New York? Conrad Blackburn Right now in New York City, there are people who are complaining that there’s no heat in some of the housing units at Rikers Island. There are people who are being locked in cells for hours and hours of the day, in violation of Local Law 42, not being fed, the cells that they inhabit are tiny. The beds are not real beds — it’s a piece of metal with a little pad on top of it. "Why don’t we build people up instead of throwing them in jail and breaking them down?" People don’t have regular access to their family members; sometimes visiting hours are constrained because a building will go on lockdown, where people are kept in their cells for twenty-three hours a day and not able to get out. People are not taken to their medical appointments. There are people with significant mental health complications in Rikers that aren’t getting the medications or the mental health care that they need. A lot of young people who are at Rikers Island are not receiving the schooling that they need because of fear of leaving their cell and being attacked. These are the lives people are leading inside of these institutions, and they scream at the top of their lungs but nobody hears them. Mind you, there are people who are in Rikers Island because bail was set on them, not having been found guilty of anything — legally innocent but still sitting in these types of conditions. Oftentimes this adds to the cycle of violence, because the things people experience when they’re in jail, the kind of torturous things that I was talking about, where you can’t get food or are locked in your cell, and you take that with you when you leave. People suffer so much trauma and torture that is then brought back to the community, back to the home. If you look at Kalief Browder‘s story, he was sitting at Rikers Island because he allegedly stole a backpack. He was repeatedly found not guilty, taken to court, and taken back to Rikers Island, but then was put into solitary confinement. There,he developed mental health complications from being placed into solitary confinement. After the case was dismissed, he got out, not found guilty, but because of what he went through, he ended up taking his own life. Those are the conditions and the consequences that people face living in jails and in prisons. Peter Lucas Where do you think that money should be invested instead? Conrad Blackburn We know that poverty drives crime. When people don’t have economic opportunities, when people can’t afford to live a dignified life, they turn to what they know or to what’s easy. Sometimes that is harming other community members, and that’s how crime is formed and fermented. Instead of spending money on throwing people into cages, instead of spending money on overpolicing our communities, why don’t we spend money on ensuring that there’s free education for people who live in the city? Why don’t we fully fund the City University of New York? Why don’t we build people up instead of throwing them in jail and breaking them down? The more educational opportunities we provide people, the more levers of society they will have access to and can then pursue whatever field of education and work that they want. We have to be able to provide these opportunities to people. * * *

Conrad Blackburn, a Socialist to Represent Harlem in Albany

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Conrad Blackburn, a Socialist to Represent Harlem in Albany Socialist, trade unionist, and candidate for New York State Assembly Conrad Blackburn: “If you are taking money from real estate developers, then your first instinct is to deliver for those real estate entities, not the people.”

Conrad Blackburn, a Socialist to Represent Harlem in Albany

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The Right Has a Lofty Vision for Schools. Where’s Ours? The Right is selling a vision of classical education that promises to build character and nurture wonder. Liberals are stuck aiming for higher test scores and employability. Public education defenders need our own inspiring take on the meaning of school.

The Right Has a Lofty Vision for Schools. Where’s Ours?

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The War on Iran Is More Expensive Than You Think In the first two weeks of its war on Iran, the US spent an estimated $2.1 billion a day. It’s no wonder Donald Trump is saying that the cost of war means the federal government can’t afford to spend money to help Americans meet their basic needs.

