by PETER SCHWARZ

On the sidelines of the G7 summit in Canada, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz endorsed Israel’s attack on Iran in an interview with public broadcaster ZDF. He said, “This is the dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us. I can only say that I have the utmost respect for the Israeli army and the Israeli leadership for having had the courage to do this.”

In another interview with the ARD public broadcaster, Merz advocated violent regime change in Tehran. “It would be good if this regime came to an end,” he said. If the Iranian regime is not prepared to enter into talks, then “Israel will go all the way.” 

Merz is saying more than he intended. His statement that Israel is doing “the dirty work for all of us” exposes the official propaganda of the government and the media justifying the genocide in Gaza and the attack on Iran as shameless lies. This is not about protecting Jewish life or Israel’s “right to exist,” but about subjugating the entire Middle East to imperialist control.

Trump, Merz, Starmer, Macron, and other imperialist leaders behave like mafia bosses, threatening Ayatollah Khamenei and other Iranian leaders with murder, the use of bunker-busting weapons, and even nuclear bombs. Israel, meanwhile, is responsible for the “dirty work” reserved for the lowest level of the mafia hierarchy, the picciotti: the underhanded assassination of high-ranking military personnel and scientists, the bombing of residential areas and infrastructure, and the terrorisation of the population.

World Socialist Web Site for more

by AMY GOODMAN, JUAN GONZALES & JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER

What is MAGA imperialism? Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster says that, despite its feints toward anti-imperialist isolationism, President Donald Trump’s foreign policy has coalesced into a “hyper-nationalist” form of populism that rejects the U.S.’s post-WWII adherence to liberal internationalism and promotes dominance over other countries via military power rather than through economic globalization. Foster explains that this “Trump doctrine is opposed to multi-ethnic empires and multi-ethnic nations,” operating under a “racial definition of foreign policy, with the notion that the United States is a white country and other ethnicities don’t belong.” And while some analyses of the Trump coalition locate its base in the “white working class,” in reality this ideology is rooted in the lower middle class, which owns more property and is less opposed to the wealthy capitalist class. “If you go back to the 1930s, to Italy and Germany, it’s the same constituency that drove the fascist movement, but it’s a result of an alliance between big capital… and the lower middle class.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

Amy Goodman: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

President Trump announced on social media Monday a new round of threatened tariffs, ranging from 25 to 40% on imports from 14 countries, including Bangladesh, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, set to take effect August 1st, barring new deals. Meanwhile, Trump has threatened to impose an additional 10% tariff on countries that align themselves with the BRICS group of nations, led by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Trump cited the group’s, quote, “anti-American policies.” The threat came as Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva kicked off a two-day BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro.

PRESIDENT LUIZ INÁCIO LULA DA SILVA: [translated] So, we don’t want an emperor. Our countries are sovereign. If Trump issues tariffs, other countries have the right to do the same. There is the reciprocity law. I think it’s not responsible for a president from a country like the United States to threaten the world with tariffs on social media. Honestly, there are other forums for the president of a country the size of the United States to talk to other countries.

AG: : This comes as Vice President JD Vance has been promoting Trump’s new foreign policy approach. Vance addressed the Ohio Republican Party last month.

VICE PRESIDENT JD VANCE: What I call the Trump doctrine is quite simple. Number one, you articulate a clear American interest. And that’s, in this case, that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon. Number two, you try to aggressively, diplomatically solve that problem. And number three, when you can’t solve it diplomatically, you use overwhelming military power to solve it, and then you get the hell out of there, before it ever becomes a protracted conflict.

AG: For more, we’re joined by John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at University of Oregon, editor of the Monthly Review, where his new article is headlined “The Trump Doctrine and the New MAGA Imperialism.”

Well, why don’t you lay out your thesis for us, professor John Bellamy Foster? And welcome to Democracy Now!

JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER: Well, thank you.

