They bought it because he said of Kamala Harris, “If she’s president, I believe that Israel will not exist within two years from now,  . . .” They didn’t consider the source, and his brazen history of pathological lies. It was a simplification they wanted to believe, because many of them are not deep thinkers, despite their vast wealth and accomplishment. Not all bright people are willing to mine past what they already know, especially those who earn or inherit financial security early in life. Some “conservative” Jewish leaders were insulted by the notion that Israel’s survival depended on one man. But they supported him because of his mythical “pro-Israel record.” But while Presidents Carter, Clinton and Obama restrained Bibi’s worst instincts, Trump promoted them.

Trump is tapping super-wealthy Jews to staff some of his cabinet and agency positions, but also to provide cover for his deeply un-Jewish agenda. His supporting cast of enabling Jews have entered the “grey zone” as defined by Philosopher Primo Levi, which “blurred the lines between collaborator, perpetrator and victim.” The wealthy Jews invested in Trump are more concerned about using Trump to grow their fortunes, than safeguarding Democracy or Judaism in America. They embrace the Evangelical “love” for Israel, ignoring the fundamentalist Christians’ apocalyptic vision of a world without Jews.

They are high-class, willing stooges, enabling an anti-Semitic president, contributing to the moral decline of American Judaism, and abetting the eventual deportations and punishment of minorities other than themselves. Forget about the Biblical commandments to “welcome the stranger into the tent.” (Leviticus 19:33-34, Deuteronomy 10:18-19, Deuteronomy 24:19-22). This group is about erecting barriers and fences around the country club estate.

The most prominent Jewish members of Trump’s close advisers include:

-Miriam Adelson, widow of Sheldon, who continues his legacy, of having financed numerous illegal settlements, and founded Yisrael Hayom, a sensational daily newspaper with even less credibility than Fox News. As with Elon Musk, she contributed $100M to Trump’s campaign, a move made possible by the notorious SCOTUS Citizens United decision in 2010.

-Lee Zeldin served as a New York Congressional Representative from 2015-2022, and voted against almost every environmental regulation before Congress. He is Trump’s choice to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, portending an even greater hostility toward any environmental agenda than Ronald Reagan anti-environment EPA head, Ann Gorsuch Burford; mother of SCOTUS Associate Neal Gorsuch.

-Daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, author of the disastrous Abraham Accords will return in an advisory capacity. “Kushner runs a multi-billion dollar investment firm tied to Arab states in the Gulf, raising ethical concerns about overlapping with government affairs,” as noted in The Times of Israel.

– Former US-Israeli Ambassador David Friedman remains part of Trump’s inner circle despite his objections to Trump’s embrace of anti-Semitic figures such as Kanye West and Nick Fuentes. Friedman is still pushing hard for a total annexation of all occupied Palestinian territories, and is delighted with Trump’s selection of Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel, who will promote the same agenda.

-Steve Witkoff is Trump’s new Middle East envoy, despite having no diplomatic experience. His qualifications? He’s a golf buddy and made a sycophantic speech at the Republican convention.

-Howard Lutnik is being considered for Secretary of Treasury, though he has no government experience, yet has been tapped to chair Trump’s transition team. A billionaire and finance chair of the Cantor-Fitzgerald investment firm, Lutnik literally ran interference for Trump when visited the gravesite of Hasidic Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, which evokes memories of when Trump’s presence was a desecration of the Western Wall of the 2^nd Temple (Wailing Wall.)

-Stephen Miller, author of the diabolical family separation policy at the Mexican border, and ban on travelers from Islamic countries, is the new Deputy Chief-of-Staff. He was a prominent speaker at Trump’s Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden last month, and founded the America First Legal Foundation to counter the work of the ACLU. Miller is unwelcome among all 12 Tribes, but has a seat at the table in Trump’s big tent of sycophants.

Some of these figures contributed to the FC PAC, which placed the Kamala Harris pro-Israel billboards in Dearborn, MI, and the pro-Palestinian billboards in Jewish enclaves of New York and Pennsylvania. They created ads allegedly on behalf of the Harris campaign, which was a brazen legal violation, but so what?  Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to entertain any form of ceasefire or truce in Gaza was a brutal form of election interference in the US, since he knew that any progress would reflect well on Biden and Harris. Now with Trump back in power, Bibi has successfully inverted the US-Israeli benefactor-client state relationship, and is comfortable dictating his agenda for Trump to follow, as Vladimir Putin does.

 Each of Trump’s picks to head Cabinet and agency positions has been calculated to inflict maximum chaos, including appointing Evangelical Zionist Mike Huckabee as US Ambassador to Israel. This discussion inevitably circles back to the question of why far-right Jews so desperately embrace Evangelical Zionism, when its ultimate intent is to erase Jews from planet Earth, either by conversion or eternal damnation. But the rich Jews such as Ms. Adelson and Kushner and company ignore that pesky inconvenience. Now for the wild card:

For many, the struggle to reconcile their political beliefs with their Jewish faith may be complicated. But as we look at the current political landscape, it is essential that we remember the lessons of history and the teachings of our faith. True support for Israel—and for the Jewish people—means standing firm against any political force that seeks to undermine democracy, justice, and the rights of all people, including those who have been marginalized and oppressed. Trump’s administration, and the wealthy Jewish individuals who enable his dangerous policies, represent a perilous crossroads for American Judaism. We must choose to be vigilant, to resist complicity, and to stand for the values that define us as a people.

—

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

The Economic Times: “From Ivanka’s husband to Howard Lutnick, how key Jewish leaders are shaping Trump’s inner circle”

The Pope mentions Gaza on several occasions in the book. At one point he expresses concern about migration crises around the world, colored as they are by “violence and hardship,” in the Sahara, the Mexican-US border, and the Mediterranean, “which has become a large cemetery in the past decade.” He adds, “also in the Middle East,” because of the “humanitarian tragedy” in Gaza.