The War on Iran Is More Expensive Than You Think

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_This article was originally published byTruthout on April 01, 2026. It is shared here under a __Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license._ Sixty-two years ago, St. John’s University (SJU) in New York City became the site of the first major faculty strike in U.S. history — a year-long conflict that followed the firing of 33 teachers, including three priests, without due process. Now, the struggle over labor conditions has forced the faculty to once again mobilize, a move precipitated by the current college administration’s abrupt announcement that it will no longer recognize two faculty unions or continue negotiations to hash out a new contract. St. John’s president, Rev. Brian J. Shanley, and Provost and Senior Vice President Simon Geir Møller, told the _National Catholic Reporter_ (NCR) that the move was necessary to give the college “the flexibility required to innovate … and deliver on our promise to our students.” But faculty members, who had been demanding improved wages and greater transparency in how their share of health insurance premiums are calculated, call it union busting. And while the university’s administrators did not respond to _Truthout’_ s multiple requests for an interview, they told _NCR_ that the decision rests on a 2020 decision promulgated by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). That decision, _Bethany College_, 369 NLRB No. 98, removed NLRB jurisdiction over most of the 849 religiously affiliated colleges and universities in the country and prompted at least eight predominantly Catholic schools — Bethany and Boston Colleges, and Duquesne, Edward Waters, Loyola Marymount, Marquette, St. Leo and Wilberforce universities — to end union recognition on campus. Critics see this as part of a general rightward trend in higher education. “The anti-union arguments that have emerged coincide with the appointment of conservative board members and trustees who do not want to deal with unions,” Joseph A. McCartin, executive director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, told _Truthout_. “College and university board members at religiously affiliated institutions are heavily weighted to the financial sector, which does not work with unions and sees them as a nuisance. But the moral principles that guide the church have a clear message about workplace justice. These colleges need to be asked how they reconcile their actions with the church’s stated values.” To wit, McCartin cites a pastoral letter, Economic Justice for All, that was written by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 1986. The 40-year-old document centers “social justice and the Biblical and ethical principles that support it” and demands that Catholic colleges and universities be “exemplary” in providing “a sufficient livelihood and social benefits” to workers. The document further demands that Catholic institutions “fully recognize the rights of employees to organize and bargain collectively … through whatever association or organization they freely choose.” Theology professor Chris Denny is president of the St. John’s Faculty Association, which, along with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), has represented the full- and part-time faculty on St. John’s Jamaica, New York, campus since 1970. “Catholicism is not a lapel pin you take out of a drawer and put on when you want to showcase your faith,” Denny told _Truthout_. “Simply put, the university’s treatment of faculty and students does not embody Catholic social justice teachings. The Vincentian tradition at St. John’s follows the model set by St. Vincent de Paul.” SJU, he says, was founded on this tradition. “It does not comport with lavish spending on athletics and team sports while the rest of the campus is a shambles. Our students understand that our workplace conditions are their learning conditions so they understand what’s at stake here.” Denny argues that the _Bethany_ decision may not have bearing on St. John’s. “We are governed by the New York State Employment Relations Act, which is overseen by the state Public Employees Relations Board (PERB),” he says. “PERB covers private entities like St. John’s and we’re now in a standoff with the administration over PERB’s role in governance.” But the matter of jurisdiction is currently subject to some legal contestation. The question of whether the PERB or the NLRB has standing over employer-employee relations at St. John’s will be at the heart of an Unfair Labor Practices claim that the Faculty Association and AAUP plan to file. They will ask PERB judges to adjudicate this issue if the administration continues to stonewall and does not return to the bargaining table. But the unions are hoping it won’t come to that. Sophie Bell, acting president of the campus AAUP chapter, says that the union was surprised by the February suspension of bargaining and the decision to end union recognition. “This was my second time bargaining for a contract and in the earlier negotiation I felt like management was a real partner at the bargaining table,” she told _Truthout_. “This time it felt different and I got the impression that Shanley does not want a union.” **GET FEARLESS, AD-FREE, UNCOMPROMISING REAL NEWS IN YOUR INBOX** Sign up Nonetheless, she says that the bargaining team — 12 union members and a slightly smaller number of managers and attorneys — had been meeting regularly since the spring of 2025 and was making slow progress. “We’ve been working without a contract since July 1. We became concerned when management hired Proskauer Rose, an anti-union law firm, to represent them, but we were still talking,” she says. But now that the talking has stopped, Bell says that the AAUP has three demands for Shanley and the Board of Trustees: Resume contract negotiations; recognize the bargaining unit’s right to a fair, equitable contract; and establish open lines of communication between faculty and Trustees. As of late March, little headway has been made toward these goals. Nonetheless, the union has continued organizing — bringing hundreds of demonstrators to Madison Square Garden during an NCAA basketball championship game that featured St. John’s, and garnering support from a raft of community and labor organizations, elected officials, and progressive religious leaders. ## Anti-Union Fervor Had Been Building on Campus That support has been encouraging, first-year writing instructor David G. Farley tells _Truthout._ At the same time, he says that faculty are on edge since no one anticipated that the union would be totally rebuffed by management. Still, Farley said rumors about administration proposals that would worsen labor conditions — including reduced research leave, increased teaching loads, and the development of a robust online course catalog that will be heavily reliant on artificial intelligence — have swirled for several years. In February, St. John’s University administrators]announced the elimination of 18 programs across the colleges including languages, chemistry, physics, toxicology, and hospitality management, Farley told _Truthout_. “At about the same time they announced a new partnership with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) for courses in security studies.” At that time, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had been ramping up its raids in communities throughout the country and, Farley says, “as concerned faculty, we quickly responded and got a petition going. We circulated it to current students, alumni, and staff, to say, _‘Don’t do this. It goes against the university’s social justice mission.’_ In February, after less than a year, the [CBP] partnership was dissolved. This victorious campaign was galvanizing for faculty and we created connections to one another in a way that we had not done before.” Jeanette C. Perron, a professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical science, agrees that the CBP campaign was significant. Nonetheless, she says that it took attending an open bargaining session to kickstart her union activism. “It was clear that we were spinning our wheels,” she told _Truthout_. “I could see that the people on the other side of the table did not respect the union. I thought our bargaining team had come up with some really good ideas about ways to save money, but everything they suggested was dismissed. That was eye-opening to see.” Moreover, management contempt for both the Faculty Association and the AAUP, Perron and Farley say, has been the glue uniting faculty, many of whom see what is happening on their campus as emblematic of the attacks on higher education more generally. “The Shanley administration has taken a profit-driven, corporatist approach to education,” Lara Vapnek, a history professor who has been at St. John’s for 20 years, tells _Truthout._ “Until Shanley came in 2020, the mission of the school was to serve the poor and promote social justice. Shanley has taken the school in a different direction and it is crushing.” She calls the summer 2025 hiring of EAB, a consulting firm hired to help the Board of Trustees “restructure” the school, and the hiring of anti-union lawyers from Proskauer Rose, turning points. “It seems as if the administration wants to turn St. John’s into an athletic franchise with an online university,” she quips. Still, like others on campus, Vapnek is heartened by the faculty activism in response to what’s happened on campus, from the amount of community support they’ve received to the organizing that is taking place on and beyond the St. John’s campus. “The kind of top-town, ‘ _Let’s just wreck it and act like everything is okay’_ mentality is very DOGE-like,” she says. “It fits with the attacks on women, people of color, and the queer community, attacks on the teaching of history, and attacks on the National Endowment for the Humanities.” “Basically, I see what’s taking place as a rejection of knowledge,” Vapnek concludes. “The faculty at St. John’s are great but we are all being treated as expendable. We think we’re providing value to students and to the university but the administration is treating us as if we’re standing in the way of progress.” That said, Vapnek and her colleagues concede that union busting at St. John’s and other colleges and universities may be the point. They refer to a 2025 audit commissioned by the AAUP and conducted by Howard Bunsis, a professor of accounting at Eastern Michigan State University. The survey found St. John’s to be in “solid financial condition” but noted that the school has the highest management salaries in the country, and perhaps predictably, Bunsis reported that faculty salaries have not kept pace with inflation. Meanwhile, basketball coach Rick Pitino’s six-year contract provides an annual salary of $3.3 million, with athletic spending far outpacing instructional spending. The average annual faculty salary is $80,757. _**Editor’s note** : This article has been corrected to clarify that 18 programs, not majors, were canceled, this February, not last spring._ _We have also corrected a quote_ _to say National Endowment for the Humanities instead of National Institutes of_ _Health_. ### _Related_ Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license. Close window ## Republish this article This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. We encourage republication of our original content. Please copy the HTML code in the textbox below, preserving the attribution and link to the article's original location, and only make minor cosmetic edits to the content on your site. # Faculty fight anti-union tactics at St. John’s University in New York by Eleanor J. Bader, The Real News Network April 2, 2026 <h1>Faculty fight anti-union tactics at St. John’s University in New York</h1> <p class="byline">by Eleanor J. Bader, The Real News Network <br />April 2, 2026</p> <div class="wp-block-media-text is-stacked-on-mobile" style="grid-template-columns:33% auto"> <figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img src="https://therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/truthout-logo.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-277549 size-full" /></figure> <div class="wp-block-media-text__content"> <p><em>This article was originally published by <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/faculty-fight-anti-union-tactics-at-st-johns-university-in-new-york/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Truthout</a> on April 01, 2026. It is shared here under a <em> </em><a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)</a> license.</em></p> </p></div> </div> <p class="has-drop-cap">Sixty-two years ago, St. John’s University (SJU) in New York City became the site of the first major faculty strike in U.S. history — a year-long conflict that followed the firing of 33 teachers, including three priests, without due process. Now, the struggle over labor conditions has forced the faculty to once again mobilize, a move precipitated by the current college administration’s abrupt announcement that it will no longer recognize two faculty unions or continue negotiations to hash out a new contract.</p> <p>St. John’s president, Rev. <a href="https://www.stjohns.edu/who-we-are/leadership-and-administration/office-president/rev-brian-j-shanley-op" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Brian J. Shanley</a>, and Provost and Senior Vice President <a href="https://www.stjohns.edu/who-we-are/leadership-and-administration/simon-geir-moller-phd" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Simon Geir Møller</a>, told the <a href="https://www.ncronline.org/news/st-johns-university-says-it-no-longer-recognizes-faculty-unions-after-56-years"></a><a href="https://www.ncronline.org/news/st-johns-university-says-it-no-longer-recognizes-faculty-unions-after-56-years" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>National Catholic Reporter</em></a> (NCR) that the move was necessary to give the college “the flexibility required to innovate … and deliver on our promise to our students.”</p> <p>But faculty members, who had been demanding improved wages and greater transparency in how their share of health insurance premiums are calculated, call it union busting.</p> <p>And while the university’s administrators did not respond to <em>Truthout’</em>s multiple requests for an interview, they told <em>NCR </em>that the decision rests on a 2020 decision promulgated by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). That decision, <a href="https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/nlrb-declines-jurisdiction-over-faculty-at-religious-institutions" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>Bethany College</em></a><a href="https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/nlrb-declines-jurisdiction-over-faculty-at-religious-institutions">, 369 NLRB No. 98</a>, removed NLRB jurisdiction over most of the <a href="https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/articles/us-colleges-with-religious-affiliations-what-students-should-know" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">849 religiously affiliated colleges and universities</a> in the country and prompted at least eight predominantly Catholic schools — Bethany and Boston Colleges, and Duquesne, Edward Waters, Loyola Marymount, Marquette, St. Leo and Wilberforce universities — to end union recognition on campus.</p> <p>Critics see this as part of a general rightward trend in higher education.</p> <p>“The anti-union arguments that have emerged coincide with the appointment of conservative board members and trustees who do not want to deal with unions,” <a href="https://global.georgetown.edu/people/joseph-mccartin" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Joseph A. McCartin</a>, executive director of the <a href="https://lwp.georgetown.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor</a> at Georgetown University, told <em>Truthout</em>. “College and university board members at religiously affiliated institutions are heavily weighted to the financial sector, which does not work with unions and sees them as a nuisance. But the moral principles that guide the church have a clear message about workplace justice. These colleges need to be asked how they reconcile their actions with the church’s stated values.”</p> <p>To wit, McCartin cites a pastoral letter, <a href="https://www.usccb.org/resources/economic_justice_for_all_1.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Economic Justice for All</a>, that was written by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 1986. The 40-year-old document centers “social justice and the Biblical and ethical principles that support it” and demands that Catholic colleges and universities be “exemplary” in providing “a sufficient livelihood and social benefits” to workers. The document further demands that Catholic institutions “fully recognize the rights of employees to organize and bargain collectively … through whatever association or organization they freely choose.”</p> <p>Theology professor Chris Denny is president of the <a href="https://fasju539789868.wordpress.com/HOME/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John’s Faculty Association</a>, which, along with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), has represented the full- and part-time faculty on St. John’s Jamaica, New York, campus since 1970.</p> <p>“Catholicism is not a lapel pin you take out of a drawer and put on when you want to showcase your faith,” Denny told <em>Truthout</em>. “Simply put, the university’s treatment of faculty and students does not embody Catholic social justice teachings. The Vincentian tradition at St. John’s follows the model set by <a href="https://ssvpusa.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. Vincent de Paul</a><a href="https://ssvpusa.org/">.</a>” SJU, he says, was founded on this tradition. “It does not comport with lavish spending on athletics and team sports while the rest of the campus is a shambles. Our students understand that our workplace conditions are their learning conditions so they understand what’s at stake here.”</p> <p>Denny argues that the <em>Bethany</em> decision may not have bearing on St. John’s. “We are governed by the <a href="https://perb.ny.gov/laws-and-rules" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">New York State Employment Relations Act</a>, which is overseen by the state Public Employees Relations Board (PERB),” he says. “PERB covers private entities like St. John’s and we’re now in a standoff with the administration over PERB’s role in governance.”</p> <p>But the matter of jurisdiction is currently <a href="https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/halted-federal-judge-stops-enforcement-1989278/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">subject to some legal contestation</a>. The question of whether the PERB or the NLRB has standing over employer-employee relations at St. John’s will be at the heart of an Unfair Labor Practices claim that the Faculty Association and AAUP plan to file. They will ask PERB judges to adjudicate this issue if the administration continues to stonewall and does not return to the bargaining table.</p> <p>But the unions are hoping it won’t come to that.</p> <p>Sophie Bell, acting president of the campus AAUP chapter, says that the union was surprised by the February suspension of bargaining and the decision to end union recognition. “This was my second time bargaining for a contract and in the earlier negotiation I felt like management was a real partner at the bargaining table,” she told <em>Truthout</em>. “This time it felt different and I got the impression that Shanley does not want a union.”</p> <p>Nonetheless, she says that the bargaining team — 12 union members and a slightly smaller number of managers and attorneys — had been meeting regularly since the spring of 2025 and was making slow progress. “We’ve been working without a contract since July 1. We became concerned when management hired Proskauer Rose, an anti-union law firm, to represent them, but we were still talking,” she says.</p> <p>But now that the talking has stopped, Bell says that the AAUP has three demands for Shanley and the Board of Trustees: Resume contract negotiations; recognize the bargaining unit’s right to a fair, equitable contract; and establish open lines of communication between faculty and Trustees.</p> <p>As of late March, little headway has been made toward these goals. Nonetheless, the union has continued organizing — bringing hundreds of demonstrators to Madison Square Garden during an NCAA basketball championship game that featured St. John’s, and garnering support from a raft of community and labor organizations, elected officials, and progressive religious leaders.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-anti-union-fervor-had-been-building-on-campus">Anti-Union Fervor Had Been Building on Campus</h2> <p>That support has been encouraging, first-year writing instructor David G. Farley tells <em>Truthout.</em> At the same time, he says that faculty are on edge since no one anticipated that the union would be totally rebuffed by management. Still, Farley said rumors about administration proposals that would worsen labor conditions — including reduced research leave, increased teaching loads, and the development of a robust online course catalog that will be heavily reliant on artificial intelligence — have swirled for several years.</p> <p>In February, St. John’s University administrators]announced the elimination of 18 programs across the colleges including languages, chemistry, physics, toxicology, and hospitality management, Farley told <em>Truthout</em>. “At about the same time they announced a new <a href="https://gothamist.com/news/st-johns-university-quietly-suspends-partnership-with-customs-and-border-protection" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">partnership with Customs and Border Protection </a>(CBP) for courses in security studies.”</p> <p>At that time, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had been ramping up its raids in communities throughout the country and, Farley says, “as concerned faculty, we quickly responded and got a petition going. We circulated it to current students, alumni, and staff, to say, <em>‘Don’t do this. It goes against the university’s social justice mission.’</em> In February, after less than a year, the [CBP] partnership was dissolved. This victorious campaign was galvanizing for faculty and we created connections to one another in a way that we had not done before.”</p> <p>Jeanette C. Perron, a professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical science, agrees that the CBP campaign was significant. Nonetheless, she says that it took attending an open bargaining session to kickstart her union activism. “It was clear that we were spinning our wheels,” she told <em>Truthout</em>. “I could see that the people on the other side of the table did not respect the union. I thought our bargaining team had come up with some really good ideas about ways to save money, but everything they suggested was dismissed. That was eye-opening to see.”</p> <p>Moreover, management contempt for both the Faculty Association and the AAUP, Perron and Farley say, has been the glue uniting faculty, many of whom see what is happening on their campus as emblematic of the attacks on higher education more generally.</p> <p>“The Shanley administration has taken a profit-driven, corporatist approach to education,” Lara Vapnek, a history professor who has been at St. John’s for 20 years, tells <em>Truthout. </em>“Until Shanley came in 2020, the mission of the school was to serve the poor and promote social justice. Shanley has taken the school in a different direction and it is crushing.” She calls the summer 2025 hiring of <a href="https://eab.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">EAB</a>, a consulting firm hired to help the Board of Trustees “restructure” the school, and the hiring of anti-union lawyers from Proskauer Rose, turning points. “It seems as if the administration wants to turn St. John’s into an athletic franchise with an online university,” she quips.</p> <p>Still, like others on campus, Vapnek is heartened by the faculty activism in response to what’s happened on campus, from the amount of community support they’ve received to the organizing that is taking place on and beyond the St. John’s campus. “The kind of top-town, ‘<em>Let’s just wreck it and act like everything is okay’</em> mentality is very DOGE-like,” she says. “It fits with the attacks on women, people of color, and the queer community, attacks on the teaching of history, and attacks on the National Endowment for the Humanities.”</p> <p>“Basically, I see what’s taking place as a rejection of knowledge,” Vapnek concludes. “The faculty at St. John’s are great but we are all being treated as expendable. We think we’re providing value to students and to the university but the administration is treating us as if we’re standing in the way of progress.”</p> <p>That said, Vapnek and her colleagues concede that union busting at St. John’s and other colleges and universities may be the point. They refer to a 2025 audit commissioned by the AAUP and conducted by <a href="https://www.emich.edu/cob/faculty/h_bunsis.php" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Howard Bunsis</a>, a professor of accounting at Eastern Michigan State University.</p> <p>The survey found St. John’s to be in “solid financial condition” but noted that the school has the highest management salaries in the country, and perhaps predictably, Bunsis reported that faculty salaries have not kept pace with inflation.</p> <p>Meanwhile, basketball coach <a href="https://www.essentiallysports.com/ncaa-college-basketball-news-rick-pitino-net-worth-and-salary-everything-you-need-to-know-about-st-johns-hcs-riches/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Rick Pitino’s six-year contract</a> provides an annual salary of $3.3 million, with athletic spending far outpacing instructional spending. The average annual faculty salary is $80,757.</p> <p><em><strong>Editor’s note</strong>: This article has been corrected to clarify that 18 programs, not majors, were canceled, this February, not last spring.</em> <em>We have also corrected a quote</em> <em>to say National Endowment for the Humanities instead of National Institutes of</em> <em>Health</em>.</p> <p>This <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com/anti-union-tactics-st-johns-university-new-york">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com">The Real News Network</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/cropped-TRNN-2021-logomark-square.png?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;"></p> <img id="republication-tracker-tool-source" src="https://therealnews.com/?republication-pixel=true&post=342437&amp;ga4=G-7LYS8R7V51" style="width:1px;height:1px;"><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: "https://therealnews.com/anti-union-tactics-st-johns-university-new-york", urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id="parsely-cfg" src="//cdn.parsely.com/keys/therealnews.com/p.js"></script> Copy to Clipboard 1