The Trump doctrine was articulated in the first Trump administration. Normally, the presidential doctrines are determined by the press, who see the administrations operating in a certain way, according to a certain principle, and they designate that as a doctrine. The Trump administration has been different. There was a lot of confusion about Trump foreign policy. Was it–was it isolationist? Was it anti-imperialist?

In the first Trump administration, Michael Anton, who is one of the main MAGAideologues and came from the Claremont Institute, which is one of the primary MAGA institutions, was in the National Security Council, and they basically had him leave the National Security Council in order to formally articulate a Trump doctrine that the media would take seriously and foreign policy experts would take seriously. So, he gave a lecture. He was appointed at Hillsdale College, which is a MAGAinstitution, and he gave a lecture at Princeton University, where he articulated the Trump doctrine, and then that was published in Foreign Policy, the leading foreign policy journal in the United States. And the Trump doctrine is said–and now Michael Anton is the deputy–well, he’s the director of policy planning for the State Department, so he’s the main idea man, essentially assistant secretary of state. He’s the main idea man in the State Department. And he articulated, on behalf of Trump, a doctrine, a Trump doctrine, with four pillars.

The first one was national populism, which is the way in which the MAGA movement designates itself, sort of a neofascist designation, as it resonates with the National Socialism of the Nazi movement. But national populism is the first pillar.

The second pillar is that all nations should be primarily nationalistic in their orientation.

The third one is the opposition to liberal internationalism and to the liberal hegemony of the United States over the world order that was established after the Second World War and has continued to this day. Instead, what is defined is a hyper-nationalist “America first” imperium, where the United States essentially rules the world on its own.

But the fourth pillar is the most important. And Anton went back to Aristotle, who said there were two–three forms of political organization: the tribe or ethnicity, the city-state or the state, and the empire. And empires are defined as multi-ethnic. And the Trump doctrine is opposed to multi-ethnic empires and multi-ethnic nations, and argues that we should–we should determine our foreign policy by ethnicity and, essentially, the tribe. In fact, it’s a racial definition of foreign policy, with the notion that the United States is a white country, and other ethnicities don’t belong, and we’re going to organize our foreign policy, as well as our domestic policy, on that basis.

So, the Trump doctrine was very important. Remember, Anton is now the number one policymaker within the State Department, so this is not a secondary matter.

Monthly Review Online for more

by RIYAD A. SHAHJAHAN & MICHALINOS ZEMBYLAS

Harvard University is under siege by the Trump administration – and the world is watching. But this case isn’t just an American issue.

It’s part of a global trend: universities cast as enemies and institutions in need of reform. Populist, right-wing governments are blaming universities for tearing at the fabric of nations.

These attacks are part of a broader strategy known as affective nationalism. It occurs when leaders use emotions, not just ideas, to build national identity. Feelings such as fear, pride, nostalgia and resentment are deployed to create a story about who belongs, who doesn’t and who’s to blame.

As scholars who study nationalism, emotion and higher education, we explore the emotional politics behind these attacks.

Global backlash

Much of President Donald Trump’s vision and rhetoric is inspired by Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has waged a culture war on higher education for over a decade, banning gender studies and reshaping university governance. Orbán’s attacks on Central European University expose his hostility to academic freedom, critical thinking and diversity. All are viewed as threats to his nationalist “illiberal democracy.”

Trump followed Orbán’s playbook. On May 22, 2025, his administration declared that Harvard could no longer enroll foreign students. A U.S. Department of Homeland Security statement claimed that university leaders “created an unsafe campus environment by permitting anti-American, pro-terrorist agitators.” The statement suggested that many of the so-called agitators were foreign students.

Similarly, in India, students at Jawaharlal Nehru University were labeled “anti-national” for protesting the Citizenship Amendment Act, which provides fast-track citizenship to non-Muslim refugees. The students argued that it marginalizes Muslims. Since 2016, the Modi government has increasingly used “anti-national” and sedition charges to silence student and academic dissent.

These labels – “elite,” “foreign” or “anti-national” – are not neutral. They fuel fear, resentment and powerful narratives that frame universities as threats. Harvard, Central European University and Jawaharlal Nehru University have become symbols of broader national anxieties around identity and belonging.