Pope Francis says that Christians must feel the pain of migrants forced to leave their homes, noting that for many it is easier to empathize with the hopes of an entrepreneur who emigrates to found a business or a retiree who goes abroad to make their pension stretch further than with the hopes of refugees forced abroad by violence or famine, seeking a more peaceful existence.

He makes an interesting point here. I wonder if the difference is agency. We see ourselves in persons who take decisive steps to achieve a goal, but are alienated from those who are forced to do something against their will. Those with agency are admirable to us, are self, while those deprived of it are lesser and Other. I tell my students that they think of becoming a refugee as something that happens to others, but it can happen to anyone. I was trying to study in Beirut in my youth when war broke out and I had to flee to Jordan. My money was frozen in the bank because the banks all closed when war broke out. A kind man, at the American University of Beirut, Dean Robert Najemy, arranged for my parents to wire me airfare. He was later killed by a gunman. Of course, I wasn’t a refugee the way the Palestinians are — I still had my homeland and could ultimately return there. But I gained sympathy regarding those who suddenly have to abandon their domiciles. I don’t think of them as lacking agency or being Other, which I hope comes through in my new book on Gaza.

The Catholic leader laments that so many Ukrainians have been forced to flee, and praises countries that took them in, such as Poland. He then turns to the Middle East, where, he says, we have seen something similar. He praises the way Jordan and Lebanon welcomed refugees. He was obviously writing before mid-September, when Lebanon got caught up in the Israel-Hezbollah feud. Some 1.5 million Syrians had taken refuge in Lebanon from the Syrian civil war. Ironically, hundreds of thousands of Syrians and Lebanese have fled this fall to Syria. Jordan took in so many Palestinian families that a majority of Jordanians today have Palestinian ancestry. Jordan also took in hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Syrians.

Francis said he was thinking especially of those who leave Gaza in the midst of the famine that has hit the Strip. We think about 100,000 Palestinians from Gaza managed to flee to Egypt before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu occupied the Rafah crossing with Israeli troops.

Then Pope Francis dropped his bombshell. According to some experts, he wrote, “what has been happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide.”

He insisted that a painstaking investigation be carried out to determine whether the situation fits the technical definition formulated by jurists and international organizations. He is likely referring to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and the Genocide Convention of 1948, on the basis of which the International Court of Justice is deliberating on whether what the Israelis are doing in Gaza is a genocide.

Although he appeals to international law in this passage, he is pessimistic that war is ever compatible with it. Elsewhere in the book he points out that no war avoids indiscriminately killing civilians. He recalls the images we have all seen coming out of Ukraine and Gaza. “We cannot,” he says, “allow the killing of defenseless civilians.” These are war crimes. Inflicting wounds on these innocents to the point where they have to have limbs amputated or their natural environment is destroyed cannot be dismissed, he says, as mere “collateral damage.” “They are,” he asserts, “victims whose innocent blood cries out to heaven and begs for an end to all war.”

“Pietà,” Digital, Midjourney / Clip2Comic, 2024

His last mention of Gaza comes in a passage where he recalls a photograph of a Palestinian grandmother in Gaza, her face not visible, holding in her arms the lifeless body of her five-year-old granddaughter, who had just been killed in an Israeli bombing, along with other family members. He notes that the image has been called “The Pieta of Gaza.”

The Encyclopedia Britannica explains, “Pietà, as a theme in Christian art, depiction of the Virgin Mary supporting the body of the dead Christ. . . . the great majority show only Mary and her Son. The Pietà was widely represented in both painting and sculpture, being one of the most poignant visual expressions of popular concern with the emotional aspects of the lives of Christ and the Virgin.”

Michaelangelo, “Pietà,” Public Domain.

He says that the photo, taken in a hospital morgue, conveys strength, sorrow and the unimaginable pain inflicted by war. He ends by again insisting that innocents must be protected even in the midst of warfare, a principle, he says, that is engraved on the hearts of all people.

The consequence of the Pope’s comments throughout is a humanization of the Palestinians — a humanization of which US and British media outlets have largely proved themselves incapable. The only way they can be all right with over 17,000 dead children in Israel’s campaign against Gaza is that they do not see them as truly human. Otherwise, even the death of one little granddaughter would have us all weeping uncontrollably.

Not only does the Pope humanize Palestinian suffering, refusing to lose his empathy in the face of the magnitude of the slaughter and the sheer number of children in burial shrouds, but in a sense he even divinizes Palestinian suffering. The dead little girl in her grandma’s arms is a Christ-like figure — Christ-like in her innocence, which did not prevent her from being brutally killed. And the heart-wrenching mourning of her grandmother is like the grief of the Mother Mary over her crucified son, himself the incarnation on earth of the divine.

The electorate affirmed that the worst human being to hold the presidency deserves a second turn in the job. Despite Trump being eight years older and obviously losing his mind, despite the fact that he ran a corrosive campaign on naked malevolence, and despite his having promised to mass arrest, cage and deport immigrants, Americans rewarded him with ultimate power.

Toward the end of the 2024 election, the candidates made their closing arguments. Trump painted the United States as a dark, terrifying and infested place, festering with pet-eating immigrants, violent criminals, and deviant trans people. America was a savage hellscape where good, “normal” Americans were forgotten as their white, heterosexual world was reshaped by Democrats into something alien and repulsive.

Trump stoked conspiracy theories and promised vengeance. He mused about reporters being shot, mimed oral sex with a microphone, spewed racist lies, and threatened to order the military against the “enemy from within.” He emphasized every rotten thing about himself. None of this prevented his popularity from expanding in multiple electorates across the country; it may have even facilitated his success.

Kamala Harris articulated a hopeful future. Positioning herself as a moderate, Harris expressed a willingness to work with her political opponents. She embraced diversity and promised to better the lives of all Americans. The electorate was offered a choice between a mainstream Democrat and a candidate running the most openly fascist campaign ever undertaken by a major-party nominee for president. They chose the latter.