Faculty fight anti-union tactics at St. John’s University in New York

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Chapo’s Comic Book Is a Riveting Political Horror Show The Chapo Trap House comic book, Year Zero #1, is a collection of horror stories with a clear political message: liberal capitalism is not failing accidentally — it is functioning as designed, producing horror as a by-product of stability.

Chapo’s Comic Book Is a Riveting Political Horror Show

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New Yorkers Want to Tax the Rich. Julie Menin Doesn’t Care. ### Zohran Mamdani has called for taxing the rich to close New York City’s large budget deficit. His position is popular with most New Yorkers, but wealthy City Council Speaker Julie Menin is giving cover to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s refusal to raise taxes. * * * Julie Menin’s refusal to push for higher taxes on the wealthy is of a piece with her other moves as the highest-ranking member of the city council. (Jim Spellman / WireImage via Getty Images) It was not an April Fool’s Day joke. On the morning of Wednesday, April 1, New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin, the most powerful member of the fifty-one-person legislative body, made an announcement regarding the contentious city budget. Rather than work with the mayor to find new revenues, Menin has continued to dig in her heels in opposition to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s progressive budget priorities. Menin is promising to balance the city’s budget by revising estimates of revenue from existing sources and achieving savings through cuts (“right-sizing”), but she continues to oppose taxing the rich and refuses to join forces with the mayor to pressure Governor Kathy Hochul on the issue. New York State is currently in budget season, with the state budget constitutionally mandated to be passed by April 1 and the New York City budget due by the end of the fiscal year. But this year, the state budget will be late, due to the ongoing battle between Governor Hochul’s defense of the fiscal status quo and the growing statewide movement to tax the rich. The majority of New Yorkers, including 72 percent of New York state Democrats, support raising taxes on the rich, but Governor Hochul remains steadfast in her refusal to seek new revenue sources among the growing ranks of ultrawealthy New Yorkers. The stakes are high. Even setting aside the devastation Donald Trump’s federal budget cuts will impose on the most vulnerable New Yorkers, Mayor Mamdani has inherited an estimated $5.4 billion deficit due to the mismanagement of the previous administration. Comptroller Mark Levine has called it the “biggest budget deficit since the Great Recession.” Mamdani has already found some savings within the budget, which Menin’s counter-budget doesn’t acknowledge. But together with the Trump cuts that will impact almost half of New York City residents, who rely on some version of Medicaid, Hochul’s refusal to tax the rich — and Menin’s support for the governor’s position — is a matter of life and death for many New Yorkers. As the Trump tax cuts represent a regressive redistribution of wealth from middle-class and low-income Americans toward those with the highest income and assets, we should understand the governor’s and speaker’s unwavering opposition to taxing the rich as making them complicit with Trump’s oligarchic agenda. Ironically, Hochul maintains a web page where New Yorkers can “tell their story” about how the federal budget cuts are affecting them personally and lists a variety of affected programs, including reductions to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits and billions in funding for hospitals. This messaging conveniently deflects responsibility for public service provision from the state to the federal government. But as the New York State Tax the Rich campaign has always pointed out, great wealth already exists in New York, and there is no reason for the state government to allow New Yorkers’ health care and social service needs to go unmet. There are many reasons why Hochul and Menin are opposed to taxing the rich. As the governor relies on the billionaire donor class — including many named in the Jeffrey Epstein files — to fund her campaigns, she is obligated to prioritize their interests. And Hochul likely feels vulnerable in an election year, as she faces a challenge from Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman. While Hochul held a comfortable lead of 20 points in February, that lead fell to 13 points in late March. This electoral heat will probably mean Hochul continuing to parrot Republican talking points in an attempt to placate her donors — but likely further alienating her base. In 2022, Hochul barely squeaked out a victory of 5 points over a MAGA Republican, former congressman, and now Trump administration acolyte Lee Zeldin in a historically low-turnout general election. Hochul failed to recognize then, and still seems not to recognize, that inspiring the Democratic base to turn out is a more promising electoral strategy than tacking to the center and providing an uninspiring “Republican lite” ticket. Menin’s refusal to push for higher taxes on the wealthy is of a piece with her other moves thus far as the highest-ranking member of the city council. In addition to public pushback against Mayor Mamdani’s extremely popular call to tax the rich, Menin has so far used her political capital to promote extremely controversial protest “buffer bills” that would limit public assembly and create police work around protests in areas surrounding houses of worship, schools, universities, and other educational institutions. These bills passed, with some revisions, despite objections from civil liberties and human rights experts. These laws violate basic democratic rights of public assembly and freedom of expression under the guise of public safety, but they explicitly attack those who protested at universities during the height of the Gaza solidarity movement. Menin’s leadership on the council appears to represent a form of magical thinking, an attempt to undercut the momentum around and popularity of Mamdani’s demand to tax the rich to create a sustainable source of revenue. Menin’s announcement on Wednesday shows her refusing to engage with the material conditions facing New York. Whether it’s because of pure ideological commitment or her own class interests, Menin seems willfully blind to the real options for dealing with the country’s largest city’s big budget problem. A case in point: during the April 1 budget presser, when asked if New York should raise taxes, Menin stated that she does “believe in progressive taxation” but wants to avoid a situation where “you’re pitting states against each other,” referring to the right-wing and factually inaccurate talking point that the rich would move from New York should their taxes be raised. Menin and the city council’s counter-budget is a last-ditch effort, in collaboration with Governor Hochul, to weaken the growing consensus around the importance of taxing the rich in New York State and beyond. This is not just a local fight but also increasingly a national one, as efforts such as Illinois’s and California’s billionaire tax proposals show; Michigan, Rhode Island, and Washington State are similarly debating more progressive taxes on their richest residents. Menin fails to understand that more than her personal financial interests are at stake: much of the future of our fragile multiracial democratic experiment hangs in the balance. She may try to dress up her intervention in New York City’s “tax dance” as a “reasonable” response to Zohran’s agenda, but history will judge her and her allies as engaging in a final, desperate attempt to shore up Reaganomics — a fading and unpopular doctrine that New Yorkers and Americans broadly seem ready to abandon. * * *

New Yorkers Want to Tax the Rich. Julie Menin Doesn’t Care.