British-Australian feminist scholar Sara Ahmed’s work on the sticky nature of emotions helps reveal the two emotions that often appear in attacks on universities: nostalgia and resentment.

The Conversation for more

by ALEXANDRA WITZE

Nuclear deterrence is no longer a two-player game, and emerging technologies further threaten the status quo. The result is a risky new nuclear age.

The Doomsday Clock — a symbolic arbiter of how close humanity is to annihilating itself — now sits at 89 seconds to midnight, nearer than it has ever been to signalling our species’ point of no return.

Many threats, including climate change and biological weapons, prompted global-security specialists at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in Chicago, Illinois, to move the clock’s hands in January. But chief among those hazards is the growing — and often overlooked — risk of nuclear war.

“The message we keep hearing is that the nuclear risk is over, that that’s an old risk from the cold war,” says Daniel Holz, a physicist at the University of Chicago, who advised on the Doomsday Clock decision. “But when you talk to experts, you get the opposite message — that actually the nuclear risk is very high, and it’s increasing.”

From Russia’s grinding war in Ukraine and the simmering tensions between India and Pakistan that flared in May, to the US and Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities in June, the world is not short of conflicts involving one or more nuclear-armed nations.

But it’s not just the number of clashes that have the potential to escalate that are causing consternation. The previous great build-up of nuclear weapons, the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union, essentially involved two, reasonably matched superpowers. Now, China is emerging as a third nuclear-armed superpower, North Korea is growing its nuclear arsenal and Iran has enriched uranium beyond what is needed for civilian use. India and Pakistan are also thought to be expanding their nuclear arsenals. Add to this the potential for online misinformation and disinformation to influence leaders or voters in nuclear-armed nations, and for artificial intelligence (AI) to bring uncertainty to military decision-making, and it’s clear that the rulebook has been ripped up.

“Eighty years into the nuclear age, we find ourselves at a reckoning point,” says Alexandra Bell, president and chief executive of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Amid this fraught landscape, scientists are working to prevent the world from annihilation. At a three-day conference in Chicago that started on 14 July — almost exactly 80 years after researchers and the US military tested the first atomic weapon — dozens of scientists, including Nobel laureates from a wide array of disciplines, met to discuss actions to prevent nuclear war. They released a fresh warning about its risks, as well as recommendations for what society can do to reduce them, including calling on all nations to speak transparently to each other about the scientific and military implications of AI.

Dawn of a nuclear age

The emerging multipolar world disrupts a tenet of nuclear security that helped to avoid nuclear war in the past. The principles of nuclear deterrence rest on the assumption that no nation wants to start a war that is bound to have devastating consequences for everyone. This meant having distributed nuclear arsenals that couldn’t be taken out with one strike, diminishing any incentive to strike first, in the knowledge the enemy would strike back and the consequence would be ‘mutually assured destruction’. It also meant clarity among nuclear-armed nations about who had what strike capability, and therefore what the possible consequences of any attack might be. A fragile stability prevailed, thanks to backchannel communications between hostile nations and diplomatic signals designed to avoid misunderstandings that could lead to the accidental pressing of the nuclear button.

Nature for more

by UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

Sleep may not just be rest for the mind—it may be essential maintenance for the body’s power supply. A new study by University of Oxford researchers, published in Nature, reveals that the pressure to sleep arises from a build-up of electrical stress in the tiny energy generators inside brain cells.

The discovery offers a physical explanation for the biological drive to sleep and could reshape how scientists think about sleep, aging, and neurological disease.

Led by Professor Gero Miesenböck from the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics (DPAG), and Dr. Raffaele Sarnataro at Oxford’s Center for Neural Circuits and Behavior, the team found that sleep is triggered by the brain’s response to a subtle form of energy imbalance. The key lies in mitochondria—microscopic structures inside cells that use oxygen to convert food into energy.