Voters who cast their ballots for Trump engaged in contemptible behavior, turning amoral, unserious about governing, and proving themselves undeserving of our constitutional legacy. More than a Trump problem, there’s a voter problem. If you elect a monster once, you’ve made a mistake. If you elect it twice, you’re the monster.

Unlike Trump’s first election, this one cannot be minimized as the result of an overconfident Democratic campaign and the successful con of a hundred thousand voters in a handful of swing states. This time, voters decisively chose Trump. The autocrat, who has grown more belligerent and maniacal over the years, is now is a maniac with a mandate.

Time and again, we hear the wild lies Trump‘s voters believe, such as babies being aborted after birth. We act as if they are sharing the same reality as ours, as if they are making informed decisions about legitimate issues. The media often portrays this gullible crowd as woefully misunderstood: if only Democrats addressed their economic anxiety, they might vote differently. That’s a myth no one should believe. They are not congenitally ignorant. They chose to close their eyes to reality.

Autocracies thrive on befuddled, ill-informed populations. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt noted, “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”

Harris decried Trump as a fascist, a petty tyrant, a liar. If all America needed was an articulate case for why Trump was terrible, then Harris was the right candidate. With a long career as a prosecutor, she’s taken on perpetrators of all kinds: “Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” she said. “I know Donald Trump’s type.” She was the prosecutor who would defeat the felon. The voters heard her case, and they found for the defendant. America knew his type, too, and liked it.

Many thought  women would rise up in defense of bodily autonomy. And they did, but not enough. Abortion was less of a key issue than expected. Harris did win the support of 54 percent of women, lower than Biden’s 57 percent in 2020. No group of voters was more loyal to Trump than white men. He managed to drive up what were already sky-high margins with his white, blue-collar base. Male voters — terrified or resentful of women — bought into Trump’s regressive idea of masculinity in which power over women is a birthright.

Despite enthusiastic crowds and the endorsement of high profile celebrities, antagonism or apathy undermined Harris: over 7 million Biden voters did not vote for her. Trump likely won as a result. Currently, Harris has received 74 million votes, while Biden obtained over 81 million votes. Some may have even voted for Trump, who increased his 2020 vote total by over 2 million, up to 76 million. The anti-Trump coalition failed to sustain their 2020 outrage. Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Julia Roberts lost to Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock, and Joe Rogan.

Voting in 2020 was portrayed as an act of heroism, because of the raging pandemic. Though Joe Biden provoked little passion, his campaign felt like the culmination of a liberation movement. The sense of outrage, which carried Biden to victory, was blunted for Harris. In a 2016 essay “Autocracy: Rules for Survival,” Masha Gessen wrote, “It is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock and outrage,” otherwise apathy would set in. And once that happened, autocracy would seem as natural as the weather.

Defusing Trump outrage and hanging over the election was the festering political wound that was Democratic support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The slaughter and starvation of Palestinians — funded by U.S. taxpayers and live-streamed on social media — has triggered one of the greatest surges in progressive activism in a generation. Roused to action by their government’s complicity in Gaza’s destruction, some voted for Jill Stein, many stayed home.

Harris loyally lined up behind the despicable and unpopular blank-check policy of Biden, which demoralized the party’s base and threatened its chances in Michigan. As the carnage continued and expanded, furious Arab American and Muslim voters determined to punish the party by making it lose. It appears to have worked: Trump captured Michigan partly thanks to a shocking, winning margin in Dearborn, the largest majority Arab-American city.

Trump will not improve the lives of Palestinians, nor those of most Americans. It’s no secret that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu supported Trump over Kamala Harris. He held off on any cease-fire deal that might help Harris. Trump supported Israel’s brutal bombing campaigns in both Lebanon and Gaza and told his buddy Netanyahu ”do what you have to do.” As a “gift” to the incoming Trump administration, Netanyahu is preparing a cease-fire plan regarding its bombing of Lebanon. 

Along with recriminations about Harris’s failure to at least express more remorse about the suffering in Gaza, a profusion of Democratic self-flagellation began immediately after the brutal loss. The party was too woke. Harris — the candidate who had been a magnet for joyful enthusiasm — was disparaged. She was too centrist, too un-primaried, too female and laughed too often. She leaned too much on reproductive freedom, or gave fatally little attention to concerns about immigration.

Democrats whined further: if only Biden hadn’t waited so long to withdraw, or if only he hadn’t mumbled something about “garbage”. Pundits opined furiously and confusingly: the campaign missed what spoke to men, perhaps particularly Black men, or Latino men — or was it women? Also, Harris failed to talk enough about the kitchen-table economy and failed to address the many grievances of the working class, who are not getting their share and fear “urban” crime.

Maybe there’s a little truth in some of that, but none of it explains the magnitude of what’s happened. Despite being the best-fed, richest, and most lethally defended humans in the history of planet Earth, Americans are afraid. Despite being coddled with too much of everything: more cars, more good roads, more personal gadgets, more guns, and more freedom than any country in the world, it’s not enough. Americans are annoyed. The price of eggs went up. Gas doesn’t cost what it cost in 1989. Did America elect a dictator because Cheerios — available in about 20 flavors — hit $5.29 at the grocery store?

Americans reelected a Bigot who promotes hatred and division and who lies — blatantly, shamelessly — every time he appears in public. They chose a man described by his own former advisers as a fascist. Voters witnessed his abuse of presidential power toward fascist ends and understood that returning him to office will immunize him legally for those abuses. Their votes affirm that conspiring to disenfranchise Americans by overturning a national election does not make someone unfit for national office — even if that someone is already plotting to do it again. There’s no way to rationalize an outright Trump victory except as a despicable reflection of the American character.

As president, Trump will likely issue shock and awe executive orders that will activate some form of Trump’s MAGA-pleasing deportation threat. The logistics of a nationwide mass kidnapping of millions of “illegals,” who are “poisoning the blood” of America are unclear. Trump confirmed last Monday that his plan for mass deportations will involve a national emergency declaration and the military. If street protests are mobilized, the regime — with a bloated strongman twitching for a reason to invoke the Insurrection Act — will deploy troops. The worst-case scenarios, including razor-wired concentration camps in the desert, are beyond horrifying.