https://jacobin.com/2026/04/new-york-menin-tax-rich/

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_This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on_ _April 02, 2026_ _._ _It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license._ Two days after Secretary of State Marco Rubio unironically advised Iran to spend its public funds “helping the people of Iran” instead of on weapons, President Donald Trump announced that the US government has “to take care of one thing: military protection” and isn’t able to provide people in the US with necessities like healthcare and childcare. “Oh wow, he actually admitted it,” said US Rap. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.) in response. At an Easter lunch at the White House Wednesday, the president said that “the United States can’t take care of daycare” and demanded that states fully fund childcare programs. “We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare. You gotta let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it too,” said Trump. “It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.” > Trump: We can't take care of daycare. We're a big country. We're fighting wars. It's not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these things. pic.twitter.com/vLGpp7KJnm > > — FactPost (@factpostnews) April 1, 2026 The wars the president has waged and threatened to wage since taking office last year include his invasion of Venezuela in January and the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro; the killing of more than 160 people in boat bombings in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean; an oil blockade on Cuba that’s left tens of thousands of people waiting for surgeries and unable to access essential medications, with Trump threatening to take over the country by force; and the current US-Israeli war on Iran. The conflicts that Trump said Americans must sacrifice federal funding for public programs in order to continue are opposed by a majority of Americans, according to polls. All have been called violations of international law by legal experts. **GET FEARLESS, AD-FREE, UNCOMPROMISING REAL NEWS IN YOUR INBOX** Sign up Trump’s comments on the government’s inability to provide public services came as the Pentagon is seeking $200 billion to continue funding the war on Iran, which has killed nearly 2,000 Iranians and more than 1,000 people across the Middle East as the conflict has widened, and exacerbated the US affordability crisis by raising average gas prices to over $4 per gallon. A 2021 analysis by The New York Times found that the US spends about $500 per family each year on early childhood care, or roughly 0.2% of its GDP. Other wealthy countries that the US considers its peers spend an average of more than $14,000 per family annually, with Norway spending close to $30,000, Finland spending more than $23,000, and Germany spending over $18,000. The president has previously attacked childcare spending, cutting $10 billion in federal childcare funds to five Democratic-led states in response to a social services fraud scandal in Minnesota. Medicaid cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed last year are projected amount to about $1 trillion over the next decade, and hundreds of hospitals are at risk of closing or having to reduce healthcare services as a result of the cuts—which, in addition to funding Trump’s military actions, helped pay for tax cuts for corporations and the rich. “The warmongers in the White House and Congress will always fund death and destruction,” said Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) Wednesday night after Trump’s comments. “They will let people in our country starve and die before they stop funding wars.” Graham Platner, a Democratic candidate for US Senate in Maine, said Trump’s remarks were a simple statement of fact about the choice the administration has made about its priorities. “Trump is right. A pointless war or universal daycare,” said Platner. “He’s right: That’s the choice.” ### _Related_ Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license. Close window ## Republish this article This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. We encourage republication of our original content. Please copy the HTML code in the textbox below, preserving the attribution and link to the article's original location, and only make minor cosmetic edits to the content on your site. # ‘Wow, he actually admitted it’: Trump says US can’t pay for childcare because it’s ‘fighting wars’ instead by Julia Conley, The Real News Network April 2, 2026 <h1>‘Wow, he actually admitted it’: Trump says US can’t pay for childcare because it’s ‘fighting wars’ instead</h1> <p class="byline">by Julia Conley, The Real News Network <br />April 2, 2026</p> <div class="wp-block-media-text is-stacked-on-mobile" style="grid-template-columns:33% auto"> <figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img src="https://therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png" alt="Common Dreams Logo" class="wp-image-268291 size-full" /></figure> <div class="wp-block-media-text__content"> <p><em>This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on </em><a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-daycare" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>April 02, 2026</em></a><em>.</em> <em>It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.</em></p> </p></div> </div> <p class="has-drop-cap">Two days after Secretary of State <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/marco-rubio" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Marco Rubio</a> unironically <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/rubio-ironically-says-iran-should-spend-money-on-its-people-not-on-the-military/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">advised</a> Iran to spend its public funds “helping the people of Iran” instead of on weapons, President <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/donald-trump" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Donald Trump</a> announced that the US government has “to take care of one thing: military protection” and isn’t able to provide people in the US with necessities like <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/healthcare" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">healthcare</a> and childcare.</p> <p>“Oh wow, he actually admitted it,” <a href="https://x.com/RepYassAnsari/status/2039489881509150732" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said</a> US Rap. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.) in response.</p> <p>At an Easter lunch at the <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/white-house" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">White House</a> Wednesday, the president said that “the <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/united-states" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">United States</a> can’t take care of daycare” and demanded that states fully fund childcare programs.</p> <p>“We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare. You gotta let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it too,” said Trump. “It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/medicaid" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Medicaid</a>, <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/medicare" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Medicare</a>, all these individual things.”</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"> <div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> https://twitter.com/factpostnews/status/2039444784083771629?s=20 </div> </figure> <p>The wars the president has waged and threatened to wage since taking office last year include his <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/why-trump-kidnapped-maduro" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">invasion</a> of <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/venezuela" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Venezuela</a> in January and the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro; the killing of more than 160 people in <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/hrw-condemns-boat-strikes" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">boat bombings</a> in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean; an <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/oil" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">oil</a> blockade on <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/cuba" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cuba</a> that’s left tens of thousands of people <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/us-blockade-kills-cubans" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">waiting</a> for surgeries and unable to access essential medications, with Trump <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/cuba-and-us-war" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">threatening</a> to take over the country by force; and the current US-Israeli war on Iran.</p> <p>The conflicts that Trump said Americans must sacrifice federal funding for public programs in order to continue are <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-venezuela-war-poll" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">opposed</a> by a <a href="https://www.aclu.org/documents/aclu-yougov-poll-on-u-s-boat-strikes" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">majority</a><a href="https://www.aclu.org/documents/aclu-yougov-poll-on-u-s-boat-strikes"></a> of Americans, <a href="https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5790498-trump-threatens-cuba-takeover/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">according</a> to <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/iran-war-too-far-poll" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">polls</a>. All have been <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/un-experts-venezuela" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">called</a> violations of <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/un-human-rights-chief-cuba-blockade" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">international</a> law by <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-iran-war-illegal" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">legal</a> experts.</p> <p>Trump’s comments on the government’s inability to provide public services came as the <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/pentagon" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Pentagon</a> is seeking $200 billion to continue <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/hell-no-pentagon-wants-over-200-billion-to-fund-trump-s-illegal-iran-war" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">funding</a> the war on Iran, which has killed nearly 2,000 Iranians and more than 1,000 people across the Middle East as the conflict has widened, and exacerbated the US affordability crisis by <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/4-dollar-gas-iran" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">raising</a> average gas prices to over $4 per gallon.</p> <p>A 2021 analysis by The <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/new-york-times" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">New York Times</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/06/upshot/child-care-biden.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">found</a> that the US spends about $500 per family each year on early childhood care, or roughly 0.2% of its GDP. Other wealthy countries that the US considers its peers spend an average of more than $14,000 per family annually, with Norway spending close to $30,000, Finland spending more than $23,000, and Germany spending over $18,000.</p> <p>The president has previously attacked childcare spending, <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-cuts-federal-funding" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">cutting</a> $10 billion in federal childcare funds to five Democratic-led states in response to a social services fraud scandal in Minnesota. Medicaid cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed last year are projected amount to about $1 trillion over the next decade, and hundreds of hospitals are <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-medicaid-cuts-hospitals" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">at risk</a> of closing or having to reduce healthcare services as a result of the cuts—which, in addition to funding Trump’s military actions, <a href="https://www.cbpp.org/blog/republican-megabills-tax-cuts-for-millionaires-are-financed-by-taking-health-insurance-from-47" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">helped pay</a> for <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/tax-cuts" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">tax cuts</a> for corporations and the rich.</p> <p>“The warmongers in the White House and Congress will always fund death and destruction,” <a href="https://x.com/RashidaTlaib/status/2039530737402323101" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said</a> Rep. <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/rashida-tlaib" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Rashida Tlaib</a> (D-Mich.) Wednesday night after Trump’s comments. “They will let people in our country starve and die before they stop funding wars.”</p> <p>Graham Platner, a Democratic candidate for <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/us-senate" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">US Senate</a> in <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/maine" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Maine</a>, said Trump’s remarks were a simple statement of fact about the choice the administration has made about its priorities.</p> <p>“Trump is right. A pointless war or universal daycare,” <a href="https://x.com/grahamformaine/status/2039529813916938561" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said</a> Platner. “He’s right: That’s the choice.”</p> <p>This <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com/trump-daycare">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com">The Real News Network</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/cropped-TRNN-2021-logomark-square.png?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;"></p> <img id="republication-tracker-tool-source" src="https://therealnews.com/?republication-pixel=true&post=342429&amp;ga4=G-7LYS8R7V51" style="width:1px;height:1px;"><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: "https://therealnews.com/trump-daycare", urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id="parsely-cfg" src="//cdn.parsely.com/keys/therealnews.com/p.js"></script> Copy to Clipboard 1

‘Wow, he actually admitted it’: Trump says US can’t pay for childcare because it’s ‘fighting wars’ instead

https://therealnews.com/trump-daycare

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The Biggest US Meatpacking Strike in 40 Years Is Still On At the sprawling JBS beef processing plant in Greeley, Colorado, 3,800 workers from around the world have united to carry out the largest US meatpacking strike in 40 years.

The Biggest US Meatpacking Strike in 40 Years Is Still On

jacobin.com/2026/04/meatpacking-ulp-...

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Dems Claim to Want a Hasan Piker — Then Try to Cancel Him Democrats spent the last year asking where their Joe Rogan was. Hasan Piker is one of the few left-wing figures with the audience they covet — but the party is deeply hostile to the spontaneity and independence that make figures like him appealing.

Dems Claim to Want a Hasan Piker — Then Try to Cancel Him

jacobin.com/2026/04/democrats-piker-...

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Private Equity Firm Apollo Has a Labor Abuse Problem ### The AFL-CIO is calling on private equity firm Apollo — whose CEO has come under fire for ties to Jeffrey Epstein — to investigate growing reports of labor abuses at its subsidiaries, including union busting and intimidation of immigrant workers. * * * America’s largest labor federation is calling on the global private equity firm Apollo Global Management to investigate worker surveillance, wrongful terminations, and intimidation of immigrant workers at its subsidiaries. (Lionel Ng / Bloomberg via Getty Images) America’s largest labor federation is calling on the global private equity firm Apollo Global Management to investigate worker surveillance, wrongful terminations, and intimidation of immigrant workers at its subsidiaries. The union is also sounding the alarm over Apollo CEO Mark Rowan’s connections to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, as well as to President Donald Trump’s push to condition university funding on adoption of conservative policies, including strict gender definitions. In a March 11 letter, the fifteen-million-member American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) detailed a “growing list of unaddressed workers’ rights violations” that allegedly occurred at three Apollo-owned companies. The AFL-CIO is urging Apollo’s board to “take action when red flags indicate potential wrongdoing” and to review its subsidiaries’ compliance with the company’s stated “Responsible Workforce Principles.” These principles state that companies will support discrimination-free workplaces, respect unionizing rights, and uphold other worker protections. In a written response to the union dated March 18, Apollo noted, “Neither Apollo nor any of its portfolio companies have ever interfered with an existing collective bargaining agreement.” The company response, which was shared with the _Lever_ , also noted, “Your letter cherry picks three isolated examples (two of which were not even originally equity investments) and ignores hundreds of other portfolio companies over the years, many of which have had productive and successful union engagement.” Through the various companies they own, private equity firms like Apollo employ roughly 10 percent of the private sector workforce, and many of these jobs are in high-risk, low-wage industries. Companies acquired by private equity firms have gone on to be associated with workforce neglect and anti-union tactics. # Disputes at Apollo-Owned Firms Among its list of concerns, the AFL-CIO highlighted incidents at a Kentucky-based facility run by Maker’s Pride, an Illinois-based food manufacturer acquired by Apollo and another private equity firm in March 2025. According to the union, workers at the company allege that managers surveilled unionization efforts, reported such activity to the police, and fired four organizers, among other actions. In September 2025, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency tasked with overseeing unions, agreed with workers, ordering Maker’s Pride to cease anti-union efforts and reinstate the terminated workers. While the labor violations took place before Apollo acquired the company, the private equity firm has kept the same management in place and is now appealing the NLRB ruling. “Appealing the decision will delay justice for the fired workers, further deteriorate worker morale, and embolden management to stay the course,” the AFL-CIO noted in its letter to Apollo. “The union avoidance activities described in the . . . decision are in direct conflict with Apollo’s Responsible Workforce Principles.” In its response to the union, Apollo noted that its funds cannot “dictate members of the management team.” According to the AFL-CIO, other labor rights violations occurred at Apollo-owned Heritage Grocers Group facilities in Illinois and the Southwest. That allegedly included hiring a union-busting consultant and running an anti-union website and text campaign. The AFL-CIO letter suggested that some of the anti-union messaging seemed designed to intimidate immigrant workers, noting that the local union has “no special relationship with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and that signing a union card will not help with immigration issues.” Heritage Grocers Group facilities have also settled prior class action lawsuits alleging pay, overtime, meal break, and rest time violations. “Without addressing each labor claim that has been made against the company, we note that the [local union] has withdrawn several labor-related complaints, and the [NLRB] has dismissed others,” the firm wrote in its letter to the union, adding that some of the actions predate Apollo ownership. Finally, at the 5 Times Square skyscraper in Manhattan, AFL-CIO representatives say Apollo-owned companies have employed subcontractors in an attempt to bypass the firm’s competitive wage and benefits standards, which Apollo subsidiaries are required to pay. Apollo told the union it does not control the business operating at the site, and that “the team was responsive to labor concerns and . . . pulled awards after receiving third-party verification of a subcontractor’s labor related violations.” The AFL-CIO noted that Apollo has a duty to adhere to its own workforce policies not just for the sake of the millions it employs but also for the millions more who have pension funds and retirement savings invested in the firm. “Billions of dollars of workers’ hard-earned pension assets are invested in Apollo or Apollo-managed private funds,” the letter states. “These workers rely upon the responsible stewardship of their investments for their retirement security.” * * * This article was first published by the Lever, an award-winning independent investigative newsroom.

Private Equity Firm Apollo Has a Labor Abuse Problem

jacobin.com/2026/04/apollo-private-e...

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Capitalism Had a Beginning and Will Someday End Historian Sven Beckert on where the capitalist system came from, what keeps it alive, and what it would take to bring it down.

Capitalism Had a Beginning and Will Someday End

jacobin.com/2026/04/capitalism-histo...

