Charges that these peaceful on-campus rallies are antisemitic in character are bad faith propaganda by hard line ethno-nationalists who have long striven to equate criticism of Israeli government policy with bigotry toward Jews — a ridiculous proposition. If accepted, this strategy would imply that criticism of the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico is a form of bigotry toward Chicanos. If so, no one has more racialist prejudice toward Chicanos than Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. The only documented antisemitic slurs have been shouted in the street in New York beyond the Columbia University campus, by outsiders rather than students and faculty. Any bigotry toward Jews is completely unacceptable and wholly contemnible.

The campus demonstrations are instead being driven by outrage at six months of war crimes committed by the fascist government now in power in Israel, which includes ministers who are the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis.

It is bad enough that presidents of major American universities are having their students and faculty arrested for “trespassing” on their own campus, with many of them suspended and forced out of their dorms (for which they paid and the rental terms of which they had not violated).

Those same presidents of leading institutions of higher education in the U.S. have stood completely silent as the extremist government in Israel has destroyed every last university in Gaza, leaving 88,000 students stranded and their education interrupted, for who knows how long. Many of them may forever be deprived of their degree.

The Israeli military has also murdered from the sky 5,479 students and 261 teachers .

Reliefweb notes,

“As of 30 March, the Education Cluster estimates that 87.7% of all school buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. 212 school buildings have had a direct hit and could be severely damaged and a further 282 have sustained moderate, minor or likely damage. Previously 503,500 children attended, and 18,900 teachers taught at the school buildings which have now had a direct hit or sustained major or moderate damage. Every university in Gaza has been destroyed.”

The dead include hundreds of undergraduates and over a hundred professors, as well as three presidents of universities.

Wesleyan President Michael S. Roth is the only one I know of to have publicly denounced this situation (thanks to Laila Lalami for tipping me to this piece).

Apologists for Israel’s total war on the innocent civilians of Gaza, blinded by their ethno-nationalism, may attempt to maintain that these universities were part and parcel of the Hamas government that has ruled Gaza since 2006. This allegation, however, is laughable. Hamas military cadres only come to 37,000 persons by Israel’s own reckoning. None of them were undergraduates or professors of literature.

About 19 institutions of higher education, including 12 universities, in Gaza served 88,000 students and employed 5200 staff and faculty before October 7, since which time they have all been closed and several have been demolished.

As I wrote last winter, the buildings of the al-Azhar University in south Gaza have been largely destroyed by Israeli shelling.

The following footage from TikTok shows the bombing of al-Azhar University in Gaza in November.

@pandapunk303 The sad part is they wont face any punishment. #freepalestine🇵🇸❤️ #alazhar #alazharuniversity #freepalestine #palestine #gaza #istandwithpalestine #foryou #fyp #crime #university #school #speakup #tiktoknew #wow #sad #messedup ♬ سبحان الله – Ali Dawud

The footage below says it shows the state last winter of al-Azhar University in Gaza:

“Destruction of Al-Azhar University in Gaza”

Al-Azhar University in Gaza was established in 1991 by the Palestine Liberation Organization, the secular rival of Hamas. It is not related to the al-Azhar in Cairo. It had 14,391 students and 387 faculty members, though some of these are now dead and none of them have any buildings in which to learn or teach. It had been ranked around 171 out of 200 among Arab regional universities, and it is amazing that it wasn’t at the bottom given that it functioned in an occupied territory under economic siege since 2007.

This was AUG’s medical school.

AU Gaza Kulliyat al-Tibb

That medical school is now not graduating doctors, to say the least.

This scholasticide is not an accident and it has nothing to do with a “war on Hamas” or “self-defense.” It is the typical gutting of a colonized people’s consciousness by a settler colonial state. These actions are intended to cripple Palestinian education and Palestinian culture in Gaza. Israeli leaders have made no secret of their hope to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from the Strip entirely.

The US national debt is $34.5 trillion, up $2 trillion since last summer, against a gross domestic product of $27 trillion. For the debt to run so far ahead of GDP could cause the US economy to crash. That is, the US Congress does not have $26 billion to give to Israel in the first place.

The enormous windfall will allow the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to continue to kill or wound a Palestinian child in Gaza every 10 minutes (see below).

Israel’s bombing raids, including against designated safe areas in Gaza, continued daily this week. On Saturday, the Israeli Air Force bombed a house in the center of Rafah, where 1.5 million refugees have been pushed from the north, killing six persons and wounding others. Rafah had been designated a safe zone by the Israelis when they were trying to force people down there.

Emma Graham-Harrison writes at The Guardian, “Ahmed Barhoum lost his wife, Rawan Radwan, and their five-year-old daughter Alaa. ‘They bombed a house full of displaced people, women and children,’ he told Associated Press on Saturday, crying as he cradled Alaa’s body, wrapped in a white shroud, and gently rocked her. ‘This is a world devoid of all human values and morals.'”

Saturday’s strikes brought the number of Palestinians killed by the Israeli military in Gaza since October 8 to over 34,000, Graham-Harrison reports. These numbers exclude more thousands buried under rubble when Israeli fighter-jets destroyed civilian apartment buildings. Some 77,000 Palestinians have been wounded, 12,000 of them children (see below).

On Wednesday through Friday of this week, Israeli bombing raids killed 113 Palestinians and injured 169 Palestinians.

UNICEF said this week that 12,000 children, at the very least, have been wounded by Israeli bombardment or other fire since last October.

That comes to 70 children injured every day, or nearly 3 every hour, one every 20 minutes or so. Since some 13,000 children have been killed, that means that a child has been either killed or wounded every 10 minutes.

Spokesperson Tess Ingram Ingram said,

“”I left Gaza yesterday after spending two weeks there. It was my second mission into Gaza this year. By far, what struck me most about this mission was the number of wounded children. Not just in the hospitals, but on the streets. In their makeshift shelters . . . their lives forever changed by the horrors of war.”

Half of the inhabitants of Gaza are children.

Most of the hospitals in Gaza have been destroyed by the Israeli military. Of 36, only 11 are still partially functioning, mainly as warehouses for the sick and wounded since they lack “needles, stitches, anaesthetic.” Children lie on mattresses or floors “languishing in pain.”