When the mitochondria of certain sleep-regulating brain cells (studied in fruit flies) become overcharged, they start to leak electrons, producing potentially damaging byproducts known as reactive oxygen species. This leak appears to act as a warning signal that pushes the brain into sleep, restoring equilibrium before damage spreads more widely.

“You don’t want your mitochondria to leak too many electrons,” said Dr. Sarnataro. “When they do, they generate reactive molecules that damage cells.”

The researchers found that specialized neurons act like circuit breakers—measuring this mitochondrial electron leak and triggering sleep when a threshold is crossed. By manipulating the energy handling in these cells—either increasing or decreasing electron flow—the scientists could directly control how much the flies slept.

Even replacing electrons with energy from light (using proteins borrowed from microorganisms) had the same effect: more energy, more leak, more sleep.

Physorg for more

by SARAH BLAKWOOD

In “Work: A Story of Experience,” Alcott fictionalizes her own stints as a servant, a seamstress, a governess, and a lady’s companion—and asks whether a wage counts as freedom for women.

In January, 1861, Louisa May Alcott began writing a novel that she planned to call “Success.” Alcott was twenty-eight and living at Orchard House, the family home in Concord, Massachusetts. That same month, her mother became briefly yet seriously ill, and Alcott put down her manuscript to care for her. “Wrote on a new book—‘Success’—till Mother fell ill,” she writes in her journal. “I corked up my inkstand and turned nurse.”

In the decade that followed, Alcott wrote and published “Little Women,” along with four other novels (“Hospital Sketches,” “Moods,” “An Old-Fashioned Girl,” “Little Men”) and more than a dozen stories. In 1872, flush with financial security and fame, she returned to her unfinished manuscript. The book it eventually grew into was no longer about success but, rather, a subject that preoccupied Alcott throughout her career: labor. It soon ran as a serial story in the Christian Union, earning its author three thousand dollars (around eighty thousand dollars today). In 1873, the story, now retitled “Work: A Story of Experience,” was published as a novel, and earned her five thousand dollars more.

It’s easy to find out how much money Alcott made from her writing because she kept very good, simple accounts in her journals, which listed what the writing paid alongside what she made from sewing, teaching, and other odd jobs. She began the practice, endearingly, as a teen-ager, in 1850, the year she sold her first piece of fiction, the story “The Rival Painters,” for five dollars. (The story was published two years later.)

Alcott may be one of our greatest but least recognized feminist theorists of labor. Her novels, essays, and personal papers reveal how much, and how inventively, she thought about the relationship between money and art, and about her place within systems of paid and unpaid work. She was often asked to lay aside her writing for domestic labor, but she also describes her family taking on such tasks to support her in her creative work. She saw domestic drudgery in the service of people she loved as an incubator for creativity, writing in her journal as a very young woman that “??I can simmer novels while I do my housework, so see my way to a little money.” Toward the end of her life, as she cared for her father after he suffered a stroke, Alcott again drew a connection between the two kinds of work—domestic and creative—that had defined her life: “Began a book called ‘Genius.’ Shall never finish it I dare say, but must keep a vent for my fancies to escape at. This double life is trying & my head will work as well as my hands.”

“Work” fictionalizes Alcott’s experiences as a servant, a seamstress, a governess, and a lady’s companion. It treats these and other forms of labor performed by women of her era (housekeeping, factory work, sex work) as inherently dignified. There is a straight line between Alcott’s itemizing of her teen-age earnings and her efforts decades later to make such labor visible to readers, and demand that it be counted. The novel opens with a domestic scene—a young woman and her aunt kneading dough at a kitchen table. This sentimental tableau is disturbed when the girl, whose name is Christie Devon, announces “a new Declaration of Independence”: she’s going to “travel away into the world and seek my fortune.” She continues, “I’m old enough to take care of myself; and if I’d been a boy, I should have been told to do it long ago. I hate to be dependent; and now there’s no need of it.”