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_This article was originally published byTruthout on April 01, 2026. It is shared here under a __Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license._ Secretary of State Marco Rubio lectured Iran in interviews this week, saying that the country should be spending money on supporting its people rather than on weapons and militaristic causes — an ironic statement coming from an administration that has gutted the U.S.’s social safety net while requesting a record-shattering Pentagon budget. “Imagine an Iran that, instead of spending their wealth, billions of dollars, supporting terrorists or weapons, had spent that money helping the people of Iran,” said Rubio, speaking of the administration’s hopes for regime change in their war in an interview on _ABC_ ’s “Good Morning America” on Monday. “You’d have a much different country. So we are always hopeful that that would exist over there.” He repeated that sentiment in an interview with _Al Jazeera_ that same day, adding that the country “wouldn’t have water shortages” and that their economy “would provide opportunities for an incredible people.” His statements ignore that the U.S.’s strict, decades-old sanctions regime is responsible for over $1 trillion in damages to Iran’s economy, Iranian officials have said. They also ignore that, the same day as Rubio’s interviews, President Donald Trump threatened to destroy “all desalinization[_sic_] plants” in Iran, which would threaten crucial water infrastructure for the country and constitute a clear war crime, experts have said. **GET FEARLESS, AD-FREE, UNCOMPROMISING REAL NEWS IN YOUR INBOX** Sign up Rubio’s comments are highly hypocritical coming from a top official in an administration that, with Republicans in Congress, enacted sweeping cuts to some of the most crucial anti-poverty programs in the U.S., Medicaid, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, kicking millions off their benefits last year. The U.S. and Israel’s war is also causing prices for oil and gas to skyrocket globally — which affects nearly every industry, with price hikes being passed on to consumers. While some countries have offered economic provisions to their citizens to ease price shocks, the Trump administration has dismissed the public’s economic concerns. Last month, top economic adviser Kevin Hassett said that the war will “hurt consumers” if it’s extended, but “that’s really the last of our concerns right now.” Meanwhile, Congress is slated to soon consider Trump’s record-shattering request for a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget in 2027 — up from the already sky-high budget for this year of $1 trillion. At the same time, the administration has reportedly requested a towering $200 billion in supplemental funding just for the war. The U.S. already has by far the largest military in the world, spending more on defense than the next nine countries combined, while also having sent over $30 billion in military support to Israel in the first two years of its genocide in Gaza. Top House Republicans are reportedly looking to enact even further cuts to Affordable Care Act subsidies in order to fund the Trump administration’s request for $200 billion in supplemental Pentagon funding for its war. These cuts could cause 300,000 more people to lose their health insurance, on top of the 16 million people estimated to lose their coverage due to the Republican cuts last year. Rubio’s comment is also hypocritical considering that this administration has denounced socialist countries that maintain anti-poverty programs, as well as his previous remarks criticizing proposals to fund public programs when he was in the Senate. ### _Related_ Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license. Close window ## Republish this article This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. We encourage republication of our original content. Please copy the HTML code in the textbox below, preserving the attribution and link to the article's original location, and only make minor cosmetic edits to the content on your site. # Rubio ironically says Iran should spend money on its people, not on the military by Sharon Zhang, The Real News Network April 1, 2026 <h1>Rubio ironically says Iran should spend money on its people, not on the military</h1> <p class="byline">by Sharon Zhang, The Real News Network <br />April 1, 2026</p> <div class="wp-block-media-text is-stacked-on-mobile" style="grid-template-columns:33% auto"> <figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img src="https://therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/truthout-logo.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-277549 size-full" /></figure> <div class="wp-block-media-text__content"> <p><em>This article was originally published by <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/rubio-ironically-says-iran-should-spend-money-on-its-people-not-on-the-military/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Truthout</a> on April 01, 2026. It is shared here under a <em> </em><a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)</a> license.</em></p> </p></div> </div> <p class="has-drop-cap">Secretary of State Marco Rubio lectured Iran in interviews this week, saying that the country should be spending money on supporting its people rather than on weapons and militaristic causes — an ironic statement coming from an administration that has gutted the U.S.’s social safety net while requesting a record-shattering Pentagon budget.</p> <p>“Imagine an Iran that, instead of spending their wealth, billions of dollars, supporting terrorists or weapons, had spent that money helping the people of Iran,” <a href="https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/03/secretary-of-state-marco-rubio-with-george-stephanopoulos-of-abc-good-morning-america" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said</a> Rubio, speaking of the administration’s hopes for regime change in their war in an interview on <em>ABC</em>’s “Good Morning America” on Monday. “You’d have a much different country. So we are always hopeful that that would exist over there.”</p> <p>He repeated that sentiment in an interview with <em>Al Jazeera</em> that same day, <a href="https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/03/secretary-of-state-marco-rubio-with-hashem-ahelbarra-of-al-jazeera" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">adding that</a> the country “wouldn’t have water shortages” and that their economy “would provide opportunities for an incredible people.” His statements ignore that the U.S.’s strict, decades-old sanctions regime is responsible <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/2/21/us-sanctions-inflicted-1-trillion-damage-on-irans-economy-fm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">for over $1 trillion</a> in damages to Iran’s economy, Iranian officials have said.</p> <p>They also ignore that, the same day as Rubio’s interviews, <a href="https://apnews.com/article/trump-iran-threat-desalination-plants-war-f624bed66bee79f68454d581ae1d624a" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">President Donald Trump threatened</a> to destroy “all desalinization[<em>sic</em>] plants” in Iran, which would threaten crucial water infrastructure for the country and <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/30/trump-threatens-to-blow-up-all-desalination-plants-in-iran" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">constitute a clear war crime</a>, experts have said.</p> <p>Rubio’s comments are highly hypocritical coming from a top official in an administration that, with Republicans in Congress, enacted sweeping cuts to some of the most crucial anti-poverty programs in the U.S., Medicaid, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, kicking millions off their benefits last year.</p> <p>The U.S. and Israel’s war is also causing prices for oil and gas to skyrocket globally — which <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/29/americans-struggling-rising-costs-iran-war" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">affects nearly every industry</a>, with price hikes being passed on to consumers.</p> <p>While some countries have <a href="https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/spain-to-temporarily-freeze-rents-due-to-middle-east-war-pm/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">offered economic provisions</a> to their citizens to ease price shocks, the Trump administration has dismissed the public’s economic concerns. Last month, top economic adviser Kevin Hassett <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/trump-adviser-says-war-induced-pain-to-consumers-is-the-last-of-our-concerns/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said</a> that the war will “hurt consumers” if it’s extended, but “that’s really the last of our concerns right now.”</p> <p>Meanwhile, Congress is slated to soon <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/07/trump-calls-record-defense-budget-00715298" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">consider Trump’s record-shattering request</a> for a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget in 2027 — up from the already sky-high budget for this year of $1 trillion. At the same time, the administration has reportedly requested a towering $200 billion in supplemental funding just for the war.</p> <p>The U.S. already has by far the largest military in the world, <a href="https://www.pgpf.org/article/chart-pack-defense-spending/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">spending more</a> on defense than the next nine countries combined, while also <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/report-us-spent-over-30b-backing-israel-regional-wars-in-2-years-of-genocide/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">having sent over $30 billion</a> in military support to Israel in the first two years of its genocide in Gaza.</p> <p>Top House Republicans <a href="https://www.axios.com/2026/03/30/gop-health-care-pay-iran-war" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">are reportedly</a> looking to enact even further cuts to Affordable Care Act subsidies in order to fund the Trump administration’s request for $200 billion <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/trump-asks-for-taxpayers-to-shell-out-200b-to-fund-his-deadly-cost-raising-war/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">in supplemental Pentagon funding for its war</a>. These cuts could cause 300,000 more people to lose their health insurance, on top of the 16 million people estimated to lose their coverage due to the Republican cuts last year.</p> <p>Rubio’s comment is also hypocritical considering that this administration has denounced <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/30/rubio-denies-us-punitive-actions-blames-cuba-for-economic-failures" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">socialist countries</a> that maintain anti-poverty programs, as well as his <a href="https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/problem-marco-rubio-s-misplaced-interest-marxism-n1280557" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">previous remarks</a> criticizing proposals to fund public programs when he was in the Senate.</p> <p>This <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com/rubio-iran-money-on-people-not-on-military">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com">The Real News Network</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/cropped-TRNN-2021-logomark-square.png?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;"></p> <img id="republication-tracker-tool-source" src="https://therealnews.com/?republication-pixel=true&post=342418&amp;ga4=G-7LYS8R7V51" style="width:1px;height:1px;"><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: "https://therealnews.com/rubio-iran-money-on-people-not-on-military", urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id="parsely-cfg" src="//cdn.parsely.com/keys/therealnews.com/p.js"></script> Copy to Clipboard 1