Despite the desperate need for medavac transportation of these children, many amputees, from Gaza, only 3,500 such requests have been granted in over six months.

Guardian News Video: “‘I can’t find food’: despair in Gaza as children face malnutrition”

WHO says that in northern Gaza, between 12% and 16.5% of children (6-59 months) have been stricken with with acute malnutrition, and 3% of children have severe acute malnutrition. In southern Gaza, 2-6% of children have acute malnutrition.

Severe acute malnutrition presents with substantial muscle wasting in the arms, unnatural thinness, and build-up of fluid and swelling in the feet. Acute malnutrition has the same symptoms but they are less exaggerated. Even a short bout of malnutrition leaves children with permanent cognitive deficits and learning disabilities.

In April, 15% of the aid missions to northern Gaza and to parts of southern Gaza that require coordination with Israel have been denied by Israeli authorities, often on arbitrary grounds.

Because Israel cut off potable water or destroyed its delivery systems with bombing, and because 270,000 tons of solid waste has accumulated in the absence of hygiene services, WHO recorded 345,768 cases of diarrhea, with 105,635 cases in children under 5. In toddlers and infants such gastrointestinal diseases can eaily lead to fatal dehydration. Without an immediate ceasefire, a team at Johns Hopkins has predicted that 11% of the deaths in Gaza over the next four months will be from epidemic diseases.

Israel is using facial recognition programs and drones to locate and kill the 37,000 members of the Hamas paramilitary, but at least 10% of their identifications are wrong, and they often strike at these individuals when they are surrounded by their wives, children, other relatives, and neighbors. Israeli rules of engagement, the loosest in the world aside from the gangs of the blood diamond cartels, allow up to 20 civilians to be killed with each strike at a member of the Qassam Brigades paramilitary. Most of these members had no knowledge of the October 7 attack, which was planned and carried out by a small clique. The Israeli destruction of civilian infrastructure and the imposition of starvation on the population are forms of illegal collective punishment.

Since Congress, which appears to have a disproportionate number of genocidal maniacs in its ranks, is all right with the Palestinians being subjected to mass murder, it should come as no surprise that they are all right with their remaining unfree from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

As often has been the case in American history, the House of Representatives has failed to understand its role in the Constitution. The representatives might like to consult their own website, which notes that the First Amendment says,

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The resolution passed Wednesday is a blatant attempt to abridge the freedom of speech. That is why it is a resolution and not incorporated into a law, because the law would be struck down immediately. As for the resolution, it is hateful hot air.

The resolution alleges that the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is “antisemitic.” They seem to be worse readers of texts even than they are constitutional scholars. The phrase doesn’t mention Jews. It says that Palestine will be free.

Palestine is currently not free.

However, on 13 December, 1993, U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher signed the Oslo Peace Accords. These accords, which have the force of U.S. law, specified that Israel would withdraw from Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank by 1997 and turn their governance over to the Palestine Authority, that is, the state of Palestine. Had the Oslo accords been implemented, then from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, Palestine would have been free.

They were not implemented because the accords were deliberately derailed by the far right wing Likud Party led by Binyamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu boasted about his role in ensuring that Palestine did not become free. The Likud wants to annex the West Bank and Gaza and to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population (which the New York Times is forbidden to tell you).

Video: “Netanyahu boasting about Manipulating America and derailing Oslo peace process”

So the chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” can be read as an insistence that Oslo, which is US treaty law, actually be implemented.

The congressional resolution insists that the phrase must mean that the state of Palestine would constitute all the land of historic Palestine, i.e. the area of the British Mandate of Palestine. In such a scenario, there would be no place for Israel.

However, in those Oslo Peace Accords of 1993, signed by the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasser Arafat, that organization agreed to recognize Israel.

So supporters of the PLO and of the state of Palestine obviously do not mean by the chant to take back away that recognition. In fact, the ones who reneged are the Israelis, who took back away their recognition of Palestine.

It may be that some people who use the phrase “from the river to the sea” mean it in an anti-Israel fashion. That it always has this sense is not something that members Congress, most of whom are signally ignorant of the Middle East, can stipulate. If we stop letting Congress play ventriloquist with Palestinians, and listen to actual Palestinians, what do we hear?

Yusuf Munayyer wrote in Jewish Currents, “I wasn’t concerned with Israel’s identity crisis over whether it could be both Jewish and democratic; I was concerned that Palestinians were being denied basic rights throughout their homeland. My column, “From the River to the Sea,” would be focused on the unity of the Palestinian experience and how all Palestinians faced a shared struggle with Zionism regardless of where they lived.”

Rep. Rashida Tlaib wrote, “From the river to the sea is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate.”

MSNBC: “Rep. Rashida Tlaib responds to House censure vote”

Congress complains that the phrase seeks to deprive the Jewish people of the right of self-determination. But the Jewish people in the sense of followers of the Judaic religion are not a national unit. American Jews are Americans. If Congress is saying that all Jews everywhere have the right of collective self-determination and that it can only be exercised in historic Palestine, then it is saying that the 6 million American Jews are deprived of that right. The resolution reduces American Jews to second-class citizens in the US. What could be more antisemitic than this resolution?

The statement is not about the Judaic religion but about the political doctrines of Zionism, which Congress is attempting to impose on us all. Moreover, the perspective adopted in the congressional resolution is not that of garden variety Zionism but that of the most extreme, fascistic forms of the ideology, which rule out a Palestinian state and any basic human rights for the 14 million Palestinians, who surely have as much right to collective self-determination as the 16 million Jews.

In contrast, the Mandatory authority in British Palestine, given that charge by the Versailles Peace Conference and its San Remo satellite conference after World War I, in its last official pronouncement of London’s vision of the future, the 1939 White Paper, said:

“The objective of His Majesty’s Government is the establishment within 10 years of an independent Palestine State in such treaty relations with the United Kingdom as will provide satisfactorily for the commercial and strategic requirements of both countries in the future. The proposal for the establishment of the independent State would involve consultation with the Council of the League of Nations with a view to the termination of the Mandate.

The independent State should be one in which Arabs and Jews share government in such a way as to ensure that the essential interests of each community are safeguarded.”