Christie is charming, energetic, and good-humored. (“Jest like her mother, full of hifalutin notions, discontented, and sot in her own idees. Poor capital to start a fortin’ on,” her grumpy Uncle Enos responds to her declaration.) For years, she’s attempted in various ways to curb her hunger for “a larger, nobler life.” She’s tried reading, she’s tried making friends with “buxom girls whose one ambition was to ‘get married,’ ” and she’s tried letting herself be courted by men who are entirely “wrapped up in prize cattle and big turnips.” None has provided the sense of personal fulfillment and independence she seeks. And so she leaves the family home and enters the workforce.

The novel’s first third follows Christie through five different types of paid employment. First, she gets a job as a domestic servant to a wealthy family—only to be dismissed when her “private candle” lights her dresses on fire and nearly burns the house down. She then finds work as an actress—until she realizes that the stage has made her vain and competitive. She takes a position as a governess, and her young charges’ uncle falls in love with her; she briefly serves as a paid companion to a melancholy young woman who, rather than pass on the family “curse” of madness, eventually takes her own life. Finally, Christie turns seamstress, until her forewoman forbids her association with a co-worker, Rachel, who, it is implied, is a “fallen” woman. Christie refuses and quits. Without meaningful work, she considers suicide. (Here, Alcott rewrites an episode of depression she experienced in 1858.)

By the second part of the book, Christie, increasingly disillusioned with the world of waged labor, falls in love with and marries David Sterling, a character loosely inspired by Henry David Thoreau, Alcott’s friend and former teacher. Both Christie and David take part in the Civil War, David as a soldier for the Union Army and Christie as a nurse. David is fatally wounded in battle, and the novel concludes with Christie, who has given birth to a daughter in the ensuing months, becoming active in a local social-reform group and remaking her life among a multiracial, multi-class, multigenerational community of women devoted to labor organizing.

Throughout “Work,” Alcott asks what counts as freedom for women. Christie leaves the family home and its enforced dependence, but her story is not a triumph of lean-in feminism. The constraints she experienced at home follow her into the outside world; a wage does not negate the limits placed on her by virtue of her gender. Alcott suggests that Christie’s true achievement lies not in her ability to support herself but in the lasting attachments she has cultivated with the women she has worked alongside in each of her various jobs.

At the outset of “Work,” Christie thinks of the home as “narrow” in a negative sense. She longs to “escape” her “narrow life,” she dismisses her uncle’s “grim prophecies and narrow views,” she finds the religious succor she seeks in despair “cold and narrow.” Midway through the book, as she begins to fall in love with David, she starts to feel comfortable, even cozy, within that narrowness. “As she lay in her narrow white bed,” Alcott writes, “with the ‘pale light of stars’ filling the quiet, cell-like room, and some one playing softly on a flute overhead, she felt as if she had left the troublous world behind her, and shutting out want, solitude, and despair, had come into some safe, secluded spot full of flowers and sunshine, kind hearts, and charitable deeds.”

The New Yorker for more

by ASATO IKEDA

Abstract: This is a conversation between Japanese artist Mio Okido and art historian Asato Ikeda, centered on Okido’s exhibition Remembered Images Imagined (Hi)stories—Japan, East Asia, and I at the Museum of Asian Art in Berlin. The dialogue examines Okido’s exploration of imperialism, nationalism, and cultural identity through works such as Ghosts, Holy Person from Hiroshima, and Viewing. Okido discusses her critical engagement with historical narratives, aesthetics as propaganda, and the systemic frameworks shaping art and memory.

Mio Okido (b. 1986) is a contemporary Japanese artist who lives and works in Berlin.¹ She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Tokyo University of the Arts and a Master of Arts degree from Berlin University of the Arts. Her work explores conflicts between people, particularly those arising from differences in social class, ideology, nationality, and cultural and political identity. She employs a variety of media and techniques, including two-dimensional art, installation art, and action pieces. Most recently, her works were featured in Remembered Images Imagined (Hi)stories—Japan, East Asia, and I at the Museum of Asian Art in Berlin, part of the Humboldt Forum. This exhibition, which ran from September 2024 to February 2025, was the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition. It took place in one of the semi-permanent galleries of Japanese and other Asian art.