Rubio ironically says Iran should spend money on its people, not on the military

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_This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on_ _Mar. 31, 2026_ _._ _It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license._ Just days after the GOP-controlled Senate skipped town once they failed to send a voter suppression bill to President Donald Trump’s desk, the Republican on Tuesday signed an executive order to create a nationwide list of US voters and crack down on voting by mail—which is how he voted in Florida’s most recent election. The order, Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections, was first reported by the Daily Caller, a right-wing outlet. It requires the secretary of homeland security to establish a “citizenship list” of verified eligible voters in each state, using Social Security Administration records and other federal databases. Trump—who has repeatedly spread lies about election fraud, including his unfounded claim that Democrats stole the 2020 election from him, which led to his supporters storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021—also directed the postmaster general to craft rules for absentee ballots sent through the US Postal Service. Legal experts expect the order will be swiftly challenged in court as unconstitutional. David Becker, a former US Department of Justice lawyer who now leads the Center for Election Innovation and Research, told Democracy Docket that “it’s obvious the president didn’t learn anything from his first failed executive order.” “This is unconstitutional on its face. The Constitution clearly gives the president no power over elections,” he said. “I expect that this will be blocked by multiple federal courts in a very short period of time and have no legal effect whatsoever.” Becker also noted that “after the Department of Justice has been telling courts they’re not creating a national voter list, this appears to confirm exactly what courts were concerned about.” Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket and a longtime election lawyer for Democrats, similarly said that “this is a massive and unconstitutional voter suppression effort aimed at giving Trump the power to create a list of who is allowed to vote by mail.” “We know where this will go—the targeting of Democrats for mass disenfranchisement,” he added. “We will sue and we will win.” > With Marc at his battle station, voters will AGAIN win. https://t.co/KQYsdqGMq8 > > — Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) March 31, 2026 US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) shared a message for the administration on social media: “See you in court. You will lose.” **GET FEARLESS, AD-FREE, UNCOMPROMISING REAL NEWS IN YOUR INBOX** Sign up Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration and California’s former secretary of state, said in a statement that “instead of focusing on lowering the cost of energy, groceries, and healthcare, Donald Trump is desperately attempting to take over and rig our elections and avoid accountability in November.” The order was issued just over seven months away from the midterm elections that could hand control of Congress back to the Democrats—which could, in term, lead to a historic third impeachment for Trump. “This executive order is a blatant, unconstitutional abuse of power,” Padilla declared. “The president and the Department of Homeland Security have no authority to commandeer federal elections or direct the independent Postal Service to undermine mail and absentee voting that nearly 50 million Americans relied on in 2024. A decade of lies about election fraud does not change the Constitution.” “Make no mistake: Trump’s attacks on our elections are a clear and present threat to our democracy. In the middle of an unauthorized war abroad and an escalating authoritarian crackdown by ICE here at home, Trump is attempting another illegal power grab,” he added, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “I will use every tool I can to stop him, and I expect immediate legal challenges in order to protect our free and fair elections.” > The president has zero power to make any changes to mail-in voting so I expect this to be another nothing-burger. https://t.co/9pk7a5oYjf > > — Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) March 31, 2026 After signing the order, Trump signaled that he, too, expects a court battle. While holding up the order, he said that “I don’t know how it can be challenged,” but critics will “probably challenge it” and “find a rogue judge.” There are “a lot of rogue judges. Very bad, bad people. Very bad judges,” he added. “But that’s the only way that can be changed, and hopefully we’ll win on appeal if it is. But I don’t see how anybody can challenge it.” Trump signed the order after unsuccessfully trying to convince the GOP-controlled Senate to pass the SAVE America Act—already approved by Republicans in the House of Representatives—before the current recess. The bill would require US voters to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and to show photo identification to participate in federal elections. Trump has been pushing for amendments to restrict mail-in voting as well as more attacks on transgender Americans. While Trump and other supporters of the bill have claimed it is needed to stop noncitizens from voting, that is already illegal and, according to research, incredibly rare. Critics warn that the SAVE America Act would disenfranchise eligible voters who don’t have access to citizenship documents, including people who have lost paperwork, can’t afford replacements, or have changed their names. ### _Related_ Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license. Close window ## Republish this article This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. We encourage republication of our original content. Please copy the HTML code in the textbox below, preserving the attribution and link to the article's original location, and only make minor cosmetic edits to the content on your site. # Lawsuits expected after Trump orders creation of national voter list, mail-in voting crackdown by Jessica Corbett, The Real News Network April 1, 2026 <h1>Lawsuits expected after Trump orders creation of national voter list, mail-in voting crackdown</h1> <p class="byline">by Jessica Corbett, The Real News Network <br />April 1, 2026</p> <div class="wp-block-media-text is-stacked-on-mobile" style="grid-template-columns:33% auto"> <figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img src="https://therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cd_stacked_white_600.png" alt="Common Dreams Logo" class="wp-image-268291 size-full" /></figure> <div class="wp-block-media-text__content"> <p><em>This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on </em><a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-voting-executive-order" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>Mar. 31, 2026</em></a><em>.</em> <em>It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.</em></p> </p></div> </div> <p class="has-drop-cap">Just days after the GOP-controlled Senate skipped town once they failed to send a voter suppression bill to President Donald Trump’s desk, the Republican on Tuesday signed an <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/03/ensuring-citizenship-verification-and-integrity-in-federal-elections/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">executive order</a> to create a nationwide list of US voters and crack down on voting by mail—which is how he <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/did-trump-vote-by-mail" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">voted</a> in Florida’s most recent election.</p> <p>The order, Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections, was first <a href="https://dailycaller.com/2026/03/31/trump-mail-in-voting-executive-order-save-america-act-midterms/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reported</a> by the Daily Caller, a <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/right-wing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">right-wing</a> outlet. It requires the secretary of homeland security to establish a “citizenship list” of verified eligible voters in each state, using <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/social-security" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Social Security</a> Administration records and other federal databases.</p> <p>Trump—who has repeatedly spread lies about election fraud, including his unfounded claim that Democrats stole the 2020 election from him, which led to his supporters storming the Capitol on <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/january-6" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">January 6</a>, 2021—also directed the postmaster general to craft rules for absentee ballots sent through the <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/us-postal-service" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">US Postal Service</a>.</p> <p>Legal experts expect the order will be swiftly challenged in court as unconstitutional. David Becker, a former <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/us-department-of-justice" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">US Department of Justice</a> lawyer who now leads the Center for Election Innovation and Research, <a href="https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/trump-signs-sweeping-order-attacking-mail-in-voting/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">told</a> <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/democracy" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Democracy</a> Docket that “it’s obvious the president didn’t learn anything from his <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-executive-order-elections" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">first failed executive order</a>.”</p> <p>“This is unconstitutional on its face. The Constitution clearly gives the president no power over elections,” he said. “I expect that this will be blocked by multiple federal courts in a very short period of time and have no legal effect whatsoever.”</p> <p>Becker also noted that “after the <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/department-of-justice" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Department of Justice</a> has been telling courts they’re not creating a national voter list, this appears to confirm exactly what courts were concerned about.”</p> <p>Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket and a longtime election lawyer for Democrats, similarly said that “this is a massive and unconstitutional voter suppression effort aimed at giving Trump the power to create a list of who is allowed to vote by mail.”</p> <p>“We know where this will go—the targeting of Democrats for mass disenfranchisement,” he added. “We will sue and we will win.”</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"> <div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> https://twitter.com/RepSwalwell/status/2039099933429846232?s=20 </div> </figure> <p><a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/us-senate" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">US Senate</a> Minority Leader <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/chuck-schumer" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Chuck Schumer</a> (D-NY) <a href="https://x.com/SenSchumer/status/2039091317301522606" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">shared</a> a message for the administration on <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/social-media" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">social media</a>: “See you in court. You will lose.”</p> <p>Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration and California’s former secretary of state, said in a statement that “instead of focusing on lowering the cost of energy, groceries, and <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/healthcare" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">healthcare</a>, <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/donald-trump" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Donald Trump</a> is desperately attempting to take over and rig our elections and avoid accountability in November.”</p> <p>The order was issued just over seven months away from the <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/midterm-elections" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">midterm elections</a> that could hand control of Congress back to the Democrats—which could, in term, lead to a historic third <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/impeachment" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">impeachment</a> for Trump.</p> <p>“This executive order is a blatant, unconstitutional abuse of power,” Padilla declared. “The president and the Department of Homeland Security have no authority to commandeer federal elections or direct the independent Postal Service to undermine mail and absentee voting that nearly 50 million Americans relied on in 2024. A decade of lies about election fraud does not change the Constitution.”</p> <p>“Make no mistake: Trump’s attacks on our elections are a clear and present threat to our democracy. In the middle of an unauthorized war abroad and an escalating authoritarian crackdown by ICE here at home, Trump is attempting another illegal power grab,” he added, referring to <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/immigration" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Immigration</a> and Customs Enforcement. “I will use every tool I can to stop him, and I expect immediate legal challenges in order to protect our free and fair elections.”</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"> <div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> https://twitter.com/ReichlinMelnick/status/2039087693871628303?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2039087693871628303%7Ctwgr%5Eb72f5eaf078b562ce0bdb6097444d1ecd11eff1e%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Ftrump-voting-executive-order </div> </figure> <p>After signing the order, Trump <a href="https://x.com/MAGAVoice/status/2039096830857015304?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">signaled</a> that he, too, expects a court battle. While holding up the order, he said that “I don’t know how it can be challenged,” but critics will “probably challenge it” and “find a rogue judge.”</p> <p>There are “a lot of rogue judges. Very bad, bad people. Very bad judges,” he added. “But that’s the only way that can be changed, and hopefully we’ll win on appeal if it is. But I don’t see how anybody can challenge it.”</p> <p>Trump signed the order after unsuccessfully trying to <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/save-america-act" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">convince</a> the GOP-controlled Senate to pass the SAVE America Act—already <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/republican-pass-save-act" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">approved</a> by <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/tag/republicans" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Republicans</a> in the House of Representatives—before the current recess.</p> <p>The bill would require US voters to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and to show photo identification to participate in federal elections. Trump has been pushing for amendments to restrict mail-in voting as well as more attacks on transgender Americans.</p> <p>While Trump and other supporters of the bill have claimed it is needed to stop noncitizens from voting, that is already illegal and, according to research, incredibly rare. Critics warn that the SAVE America Act would disenfranchise eligible voters who don’t have access to citizenship documents, including people who have lost paperwork, can’t afford replacements, or have changed their names.</p> <p>This <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com/trump-national-voter-list-mail-in-voting-crackdown">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://therealnews.com">The Real News Network</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="https://i0.wp.com/therealnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/cropped-TRNN-2021-logomark-square.png?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;"></p> <img id="republication-tracker-tool-source" src="https://therealnews.com/?republication-pixel=true&post=342412&amp;ga4=G-7LYS8R7V51" style="width:1px;height:1px;"><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: "https://therealnews.com/trump-national-voter-list-mail-in-voting-crackdown", urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id="parsely-cfg" src="//cdn.parsely.com/keys/therealnews.com/p.js"></script> Copy to Clipboard 1

Lawsuits expected after Trump orders creation of national voter list, mail-in voting crackdown

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‘Don’t be a snitch’: US postal workers side with communities over collaboration with ICE