Our country has been deliberately set on fire by fellow Americans. Aside from mass deportations and contempt for climate change, human rights, and gun control, Trump will appoint a more reactionary federal judiciary and assault the press. On day one, Trump will pardon the J6ers creating a paramilitary force answerable to him. These are not the imaginings of a paranoiac. These are campaign promises announced from the podium and include a federal government stocked with fools and jesters whose highest qualification is fealty to the Great Leader.

Trump has already initiated a Cabinet reminiscent of the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the German Expressionist film about an evil hypnotist who brainwashes automatons to commit murders for him. Trump’s lackeys and loyalists include a propagandist for Russia — Tulsi Gabbard — as Director of National Intelligence, a Fox News host and subject of sexual assault charges — Pete Hegseth — as Secretary of Defense, an End Times Christian Zionist — Mike Huckabee — as ambassador to Israel, and an accused statutory rapist — Matt Gaetz — as Attorney General.

Somehow topping all these MAGA freaks is the anti-vaxxer — Robert F. Kennedy — nominated to lead Health and Human Services. Kennedy recently commented that on its first day in power, the Trump regime will ban fluoride in water. Fluoridated water has been a favorite target of paranoid anti-Communist conspiracists dating to the 1950s. In Stanley Kubrick’s vicious satire Dr. Strangelove, General Jack D. Ripper explains that he avoids fluoridated water because it’s a Communist plot that will sap his “precious bodily fluids.”

Trump’s nominations are meant to bolster his effort to lay waste to the institutions that he has come to despise or regard as threats to his power or purse strings. “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty,” wrote Arendt. Trump’s cabinet offers a deliberate negation or mockery of the government functions they’re supposed to administer. They are his shock troops.

Trump wants to force Senate Republicans to humiliate themselves by confirming these unqualified toadies. Republicans will not try to stop this Trump travesty or any other. On the contrary, they’ll say — and are already saying it — that they owe it to Americans to give them every stupid, destructive thing they voted for.

Having lived through the circus of Trump 1.0, the voters also affirm that they’d prefer to plunge the country back into that embarrassing prior horror: blatant corruption, blathering of state secrets, the turbo-obnoxious Trump family, freak-show personnel choices, blue-state retribution, government-by-impulse, and policy-by-tweet. Trump 2.0 will likely involve more overt and impeachable crises, like flouting court orders or the constitution. Trump’s voters are plainly willing to run the risk. Knowing now what a Trump show-presidency looks like, they’ve voted for a sequel.

The public has chosen malevolent leadership. The only consolation for the enemies within is clarity — the moral clarity of the voter’s decision is crystalline: Trump will regard his slim plurality vote margin as a “mandate” to do his worst. We hope that many of the ideas on Trump’s demented wish list will not actually come to fruition and that our democracy can once more withstand this sociopath and the lunatics who surround him. But that is just desperate, wishful thinking. As of yet, there is nothing that will break the iron grip Trump has over his cult, now joined by a plurality of Americans.

Over the past decade, opinion polls have shown Americans’ faith in their institutions waning. But no opinion poll could make this shift in values any clearer than this vote. The United States will become a different kind of country. The lesson of this election is that the American people aren’t worthy of their Constitution. They elected a president who has never read it and who, by his behavior, holds the most fundamental values and traditions of our democracy, our Constitution, in contempt. Like the counter-culture hippies and anti-Vietnam radicals of the 1960s, the enemies within are rebels — strangers in a strange land, exiled inside a country many of us no longer feel fully part of. 

In the midst of the Vietnam War and Watergate, Richard Nixon won a huge and depressing landslide reelection in 1972. In a stunning shift, this dark history was overturned with Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Change is always possible, but we should not underestimate how arduous it will be to achieve, or how long it will take. In 2020, we believed that we had broken with history, with the Trump era; in 2024, it is apparent that history has broken some part of us. Acknowledging this is not surrender but a realization that the fights ahead will be formidable, but that anything is possible.

The United Nations lowered the U.S. ranking to #41 among nations in 2022 due to the extreme gap between the rich and the rest and women’s loss of reproductive freedom. Elsewhere the U.S. ranks as a “flawed democracy” because of its severely fractured society.  These ongoing societal failures feed a continuous decline in health, such that we now ranks 48^th among 200 countries in life expectancy, while having the largest number by far of billionaires and millionaires compared to other wealthy countries.  Corporate lobbies for the weapons industry, fossil fuels, pharmaceuticals, processed foods, etc. dictate our federal government’s priorities while 78% of US people live paycheck to paycheck.

Blessed is the Poor People’s Campaign: This national campaign in more than 45 states is organized around the needs and demands of the 140 million poor and low income Americans.  Its vision to restructure our society from the bottom up, recognizes “we must…deal with the interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation and the denial of health care, militarism and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism that blames the poor instead of the systems that cause poverty.”  Add sexism to that list of injustices.

Blessed is Fair Share Massachusetts, a coalition of labor unions and dozens of community and faith-based organizations that won passage of the Fair Share Amendment in 2022. The constitutional amendment has instituted a 4% surcharge on annual income over $1 million.  In 2024 the $1.8 billion accrued from the tax on millionaires provides free school meals; free community college; and funds to invest in roads, bridges, and public transit. 

In 1948, the United States signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which recognizes adequate housing as one cornerstone of the right to an adequate standard of living. All 27 European Union (EU) member states as well as Australia and South Africa institutionalized housing as a human right for their citizens while the United States has not.  In every state except Oregon and Wyoming, it can be illegal to be homeless, essentially casting blame on 650,000 adults and over 2 million children for their poverty-stricken homelessness

Blessed is Rosie’s Place, a model to our country of woman-centered humanism.  Much more than a shelter, it is a mecca and “a second chance for 12,000 poor and homeless women each year” in Boston.  Rosie’s Place was founded on Easter Sunday 1974 in an abandoned supermarket, as the first shelter for women in the country.  From providing meals and sanctuary from the streets, it grew into a multi-service community center that offers women emergency shelter and meals plus support and tools to rebuild their lives.  Rosie’s offers a food pantry, ESOL classes, legal assistance, wellness care, one-on-one support, housing and job search services, and community outreach.  Ninety percent of homeless women have suffered severe physical or sexual abuse at some time in their lives.