The mandatory authority envisioned that the Palestinian people in its charge would be no different from the Syrian people under French rule, the Iraqi people under British rule (class A mandates), or the people of French and British [formerly German] Togoland, which were Class B mandates. British Togoland became part of Ghana and French Togoland became the Togolese Republic or Togo. There is today a Syria, an Iraq, a Togo. There is no Palestine. International law was thwarted by hard line Zionists, in the crimes of whom Congress is an accessory after the fact.

The League of Nations and then the United Nations were committed to ending the problem of statelessness and would not have wanted the Palestinians to be colonized forever, and forever to lack collective sovereignty.

Again, this principle was made explicit by the British government:

“His Majesty’s Government are charged as the Mandatory authority “to secure the development of self governing institutions” in Palestine. Apart from this specific obligation, they would regard it as contrary to the whole spirit of the Mandate system that the population of Palestine should remain forever under Mandatory tutelage. It is proper that the people of the country should as early as possible enjoy the rights of self-government which are exercised by the people of neighbouring countries.”

So the first nation to pledge that “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” (by 1949!) was the United Kingdom, the mandatory authority to which the League of Nations and then the United Nations forwarded the rule of Palestine. Moreover, its pledges in this regard have continuing force in international law regarding the ultimate disposition of the Palestinian people.

The UN General Assembly partition plan of 1947 was no more than a (remarkably pro-Zionist) suggestion and did not have the force of law. Only the UNSC has executive authority, and that body never adopted the plan. Both the Zionists and the Palestinians rejected it. Some Zionist apologists pretend that David Ben Gurion and other Zionist leaders accepted the plan, but then why did they usurp territory such as the Galilee that was not awarded to them? Ben Gurion wrote in his diary when Israel was founded in 1948 that its borders were not specified in the constitution, just as those of the United States had not been in its. He had in mind an expansionist Manifest Destiny, and tried to annex Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Palestinian Gaza and southern Lebanon, and officials around him plotted to get the West Bank from the late 1950s. Does that sound like he accepted the UNGA map?

Moreover, the Palestinian rejection of the UNGA proposal is no grounds for forever denying them the right to citizenship in a state, which is denied to no other people in the world. That is, there are peoples who chafe at the citizenship they have, such as Syrian Kurds, but there is no other group of several million people who have been kept stateless for many decades the way the Palestinians have been.

An end to this statelessness is one of the things that is meant by “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Congress has repeatedly obstructed any attempt to end Palestinian statelessness or to realize the vision of even the British colonialists, supercilious and racist as they were. Congress is clearly much more so. “It is proper,” British officials maintained, “that the people of the country should as early as possible enjoy the rights of self-government which are exercised by the people of neighbouring countries.” “As early as possible” was not envisioned in 1939 as some date after 2024.

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Last September witnessed what used to be a truly rare weather phenomenon: a Mediterranean hurricane, or “medicane.” Once upon a time, the Mediterranean Sea simply didn’t get hot enough to produce hurricanes more than every few hundred (yes, few hundred!) years. In this case, however, Storm Daniel assaulted Libya with a biblical-style deluge for four straight days. It was enough to overwhelm the al-Bilad and Abu Mansour dams near the city of Derna, built in the 1970s to old cool-earth specifications. The resulting flood destroyed nearly 1,000 buildings, washing thousands of people out to sea, and displaced tens of thousands more.

Saliha Abu Bakr, an attorney, told a harrowing tale of how the waters kept rising in her apartment building before almost reaching the roof and quite literally washing many of its residents away. She clung to a piece of wooden furniture for three hours in the water. “I can swim,” she told a reporter afterward, “but when I tried to save my family, I couldn’t do a thing.” Human-caused climate change, provoked by the way we spew 37 billion metric tons of dangerous carbon dioxide gas into our atmosphere every year, made the Libyan disaster 50 times more likely than it once might have been. And worse yet, for the Middle East, as well as the rest of the world, that nightmare is undoubtedly only the beginning of serial disasters to come (and come and come and come) that will undoubtedly render millions of people homeless or worse.

“Libya Flood,” Digital, Dream / Abstract v. 2, 2024.

Failing Grades

In the race to keep this planet from heating up more than 2.7° Fahrenheit (1.5° Centigrade) above the preindustrial average, the whole world is already getting abominable grades. Beyond that benchmark, scientists fear, the planet’s whole climate system could fall into chaos, severely challenging civilization itself. The Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI), which monitors the implementation of the Paris climate accords, presented its alarming conclusions in a late March report. The CCPI crew was so disheartened by its findings — no country is even close to meeting the goals set in that treaty – that it left the top three slots in its ranking system completely empty.

For the most part, the countries of the Middle East made a distinctly poor showing when it came to the greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels that are already heating the planet so radically. Admittedly, Morocco, with longstanding and ambitious green energy goals, came in ninth, and Egypt, which depends heavily on hydroelectric power and has some solar projects, ranked a modest 22nd. However, some Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates hit rock bottom in the CCPI’s chart. That matters since you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that the region produces perhaps 27% of the world’s petroleum annually and includes five of the 10 largest oil producers on the planet.

Ironically enough, the Middle East is at special risk from climate change. Scientists have found that it’s experiencing twice the rate of heating as the global average and, in the near future, they warn that it will suffer, as a recent study from the Carnegie Institute for International Peace put it, from “soaring heat waves, declining precipitation, extended droughts, more intense sandstorms and floods, and rising sea levels.” And yet some of the countries facing the biggest threat from the climate crisis seem all too intent on making it far worse.

Little Sparta

The CCPI index, issued by Germanwatch, the NewClimate Institute, and the Climate Action Network (CAN), ranks countries in their efforts to meet the goals set by the Paris Agreement according to four criteria: their emissions of greenhouse gases, their implementation of renewable energy, their consumption of fossil-fuel energy, and their government’s climate policies. The authors listed the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 65th place, calling it “one of the lowest-performing countries.” The report then slammed the government of President Mohammed Bin Zayed, saying: “The UAE‘s per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are among the highest in the world, as is its per capita wealth, while its national climate targets are inadequate. The UAE continues to develop and finance new oil and gas fields domestically and abroad.” On the southeast coast of the Arabian Peninsula, the UAE has a population of only about a million citizens (and about eight million guest workers). It is nonetheless a geopolitical energy and greenhouse gas giant of the first order.