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<cite>Palestine 36</cite> Reclaims a Buried Anti‑Colonial Revolt ### Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36 resurrects the mass anti‑colonial revolt that Britain crushed with overwhelming force — and shows how its legacy still shapes the present. * * * Still from Palestine 36. (Watermelon Pictures) Bethlehem-born writer-director Annemarie Jacir is at the cutting edge of a new generation of Palestinian filmmakers breaking through to Western audiences and beyond with undeniably powerful movies. Jacir’s 2008 _Salt of this Sea_ received two nominations at the Cannes Film Festival, while her 2012 Palestinian refugee drama, _When I Saw You_ , costarring Saleh Bakri, won an award at the Berlin International Film Festival. Now, her latest feature, _Palestine 36_ — which also costars Bakri as well as Academy Award winner Jeremy Irons — is having the national release Jacir’s epic richly deserves. As its title suggests, _Palestine 36_ — which was Palestine’s official selection for Best International Feature at the Academy Awards and winner of the Tokyo International Film Festival’s Best Film Award — fictionalizes a key period in the ongoing Palestinian liberation struggle. According to Rashid Khalidi’s _The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine_ , by 1939, the British military dispatched “a hundred thousand troops in Palestine, one for every four adult Palestinian men. . . . It took the full might of the British Empire, which could only be unleashed when more troops became available after the Munich Agreement in 1938 . . . to extinguish the Palestinian uprising.” In this candid conversation, Jacir lays out the historical context and framework within which she dramatizes the mass uprising that began when Yasser Arafat was only seven years old — a revolt that shook the mightiest military in Europe. Jacir was interviewed for _Jacobin_ by film historian and critic Ed Rampell. * * * Ed Rampell Tell us about your personal background and how you got into filmmaking? Annemarie Jacir My parents are Palestinians from Bethlehem. My father is turning ninety, he was born in 1936, the first year of the revolt. My mother was born in the last year of the revolt in 1939. Ed Rampell Your family is Christian? Annemarie Jacir I am an _atheist_. Ed Rampell But you were born into a Christian family? Annemarie Jacir Yes. After Palestine was occupied, the West Bank was occupied in ’67, they stayed there for a couple of years, they decided, they found work abroad and didn’t want to bring up a family under occupation. I grew up in Saudi Arabia, lived there for the first sixteen years of my life. I came to the US after that and my undergraduate was political studies and literature, at the Claremont Colleges in California, at Pitzer. I graduated from Pitzer with a double major, I was interested in film my final year and thought of switching majors. And my father said, “You just did a double major. Get out of school and finish.” So, I moved into LA where I lived a few years trying to learn about how to make films. I was contacting everybody about a job, production assistant, whatever. Those were very rough years and I found that LA really wasn’t my kind of city. I didn’t have the connections, couldn’t get into the film industry, so I was doing crappy jobs that were not really teaching me about filmmaking. I ended up at a literary agency representing screenwriters and started reading lots of scripts. I still didn’t feel like the whole machine of Hollywood was the kind of cinema I wanted to make. Then I went to graduate school in New York at Columbia and studied film. After that, I went to Palestine and have been living in Palestine ever since. Ed Rampell _Palestine 36_ brilliantly dramatizes history, especially events that few Westerners have ever heard of. Americans tend to think that between the two world wars, Britain was at peace, until it went to war with the Nazis in 1939. Your film shows otherwise. So, what happened in 1936 in Palestine? Annemarie Jacir In 1936, the British have already been in Palestine for almost twenty years. There’s already a lot of disgruntlement to begin with. The early years of British control [as a League of Nations Mandate], there was probably some kind of feeling that things were going to get better. But they didn’t. It was a project to control the resources and people. Also, there was, and I’m surprised how few people know this, there was Jewish emigration. But it was before the Holocaust. Yeah, because there was antisemitism, pogroms, and fascism, and Jews were fleeing Europe way before the Holocaust. Everybody thinks it happens later, when Palestine is flooded with refugees. Jews were emigrating — of course, there’s an indigenous Jewish population in Palestine, it was very small. Palestinian society is Jewish, Muslim, Christian, very mixed. So you look at the numbers of [Jewish emigration], and you see this influx. These things were all coming together and creating a tense atmosphere. There was the beginning of the first mass revolt against British colonialism in 1936. It included a national strike that was really the longest strike in history at that moment, a six-month strike. The revolt was really in two phases. It begins in ’36, and the British are losing control. Because it’s a farmer-led revolt. They couldn’t figure it out and began to lose control. Then there’s the Peel Commission, and they’re trying to figure out a diplomatic solution. And it becomes clear that there’s going to be no resolution. Then there’s the second phase of the revolt, which begins after the Peel Commission in 1937. That’s when the British brought in thousands and thousands of troops, weapons, tanks, planes — they were strafing the countryside. The purpose was to crush the revolt as quickly as possible. Many historians feel that was done as quickly as possible because World War II was on the horizon, so they had to crush this revolt and get out of there, basically. Ed Rampell That’s the historical background for the real-life events that you dramatize in _Palestine 36_ , largely through focusing on at least two Palestinian families. Amir and Khuloud are urban intellectuals in Jerusalem, and the villagers of rural Al Basma. The two families are connected by Yusuf. Tell us about these characters and how fact-based they are? Annemarie Jacir The heart of the film is the Palestinian villagers. Yusuf and his family, and Rabab [Yafa Bakri] and her daughter Afra [Wardi Eilabouni, with Nazareth-born Hiam Abbass, who was Emmy nominated for the HBO series _Succession_ , playing the grandmother Hanan], and the little boy Kareem [Ward Helou] and his father, the priest [Jalal Altawil plays Father Boulos]. These are our villagers. There’s Khuloud [Lebanon-born Yasmine Al Massri, costar of the ABC-TV FBI series _Quantico_] and Amir [Tunisia-born Dhafer L’Abidine] in the city. And there’s Khalid [Saleh Bakri, a frequent collaborator with Jacir and star of Cherien Dabis’s _All That’s Left of You_], a dockworker. "Everything the British did in Palestine, the Israelis just copied the blueprint." These characters all link up. For me, it was important, I didn’t want to have _a_ hero — the _one_ hero to do this classic story; you follow this person from here and there’s one hero. There’s no hero, they’re just regular people that are living through this very intense moment and they make a decision. All of them make a decision, whether it’s very small or big, wrong or right. They’re all confronted with history and they do something, they make a decision about how to move forward. The Palestinian characters are all fictional, they all come from different places. Khuloud, for example, the female journalist, she’s sort of a mix of upper-class female journalist, a socialite that was living in Jerusalem at the time and she was known very much for her parties with the British. The Palestinian elite was mixing with the British a lot. And women who were journalists at the time and founding printing presses — and not just in Palestine but also in Lebanon and Egypt — they’d write under male names, for two reasons. Yes, to be taken seriously in a patriarchal world, but also because these places had colonial governments and to write under a name when you were being critical, actually it’s protection. Ed Rampell And when we first see Khuloud, she’s cross-dressing. Why? Annemarie Jacir Yes, exactly. Why not? [Laughs] Ed Rampell It’s surprising. My interpretation is that as a woman in patriarchal society, she was assuming male roles that were denied to women. Annemarie Jacir Yeah. She’s writing under a male name. She’s having some fun with it, takes Amir’s suit. Who’s wearing the pants? [Laughs] The four British characters in the film are all based on actual historical characters. Wingate [a British officer and Christian Zionist played by Robert Aramayo] was a real guy, a really violent, unhinged man. They just released some papers with some new stuff about him; he was really much more crazy than my film shows. For me, his long hair was my poetic license but not historically accurate. He was always dirty, his uniform was always dirty, he never showered. He was known for being that way. Later, he had long hair, after he gets dismissed from the British Army, he was dismissed from Palestine actually. For me I wanted to indicate he was outside of the system, doing his own thing in the countryside. His unkempt hair was a way to signal that — but you can’t smell him onscreen. Thomas, the secretary [to the high commissioner], is based on a real guy who actually quit and became a Marxist. It’s an amazing story. He went there thinking there were good intentions, that they were doing something for the native population and it was helpful, then slowly, in his diaries, he realizes it is a failed project with an agenda, and he doesn’t want to be a part of it. He ends up quitting and becoming a Marxist and anti-colonial activist for the rest of his life. In my film he’s Hopkins [played by Billy Howle], but his real name was Hodgkin. Ed Rampell Oscar winner Jeremy Irons portrays Sir Arthur Grenfell Wauchope, Britain’s high commissioner for the Palestine Mandate. How did you manage to cast such a high-profile movie star? Annemarie Jacir Because he has an Irish wife, and we were on the Berlin film festival’s jury together. Irons was president of the jury. So we spent a lot of time together and became friends. I was writing this project at the time and telling him about it one day over breakfast and [his wife] was like, “This is amazing! Jeremy, you’ve got to be in this!” He was like, “Is there a role for me?” I was like, “ _Yeah_ there’s a role for you!” And he said, “Let me read the script. And if it’s helpful, I’d like to be part of it.” It was a beautiful role. Ed Rampell Liam Cunningham, costar of Ken Loach’s 2007 drama about the Irish War of Independence, _The Wind that Shakes the Barley_ , and of HBO’s _Game of Thrones_ , plays [Charles] Tegart, the real-life counterinsurgency expert who explains to the high commissioner and other British officials in your film the necessity of extremely brutal counterterrorist tactics to suppress the Arab Revolt. Is this scene a direct reference to the scenes of the pacification specialist in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film, _The Battle of Algiers_ _?_ Annemarie Jacir People have brought up _The Battle of Algiers_ a lot with this film. But you’re the first person [to connect it to] that scene. Yes, you’re the first person to put your finger on it.**** "This film is really a testament to what Palestinian creativity is, and what Palestinians can do, even in the worst conditions. We almost died making it. Now we give it to the world." Charles Tegart was Irish. They reference Ireland in the dialogue. That’s why Liam got such a kick out of playing that scene. This expert, he was in India, then they brought him to Palestine. He made a whole career out of this. He was the first one to come up with the concept of a wall, not the Israelis — they did it later. Everything the British did, the Israelis just copied the blueprint of it. And there are military forts all across the country, in order to create this system of control, called “Tegart’s forts.” They still exist. Ed Rampell Is that similar to the Strategic Hamlet Program in South Vietnam? Annemarie Jacir Yeah. Absolutely. Ed Rampell Are the period clips actual archival footage? Annemarie Jacir Yeah. Every time you see the [original screen ratio], that’s real archival footage — it’s not manipulated. We restored it and I colorized it; I didn’t want black and white. Ed Rampell Your film seems to suggest that two peoples were victimized by the Holocaust. Obviously, the Jewish people; but also, the Palestinians were impacted by the immigration of more and more Jews fleeing Nazism. Many came to Palestine. Especially as other countries around the world, including the US largely — Annemarie Jacir Shut their doors. Absolutely. Ed Rampell But of course, it wasn’t the Palestinians who perpetrated the Holocaust. Annemarie Jacir The European Aryans did it. They did the most vile thing: the Holocaust. Then didn’t want to take responsibility for it. And instead of dealing with their own racism, they threw it on Palestinians, who have no history of antisemitism. We are Semites also [laughs]. That was the [Westerners’] way of dealing with it: that we would deal with it. They shut their doors, the US shut their doors, and thought, “OK, the way we deal with our racism is to put these people somewhere else.” Which is just ridiculous. The Zionist project considered many other places besides Palestine: Argentina, Uganda, Palestine. There were many proposals. I think it would have been the same thing in Uganda, if the Zionist project was about dispossessing the native population. Palestine ended up being what was chosen. Palestine has never been closed to Jews. Jewish pilgrims have been coming to Palestine — I said there’s an indigenous population. There are also Jews who have been coming to Palestine for hundreds of years, as well as Muslims and Christians. Bosnians fled persecution and came to Palestine. Circassians fled persecution and came to Palestine — I’m talking about in the 1800s. Armenians fled persecution and came to Palestine and lived among the Palestinians and became part of the fabric of life. And if Jews had done that — escaped, had nowhere to go, needed to be protected, and they came like so many communities — we would be in a very different place today. The Zionist project wasn’t about that. It was about control and dispossession. Ed Rampell Which the British facilitated for their own imperial interests? Annemarie Jacir Of course. They played both sides. Ed Rampell Earlier, you mentioned the Peel Commission. One of the most dramatic, pivotal scenes of your entire film is a dinner party where the Peel Commission’s results are announced over the radio at the Jerusalem home of the intellectuals Amir and Khuloud. _Palestine 36_ clearly shows that the British, under the mandate as the colonizers, gave preferential treatment to the Zionists to pursue London’s own colonial interests. In retrospect, considering the massive suffering of Palestinians with the events in the 1930s depicted in your film, continuing with the Nakba, and most recently with the Gaza genocide and the ongoing persecution in the West Bank, do you think that even though it was a bad deal, that in retrospect the Palestinians would have been better off if they had accepted the partition offered? As the British radio announcer says when they’re broadcasting the Peel Commission’s results: “Half a loaf is better than no bread.” Annemarie Jacir I think it would have led to exactly the same thing. I don’t know why anybody would agree that a colonial or outside power would decide. The British and French partitioned the whole Arab world and all of Africa. They had no right to do so. So why anybody would accept that — it’s never going to happen. Now, you’re asking would we be in a better place today had they accepted that? The Peel Commission and that announcement that’s on the radio is word for word the conclusion of the Peel Commission, it’s not my creative writing. The Peel Commission was not giving Palestinians independence. It wasn’t just partition, it was also that the Palestinians would not be ruled by Palestinians — Ed Rampell And they’d be forcibly removed. Annemarie Jacir Yes, but they’d be ruled by Transjordan. Even if they split the Palestinian part, it wouldn’t be run by Palestinians — it would be run by the Transjordanian government, a pro-British creation. It wasn’t even independence in that way. It’s very important. Arabs aren’t this big blob, twenty-two countries are not all the same. It’s not monolithic. Ed Rampell Where did you shoot _Palestine 36_? Annemarie Jacir We shot in Jordan, Palestine, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Bethlehem. This film was made under such difficult conditions. We had to stop shooting four times. It was terrible. And we continued. What was supposed to be three months ended up being almost two years struggling to make this film, because we made it during the genocide. This film is really a testament to what Palestinian creativity is and what Palestinians can do, even in the worst of conditions. We almost died making it. Now we give it to the world. We hope they can meet us; we make films to connect. It’s all about connecting. That connection cannot be severed. We’ve got to fight for it. Ed Rampell More films are being released now in the West by Palestinian and Arab filmmakers, such as _The Voice of Hind Rajab_. Why do you think that’s happening now? Annemarie Jacir [Laughs] I don’t think it’s happening now. It’s been happening for a long time. There’s a new wave of Palestinian directors, there have been lots of films over the years. I think there are less now. However, it’s because of Watermelon [Pictures] distributing the films — that has always been the obstacle in America, it has always been difficult for our films to be seen in the US, to be shown. We have been left out of the distribution in the US. We’re blocked from reaching our audience and we’re prevented from being in cinemas. There are the gatekeepers — now, because of Watermelon, there is distribution of those films that others have been afraid to touch. Or if they did touch — I have had distribution with my other films but getting them into cinemas is a battle. You have to have a distributor ready to take on that battle. Watermelon is committed to doing that. Ed Rampell At the Academy Awards this year, presenter Javier Bardem said: “No to war. Free Palestine!” What did you think of that? Annemarie Jacir I loved that and I thought it was so much needed. I was wondering why, in general, the Oscars were so quiet and nobody was saying anything. And not even just about Palestine. The state of the world is beyond awful. It’s the darkest times everywhere. Thank God for Javier, that he said something. And I wonder why more people didn’t say anything. * * *