Blessed are the nearly 3000 domestic violence shelters and groups organized throughout the U.S. to provide temporary shelter and help women re-build their lives, offering legal assistance, counselling, educational opportunities and multi-services for their children.

“Beating the Blues,” Digital, Midjourney / Clip2Comic, 2024

A recent Gallup Survey found that the U.S. ranks last among comparable nations in trust of their government and major institutions, including business leaders, journalists and reporters, the medical system, banks, public education and organized religion – a plunge from top of the list nearly 20 years ago.

Blessed is Hands Across the Hills, a blue-state red-state seven-year effort formed after Donald Trump’s 2016 election to bring together progressive residents in western Massachusetts and more conservative residents of rural eastern Kentucky, for conversations and sometimes intense dialogues about their political and cultural differences.  They disputed the idea, “that we are hopelessly divided, as a myth sold to us by politicians and mass media, to hide our nation’s all-too-real inequalities.”

Blessed are the peacemakers across dozens of federal agencies, including the military and in communities throughout the country who challenge, resist, resign and refuse orders in our flawed hyper-militaristic government. Since the US-enabled genocide in Gaza, more than 250 veterans and active-duty soldiers have become members, respectively, of About Face: Veterans Against the War,  Feds for Peace, Service in Dissent, and A New Policy PAC.  All have arisen from current and former federal employees aligned with the majority of Americans who want the Israeli-US war on Gaza (now expanded to Lebanon and the West Bank) to end through diplomacy.

Blessed are those of the people, for the people and by the people – beacons in a country sundered by militarism, rich privilege, origins in slavery and genocide of Native Americans, and persistent inequality of women.

Munich, Germany (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) –– More than three years have passed since US troops left Afghanistan in August 2021, putting an end to an occupation that lasted two decades. With the Taliban back in power, the rights of women and girls have suffered a severe setback. Under the Taliban’s rule, they are no longer allowed to attend public secondary schools and universities. Last September, the fundamentalist group issued a religious code banning women from raising their voices or reciting the Quran in public.

Political and media freedoms have also been severely restricted, and poverty and unemployment have increased amid a massive withdrawal of foreign aid. The war’s end has brought public security and access to rural areas has improved, but these benefits are often denied to the female half of society. Women are forbidden to travel long distances without a male chaperone.

Amin Saikal, an emeritus professor of Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies at the Australian National University (ANU), is the author of “How to Lose a War: The Story of America’s Intervention in Afghanistan”. The US, explains Saikal, had traditionally paid limited attention to Afghanistan. This changed with the Soviet invasion of the country in 1979, after which the Carter administration approached Afghanistan as having ‘strategic importance’. Under Carter’s successor, Reagan, the US lavished Pakistan and the Mujahideen fighting the Soviets with military and financial assistance.

The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 gave way to a period of profound internal strife that culminated with the Taliban’s takeover of the country in 1996. Saikal defines the Clinton administration’s approach to the Taliban as “full of ambiguity.”[1] On the one hand, it maintained informal contact with the group. On the other hand, it feared the Taliban’s alliance with Al-Qaeda, founded by former mujahidin Osama bin Laden. The 9/11 terrorist attacks, organized by bin Laden’s terrorist organization, would put an end to this era of ambiguity.

According to Saikal, the Bush administration’s decision to invade Afghanistan following 9/11 assumed that the Taliban and al-Qaeda could be defeated, and Afghanistan changed, with limited combat and economic investment. The ‘light footprint’ approach, however, soon morphed into a ‘heavy footprint’ one. Saikal lists several reasons for this. First, the US underestimated the complexity of intervening in Afghanistan. Second, the failure to capture or kill bin Laden at the beginning of the war led to an obsession with finding him. Third, the Bush administration greatly expanded its priorities in Afghanistan, where it now wanted to engage in ‘democracy promotion’ and a ‘war on terror.’

Reflecting on two decades of war in Afghanistan, former Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt noted that after the Taliban were overthrown, there would have been a theoretical possibility for a political settlement including the fundamentalist group. But the US would not have accepted this, nor the Northern Alliance armed groups the US had supported to depose the Taliban, remarks Bildt.

It is highly doubtful that the US ever had a real chance at achieving its declared objectives in Afghanistan. Saikal, however, believes this was possible. According to him, a key problem was that “Afghanistan’s conditions required from the outset a much larger appropriate military and reconstruction involvement than what unfolded.”[2] The invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to an opposite trend, as the US transferred resources to the new war theater.

Amin Saikal, How to Lose a War: The Story of America’s Intervention in Afghanistan< (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2024). Click Here to Buy.

Saikal considers that the constitutional structure adopted by Afghanistan in 2004 had profound flaws because it created a system of government that was too centralized. The strong presidency established in the constitution led to the domination of the executive over the legislative and judicial powers. It was also responsible for a winner-takes-all mentality that left many strongmen with little formal power but the capacity to spoil the country’s politics and security. Saikal spares no criticism for the two men who presided over Afghanistan during this period, Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani.

About Karzai, Saikal writes that he “invoked the constitution and stressed the importance of the rule of law only when they suited his political and power needs.”[3] The emeritus professor describes Karzai’s government as highly corrupt, dysfunctional, and lacking a clear ideological project. Initially lauded in Western capitals, Afghanistan’s Western partners were only too happy to see Karzai leave his position in 2014. His successor, Ashraf Ghani, was elected after a voting process that saw even more fraud than the previous presidential election in 2009.