Buy the Book

The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, or ADNOC, headquartered in that country’s capital and helmed by businessman Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber (who is also the country’s minister of industry and advanced technology), has some of the more ambitious plans for expanding petroleum production in the world. ADNOC is, in fact, seeking to increase its oil production from four million to five million barrels a day by 2027, while further developing its crucial al-Nouf oil field, next to which the UAE is building an artificial island to help with its expected future expansion. To be fair, the UAE is behaving little differently from the United States, which ranked only a few spots better at 57. Last October, in fact, American oil production, which continues to be heavily government-subsidized (as does that industry in Europe), actually hit an all-time high.

The UAE is a major proponent of the dubious technique of carbon capture and storage, which has not yet been found to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions significantly or to do so safely and affordably. The magazine Oil Change International points out that the country’s carbon capture efforts at the Emirates Steel Plant probably sequester no more than 17% of the CO2 produced there and that the stored carbon dioxide is then injected into older, non-producing oil fields to help retrieve the last drops of petroleum they hold.

The UAE, which the Pentagon adoringly refers to as “little Sparta” for its aggressive military interventions in places like Yemen and Sudan, brazenly flouts the international scientific consensus on climate action. As ADNOC’s al-Jaber had the cheek to claim last fall: “There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C.”

Such outrageous denialism scales almost Trumpian heights in the faux grandeur of its mendacity. At the time, al-Jaber was also, ironically enough, the chairman of the yearly U.N. Conference of Parties (COP) climate summit. Last November 21st, he boldly posed this challenge: “Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.” (In the world he’s helping to create, of course, even the caves would sooner or later prove too hot to handle.) This year the International Energy Agency decisively answered his epic piece of trolling by reporting that the wealthier nations, particularly the European ones, actually grew their gross national products in 2023 even as they cut CO2 emissions by a stunning 4.5%. In other words, moving away from fossil fuels can make humanity more prosperous and safer from planetary catastrophe rather than turning us into so many beggars.

“Absolutely Not!”

What could be worse than the UAE’s unabashedly pro-fossil fuel energy policy? Well, Iran, heavily wedded to oil and gas, is, at 66, ranked one place lower than that country. Ironically, however, extensive American sanctions on Iran’s petroleum exports may, at long last, be turning that country’s ruling ayatollahs toward creating substantial wind and solar power projects.

But I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that dead last — with an emphasis on “dead” — comes that favorite of Donald (“drill, drill, drill“) Trump, Saudi Arabia, which, at 67, “scores very low in all four CCPI index categories: Energy Use, Climate Policy, Renewable Energy, and GHG Emissions.” Other observers have noted that, since 1990, the kingdom’s carbon dioxide emissions have increased by a compound yearly rate of roughly 4% and, in 2019, that relatively small country was the world’s 10th largest emitter of CO2.

Worse yet, though you wouldn’t know it from the way the leaders of both the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are acting, the Arabian Peninsula (already both arid and torrid) is anything but immune to the potential disasters produced by climate change. The year 2023 was, in fact, the third hottest on record in Saudi Arabia. (2021 took the all-time hottest mark so far.) The weather is already unbearable there in the summer. On July 18, 2023, the temperature in the kingdom’s Eastern Province, al-Ahsa, reached an almost inconceivable 122.9° F (50.5° C). If, in the future, such temperatures were to be accompanied by a humidity of 50%, some researchers are suggesting that they could prove fatal to humans. According to Professor Lewis Halsey of the University of Roehampton in England and his colleagues, that kind of heat can actually raise the temperature of an individual by 1.8° F. In other words, it would be as if they were running a fever and, worse yet, “people’s metabolic rates also rose by 56%, and their heart rates went up by 64%.”

While the Arabian Peninsula is relatively dry, cities on the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden can at times be humid and muggy, which means that significant increases in temperature could sooner or later render them uninhabitable. Such rising heat even threatens one of Islam’s “five pillars.” This past year the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, known as the Hajj, took place in June, when temperatures sometimes reached 118° F (48° C) in western Saudi Arabia. More than 2,000 pilgrims fell victim to heat stress, a problem guaranteed to worsen radically as the planet heats further.

Despite the threat that climate change poses to the welfare of that country’s inhabitants, the government of King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman is doing less than nothing to address the growing problems. As the CCPI’s authors put it, “Saudi Arabia’s per capita greenhouse gas emissions are rising steadily. Its share of renewable energy in total primary energy supply (TPES) is close to zero.” Meanwhile, at the 2022 U.N. climate summit conference held in Egypt, “Saudi Arabia played a notably unconstructive role in the negotiations. Its delegation included many fossil fuel lobbyists. It also tried to water down the language used in the COP’s umbrella decision.”

At the next meeting in Dubai last fall, COP28, the final document called only for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.” Avoided was the far more relevant phrase “phase down” or “phase out” when it came to fossil fuels and even the far milder “transitioning away” was only included over the strenuous objections of Riyadh, whose energy minister, Prince Abdulaziz Bin Salman, said “absolutely not” to any such language. He added, “And I assure you not a single person — I’m talking about governments — believes in that.” His assertion was, of course, nonsense. In fact, some leaders, like those of Pacific Island nations, consider an immediate abolition of fossil fuels essential to the very survival of their countries.

Abandoning the Logic of Small Steps

Although Saudi Arabia’s leaders sometimes engage in greenwashing, including making periodic announcements about future plans to develop green energy, they have done virtually nothing in that regard, despite the Kingdom’s enormous potential for solar and wind power. Ironically, the biggest Saudi green energy achievement has been abroad, thanks to the ACWA Power firm, a public-private joint venture in the Kingdom. The Moroccan government, the only one in the Middle East to make significant strides in combatting climate change, brought in ACWA as part of a consortium to build its epochal Noor concentrated solar energy complex near the ancient city of Ouarzazate at the edge of the Sahara desert. It has set a goal of getting 52% of its electricity from renewables by 2030. Though critics pointed out that it missed its goal of 42% by 2020, government boosters responded that, by the end of 2022, 37% of Morocco’s electricity already came from renewables and, just in the past year, it jumped to 40%, with a total renewables production of 4.6 gigawatts of energy.