Ikeda: How long have you been living in Germany, and why Germany?

Okido: I briefly studied in Germany in 2013 while still affiliated with Tokyo University of the Arts, but I returned to Japan afterward. I moved to Berlin more permanently in 2015. My primary interest was in understanding how postwar German history differed from that of Japan. During the Cold War, Germany was divided into two spheres—Western capitalist and Eastern communist—while Japan was not. I come from Sado Island in Niigata Prefecture, which is geographically close to Russia. My grandfather, who was stationed in China as a soldier during the war and later sent to Siberia as a prisoner of war, spent some time in Russia. Despite this physical proximity, Japan has been diplomatically and culturally distant from Russia on the official level, which has always felt like a “black box” to me. I found that very intriguing, and Germany’s unique relationship with Russia was one of the reasons I chose to live there.

Ikeda: I’d like to ask about the works currently displayed at the Museum of Asian Art in Berlin, particularly those related to Japan and the Second World War. Could you first talk about how the exhibition came about?

Okido: The exhibition was curated by Kerstin Pinther (curator for modern and contemporary art in a global context) and Alexander Hofmann (curator for arts of Japan).² In 2023, I became a fellowship holder for the project Collaborative Museum at the Ethnological Museum of Berlin and the Museum of Asian Art, both of which are located at the Humboldt Forum in Mitte. These museums house over 500,000 objects, making them one of Europe’s largest collections of non-European art and culture.

The Humboldt Forum and its authoritative presence in central Berlin have been a focal point of critical debate about decolonization. The museums launched this project to collaborate with contemporary artists who are critical of the state’s colonial legacy, reframing the collection to challenge colonial structures and existing power dynamics. The aim is to promote diversity, accessibility, and a reimagined relationship with the collection, even though the content of the collection itself cannot be changed easily.

APJJF for more

DEMOCRACY NOW

“The point of this is to lure Palestinians as though they’re animals going into a cage, lure them with the bait of promise of aid, and then entrap them in the south of Gaza.” As starving Palestinians in Gaza compete for the limited trickle of supplies admitted into the enclave by a new U.S.- and Israeli-backed humanitarian aid scheme, journalist Jeremy Scahill of Drop Site News says the sparse aid is actually another Israeli military tactic “meant to serve as part of Netanyahu’s war of annihilation. … They’re using food as a weapon of war in an effort to further dehumanize Palestinians.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And Israeli-U.S. plan to sideline the United Nations aid delivery system is continuing to cause chaos in Gaza. At least 10 Palestinians have been shot dead as Israeli troops have repeatedly opened fire at newly established aid distribution sites.

The aid is being distributed by a shadow U.S. group registered in Delaware called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. A separate U.S. company called Safe Reach Solutions is helping to provide security. The New York Times reports that firm is run by a former senior CIA officer named Philip Reilly, who reportedly helped train the Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s.

The U.N. and international aid groups have condemned the new Israeli-U.S. plan. This is UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini.

PHILIPPE LAZZARINI: The model of aid distribution proposed by Israel does not align with core humanitarian principle. It will deprive a large part of Gaza, the highly vulnerable people, of desperately needed assistance.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of Drop Site News, recently wrote an article headlined “Netanyahu: Gaza Aid Scheme Offers Israel Symbolic Cover to Finish the Genocide.” Jeremy Scahill has also been reporting on proposals for a new ceasefire in Gaza.

We’ll get to that in a minute, Jeremy. But why don’t you lay out what is going on? This shadowy group that has moved in, condemned by humanitarian aid organizations, by the United Nations, talk about who they are and what’s happening.