Secretary of State John Kerry engaged in a mediation effort between Ghani, the official winner of the 2014 election, and his opponent Abdullah Abdullah, who also claimed to have won the vote. The impasse was resolved in favor of Ghani, who had better connections in Western countries after having spent more than a decade of his life in the US. Ghani, explains Saikal, sought to present himself as a traditional Muslim and Afghan but “ultimately could not be the man of the people.”[4]

The new president also generated resentment among other ethnic groups when he surrounded himself with fellow Pashtuns. Ghani presided over a continuous loss of territories to the Taliban. Although he had promised never to leave the country, he abandoned Kabul as the Taliban were completing its conquest of Afghanistan in August 2021.  

In his balance of twenty years of US presence in Afghanistan, Saikal notes that the country’s economy remained dependent on foreign aid, opium cultivation, and the black-market sector. Infrastructural projects and investments in the health and education sectors significantly improved the overall situation in the country. Still, the improvements bore no proportion with the money spent — $36 billion was allocated to governance and development, with smaller amounts for humanitarian aid, in a figure that does not include contributions by US allies.

US funds were misappropriated by both Americans and Afghans, while mismanagement, wastage, and corruption resulted in Afghanistan seeing “only artificial, not structural, economic development.”[5] The area where improvements were more significant, especially in comparison to the periods that preceded and followed the US intervention, was women’s rights. Even so, the gains were too often restricted to urban areas.

The 2020 Doha Agreement between the US and the Taliban was the prelude to the US exit from Afghanistan. The negotiations, handled on behalf of the Trump administration by Zalmay Khalilzad (who had played a major role in Bush’s Afghanistan policy), were “disastrous”, in Saikal’s words.[6] The emeritus professor argues that Khalilzad, under Trump’s imperative, was so concerned about reaching a quick agreement that he made too many concessions considering that the Taliban did not have control over many areas of Afghanistan at that time.

Under the terms of the Doha Agreement, the US promised to withdraw from Afghanistan in fourteen months whereas the Taliban committed themselves not to attack US and allied troops. The Taliban also agreed not to allow terrorist groups to operate from Afghanistan after the US withdrawal. That they were not ready to keep this promise became evident when a US drone strike killed al-Qaida’s leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in central Kabul one year after US troops had left Afghanistan.

“How to Lose a War” is the result of Saikal’s decades-long study of Afghanistan’s history and politics. He had access to some of the most prominent politicians and military men, both Afghan and foreign, who shaped Afghanistan during the last two decades. Saikal combines these insider sources with a clear analytical mind in a text that will prove a fruitful read not only for experts but also for those who have been following international politics less closely.

It would be a positive development if the book contributed to renewing the current conversation on Afghanistan, which has moved to the background since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s war on Gaza. One of the current discussions concerning Afghanistan is how foreign governments, NGOs, and multilateral institutions should engage with the Taliban-led country. Saikal pays little attention to the topic in his book, but this is a debate that is likely to stay with us for a long time since there is no realistic chance of the Taliban losing power in the short term.

In his book “The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan after the Americans Left”, Hassan Abbas argues that it is vital “to acknowledge the difference between engagement and endorsement”.[7] Abbas sees engagement as a way to better understand the interests and actions of the other side, in this case, the Taliban. Endorsement, on the contrary, would mean supporting the Taliban’s worldview. Whereas endorsement arises from affinity, engagement is born out of pragmatism. Abbas is convinced that engagement with the Taliban is possible and much-needed, even if the gains to be made are limited.

Graeme Smith, the Afghanistan Senior Analyst for the International Crisis Group, makes a similar argument. He notes that, when engaging the Taliban diplomatically, the rights of women and girls cannot be dropped from the conversation. At the same time, however, the international sanctions regime imposed on Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover has counter-productive results as they “do not have much effect on the Taliban, but they do drive up rates of malnutrition among children and disease among vulnerable families, especially female-headed households that often struggle in a patriarchal society.”

Smith reports that some European countries that publicly chastise the Taliban have sent discreet delegations to Afghanistan to confer about security issues. Calling the Taliban out for their transgressions while seeking to ease the suffering of the Afghan population and limiting the danger of international terrorism emerging from Afghanistan is a very complicated endeavor. It does not need to be hypocritical, though.

 Notes

[1] Amin Saikal, “How to Lose a War: The Story of America’s Intervention in Afghanistan” (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2024), p. 61.

[2] Ibid., p. 201.

[3] Ibid., p. 107.

[4] Ibid., p. 129.

[5] Ibid, p. 169.

[6] Ibid., p. 214.

[7] Hassan Abbas, “The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan after the Americans Left” (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2023), p. 210.

Morocco’s Atalayer reports that Rabat will attempt to double sustainable energy generation in the Sahara by 2030.

What is so special about 2030? It is the soccer World Cup centenary, a World Cup for the ages. The first World Cup was held in Uruguay in 1930.

Spain, Portugal and Morocco jointly submitted the successful bid as hosts that year, with each country providing 6 or 7 stadiums. For Morocco, this success boosts its prestige in the Arab world and Africa. Countries fight tooth and nail over this honor. Qatar’s successful bid for the 2022 World Cup was one of the reasons Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates imposed an economic boycott on it 2017-2020. They were that jealous.

So Morocco wants literally to shine in 2030, by showing off its impressive progress toward greening its grid.

Morocco gets 44% of its electricity from renewables, up from 37% only 3 years ago. It has about 4.6 gigawatts of green energy.

About 1.3 GW of Morocco’s wind and solar plants are sited in the Western Sahara, a region Morocco absorbed in 1975-1979 when Spanish colonialism there ended. Some of the Amazigh tribes there had long ties with the Moroccan monarchy before the 1884 Spanish conquest. Some of the 600,000 people in Western Sahara, however, weren’t happy to become part of Morocco, and the POLISARIO party has long led a movement for independence.

But Morocco is a country of 38 million people, and its military is the 5th most powerful in Africa. So it has gradually made its claims stick, de facto. Moreover, most economists don’t consider the Western Sahara to have the makings of a viable independent country. What is important is that they have a democratic say in their own affairs.