Moreover, Morocco has a plethora of green energy projects in the pipeline, including 20 more hydroelectric installations, 19 wind farms, and 16 solar farms. The solar plants alone are expected to generate 13.5 gigawatts within a few years, tripling the country’s current total green energy output. Two huge wind farms, one retooled with a new generation of large turbines, have already come online in the first quarter of this year. The country’s expansion of green electricity production since it launched its visionary plans in 2009 has not only helped it make major strides toward decarbonization but contributed to the electrification of its countryside, where access to power is now universal. Just in the past two and a half decades, the government has provided 2.1 million households with electricity access. Morocco has few hydrocarbons of its own and local green energy helps the state avoid an enormous drain on its budget.

In contrast to the pernicious nonsense often spewed by Saudi and Emirati officials, the Moroccan king, Mohammed VI, is in no doubt about the severe challenges his poverty-ridden country faces. He told the U.N. COP28 climate conference in early December, “Just as climate change is inexorably increasing, the COPs must, from here on, emerge from the logic of ‘small steps,’ which has characterized them for too long.”

Large steps toward a Middle East (and a world) of low-carbon energy would, of course, be a big improvement. Unfortunately, on a planet they are helping to overheat in a remarkable fashion, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, and Saudi Arabia have largely taken steps — huge ones, in fact — toward ever more carbon dioxide emissions. Worse yet, they’re located in a part of the world where such retrograde policies are tantamount to playing Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun.

Copyright Juan Cole 2024

Via Tomdispatch.com

In recognition of Arab American Heritage Month and in light of the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, UM-Flint, in partnership with the Arab American Heritage Council, invited historians Juan Cole, University of Michigan Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History, and Melanie Tanielian, U-M associate professor of history, and Muna Tareh, a UM-Flint alum and political scientist, to provide context for understanding the region.

University of Michigan-Flint Video: “Palestinian History: Understanding the Past, Engaging with the Present” | April 15, 2024

Bierce often tweaked the white nationalist Establishment. For instance, consider this entry:

“ABORIGINIES, n. Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country. They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize.”

A more concise summation of the genocidal character of white settler colonialism would be hard to discover.

And I rather like this one, skewering pretensions of impartiality:

“ABSURDITY, n. A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one’s own opinion.”

My homage to Bierce at Informed Comment has been The Ghoul’s Glossary. I did mine as contextual, political satire, and some of the bons mots have faded. But there are a few I’d keep for a book. For instance, this one from 2008:

“Zionism: The theory that because Nazis hated Jews, the latter would be much better off all gathered together on disputed land in the midst of 300 million Arabs and Iranians.”

Or this:

“Palestinians: Dispossessed, displaced and stateless persons who are ungrateful for their condition and therefore vaguely dangerous.”

Or speaking of the American attempt to pivot away from the Middle East after causing a spot of bother earlier in the century:

“Withdrawal: A way to avoid the worst consequences of a moment of pleasurable conquest, which, however, often comes too late to avoid years of support payments.”

I bring all this up because the intrepid Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim at The Intercept have sprung the style guide of the New York Times for talking about Israel and Palestine. If it weren’t so serious, it would be hilarious. It is sort of a Devil’s Dictionary in reverse, which punches down rather than up. It more resembles Bierce’s forays into horror fiction.

Al Jazeera English Video: “Mass grave found in Gaza: Bodies found in grounds of al-Shifa hospital”

So I thought I’d rearrange their fine column as a supplement to the Ghoul’s Glossary.

CARNAGE: When Israelis kill Palestinians this word should be avoided since it conveys more emotion than information. May be used when Palestinians kill Israelis. Example: “One Israeli said that being high on LSD during the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7 prompted a spiritual revelation that helped him escape the carnage at a desert rave.” NYT, April 12, 2024. May also be used of peoples not under the Palestine Exception. E.g.: “As the war continues with no end in sight, Ukraine’s youngest are in increasing peril, at risk of being dragged toward the carnage of ground combat as they defend their homeland.” NYT, April 11, 2024.

DEADLY VIOLENCE: When Israeli settlers kill innocent Palestinian civilians. E.g.: “Deadly violence against Palestinians by Israeli settlers in the West Bank has also reached record levels,” NYT, Feb. 21, 2024. Contrast to TERRORISM, when Palestinians kill Israeli civilians.

ETHNIC CLEANSING: Large scale removal of a people other than the Palestinians from their homeland. With regard to Palestine (oops, see PALESTINE), it is “another historically charged term: If someone is making such an accusation, we should press for specifics or supply proper context.” May be used for other peoples not under the Palestine Exception. E.g.: “Another Ethnic Cleansing Could Be Underway — and We’re Not Paying Attention: Azerbaijan is blockading the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, and people are dying.” NYT, Sept. 2, 2023.

FIGHTERS. This term ordinarily refers to “those who fight,” but cannot be used of Palestinians lest it imply that they are regular soldiers with a state and an army, which they are not and never will be allowed to have. It may be used of non-Palestinian irregulars who are favored by the US government, and who do not fall under the Palestine Exception. E.g. “The fighters who have claimed responsibility for a rare assault just over the Ukrainian border in Russia’s Belgorod region are members of a volunteer unit made up of Russian citizens who have been fighting with Ukraine’s forces against their own country.” NYT, May 25, 2023. Note: Russian renegades who attack Russian targets in Russia from Ukraine are never to be referred to as TERRORISTs, since they are not Palestinian.

GENOCIDE: This is something that is definitely not being committed by Israel in Gaza, though it may be reported that some judges expert in international law make the mystifying charge that Israelis would ever do such a thing. Their charges should be explained away as a form of incomprehensible legal jargon not applicable to the real world. The term may, however, be used of peoples other than the Palestinians, who are not under the Palestine Exception. E.g., re: Rwanda, “one of the last fugitives charged in connection with the 1994 genocide.” NYT, June 7, 2023.

MASSACRE: When Israelis kill Palestinians this term should be avoided since it conveys more emotion than information. It may, however, be used when Palestinians kill Israelis. . Example: “‘It’s a Massacre’: Inside an Israeli Village Raided by Palestinian Fighters.” NYT Oct. 10, 2023.