JEREMY SCAHILL: I mean, first of all, Amy, we should be very clear that this cutout of a company — you know, “cutout” is a term of espionage — it was established by people with ties to the CIA and Israeli intelligence, was meant to serve as part of Netanyahu’s war of annihilation. Netanyahu himself said the quiet part out loud in a recent speech, when he said that he was getting some pressure even from his most passionate backers in the Republicans in the Senate. And he said, you know, that they didn’t want the optics of starving Palestinians, and that this could hinder the ability of the United States to continue arming and supporting Netanyahu, and so they wanted to give the veneer of some form of aid.

And Netanyahu and Israel have been at war against UNRWA, the U.N. agency that was established in the aftermath of the Nakba in the late 1940s, when the state of Israel was imposed on Palestine as a European colonial-settler state. And so, this serves two purposes. It allowed Netanyahu to say, “Look, we’re letting aid in, and we’re doing it so that Hamas can’t steal it” — which, by the way, was a lie. And even Biden’s top humanitarian official, David Satterfield, said this week that there was no evidence ever presented by Israel that Hamas was stealing or hoarding the aid. So, part of it was just was to give the veneer of we’re doing something humanitarian. The other part of it was to continue the war against UNRWA, to destroy the premier aid organization serving Palestinian refugees, forcibly displaced people. And UNRWA, its very existence, Netanyahu and Israel hate, because it recognizes the international laws that say that the Palestinians have a right to return to their land that they started to be — to lose in 1947, 1948, when the Nakba began.

So, they created this shell company, with ties to American intelligence officers, as a way of further destroying UNRWA, but also serving Netanyahu’s agenda. They then bring in an American mercenary company that — you know, Blackwater-style guys that you saw in Iraq and Afghanistan throughout the so-called war on terror. And then they created what international aid officials have said are concentration camp or internment camp-like conditions. Others have likened it to ghetto-style conditions, where Palestinians are going to be forced to stand out in the heat all day in barbed-wire fence enclosures, looking like a cage, and then they get a box with a paltry amount of food aid in it. There’s no medicine. There’s no infant formula. This is all just trickery that is being used to further the genocide.

And, Amy, I’ve been talking to people. A personal friend of mine whose family is from Khan Younis, four members of his family were shot sniper style yesterday by the Israeli military when they went to pick up these aid boxes at one of the two sites, the one near Rafah.

What is happening is that the Israelis are also using this as an intelligence operation. They’ve snatched, kidnapped a number of Palestinians. They’ve interrogated them. When they don’t get the answers they want, they’ve disappeared them.

They haven’t given any mechanism for how people are supposed to line up or know where to go. What we’re hearing from sources on the ground is that word just spreads via WhatsApp and text messages. “Oh, there’s going to be aid delivered in this place.” People go there, and it’s just pure chaos.

So, none of this is by accident. This is by design. And you have, on the one hand, a pittance of aid that is being actually distributed, relative to what is needed just to have — just to address the basic starvation factor in Gaza right now. And on the other hand, Israel is using this and the desperation of people to further dehumanize Palestinians. And when they go to try to desperately grab whatever aid they can, as we saw happen at a U.N. warehouse, then they say, “Well, Hamas is shooting starving people trying to get food.” No, Israel has intentionally starved the population of Gaza now for three months. They have continued the campaign of dehumanization, and they’re using food as a weapon of war in an effort to further dehumanize Palestinians.

And the last thing I’ll say about this is Netanyahu and Bezalel Smotrich, who’s in the war cabinet, both said that the point of this is to lure Palestinians, as though they’re animals going into a cage, lure them with the bait of promise of aid, and then entrap them in the south of Gaza, where they can either kill them in an increasingly shrinking killing cage or lock that cage and ship them off to another country. They call it Trump’s plan, but actually it’s been Netanyahu life’s work to try to erase Palestinians as a people and as a territory.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, on Wednesday, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation posted a video online showing Palestinians lined up, cheering at a new aid distribution site. The post includes this message: “Humanity shines as thousands cheer the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, heralding a new era of hope and compassion.”

MASKED MAN: Isn’t this crazy? Look at that.

Democracy Now for more

by BEN NORTON

Geopolitical Economy for more