Palestine 36 Reclaims a Buried Anti‑Colonial Revolt

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Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate Opponent Is a Phony Populist Mallory McMorrow, who is running against Medicare for All champion Abdul El-Sayed for US Senate, recently went viral presenting herself as a populist crusader against surveillance pricing. Her record as a Michigan state legislator tells a different story.

Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate Opponent Is a Phony Populist

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Canada Is Redefining Who Can Seek Asylum Forty-one years after the Supreme Court of Canada affirmed the right of every refugee in the country to fundamental justice, Canada’s federal government is denying certain classes of refugees the right to an oral hearing.

Canada Is Redefining Who Can Seek Asylum

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The US and Israel Are Making Gaza-Style War the New Normal In Iran and Lebanon, the US and Israeli militaries are bombing dense residential blocks, destroying civilian infrastructure, slaughtering children, and assassinating health workers. If it sounds familiar, it’s because this is the Gaza playbook, transplanted.

The US and Israel Are Making Gaza-Style War the New Normal

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The Trump Library Is Going Full-On Supervillain Eight million people showed up at last weekend’s No Kings protests. Donald Trump's response? Release footage of a skyscraper bearing his name, a golden statue of himself, and a throne room with paid parking — and call it a “presidential library.”

The Trump Library Is Going Full-On Supervillain

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Why Yemen&#8217;s Houthis Opened a New Front in the Iran War ### Pushed by Tehran and domestic pressure, Yemen’s Houthis attacked Israel and joined the regional conflict. But they remain wary of reigniting their costly war with Saudi Arabia. * * * The Houthis have entered the Iran War, launching two ballistic missile attacks on Israel. (Mohammed Hamoud / Getty Images) In his inaugural speech on March 12, Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, announced that “new fronts” would be opened in Tehran’s war against the United States and Israel. Khamenei singled out Yemen’s “brave and faithful” Houthi movement, which forms part of a now-reduced resistance coalition of Iraqi and Lebanese militia fighting to “shorten the path to eliminating the Zionist sedition.” On March 26, the Houthis entered the war, launching two ballistic missile attacks over 2,000 kilometers into Israel. The date was selected to fall on the eleventh anniversary of the start of Saudi Arabia’s unsuccessful seven-year-long bombing campaign, launched in 2015 to roll back the Houthi takeover of the capital city Sanaa and much of northern Yemen, territory on which two-thirds of the population live. In a speech on “the National Day of Steadfastness,” the movement’s leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, made a distinction between the Houthi intervention and the Arab nations in “servitude to the tyranny” of “Zionist Jews and their Western Zionist supporters.” “Most regrettably,” al-Houthi said, “some regimes in this region have become entangled in serving them. They have opened their lands and deployed their wealth, media, and political positions in support of the aggression against the Islamic Republic of Iran.” The following day, the Houthi armed forces outlined their rationale and red lines. Yahya Saree, their spokesman, foregrounded that their fight was against the “Zionist scheme” and to enforce the Gaza ceasefire, rather than based on its alliance with Iran. Crucially, he said that the Houthis would not attack Muslim countries unless they joined a coalition with the United States and Israel. The Houthis emerged in the 1990s from Yemen’s Shia Zaydi population, a large religious minority whose heartland is the northern city of Saada. It was formed to combat corruption that they said had impoverished their territories and attacked the central government led by military ruler Ali Abdullah Saleh and his patron, Saudi Arabia. Saleh famously ruled by “dancing on the heads of snakes,” funneling oil revenues and Saudi cash through loyal tribal networks to prevent state fragmentation. The Houthis existed in a state of managed low-level warfare until in 2014, when following the Arab Spring’s failure, they marched into Sanaa. This triggered a war with Saudi Arabia and its junior coalition partner, the United Arab Emirates, which all but tore the social fabric of Yemen apart. Saudi Arabia instituted a highly destructive blockade of the country and backed a paper government, which lived much of its life in exile inside the kingdom. The Houthis killed Saleh in 2017 and the state fragmented. Yemen suffered a catastrophic humanitarian disaster due to a lack of food and medicine and Saudi bombing campaigns, sustained by the United States and the UK, killed tens of thousands, including civilians. Tehran helped the Houthis to develop a ballistic missile program — a cruder version of their own — which it used to target Saudi oil infrastructure, helping to establish the deterrence necessary to bring an end to the war. Following the 2022 ceasefire, the Houthis entrenched their power, which extends from the northwest down through the port of Hudaydah and into parts of the Taiz governorate. The powerful Islamist militia survives through a war economy characterized in part by oil racketeering, tolls, and khat cultivation. The Houthis bombed the ports that its enemy, the Saudi-backed internationally recognized government, used to export oil worth approximately $1-2 billion per year. Yemen now exports almost no oil, a significant problem for a country that statisticians regularly place in the bottom ten of the world’s poorest nations. After the October 7, 2023, attacks and the subsequent Israeli genocide in Gaza, the Houthis launched attacks on Israel and on Israeli shipping in the Red Sea, resulting in Israeli and US attacks, under both Joe Biden’s and Donald Trump’s administrations. These attacks culminated in a massive US air and naval assault in the spring of 2025 against Houthi-controlled infrastructure, including Ras Isa Port, missile launch sites, and also a prison in Saada, which allegedly killed and injured hundreds. Trump declared victory and a ceasefire was established with the Houthis, who continued to attack Israel and commercial shipping for several months. Iran’s relationship with the Houthis is characterized by broad strategic alignment combined with frequent disagreement on tactics and which interests to prioritize. Yemen’s Zaydis are Fiver Shias, who disagree with Twelver Iranian Shias on the succession of the fifth imam. Iranian Shias recognize Zayd’s older half-brother al-Baqir as the legitimate successor of the Prophet Mohammed. The Houthis are as concerned with shoring up their domestic position as they are with fighting the United States and Israel, who pose an immediate existential threat to Iran. Over the monthlong US-Israeli assault against Iran, the Houthis have been under extraordinary pressure to enter the war. Iran supported the Houthis in their long war against Saudi Arabia (from 2015 to 2022) and continues to exert significant institutional pressure on the group. “But the pressure is not just from Iran,” says Farea al-Muslimi, a research fellow at Chatham House. “It also comes from their own constituencies and even their enemies who accuse them of being unserious and unable to play a regional role.” The Palestinian cause is fundamental to the Houthi self-identity and ideological reproduction. “[The Houthis] decided this was the time when they ought to get involved,” Helen Lackner, a scholar of Yemeni tribal politics, told _Jacobin_. “It’s very difficult for them not to get involved . . . because of their propaganda and of course because of the Israeli involvement. If it was just the Americans, then they could maybe sit on the sidelines. Being anti-Israel is really a very fundamental position.” The Houthis’ decision to open a new front is a calculated balancing act. On the one hand, they can’t avoid entering a war that they are both ideologically invested in and is going poorly for their enemies. “They also know for sure that they are next after Iran and Israel will go after them very brutally,” explains al-Muslimi. “So, they tried to, as you say in Arabic, have them for lunch before they have you for dinner.” On the other hand, the Houthis are attempting to exercise caution so as to not derail the “roadmap” process with Saudi Arabia, which would establish a modus vivendi with its giant northern neighbor. Under the roadmap, Riyadh could finance public spending in Houthi territory, particularly state salaries, and rebuild civilian infrastructure, much of which the Royal Saudi Air Force destroyed in the war. Since 2022, Yemen’s civil war has been all but frozen. The rivalry between Saudi Arabia and the UAE within Yemen was decided in January in favor of Riyadh, when it ousted the overstretched UAE-backed separatist Southern Transitional Council in the south. Saudi Arabia now enjoys a near monopoly of influence over the new official government of Yemen (ministers were even sworn in this year in Riyadh) as well as the militias that support it, such as the Southern Giants Brigades. Riyadh seeks to develop the Yemeni state around favored Sunni partners but is also in long-standing talks with the Houthis to neutralize them as a threat. “The Houthis would be very happy if the war finished tomorrow,” explains Luca Nevola, a senior analyst for Yemen and the Gulf at Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, who spent several years living in Houthi territory. “This is especially true as the negotiations with Saudi Arabia are a lifeline for their movement.” Nevola says that Israel was very effective in weakening the Houthis in 2025 with decapitation strikes after the Houthis had attacked Israel for its genocide in Gaza. The Houthis now face a security dilemma: join the war and risk losing their potential Saudi patrons or stay out and lose credibility at home and in Tehran. By targeting only Israel, the Houthis are trying to avoid both horns of the dilemma. “There is a lot of illusion in their idea of balancing. I think this will spill over,” says al-Muslimi. “They are thinking, ‘We can make a calculated move, thirty days into the war, get in and get out with low cost.’ They think they can show up to the party last but enjoy happy hour and then go home not hungover.” A war as unpredictable and open-ended as the one now being waged by Trump and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu creates a hazard of mission creep for all belligerents. Other than the United States, all actors in this war see it as existential. If Israel escalates, as it almost certainly will, the Houthis are at risk of being sucked into an all–nothing logic of a war for survival. * * *

Why Yemen’s Houthis Opened a New Front in the Iran War

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Israel Is Stepping Up Its Ethnic Cleansing in the West Bank Even as Israel attacks Iran and Lebanon, it is also intensifying ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The military and settler militias are using a crisis Israel created as cover for its illegal takeover of the West Bank.

Israel Is Stepping Up Its Ethnic Cleansing in the West Bank

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