PALESTINE: A word not to be used “except in very rare cases.” No such place has ever existed nor does it now. “Do not use in datelines, routine text or headlines, except in very rare cases such as when the United Nations General Assembly elevated Palestine to a nonmember observer state, or references to historic Palestine.” That is, other benighted organizations may use the word, but not the NYT in its own voice.

OCCUPIED TERRITORIES: Ordinarily this phrase refers to territories seized in war from another people, which are militarily controlled. However, because of the Palestine Exception, it should not be used of the situation in Palestine (oops, S.V. PALESTINE) “When possible, avoid the term and be specific (e.g. Gaza, the West Bank, etc.) as each has a slightly different status.” The term may be used of other occupied territories [which of course actually all have the same status under the 1949 Geneva Convention] E.g. ” the United States might establish what amounts to a military base in Ukraine or encourage Ukraine to retake the Russian-occupied areas of the Donbass by military force.” NYT, Nov. 24, 2021.

REFUGEE CAMPS: A term be avoided in favor of “refugee centers.” “While termed refugee camps, the refugee centers in Gaza are developed and densely populated neighborhoods dating to the 1948 war. Refer to them as neighborhoods, or areas, and if further context is necessary, explain how they have historically been called refugee camps.” The term may, however, be used for densely-populated, decades-old places for non-Palestinians such as Afghans, who are not under the Palestine Exception. E.g.: “Sarwar selling watches in a camp for Afghan refugees in Karachi.” NYT, Nov. 24, 2023.

SLAUGHTER: When Israelis kill Palestinians it should be avoided since it conveys more emotion than information. May be used when Palestinians kill Israelis. Example: Thomas Friedman: “Israel’s response to the Hamas slaughter.” NYT, October 29, 2023.

TERRORISM: When Palestinian guerrillas kill Israeli civilians. E.G. “It is accurate to use ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ in describing the attacks of Oct. 7, which included the deliberate targeting of civilians in killings and kidnappings.” When Israeli settlers kill Palestinians, the term of art is in contrast “deadly violence.” E.g.: “Deadly violence against Palestinians by Israeli settlers in the West Bank has also reached record levels,” NYT, Feb. 21, 2024.

Reporters for CNN, some of them stringers on the ground in Gaza, reported Sunday that thousands of civilians attempted to return from their 191-day exile in Rafah to their homes in the north. They appear just to have grabbed up their children and a few things, and hit the road, as rumors circulated that people were being let through the checkpoints by the Israelis. The rumors were untrue.

Al-Sharq reports that according to eyewitnesses, early on Sunday “dozens of displaced women and children were able to return from the south of the Gaza Strip to the north, without the Israeli army attacking them at the checkpoiint at Al-Shuhada Junction on the coastal road, Al-Rashid Street.”

Videos shared by women and children in this brave and successful exodus north appear to have started the rumor that it was safe to go home, which then created the rush of thousands of hopeful returnees.

Eyewitnesses told al-Sharq: “But fire was opened on another group of citizens hundreds of yards from the checkpoint.”

Mohammad Al-Sawalhi, Abeer Salman, Kareem Khadder and Zeena Saifi report in more detail for CNN that the group used donkey carts, bicycles, even some pick-up trucks to head north. They quote one Majd al-Aqqad as saying “I’m going to Gaza City. It’s enough. We need to go back to our homes and lands. We are tired of displacement… we heard people saying we can go back, but no one official told us. We’ll leave it to God.”

Another interviewee who went north, Um Mohammed, told them, “I don’t know anything about my house. It’s our home and our land. The Israelis displaced us and humiliated us,”

But then the Israeli troops began shooting, apparently an entire arsenal, including from helicopter gunships, when they saw some men with the refugees. A woman who appears to have declined to be identified told CNN, “We reached all the way to the checkpoint until we saw Israeli tanks. We headed back because they fired towards us. We didn’t see anyone make it to the other side. We risked our children’s lives to cross, but apparently it was all a lie,”

One little girl was shot in her mother’s arms and is now being treated in what is left of a hospital back south.

MEMO video: Gaza’s displaced retreat to the south after Israeli military blocks them

Meanwhile, Israel’s artificial intelligence programs went on mindlessly identifying supposed militants and directed air force pilots and drone operators to hit them at home with their families and neighbors.

According to Sharq the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza alleged, “the Israeli occupation committed 4 massacres against families in the Gaza Strip, as a result of which 43 dead [“martyrs”] and 62 wounded arrived at hospitals during the past 24 hours.” As a result of these bombings, “a number of victims are still under the rubble and on the roads, and ambulance and civil defense crews cannot reach them.”

These 43 newly dead Palestinians brought the total since last October to 33,739, the Ministry said, with 76,371 injured. Some 70% of the casualties are women and children, and many of the others are noncombatant men. Since the Israelis are using an indiscriminate artificial intelligence program, we cannot know whether any of the men they are killing were in any way connected to the October 7 attack, which involved perhaps a couple thousand cadres. The operation was kept secret from all but a few persons in Gaza, and it appears that even the expatriate civilian leadership may not have known about it.

On Monday morning, Sharq writes, “the Palestinian Wafa News Agency reported that an Israeli airstrike killed 5 Palestinians in an area northwest of the Nuseirat refugee camp, in the central Gaza Strip.”

It continues, “Wafa reported, citing local sources, that Israeli fighters bombed a house northwest of the Nuseirat camp, and also a mosque inside the camp, while it indicated that Israeli army artillery bombed the [residential] Asar Tower [apartment complex] in Nuseirat.”

Unless Israeli troops were taking fire from the mosque, which seems unlikely, bombing it is a war crime. Bombing a residential apartment building, unless you know that no innocent civilians are in it, is also a war crime.

In fact, it is by now all a war crime. This is not “self-defense” or “defeating Hamas.” It is just bombing people you think may have served in the Hamas paramilitary at some point, and everyone around them. Some 10 percent of the AI identifications are admitted to be faulty. And the rationale for killing every single paramilitary member is weak, especially if it is done from the air, leaving them no opportunity to surrender, and especially if you are trying to kill their children and wives along with them.

As for Nuseirat Camp, according to UNRWA, just a few years ago it had about 85,000 Palestinian refugees, whose families had been ethnically cleansed by Zionist gangs and chased out of their homes in what is now southern Israel in 1948. It was about as populous as Santa Fe, New Mexico.