Plus the Trump family helped the Moroccan government in this endeavor.

The Trump family?

Yes, Kushner persuaded Morocco to join the Abraham Accords recognizing Israel. In return, the United States recognized the Moroccan claim on the Western Sahara.

And now that it was the U.S. position, French President Emmanuel Macron swung around and also recognized the territory as Moroccan.

Billionaire Moroccan Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch intends to install another 1.4 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity into the Sahara. Integrating the territory into the country’s green energy grid is one of the ways Rabat is weaving it into the fabric of the country’s economy.

Akhannouch will put $2.1 billion into these projects, and they will generate green energy jobs for the local population.

The entire episode demonstrates the ways in which renewable energy is increasingly intertwined with nation-building projects, with all their virtues and vices.

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

The World’s Largest Concentrated Solar Power Plant | A Brief History of the Future | PBS

The report says, “The developments in this report lead the Special Committee to conclude that the policies and practices of Israel during the reporting period are consistent with the characteristics of genocide.”

It goes on to specify: “The targeting of Palestinians as a group; the life – threatening conditions imposed on Palestinians in Gaza through warfare and restrictions on humanitarian aid – resulting in physical destruction, increased miscarriages and stillbirths – and the killing of and serious bodily or mental harm caused to Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are violations under international law. Civilians have been indiscriminately and disproportionally killed en masse in Gaza . . . ”

Genocide as the term is used in contemporary International Humanitarian Law does not have the connotation of killing millions of people. It has become a technical term for trying to wipe out even a portion of a people simply because they belong to that people. Trying to prevent them from having children is one of the actions listed as indicating genocidal intent in the Rome Statute and the Genocide Convention. That is why the Special Committee mentions “increased miscarriages and stillbirths” happening as a result of Israeli actions in Gaza. It also talks about the “unchilding” of the 800,000 Palestinian minors in Gaza, who have been deprived of their childhoods and subjected to physical and emotional traumas that will scar them for the rest of their lives, making them prone to depression and other debilitating mental conditions.

One of the things that most alarmed the committee is the Israeli use of artificial intelligence for targeting, in ways that certainly increased the civilian death toll and showed a reckless disregard for civilian lives in direct contradiction of International Humanitarian Law.

It expressed grave concern over the unprecedented destruction of civilian infrastructure and the exceptionally high civilian death toll in Gaza. They said that this way of proceeding raised significant questions about Israel’s use of artificial intelligence to guide its military operations.

The Special Committee cited Israel’s +972 Magazine and The Guardian among other sources suggesting that the Israeli military lowered the thresholds for target selection and simultaneously increased the previously accepted ratio of civilian to combatant casualties. Yuval Abraham of +972 Magazine reported that the Israeli Rules of Engagement permitted the killing of 15 to 20 civilians for every militant killed. Those aren’t military Rules of Engagement, they are instructions for shooting fish in a barrel (my comment, not the UN’s).

The Special Committee observed, “These directives reportedly enabled the military to use artificial intelligence systems (which rely on mass surveillance to process large volumes of data), to rapidly generate tens of thousands of targets, as well as to track targets to their homes, particularly at night when families shelter together.”

And by the way, there was very little human supervision of these targeting decisions made by AI, which is known to have a 10% error rate. At 43,000 dead from drones and air strikes, 70% of them women and children, that could be 4,300 that were straight up errors having nothing to do with Hamas. Not that the children of Hamas members deserved to die when their father returned home in the evening. They were children.

They continued, “Reliance on the artificial intelligence-assisted targeting purportedly accelerated decision-making to the point of soldiers reportedly authorizing strikes in a matter of seconds, while the home-tracking of targets and night strikes would have disproportionately increased civilian casualties.”

They said that they were profoundly troubled by the indiscriminate loss of life reportedly caused by these AI-enhanced targeting mechanisms, noting that fatalities were multiplied because AI targeting was combined with explosive weaponry with wide-area effects.

“Lavender,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

The report concludes that Israel’s approach approach ignores Israel’s legal obligations under international humanitarian law to make a distinction between civilians and combatants and to implement sufficient safeguards to minimize harm to non-combatants.

The report concludes in this regard, “As stated by the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the requirement to select means and methods of warfare that avoid or at the very least minimise to every extent civilian harm appears to have been consistently violated in Israel’s bombing campaign.”

The Special Committee asserts that Gaza has become “unliveable” for Palestinians. It points to statements of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres where he underlines that no justification exists for the collective punishment of the Palestinian population.

The report notes that Israel has not yet complied with Guterres’ call for a cease-fire, a call that has been reiterated in Security Council resolution 2735 (2024), and that the Israeli government has similarly ignored no less than three binding orders issued by the International Court of Justice.

In view of these persistent violations, the Special Committee aligns with the Secretary-General’s assessment that the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza represents a moral failure that reflects poorly on humanity as a whole. They say, “In the light of those ongoing violations, the Special Committee shares the view of the Secretary-General that the humanitarian crisis has become a moral stain on us all.”

Since I study the Middle East, I’ve had to learn about energy markets and security. One time about a decade ago I was doing some energy consulting with the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI). Japan had had to deal with the closure of many of its nuclear plants after the Fukishima disaster by importing Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) from the Middle East. They were nervous about the security of the region, though. I told my Japanese colleagues that they would be better off going in for wind and solar. One replied that Japan had very little land available for solar farms. I don’t know how sincere this reply was. I think those bureaucrats were just wedded to nuclear power. In fact, Japan now has over 87 gigawatts of solar power. It has been adding about 6 gigs of solar a year recently.

One solution to this problem that is increasingly being tried out is agrovoltaics, putting solar panels on farms but in such a way that they help crops grow. So far in the US, most agrovoltaic set-ups are for sheep raising, since grass can grow under the panels. In fact, the panels help the grass thrive in hot, sunny environments by providing shade and allowing retention of moisture, which is also good for “tomatoes, turnips, carrots, squash, beets, lettuce, kale, chard, and peppers.”