H/t UNRWA .

Poverty-stricken, their orchards and farms now in the hands of Israelis, they were crowded into makeshift structures and dense apartment buildings. They suffered from lack of potable water, inability to fish off the coast, and malnutrition and unemployment, all exacerbated by the Israeli blockade imposed in 2007 to punish them collectively for the fact that Hamas ruled them. Most have now been doubly made refugees, having been expelled to Rafah by the Israeli military, with no consideration for their welfare or well-being. Imagine almost everyone in Santa Fe being frog-marched south to huddle on the Mexican border with inadequate shelter, food and water.

Iran struck because Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on April 1 had the consular annex of the Iranian embassy in Damascus bombed, killing high-ranking Iranian officials, including Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi and seven other officers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Those officials were there at the invitation of the Syrian government, and embassies are protected from military attack by the Vienna Convention.

Iran cited Article 51 of the United Nations Charter for its counter-strike on Israel, which guarantees states the right of self-defense. Embassies are considered national soil.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s clerical Leader, had said Wednesday at his Eid al-Fitr sermon: “The consulate and embassy institutions in any country are the soil of that country. The evil regime made a mistake and must be punished and will be punished.” He added, “The events in Gaza showed the evil nature of Western civilization to the world. They killed thirty-odd thousand defenseless people; aren’t these human? Do they not have rights?” He also said, “They showed what kind of civilization this is. A child is killed, in the mother’s arms. The patient dies in the hospital. Their power cannot touch … the men of the resistance; so they target the lives of family members, the lives of children and the oppressed, the lives of old men.”

Al Jazeera English Video: “Israel’s war on Gaza live: Blasts, sirens as Iranian missiles intercepted”

Iran’s permanent mission to the United Nations in New York wrote on X,

“Conducted on the strength of Article 51 of the UN Charter pertaining to legitimate defense, Iran’s military action was in response to the Zionist regime’s aggression against our diplomatic premises in Damascus. The matter can be deemed concluded. However, should the Israeli regime make another mistake, Iran’s response will be considerably more severe. It is a conflict between Iran and the rogue Israeli regime, from which the U.S. MUST STAY AWAY!”

Tehran is saying that with this exchange, “the matter can be deemed concluded.” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is not looking for an all-out war.

It was not only the strike on the Iranian embassy that set the stage for Iran’s barrage, but also the six months of intensive Israeli bombing of the Palestinians of Gaza, in which the vast majority of those killed were innocent noncombatants, with 70% being women and children and many others noncombatant men. The death toll now stands at 33,686 Palestinians. Only a small clique of militants committed the horrific October 7 attack on Israel, without telling anyone else what they were planning. There is no military or other justification for using an artificial intelligence program to identify all members of Hamas’s paramilitary (some of which is the equivalent of a neighborhood watch for local security) and to murder them from the skies along with their spouses, children, extended families, and neighbors.

Iran is pledged to defend the Palestinians and has been made to look ineffectual and foolish by the ongoing Israeli atrocities, which have set the blood of the publics in the Middle East to boiling and much raised the esteem in which they hold Iran. The embassy strike was the last straw. If Iran did not reply to it at least symbolically, its credibility, and any deterrence it was perceived to have, became a joke.

Netanyahu for his part was attempting to provoke Iran, in the hope that Tehran would take the bait. He knew that even Washington had come to see Israel as the aggressor in Gaza, and that he was losing support in Congress. He knew that if the issue became an Iranian attack on Israel, the Western capitals would all rally around him and forgive him at least for a while for having brought the Israeli equivalent of Neo-Nazis into his cabinet and then gone Amalek on tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians.

In the end, Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards let their devotion to the late Gen. Zahedi sway their emotions and they fell for Netanyahu’s trick.

Earlier on Saturday the naval section of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps boarded and confiscated a container ship in the Gulf of Oman that belongs to the company of one of Netanyahu’s billionaire backers. While this action violated the law of the sea and can’t be condoned, it was a wiser way of replying to the embassy attack than sending missiles against Israel. It hit Netanyahu where it hurts and no one would have cared about it in the outside world.

Now, we have to suffer with Netanyahu proclaiming his victimhood (he started it) and suffering through statements of solidarity with his fascist government in the face of the ayatollahs, with the ongoing genocide in Gaza cast into the shade.

As many observers are pointing out, this very dangerous situation was caused by President Joe Biden’s mishandling of the Gaza crisis. He should have cut Netanyahu off at the knees by January 1, once it became clear that the Israelis were implementing their notorious Amalek imperative, which implied genocide. By vetoing 3 United Nations Security Council resolutions demanding a ceasefire and by undercutting the only one he allowed to pass by branding it nonbinding, Biden let the butchery continue apace. It continued the past week, during which Israel continued to bomb the bejesus out of Gaza, to kill hundreds of innocents, and to starve them (despite phony pledges to let more aid in, on which Netanyahu did not follow through.)

Biden, UK PM Rishi Sunak and other leaders could also have defused the deliberate provocation of Iran by Netanyahu by simply condemning the embassy attack of April 1 and defending the Vienna convention. Again, the Iranian mission to the UN said this plainly:

“Had the UN Security Council condemned the Zionist regime’s reprehensible act of aggression on our diplomatic premises in Damascus and subsequently brought to justice its perpetrators, the imperative for Iran to punish this rogue regime might have been obviated.”

Instead, Biden and his allies declined to condemn Netanyahu’s action, continuing the North Atlantic insouciance toward Israeli war crimes and continuing the implementation of their double standard whereby International Humanitarian Law applies only to white people. That is, there is not as much difference between Trumpian white nationalism and Biden’s foreign policy as it might seem on the surface, though Trump is of course far worse.*

—
*earlier syntax problem fixed.

Sen. Warren spoke at the Islamic Center of Boston in Wayland, Massachusetts, and a video of one of her exchanges was posted to X by WGBH reporter Tori Bedford (@Tori_Bedford).

A member of the congregation asked her if Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, an allegation that has been made in international forums.

She replied:

WARREN: “So, I think what’s happening now is going to be a long and involved debate over what constitutes genocide when you ask a legal question. For me it is far more important to say that what Israel is doing is wrong — and it is wrong. It is wrong to starve children, women, a civilian population, in order to try to bend them to your will. It is wrong to drop 2,000-pound bombs in densely-populated civilian areas. I think I can make a more effective argument by describing the behavior that is happening and whether I believe it is right or wrong and look people in the eyes if you want to tell people you think it is right and it should be the policy of the United States of America to support those actions. So that’s how I analyze this –”

Audience member: “You didn’t answer the question.”

WARREN: “No, I did answer the question. I said –”

Audience member: “It was a yes or no.”

Audience member: “It was a yes or no. The second question was a yes or no question, to clarify.”

WARREN: “So if you want to do it as an application of law, I believe they [the International Court of Justice] will find it is genocide, and they have ample evidence to do so. What I’m also trying to tell you is that I’m trying to get people past a labels argument, which seems to throw up a screen, and get them to look at the behavior on the ground, get them to look at the children; to get them to look at the moms and the old people and the people who have been displaced and the people who are living outside and the people who are drinking dirty water. And talk about what the role of the United States is in connection with supporting the Netanyahu government, which put the people of Gaza in that position.”

At a Q&A at a Wayland mosque last week, @SenWarren is asked if she thinks that Israel is committing a genocide.

"If you want to do it as an application of law, I believe that they will find that it is genocide," she says, adding that she's trying to get "past a labels argument" pic.twitter.com/mxqBP6oTlH

— Tori Bedford (@Tori_Bedford) April 8, 2024

I think the subtext of this exchange is that it is easier for a member of the Senate to decry particular military tactics of the Israeli government than to utter the word “genocide,” because admitting that Israel is committing genocide would require that the US cease transferring arms and perhaps even money to Tel Aviv. Even elements of the Israel lobbies must be feeling pretty conflicted about the horror story in Gaza by now, and might be willing to tolerate severe criticism of it. But “genocide” is a step too far for most of them. Most Jewish Americans, of course, know the score, and young Jews are done out with Netanyahu and increasingly with Israel; I’m talking about the AIPAC establishment.

It is important to underline that we got this admission from Warren, who has a Rutgers law degree, that under International Humanitarian Law, Israel’s conduct in Gaza meets the legal definition of genocide, only because Muslim Americans held her feet to the fire.

Israel in the halls of Congress is now the king with no clothes, and Warren has worked herself toward admitting it in public. Many of the Progressive Caucus among Democrats in the House have been saying these things for some time. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), for instance, used the term genocide on the House floor two weeks ago, and so paved the way for this admission by the more circumspect Warren (who began her political career as a Republican).

Then, Power testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday. Rep. Jaoquin Castro (D-TX) questioned her about the situation the Israeli government has created in Gaza (“House Foreign Affairs Committee Holds Hearing on USAID’s Foreign Policy and International Development Priorities”) (emphasis added):

“JOAQUIN CASTRO:… Administrator Power, thank you for joining us today. And of course, I’d normally ask you about locally led development and some of your great work there at USAID. But I want to ask you obviously, about the very urgent situation, humanitarian situation in Gaza. In your testimony, you said that the entire population of Gaza is living under the threat of famine.

News reports came out recently that certain USAID officials sent a cable to the National Security Council warning that famine is already likely occurring in parts of the Gaza Strip. According to the report, quote, ‘famine conditions are most severe and widespread in northern Gaza, which is under Israeli control.’ Do you think that it’s plausible or likely that parts of Gaza, and particularly northern Gaza, are already experiencing famine?

SAMANTHA POWER: Well, the methodology that the IPC [Integrated food security Phase Classification] used, is one that we had our experts scrub, it’s one that’s relied upon in other settings, and that is their assessment. And we believe that assessment is credible.

JOAQUIN CASTRO: So there’s — famine is already occurring there.

SAMANTHA POWER: That is — yes.

JOAQUIN CASTRO: Yeah. OK. And more than half of the population of Gaza is under the age of 18, as you know, and are seriously affected by the lack of access to food and nutrition. And various organizations, including the United Nations, have warned that hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children may die, if they don’t get necessary food and nutrition assistance in just the next two to three weeks.

Has USAID made such an assessment itself? And do you have a sense of how many such children might be at risk of dying if they don’t get access to food and nutrition that’s currently unavailable?

SAMANTHA POWER: I do not have those assessments on hand. but I will say that the — in northern Gaza, the rate of malnutrition, prior to October 7th, was almost zero. And it is now one in three kids. But extrapolating out is hard. And I will say, just with some humility, because it is so hard to move around in Gaza, because the access challenges that give rise, in part, to the malnutrition are so severe, it is also you know, hard to do the kind of scaled assessments that we would wish to do. But in terms of, you know, actual severe acute malnutrition for under fives, that rate was 16 percent in January, and became 30 percent in February.

And we’re awaiting the — the March numbers. But we expect it to continue —

JOAQUIN CASTRO: So it got markedly worse.

SAMANTHA POWER: Yeah, markedly worse . . .

President Joe Biden apparently lives in a world where it is unthinkable that Israel is committing a genocide or deliberately starving the civilian population to, as Sen. Warren put it, “to try to bend them to” its will. But the people around him are not blind or stupid, and they know the score. They haven’t been able to get through to him in any significant way. He finally admitted that 30,000 are dead in Gaza and said “it cannot become 60,000.” He is not doing anything practical to forestall that result, however, and the likelihood is indeed that 60,000 will be murdered if not more.

Power declines to resign, even though she helped propel the Obama administration into a war in Libya to try to prevent the killing of 25,000 protesters by Gaddafi in 2011. If she were consistent she would be calling for a US war on Israel to make it withdraw from Gaza.

Warren, meanwhile, continues to vote to give ever more arms and money to Israel, so she appears merely to regret the genocide but prefers to be senator than to try to do anything practical to stop it.

Despite these frank admissions, which come far too late, the reek of rank hypocrisy in the Democratic Party concerning the impunity of Netanyahu and his fascist henchmen continues to lie like a thick layer of fog over our nation’s capital.

As for the truly unhinged Republican Party, which may be to the right of Netanyahu, its bright idea is to condemn Biden for being too hard on the Likud. Some Democrats say they will go along, for all the world like politicians of the Hutu Power faction denouncing Rwandans who were too soft on the Tutsi minority.