Solar panels are rapidly becoming more efficient, which will allow this form of energy to produce electricity while taking up less space.

In the meantime, another possible solution is to put the solar panels on floating platforms. Japan has put them on lakes, for instance.

The panel arrays can also be placed offshore. Fish and other marine life like structures such as the steel truss platform piling used for China’s offshore solar farms. It gives them places to hide from predators, e.g.

China is the most advanced solar society in the world with over 600 gigawatts of installed solar capacity, which saves the country billions of dollars a year over paying for imported fossil gas. The US is in comparison backward, only having about 130 GW of solar.

It is therefore no surprise that Beijing has, as Aman Tripathi reports, just connected to high capacity transmission wires the world’s large offshore solar plant off the coast of Shandong Province, a 1-gigawatt facility. The facility also does fish farming.

The nearly 3,000 photovoltaic platforms are attached to fixed pilings in the sea floor and are spread over an area of some 4 square miles. It will generate enough power to provide electricity to 2.6 million people.

And this installation is only the beginning. China is aiming to have 60 gigawatts of offshore solar in only 3 years from now — an incredible build-out if it happens.

China also already has 61 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity.

Wind, water, solar and battery are clearly the way forward on meeting the world’s power needs while avoiding massive carbon pollution. Solar plus battery in my view has the greatest potential over the medium to long term. The issue of where to put the PV panels is not in my view a very serious problem. If there is a will to use them to cut carbon dioxide production, as there is in China, then places will be found to put them — as China is demonstrating.

And by the way, if the US government under the incoming Trump administration puts roadblocks in the way of solar power, it will just accelerate American decline and help propel China further toward great power status. The future is solar panels and electric vehicles, and China is already eating our lunch on those two. If that goes on for a while, we’ll be poor, breathing dirty air, and paying trillions for climate catastrophes, while China replaces us as the world’s leading superpower.

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

News.Com.Au : “China’s Massive 1-gigawatt Offshore Solar Cell Platform Now Connected To The Grid”

A report published by the United Nations Commission regarded Israel’s attacks on Gaza’s health facilities as war crimes and crimes against humanity. Chair of the UN Commission, Navi Pillay, stated: “By targeting healthcare facilities, Israel is targeting the right to health itself, with significant long-term detrimental effects on the civilian population. Children in particular have borne the brunt of these attacks, suffering both directly and indirectly from the collapse of the health system.”

Moreover, Israel’s assault on the Palestinian healthcare sector has been unparalleled in its inhumanity. An analysis by the charity Save the Children, covering the period from October 7, 2023, to early April 2024, showed that the rate of Israeli attacks on healthcare in Gaza is higher than in any other conflict worldwide since 2018. According to Save the Children, on average, Israel carried out 73 attacks per month on Palestinian healthcare facilities. Ukraine followed with 67 attacks per month, while the Democratic Republic of Congo averaged 11 attacks per month.

As part of Israel’s strategy to destroy the health sector, it has also targeted healthcare staff. For example, last May, Dr. Adnan Al Bursh, head of the orthopedic department at Al-Shifa Hospital, was reportedly abducted by the Israeli army and tortured to death. After one year of the Israeli war on Gaza, an estimated 986 Palestinian healthcare personnel were killed by Israel, along with 85 civil defense workers. Al Jazeera indicated that 34 hospitals and 80 health centers became inoperative, in addition to the destruction of 131 ambulances.

International healthcare staff in Gaza do not feel safe from Israeli attacks either. For instance, in the previously mentioned Save the Children report, Dr. Simon Struthers, a pediatrician at a field hospital in Rafah, stated: “We can’t take risks and must be careful which route we take because of what’s going on. We’re fearful of what’s coming from Israeli forces, rather than the local population, who are very supportive of us.”

Human Rights Watch (HRW) argued last year that the Israeli military’s persistent and seemingly illegal assaults on healthcare facilities, staff, and transportation were further dismantling Gaza’s medical infrastructure and said that they should be examined as potential war crimes. The HRW quotes special adviser on Palestinian health A. Kayum Ahmed: “Israel’s repeated attacks damaging hospitals and harming healthcare workers, already hard hit by an unlawful blockade, have devastated Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure. The strikes on hospitals have killed hundreds of people and put many patients at grave risk because they’re unable to receive proper medical care.”

Sadly, many Palestinians may have died from natural causes and diseases such as cancer, diabetes or other treatable conditions, whose lives might have been saved if not for Israel’s destruction of Palestinian hospitals. These victims are not counted among those who died due to direct Israeli fire, though their deaths can still be attributed to the conditions created by the occupation and blockade. Even in times of ceasefire, Palestinians will continue to die unnecessarily as it will take time for the Palestinian healthcare sector to recover to its previous state—which was already severely under-resourced due to Israel’s longstanding blockade on Gaza.

You may think that the circumstances of the Gaza War explain this attack on Palestinian healthcare. In fact, the targeting of healthcare facilities is not a new tactic in Israel’s conflict with the Palestinian people. According to a 2017 report issued by the charity Medical Aid for Palestine, 147 hospitals and clinics, along with 80 ambulances, were either damaged or destroyed in Israeli military offensives on Gaza between 2008 and 2017. Additionally, 145 medical staff, most of them ambulance drivers, were either injured or killed. In the West Bank, between October and December 2015, there were eight armed Israeli raids on Palestinian hospitals. The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) documented 92 instances of damage to ambulances and 147 injuries to medical workers.

Considering the scale and history of attacks on the health sector and the targeting of Palestinian healthcare personnel by Israel, along with the failure of governments and the international community to hold Israel accountable — often appearing complicit — healthcare professionals and their representative bodies across the world should show solidarity with their colleagues in occupied Palestine. Healthcare organizations should also express their support by boycotting healthcare products produced in Israel and its illegal settlements before it is too late.

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Al Jazeera English: “Israel shells Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza”